When the ‘Company of Death’ repulsed the German army of Frederick Barbarossa on the field of Legnano41 it raised aloft before the eyes of Europe not only the banner of democracy but also of nationality. Others, as we have seen, followed these banners once displayed: the Swiss Cantons shook off the Habsburg yoke: the Flemish towns defied their counts and French overlords: the Hanse cities formed political as well as commercial leagues against Scandinavia: France, England, and Spain emerged, through war and anarchy, modern states conscious of a national destiny.

This slow evolution of nations and classes is the history of the later Middle Ages; but in Italy there is no steady progress to record; rather, a retrogression that proves her early efforts to secure freedom were little understood even by those who made them.

Frederick II had ruled Lombardy in the thirteenth century through tyrants; but, long after the Hohenstaufen had disappeared, and the quarrels of Welfs and Waiblingen had dwindled into a memory in Germany, the feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines were still a monstrous reality in towns south of the Alps, where petty despots enslaved the Communes and reduced the country to perpetual warfare.

At length from this welter of lost hopes and evil deeds there emerged, not Italy a nation, but five Italian states of pre-eminence in the peninsula, namely, Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples, and Rome. Each was more jealous of the other than of foreign intervention, so that on the slightest pretext one would appeal to France to support her ambitions, another to Spain or the Empire, and yet a third to Hungary or the Greeks. If Italy, as a result, became at a later date ‘the cockpit of Europe’, where strangers fought their battles and settled their fortunes, it was largely her lack of any national foresight in mediaeval times that brought on her this misery.

The history of Milan, first as a Commune fighting for her own liberty and destroying her neighbour’s, then as the battle-ground of a struggle between two of her chief families, and finally as the slave of the victor, is the tale of many a north Italian town, only that position and wealth gave to the fate of this famous city a more than local interest.

The lords of Milan in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were the Visconti, typical tyrants of the Italy of their day, quick with their swords, but still more ready with poison or a dagger, profligate and luxurious, patrons of literature and art, bad enemies and still worse friends, false and cruel, subtle as the serpent they so fittingly bore as an emblem. No bond but fear compelled their subject’s loyalty, and deliberate cruelty to inspire fear they had made a part of their system.

Bernabò Visconti permitted no one but himself to enjoy the pleasures of the chase; but for this purpose he kept some five thousand savage hounds fed on flesh, and into their kennels his soldiers cast such hapless peasants as had accidentally killed their lord’s game or dared to poach on his preserves.

No sense of the sanctity of an envoy’s person disturbed this grim Visconti’s sense of humour, when he demanded of messengers sent by the Pope with unpleasant tidings whether they would rather drink or eat. As he put the question he pointed towards the river, rushing in a torrent beneath the bridge on which he stood, and the envoys, casting horrified eyes in that direction, replied, ‘Sir, we will eat.’ ‘Eat this, then,’ said Bernabò sternly, handing them the papal letter with its leaden seals and thick parchment, and before they left his presence the whole had been consumed.

Galeazzo Visconti, an elder brother of Bernabò, bore an even worse reputation for cruelty. Those he condemned to death had their suffering prolonged on a deliberate programme during forty-one days, losing now an eye, and now a foot or a hand, were beaten, forced to swallow nauseous drinks, and then, when the agony could be prolonged no further, broken on the wheel. The scene of this torture was a scaffold set in the public gaze that Milan might read what was the anger of the Visconti and tremble.

The most famous of this infamous family was Gian Galeazzo, son of Galeazzo, a youth so timid by nature that he would shake and turn white at the sudden closing of a door, or at a noise in the street below. His uncle, Bernabò, believed him half-witted, and foolishly accepted an invitation to visit him after his father’s death, intending to manage the young man’s affairs for him and to keep him in terrified submission. The wily old man was to find himself outmatched, however, for Gian Galeazzo came to their meeting-place with an armed guard, arrested his uncle, and imprisoned him in a castle, where he died by slow poison.

After this Gian Galeazzo reigned alone in Milan, with no law save his ruthless ambition; and by this and his skill in creating political opportunities, and making use of them at his neighbour’s expense, he succeeded in stretching his tyranny over the plains of Lombardy and southwards amongst the hill cities of Tuscany. Near at home he beat down resistance by force of arms, while farther away he secured by bribery or fraud the allegiance of cities too weak to stand alone, yet less afraid of distant Milan than of Venice or Florence that lay nearer to their walls.

