Half the territory of Italy, but far less of its wealth and population, lay within the kingdom of Naples and the papal states, for much of the land — mountain, marsh and arid plain — defied habitation or exploitation. Devastated by plague in the fourteenth century, the population touched its nadir around the start of the fifteenth, then began a slow overall growth through the next hundred years despite recurrent epidemics and famine. Six general visitations of plague (1422—5, 1436—9, 1447—51, 1477—9, 1485 —7, 1493) and a five-year cycle of crop failure inflicted appalling casualties: Viterbo lost 6,600 of its 10,000 inhabitants at the outset of the century and had not recovered fifty years later; 14,000 are said to have perished in Bologna alone in 1447, and 75,000 over the whole kingdom in 1493. Malaria infesting the marshlands created by sedimentation of rivers on the western coasts took its own steady toll of life to add to the victims of occasional disasters such as the earthquake which struck the south in December 1456 killing some 30,000 people.
Relatively few reached an advanced age: Pozzuoli in 1489 had 77.5 per cent of its citizens under thirty years of age, 45.5 per cent under fifteen, figures not without significance for the fiscal health of government. How slowly the population recovered may be measured by the census figures for the kingdom: excluding Naples, they showed only 254,000 hearths in 1500 against 230,000 in 1450. Nor was this increase evenly distributed. Rural depopulation went hand in hand with rapid urban growth, especially in the larger cities. In the province of Rome a quarter of the villages had disappeared between the onset of the Black Death and 1416, most of them for good. Great landowners everywhere seized the opportunity to occupy abandoned farmland which became incorporated in their latifundia — large, backward, thinly peopled estates devoted overwhelmingly to a pastoral economy which produced wool for export and meat for the cities. Only in a few climatically favoured regions — Puglia above all — did they grow sufficient grain to furnish a significant export. Urban development, by contrast, attracted immigrants, often from far afield. Rome, peculiarly open thanks to the multi-national character of its government, absorbed waves of Genoese, Tuscans, Lombards and, above all, Neapolitans, balking only at an influx of Corsican peasants in 1485. Towns and cities generally welcomed the newcomers to fill their empty quarters and coffers. Most grew at a slowly accelerating pace, and some to a great size by contemporary standards. Rome, the administrative and devotional centre of an international religion as well as a regional centre of government, expanded its population during the century from under 20,000 to some 50,000, but continued to share its importance, as the popes did their temporal power, with other great cities of the papal states, such as Ferrara which grew to 30,000 or Bologna which regained its pre-plague level of 50,000. Ancient universities helped attract men to Bologna and Perugia, whereas that of Rome had withered away until Martin V gave it modest new life. In the kingdom, by contrast, the old capital, Naples, reasserted its primacy to such a degree that its population reached 150,000, whereas other cities remained relatively stunted; one as important as Salerno, for example, boasted fewer than 5 ,000 inhabitants. Programmes designed to boost industry and commerce in these capitals failed to change their character as centres of conspicuous consumption sucking in the surplus wealth of their regions. However, they could boast some of the most inspired urban development of the century whether in public utilities or architectural splendour. Inevitably, many other cities which had earlier enjoyed some prosperity saw it slip away: those on the northern Adriatic coast suffered markedly, Rimini and Fano from the silting of their harbours, others from Venetian hostility. Only Ancona prospered.
In such an overwhelmingly agricultural economy native traders found themselves confined to a secondary, short-distance role. Those from Salerno, for example, would not venture out of the Tyrrhenian Sea, nor those from Trani and Barletta beyond the Adriatic. Powerful economies on its land borders had a similar inhibiting influence on the papal state. Long-distance and substantial transactions, whether in merchandise or money, therefore lay in the hands of foreigners — Florentines, Genoese, Venetians, Catalans and Ragusans — throughout the century. Ferrara and the Romagna might, indeed, be said to have passed into a Venetian economic orbit, while Florence gained an increasing ascendancy over Perugia and Bologna.
In contrast to its passive commercial role, the kingdom developed an active naval power thanks to the revival of the Neapolitan shipyards and arsenal by its Aragonese rulers. Used in conjunction with land forces, the galley fleets constructed there made Naples a power to be reckoned with in central Italy throughout the century. The Papacy enjoyed no such advantage, its naval endeavours being directed solely to crusading ends which were mainly served by hiring vessels at Ancona.
Politically the region in 1415 was a kaleidoscopic patchwork subject to a papal suzerainty that had lost all substance through a century of exile, schism and conciliar challenge. In Naples the Angevin rulers had fared little better: dynastic feuds and incompetent monarchs had allowed the formidable state apparatus created by Normans, Hohenstaufen and early Angevins to decay to a point where, like papal suzerainty, it existed in little more than name. A phantom recovery under King Ladislas (1386—1414) owed everything to his military flair and to papal disarray, nothing to regeneration of his state. Everywhere power had consequently passed to local magnates and oligarchies determined to resist any reimposition of central authority. Technical distinctions can be drawn between the feudal nobility of Naples and the proprietary landowners of the papal states, but all shared a common aristocratic ethos and often, as with the Orsini family of Rome, ramified throughout the south. Some — most notably the Este of Ferrara, the Malatesta of Rimini and the Montefeltro of Urbino — had under the guise of papal vicariates achieved de facto hereditary rule and independence; much the same might be said of Giovanni Antonio del Balzo Orsini, Prince of Taranto, whom no king dared tax or call to account. Others nursing the same ambition pursued it with a ruthlessness that imperilled the fabric of state and society.
