pidity of
Louis; and while he was still but Duke of Orleans, with no sure prospect
of inheriting the crown of France, he seems to have indulged the fancy
of annexing Milan. No sooner had he ascended the French throne than he
began to act upon this ambition. He descended into Lombardy, overran the
Milanese, sent Lodovico Sforza to die in a French prison, and initiated
the duel between Spain and France for mastery, which ended with the
capture of Francis I. at Pavia, and his final cession of all rights over
Italy to Charles V. by the Treaty of Cambray.

Of all the republics which had conferred luster upon Italy in its
mediaeval period of prosperity Venice alone remained independent. She
never submitted to a tyrant; and her government, though growing yearly
more closely oligarchical, was acknowledged to be just and liberal.
During the centuries of her greatest power Venice hardly ranked among
Italian States. It had been her policy to confine herself to the lagoons
and to the extension of her dominion over the Levant. In the fifteenth
century, however, this policy was abandoned. Venice first possessed
herself of Padua, by exterminating the despotic House of Carrara; next
of Verona, by destroying the Scala dynasty. Subsequently, during the
long dogeship of Francesco Foscari (1423-1457), she devoted herself in
good earnest to the acquisition of territory upon the mainland. Then
she entered as a Power of the first magnitude into the system of purely
Italian politics. The Republic of S. Mark owned the sea coast of the
Adriatic from Aquileia to the mouths of the Po; and her Lombard
dependencies stretched as far as Bergamo westward. Her Italian neighbors
were, therefore, the Duchy of Milan, the little Marquisate of Mantua,
and the Duchy of Ferrara. When Constantinople fell in 1453, Venice was
still more tempted to pursue this new policy of Italian aggrandizement.
Meanwhile her growing empire seemed to menace the independence of less
wealthy neighbors. The jealousy thus created and the cupidity which
brought her into collision with Julius II. in 1508, exposed Venice to
the crushing blow inflicted on her power by the combined forces of
Europe in the war of the League of Cambray. From this blow, as well as
from the simultaneous decline of their Oriental and Levantine commerce,
the Venetians never recovered.

When we turn to the Florentines, we find that at the same epoch, 1494,
their ancient republican constitution had been fatally