The problem why the Italians failed to achieve the unity of a coherent nation has been implicitly discussed in the foregoing pages upon the history of the Communes and the development of despotism.  We have already seen that their conception of municipal independence made a narrow oligarchy of enfranchised burghers lords of the city, which in its turn oppressed the country and the subject burghs of its domain.  Every conquest by a republic reduced some village or center of civil life to the condition of serfdom.  The voices of the inhabitants were no longer heard debating questions that affected their interests.  They submitted to dictation from their masters, the enfranchised few in the ascendant commonwealth.  Thus, as Guicciardini pointed out in his ‘Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli,’ the subjection of Italy by a dominant republic would have meant the extinction of numberless political communities and the sway of a close oligarchy from the Alps to the Ionian Sea.[1] The 3,200 burghers who constituted Florence in 1494, or the nobles of the Golden Book at Venice, would by such unification of the country under a victorious republic have become sovereigns, administering the resources of the nation for their profit.  The dread of this catastrophe rendered Venice odious to her sister commonwealths at the close of the fifteenth century, and justified, according to Guicciardini’s views of history, the action taken by Cosimo de’ Medici in 1450, when he rendered Milan strong by supporting her despot, Francesco Sforza.[2] In a word republican freedom, as the term is now understood, was unknown in Italy.  Municipal autonomy, implying the right of the municipality to rule its conquests for its own particular profit, was the dominant idea.  To have advanced from this stage of thought to the highly developed conception of a national republic, centralizing the forces of Italy and at the same time giving free play to its local energies, would have been impossible.  This kind of republican unity implies a previous unification of the people in some other form of government.  It furthermore demands a system of representation extended to all sections of the nation.  Their very nature, therefore, prevented the republican institutions won by the Italians in the early Middle Ages from sufficing for their independence in a national republic.

    [1] Op.  Ined. vol. i. p. 28.

    [2] Ib. vol. iii. p. 8.

It may with more reason be asked in the next place why Italy did not become a monarchy, and again why she never produced a confederation, uniting the Communes as the Swiss Cantons were combined for mutual support and self-defense.  When we attack the first of these two questions, our immediate answer must be that the Italians had a rooted disinclination for monarchical union.[1] Their most strenuous efforts were directed against it when it seemed to threaten them.  It may be remembered that they were not