Chapter 3

But this system of the free town contained in itself, as does every other institution, the seed of death--contained it in that expanding element which developes, ripens, rots, and finally dissolves all living organisms. A little town is formed in the midst of some feudal state, as Pisa, Florence, Lucca, and Bologna were formed in the dominions of the lords of Tuscany; the _elders_ govern it; it is protected from without; it obtains privileges from its suzerain, always glad to oppose anything to his vassals, and who, unlike them, is too far removed in the feudal scale to injure the commune, which is under his supreme jurisdiction but not in his land. The town can thus develope regularly, governing itself, taxing itself, defending itself against encroaching neighbours; it gradually extends beyond its own walls, liberates its peasantry, extends its commerce, extinguishes feudalism, beats back its suzerain or buys privileges from him; in short, lives the vigorous young life of the early Italian commonwealths. But now the danger begins. The original system of government, where every head of a family is a power in the State, where every man helps to govern, without representation or substitution, could exist only as long as the commune remained small enough for the individual to be in proportion with it; as long as the State remained small enough for all its citizens to assemble in the market-place and vote, for every man to know every detail of the administration, every inch of the land. When the limits were extended, the burgher had to deal with towns and villages and men and things which he did not know, and which he probably hated, as every small community hated its neighbour; witness the horrible war, lasting centuries, between the two little towns of Dinant and Bouvines on the Meuse. Still more was this the case with an important city: the subjugated town was hated all the more for being a rival centre; the burghers of Florence, inspired only by their narrow town interest, treated Pisa according to its dictates, that is, tried to stamp it out. Thence the victorious communes came to be surrounded by conquered communes, which they dared not trust with any degree of power; and which, instead of being so many allies in case of invasion, were merely focuses of revolt, or at best inert impediments. Similarly, when the communes enlarged, and found it indispensable to delegate special men, who could attend to political matters more thoroughly than the other citizens, they were constantly falling under the tyranny of their _captains of the people_, of their _gonfalonieri_, and of all other heads of the State; or else, as in Florence, they were frightened by this continual danger into a system of perpetual interference with the executive, which was thus rendered well-nigh helpless. To this rule Venice forms the only exception, on account of her exceptional position and history: the earliest burghers turning into an intensely conservative and civic aristocracy, while everywhere else the feudal nobles turned into petty burghers, entirely subversive of communal interests. Venice had the yet greater safeguard of being protected both from her victorious enemies and her own victorious generals; who, however powerful on the mainland, could not seriously endanger the city itself, which thus remained a centre of reorganization in time of disaster. In this Venice was entirely unique, as she was unique in the duration of her institutions and independence. In the other towns of Italy, where there existed no naturally governing family or class, where every citizen had an equal share in government, and there existed no distinction save that of wealth and influence, there was a constant tendency to the illegitimate preponderance of every man or every family that rose above the average; and in a democratic, mercantile State, not a day passed without some such elevation. In a systematic, consolidated State, where the power is in the hands of a hereditary sovereign or aristocracy, a rich merchant remains a rich merchant, a victorious general remains a victorious general, an eloquent orator remains an eloquent orator; but in a shapeless, flunctuating democracy like those of Italy, the man who has influence over his fellow-citizens, whether by his money, his soldiers, or his eloquence, necessarily becomes the head of the State; everything is free and unoccupied, only a little superior strength is required to push into it. Cosimo de' Medici has many clients, many correspondents, many debtors; he can bind people by pecuniary obligations: he becomes prince. Sforza has a victorious army, whom he can either hound on to the city or restrain into a protection of its interests: he becomes prince. Savonarola has eloquence that makes the virtuous start up and the wicked tremble: he becomes prince. The history of the Italian commonwealths shows us but one thing: the people, the only legal possessors of political power, giving it over to their bankers (Medici, Pepoli); to their generals (Della Torre, Visconti, Scaligeri); to their monkish reformers (Fra Bussolaro, Fra Giovanni da Vincenza, Savonarola). Here then we have the occasional but inevitable usurpers, who either momentarily or finally disorganize the State. But this is not all. In such a State every family hate, every mercantile hostility, means a corresponding political division. The guilds are sure to be rivals, the larger wishing to exclude the smaller from government: the lower working classes (the _ciompi_ of Florence) wish to upset the guilds completely; the once feudal nobles wish to get back military power; the burghers wish entirely to extirpate the feudal nobles; the older families wish to limit the Government, the newer prefer democracy and Cæsarism. Add to this the complications of private interests, the personal jealousies and aversions, the private warfare, inevitable in a town where legal justice is not always to be had, while forcible retaliation is always within reach; and the result is constant party spirit, insults, scuffles, conspiracies: the feudal nobles build towers in the streets, the burghers pull them down; the lower artizans set fire to the warehouses of the guilds, the magistrates take part in the contest; blood is spilt, magistrates are beheaded or thrown out of windows, a foreign State is entreated to interfere, and a number of citizens are banished by the victorious party. This latter result creates a new and terrible danger for the State, in the persons of so many exiles, ready to do anything, to join with any one, in order to return to the city and drive out their enemies in their turn. The end of such constant upheavings is that the whole population is disarmed, no party suffering its rival to have any means of offence or defence. Moreover, as industry and commerce develope, the citizens become unwilling to fight, while on the other hand the invention of firearms, subverting the whole system of warfare, renders special military training more and more necessary. In the days of the Lombard League, of Campaldino and Montaperti, the citizens could fight, hand to hand, round their _carroccio_ or banner, without much discipline being required; but when it came to fortifying towns against cannon, to drilling bodies of heavily armed cavalry, acting by the mere dexterity of their movements; when war became a science and an art, then the citizen had necessarily to be left out, and adventurers and poor nobles had to form armies of mercenaries, making warfare their sole profession. This system of mercenary troops, so bitterly inveighed against by Machiavelli (who, of course, entirely overlooked its inevitable origin and viewed it as a voluntarily incurred pest), added yet another and, perhaps, the very worst danger to civil liberty. It gave enormous, irresistible power to adventurers unscrupulous by nature and lawless by education, the sole object of whose career it became to obtain possession of States; by no means a difficult enterprise, considering that they and their fellows were the sole possessors of military force in the country. At the same time, this system of mercenaries perfected the condition of utter defencelessness in which the gradual subjection of rival cities, the violent party spirit, and the general disarming of the burghers, had placed the great Italian cities. For these troops, being wholly indifferent as to the cause for which they were fighting, turned war into the merest game of dodges--half-a-dozen men being killed at a great battle like that of Anghiari--and they at the same time protracted campaigns beyond every limit, without any decisive action taking place. The result of all these inevitable causes of ruin, was that most of the commonwealths fell into the hands of despots; while those that did not were paralyzed by interior factions, by a number of rebellious subject towns, and by generals who, even if they did not absolutely betray their employers, never efficiently served them.

