In the year 1494, when Charles VIII. of France, at Lodovico Sforza’s invitation, crossed the Alps to make good his claim on Naples, the peninsula was Independent.  Internal peace had prevailed for a period of nearly fifty years.  An equilibrium had been established between the five great native Powers, which secured the advantages of confederation and diplomatic interaction.

While using the word confederation, I do not, of course, imply that anything similar to the federal union of Switzerland or of North America existed in Italy.  The contrary is proved by patent facts.  On a miniature scale, Italy then displayed political conditions analogous to those which now prevail in Europe.  The parcels of the nation adopted different forms of self-government, sought divers foreign alliances, and owed no allegiance to any central legislative or administrative body.  I therefore speak of the Italian confederation only in the same sense as Europe may now be called a confederation of kindred races.

In the year 1630, when Charles V. (of Austria and Spain) was crowned Emperor at Bologna, this national independence had been irretrievably lost by the Italians.  This confederation of evenly-balanced Powers was now exchanged for servitude beneath a foreign monarchy, and for subjection to a cosmopolitan elective priesthood.

The history of social, intellectual, and moral conditions in Italy during the seventy years of the sixteenth century which followed Charles’s coronation at Bologna, forms the subject of this work; but before entering upon these topics it will be well to devote one chapter to considering with due brevity the partition of Italy into five States in 1494, the dislocation of this order by the wars between Spain and France for supremacy, the position in which the same States found themselves respectively at the termination of those wars in 1527, and the new settlement of the peninsula effected by Charles V. in 1529-30.

The five members of the Italian federation in 1494 were the kingdom of Naples, the Papacy, the Duchy of Milan, and the Republics of Venice and Florence.  Round them, in various relations of amity or hostility, were grouped these minor Powers:  the Republics of Genoa, Lucca, Siena; the Duchy of Ferrara, including Modena and Reggio; the Marquisates of Mantua and Montferrat; and the Duchy of Urbino.  For our immediate purpose it is not worth taking separate account of the Republic of Pisa, which was practically though not thoroughly enslaved by Florence; or of the despots in the cities of Romagna, the March.  Umbria, and the Patrimony of S. Peter, who were being gradually absorbed into the Papal sovereignty.  Nor need we at present notice Savoy, Piemonte, and Saluzzo.  Although these north-western provinces were all-important through the period of Franco-Spanish wars, inasmuch as they opened the gate of Italy to French armies, and supplied those armies with a base for military operations, the Duchy of Savoy had not yet become an exclusively Italian Power.