CHAPTER I. State of Europe at the Middle of the Fifteenth Century.

The Boundary between the Middle Ages and Modern Times.— Western Europe.—Northern, Eastern, and Central States

CHAPTER II. France from 1453 to 1494.

Progress of the Royal Authority during the Last Years of Charles VII.—Louis XI. (1461-83).—League of Public Welfare (1465). —Interview of Peronne (1468).—Ambition and Death of the Duke of Burgundy (1477).—Ruin of the Great Feudal Houses.—Death of Louis XI. (1483).—Reign of Charles VIII until the Italian Expedition (1483-94)

CHAPTER III. England from 1453 to 1509.

State of England at the Middle of the Fifteenth Century.—War of the Roses (1455-85).—Henry VII., Tudor (1485-1509).—Suppression of Public Liberties

CHAPTER IV. Spain from 1453 to 1521

State of Spain at the Middle of the Fifteenth Century.—Navarre, Aragon, and Castile.—Portugal

CHAPTER V. Germany and Italy from 1453 to 1494.

Divisions of Germany and Italy.—The Emperors Frederick III. and Maximilian.—Italy in the Second Part of the Fifteenth Century 51

CHAPTER VI. The Ottoman Empire from 1453 to 1520.

Mohammed II (1451-81).—Baiezid II. and Selim I. (1481-1520),

BOOK II.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE POLITICAL REVOL UTI0N.—FIRST EUROPEAN WARS (1494-1559).

CHAPTER VII. The Italian Wars (1494-1516).

Résumé of the Preceding Period.—Expedition of Charles VIII. into Italy (1494).—Louis XII. (1498-1515).—New Conquest of the Milanais by Francis I. (1515)

CHAPTER VIII. The First Period of Rivalry Between the Houses of France and Austria (1519-29).

Francis I. and Charles V.—First War (1521-25).—Second War (1526-29).—Treaty of Cambrai

CHAPTER IX. The Second Period of Rivalry Between the Houses of France and Austria.—Intervention of Turkey and England (1529-47).

New System of French Alliances.—Charles V. before Tunis and Algiers.—Third War with France (1536-38).—Fourth War (1542-44),

CHAPTER X. The Third Period of Rivalry Between the Houses of France and Austria (1547-59).

Supremacy of Charles V.—Fifth War against France (i547^-56).— Last Struggle for Italian Independence.—Treaty of Cateau- Cambresis (1559),

BOOK III.

REVOLUTION IN INTERESTS, IDEAS, AND CREEDS.

CHAPTER XI. The Economic Revolution, or Discovery of America and of the Passage to India.

First Maritime Discoveries.—Vasco da Gama (1497) and the Colonial Empire of the Portuguese.—Christopher Columbus (1492).— Cortes (1519).—Magellan (1520).—Pizarro (1529).—Colonial Empire of the Spaniards.—Consequences of the New Discoveries.—Introduction of Posts and of Canals with Locks

CHAPTER XII. Revolution in Letters, Arts, and Sciences, or the Renaissance.

Invention of Printing.—Renaissance of Letters.—Renaissance of Arts.—Renaissance of Sciences

CHAPTER XIII. Revolution in Creeds, or the Reformation.

State of the Clergy in the Sixteenth Century.—Luther : The Reformation in Germany and in the Scandinavian States (1517-55).Zwingli and Calvin : The Reformation in Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland (1517-59).—The Reformation in England (1531-62).—Principal Differences among the Protestant Churches

BOOK IV.

THE CATHOLIC RESTORATION AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS.—PREPONDERANCE OF SPAIN.

CHAPTER XIV. The Council of Trent and the Catholic Restoration.

Reforms at the Pontifical Court and Attempts at Reconciliation with the Protestants.—Defensive Measures: The Inquisition, the Index, the Jesuits.—Council of Trent (1545-63)

CHAPTER XV.The Religious Wars (1559-98).

The Catholic Chiefs and the Protestant Chiefs.—Struggle of the two Religions in the Netherlands ; Formation of the Republic of the United Provinces (1566-1609).—Struggle of the two Religions in England; Elizabeth and Mary Stuart ; the Great Armada (1559-1588).—Religious Wars in France (1562-98)

CHAPTER XVI.Consequences of the Religious Wars in France, Spain, England, and Holland.

Decline and Ruin of Spain.—Prosperity of England and Holland.— Reorganization of France by Henry IV. (1598-1610),

BOOK V.

THE ASCENDENCY OF FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XIII. AND LOUIS XIV. (1610-1715).

CHAPTER XVII. Louis XIII. and Richelieu—Internal Pacification (1610-43).

The Minority of Louis XIII. and the Regency of Marie de Medici (1610-17).—Richelieu humbles the Protestants and the High Nobility (1624-42), 255

CHAPTER XVIII. The Thirty Years’ War,

PAGE The Northern Countries and Germany at the Time of the Thirty Years’ War.—The Thirty Years’ War ; the Palatine and Danish Periods (1618-26); the Swedish and French Periods (1630-48)

CHAPTER XIX. England Under the Stuarts and Cromwell.

The Stuarts : James I. (1603-25); Charles I. (1625-40).—The Long Parliament (1640-1649).—The Commonwealth of England (1649-60)

CHAPTER XX. France from 1643 to 1661.—Condition of Europe in 1661.

Mazarin and the Fronde.—War with Spain ; Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659).—Condition of Europe in 1661

CHAPTER XXI. The Reign of Louis XIV. to the War of the League of Augsburg.

Administrative Centralization of France; 'Colbert and Louvois.—War in Flanders (1667).—First Coalition against France (1668).— War with Holland (1672).—Conquests by Louis XIV. in Time of Peace.—Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685)

CHAPTER XXII. Revolution of 1688 in England.—Second and Third Coalitions against France.—Peace of Ryswick (1697) and of Utrecht (1713).

Charles II. and James II. (1660-88).—Wars of the League of Augsburg (1688-97) and of the Spanish Succession (170113)..... 349

CHAPTER XXIII. Letters, Arts, and Sciences in the Seventeenth Century.

Letters and Arts in France.—Letters and Arts in Foreign Countries. —The Sciences in the Seventeenth Century, .... 365

BOOK VI.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.—GREATNESS OF ENGLAND, RUSSIA, AND PRUSSIA.

CHAPTER XXIV. Rise of Russia and Ruin of Sweden.

Peter the Great and Russia at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century; Power of Sweden; Narva and Pultowa.—Charles XII at Bender; Treaties of the Pruth (1711) and Nystadt (1721) —Second journey of Peter to Europe (1716) ; St. Petersburg ; The Czar Chief of the Russian Church

CHAPTER XXV. Creation of Prussia.—Humiliation of France and Austria.

Regency of the Duke of Orleans ; Ministries of Dubois, of the Duke of Bourbon, and of Fleury (1715-43).—Formation of Prussia, and Situation of Austria.—War of the Austrian Succession (1741-48).—The Seven Years’ War (1756-63)

CHAPTER XXVI.Maritime and Colonial Power of England.

England from 1688 to 1763.—The English East India Company

CHAPTER XXVII. Foundation of the United States of America.

Origin and Constitution of the English Colonies in America.—American War (1775-83)

CHAPTER XXVIII.Destruction of Poland.—Decline of the Ottomans.— Greatness of Russia.

Russia from Peter the Great to Catherine II.—Catherine II. (1762-96).—First Partition of Poland (1772).—Treaties of Kainardji (1774) and Jassy (1792).—Second and Third Partitions of Poland (1793 and 1795)

BOOK VII.

PRELIMINARIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

CHAPTER XXIX. Sciences and Letters in the Eighteenth Century.

Scientific and Geographical Discoveries.—Letters and Arts

CHAPTER XXX. Attempts at Reform.

Disagreement between Ideas and Institutions.—Agitation of Mind and Demands for Reforms.—Reforms Accomplished by the Governments.—Last Years of Louis XV. (1763-74).—Political and Military Decline of France.—Attempt at, and then Abandonment of Reforms under Louis XVI. (1774-93),

Chronological List of the Popes, Emperors, and Princes who reigned in the Principal States between 1453 and 1789

AUTHOR’S PREFACE.

This volume contains the history in general of the European states from 1453 to 1789, that is to say, from the close of the Middle Ages to the commencement of contemporaneous history. Upon the three and a half centuries which preceded 1789 we can now pronounce consummatum est. The French Revolution, which tends more and more to become a European revolution, separates the utterly dead old regime from the new regime inaugurated by the grand leaders of the Constitutional Assembly.

The Middle Ages had been characterized by the preponderance of local powers, and by the most complete development of individual energies, at least among the lords of feudalism and the burgesses of the communes. The distinguishing feature of Modern Times is found in the preponderance of the central power, or the absolute authority of the kings, and in state action substituted for that of communities.

But while the power and political life of the nations were concentrated in the hands of their chiefs, intelligence, by a contrary effort breaking its fetters, was diffused everywhere and upon all. The revolution was the struggle of these two opposing forces. So their reconciliation—that of social order with liberty, or the development of individual activity and individual rights conjointly with the strength of the state—is the problem of our age, and will be the dominant characteristic of future society.

I do not claim to include in this volume all even of the prominent facts which have been produced from 1453 to 1789, but only to give a rapid sketch of European life in general, and of those momentous events which permit us to trace its progressive march.

The word revolution occurs often in these pages. It is because I know no other to express those modifications which are continually operating in the life of nations. Science has demonstrated that there is not one of our organs whose elements are not in a brief space of time completely replaced. If the human body is thus the theater of an incessant renovation and transformation, what must that not be which is accomplished at the heart of that social order on which so many influences exert their powerful action?

There are persons whom the mere word revolution appalls. Let us have none of those childish terrors; let us look everything in its face, and we shall behold the menacing phantom transform itself into a prudent and necessary counselor. Why should that word which serves to indicate eternal wisdom when describing celestial motion become a cause of terror when used to represent the general movements of the moral world ?

The History of Modern Times, beheld I dare not say from above, but from a distance, is summed up in a small number of dominant facts. The rest is episodic.

First, there is the political revolution which intrusts to the hand of kings the authority formerly wielded by the lords; its inevitable consequence is found in great foreign wars. The kings in truth do not resist the temptation of employing for their personal ambition the national forces which they control. Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I seek beyond the Alps crowns which others seize ; and the result of the first Italian wars is the predominance of Spain and of the house of Austria upon the peninsula.

While the kings wrestle with each other along their frontiers, Christopher Columbus, Raphael, Copernicus, Rabelais, and the predecessors of Bacon and Descartes unveil new worlds. Maritime commerce is born among the western nations; the precious metals by their sudden abundance produce effects analogous to those of which we ourselves are witnesses, and personal property is amassed in the hands of plebeians. The arts, letters, sciences, and philosophy are transformed : in a word there is the revolution, or, as the men of the sixteenth century called it by an expressive and charming name, the Renaissance, which is wrought in ideas and interests as it is wrought in politics, and which is brought about even in creeds.

But the vanquished past is restive under its defeat; feudalism seeks a new life in making use of Protestantism. Though it fails in France, where, under the bloody ruins piled up by religious wars, Henry IV finds again the rights and the authority of Francis I, it succeeds in Germany, where the peace of Augsburg, prelude to the treaties of Westphalia, consecrates the independence of the princes and the ruin of imperial authority.

At the same time by the Council of Trent and by the creation of the Jesuit order the Catholics determine at the heart of the Church a movement of concentration akin to that accomplished in social order. The absolute authority of the pontifical monarchy is founded; protesting against the new spirit, Rome at last assumes the arms of austerity and discipline. At the service of the Catholic restoration Philip II. places the treasures of the New World and his veteran Spanish troops. The great battle of creeds is joined, but the victory is won by the ideas of toleration represented by Henry IV. Spain declines and France ascends.

During the second half of the sixteenth century everything had taken on a religious form : the democratic aspirations of the great cities were called the Holy League; the desires for independence of the provincial nobility, Calvinism; the kings were by turns on one side or the other. In the seventeenth everything became again political. Richelieu, a state cardinal, as the Pope in disdain entitled that priest, who was the ally of the Protestant powers, was its highest expression, and thanks to him the preponderance exercised by the house of Austria passed to the house of Bourbon.

But Louis XIV commits the same fault as Charles V and Philip II in undertaking for his own account their ambitious projects. He abandons the traditional policy of France, that of Francis I, of Henry II, of Henry IV, and of Richelieu; he repudiates the Protestant alliances; he exhausts his kingdom to dominate Europe in the name of his dynasty, which he renders usurping, and in the name of Catholicism, which he renders persecuting ; and he descends to the tomb as sad as the mighty vanquished of the preceding age, discrowned of his glory, with the grief of seeing new stars climb the horizon which eclipse his own. To Louis XIV is due the greatness of Prussia and England.

In the eighteenth century France descends still lower. At Rossbach she seems to lose even her military qualities, and is as destitute of great generals as of great bishops and great ministers of state. Another power of former times, even Austria, has the same fate as France. In Germany she loses a vast and opulent province, in Italy a kingdom; then by a strange overturning of political ideas those two irreconcilable enemies, who for two hundred years disputed the supremacy against each other, unite without being able to regain their military honor or restore their compromised fortune.

In the presence of these venerable monarchies, which decline in consequence of their errors, young and valiant states grow strong through the skill of their leaders, the devotion of their peoples, or the virtue of their free institutions.

Prussia under Frederick II doubles her resources and becomes conscious of her strength; under Peter the Great and Catherine II Russia is born, and speedily casts her threatening shadow over the eastern half of Europe; England al last grasps the scepter of the seas, while time solidifies her successful revolution of 1688, and she accomplishes the task of the coalition which was roused against France by the disastrous ambition of Louis XIV; moreover, she banishes from almost all the two Indies the flag of the French.

But, like the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons, she misuses her victory. She claims upon the seas the supremacy which Philip II. and Louis XIV sought upon the Continent, and against her the coalition is renewed; her colonies revolt; under the thunderclap of 1789 which revolutionizes everything maritime despotism is compromised just as continental despotism had been broken.

The triumph of the English colonies on the other side of the Atlantic had a far other reach than the victors themselves believed. It was not only American independence which the starry flag bore in its folds ; it was the harbinger of a commercial policy which was to produce a new revolution in the economical interests of the world. Resultant of the victory of Washington there was a future which is the present today, the abolition of monopolies, of the slave trade, and of the colonial system, whose vigorous formula had been drawn up by Colbert and the Long Parliament. Freedom of colonial commerce and of the seas found its germ in the liberty of the revolutionists in America.

While beyond the ocean a new people arose, in the midst of our aged continent a people, ancient, heroic, necessary, was blotted from the roll of nations. Poland was invaded and dismembered; Prussia, Russia, and Austria shared its bloody fragments. Herein was a political crime which caused torrents of blood and tears to flow, the fountains of which are not yet dry.

England and France allowed the tragedy to be accomplished, absorbed as were both by the American war, which was drawing nigh ; the latter by the intellectual agitation, which was become formidable.

France in the eighteenth century had regained in letters the influence she had lost in war. Nations no longer dominated by her arms submitted to the influence of her mind. Her conquerors even spoke her language, read her books, and were subdued by her ideas. What mattered it to Voltaire that France lost Canada; to Buffon, to Diderot, to d’Alembert, to the philosophers and literary men of the age, that the Russians marched to Constantinople and, the Prussians to Warsaw ? They had another task than to be anxious for the fate of a province, even of an empire. They sought for man, believed they had found him, and meant to make of him a citizen. They studied society, believed it ill built, and desired its reconstruction. There was a civilization to recast. For workmen so ardently employed at such a task what mattered the sound of a stone which was detached from the old edifice and fell.

Those even whom they seemed to threaten listened to them with deference. The monarchs paid court to those men of mind. Everywhere the kings experimented with their ideas, and despite the wars an effort at reformation was made from one end to the other of Europe. It was felt that in the bosom of modern society there existed a profound disagreement; that in political institutions they were still far in the past, while through ideas they lived in the future. The princes wished to re-establish harmony. For the economists they developed highways, canals, agriculture; for Beccaria and Montesquieu they tempered the penal laws and on many points ameliorated legislation; for Voltaire they spoke of toleration, banished the Jesuits, diminished the number of monasteries, and sought the public welfare. But they were still seeking, and already some, like Joseph II, had died in their labor; others, like Charles IV and Ferdinand IV, were falling back into the old repose, when the dike disastrously built up in France against legitimate desires, and behind which the great waters were heaped together, gave way and everything was swept headlong by the furious torrent.

BOOK I. REVOLUTION IN THE POLITICAL ORDER, OR DEFINITIVE RUIN OF THE POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS OF THE MIDDLE AGES, AND A NEW SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT.

CHAPTER I. STATE OF EUROPE AT THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

It is customary to take the year 1453 as the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of Modern Times, because that date marks two important events : the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans, and the close of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. But it is in a higher sphere that we must seek reasons for tracing a boundary between these two periods of the world’s life, and we should find them in times more recent: at the end of the fifteenth century and at the beginning of the sixteenth, when was being accomplished the revolution that changed the interests, the ideas, and the creeds of Europe.

In 1494 the Italian wars began, and with them the rivalries and the battles of the great European nations.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America, and five years later Vasco da Gama reached the Indies—commercial revolution.

In 1508 Raphael and Michael Angelo were painting at Rome the loggie of the Vatican and the Sixtine Chapel— revolution in the arts.

At that period Copernicus was meditating his new system of the world—revolution in science—while printing, recently discovered, and classic antiquity, as it were, refound, were making ready a literary revolution.

Finally, in 1517, burst forth the voice of Luther— religious revolution.

Modern civilization is still under the influence of these grand events, but it also remained three or four hundred years under that of another event which was brought about before the rest, namely, the advent of absolute royalty. In the second half of the fifteenth century the kings of France, England, Portugal, and Spain added to their power rights which the Middle Ages had denied them, and which the Roman emperors had formerly exercised.

The date 1453, though not rigorously exact, is sufficiently reasonable for us to retain it.

Of all the dominant facts which determine the new character of modern history the change in the governments of the peoples is the first to manifest itself and to produce its consequences ; it will also be the first which we shall study, but it is appropriate to enumerate beforehand the different states which divided Europe among them in 1453.

At that period the European peoples were not united as today by similarity of manners, tastes, habits, and by the thousand ties which frequent relations develop. Hardly did the northern nations know by name those of the south.

However, all those peoples were Christian, and, save in the Greek Church, all recognized the spiritual authority of the Popes as successors of St. Peter and vicars of Jesus Christ. Apparently, therefore, Europe, which in the eleventh century had rushed with so much enthusiasm to the crusade when Constantinople was menaced, ought in the middle of the fifteenth to rise en masse against Islam, which now established its fixed habitation on European soil. Nothing of this was seen, however ; only by the attentive examination of its political situation shall we discover the causes of its inaction and indifference.