After the death of Ladislas their prospects looked bright, for those who commanded any form of force or authority had a free hand. None took grimmer advantage than the condottiere Braccio da Montone; with the most battle-hardened army in Italy at his command and the helpless acquiescence of Pope John XXIII he made himself master of his native Perugia, then went on to carve out a large domain in the heart of the papal states. Muzio Attendolo Sforza, his erstwhile comrade in arms, chose to seek his territorial fortune in the service of Queen Giovanna II, Ladislas’s ageing, weak-willed sister and successor who had become the prey of baronial factions.
European diplomacy orchestrated by the Emperor Sigismund was meanwhile labouring at the Council of Constance to impose a settlement on the schismatic factions of western Christendom. It finally emerged in the form of Cardinal Oddo Colonna who became Pope Martin V on 11 November 1417. Sprung from the clan which had dominated a great swath of Roman countryside and city throughout the Middle Ages, Martin determined to establish his court in that native stronghold lest he remain a captive of conciliar forces. But the road to Rome, he soon discovered, was long and painful, for none of those wielding power in papal lands, save his own kin, had cause to welcome a master cloaked in greater authority than any seen in those parts for a century. With no army and an empty treasury, Martin had little choice but to negotiate his passage, yielding what those who stood in his path might demand. What they asked — the signori who had established their sway over the towns of the Romagna, Umbria and the March of Ancona — was recognition of their de facto independence as papal vicars bridled only by a modest annual tribute. Titles proved another useful currency: that of duke of Spoleto won the services of Guidantonio da Montefeltro against Braccio who none the less extracted from Martin the vicariate of Perugia and virtual licence to conquer at will.
On 29 September 1420 Martin finally entered Rome amid tumultuous rejoicing. Since all ranks of society expected the return of a papal court to resurrect the city from the miserable insignificance into which it had fallen, Martin had little difficulty in imposing municipal statutes that gave him control of key appointments, including those of senator and treasurer, and in directing a substantial portion of Roman revenues to the office of his own chamberlain. The Colonna, backed by clients and allies, gave him the muscle needed to enforce his will. The embellished family palace in Rome became his headquarters; relatives were manoeuvred into every available estate and office; one niece married the lord of Urbino, another a Malatesta. In the curia, Italians quickly achieved a preponderance that was to become entrenched from the greatest dignity to the least. Only the Orsini and their friends stood implacably hostile, convinced that Colonna triumph must presage Orsini ruin. Thus securely installed as signore of Rome, Martin continued to deal cautiously with his territorial vassals, and with the Church at large, for the shadow of conciliar authority hung over him still. Nor had he the resources for an adventurous territorial policy. By 1426, remnants of former papal revenues assiduously garnered were yielding an income of 170,000 florins, perhaps only a half of their pre-schism level, and now derived in equal parts from ecclesiastical function and territorial dominion, the last of which had earlier contributed relatively little.
Martin’s sure-footed performance within the papal territories was matched by similar adroitness in his dealings with Naples. While ready to recognise the childless Giovanna in return for lavish territorial gifts to his brother Giordano, he became persuaded that Rome’s long-term interests would best be served by backing French claims, represented by Louis III of Provence, to the succession. Louis, supported by Sforza’s army, duly invaded the kingdom in 1420 to enforce his title. Against that threat the queen and Sergianni Caracciolo (her lover and the power behind the throne) appealed to Alfonso, the young king of Aragon and Sicily, who, in that summer of 1420, was battling to secure his dominion over Sardinia and Corsica. After some hesitation he accepted what he chose to represent as a call to rescue a damsel in distress; in reality he had staked his reputation on winning the kingdom of Naples, and so bringing to a triumphant conclusion the adventure launched by his ancestors at the time of the Sicilian Vespers. Around these foreign banners the Neapolitan nobility rallied into opposing factions: Sforza, the Colonna and former partisans of Anjou supported Louis; Braccio and the Orsini, led by the prince of Taranto, predictably joined the other camp. In the ensuing conflict, with neither party strong enough to prevail, the crown lost all authority. What turned the scales was an irreconcilable contradiction between Alfonso’s pretensions as heir apparent and Caracciolo’s resolve to remain master of the queen. Exacerbated by xenophobic mistrust of Alfonso’s Spanish entourage, their enmity escalated during the summer of 1423 into open hostilities culminating in the sack of Naples by a Catalan fleet. In October 1423 the frustrated king returned to Spain furiously resentful against a pope whom he regarded as the architect of his humiliation. Martin, by contrast, had the satisfaction of seeing Giovanna recognise the Angevin prince as her heir, and — a still greater joy — Braccio fall in battle. Perugia thereupon passed into the hands of a noble oligarchy hardly more subject to papal control than the defunct warlord, but decidedly less dangerous.
