Che se non fusser le gran parti in quella,
      Dominerebbe il mondo Italia bella.

If we examine the constitution of these tyrannies, we find abundant proofs of their despotic nature.  The succession from father to son was always uncertain.  Legitimacy of birth was hardly respected.  The last La Scalas were bastards.  The house of Aragon in Naples descended from a bastard.  Gabriello Visconti shared with his half-brothers the heritage of Gian Galeazzo.  The line of the Medici was continued by princes of more than doubtful origin.  Suspicion rested on the birth of Frederick of Urbino.  The houses of Este and Malatesta honored their bastards in the same degree as their lawful progeny.  The great family of the Bentivogli at Bologna owed their importance at the end of the fifteenth century to an obscure and probably spurious pretender, dragged from the wool-factories of Florence by the policy of Cosimo de’ Medici.  The sons of popes ranked with the proudest of aristocratic families.  Nobility was less regarded in the choice of a ruler than personal ability.  Power once acquired was maintained by force, and the history of the ruling families is one long catalogue of crimes.  Yet the cities thus governed were orderly and prosperous.  Police regulations were carefully established and maintained by governors whose interest it was to rule a quiet state.  Culture was widely diffused without regard to rank or wealth.  Public edifices of colossal grandeur were multiplied.  Meanwhile the people at large were being fashioned to that self-conscious and intelligent activity which is fostered by the modes of life peculiar to political and social centers in a condition of continued rivalry and change.

Under the Italian despotisms we observe nearly the opposite of all the influences brought to bear in the same period upon the nations of the North.  There is no gradual absorption of the great vassals in monarchies, no fixed allegiance to a reigning dynasty, no feudal aid or military service attached to the tenure of the land, no tendency to centralize the whole intellectual activity of the race in any capital, no suppression of individual character by strongly biased public feeling, by immutable law, or by the superincumbent weight of a social hierarchy.  Everything, on the contrary, tends to the free emergence of personal passions and personal aims.  Though the vassals of the despot are neither his soldiers nor his loyal lieges, but his courtiers and taxpayers, the continual object of his cruelty and fear, yet each subject has the chance of becoming a prince like Sforza or a companion of princes like Petrarch.  Equality of servitude goes far to democratize a nation, and common hatred of the tyrant leads to the combination of all classes against him.  Thence follows the fermentation of arrogant and self-reliant passions in the breasts of the lowest as well as the highest.[1] The rapid mutations of government teach men to care for themselves and to depend upon themselves alone