France, by the expulsion of the English, had just founded her nationality in an impregnable manner; her political unity was far from being equally well constituted. The royal domain was hampered on all sides, as was the authority of the king, by the domains or the influence of the feudal nobility, due in great part to the baleful custom of appanages. But Charles VII, who had won the title of the Victorious, was about to merit that of the Well Served, thanks to the able ministers who surrounded him, and who, after having reconquered the kingdom, wished to reorganize it.

England under an imbecile sovereign, the unhappy Henry VI, and a foreign queen, Margaret of Anjou, saw those catastrophes already being accomplished which foretold the terrible tragedies of the War of the Roses. The most popular prince, the Duke of Gloucester, had just perished in a mysterious manner and without doubt by order of the court (1447).

Scotland was the theater of a desperate struggle between the kings and their barons. James I had been assassinated in 1437 by the grandees. To break their league James II. in his turn poignarded with his own hand their chief, William Douglas, but he died in 1460 leaving as his heir a child seven years of age, James III, who was slain in cold blood after the battle of Sauchieburn (1488).

Spain still consisted of five kingdoms. In Castile that very year (1453) the grandees had beheaded the favorite of John II; and this tragedy shows that there existed neither a strong royalty nor a very tranquil country. So the crusade against the Moors had been abandoned, and the Mussulman king of Granada presumed to interfere in the troubles of the kingdom. But on every side Castile enveloped this last vestige of Arab domination, and was to overthrow it as soon as it regained union and internal peace.

In Navarre the father was fighting against the son.

When Castile took possession of the kingdom of Murcia, Aragon was no longer in contact with the Moors, so its kings had turned their ambition toward the Mediterranean and Italy. But Alphonso V. the Magnanimous was himself about to ruin the greatness of his house by dividing at his death Aragon, Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples between his brother and his son (1458).

Portugal, also separated from the Moors of Spain, after Cordova and Seville had been captured by the Castilians, and no longer able to aggrandize itself in the peninsula, was entirely given up to discoveries along the African shores. In this path it was going to find a century of prosperity and power.

Italy had freed itself almost completely from German supremacy; but she had not been able to constitute her national unity, and found herself divided into a crowd of states. Alphonso V of Aragon reigned at Naples from 1442, and endeavored to extend his influence in upper Italy, where he would gladly have destroyed the fortunes of Sforza. In perpetual revolutions Genoa forgot both Galata, that suburb of Constantinople which the Ottomans had just captured from her, and the dangers which menaced her commerce in the Levant. Embarrassed by her liberty, she yielded alternately to Milan and France. In 1453 for exception she belonged to nobody. Venice had given herself up to ambition for continental conquests, and had created herself enemies in Italy even, when she ought to have employed all her resources to defend her colonies and her factories against the Ottomans. A condottiere, Francesco Sforza, had just deprived the Visconti of Milan, which he kept despite the emperor and the King of Naples (1447).

Peace had just been re-established in the Church by the abdication of Felix V and the declaration of obedience made by the fathers of the Council of Basel to the new Pope, Nicolas V (1449). This lettered pontiff welcomed the learned fugitives of Constantinople; but the papacy, barely escaped from the schism, had not as in the past a voice sufficiently powerful to rouse Christendom against the infidels; returning to Rome after so long an exile, it found the pontifical states a prey to the most frightful disorder. In Tuscany, Cosmo, son of the banker Giovanni de Medici, lulled the Florentines to sleep by the charm of the arts and poetry. Florence played in Italy only a secondary part, and even shared Tuscany with many republics and seigniories. Twenty other princes bore sway in the Romagna and in Lombardy ; and a brilliant but corrupt civilization covered all Italy.

The eight Helvetic cantons had just concluded an alliance with France (1452). The victories over Austria at Morgarten and Sempach, the recent but glorious defeat of St. Jacques, had carried afar the military renown of these mountaineers.

In the north the union formed at Calmar in 1397 between Sweden and Denmark had just been broken. The Swedes had elected a prince of their blood, Charles VIII Canutson (1448): this election was to become for the two peoples the origin of a hundred years’ war. The preponderance on this side belonged to Denmark.

Russia, interested more directly than any other nation in the woes of the Byzantine Greeks, was unable to act; the Tartars of the Golden Horde held her under their yoke; the republic of Novgorod isolated her from the Baltic; Europe was closed to her by Poland. The Grand Duke of Moscow, Basil III, in 1445 had been made prisoner by the Khan of Kazan and compelled to pay ransom. A usurper, Demetrius, had profited by this disaster to overthrow the grand duke and put out his eyes. Basil was restored, but in 1451 the Tartars penetrated as far as the walls of Moscow, whence they were repulsed by cannon. Thus far nothing announced the greatness reserved to this empire.

But already the Golden Horde was becoming dismembered and therefore weakened. The petty principalities and republics were to promptly disappear as soon as the grand duke had nothing more to fear from the Mongols: this soon took place under Ivan III (1462-1504), that coarse outline of another barbarian of genius who will be called Peter the Great. Ivan is already about to take the title of brother of Cesar Augustus, to espouse a daughter of the Paleologi, as if he wished to proclaim himself heir of the emperors of Constantinople, and allow himself to be called “ the star chosen of God to give light to the world.”

In Prussia and Livonia the Teutonic order, conquered by the Poles, who in 1435 had stripped it of Pomerelia (Dantzic), was still enfeebled by the insurrection of the cities and country nobles who in 1440 had formed the League of Marienwerder. This league, in spite of a papal excommunication and an imperial command, refused obedience to the order, which, after having ruled in all the north of Europe, was now in full decline.

To Poland, Casimir IV in 1444 had reunited Lithuania. This reunion, precarious though it still was, bestowed sufficient strength upon Poland to enable her to hold the foremost place among Slavic states.

At the center of the continent Germany, so strong by the number and the warlike spirit of its inhabitants, was condemned to powerlessness by the vices of its constitution. The feudal aristocracy had almost completely annulled the central power, and the Holy German Empire was only an agglomeration in anarchy of independent states, adjacent but not united, whose chief, without power, without arms, without revenue, possessed only the name of emperor; so with difficulty did the electors find a man willing to accept the onerous title. One member of the house of Hapsburg-Austria, Frederick of Styria, elected in 1440 after the refusal of the Landgrave of Hesse, delayed three months to communicate his acceptance, and reigned as Duke of Austria rather than as emperor. However, from Carniola and Carinthia he could hear the threatening sound of Ottoman progress in the valley of the Danube. But instead of uniting energetically with John Huniadi, the heroic defender of Hungary, he retained the young king of that country, Ladislaus VI, and only gave him up on compulsion in 1453.

Master of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, Ladislaus VI, son of the last Emperor of Germany, could have founded a power which would have become the bulwark of Europe against the Ottomans; but Bohemia had not yet recovered from the horrid Hussite war. The Utraquists there formed a powerful party who had imposed on the prince terms at which he was indignant; and in Hungary this Austrian king in the midst of the Magyar nobility seemed like a foreign prince. Moreover, he was himself incompetent for the task he should have fulfilled.

The Ottomans had been arrested in the valley of the Danube by six Christian states, three south of that river—the kingdoms of Bulgaria, Servia, and Bosnia, and three to the north—the principalities of Moldavia and Walachia and the kingdom of Hungary. But in 1453 Bulgaria had been conquered more than half a century before, Servia was in great part subdued, and the Kral had been able to save Belgrade, the key of the valley of the Danube, only by remitting it to the Hungarians (1437); Bosnia was already tributary to Mohammed II, and the sultans had long inscribed Walachia on the lengthy roll of their provinces. Up to that time the Moldavians had escaped the yoke, and the Hungarians were making head against the storm under their brave chief John Huniadi, to whom his still more famous son Mathias Corvinus was to succeed. Hungary in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries against the Ottomans will be what Poland had been in the thirteenth and fourteenth, the bulwark of Christianity.

The Ottomans were then led by one of their most glorious sultans, Mohammed II, who had sworn to capture Constantinople, and who on May 29, 1453, kept his oath: Christianity had allowed its last rampart to fall.

At the sound of this overwhelming disaster terror spread in Italy. All the princes of the peninsula felt themselves menaced and were solemnly reconciled to each other at Lodi (May 9, 1454). They took up again the thought of the crusades; this thought crossed the mountains, and at the court of the Grand Duke of the West all the Flemish and Burgundian nobility swore upon the pheasant* to take arms in order to hurl the Ottomans back into Asia. Empty words. The time of the crusades was past, no more to return. Venice treated that very year with Mohammed II, who now ruled from the middle of Asia Minor to the walls of Belgrade and the shores of the Adriatic.

In fact Europe was no longer capable of uniting, as at the eleventh century, in one great religious thought, nor was she yet in condition to act in concert for a grand political idea. At the middle of the fifteenth century everyone lived apart in isolation as during the full Middle Ages: there was not a single general question which could rally all the governments; there was not even any great force to rally the peoples about a principle. However, this force existed, and in France, always the vanguard of Europe, it was already acting. It was royalty which was to draw each state from feudal chaos, to secure internal order, to prepare equality, and through the encouragement given to commerce, manufactures, letters, and arts to aid in the development of a new civilization.

CHAPTER II.

FRANCE FROM 1453 TO 1494

Progress of the Royal Authority during the Last Years of Charles VII. —Louis XI (1461-83).—League of Public Welfare (1465).—Interview of Péronne (1468).—Ambition and Death of the Duke of Burgundy (1477).—Ruin of the Great Feudal Houses.—Death of Louis XI (1483).—Reign of Charles VIII until the Italian Expedition (1483-94).

The French royalty had already passed through many vicissitudes. Clovis and his sons were only warlike chiefs; Hugh Capet was a feudal lord, having one title more than his vassals, but no more power. Under his earlier successors even this shadow of authority was lost. With Louis the Fat or the Vigilant royalty shook off this torpor, and the king became the chief policeman of the country. By introducing security upon the highways and, above all, better order in society he gained a popularity which doubled his strength. Philip Augustus rendered the royalty conquering, Louis IX consecrated it; under Philip the Fair and Philip of Valois it became sufficiently strong to destroy a powerful feudalism, to make itself master of the administration of the country, to brave the successor of Gregory VII, and to progress toward absolute power. But then the Hundred Years’ War began; France was thrown back into chaos, a new feudalism was formed which was even aided by the enfeebled hands of the royalty: at the beginning of his reign Charles VII was nothing but the King of Bourges.

But under the pressure of their misfortunes the French drew nearer each other. At the touch of the foreigner the nation recognized itself, became conscious of its existence, and was saved by that outburst of patriotism which was personified in Joan of Arc. Once delivered from the abyss, it wished to fall back into it no more, rallied around its chief, and bestowed upon him strength in return for the order and security which he assured it. The indolent Charles VII. found himself thus restored to the power which Philip the Fair possessed, and the King of Bourges became Charles the Victorious. Skillful generals—Richemond, Dunois, La Hire, Xaintrailles—led his armies; wise ministers—Jacques Coeur, the Bureau brothers, Chevalier, Cousinot—directed his councils ; reforms were accomplished, victories gained, and France was delivered from the English.

Of these reforms the most important was that of the army. In the Middle Ages all the military strength was in the hands of the grandees; the king, to take it from them and control it, instituted fifteen military companies, which were the beginning of the standing army; to pay them he introduced an annual impost. At the same time the artillery was put upon a formidable footing. Hereafter no good armor could make the noble invulnerable; there was no wall that could not be thrown down. The bullet traversed all, and the highest towers were the soonest overthrown. But this formidable weapon was very costly : few save the king could have cannon. Shortly he alone was to have them. Then he would possess the two mightiest material forces which exist, money and an army; and in public opinion he would have still a third title, worth more than both the others. So no feudal ambition could arise without being humiliated, no revolt burst forth without being speedily punished.

The nobles made the proof of all this under Charles himself. The plots which they formed were impotent, and they passed through a new experience, beholding the law operative in their ranks. A leader in extortions, the bastard brother of the Duke of Bourbon, was sewed up in a sack and cast into a river; the Lord of Esparre, who intrigued for the English, was beheaded; the Duke of Alencon, who promised to open his fortress to them, was condemned to death; and the Duke of Armagnac was banished and suffered confiscation of his goods. The dauphin himself, who began all the plots against his father, was first reduced to living in his appanage, and then obliged to flee to the Duke of Burgundy.

However, the nobility did not accept its defeat. Under Louis XI it was seen joining in a final battle, for its dominions and resources were sufficiently vast to give it a legitimate hope of yet being the victor.

The force that pressed forward the French royalty and which was going to likewise press forward all European royalties—I mean the need of concentration of power— acted also in the interior of the great fiefs. The Duke of Brittany, for example, in his western peninsula, so adapted to form a state apart, and the Duke of Burgundy in his vast and opulent provinces of the north and east, dreamed of and attained sovereign authority just like the king, whereby an additional means was placed in their hands to make royalty recoil. The Count of Dunois at the moment when Charles VII was expiring had expressed the sentiment of all : “Gentlemen, let each one look out for himself.”

The new king had been during the preceding reign the leader of the malcontents. In 1440 he was the animating spirit of a plot against his father. Later his restless spirit and secret intrigues had caused his exile to his appanage. Thence he had so view of Péronne continued his underhand dealings that Charles VII had sent Dammartin with an army to arrest him. He had escaped, had sought an asylum from the Duke of Burgundy, and was still in the states of that prince when he learned of his father’s death. Charles VII, undermined by sickness and fearing a worse disease—an experience which happened sometimes, they say, to the enemies of his son—let himself die of hunger, July 22, 1461.

The grandees believed their reign had come when they saw the former chief of the Praguerie, the protégé of the Duke of Burgundy, almost receive from the latter’s hand the crown of France. He quickly undeceived them. He removed the majority of the officers appointed by his father and reinstated those whom he had condemned, as Alençon and Armagnac. The people expected a general abolition of taxes as sign of joyous advent: the permanent tax was raised from 1,800,000 livres to 3,000,000; and when riots broke out at Rheims and Rouen he repressed them sternly. He intimated to the University of Paris the papal prohibition of interfering with the affairs of the king and the city. He curtailed the extraordinarily extended jurisdiction of the parliaments of Paris and Toulouse by creating at their expense in 1462 the parliament of Bordeaux. He had already organized in 1453 that of Grenoble, and later, in 1479, he founded that of Dijon.

The ecclesiastical body had not greater reason for satisfaction. The king, less for the sake of pleasing Rome than for displeasing his nobility, revoked the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, despite the remonstrances of Parliament, which represented to him that through annates, anticipatory donations, and the like, the Holy See derived each year from France 1,200,000 ducats ; but he demanded of the clergy an exact cadaster of their property with documents in confirmation, a demand which in every respect was menacing for the proprietors. Finally the nobility with fright and anger heard him forbid the chase, lay claim to all the ancient feudal rights, taxes on wines and liquors, the redemptions, wardships, and forfeitures, and draw up enormous lists of taxes in arrears and demand their immediate payment.

He did not even treat the high aristocracy more gently. He deprived the house of Brez6 of the seneschalship of Normandy; the house of Bourbon of the government of Guyenne, which he gave to a member of the house of Anjou in order to set the two families at variance; and he took away from his brother Charles his government of Berry. He obliged the Duke of Brittany to recognize appeals from his court to the parliament of Paris, to pay the dues of feudal vassalage, and to accept the bishops whom he sent him. He arraigned even the powerful house of Burgundy, ransomed from the aged Duke Philip the Good the cities of the Somme, which the Count of Charolais, his son, would not have been willing to restore at any price (1463); so, too, he caused the surrender to himself by the King of Aragon of Cerdagne and Roussillon as guarantee of 350,000 gold crowns which he lent him (1462).

Louis had not reigned four years when everybody was against him. Five hundred princes or lords formed the League of Public Welfare, inasmuch as they acted, so they said, only through compassion for the miseries of the kingdom occasioned by “the pitiable government of Louis XI”

Louis judged that so many princes and lords would not speedily set themselves in motion, and that it would be possible for him to win the game by activity and promptitude. He hastened first against the confederates of the south and against their chief, the Duke of Bourbon. With that disciplined army and that excellent artillery which his father had bequeathed him, he in fact imposed upon the duke new oaths of fidelity.

But while he thought he had finished with them, the Count of Maine, charged with arresting the Bretons, retreated before them; the Duke of Nevers, instead of defending the barrier of the Somme against the Burgundians, delivered it to the Count of Charolais; and July 5 this count, who was already called Charles the Bold, arrived before Paris without having encountered a single obstacle. Everywhere he made proclamation that he came for the good of the country, that he abolished the villain tax and the salt tax.

Would Paris declare for the princes or for the king? This was a question of life and death to Louis XI, who, paying no more attention to the followers of Bourbon and to the conspirators of the south, thought only of re-entering his capital, believing himself lost if he did not re-enter it. He arrived at Monthery in the morning of July 16, and there found the Burgundians, who blocked his way. Forced to fight, the king made a vigorous attack. He charged and dismounted the Count of St. Pol, who was in front. The Bold with the bulk of his army in his turn charged one wing of the king’s forces, put it to rout, and pursued it to within a half league of Monthery. Thus each party was half victorious, half defeated but the end of Louis was attained: he had entered Paris. There he was shut in by 50,000 men. Before this army had closed all the issues the king departed August 10 for Normandy, and returned August 28 with 12,000 men, 60 wagons of powder, 700 muids of flour, ( the muid Latin modius was a measure introduced by Charlemagne of very varying quantity, but in 1465 equivalent to 41% bushels) and provisions of all sorts. Then he went to take the oriflamb from St. Denis and pretended that he wished to attack while in reality desirous only to keep on the defensive.

Although Louis XI was personally very brave on the field of battle his favorite combats were those of the mind, of finesse and ruse. Humble in speech and attire, giving much, but promising far more, buying or buying back without bargaining those whom he needed, and holding none in resentment for the past, he was sure of attaching to himself many of those princes and lords who had so much difficulty in living together. (So he negotiated and parleyed incessantly. Many of the conspirators had already offered to sell their allegiance: the Count of Armagnac for money, the Duke of Nemours for lands, the Count of St. Pol for the sword of Constable of France, others for pensions or commands. Nothing was refused. y hiBs diplomacy the king saw the league already dissolved, and the dukes, of Brittany and Burgundy isolated and perhaps enemies.