The influence which a pope might exercise upon the Neapolitan succession was denied him in respect of his own throne. The more autocratically he wielded power in his lifetime — and all subsequent attempts by the cardinals to curtail it by means of articles sworn on election proved futile — the more violent was the reaction when his death returned authority to the College of Cardinals. This cosmopolitan body of talented men, working in the interest of secular patrons as well as of their own ambitions, defied all efforts at long-term manipulation. The doubling of their number over the century only increased the range of interests at play by bringing in the great families of Italy: Medici, Sforza, Gonzaga, Farnese. Moreover, the comparative brevity of papal reigns ensured that most cardinals outlived several popes. From Martin V to Alexander VI these reigns averaged only some nine years, a stark contrast to Naples, where Alfonso and his son reigned for sixty years, or to Ferrara, ruled for a century by Niccolo d’Este and three sons. When Martin died in February 1431 it was an anti-Colonna coalition engineered in the conclave by the Orsini that brought about the election of Cardinal Condulmer, a Venetian patrician who styled himself Eugenius IV. Their further manipulation of this ‘capricious and stubborn man’ to undo the Colonna loosed such carnage and devastation upon Rome and the surrounding countryside that on 29 May 1434 a popular rising forced Eugenius to flee in fear of his life. Thus menaced in the very heart of his state, he had been compelled to abandon almost every effective claim upon the service of papal vassals, and to yield the March of Ancona to Francesco Sforza, son of the old condottiere, who had conquered that province in the style of Braccio. With the Council of Basle simultaneously challenging the very foundation of his authority, a new descent into schismatic disintegration looked imminent. Although Giovanni Vitelleschi, a cardinal turned condottiere, did regain possession of Rome late in 1434, the chief beneficiaries of this success were the Orsini; Eugenius himself dared not return.
To the south Alfonso’s ambitions posed another threat. Ever since 1427 disaffected Neapolitan nobles led by the prince of Taranto had been trying to coax him back. In the summer of 1432 he reached Sicily with a large fleet, patently awaiting the opportune moment to launch himself upon Naples, and meanwhile bombarding Eugenius with demands for recognition of his claims to its throne. When first Louis of Anjou and then Queen Giovanna died within a few weeks of each other early in 1435 the way seemed clear, despite Giovanna’s last-minute nomination of Louis’s brother, Rene, as heir, for that prince lay captive in the hands of the duke of Burgundy. Alfonso, now self-proclaimed king of Naples, had to reckon instead with resolute opposition from the Genoese who feared that their trading life-lines might be severed should their Catalan rivals gain the kingdom. A first, seemingly decisive, trial of strength saw a Genoese fleet annihilate Alfonso’s superior force in a battle fought off the island of Ponza on 4 August 1435. No naval encounter of that century had a more dramatic outcome: Alfonso, two of his brothers and his whole entourage, Spanish and Italian, found themselves prisoners of the Genoese and ultimately of Filippo Maria Visconti, Milanese overlord of the Republic.
By an extraordinary exercise of personality and persuasion Alfonso contrived to turn disaster to account by converting Visconti from captor to accomplice in a grandiose design for the subjection of Italy: all north of a line bisecting the papal states would be in the province of Milan, to the south the will of Aragon should hold sway. Even though this deal with the arch-enemy goaded Genoa into rebellion against Milan, Alfonso, free once more, renewed his Neapolitan campaign in January 1436 in a far stronger position than ever before. His opponents lacked an effective leader, despite the arrival of Rene’s spirited wife Isabel; nor could they match the financial resources he was able to draw from Aragon, Sicily and Sardinia, his other kingdoms. With the port of Gaeta, second only to Naples itself, as his base, he began a methodical subjugation of the kingdom concentrating first on the Terra di Lavoro, the richest and most populous province. That it took more than six years to complete the conquest was due partly to an insufficiency of men and money (any European state would have found it well nigh impossible to amass the resources needed for definitive success in so large an enterprise), still more to persistent intervention by Genoa and the pope. Half-guest, half-hostage in Francophile Florence since 1434, Eugenius could not abandon the Angevin cause; nor did Alfonso encourage him to do so as, in league with Milan, he threatened to give his allegiance to the anti-Pope Felix (elected by the Council of Basle in 1439). But papal finances, woefully reduced by the collapse of Eugenius’s authority, could not hope to sustain a war in the kingdom. The fearsome Cardinal Vitelleschi, dispatched there at the head of an army in 1436 and again in 1437, achieved some passing triumphs only to find his supplies cut off when Eugenius had to devote his limited resources into hosting his Byzantine guests at the Council of Florence.
Into the pope’s place stepped Rene of Anjou. Having spent everything on ransoming himself from Burgundy, he arrived in Naples as a pensioner of the Genoese with little to offer his followers but an agreeable personality. That quality failed to stem a tide of defections when barons and towns, sensing the ebb of Angevin fortune, began to grasp Alfonso’s ready promises of pardon, office, title and cash. Only Genoa and the condottieri families of Sforza and Caldora, both with huge estates in the kingdom at stake, stood firm. By the spring of 1442 Rene was isolated, under siege in Naples; even Genoa now began to despair. On 2 June the Aragonese forces broke in and the capital was theirs; a victory over Antonio Caldora and Giovanni Sforza on 28 June completed their triumph.