It was Gian Galeazzo’s aim to found a kingdom in North Italy, and he went far towards realizing his project, stretching his dominion at one time to Verona and Vicenza at the very gates of Venice, while in the south he absorbed as subject-towns Pisa and Siena, the two arch-enemies of Florence. This territory, acquired by war, bribery, murder, and fraud, he persuaded the Emperor to recognize as a duchy hereditary in his family, and at once proceeded to form alliances with the royal houses of Europe. The marriage of his daughter Valentina with the young and weak-minded Duke of Orleans, brother of the French king, though hardly an attractive union for the bride, proved fraught with importance for the whole of Italy, since at the very end of the fifteenth century, Louis, Duke of Orleans, a grandson of Valentina Visconti, succeeded to the French crown as Louis XII, and also laid claim to the duchy of Milan, as a descendant of the Visconti.42

At first sight it seems strange that any race so cruel and unprincipled as the Visconti should continue to maintain their tyranny over men and women naturally independent like the inhabitants of North Italy. Certainly, if their rulers had been forced to rely on municipal levies they would not have kept their power even for a generation; but unfortunately the old plan of expecting every citizen of military age to appear at the sound of a bell in order to defend his town had practically disappeared. Instead the professional soldier had taken the citizen’s place—the type of man who, as long as he received high wages and frequent booty, did not care who was his master, nor to what ugly job of carnage or intimidation he was bidden to bring his sword.

This system of hiring soldiers, condottieri, as they were called in Italy, had arisen partly from the laziness of the townsmen themselves, who did not wish to leave their business in order to drill and fight, and were therefore quite willing to pay volunteers to serve instead of them. Partly it was due to the reluctance of tyrants to arm and employ as soldiers the people over whom they ruled. From the point of view of the Visconti, for instance, it was much safer to enrol strangers who would not have any patriotic scruples in carrying out a massacre, or any other orders equally harsh.

For such ruffians Italy herself supplied a wide recruiting-ground, namely, the numberless small towns, once independent but now swallowed up by bigger states, who treated the conquered as perpetual enemies to be bullied and suppressed; allowing them no share in the government nor voice in their future destiny. Wide experience has taught the world that such tyranny breeds merely hatred and disloyalty, and the continual local warfare from which mediaeval Italy suffered could be largely traced to the failure to recognize this political truth. With no legitimate outlet for their energies, the young men of the conquered towns found in the formation of a company of adventurers, or in the service of some prince, the only path to renown, possibly a way of revenge.

To Italian condottieri were added German soldiers whom Emperors visiting Italy had brought in their train, and who afterwards remained behind, looking on the cities of Italy as a happy hunting-ground for loot and adventure. Yet a third source of supply were freebooters from France, released by one of the truces of the Hundred Years’ War, and hastily sent by those who had employed them to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Amongst those who came to Italy in the fourteenth century, and built for himself a name of terror and renown, was an English captain, Sir John Hawkwood, the son of an Essex tailor, knighted by Edward III for his prowess on the battle-fields of France. Here is what a Florentine chronicler says of him:

‘He endured under arms longer than any one, for he endured sixty years: and he well knew how to manage that there should be little peace in Italy in his time.... For men and Communes and all cities live by peace, but these men live and increase by war, which is the undoing of cities, for they fight and become of naught. In such men there is neither love nor faith.’

One tale of the day records how some Franciscans, meeting Sir John Hawkwood, exclaimed as was their custom, ‘Peace be with you.’ To their astonishment he answered, ‘God take away your alms.’ When they asked him the reason for wishing them so ill, he replied, ‘You also wished that God might make me die of hunger. Know you not that I live on war, and that peace would ruin me? I therefore returned your greeting in like sort.’

Sir John Hawkwood spent most of his time in the service of Florence; and, whatever his cruelty and greed, he does not seem to have been as false as other captains of his time. Indeed, when he died, the Florentines buried him in their cathedral, and raised an effigy in grateful memory of his deeds on behalf of the city.

Returning to the history of Milan and her condottieri, Gian Galeazzo, though timid and unwarlike himself, was a shrewd judge of character, and his captains, while they struck terror into his enemies, remained faithful to himself. When he died in 1402, however, many of them tried to establish independent states; and it was some years before his son, Filippo Maria, could master them and regain control over the greater part of the Duchy.