Unhappily Louis XI could not be everywhere at once. He was powerless against desertions and distant treasons, of which many were taking place. Pontoise was delivered up by its governor, Rouen likewise; then Evreux, Caen, Beauvais, Péronne, declared for the princes. The king hastened to finish. He granted everything they wanted: to his brother the Duke of Berry, Normandy; to the Duke of Burgundy, Bologne, Guines, Roye, Montaidier, Péronne, cities of the Somme; to the Count of Charolais, Ponthieu; to the Duke of Brittany, exemption from appeals to Parliament, direct nomination of bishops, and exemption from feudal dues—in a word, a petty independent royalty; to the Duke of Lorraine, the march of Champagne without obligation of homage, Mouzon, St. Menehould, Neufchateau, 30,000 crowns in ready money; to the dukes of Bourbon and Nemours, to the counts of Armagnac, of Dunois, of Dammartin, to the Sire d’Albret and to very many more, lands and enormous pensions, without counting promises for the future. As to the public welfare, nobody spoke of it; no one had seriously thought about it.

Such a treaty strictly executed would have been the ruin of the royalty and of France. But one could be sure that Louis XI would not execute it if there were possibility of doing otherwise; already Parliament, supple to his hand, refused its registration.

The cession of Normandy was especially dangerous, inasmuch as by means of this province the dominions of the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy touched each other, and all the coasts from Nantes to Dunkirk were open to the English. From the first day Louis pondered the means of retaking it. To accomplish this it was necessary that the Bold, who became duke in 1467, but who reigned in fact from 1465, should be diverted from the affairs of France. Louis easily found means to occupy him at home: three insurrections burst out at once, at Liege, Dinant, and GJhent. While the Bold hastened thither the king sent 120,000 gold crowns to the Duke of Brittany, which decided him to keep quiet, and he himself entered Normandy. Evreux, Vernon, Louviers, Rouen, opened their gates. In a few weeks the entire province was in his hands, and Charolais could do nothing more than write to the king very humbly in favor of his former ally. Neither were the chiefs of the other houses more aggressive. One after the other they had been gained or made neutral by the king. He had attached to himself the house of Bourbon by giving to Duke John a whole kingdom to govern the south of France (Berry, Orleans, Limousin, Perigord, Quercy, Rouergue, Languedoc); to the brother of the duke, Pierre de Beaujeu, his daughter Anne in marriage; to the bastard of Bourbon, the title of Admiral of France, and the command of Honfleur. He had gained the house of Anjou by giving 120,000 livres to John of Calabria, the son of René; the house of Orleans, by attaching to himself the aged Dunois, the hero of the English wars; and finally the Count of St. Pol, the companion and the friend from childhood of the Bold, by making him constable.

“Nobody, therefore, thought of disputing Normandy with the king? The Bold was solitary, and however great his power, could do nothing, being alone. But he formed an alliance with Edward IV, the King of England, and succeeded in bringing to him the Duke of Brittany, who also called the English to his aid, and offered them as guarantee of his fidelity twelve strongholds in his duchy, whichever they wished.

In face of this new peril Louis appealed to the opinion of France. April 6, 1468, he convoked at Tours the States General, of the kingdom and simply asked them if they were willing that Normandy should cease to continue a part of the crown domains. The States replied “that according to the laws the brother of the king should have been content with an appanage of 12,000 livres income, and that since the king was generous enough to give him 60,000 he ought to be grateful for it.” Louis solemnly sent this decision to the Duke of Burgundy, who received the deputies in a harsh manner. Meanwhile he crushed the Duke of Brittany, and by the rapidity of his blows forced him to treat in Ancenis before the Duke of Burgundy, who was collecting his troops at Péronne, was able to aid him.

Then the king, disembarrassed of the Bretons, and having at his orders an excellent army and superior artillery, could apparently have treated the Duke of Burgundy with little mercy, but at Portsmouth there was an English fleet and army ready to cross. King Edward had publicly announced to his Parliament his approaching descent into France; this, above all, Louis XI desired to prevent.

The best means of preventing it was by treating also with the Bold. Counting upon his adroitness, Louis wished to conduct the negotiations himself, and went to find the duke at Péronne. This was a great imprudence despite the safe conduct which he had obtained before putting himself in the hands of his enemy, for the princes of that age were not greatly in the habit of keeping their word, and he least of all.

For a long time Louis had emissaries at Liege, a turbulent city situated outside the states of Burgundy, and depending only on its bishop; but this bishop, Louis of Bourbon, having placed himself under the protection of the duke, every revolt against him seemed a revolt against the duke himself. Now at the time while Louis was proceeding toward Péronne an insurrection broke out at Liege, and he was already conferring with the Bold when the news arrived that the citizens of Liege had put their bishop in prison and had massacred many canons. Charles became infuriated in consequence, accused the king of treason, and shut him up in the castle of Péronne, where Charles the Simple had already died in captivity. Louis did not go free till after having signed a ruinous and humiliating treaty. He promised to yield Champagne to his brother, which brought the Burgundians without striking a blow to the gates of Paris, and agreed to accompany the duke against Liege. That unhappy city, whose inhabitants were fighting with “Long live the king” upon their lips, was sacked (1468).

For Louis XI and for Charles the Bold the treaty of Péronne marks the point of departure of new conduct. For the first it was the last of his mistakes, for the second the commencement of dreams and of unattainable enterprises. While the King of France, trusting no one because he had been deceived by all, now refused every risk, even when he had two chances to one, the Duke of Burgundy by a contrary effect believed nothing above his strength, inasmuch as he saw nothing above his hopes.

It was necessary for Louis to regain the lost ground. He made his brother Charles accep Guyenne instead of Champagne, which would so well have suited the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke of Brittany was compelled once more to renounce any foreign alliance; to hold him more firmly Louis purchased his favorite Leskun, attached to himself the powerful Breton family of Rohan, and afterward caused those rights to be ceded to him which the house of Blois claimed to possess in Brittany. Two traitors, the Cardinal la Balue and the Bishop of Verdun, were confined in iron cages, where they remained ten years. Two others, the Duke of Nemours and the Count of Armagnac, were reduced— the former to implore pardon, and the latter to flee from the kingdom, abandoning his property, which the king confiscated. At the same time to the King-maker, Earl Warwick, whom he reconciled with Margaret of Anjou, Louis gave the means of overthrowing in England Edward IV, the brother-in-law of the Bold.

Then, sure of having again isolated the duke, the king dared attack him openly. He convoked at Tours an assembly of notables, exposed his wrongs at length, and obtained a declaration from thi assembly stating that Charles by his hostile acts had freed the king from the obligations contracted at Péronne. In virtue of this declaration the king seized those places upon the Somme which he so much desired and which were within his reach—St. Quentin, Roye, Montdidier, and Amiens. He had put on foot 100,000 men, and the duke was unprepared.

But the dukes of Brittany and of Guyenne and the Constable of St. Pol, the chief of the army, terrified by the rapid progress of the king, were already betraying him. A dauphin was born the preceding year; the Duke of Guyenne, being no longer heir to the crown, was interested in reforming anew the league of the princes. Louis, seeing that his successes slackened, understood that new plots were forming. He believed it prudent to stop, and concluded a truce with the Duke of Burgundy. This was necessary, inasmuch as Edward IV, the ally of Burgundy, was at that moment once more reascending the English throne.

So Louis XI again had to break the thousand fetters with which the aristocracy sought to bind the royalty. The question was of nothing less than the dismemberment of France. “I care more for the good of France than they think,” said the Duke of Burgundy, “ for instead of one king as now I would have six.” (The court of .the Duke of Guyenne was the center of all these intrigues. Through him a new and powerful feudal house was again forming. The Duke of Burgundy offered him the hand of Mary, his only daughter; that is to say, the hope of uniting his possessions of Aquitaine, states more extended, more populous, more rich, than those of the king himself. The young duke was therefore the greatest obstacle which inconvenienced the king.

This obstacle disappeared: the prince died. Was he poisoned ? If so, was his being poisoned the work of the king ? These are questions which history cannot answer. But if the guilt of the king on this point remains in doubt, there is no question as to the atrocious joy which he felt at the sickness and then at the death of his brother.

This event destroyed all the plans of the Bold. Nevertheless, since he was ready, he crossed the Somme and invaded the kingdom, swearing to put everything to fire and sword, though the truce he had concluded with Louis XI was not yet expired. This war was carried on with atrocious cruelty. men, women, and children had fled to the large church: they were massacred there together.

The inhabitants of Beauvais profited by such a warning, and when, June 27, 1472, the Burgundian army arrived under their walls they valiantly sustained an assault which lasted eleven hours; the women themselves took part in the defense. One of them, Jeanne Hachette, tore away a Burgundian standard that a soldier had already planted upon the rampart. The duke, arrested by this heroism, was compelled to retire. He took his revenge by burning St. Valery, Eu, and Neufchateau; he failed before Dieppe and encamped under the walls of Rouen, where he had appointed a rendezvous, it was said, with the Duke of Brittany. He remained there four days. Then, accusing Francis II.of not keeping his promise, he returned to his states.

If the duke Francis II had failed at his rendezvous it was because Louis XI had made against him furious war. He had captured from him la Guerche, Machecoul, Ancenis, and Chantocé; and then, after having terrified him by his successes, he had offered him an advantageous peace. The duke signed it October 18, and October 23 Charles the Bold, a little before so untractable, himself accepted the truce of Senlis.

Thus the treaty of Péronne, which was supposed to have aid the King of France so low, was rendered null. The shame of Liege was compensated in the eyes of Louis XI by the shame of Beauvais. And if the king had emerged with so much good fortune and address from so evil a case, what would he not accomplish in future with larger resources and fewer embarrassments ? As to the resources, he was increasing them by an able and firm administration. As to the embarrassments, the Bold seemed to have given himself the task of diminishing them by attempting the realization of projects above his strength.

Beginning with 1472 all the attention of the Duke of Burgundy was directed toward Germany, Lorraine, and Switzerland. The affairs of France had for him only secondary importance. An Austrian prince, Sigismund, had just pledged to him the landgravate of Upper Alsace and the county of Ferrette; he bought Guelderland and the county of Zutphen (1469). Seeing his domains thus increased in the valleys of the Meuse and Rhine, he dreamed of reuniting all the countries which had formerly composed the share of King Lothaire and of forming a new-kingdom under the name of Belgian Gaul. His states formed two separate groups which could have been united by Champagne, Lorraine, and Alsace. He had missed Champagne, but he held Alsace; he expected without difficulty to take Lorraine; Switzerland would come afterward, then Provence; and Lotharingia would be reconstituted. He commenced where he ought to have finished. He sought from the emperor the title of king (1473). Louis prevented the success of his negotiations.

On this side he failed; on the other he saw a league forming between René II, the young Duke of Lorraine, the archduke Sigismund, the cities of the Rhine, which felt themselves menaced, the Swiss, whom Hagenbach, his agent in Alsace, had annoyed in their commerce by a thousand exactions, and finally the eternal enemy, the King of France, the instigator of this coalition which wove its meshes around the Burgundian states. Suddenly the archduke brought him the 100,000 florins agreed upon for the ransom of Alsace; Hagenbach was seized and beheaded by the inhabitants of Brisach (1474). Together with this news the duke received the solemn defiance of the Swiss, who entered Franche Comte and gained over the Burgundians the bloody battle of Hericourt. And these events occurred at the very moment when he was himself engaged in another war to sustain the Archbishop of Cologne against the Pope, the emperor, and his subjects. In behalf of this prince he was besieging the little city of Neuss, which resisted eleven months. While he was here losing both his time and strength, his brother-in-law and ally, Edward IV, at last landed at Calais.

Edward expected a short and glorious campaign. His hopes were dissipated after he had made a few marches in the interior of the country. The Burgundian cities did not open their gates to receive the ally of the Duke of Burgundy; the Burgundian soldiers did not appear in order to join the English troops, who found themselves without shelter or magazines. He counted at least on entering St. Quentin, which was commanded by St. Pol, the secret ally of Charles the Bold. He was received by cannon shot. Deceived and irritated, he hastened to accept the favorable conditions by which Louis offered to treat. By the peace of Pecquigny “the two kings promised to assist each other against their rebellious subjects;” furthermore, Edward obtained 75.000 crowns in ready money and a life annuity of 50,000 (August 29, 1475).

Then the Bold also found it very necessary to make peace. The following September he signed the treaty of Soleure with the King of France in order to terminate his affairs with Lorraine and Switzerland. In fact November 30 he entered Nancy. Lorraine. abandoned by the king, who had, however, been the first to instigate Rene to take arms, was conquered. Forthwith Charles turned against the Swiss, who burned and plundered at their ease in Franche Comte. He attacked them in dead winter with an army of 18,000 men who had just made two exhausting campaigns. He was completely beaten at Granson (March, 1476), and three months after at Morat.

At this news Lorraine rose and recalled the young Rend de Vaudemont. This last affront made the Bold lose all prudence. He got together in haste 6000 mercenaries and rushed to Nancy. But René found soldiers with the money of Louis XI; the Swiss, on whose side he fought at Morat, came to his aid. The Bold was unwilling to retreat and accepted an unequal battle. In a few hours the Burgundians were routed and the “Grand Duke of the West” remained among the dead (1477).

While Charles the Bold was dashing himself against the Germans, the people of Lorraine, and the Swiss, Louis XI had profited by the respite afforded to settle his accounts with those who had so many times turned against him. One of the first who had to render this difficult account was the Duke of Alençon. This duke, condemned to death under Charles VII, had been pardoned by Louis XI, but he assassinated those who gave testimony against him, coined false money, and entered into plots against the king. Arrested in 1473, he was the following year condemned for the second time to capital punishment. Louis XI kept him in prison until his death. He left a son; those who had appropriated the goods of his father implicated him in a plot of high treason, then had him condemned to give up all his castles to the king, to demand pardon, and to endure perpetual confinement (1481).

There were complaints, very serious in another sense, to bring against the Count of Armagnac, that horrible John V who had espoused his sister Isabella, and forced the chaplain to bless this incestuous marriage by threatening to throw him into the river if he made difficulty. His arrest having been decreed by Parliament, he had been condemned for incest, murder, and forgery under Charles VII, but had fled; and one of the first acts of Louis XI on his accession had been to restore him his domains. This frightful man cherished for the king the gratitude to be expected : he was constantly with his enemies. It was only in 1473 that the king could concern himself with him. Cardinal d’Alby came with an army to besiege Lectoure. The city resisted. Negotiations followed; and while, they negotiated the cardinal seized one of the gates of the city.

John V of Armagnac was stabbed before the eyes of his wife. The latter was enceinte. They gave her poison. Of all the population of Lectoure three men and four women survived.

In this house of Armagnac there was a younger branch, that of Nemours, whose chief, loaded with goods and honors by Louis XI, betrayed him ten times. Freed from the Burgundians and the English, Louis besieged and captured the Duke of Nemours in his castle of Carlat and shut him up in the castle of Pierre-Encise, a prison so frightful that the hair of the prisoner became white in a few days. Then he had him carried to the Bastille, chained and placed in an iron cage ; he ordered that he should be allowed to go out from it only for torture, that the severest torture should be inflicted, and that he should be made to confess. Nemours, condemned to death, was beheaded in the market-place.

A brother of John V of Armagnac and a member of the powerful house of d’Albret, both also guilty of plots against the king, were the former imprisoned, the latter beheaded. These severe executions ended by teaching respect of law and the king to the so often rebellious lords of the south.

The King of Aragon had given Roussillon in pledge to Louis XI for 2oo_:ooo crowns. But he intended not to pay the money, but to regain the province, whose spirit of hostility to the French he fomented secretly. In 1474 Louis XI. cut these intrigues short by sending a good army which captured Perpignan after a siege of eight months, endured with admirable constancy. One woman, it was said, had nourished one of her children with the body of another who had died of famine.

In the north there was a man to punish who, like Jacques of Nemours, was nobody save by Louis XI, to whom with the title of Constable Louis XI had intrusted the Sword of France, the defense of the kingdom. This man, the Count of St. Pol, had resolved to create for himself an independent kingdom at the expense of England, France, and Burgundy. He had toiled at it during ten years, employing only one means to succeed, deceiving by turns the English, French, and Burgundians, but forgetting that the day might come when the King of France, the King of England, and the Duke of Burgundy would exchange the letters which he bad written them. Louis was the most implacable. At the approach of the French troops the constable fled to Mons. The king wrote him to return without fear. “I am in great difficulties,” he wrote him; “I have much need of a head like yours”; and he added before those who were present for fear they should mistake: “It is only the head which I wish; the body can stay where it is.” The Duke of Burgundy gave him up; he was decapitated in the Place de Greve (1475).

But of all these deaths the most fortunate for the king was that of the Bold. His was really the death of feudalism. “Never afterward did the King of France find,” said Comines, a man bold enough to raise his head against him or to contradict his will.” The duke left only a daughter. The king tried to take the heiress and the heritage. He put forward a project of marriage between Mary of Burgundy, who was twenty years old, and the dauphin, who was eight. But counting little upon so inappropriate a marriage, he made certain of a part of the dowry by seizing under various pretexts Burgundy, Picardy, and Artois. Mary, despoiled and betrayed by the king, who, giving to the Flemings one of her letters, brought about the death of her two counselors, Hugonet and Humbercourt, threw herself into the arms of Austria. She espoused the archduke Maximilian: a fatal marriage, whence issued the monstrous power of Charles V, and which became for the houses of France and Austria the first cause of a struggle lasting two centuries. This struggle at its origin under Louis XI. had not the gravity which it afterward acquired. It was marked by only one battle, that of Guinegate, which was lost by the French (1479). Louis none the less succeeded in definitely incorporating Burgundy and Picardy with the territory of Boulogne into the royal domain, and obtained, moreover, the cession of Artois and Tranche Comte as dowry of the daughter of Maximilian, who was promised to the dauphin (treaty of Arras, 1482).

He did not long survive this treaty, which was the coronation of his entire reign. Withdrawn to his inaccessible castle of Plessis-les-Tours, a prey to remorse and superstitious terrors, he there long struggled against death. He had made the monk Francisco de Paolo come from Calabria, hoping that his prayers might prolong his life, and had caused the sultan Baiezid to send him all the relics found at Constantinople. Remedies, prayers to Heaven, desires of life, were useless. “It all accomplished nothing,’’ said Comines; “he was obliged to pass the way that the others had passed.’’ Warned at last by his physician, Coittier, who had extorted from him 50,000 crowns in five months, that he must die, he resigned himself, sent for his son the dauphin, who had been reared in isolation at the castle of Amboise, gave him excellent counsels—such as always are given at such an hour—and the famous maxim, “He who does not know how to dissimulate does not know how to reign.” He expired August 30, 1483. That very year Luther and Rabelais were born, two other representatives of the new epoch that was commencing.

