[Sidenote: [1701-1800 A.D.]]
Italy’s condition when she left the death-stricken hands of the dynasty
of Charles V made a lively impression on her new sovereigns. It showed
what could be done towards the unhappiness of a country by foreign
rule--a rule which only thought from day to day of gathering fruits of
conquest, without even trying to assure those of the morrow.
For a century and a half the governors of Milan and Naples, and following
their example the independent sovereigns, egoists, or oppressors, with
rare exceptions, had allowed ancient evils to subsist or replaced them
by new ones. They had only sought to exploit to their own profit the
privileges, the old institutions of the Middle Ages, instead of reforming
or ameliorating them. Nobles and clergy in particular had been left in
possession of their old rights over the chase, fishing, mills, furnaces,
justice even, and were the real instruments of domination. Thence arose
the strangest position of affairs.
Legislations, ancient and contradictory customs which in the south
went back to the Normans, the Hohenstaufens, and the Angevins, or in
the north at Bologna, Florence, Pisa, Siena, survived in institutions
of lost republics, formed an inextricable chaos where the arbitrator
reaped a rich harvest. Privileges and jurisdictions, both feudal and
clerical, confused or perverted the systems of judicial and political
administration; taxation varied in every country and for every person;
power made itself oppressively but universally felt. The general
tax-collectors, to whom finance was given over, and venal officials, who
represented authority, still further augmented disorder. Lastly the power
of the holy see, taking a more active part in political institutions in
Italy than anywhere else, came as a final burden.
In the country the rights of primogeniture, mortgage, trusteeship,
and free pasturage condemned the land to sterility. In towns the old
corporations, statutes, and recent monopolies killed all commerce and
industry. There were hardly any natural products in this the most fertile
country of Europe, still less of manufactured products in towns which
formerly had filled the markets of Europe with their exports, and the
bad condition of the roads overburdened with turnpikes did not allow of
transit over a peninsula so admirably situated and which in the Middle
Ages had served as a link between Europe and the Levant. Moreover the
deserted state of Apulia recalled the times of the decadence of the Roman
Empire. In the kingdom of Naples the royal pasturage had an extent of
fifty miles in length and fifteen miles in breadth. In Tuscany and the
papal states the Maremma reached as far as the Mediterranean coasts. The
greater part of the towns in central and southern Italy were depopulated,
their palaces deserted, the houses fallen into ruins and never repaired.
Even literature and art, which had maintained themselves up to that time,
had now shared the common fate.[h]
[Sidenote: [1701-1725 A.D.]]
Politically the eighteenth century, like the sixteenth, began in Italy
with fifty years of warfare; but the sufferings of the country, although
often heavy, were always much lighter than those which had prevailed
during the great struggle between France and the house of Charles V.
There broke out successively four European wars, into all of which the
Italians were dragged by their foreign masters.[f] The first of these was
the war of the Spanish Succession; the second, the war of the Quadruple
Alliance; the third, the war of the Polish Succession; the fourth,
the war of the Austrian Succession. A brief review of the effect upon
Italy of these wars will form the chief topic of the present chapter.
But before taking up the sweep of these political events, it may be of
interest to glance at the internal conditions of the most interesting of
Italian states, Tuscany, and witness the passing of its famous family of
Medici, which now becomes extinct after three centuries of domination.
Cosmo III, who occupied the ducal throne at the close of the century,
continued to reign until 1723.[a]
Although neither public nor private conditions were very satisfactory
under his government, the brilliancy of the court gave no indication
that times were bad. There never was a time of greater luxury, nor had
so many rich gifts ever found their way into foreign lands before.
Cosmo had an abnormal craving for notoriety. He wished to pass for
the most magnificent of sovereigns, while his ever-increasing leaning
towards piety gave rise to the most singular contrasts between his
private and his court life--contrasts which were intensified by the
habits and surroundings of his sons and for a time of his own brother
also. The latter, Francesco Maria, when cardinal, knew no moderation
in his expenditure, and the learned French Benedictines who saw him in
Rome, in 1687, report that the grand duke was forced on account of his
extravagance to recall him to Siena, and then describe how refreshments
alone cost him daily twenty-five _louis d’or_. Besides monks of all
orders, who were always to be found in the palace (the prince had founded
near the Ambrogiana an Alcantarian[21] monastery which was maintained at
his expense), individuals of all nations presented themselves at court.
The ambassadors took the greatest pains to gratify Cosmo’s wishes: Czar
Peter sent him four Calmucks, and from the Danish king, Frederick IV,
he received Greenlanders. The residences were filled with treasures and
curiosities of all kinds, and the princely vineyards and gardens were
of the choicest. At the end of the winter of 1719, King Frederick IV of
Denmark spent nearly six weeks in Florence, which he had already visited
as crown prince in 1692 under the incognito of the count of Schaumburg.
The great trouble which the ceremonial gave, in spite of the incognito
on that occasion, is described by the prince’s attendant, Hans Heinrich
von Ahlefeld, in his account of the journey. An inscription on the
archway of the Porta San Gallo commemorates the visit of the Scandinavian
monarch, whose predecessor, Christian I, had passed through that very
gate 235 years before. Cosmo celebrated the visit of his exalted guest,
in spite of the Lenten season, by balls and music. A large print which
represents the evening progress of the princess Violante Beatrice at the
time of the investment of Siena on April 12th, 1717, gives some idea of
the brilliancy and ceremonial as well as of the costumes and uniforms in
customary use on official occasions: the princess drove through the gaily
decorated town in her state carriage, almost entirely made of crystal
and drawn by six horses, surrounded by pages and halberdiers bearing
torches, and followed by the magnificent carriages of the nobility on
to the Piazza del Campo, whose every tower and roof was brilliantly
illuminated and which was filled to overflowing by a surging crowd.
The privations and losses of later years so depressed Cosmo, however,
that he could think of nothing but his religious exercises, and the
distinguished flower of Florentine youth went into foreign lands to
seek compensation for the restrictions imposed upon them at home. When
in 1720 the electoral princess of the Palatinate, who was by no means a
pleasure-seeker, felt it incumbent upon her to break through this severe
régime by encouraging the carnival festivities, the whole nation showed
unmistakably how hateful this morose existence had been to them.[b]
Cosmo III died at an advanced age on October 31st, 1723, leaving as
his successor his son Giovan Gastone. The country at this time was
plunged in debt, industries had decayed, prosperity was destroyed.
The new archduke drove away the monks and priestly flatterers that
had surrounded his father, suppressed several pensions that had been
awarded, converted heretics, Turks, and Jews--lightened, in a word, many
of the burdens that oppressed the land without displaying the energy
necessary to remove the worst evils from which it suffered. He held at a
distance his German wife, who had lately entered with alacrity upon the
duties of her position as reigning archduchess in Florence. In matters
pertaining to exterior politics he followed closely in the footsteps of
his father. Entertaining little hope of setting aside the decisions of
the Quadruple Alliance, he took good care to fix the allodial estates of
the house of Medici and to indicate which portions could be looked upon
as territorial and which must be ceded to the electress of the Palatinate
as compensation for the future transfer of the feudal tenure to another
family of the Medici female line.
