The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
had better do the same. This was in 1466; three years later the blow was ready to fall, and again Venice received warning through another merchant, Piero Dolfin, resident in Chios. Let the government, he wrote, fortify its places in the Levant and lose no time about it; “on this depends the safety of the State, for Negroponte once lost the rest of the Levant is in peril.”
But Venice, exhausted by the drain of the land wars against Visconti, was unwilling to face another and more terrible campaign by sea unless she were forced to do so. She endeavoured to open negotiations at Constantinople on the pretext that she was acting in the name of Hungary. But in 1470 Negroponte fell. The War had already cost considerably over a million ducats, and the government was reduced to suspending either two-thirds or a half of all official salaries which were over twenty-five ducats per annum. In spite of this she rejected, as extravagant, terms of peace offered her in 1476; and faced the struggle once more. Scutari was attacked by the Sultan in person, who, in his determination to enter the town, blew besieged and besiegers alike to atoms before his siege guns. But the Republic could not hold out for ever unaided; Scutari was at the last extremity; a large army was rumoured to be on its way to attack Friuli. Venice was forced to recognise the facts, and in 1479 she proposed terms of peace. Scutari, and all Venetian possessions in the Morea were ceded to the Turk. Venice agreed to pay ten thousand ducats a year for the privileges of trading, and one hundred thousand in two years, as a war indemnity; and received permission to keep an Agent (Bailo) in Constantinople.
The Peace of 1479 marks an epoch in the history of Venetian relations with the East, and indicates a return to her original policy of peaceable dealings, whenever possible, with the Turk.
In truth, the Republic had every reason to complain of the conduct of Europe. After sixteen years of continuous warfare, which she had undertaken on the strength of European promises, Venice concluded a ruinous peace, by which she lost a part of her Levantine possessions and was reduced to the position of a tributary. Yet instantly all Europe attacked her for her perfidy to the Christian faith, and the princes of Italy professed to believe that Venice had abandoned the Turkish War, merely in order to devote herself to the extension of her power on the mainland. Had she received any support from Europe or Italy, she would never have closed the War with such a balance against herself. In truth the Republic was too exhausted to continue the’ struggle. It was not her fault that, the year after the conclusion of the Peace, Italy and all Europe were alarmed by the news that the Turks had seized Otranto. This was the inevitable result of the withdrawal of Venice from the struggle,—a withdrawal in its turn due to lack of any support from Italy or Europe. When invited by the Pope to join an Italian league against the Turk, Venice, mindful of the results which had followed on her acceptance of the last papal invitation, replied that she had made peace with the Sultan, and confirmed the suspicion that she was in secret understanding with the Turk. Her next step emphasised the further suspicion that her object in coming to terms with the Turk had been to allow herself a free hand to extend in Italy.
We have seen that in 1441 Venice had occupied Ravenna-under protest from Rome-as heir of the Polentani, Lords of Ravenna. She now (1481) attacked the Marquis of Ferrara on the ground that he was infringing a Venetian monopoly by the erection of salt-pans at the mouth of the Po. As the territory of Ferrara lay between the Venetian frontier and Ravenna it looked as if Venice desired to unite her possessions in that direction by the acquisition of Ferrara. This policy induced the Duke of Milan, the Pope, and the King of Naples to combine in support of Ferrara against Venice. The War was popular with the Venetians at first, but the strain on both treasury and private purses soon became insupportable, and no success crowned the Venetian arms. The distressed condition of the Republic is described by Malipiero. Payment of the interest on the funds was partially suspended; the shops on the Rialto were mortgaged; private plate, and jewellery compulsorily called in; salaries cut down. The revenue from the mainland was falling off. The arsenal was nearly empty. Famine and plague were at the door. “We shall be forced to sue for peace and restore all we have gained.”
Malipiero was partially right. Venice was forced to sue for peace, but not till she had taken the ruinous step (which other Italian princes took before and after her) of suggesting to the French that they should make good their claims on certain Italian provinces,—Charles VIII his claim on Naples, the Duke of Orleans his claims on Milan. Two members of the hostile League, Milan and Naples, were thus threatened in their own possessions, with the result that peace was concluded at Bagnolo in 1484. Venice retained Rovigo and the Polesine, but was forced to surrender the towns she had taken in Apulia during the course of the War.
This invitation to foreigners was fatal to all Italian princes, as events were soon to demonstrate. The five Great Powers of Italy, Venice, Milan, Florence, the Pope and Naples, were able to hold their own against each other, but the moment the more potent ultramontane sovereigns appeared upon the scene, nominally in support of one or other of the Italian States, really in pursuit of their own aggrandisement, the balance was irretrievably upset. The sequence of these events, culminating in the Wars of the League of Cambray, after which Venice never again recovered her commanding place among the political communities of Europe, has been narrated in a previous Chapter.
CHAPTER IX. GERMANY AND THE EMPIRE, by T.F. Tout
IT is a commonplace to contrast the political condition of Germany on the eve of the Reformation with that of the great national States of Western Europe. In Germany the dangerous confusion of the national monarchy with the tradition of the Roman Empire had continued fatal to the German Kingdom, even after the imperial idea had ceased to exert any commanding influence over men’s minds. The royal power in consequence became the merest shadow of its former self. Central organisation ceased to exist. Private war and general anarchy were chronic. The national life waxed cold, when uncherished by a strong national monarchy; and in the end salvation was to come from the development of the rude feudal nobility of the Middle Ages into an order of small independent rulers, so extraordinarily tenacious of their sovereign rank that more than a score of them have preserved it even amidst the changed conditions of the nineteenth century. While in France, Spain, and England national monarchies, both autocratic and popular, were establishing national unity, ordered progress, and strong administration, Germany was forced to content herself with the loosest and most impotent of federal governments.
Looking at the course of German history in the fifteenth century with knowledge of what happened later, it would be hard to deny the strength of this contrast. Yet there was no very great or essential dissimilarity between the condition of Germany under Frederick III and that of the France of the Armagnac and Burgundian feuds. The elements of political life were in each case the same. There was a monarchy whose great history was still remembered even in the days of its impotence and ruin. There was a real sense of national life, a consciousness so strong that it could bend even the selfish instincts of feudal nobles into cherishing an ambition wider and more patriotic than that of making themselves little kings over their own patrimony. The strongest of the German feudal houses was less well organised on a separatist basis than the Duchy of Britanny or the Duchy of Burgundy. And few indeed of them could base their power on any keenly felt local or national tradition, or upon anything more solid than the habit of respect for an ancient house. Moreover, the ecclesiastical States might have been, and both the small nobility and the wealthy numerous and active free towns actually were, permanent counterpoises to the absolute supremacy of the greater feudatories in a way to which French history supplies no parallel. All medieval history shows how the possibilities of despotism lurked even in the most decrepit of feudal monarchies, and how the most disorderly of feudal barons could be constrained to use their swords to further national ends.
Even in its worst decay the German kingship still counted for something. “The King of the Romans,” as the German King was styled before the papal coronation gave him the right to call himself “Roman Emperor,” was still the first of earthly potentates in dignity and rank. The effective intervention in European affairs of a German King so powerless as Sigismund of Luxemburg would have been impossible but for the authority still associated with the imperial name. The German Kings had indeed no longer a direct royal domain such as gave wealth and dignity to the Kings of France or England. They were equally destitute of the regular and ample revenue which ancient custom or the direct grant of the Estates allowed the Kings of France and England to