e milder in their exercise of power and less ambitious. Having
begun by disarming their subjects, they now proceeded to lay down arms
themselves, employing small forces for the protection of their person
and the State, engaging more cautiously in foreign strife, and
substituting diplomacy, wherever it was possible, for warfare. Gold
still ruled in politics, but it was spent in bribery. To the ambitious
military schemes of Gian Galeazzo Visconti succeeded the commercial
cynicism of Cosimo de' Medici, who enslaved Florence by astute
demoralization.[1] The spirit of the age was materialistic and positive.
The Despots held their state by treachery, craft, and corruption. The
element of force being virtually eliminated, intelligence at last gained
undivided sway; and the ideal statecraft of Machiavelli was realized
with more or less completeness in all parts of the peninsula. At this
moment and by these means Italy obtained a brief but golden period of
peace beneath the confederation of her great powers. Nicholas V. had
restored the Papal court to Rome in 1447; where he assumed the manners
of despotism and counted as one among the Italian Signori. Lombardy
remained tranquil under the rule of Francesco Sforza, and Tuscany under
that of the Casa Medici. The kingdom of Naples, conquered by Alfonso of
Aragon in 1442, was equally ruled in the spirit of enlightened
despotism, while Venice, who had so long formed a state apart, by her
recent acquisition of a domain on terra firma, entered the community of
Italian politics. Thus the country had finally resolved itself into five
grand constituent elements--the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of S. Mark,
Florence, Rome, and the kingdom of Naples--all of them, though widely
differing in previous history and constitutional peculiarities, now
animated by a common spirit.[2] Politically they tended to despotism;
for though Venice continued to be a republic, the government of the
Venetian oligarchy was but despotism put into commission.
Intellectually, the same enthusiasm for classical studies, the same
artistic energy, and the same impulse to revive Italian literature
brought the several centers of the nation into keener sympathy than they
had felt before. A network of diplomacy embraced the cities; and round
the leaders of the confederation were grouped inferior burghs,
republican or tyrannical as the case might be, like satellites around
the luminaries of a solar system. When Constantinople