Chapter XVII: Italy in the Eighteenth Century (1)

[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.

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

[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.