those long complicated
contests, the chief centers acquired separate personalities, assumed the
physiognomy of conscious freedom, and stamped the mark of their own
spirit on their citizens. At the end of all discords, at the close of
all catastrophes, we find in each of the great towns a population
released from mental bondage and fitted to perform the work of
intellectual emancipation for the rest of Europe. Thus the essential
characteristic of Italy is diversity, controlled and harmonized by an
ideal rhythm of progressive movement.[1] We who are mainly occupied in
this book with the Italian genius as it expressed itself in society,
scholarship, fine art, and literature, at its most brilliant period of
renascence, may accept this fact of political dismemberment with
acquiescence. It was to the variety of conditions offered by the Italian
communities that we owe the unexampled richness of the mental life of
Italy. Yet it is impossible to overlook the weakness inflicted on the
people by those same conditions when the time came for Italy to try her
strength against the nations of Europe.[2] It was then shown that the
diversities which stimulated spiritual energy were a fatal source of
national instability. The pride of the Italians in their local
independence, their intolerance of unification under a single head, the
jealousies that prevented them from forming a permanent confederation,
rendered them incapable of coping with races which had yielded to the
centripetal force of monarchy. If it is true that the unity of the
nation under a kingdom founded at Pavia would have deprived the world of
much that Italy has yielded in the sphere of thought and art, it is
certainly not less true that such centralization alone could have
averted the ruin of the sixteenth century which gives the aspect of a
tragedy to each volume of my work on the Renaissance.

[1] See Guicciardini (_Op. Ined._ vol. i. p. 28) for an eloquent
demonstration of the happiness, prosperity, and splendor conferred
on the Italians by the independence of their several centers. He is
arguing against Machiavelli's lamentation over their failure to
achieve national unity.

[2] This was the point urged by Machiavelli, in the _Principe_, the
_Discorsi_, and the _Art of War_. With keener political insight than
Guicciardini, he perceived that the old felicity of Italy was about
to fail her through the very independence of her local