Lehal Library

xiii Introduction bigger in any way that was convenient. Over the previous century the Florentines had captured Arezzo, Pisa and Cortona and wasted huge energies in a series of failed attempts to conquer Lucca. Rome’s aim under any pope was always to expand north and east into Romagna and Emilia, with a view to swal- lowing up Perugia, Bologna, Rimini and Forlì, a project that would bring it into conflict with both Venice and Flor- ence. In the far south, Naples was governed by a branch of the house of Aragon, but the crown was contested by the Angevin kings of France and by the Spanish royal fam- ily (also Aragons) which already ruled Sicily. So the scenario was complicated. Scattered between the large states were at least a score of smaller ones, some no bigger than a town and the surrounding fields, and all con- stantly under threat of invasion from one enemy or another. However, if the situation was rarely static, it is also true that there were few major changes. As soon as one power achieved some significant military victory, the others immediately formed an alliance against it to halt its progress. Florence, in particular, owed its continuing inde- pendence largely to the fact that if Venice, Milan or Rome tried to take it, the other two would at once intervene to prevent this happening. So for more than a hundred years a certain balance of power had been kept. All this ended with the French invasion of 1494. The invasion was, as Machiavelli himself explains in The Prince, largely the Italians’ own fault. For some time the xiv