The
Chancellor, however, expected in return for the patents in question a
gratuity which was thought excessive at Ferrara. The opinion of Borso,
himself created Duke of Modena and Reggio in return for an annual
payment of 4,000 gold florins, when his imperial patron was
distributing titles and diplomas to all the little court, is not
mentioned. The humanists, then the chief spokesmen of the age, were
divided in opinion according to their personal interests, while the
Emperor was greeted by some of them with the conventional acclamations
of the poets of imperial Rome. Poggio confessed that he no longer knew
what the coronation meant: in the old times only the victorious
Imperator was crowned, and then he was crowned with laurel.
With Maximilian I begins not only the general intervention of foreign
nations, but a new imperial policy with regard to Italy. The first step
-- the investiture of Lodovico il Moro with the duchy of Milan and the
exclusion of his unhappy nephew -- was not of a kind to bear good
fruits. According to the modern theory of intervention when two parties
are tearing a country to pieces, a third may step in and take its
share, and on this principle the empire acted. But right and justice
could be involved no longer. When Louis XI was expected in Genoa
(1507), and the imperial eagle was removed from the hall of the ducal
palace and replaced by painted lilies, the historian Senarega asked
what, after all, was the meaning of the eagle which so many revolutions
had spared, and what claims the empire had upon Genoa.
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