The future hope of Italy, however, was growing in a remote
and hitherto neglected corner. Emmanuel Philibert, duke of
Savoy, represented the oldest and not the least illustrious reigning
house in Europe, and his descendants were destined to achieve
for Italy the independence which no other power or prince
had given her since the fall of ancient Rome. (See Savoy, House of.)
When Emmanuel Philibert succeeded to his father Charles III. in 1553, he was a duke without a duchy. But the princes of the house of Savoy were a race of warriors; and what Emmanuel Philibert lost as sovereign he regained as captain of adventure in the service of his cousin Philip II. The treaty of Câteau Cambresis in 1559, and the evacuation of the Piedmontese cities held by French and Spanish troops in 1574, restored his state. By removing the capital from Chambéry to Turin, he completed the transformation of the dukes of Savoy from Burgundian into Italian sovereigns. They still owned Savoy beyond the Alps, the plains of Bresse, and the maritime province of Nice.
Emmanuel Philibert was succeeded by his son Charles Emmanuel I., who married Catherine, a daughter of Philip II. He seized the first opportunity of annexing Saluzzo, which had been lost to Savoy in the last two reigns, and renewed the disastrous policy of his grandfather Charles III. by invading Geneva and threatening Provence. Henry IV. of France forced him in 1601 to relinquish Bresse and his Burgundian possessions. In return he was allowed to keep Saluzzo. All hopes of conquest on the transalpine side were now quenched; but the keys of Italy had been given to the dukes of Savoy; and their attention was still further concentrated upon Lombard conquests. Charles Emmanuel now attempted the acquisition of Montferrat, which was soon to become vacant by the death of Francesco Gonzaga, who held it together with Mantua. In order to secure this territory, he went to war with Philip III. of Spain, and allied himself with Venice and the Grisons to expel the Spaniards from the Valtelline. When the male line of the Gonzaga family expired in 1627, Charles, duke of Nevers, claimed Mantua and Montferrat in right of his wife, the only daughter of the last duke. Charles Emmanuel was now checkmated by France, as he had formerly been by Spain. The total gains of all his strenuous endeavours amounted to the acquisition of a few places on the borders of Montferrat.
Not only the Gonzagas, but several other ancient ducal
families, died out about the date which we have reached. The
legitimate line of the Estensi ended in 1597 by the
death of Alfonso II., the last duke of Ferrara. He
left his domains to a natural relative, Cesare d’Este,
Extinction
of old ducal families.
who would in earlier days have inherited without
dispute, for bastardy had been no bar on more than one occasion
in the Este pedigree. Urban VIII., however, put in a claim to
Ferrara, which, it will be remembered, had been recognized a
papal fief in 1530. Cesare d’Este had to content himself with
Modena and Reggio, where his descendants reigned as dukes
till 1794. Under the same pontiff, the Holy See absorbed the
duchy of Urbino on the death of Francesco Maria II., the last
representative of Montefeltro and Della Rovere. The popes
were now masters of a fine and compact territory, embracing
no inconsiderable portion of Countess Matilda’s legacy, in
addition to Pippin’s donation, and the patrimony of St Peter.
Meanwhile Spanish fanaticism, the suppression of the Huguenots
in France and the Catholic policy of Austria combined to
strengthen their authority as pontiffs. Urban’s predecessor,
Paul V., advanced so far as to extend his spiritual jurisdiction
over Venice, which, up to the date of his election (1605), had
resisted all encroachments of the Holy See. Venice offered the
single instance in Italy of a national church. The republic
managed the tithes, and the clergy acknowledged no chief above
their own patriarch. Paul V. now forced the Venetians to
admit his ecclesiastical supremacy; but they refused to readmit
the Jesuits, who had been expelled in 1606. This, if we do not
count the proclamation of James I. of England (1604), was the
earliest instance of the order’s banishment from a state where
it had proved disloyal to the commonwealth.
Venice rapidly declined throughout the 17th century. The loss of trade consequent upon the closing of Egypt and the Levant, together with the discovery of America and the sea-route to the Indies, had dried up her chief source of wealth. Prolonged warfare with the Ottomans, Decline of Venice and Spain. who forced her to abandon Candia in 1669, as they had robbed her of Cyprus in 1570, still further crippled her resources. Yet she kept the Adriatic free of pirates, notably by suppressing the sea-robbers called Uscocchi (1601–1617), maintained herself in the Ionian Islands, and in 1684 added one more to the series of victorious episodes which render her annals so romantic. In that year Francesco Morosini, upon whose tomb we still may read the title Peloponnesiacus, wrested the whole of the Morea from the Turks. But after his death in 1715 the republic relaxed her hold upon his conquests. The Venetian nobles abandoned themselves to indolence and vice. Many of them fell into the slough of pauperism, and were saved from starvation by public doles. Though the signory still made a brave show upon occasions of parade, it was clear that the state was rotten to the core, and sinking into the decrepitude of dotage. The Spanish monarchy at the same epoch dwindled with apparently less reason. Philip’s Austrian successors reduced it to the rank of a secondary European power. This decline of vigour was felt, with the customary effects of discord and bad government, in Lower Italy. The revolt of Masaniello in Naples (1647), followed by rebellions at Palermo and Messina, which placed Sicily for a while in the hands of Louis XIV. (1676–1678) were symptoms of progressive anarchy. The population, ground down by preposterous taxes, ill-used as only the subjects of Spaniards, Turks or Bourbons are handled, rose in blind exasperation against their oppressors. It is impossible to attach political importance to these revolutions; nor did they bring the people any appreciable good. The destinies of Italy were decided in the cabinets and on the battlefields of northern Europe. A Bourbon at Versailles, a Habsburg at Vienna, or a thick-lipped Lorrainer, with a stroke of his pen, wrote off province against province, regarding not the populations who had bled for him or thrown themselves upon his mercy.
This inglorious and passive chapter of Italian history is continued to the date of the French Revolution with the records of three dynastic wars, the war of the Spanish succession, the war of the Polish succession, the war of the Austrian succession, followed by three European treaties, Wars of Succession. which brought them respectively to diplomatic terminations. Italy, handled and rehandled, settled and resettled, upon each of these occasions, changed masters without caring or knowing what befell the principals in any one of the disputes. Humiliating to human nature in general as are the annals of the 18th-century campaigns in Europe, there is no point of view from which they appear in a light so tragi-comic as from that afforded by Italian history. The system of setting nations by the ears with the view of settling the quarrels of a few reigning houses was reduced to absurdity when the people, as in these cases, came to be partitioned and exchanged without the assertion or negation of a single principle affecting their interests or rousing their emotions.
In 1700 Charles II. died, and with him ended the Austrian family in Spain. Louis XIV. claimed the throne for Philip, duke of Anjou. Charles, archduke of Austria, opposed him. The dispute was fought out in Flanders; but Lombardy felt the shock, as usual, of the French and Spanish Succession. Austrian dynasties. The French armies were more than once defeated by Prince Eugene of Savoy, who drove them out of Italy in 1707. Therefore, in the peace of Utrecht (1713), the services of the house of Savoy had to be duly recognized. Victor Amadeus II. received Sicily with the title of king. Montferrat and Alessandria were added to his northern provinces, and his state was recognized as independent. Charles of Austria, now emperor, took Milan, Mantua, Naples and Sardinia for his portion of the Italian spoil. Philip founded the Bourbon line of Spanish kings, renouncing in Italy all that his Habsburg predecessors had gained. Discontented with this diminution