Thus after twenty years of effort the king saw “the house of Burgundy feeble and powerless; the Duke of Burgundy unable to undertake anything, and held in check by the great number of warlike peoples upon his frontier; Spain in peace with Louis and fearful of his arms; England weakened and herself in trouble; Scotland absolutely his own; many allies in Germany, and the Swiss as submissive as his own subjects.” Bossuet says too much in regard to the Swiss, whose affection for the king was due simply to the gold which he sowed lavishly in their country; but he does not say enough about the interior of France. To the four provinces gained from Burgundy (the duchy and the county, together with Charolais and Auxerre, Artois and Picardy with the territory of Boulogne) there must be added Maine, Provence, and Anjou, bequeathed him by will. A lawsuit had gained him the duchy of Alencon and Perche; the death of his brother, Guyenne; his intervention in the affairs of Spain, Roussillon and Cerdagne: altogether eleven provinces united to the crown domain, not counting the profits of the executions of St. Pol, Nemours, and Armagnac.

He had instituted posts, multiplied fairs and markets, encouraged commerce and manufactures, and called 'to France the earliest printers.

“Louis XI,” says one of his historians, “was equally renowned for his vices and virtues, and everything reckoned in the scale, he was a king.” France owes him much, but she has not been able to absolve him for believing that all means were good for attaining a useful end.

The successor of Louis XI was a child of thirteen years and two months, of age by law, but feeble in body and mind, and destined long to remain under guardianship. He was under the protection of his elder sister, Anne of Beaujeu, “the least foolish woman in the world,” her father Louis XI was wont to say. His good qualities she possessed without the bad ones. A violent reaction broke out against the policy of the dead king; and the most compromised of his ministers—Olivier the Devil, Daniel and John Doyat—were its victims. But the grandees wished still more, even the nullification of the principal acts of Louis XI. In this hope they demanded the convocation of the States General.

They obtained it, but the deputies, especially those of the third estate, did not wish to be used as instruments of feudal resentment. Very bold discourses were pronounced; one still reads with astonishment that of a noble, Philip Pot, Lord of la Roche, upon the obligations of princes and the rights of the peoples. The States left to Anne of Beaujeu full power by leaving to her the guardianship of the king’s person, upon whose mind she exercised great influence, and who, being of age, possessed, or rather left to her, full royal authority.

They instituted a governmental council over which in the absence of the king the Duke of Orleans was to preside, and when he was not present the Duke of Bourbon or the Lord of Beaujeu. The Lady of Beaujeu was not even named in this act; the Duke of Orleans, on the contrary, remained the ostensible chief of the government, and thought himself so in reality. However, the Lady of Beaujeu, who had accustomed her brother to obey and fear her, by making him preside at the council, thrust aside the Duke of Orleans, and by making her husband, the plain Lord of Beaujeu, preside over it, she crowded from it the Duke of Alençon, the Duke of Angouleme, and the other princes of the blood, who with higher qualifications were unwilling to sit below him. Thus without anyone foreseeing it, was constituted what was called the government of Madame, whereby was to be continued the firm and energetic policy of Louis XI.

The Duke of Orleans was not slow to see that he had been outplayed. Then he had recourse to plots. To this Anne put an end like a worthy daughter of Louis XI. She ordered the arrest of the prince. He escaped, saving himself by whip and spur at the very moment when he was about to be seized, and began a civil war. He drew to his side the Duke of Brittany, Francis II, made alliance with Maximilian, who reproached himself for the concessions of the treaty of Arras, and even solicited the aid of Richard III, King of England.

Anne of Beaujeu counteracted all. She kept Richard III in his kingdom by giving aid in men and money to his competitor, Henry of Richmond, who soon became King of England as Henry VII; against Maximilian she treated with the States of Flanders, who acted in the name of their prince, still a child, Duke Philip of Austria; against the Duke of Brittany she made alliance with the nobility of the country, who were irritated by the favor shown Landais the detested minister of Francis II. Landais was seized and hung. At once La Tremoille hastened to besiege the Duke of Orleans in Baugency, there took him prisoner, and obliged him to return to the court in order to promise that he would hereafter occupy himself only with his pleasures.

But Maximilian, named some months later King of the Romans, that is to say, heir of the imperial crown, broke the treaty of Arras. The league of princes was formed anew, a league of public welfare as genuine as that of twenty years earlier! Anne had not committed the faults of Louis XI. More resources were in her hands and she used them wisely. While d’Esquerdes delayed Maximilian in Artois (1487), and there captured St. Omer and Terouanne, she put at the head of an army full of ardor the young king, who was all joyous at seeing himself on horseback in splendid armor, and they marched against the confederates of the south. Everywhere the citizens armed against the lords, against their garrisons; in a few days “the tasks of the south were regulated.” Anne then returned against Brittany. La Tremoille entered the duchy with the French troops April, 1488; he took possession of Chateaubriant, Ancenis, and Fougeres, and beat the Breton army (July 27) at St. Aubin du Cormier. The Duke of Orleans was captured. At the north affairs were no less prosperous. The Flemings, roused against Maximilian, drove from their country his German troops and obliged him to sign a new convention on the basis of the treaty of Arras of 1482. So the Lady of Beaujeu triumphed over all the coalitions and preserved the conquests of her father. To them she added a great province.

Francis II, Duke of Brittany, had just died without other heir than his young daughter Anne. A province which rounded out the kingdom toward the west could not be allowed to fall into foreign hands. Anne of Beaujeu used every means, even force, to bring about the marriage of the king with the young duchess. Charles VIII. went, the helmet on his head, to conquer his bride and the duchy. Anne of Brittany, besieged in Rennes and abandoned by Maximilian, who had, however, betrothed her by procuration, consented to espouse Charles VIII.(1491). The last asylum of princely independence was opened to the royal authority, and the most obstinate of provincial individualities had just merged itself like the rest in that great whole of the kingdom of France. The rebel princes no longer had a place of refuge where they could lift their banner against the king. Their contemporaries called the last war which they made the foolish war, and those which they undertook in the future were to be more foolish still. The royalty of France has therefore become its own master ; let us see how that of England reached the same state.

CHAPTER III.

ENGLAND FROM 1453 TO 1509

State of England at the Middle of the Fifteenth Century.—War of the Roses (1455-85).—Henry VII Tudor (1485-1509).—Suppression of Public Liberties.

In England as in France a powerful aristocracy held the monarchy in check. But while in France the people was the ally of the king against the feudal nobility, in England it was allied with the nobility against the king, and the monarchy had been compelled, from the time of King John, in Magna Charta to recognize and proclaim national rights. During almost two centuries Parliament, composed of two chambers, the House of Lords or Upper House, and the House of Commons or Lower House, had been invested with the right of voting taxes, of regulating their nature, of fixing their amount, and of supervising their employment. The king meanwhile could not raise a penny without its consent. Parliament also decided questions of succession to the throne and of regency, and voted subsidies only after the king had satisfied its complaints. It is true that its sessions were not regularly fixed, that the court had a considerable influence over its individual members; but this great body was none the less considered the stern guardian of English liberties and as one' of the two essential elements of national sovereignty. By it new laws were to be approved.

The life and liberty of individuals as well as their future were protected against the excess of power or the errors of governmental agents. It was a principle recognized and practiced in England that a man could not be arrested and detained without the order of a magistrate, and could be judged only by his peers—the lords by the Upper House, the ottyer citizens by a jury sitting in public session in the county where the crime had been committed, and pronouncing a unanimous decision, which was without appeal. Without doubt there was more than one instance of arbitrary judgment, but there were no exceptional tribunals. There were transient abuses which could not formulate themselves into fixed law. Finally, every royal officer could be prosecuted for abuse of power without having the right to invoke a royal order as his excuse. The ministers themselves could be impeached by Parliament.

England was then already, if we consider only its institutions, in advance of all other states. But it had few manufactures, and little commerce, so that material interests were not strong enough to dominate political questions. Moreover, excessive violence characterized the habits of the people. In all classes aggressive and ferocious instincts had been developed to a high degree by the Hundred Years’ War. The fury shown in the conflict against France was to manifest itself anew in civil struggles.

This civil strife originated in the rivalry of the houses of York and Lancaster, the White and the Red Rose.

The victories of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt had inspired in the English that patriotic and boundless pride which has made them accomplish so great achievements,and which has remained the distinctive trait of their national character. It was the misfortune of the house of Lancaster, then represented by Henry VI., that it was powerless to satisfy this pride, and that it had to answer for the cruel assaults it received daily through defeats in France after the appearance of Joan of Arc, and especially after the death of the Duke of Bedford. At each bad news arriving from the Continent universal clamors arose against the ministers. First was Mans, surrendered by order of Suffolk, then Rouen which opened its gates, then a great pitched battle— that of Fourmigny—lost by the English, then Bordeaux, which beheld Dunois penetrate its walls in triumph.

Under the blow of so many disasters they remembered that the ruling dynasty after the deposition of Richard II had usurped the throne, and that Richard, Duke of York, was the legitimate heir. He descended in direct line on his mother’s side from the second son of Edward III—in England women inherit and transmit rights to the throne— and on his father’s side from the fourth son. Henry VI descended only from the third son of Edward IV. The house of Lancaster was strong in being the original choice of the nation, in its uncontested possession of the throne during sixty years, and it invoked the oath of fidelity of the Duke of York himself. But the mental feebleness which Henry VI had inherited from his maternal grandfather, Charles VI, was degenerating into real imbecility: his wife, Margaret of Anjou, found herself alone to confront popular resentment. Already an object of suspicion to the English through her French origin, the queen was hated after the murder of the Duke of Gloucester, that brother of the glorious Henry V, who was commonly called the good duke, because he always wished war with France, and whom she had arrested in 1447, and put to death two days later in his prison. According as the war went on disastrously upon the Continent so much the more did hate increase against her, whom they made responsible for all their misfortunes, and who at her marriage instead of bringing a dowry to her husband had obtained the evacuation of Anjou and Maine by the English troops. The Duke of York believed the occasion favorable. First, he incited the Commons to accuse the favorite minister, the Duke of Suffolk, and to refuse all subsidies until he had been judged. The king to save the accused from a death sentence condemned him to five years’ banishment. Two thousand persons endeavored to arrest Suffolk on his departure from prison. He was, however, able to gain the port of Ipswich, whence he speedily set sail. He thought himself safe, when he was overtaken by Nicholas of the Tower, one of the largest vessels of the royal navy. He was ordered to come on board, and when he reached the deck the captain saluted him with the words, “Welcome, traitor.” The following day the unhappy man underwent a mock trial before the sailors. A boat was alongside. It contained a block, a rusty sword, and an executioner. The duke was let down into it. The executioner struck off his head, but only at the sixth blow. The tragedy was hardly finished when another commenced.

Mortimer of York had been beheaded in 1445. An Irishman, Jack Cade, pretended to be this prince, and to have escaped his executioners; he speedily stirred up revolt in the county of Kent. He assembled as many as 60,000 men, and was during several days master of London. But the adventurer could not maintain discipline among his followers. The citizens took arms to protect themselves from pillage. The promise of amnesty finally dispersed the insurgents. Cade, on whose head a price had been put, fell into a trap and was slain.

Richard of York had been connected with this insurrection, but no one dared touch him. Emboldened by impunity and by the feebleness of the Lancastrians, which the easy success of Cade had shown, he raised a small army, presented himself at the gates of London, and demanded that the Duke of Somerset, who had replaced Suffolk, be committed to the Tower. He was satisfied this time by thus proving his strength. But an heir to the throne being born in 1453, Richard did not conceal his designs; during a mental alienation of the king he caused himself to be appointed protector. The king, regaining his health, deprived him of his functions. Then he openly took arms, being aided by the great nobles, and especially by Warwick, whose wealth and talent, and also his inconstancy, gave him the title of King-maker. This famous captain, son of the Earl of Salisbury, belonged to the Nevil family, one of the most illustrious houses of England. He furnished daily support on his lands to 30,000 persons. When he occupied his London house six oxen were provided at each repast for his vassals and friends. Victor (1455) at St. Albans in the county of Hertford, Richard again obtained from the lords the title of protector. He thus accustomed himself to place his hand upon the government while leaving Henry VI his crown.

In 1456 Henry, having regained his health, resumed the authority, and the Duke of York appeared content. He was only waiting for a better opportunity of action. He thought he had found it in 1460, and five years after the day of St. Albans the second battle of this war, that of Northampton, was fought. Before the action the Yorkists fad given orders to spare the private soldiers, but to slay all the officers. Richard was again victorious, and Parliament declared him the legitimate heir. They still left to Henry VI his title of king.

In the name of her son Margaret protested, took arms, was aided by succor from Scotland, which she purchased through the cession of the stronghold of Berwick, and assembled 20,000 men. Richard marched against her with 5000. This time he was beaten and slain at Wakefield in the county of York. On the walls of York Margaret exposed his head, which in derision she adorned with a paper crown. The youngest of his sons, the Count of Rutland, scarcely eighteen years old, was butchered in cold blood after the victory. He was fleeing when stopped by Lord Clifford on Wakefield bridge. Clifford asked his name. The boy, terrified, fell on his knees. His tutor, thinking thus to save him, gave his name. “Thy father slew mine,” cried Clifford; “I wish likewise to slay thee and all thine.” This murder, followed by many others, provoked bloody reprisals. The struggle assumed an atrocious character. Massacre of prisoners, proscription of the conquered and confiscation of their property, became the rule on both sides. Always the executioner followed the soldiery.

Richard of York had an avenger in his oldest son, whom the people and then the Parliament proclaimed king at London as Edward IV. First he experienced defeat at the second battle of St. Albans, which Warwick lost. But two months after Edward himself vanquished the Lancastrians at the bloody fight of Towton, southwest of York. More than 36,000 men remained on the field of battle, of whom 28,000. wore the red rose. Margaret fled to Scotland, and thence to France, where Louis XI. loaned her 2000 soldiers, while making her promise to restore Calais to France. But the battle of Hexham on Tyne in Northumberland anew overthrew her hopes (1463). She escaped with her son only after encountering a thousand dangers, and returned to France, while Henry VI, a third time prisoner, was shut up in the Tower of London, where he remained seven years.

The crown of Edward IV, was firmly set upon his head. But by his marriage with Elizabeth Woodville, the daughter of a private gentleman, he discontented his brother, the Duke of Clarence, whom the birth of a Prince of Wales quickly deprived of his rank as heir presumptive. The powerful and haughty house of Nevil was provoked by the rapid promotion of the relatives of Elizabeth; especially Warwick was incensed, whom the king had sent as ambassador to France to demand the hand of a sister-in-law of Louis XI. Warwick and Clarence united their resentments, at first in vain, and they were obliged to take refuge in France. Queen Margaret and her most redoubtable adversary found themselves together in the same asylum. Reconciled by misfortune and by the mediation of Louis XI, who delighted in embarrassing the ally of the Duke of Burgundy, they combined against their common enemy. Warwick promised to restore the house of Lancaster. Scarcely had he disembarked in England when his tenants, his former companions in arms, and the partisans of the Red Rose flocked to him in crowds. In a few days he had 60,000 men. Edward, abandoned by his followers at Nottingham near Trent (1470), fled, without having been able to fight, to the Netherlands to his brother-in-law, Charles of Burgundy, while Parliament, docile to the wishes of the stronger party, restored Henry VI.

The Lancastrian triumph was short. After a few months Edward reappeared with a small army which Burgundy had helped him to form. Warwick succumbed at Barnet, four leagues from London, on account of the defection of Clarence, who returned to his brother. The indomitable Margaret, arriving from France with a new army, was no happier at Tewksbury in the county of Gloucester (May, 1471). This last battle was decisive. The Prince of Wales being slaughtered before the eyes of the king, Henry dead or assassinated some days after in his prison, Margaret confined in the Tower, the partisans of the Red Rose slain or proscribed, Edward remained peaceful possessor of the throne. But this security he employed only to abandon himself to pleasure. However, he issued a moment from this voluptuous repose of Charles the Bold, to commence against Louis XI an expedition which was terminated by the treaty of Pecquigny. His last years were darkened by the trial of his brother Clarence, whom he caused to be put to death (1478). In 1483, still young—only forty-two years old—he died, victim of his debauches.

Before expiring Edward IV entreated his family and his principal partisans to remain united. Apparently he felt presentiment of the tragedies in store. In fact his son, Edward V, survived him only three months.

For a long time Richard of York, Duke of Gloucester, a monster of hypocrisy and cruelty, the third brother of Edward IV, had coveted the crown. He profited by the youth of his nephew to deprive him of it. He commenced by putting to death all those who could defend him—Lord Rivers, his uncle, Sir Richard Gray, Lord Hastings—then he called in question the legitimacy of his birth, and caused him finally to be smothered in the Tower of London, together with his younger brother, by the infamous Tyrrel. The bodies of the two unhappy victims were hidden under the steps of the staircase of their prison, and Richard III was proclaimed king.

This usurpation troubled the Yorkists, and the Lancastrians took courage. Buckingham, one of those who had done most to place the crown on the head of Richard, discontented, not by his crimes, but without doubt by some pressing demand which had been denied, rose against him and called the Welshman Henry Tudor, Count of Richmond, last scion on his mother’s side of the family of Lancaster. Henry levied 2000 men in Brittany and landed in Wales. He arrived too late to save Buckingham, who was overwhelmed and slain, but he conquered Richard at Bosworth between Leicester and Coventry. The usurper, despite prodigies of valor, perished in the fight (1485). This was the last of the ten great battles of the war. The Lancastrians had been six times defeated, but the honor and the profit of the last day remained to them.

Henry caused himself to be acknowledged as King of England, and united the two Roses by espousing Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, the heiress of York. With him began the Tudor dynasty, which reigned 118 years until the advent of the Stuarts in 1603.

But by preserving, despite this politic marriage, a marked preference for the Lancastrians, Henry provoked the resentment of the Yorkists. They raised up against him two impostors. One, Lambert Simnel, a baker’s son, passed as the young Earl of Warwick, son of the Duke of Clarence; the other, Perkin Warbeck, the son of a converted Jew from Tournay, pretended to be the Duke of York, the second son of Edward IV, whom Richard had smothered in the Tower. Henry VII conquered the first at Stoke near Nottingham (1487), and the second at Towton, north of Exeter (1498). He pardoned Simnel, who found employment in the royal kitchens, but Warbeck was confined in the Tower of London. Having wished some months after to escape from this prison with the real Earl of Warwick, who was likewise detained there, he was hung at Tyburn, and the king, to end his fears, also beheaded Warwick. State prisoner from his childhood, this unhappy young man could be guilty only of cherishing regrets and hopes. But Ferdinand the Catholic had consented to bestow his daughter, Catherine of Aragon, upon the son of Henry VII. only on condition that the death of Warwick should free his future son-in-law from all disquietude. With this prince became extinct the race of the Plantagenets, who had governed England 331 years since 1154.

