expansion, Milanese and Paduan aggression which threatened its frontiers. Now it took its place as a mainland power, though not without dislocation for others. Venice's government was unlike any other; a republic with a formal head of state, the doge, who was appointed for life, a political system that presented to the outside world the picture of a model of stability; all this was much admired and 'mythologized'.

The fifth power, the papacy--and it must be viewed, by the fifteenth century, above all as a political power--was surrounded by a mass of special and destabilizing circumstances. It still had the least control over its territory, and unlike most territorial states where one might expect to find control stronger at the centre and weaker at the periphery the papacy had the core of its political weakness at its doorstep. The Rome to which the popes formally returned at the end of the Great Schism was backward, underdeveloped, with no industry to speak of apart from religious tourism; it was still very much in the clutches of rival families of the landed nobility from the surrounding area, including Neapolitan families (and papal and Neapolitan affairs continued to be intertwined). The nature of papal power itself, too, could be a source of weakness. Nondomestic, non-political considerations were always present; above all the system of election, whereby the electors, the cardinals, had all been appointed by previous popes, made for instability. It was important psychologically as much as anything else. Popes had always been prone to feather the nest for their relatives, and the reasonable explanation for this nepotism was that they required advisers and officers whom they could trust. The fifteenth-century papacy shows the trend very clearly; almost each pope was succeeded, two or three elections later, by a member of his family whom he had usually himself promoted to the cardinalate and whose political standing had grown in the intervening years. It meant that the papacy was as open to factionalism as ever, and was likely to be subject to regular changes of diplomatic alignment, as Venetian, Genoese, or Sienese popes succeeded in turn.

War broke out between Florence and Milan in 1423--by now these were traditional enemies--and was to last for

-260-