But he was no warrior; his career was peace. The old medieval Italians
who had combated like lions against the French and Germans and against
each other, when resting from the labors and the high conceptions
which have left us the chief sculptures and architecture of the
Peninsula, were dead; and their posterity had almost ceased to know
war. Italy had indeed still remained a battle-ground, but not for
Italian quarrels nor for Italian swords; the powers which, like
Venice, could afford to have quarrels of their own, mostly hired other
people to fight them out. All the independent states of the Peninsula
had armies, but armies that did nothing; in Lombardy, neither
Frenchman, Spaniard, nor Austrian had been able to recruit or draft
soldiers; the flight of young men from the conscription depopulated
the province, until at last Francis II. declared it exempt from
military service; Piedmont, the Macedon, the Boeotia of that Greece,
alone remained warlike, and Piedmont was alone able, when the hour
came, to show Italy how to do for herself.
Yet, except in the maritime republics, the army, idle and unwarlike as
it was in most cases, continued to be one of the three careers open to
the younger sons of good family; the civil service and the Church were
the other two.
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