 23 The Renaissance All history is the record of change, either in the direction of social progress or decay. But so gradual is this movement that, like the transition from night to dawn or noon to evening, it is beyond our vision to state the moment when tendencies began or ceased. It is only possible to note the definite changes in their achievement, and then to disentangle the threads by turning back along the twisted chain into which they have been woven. Sometimes in history there have been so many changes within a short time that the effect has been cumulative and an epoch has been created, as at the break-up of the Roman Empire, when civilization was merged in the Dark Ages. Again, it is true of Europe at the end of the 15th century and during the greater part of the 16th, a period usually called the Renaissance, or time of new birth, because then it became apparent that the old medieval outlook and ways of life had vanished, while others, much more familiar and easy to understand, had taken their place. The modern world had been called into being. The most obvious change to be found at the Renaissance was the collapse of the medieval idea of a world empire ruled in the name of God by Pope and Emperor. The Western Empire still remained pretentious in its claims, but its wiser rulers, such as Rudolph I and Charles IV, had already realized that success lay rather in German kingship than in imperial influence. The popes had been restored to Rome, but the threat of councils that could depose and reform hung like a cloud over their insistence on the absolute obedience of Christendom. And, recognizing the inevitable, the Vatican had sunk the ambitions of an innocent three in those of a temporal Italian prince. Searching along the chain of causes, it becomes clear enough that the trend of history during the later Middle Ages had been this development of the smaller unity of the nation out of the bigger unity of the world state. By the end of the 15th century, England, France and Spain were already nations, while even Germany and Italy, feeling the call in a lesser degree, had substituted for a wider sense of nationality, devotion to a province or city-state. The second to the great changes that characterized the Renaissance was the development of the idea of man as an individual. All through the Middle Ages, except perhaps in the case of rulers, men and women counted in the life of the world around them not so much as separate influences as a part of the system into which they were born or absorbed. In early days, the tribe accepted its members' acts, whether good or bad, as something that was the concern of all to be atoned for, supported, or avenged as a public duty. Still, more strongly was this attitude expressed in family affairs, as in the numerous vendettas or feuds like those of the Welfths and Weiblgen or of the Blacks and Whites in Florence. Turning from racial ties to social, we find medieval associations of all kinds holding a man bound, not by his own personal choice or discretion, but by the decision of the group to which he happened to be attached. The feudal system was never complete enough in practice to make a good example of this bondage, but in theory, from the tenant-in-chief to the landowner lowest in the social scale, there was a settled rule of life, dictating the duties and responsibilities of lord and vassal. Still more was this binding rule true of the greatest of all medieval corporations, monasticism, that demanded from its sons and daughters absolute obedience in the annihilation of self. St. Bernard, whose personality was so strong that he could not remain hidden among the mass of his fellows, was, yet, we remember, angry with Abelard for this above all other failings, that he had set up as individual judgment as a test of life. In Abelard, as in Arnold of Bressia lay the first stirrings of the independent modern spirit that at the Renaissance was to shake the foundations of the medieval world. Besides monasticism there were other associations, the universities and the class corporations, merchant guilds such as the North German Hansa and smaller city guilds such as greater and lesser arts in Florence, comprising groups of lawyers, fishmongers, and the like. All these last maintained a standard of uniformity, regulating not only hours of work, rate of pay, nature of employment, scale of contributions, like a modern trade union, but went much farther, interfering in the life of each individual member to insist on what he should wear in public and how he might spend the money he had earned. It was the spirit of benevolent slavery that held sway so long as the strivings of the individual mind were overborn by a sense of helplessness in the face of ignorance or by the weight of tradition. This weight of tradition leads naturally to the third great change heralded by the Renaissance, the breaking up of a sky curtain in mental darkness into separate groups of clouds, still heavily charged with superstition and ignorance, but their density relieved by the light of a genuine inquiry after truth for its own sake. During the Middle Ages we have seen that men and women looked back for inspiration to the Roman Empire, and this made them distressed progress, just as a timid rider will dread a spirited horse because he fears to lose control and to be carried into unknown ways. The earliest guardian of medieval