Part 12
“A period of three centuries of weakness, humiliation, and suffering, in Italy, began in the year 1530: from that time she has been always oppressed by foreigners, and enervated and corrupted by her masters. These last have reproached her with the vices of which they were themselves the authors. After having reduced her to the impossibility of resisting, they have accused her of cowardice when she submitted, and of rebellion when she made efforts to vindicate herself. The Italians, during this long period of slavery, have been agitated with the desire of becoming once more a nation; as, however, they had lost the direction of their own affairs, they ceased to have any history which could be called theirs; their misfortunes have become but episodes in the histories of other nations.”
Sismondi closes his history of the Italian Republics, with an account of the successive fall of all the republics, which still remained independent after the coronation of Charles V. Florence had been on the point of recovering its liberty from the tyranny of the Medici, when the constable Bourbon approached the walls in his march to Rome, on the 26th of April, 1527; but the terror inspired by that army of brigands, repressed the movement. When they heard, however, of the taking of Rome, the Florentines rose with firmness, expelled the Medici, and restored the republic. Michæl Angelo completed the fortifications of Florence, in 1529. On the other hand, “Clement VII. sent against his native city that very prince of Orange, the successor of Bourbon, who had made him prisoner at Rome; and with him that very army of robbers which had overwhelmed the Holy See, and its subjects, with misery and every outrage. This army entered Tuscany, September, 1529.” Florence capitulated, after immense but vain efforts at defence, on the 12th of August, 1530.
Into Sienna, Charles V. introduced a Spanish garrison, but the Siennese, unable to bear the pride, cupidity, and ferocity of the Spanish, drove them out the 11th of August, 1552. In 1555, after incredible sufferings, it capitulated, the 2nd of April, 1555. The Spaniards retained possession, nevertheless, for two years, and death and exile were the lot of the generous citizens to whom amnesty had been promised.
In 1556 Burtamachi of Lucca made an attempt to restore liberty to the Tuscan cities, which were all to be organized with popular constitutions and confederate. The plot was discovered, Burtamachi executed, and the city given up to a small oligarchy for the next two hundred and fifty years. “Genoa, which had received the name of republic through Charles V.’s connivance (who had needed its services in the war of 1528), was governed by a narrow aristocracy, founded by Andrea Doria, who at the same time “attached his country to the house of Austria, with a submission which the greater number of Genoese felt as a deep humiliation.” In 1547 the conspiracy of the French nearly destroyed this government; Vachero’s conspiracy, in 1628, was also abortive. “But the spirit of the ancient Italian republics was not extinguished among the people of Genoa, as among the nobles.” In the war of the Austrian succession, in 1746, they made alliance with the Bourbons. “The Austrians appeared before Genoa; and the senate, which dared not arm the population, opened their gates to them. The Austrians abused, as they have ever done, the favours of fortune. They exacted from Genoa a contribution of 9,000,000 of florins to the empire, a sum which that city was not in a condition to pay. They seized all the money in the bank, all the plate of the churches, and even the property of individuals.” To these injuries they added insults which at length roused the people, who, having no other arms, attacked their oppressors with stones from the streets, and tiles torn from the houses, till, notwithstanding a firing by the soldiers that filled many houses with the dead, the streets were covered with dead Austrians, and the rest fled in terror. These mostly perished on the barren mountains around the city; for the Genoese retained their advantage till the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle secured their republic against Austria, under the protection of the French.
Venice employed all the sixteenth century in endeavouring to repair the disasters of the league of Cambray. Its policy was, especially during the seventeenth century, to throw off the yoke of Austria, but it knew its own weakness too well to make an open movement. During the Thirty Years’ War, however, it gave succour to the Protestants of Germany, to Bethlehem Gabor, and to Ragotski in Hungary. “But the attacks of the Turks made it necessary for the Venetians to make friendly advances to Austria; and as its own government grew more aristocratic, and odious with despotism, it became more and more timid. It attempted to be neutral in the war of the Spanish succession. In the French war of 1796 it actually took the side of Austria; but when Bonaparte declared war against it, in 1797, Austria, with characteristic ingratitude, refused all assistance; and at the peace of Santo Formio took possession of Venice, and part of its states. But after the French made themselves masters of Vienna, she was obliged by the treaty of Presburg to restore Venice to the kingdom of Italy.
