The Greatest Story in the World, Period 2 by Horace G. Hutchinson

It is curious to note the different modes of government which / prevailed in the different States of Italy in the fifteenth century. / There was, nearly halfway down the long peninsula, this Papal State / or State of the Church, firmly established by 1450. In the extreme / south was the kingdom, that is to say a State governed by a monarchy, / of Naples, with which the island of Sicily was at one time included, / while at another time the kingdom was separated from it. In the / extreme north there was Milan, of which the Duke was the head. / Another of the five great States by which all Italy at that time was / held was Florence, under a republican government, and there was the / powerful naval State of Venice, also in name a republic, though its / mode of government differed from the mode of Florence. In Italy more / than in any other country, although conditions everywhere were / constantly changing, we find what we may call experiments in ways of / government being attempted. I do not think that there is any form of / government, or even of anarchy -- which is absence of all / government -- under which mankind ever has tried to live that was not / put upon its trial in Italy during these years. Yet, through all the / shifting scene, so unsettled that even the Pope himself had to fly / from the Holy City, the power of the Church still increased and / increased. And one of the means of its {172} increase we have to / recognise in the Crusades. Although the later Crusades lost much of / the high spiritual motives which had inspired the first Crusades, / even the worst of them was waged with the underlying idea in the / minds of the warriors that they were fighting in the sacred cause of / religion.

The earlier Crusades had been fired with the project, which for a / while had been achieved, of rescuing the Holy Places of Palestine / from the infidel. The first Crusaders of all had been invited / thither by the Emperor at Constantinople. The fourth Crusaders had / attacked and taken Constantinople itself and had put one of their / leaders, Baldwin, the Norman, on the imperial throne. But there were / other so-called Crusades that never went eastward at all. Only a few / years later than the date, 1204, of the expedition which captured the / imperial capital of the East, that so-called Crusade against the / Albigenses swept over the beautiful country of the troubadours. The / people of this part of France had been disposed, for many years, to / adopt a view of the nature of God which had been brought from the / east of Europe and was opposed to the doctrine of the Church of Rome. / Moreover, these heretics, as the Church deemed them, set their faces / firmly against some of the evil practices of the clergy.