On May 29, 1453, Mohammed II. stormed Constantinople. The West was threatened, more especially Venice, which had such great and wealthy possessions in the Levant, and Naples. This time the excellent Pope Nicholas V. did not exert himself in vain. On April 9, 1454, Venice concluded a tolerably favourable peace with Francesco Sforza at Lodi, in which King Alfonso, Florence, Savoy, Montferrat, Mantua, and Siena, were to be included. The king, who had made considerable preparations for war, did not ratify the compact till January 26 of the following year. The States of Northern and Central Italy then joined in an alliance, and a succession of peaceful years followed, which were only momentarily interrupted in the case of Florence by the freebooting expedition of Jacopo Piccinino, a son of the Niccolò who was conquered at Anghiari. Dismissed from the Venetian service, he attacked the Sienese territory in 1455, on his own account, but was defeated and compelled to set sail for Naples from Orbetello. In the confusion which broke out in Naples after king Alfonso’s death neither Florence nor Venice was involved. The ancient Florentine friendship with the house of Anjou had to yield to other influences. At the same time, when the Turks conquered the Morea, and thus approached nearer and nearer to the coasts of Italy, the Angevin party in the kingdom attempted a new rising against Ferrante of Aragon, who in 1460 suffered a defeat from Duke John, which would have driven him from the throne had his opponents been more united and more powerful. Assistance from Milan and from Rome, where Pius II. now occupied the Holy See, after the short reign (not quite three years) of Calixtus III., combined with his own energy and skill, facilitated the King’s restoration to power; and not long after, he saw the Anjou expelled from the kingdom by the decisive victory at Troia, and the insurrectionary barons, among whom were several of his near relations, given into his power. Thus Florence, like Venice, which had then little time to think of anything except danger from the Turks, was appealed to for assistance by Ferrante on the ground of the alliance concluded in consequence of the peace of Lodi; but Florence refused, from a consideration of the late King’s double dealing in the affair of Piccinino. In the midst of the civil disputes and confusion above described, of repeated foreign troubles, and an immense exertion of material power to secure her political position, Florence in the times of Cosimo de’ Medici was still the harbour of refuge for all Italy, and, in consequence of an event important in the history of the world, the haven of Christendom. The ever-memorable movement in the intellectual world will be mentioned later; the occurrence which forms an important epoch in ecclesiastical history must be considered here.