n so
intensified as to lead to a bloody war of succession, and to hasten
the French invasion.

The inextinguishable desire for liberty in Milan blazed forth upon the
death of the last duke. In spite of so many generations of despots, the
people still regarded themselves as sovereign, and established a
republic. But a state which had served the Visconti for nearly two
centuries, could not in a moment shake off its weakness and rely upon
itself alone. The republic, feeling the necessity of mercenary aid, was
short-sighted enough to engage Francesco Sforza as commander-in-chief
against the Venetians, who had availed themselves of the anarchy in
Lombardy to push their power west of the Adda.

Sforza, though the ablest general of the day, was precisely the man whom
common prudence should have prompted the burghers to mistrust. In one
brilliant campaign he drove the Venetians back beyond the Adda, burned
their fleet at Casal Maggiore on the Po, and utterly defeated their army
at Caravaggio. Then he returned as conqueror to Milan, reduced the
surrounding cities, blockaded the Milanese in their capital, and forced
them to receive him as their Duke in 1450. Italy had lost a noble
opportunity. If Florence and Venice had but taken part with Milan, and
had stimulated the flagging energies of Genoa, four powerful republics
in federation might have maintained the freedom of the whole peninsula
and have resisted foreign interference. But Cosimo de' Medici, who was
silently founding the despotism of his own family in Florence, preferred
to see a duke in Milan; and Venice, guided by the Doge Francesco
Foscari, thought only of territorial aggrandizement. The chance was
lost. The liberties of Milan were extinguished. A new dynasty was
established in the duchy, grounded on a false hereditary claim, which,
as long as it continued, gave a sort of color to the superior but still
illegal pretensions of the house of Orleans. It is impossible at this
point in the history of Italy to refrain from judging that the Italians
had become incapable of local self-government, and that the prevailing
tendency to despotism was not the results of accidents in any
combination, but of internal and inevitable laws of evolution.

It was at this period that the old despotisms founded by Imperial Vicars
and Captains of the People came to be supplanted or crossed by those of
military adventurers, just as at a somewhat later time the Condottiere
and the