knowledge had been the church, and in the light that she understood her task she faithfully taught the world about her. Her motto was reverence for the past, but bent in worship before the altar of tradition, she lost sight of that other great world motto, trust the future, which has been one of the guiding stars of modern times. Her interpretation of the faith, of the legitimate bounds of knowledge, of the limits of art, had been almost a necessary school of discipline for the early Middle Ages, with their tendency to barbaric license. But as she civilized men's minds and their aptitude for reasoning and understanding deepened, the restrictions of the school became the bars of a prison. The medieval church, once a pioneer, lost her grip on realities, her spiritual outlook became obscured by material ambitions, her faith weakened. Until, at last, so little sure was she in her heart of the complete truth of her teaching that she opposed and denounced criticism or discovery, much as a merchant who is secretly afraid that his methods of business may be obsolete refuses to entertain new fangled notions that would open his eyes. When Columbus laid his scheme for crossing the Atlantic, before a council of bishops and leading members of the Spanish universities, medieval knowledge derided his presumption by quoting texts from the Old Testament and various statements of St. Augustine and other fathers of the church. There could be no antipodes, they argued, because it was distinctly said that the world was peopled by the descendants of Noah, and how could such men have crossed these miles of ocean? Many similar objections were raised, and the Mariner's Project condemned, just as Roger Bacon had been judged a heretic for his scientific inquiries two hundred years before. It is significant of the change of mental outlook that while Roger Bacon wasted his last years in prison and Abelard was driven from the lecture hall to a monastery, Columbus found public support, vindicated his calculations, and so opened up a new world. The great secret of the Renaissance is indeed this release of the restless spirit of inquiry after truth, that is as old as humanity itself, and that, swooping like a bird through the door of a cage out into the air in sunshine, reckless of danger, carried along by the sheer joy of unfettered life, sometimes foolish and sometimes extravagant in its zest for experience, was at first too absorbed in the glory and interest of freedom to feel any regret for the prison that had been at least a shelter from the many stormy problems that were to rend the modern world. Charlemagne had believed that, without knowledge, good works were impossible. The man of the early Renaissance were not so intent upon the importance of good works, or the hope of salvation as their forefathers, but they would have ascended eagerly to the statement that, without knowledge, any true understanding of human life was impossible. Had the conditions under which knowledge could be obtained remained as restricted as in medieval times, the Renaissance on its intellectual side would, in all probability, have become a cult, a movement shared by a few learned men and women to which the mass of the people in every nation had no clue, and in this way it would have died out like a plant unable to spread its roots. Human invention intervened with the discovery of printing, which brought the great thoughts of the world out of the monastic libraries where they had been laboriously collected and copied by hand, to distribute them, slowly at first but ever faster and faster, throughout the busy centers of Europe, where brains as well as stomachs are always eager for food. It was a German, John Gutenberg, who invented printing by means of movable types, but because he had not enough money to carry out his design, he was forced to borrow from a rich citizen of mines called John Fust. This Fust treated John Gutenberg very badly, for he demanded back the money he had lent so soon as he understood the value of the other secret, and by this means forced Gutenberg, when he could not pay, to hand over his plant in compensation. Fust then began to print on his own account, and when the people of mines saw the copies of the Bible that he produced, each number an exact replica of the first, they declared that he had sold himself to the devil and was practicing magic. Thus, it is said, started the legend of Dr. Faustus that has inspired poets, musicians and dramatists. The first English printer was William Caxton, a Kentishman, to view whose press came king and court in great amazement, interested but utterly unaware of what a mental revolution this small piece of machinery was to bring about. The greatest of all Italian printers were the Venetians, whose famous Albin press produced volumes that are still the admiration of the world, as well as a treasure trove for book collectors. In modern times, the desire for knowledge, or rather for information, has become a scramble, and printing has degenerated into a trade. In the 15th and 16th centuries, it was regarded as an art, and Aldus Manutius, the Roman who established his press at Venice, intending to reproduce an edition of all the Greek authors then known, was a great scholar, who modeled his letters on the handwriting of the Italian poet Petrarch, and gathered around him the most intellectual and enterprising minds of his day to advise and help him. It was at the Aldean press that one of the leaders of the Dutch Renaissance, Erasmus, had several of his books printed, and Venice at this time became a center for scholars and for all whose minds were alive with a thirst for new impressions. 