and round the leaders of the confederation were grouped inferior burghs, republican or tyrannical as the case might be, like satellites around the luminaries of a solar system.  When Constantinople was taken by the Turks in 1453, Italy felt the need of suppressing her old jealousies, and Nicholas V. induced the four great powers to sign with him a treaty of peace and amity.  The political tact and sagacity of Lorenzo de’ Medici enabled him to develop and substantiate the principle of balance then introduced into Italian politics; nor was there any apparent reason why the equilibrium so hardly won, so skillfully maintained, should not have subsisted but for Lodovico Sforza’s invitation to the French in 1494.  Up to that date the more recent wars of Italy had been principally caused by the encroachments of Venice and the nepotism of successive Popes.  They raised no new enthusiasm hostile to the interests of peace.  The Empire was eliminated and forgotten as an obsolete antiquity.  Italy seemed at last determined to manage her own affairs by mutual agreement between the five great powers.

    [1] I have attempted to analyze Cosimo’s method in the article on
    ‘Florence and the Medici,’ Studies and Sketches in Italy.

[2] This centralization of Italy in five great powers was not obtained without the depression or total extinction of smaller cities.  Ferrari counts seventeen towns, who died, to use his forcible expression, at the close of the civil wars. Storia delle Rivoluzioni d’ Italia, iii. 239.

Still the ground beneath this specious fabric of diplomacy rung hollow.  The tyrannies represented a transient political necessity.  They were not the product of progressive social growth, satisfying and regulating organic functions of the nation.  Far from being the final outcome of a slow, deliberate accretion in the states they had absorbed, we see in them the climax of conflicting humors, the splendid cancers and imposthumes of a desperate disease.  That solid basis of national morality which grounds the monarch firm upon the sympathies and interests of the people whom he seems to lead, but whom he in reality expresses, failed them.  Therefore each individual despot trembled for his throne, while Italy, as in the ominous picture drawn by her historian, felt that all the elements were combining to devour her with a coming storm.  The land of earthquakes divined a cataclysm, to cope with which she was unable.  An apparently insignificant event determined the catastrophe.  The Sforza appealed to France, and after the disastrous descent of Charles VIII. the whole tide of events turned.  Instead of internal self-government by any system of balance, Italy submitted to a succession of invasions terminating in foreign tyranny.