The Borgias by G.J. Meyer Page B

Sicily, both places fell next into the hands of the Spanish, and from the Dark to the High Middle Ages a succession of German chieftains and kings descended regularly upon Italy and laid claim to various parts of it. Meanwhile the bishops of Rome were evolving into popes, declaring themselves the spiritual leaders of all Christendom, and becoming the overlords of much of central Italy.
    The peninsula became an arena in which the popes and Germany’s so-called Holy Roman emperors fought each other for dominance. Both sides, in seeking the support of the cities, granted them liberties and favors that ultimately, if inadvertently, helped them to become autonomous. Those cities, in turn, were developing in strikingly different ways, sometimes adopting republican forms of government that at a distance could almost be mistaken for democracy. Many fell under the dominion of warlords, and even the republics came to be run by elites that rarely constituted more than a fraction of their populations.
    By the time Alonso Borgia became Calixtus III, the peninsula had long been dominated by five “great” (by Italy’s modest standards) powers:
    Venice, a republic dominated by an oligarchy of merchant families that had grown immensely rich and risen to a position of international importance by trading throughout the eastern Mediterranean, building there a great network of colonies and commercial alliances.
    Florence, also a republic and ruled by families that had made their fortunes in banking, manufacturing, and trade, the jewel in Italy’s golden crown by virtue of the astonishing artistic and intellectual flowering that, before the end of the fifteenth century, would make it one of the most dazzling cultural phenomena in all of human history.
    Rome, a theocracy dominated by the pope, gradually recovering some of its long-lost strength but still an administrative center only, without a commercial middle class capable of challenging the baronial clans.
    Milan, the giant of the north, an industrial powerhouse and master of the vast fertile plain of Lombardy, politically a tyranny, long in the grip first of its Visconti and then of its Sforza dukes.
    And of course Naples, Il Regno, a kingdom encompassing the whole southern half of the mainland, the most feudal state in Italy and therefore also the most backward, fatally weakened by an endless struggle betweenits great capital city and rural barons unwilling to be ruled by anyone.
    The greatest of Italy’s cities—Naples, Venice, and Milan—all had populations of well over a hundred thousand when London was still the only city in England with as many as twenty thousand residents. And all of them controlled great expanses of countryside, staking out broad spheres of influence by conquest, intimidation, and bribery. All of them but Naples, which stagnated under the oppressive rule of a series of more or less vicious and decadent monarchs, possessed a vitality to be found almost nowhere else. They took for granted things that remained unknown or unwelcome elsewhere: rapid change, steady growth, and wide-open social mobility—even, in some places, educational opportunities for women comparable to those available to men.
    The absence of a functioning feudal system, and of feudalism’s arrangement of the population into commoners who owed loyalty to nobles who in turn owed loyalty to kings, had one unfortunate consequence. Some of the greatest of the city-states, along with innumerable smaller communities including tiny hilltop villages, came to be dominated by local strongmen who could make no claim to political legitimacy—to having any real right to the power they wielded. In the fourteenth century, when the papacy was absent from Rome and utterly incapable of stopping thugs from seizing pieces of the Papal States and setting themselves up as tyrants, authority based on force alone became virtually the norm. Thus the masters of one city-state after another were in a vastly less