[p. 552]
|552| when they stirred the lust of conquest of greater powers and became the theatre of the wars of foreign powers. The small states, which as a power set themselves over against a power a thousand times and more greater, experienced the necessary fate of their fall, and beside a regret over it there stands the feeling of the necessity and of the guilt which pygmies load upon themselves when, setting themselves beside colossi, they are trampled down. The existence too of the greater Italian states, which had formed themselves by the engulfing of a multitude of smaller ones, thus vegetated on without strength and true independence, a ball in the plans of foreign powers; they maintained themselves somewhat longer by the prudence of humbling themselves skilfully and at the right time and of warding off, by constant half-submissions, the full subjection, which in the end, however, did not fail to come.
What has [become] of the multitude of independent states Pisa, Siena, Arezzo, Ferrara, Milan, of these hundreds of states, as every city was one, what of the families of the many sovereign dukes, margraves, etc., of the princely houses Bentivoglio, Sforza, Gonzaga, Pico, Urbino, etc., and of the countless knightly nobility? The independent states were swallowed up by greater ones and these again by greater ones, and so on; one of the greatest, Venice, has in our days been given its end by a letter of a French general, brought by an adjutant. The most brilliant princely houses have neither sovereignty nor even political, representative significance any longer. The noblest families have become court nobility.
In the period of misfortune, when Italy was hastening towards its wretchedness and was the battlefield of the wars which foreign princes waged over its lands, at once furnishing the means for those wars and being the prize of them, when it entrusted its own defence to assassination, poison and treachery
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