itself, where there existed no time-honored hierarchy of classes and no fountain of nobility in the person of a sovereign, one man was a match for another, provided he knew how to assert himself.  To the conditions of a society based on these principles we may ascribe the unrivaled emergence of great personalities among the tyrants, as well as the extraordinary tenacity and vigor of such races as the Visconti.  In the contest for power, and in the maintenance of an illegal authority, the picked athletes came to the front.  The struggle by which they established their tyranny, the efforts by which they defended it against foreign foes and domestic adversaries, trained them to endurance and to daring.  They lived habitually in an atmosphere of peril which taxed all their energies.  Their activity was extreme, and their passions corresponded to their vehement vitality.  About such men there could be nothing on a small or mediocre scale.  When a weakling was born in a despotic family, his brothers murdered him, or he was deposed by a watchful rival.  Thus only gladiators of tried capacity and iron nerve, superior to religious and moral scruples, dead to national affection, perfected in perfidy, scientific in the use of cruelty and terror, employing first-rate faculties of brain and will and bodily powers in the service of transcendent egotism, only the virtuosi of political craft as theorized by Machiavelli, could survive and hold their own upon this perilous arena.

[1] Brantome Capitaines Etrangers, Discours 48, gives an account of the entrance of the Borgia into Chinon in 1498, and adds:  ’The king being at the window saw him arrive, and there can be no doubt how he and his courtiers ridiculed all this state, as unbecoming the petty Duke of Valentinois.’

The life of the despot was usually one of prolonged terror.  Immured in strong places on high rocks, or confined to gloomy fortresses like the Milanese Castello, he surrounded his person with foreign troops, protected his bedchamber with a picked guard, and watched his meat and drink lest they should be poisoned.  His chief associates were artists, men of letters, astrologers, buffoons, and exiles.  He had no real friends or equals, and against his own family he adopted an attitude of fierce suspicion, justified by the frequent intrigues to which he was exposed.[1] His timidity verged on monomania.  Like Alfonso II. of Naples, he was tortured with the ghosts of starved or strangled victims; like Ezzelino, he felt the mysterious fascination of astrology; like Filippo Maria Visconti, he trembled at the sound of thunder, and set one band of body-guards to watch another next his person.  He dared not hope for a quiet end.  No one believed in the natural death of a prince:  princes must be poisoned or poignarded.[2] Out of thirteen of the Carrara family, in little more than a century (1318-1435), three were deposed or murdered by near relatives, one was expelled by a rival from his state, four were executed by the Venetians.  Out of five of the La Scala family, three were killed by their brothers, and a fourth was poisoned in exile.