The conclusions to be drawn from the facts before us seem to be in general these.  The link between government and governed in Italy had snapped.  The social bond was broken, and the constituents that form a nation were pursuing divers aims.  On the one hand stood Popes and princes, founding their claims to absolute authority upon titles that had slight rational or national validity.  These potentates were ill-combined among themselves, and mutually jealous.  On the other side were ranged disruptive forces of the most heterogeneous kinds—­remnants from antique party-warfare, fragments of obsolete domestic feuds, new strivings after freer life in mentally down-trodden populations, blending with crime and misery and want and profligacy to compose an opposition which exasperated despotism.  These anarchical conditions were due in large measure to the troubles caused by foreign campaigns of invasion.  They were also due to the Spanish type of manners imposed upon the ruling classes, which the native genius accepted with fraudulent intelligence, and to which it adapted itself by artifice.  We must further reckon the division between cultured and uncultured people, which humanism had effected, and which subsisted after the benefits conferred by humanism had been withdrawn from the race.  The retirement of the commercial aristocracy from trade, and their assumption of princely indolence in this period of political stagnation, was another factor of importance.  But the truest cause of Italian retrogression towards barbarism must finally be discerned in the sharp check given to intellectual evolution by the repressive forces of the Counter-Reformation.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

INDEX.

A

ACADEMIES, Italian, the flourishing time of, i. 52.

ACCIAIUOLI, Roberto, i. 33.

ACCOLTI, Benedetto, conspirator against Pius IV., i. 132.

ACCORAMBONI, Claudio (father of Vittoria), i. 356.

—–­Marcello (brother of Vittoria): 
  intrigues for the marriage of his sister with the
  Duke of Bracciano, i. 358 sqq.;
  procures the murder of her husband, 362;
  employs a Greek enchantress to brew love-philters, 365;
  his death, 372.

—–­Tarquinia (mother of Vittoria), i. 356.

—–­Vittoria, the story of, i. 355 sqq.;
  her birth and parentage, 356;
  marriage with Felice Peretti, 357;
  intrigue with the Duke of Bracciano, 360;
  the murder of her husband, 362;
  her marriage with Bracciano, 364;
  annulled by the Pope, 364, 366;
  the union renounced by the Duke, 365;
  put on trial for the murder of Peretti, ib.;
  their union publicly ratified by the Duke, 366;
  flight from Rome, ib.;
  death of Bracciano, 367;
  her murder procured by Lodovico Orsini, 369.