Pope Eugenius had then to accept that no power, Italian or foreign, would challenge Alfonso’s victory, and that, unless he came to terms, he risked the king defecting to the anti-Pope Felix V and invading the papal states. A peace was accordingly patched up at the border town of Terracina in June 1443. Brokered by the pope’s chamberlain, Cardinal Ludovico da Treviso, who had assumed Vitelleschi’s mantle as terror of the papal court but with a pro-Aragonese stance, it recognised the title of Alfonso and his illegitimate son Ferrante to the Neapolitan crown, granted Alfonso the papal territories of Benevento and Terracina for life and reduced the tribute due to the Papacy to a token white palfrey. A joint operation to expel Sforza from the March of Ancona, where he threatened Alfonso’s hold on the Abruzzi provinces, was dressed up as a service to Eugenius against a disobedient vassal.
Most Italians would have joined the king’s Spanish subjects in wishing him a speedy departure from Italy once Naples had been won. He disappointed them all by remaining there for the rest of his life, partly to escape fruitless entanglement in Iberian conflicts, partly because he never felt entirely confident of his hold upon the kingdom, and partly for the growing attraction of congenial political and cultural surroundings. Until Alfonso’s death in 1458 Naples thus became the political and administrative centre of an Aragonese empire that dominated the western Mediterranean. The central councils and regulatory organs of the Aragonese state, complete with their Spanish personnel, which had accompanied him to Italy in 1432, now functioned alongside, but separate from, the established machinery of Neapolitan government where natives held almost every office. In order to convince those who wielded power in the kingdom — the landowning aristocracy — that their interest lay with his dynasty, Alfonso confirmed their authority over their estates and those who lived on them, indulged them with a lavish creation of titles, flattered them with titular offices and consultation in parliaments and enmeshed the greatest — the Orsini and Ruffo — in marriages to his children. At the same time he reinforced the crown’s hold upon them, a hold almost obliterated by thirty years of turmoil, by forbidding them to keep armed retainers, reforming central and provincial administration, securing an adequate revenue estimated in 1444 at 830,000 ducats and reacting decisively against any show of resistance. After he had stamped on a rebellion in 1444 no one risked further open defiance. He endeavoured also to create bonds between his new kingdom and his other realms: bonds of economic self-interest based upon a proto-mercantilist vision of a trading community; familial bonds growing from the settlement of Spanish nobles and officials, led by his own children, among the Neapolitan nobility. And Alfonso himself, though remaining a Spaniard in personality, exhibited the traits of an Italian prince, fostering a court culture that in its art, building, music, poetry and humanist enterprise fused Italian and Spanish elements into an achievement that rivalled those of Tuscany and the north. Naples, his capital, doggedly loyal to Anjou until 1442, changed in sympathy as it prospered at the centre of Alfonso’s empire: its university reopened, its port was rebuilt and its roads paved, while nobles built mansions and the king refashioned the old fortress of Castelnuovo to new standards of magnificence.
With so formidable a neighbour, the pope had no choice but to follow a policy of complaisance that gave Alfonso an informal protectorate over the papal states, yet not without benefit to himself for it secured Eugenius in possession of Rome (to which he returned in September 1442), and drew the teeth of the Council of Basle and its anti-pope. Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, held meanwhile, albeit erratically, to his Aragonese alliance, but Florence and Venice, dismayed by this northward spread of Alfonso’s influence, struggled to check or reverse it. Time and again they rescued Francesco Sforza from final defeat in the March of Ancona until in December 1446 the king in person led an army towards Rome resolved to expel all rivals from the lands of the Church. He camped at Tivoli in January 1447 too late to browbeat Eugenius further — the pope died on 23 February — but well placed to secure another malleable occupant of the papal throne.
The new pope, Nicholas V, emerged from within the curial system: a prelate well versed in papal government but without the backing of great family or fortune; a man of humanist and peaceable inclinations. His even-handed distribution of lands among the Colonna and Orsini brought peace to the Roman countryside. The problem of the March of Ancona solved itself when Sforza renounced his titles there in order to press his claims to Milan following the death of Filippo Maria Visconti, his father-in-law. Other signori and oligarchs enjoyed untroubled possession under Nicholas who reaped some benefit from this unaccustomed stability in more regular tribute payments, reorganised transhumance tolls, and from the pockets of thousands of pilgrims who flocked to Rome in 1450 when he proclaimed a jubilee to celebrate reconciliation with the schismatics of Basle. Prosperity visibly returned to the city so that when, in January 1453, Stefano Porcari, a member of the old municipal elite, tried to raise Rome against papal rule he found no response. Romans old and new, high and low, were bound by self-interest to that power symbolised by Nicholas’s new Vatican with its state apartments, refashioned basilica and fortifications; there now lay the fixed centre of the Catholic world.
