of the Neapolitan kingdom, semi-feudal customs flourished in the south far more than in the north of Italy.  The barons were more powerful; and the destinies of the Regno often turned upon their feuds and quarrels with the Crown.  At the same time the Neapolitan despots shared the uneasy circumstances of all Italian potentates, owing to the uncertainty of their tenure, both as conquerors and aliens, and also as the nominal vassals of the Holy See.  The rights of suzerainty which the Normans had yielded to the Papacy over their southern conquests, and which the Popes had arbitrarily exercised in favour of the Angevine princes, proved a constant source of peril to the rest of Italy by rendering the succession to the crown of Naples doubtful.  On the extinction of the Angevine line, however, the throne was occupied by a prince who had no valid title but that of the sword to its possession.  Alfonso of Aragon conquered Naples in 1442, and neglecting his hereditary dominion, settled in his Italian capital.  Possessed with the enthusiasm for literature which was then the ruling passion of the Italians, and very liberal to men of learning, Alfonso won for himself the surname of Magnanimous.  On his death, in 1458, he bequeathed his Spanish kingdom, together with Sicily and Sardinia, to his brother, and left the fruits of his Italian conquest to his bastard, Ferdinand.  This Ferdinand, whose birth was buried in profound obscurity, was the reigning sovereign in the year 1492.  Of a cruel and sombre temperament, traitorous and tyrannical, Ferdinand was hated by his subjects as much as Alfonso had been loved.  He possessed, however, to a remarkable degree, the qualities which at that epoch constituted a consummate statesman; and though the history of his reign is the history of plots and conspiracies, of judicial murders and forcible assassinations, of famines produced by iniquitous taxation, and of every kind of diabolical tyranny, Ferdinand contrived to hold his own, in the teeth of a rebellious baronage or a maddened population.  His political sagacity amounted almost to a prophetic instinct in the last years of his life, when he became aware that the old order was breaking up in Italy, and had cause to dread that Charles VIII. of France would prove his title to the kingdom of Naples by force of arms.[13]

Such were the component parts of the Italian body politic, with the addition of numerous petty principalities and powers, adhering more or less consistently to one or other of the greater States.  The whole complex machine was bound together by no sense of common interest, animated by no common purpose, amenable to no central authority.  Even such community of feeling as one spoken language gives, was lacking.  And yet Italy distinguished herself clearly from the rest of Europe, not merely as a geographical fact, but also as a people intellectually and spiritually one.  The rapid rise of humanism had aided in producing this national self-consciousness.  Every State