Thenceforth Henry reigned without opposition. The bloody War of the Roses had decimated and ruined the English aristocracy. Eighty blood members of the royal family had perished in it, and how many of the nobility ! If we are to believe Sir John Fortescue, a contemporary, under Edward IV. alone one-fifth of the lands of the kingdom by confiscation had been added to the royal domain. So the English monarchy on issuing from this war no longer encountered a powerful and haughty aristocracy, the principal obstacle which had thus far opposed it.

In the “History of the Middle Ages” we have seen how liberal the English constitution had already become by the middle of the fifteenth century. The monarchy, however, preserved an immense power. “ The person of the king was inviolable. He alone had the right to convoke the states of the realm, which he could dissolve according to his good pleasure, and whose legislative enactments could not be legalized without his consent. He was the chief of executive administration, the only organ of the nation in the presence of foreign powers, commander of the land and sea forces of the state, the fountain of justice, clemency, and honor. He possessed great powers for the regularization of commerce. Money was coined in his name. He fixed the weights and measures and determined the places wherein markets and ports should be established, dis ecclesiastical patronage was immense. His hereditary revenues, administered with economy, sufficed to defray the ordinary expenses of the government. His private possessions were vast. He was, moreover, Lord Suzerain of his realm, and in this capacity possessed an infinite Himber of lucrative and formidable rights, which enabled him to disquiet and crush those who opposed his designs and to enrich and promote without any cost to himself those who enjoyed his favor.” These determinate powers gave him who was clothed with them the perpetual determination to go beyond them. The exhaustion of the aristocracy after the War of the Two Roses furnished the opportunity.

Edward IV had not always waited for the consent of the Houses to establish and raise taxes. Henry VII went farther. This covetous and timorous king was better obeyed than Edward III, the victor of Crecy; better than Henry V, the hero of Agincourt. During his reign Parliament was rarely convoked; when it was it showed no independence, and accepted without a word the propositions submitted to it by the king. Forced loans disguised under the name of benevolences, arbitrary confiscations, proscriptions, barbarous and unjust measures which the civil war alone had brought about, acquired a sort of legality through the adhesion or the silence of the Houses. Parliament recognized the Star Chamber, a new tribunal under an ancient name, whose members were entirely devoted to the king, and which became one of the most docile instruments and most redoubtable weapons of absolute power. The Star Chamber in effect multiplied the cases which were withdrawn from any connection with a jury, and which put at the discretion of the agents of the king the fortune and the life of all those whom the king wished to strike.

The lords had preserved from the Middle Ages the right of having about them an army of servitors who aided them to disturb the country and defy justice. This was the right of maintenance. Henry VII abolished it. Moreover, he authorized the nobles to sell their entailed lands. Thereby he struck the feudal aristocracy in both present and future. By suppressing maintenances the king took away their soldiers from the nobles; by suppressing entails he prepared the division of great estates—that is to say, the ruin of the great land owners—if custom, stronger than law, had not continued to enforce the system of entail which still today exists in England.

Henry VII commenced the commercial and material greatness of his country. A treaty concluded with the Netherlands in 1496 established free exchange between the two countries; another with Denmark opened the Baltic to the English and insured them the exclusive commerce of Iceland. Following the example of the kings of the Spanish peninsula, he endeavored to direct the activity of the English toward maritime discoveries, and the Venetian Sebastian Gabotto (Cabot) was the first to carry the English flag into the island of Newfoundland, and to coast along the Floridas, where he was speedily followed by the merchants of Bristol. Henry VII also encouraged national industry by attracting to England Flemish workmen and by forbidding the exportation of wool. Finally, he rendered justice less inaccessible to the poor, and by marrying his daughter Margaret to the Scotch king James IV prepared the reunion of the two crowns which divided Great Britain. From this union dates the right of the Stuarts to the throne of England, which they ascended in 1603. Another marriage had graver consequences; I mean the betrothal of Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand the Catholic, to Arthur, the elder son of the king, and, after the premature death of this young prince, to his second son, who became Henry VIII. We shall see the schism of England from Rome issue from this marriage. Henry died in 1509, aged fifty-three years. Seized at his last moments with religious terror, he had given money necessary for the saying of two thousand masses.

As he appears to us in history this prince remains far inferior to his two celebrated contemporaries, Louis XI and Ferdinand the Catholic. As cruel as the first, as knavish as the second, he by no means possessed their political genius. Sordid avarice diminished or corrupted his most sagacious acts. Thus the law for the abolition of maintenances was in his eyes less a grand governmental measure than a pretext for police exactions and fines. One day he paid a visit to the Earl of Oxford at his castle of Henninghaw. The earl was one of the most devoted partisans of the Lancastrian line, and one of those who had most suffered for it. In order to pay honor to his sovereign he drew up along the route of Henry his servants and vassals dressed in their finest clothes. Their number and the richness of their attire made the king think that he could well strike a good blow in this opulent house. “My lord,” said he to the earl, “your generosity has been vaunted to me, but I see it is far above what I have heard. Are all these people yours? ”“ Yes, sire, and they have come to enjoy the pleasure of seeing your Majesty.” “I thank you for your good reception,” replied the king, “but I cannot suffer violation of the laws in my presence.” A suit was forthwith brought against the earl, and he was quit only by paying an enormous sum—15,000 marks.

All things seemed good to this sordid prince for filling his treasury. From his subjects he extorted money to make war; from foreigners he received it to make peace. Thus he descended into France in 1492, and by the treaty of Etaples sold to Louis XI the retreat of the English army for 745,000 gold crowns. He caused places at court, even those in the Church, to be purchased. He gave bishoprics only for ready money, and sold his pardon to the guilty. With care he sought out what persons died without heirs and seized their property by right of escheat, a procedure which very often took place in presence of legitimate heirs. His favorite ministers, Empson, Dudley, and Cardinal Morton, knew how to derive profit from everything, especially from justice. An expedient of Morton to obtain money from benevolence has become celebrated. “ If thou spendest much,” said he, “the reason is thou art rich : thou must pay; if thou spendest nothing thou art practicing economy, so keep on paying.” This infernal dilemma was called the fork and hook of Morton.

This reign inaugurated for England a despotism which lasted a century and a half, because on issuing from the War of the Roses the nation, worn out by the barren and bloody agitations of internal strife, cast itself with ardor into the pacific labors of commerce and manufacturing. Seeing the government of Henry VII second this tendency by the commercial treaties which it concluded and by the voyages of discovery which it undertook, England asked of it nothing more, and for a time forgot its Parliament and its liberties. The question of the Reformation and the struggles against Spain once more turned the attention of the English people in another direction. But after the bloody tyranny of Henry VIII, after the glorious tyranny of Elizabeth, thanks to progress in national wealth and public opinion, these recollections were to awake with indomitable energy.

England preserves a curious monument of the architecture of the age in the chapel wherein Henry VII was interred at Westminster. This is a model of the flamboyant Gothic, last period of pointed architecture.

CHAPTER IV.

SPAIN FROM 1453 TO 1521.

State of Spain at the Middle of the Fifteenth Century.—Navarre, Aragon, and Castile.—Portugal.

The Spanish people remained till then almost entirely foreign to the affairs of the other European nations. They had been obliged to conquer their soil step by step from the Moors, and this task, the first condition of their national existence, was not even yet accomplished. The southern extremity of the peninsula belonged to the Mussulmans and formed the kingdom of Granada, the last of the nine states into which the caliphate of Cordova had been dismembered. Spain had therefore lived a life apart during all the Middle Ages. She had, so to speak, only a single thought, to drive out the Moors, who were even more odious to her as Mussulmans than as foreigners.

To this isolation she was indebted for a remarkable originality. Nowhere has religion exercised a larger influence over the mind. There it was half of the fatherland.

Spain was still in the full Middle Ages; that is to say, anarchy was there at its height under the name of privileges of class, province, city, and individual.

The kings had only a shadow of power. In Castile the nobles had just obliged the feeble John II to permit the condemnation and execution of his favorite, Alvarez de Luna. The formula which the lords were wont to employ at the coronation of the kings of Aragon is well know : “We, who each are worth as much as you, and who united are more powerful than you, we make you our king and lord on condition that you preserve our fueros and immunities; if not, not.” And these were by no means empty words, souvenir of departed days, but the pure and simple expression of real facts. In Aragon there was a magistrate—called the justiza—invested with the highest jurisdiction, who had filled more than once the role of supreme arbitrator between the king and his subjects. This magistrate, whose office somewhat resembled that of the ephori in ancient Sparta, exercised the functions of supervisor of the prince and protector of the people. His person was sacred, his power and jurisdiction were almost without bounds. In doubtful cases the kings themselves were obliged to consult him. He received appeals from the sentences of the royal judges, could without appeal call up a case, and had the right of examining royal proclamations, of expelling the ministers, and of forcing them to give account, without himself having any account to render to the states. Even as a private man he could be arrested only by a decree of the cortes. But a tribunal was established to receive all the complaints brought against him.

In Castile as in Aragon the defense of public liberties was confided especially to elected assemblies, which were called, and are still called, the cortes. The cortes of Aragon were composed of four orders: (1) the clergy, (2) the barons, or ricos hombres, (3) the lower nobles, or infanzones, (4) the deputies of the cities, or procuradores. The cortes of Aragon voted the taxes, decided peace and war, coined money, revised the decisions of the tribunals, watched over the administration of the country in order to reform abuses, and had every two years a forty days’ session which the king could not dissolve. The cortes of Castile comprised only three orders—the clergy, the nobility, and the deputies of the cities. They voted subsidies only after having attended to the business of the people. Often, as in case of a royal minority, the cortes were called to act as the government of the country. In the council of the regency, established during the minority of John I, it became necessary to admit citizens equal in number, power, and insignia to the noble members of the council.

Besides the cortes, charged with defending general liberties against the king, each province possessed special liberties or privileges, called fueros. The most famous were those of Aragon and of the Basque country. The Basque provinces possessed a real independence which they have preserved all through the duration of modern times. The Catalans have more than once asserted it: in 1462 they deposed John II; in 1640 they constituted themselves a republic.

As result of all these privileges in Spain, there was no genuine patriotism, and the spirit of locality was profoundly rooted. Not only the kingdoms, but the provinces, and in the provinces the cities, lived apart. Every noble was ready to believe himself sole master in his dominions; and in recollection of their ancient immunities the grandees of Spain have preserved the privilege of remaining covered in presence of their sovereign. Finally, the three great military orders of Alcantara, Calatrava, and Compostella, or St. James, constituted by their wealth, their strongholds, and their military organization three states, as it were, in the state.

But already the turbulence of the feudal aristocracy, private wars, and the brigandage which was their consequence had brought about also the creation of the St. Hermandad. As early as 1260 the cities of Aragon, and a little later those of Castile, had united to assure the maintenance of public peace. They had instituted tribunals and levied and organized troops for repression of disorders committed upon the highways. The establishment of the St. Hermandad, or sacred brotherhood, a sort of civil guard, excited violent murmurs among the nobles. The archers of the brotherhood had more than one skirmish to sustain against the feudal bandits. But the institution withstood all the efforts made to destroy it, withstood even the vices inherent in its organization, .and at the siege of Granada rendered important service.

Let us now survey each of these states.

John of Aragon, an active and able prince, but of uscrupulous ambition, had espoused the Queen of Navarre, by whom he had one son, Don Carlos, Prince of Viana. The young prince on the death of his mother was to inherit her crown. His father retained it. The partisans of the son took arms and were beaten at the battle of Aibar (1452). The war, twice suspended, was twice renewed, and this sacreligious strife was terminated only by the death of the Prince of Viana, who was probably poisoned by his father (1461). He had two sisters—one, Blanche, the repudiated wife of Henry IV. of Castile; the other, Leonora, Countess of Foix. Don Carlos had bequeathed his rights to the former. She inherited only his misfortunes, and died in the castle of Orthez of poison administered by her sister. A granddaughter of Leonora in 1484 transferred the crown to the French house of Albret, but a second son of John of Aragon, Ferdinand the Catholic, conquered Spanish Navarre (1512) and in 1515 declared it forever united to his states. Lower Navarre north of the Pyrenees preserved its own kings until the time of Henry IV.

This John of Aragon in 1458 became King of Aragon through the death of Alphonso V, his brother. His reign was troubled by continual rebellions. The Catalans, whose privileges he violated, espoused the quarrel of the Prince of Viana. After the death of the “holy martyr,” rather than belong to John II they preferred to submit to the King of Castile, who refused their allegiance but accepted the cession of the city of Estella in Navarre; then to Don Pedro of Portugal, finally to the house of Anjou. The untimely death of John of Calabria, son of King Rene, ruined their hopes. After eleven years of war they submitted (1472). To obtain means for resistance against this insurrection John II had pledged to France Cerdagne and Roussillon in return for a loan of 350,000 gold crowns. Louis XI was not the man to let go what he had once seized. John II in 1473 failed in the attempt to recover Roussillon. He died in 1479 at the age of eighty-two. His second son, Ferdinand the Catholic, succeeded him.

In Castile the same spectacle or worse: Henry IV, who in 1454 succeeded his father, John II, rendered himself both odious and contemptible by his predilection for Bertrand de Cueva, a covetous and cowardly favorite who dishonored him. In 1459 the cortes demanded that the brother of the king, Don Alphonso, be recognized as his heir. In 1465 the nobles took arms and deposed the king in effigy. A platform was raised in the plain of Avila; thereon was put the image of Henry with scepter and crown covered by black crape. Then a herald advanced and read in a loud voice a long enumeration of the crimes of the monarch. At announcement of the first crime the Archbishop of Toledo removed the crown ; at the second the Count of Plasencia detached the sword of justice ; at the third the Count of Beneventum tore away the scepter. Finally, the royal effigy was cast from the throne to the ground. This strange ceremony was the signal of civil war, the principal actors of the scene having proclaimed as king the brother of Henry IV, Don Alphonso, who was only twelve years old. But the young king died after the indecisive battle of Medina del Campo in 1467, and Henry IV consented to recognize his sister Isabella as Princess of the Asturias, or heiress, to the detriment of his own daughter (1468). It was one of the conditions of peace that Isabella could not marry without the consent of the king. Many princes, among them the King of Portugal, and Charles, Duke of Guyenne, brother of Louis XI, sought her hand. To them Isabella preferred Ferdinand, eldest son of the King of Aragon, and espoused him secretly at Valladolid without waiting for the consent of Henry IV. The contract of marriage stipulated that the government of Castile should belong to Isabella alone.

This marriage rekindled civil war. The king no longer disavowing his daughter Jane, called Bertraneia, declared her his heiress, but was not able to assure her her inheritance. When he died in 1474 Alphonso V, King of Portugal, endeavored to support the cause of Jane, but was beaten at Toro despite the aid of the rich and powerful Archbishop of Toledo, Cavillo d’Acunha (1476). This prelate, whose turbulent humor had already troubled the reign of Henry IV, had declared against Isabella through hatred of her Aragonese husband. He was wont to say, “I placed the infanta Isabella on the throne of Castile; I shall easily be able to make her descend from it. Though I put a scepter in her hand, I will now compel her to resume the distaff.” He even resisted the menaces of the Pope, and only in 1478 became reconciled with his former protegee. Then the King of Portugal was obliged to yield; Bertraneia retired to a nunnery, and the same year Ferdinand the Catholic became King of Aragon by the death of John II (1479). The two crowns of Aragon and Castile were united.

From that day Spain existed. Isabella, endowed with stable genius, and Ferdinand, an exceedingly able man, though perfidious and disloyal, which seemed in that age an additional excellence, toiled with a vigor and constancy that never flagged to found national unity to the profit of the monarchy. The Moors still occupied the south of the peninsula. In 1462 the loss of Gibraltar closed Africa to them. The troubles of Castile suspended the war. It recommenced in 1482. Thanks to their intestine disorders, they lost the same year Alhama, the bulwark of their capital, Ronda three years after, Velez, Malaga, in 1487, Almeria in 1489; two years later Granada even was besieged. This powerful city was flanked by more than a thousand towers and still contained 200,000 inhabitants. The siege lasted nearly nine months. By accident one night the tents of Isabella caught fire. The queen desired the Spaniards to build a city on the site of the burned camp, and thus to show the Mussulmans that the siege would never be raised. Built in eighty days, this city still exists under the name of Santa Fe. Finally, pressed by famine, generally beaten in the petty combats which constantly took place under their walls, abandoned by Africa, which put forth no effort to save them, the Moors surrendered. This was the last of the “three thousand seven hundred battles” which they had waged with the Christians. Gonsalvo of Cordova drew up the articles of capitulation. These stipulated that the Mussulmans should be always governed according to their own laws, that they should keep their property and customs, and enjoy the free exercise of their faith, without being subjected to other taxes than those they paid their kings. When he reached Mount Padul, whence Granada is seen, Boabdil (Abdoul Abdallah), its last prince, cast a long look upon the city while tears bathed his face. “My son,” said to him his mother, Aischa, “you do well to weep like a woman for the throne which you were unable to defend like a man.” The domination of the Arabs in Spain had lasted 782 years. It left behind it architectural monuments of refined elegance, agriculture and manufactures carried to perfection, picturesque details in the customs, dress, and household furniture, more than one sonorous word in the language, and even in national thought a touch of delicate and flowery courtesy of which the rude Northern conquerors were utterly ignorant.

Spain was freed, but she cherished against the infidels a horror and a hatred ripened, so to speak, by eight centuries of war. The population of the peninsula presented a strange mixture of Moors, Jews, and Christians. To make the whole homogeneous by imposing a single faith, to fortify the unity of the state by the unity of religion, Ferdinand created a new Inquisition. This celebrated tribunal, which has left a terrible and an execrated name, at this its second appearance had a political rather than ecclesiastical design. Organized in Castile in 1480, the Holy Office was established four years later in Aragon, and there maintained itself despite an earnest opposition. It was then the only tribunal recognized in both countries. The king named its chief the Grand Inquisitor, and retained for his treasury the goods of the condemned. These were first Judaizing Christians and converted Moors who remained secretly faithful to Mohammed; later, innovators in politics as well as in religion. From January to November, 1481, the inquisitors sent 298 newly professed Christians to the stake in Seville, and 2000 in the provinces of Seville and Cadiz. Placed under the control of the kings, and at times suspected by the court of Rome, it was first a means of government and an instrument of despotism to defend the “two majesties” (ambas majestades), inasmuch as Ferdinand, who at the capture of Granada had acquired for himself and his successors the surname of Catholic, so judiciously confounded religion and monarchy that the same name served to designate God and the king, and thus rebellion became sacrilege. “What still more alienated men’s minds,” said the Jesuit Mariana, “was seeing that this tribunal inflicted upon children the punishment of their parents; that the accuser was not known and was not confronted with the accused; that the witnesses were not known. Moreover, nothing seemed harder than those secret investigations, which disturbed commerce and society.” The Dominican Thomas de Torquemada was the first Grand Inquisitor. In the eighteen years during which he directed this blood tribunal 8000 persons were burned, 6500 were burned in effigy or after death, 9000 underwent the punishment of branding, of confiscation of goods, or of perpetual imprisonment.

