uite dazzling. Milan, Florence,
Rome, were successively occupied, and finally Charles was actually
seated upon the throne in Naples (1495).

But the seat was not comfortable. The Neapolitans did not want him;
and, what was more important, Spain, England, and Austria talked of
uniting to drive him out. And so he and his army returned to France,
and all that had been gained by the enterprise was a wide-open door
between France and Italy at the very time when it might better have
been kept closed, and the discovery by Europe that the Italian
peninsula was an easy prey to any ambitious European power. What
Charles had done might also, and more effectually, be done by England,
Spain, or Austria. All of which bore bitter fruit in the next century.

But for France the fruit was of a more deadly kind. The princely and
noble blood of Italy began to be mingled with hers, bringing a vicious
and corrupt strain at a critical period.

Old as she was in centuries, France was but a child in civilization.
An uncouth, untutored child, just emerging from barbarism, was suddenly
brought under the influence of a fascinating, highly developed
civilization, old in wickedness. A nation in which the ruling class
had only recently learned to read and write was naturally dazzled by
this sister nation, saturated with the learning and culture of the
ages, mistress of every brilliant art and accomplishment; who after
having run the whole gamut of human experience, drunk at every known
fountain, had arrived at the code summed up by Machiavelli as the best
by which to live! It was an easy task for the Medici to control the
policy, as they did for generations, of such simple barbarians.

Italy presents a strange spectacle in this closing fifteenth century:
All the concentrated splendor from the fall of Byzantium hanging over
her like a luminous cloud before dispersing as the Renaissance; Lorenzo
de' Medici, at Florence, directing the intellectual currents of Europe;
Angelo and Raphael creating the world's sublimest masterpieces in art;
her great Genoese son uncovering another hemisphere; Savonarola, like
an inspired prophet of old, calling upon men to "repent, repent, while
there is yet time"; Machiavelli instructing the nations of the earth in
villainy as a fine art; and Alexander VI., the basest man in Europe,
poisoner, father of every crime, claiming to be Vicegerent of Christ
upon earth!

But the currents were moving swiftly toward a c