Another great Neapolitan writer of the age, though working on a much smaller scale than Vico, attracted more notice from contemporaries, inasmuch as Vico seemed to deal merely with abstract things, while PIETRO GIANNONE came into rough contact with vested interests. Giannone, born at Ischitella, in Apulia, May 1676, went to the Neapolitan bar, and made the legal and ecclesiastical history of the kingdom his especial study. In his Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples (1723), the work of twenty years, he demonstrated the illegitimacy of the Papal claims to jurisdiction over Naples, with a learning and research which, now that these claims are no longer heard of, maintain his works in request as one of the highest authorities upon mediæval law. The more ordinary qualities of a historian are not manifested in the same measure, but Giannone’s place is something quite apart. The book was received with gratitude and delight by the educated part of the public; but the monks, secretly prompted by the court of Rome, raised an outcry against Giannone as an unbeliever in St. Januarius, and he was compelled to fly the country. He found refuge successively in Vienna, Venice, and Geneva; but having been tempted into Savoy for the purpose of attending the Roman Catholic service, was seized and most iniquitously imprisoned by the King of Sardinia, the King Charles of Browning’s drama, until his death in 1748, though he maintained all the time an amicable correspondence with the King and his minister D’Ormea. Notwithstanding the wrongs which he suffered from the house of Savoy, he foresaw and foretold its greatness and service to the nation. He imitated Machiavelli by exhorting the Italians to military discipline, and his principal work is epoch-making as a precursor of the great movement which tended to subject the Church to the civil power in the latter half of the eighteenth century. He also composed the _Triregno_, a review of the temporal power of the Church in general, which was so effectually sequestrated as to have remained unpublished until 1895. It is not quite complete. Giannone’s autobiography, which comes down to a late period of his captivity, was published for the first time in 1891.