Sforza’s departure for Milan left Alfonso uncontested arbiter of the papal states as Florence and Venice concentrated their attention on the fate of the Visconti dominions. The moment had come, he reckoned, to fall upon Florence and force it to accept Aragonese encroachment upon the coastlands north and south of Elba. Twice he fought the Republic using papal territory as his base. In 1447—8 he took command himself with Milan as his ally; on the second occasion (1452—4), in league with Venice, he gave command to his son, Ferrante. Both campaigns ended in humiliation: a precipitate retreat from Piombino in 1448, and betrayal when Venice negotiated the Peace of Lodi behind his back in 1454. Although he managed to hold on to a few coastal bases, the strength of Aragon and Naples combined had clearly run against effective countervailing combinations backed by France and Anjou; from the resulting rough equilibrium emerged the Italian League. On its flanks, however, Alfonso still found freedom to pursue his designs for the subjection of Genoa and lands on the eastern shores of the Adriatic.
When Alfonso Borgia, former president of Alfonso’s council and then his henchman in Rome, was elected Pope Calixtus III in April 1455, the seal appeared set on Aragonese domination of the Papacy. Spaniards swarmed into Rome in numbers sufficient to upset those growing used to an Italian near monopoly of curial offices; two Borgia nephews received cardinals’ hats in an unprecedentedly blatant exercise of nepotism, and another became captain-general of the papal armies. Alfonso confidently looked forward to compliance in everything from the grant of vicariates to annulment of his marriage to a barren wife. Europe, Italy and he were therefore all astounded to see Calixtus turn violently against his old master. They clashed almost immediately over Calixtus’s refusal to confirm the Aragonese succession in Naples; within a year they had become open, bitter enemies as Alfonso retaliated by sabotaging the pope’s projects for a crusade against the Turks.
In this wreck of the understanding between Rome and Naples both states were to suffer. The blows fell first on the Roman lands where, by mobilising the Colonna against Alfonso’s Orsini allies, Calixtus ended a promising decade of order. The wider Romagna suffered the depredations of Jacopo Piccinino, an unemployed condottiere to whom the king gave every encouragement, and in 1457 Alfonso launched both Piccinino and Federigo da Montefeltro against his detested foe, Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini, with scant regard for claims of papal suzerainty. Blank refusal of every request from Naples was all Calixtus could oppose to this onslaught until Alfonso’s death (27 June 1458) put the fate of the kingdom momentarily in papal hands and severed its bonds with the crown of Aragon which passed to Alfonso’s brother, Joan. Ignoring Neapolitan recognition of Ferrante, he declared Naples a lapsed fief, perhaps under the senile delusion that his nephew, Pedro Luis, might reign there. The true beneficiary proved to be John of Anjou, Rene’s son, who landed near Naples in November 1459, once again with Genoese backing, to reopen the contest for the throne. For Calixtus this was posthumous revenge; he had died in August 1458. But his anti-Aragonese vendetta was not sustained by his successor Pius II, a career diplomat and writer of encyclopaedic range from Siena, who had been much impressed by Alfonso on a visit to Naples and understood the danger that turmoil in the kingdom posed for his own state. A papal legate was accordingly despatched to crown Ferrante in February 1459, despite strident protests from France.
The fires of civil war stoked by Calixtus, Anjou and Neapolitan magnates looking for a more tractable ruler none the less took hold during that summer, and it would be four years before Ferrante could extinguish them. Throughout, Pius maintained steadfast support, resisting French pressure, mobilising the Italian League, and contributing troops paid by his own treasury. He had good cause to persevere, for a backlash of war swept from Naples over the papal states. Piccinino, Sigismondo Malatesta and the count of Anguillara, with Angevin support, rampaged through the March of Ancona to the gates of Rome inciting disorder within its walls. Only with the collapse of the Neapolitan rebellion in 1463 did peace return.
A common struggle had re-established the understanding between pope and king which was given a new dynastic twist by the marriage of Antonio Piccolomini, Pius’s nephew, to Ferrante’s illegitimate daughter, Maria. All this warfare, however, had cost Pius great sums at the same time that he was endeavouring, like Calixtus, to lead Europe by example into a crusade. There came providentially to his rescue the rich alum deposits discovered in 1461 north-west of Rome at Tolfa, profits from which in time boosted papal revenues by some 20 per cent. Yet still more was needed, so in 1463 there appeared a new fiscal device that was to be adopted time and again by Pius’s successors — the curial office created specifically for sale; whose holders were in effect purchasing a life annuity. Pius began on an heroic scale with a College of seventy abbreviators, clerks responsible for the drafting of papal bulls. All the proceeds, along with the profits from alum, went into a special crusading account as earnest of the pledge that he had given at the Congress of Mantua in 1459. However, this had no more effect upon international indifference than did his final despairing journey to Ancona, the designated port of departure, where he died on 15 August 1464.
