If we examine the constitution of these tyrannies, we find abundant
proofs of their despotic nature. The succession from father to son was
always uncertain. Legitimacy of birth was hardly respected. The last La
Scalas were bastards. The house of Aragon in Naples descended from a
bastard. Gabriello Visconti shared with his half-brothers the heritage
of Gian Galeazzo. The line of the Medici was continued by princes of
more than doubtful origin. Suspicion rested on the birth of Frederick of
Urbino. The houses of Este and Malatesta honored their bastards in the
same degree as their lawful progeny. The great family of the Bentivogli
at Bologna owed their importance at the end of the fifteenth century to
an obscure and probably spurious pretender, dragged from the
wool-factories of Florence by the policy of Cosimo de' Medici. The sons
of popes ranked with the proudest of aristocratic families. Nobility was
less regarded in the choice of a ruler than personal ability. Power
once acquired was maintained by force, and the history of the ruling
families is one long catalogue of crimes. Yet the cities thus governed
were orderly and prosperous. Police regulations were carefully
established and maintained by governors whose interest it was to rule a
quiet state. Culture was widely diffused without regard to rank or
wealth. Public edifices of colossal grandeur were multiplied. Meanwhile
the people at large were being fashioned to that self-conscious and
intelligent activity which is fostered by the modes of life peculiar to
political and social centers in a condition of continued rivalry and
change.

Under the Italian despotisms we observe nearly the opposite of all the
influences brought to bear in the same period upon the nations of the
North. There is no gradual absorption of the great vassals in
monarchies, no fixed allegiance to a reigning dynasty, no feudal aid or
military service attached to the tenure of the land, no tendency to