Strange judgements fell on these two so-called parties,
which now served only to give official sanction to personal and f
family disputes.
An Italian prince, whom Agrippa of Nettesheim advised to put them down,
replied that their quarrels brought him in more than 12,000 ducats a
year in fines. And when in the year 1500, during the brief return of
Lodovico il Moro to his States, the Guelphs of Tortona summoned a part
of the neighbouring French army into the city, in order to make an end
once for all of their opponents, the French certainly began by
plundering and ruining the Ghibellines, but finished by doing the same
to the Guelphs, till Tortona was utterly laid waste. In Romagna, the
hotbed of every ferocious passion, these two names had long lost all
political meaning. It was a sign of the political delusion of the
people that they not seldom believed the Guelphs to be the natural
allies of the French and the Ghibellines of the Spaniards. It is hard
to see that those who tried to profit by this error got much by doing
so. France, after all her interventions, had to abandon the peninsula
at last, and what became of Spain, after she had destroyed Italy, is
known to every reader.
But to return to the despots of the Renaissance. A pure and simple
mind, we might think, would perhaps have argued that, since all power
is derived from God, these princes, if they were loyally and honestly
supported by all their subjects, must in time themselves improve and
los e all traces of their violent origin.
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