His other principle was to do all he could to prevent any Italian state from gaining such an increase of importance as to destroy the balance of power. In the summer of that same year, 1485, a complication arose which threatened the peace of Italy and put to the proof Lorenzo’s political skill. It was a quarrel between Innocent VIII. and Ferrante of Naples. The kingdom of Naples, the greatest territorial power in Italy except Venice, was suffering from internal evils which both in earlier and later times proved incurable, and brought about the ruin of the fairest and richest portion of the peninsula. The political parties were as old as the monarchy; they were connected with deep-seated national divergences; and their differences were heightened and embittered by repeated conquests and changes of dynasty, by the feudal connection with the Holy See—dating from the time of the Normans—and by the passionate temper and moral degradation that poisoned and corrupted all civil and political relations in Southern Italy. The crown was completely held in check by the higher nobility; it would have been powerless had not the nobility been torn by factions. The split between the Aragonese and Angevin parties was of very long standing. The times of the second and of the first Joanna, the Sicilian Vespers, the French conquest, were all steps of a ladder ascending up to the Hohenstaufen Kaiser Henry VI. and the last of the Norman kings. The wars were fresh in the memories of all. It was not much more than twenty years since Ferrante had quelled the dangerous rising, the calamitous consequences of which never gave him any peace. His policy differed considerably from that of his father. King Alfonso’s hand had borne heavily on the party who had so long disputed his sovereignty over Naples, but when peace was restored he not only richly rewarded his own adherents, but tried to win over to his side his opponents. His son had a deep distrust of both parties, and his only aim was to increase the royal power at the expense of feudalism.