Even more cowardly than his father, Filippo Maria lived, like Louis XI of France, shut off from the sight of men. Sismondi, the historian, describes him as ‘a strange, dingy, creature, with protruding eyeballs and furtive glance.’ He hated to hear the word ‘death’ mentioned, and for fear of assassination would change his bedroom every night. When news was brought him of defeat he would tremble in the expectation that his condottieri might desert him: when messengers arrived flushed with victory he was scarcely less aghast, believing that the successful general might become his rival.

Such was the penalty paid by despots, save by those of iron nerve, in return for their luxury and power: the dread that the most servile of condottieri might be bribed into a relentless enemy, poison lurk in the seasoned dish or wine-cup, a dagger pierce the strongest mesh of a steel tunic. So night and day was the great Visconti haunted by fear, while his hired armies forced Genoa to acknowledge his suzerainty, and plunged his Duchy into rivalry with Venice along the line of the River Adige.

The history of Venice differs in many ways from that of other Italian states. Built on a network of islands that destined her geographically for a great sea-power, she had looked from earliest times not to territorial aggrandisement, but to commercial expansion for the satisfaction of her ambitions. In this way she had avoided the strife of feudal landowners, and even the Guelf and Ghibelline factions that had reduced her neighbours to slavery.

Elsewhere in Italy the names of cities and states are bound up with the histories of mediaeval families; Naples with the quarrels of Hohenstaufen, Angevins, and Aragonese: Rome with the Barons of the Campagna, the Orsini and Colonna: Milan with the Visconti, and later with the Sforza: Florence with the Medici: but in Venice the state was everything, demanding of her sons and daughters not the startling qualities and vices of the successful soldier of fortune, but obedience, self-effacement, and hard work.

The Doge, or Duke, the chief magistrate of Venice, has been compared to a king; but he was in reality merely a president elected for life, and that by a system rendered as complicated as possible in order to prevent wire-pulling. Once chosen and presented to the people with the old formula, ‘This is your Doge an’ it please you!’ the new ruler of the city found himself hedged about by a hundred constitutional checks, that compelled him to act only on the well-considered advice of his six Ducal Councillors, forbade him to raise any of his family to a public office or to divest himself of a rank that he might with years find more burdensome than pleasant. He was also made aware that the respect with which his commands were received was paid not to himself but to his office, and through his office to Venice, a royal mistress before whom even a haughty aristocracy willingly bent the knee.

In early days all important matters in Venice were decided by a General Assembly of the people; but as the population grew, this unwieldy body was replaced by a ‘Grand Council’ of leading citizens. In the early fourteenth century another and still more important change was made, for the ranks of the Grand Council were closed, and only members of those families who had been in the habit of attending its meetings were allowed to do so in future. Thus a privileged aristocracy was created, and the majority of Venetians excluded from any share in their government; but because this government aimed not at the advantage of any particular family but of the whole state, people forgave its despotic character. Even the famous Council of Ten that, like the Court of Star Chamber under the Tudors, had power to seize and examine citizens secretly, in the interests of the state, was admired by the Venetians over whom it exerted its sway, because of its reputation for even-handed justice, that drew no distinctions between the son of a Doge, a merchant, or a beggar. ‘The Venetian Republic’, says a modern writer on mediaeval times, ‘was the one stable element in all North Italy,’ and this condition of political calm was the wonder and admiration of contemporaries.

Sometimes to-day it seems difficult to admire mediaeval Venice because of her selfishness and frank commercialism. She had no sense of patriotism either towards Italy or Christendom; witness the Fourth Crusade,43 where nothing but her insistent desire to protect her trading position in the East had influenced her diplomacy.

This accusation of selfishness is true; but we must remember that the word ‘patriotism’ has a much wider scope in modern times than was possible to the limited outlook of the Middle Ages. Venice might be unmoved by the words ‘Italy’ or ‘Christendom’, but the whole of her life and ideals was centred in the word ‘Venice’. Her sailors and merchants, who laid the foundations of her greatness, were no hired mercenaries, but citizens willing to lay down their lives for the Republic who was their mother and their queen. Thus narrowing the term ‘patriotism’, we see that of all the Italian Powers Venice alone understood what the word meant, in that her sons and daughters were willing to sacrifice as a matter of course not merely life but family ambitions, class, and even individuality to the interests of their state.

