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The dynasties of Visconti and Sforza from 1300 to 1500 bridged over the years that intervened between the Middle Age and the Renaissance, between the period of the free burghs and the period during which Italy was destined to become the theater of the action of more powerful nations. Their alliances and diplomatic relations prepared the way for the interference of foreigners in Italian affairs.
That is what he makes emphatically clear in In the Time of the Breaking of Nations: Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass: Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass.
The great Emperor Frederick the Second, the scholar-pope Pius the Second, and all the monarchs of the Angevin, Aragonese and Bourbon dynasties have been associated with this “castle by the sea.” The whole district was once the property of that human monster Pier-Luigi Farnese, duke of Parma, heir of Pope Paul the Third, of whose demoniacal cruelty and treachery the racy pages of Cellini’s Memoirs give so vivid an account, and whose repulsive face has grown familiar to us from Titian’s famous portraits in the gallery of Naples.
The basis of the monarchy is destroyed, for the magistrate is no longer a paternal ruler residing amongst and mildly swaying his children, but a marauder, who arrives no man knows whence, and who departs no one knows whither. The consequence is universal stagnation; no great undertakings are accomplished; and the works and labors of former dynasties are allowed to fall into decay.
It does not limit its attention to a particular fraction of a people, to the exclusion of the rest. Governments and rulers, and the public doings of states, such as foreign wars, and the struggles of rival dynasties, naturally form a prominent topic in historical writings. But this is only one department in the records of the past.
Legge quotes Marco Polo, the greatest traveller of the Middle Ages, who visited China in the thirteenth century," the speaker began, taking a paper from the table, and reading as follows in regard to the Grand Canal: "'Kublâi caused a water communication to be made in the shape of a wide and deep channel dug between stream and stream, between lake and lake, forming as it were a great river on which large vessels can ply. Kublâi was the first sovereign of one of the old dynasties.
It was now his duty to defend the unification of Germany against this new Particularism; in old days Particularism found its support in the dynasties, "now it is," he said, "in the Parliaments.
It seems that as Egyptian monarchs were wont to build pyramids to mark the glory of their several dynasties, so the Kandian kings and earlier rulers of Ceylon each sought to excel his predecessor by constructing larger tanks, thus elaborating the means of irrigation and increasing the productiveness of the island.
I wrote them freely, and indeed could not comfortably take money from Chapman in his present circumstances, but I would much rather write for the National Review if I am admissible.... I value forms of government in proportion as they develop moral results in individual man; and if I now am democratic for Europe, it is not from any abstract and exclusive zeal for democracy, all the weaknesses of which I keenly feel, but because the dynasties, having first corrupted or destroyed the aristocracies, and next become hateful, hated, and incurable themselves, have left no government possible which shall have stability and morality except the democratic.
Naples for example received a fresh and stronger impulse from the new Aragonese dynasty. A striking feature of this epoch is the attempt of the Condottieri to found independent dynasties of their own. Facts and the actual relations of things, apart from traditional estimates, are alone regarded; talent and audacity win the great prizes.
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