SAVOY, HOUSE OF).
When Emmanuel Philibert succeeded to his father Charles III. in 1553, he was a duke without a duchy. But the princes of the house of Savoy were a race of warriors; and what Emmanuel Philibert lost as sovereign he regained as captain of adventure in the service of his cousin Philip II. The treaty of Cateau Cam bresis in 1559, and the evacuation of the Piedmontese cities held by French and Spanish troops in 1574, restored his state. By re moving the capital from Chambery to Turin, he completed the transformation of the dukes of Savoy from Burgundian into Italian sovereigns. Emmanuel Philibert was succeeded by his son Charles Emmanuel I., who married Catherine, a daughter of Philip II. He seized the first opportunity of annexing Saluzzo, which had been lost to Savoy in the last two reigns, attacked Geneva and threatened Provence. Henry IV. of France forced him in 16oi to relinquish Bresse and his Burgundian possessions. In return he was allowed to keep Saluzzo. Charles Emmanuel then attempted the acquisition of Montferrat, but after several campaigns he only secured a few places on the borders of that province.
The Gonzaga, and several other ancient ducal families, died out about this time. The legitimate line of the Estensi ended in 1597 by the death of Alfonso II., the last duke of Ferrara. He left his domains to a natural relative, Cesare d'Este. Urban VIII., however, put in a claim to Ferrara, which, it will be remembered, had been recognized a papal fief in 153o. Cesare d'Este had to content himself with Modena and Reggio, where his descendants reigned as dukes till 1794. Under the same pontiff, the Holy See absorbed the duchy of Urbino on the death of Francesco Maria II., the last representative of Montefeltro and Della Rovere. The popes were now masters of a territory embracing a large part of Countess Matilda's legacy, in addition to Pippin's donation, and the patrimony of St. Peter. Urban's predecessor, Paul V., advanced so far as to extend his spiritual jurisdiction over Venice, which, up to the date of his election (1605), had offered the single instance in Italy of a national church. The republic managed the tithes, and the clergy acknowledged no chief above their own patriarch. Paul V. forced the Venetians to admit his ecclesiastical supremacy; but they refused to readmit the Jesuits, who had been expelled in 1606.
Venice rapidly declined throughout the i 7th century. The loss of trade consequent upon the discovery of America and the sea route to the Indies, had dried up her chief source of wealth. Pro longed warfare with the Ottomans, who forced her to abandon Candia in 1669, still further crippled her resources. Yet she kept the Adriatic free of pirates, notably by suppressing the sea robbers called Uscocchi (1601-17), maintained herself in the Ionian islands, and in 1684 Francesco Morosini, upon whose tomb we still may read the title Peloponnesiacus, wrested the whole of the Morea from the Turks. But after his death in 1715 the republic relaxed her hold upon his conquests. Though the signory still made a brave show upon occasions of parade, it was clear that the State was relapsing into complete decay. The Spanish monarchy at the same epoch dwindled with apparently less reason. The revolt of Masaniello in Naples (1647), followed by rebellions at Palermo and Messina, which placed Sicily for a while in the hands of Louis XIV. (1676-78) were symptoms of progressive anarchy. The population, ground down by preposterous taxes and ill-governed, rose in blind exasperation against their op pressors. But the destinies of Italy were decided in the cabinets and on the battlefields of northern Europe, and the Italians themselves had no say in these events.
Italy, handled and rehandled, settled and resettled, during the dynastic wars of the Spanish, Polish and Austrian successions, changed masters without caring or knowing what befell the prin cipals in any one of the disputes. The people came to be parti tioned and exchanged without the assertion or negation of a single principle affecting their interests or rousing their emotions.
