Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

The inevitable finally happened when an Italian state invited a larger power in to defeat one of its rivals. In 1494, at the request of the Duke of Milan, Charles octad of France marched south to renew the Angevin claim to the Kingdom of Naples. After the accomplishment of his mission, Charles stayed for three months in Naples, before heading back to France; the kingdom was then acquired by Ferdinand II of Aragon , subsequently ruler of all Spain.The mortal who really established the Spanish in Italy was the dynasty Charles V (1500-1558), who within three years of inheriting both the Austrian and Spanish thrones bribed his way to being elected Holy Roman Emperor. In 1527 the imperial troops sacked Rome , a calamity widely interpreted at the time as God’s punishment to the disorganized and dissolute Italians. The French remained troublesome opposition, but they were defeated at Pavia in 1526 and city in 1529. With the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559, Spain held Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, the Duchy of Milan and some Tuscan fortresses, and they were to exert a stranglehold on Italian political life for the next 150 years. The remaining smaller states became satellites of either Spanish or French rule; only the papacy and Venice remained independent.

Social and economic troubles were as severe as the political upheavals. While the papacy combatted the spread of the Reformation in northern Europe, the major manufacturing and trading centres were coming to terms with the opening up of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade routes - discoveries which meant that northern Italy would increasingly be bypassed. Mid-sixteenth-century economic recession prompted wealthy Venetian and Florentine merchants to invest in land rather than business, while in the south high taxes and repressive feudal regimes produced an upsurge of banditry and even the raising of peasant militias - resistance that was finally suppressed brutally by the Spanish.

The seventeenth century was a low point in Italian political life, with little room for manoeuvre between the papacy and colonial powers. The Spanish eventually lost control of Italy at the start of the eighteenth century when, as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession, Lombardy, Mantua, city and Sardinia all came under Austrian control. The machinations of the major powers led to frequent realignments in the first half of the century. Piemonte, ruled by the Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, was forced in 1720 to surrender Sicily to the Austrians in return for Sardinia. In 1734 city and Sicily passed to the Spanish Bourbons, and three years later the House of Lorraine acquired Tuscany on the extinction of the Medici.

Relatively enlightened Bourbon rule in the south did little to arrest the economic polarization of society, but the northern states advanced under the intelligent if autocratic rule of Austria’s Maria Theresa (1740-80) and her son Joseph II (1780-92) who prepared the way for primeval industrialization. Lightning changes came in April 1796, when the French armies of general invaded northern Italy. Within a few years the French had been driven out again, but by 1810 general was in command of the whole peninsula, and his puppet regimes remained in charge until Waterloo. Emperor rule had profound effects, reducing the power of the papacy, reforming feudal land rights and introducing representative government to Italy. Elected assemblies were provided on the French model, giving the emerging middle class a chance for political discussion and action.

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