art of
politics had sunk in Italy.

[5] P. 125.

[6] P. 175.

The charm of a treatise like that of Pandolfini on the family evaporates
as soon as we try to make a summary of its contents. Enough, however,
has been quoted to show the thoroughly _bourgeois_ tone which prevailed
among the citizens of Florence in the fifteenth century.[1] Very
important results were the natural issue of this commercial spirit in
the State. Talking of the Ordinanze di Giustizia, Varchi observes:
'While they removed in part the civil discords of Florence, they almost
entirely extinguished all nobility of feeling in the Florentines, and
tended as much to diminish the power and haughtiness of the city as to
abate the insolence of the patriciate.'[2] A little further on he says:
'Hence may all prudent men see how ill-ordered in all things, save only
in the Grand Council, has been the commonwealth of Florence; seeing
that, to speak of nought else, that kind of men who in a wisely
constituted republic ought not to fulfill any magistracy whatever, the
merchants and artisans of all sorts, are in Florence alone capable of
taking office, to the exclusion of all others.' Machiavelli, less wordy
but far more emphatic than Varchi, says of the same revolution: 'This
caused the abandonment by Florence not only of arms, but of all nobility
of soul.'[3] The most notable consequence of the mercantile temper of
the republics was the ruinous system of mercenary warfare, with all its
attendant evils of ambitious captains of adventure, irresponsible
soldiery, and mock campaigns, adopted by the free Italian States. It is
true that even if the Italians had maintained their national militias in
full force, they might not have been able to resist the shock of France
and Spain any better than the armies of Thebes, Sparta, and Athens
averted the Macedonian hegemony. But they would at least have run a
better chance, and not perhaps have perished so ignobly through the
treason of an Alfonso d'Este (1527), of a Marquis of Pescara (1525), of
a Duke of Urbino (1527), and of a Malatesta Baglioni (1530).[4]
Machiavelli, in a weighty passage at the end of the first book of his
Florentine History, sums up the various causes which contributed to the
disuse of national arms among the Italians of the Renaissance. The fear
of the despot for his subjects, the priest-rule of the Church, the
jealousy of Venice for her own nobles, and the commercial sluggishness
of the