ll looked at
one another...."

[Illustration: PORTAL OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA]

Sacchetti does not answer the question asked by the astonished people
of Ravenna, but goes on to tell us of the lord "who delighted in such
things as do all lords." He could not have answered it for he did not
know himself what it meant. We are in better case, I think, and know
that what that wild and half--blasphemous act meant was that the
Renaissance had made an end of the Middle Age here in Ravenna as
elsewhere.

XVII

RAVENNA IN THE RENAISSANCE

THE BATTLE OF 1512

When in the year 1438 duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan forced
Ostasio da Polenta, the fifth of that name, into an alliance and the
Venetians thereupon invited him to visit them, Venice had decided for
her own safety to annex Ravenna and Ostasio soon learned that the new
government had proclaimed itself in his old capital. He, as I have
said, presently disappeared, the victim of a mysterious assassination;
and Venice governed Ravenna by _provveditori_ and _podesta_, as
happily and successfully, it might seem, as she governed Venetia and a
part of Lombardy. For her doubtless the acquisition of Ravenna was not
a very great thing, nor does it seem to have changed in any very great
degree the half-stagnant life of the city itself, which, as we may
suppose, had for so long ceased to play any great part in the life of
Italy, that a change of government there was not of much importance to
any one except the Holy See, the true over-lord.

The Holy See, however, had no intention of submitting to the incursion
of the republic into its long established territories without a
protest. In the war of Ferrara, Venice had come into collision with
the pope and had in reality been worsted, though the peace of Bagnolo
(1484) gave her Rovigo, the Polesine, and Ravenna. But she had adopted
a fatal policy in appealing to the French, a policy which led straight
on to Cambray, which, as we may think, so unfortunately crippled her
for ever.

The descent of the French was successful at least in this, that it
aroused the cupidity and ambition of the king of Spain and of the
emperor. Italy was proved to be any one's prize at Fornovo, and when
Louis XII. succeeded Charles VIII. in 1498 and combined in his own
person the claim of the French crown to Naples and to Genoa and the
Orleans claim to Milan, Venice, instead of being doubly on guard,
thought she saw a chance of extending he