It is not within the province of this work to narrate these wild adventures in detail. It is enough to say that the struggle between the several parties was carried on for years, with no scruple and little humanity. The policy of the different governments shifted continually; after allying herself with Visconti, Venice soon began to plot against him, judging that a ruined neighbour like Carrara would be safer than one too powerful, as Giovanni Galeazzo was growing to be; and so the fugitive couple was taken into favour again by the Republic. Although Visconti’s military governor in Padua, when Carrara came to take his own again, sent him word that a man must be a fool who, having left the house by the door, expected to return by the window, yet Carrara soon got the better of him by the help of Venice and the Duke of Bavaria. What is most amazing in the history of the Italian principalities and republics is that any one of them should ever, under any circumstances, have believed in the promises made by any other. An open treaty was almost always supplemented by a secret one of a precisely contrary nature; oaths ratified upon the faith of the Blessed Sacrament were broken as lightly as lovers’ vows; the safe conduct given by a prince or a republic was generally the prelude to an assassination; and governments had not even that temporary regard for their obligations which is vulgarly described as honour among thieves. Writers of history have accustomed us too long to consider that these vices of mediæval Italian diplomacy were manifestations of the deepest craft and of the most profound subtlety, and we have been taught to look upon Macchiavelli as a master in the art of political dissimulation. Men of northern extraction who, by the accidents of birth, education, and long acquaintance, are thoroughly acquainted with the Latin character, cannot but smile at such a judgment. In all ages, Latins, and especially Italians, have deceived each other, but have rarely succeeded in deceiving us. The wiles of Cæsar Borgia would not have imposed upon an average English schoolboy. In her diplomatic relations with northern Europe, Italy has almost invariably been the victim of that profound duplicity which rests upon a carefully cultivated reputation for respecting the truth. It is the man whose word can generally be trusted who possesses the greatest power of deception when he chooses to perjure himself. It was not the complication of the Italian nature which produced the complicated state of Italian politics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but its extreme simplicity, which made Italian princes the easy victims of the most transparent deceptions. [Sidenote: _1405. Padua taken from Carrara by the Venetians, Francesco Bassano; Ceiling of Sala dello Scrutinio._] [Sidenote: _1406. Rom. iv. 40._]