he end get the better of its adversaries, and consolidate itself
into a first-rate Power. The internal spirit of the Papacy at this
time corresponded to its external policy. It was thoroughly
secularised by a series of worldly and vicious pontiffs, who had clean
forgotten what their title, Vicar of Christ, implied. They
consistently used their religious prestige to enforce their secular
authority, while by their temporal power they caused their religious
claims to be respected. Corrupt and shameless, they indulged
themselves in every vice, openly acknowledged their children, and
turned Italy upside down in order to establish favourites and bastards
in the principalities they seized as spoils of war.

The kingdom of Naples differed from any other state of Italy. Subject
continually to foreign rulers since the decay of the Greek Empire,
governed in succession by the Normans, the Hohenstauffens, and the
House of Anjou, it had never enjoyed the real independence, or the
free institutions, of the northern provinces; nor had it been
Italianised in the same sense as the rest of the peninsula. Despotism,
which assumed so many forms in Italy, was here neither the tyranny of
a noble house, nor the masked autocracy of a burgher, nor yet the
forceful sway of a condottiere. It had a dynastic character,
resembling the monarchy of one of the great European nations, but
modified by the peculiar conditions of Italian statecraft. Owing to
this dynastic and monarchical complexion of the Neapolitan kingdom,
semi-feudal customs flourished in the south far more than in the north
of Italy. The barons were more powerful; and the destinies of the
Regno often turned upon their feuds and quarrels with the Crown. At
the same time the Neapolitan despots shared the uneasy circumstances
of all Italian potentates, owing to the uncertainty of their tenure,
both as conquerors and aliens, and also as the nominal vassals of the
Holy See. The rights of suzerainty which the Normans had yielded to
the Papacy over their southern conquests, and which the Popes had
arbitrarily exercised in favour of the Angevine princes, proved a
constant source of peril to the rest of Italy by rendering the
succession to the crown of Naples doubtful. On the extinction of the
Angevine line, however, the throne was occupied by a prince who had no
valid title but that of the sword to its possession. Alfonso of Aragon
conquered Naples in 1442, and neglecting his hereditary dominio