Such a condition of civic disorder lasted throughout the Middle Ages, until the end of the fifteenth century, without any further evils arising from it. The Italians made endless wars with each other, conquered each other, changed their government without end, fell into the power of tyrants; but throughout these changes their civilization developed unimpeded; because, although one of the centres of national life might be momentarily crushed, the others remained in activity, and infused vitality even into the feeble one, which would otherwise have perished. All these ups and downs seemed but to stir the life in the country: and no vital danger appeared to threaten it; nor did any, so long as the surrounding countries--France, Germany, and Spain--remained mere vast feudal nebulae, formless, weightless, immovable. The Italians feared nothing from them; they would call down the King of France or the Emperor of Germany without a moment's hesitation, because they knew that the king could not bring France, nor the emperor bring Germany, but only a few miserable, hungry retainers with him; but Florence would watch the growth of the petty State of the Scaligers, and Venice look with terror at the Duke of Milan, because they knew that _there_ there was concentrated life, and an organization which could be wielded as' perfectly as a sword by the head of the State. In the last decade of the fifteenth century the Italians called in the French to put down their private enemies: Lodovico of Milan called down Charles VIII. to rid him of his nephew and of the Venetians; the Venetians to rid them of Lodovico: the Medici to establish them firmly in Florence; the party of freedom to drive out the Medici. Each State intended to use the French to serve their purpose, and then to send back Charles VIII. with a little money and a great deal of derision, as they had done with kings and emperors of earlier days. But Italian politicians suddenly discovered that they had made a fatal mistake; that they had reckoned in ignorance, and that instead of an army they had called down a nation: for during the interval since their last appeal to foreign interference, that great movement had taken place which had consolidated the heterogeneous feudal nebulae into homogeneous and compact kingdoms.

