"City-State

sent time. They believed that every city with its outlying country should constitute an independent state, with its own particular law-making and governing bodies, a

re of self-government, so that by the year 1500 they had become somewhat similar to the city- states of antiquity. In Germany, though they still maintained their local self-government, they were loosely attached to the Holy Roman Empire and were overshadowed in

er a National Monarchy not Att

literary expression, the people of the peninsula had not built up a national monarchy like those of western Europe nor had they even preserved the form of allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire. This was due to several significant events of earlier times. In the first place, the attempt of the medieval German emperors to gain control of Italy not only had signally failed but had left behind two contending factions throughout the whole country,-one, the Ghibellines, supporting the doctrine of maintaining the traditional connection with the Germanies; the other, the Guelphs, rejecting that doctrine. In the second place, the pope, who exercised extensive political as well as religious power, felt that his ecclesiastical influence would be seriously impaired by the creation of political unity in the country; a strong lay monarch with a solid Italy behind

ons of the country. The southern third of the peninsula comprised the ancient kingdom of Naples, which had grown up abou

aly in 1500: the Kingd

y called the Sicilian Vespers, had severed the relation between the island and the mainland, the former passing to the royal family of Aragon, and the latter troublously remaining in French hands until 1442. The reunion of the Two Sicilies at that date under the crown of

ly in 1500: th

ricts, as well as over the city, had been expressly recognized and conferred upon the bishop by Charlemagne in the eighth century. This bishop of Rome was, of course, the pope; and the pope slowly extended his territories through central Italy from the Tiber to the Adriatic, long using them merely as a bulwark to his religious and ecclesiastical prerogatives. By the year 1500, however, the p

ty-States of Nort

lane both of material prosperity and of intellectual culture than was to be found at that time in any other part of Europe, nevertheless they were deeply jealous of each other and carried on an interminable series

City-States: Milan

f art with the fine political subtleties of Italian tyrants. The Visconti ruled Milan from the thirteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth, when a Sforza, a leader of condottieri established the supremacy of his own family. In 1499, ho

ype of the Commercial

-Sta

ouncil controlled by the commercial magnates; (2) a centralized committee of ten; (3) an elected doge, or duke; and (4), after 1454, three state inquisitors, henceforth the city's real masters. The inquisitors could pronounce sentence of death, dispose of the public funds, and enact statutes; they maintained a regular spy system; and trial, judgment, and execution were secret. The mouth of the lion of St. Mark received anonymous denunciations, and the waves which passed under the Bridge of Sighs carried away the corpses. To this regime Venice owed an internal peace which contrasted with the endless civil wars of the other Italian cities. Till the final destruction of the state in 1798 Venice knew no political revolution. In foreign affairs, also, Venice possessed considerable inf

note:

until in 1499 she fell prey to the invasion of King Louis XII of France. Thereafter Genoa remained some years subject to the French, but in

tutions as for its art, in the first half of the fifteenth century had come under the tutelage of a family of traders and bankers, the wealthy Medici, who preserved

Type of the Cultured

y-S

1494, and aided materially in the expulsion of the Medici. Savonarola soon fell a victim to the plots of his Florentine enemies and to the vengeance of the pope, whom Charles VIII had

Obscure Duchy o

nsignificant duchy of Savoy, tucked away in the fastnesses of the northwestern Alps, whose d

City-States in

rman, but in the south the Walloons used a French dialect. At first the provinces had been mere feudal states at the mercy of various warring noblemen, but gradually in the course of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, important towns had arisen so wealthy and populous that they were able to wrest charters from the lords. Thus arose a n

City-Stats of the Netherlan

rity, which was supported by the nobility and clergy and opposed by the cities. In 1465 a common parliament, called the States General, was constituted at Brussels, containing deputies from each of the seventeen provinces; and eight years later a grand council was organized with supreme judicial and financial functions. Charles the Bold, who died in 1477, was prevented from constructing a great central kingdom between France and the

rope, and the splendor of the ducal court surpassed that of any contemporary sovereign. A permanent memorial of it remains in the celebrated Order of the Golden Fleece, which was institu