Ferrante meanwhile went about the business of consolidating his throne on foundations less grandiose than those that had supported his father. Although many Spaniards established in the baronage and bureaucracy continued in his service, large numbers returned to their native land, their places being filled by Italians of proven fidelity, conspicuous among whom were the principal secretaries, Antonello Petrucci and Giovanni Pontano. To redress a gross imbalance between baronial and royal demesne Ferrante bestowed land forfeited by rebellion, including the huge estates of the prince of Taranto, upon his numerous progeny and relatives by marriage. A reduction in the rates of direct taxation, granted as a gesture of good will at the outset of his reign, was offset by increased revenue from a rising volume of trade. Alfonso’s mercantile enthusiasm had left its mark on his son. Road-building schemes and a drive against baronial abuse of tolls and markets in a background of domestic peace brought a modest prosperity to ports and fairs. A rising output of wool and silk fuelled the export of those raw materials. Projects to develop quality textile production in Naples, on the other hand, made little headway against a regional decline, but the capital continued to flourish as the provincial nobility with royal encouragement moved to build themselves palaces there. As external buttresses to his throne Ferrante relied principally upon Sforza Milan and Aragon, both states, like Naples, menaced by French ambitions. With both he contracted marriage alliances. The Italian League, although never entirely effective in a crisis, offered some guarantee against Florentine and Venetian hostility. In the papal states the need of many signori to find a reliable paymaster ensured a measure of influence, most importantly through Federigo da Montefeltro of Urbino who, after the fall of the Malatesta, emerged as the greatest condottiere prince of that region. Unlike his father, however, Ferrante seldom held the initiative in his dealings with the Papacy, but had to follow the shifts of policy resulting from the play of Roman politics. Both he and the Church had the good fortune to see the tiara pass in 1464 to the Venetian, Paul II. Admittedly Paul, a nephew of Eugenius IV, was vain and worldly but his character had an open, pleasant aspect uncommon in fifteenth-century popes, and he was not plagued by consuming ambitions. Moves to buttress his territorial base by executing claims upon the lands of old adversaries, first the Roman barons of Anguillara, then the residual Malatesta possessions, did arouse Ferrante’s suspicions to the extent that, in 1469, he sent troops to Rimini to support Roberto Malatesta against Paul. But when Milan and Florence, too, declared for Roberto, and Venice declined to intervene, Paul backed away from confrontation. A battle over alum ended by contrast in a papal victory. In order to safeguard his revenue from the Neapolitan mines at Agnano, Ferrante intrigued against Paul’s operations, backed by the Medici, to secure ownership of Tolfa. He failed both there and in a subsequent scheme to tie papal and Neapolitan interests together in a consortium. By 1472 production from the Tolfa mines had so far outstripped that of their southern partners that the arrangement collapsed.
An expanding revenue, no longer mortgaged to war or crusading, enabled Paul to resume the building in Rome which had been neglected since Nicholas V. (Pius II had invested all his architectural enthusiasm in transforming his native village into a model Renaissance town.) Work concentrated on Paul’s private residence, the palazzo of St Mark, rather than the Vatican, with spin-off benefits to the adjacent old centre of Rome, the Capitol. The pope could also afford to dispense with the abbreviators, a move which precipitated a conflict with the ‘Roman Academy’, a community of humanists led by Pomponio Leto, a professor of the university, that had proliferated in the papal bureaucracy since the days of Nicholas; many of them had invested in the new offices. Yet economy alone did not motivate Paul; a desire to curtail the influence of Sienese introduced into the curia under Pius II is also evident, as it was in the pope’s restoration of the Medici as papal bankers in place of the Sienese Spannocchi. Humanists who indulged in pagan and republican posturings were inviting trouble from an ecclesiastical autocrat; yet Paul was no enemy to their true concerns, for he patronised scholars generously, encouraged the introduction of printing in Rome (1468) three years before Ferrante brought it to Naples, and began building the Vatican library.
How moderately Paul had governed the Church and its lands became evident when they fell into the very different hands of his successor, the Genoese, Francesco della Rovere, Sixtus IV. A Franciscan of humble origins, Sixtus owed his tiara to anti-Venetian settlement in the Sacred College and Italy at large. He discovered no constructive purpose for the power that was now his but employed it rather in the unashamed aggrandisement of his family. Six close relatives were packed into the Sacred College within seven years, others into positions of temporal glory; Giovanni della Rovere, a nephew, married the duke of Urbino’s daughter (1474); another, Leonardo, in 1472 became both prefect of Rome and husband of a daughter, albeit an illegitimate one, of Ferrante; the king’s niece married Antonio Basso della Rovere in 1479, while yet another nephew, Girolamo, the greediest of them all, was given a Sforza bride. To this unscrupulous gang the Papacy afforded an ideal instrument for achieving the goal of every parvenu Italian in that century — temporal dominion; and they knew that time was against them, Sixtus being already fifty-five years old when elected. Instead of obstructing their designs, as he had those of Paul II, Ferrante unwisely chose to back them in the belief that he would thereby make himself an indispensable ally to petty princelings, increase his influence in the papal states and win concessions from Rome, as indeed he did when Sixtus waived for life the tribute due for Naples and created the king’s son, Giovanni, a cardinal in December 1477. Milan and Urbino, too, fell in with the della Rovere, a stance that earned Federigo de Montefeltro his ducal title in 1474. Florence proved less accommodating. Quarrels with the Medici over alum contracts and Imola led to Lorenzo losing the papal account to a Genoese banker, management of Tolfa to the rival Pazzi, and in 1478 to the murder of Giuliano de’ Medici; Lorenzo narrowly escaped the same fate. Whether or not the della Rovere were directly implicated in the crime hardly matters, for they seized upon the subsequent mob murder of the archbishop of Pisa and imprisonment of Cardinal Raffaello Riario (a great-nephew of Sixtus) as justification for war upon Florence. Ferrante joined them because Medicean Florence remained in his judgement an irreconcilable foe of his dynasty. Moreover, he desired to demonstrate to Italy, and to his own subjects, how fifteen years of internal peace and reorganisation had strengthened the crown’s military capabilities.
