The Borgias by G.J. Meyer Page A

the Alps southward the peninsula was a crazy quilt of large and small city-states, some of which were more or less autonomous while others were subject to domineering neighbors. They differed vastly in character and had long since shown themselves to be incapable of sustained cooperation. To the extent that their people saw themselves as members of a single Italian nation, they did so by virtue of more or less sharing a common language (“more or less” because that language was splintered into a babel of dialects) and a culture unlike any to be found elsewhere. But their nationhood, such as it was, had never come close to producing unity. That this remained true while France and Spain were beginning to coalesce under increasingly powerful monarchs meant that Italy, for all its achievements, was year by year growing comparatively weaker. It was becoming vulnerable.
    How Italy had come to be such a stunning place—and that is literally what it was, newcomers from the north consistently describing themselves as stunned upon experiencing it for the first time—is of course a complicated story. Probably it starts with the fact that much of the Italian peninsula, having been the heart of the empire of the Caesars, continued during what we call the Dark Ages to cling to two things that were disappearing in places more distant from Rome. One was the town as thecore around which society was organized. Whereas throughout northern Europe cities of any significance became rare, with the nobility withdrawing into often-remote fortresses from which they could dominate populations of peasants, the most vital parts of Italy remained distinctly town-centered.
    Except in the region around Rome and the sprawling kingdom of Naples, both of which developed a feudal order similar to the one prevailing beyond the Alps, the survival of the towns and the evolution of some of them into great cities became an essential element in Italy’s unique character. Class and caste distinctions grew faint and porous as nobles and merchants, artisans and soldiers and clergy, learned to live together on terms approaching equality in their crowded, lively streets. More than in any other place in Europe, the townsfolk of Italy were not oppressed, could not even be looked down on, by the hereditary nobility. To the contrary, some of the greatest cities came to be ruled by their commercial classes. It was not uncommon for nobles to be excluded from public life, and for noble families to be forced to abandon their rural strongholds and move to town.
    The other fragment of the classical past that set Italy apart was the Roman law, which was not swept away in favor of rigid, status-focused feudal codes as happened elsewhere. This proved to have a profound impact intellectually, culturally, and socially. While the scholars of a slowly reviving northern Europe were focusing on theology and philosophy, in the early twelfth century their Italian counterparts discovered and undertook the study of digests of imperial law compiled under the Emperor Justinian six hundred years earlier. Italy’s traders found in the old code an ideal framework for their bustling commercial life: practical rules and regulations and guidelines, ways of doing business, that grew ever more relevant as the economy developed. The Italian universities, the first to appear anywhere on earth, attached an importance to the study of the law not to be found in France, Germany, or Spain.
    Italy was shaped also, even long after Rome ceased to be the hub of the known world, by an astonishing diversity of outside influences. The Eastern Christian Empire, from its capital at Constantinople, early put its cosmopolitan stamp on Sicily and the southern part of the peninsula as well as on its main outpost on the northern Adriatic coast, the port of Ravenna. Sicily was an Arab possession until late in the eleventh century,the Normans then came from northern France to make themselves kings of Naples as well as