A new turn was given to Tuscan affairs in 1725, while the belief still
prevailed that the infante Charles would shortly arrive from Spain with
an armed force with the intention of so establishing himself in Tuscany
that his position and that of his successors could not be shaken either
by the negotiations at Cambray or the pretensions of the emperor. Instead
of this solution the Madrid court secretly despatched to Vienna Baron
de Ripperda, an able Belgian who had recently gone over to the Catholic
church. This envoy succeeded in effecting a separate contract between
the emperor and Philip V whereby Tuscany and Parma were to be held
as possessions of the infante Charles and his successors without the
establishment there of foreign garrisons, exactly in accordance with the
provisions of the Quadruple Alliance. Although this agreement (which
brought to a close the congress of Cambray) dispelled the fears of the
archduke as to an irruption of the Spaniards into his domains before his
death, and made possible an undisturbed continuance of his dissolute mode
of life, fresh mistrust arose between the courts of Vienna and Madrid
which created renewed tension in the affairs of the Italian states.[c]
[Sidenote: [1725-1743 A.D.]]
Giovan Gastone loved conviviality, and during the first years of
his reign he took part in the social functions given by the most
distinguished families in the capital. Florence seemed to be suddenly
transformed. The new sovereign put a stop to the prying censorship of
morals with which his predecessor had tormented his subjects of all
classes. After he had once made the regulations that seemed to him
urgently needed, he refused to hear anything more about the affairs of
administration, and he prohibited all reports on the life and doings of
his subjects. The doors of his palace were closed to all the monks and
clergy, and to the converts and neophytes that Cosmo had loved to gather
round him. The palace, however, gained nothing by the changed company
in which Giovan Gastone indulged, more especially during the last sad
years of his reign. When his father’s pensions to his clerical protégés
ceased, the ill-deserved gratuities bestowed upon the depraved clients
of Giuliano Dami, the _ruspanti_ (as they were called from their weekly
doles of the goldpieces known as _ruspo_) were much worse. The depravity
of morals from which the whole of Italy suffered had never been worse.
And Giovan Gastone’s indifference increased with his ill-health. “The
present court,” writes Johann Georg Keysler in January, 1730, “is very
quiet and dreary. The sister of the grand duke has turned _dévote_
and frequents cloisters and churches more than the court. The grand
duchess, widow of the elder brother, is of a lively disposition, it is
true, and particularly gracious to foreigners, but perhaps she shrinks
from the thought of passing for a lover of vanities in the eyes of her
sister-in-law. The grand duke himself has not left his room since last
July. No traveller or foreign minister is admitted to an audience with
him, and he spends most of his time in bed, partly on account of the
discomforts of asthma and dropsy from which he suffers, and partly on
account of the strong drinks and liquors which he takes.”
The presence of the infante Don Charles roused this gloomy court for
the last time. The prince shot hares and game in the Boboli Gardens and
drove through the corridor between the palace and the Uffizzi in a little
carriage drawn by a stag. As soon as he had gone everything returned to
its former gloom. Giovan Gastone did not leave his couch again. Only
once, just before the last crisis, when he felt himself a little better,
he was carried in his arm-chair to the window on the ground-floor, while
the surging crowds thronged the square. He doled out money by handfuls
and bought masses of things that were offered to him, such as books,
pictures, stuffs and all the thousand and one strange things which were
exposed for sale at this curious fair. Thus did the last of the Medici
bid his last farewell to the Florentine people.[b]
Gastone had no bounds to his profusion and the dissipation of their
wealth; and when he died (1737), his reign had inflicted many deep wounds
on the prosperity of Tuscany. The death of his sister, a few years
afterwards, completed the extinction of the sovereign house of Medici.
A distant collateral branch of the same original stock, descended from
one of the ancestors of the great Cosmo, was left to survive even to
these times; but no claim to the inheritance of the ducal house was
ever recognised in its members. Francis of Lorraine, the consort of
Maria Theresa of Austria, to whom this inheritance was assigned by the
Peace of Vienna, naturally resided little in Tuscany, and his elevation
to the imperial crown seemed to consign the grand duchy to the long
administration of foreign viceroys. But the governors chosen by Francis
were men of ability and virtue, who strove to ameliorate the condition
of the people; and on the death of the emperor Francis (1765), his will,
in consonance with the spirit of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, gave to
Tuscany a sovereign of its own. This was his second son, Peter Leopold,
to whom he bequeathed the grand duchy, while his eldest, Joseph II,
succeeded to his imperial crown. Leopold was only eighteen years of
age when he commenced a reign which exhibited to admiration the rare
spectacle of a patriot and a philosopher on the throne.[e] We shall have
occasion to make further reference to the life of this remarkable prince
later on. Now we must take up the development of Italian history in
general from the beginning of the century. Our first concern is with the
wars that grew out of the extinction of the Habsburg dynasty in Spain.[a]
ITALY IN THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION
[Sidenote: [1700-1765 A.D.]]
Charles II of Spain died without sons in the year 1700, and several
sovereigns, amongst whom was Victor Amadeus II, laid claim to the
throne and made alliances to obtain it, or at least to divide the vast
inheritance among themselves. Before dying, Charles had appointed Philip
duke of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV, to be his successor, and although
the country was exhausted and a terrible war could be foreseen, the king
of France accepted the inheritance for his grandson with the famous
saying, “The Pyrenees are no more.” Philip V was in fact recognised in
Madrid, but a European war of thirteen years’ duration followed.
The duke of Savoy was undecided what side to adopt, but willing or
unwilling he was compelled to side with France, and to give in marriage
to Philip V his daughter Maria Louisa, who in spite of her youth showed
great judgment, and during her husband’s absence on his campaign in
Italy, governed the kingdom in a wise and intelligent manner. Clement XI,
exalted in that year to the pontifical see, would not side with France,
but intervened to prevent war; and, seeing that he was unsuccessful,
endeavoured--but in vain--to form a league among the Italian princes to
save Italy from again becoming the arena of European wars. To this pope,
sincerely and courageously Italian, praise is due. Eugene of Savoy,
conqueror of the Turks, was despatched from Hungary to Italy against the
Franco-Piedmontese, and it must have grieved him to turn his arms against
his kinsman.
For two years the war was continued without any definite results, though
the French were worsted at Chiari, and their mediocre General Villeroi
was taken prisoner at Cremona; later at Luzzara in Modena the victory was
uncertain. Meanwhile Eugene, more than ever disgusted with the arrogance
of the French, endeavoured to separate the duke from the league, and had
no trouble in persuading him to abandon it. Louis XIV avenged himself by
taking prisoner all the Piedmontese on his territory. The duke arrested
the French ambassador, and appealed to his people saying, “I prefer the
honour of dying arms in hand to the shame of suffering myself to be
oppressed.” Having renewed his troops, he confronted the enemy’s arms
almost alone (Eugene had returned to fight in Germany); his courage
appeared to become stronger in danger.
Fortune does not always favour the good and brave, and Victor lost
many towns and was reduced to defending his own capital. A desperate
attack was made on the latter, but the citizens maintained their ancient
reputation.
[Sidenote: [1706-1714 A.D.]]
Before giving orders for the bombardment, La Feuillade, who commanded
the besiegers, sent word to the duke to inquire where he was quartered,
that he might spare him. “On the walls of the citadel,” replied the duke.
The defence being well ordered, the duke made a sally with a few brave
and tried followers. Thus threatened at close quarters, hearing distant
rumours of trouble, suffering, and every kind of want, the intrepid men
of Turin held out. The fury of the artillery, the laying of mines, the
assaults, lasted three months, but day and night the citizens above and
below ground watched and combated. Even from the orphanage the orphans
came forward to labour in the mines. Aid was expected, but it came not;
though the ever active Eugene was commissioned to bring reinforcements.
Eventually the two princes met, and together from the hill of Superga
they drew up the plan of battle, the duke promising to erect there a
church in thanksgiving if the victory was his.