15th-century Italy was not, on the surface, so very different from Italy in the 14th. The complete domination of the five powers foreshadowed in the earlier century had become fixed, and three of them, Milan, Florence, and Naples, had succeeded in forming an alliance to preserve the balance of power in the peninsula, and to keep at bay the ambitions of Venice, whose empire was still spreading over the mainland. In Naples, ruled for Ranti I, an illegitimate son of Alfonso V of Aragon, a typical despot like the Angevins his father had replaced. In Milan, the Visconti had merged themselves in the house of Sforza through a clever ruse of one of the most famous of medieval condottieri, Francesco Sforza, who, besieging his master, Filippo Maria Visconti in Milan in 1441, had forced him to give him his only daughter and heiress Bianca in marriage, and then to acknowledge him as his successor. The grim traditions established by the Visconti continued under this new family, christened with their very names. Francesco's son, Galliazzo Maria, whose life was spent in debauch, is said to have poisoned his mother and buried his subjects alive. When he was assassinated, his brother, Ludovico, called from his swarthy complexion Il Moro, or the Moor, seized the reins of government and proceeded to act on behalf of his young nephew, Gian Galliazzo, whom he kept in the background at Pavia, declaring him a helpless invalid. Filippo de Comanas describes Ludovico as clever but very nervous and cringing when he was afraid, a man without faith when he thought it to his advantage to break his word. Outwardly he displayed the genial manners customary in a Renaissance prince, and presided at Milan over a court so famed for its hospitality, wit, and intellect that it drew within its circle painters, sculptors, writers, and scholars, as well as military heroes and men of fashion. It will be seen that Italy opened her arms wide to the new spirit of intellectual and artistic enjoyment. Venice, Naples, Milan, each vied with the other in attracting and rewarding genius. Even the popes at Rome, whose natural instinct as the guardian of medieval tradition was to distrust freedom of thought, were influenced by the atmosphere around them, and to Pope Nicholas V the world owes the foundation of the wonderful Vatican Library. To the queen of the Renaissance states we turn last, to Florence, the city of flowers, that we left distracted by the internal discords of her blacks and whites, and by her wars against Filippo Maria Visconti. The turning of the century had seen great changes in Florence, the whittling away of the old ideal of liberty that would brook no master, so that she became willing to accept the domination of a family superficially disguised as a freely elected government. The Medici were no royal stock, nor were they flaunting condotiere like the Sforza, but a house of bankers who, by brains and solid hard work, had built up for itself a position of respect, not only in Florence, but also throughout Europe, where their loans had secured the fortunes of many a monarchy that would otherwise have tumbled in ruins owing to lack of funds. It was the advantage of such monarchies to preserve the credit of the house of Medici, and so the bankers gained outside influence to aid their ambitions at home. Within Florence, the Medici posed as common-sense men of business, unassuming citizens, easy of access, ready friends, ever the supporters, while they were climbing the ladder of civic fame, of the popular party that loved to shout, liberty in the streets, while it voted her destroyers into public offices. Cosimo de Medici, the first of the family to establish a position of supremacy, was related to many of the nobles debarred by their rank from any share in the government, but, though he won the allegiance of this faction, he took care to claim no honor himself that might frighten the public mind with terrors of a despot. Instead, simply clad and almost unattended, he walked through the streets chatting in friendly equality with emergency met, many of whose interests were identical or wrapped up with his own financial projects, discussing agriculture with the Tuscan farmers like a country gentleman, freely spending his money on the schemes of the working classes, or scattering it amongst beggars. When he died, his mourning fellow citizens inscribed on his tomb the words Pater Patria, father of his country. They had felt the benefits received through Cosimo's government. They had not realized, or were indifferent to, the chains with which he had bound them. Some bitter enemies he had, of course, aroused, but these with quiet but remorseless energy he had swept from his path. It was his custom to sap the fortunes of possible rivals by immense exactions, to make them pay, in fact, for the liberal government, for which he would afterwards receive the praise while drawing away their friends and supporters by bribery and threats. At last, ruined and deserted, they would be driven from the city. And here even Cosimo did not rest, since his influence at foreign courts enabled him to hunt his prey from one refuge to