A Short History of Italy (476-1900)

In the year 476 an unfortunate young man, mocked with the great names of the founders of the City and of the Empire, Romulus Augustus, nicknamed Augustulus, was deposed from the...

The Ostrogoths were a fine people; and historians have speculated sadly on the immense advantage, the vast saving of ills, that would have accrued to Italy had they succeeded in...

The Imperial dominion over all Italy had lasted scarce a dozen years before another Barbarian nation, the Lombards, came and repeated the experiment in which the Goths had faile...

One great political effect of the Lombard conquest was the opportunity which it gave the Papacy, while Lombard and Byzantine were buffeting each other, to grow strong and indepe...

We now come to the separation of the Latin world from the Greek world in both political and ecclesiastical affairs, and to the reconstruction of Europe by the alliance of the Fr...

The papal theory embodied in the _Donation of Constantine_ was obviously crammed with seeds of future strife; for the present, however, the fortunes of the House of Pippin and o...

The period from the death of Charlemagne (814) to the coronation of Otto the Great (962) is a long dismal stretch, tenanted by discord and ignorance. At the beginning stands the...

These triumphs were due to the brilliant vigour of Pope Nicholas; but that triumphant position could not last, it was fictitious. The Papacy needed the support of a strong secul...

This Roman Empire (it did not receive its full title of Holy Roman Empire until later) deserved the name Roman because it rested on the Roman tradition of the political unity of...

The struggle over the lay investiture of bishops did not arise at first. The Papacy was still a dependent bishopric in the gift of the Emperors, who continued to depose bad Roma...

The last chapter dealt with the struggle between the two great mediaeval institutions, the Empire and the Papacy. This deals with the contest between the Empire, representing th...

Gregory VII was well named the Julius Caesar of the Papacy. His great conception of a sovereign ecclesiastical power, supreme over Europe, was destined to be realized. For in th...

In spite of the dazzling success achieved by Innocent, matters were not well with the Church in Italy. Corruption threatened it from within, heresy from without. Simony was ramp...

Assisi, built for safety on a hill and protected by great walls and gates, was a good example of a little mediaeval town. In the centre was the _piazza_, on which fronted a Roma...

The Church seized the Franciscan Order as a man in danger grasps at a means of safety, and shaped it to her needs; for, in spite of her brilliant triumphs under Innocent, her ne...

We are now coming out of the Middle Ages, and the dawn of a new era grows more and more apparent. The Empire, embodiment of an old outworn theory, has already fallen, and its vi...

After the Papacy had been dragged in servitude to France, the Empire, like a dying soldier who gets on his feet to shout one shout of triumph over his enemy's fall, made a last...

Now that the two great actors, whose long-drawn quarrel has been the main thread of Italian history, have made their exits, and left us, as it were, with a sense of emptiness, i...

This intervening period--the twilight between the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Modern World--needs a little further emphasis, from the very fact that it is a period of transi...

Though the beginning of the Modern World manifested itself in every department of life, political, social, and intellectual, it is best known to us through the arts, because in...

Perhaps the quality which strikes us most in this dawn of our Modern World is its suddenness; Niccolo Pisano gets up, as it were, out of the ground, Giotto follows Cimabue, Dant...

Sicily was in a state of hopeless despondency. The island was nominally subject to the House of Aragon, but its kings were not men of sufficient character to impose their author...

The fourteenth century undoubtedly felt itself emancipated from the limitations of the Middle Ages, and with justice, so far as the classical revival was concerned, but it did l...

The return of the Papacy to Rome was an event of importance both for Italy and the Catholic Church. Had it remained in France, it must have dwindled and shrunk, like Antaeus, ke...

By Renaissance, new birth, we mean the rapid, many-sided, intellectual development which started forward in Italy at this time. It was really a stage in the movement which began...

The last chapter confined itself to the fine arts and omitted the main element, humanism, which gave volume and impetus to the stream, and, though not memorable for conspicuous...

We must now leave the great intellectual progress of the Renaissance on its way from its home in Florence to its culmination in Rome, and look over the political condition of th...

The Papacy found itself in an exceedingly difficult situation. It had to adapt an ecclesiastical system, matured in the Middle Ages, to new political systems, to new knowledge,...

We are now at liberty to return to the great intellectual and artistic movement that lifted Italy to the primacy in Europe, and reached its zenith in the period of time to which...

We have now come to the beginning of long centuries of national degradation, and one has a general sense of passing from a glorious garden into a series of gas-lit drawing-rooms...

The _Cinquecento_, as the Italians call the sixteenth century, exhibits in the arts the same disintegration and decay that we have found in the political life of Italy. Honesty,...

At the end of the sixteenth century Italy is well under way on a new stretch of history, which lasted until the nineteenth century. Except Venice, always individual, and the Pap...

We have now reached a period of comparative stability in which dukes, viceroys, oligarchs, and Popes sit settled in their respective dominions with a security that appears a lit...

We should do wrong to leave these centuries to stand solely on their political record. Even this dreary period has contributed not a little to the sum of Italy's attractions. Af...

Now come those great events, most important to Italy, the French Revolution and the invasion by Napoleon. The storm burst upon a scene of quiet. Italy was still like a comedy of...

Outwardly despotism had been triumphantly reestablished, and Popes, princes, and privileged persons in general made a gallant attempt to pretend that the French Revolution and t...

After 1821 followed ten years of outward repose. Times were hard for lovers of independence, but hope and purpose had been let loose, and in dark corners, cloaking themselves as...

The period of waiting for coming events was short. The whole Continent of Europe was straining like a greyhound in its leash; Italy, from end to end, was on tiptoe with exciteme...

After the uprisings of 1848-49, the old tyrannical system prevailed for eight years and seemed heavier than ever. Liberalism meant suspicion, disfavour, danger. The liberals wer...

The union of Italy was so triumphant, the efforts which accomplished it so heroic, and the whole tone of Italian history throughout the Risorgimento so romantic and noble, that...