The ambitions of Venice were bound up with the shipping and commerce that had gained for her the carrying-trade of the world. To take, for example, the wool manufacture, of such vital interest to English and Flemings, we find that at one time this depended largely on Venetian merchants, who would carry sugar and spices to England from the East, replace their cargo with wool, unload this in its turn in the harbours of Flanders, and then laden with bales of manufactured cloth return to dispose of them in Italian markets.

Besides the carrying-trade, which depended on her neighbour’s industry, Venice had her own manufactures such as silk and glass; but in either case both her sailors and workmen found one thing absolutely vital to their interests, namely, the command of the Adriatic. Like the British Isles to-day, Venice could not feed her thriving population from home-produce, and yet, with enemies or pirates hiding along the Dalmatian coast, safety for her richly-laden vessels passing to and fro could not be guaranteed. These are some of the reasons why from earliest times the Republic had embarked on an aggressive maritime policy that brought her into clash with other Mediterranean ports, and especially with Genoa, her rival in Eastern waters.

When, at the end of the Fourth Crusade, Venice forced Constantinople to accept a Latin dynasty, she secured for herself for the time being especial privileges in that world-market; Genoa, who adopted the cause of the exiled Greeks, achieved a signal triumph in her turn when in 1261 with her assistance Michael Paleologus, a Greek general, restored the Byzantine Empire amid public rejoicings.

Open warfare was now almost continuous between the republics; there was street-fighting in Constantinople and in the ports of Palestine, sea-battles off the Italian and Greek coasts, encounters in which varying fortunes gave at first the mastery of the Mediterranean to neither Venice nor Genoa, but which disastrously weakened the whole resistance of Christendom to the Mahometans.

At length in 1380 a decisive battle was fought off Chioggia, one of the cities of the Venetian Lagoons, whither the Genoese fleet, triumphant on the open seas, had taken up its quarters determined to blockade the enemy into surrender. ‘Let us man every vessel in Venice and go and fight the foe’, was the general cry; and a popular leader, Pisani, imprisoned on account of his share in a recent naval disaster, was released on the public demand and made captain of the enterprise. ‘Long live Pisani!’ the citizens shouted in their joy, but their hero, true to the spirit of Venice, answered them, ‘Venetians cry only, “Long live St. Mark!”’

With the few ships and men at his disposal, Pisani recognized that it was out of the question to lead a successful attack; but he knew that if he could defer the issue there was a Venetian fleet in the eastern Mediterranean which, learning his straits, would return with all possible speed to his aid. He therefore determined to force the enemy to remain where they were without offering open battle, and this manœuvre he carried out with great boldness and skill, sinking heavy vessels loaded with stones in the channels that led to Chioggia, while placing his own fleet across the main entrance to prevent Genoese reinforcements. The blockaders were now blockaded; and through long winter days and nights the rivals, worn out by their bitter vigil, starving and short of ammunition, watched one another and searched the horizon anxiously. At length a shout arose, for distant sails had been sighted; then as the Venetian flag floated proudly into view the shout of Pisani and his men became a song of triumph: the Republic was saved. Venice was not only saved from ruin, her future as Queen of the Adriatic was assured, for the Genoese admiral was compelled to surrender, and his Republic to acknowledge her rival’s supremacy of the seas.

The sea-policy of Venice was the inevitable result of her geographical position; but as the centuries passed she developed a much more debatable land-policy. Many mediaeval Venetians declared that since land was the source of all political trouble, therefore Venice should only maintain enough command over the immediate mainland to secure the city from a surprise attack. Others replied that such an argument was dictated by narrow-minded prejudice, a point of view suitable to the days when Lombardy had been divided amongst a number of weak city states, but impracticable with powerful tyrants, such as the Visconti, masters of North Italy. Unless Venice could secure the territories lying at the foot of the Alps, and also a wide stretch of eastern Lombardy, she would find that she had no command over the passes in the mountains by means of which she carried on her commerce with Germany and Austria.

The advocates of a land-empire policy received confirmation of their warnings when in the early part of the fourteenth century Mastino della Scala, lord of Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso, attempted to levy taxes on Venetian goods passing through his territories. The Republic, roused by what she considered an insult to her commercial supremacy, promptly formed a league with Milan and Florence against Mastino, and obtained Treviso and other towns as the result of a victorious war.

