undermined by the
advances of the family of Medici towards despotism. Lorenzo de'Medici,
who enjoyed the credit of maintaining the equilibrium of Italy by wise
diplomacy, had lately died. He left his son Piero, a hot-headed and rash
young man, to control the affairs of the commonwealth, as he had
previously controlled them, with a show of burgherlike equality, but
with the reality of princely power. Another of his sons, Giovanni,
received the honor of the Cardinalship. The one was destined to
compromise the ascendency of his family in Florence for a period of
eighteen years, the other was destined to re-establish that ascendency
on a new and more despotic basis. Piero had not his father's prudence,
and could not maintain himself in the delicate position of a commercial
and civil tyrant. During the disturbances caused by the invasion of
Charles VIII. he was driven with all his relatives into exile. The
Medici were restored in 1512, after the battle of Ravenna, by Spanish
troops, at the petition of the Cardinal Giovanni. The elevation of this
man to the Papacy in 1513 enabled him to plant two of his nephews, as
rulers, in Florence, and to pave the way whereby a third eventually rose
to the dignity of the tiara. Clement VII. finally succeeded in rendering
Florence subject to the Medici, by extinguishing the last sparks of
republican opposition, and by so modifying the dynastic protectorate of
his family that it was easily converted into a titular Grand Duchy.

The federation of these five Powers had been artificially maintained
during the half century of Italy's highest intellectual activity. That
was the epoch when the Italians nearly attained to coherence as a
nation, through common interests in art and humanism, and by the
complicated machinery of diplomatic relations. The federation perished
when foreign Powers chose Lombardy and Naples for their fields of
battle. The disasters of the next thirty-three years (1494-1527) began
in earnest on the day when Louis XII. claimed Milan and the Regno. He
committed his first mistake by inviting Ferdinand the Catholic to share
in the partition of Naples. That province was easily conquered; but
Ferdinand retained the whole spoils for himself, securing a large
Italian dependency and a magnificent basis of operations for the Spanish
Crown. Then Louis made a second mistake by proposing to the visionary
Emperor Maximilian that he should aid France in subjugating Venice. We
have few in