Naples, which had so lately been added to the Spanish dominions, was still exposed to the attacks of the French, who claimed one-half, and were always ready to appropriate to themselves the whole of the kingdom. Naples was separated from France, indeed, by a considerable extent of territory in Italy; but the smaller Italian States were too weak to render any serious resistance, and too fickle to be counted upon as friends or as foes by any Spanish sovereign. The best way to render Naples secure was, in the eyes of Ferdinand, the foundation of a great kingdom in northern Italy, powerful enough to prevent the French from marching their armies to the south. The formation of such a kingdom moreover would have greatly facilitated a peaceful division of the great Austro-Spanish inheritance between Prince Charles and his brother, the Infante Ferdinand. If Charles could be provided not only with the kingdom of Spain, but with the possessions of Maximilian and Ladislaus and the Princess Anne, and the empire of central Europe, his younger brother Ferdinand might content himself with a kingdom to be made up of all the States of Italy, protected against the encroachments of France by Spanish infantry and German landsknechts, and ready to drive the Turk out of the Mediterranean in support of the Christian empire on the Danube. The kingdom of Italy, thus designed for his younger grandson by the far-seeing Ferdinand of Aragon, was to consist of Genoa, Pavia, Milan, and the Venetian territories on the mainland. The country of the Tyrol, being the most southern of the Austrian dominions, could, without sensibly weakening the projected empire, be separated from it and added to the new kingdom in Italy. Thus stretching from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, and from the Gulf of Spezia to the Lake of Constance, this sixteenth century kingdom of Italy, with the whole power of the Holy Roman Empire to support it, would have been a splendid endowment for a younger son of the greatest family on earth. There was also a reasonable prospect that it might afterward be still further enlarged by the addition of Naples, and the smaller Italian States would easily have fallen a prey to their powerful neighbor. But in addition to all this, Ferdinand thought that he would render a notable service to the Catholic religion and to the peace of Europe if the Church were thoroughly reformed. What Rome herself has lost by Ferdinand’s failure it is not given even to the Infallible to know. What the king’s reforms were to be, we can only shrewdly surmise; and although they would most assuredly not have been Protestant, they would with equal certainty have been by no means palatable to the Vatican. For it is reasonably probable that if either Louis XII. or Ferdinand the Catholic had been permitted to carry out their designs, the Pope of Rome would have found himself deprived of his temporal power, and Garibaldi, nay, perchance Luther, would have been forestalled.