One of the chief features of the Renaissance was the appearance for the first time on the stage of history of full-formed and colossal nations.  France, Spain, Austria, and England are now to measure their strength.  Venice, Florence, Milan, Naples, even Rome, are destined in the period that is opening for Europe to play but secondary parts.  Italy, incapable of coping with these great powers, will become the mere arena of their contests, the object of their spoliations.  Yet the Italians themselves were far from being conscious of this change.  Accustomed through three centuries to a system of diplomacy and intrigue among their own small states, they still thought more of the balance of power within the peninsula than of the means to be adopted for repelling foreign force.  Their petty jealousies kept them disunited at an epoch when the best chance of national freedom lay in a federation.  Firmly linked together in one league, or subject to a single prince, the Italians might not only have met their foes on equal ground, but even have taken a foremost place among the modern nations.[1] Instead of that, their princes were foolish enough to think that they could set France, Germany, or Spain in motion for the attainment of selfish objects within the narrow sphere of Italian politics, forgetting the disproportion between these huge monarchies and a single city like Florence, a mere province like the Milanese.  It was just possible for Lorenzo de’ Medici to secure the tranquillity of Italy by combining the Houses of Sforza and of Aragon with the Papal See in the chains of the same interested policy with the Commonwealth of Florence.  It was ridiculous of Lodovico Sforza to fancy that he could bring the French into the game of peninsular intrigue without irrevocably ruining its artificial equilibrium.  The first sign of the alteration about to take place in European history was the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII.  This holiday excursion of a hairbrained youth was as transient as a border-foray on a large scale.  The so-called conquest was only less sudden than the subsequent loss of Italy by the French.  Yet the tornado which swept the peninsula from north to south, and returned upon its path from south to north within the space of a few months, left ineffaceable traces on the country which it traversed, and changed the whole complexion of the politics of Europe.

[1] Read, however, Sismondi’s able argument against the view that Italy, united as a single nation under a sovereign, would have been better off, vol. vii. p. 298 et seq.  He is of opinion that her only chance lay in a Confederation.  See chapter ii. above, for a discussion of this chance.

The invasion of Italy had been long prepared in the counsels of Louis XI.  After spending his lifetime in the consolidation of the French monarchy, he constructed an inheritance of further empire for his successors by dictating to the old King Rene of Anjou (1474) and