This campaign might, of course, be called merely a part of Venice’s commercial policy, defence not aggression; but later, in 1423, the Florentines persuaded the Republic to join with them in a war against the Visconti, declaring that they were weary of struggling alone against such tyrants, and that if Venice did not help them they would be compelled to make Filippo Maria ‘King of North Italy.’ The result of the war that followed was a treaty securing Venice a temporary increase of power on the mainland, and may be taken as the first decisive step in her deliberate scheme of building up a land-empire in Italy.

Machiavelli, a student of politics in the sixteenth century, who wrote a handbook of advice for rulers called The Prince, as well as the history of Florence, his native city, declares that the decline of the Venetians ‘dated from the time when they became ambitious of conquests by land and of adopting the manners and customs of the other states of Italy’. This may be true; but it is doubtful whether the great Republic could have remained in glorious isolation with the Visconti knocking at her gates.

From Venice we must turn to Florence, which, by the fifteenth century, emerged from petty rivalries as the first city in Tuscany. Like Milan, Florence fell a prey to Guelfs and Ghibellines; but these feuds, instead of becoming a family rivalry between would-be despots, developed into a bitter class-war.

On the fall of Frederick II the Guelfs, who in Florence at this date may be taken as representing the populo grasso, or rich merchants, as opposed to the grandi, or nobles, succeeded in driving the majority of their enemies out of the city. They then remodelled the constitution in their own favour.

The chief power in the city was now the ‘Signory’, composed of the ‘Gonfalonier of Justice’ and a number of ‘Priors’, representatives of the arti, or guilds of lawyers, physicians, clothiers, &c.: to name but a few. No aristocrat might stand for any public office unless he became a member of one of the guilds, and in order to ensure that he did not merely write down his name on their registers it was later enacted that every candidate for office must show proof that he really worked at the trade of the guild to which he claimed to belong.

Other and sterner measures of proscription followed with successive generations. The noble who injured a citizen of lesser rank, whether on purpose or by accident, was liable to have his house levelled with the dust: the towers, from which in old days his ancestors had poured boiling oil or stones upon their rivals, were reduced by law to a height that could be easily scaled; in the case of a riot no aristocrat, however innocent his intentions, might have access to the streets. The grande was, in fact, both in regard to politics and justice, placed at such an obvious disadvantage that to ennoble an ambitious enemy was a favourite Florentine method of rendering him harmless.

The Guelf triumph of the thirteenth century did not, in spite of its completeness, bring peace to Florence. New parties sprang up; and the government in its efforts to keep clear of class or family influence introduced so many complicated checks that great injury was done to individual action, and all hope of a steady policy removed. Members of the ‘Signory’, for instance, served only for two months at a time: the twelve ‘Buonomini’, or ‘Good men’, elected to give them advice only for six. What was most in contrast to the ideal of ‘the right man for the right job’ was the practice of first making a list of all citizens considered suitable to hold office, then putting the names in a bag, and afterwards picking them out haphazard as vacancies occurred. Even this precaution against favouritism—and, one is inclined to add, also against efficiency—was checked by another law, the summoning of a parlamento in cases of emergency. This parlamento was an informal gathering of the people collected by the ringing of a bell in the big square, where it was then asked to decide whether a special committee should be appointed with free power to alter the existing constitution. Politicians argued that here in the last resort was a direct appeal to the people, but in reality by placing armed men at the entrances to the square a docile crowd could be manœuvred at the mercy of any mob-orator set up by those behind the scenes.

Power remained in Florence in the hands of the prosperous burghers and merchants, and these in time developed their own feuds under the names of ‘Whites’ and ‘Blacks’, adopted by the partisans in a family quarrel.

The greatest of Italian poets, Dante Alighieri, was a ‘White’, and was exiled from his city in 1302 owing to the triumph of his rivals. When pardon was suggested on the payment of a large sum of money, Dante, who had tried to serve his city faithfully, refused to comply, feeling that this would be an open acknowledgement of his guilt. ‘If another way can be found ... which shall not taint Dante’s fame and honour’, he wrote proudly, ‘that way I will accept and with no reluctant steps ... but if Florence is not to be entered by any such way never will I enter Florence.’

Dante’s mental outlook was typical of mediaeval times in its stern prejudices and hatreds, but it was also clearer and nobler in its scope. An enthusiastic Ghibelline in politics, he believed that it was the first duty of Holy Roman Emperors to exert their authority over Italy, but this vision was not narrowed, as with many Italians, into the mere hope of restoration to home and power, with a sequel of revenge on private enemies. Dearer to Dante than any personal ambitions was the desire for the salvation of both Church and state from tyranny and corruption; and this he believed could only be achieved by bestowing supreme power on a world-emperor.