Thus, after Italy lost its liberty, in the first half of the fifteenth century, four of the five nominal republics became narrow aristocracies.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century Napoleon Bonaparte effected a momentary resurrection of this beautiful country. “Five millions and a half of inhabitants in the kingdom of Italy were put in possession of a constitution, securing the participation of numbers in the government, which is the essence of a republic.” Six millions and a half in the kingdom of Naples received institutions less advanced, it is true; but even there the law had succeeded arbitrary power; public and oral evidence had succeeded secret information and the torture; equality, the feudal system of education, instead of retrograding, had been rendered progressive; and thought, as well as religious conscience, had recovered freedom. Finally, five millions and a half, (Piedmontese, Genoese, Parmesans, Tuscans, and Romans,) were temporarily united to France, “secure that at no very distant period, when their political education should be accomplished, they would again be incorporated in that Italy to the future liberty and glory of which they now directed every thought.”
“It has been the work of the _coalition_ to destroy all; to place Italy again under the galling yoke of Austria; to take from her, with political liberty, civil and religious freedom, and even freedom of thought; to corrupt her morals, and to heap upon her the utmost degree of humiliation. Italy is unanimous in abhorring this ignominious yoke; Italy, to break it, has done all that could be expected of her. In a struggle between an established government and a nation, the former has all the advantage; it has in its favour rapidity of communication, certainty of information, soldiers, arsenals, fortresses, and finances. The people have only their unarmed hands, and their masses _unaccustomed to act together_: nevertheless, in every struggle with its oppressors, during these fifteen years, in Italy, (Sismondi wrote in 1832,) the victory has remained with the people. At Naples, in Sicily, in Piedmont, in the states of the Church, at Modena and Parma, unarmed masses have seized the arms of the soldiers; men chosen by the people have taken the places of the despots in their palaces. The Italians, everywhere victorious over their own tyrants, have, it is true, been everywhere forced back under the yoke, with redoubled cruelty, by the league of foreign despots. Attacked before they could have given themselves a government, or formed a treasury, arsenals, or an army, by the sovereign of another nation, who reckons not less than 30,000,000 of subjects, they did not attempt a hopeless resistance, which would have deprived them of every chance for the future.”
“Europe will know no repose till the nation which, in the dark ages, lighted the torch of civilization with that of liberty, shall be enabled herself to enjoy the light which she created.”
But we must now turn our regards upon SPAIN, which the Austrian family, in the person of the ruthless conqueror of Italy, had taken into its _Christian_ (?) guardianship, by right of his mother, Joanna of Castile.
It is not perhaps sufficiently well known, that Spain, as well as the other countries of Europe, received from its Gothic and Vandalic ancestors the germs of constitutional government, which, from peculiar circumstances attending the Saracen conquest, were preserved in singular purity in the several kingdoms of Spain, that were afterwards united under Ferdinand and Isabella. Robertson, in a view of the state of Europe, which he prefixes to his biography of Charles V., says:—
“Notwithstanding the singular revolution which the invasion of the Moors occasioned in Spain, and the peculiarity of its fate, in being so long subject to the Mahomedan yoke, the customs introduced by the Vandals and Goths had taken such deep root, and were so thoroughly incorporated with the frame of its government, that in every province which the Christians recovered from the Moors, we find the condition of individuals, as well as the political constitution, nearly the same as in other nations of Europe.”
“The royal prerogative was circumscribed within such narrow bounds as reduced the power of the sovereign almost to nothing. The privileges of the nobility were great in proportion, and extended so far as to border on absolute independance. The immunities of the cities were likewise greater than in other feudal kingdoms; they possessed considerable influence in the arts, and they aspired at obtaining more.”
In Spain also, as in other countries where the germs of constitutional liberty existed, as the best legacy of their northern ancestry, there was a struggle for development, which the conservative historians uniformly stigmatize as “turbulence” and “want of respect to law,” though in fact it is an aspiration for a government of laws rather than of persons.
“In 1492,” says Robertson, “in the principality of Catalonia, which was annexed to the kingdom of Aragon, the impatience of the people to obtain the redress of their grievances having prompted them to take arms against their sovereign John II., they, by a solemn deed, recalled the oath of allegiance which they had sworn to him, declared him and his posterity to be unworthy of the throne, and endeavoured to establish a republican form of government, in order to secure the perpetual enjoyment of that liberty after which they aspired. Nearly about the same period, the indignation of the Castilian nobility against the weak and flagitious administration of Henry IV. having led them to combine against him, they arrogated, as one of the privileges belonging to their order, the right of trying and of passing sentence on their sovereign. That the exercise of this power might be as public and solemn, as the pretension to it was bold, they summoned all the nobility of their party to meet at Avila; a spacious theatre was erected in a plain, without the walls of the town; an image, representing the king, was seated on a throne, clad in royal robes, with a crown on its head, a sceptre in its hand, and the sword of justice by its side.