In 1492 the Inquisition was sufficiently strong to obtain the banishment of the Jews after having despoiled them of their goods. They were forbidden to carry away either gold or silver, but only articles of merchandise. Contemporary writers estimate at 800,000 the number of those who left Spain. The larger number of these perished or were made to endure atrocious sufferings. Thus fanaticism immolated an entire people, who had long been the principal, the only, representatives of arts, manufactures, and science. A decree deprived the Moors of the religious liberty which the treaty of Granada had left them, and thus many went into exile. Their definite expulsion was not pronounced till a century later (1609). So Spain gained its religious unity, but she lost her arts, manufactures, and commerce, of which the Jews and the Moors were the most active agents.

Through the Inquisition the king controlled consciences; through the right conferred on him by the Pope of appointing to all the Church livings he gained a great ascendancy over the clergy; by having himself elected grand master of the orders of Calatrava, Alcantara, and St. James he acquired military power and considerable revenues. This last order—the most important of them all, it is true—could equip 1000 lancers. The reunion of these dignities to the crown was at first only personal, but Ferdinand caused the Pope to declare it perpetual. Through the reorganization of the St. Hermandad, of which he declared himself the protector, and which he subordinated to the council of Castile, the monarchy acquired the means of controlling the national police, and under pretext of punishing or repressing private wars among the barons, it razed their castles. In 1481 forty-six castles were demolished in the province of Galicia alone and the highest heads fell. Commissioners were sent into all the provinces to listen to the complaints of the people against the grandees and to supervise the judges, who in case of betrayal of trust were to restore sevenfold. Finally, by the famous bulle de la cruzada the king obtained a considerable share in the sale of indulgences.

United within, Spain abroad assumed an importance she had never possessed. For the crown of Castile Columbus discovered the new world. Ximenes gave it Oran on the coast of Africa (1509), and Pedro de Vera the Canaries, whose native population, the Guanches, was exterminated. A stopping place, important for the navigation of the Atlantic, was thus acquired for Spain. For the crown of Aragon Ferdinand conquered the kingdom of Naples (1504), and took away Navarre from Jean d’Albret (1512), thereby closing to the advantage of Spain one of the two gates of the Pyrenees. He already held the other through Roussillon, which Charles VIII had restored to him in 1493.

The death of Isabella came near separating the two kingdoms. The queen left only a daughter, Jane the Foolish, married to the archduke Philip the Fair, son of Mary of Burgundy and of Maximilian of Austria, consequently already sovereign of the Netherlands. Discontented with her son-in-law, the queen by will-bequeathed the regency of Castile to her husband. The Castilians reluctantly submitted to the last wishes of their great sovereign, and Philip needed only to disembark in Spain to seize the power. But he died soon afterward, and Ferdinand, thanks to the support of the famous Cardinal Ximenes, Archbishop of Toledo, was recognized by the cortes Regent of Castile during the minority of his grandson Charles, son of Philip the Fair.

However, the unity of Spain was not yet made sure. Ferdinand through dislike of Philip the Fair had contracted a second marriage with Germaine de Foix, niece of Louis XII, in whose favor the French king renounced his claim to Naples. This union was childless. A project of bequeathing Aragon to his second grandson at the expense of the first, whom he did not love, came to nothing. Ferdinand, inspired on the bed of death (1516) with the grand thought of the unity of Spain, bequeathed all his crowns to Charles, who had already gathered the heritage of Isabella, and who was still to gather that of his grandfather, the emperor Maximilian. Philip II was right in saying when speaking of King Ferdinand, “To him we owe all.”

Ximenes, Archbishop of Toledo and Grand Inquisitor, was Regent of Castile until the arrival of the young king, then in Flanders. An austere man, with a mind of rare vigor, he had anticipated the Reformation by making it himself; at least he had brought back many monastic Spanish orders to rigid discipline; to reanimate the religious spirit in the country, he had conducted at his own expense a crusade into Africa under the walls of Oran, of which he made himself master. On the death of Isabella he administered Castile, and kept it quiet after the death of Ferdinand. Stern to others as to himself, he remained a monk under the Roman purple and in the palace of kings; but he no more tolerated resistance to the faith than to the prince. He burned the heretics and curbed the lords. One day the grandees asked him what were his credentials. “There they are,” he replied, pointing to formidable artillery and to a body of troops drawn up under the windows of the palace.

Charles, who in Spain was Charles I and in the empire Charles V, at first committed only errors. He disgraced Ximenes and surrounded himself with Flemish favorites. When in 1519 Spain learned that he had obtained the imperial crown and. that he had accepted it, she feared, with reason, that she was to see her blood and money sacrificed to the ambition of the new emperor. Charles despised these murmurs and embarked for Germany, but his departure was the signal for an insurrection which spread from Toledo all through Castile. The insurrected cities united in a confederation which took the name of the Holy League (Junta Santa), and refused to lay down arms until the emperor had abolished the pecuniary privileges of the nobility. The aristocracy then separated its cause from that of the citizens and rallied around the sovereign. The army of the league was beaten at Villalar, and its chief, the noble Don Juan de Padilla, died upon the scaffold (1521).

Charles V then completed the work of Ferdinand and Isabella. He compelled the Moors of the province of Valencia to be baptized, and all those of Granada to renounce their costume and language. He cited before the tribunal of the Holy Office the bishops who had declared for the communeros. The clergy was obliged to bow the head beneath the weapon which it itself had furnished. Many others bowed it; the privileges of the cities were abolished, and Charles deprived the cortes of their importance by compelling them to vote the taxes before the consideration of complaints, and by forbidding the deputies any preliminary reunion. The nobles refusing to pay their share of the state expenses, he ceased to summon them to the cortes. They appeared no longer in the armies, now composed of mercenaries, nor at the court, crowded with Flemings.

So the king triumphed both over the citizens and over the nobles—an injurious victory, which was one of the principal causes of the decline of Spain. Thenceforward the activity of this great nation was repressed by a despotism which knew not, like that on the other side of the Pyrenees, how to give glory in exchange and to prepare the way for civil equality.

At the southwest extremity of the peninsula the tiny kingdom of Portugal was then casting a brilliant light. The Capetian house of Burgundy, which had founded this kingdom, was then perpetuated only by an illegitimate branch, that of Avis, which reigned since the glorious day of Aljubarota, when John I the Bastard had beaten his competitor, the King of Castile (1385).

The new dynasty, offspring of popular reaction and national sentiment, at first respected public liberty. John I had convoked the. cortes twenty-five times. The minority of Alphonso V, surnamed the African (1438-81), was favorable to the grandees; a civil war broke out, then followed useless but glorious expeditions into Africa, with the capture of Arzila and Tangiers, and an unfortunate intervention in Spain, where Alphonso sustained the rights of Jane of Castile, daughter of Henry IV. Conquered at Toro (1476), he was forced to solicit the assistance of France. Louis XI. did not greatly love adventurous expeditions; he gave him nothing, but he hindered him from shutting himself up in a monastery, preferring to see at Lisbon a prince friendly to France, hostile to Castile and Aragon, rather than to count one monk more, though a king, in his abbeys.

John II (1481-95), the successor of Alphonso V, was the Louis XI of Portugal, and a Louis XI still more energetic than he of France. At the very commencement of his reign he revoked in the cortes of Evora all the concessions made to the nobility to the detriment of the royal domain; he took away from the lords the right of life and death over their vassals, and subjected them themselves to the jurisdiction of the crown officers (1482). This reform excited a revolt; the Duke of Braganza put himself at the head of the malcontents. John II had him seized and beheaded (1483).

The nobles then betook themselves to attempts at assassination. The king with his own hand stabbed their chief, his cousin, the Duke of Viseu. Appalled at such examples, the nobility bowed its head. The independence of the national assemblies was likewise broken; the cortes reappeared only three times in fourteen years. Then the royal despotism found itself solidly established; in return it gave a powerful impulse to commerce and the spirit of adventure, and the Renaissance was encouraged. Lisbon, declared a free port, received the Jews driven from Spain; the islands of Cape Verd were discovered; the Cape of Good Hope was passed and the nation launched itself into that adventurous career wherein, following the footsteps of Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque, it was destined to attain a grandeur ephemeral, but for a moment dazzling.

Emanuel the Fortunate harvested what John II had sown. During the course of his reign, as tranquil at home as it was glorious abroad, discoveries succeeded each other with marvelous rapidity, and in the midst of the riches of India Portugal forgot its ancient spirit of independence. Emanuel let the cortes fall into disuse; during the last twenty years of his reign he did not convoke them once.

So the momentous fact which we have already recognized in France, Aragon, and Castile was reproduced in Portugal: the monarchy became preponderant. “John taught all human kings the art of reigning,” said Camoens. When, learning of his end, the great Isabella cried, “The man is dead,” everybody understood that he who had just passed away was the energetic King of Portugal.

CHAPTER V.

GERMANY AND ITALY FROM 1453 TO 1494.

Divisions of Germany and Italy.—The Emperors Frederick III. and Maximilian.—Italy in the Second Part of the Fifteenth Century. Divisions of Germany and Italy. The emperors Frederick III. and Maximilian.

We have just seen vast monarchies and powerful royalties formed in France, England, and Spain. The three great nations of the West, reunited each under a national chief who introduced order and obedience in the interior, were therefore ready for action abroad, and in fact were going to act beyond their frontiers.

At the center of the European continent two nations, on the contrary, persisted in continuing to live the life of anarchy as in the Middle Ages. Divided, consequently feeble, Germany and Italy were to tempt the ambition of every conqueror, and so one after the other to behold the armies of Europe march upon their soil to decide their quarrels. Italy became the first European battlefield ; when victory had given it to one of the assailants, Germany took her turn. By the woes of repeated invasions these two countries had to pay for the ambition and pride of their cities and princes.

In Germany the house of Austria had just reseized the imperial scepter, no more to lose it. But the indolent Frederick III was incapable of attaching real power to the title of emperor. During a reign of fifty-three years (1440-93) he forgot the empire and was busied only in aggrandizing his Austrian domains, which he raised to an archduchy in 1453. The electors vainly menaced him with deposition; he did not abandon his systematic indifference. He permitted the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, to break the feudal bond which attached the Netherlands to the empire; and if he disappointed the ambition of the Bold by refusing him the title of king, he made few efforts to save Neuss and the Swiss, who rescued themselves all alone, the first by obstinate resistance, the second by three victories. In 1460 a civil war broke out in Germany itself. Frederick was satisfied with putting its author, the Elector Palatine, under the ban of the empire; the elector replied to this impotent sentence by adding to his castle at Heidelberg a tower which he called Trutz-Kaiser (Plague on the Emperor), and which merited its name. Another bad civil war continued from 1449 to 1456 between many princes and seventy-two cities. More than two hundred villages were burned on one side or the other. Frederick remained simple spectator of the struggle, in which the Swiss, however, had taken part.

In his own dominions Frederick when he drew the sword was less indolent without being more successful. His predecessor, Albert of Austria, had left to his son, Ladislaus the Posthumous, the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary, together with the duchy of Austria. Frederick detained the young king, and when the energetic demands of the Bohemians and Hungarians obliged him to let him go free he, however, kept the crown of St. Stephen, to which in the eyes of the Hungarians seemed attached the independence of their country. Mohammed II entered Constantinople, and in 1456 he conducted his victorious troops before Belgrade, the last bulwark of Christianity. There was then a glorious role to play; Frederick left it to John Huniadi, “the White Knight of Walachia.” A Franciscan, Giovanni Capistrano, led to the Hungarian hero 40,000 Germans whom his preaching had inspired. Huniadi penetrated into the city, caused the siege to be raised, but died of his wounds, bequeathing to his son, Mathias Corvinus, his glory and his popularity.

Two years after Ladislaus died. Frederick claimed to be his heir. Everywhere he failed. The Bohemians elected as king Podiebrad, the Hungarians Mathias Corvinus, and Frederick was obliged to share the archduchy of Austria with his cousin Sigismund and his brother Albert. He endeavored to take their part by force, was beaten, and would have been captured at Vienna had it not been for the assistance brought him by Podiebrad. The death of Albert gave him naturally what he coveted, but after that of Podiebrad in 1471 Bohemia escaped him still; Vladislaus, the oldest son of Casimir IV, King of Poland, was elected. Frederick hoped that at least a long rivalry was going to exhaust Bohemia and Hungary, where Mathias, aided by the Venetians and Scanderbeg, sustained gloriously the contest against the Ottomans. But the two kings agreed ; Mathias found himself free to call the emperor to account for his intrigues; for his underhand dealing in Hungary, and for his cowardly abandonment of the cause of Christianity and civilization. The Austrian troops were beaten ; Vienna was captured in 1485, and remained in the hands of Mathias until his death in 1490.

Yet this emperor “of very little heart,” as says Comines, this archduke always defeated, founded the greatness of his dynasty. The marriage of his son Maximilian with Mary of Burgundy gave the Netherlands, and later still Spain, to Austria. We have already seen how this marriage was brought about, and what were the relations of Frederick III with Charles the Bold.

Maximilian was educated, eloquent, and brave. He loved letters, arts, and sciences, and cultivated them with success; but his character was light and fickle. He never lingered long upon the same matter or in the same place, always upon the highways of Europe and engaged in every adventure, making, in a word, much noise and accomplishing little. He occupied himself, however, somewhat more with Germany than did his father. The anarchy had become such that certain states had taken the initiative of the most energetic measures. In 1488 the Swabian cities and princes formed a league at Esslingen; the extent of the disorder can be judged by this fact, that in a few years the confederation had razed no less than 144 fortresses whose masters were from time immemorial in the habit of plundering travelers and of pillaging the country. But a partial and temporary effort was not enough; a system of general and permanent repression was necessary if public peace was to be established.

This was the end sought by the diet of Worms when promulgating the famous constitution of 1495, which forbade under penalty of fine and forfeiture all war between the states. In order to punish violations of this fundamental law, or to prevent them, a permanent tribunal was instituted whose members were chosen by the emperor from a list of candidates presented by the states. This tribunal took the name of the Imperial Chamber.

It remained now to put in execution the decrees of this supreme court. For this they provided by the division of Germany into ten districts—a wise project, which the emperor Albert II had already tried, and which was realized during the reign of Maximilian by the diets of Augsburg (1500) and of Treves (1512). All the German territory, all Bohemia and its dependencies, were divided into ten departments, which had each its director. Each district maintained at its expense a body of troops which were placed under the command of the prince director and charged with the maintenance of public peace. The posts, instituted by Maximilian after the example of those which Louis XI had organized in France, were also a bond between the different parts of the territory.

Unhappily for Germany these institutions of public police only half succeeded. The diet, which alone exercised legislative power, distrusted the Austrian emperors; they on the other hand hindered the putting in operation of rules and laws established by the sovereign assembly. Thus the Aulic Council, created in 1501 by Maximilian for the administration of his hereditary estates and for the decision of cases reserved for the emperor, diminished the authority of the Imperial Chamber. Limited at first to the Austrian estates, the jurisdiction of the new tribunal, while dependent upon the court of Vienna, extended little by little beyond its bounds and made a powerful competition with the Imperial Chamber, whose members were badly paid and their decisions badly obeyed. The encroachments of the Aulic Council were to be one of the causes of the Thirty Years War.

Upon the whole, at the end of this period the Holy German Empire, by whatsoever title the pride of its chief was flattered, was in reality an agglomeration, without stability, of princes and cities who had hardly other bonds than ancient recollections, similarity of customs, and identity of language—bonds that were to prove themselves exceedingly fragile on the day when thundered the storm of religious passion.

Even already the most powerful of the German princes were uneasy at this activity of Maximilian. Upon their lands they had seized the absolute power just as the kings had done in their kingdoms. “They do everything that they please,” said an almost contemporary writer. The revolution remarked in France, England, and Spain had then also taken place in the empire, but to the profit of the princes, not to that of the emperor. In 1502 the seven electors concluded the electoral union, through which they bound themselves to meet annually in order to provide means for maintaining their independence and for arresting the encroachments of imperial authority. Their fears were groundless; two things were lacking to give Maximilian success, money and perseverance. All his life he rushed from one project to another, and all his life he was, as the Italians called him, Massimiliano pochi danari (Max the Penniless).

The political history of the empire is as empty under Maximilian I as under Frederick III. And it is less as emperor that he takes part in the chief affairs of Europe than as father of the ruler of the Netherlands or as Archduke of Austria. It is under this title that he signs with Charles VIII the treaty of Senlis, which brings him Artois and Franche Comté (1493), that he carries on a disastrous war against the Swiss and concludes with them the peace of Basel (1499), that he joins the league against Charles VIII, later that of Cambrai against Venice (1508), that later still he joins the coalition against Louis XII, and that he gains the battle of Guinegate (1513). A quarrel arising as to the Bavarian succession, in which he interfered, brought him many cities and much territory upon the Inn; the death of a count of Goritz and Gradisca endowed him with those two territories; finally, that of the archduke Sigismund of the Tyrolese branch reunited in his hands all the possessions of Austria. His life was sufficiently prolonged to see the immense extension given to the power of his house by the marriage of Philip the Fair with Joanna the Foolish, heiress of Spain, Naples, and the New World; and he prepared the marriage of his grandson Ferdinand with the sister of Louis II, which assured him the succession to the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia. But he saw also the beginning of what was one of the principal obstacles to this power, the Reformation. He died in 1519, and Luther at that date had already broken with Rome. It is reported that to familiarize himself with death Maximilian carried his coffin with him during the last year of his life.

At the moment of the invasion of the French, Italy was the center of all the Mediterranean commerce. There was then in Europe no country where agriculture was so wisely conducted, where business was so active. “The manufactures of silk, wool, flax, skins, the quarrying of Carrara marble, the foundries of Maremma, the manufacture of alum, sulphur, and bitumen, were still in full activity. The system of cultivation by petty farmers, so superior at this epoch to whatever was carried on in the rest of Europe, assured Italy a fertility augmented in Lombardy by the hydraulic labors of Ludovico il Moro, in Tuscany by precautions taken against inundations and stagnant waters, which even today render desolate countries formerly fertile. The villages, where the peasants intrenched themselves behind ramparts, bore witness to a comfort which corresponded to the splendor of the great cities; and in them there were so many charms in the relations of life, so much courtesy and a courtesy so exquisite, so much intelligence, in a word, of that which renders life sweet and easy, that the Italian, the richest, the happiest, the most civilized of European nations, could treat other nations as barbarians who were always ready to admire its splendid cities and to sit in its learned schools” (Zeller).

