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So the once renowned descriptions of this province by Grano and the rest of them are little more than rhetorical exercises; they are "Laus Calabria." And then their sources of information were limited and difficult of access.
And thus it happens, that a spectacle, somewhat painful to good sense, is annually renewed of confiding households leaving a real Calabria in Montgomeryshire or Devonshire, for dreary, sunburned flats in Bavaria, in Provence, in Languedoc, or in the 'Legations' of the Papal territory. 'Vintagers, at a distance, how romantic a sound!
We leave Languedoc and are again in Provence, or what was Provence, till the Popes by a fraud obtained it. Avignon belonged to Provence, which was claimed by Charles of Anjou in right of his wife, and it had descended to his son, Charles II. of Naples. On the death of the latter it fell to Robert of Naples, and from him to his grand-daughter, Joanna, the heiress of the Duke of Calabria.
The Vaudians of Provence had been settled there since the end of the thirteenth century; and in the course of the fourteenth other Vaudians from Dauphiny, and even from Calabria, had come thither to join them.
The rival claimants had come to a compromise by virtue of which they were to undertake together the conquest and thereafter share the spoil Naples and the Abruzzi going to France, and Calabria and Puglia to Spain.
In order to direct the operations of the war with greater efficiency, the League assembled a diet at Cremona, which was attended by the pope's legate, the Count Girolamo, the duke of Calabria, the Signor Lodovico Sforza, and Lorenzo de' Medici, with many other Italian princes; and when the measures to be adopted were fully discussed, having decided that the best way of relieving Ferrara would be to effect a division of the enemy's forces, the League desired Lodovico to attack the Venetians on the side of Milan, but this he declined, for fear of bringing a war upon the duke's territories, which it would be difficult to quell.
To sneer at them is to misjudge their period. It was the very spirit of the Renaissance to press rhetorical learning into the service of patriotism. They made some happy guesses and not a few mistakes; and when they lied deliberately, it was done in what they held a just cause as scholars and gentlemen. The Calabria Illustrata of Fiore also fares badly at the hands of critics.
In accordance with the shortsighted policy of small expeditions, a British force under Sir John Stuart was landed in Calabria to raise the peasantry, and on July 4, defeated the French at the point of the bayonet in the battle of Maida.
"Antonio, a fisherman of the Lagunes, favored by his holy patron of the Miraculous Draught, had borne away the prize of gold while a waterman who wore his face concealed, but who hath trusted to the care of the blessed San Giovanni of the Wilderness, is worthy of the silver prize, and that the third had fallen to the fortunes of Gino of Calabria, a servitor of the illustrious Don Camillo Monforte, Duca di Sant' Agata, and lord of many Neapolitan Seignories."
and all this without counting analogous articles, and especially direct assessments levied on this or that individual as rich or a proprietor, veritable ransoms, similar to those demanded by the bandits of Calabria and Greece, extorted from any traveler they surprise on the highway.
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