“The accusation against the king was read, and the sentence of deposition was pronounced, in presence of a numerous assembly. At the close of the first article of the charge, the archbishop of Toledo advanced, and tore the crown from the head of the image; at the close of the second, the Conde de Placentia snatched the sword of justice from its side; at the close of the third, the Conde de Beneventi wrested the sceptre from its hand; at the close of the last, Don Diego Lopez de Stuniga tumbled it headlong from the throne. At the same instant, Don Alphonso, Henry’s brother, was proclaimed king of Castile and Leon, in his stead.
“The most daring leaders of faction would not have ventured on these measures, nor have conducted them with such public ceremony, if the sentiments of the people concerning the royal dignity had not been so formed by the laws and policy, to which they were accustomed both in Castile and Catalonia, as prepared them to approve of such extraordinary proceedings, or to acquiesce in them.
“In Aragon, the form of government was monarchical, but the genius and maxims of it were purely republican. The kings, who were long elective, retained only the shadow of power; the real exercise of it was in the Cortes or parliament of the kingdom. This supreme assembly was composed of four different arms or members. The nobility of the first rank; the equestrian order, or nobility of the second class; the representatives of the cities and towns, whose right to a place in the Cortes, if we may give credit to the historians of Aragon, was coëval with the constitution; the ecclesiastical order, composed of the dignitaries of the church, together with the representatives of the inferior clergy. No law could pass in this assembly without the assent of every single member who had a right to vote. Without the permission of the Cortes, no tax could be imposed; no war could be declared; no peace could be concluded; no money could be coined; nor could any alteration be made in the current specie. The power of reviewing the proceedings of all inferior courts, the privilege of inspecting every department of administration, and the right of redressing all grievances, belonged to the Cortes. Nor did those who conceived themselves to be aggrieved, address the Cortes in the humble tone of suppliants, and petition for redress; they demanded it as the birthright of freemen, and required the guardians of their liberty to decide with respect to the points which they laid before them. This sovereign court was held during several centuries, every year; but in consequence of a regulation introduced about the beginning of the fourteenth century, it was convoked from that period only once in two years. After it was assembled, the king had no right to prorogue or dissolve it without its own consent; and the session continued forty days.
“Not satisfied with having erected such formidable barriers against the encroachments of the royal prerogative, nor willing to commit the sole guardianship of their liberties entirely to the vigilance and authority of an assembly, similar to the diets, states-general, and parliaments, in which the other feudal nations have placed so much confidence, the Aragonese had recourse to an institution peculiar to themselves, and elected a Justiza or supreme judge.
“This magistrate, whose office bore some resemblance to that of the Ephori in ancient Sparta, acted as the protector of the people and the comptroller of the prince.
“The person of the Justiza was sacred, his power and jurisdiction almost unbounded. He was the supreme interpreter of the laws. Not only inferior judges, but the kings themselves, were bound to consult him in every doubtful case, and to receive his responses with implicit deference. An appeal lay to him from the royal judges, as well as from those appointed by the barons within their respective territories. Even when no appeal was made to him, he could interpose by his own authority, prohibit the ordinary judge to proceed, take immediate cognizance of the cause himself, and remove the party accused to the Manifestation or prison of the state, to which no person had access but by his permission. His power was exerted with no less vigour and effect in superintending the administration of government, than in regulating the course of justice.
“It was the prerogative of the Justiza to inspect the conduct of the King. He had a title to review all the royal proclamations and patents, and to declare whether or not they were agreeable to law, and ought to be carried into execution. He, by his sole authority, could exclude any of the king’s ministers from the conduct of affairs, and call them to answer for their mal-administration.
“He himself was accountable to the Cortes only, for the manner in which he discharged the duties of this high office; and performed functions of the greatest importance that could be committed to a subject.”
It is evident from the bare enumeration of the privileges of the Aragonese Cortes, as well as of the rights belonging to the Justiza, that a very small portion of power remained in the hands of the King.
The Aragonese seem to have been solicitous that their monarchs should know and feel this state of impotence to which they were reduced.
