der ill omens for the Republic, occupied the
remnant of his many conquests.

Julius had resisted Alexander, as a man unfit for his function, and it
soon appeared that this was not a private feud, but a total reversal
of ideas and policy. The change was not felt in religious reform or
in patronage of learning, but first in the notion of territorial
politics. Caesar had rebuilt the duchy of Romagna in the service of
the papacy; and it was the essence of the schemes of Julius that it
should be secured for the Holy See, together with all else that could
be claimed by right, or acquired by policy and war. The Borgias had
prevailed by arms, and Julius would not consent to be their inferior
and to condemn his whole career. He must draw the sword; but, unlike
them, he would draw it in the direct interest of the Church. He had
overthrown the conqueror, not that the conquests might be dissolved,
or might go to Venice, but in order that he himself and his successors
might have power in Italy, and through Italians, over the world. Upon
this foundation he instituted the temporal power, as it subsisted for
three centuries. The jealous municipal spirit of the Middle Ages had
dissolved society into units, and nothing but force could reverse the
tradition and weld the fragments into great communities. Borgia had
shown that this could be done; but also that no victorious
condottiere, were he even his own son, could be trusted by a Pope.
Julius undertook to command his army himself, and to fight at the head
of his troops. Letting his white beard grow, putting on armour, and
proudly riding his war-horse under fire, he exhibited the most
picturesque and romantic figure of his time.

The Venetians, commanding the seaboard with their galleys, were not
easy to dislodge from the towns they occupied. Essentially a maritime
and commercial Power, their centre of gravity lay so far east that it
was once proposed to move the capital from the Lagoons to the
Bosphorus. When the advancing Turk damaged their trade and threatened
their Colonial empire, they took advantage of Italian disintegration
to become a continental state, and the general insecurity and
oppression of miniature potentates made it a happy fate to be subject
to the serene and politic government, whose 3000 ships still held the
sea, flying the Christian flag. Renouncing non-intervention on the
mainland, they set power above prosperity, and the interest of the
State above t