l
sovereignty. Nor need we at present notice Savoy, Piemonte, and Saluzzo.
Although these north-western provinces were all-important through the
period of Franco-Spanish wars, inasmuch as they opened the gate of Italy
to French armies, and supplied those armies with a base for military
operations, the Duchy of Savoy had not yet become an exclusively Italian
Power.

The kingdom of Naples, on the death of Alfonso the Magnanimous in 1458,
had been separated from Sicily, and passed by testamentary appointment
to his natural son Ferdinand. The bastard Aragonese dynasty was Italian
in its tastes and interests, though unpopular both with the barons of
the realm and with the people, who in their restlessness were ready to
welcome any foreign deliverer from its oppressive yoke. This state of
general discontent rendered the revival of the old Angevine party, and
their resort to French aid, a source of peril to the monarchy. It also
served as a convenient fulcrum for the ambitious schemes of conquest
which the princes of the House of Aragon in Spain began to entertain. In
territorial extent the kingdom of Naples was the most considerable
parcel of the Italian community. It embraced the whole of Calabria,
Apulia, the Abruzzi, and the Terra di Lavoro; marching on its northern
boundary with the Papal States, and having no other neighbors. But
though so large and so compact a State, the semifeudal system of
government which had obtained in Naples since the first conquest of the
country by the Normans, the nature of its population, and the savage
dynastic wars to which it had been constantly exposed, rendered it more
backward in civilization than the northern and central provinces.

The Papacy, after the ending of the schism and the settlement of
Nicholas V. at Rome in 1447, gradually tended to become an Italian
sovereignty. During the residence of the Popes at Avignon, and the
weakness of the Papal See which followed in the period of the Councils
(Pisa, Constance, and Basel), it had lost its hold not only on the
immediate neighborhood of Rome, but also on its outlying possessions in
Umbria, the Marches of Ancona, and the Exarchate of Ravenna. The great
Houses of Colonna and Orsini asserted independence in their
principalities. Bologna and Perugia pretended to republican government
under the shadow of noble families; Bentivogli, Bracci, Baglioni. Imola,
Faenza, Forli, Rimini, Pesaro, Urbino, Camerino, Citta di Castello,
obeyed the ru