Spanish-Austrian Ascendency - 1527-1700
It was high time, after the sack of Rome in 1527, that Charles V should undertake Italian affairs. The country was exposed to anarchy, of which this had been the last and most disgraceful example. The Turks were threatening Western Europe, and Luther was inflaming Germany. By the treaty of Barcelona in 1529 thepopeand emperor made terms. By that of Cambray in the same year France relinquished Italy to Spain. Charles then entered the port of Genoa, and on November 5th met Clement VII. at Bologna. He there received the imperial crown, and summoned the Italian princes for a settlement of all disputed claims. Francesco Sforza, the last and childless heir of the ducal house, was left in Milan till his death, which happened in 1535.
The republic of Venice was respected in her liberties and Lombard territories. The Este family received a confirmation of their duchy of Modena and Reggio. and were invested in their fief of Ferrara by the pope. The mar quisate of Mantua was made a duchy;and Florence was secured, as we have seen, to the Medici. The great gainer by this settlement was the papacy, which held the most substantial Italian province, together with a prestige that raised it far above all rivalry. The rest of Italy, however parceled, henceforth became but a dependency of Spain. Charles V., it must be remembered, achieved his conquest and confirmed his authority far less as emperor than as the heir of Castile and Aragon. A Spanish viceroy in Milan and another in Naples, supported by Rome and by the minor princes who followed the policy dictated to them from Madrid, were sufficient to preserve the whole peninsula in a state of somnolent, inglorious servitude.
In 1534 Alessandro Karnese, who owed his elevation to his sister Giulia, one of Alexander VI's mistresses, took the tiara with the title of Paul III. It was his ambition to create a duchy for his family ; and with this object he gave Parma and Piacenza to his son Pier Luigi. After much wrangling between the French and Spanish parties, the duchy was confirmed in 1586 to Ottaviano Farnese and his son Alessandro, better known as Philip II's general, the prince of Parma. Alessandro's descendants reigned in Parma and Piacenza till the year 1731.
Paul III's pontificate was further marked by important changes in the church, all of which confirmed the spiritual autocracy of Rome. In 1540 this pope approved of Loyola's foundation, and secured the powerful militia of the Jesuit order. The Inquisition was established with almost unlimited powers in Italy, and the press was placed under its jurisdiction. Thus free thought received a check, by which not only ecclesiastical but political tyrants knew how to profit. Henceforth it was impolitic to publish or utter a word which might offend the despots of church or state; and the Italians had to amuse their leisure with the polite triflings of academies. In 1545 a council was opened at Trent for the reformation of church discipline and the promulgation of orthodox doctrine. The decrees of this council defined Roman Catholicism against the Reformation ; and, while failing to regenerate morality, they enforced a hypocritical observance of public decency. Italy, to outer view, put forth blossoms of hectic and hysterical piety, though at the core her clergy and her aristocracy were more corrupt than ever.
In 1556 Philip II., by the abdication of his father, Charles V, became king of Spain. He already wore the crown of the Two Sicilies, and ruled the duchy of Milan. In the next year Ferdinand, brother ot Charles, was elected emperor. The French, meanwhile, had not entirely abandoned their claims on Italy. Gian Pietro Caraffa, who was made pope in 1555 with the name of Paul IV, endeavored to revive the ancient papal policy of leaning upon France. He encouraged the duke of Guise to undertake the conquest of Naples, as Charles of Anjou had been summoned by his predecessors. But such schemes were now obsolete and anachronistic. They led to a languid, lingering Italian campaign, which was settled far beyond the Alps by Philip's victories over the French at St. Quentin and Gravelines.
The peace of Cateau Cambresis, signed in 1559, left the Spanish monarch undisputed lord of Italy. Of free commonwealths there now survived only Venice, which, together with Spain, achieved for Europe the victory of Lepanto in 1573 ; Genoa, which, after the ineffectual Fiescbi revolution in 1547, abode beneath the rule of the great Doria family, and held a feeble sway in Corsica, and the two insignificant republics of Lucca and San Marino.
When the male line of the Gonzaga family expired in 1627, Charles, duke of Nevers, claimed Mantua and Montserrat in right of his wife, the only daughter of the last duke. Carlo Emmanuele was now checkmated by France, as he had formerly been by Spain. The total gains of all his strenuous endeavors amounted to the acquisition of a few places on the borders of Montserrat. Not only the Gonzagas, but several other ancient ducal families, died out about this time. 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, 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 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 Delia 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, Philip's Austrian successors reduced the Spanish monarchy to the rank of a secondary European power. This decline of vigor 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 awhile 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 Hapsburg 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.
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