nothing but the lull which goes before a storm. She was too rich and too
happy to escape the envy of other nations. As yet the plains of Pisa had
not been reduced to marsh-lands by the combined negligence and jealousy
of the Florentine Republic, neither had the rich country that lay around
Rome been converted into a barren desert by the wars of the Colonna and
Orsini families; not yet had the Marquis of Marignan razed to the ground
a hundred and twenty villages in the republic of Siena alone; and though
the Maremma was unhealthy, it was not yet a poisonous marsh: it is a fact
that Flavio Blando, writing in 1450, describes Ostia as being merely less
flourishing than in the days of the Romans, when she had numbered 50,000
inhabitants, whereas now in our own day there are barely 30 in all.

The Italian peasants were perhaps the most blest on the face of the
earth: instead of living scattered about the country in solitary fashion,
they lived in villages that were enclosed by walls as a protection for
their harvests, animals, and farm implements; their houses--at any rate
those that yet stand--prove that they lived in much more comfortable and
beautiful surroundings than the ordinary townsman of our day. Further,
there was a community of interests, and many people collected together in
the fortified villages, with the result that little by little they
attained to an importance never acquired by the boorish French peasants
or the German serfs; they bore arms, they had a common treasury, they
elected their own magistrates, and whenever they went out to fight, it
was to save their common country.

Also commerce was no less flourishing than agriculture; Italy at this
period was rich in industries--silk, wool, hemp, fur, alum, sulphur,
bitumen; those products which the Italian soil could not bring forth were
imported, from the Black Sea, from Egypt, from Spain, from France, and
often returned whence they came, their worth doubled by labour and fine