another until they died, impotently cursing the name of Medici, a warning to malcontents of the length and breadth of a private citizen's revenge. The Medici, it has been said, used taxes as other men used their swords, and the charge of deliberate corruption that has been brought against them is undeniable. It is better to injure the city than to ruin it, once declared Cosimo himself, adding cynically, it takes more to direct a government than to sit and tell one's beads. Neither he nor his descendants were the type of ruler represented by Charlemagne or Alfred the Great. Their ideals were, frankly, low, with self-interest in the foreground, however skillfully disguised. When this has been admitted, however, it should be also remembered that Cosimo employed no army of hired refians to terrorize fellow-citizens as the disconti had done. Florence was willing to be corrupted, and if she lost the freedom she had loved in theory, yet she rose under a benevolent despotism of the Medici to a greater height of material and political prosperity than ever before or since in her history. The authority that they possessed in Florence and throughout Christendom, says Machiavelli, was not obtained without being merited. It was under the fostering care of the Medici that Florence, more than any of the other Italian states, became the home of the intellectual renaissance, from which the new learning was to radiate out across the world. This intellectual movement was twofold. Still, under medieval influence, it began at first by finding its inspiration in the past, and so introduced a great classical revival in which manuscripts of Greek and Latin authors and statues of gods and nymphs were almost as much revered as relics of the saints in an earlier age. Rich men hastened on journeys to the east in order to purchase half-burn fragments of literature from astonished Greeks, while in the lecture halls of Italy, eager pupils clamored for fresh light on ancient philosophy and history. So great was the enthusiasm that it is said one famous scholar's hair turned white with grief when he learned the shipwreck of a cargo of classical books. Cosimo de Medici had been friend and patron of learned men, but it was in the time of his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent that the renaissance reached its height in Florence. It was Lorenzo who founded the Platonic Academy in imitation of the old academies of Greek philosophers, an assembly that became the battleground of the sharpest and most brilliant intellects of the day. Here were fought word tournaments, often venomous in the intensity of their partisanship between defenders of the views of Plato and of Aristotle. Here were welcomed like princes, cultured Greeks, driven into exile by Mohammedan invasion, certain of crowded and enthusiastic audiences if only they were prepared to lecture on the literary treasures of their race. The enthusiasm recalled the days when Abelard held Paris spellbound by his reasoning on theology, but showed how far away had slipped the age of dialectics. The last great name amongst the schoolmen is that of Don Scotus, a Franciscan at the thirteenth century, who raised the process of logical reasoning to such a fine art that it has been said of him he reasoned scholasticism out of human reach. Ordinary theologians could not dispute with him since it made their brains real even to try and follow his arguments, so at last they snapped their fingers at him, crying, oh, dons, dons. Thus, by his excessive skill and intellectual juggling, he reduced himself in his subjects to absurdity, and dunce has passed down to posterity as a fitting name for someone unreasonably stupid. Scholasticism, the glory of medieval lecture halls, held no thriller charm for men of the Renaissance, and though Aristotle was still revered and a great deal of labor expended on trying to make his views and those of Plato match with current religious beliefs, yet the spirit that underlay this attempt was wholly different to the efforts of medieval minds. Salvation, the city of God, such words and phrases had been keys to the thought of the Middle Ages from St. Augustine to St. Dominic and St. Thomas Aquinas. To Renaissance minds, there was but one master word, humanity. What message had these classical philosophers that tradition held had lived in a golden age for struggling humanity more than a thousand years later? The men and women of the Renaissance, as they put this question, hoped that the answers they discovered would agree with the faith that the church had taught them, but there was no longer the same insistence that they must or be disregarded as heresy. The interest in an immortal soul had become mingled with interest in what was human and transitory, with the beauty and charm of this life as well as with the glory of the next. Searching after beauty, no longer under the stern schoolmistress tradition, but led by that will of the wisp literary instinct, the poets and authors under the influence of the Renaissance gradually turned from the use of Latin and Greek to that more natural medium of expression, their own language. This was the second aspect of the new learning, the disappearance of the belief that Latin and Greek alone were literary, and the gradual linking up medieval with modern scholarship by the discovery that the growth of national ideas and aspirations could best be expressed