A Neapolitan army led by Alfonso, duke of Calabria, the king’s eldest son, combined with the forces of Urbino, quickly justified Ferrante’s confidence with a string of victories that by the end of 1479 had Florence at bay. Then doubts began to arise as to the wisdom of engineering too great a papal triumph; from doubt came secret negotiations, and then Lorenzo’s astonishing venture to Naples in December 1479 in search of peace. There followed a diplomatic somersault as dramatic as that accomplished by King Alfonso in 1435: Ferrante and Lorenzo sealed not only a peace but an understanding that lasted the rest of their lives. A furious Sixtus had to rest content with booty far below his expectations, the main prize being Forli which he bestowed as a vicariate on Girolamo Riario.
For a brief time Ferrante appeared as the arbiter of Italy, only to find himself suing for its aid when, in August 1480, a Turkish invasion force, long feared yet largely discounted, stormed the Adriatic port of Otranto. The Neapolitan army had to abandon Tuscany to confront the Turks, and most of the gains of war were sacrificed for promises of Milanese, Florentine and papal assistance. In the event the duke of Calabria’s military competence and the death of Sultan Mehemmed II led to the expulsion of the Turks in August 1481 without any significant outside aid; papal galleys and Hungarian troops appeared very late in the day. But Ferrante’s enemies were resolved that the triumphant Christian hero should not reappear as cock of the walk in central Italy. With Sixtus’s blessing the Venetians fell upon the king’s ally, Duke Ercole of Ferrara, and the kingdom’s Adriatic coast, where they occupied Gallipoli; they worked, too, upon the discontents of a baronage alarmed by the advance of royal authority. Reacting energetically, Ferrante sent Duke Alfonso against Rome, hoping to cudgel Sixtus into neutrality, and his brother Federico to confront Venice in the Adriatic. The odds, however, had turned against him. When Alfonso suffered a heavy defeat outside Rome, only pressure from Milan, now controlled by an erstwhile protege, Ludovico Sforza (‘Il Moro’), on whom Ferrante had bestowed the dukedom of Bari, managed to detach the pope from Venice. Late in 1483, as Neapolitan finances began to crumple under the strain of continual warfare, it became impossible to pay the armies engaged against the Venetians, and thereafter Ferrante had no choice but to accept a peace (7 August 1484) that was largely the work of his Milanese ally. It rescued Ferrara, and made Venice surrender most of its conquests, but left Naples exhausted. For Pope Sixtus, the outcome of six barren years of fighting was still more calamitous. Legend has it that news that his schemes had come to naught precipitated his death on 12 August. Certainly this was a fitting moment to terminate a career dedicated to a megalomaniac concept of the papal office which was destined unfortunately to resurface in the pontificate of Giuliano della Rovere as Julius II.
Like many another despot, Sixtus embellished his capital with fine monuments that caught the full flowering of Renaissance genius in art and architecture. In August 1483 great crowds flocked to wonder at the new Sistine Chapel. Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio, Pinturicchio, Melozzo and Rosselli all served him in the pursuit of magnificence and fame. Many wealthy cardinals competed in swelling the flood of patronage. But let it not be forgotten that this century saw more destruction of the antique in Rome than building of the new. Elsewhere in the lands of the Church, every signore, from the greatest — Montefeltro, Este, Malatesta, Bentivogli — to the least, devoted money and enthusiasm to rebuilding and beautifying their own surroundings. All the arts blossomed in a blaze of courtly competition. And the cost to the Papacy paled beside the sums poured into war and the extravagant life style of the della Rovere family. Need for money drove Sixtus to revive the College of Abbreviators in 1478, and then to float the Colleges of Sollecitatori (1482) and Notari (1483). He also found a fruitful source of largely unsolicited business in a swelling volume of petitions from all corners of Europe for papal dispensations; the office of the datary, which collected the fees, assumed a new prominence in the curia. On the other hand, an attempt to stimulate the pilgrim trade by reducing the interval between jubilees to twenty-five years did not live up to expectations in 1475 when flooding of the Tiber drove visitors away.