Single small States, relying upon mercenary troops, could not for a moment resist the shock of such an agglomeration of soldiery as that of the French, and of their successors the Spaniards and Germans. Sismondi asks indignantly, Why did the Italians not form a federation as soon as the strangers appeared? He might as well ask, Why did the commonwealths not turn into a modern monarchy? The habit of security from abroad and of jealousy within; the essential nature of a number of rival trading centres, made such a thing not only impossible of execution, but for a while impossible of conception; confederacies had become possible only when Burlamacchi was decapitated by the imperialists; popular resistance had become a reality only when Feruccio was massacred by the Spaniards; a change of national institutions was feasible only when all national institutions had been destroyed; when the Italians, having recognized the irresistible force of their adversaries, had ceased to form independent States and larger and smaller guilds; when all the characteristics of Italian civilization had been destroyed; when, in short, it was too late to do anything save theorize with Machiavelli and Guicciardini as to what ought to have been done. We must not hastily accuse the volition of the Italians of the Renaissance; they may have been egotistic and timid, but had they been (as some most certainly were) heroic and self-sacrificing to the utmost degree, they could not have averted the catastrophe. The nature of their civilization prevented not only their averting the peril, but even their conceiving its existence; the very nature of their political forms necessitated such a dissolution of them. The commune grows from within; it is a little speck which gradually extends its circumference, and the further this may be from the original centre, the less do its parts coalesce. The modern monarchy grows from external pressure, and towards the centre; it is a huge mass consolidating into a hard, distinct shape. Thence it follows that the more the commonwealth developes, the weaker it grows, because its tendency is to spread and fall to pieces; whereas the more the monarchy developes, the stronger it becomes, because it fills up towards the centre, and becomes more vigorously knit together. The city ceases to be a city when extended over hundreds of miles; the nation becomes all the more a nation for being compressed towards a central point.

The entire political collapse of Italy in the sixteenth century was not only inevitable, from the essential nature of the civilization of the Renaissance, but it was also indispensable in order that this civilization might fulfil its mission. Civilization cannot spread so long as it is contained within a national mould, and only a vanquished nation can civilize its victors. The Greece of Pericles could not Hellenize Rome, but the Greece of the weak successors of Alexander could; the Rome of Cæsar did not Romanize the Teutonic races as did the Rome of Theodosius; no amount of colonizing among the vanquished can ever produce the effect of a victorious army, of a whole nation, suddenly finding itself in the midst of the superior civilization of a conquered people. Michelet may well call the campaign of Charles VIII. the discovery of Italy. His imaginative mind seized at once the vast importance of this descent of the French into Italy, which other historians have been too prone to view in the same light as any other invasion. It is from this moment that dates the _modernisation_, if we may so express ourselves, of the North. The barbarous soldiers of Gaston de Foix, of Frundsberg, and of Gonsalvo, were the unconscious bearers of the seeds of the ages of Elizabeth, of Louis XIV., and of Goethe. These stupid and rapacious ruffians, while they wantonly destroyed the works of Italian civilization, rendered possible the existence of a Montaigne, a Shakespeare, and a Cervantes.

Italy was as a vast store-house, sheltered from all the dangers of mediæval destruction; in which, while all other nations were blindly and fiercely working out their national existence, the inheritance of Antiquity and the produce of the earliest modern civilization had been peaceably garnered up. When the store-house was full, its gates had to be torn open and its riches plundered and disseminated by the intellectual starvelings of the North; thus only could the rest of mankind feed on these riches, regain and develope their mental life.

What were those intellectual riches of the Renaissance? What was that strong intellectual food which revived the energies and enriched the blood of the Barbarians of the sixteenth century? The Renaissance possessed the germs of every modern thing, and much that was far more than a mere germ: it possessed the habit of equality before the law, of civic organization, of industry and commerce developed to immense and superb proportions. It possessed science, literature, and art; above all, that which at once produced and was produced by all these--thorough perception of what exists, thorough consciousness of our own freedom and powers: self-cognizance. In Italy there was intellectual light, enabling men to see and judge all around them, enabling them to act wittingly and deliberately. In this lies the immense greatness of the Renaissance; to this are due all its achievements in literature and science, and, above all, in art: that, for the first time since the dissolution of antique civilization, men were free agents, both in thought and in deed; that there was an end of that palsying slavery of the Middle Ages, slavery of body and of mind, slavery to stultified ideas and effete forms, which made men endure every degree of evil and believe every degree of absurdity. For the first time since Antiquity, man walks free of all political and intellectual trammels, erect, conscious of his own thoughts, master of his own actions; ready to seek for truth across the ocean like Columbus, or across the heavens like Copernicus; to seek it in criticism and analysis like Machiavelli or Guicciardini, boldly to reproduce it in its highest, widest sense like Michael Angelo and Raphael.

