Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2

and could not maintain himself in the delicate position of a commercial
and civil tyrant. During the disturbances caused by the invasion of
Charles VIII. he was driven with all his relatives into exile. The
Medici were restored in 1512, after the battle of Ravenna, by Spanish
troops, at the petition of the Cardinal Giovanni. The elevation of this
man to the Papacy in 1513 enabled him to plant two of his nephews, as
rulers, in Florence, and to pave the way whereby a third eventually rose
to the dignity of the tiara. Clement VII. finally succeeded in rendering
Florence subject to the Medici, by extinguishing the last sparks of
republican opposition, and by so modifying the dynastic protectorate of
his family that it was easily converted into a titular Grand Duchy.

The federation of these five Powers had been artificially maintained
during the half century of Italy's highest intellectual activity. That
was the epoch when the Italians nearly attained to coherence as a
nation, through common interests in art and humanism, and by the
complicated machinery of diplomatic relations. The federation perished
when foreign Powers chose Lombardy and Naples for their fields of
battle. The disasters of the next thirty-three years (1494-1527) began
in earnest on the day when Louis XII. claimed Milan and the Regno. He
committed his first mistake by inviting Ferdinand the Catholic to share
in the partition of Naples. That province was easily conquered; but
Ferdinand retained the whole spoils for himself, securing a large
Italian dependency and a magnificent basis of operations for the Spanish
Crown. Then Louis made a second mistake by proposing to the visionary
Emperor Maximilian that he should aid France in subjugating Venice. We
have few instances on record of short-sighted diplomacy to match the
Treaties of Granada and Blois (1501 and 1504), through which this
monarch, acting rather as a Duke of Milan than a King of France,
complicated his Italian schemes by the introduction of two such
dangerous a

John Addington Symonds (October 5, 1840 - April 19, 1893) was an English poet and literary critic. He was an early advocate of the validity of male love which included for him pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, and which he would refer to as lamour de limpossible.

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