Italy, we have seen, was pre-eminently the home of the Renaissance--the teacher destined to give the world the ‘New Learning’ as she had preserved the old during the Dark Ages. In those sunny days, when Lorenzo ‘the Wise’, as well as ‘the Magnificent’, ruled in Florence, and by his statesmanship preserved so neat a balance of politics that the peninsula, divided by five ambitious Powers, yet remained at peace, a glorious future seemed assured; but in 1492, the year that Columbus discovered America, Lorenzo died. ‘The peace of Italy is dead also,’ exclaimed a statesman with prophetic insight, when he heard the news: and indeed the stability and moderation that Lorenzo and his house had symbolized was soon threatened. In Florence, Wisdom was succeeded by Folly in the person of Piero, Lorenzo’s son, an Orsini on his mother’s side, and an inheritor to the full of the haughty, intractable temperament of the Roman baronage. Playing his football in the streets amongst the shopkeepers’ open booths, insolent to the merchants his father had courted, reckless of advice, Piero was soon to learn that a despotism, such as that of the Medici, founded not on armies but on public goodwill, falls at the first adverse wind. This wind, a whirlwind for Italy, blew from France; but it was Ludovico ‘Il Moro’, not the young Medici, who actually sowed the seed. ‘Nervous and cringing,’ as Philip de Commines had described him, Ludovico had found himself involved by his treatment of his nephew in a fog of suspicions and fears. Left to himself, uneducated and ailing in health, Gian Galeazzo Sforza would never have dared to thwart his ambitious uncle; but he had married a Neapolitan princess of stronger fibre, a granddaughter of Ferrante I, and when she complained to her relations, and they in turn remonstrated with ‘Il Moro’, trouble began. It seemed to Ludovico, assailed by secret visions of Naples allying herself with Milan’s most dreaded enemy Venice, or even with Florence and Rome to secure revenge and his own downfall, that he must hastily give up the idea that Lorenzo had advocated of a balance of power within the peninsula itself, and look instead beyond the mountains for help and support. Mediaeval annals could give many instances of Popes and former rulers of Milan who had taken this same unpatriotic step, while a ready excuse could be found for invoking the aid of France, on account of the French King’s descent from the Second House of Anjou, that Alfonso V, Ferrante’s father, had driven from Naples.[52]