Despotism in Italy as in ancient Greece was democratic. It recruited its
ranks from all classes and erected its thrones upon the sovereignty of
the peoples it oppressed. The impulse to the free play of ambitious
individuality which this state of things communicated was enormous.
Capacity might raise the meanest monk to the chair of S. Peter's, the
meanest soldier to the duchy of Milan. Audacity, vigor, unscrupulous
crime were the chief requisites for success. It was not till Cesare
Borgia displayed his magnificence at the French Court, till the Italian
adventurer matched himself with royalty in its legitimate splendor, that
the lowness of his origin and the frivolity of his pretensions appeared
in any glaring light.[1] In Italy itself, where there existed no
time-honored hierarchy of classes and no fountain of nobility in the
person of a sovereign, one man was a match for another, provided he knew
how to assert himself. To the conditions of a society based on these
principles we may ascribe the unrivaled emergence of great
personalities among the tyrants, as well as the extraordinary tenacity
and vigor of such races as the Visconti. In the contest for power, and
in the maintenance of an illegal authority, the picked athletes came to
the front. The struggle by which they established their tyranny, the
efforts by which they defended it against foreign foes and domestic
adversaries, trained them to endurance and to daring. They lived
habitually in an atmosphere of peril which taxed all their energies.
Their activity was extreme, and their passions corresponded to their
vehement vitality. About such men there could be nothing on a small or
mediocre scale. When a weakling was born in a despotic family, his
brothers murdered him, or he was deposed by a watchful rival. Thus only
gladiators of tried capacity and iron nerve, superior to religious and
moral scruples, dead to national affection, perfected in perfidy,
scientific in the use of cruelty and terror, employing first-rate
faculties of brain and will and bodily powers in the service of