Even in swearing allegiance to their sovereign, an act which ought naturally to be accompanied with professions of submission and respect, they devised an oath, in such a form, as to remind him of his dependence on his subjects. “We,” said the Justiza to the king in the name of his high-spirited barons, “who are each of us as good, and who are altogether more powerful than you, promise obedience to your government, if you maintain our rights and liberties; but if not, not.” Conformably to this oath they established it as a fundamental article in their constitution, that if the king should violate their rights and privileges it was lawful for the people to disclaim him as their sovereign, and to elect another, even though a heathen, in his place. The attachment of the Aragonese to this singular constitution of government was extreme, and their respect for it approached to superstitious veneration. In the preamble to one of their laws, they declare, that such was the barrenness of their country, and the poverty of the inhabitants, that, if it were not on account of the liberties by which they were distinguished from other nations, the people would abandon it, and go in quest of a settlement to some more fruitful region.
“In Castile, there were not such peculiarities in the form of government, as to establish any remarkable distinction between it and that of the other European nations. The executive part of government was committed to the king, but, with a prerogative extremely limited. The legislative authority resided in the Cortes, which was composed of the nobility, the dignified ecclesiastics, and the representatives of the cities. The assembly of the Cortes in Castile was very ancient, and seems to have been almost coëval with the constitution. The members of the three different orders, who had a right of suffrage, met in one place, and deliberated as one collective body; the decisions of which were regulated by the sentiments of the majority. The right of imposing taxes, of enacting laws, and of redressing grievances, belonged to this assembly; and in order to secure the assent of the king to such statutes and regulations as were deemed salutary or beneficial to the kingdom, it was usual in the Cortes to take no step towards granting money, until all business relative to the public welfare was concluded. The representatives of cities seem to have obtained a seat very early in the Cortes of Castile, and soon acquired such influence and credit as were very uncommon, at a period when the splendor and pre-eminence of the nobility had eclipsed or depressed all other orders of men. The number of members from cities bore such a proportion to that of the whole collective body, as rendered them extremely respectable in the Cortes. The degree of consideration which they possessed in the state may be estimated by one event. Upon the death of John I., a council of regency was appointed to govern the kingdom during the minority of his son.
“It was composed of an equal number of noble men and of deputies chosen by the cities; the latter were admitted to the same rank, and invested with the same powers, as prelates and grandees of the first order. But though the members of communities in Castile were elevated above the condition wherein they were placed in other kingdoms of Europe; though they had attained to such political importance that even the proud and jealous spirit of the feudal aristocracy could not exclude them from a considerable share in the government; yet the nobles, notwithstanding these acquisitions of the commons, continued to assert the privileges of their order, in opposition to the crown, in a tone extremely high. There was not any body of nobility in Europe more distinguished for independence of spirit, haughtiness of deportment, and bold pretensions, than that of Castile. The history of that monarchy affords the most striking examples of the vigilance with which they observed, and of the vigour with which they opposed, every measure of their kings that tended to encroach on their jurisdiction, to diminish their dignity, or to abridge their power. Even in their ordinary intercourse with their monarchs, they preserved such a consciousness of their rank, that the nobles of the first order claimed it as a privilege to be covered in the royal presence, and approached their sovereign rather as equals than as subjects.
“The constitutions of the subordinate monarchies, which depended upon the crowns of Castile and Aragon, nearly resembled those of the kingdoms to which they were annexed.
“In all of them, the dignity and independence of the nobles were great; the immunities and power of the cities were considerable.
“An attentive observation of the singular situation of Spain, as well as the various events which occurred there, from the invasion of the Moors to the union of the kingdom, under Ferdinand and Isabella, will discover the causes to which all the peculiarities in its political constitution I have pointed out, ought to be ascribed.
“As the provinces of Spain were wrested from the Mahomedans gradually and with difficulty, the nobles who followed the standard of any eminent leader in these wars, conquered not for him alone but for themselves. They claimed a share in the lands which their valour had won from the enemy, and their prosperity and power increased, in proportion as the territory of the prince extended.
“During their perpetual wars with the Moors, the monarchs of the several kingdoms in Spain depended so much on their nobles, that it became necessary to conciliate their good will by successive grants of new honours and privileges. By the time that any prince could establish his dominions in a conquered province, the greater part of the territory was parcelled out by him among his barons, with such jurisdiction and immunities as raised them almost to sovereign power.
“At the same time, the kingdoms erected in so many different corners of Spain, were of inconsiderable extent. The petty monarch was but little elevated above his nobles. They, feeling themselves to be almost his equals, acted as such; and could not look up to the kings of such limited domains with the same reverence that the sovereigns of the great monarchies in Europe were viewed by their subjects. While these circumstances concurred in exalting the nobility, and in depressing the royal authority, there were other causes which raised the cities in Spain to consideration and power.