exclusion of his unhappy nephew -- was not of a kind to bear good
fruits. According to the modern theory of intervention when two parties
are tearing a country to pieces, a third may step in and take its
share, and on this principle the empire acted. But right and justice
could be involved no longer. When Louis XI was expected in Genoa
(1507), and the imperial eagle was removed from the hall of the ducal
palace and replaced by painted lilies, the historian Senarega asked
what, after all, was the meaning of the eagle which so many revolutions
had spared, and what claims the empire had upon Genoa. No one knew more
about the matter than the old phrase that Genoa was a _camera imperii_.
In fact, nobody in Italy could give a clear answer to any such
questions. At length when Charles V held Spain and the empire together,
he was able by means of Spanish forces to make good imperial claims:
but it is notorious that what he thereby gained turned to the profit,
not of the empire, but of the Spanish monarchy.

* * *

Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of
the fifteenth century was the public indifference to legitimate birth,
which to foreigners -- for example, to Commines -- appeared so
remarkable. The two things went naturally together. In northern
countries, as in Burgundy, the illegitimate offspring were provided for
by a distinct class of appanages, such as bishoprics and the like: in
Portugal an illegitimate line maintained itself on the throne only by
constant effort; in Italy. on the contrary, there no longer existed a
princely house where even in the direct line of descent, bastards were
not patiently tolerated. The Aragonese monarchs of Naples belonged to
the illegitimate line, Aragon itself falling to the lot of the brother
of Alfonso I. The great Federigo of Urbino was, perhaps, no Montefeltro