The men of the Renaissance had to pay a heavy price for this intellectual freedom and self-cognizance which they not only enjoyed themselves, but transmitted to the rest of the world; the price was the loss of all moral standard, of all fixed public feeling. They had thrown aside all accepted rules and criteria, they had cast away all faith in traditional institutions, they had destroyed, and could not yet rebuild. In their instinctive and universal disbelief in all that had been taught them, they lost all respect for opinion, for rule, for what had been called right and wrong. Could it be otherwise? Had they not discovered that what had been called right had often been unnatural, and what had been called wrong often natural? Moral teachings, remonstrances, and judgments belonged to that dogmatism from which they had broken loose; to those schools and churches where the foolish and the unnatural had been taught and worshipped; to those priests and monks who themselves most shamefully violated their teachings. To profess morality was to be a hypocrite; to reprobate others was to be narrow-minded. There was so much error mixed up with truth that truth had to share the discredit of error; so many innocent things had been denounced as sins that sinful ones at length ceased to be reprobated; people had so often found themselves sympathizing with supposed criminals, that they soon lost their horror of real ones. Damnation came to be disassociated from moral indignation: it was the retribution, not of the unnatural and immoral, but of the unlawful; and unlawful with respect to a law made without reference to reason and instinct. As reason and instinct were thus set at defiance, but could not be silenced, the law was soon acquiesced in without being morally supported; thus, little by little, moral feeling became warped. This was already the case in Dante's day. Farinata is condemned to the most horrible punishment, which to Dante seems just, because in accordance with an accepted code; yet Dante cannot but admire him and cannot really hate him, for there is nothing in him to hate; he is a criminal and yet respected--fatal combination! Dante punishes Francesca, Pier delle Vigne, and Brunetto Latini, but he shows no personal horror of them; in the one case his moral instinct refrains from censuring the comparatively innocent, in the other it has ceased to revolt from the really infamous. Where Dante does feel real indignation, is most often in cases unprovided for by the religious codes, as with those low, grovelling, timid natures (the very same with whom Machiavelli, the admirer of great villains, fairly loses patience), those creatures whom Dante personally despises, whom he punishes with filthy devices of his own, whom he passes by with words such as he never addresses to Semiramis, Brutus, or Capaneus. This toleration of vice, while acquiescing in its legal punishment, increased in proportion to the development of individual judgment, and did not cease till all the theories of the lawful and unlawful had been so completely demolished as to permit of their being rebuilt on solid bases.

This work of demolition had not yet ceased in the beginning of the sixteenth century; and the moral confusion due to it was increased by various causes dependent on political and other circumstances. The despots in whose hands it was the inevitable fate of the various commonwealths to fall, were by their very position immoral in all their dealings: violent, fraudulent, suspicious, and, from their life of constant unnatural tension of the feelings, prone to every species of depravity; while, on the other hand, in the feudal parts of Italy--which had merely received a superficial Renaissance varnish imported from other places with painters and humanists--in Naples, Rome, and the greater part of Umbria and the Marches, the upper classes had got into that monstrous condition which seems to have been the inevitable final product of feudalism, and which, while it gave France her Armagnacs, her Foix, and her Retz, gave Italy their counterparts in her hideously depraved princelets, the Malatestas, Varanos, Vitelli, and Baglioni. Both these classes of men, despots and feudal nobles, had a wide field for their ambition among the necessarily dissolved civic institutions; and their easy success contributed to confirm the general tendency of the day to say with Commines, "Qui a le succès a l'honneur," and to confound these two words and ideas. Nor was this yet all: the men of the Renaissance discovered the antique world, and in their wild, blind enthusiasm, in their ardent, insatiable thirst for its literature, swallowed it eagerly, dregs and all, till they were drunk and poisoned.