One attempt at reform had been made in 1294, when the conclave of Cardinals, suddenly stung with the contrast between the character of the Catholic Church and its professions, chose as their Vicar a hermit noted for his privations and holy life. Celestine V, as he was afterwards called, was a small man, pale and feeble, with tousled hair and garments of sackcloth. When a deputation of splendidly dressed cardinals came to find him, he fled in terror, and it was almost by force that he was at last persuaded to go with them and put on the pontifical robes. The men and women who longed for reform now waited eagerly for this new Pope’s mandates; but their expectations were doomed to failure. Celestine V had neither the originality nor the strength of will to withstand his change of fortunes. Terrified by his surroundings, he became an easy prey to those who were unscrupulous and ambitious, giving away benefices sometimes twice over because he dared not refuse them to importunate courtiers, and creating new cardinals almost as fast as he was asked to do so. At last he was allowed to abdicate, and hurried back to his cell, but only to be seized by his successor, the fierce Boniface VIII,44 and shut up in a castle, where he died.

Dante hated Boniface as a ruler who debased his spiritual opportunities in order to obtain material rewards, but he had hardly less scorn for Celestine V, who was given power to reform the Church of Christ and ‘made the great refusal’. Reform, in the Florentine’s eyes, could not be looked for from Rome, but, when the Emperor Henry VII crossed the Alps,45 his hopes rose high that here at last was the saviour of Italy, and it is probable that at this time the poet wrote his political treatise called the De Monarchia, embodying his views. He himself went out to meet his champion, but Henry was not destined to be a second Charlemagne or Otto the Great, and his death closed all expectations built on his chivalrous character and ideals.

Dante’s greatest work is his long poem the Divina Commedia, divided into three parts, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso. It tells how on Good Friday of the year of Jubilee 1300 the Florentine, meeting with the spirit of Virgil whom he had chosen as his master, was led by him through the realms of everlasting punishment and of penance, and from there was borne by another guide, Beatrice, the idealized vision of a woman he had loved on earth, up through the ‘Nine Heavens’ to the very throne of God. As a summary of mediaeval theories as to the life eternal, and also as the reflection of a fourteenth-century mind on politics of the day, the Divine Comedy is indeed an historical treasury as well as a masterpiece of Italian literature. It is, however, a great deal more—the revelation of the development of a human soul. Dante’s journey is told with a mastery of atmosphere and detail that holds our imaginations to-day with the sense of reality. It was obviously still more real to himself and expresses the agonized endeavour of a soul, alive to the corruption and nerve-weariness of the world around him, to find the way of salvation, a pilgrimage crowned at last by the realization of a Civitas Dei so supreme in its beauty and peace as to surpass the prophecies of St. Augustine.

Dante himself did not live to fulfil his earthly dream of returning to Florence, but died at Ravenna in 1321. On his tomb is an inscription in Latin containing the words, ‘Whom Florence bore, the mother that did little love him’; while his portrait has the proud motto so typical of his whole life, ‘I yield not to misfortune’. In later centuries Florence recalled with shame her repudiation of this the greatest of her sons; but while he lived, and for some years after his death, political prejudices blinded her eyes. In the Emperor Henry VII, to whom Dante referred as ‘King of the earth and servant of God’, Florence saw an enemy so hateful that she was willing to forgo her boasted democracy, and to accept as master any prince powerful enough to oppose him. Thus she granted the Signoria, or ‘overlordship’ of the city, for five years to King Robert of Naples, the head of the Guelf party in Italy during the early years of the fourteenth century.

King Robert of Naples was a grandson of Charles, Count of Anjou, brother of St. Louis, and, true to the tradition of his house, stood as the champion of the Popes against imperial claims over Italy. Outwardly he was by far the most powerful of the Italian princes of his day; but in reality he sat uneasily on his throne. The Neapolitans had not learned with time to love their Angevin rulers, but even after the death of Conradin remembered the Hohenstaufen, and envied Sicily that dared to throw off the French yoke and give herself to a Spanish dynasty.

It is difficult to provide a short and at the same time connected account of the history of Naples from the death of King Robert in 1343 until 1435, when it was conquered by the House of Aragon. For nearly a century there is a dismal record of murders and plots, with scarcely an illuminating glimpse of patriotism or of any heroic figure. It is like a ‘dance of death’, with ever-changing partners, and nothing achieved save crimes and revolutions.

