The emperor’s principal embarrassments had occurred in Italy. It will be recollected that Naples and Sicily belonged to the crown of Spain by conquest, and that the dukedom of Milan, a vacant fief of the empire, had been conferred upon Philip. Charles’s warlike and turbulent representatives in these states had plunged him into endless troubles, first by their encroachment on the principalities of Parma and Piacenza, belonging to the papal Farneses, and, secondly, by the seizure of the republic of Siena. The discontent caused by these encroachments was taken advantage of by the French king to side with the Italians against their suzerain, the emperor. The French already held Piedmont, one of the fiefs of the empire, and now expelled the imperialists from Siena. The Pope and the Duke of Florence, who had hitherto been neutral, then sided with the French; the populations of Milan and Naples cried aloud against the oppression they suffered from the Spanish governors, and the Spanish imperial domination of Italy seemed tottering to its fall. The Spanish governors were hastily changed, and an arrangement patched up with the Medicis. Thenceforward the war was carried on against the French in Italy with varying success, the Turks frequently making diversions on the coast in the interest of France. The imperial and Spanish officials in the various states of Italy were quarrelling with each other in face of the common enemy, and all was in confusion when Philip made his marriage journey to England. It was then decided by the emperor to transfer to his son the crowns of Naples and Sicily, and the dukedom of Milan, with which he had been nominally invested in 1546, and the act of abdication of these dominions was read in Winchester Cathedral before the marriage ceremony. This was doubtless intended as a first step towards the old project of transferring to Spain the suzerainty of the empire over Italy, as Philip bad also received a transference of the rights of the emperor over Siena as soon as the republic had been recaptured from the French. It will thus be seen how anomalous was Philip’s position in Italy. He was independent King of Naples, a tributary prince of the empire in Milan, and a substitute for the emperor in his suzerainty over Siena. The imperial troops in Milan had hitherto been a coercive power over the other imperial fiefs, but they could no longer be so regarded, as they were the forces of a Spanish prince, who in Milan was himself a tributary prince of the empire, with no rights over the rest. Philip soon found that it was practically impossible to govern from England his Italian states in this complicated condition of affairs, and in November 1554 appointed Alba with very full powers to exercise all his sovereignties in Italy, with supreme command of the army. The emperor did not like the idea. We have seen the opinion he held of Alba and how he dreaded making so great a noble too powerful, and it was only with great difficulty that he