in a living national tongue. The forerunners of this movement lived long before the period that we usually call the Renaissance, thus Dante, greatest of medieval minds, was inspired to employ his native Italian in his masterpiece, the Divina Comedia, that, had his genius been less original, might have been merely a classical imitation. Petrarch, the friend of Rienzi and lover of liberty who lived at the papal court of Avion, was half ashamed of his Italian sonnets, yet it is by their charm, still more than by his Latin letters that he lives today, as is Boccaccio by the witty, easy flowing style of his tales. These are the names of literary immortals, and perhaps it may seem strange to find, when we pass from them to the new learning itself, that the greater part of the works published by members of the Platonic Academy and other intellectual circles are now as dead as the dialectics of the schoolmen. Yet it is still harder, if we turn their pages, to believe that such florid sentences and long-grown arguments could ever have stirred men's blood to a frenzied enthusiasm or passion. The explanation lies in the fact that for all the charms of its newly won freedom, the renaissance on its literary side was not a time of creation, but of criticism and inquiry. Its leaders were too busy clearing away outworn traditions, collecting material for fresh thought, and laying literary foundations to build themselves with any breadth of vision. Where they paused, exhausted, or failed, the giants of the modern world were able to erect their masterpieces. Lorenzo the Magnificent himself we can remember for the genuine love of nature and poetry apparent in his sonnets, but his claim to remain immortal in the world's history must rest not on his literary achievements, but on his generous patronage and appreciation of scholars and artists, as well as on the political wisdom that made him the first statesman of his day. If the literature of the renaissance was mainly experimental in character, painting was preeminently its finished glory, the representation of that sense of beauty in nature and in human life from which the Middle Ages had turned away as from a snare set by the devil to distract souls from paradise. Here again, in painting, there is a two-fold aspect, the artist's mind seeking in the past as well as aspiring to the future for inspiration to guide his brush. It was the life of St. Francis, the little brother of Assisi, that Giotto, the great forerunner of the new art, found that sense of humanity idealized that spurred him to break away from the old conventional Byzantine models, stiff, decorative, and inhuman, in order to attempt the realization of life as he saw it around him in the street and field. Gimabue, a famous Florentine painter, had found Giotto as a shepherd lad, cutting pictures of the sheep grouped around him with a stone upon the rockside. He carried the boy away to be his apprentice, but the pupil soon excelled the master and not merely Florence but all Italy heard of his wondrous colors and designs. He took nature for his guide, says Leonardo da Vinci, and many are the tales of this kindly peasant genius, small and ugly in appearance, but full of the joy and humor of the world that he studied so shrewdly. The Angevan king, Robert of Naples, once asked him to suggest a symbol of his own turbulent southern kingdom, whereupon the artist drew a donkey saddled, sniffing at another saddle lying on the ground. Such are your subjects, he remarked, that every day would seek a new master. No politician could have made a more fitting summary of medieval Naples. Giotto's chief fame today lies in his frescoes of the life of St. Francis on the walls of the double chapel at Assisi and in the Franciscan church of Santa Croce and Florence. Most of them, damaged by the action of time and weather on the rough plaster, have been repaired to their disadvantage, though a few remain unharmed to show the painter's clear, delicate coloring and boldness of outline. To the average sightseer today they seem perhaps just legendary pictures, more or less crude in design, but when Giotto painted we must remember that the crowds who watched his brush and breathless admiration read as they gazed the story of the most human of saints, a man who had but lately walked amongst the Umbrian hills and whose words and deeds were to them more vivid than many a living utterance. To understand what the genius of Giotto meant to his own day, we must first consider the stiff unreality of former art, just as we cannot realize the greatness of Columbus by thinking of a modern voyage from the continent to America, but only by recalling the primitive navigation of his time. Giotto, like Columbus, had many imitators and followers, some of them famous names, but the pioneer work that he had done for art was commemorated at the Renaissance when, by the orders of Lorenzo de Medici, a Latin epitaph was placed on his tomb containing these words, lo, I am he by whom dead art was restored to life, by whom art became one with nature. It would be impossible to condense satisfactorily in a few short paragraphs the triumphant history of Renaissance painting, the rapid development of which Giotto and his school had made practicable, or even to give a slight sketch of the artists on whom that history depends. Never before has so much genius been crowded into so few years, but