King Robert’s successor was a granddaughter, Joanna I, a political personage from her cradle, and married at the age of five to a boy cousin two years her senior, Andrew of Hungary, brother of Louis the Great. We cannot tell if, left to themselves, this young couple, each partner so passionate and self-willed, could have learned to work together in double harness. What is certain is that no one in that corrupt court gave them the chance, one party of intriguers continually whispering in Joanna’s ear that as queen it was beneath her dignity to accept any interference from her husband, while their rivals reminded the young Prince Andrew that he was descended from King Robert’s elder brother, and therefore had as great a right to the throne as his wife. Frequent quarrels as to whose will should prevail shook the council-chamber, and then at last came tragedy.

In 1345 Joanna and Andrew, then respectively eighteen and twenty, set out together into the country on an apparently amicable hunting-expedition. As they slept one night in the guest-room of a convent the Prince heard himself called by voices in the next room. Suspecting no harm he rose and went to see which of his friends had summoned him, only to find himself attacked by a group of armed men. He turned to re-enter the bedroom, but the door was locked behind him. With the odds now wholly against him, Andrew fought bravely for his life, but at length two of his assassins succeeded in throwing a rope round his neck, and with this they strangled him and hung his body from the balcony outside.

Attendants came at last, and, forcing the door, told Joanna of the murder; on which she declared that she had been so soundly asleep that she had heard nothing, though she was never able to explain satisfactorily how in that case the door of her bedroom had become locked behind the young king. Naturally the greater part of Europe believed that she was guilty of connivance in the crime, and King Louis of Hungary brought an army to Italy to avenge his brother’s death. He succeeded in driving Joanna from Naples, which he claimed as his rightful inheritance, but he was not sufficiently supported to make a permanent conquest, and in the end he was forced to hurry away to Hungary, where his throne was threatened, leaving the question of his sister-in-law’s guilt to be decided by the Pope.

The Pope at this time looked to the Angevin rulers of Naples as his chief supporters, and at once proclaimed Joanna innocent. It is worthy of note that three princes were found brave enough to become her husband in turn; but, though four times married, Joanna had but one son, who died as a boy.

At first she was quite willing to accept as her heir a cousin, Charles of Durazzo, who was married to her niece, but soon she had quarrelled violently with him and offered the throne instead to a member of the French royal house, Louis, Duke of Anjou. This is a very bewildering moment for students of history, because it introduces into Italian politics a second Angevin dynasty only distantly connected with the first, yet both laying claim to Naples and waging war against one another as if each belonged to a different race.

Joanna in the end was punished for her capriciousness, for in the course of the civil wars she had introduced she fell into the hands of Charles of Durazzo, who, indignant at his repudiation, shut her up in a castle, where she died. One report says that she was smothered with a feather-bed; another that she was strangled with a silken cord—perhaps in memory of Prince Andrew’s murder.

After this act of retribution, Charles of Durazzo maintained his power in Naples for four years, though he was forced to surrender the County of Provence to his Angevin rival. Not content with his Italian kingdom, he set off with an army to Hungary as soon as he heard of the death of Louis the Great, hoping to enforce his claims on that warrior’s lands. Instead he was assassinated, and succeeded in Naples by his son Ladislas, a youth of fifteen.

Ladislas proved a born soldier of unflagging energy and purpose, so that he not only conquered his unruly baronage but made himself master of southern Italy, including Rome, from which with unusual Angevin hostility he drove the Pope. Here was a chance for bringing about the union of Italy under one ruler, and Ladislas certainly aimed at such an achievement, but apart from his military genius he was a typical despot of his day—cruel, unscrupulous, and pleasure-seeking as the Visconti—and when he died, still a young man, in 1414 few mourned his passing.

His sister, Joanna II, who succeeded him, lacked his strength while exhibiting many of his vices. Like Joanna I she was false and fickle; like Joanna I she had no direct heirs, so that the original House of Anjou in Naples came to an end when she died. Many negotiations as to her successor took place during the latter years of her reign, and for some time it seemed as if the old queen would be content to accept Louis III of Anjou, at this time the representative of the Second Angevin House, but in a moment of caprice and anger she suddenly bestowed her favour instead on Alfonso V of Aragon and Sicily, and adopted him as her heir. Of course, being Joanna, she again changed her mind; but, though Alfonso pretended to accept his repudiation, the hard-headed Spaniard was not to be turned so easily from an acquisition that would forward Aragonese ambitions in the Mediterranean.

