thrown back upon the policy of territorial
aggrandisement in Italy, from which they had hitherto refrained as
alien to the temperament of the Republic. At the end of the fifteenth
century Venice therefore became an object of envy and terror to the
Italian States. They envied her because she alone was tranquil,
wealthy, powerful, and free. They feared her because they had good
reason to suspect her of encroachment; and it was foreseen that if she
got the upper hand in Italy, all Italy would be the property of the
families inscribed upon the Golden Book. It was thus alone that the
Italians comprehended government. The principle of representation
being utterly unknown, and the privileged burghers in each city being
regarded as absolute and lawful owners of the city and of everything
belonging to it, the conquest of a town by a republic implied the
political extinction of that town and the disfranchisement of its
inhabitants in favour of the conquerors.

Florence at this epoch still called itself a Republic; and of all
Italian commonwealths it was by far the most democratic. Its history,
unlike that of Venice, had been the history of continual and brusque
changes, resulting in the destruction of the old nobility, in the
equalisation of the burghers, and in the formation of a new
aristocracy of wealth. Prom this class of _bourgeois_ nobles sprang
the Medici, who, by careful manipulation of the State machinery, by
the creation of a powerful party devoted to their interests, by
flattery of the people, by corruption, by taxation, and by constant
scheming, raised themselves to the first place in the commonwealth,
and became its virtual masters. In the year 1492 Lorenzo de' Medici,
the most remarkable chief of this despotic family, died, bequeathing
his supremacy in the Republic to a son of marked incompetence.

Since the Pontificate of Nicholas V. the See of Rome had entered upon
a new period of existence. The Popes no longer dreaded to reside in
Rome, but were bent upon making the metropolis of Christendom both
splendid as a seat of art and learning, and also potent as the capital
of a secular kingdom. Though their fiefs in Romagna and the March were
still held but loosely, though their provinces swarmed with petty
despots who defied the Papal authority, and though the princely Roman
houses of Colonna and Orsini were still strong enough to terrorise the
Holy Father in the Vatican, it was now clear that the Papal See must
in t