[Illustration: TURIN]
Turin was in peril. On the 29th of August a large number of the enemy
reached a postern of the citadel unseen; a mine was laid at the spot, but
could not be fired without danger; in this imminent peril Pietro Nicco
d’Andorno, of Biella, made the companies retire, and like a new Decius
offered himself to die; the match being applied, he was buried with the
French under the ruins. This great deed brought glory on Turin, and the
fame of it shall live forever in the country. Nevertheless the French
occupied the castle of Pianezza, on the left bank of the Dora Riparia;
it was imperative that the Piedmontese should dislodge them from this
place, but for this it was necessary to take them unawares and they knew
not how. But an old peasant woman, by name Maria Bricca, discovered on
the night of the 5th of September that instead of keeping watch the
French were amusing themselves, and she immediately ran to give the news
in the Italian camp. At the head of the soldiers she led the way by a
subterranean passage into the castle, and, hatchet in hand, crying “_Viva
Savoia_” she informed the enemy they were prisoners.
Two days later Victor and Eugene, uniting their talents and forces,
inflicted on the French a crushing defeat, so that twenty thousand were
left dead on the field and the survivors fled beyond the Alps. The
Franco-Spaniards evacuated Naples; and the Austrians, solely because
they were the new lords, were greeted as friends and liberators. The war
was continued outside Italy, and later the exhausted powers were brought
to signing the Treaty of Utrecht 1713, confirmed the following year at
Rastatt. By this treaty Austria obtained Milan, Naples, and Sardinia;
Victor Amadeus obtained the far distant Sicily, Montferrat, Lomellina,
and Val di Susa, with the title of king; a few small states were
distributed--Mantua, Mirandola, and afterwards, Guastalla.
This aggrandisement of the house of Savoy and also that of Prussia
was specially insisted upon by England, then the peacemaker of the
continent and arbitrator in this peace, for which reason she intervened
between France and Austria, and preserved European equilibrium. Thus
were favoured the legitimate ambitions of two minor states, Piedmont
and Prussia, that aimed at a high mark, and in the similarity of their
fortunes they became the bulwarks of two nations, the hope and pride of
two countries.[d]
WAR OF THE QUADRUPLE ALLIANCE
[Illustration: COURT OF PALACE BUILT BY CHARLES VII OF NAPLES AT PORTICI
IN 1738]
[Sidenote: [1714-1718 A.D.]]
It was by the ambitious intrigues of an Italian princess and an Italian
priest, that the repose of the peninsula was again disturbed, only four
years after this pacification. Giulio Alberoni, the son of a peasant, and
originally a poor curate near Parma, had risen by his talents and artful
spirit to the office of first minister of Spain. Philip V, on the death
of his queen, Maria Louisa of Savoy, had espoused the princess Elizabeth
Farnese; and Alberoni, by means of this marriage, of which he was
regarded as the author, enjoyed the favour of the new queen, and acquired
an absolute ascendency over the feeble mind of her husband.
His first object was to obtain a cardinal’s hat for himself; and being
indulged with that honour by the pope, the next and more comprehensive
scheme of his ambition was to signalise his public administration. To
his energetic and audacious conceptions, it seemed not too gigantic
or arduous an undertaking to recover for the Spanish monarchy all its
ancient possessions and power in Italy, which had been totally lost by
the Peace of Utrecht. He duped the wily Victor Amadeus, and enlisted him
in his views by the promise of the Milanese provinces in exchange for
Sicily; and the disgust which the stern and haughty insolence of the
imperial government had already excited in the peninsula, rendered the
pope, the grand duke of Tuscany, and other Italian princes, not adverse
to the designs of the Spanish minister.
But the great powers of Europe looked with far different eyes upon his
unquiet ambition. The personal interest and feelings of the duke of
Orleans, who now governed France during the minority of Louis XV, placed
him in opposition to Philip V; and the duke discovered a plot laid by
Alberoni, through the Spanish ambassador at Paris, to deprive him of the
regency of France, to which the cardinal persuaded his master to assert
his claim as the nearest relative of Louis XV. The intrigues held with
the Scottish Jacobites by Alberoni, who had formed a chimerical scheme of
placing the pretender on the throne of Great Britain, and thus securing
a new and grateful ally for Spain, rendered George I as jealous as the
duke of Orleans of the designs of the court of Madrid. For their mutual
protection against the machinations of Alberoni, the British monarch and
the French regent negotiated a defensive league between Great Britain,
France, and Holland, which, by the accession of the emperor to its
objects, shortly swelled into the famous Quadruple Alliance (1718).
Besides the provision of the contracting parties for their mutual
defence, the Quadruple Alliance laboured at once to provide for the
continued repose of Italy, and to gratify the ambition both of the
family of Austria and of the Spanish house of Bourbon. Although Parma
and Piacenza were not feminine fiefs, the approaching extinction of the
male line of Farnese gave Elizabeth the best subsisting claim to the
succession of her uncle’s states. To the grand duchy of Tuscany she had
also pretensions by maternal descent, after the failure of the male
ducal line of Medici; which, like that of Farnese, seemed to be fast
approaching its termination. As, therefore, the children of the young
queen were excluded from the expectation of ascending the Spanish throne,
which the sons of Philip by his first marriage were of course destined
to inherit, the idea was conceived of forming an establishment in Italy
for Don Charles, her first-born; and the Quadruple Alliance provided
that the young prince should be guaranteed in the succession both of
Parma and Piacenza, and of Tuscany, on the death of the last princes of
the Farnese and Medicean dynasties. It was to reconcile the emperor to
this admission of a Spanish prince into Italy, that Sicily was assigned
to him in exchange for Sardinia. The weaker powers and the people were
alone sacrificed. While the princes of Parma and Tuscany were compelled
to endure the cruel mortification of seeing foreign statesmen dispose by
anticipation of their inheritance, during their own lives, and without
their option; and while, with a far more flagrant usurpation of natural
rights, the will of their subjects was as little consulted--it was
resolved to compel Victor Amadeus to receive, as an equivalent for his
new kingdom of Sicily, that of Sardinia, which boasted not a third part
of either its population or general value.
The provisions of the Quadruple Alliance were haughtily rejected by
Alberoni, who had already entered on the active prosecution of his
designs upon the Italian provinces. Having hitherto endeavoured, during
his short administration, to recruit the exhausted strength of Spain,
he now plunged that monarch headlong into a new contest, with such
forces as had been regained in four years of peace; and his vigorous,
but overwrought direction of the resources of the state, seemed at
first to justify his presumption. A body of eight thousand Spaniards
was disembarked on the island of Sardinia, and at once wrested that
kingdom from the feeble garrisons of the imperialists (1717). In the
following year, a large Spanish fleet of sixty vessels of war, convoying
thirty-five thousand land-forces, appeared in the Mediterranean; and
notwithstanding the previous negotiations of Alberoni with Victor
Amadeus, Sicily was the first object of attack. Against this perfidious
surprise, the Savoyard prince was in no condition to defend his new
kingdom; and though his viceroy at first endeavoured to resist the
progress of the Spanish arms, Victor Amadeus, sensible of his weakness
and inability to afford the necessary succours for preserving so
distant a possession, made a merit of necessity, and assented to the
provisions of the Quadruple Alliance (1718). Withdrawing his troops from
the contest, he assumed the title of king of Sardinia, though he yet
possessed not a foot of territory in that island.
[Sidenote: [1718-1731 A.D.]]
