Cosimo de' Medici (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III FOREIGN POLICY FROM 1435 TO 1447?THE VENETIAN ALLIANCE?THE BALANCE OF POWER During the first few years after Cosimo's return from exile, the place which he took in the foreign policy of Florence was of comparatively secondary importance. His energies were employed in securing his position at home, and he had not yet obtained that hold upon the political and diplomatic machinery of the Commune which afterwards enabled him to make the Florentines bend their inclinations to his will. He also found Florence already committed to a particular foreign policy, which had been shaped by circumstances not in her own control, and from the force of which he too could not escape. Since it was a policy of circumstances, and not of design, it is very difficult to judge how far he was instrumental in controlling its details. His name appears very seldom; and when he does act in person, it is rather as the exponent of the national, than as the initiator of an original, foreign policy. In such independent action as was possible to him, he could be nothing more than opportunist; he could do no more than make the best of certain chances whichcame in his way. During these early years, however, those political conditions, and those ideas and aims of his own were gradually formed, which in after years determined his independent foreign policy. Florence at this time, it has been said, was guided by necessity. Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, greedy, shifty and faithless, was endangering by his intrigues and ambition the neighbouring Powers,?Venice, Florence, and the Pope,?who were forced to hold together in order to withstand him. Florence had no great love for Venice, her commercial rival; yet however cavalierly Venice might treat her, she was obliged to cling to the Venetian A...