The conclave to elect Sixtus’s successor met in an atmosphere of violence provoked by the late pope’s onslaught on the Colonna, who had been drawn into alliance with Naples, and by his longer-running campaign against communal autonomy in Rome. The horse-trading between these hostile interests and those of the della Rovere clan, desperate to retain some grip on power, settled upon an ineffective Genoese cardinal, Giovanni-Battista Cibo, who, as Pope Innocent VIII, behaved as the creature of Giuliano della Rovere. While Romans looked in vain for the promised restoration of their liberties, the Colonna gained a free hand against the Orsini, and there ensued a reign of lawlessness unparalleled since the days of Eugenius. Soon the turmoil of Rome became caught up in a greater upheaval, the second barons’ revolt which convulsed the kingdom of Naples in 1485. A steep increase in taxation made necessary by war debts, dislike of Ferrante’s authoritarian style of government, apprehension at the prospect of being ruled by the still sterner figure of his son, Alfonso, and, in some, fear of retribution for treasonable dealings with Venice, gathered into a widespread mood of disaffection which yielded to neither threats nor concessions from the crown. It found in Cardinal della Rovere a champion who, while labouring to enlist France and Venice for the cause, cast the whole weight of papal influence against Ferrante, and gave the signal for the outbreak of rebellion on 26 September 1485. Although the king initially fell into despair, his position was substantially more favourable than in 1459. No French invader materialised, Florence remained staunch, Milan followed, while Venice shuffled; Ferdinand the Catholic sent Sicilian troops and Spanish galleys to support his cousin. Most crucially, the internal balance of forces favoured the king decisively from the beginning, a measure of the shift of power effected over two decades. Consequently the duke of Calabria was able, with Orsini support, to fall upon Rome, defeat Innocent’s forces and extract a peace treaty (11 August 1486). This left the rebels helpless before a king who speedily and ruthlessly plucked out those judged most disloyal and dangerous, among them Petrucci, his chief secretary, the princes of Altamura and Bisignano and the dukes of Nardo and Melfi. Most disappeared into the dungeons of Castelnuovo to become the subject of grisly legends. In the aftermath the Aragonese succession in Naples seemed internally secure, but for five years more Innocent pursued his quarrel, rejecting Ferrante’s proffered tokens of tribute, and threatening him with France. Only in 1492 did Lorenzo de’ Medici, shortly before his death, succeed in bringing them to an agreement that ratified the Aragonese succession.
While this futile contest absorbed all Innocent’s resources he had no choice but to yield on every other front. The Orsini returned to favour and, with the Colonna, reimposed their domination upon the Roman countryside. Medici influence made a spectacular comeback with a cardinal’s hat for Lorenzo’s thirteen-year-old son, Giovanni, and two marriages: his daughter, Maddalena, to the pope’s son, his son, Piero, to an Orsini. Elsewhere, too, in his states the pope submitted his authority to Florentine interest, as in Perugia where in 1488 the Baglioni made themselves sole masters. A similar upheaval in Bologna led the Bentivogli to tie their fortunes more closely to Milan. Thus had papal authority come to count for nothing in the greater cities. In the light of that retreat, repeated on a smaller scale throughout the lands of the Church, it is unsurprising to find that Innocent financed himself by selling yet more offices including another college and twenty-four apostolic secretaryships, with the explicit provision that no duties whatsoever attached to them.
A pontificate which, by general consent, had been disastrous ended with Innocent’s death on 25 July 1492, but with little prospect of improvement because, after several unsuccessful bids, the turn had come of Rodrigo Borgia, nephew of Calixtus III, to ascend the papal throne as Alexander VI. Thirty-six years a cardinal and only one less as vice-chancellor of the Church had made him the most influential figure in the curia, and one identified with most of the excesses that had disfigured papal government over those years. Three sons, a daughter and a flock of nephews, all fired by della Rovere example, stood ready to carve their fortunes from the Church. Six of them became cardinals. Memories of an earlier generation of Borgia ambition did not reassure Ferrante, now well advanced into old age; nor did Alexander’s dependence upon Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, Ludovico il Moro’s brother, because Neapolitan relations with Milan had soured since 1488 when the king’s granddaughter, Isabel, married to the titular duke of Milan, had tried to prise Ludovico’s hands off her husband and his state. An immediate clash of wills developed over a mischief-making sale arranged by della Rovere of some estates near Rome belonging to Innocent’s son. They were bought by Virginio Orsini, relative of the Medici and captain-general of the Neapolitan army. Milan and Venice promptly lined up behind Alexander’s protests, threatening to resolve the matter by force. Ferrante, however, refused to be drawn, and by the summer of 1493 had produced a solution that satisfied honour on both sides; moreover, he managed to trump the marriage of the pope’s daughter, Lucrezia, to a minor Sforza with a suitably endowed match between her brother, Goffredo, and his own illegitimate grand-daughter.
As one Spanish dynasty tightened its grip on Rome and the papal curia, the other in Naples was nearing the end of a long reign. For long enemies, they now found themselves driven together by a common peril. Cardinal della Rovere, Alexander’s doughtiest opponent, had withdrawn to France in despair after failing to block the appointment of hostile cardinals, including two Borgias, in September 1493. At the French court he joined with Neapolitan refugees from Ferrante’s vengeance in urging Charles VIII to pursue the title to Naples that he had recently inherited from the Angevins. Knowing what was afoot, Ferrante had begun to prepare his defences. Those on land he entrusted to the formidable duke of Calabria, those at sea to his second son Federico, while his agents laboured in every court to turn the diplomatic tide. Should an invasion come, he felt confident his sons would fight with ‘hands, feet and every limb’, and would again beat the French who were widely reckoned inferior to Italians in fighting qualities. In that belief he died on 25 January 1494. He was deceived; in little more than a year his sons were in flight and Charles entered Naples unopposed. But the deeper transformation wrought in the kingdom by fifty years of Aragonese rule was not so readily undone, nor would the dynasty led by Ferdinand ‘the Catholic’ yield possession to France. In Naples and in Rome the way had been prepared for a long-lasting Spanish domination.