whose
whole business in life it was to form companies of trained horsemen,
and with these bands to hire themselves out to the republics and the
despots. Gain was the sole purpose of these captains. They sold their
service to the highest bidder, fighting irrespectively of principle or
patriotism, and passing with the coldest equanimity from the camp of
one master to that of his worst foe. It was impossible that true
military spirit should survive this prostitution of the art of war. A
species of mock warfare prevailed in Italy. Battles were fought with a
view to booty more than victory; prisoners were taken for the sake of
ransom; bloodshed was carefully avoided, for the men who fought on
either side in any pitched field had been comrades with their present
foemen in the last encounter, and who could tell how soon the general
of the one host might not need his rival's troops to recruit his own
ranks? Like every genuine institution of the Italian Renaissance,
warfare was thus a work of fine art, a masterpiece of intellectual
subtlety; and like the Renaissance itself, this peculiar form of
warfare was essentially transitional. The cannon and the musket were
already in use; and it only required one blast of gunpowder to turn
the sham-fight of courtly, traitorous, finessing captains of adventure
into something terribly more real. To men like the Marquis of Mantua
war had been a highly profitable game of skill; to men like the
Marechal de Gie it was a murderous horseplay; and this difference the
Italians were not slow to perceive. When they cast away their lances
at Fornovo, and fled--in spite of their superior numbers--never to
return, one fair-seeming sham of the fifteenth century became a vision
of the past.

* * * * *

_FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI_

Di Firenze in prima si divisono intra loro i nobili, dipoi i
nobili e il popolo, e in ultimo il popolo e la plebe; e
molte volte occorse che una di queste parti rimasa
superiore, si divise in due.--MACHIAVELLI.

I

Florence, like all Italian cities, owed her independence to the duel
of the Papacy and Empire. The transference of the imperial authority
beyond the Alps had enabled the burghs of Lombardy and Tuscany to
establish a form of self-government. This government was based upon
the old municipal organisation of duumvirs and decemvirs. It was, in
fact, nothing more or less than a survival from the ancient Roman