Having been for centuries the battle-field of rival dynasties, Italy, though a geographical unit with natural frontiers more marked than those of any other land, and with inhabitants fairly homogeneous in birth, speech, and institutions, was neither a nation nor a family of kindred nations, but a congeries of heterogeneous states. Some of these, like Venice and Genoa, boasted the proud title of republics; they were in reality narrow, commercial, even piratical oligarchies, destitute of any vigorous political life. The Pope, like other petty rulers, was but a temporal prince, despotic, and not even enlightened, as was the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Naples and the Milanese both groaned under the yoke of foreign rulers, and the only passable government in the length and breadth of the land was that of the house of Savoy in Piedmont and Sardinia, lands where the revolutionary spirit of liberty was most extended and active. The petty courts, like those of Parma and Modena, were nests of intrigue and corruption. There was, of course, in every place that saving remnant of high-minded men which is always providentially left as a seed; but the people as a whole were ignorant and enervated. The accumulations of ages, gained by an extensive and lucrative commerce, or by the tilling of a generous soil, had not been altogether dissipated by misrule, and there was even yet rich store of money in many of the venerable and still splendid cities. Nowhere in the ancient seats of the Roman commonwealth, whose memory was now the cherished fashion in France, could anything more than a reflection of French revolutionary principles be discerned; the rights of man and republican doctrine were attractive subjects of debate in many cities throughout the peninsula, but there was little of that fierce devotion to their realization so prevalent beyond the Alps. The sagacity of Bonaparte saw his account in these conditions. Being a professed republican, he could announce himself as the regenerator of society, and the liberator of a people. If, as has been supposed, he already dreamed of a throne, where could one be so easily founded with the certainty of its endurance? As a conqueror he would have a divided, helpless, and wealthy people at his feet. If the old flame of Corsican ambition were not yet extinguished, he felt perhaps that he could wreak the vengeance of a defeated and angry people upon Genoa, their oppressor for ages.