In 1700 Charles II. died, and with him ended the Austrian fam ily in Spain. Louis XIV. claimed the throne for Philip, duke of Anjou. Charles, archduke of Austria, opposed him. The dispute was fought out in Flanders ; but Lombardy felt the shock, as usual, of the French and Austrian dynasties. The French armies were more than once defeated by Prince Eugene of Savoy, who drove them out of Italy in 1707. Therefore, in the peace of Utrecht (1713), the services of the house of Savoy had to be duly recog nized. Victor Amadeus II. received Sicily with the title of king. Montferrat and Alessandria were added to his northern provinces, and his state was recognized as independent. Charles of Austria, now emperor, took Milan, Mantua, Naples and Sardinia for his portion of the Italian spoil. Philip founded the Bourbon line of Spanish kings, renouncing in Italy all that his Habsburg predeces sors had gained. Discontented with this diminution of the Span ish heritage, Philip V. married Elisabetta Farnese, heiress to the last duke of Parma, in 1714. He hoped to secure this duchy for his son, Don Carlos ; and Elisabetta further brought with her a claim to the grand-duchy of Tuscany, which would soon become vacant by the death of Gian Gastone de' Medici. After this marriage Philip broke the peace of Europe by invading Sardinia. The Quadruple Alliance was formed, and the new king of Sicily was punished for his supposed adherence to Philip V. by the forced
exchange of Sicily for the island of Sardinia. It was thus that in 1720 the house of Savoy assumed the regal title which it bore until the creation of the Italian kingdom in the next century. Though a despot, as all monarchs were obliged to be at that date, Victor Amadeus II. reigned with prudence, probity and zeal for the welfare of his subjects. He took public education out of the hands of the Jesuits, which, for the future development of manli ness in his dominions, was a measure of incalculable value. In 173o Victor Amadeus abdicated in favour of his son Charles Emmanuel III. Repenting of this step, he subsequently attempted to regain Turin, but was imprisoned in the castle of Rivoli, where he ended his days in 1732.
When the emperor Charles VI., father of Maria Theresa, died in 174o, the three branches of the Bourbon house, ruling in France, Spain and the Sicilies, joined with Prussia, Bavaria and the kingdom of Sardinia to despoil Maria Theresa of her heritage. Lombardy was made the seat of war, and here the king of Sar dinia acted as in some sense the arbiter of the situation. After war broke out, he changed sides and supported the Habsburg Lorraine party. At first, in 1745, the Sardinians were defeated by the French and Spanish troops. But Francis of Lorraine, elected emperor in that year, sent an army to the king's support, which in 1746 obtained a signal victory over the Bourbons at Piacenza. Charles Emmanuel now threatened Genoa. The Austrian soldiers already held the town. But the citizens expelled them, and the republic kept her independence. In 1748 the Treaty of Aix-la Chapelle, which put an end to the War of the Austrian Succession, once more redivided Italy. Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla were formed into a duchy for Don Philip, brother of Charles III. of the Two Sicilies, and son of Philip V. of Spain. The duchy of Mo dena was placed under the protection of the French. So was Genoa, which in 1755, after Paoli's insurrection against the mis government of the republic, ceded her old domain of Corsica to France.
From the date of this settlement until 1792, Italy enjoyed a period of repose and internal amelioration under her numerous paternal despots. The Austrian government in Lombardy under Maria Theresa was characterized by improved agriculture, regular administration, order, reformed taxation and increased education. The nobles and the clergy were rich and influential, but kept in order by the civil power. There was no feeling of nationality, but the people were prosperous and enjoyed profound peace. On the death of Maria Theresa in 178o, the emperor Joseph II. instituted much wider reforms. Feudal privileges were done away with, clerical influence diminished and many monasteries and convents suppressed, the criminal law rendered more humane and torture abolished largely as a result of G. Beccaria's famous pamphlet Dei delitti e delle gene. On the whole the Austrian rule in pre revolutionary days was beneficial and far from oppressive, and helped Lombardy to recover from the ill-effects of the Spanish domination. It did little for the moral education of the people, but the same criticism applies more or less to all the European governments of the day. The emperor Francis I. ruled the grand duchy of Tuscany by lieutenants until his death in 1765, when it was given, as an independent state, to his second son, Peter Leopold. The reign of this grand duke was long recalled as a period of internal prosperity, wise legislation and important public enter prise. In 1790 he succeeded to the empire, and left Tuscany to his son Ferdinand. The kingdom of Sardinia was administered upon similar principles ; Charles Emmanuel made his will law, and erased the remnants of free institutions from his state. At the same time he wisely followed his father's policy on education and the Church__ This is perhaps the best that can be said of a king who incarnated the stolid absolutism of the period. From this date, however, we are able to trace the revival of independent thought among the Italians. The European ferment of ideas which preceded the French revolution expressed itself in men like Alfieri, the fierce denouncer of tyrants, Beccaria, the philosopher of criminal jurisprudence, Volta, the physicist, and numerous political economists of Tuscany. The papacy, during this period, had to reconsider the question of the Jesuits, who made them selves universally odious, not only in Italy, but also in France and Spain. In the pontificate of Clement XIII. they ruled the Vatican, and almost succeeded in embroiling the pope with the concerted Bourbon potentates of Europe. His successor, Clement XIV., suppressed the order altogether by a brief of 1773.