Meanwhile the powers of the Quadruple Alliance, finding all negotiations
hopeless, had begun to act vigorously against the Spanish forces. Even
before the open declaration of war, to which England and France had
now recourse to reduce the court of Spain to abandon its designs, Sir
George Byng, the British admiral in the Mediterranean, had not hesitated
to attack the Spanish fleet, which he completely annihilated off the
Sicilian coast. This disaster overthrew all the magnificent projects of
Alberoni. The British admiral poured the imperial troops from the Italian
continent into Sicily; and the Spaniards rapidly lost ground, and made
overtures for evacuating the island. The enterprises of the court of
Madrid were equally unfortunate in other quarters; and Philip V, at last
discovering the impracticability of Alberoni’s schemes, sacrificed his
minister to the jealousy of the European powers, and acceded to the terms
of the Quadruple Alliance (1719). Victor Amadeus was placed in possession
of the kingdom of Sardinia, which his house has retained ever since this
epoch with the regal title. The cupidity of the emperor was satisfied
by the reunion of the crowns of the Two Sicilies in his favour; and
the ambitious maternal anxiety of the Spanish queen was allayed by the
promised reversion of the states of the Medici and of her own family to
the infante Don Charles (1720).
For thirteen years after the conclusion of the war of the Quadruple
Alliance, Italy was left in profound and uninterrupted repose. The first
half of the eighteenth century was completely the age of political
chicanery; and the intricate negotiations, which engrossed the attention
and only served to expose the laborious insincerity of the statesmen of
Europe, seemed to be ever threatening new troubles. But the treaties,
which followed that of the Quadruple Alliance in thick succession for
many years, had no other effect in Italy than to secure the Parmesan
succession to the infante Don Charles of Spain. Francesco and Antonio,
the two surviving sons of the duke Ranuccio II of Parma and Piacenza, who
died in 1694, had both inherited the diseased and enormous corpulence of
their family. Neither of them had issue; the duke Francesco terminated
his reign and life in 1727; and Antonio, his successor, survived him
only four years. The death of the youngest of her uncles realised the
ambitious hopes which Elizabeth Farnese had cherished of conveying the
states of her own house to her son (1731). The male line of Farnese
having thus become extinct, the youthful Don Charles, with a body of
Spanish troops, was quietly put in possession of the duchies of Parma and
Piacenza, and reluctantly acknowledged by the last prince of the Medici
as his destined successor in the grand duchy of Tuscany.
THE WAR OF THE POLISH SUCCESSION
[Sidenote: [1731-1738 A.D.]]
The final settlement of the Parmesan and Tuscan succession seemed to
eradicate the seeds of hostilities in Italy; but it had become the
unhappy fortune of that country to follow captive in the train of foreign
negotiation, and to suffer and to bleed for the most distant broils of
her foreign masters. Only two years had elapsed after the elevation of
the Spanish prince to the ducal throne of Parma, when Italy was suddenly
chosen as the field for the decision of a quarrel which had originated
in the disputed election of a king of Poland. Upon this occasion, the
two branches of the Bourbon dynasty united in the same league against
the house of Austria, and resolved to attack its possessions in Italy.
Charles Emmanuel III, the new king of Sardinia, joined their formidable
confederacy, and the imperial strength in the peninsula was crushed under
its weight.
While Charles Emmanuel, at the head of the French and Piedmontese troops,
easily conquered the whole Milanese states in a short time, the Spaniards
at Parma, being delivered of all apprehension for the issue of the war in
Lombardy, found themselves at liberty to divert their views to the south.
A Spanish army of thirty thousand men disembarked in the peninsula under
the duke of Montemar, and joined Don Charles; and that young prince, at
the age of seventeen, assuming the nominal command-in-chief of the forces
of Spain in Italy, led them to attempt the conquest of the Sicilies.
The duke of Montemar, who guided his military operations, gained for
him a complete and decisive victory at Bitonto in Apulia over the
feeble imperial army, which was intrusted with the defence of southern
Italy. The opposition of language, and manners, and character, between
the Germans and Italians, rendered the cold sullen tyranny of Austria
peculiarly hateful to the volatile Neapolitans; and they eagerly threw
off a yoke to which time had not yet habituated them. The capital had
already opened its gates before the battle of Bitonto; and the provinces
hastened to offer a ready submission to the conquerors. The Sicilians
imitated the example of their continental neighbours; and at Naples and
Palermo Don Charles received the crowns of the Two Sicilies (1735).
For the facility with which the Spaniards had effected these conquests,
they were principally indebted to the powerful operations of the French
in Lombardy, and to the vigour with which the armies of Louis XV pressed
those of the emperor in Germany, and prevented him from despatching
sufficient succours to his Italian dependencies. The court of Madrid now
began to cherish again the hope of recovering the whole of the Italian
provinces, which the Spanish monarchy had lost by the Peace of Utrecht;
and the duke of Montemar conducted his army into Lombardy to unite with
the French and Piedmontese in completing the expulsion of the Austrians
from the peninsula. But the emperor, discouraged by so many reverses,
made overtures of peace; and the French cabinet was not disposed to
indulge the ambition of Spain with further acquisitions.
Negotiations for a general peace were opened, to which Philip V was
compelled to accede; and at length the confirmation of the preliminaries
by the Peace of Vienna once more changed the aspect of Italy. The crowns
of Naples and Sicily were secured to Don Charles. The provinces of Milan
and Mantua were left to the emperor; the duchies of Parma and Piacenza
were annexed to his Lombard possessions to recompense him in some measure
for the loss of the Sicilies; and the extinction of the house of Medici
by the death of the grand duke Giovan Gastone, while the negotiations
were yet pending, completed a new arrangement for the succession of
Tuscany. Francis, duke of Lorraine, who had lately received the hand
of Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter and heiress of the emperor, took
possession of the grand duchy, in exchange for his hereditary states; and
Charles VI was gratified by this favourable provision for his son-in-law
and destined successor in the imperial dignity. Finally, the king of
Sardinia, in lieu of the ambitious hopes, with which he had been amused,
of possessing all the Milanese duchy, was obliged to content himself with
the acquisition of the valuable districts of Tortona and Novara.
THE WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION
[Sidenote: [1738-1742 A.D.]]
This general accommodation among the arbiters of Italy procured only a
brief interval of repose for the degraded people of the peninsula, before
they were exposed to far greater evils than those which they had suffered
in the short course of the late war. The emperor Charles VI died only two
years after the confirmation of the Peace of Vienna; and the very powers
who by that treaty had guaranteed the famous Pragmatic Sanction--or
act by which the emperor, as he had no son, was allowed to settle his
hereditary states upon his daughter Maria Theresa--conspired to rob her
of those dominions. The furious war of the Austrian Succession which
followed, filled Italy during seven years with rapine and havoc.
In the year after the death of Charles VI, a Spanish army under the duke
of Montemar, disembarked on the Tuscan coast to attempt further conquests
in Italy; and although these troops arrived to attack the territories
of his consort, the new grand duke was obliged to affect a neutrality
and to permit their free passage through his dominions. On the other
hand, the king of the Sicilies, who desired to aid his father’s forces
in their operations, was equally compelled to accept a neutrality, by
the appearance of a British squadron in the bay of Naples, and the
threatened bombardment of that city. This humiliation, to which the
exposed situation of his capital reduced him, did not, however, prevent
the Neapolitan monarch at a later period from taking part in the war. But
his engagement in the contest had only the effect of drawing the Austrian
arms into southern Italy, and inflicting the ravages of a licentious
soldiery upon the neutral states of the church and the frontiers of
Naples (1742).