Despite all that, Italy was the most feeble of European nations. She had artists and merchants, but not a people. She had condottieri, but no soldiers. The Italians, so skillful in conspiracy, no longer knew how to fight: at the battle of Anghiari they contended four hours and nobody was killed save a horseman suffocated in the crowd. Such were the bitter fruits of despotism ; as there no longer existed liberty or fatherland there no longer existed citizens or courage.

More divided than Germany, Italy had not even a name which was accepted by all, as that of the emperor, nor authority which was at least sometimes respected, as that of the diet. Her different states, completely independent, had no other bond among them than similarity of language and customs.

In the middle of the fifteenth century a new situation was beginning for the peninsula. It was no longer Guelph or Ghibelline, pontifical or imperial; above all, it was no longer republican, but princely. A condottiere, Sforza, had founded a ducal line at Milan, and many others had equally good fortune in Romagna and Emilia. A family of bankers, the Medici, ruled at Florence, the King of Aragon at Naples. It was important to know if these princes were going at least to act in concert to defend against the foreigner the independence of Italy which they had subjected. Without speaking of the pretensions and the cupidities which menaced from the side of France and Germany, great dangers were created for Italy by the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans, and by the efforts, already successful, to find a sea route to India. Her existence was perhaps to be called in question, certainly her prosperity. In fact by the fall of the Eastern Empire she had lost the principal source of her commerce. If now the Portuguese closed to her the route to India via Alexandria by rendering this route useless, and if the Ottomans, her enemies upon the Greek peninsula, were to make themselves masters of Egypt, Italian commerce would be annihilated. Let us add that these Ottomans, who were soon to capture Egypt, launched their cavalry into Friuli and their fleets upon the Italian shores. The doge was no longer the sole spouse of the Adriatic.

Apparently in the presence of such perils the Italians would have no other thought than union. This was in fact the first sentiment inspired in them by the terrible blow which had just smitten the Greek Empire. They forgot their ancient animosities and swore eternal concord at Lodi (1454), a precarious peace due to the wisdom of the great men who were then the arbiters of Italian destinies: Francisco Sforza, Duke of Milan; Cosmo de Medici, to whom Florence had decreed the beautiful surname Father of the Country; Alphonso V the Magnanimous; Popes Calixtus III and Pius II (1455-64), who desired that every morning the “bell of the Turks” should be rung throughout all Christendom.

But Alphonso died (1458). The Angevine prince John of Calabria claimed his crown and Italy was thrown into inextricable confusion. The Pope diverted Scanderbeg from his heroic struggle to mix him up with those impious wars (1462). He sustained John of Calabria. Francisco Sforza, who also dreaded a French pretender, the Duke of Orleans, heir of the Viscontis, whom he had dispossessed, took sides for the Aragonese, and aided Ferdinand, King of Naples, to repulse his competitor (1463).

Peace, re-established in the peninsula by the defeat of John of Calabria at Troja, was anew compromised by the almost simultaneous death of Cosmo (1464), of Francisco Sforza (1466), and of Pius II, who expired at Ancona in sight of the fleet upon which he was to cross to Greece (1464). In 1478 coalition against Florence; in 1482 coalition against Venice. The Ottomans took advantage of this condition of things. They surprised Otranto (1480), butchered or made slaves 12,000 Christians, and sawed the governor in two. Italy grew accustomed to the dread of the Ottoman as she had grown accustomed to her tyrants. The generation of superior men whom she possessed at the middle of the century left only unworthy successors. Let us look into the interior of each state and then we shall see under the splendor of a material and corrupt civilization all the signs of political and moral death.

At Milan the Sforzas since 1450 had replaced the Viscontis. The fortune of this family was remarkable. One day at the beginning of the fifteenth century the peasant Attendolo while he was working in the fields saw soldiers pass; he threw down his spade and ran to enlist; he possessed courage and intelligence; he changed his name into that of Sforza (the brave), became a captain, chief of a company of bandits, the most dreaded condottieri of Italy, and bequeathed his renown, his talents, his soldiers, and a number of strongholds to his natural son, Francisco Sforza, who obtained from the Pope the march of Ancona, then, in the interests of Venice and Florence, defeated the Duke of Milan, who disarmed him by the gift of his daughter’s hand. The duke dead, Milan became a republic and engaged Sforza to protect her against Venice. He defended her at first and conquered the Venetians, but then subdued the Milanese and obliged them to proclaim him duke (1450). He reigned sixteen years, respected by the sovereigns, who sought his alliance, as did Louis XI, to whom he sent succor during the League of Public Welfare. His unworthy son, Galeazzo Maria, extended over all the duchy a rapacious and violent tyranny which no longer respected the honor or life of the citizens. In the midst of his guards he was assassinated by the grandees in the church of St. Stephen (1476). He left a child eight years old, Giovanni Galeazzo, who succeeded him under the guardianship of his mother, Bonna of Savoy, and of the chancellor Simonetta. But the uncle of the young prince, Ludovico Sforza, surnamed il Moro, put he minister to death, drove away the regent, and governed in he name of his nephew, whom he declared of age (1480). Quickly throwing aside the mask, he shut up Giovanni Galeazzo in the castle of Pavia with his young wife Isabella, granddaughter of the King of Naples, who menaced the usurper with war if he did not restore the power to the legitimate sovereign. It was then that Ludovico, fearing there would be formed a league of Italian states against him, invited Charles VIII to cross the Alps.

Nevertheless the Milanais was always one of the richest countries of the world, and the Lombards continued as in the Middle Ages to be bankers for a part of Europe, thanks to the abundance of capital which a perfected agriculture, flourishing manufactures, and extended commerce collected in their hands. They hurried in crowds to the fair of Beaucaire and to that of Lyons, which Louis XI had just established. At Bruges and Flanders they possessed a great entrepot of their merchandise, which from there spread into the north of France, into Germany and England; the vessels of the Hanseatic League thence transported it even as far as the Scandinavian countries. They also cultivated the arts. Ludovico il Moro retained at Milan the illustrious Leonardo da Vinci and continued the cathedral, that marble mountain covered by an entire population of statues which is eclipsed in grandeur only by St. Peter’s at Rome.

As to Genoa, ceded by Louis XI to Francisco Sforza in 1464, she recovered a few moments of liberty after the death of Galeazzo Maria in 1476, only to fall once more under the yoke of Ludovico il Moro, who obtained from Charles VIII the investiture of Genoa as a fief of the French crown (1490).

The first rank among Italian states belonged to Venice. During fifty years she had profited by every discord to increase her power. From 1423 to 1453 she acquired four provinces on the Italian peninsula, but these ruinous acquisitions had diminished her revenues 100,000 ducats. When the terrible news of the capture of Constantinople by Mohammed II. fell upon Italy, she rallied to the other princes and signed with them the peace of Lodi; but the following year she forgot the crusade and treated with Mohammed II. When reproached with this hasty defection the Venetians replied: “We are Venetians first, Christians second.” However, their possessions in the Archipelago and in Greece rendered peace with the Ottomans impossible. War broke out in 1464; the Ottomans captured Negropont and Scutari, crossed the Piave, and ravaged everything as far as the lagoons. From Venice they saw the conflagration. She treated once more, and this time submitted to shameful conditions; she paid tribute to the Mussulmans (1479). But four years earlier she had acquired Cyprus by maintaining in the island one of her patricians, Catherine Cornaro, “the daughter of St. Mark,” who declared the republic her heir in 1489. Venice did not scruple to demand of the Sultan of Egypt investiture of this ancient kingdom of the Lusignans.

Venice seemed then at the apogee of her power. With her 3000 ships, her 30,000 sailors, her numerous and veteran army, her famous factories of plate glass, silk stuffs, and gold and silver objects, her immense commerce, and her despotic but skillful government, she could have played a mighty role against the stranger ; but “she remained apart in her importunate and mad ambition, believing that the wind blew always on her stern, and never considering it a fault to gain at the expense of each; thus was she hated by all.” This hatred was first shown in 1482. The Duke of Ferrara had attempted to establish salt works at Commachio in order to escape buying salt, according to the treaties, in the warehouses of Venice. Venetian opposition to this attempt was the pretext for a league formed by all the princes against her. The true cause was the jealousy which Venice inspired. The King of Naples, Milan, Mantua, Florence, and soon the Pope, sustained the Duke of Ferrara. But Venice braved the armies of the allies like the excommunications of the Pope, and at the peace gained Polesina from Rovigo.

She had also a government fully able to bestow on her, if not liberty, at least power and wealth. As far as possible she had developed her aristocracy. The authority of the doge, already so sustained by the Grand Council, and then by the Council of the Ten, had become purely nominal after the creation in 1454 of the three state inquisitors, now the real masters of Venice. They could without giving account of their decision pronounce sentence of death and dispose of the public funds. Justly the ambition of these three men was feared, to whom all authority was committed; hence two with the approval of the doge could condemn the third. The three inquisitors of state had the right of making their own statutes, and of changing them as they pleased, so that the republic was ignorant even of the law which governed it. To this regime Venice owed an internal peace which contrasted with the ceaseless agitations of the other Italian cities. Everywhere was admired the wisdom of this government, which maintained its subjects in tranquillity, and knew how at the same time to procure their welfare by assuring them labor. No city was vaunted like Venice for its pleasures, and for the luxurious life there led by the rich and ofttimes by the people. But there the spy and the informer reigned, being encouraged, paid, and organized, and terror hovered over every head, so that material prosperity was insufficient. The noble who spoke ill of the government was twice warned, the third time drowned; every workman who exported any commodity useful to the republic was stabbed. Judgment, execution, all was secret. The mouth of the lion of St. Mark received the anonymous denunciations, and the waves which passed under the Bridge of Sighs carried away the corpses.

To preserve herself from the ascendancy of generals and the influence of armies Venice employed only condottieri and foreign chiefs, near whom she kept as supervisors two proveditors. Thus without peril she was unable to undertake offensive war and win conquests, for she floated always between the fear of too great success, which would render the general too powerful, and of treason, which would make him pass to the enemy. The trial of the. condottiere Carmagnola had been carried on during eight months without the count having any intimation of the danger which he ran ; he was left at the head of his army and heaped with honor when he had been already condemned to perish (1432).

On the other side of Italy in the valley of the Arno rose Florence the Beautiful. Long troubled by the quarrel of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, she had found peace again only in 1343, when all the classes of the population were confounded in political equality. The nobles, long held apart from government, were raised to the rank of citizens. The constitution of Florence was remarkable; the executive power belonged to a college of six priors which was renewed every two months; the legislative power to two assemblies, the council of the people and the council of the commune, whose members were nominated for four months. In order to avoid cabals they had recourse to lot, both for the nomination of the councilors and for that of the priors. Moreover, the general assembly of the people remained sole sovereign, and must be convoked every time that there was a question of modifying fundamental law.

Just as the Athenian democracy excluded the metoikoi, or domiciliated strangers, from its bosom, the Florentine democracy did not admit to political power the non-privileged artisans, the Ciompi, or Wooden Shoes. The latter rose in 1378. But the citizens remained masters of authority.

This victory profited only the great families of the city, first, that of the Albizzis; second, that of the Medicis. This house, which was to become so powerful, had rendered itself popular by raising the citizens of the second class, or, as they said at Florence, the minor arts, to political rights. After Sylvestro, Cosmo de Medici acquired by commerce, and especially by banking, an immense fortune. He used it to assist the poor and to gain friends among the rich by lending them money. He found himself quickly the benefactor or the creditor of the majority of the Florentine citizens. At this the Albizzis took umbrage and banished him. But this exile established his power; at the end of a year Cosmo returned in triumph (1434). It depended only upon himself whether he would assume the supreme power. He cared little for a sounding title : his authority was only the more absolute and more durable. All public functions, all the offices, belonged to his friends. He was in appearance a simple banker; in reality he was the master, and continued such all his life (1434-64).

Those were glorious years for Florence. The shadow of republican government existed, and that sufficed for much. Peace and order reigned to the profit and satisfaction of all. Letters and arts flourished, thanks to the protection of Cosmo and to the increasing progress of industry and commerce; thus grateful Florence decreed to her chief the name of Father of his Country. He expended 6,000,000 dollars in the construction of palaces, hospitals, and libraries, but he led himself the most simple life, and instead of seeking princely alliances for his children, he married them into Florentine families, so that his sons remembered they were the equals of their fellow-citizens before being their rulers. But after the first generation, heredity of power in a family of parvenus produced its too common results; the Medicis forgot their citizen origin, considered themselves as princes, and Florence lost even the appearance of its ancient liberty.

This liberty in 1465 was demanded back from Pietro I, by the nobles. He foiled their plots, but one of his sons fell their victim (1478). Pope Sixtus IV, blinded by his affection for one of his nephews, Girolamo Riario, wished to conquer for him a principality in the Romagna. This would have destroyed the Italian equilibrium and violated the treaty of Lodi. The Florentines protested. Irritated by this resistance, Riario took part in the conspiracy of the Pazzis. They were to assassinate Guiliano and Lorenzo de Medici during mass at the elevation of the Host (1478). Guiliano was slain, but Lorenzo escaped and punished the murderers. Among the accomplices was the Archbishop of Pisa, Salviati, who was hung in his pontifical robes at a window of his palace. Therefore an excommunication was launched against the Medici and war burst forth, in which all the Italian powers took part. During this war the Ottomans sacked Otranto.

This apparition of the crescent on the very soil of Italy appalled the princes. Sixtus IV. opened his eyes and consented to treat. Peace was anew established by the prudence of Lorenzo de Medici, who betook himself to Naples in order to negotiate with Ferdinand.

Lorenzo deserved his surname of Magnificent and Father of the Muses by his zeal for learned men and artists. He welcomed the Greeks driven from Constantinople, had Plato translated by Ficino, published an edition of Homer by Chalcocondylas, encouraged Angelo Politano, an erudite poet, le Poggio, a learned man of letters, and had cast by Ghiberti the doors of the baptistery of St. John, “worthy,” said Michael Angelo, “to be the gates of paradise.” In 1490 Lorenzo, ruined by his magnificence, was almost bankrupt. Florence to save him from this disgrace became bankrupt herself. She reduced by one-half the interest on the public debt and by one-fifth the nominal value of the specie deposited in the treasury, whence it was issued at its former rate. A single voice dared to protest against this omnipotence of the Medici, that of the Dominican monk of Ferrara, Girolamo Savonarola. He wished to restore to the clergy purity of manners; to the people, liberty; to letters and the arts, religious sentiment. When Lorenzo was on his deathbed in 1492 he adjured him to give back liberty to Florence, demanding it as the price of absolution. Lorenzo refused. “Then,” cried the monk, “the time has come. A man will arise who in a few weeks will invade Italy without drawing the sword. He will pass the mountains like Cyrus, and the rocks and fortresses will fall before him.”

The son of Lorenzo, Pietro II, showed only incapacity. He isolated himself from the plebeians, lived like a prince, and aroused violent hatred by his debaucheries. Two parties were then formed in the city—that of the young nobles, the arrabiati, or madmen, and that of the people, the frateschi, or friends of the monks. Savonarola was at the head of the latter. The disorders of Pietro only confirmed the monk in the thought that a terrible punishment was reserved for Italy; and he himself was one of those who made the highways easy for the foreign conqueror. “O Italy! O Rome!” said Savonarola. “The barbarians are coming famished like lions and the mortality shall be so great that the grave diggers will go through the streets crying, ‘Who has any dead? and then one will bring out his father, another his son... O Rome! I repeat it to thee, do penance do penance, O Venice! O Milan!”

The Council of Basel had ended the schism of the Church, and after 1447 Christianity had but one chief, Nicholas V, a lettered man and protector of the learned. The conspiracy of Stefano Porcaro (1453), who endeavored to establish at Rome the republican government, and the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans, against whom he himself preached a crusade in 1455, had troubled his pontificate. His successor, the Spaniard Alphonso Borgia, Pope under the name of Calixtus III., had prepared the way for honors to his family, which was destined to a shameful celebrity.

In 1458 the pontifical tiara had been given to the former secretary of the Council of Basel, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, celebrated as Pius II. Pope Paul II (1464-71) was still animated by the grand thought of the crusade. He sustained Scanderbeg, he armed the Persians against the Ottomans; but after him commenced a deplorable period in the history of the papacy. During more than half a century the pontiffs, many of whom were, however, remarkable for their genius, forgot the interests of Christianity to think only of their family or their temporal dominions. We have seen the efforts of Sixtus IV (1471-84) to create a sovereignty for his nephew. The feeble Innocent VIII (1484-92) did not make the pontificate enter upon better ways. After him the Church had the grief and shame of seeing in the chair of St. Peter Alexander VI, the second Pope of the Borgia family. His election was disgraced by the most flagrant simony, his pontificate by debauchery, cruelty, and perfidy. He was not deficient, however, in skill and penetration; he excelled in council, and knew how to conduct important affairs with marvelous address and activity. It is true he always played with his word, but the Italy of that day held integrity and good faith in exceedingly small esteem.

The Roman state was then a prey to a crowd of petty tyrants and desolated by their bloody rivalries. There were wars, assassinations, and continual poisonings. At the very doors of Rome the Colonnas and Orsinis boasted that they were the handcuffs of the Pope. Alexander VI succeeded by means of ruse and cruelty in destroying or subjugating all these lords. In this undertaking no one seconded him better than his son, Caesar Borgia, who had chosen as device, “Aut Caesar, aut nihil.” Handsome, educated, and brave, but corrupt and evil, this man, capable of striking off the head of a bull with a single blow of his saber, and of pursuading everything he wished by the enchantment of his speech, used hardly any weapons except lying, poison, and the dagger. He meditated his blows calmly, took his time, and acted in silence; secretissimo, says Machiavelli, his secretary and panegyrist. “What has not been done by noon,” he often repeated, “will be done in the evening.” No crime was repugnant to him; he contributed more than any other to merit for Italy the surname “the Poisonous” given her by the writers of the time. However, he could not reap the fruit of his efforts. Scarcely had he acquired the Romagna when his father died. Says Machiavelli, “He had prepared everything, foreseen everything, save that he was to be at death’s door at the moment when his father was dying.” The father and the son had drunk by inadvertence a poison which they destined for a cardinal. As he had betrayed everyone so he was betrayed; imprisoned some time by Ferdinand the Catholic, he lived afterward as an adventurer, and was slain before a paltry town of Navarre.

