[Sidenote: The City-States of Northern Italy in 1500] North and west of the Papal States were the various city-states which were so thoroughly distinctive of Italian politics at the opening of the sixteenth century. Although these towns had probably reached a higher plane both of material prosperity and of intellectual culture than was to be found at that time in any other part of Europe, nevertheless they were deeply jealous of each other and carried on an interminable series of petty wars, the brunt of which was borne by professional hired soldiers and freebooters styled _condottieri_. Among the Italian city-states, the most famous in the year 1500 were Milan, Venice, Genoa, and Florence. [Sidenote: Italian City-States: Milan Governed by Despots] Of these cities, Milan was still in theory a ducal fief of the Holy Roman Empire, but had long been in fact the prize of despotic rulers who were descended from two famous families--the Visconti and the Sforza--and who combined the patronage of art with the fine political subtleties of Italian tyrants. The Visconti ruled Milan from the thirteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth, when a Sforza, a leader of _condottieri_ established the supremacy of his own family. In 1499, however, King Louis XII of France, claiming the duchy as heir to the Visconti, seized Milan and held it until he was expelled in 1512 by the Holy League, composed of the pope, Venice, Spain, and England, and a Sforza was temporarily reinstated. [Sidenote: Venice, a Type of the Commercial and Aristocratic Italian City-States]