Thus to the play of personality, whether in combat with society and rivals, or in the gratification of individual caprice, every liberty is allowed.

Might is substituted for right, and the sense of law is supplanted by a mere dread of coercion.
What is the wonder if a Benvenuto Cellini should be the outcome of the same society as that which formed a Cesare Borgia?
What is the miracle if Italy under these circumstances produced original characters and many-sided intellects in greater profusion than any other nation at any other period, with the single exception of Greece on her emergence from the age of her despots?
It was the misfortune of Italy that the age of the despots was succeeded not by an age of free political existence, but by one of foreign servitude.
[1] See Guicciardini, 'Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze,' _Op.
Ined._ vol.ii.p.

53, for a critique of the motives of tyrannicide in Italy.
Frederick II.

was at the same time the last emperor who maintained imperial sway in Italy in person, and also the beginner of a new system of government which the despots afterwards pursued.

His establishment of the Saracen colony at Nocera, as the nucleus of an army ready to fulfill his orders with scrupulous disregard for Italian sympathies and customs, taught all future rulers to reduce their subjects to a state of unarmed passivity, and to carry on their wars by the aid of German, English, Swiss, Gascon, Breton, or Hungarian mercenaries, as the case might be.
Frederick, again, derived from his Mussulman predecessors in Sicily the arts of taxation to the utmost limits of the national capacity, and founded a precedent for the levying of tolls by a Catasto or schedule of the properties attributed to each individual in the state.