before we leave this preeminent age in modern art there is one arresting figure who must be described, a man who more than any other embodies the spirit of the Renaissance at its best, Leonardo da Vinci, foremost amongst the supreme masters of the world. Leonardo, the Florentine, as he liked to call himself, was born in the fortified village of Vinci midway between Florence and Pisa, the illegitimate son of a notary, born as it would seem to no great heritage, he was yet early distinguished amongst his fellows. The richest gifts of heaven, says Vasari, are sometimes showered upon the same person, and beauty, grace, and genius are combined in so rare a manner in one man that, to whatever he may apply himself, every action is so divine that all others are left behind him. This reads like exaggeration until we turn to the facts that are known about Vinci's life, and find he is all indeed Vasari described, a giant amongst his fellows in physique and intellect, and still more in practical imagination, so strong was he that with his fingers he could bend a horseshoe straight, so full of potent charm for all things living that his presence in a room would draw men and women out of sadness, while in the streets the wildest horses would willingly yield to his taming power. Of the cruelty that rests like a stain on the middle ages, there was in him no trace, rather that hot compassion for suffering and weakness so often allied with strength. It is told of him, as of St. Francis, that he would buy the singing birds sold in cages in the street, that he might set them free. His copy books are full of the drawings of horses, and probably his greatest work of art judged by the opinion of his day, and the rough sketches still extant of his design, was the statue he modeled for Ludovico Il Moro of Francesco Sforza, the famous condottieri poised on horseback. Unfortunately it perished almost at once, hacked in pieces by the French soldiery when they drove Ludovico from his capital some years later. Leonardo has been called the true founder of the Italian School of Oil Painting. His most celebrated picture, the Last Supper, painted in oils as an experiment on the walls of a convent near Belan, began to flake away owing to the damp even before the artist's death. It has been so constantly retouched since that very little saved the consummate art in the arrangement of the figures and the general dramatic simplicity of the scene depicted is left to show the master hand. Even this is enough to convey his genius. Amongst the most famous of his works that still remain are his Mona Lisa, sometimes called Gio Conda, the portrait of a Neapolitan lady and the Madonna of the Rocks, both in the gallery of the Louvre. Leonardo excelled his age in engineering, in his knowledge of anatomy and physics, in his inventive genius that led him to guess at the power of steam and struggle over models of aeroplanes at which his generation laughed and shrugged their shoulders. He himself took keen pleasure in such versatility, but his art that held other men spellbound with admiration would plunge him into depression. When he sat down to paint, he seemed overcome with fear, says one account of him, and describes how he would alter and finally destroy, in despair of attaining his ideal, canvases that those about him considered already perfect. It is little wonder, then, that few finished works came from the brush of this indefatigable worker, but his influence on his age and after centuries was nonetheless prodigious. Leonardo stands for all that was best in the Renaissance, its zest for truth, its eager vitality and love of experiment, but most of all for its sympathy. He is the embodiment of that motto that seems more than any other to express the Renaissance outlook. Homo sum, umani nil ame alien amamputo. I am a man and nothing pertaining to mankind is foreign to my nature. Italy, as we have seen, was preeminently the home of the Renaissance, the teacher destined to give the world the new learning as she had preserved the old during the Dark Ages. In those sunny days when Lorenzo the Wise as well as the Magnificent ruled in Florence, and by his statesmanship preserved so neat a balance of politics that the peninsula divided by five ambitious powers yet remained at peace. A glorious future seemed assured, but in 1492, the year that Columbus discovered America, Lorenzo died. The peace of Italy as dead also exclaimed a statesman with prophetic insight when he heard the news, and indeed the stability and moderation that Lorenzo in his house had symbolized was soon threatened. In Florence, wisdom was succeeded by Folly in the person of Piero, Lorenzo's son, an Orsini on his mother's side, an inheritor to the full of the haughty and tractable temperament of the Roman baronage. Playing his football in the streets among the shopkeepers opened booze, insolent to the merchants his father had courted, reckless of advice, Piero was soon to learn that a despotism such as that of the Medici founded not on armies, but on public good will, falls at the first adverse wind. This wind, a whirlwind for Italy, blew from France, but it was Ludovico Il Moro, not the young Medici, who actually sowed the seed. Nervous and cringing, as Philippe de Comunez had described him, Ludovico had found himself involved by his treatment of his nephew in a fog of suspicions and fears. Left to himself, uneducated