But northern Italy was the constant theatre of far more destructive
hostilities; and the Italian sovereign, who acted the most conspicuous
part in the general war of Europe, was Charles Emmanuel III, the king
of Sardinia. That active and politic prince, pursuing the skilful but
selfish and unscrupulous system of aggrandisement, which had become
habitual to the Savoyard dynasty, made a traffic of his alliance to the
highest bidder. He first offered to join the confederated Bourbons;
but the court of Spain could not be induced to purchase his adherence
by promising him an adequate share of the Milanese states, which the
Spaniards were confident of regaining. Charles Emmanuel therefore
deserted the Bourbon alliance to range himself in the party of Maria
Theresa. But it was not until he had extorted new cessions of territory
from that princess in Lombardy, and large subsidies from England which
protected her, that he entered seriously and vigorously into the war,
as the auxiliary of Austria and England. As soon as Charles Emmanuel
began to declare himself against the Bourbon cause, his states became
immediately the prey of invasion. Although the Spanish dynasty pretended
to lay claim to the whole succession of the house of Austria, the real
motive which actuated the court of Madrid in these wars was the ambition
of the queen of Spain, Elizabeth Farnese, to obtain an establishment
in Italy for another of her sons, the infante Don Philip; and that
prince, leading a Spanish army from the Pyrenees through the south of
France, overran and occupied all Savoy, which was mercilessly pillaged
by his troops. But Don Philip was unable to penetrate into Piedmont; and
meanwhile the duke of Montemar, with the Spanish army already in Italy,
had been oppressed successfully by the Austrians and Piedmontese on these
opposite frontiers of Lombardy.
[Sidenote: [1742-1748 A.D.]]
But Charles Emmanuel, even after he had formally pledged himself to
England and Austria, was perpetually carrying on secret and separate
negotiations with the Bourbons; and it was only because he could not
obtain all the terms which he demanded of them, and because he was also
as suspicious of their ill-faith as he was conscious of his own, that
he maintained his alliances unchanged to the end of the war (1743).
His states were almost constantly the theatre of hostilities, equally
destructive to his subjects, whether success or failure alternately
attended his career. Yet he displayed activity and skill and courage,
scarcely inferior to the brilliant qualities which had distinguished his
father, Victor Amadeus. When, however, the infante Don Philip had been
joined by the prince of Conti with twenty thousand men, all the efforts
of the Sardinian monarch, though he headed his troops in person, could
not resist the desperate valour of the French and Spanish confederates;
who, forcing the tremendous passes of the Alps, broke triumphantly into
Piedmont, and for some time swept over its plains as conquerors (1744).
But reinforced by the Austrians, Charles Emmanuel, before the end of
the same campaign, turned the tide of fortune, and obliged the allies
to retire for the winter into France. They still retained possession of
the duchy of Savoy, and crushed the inhabitants under every species of
oppression.
In the following year, Genoa declared for the Bourbon confederation; and
the Spanish and French forces under Don Philip, being thus at liberty
to form a junction in the territories of that republic with the second
Spanish army from Naples, the king of Sardinia and the Austrians were
utterly unable to resist their immense superiority of numbers (1745). In
this campaign, Parma and Piacenza were reduced by the duke of Modena, the
ally of France and Spain; Turin was menaced with bombardment; Tortona
fell to the Bourbon arms; Pavia was carried by assault; and Don Philip,
penetrating into the heart of Lombardy, closed the operations of the year
by his victorious entry into Milan.
But such were the sudden vicissitudes of this sanguinary war, that the
brilliant successes of the Spanish prince were shortly rendered nugatory
by a growing misunderstanding between the courts of Paris and Madrid,
and by the arrival of large reinforcements for the Austrian army in the
peninsula (1746). Don Philip lost, in less than another year, all that he
had acquired in the preceding campaign. He was driven out of Milan; he
was obliged to evacuate all Lombardy; and the French and Spanish forces
were finally compelled, by the increasing strength of the Austrians, to
recross the Alps, and to make their retreat into France. The king of
Sardinia and his allies carried the war into Provence, without meeting
with much success; and the French in their turn endeavoured once more to
penetrate into Piedmont. But while that quarter of Italy was threatened
with new ravages, the peninsula was saved from further miseries by the
signature of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748).
One of the declared purposes of the European powers in their assembled
congress was to give independence to Italy; and if that object could
have been attained without the restoration of ancient freedom, and the
revival of national virtue among the Italians, the provisions of the
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle would have been wise and equitable. The
Austrians were permitted to retain only Milan and Mantua; and all other
foreign powers consented to exclude themselves from the peninsula. The
grand duke Francis of Lorraine, now become emperor, engaged to resign
Tuscany to a younger branch of his imperial house. The throne of the Two
Sicilies was confirmed to Don Charles and his heirs, to form a distinct
and independent branch of the Spanish house of Bourbon; and the duchies
of Parma and Piacenza were elevated anew into a sovereign state in favour
of Don Philip, who thus became the founder of a third dynasty of the
same family. The king of Sardinia received some further accessions of
territory, which were detached from the duchy of Milan; and all the other
native powers of Italy remained, or were re-established, in their former
condition.
FORTY YEARS OF “LANGUID PEACE” FOR DIVIDED ITALY
[Sidenote: [1748-1789 A.D.]]
Thus was Italy, after two centuries of prostration under the yoke of
other nations, relieved from the long oppression of foreigners. A small
portion only of her territory remained subject to the empire; and all the
rest of the peninsula was divided among a few independent governments.
But after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, Italy was still as little
constituted as before to command the respect or the fear of the world.
Her people for the most part cherished no attachment for rulers to whom
they were indebted neither for benefits nor happiness, in whose success
they could feel no community of interest, and whose aggrandisement could
reflect no glory on themselves.
The condition of Italy after the nominal restoration of her independence,
offers, as a philosophical writer has well remarked, a striking lesson
of political experience. The powers of Europe, after having in some
measure annihilated a great nation, were at length awakened to a sense of
the injury which they had inflicted upon humanity, and upon the general
political system of the world. They laboured sincerely to repair the
work of destruction; there was nothing which they did not restore to
Italy, except what they could not restore--the extinguished energies and
dignity of the people. Forty years of profound peace succeeded to their
attempt; and these were only forty years of effeminacy, weakness, and
corruption--a memorable example to statesmen that the mere act of their
will can neither renovate a degraded nation, nor replenish its weight in
the political balance; and that national independence is a vain boon,
where the people are not interested in its preservation, and where no
institutions revive the spirit of honour, and the honest excitement of
freedom.
During these forty years of languid peace (from the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle to the epoch of the French Revolution) the general
history of Italy presents not a single circumstance for our observation;
and it only remains for us to pass in rapid review the few domestic
occurrences of any moment in the different Italian states of the
eighteenth century. The affairs of the Sicilies, of the popedom, of the
states of the house of Savoy, of the duchies of Tuscany and Modena,
of the republics of Genoa and Venice, and of the Milanese and Mantuan
provinces, may each require a brief notice. But the obscure or tranquil
fortunes of Lucca, and of the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, would
scarcely merit a separate place in this enumeration.
The duchies of Parma and Piacenza, which had once more been separated
from that of Milan to form the independent appanage of a Spanish prince,
relapsed into the deep oblivion from which the dispute for their
possession had alone drawn them. Don Philip reigned until the year 1765,
and his son, Don Ferdinand, succeeded him. The administration of both of
these princes was, in a political sense, marked by no important event;
but the literary and scientific tastes of Don Philip entitle him to be
mentioned with respect, and shed some beneficial influence on his ducal
states.
THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES AND SICILY
[Sidenote: [1738-1765 A.D.]]
