The kings becoming weary, the people being drained of their blood, the necessity of peace was strongly felt. Charles V., who had no title to greatness, but the extent of his dominions, who was crooked in design and avaricious of spirit, hastened to form an incestuous union with the Pope, and the fruit of their embraces was the slavery of Florence. Cæsar bound himself to immolate the Republic to the vengeance of Clement and put under Papal pay the hordes of assassins who had already desolated the greater part of the Peninsula. The bastard Alexander de’ Medici married a bastard daughter of the emperor; whence the treaty of Cambray by which France delivered Italy, bound hand and foot to Charles Fifth, recovering Bourgogne and his children for the shameful desertion. He ignominiously lost in this treaty the honour which he preserved stainless in his defeat and capture at Pavia. This king had strange contradictions in his character. He promised, with apparent sincerity, liberty to nations and then abandoned them at caprice; he was hated by people whom he overwhelmed with public burdens, but loved by the learned whom he protected and honoured. He offered his hand to the heretics of Germany, and burned under a slow fire the heretics of France. He invited the Turks into Italy and betrayed the Venitians and Florentines; but he kept faith with his bitter enemy, granting Charles V. safe conduct through French territory. The pontiff being about to crown Charles in Bologna with the Lombard and Imperial diadems, the latter ordered the Italian princes, as his vassals, to pay him homage on that occasion (1530). Alfonso d’Este, Frederick Gonzaga, the dukes of Urbino and Savoy, and the Marquis of Monferrato submitted to him; the Republics of Genoa, Siena and Lucca counted themselves happy in being permitted to retain their old form of government, and Florence which under the influence of Nicolò Capponi had elected Christ for its king, now vainly defended by the brave Ferruccio was forced to humble herself to slavery. That portion of North Italy which in modern language is called Piedmont was involved in equal if not greater disasters. On account of its situation between Austria and France, it was overrun and desolated by barbarian invaders from 1494 to 1559. “We do not believe,” say the commissioners of Henry VIII. of England, “that it is possible to find in all Christendom greater wretchedness than reigns in this country. The best towns are either in ruins or depopulated. There are few districts in which food is to be found. The extensive plain, fifty miles in length, which lies between Vercelli and Pavia, once so fertile in cereals and wines, is reduced to a desert. The fields are uncultivated; except three poor women gathering a few grapes, we saw not the shadow of a human creature. There, they neither sow nor reap; the country sides are growing wild, and the uncultivated vines are returning to their primitive state.”