Instead of internal self-government by any system of balance, Italy submitted to a succession of invasions terminating in foreign tyranny.
The problem why the Italians failed to achieve the unity of a coherent nation has been implicitly discussed in the foregoing pages upon the history of the Communes and the development of despotism.

We have already seen that their conception of municipal independence made a narrow oligarchy of enfranchised burghers lords of the city, which in its turn oppressed the country and the subject burghs of its domain.
Every conquest by a republic reduced some village or center of civil life to the condition of serfdom.

The voices of the inhabitants were no longer heard debating questions that affected their interests.

They submitted to dictation from their masters, the enfranchised few in the ascendant commonwealth.

Thus, as Guicciardini pointed out in his 'Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli,' the subjection of Italy by a dominant republic would have meant the extinction of numberless political communities and the sway of a close oligarchy from the Alps to the Ionian Sea.[1] The 3,200 burghers who constituted Florence in 1494, or the nobles of the Golden Book at Venice, would by such unification of the country under a victorious republic have become sovereigns, administering the resources of the nation for their profit.
The dread of this catastrophe rendered Venice odious to her sister commonwealths at the close of the fifteenth century, and justified, according to Guicciardini's views of history, the action taken by Cosimo de' Medici in 1450, when he rendered Milan strong by supporting her despot, Francesco Sforza.[2] In a word republican freedom, as the term is now understood, was unknown in Italy.