The transition of the crowns of Naples and Sicily, from the extinguished
Spanish branch of the house of Austria to the collateral line of Germany,
and from that dynasty again to a junior member of the Spanish Bourbons,
has already been noticed; and we take up the annals of the Sicilies from
the epoch only at which the infante Don Charles was confirmed in the
possession of their throne by the Treaty of Vienna. This sovereign, who
reigned at Naples under the title of Charles VII, but who is better known
by his later designation of Charles III of Spain, governed southern Italy
above twenty-one years.
The general reputation of his character has perhaps been much over-rated;
but, as the monarch of the Sicilies, he undoubtedly laboured to promote
the welfare of his kingdom. The war of the Spanish Succession paralysed
all his efforts during the first half of his reign; but after the
restoration of tranquillity in 1748, he devoted himself zealously and
exclusively to the pacific work of improvement. He was well seconded by
the virtuous intentions, if not by the limited talents, of his minister
Tanucci. The principal error of both proceeded from their ignorance of
the first principles of finance; and the cultivated mind and theoretical
knowledge of Tanucci fitted him less for the active conduct of affairs
than for the station of professor of law, from which the king had raised
him to his friendship and confidence.
It has been objected as a second mistake of Charles, or his minister,
that the system of government which they adopted contemplated only the
continuance of peace, and contained no provision against the possibility
of war. No attempt was made either to kindle a martial spirit in the
people, or to rouse them to the power of defending themselves from
foreign aggression and insult. The army, the fortifications, and all
warlike establishments were suffered to fall into utter decay; and the
military force of the kingdom, which was nominally fixed at thirty
thousand men, was kept so incomplete that it rarely exceeded half that
number. The only security for the preservation of honourable peace at
home was forgotten in a system which neglected the means of commanding
respect abroad; but Charles occupied himself, as if he indulged the
delusive hope of maintaining his subjects in eternal tranquillity.
He studiously embellished his capital; and the useful public works,
harbours, aqueducts, canals, and national granaries, which preserve the
memory of his reign, are magnificent and numerous.
The laudable exertions of Charles were but just beginning to produce
beneficial effects, when he was summoned by the death of his elder
brother, Ferdinand VI of Spain, who left no children, to assume the
crown of that kingdom (1759). According to the spirit of the Peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle, his next brother, Don Philip, duke of Parma, should
have succeeded to the vacant throne of the Sicilies; but Charles III was
permitted to place one of his own younger sons in the seat which he had
just quitted. His eldest son betrayed such marks of hopeless idiocy that
it was necessary to set him altogether aside from the succession to any
part of his dominions; the inheritance of the Spanish throne was reserved
for the second, who afterwards reigned under the title of Charles IV; and
it was to the third that the sceptre of the Sicilies was assigned.
[Sidenote: [1759-1825 A.D.]]
This prince, who under the name of Ferdinand IV of Naples and Sicily
reigned till 1825, was then a boy of nine years of age. Charles appointed
a Neapolitan council of regency to govern in his son’s name; but the
marquis Tanucci remained the real dictator of the public administration;
and the new monarch of Spain continued to exercise a decisive influence
over the councils of the Two Sicilies during the whole of his son’s
minority, and even for some time after its expiration. It was by the
act of Tanucci, and in conjunction with the policy of Charles, that
the Jesuits were expelled from the Two Sicilies and from Spain at the
same epoch; that the ancient usurpations of the holy see were boldly
repressed; and that the progress of other useful reforms was zealously
forwarded.
It was the most fatal negligence of Charles III, and the lasting
misfortune of his son, that the education of Ferdinand IV was entrusted
to the prince of San Nicandro, a man utterly destitute of ability or
knowledge. The young monarch, who was not deficient in natural capacity,
was thus permitted to remain in the grossest ignorance. The sports of
the field were the only occupation and amusement of his youth; and the
character of his subsequent reign was deplorably influenced by the
idleness and distaste for public affairs in which he had been suffered to
grow up. The marriage of Ferdinand with the princess Carolina of Austria
put a term to the ascendency of Charles III over the Neapolitan councils.
His faithful servant Tanucci lost his authority in the administration;
some years afterwards he was finally disgraced; and the ambitious consort
of Ferdinand, having gained an absolute sway over the mind of her feeble
husband, engrossed the direction of the state. Her assumption of the
reins of sovereignty was followed by the rise of a minion, who acquired
as decided an influence over her spirit as she already exercised over
that of the king. This was the famous Acton, a low Irish adventurer,
who, after occupying some station in the French marine, passed into
Tuscany, and was received into the service of the grand duke. He had the
good fortune to distinguish himself in an expedition against the pirates
of Barbary; and thenceforth his elevation was astonishingly rapid. He
became known to the queen, and was entrusted with the direction of the
Neapolitan navy. Still young, and gifted with consummate address, he won
the personal favour of Carolina; he governed while he seemed implicitly
to obey her; and without any higher qualifications, or any knowledge
beyond the narrow circle of his profession, he was successively raised to
the office of minister of war and of foreign affairs. The whole power of
government centred in his person; and Acton was the real sovereign in the
Sicilies, when the corrupt court and the misgoverned state encountered
the universal shock of the French Revolution.[e]
THE STATES OF THE CHURCH
[Sidenote: [1700-1800 A.D.]]
On the outline of government and policy in the ecclesiastical state, as
these features presented themselves in the seventeenth century, very
little has to be either altered or added, if we would make the picture
true for the age that succeeded. It is necessary indeed to pay, at
the outset, that tribute of respect which is deserved by the personal
character of most of the sovereigns who ruled on the Seven Hills during
the eighteenth century. Never had the bishops of Rome been so decorous,
so generally unexceptionable in morals; seldom had they numbered so many
men of sincere and earnest piety; never had the list included names more
illustrious for talent and learning. Two popes in particular, Prospero
Lambertini and the accomplished Antonio Ganganelli, would have reflected
honour upon any throne in Christendom.
But those venerable priests, who, for a few years before they sank into
the grave, left the altar and the closet, the breviary and the pen, to
wear the triple crown and wield the keys of St. Peter, discovered by
sad experience what everyone who has administered that office must have
discovered before he had slept a month under the roof of the Vatican.
Genius becomes a public calamity, virtue itself is paralysed into
despair, when, after a lifetime spent in the library or the cloister,
they are summoned, in the decrepitude of old age, to discharge duties
more complicated, more difficult, requiring greater versatility and
greater energy in action than those which belong to any other sovereignty
in the world. Where the whole edifice of government must be overturned
before effectual repair can be wrought upon any of its parts, differences
in the character of successive rulers are confined in their results
to individual and temporary interests. In regard to the permanent
improvement or deterioration of the state, Rodrigo Borgia was as innocent
as the irreproachable Barnaba Chiaramonti; Clement VII was as wise as
Sixtus V; and the hermit-pope Pietro di Murrhone, with his gentle and
pious ignorance, was not more helpless than Julian della Rovere, who wore
armour beneath his sacerdotal robe.
The most unpleasing task which the popes of the eighteenth century had to
perform was that of accommodating their prerogatives over the Catholic
states to those opinions of independence which were now rooted in every
cabinet of Europe. The priestly chiefs bowed with infinite reluctance to
this hard necessity; some of them disgraced themselves by persecuting
foreign inquirers, like Giannone and Genovesi; and, but for the activity
and talent of Clement XIV, who yielded gracefully what he had no power
to withhold, the papal court might have suffered losses infinitely more
injurious than the sacrifice which it was obliged to make of its able
servants the Jesuits. Pius VI, on whose head were to break the thunders
of the French Revolution, was more a man of the world than any of his
recent predecessors. Long employed in offices of the government, and
familiar in an especial degree with the business of the Roman exchequer,
he distinguished himself by endeavours zealous and incessant, but
utterly unsuccessful, to introduce internal ameliorations. The sluggish
imbecility of the papal rule cannot be better proved than by the fact
that, till the middle of the eighteenth century, while internal taxes and
restrictions ground the faces of the people, there was no duty (though,
at several points of time, there were absolute prohibitions) on the
importation of foreign manufactures; and that one of the most vaunted
measures of this reign was the organisation of a force to protect the
frontiers against smuggling; a measure of which, amidst all their recent
tariffs, the popes do not appear to have ever dreamed.