Directly Joanna II died, Alfonso appeared off Naples with a fleet, and though he was taken prisoner in battle and sent as a prisoner to Filippo Maria Visconti at Milan, he acted with such diplomacy that he persuaded that despot, hitherto an ally of the Angevins, that it was much safer for Milan to have a Spanish rather than a French House reigning in Naples. This was the beginning of a firm alliance between Milan and Naples, for Alfonso, released from his captivity, succeeded in establishing himself in ‘the Kingdom’, where withdrawing his court from Aragon he founded a new capital that became a centre for learned and cultured Italians as of old in the days of Frederick II.

We have dealt now with four of the five principal Italian states during the later Middle Ages. In Rome, to pick up the political threads, we must go back to the effects of the removal of the papal court to Avignon in 1308.46

From the point of view of the Popes themselves, many of them Frenchmen by birth, there were considerable advantages to be gained by this change—not only safety from the invasions of Holy Roman Emperors aspiring to rule Italy, but also from the turbulence of Roman citizens and barons of the Campagna.

Avignon was near enough to France to claim her king’s protection, but far enough outside her boundaries to evade obedience to her laws. It stood in the County of Provence, part of the French estates of the Angevin House of Naples, but during her exile Joanna I, penniless and in need of papal support, was induced to sell the city, and it remained an independent possession of the Holy See until the eighteenth century.

From the immediate advantages caused by the ‘Babylonish Captivity’, as these years of papal residence in Avignon were called, we turn to the ultimate disadvantages, and these were serious. Inevitably there was a lowering of papal prestige in the eyes of Europe. In Rome, that since classic times had been the recognized capital of the Western world, the Pope had seemed indeed a world-wide potentate, on whom the mantle both of St. Peter and of the Caesars might well have fallen. Transferred to a city of Provence he shrank almost to the measure of a petty sovereign.

During the Hundred Years’ War, for instance, there was widespread grumbling in England at the obedience owed to Avignon. The Popes, ran popular complaint, were more than half French in political outlook and sympathy, so that an Englishman who wished for a successful decision to his suit in a papal law-court must pay double the sums proffered by men of any other race in order to obtain justice. What was more, he knew that any money he sent to the papal treasury helped to provide the sinews of war for his most hated enemies.

The Papacy had been disliked across the Channel in the days of Innocent IV, when England was taxed to pay for wars against the Hohenstaufen: now, more than a century later, grumbling had begun to crystallize in the dangerous shape of a resistance not merely to papal supremacy, but to papal doctrine on which that supremacy was based. Thus Wycliffe, the first great English heretic, who began to proclaim his views during the later years of Edward III’s reign, was popularly regarded as a patriot, and his sermons denouncing Catholic doctrine widely read and discussed.

In the thirteenth century it had been possible to suppress heresy in Languedoc; but in the fourteenth century there were no longer Popes like Innocent III who could persuade men to fight the battles of Avignon, and so the practice of criticism and independent thought grew, and by the fifteenth century many of the doctrines taught by Wycliffe had spread across Europe and found a home in Bohemia.

With the history of Bohemian heresy we shall deal later, but, having treated its development as partly arising from the change in papal fortunes, we must notice the effect of the Babylonish Captivity on Rome herself, and this, indeed, was disastrous.

‘The absence of the Pope’, says Gregorovius, a modern German historian, ‘left the nobility more unbridled than ever; these hereditary Houses now regarded themselves as masters of Rome left without her master. Their mercenaries encamped on every road; travellers and pilgrims were robbed; places of worship remained empty. The entire circumstances of the city were reduced to a meaner level. No prince, nobleman, or envoy of a foreign power, any longer made his appearance.... Vicars replaced the cardinals absent from their titular churches, while the Pope himself was represented in the Vatican, as by a shadow, by some bishop of the neighbourhood, Nepi, Viterbo, or Orvieto.’

The wealth and pomp that had made the papal court a source of revenue to the Romans were transferred to Provence: the Orsini and Colonna battled in the streets with no High Pontiff to hold them in check. Only his agents remained, who were there mainly to collect his rents and revenues, so that the city seemed once again threatened with political extinction as when Constantine had removed his capital to the Bosporus.