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 Italianized 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 state-craft. 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 favor 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 dominion, settled in his Italian capital. Possessed with the
enthusiasm for literature which was then the ruling passion of the
Italians, and very liberal to men of learning, Alfonso won for himself
the surname of Magnanimous. On his death, in 1458, he bequeathed his
Spanish kingdom, together with Sicily and Sardinia, to his brother, and
left the fruits of his Italian conquest to his bastard, Ferdinand. This
Ferdinand, whose birth was buried in profound obscurity, was the
reigning sovereign in the year 1492. Of a cruel and sombre temperament,
traitorous and tyrannical, Ferdinand was hated by his subjects as much
as Alfonso had been loved. He possessed, however, to a remarkable
degree, the qualities which at that epoch constituted a consummate
statesman; and though the history of his reign is the history of plots
and conspiracies, of judicial murders and forcible assas