At last the League of Cambrai
actually did strike a serious blow at the State which all Italy ought
to have supported with united strength.
The other States, also, were animated by feelings no less unfriendly,
and were at all times ready to use against one another any weapon which
their evil conscience might suggest. Lodovico il Moro, the Aragonese
kings of Naples, and Sixtus IV--to say nothing of the smaller powers--
kept Italy in a constant perilous agitation. It would have been well if
the atrocious game had been confined to Italy; but it lay in the nature
of the case that intervention sought from abroad--in particular the
French and the Turks.
The sympathies of the people at large were throughout on the side of
France. Florence had never ceased to confess with shocking _naivete
_its old Guelph preference for the French. And when Charles VIII
actually appeared on the south of the Alps, all Italy accepted him with
an enthusiasm which to himself and his followers seemed unaccountable.
In the imagination of the Italians, to take Savonarola for an example
the ideal picture of a wise, just, and powerful savior and ruler was
still living, with the difference that he was no longer the emperor
invoked by Dante, but the Capetian king of France. With his departure
the illusion was broken; but it was long before all understood how
completely Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I had mistaken their
true relation to Italy, and by what inferior motives they were led.
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