and ailing in help, Gian Galliazzo Sforza would never have dared to thwart his ambitious uncle. But he had married a neapolitan princess of stronger fiber, a granddaughter of Ferrante I, and when she complained to her relations and they in turn remonstrated with Il Moro, trouble began. It seemed to Ludovico, assailed by secret visions of naples, allying herself with Milan's most dreaded enemy, Venice, or even with Florence and Rome to secure revenge in his own downfall, that he must hastily give up the idea that Lorenzo had advocated of a balance of power within the peninsula itself, and look instead beyond the mountains for help and support. Medieval annals could give many instances of popes and former rulers of Milan who had taken the same unpatriotic step, while a ready excuse could be found for invoking the aid of France on account of the French king's descent from the second house of Anjou that Alfonso V. Ferrante's father had driven from naples. Acting then from modes of personal ambition, not from any wide conception of statecraft, Ludovico persuaded Charles VIII, the France son of Louis XI, that honor and glory lay in his renewal of the old Angevin claims to naples, and in 1494, with a great flourish of trumpets, the French expedition started across the Alps. I will assist in making you greater than Charlemagne, Ludovico had boasted, when dangling his bait before the young French king's eyes. But the results of what he had intended were so far beyond his real expectations as to give him new cause for cringing in fear. The French, said Pope Alexander VI sarcastically, needed only a child's wooden spurs and chalk to mark up their lodgings for the night. Almost without opposition, and where they encountered it, achieving easy victories, the French marched through Italy from north to south, entering Florence that had driven Piero and his brothers into exile, compelling the hasty submission of Rome, sweeping the Aragonese from naples whose fickle population came out with tears to greet their new conquerors. Certainly the causes of this victory were not due to the young conqueror himself, with his ungainly body and overdeveloped head, with his swollen ambitions and feeble brain, with his pious talk of a crusade against the east, and the idle debauch for which he and his subjects earned unenviable notoriety. Comenes, a Frenchman with a shrewd idea of his master's incompetence, believed that God must have directed the conquering armies, since the wisdom of man had nothing to say to it. But Italian historians found the cause of their country's humiliation in their political and military decadence. We have seen how companies of hired soldiers held Italy enthralled during the 14th century, but with the passing of years what was once a serious business had become a complicated kind of chess with mercenary levies for pawns. Fifteenth century condotiere were as great believers in war as ever, Sir John Hawquod. But, susceptible to the veneer of civilization that glosses the Renaissance, they had lost the medieval taste for bloodshed. What they retained was the desire to prolong indeterminate campaigns in order to draw their pay, while reducing the dangers and hardships involved to the least adequate pretense of real warfare. Here is Machiavelli's sarcastic commentary. They spared no effort, he says, to relieve themselves and their men from fatigue and danger, not killing one another in battle but making prisoners. They would attack no town by night, nor would those within make sorties against their besieging foes. Their camps were without rampart or trench. They fought no winter campaigns. Before the national levies of France, rough campaigners with no taste for military chess, but only determined on as speedy a victory as possible, the make-believe armies of Italy were moaned down like nine pins or ran away. Thus clashed two opposing systems, one real and the other by this time almost wholly artificial. And because of its noise and stir, 1494, the year of Charles VIII's invasion of Italy is often taken as the boundary line between medieval and modern times, just as the year 476, when Romulus Augustulus gave up his crown, is accepted as the beginning of the Middle Ages. In both cases it is not the events of the actual year that can be said to have created the change. They are merely the culminating evidence of the end of an old order of things and the beginning of anew. By 1494 Constantinople was in the hand of the Turks. Columbus had discovered America. John Gutenberg had invented his printing press. Vasco de Gama was meditating as voyaged India. All these things were witness of a new birth, the infancy of a modern world. But the year 1494 stands also as evidence of the death of an old, the medieval. Stung by the oppression and insolence of their conquerors, Italian armies in intrigue were to drive the French in the years to come temporarily out of Naples. But in spite of this success the effect of Charles VIII's military walkover was never to be effaced. Italy, in Roman times the center of Europe, from which all law and order had radiated, had clung to a fiction of this power in glory throughout medieval days. Now at last the sham was exposed and before the forces of nationality her boasted supremacy collapsed. The center of political gravity had changed and with it the traditions and ideals for which the supremacy of Italy had stood.