the poets, he showed peculiar aptitude for philosophy and history.  But his development was precocious.  His zeal for learning and the excessive ardor with which he devoted himself to physical exercises undermined his constitution.  He became an invalid and died childless, after exhibiting to his court for many years an example of patience in sickness and of dignified cheerfulness under the restraints of enforced inaction.  His wife, Elizabetta Gonzaga, one of the most famous women of her age, was no less a pattern of noble conduct and serene contentment.

Such were the two last princes of the Montefeltro dynasty.[2] It is necessary to bear their virtues in mind while dwelling on the characteristics of Italian despotism in the fifteenth century.  The Duchy of Urbino, both as an established dynasty not founded upon violence, and also as a center of really humane culture, formed, it is true, an exception to the rule of Italian tyrannies:  yet, if we omitted this state from our calculation, confining our attention to the extravagant iniquities of the Borgia family, or to the eccentricities of the Visconti, or to the dark crimes of the court of Naples, we should gain a false notion of the many-sided character of Italy, in which at that time vices and virtues were so strangely blended.  We must never forget that the same society which produced a Filippo Maria Visconti, a Galeazzo Maria Sforza, a Sigismondo Malatesta, a Ferdinand of Aragon, gave birth also to a Lorenzo de’ Medici and a Federigo da Montefeltro.  It is only by studying the lives of all these men in combination that we can obtain a correct conception of the manifold personality, the mingled polish and barbarism, of the Italian Renaissance.

[1] It is not easy to say what a panegyrist of that period intended by ‘a complete knowledge of Greek,’ or ‘fluent Greek writing,’ in a Prince.  I suspect, however, that we ought not to understand by these phrases anything like a real familiarity with Greek literature, but rather such superficial knowledge as would enable a reader of Latin books to understand allusions and quotations.  Poliziano, it may be remarked, thought it worth while to flatter Guidobaldo in a Greek epigram.

[2] After Guidobaldo’s death the duchy was continued by the Della Rovere family, one of whom, Giovanni, Prefect of Rome and nephew of Sixtus IV., married the Duke’s sister Giovanna in 1474.

Some more detailed account of Baldassare Castiglione’s treatise Il Cortegiano will form a fitting conclusion to this Chapter on the Despots.  It is true that his book was written later than the period we have been considering,[1] and he describes court life in its most graceful aspect.  Yet all the antecedent history of the past two centuries had been gradually producing the conditions under which his courtier flourished; and the Italian of the Renaissance, as he appeared to the rest of Europe, was such a gentleman as he depicts.  For the historian his book is of equal value in its own department with the Principe of Machiavelli, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, and the Diary of Burchard.