was taken by the
Turks in 1453, Italy felt the need of suppressing her old jealousies,
and Nicholas V. induced the four great powers to sign with him a treaty
of peace and amity. The political tact and sagacity of Lorenzo de'
Medici enabled him to develop and substantiate the principle of balance
then introduced into Italian politics; nor was there any apparent reason
why the equilibrium so hardly won, so skillfully maintained, should not
have subsisted but for Lodovico Sforza's invitation to the French in
1494. Up to that date the more recent wars of Italy had been principally
caused by the encroachments of Venice and the nepotism of successive
Popes. They raised no new enthusiasm hostile to the interests of peace.
The Empire was eliminated and forgotten as an obsolete antiquity. Italy
seemed at last determined to manage her own affairs by mutual agreement
between the five great powers.

[1] I have attempted to analyze Cosimo's method in the article on
'Florence and the Medici,' _Studies and Sketches in Italy_.

[2] This centralization of Italy in five great powers was not
obtained without the depression or total extinction of smaller
cities. Ferrari counts seventeen towns, who died, to use his
forcible expression, at the close of the civil wars. _Storia delle
Rivoluzioni d' Italia_, iii. 239.

Still the ground beneath this specious fabric of diplomacy rung hollow.
The tyrannies represented a transient political necessity. They were not
the product of progressive social growth, satisfying and regulating
organic functions of the nation. Far from being the final outcome of a
slow, deliberate accretion in the states they had absorbed, we see in
them the climax of conflicting humors, the splendid cancers and
imposthumes of a desperate disease. That solid basis of national
morality which grounds the monarch firm upon the sympathies and
interests of the people whom he seems to lead, but whom he in reality
expresses, failed them. Therefore each individual despot trembled for
his throne, while Italy, as in the ominous picture drawn by her
historian, felt that all the elements were combining to devour her with
a coming storm. The land of earthquakes divined a cataclysm, to cope
with which she was unable. An apparently insignificant event determined
the catastrophe. The Sforza appealed to France, and after the disastrous
descent of Charles VIII. the whole tide of events turned. Instead of
internal