In the kingdom of Naples the victory of Troja in 1462 had placed the crown upon the head of Ferdinand I, but this prince apparently endeavored to rouse a new revolution by reviving hatred instead of effacing the marks of civil strife. The harshness of his government having excited his nobles against him, he deceived them by promises, invited them to a festival of reconciliation, and at his own table had them seized and then butchered. The people were not better treated than the grandees. Ferdinand monopolized for himself all the commerce of the kingdom; he sold bishoprics and abbeys, made money out of everything, and knew not how to employ this money in defense of the state : thus he permitted the Ottomans to seize Otranto in 1480, to massacre its population, and to saw its governor in two. In 1484 the Venetians also captured Gallipoli and Policastro on the shores of his kingdom. Such an administration rendered a catastrophe inevitable and imminent.

At the end of the fifteenth century Italy was a country of rich and corrupt civilization; the marvels of the arts and the splendor of letters poorly concealed its precocious decline. War was made only by the arms of the condottieri, who displayed scientific tactics in the skirmish, where blood flowed little, and who gained their pay as cheaply as possible. Fatal sign for a people is the loss of military virtues: to live well one must be ready to die well; and Italy trembled before a sword; so she held in honor the ruse, the perfidy, and the lie. With poison or the poignard, questions were resolved which elsewhere or in other times would have been cut with the sword. Italian diplomacy was a school of crimes. Surfeited with riches and given up to anarchy, the peninsula was a prey reserved to him who should dare to seize it first. Charles VIII. wished to take it, but before leading him thither let us behold other conquerors who also were approaching its shores.

CHAPTER VI.

Mohammed II. (1451-81).—Bafezid II. and Selim I. (1481-1520)

For the Ottomans the capture of Constantinople had guaranteed their domination in Europe.

Despite their conquests even to the banks of the Danube and the shores of the Adriatic, Constantinople while independent was for them a perpetual menace. One disaster could deprive them of all, could hurl them back into Asia, whence the Greeks and the fleets of Christian powers, at last conscious of the danger, would have prevented their coming forth.

Constantinople having fallen, their establishment in Europe was no longer a camp which a hurricane could have swept away. The castle of the Seven Towers replaced the desert tent.

Mohammed II, the seventh Ottoman emperor, was then obeyed from the walls of Belgrade on the Danube to the center of Asia Minor. This empire, already formidable, had two enemies: on the west the great body of Christian nations who had easily remained indifferent to the fate of the schismatic Greeks, but who would not permit themselves to be submerged by the invasion which now reached their frontiers; on the east, at the center of Asia Minor, the Seldjoukian principality of Caramania (Koniah, Kaisarieh), and behind this principality after its fall had come (1464) the Persians, animated against the Ottomans by the hatred which nearness often excites between two peoples, and which religious differences envenom. We shall see Mohammed II and his successors hurl themselves against these two barriers; and the two enemies of the new empire which menaces both Europe and Asia assist each other in arresting its progress. To a success upon the Danube often replied an attack along the Euphrates; to a victory in Asia, a new war in Europe. Nor let us forget among the enemies of the Ottomans the intrepid troop of the knights of Rhodes, of that island which hung upon the flanks of Asia like a vigilant sentinel of Christianity.

To them let us add the raias (flocks), that is to say, the subjects. For the moment they were docile and trembling, but more numerous than their masters, at least in Europe. Later they constituted a danger for the empire, inasmuch as Mohammed II granted them privileges which made of them a national body, having their own laws, tribunals, and chiefs, as also their own language and religion.

The Ottoman government was a despotism like that of all Asiatic peoples. The sultan, or Padishah, exercised absolute power. His subjects were only his slaves, whom he exalted or reduced to nothingness according to the caprices of his will.

This despotism was limited by the forces even upon which it rested. Thus the Koran was placed above the sultan. The law of the Prophet was the law of all—of the master as well as of the subjects. Although the mouphti and oulema, charged with interpreting the Book, had no political office, the people often listened to their voice when they invoked the sacred name of God against an iniquitous or dangerous measure. But those whom the sultans had most to fear were those who served them best, the Janissaries. This chosen soldiery had already revolted under Mourad II. If we except the nascent army of France, the Ottomans had at this period an incontestable superiority over the Europeans in military affairs. They had more discipline, a larger experience in the art of fortifying strongholds and of casting cannon, and in the skillful employment of field or siege artillery. Moreover, no Christian power then had the capacity or the idea of maintaining fit standing army so numerous as that of the sultan. Let us add to these material means the stimulating energy of fanaticism and of martial ardor, and we shall comprehend the rapidity of their progress. “Paradise is found in the shadow of the sword,” had said the Prophet. All the Christian nations were still aristocratic societies; in the Ottoman nation the most perfect spirit of equality prevailed. The brave man could aspire to everything, for even in the densest crowd and among the slaves, the sultan sought the most courageous and most skillful to make of him a pasha or vizier. In all these characteristics we recognize that the Ottomans possessed a great superiority over the Christians in means of action and instruments of conquest. This explains their unbroken successes during a century which is filled by three great heroes—sultans Mohammed II, Selim I, and Souleiman I—and the feeble Baiezid II.

To the first is due the glory of having completed the conquest of the Greek Empire. He made himself master of the duchy of Athens, of Corinth, and of almost the whole Morea (1458). In 1461 he took Trebizond, the following year the island of Lesbos, and two years later the principality of Caramania, whose chief, through his attacks upon the Ottoman rear in Asia Minor, had often arrested their progress in Europe. The Ottomans resembled then a formidable advancing tide beating alternately its opposite shores; an ocean, dried up today.

Venice, which, as we have seen, openly avowed that she put her interests above those of Christianity, had obtained from Mohammed II (1454) a treaty favorable to her commerce. Thus she made small efforts to second Pope Pius II, who succeeded, however, in uniting the Italian powers against the Ottomans, but who died of fatigue at Ancona at the moment of embarkation (1464). At last Venice, alarmed by their progress, commenced the war on her own account, but with no result save ravaging the enemy’s coasts.

Against Italy a serious attack was difficult. But Hungary, situated on the very highway of invasion, had everything to fear; she accepted the struggle; Huniadi, her regent, shut himself up in Belgrade at the confluence of the Save and the Danube; all the forces of Mohammed II broke themselves against it (1456). This valiant man fell in the midst of his triumph. His son, Mathias Corvinus, replaced him worthily. Elected king in 1458, he defended the line of the Danube with success against all the attacks of the sultan. Hungary owes him her first standing army (the Black Guard), her cannon foundries, and her university at Buda. He was the greatest of her kings (1458-93). He would perhaps have inflicted signal disaster upon the Ottomans if he had not wasted his strength in an impolitic struggle against Bohemia and against Frederick III of Austria, who refused to restore to Hungary the crown of St. Stephen, and whose capital, Vienna, Mathias occupied for five years.

Arrested at the north by the Hungarians, who defended energetically the passage of their rivers, and by the Roumanians, who intrenched themselves in their immense fortress the Carpathians, Mohammed II returned southward and attacked Albania. Its conquest became easy when Scanderbeg died (1467). This intrepid chieftain, who by his courage had made himself Prince of Albania (Epirus), had during twenty-three years repulsed all the Ottoman attacks and gained over them twenty-two victories. After his death the Ottomans divided his bones to wear them at their necks as amulets (1468). Croia, his principal fortress, did not surrender until ten years later. In 1470 an immense fleet disembarked an Ottoman army in the Venetian island of Negropont. After four terrible assaults the capital of the island, which bore the same name, was carried by storm; not one of its defenders or of its inhabitants was spared. Happily Mohammed II. was then called to the other extremity of his empire by the Tartar Ouzoun Hassan, who had just founded in Persia the dynasty of the White Sheep, and whom Pope Paul II stirred up to attack the Ottomans. Hassan was beaten (1473). This diversion had none the less its desired effect. The Moldavians, commanded by Stephen IV, the “athlete of Christ,” defeated an Ottoman army near Racovitz (1475); in Albania and Greece the Ottomans failed in two attacks against Scutari and Lepanto. Mohammed II was not accustomed to defeat. His pride was roused. On the one side he launched his fleet against Caffa, a rich Genoese emporium on the Black Sea, which was ruined; and on the other a countless cavalry penetrated as far as the Piave and cast terror throughout all Italy (1477).

Humbly Venice demanded peace, and obtained it by restoring Scutari, and by an annual tribute wherewith she purchased the liberty of carrying on commerce in the Black Sea (1479). The following year an Ottoman fleet seized Otranto, on the coast of the kingdom of Naples. But this city was recaptured, and the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, Pierre d’Aubusson, defended Rhodes against the Grand Vizier, who after three months of ineffectual efforts raised the siege. Mohammed II none the less formed the most redoubtable plans. He wished to march against the Mamelukes of Egypt, swore to feed barley to his horse upon the altar of St. Peter at Rome, and, when hearing of the ceremony whereby the Doge of Venice espoused the Adriatic, promised “to send him quickly to the bottom of that sea in order to consummate his marriage.” Sickness arrested all these designs. He died at Nicomedia at the age of fifty-three (1481).

Baiezid II, a savant rather than a soldier, had to struggle against his brother Zizim, or Djem, who disputed the power. Thanks to the genius of his Grand Vizier, Achmet, Baiezid gained the day. Not long after he strangled him to whom he owed the empire. The conquered Zizim fled to Rhodes. The knights gave him a brilliant reception. But to avoid a war with the sultan Pierre d’Aubusson consented, in return for an annual tribute of 40,000 sequins, to prevent Zizim from returning to Turkey. He was confined in a commandery of Poitou. From there he fell into the hands of Pope Alexander VI. Charles VIII during his Italian expedition exacted that this brother of Baiezid should be given up to him. Zizim could aid him in the conquest of Constantinople. The unfortunate prince was delivered up, but had been already poisoned. The rumor spread that the sultan had promised 300,000 ducats to the sovereign pontiff if he would rid him of his brother.

Despite his pacific inclinations the sultan was obliged to occupy the Janissaries; he conquered Bosnia, Croatia, and Moldavia. The Ottomans, already masters of Wallachia, then dominated the two banks of the Danube (1489). But Baiezid soon returned to his favorite tastes, the study of letters, and a short war against Venice alone troubled the repose of this indolent and voluptuous prince. He was deposed by his discontented soldiers. Selim, his fourth son, girded on the saber and commenced his reign by parricide; he poisoned his father, then murdered his brothers and their children, so there should be left no rivals for him to fear (1512).

The movement of conquest, interrupted under Baiezid II, recommenced with Selim the Ferocious. To his warlike ardor Selim owed the affection of the Janissaries and consequently the power. He justified their, hopes; two Grand Viziers were successively put to death for having asked him in what direction his imperial tent should face; that is to say, toward what country he was to direct his arms. A third arranged the tents toward the four corners of the world. “That is the way,” said he, “I wish to be served.” During the eight years of his reign without cessation he led his Janissaries to new enterprises. First he attacked Persia, where Ismail had just founded the Sophi dynasty. There was not only political rivalry between the two peoples, but also religious hate; the Persians are Schiites; that is to say, they acknowledge no legitimate successor of the Prophet save Ali, the fourth caliph, and his descendants the Ottomans recognize the legitimacy of Aboubekir, Omar, and Othman, and defer to their theological explanations; they accept, in a word, the tradition, or Sunna, whence their name Sunnites. It is among them a popular saying that the death of a single Schiite is more agreeable to God than that of seventy Christians; so before entering upon the campaign the sultan did not fail to make in his empire a rigorous search after heretics; he found 40,000, who were all put to death. This horrible massacre inaugurated the war. The two armies met near Tauris in Aderbaidjan and engaged in a terrible battle. The Ottomans conquered, thanks to their artillery; but they had lost 40,000 men, and this day is still for them a day of mourning (1514). The Janissaries compelled Selim to retire; the only result of the bloody victory was the temporary possession of Tauris.

The Mamelukes had ruled for more than two centuries in Egypt and Syria. This powerful military republic was an object of disquietude and jealousy to the Ottomans. Selim passed the Taurus at the head of 150,000 men and penetrated into Syria, which was opened to him by the treason of the Governor of Damascus and Aleppo. A great battle was fought near the latter city; the conquered Mamelukes lost their sultan, the heroic Kansou-Al-Gouri, who died of exhaustion and rage after having slain with his own hand forty enemies.

Syria submitted to the sultan (1516). The victory of Gaza and another near Cairo gave him Egypt, where he was received as liberator by the native population. The Copts delivered to him more than 20,000 Mamelukes, whom he slaughtered in a single day and whose dead bodies were thrown into the Nile. Despite this massacre Selim was obliged to employ a part of the Mameluke beys in the new administrative organization which he gave Egypt; and the Copts as well as the fellahs gained from the Ottoman conquests only an aggravation of their misfortunes (1517). The submission of Egypt brought about that of the Arab tribes; the Shereef of Mecca came to offer to the conqueror the keys of the Kaaba, and Selim found himself master of the three holy cities, Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. In 1518 a successful expedition against the Persians acquired for him the Diarbekir, or the upper part of the Tigris and Euphrates basin.

At Cairo Selim had found Motavakkel, last descendant of Abbas the Caliph, whom he brought to Constantinople, where he died in obscurity. But Motavakkel had before this intrusted to him the standard of Mohammed, and had resigned to his hands his spiritual authority. So the sultan became the Commander of the Faithful, the heir of the Prophet, and held at once, in the language of the Middle Ages, the two swords, that of temporal authority and that of spiritual power.

The conquest of Egypt had another result. The capture of Alexandria by the Ottomans resulted in dealing a mortal blow to Venice; her communications with the East were thenceforward interrupted.

To these vast acquisitions the sultan added that of Algiers, which a pirate, Horouk, surnamed Barbaroussa, son of a potter of Mitylene, had in 1516 conquered from the Spaniards. On the death of Horouk his brother, Khaireddin, succeeded. But seeing himself too weak to resist the Arabs and the Christians, he addressed himself to the Porte, which in return for a formal act of submission granted him the title of bey, together with 2000 Janissaries, artillery, and money. Thanks to this assistance Khaireddin drove the Spaniards from the fort which they occupied near the city, and by sagacious labors made the harbor of Algiers a redoubtable place of rendezvous for his pirates.

So in a few years Selim had almost doubled the empire of the Ottomans. Its dominion extended from the Danube to the Euphrates, and from the Adriatic to the cataracts of the Nile. Masters of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, where they possessed all the shores, the Ottomans had just acquired the important port of Algiers on the western basin of this European sea. The despotic form of their government assured secrecy to their policy and unity to their military operations.

Finally, no army in Europe equaled the militia of the Janissaries. At that moment Selim died, and Souleiman the Magnificent girded on the saber in the mosque of Eyoub. He was to be the rival of his two great contemporaries, Francis I and Charles V, the friend of the one, the enemy of the other (1520).

George Grote's History of Greece FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE CLOSE OF THE GENERATION CONTEMPORARY WITH ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
VOLUME I.	Legendary Greece: FROM THE GODS AND HEROES TO THE FOUNDATION OF THE OLIMPIC GAMES (776 BC)
VOLUME II.	EARLY HISTORY OF GREECE
VOLUME III.	THE AGE OF THE DESPOTS AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE WESTERN COLONIES
VOLUME IV.	THE FOUNDATION OF THE DEMOCRACY AT ATHENS AND THE RISE OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE
VOLUME V.	PERSIANS AND GREEKS.
VOLUME VI:	FROM THE THIRTY YEARS’ TRUCE, FOURTEEN YEARS BEFORE THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR, TO THE PEACE OF NIKIAS
VOLUME VII:	FROM THE PEACE OF NIKIAS DOWN TO THE OLIGARCHICAL CONSPIRACY OF THE FOIR HUNDRED AT ATHENS
VOLUME VIII.	THE SOCRATIC AGE
VOLUME IX.	FROM THE RETREAT OF THE TEN THOUSAND TO THE PEACE OF ANTALCIDAS
VOLUME X.	FROM THE PEACE OF ANTALCIDAS TO THE ERA OF DIONYSUUS OF SYRACUSA
VOLUME XI.	B.C. 394-336. TIMOLEON THE CORINTHIAN AND PHILIPS THE MACEDON
VOLUME XII.	ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

History of India.
From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century
From the Sixth Century B. C. to the Mohammedan Conquest, Including the Invasion of Alexander the Great
From the Mohammedan Conquest to the reign of Akbar the Great. A.D .712-1555
From the Reign of Akbar the Great to the Fall of the Moghul Empire
From the first European Settlements to the Founding of the English East India Company
The European Struggle for Indian Supremacy in the Seventeenth Century
From the Close of the Seventeenth Century to the Present Time

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		George Finlay, (1799-1875), British historian and participant in the War of Greek Independence (1821-32) known principally for his histories of Greece and the Byzantine Empire.

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CONSEQUENCES OF THE POLITICAL REVO­L UTI0N.—FIRST EUROPEAN WARS (1494-1559).

BOOK III.

REVOLUTION IN INTERESTS, IDEAS, AND CREEDS.

BOOK IV.

THE CATHOLIC RESTORATION AND THE RELIGIOUS WARS.—PREPONDERANCE OF SPAIN.

BOOK V.

THE ASCENDENCY OF FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XIII. AND LOUIS XIV. (1610-1715).

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THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.—GREATNESS OF ENGLAND, RUSSIA, AND PRUSSIA.

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PRELIMINARIES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

BOOK I. REVOLUTION IN THE POLITICAL ORDER, OR DEFINITIVE RUIN OF THE POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS OF THE MIDDLE AGES, AND A NEW SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT.

CHAPTER I. STATE OF EUROPE AT THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

CHAPTER II.

FRANCE FROM 1453 TO 1494

CHAPTER III.

ENGLAND FROM 1453 TO 1509

CHAPTER IV.

SPAIN FROM 1453 TO 1521.

CHAPTER V.

GERMANY AND ITALY FROM 1453 TO 1494.

CHAPTER VI.

Mohammed II. (1451-81).—Bafezid II. and Selim I. (1481-1520)

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Cristo Raúl (Editor)

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ITALY AND HER INVADERS (THOMAS HODGKIN )

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de JOHN CODMAN ROPES (Author), Cristo Raul (Editor)

A HISTORY OF THE PAPACY FROM THE GREAT SCHISM TO THE SACK OF ROME

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A History of the Popes from the Great Schism to the Sack of Rome. A.D. 1378-1525 Jewels of the Western Civilization Book (COMPLETE SET)

George Grote's History of Greece

FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE CLOSE OF THE GENERATION CONTEMPORARY WITH ALEXANDER THE GREAT.

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CONSEQUENCES OF THE POLITICAL REVOL UTI0N.—FIRST EUROPEAN WARS (1494-1559).