of Ferrara.  When Constantinople fell in 1453, Venice was still more tempted to pursue this new policy of Italian aggrandizement.  Meanwhile her growing empire seemed to menace the independence of less wealthy neighbors.  The jealousy thus created and the cupidity which brought her into collision with Julius II. in 1508, exposed Venice to the crushing blow inflicted on her power by the combined forces of Europe in the war of the League of Cambray.  From this blow, as well as from the simultaneous decline of their Oriental and Levantine commerce, the Venetians never recovered.

When we turn to the Florentines, we find that at the same epoch, 1494, their ancient republican constitution had been fatally undermined by the advances of the family of Medici towards despotism.  Lorenzo de’Medici, who enjoyed the credit of maintaining the equilibrium of Italy by wise diplomacy, had lately died.  He left his son Piero, a hot-headed and rash young man, to control the affairs of the commonwealth, as he had previously controlled them, with a show of burgherlike equality, but with the reality of princely power.  Another of his sons, Giovanni, received the honor of the Cardinalship.  The one was destined to compromise the ascendency of his family in Florence for a period of eighteen years, the other was destined to re-establish that ascendency on a new and more despotic basis.  Piero had not his father’s prudence, and could not maintain himself in the delicate position of a commercial and civil tyrant.  During the disturbances caused by the invasion of Charles VIII. he was driven with all his relatives into exile.  The Medici were restored in 1512, after the battle of Ravenna, by Spanish troops, at the petition of the Cardinal Giovanni.  The elevation of this man to the Papacy in 1513 enabled him to plant two of his nephews, as rulers, in Florence, and to pave the way whereby a third eventually rose to the dignity of the tiara.  Clement VII. finally succeeded in rendering Florence subject to the Medici, by extinguishing the last sparks of republican opposition, and by so modifying the dynastic protectorate of his family that it was easily converted into a titular Grand Duchy.

The federation of these five Powers had been artificially maintained during the half century of Italy’s highest intellectual activity.  That was the epoch when the Italians nearly attained to coherence as a nation, through common interests in art and humanism, and by the complicated machinery of diplomatic relations.  The federation perished when foreign Powers chose Lombardy and Naples for their fields of battle.  The disasters of the next thirty-three years (1494-1527) began in earnest on the day when Louis XII. claimed Milan and the Regno.  He committed his first mistake by inviting Ferdinand the Catholic to share in the partition of Naples.  That province was easily conquered; but Ferdinand retained the whole spoils for himself, securing a large Italian dependency and