[Sidenote:  Superstition.]

‘Owing to the evil ensample of the Papal Court,’ writes Machiavelli, ’Italy has lost all piety and all religion:  whence follow infinite troubles and disorders; for as religion implies all good, so its absence implies the contrary.  To the Church and priests of Rome we owe another even greater disaster which is the cause of her ruin.  I mean that the Church has maintained, and still maintains Italy divided.’  The Papacy is too weak to unite and rule, but strong enough to prevent others doing so, and is always ready to call in the foreigner to crush all Italians to the foreigner’s profit, and Guicciardini, a high Papal officer, commenting on this, adds, ’It would be impossible to speak so ill of the Roman Court, but that more abuse should not be merited, seeing it is an infamy, and example of all the shames and scandals of the world.’  The lesser clergy, the monks, the nuns followed, with anxious fidelity, the footsteps of their shepherds.  There was hardly a tonsure in Italy which covered more than thoughts and hopes of lust and avarice.  Religion and morals which God had joined together, were set by man a thousand leagues asunder.  Yet religion still sat upon the alabaster throne of Peter, and in the filthy straw of the meanest Calabrian confessional.  And still deeper remained a blind devoted superstition.  Vitellozzo Vitelli, as Machiavelli tells us, while being strangled by Caeesar Borgia’s assassin, implored his murderer to procure for him the absolution of that murderer’s father.  Gianpaolo Baglioni, who reigned by parricide and lived in incest, was severely blamed by the Florentines for not killing Pope Julius ii. when the latter was his guest at Perugia.  And when Gabrino Fondato, the tyrant of Cremona, was on the scaffold, his only regret was that when he had taken his guests, the Pope and Emperor, to the top of the Cremona tower, four hundred feet high, his nerve failed him and he did not push them both over.  Upon this anarchy of religion, morals, and conduct breathed suddenly the inspiring breath of Pagan antiquity which seemed to the Italian mind to find its finest climax in tyrannicide.  There is no better instance than in the plot of the Pazzi at Florence.  Francesco Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini decided to kill Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici in the cathedral at the moment of the elevation of the Host.  They naturally took the priest into their confidence.  They escorted Giuliano to the Duomo, laughing and talking, and playfully embraced him—­to discover if he wore armour under his clothes.  Then they killed him at the moment appointed.

[Sidenote:  Pagan influence.]