In the details of his new system of foreign duties on merchandise, as
well as in many of his regulations for agriculture and internal trade,
Pius and his advisers proved singularly how much they were still in the
dark as to the principles of political economy. His partial abolition of
the innumerable baronial tolls did not confer benefits half sufficient to
counterbalance the evils produced by his arbitrary restrictions on the
corn-trade; his expensive operations for draining the Pontine marshes
were rendered useless by his gift the reclaimed lands to his nephew; and
his depreciation of the currency by excessive issues of paper money was
an anticipation of one of the worst errors committed by the leaders of
the French Revolution.
THE SARDINIAN KINGDOM
During the latter half of the eighteenth century, the counts of Savoy
were precluded from prosecuting further that policy which had gained
for them an extensive dominion and a kingly name. But, even amidst the
wars which had preceded this period, and still more energetically after
their close, the able and ambitious Victor Amadeus continued that system
of internal improvement, to whose results he looked forward as likely
to make him the sovereign of a people rich as well as warlike, rivals
of their southern neighbours in literature and art, as they had already
outstripped them in energy and public spirit.
In his endeavours for the intellectual improvement of the higher ranks
(for whom exclusively his institutions were designed), he succeeded as
ill as an arbitrary king may be expected to succeed when he aims at
amending a corrupted, martial, and ignorant aristocracy. For commerce he
was able to effect greatly more, through those regulations imposed on the
silk-manufacture, which, however alien their narrow spirit may be to the
genuine principles of commerce, were found to be not ill-calculated to
check an equally narrow spirit abroad, and were accordingly imitated in
Milan and the eastern provinces. Several excellent laws aided the rural
population. One enactment expressly recognised, in contradiction to all
older practice, agricultural leases for a fixed term of years, usually
from nine to eighteen; and not only so, but the lawgivers studiously left
loopholes for evading a rule which they were in terms obliged to enact,
for making the endurance of such leases dependent on the survivance of
the landlord who had granted them. This characteristic artifice shows
the influence of the higher classes, against whom however Victor Amadeus
carried by arbitrary interference his great and beneficial measure
for an equalisation of public burdens. For, before he abdicated the
throne, all the estates in Piedmont, without distinction of tenure, were
subjected to an impartial land-tax, assessed in conformity to a general
valuation, which likewise furnished the materials for levying all local
burdens on the communes, such as those for roads, schools, and costs of
administration.
When we add such improvements as these to the changes which we perceived
to be in progress during the seventeenth century, we shall wonder, if
we learn nothing more, how it should have happened that the subjects of
this kingdom were not only the first to throw themselves into the arms of
the revolutionary French, but have since complained of their government
more bitterly than any other Italians. It is not difficult to find the
reasons. All the reforms of the Piedmontese princes were made for their
own ends, not for the sake of the people, who were kept peremptorily in
subjection to the king, and left in total dependence on his character for
their share of individual comfort; the nobles, likewise, being disarmed
as well as the commonalty, the crown was freed from the only check on its
conduct; and bitter discontents arose both from that abject submission
to the priesthood, and from that childish fear of change, which for the
last few generations have distinguished the princes. But, at the same
time, amidst the innovations which were introduced after the middle of
the seventeenth century, it had been found expedient to conciliate
the alarmed aristocracy by leaving its members in possession of many
personal and empty, yet invidious privileges; and the consequence was a
haughtiness on the part of the upper ranks met by sullen defiance among
the multitude, a mutual mistrust among all orders, ready to kindle into
deadly hatred.
[Sidenote: [1700-1740 A.D.]]
Charles Emmanuel III, notorious in the early years of his reign for his
ingratitude towards a father who had resigned the throne in his favour,
was more creditably distinguished in later life by his endeavours to
reconcile the conflicting wishes of the different orders of society, and
to purify completely the administration of justice. His nobles complained
of the number of commoners whom he promoted to public posts: the suitors
in the courts of law marvelled at the conduct of a king who so far
distrusted his own judgment, and so far honoured the judicial servants
of his crown, as to refuse granting any briefs of dispensation from
judicial sentences, unless after consultation with the judges by whom
the decision had been pronounced. He was less prudent in his management
of the military force, which he weakened greatly by the promotion of
inefficient officers, the nobility being always preferred, and a commoner
finding it all but impossible to rise to high rank. This abuse became
greatly more flagrant in the reign of his successor, who gave the last
impulse to the growing discontent of his subjects, by his superstitious
subservience to confessors and bigots, and not less by increasing his
army to an unreasonable size, and taxing the people severely for its pay
and subsistence.
Sardinia, rude, poor, and lawless, like other provinces of Spain, was
little improved by its new sovereign, Victor Amadeus II. In his son,
however, it found the best ruler it had seen for ages. Much was done by
him to weaken feudalism, encourage agriculture, and extirpate the bands
of robbers; two universities were founded, and the inferior schools
somewhat improved; and the year 1738 was a remarkable epoch in the
island, from the reforms which it witnessed in every department.
THE FOUR REPUBLICS
[Sidenote: [1736-1768 A.D.]]
The history of Lucca offers no fact worthy of being mentioned. Its
oligarchy grew more and more exclusive, and the peasant landholders in
its rural districts became impoverished through the excessive division of
property by succession.
The miniature republic of San Marino had retreated into its wonted
obscurity since 1739, when the fallen intriguer, Cardinal Alberoni, then
papal legate in Romagna, repeated at its expense that treachery by which
he had formerly convulsed all Europe. Alleging that the government of San
Marino had become a narrow oligarchy, which was true but did not justify
his interference, he conquered its territory with a single company of
soldiers and a few officers of police. The people appealed to Clement
XII, who ordered them to determine their own fate in a general meeting:
they unanimously voted against submission to the church, and the papal
troops were withdrawn.
In 1746, the Genoese commonalty, unsupported by the nobles, showed, in
their expulsion of the Austrians, a spirit worthy of their fathers. With
this bold insurrection the history of the republic of Genoa closes for
half a century. In 1718 it had increased its territory, by purchasing the
imperial fief of Finale; but within a few years it lost Corsica.
The revolted Corsicans allowed their country to be formed into a mock
kingdom in 1736, by the foolish ambition of Theodore von Neuhof, a
German baron; and, after they had been deserted by him, they continued
to resist the united forces brought against them by the Genoese and Louis
XV of France. The islanders now established a republic, which, from
1755, was headed by the celebrated Pasquale Paoli: and the contest for
freedom was maintained manfully till Genoa, tired of an expensive war,
and deeply indebted to France, ceded Corsica to that power on receiving
an acquittance. Louis renewed the attack with increased vigour, and the
besieged republicans resisted bravely till the struggle became utterly
hopeless. Paoli emigrated to England, and the island became a French
province in 1768, the year before it gave birth to Napoleon Bonaparte.
