dukes.  Hand in hand with political despotism marched religious tyranny.  The Counter-Reformation over which the Inquisition presided, was part and parcel of the Spanish policy for the enslavement of the nation no less than for the restoration of the Church.  Meanwhile the weakness, discord, egotism, and corruption which prevented the Italians from resisting the French invasion in 1494, continued to increase.  Instead of being lessoned by experience, Popes, Princes, and Republics vied with each other in calling in the strangers, pitting Spaniard against Frenchman, and paying the Germans to expel the Swiss, oblivious that each new army of foreigners they summoned was in reality a new swarm of devouring locusts.  In the midst of this anarchy it is laughable to hear the shrill voice of priests, like Julius and Leo, proclaiming before God their vows to rid Italy of the barbarians.  The confusion was tenfold confounded when the old factions of Guelf and Ghibelline put on a new garb of French and Spanish partisanship.  Town fought with town and family with family, in the cause of strangers whom they ought to have resisted with one will and steady hatred.  The fascination of fear and the love of novelty alike swayed the fickle population of Italian cities.  The foreign soldiers who inflicted on the nation such cruel injuries made a grand show in their streets, and there will always be a mob so childish as to covet pageants at the expense of freedom and even of safety.

[1] Guicciardini’s Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze (Op.  Ined. vol. ii. p. 94) sets forth the state of internal anarchy and external violence which followed the departure of Charles VIII., with wonderful acuteness.  ‘Se per sorte l’ uno Oltramontano caccera l’ altro, Italia restera in estrema servitu,’ is an exact prophecy of what happened before the end of the sixteenth century, when Spain had beaten France in the duel for Italy.

[2] Matarazzo, in his Cronaca della Citta di Perugia (Arch.  St., vol. xvi. part 2, p. 23), gives a lively picture of the eagerness with which the French were greeted in 1495, and of the wanton brutality by which they soon alienated the people.  In this he agrees almost textually with De Comines, who writes:  ’Le peuple nous advouoit comme Saincts, estimans en nous toute foy et bonte; mais ce propos ne leur dura gueres, tant pour nostre desordre et pillerie, et qu’aussi les ennemis oppreschoient le peuple en tous quartiers,’ etc., lib. vii. cap. 6.  In the first paragraph of the Chronicon Venetum (Muratori, vol. xxlv. p. 5), we read concerning the advent of Charles:  ’I popoli tutti dicevano Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.  Ne v’era alcuno che li potesse contrastare, ne resistere, tanto era da tutti i popoli Italiani chiamato.’  The Florentines, as burghers of a Guelf city, were always loyal to the French.  Besides, their commerce with France (e.g. the wealth