with the coldest equanimity from the camp of one master to that of his worst foe.  It was impossible that true military spirit should survive this prostitution of the art of war.  A species of mock warfare prevailed in Italy.  Battles were fought with a view to booty more than victory; prisoners were taken for the sake of ransom; bloodshed was carefully avoided, for the men who fought on either side in any pitched field had been comrades with their present foemen in the last encounter, and who could tell how soon the general of the one host might not need his rival’s troops to recruit his own ranks?  Like every genuine institution of the Italian Renaissance, warfare was thus a work of fine art, a masterpiece of intellectual subtlety; and like the Renaissance itself, this peculiar form of warfare was essentially transitional.  The cannon and the musket were already in use; and it only required one blast of gunpowder to turn the sham-fight of courtly, traitorous, finessing captains of adventure into something terribly more real.  To men like the Marquis of Mantua war had been a highly profitable game of skill; to men like the Marechal de Gie it was a murderous horseplay; and this difference the Italians were not slow to perceive.  When they cast away their lances at Fornovo, and fled—­in spite of their superior numbers—­never to return, one fair-seeming sham of the fifteenth century became a vision of the past.

* * * * *

FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI

Di Firenze in prima si divisono intra loro i nobili, dipoi i nobili e il popolo, e in ultimo il popolo e la plebe; e molte volte occorse che una di queste parti rimasa superiore, si divise in due.—­MACHIAVELLI.

I

Florence, like all Italian cities, owed her independence to the duel of the Papacy and Empire.  The transference of the imperial authority beyond the Alps had enabled the burghs of Lombardy and Tuscany to establish a form of self-government.  This government was based upon the old municipal organisation of duumvirs and decemvirs.  It was, in fact, nothing more or less than a survival from the ancient Roman system.  The proof of this was, that while vindicating their rights as towns, the free cities never questioned the validity of the imperial title.  Even after the peace of Constance in 1183, when Frederick Barbarossa acknowledged their autonomy, they received within their walls a supreme magistrate, with power of life and death and ultimate appeal in all decisive questions, whose title of Potesta indicated that he represented the imperial power—­Potestas.  It was not by the assertion of any right, so much as by the growth of custom, and by the weakness of the Emperors, that in course of time each city became a sovereign State.  The theoretical supremacy of the Empire prevented any other authority from taking the first place in Italy.  On the other hand, the practical inefficiency of the Emperors to play their part encouraged the establishment of numerous minor powers amenable to no controlling discipline.