The commerce of Venice was nearly at a end; her manufactures were
insignificant; her flag was insulted on her own Adriatic by every power
of Europe. She still, however, possessed an Italian territory, peopled
by two millions and a half of subjects; her Dalmatian and Albanian
provinces and the Ionian Isles had half a million more. Her taxes had
been nearly doubled in the eighteenth century, and amounted, in 1789, to
about 11,600,000 ducats (£1,919,800 or $9,599,000); her public credit was
bad; and her debt was 44,000,000 ducats (£7,283,300 or $36,416,500). The
gloomy government remained unchanged. The Council of Ten had resisted
frequent attempts to overturn it: an attack in 1761 was checked by
arrests and imprisonments in monasteries; and the Ten and the Three still
exercised, though more cautiously than before, their singular functions.
Their spies cost annually, in the eighteenth century, about 200,000
ducats; and more than one secret execution was laid to their charge.
But licentiousness was more prevalent than cruelty; infamous women were
pensioned as informers by the state; and in the public gaming-houses,
amidst the masked gamesters, senators, officially appointed, presided
undisguised.
In 1768, the nobles, displeased with the church, named a commission
to inquire into the state of its revenues. The report, which is still
extant, is curious. The commissioners estimate the gross income at
4,274,460 ducats (£719,100, $3,595,500). Of this sum, 2,734,807 ducats
were permanent, being derived from lands, money invested, or perpetual
rents. The remainder was casual, being made up of the alms bestowed on
mendicant orders, and of the prices paid for temporary masses. The whole
number of masses for which the clergy received payment was prodigious,
being not less than 8,938,459. Of these the parochial and other secular
clergymen celebrated 4,250,060; the monastic orders celebrated the rest,
being 4,688,399, of which 3,107,682 were masses on perpetual foundations.
On the latter class the Venetian commissioners sarcastically remark
that the whole number of the monks and friars was 7,638, of which only
3,272 were in priest’s orders, and entitled to say mass; and that,
consequently, if the monks performed all the masses for which they took
payment, each of their priests would have to officiate fourteen or
fifteen hundred times a year.
MILAN AND TUSCANY
[Sidenote: [1755-1790 A.D.]]
For seventeen years after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the duchies of
Milan and Mantua, forming one province, and the grand duchy of Tuscany
as another, were governed by viceroys appointed by Maria Theresa and her
husband Francis. On the emperor’s death in 1765, the two Lombard duchies
continued to constitute a province of the empire under his son Joseph
II; but Tuscany was formed into an independent sovereignty for Peter
Leopold, the new emperor’s younger brother. All these sovereigns were
remarkable persons: the sons were worthy of their heroic mother; and
Leopold, free from that ambition which stained the names of Maria Theresa
and Joseph with the infamous partition of Poland, was one of the greatest
men that ever filled a throne.
The statistical results of this period were highly pleasing. Austrian
Lombardy, at length enabled to profit in some measure by its singular
physical advantages, was, in 1790, by far the most flourishing province
in Italy; while Tuscany also was prosperous, and in some respects more
decidedly so than Joseph’s duchies. The institutions of both states were
wonderfully improved; and the history of these changes is one of the most
interesting pages in the annals of modern Italy.
That the long servitude of the Italians had ruined their character as
well as their national resources, could not have been more clearly
proved than by the bitter opposition with which they met all the reforms
introduced by their new masters. There was hardly an improvement of
any importance, especially in Lombardy, that was not absolutely forced
upon the natives; and the most sweeping changes were skilfully evaded,
some of them during more than a generation. Much of this delay was
attributable to the wonted slowness of the Austrian court; but much also
was produced by the passive resistance of the people. The great system of
administration, the first draft of which had been laid before the empress
in 1739, did not come into activity till 1755, and its introduction makes
that year an important epoch for northern Italy.
A few only of the features which distinguished the plan of taxation
can be here described. One of the worst evils to be removed was the
subdivision of the state into seven districts, each of which, like a
separate kingdom, has its duties on mercantile imports, exports, and
transits. This abuse was swept away by a single stroke of the pen; and
similar restrictions on agricultural produce shared the same fate.
The excise was subjected to good regulations, and the customs based
on principles as fair as any that then prevailed in Europe. Lastly, a
new survey and valuation formed the rule for an equitable assessment
of the land-tax. A dispassionate and well-qualified judge was able to
find in the system but four serious defects: an insufficient check on
the land-valuators; the retention of the unwise mercantile-tax; the
imposition of a capitation-tax on the peasantry and others who paid no
land-tax; and the permission to the church, which possessed a third of
the lands in the state, and had till now paid no taxes for them, to
retain too many of its Spanish privileges.
But the portion of the plan that most interests us is the administrative.
In the general government, the obnoxious senate was retained, and formed
a very injurious barrier between the subjects and the throne, generating
petty cabals, and assisting in keeping up that tendency to secrecy and
plotting which had been triumphant under the Spaniards. In the provincial
government, the leading principle was, to subject everything in the last
instance to the control of the boards of administration at Milan, while
the immediate administration of every province was put under a delegate
appointed by the sovereign; although, at the same time, a considerable
part of the actual management was consigned to a provincial council
established in every chief city. The local statutes of the old republics
or petty principalities, which it was not in all cases considered safe
to touch, created many diversities in the execution of this plan; but
the general rule was to introduce in the provincial councils members of
three orders: the representatives of the cities, who were nobles, and
elected by their own class in each town; the representatives elected by
the landholders of the province; and the mercantile men who represented,
and were elected by, the corporation of merchants. The council so formed
devolved its ordinary powers on a committee of its own body, called the
prefects of government. Communal councils were also instituted, according
to regulations laid down in a prolix code. Each of them administered
the patrimony of the commune, under the presidency of a chancellor
appointed by the sovereign. Their own members were five for each commune:
three representatives of the landholders, one representative of the
mercantile body, and one representative of those who were subject to
the capitation-tax. They were elected annually in a meeting of all the
landholders rated on the books for the land-tax; soldiers and churchmen,
however, being ineligible. The same constituency also elected the consul,
who was an inferior criminal judge, and the syndic, who had dignity
without any real duties.
[Illustration: AN ITALIAN PEASANT, CLOSE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY]
Joseph, seconded by his excellent viceroy Count Firmian, under whom
served Verri, Carli, Neri, and other enlightened Italians, followed out
the plan of amelioration which had been thus delineated for him. He
improved the courts of justice and the judicial procedure, especially
in criminal causes, abolishing, at the suggestion of Beccaria, torture
and secret trials. He annulled or diminished the most vexatious of the
feudal privileges, and imposed checks on the perpetual destination
of estates. He patronised agriculture, and extended commerce and
manufactures by the construction of roads, as well as by the abolition of
some remaining imposts and restrictions. When the death of his mother,
in 1780, freed him from her remonstrances on ecclesiastical matters,
he commenced with his accustomed impetuosity a series of changes in
that department, which Pius VI considered so dangerous that he made a
fruitless journey to Vienna in the hope of procuring their repeal. The
most material of those measures were the following: all dissenters were
to enjoy toleration; the bishops were forbidden, as they had already
been forbidden by other princes, to act upon any papal bull but such as
should be transmitted to them by the government; the monastic clergy
were declared to be dependent, not on the general of their order who
lived in Rome, but directly on the resident bishop of the diocese within
which their cloister was situated; lastly, all nunneries were suppressed,
except those which pledged themselves to occupy their members in the
education of the young. The emperor’s death interrupted the consolidation
of his famous system for giving uniformity to his system of government
throughout all the Austrian dominions. The decree of 1786, which
promulgated this new constitution, divided the Italian provinces into
eight circles, in each of which the local administration was to be vested
in a chamber closely dependent upon the government. This departure from
the late arrangement created in Lombardy universal discontent.