The blood which was poured out like water did not profit our cause. Some died in battle, some lost their heads on the block, and others preferred banishment to being witnesses of the national degradation. Hospitable Venice, who alone was clean from the Spanish leprosy, opened her doors to the fugitive patriots, and they, having broken their swords, continued to protest with their pens. Italian statesmen had good reason to struggle against the growing importance of the house of Hapsburgh, whose only enemy was France then barely escaped out of her contests with feudalism and with the English. Donato Gianotti, the successor of Machiavelli, as secretary of the Florentine Republic, wrote a wonderful address to Paul III., in which he urged that Genoa should be redeemed from the hands of the Dorias and Spaniards, and the republic and principalities bound in alliance with France, as necessary measures for the defence of national liberty. The object of this discourse, so rich in political wisdom, was to warn the Italians of the danger of neglecting their own interests. “They cannot,” he says, “secure their safety except by making preparations to take up arms against that power _which can only secure itself in its possessions by enslaving all Italy_.”[31] Gianotti urged the importance of tempting the confederates of the emperor, and, if possible, enlisting them in the national cause, and adds: “The State of Genoa under the authority of Andrea Doria, ought to be reconciled to the King of France; and I do not believe the Genoese would be disinclined to it, for their sympathies are for France, and they know the advantages to a Republic of independence and the free use of their political power. It was useful to the Genoese, at the moment, to follow the influence of Doria and, ceasing to be French, to become imperialists, as a step towards liberty; but at present it would not be less useful to them to unite, without altering the form of their state, with the other governments of the Peninsula.”