A deplorable contemporary event, meanwhile, passed almost unnoticed in the general joy at the expulsion of the French, and the unprecedented development of the Pope’s temporal power. This was the subversion of the Florentine republic and the restoration of the Medici, discreditable to the Spaniards who achieved it and to the Pope who permitted it, but chiefly to the Florentines themselves. Their weakness and levity, the memory of the early Medicean rulers, the feeling that since their expulsion Florence had been no strong defence or worthy example to Italy, and the fact that no foreigner was placed in possession, mitigated the indignation and alarm naturally aroused by such a catastrophe. It was not foreseen that in after years a Medicean Pope would accept the maintenance of his family in Florence by way of consideration for the entire sacrifice of the independence of Italy.
The time of Julius’s removal from the scenes of earth was approaching, and it was well for him. The continuance of his life and of his reputation would hardly have been compatible. He was about to show, as he had shown before, that, however attached in the abstract to the liberty of Italy, he was always willing to postpone this to his own projects. He had two especially at heart, the subjugation of Ferrara and the success of the Lateran Council, which he had convoked to eclipse the schismatical Council of Pisa. For this the support of the Emperor Maximilian was necessary; for the Council, which had already begun to deliberate, might appear hardly more respectable than its rival, if it was ignored by both France and Germany. As a condition, Maximilian insisted on concessions from the Venetians, whom the Pope ordered to surrender Verona and Vicenza, and to hold Padua and Treviso as fiefs of the Empire. The Venetians refused, and Julius threatened them with excommunication. Fortunately for his fame, the stroke was delayed until it was too late. He had long been suffering from a complication of infirmities. At the end of January, 1513, he S took to his bed; on February 4 he professed himself without hope of recovery; on February 20 he received the last sacraments, and he died on the following day. Goethe says that every man abides in our memory in the character under which he has last been prominently displayed; the last days of Julius II exhibited him to the most advantage. He addressed the cardinals with dignity and tenderness; he deplored his faults and errors without descending to particulars; he spoke of the schismatics with forbearance, yet with unbending resolution; he ordered the reissue of his regulations against simony in pontifical elections; and gave many wholesome admonitions respecting the future conclave. On foreign affairs he seems not to have touched. His death evoked the most vehement demonstrations of popular sorrow. Never, says Paris de Grassis, who as papal master of the ceremonies was certain to be well-informed, had there been at the funeral of any Pope anything like the concourse of persons of every age, sex and rank thronging to kiss his feet, and imploring with cries and tears the salvation of him who had been a true Pope of Rome and Vicar of Christ, maintaining justice, augmenting the Church, and warring upon and putting down tyrants and enemies. “Many to whom his death might have been deemed welcome lamented him with abundant tears as they said, ‘ This Pope has delivered us all, all Italy and all Christendom from the hands of the Gauls and Barbarians.’ “
This enthusiastic panegyric would have been moderated if the secret springs of Julius’s policy had been better known; if it had been understood how Fortune, rather than Wisdom, had stood his friend through life; and if the inevitably transitory character of his best work had been perceived. A national dynasty might be restored to Milan, but it could not be kept there, nor could it prove aught but the puppet of the foreigner while it remained. The fate of Italy had been sealed long ago, when she refused to participate in the movement of coalescence which was consolidating disjointed communities into great nations. These nations had now become great military monarchies, for which a loose bundle of petty States was no match. A Cesare Borgia might possibly have saved her, if he had wrought at the beginning of the fifteenth century instead of the end. Venice did something; but she was essentially a maritime Power, and her possessions on the mainland were in many respects a source of weakness. The only considerable approach to consolidation was the establishment of the Papal Temporal Power, of which Alexander and Julius were the chief architects. While the means employed in its creation were often most condemnable, the creation itself was justified by the helpless condition of the Papacy without it, and by the useful end it was to serve when it became the only vestige of dignity and independence left to Italy.
CHAPTER VIII. VENICE, by Horatio Brown
THE beginning of the fifteenth century offers a convenient point whence to survey the growth of the Venetian Republic. Venice had by that time become the Venice of modern European history; a great trading city; a mart for the exchange of goods between East and West; committed to a policy destined to make her one of the five Italian Powers and eventually to raise up against her a coalition of all Italy and Europe. Her constitution was fixed; her colonial system developed; her position towards the Church defined; her aggrandisement on the Italian mainland initiated; her wealth, her splendour, her art were beginning to attract the attention of the civilised world. The various threads of Venetian history are drawn together at this epoch. The Republic was about to move forward upon a larger, more ambitious career than it had hitherto followed; a career for which its various lines of development,—the creation of a maritime empire, expansion on the mainland, efforts for ecclesiastical independence, growth and solidification of the constitution,—had been slowly preparing it. An examination of each of these lines, in turn will enable us to understand the nature of the Venetian Republic as it emerged from the Middle Ages and became, for a time, one of the greatest factors in European history.
The growth of Venetian maritime empire in the Levant and supremacy in the Mediterranean falls into four well-defined periods. The Venetians began by moving slowly down the Dalmatian coast and establishing their power in the Adriatic; they then pushed out eastward and acquired rights in Syrian seaports, such as Sidon, Tyre, Acre; they seized many of the islands in the archipelago as their share of the plunder after the Fourth Crusade; finally they met, fought, and defeated their only serious maritime rivals the Genoese.
The Adriatic is the natural water avenue to Venice. If her commerce was to flourish, it was essential that she should be mistress in this sea. But the eastern coast of the Adriatic, with its deep gulfs, and numerous islands, had for long sheltered a race of pirates who never ceased to molest Venetian traffic. It was necessary to destroy this corsairs’ nest, and Venice embarked on the first great war she undertook as an independent State in her own individual interests. This war was entirely successful. The Dalmatian coast towns recognised the Doge as “Duke of Dalmatia” and submitted to a nominal tribute in recognition of the supremacy of the Republic. Venice, it is true, did not remain in undisturbed and continuous possession of Dalmatia, but she acquired a title which she subsequently rendered effective. She thus took the first step towards that indispensable condition of her commercial existence, supremacy in the Adriatic. The Dalmatian cities were now open to her merchants. The Dalmatian sea-board furnished a food supply which the Lagoons could not; Dalmatian forests yielded timber for building ships and houses.
With the period of the Crusades Venice achieved a still wider expansion in the Levant. The eyes of Europe had been attracted to the little city in the Lagoons which had attacked and subdued the Narentine pirates, challenged and fought the Normans, and rendered striking services to the Eastern Emperor himself. When the Crusaders began to look about for a port of embarcation and for transport-service to the Holy Land, the three cities of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice offered themselves. Venice was not only the most powerful; she was also the most easterly of the three. Her geographical position naturally led to the choice of Venice as the port of departure. The issue of the Crusades proved that the Republic entered upon those enterprises in a purely commercial spirit. When Sidon fell, the Venetians received from Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, in return for their assistance, a market-place, a district, a church, and the right to use their own weights and measures in that