Italy. Under tyrannies, in the
midst of intrigues, wars, and revolutions, the peculiar individuality of
the Italians obtained its ultimate development. This individuality, as
remarkable for salient genius and diffused talent as for self-conscious
and deliberate vice, determined the qualities of the Renaissance and
affected by example the whole of Europe. Italy led the way in the
education of the Western races, and was the first to realize the type of
modern as distinguished from classical and mediaeval life.

During this age of the despots, Italy presents the spectacle of a nation
devoid of central government and comparatively uninfluenced by
feudalism. The right of the Emperor had become nominal, and served as a
pretext for usurpers rather than as a source of order. The visits, for
instance, of Charles IV. and Frederick III. were either begging
expeditions or holiday excursions, in the course of which ambitious
adventurers bought titles to the government of towns, and meaningless
honors were showered upon vain courtiers. It was not till the reign of
Maximilian that Germany adopted a more serious policy with regard to
Italy, which by that time had become the central point of European
intrigue. Charles V. afterwards used force to reassert imperial rights
over the Italian cities, acting not so much in the interest of the
Empire as for the aggrandizement of the Spanish monarchy. At the same
time the Papacy, which had done so much to undermine the authority of
the Empire, exercised a power at once anomalous and ill-recognized
except in the immediate States of the Church. By the extinction of the
House of Hohenstauffen and by the assumed right to grant the investiture
of the kingdom of Naples to foreigners, the Popes not only struck a
death-blow at imperial influence, but also prepared the way for their
own exile to Avignon. This involved the loss of the second great
authority to which Italy had been accustomed to look for the maintenance
of some sort of national coherence. Moreover, the Church, though
impotent to unite all Italy beneath her own sway, had power enough to
prevent the formation either by Milan or Venice or Naples of a
substantial kingdom. The result was a perpetually recurring process of
composition, dismemberment, and recomposition, under different forms, of
the scattered elements of Italian life. The Guelf and Ghibelline
parties, inherited from the wars of the thirteenth century, survived the
political inter