s
generous weapon would not reach, the harquebuss and knife of paid
assassins were employed without compunction.[183] We must not, however,
ascribe this condition of society wholly or chiefly to Spanish
influences.

[Footnote 183: The lax indulgence accorded by the Jesuit casuists to
every kind of homicide appears in the extracts from those writers
collected in _Artes Jesuiticae_ (Salisburgi, 1703, pp. 75-83).
Tamburinus went so far as to hold that if a man mixed poison for his
enemy, and a friend came in and drank it up before his eyes, he was not
bound to warn his friend, nor was he guilty of his friend's death (_Ib._
p. 135, Art. 651).]

It was in fact a survival of mediaeval habits under altered
circumstances. During the municipal wars of the thirteenth century, and
afterwards during the struggle of the despots for ascendency, the nation
had become accustomed to internecine contests which set party against
party, household against household, man against man. These humors in the
cities, as Italian historians were wont to call them, had been partially
suppressed by the confederation of the five great Powers at the close of
the fifteenth century, and also by a prevalent urbanity of manners. At
that epoch, moreover, they were systematized and controlled by the
methods of _condottiere_ warfare, which offered a legitimate outlet to
the passions of turbulent young men. But when Italy sank into the sloth
of pacification after the settlement of Charles V. at Bologna in 1530,
when there were no longer _condottieri_ to levy troops in rival armies,
when political parties ceased in the cities, the old humors broke out
again under the aspect of private and personal feuds. Though the names
of Guelf and Ghibelline had lost their meaning, these factions
reappeared, and divided Milan, the towns of Romagna, the villages of the
Campagna. In the place of _condottieri_ arose brigand chiefs, who, like
Piccolomini and Sciarra, placed themselves at the head of regiments, and
swept the country on marauding expeditions. Instead of exiles, driven by
victorious parties in the state to seek precarious living on a foreign
soil, bandits, proscribed for acts of violence, abounded. Thus the
habits which had been created through centuries of political ferment,
subsisted when the nation was at rest in servitude, assuming baser and
more selfish forms of ferocity. The end of the sixteenth century
witnessed the final degeneration and corruption of a me