History of Italy during foreign domination and the unification
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This is the history of Italy during foreign domination and the unification.
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[edit] Foreign domination (16th-18th centuries)
- See Also: Italian Wars
At the beginning of the 16th century the states of the Italian peninsula began to suffer the effects of an economic crisis due to the move of the main trade routes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Since Italy was not unified politically, most of the small and weak Italian states were defeated by foreign powers (mainly Spain); some of them (e.g. Milan and Naples) were annexed, others (e.g. Venice and Florence) were reduced to a lesser role. The papacy lost much of its importance both because of military defeats and the Protestant Reformation, which deeply weakened the Catholic Church.
In order to prevent the further expansion of Protestantism, the church endorsed the wars of the emperor Charles V (who was also king of Spain) and his successors, and started the so-called Counter-Reformation, with which it established strict control over intellectual life in Catholic countries. Soon, French and Spanish rivalries would present themselves in the Italian peninsula.
In 1494 Charles VIII of France invaded Italy unopposed. Charles entered Naples on February 22, 1495 and was crowned on May 12. In November his armies entered Florence while a revolution had expelled Piero de Medici. In 1495, Ferdinand II of Naples, son of Alfonso II started the Spanish acquisition of Naples with the help of a Ventian fleet and troops under the command of Gonzalo de Córdoba.
In 1798 France declared war on the Kingdom of Naples.
[edit] Treaties that affected Italian states
- Treaty of Marcoussis
- Treaty of Granada
- Treaty of Lyon
- Treaty of Blois
- Treaty of Madrid
- Treaty of Barcelona
[edit] Battles
- Battle of Ravenna Nov. 4, 1512
- Battle of Marignano Sept. 13–14, 1515
- Battle of Pavia Feb. 24, 1525
[edit] Aftermath of the Italian Wars
The Italian Wars led to Spanish hegemony over Italy. Although many states, such as Venice, did not come under the direct control of the Spanish crown, all of Italy relied on Spain for protection against external aggression. Spanish control was replaced with Austrian hegemony in the early eighteenth century, although Spanish control over Naples and Sicily was restored later in the century.
Italy experienced a period of relative peace in the seventeenth and eighteeth centuries. However, the Italian economy stagnated due to the decline of the Mediterranean trade routes; in the early seventeenth century the economy experienced a depression. The peninsula was not influenced by the Reformation, but Italy did make some contributions to the Enlightenment; it produced some examples of enlightened absolutism and some intellectuals such as Galileo and Genovesi. Enlightened despots ruled in the conservative Papal states, and some reformists movements existed in conservative Venice.
[edit] French Rule and Unification (1796-1861)
At the end of the 18th century, Italy was almost in the same political conditions as in the 16th century; the main differences were that Austria had replaced Spain as the dominant foreign power (and that too was not true with regards to Naples and Sicily), and that the dukes of Savoy (a mountainous region between Italy and France) had become kings of Sardinia by increasing their Italian possessions, which now included Sardinia and the north-western region of Piedmont. This situation was shaken in 1796, when French armies led by Napoleon invaded Italy; even if the states they created (e.g., Cisalpine Republic) were just satellites of France, they sparked a nationalist movement. The Cisalpine Republic was converted into the Italian Republic in 1802, under the presidency of Napoleon; a Kingdom of Italy was later set up. A second satellite state, the Ligurian Republic (successor to the old Republic of Genoa), was pressured into merging with France in 1805.
The Congress of Vienna (1814) restored a situation close to that of 1795, dividing Italy between Austria (in the north-east and Lombardy), the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (in the south and in Sicily), and Tuscany, the Papal States and other minor states in the centre. However, some of the old republics such as Venice and Genoa were not recreated (Venice went to Austria, and Genoa went to the Kingdom of Sardinia).
For the transformation of the peninsula into the Kingdom of Italy see the main article on Italian unification.
[edit] References
- List of Holy Roman Emperors
- List of Popes
- Historical states of Italy
- House of Savoy (including the list of the modern kings of Italy)
- Text of the "Albertine Statute" (Constitution of the Kingdom of Sardinia from 1840 to 1861, and of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1946): original Italian
- "Italy." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 30 Apr. 2006 <http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-27638>.
