But the cup was charged with a bitterness beyond these humiliations. Surrounded by ecclesiastical provinces, the inhabitants of the duchy had long a foretaste of their coming fate, which amply accounted for the exultation with which they had hailed the promised continuance of the ducal line, and their sullen despair on witnessing its inevitable extinction. The Venetian Relazioni, quoted by Ranke, supply us with the opinion of disinterested contemporaries as to the condition of the papal state during the seventeenth century. In 1600, its "nobles and people would gladly cast themselves upon any sovereign whatever, to escape from the hands into which they had fallen." Ten years later, the very blood of the inhabitants was wrung from them by excessive taxation, and their enterprise was crushed by commercial restrictions. "The foreign traders had quitted Ancona, the native merchants were bankrupt, the gentry impoverished, the artizans ruined, the populace dispersing." A year or two after the last Duke's death, his people are described as grumbling much at the change, calling the new government a tyranny, and sneering at the priests as interested solely in accumulating wealth, and aggrandising themselves. In 1666, we have this calamitous but probably overcoloured picture:--"It is palpably evident that the ecclesiastical realm is quite overburdened, so that many landholders, unable to extract enough from their possessions to meet the extraordinary public imposts, resort of necessity to the abandonment of their estates, in order to seek fortune and sustenance in less rapacious communities. I speak not of duties and customs, from which nothing eatable is excepted; because the taxes, donatives, subsidies, and other extraordinary extortions would excite pity and astonishment, even if the terrible commissioners sent from Rome into these cities, with absolute authority to inquire, sell, carry off, and confiscate, did not exceed all belief; no month ever passing without a flight of griffins and harpies, in the guise of commissioners, either of the fabric of St. Peter's, or of pious bequests, or of movable goods, or of archives, or of some five-and-twenty other Roman courts, by all which the already drained purses of the helpless subjects are tortured to the last degree. And thus,--setting aside Ferrara and Bologna, to which some consideration is extended, and which are favoured by nature and art with excellent soil, and with manufacturing industry,--all other cities of Romagna, La Marca, Umbria, the Patrimony, Sabina, and the Campagna are utterly wretched; and, to the disgrace of the Roman government, in none of them do woollen or silk factories exist, nor even of gold stuffs, except in a few such little towns as Fossombrone, Pergola, Matelica, Camerino, and Norcia, although the abundance of wool and silk might afford a most advantageous trade. The ecclesiastical territory is merely an estate leased out to tenants, who give no thought to its