ITALY
233
ITALY
and the Fredericks. The former power of empire and
papacy was now eagerly divided up between their
more or less authorized representatives, and soon the
"age of the despots", the nubes tyrannorum, set in,
bold and resourceful men who kept and increased on
all sides the power they had once obtained. The Vis-
conti and Sforza at Milan, the Baglioni at Perugia, the
Malatesta at Ravenna, the Sealigers at \'erona, and a
hundred others are types of a masterful and unique
race that dominated for personal ends the prevailing
anarchy (J. A. S\-monds, "The Age of The Despots",
New York, 1888). The great Spanish captain and
cardinal, Gil d' Albornoz, between 1350 and 1370 re-
stored in great measure the papal authority in its
hereditary possessions (Wurm, "Cardinal Albornoz",
1894), but it was not until after the close of the West-
ern Schism (1417) that in Martin V the States of the
Church again recognized in a practical way the domi-
nation of the pope (Von Reumont, " Gesch. d. Stadt
Rom", Berlin, I8tj7).
of Trent (1545-63), the lives of holy reformers like St.
Charles Borromeo, the new orders anil congregations,
and the combined religious, ecclesiastical, and theo-
logical activities known as the Counter-Reformation
(Canto, " Gli eretici d' Italia", Florence, 1865-67; see
Protestantism; Socini.vnism; Bruno, Giord.\no).
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offer a rather sad spectacle in the various politico-ecclesias- tical conflicts of Catholic states with the Holy See, in large measure, however indirectly, a result of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), e. g. Naples apropos of the so-called Monorchia Sicula; the conflict of Ven- ice in 1605-07 with Paul III, on which occasion its state-theologian, Fra Paolo Sarpi, contributed power- fully to the Venetian opposition; the stubborn pur- pose of Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, to control fully all larger ecclesiastical appointments in his state ; the offensive attitude of Louis XIV apropos of liis ambassador's impossible privileges (1685), and other similar troubles. To these may be added the pohtical
Fifteenth-century Italy beheld the famous reform
councils of Basle (1431), Ferrara-Florence (1438-39),
the vain attempts at a parliamentary organization of
the Roman Church, the equally vain efforts at re-
union with the Greeks, the fall of Constantinople
(1453), the rapid and influential development of a
pagan-minded humanism (SjTnonds, "The Revival of
Learning in Italy", New York, 1888; Burckhardt,
"The Culture of the Renaissance") and of the fine
arts, the moral disorders of some high-placed ecclesias-
tics, offset however by an extraordinary development
of sanctity (St. Bernardine of Sienna, St. John Capis-
tran, St. Antonine of Florence, St. Frances of Rome,
and others). For a while the well-known "five
states" of Italy (Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples,
Rome) represented the political order, but from the
end of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth
century Spain and the pope divided the mastery of the
peninsula until early in the eighteenth century. After
vain efforts to establish its suzerainty at Naples and
Milan, France was obliged to abandon the rich prize,
and after the first quarter of the sixteenth century no
longer repeated its earlier attempts at the hegemony
of the peninsula. The Protestant Reformation made
little headway in Italy, owing to the vigorous measures
of the civil and ecclesiastical order, the antipathetic
genius of the people, the Inquisition (reorganized at
Rome, 1542), the Society of Jesus (1540), the Council
workings of Jansenism (see Jansenius and Jansen-
ism; also L'nigenitus) and GaUicanism (q. v.), and
the concern for the safety of Christendom against the
encroachments of Islam. By the Treaty of Utrecht
(1713-14) Austria succeeded Spain in Northern Italy
(Mantua, Milan) and later (1737) obtained the Grand
Duchy of Tuscany. Savoy received Sardinia (1720)
and by the middle of the century, Naples and Sicily,
Parma and Piacenza acknowledged the rule of Span-
ish Bourbons. The ecclesiastical relations of the new
powers with the Holy See, much troubled in the pre-
vious fifty years, were placed on a more satisfactory
basis by a series of concordats, with Sicily in 1741,
Sardinia in 1742, and Milan in 1745 (\'incenzo Nussi,
"Concordata" etc., Rome, 1870). The Patriarchate
of Aquileia, whose territory lay partly in Austria and
partly in the RepubHc of Venice, was divided into two
archiepiscopal sees, Gorz for Austria and Udine for
Venice. Italy was henceforth alternately the instru-
ment of Spanish or Austrian policy, as was seen
when in 1767 the Bourbons of Naples, Parma, and
Piacenza expelled the Jesuits, and in 1786 when the
ill-famed Sj-nod of Pistoia promulgated in Italy the
anti-ecclesiastical principles and measures of the -Aus-
trian Emperor Joseph II (see Pius VII, Pope; Ricci,
SciPio). Religious life nevertheless flourished in
Italy where the orders of the Redemptorists (1732)
and the Passionists (1741) were established by their
