TO A.D. 1429] RISE OF THE MEDICI 191 a half millions of florins; and the popular Giovanni de' Medici, who had been at the head of a peace party, obtained political supremacy by the invention and establishment of an equitable income-tax for payment of the public debts. The tax was half per cent. on incomes, as a forced loan to the Government at five per cent.; or a third part of the tax might be paid, with abandonment of right to interest and repayment. Money was worth much more than five per cent. to the traders of Florence; but the deductions allowed before charging for this income-tax secured to every one untaxed his house, his horse, and two hundred florins a year for each mouth in his household. Thus there was a protection against general discontent, and licence for irregular taxation. The half per cent., or decima, was soon taken as the mere unit of calculation, and forced loans of this or that number of decimas, for this or that new exigence of the State, might afterwards be raised at the discretion of the ruler. Such loans were raised now and then as often as twelve times a year, to feed the magnificence of one man at the expense of commerce which had given freedom and strength to the city, and which had sent up that strong shoot of artistic life whereof the later Medici consumed the fruit. In 1429 Giovanni died, "enormously rich in treasure, but richer still in good repute," lord only of his counting-house. He had steadily rejected the advice of his son Cosmo that he should take advantage of his position in the city by placing himself at the head of the popular party against the weaker faction of the aristocracy, and so rise to political power. When Cosmo became chief of his house he became chief also of the popular party, which he made a faction. It was faction against faction, chief against chief, and some began to ask themselves to which of the chiefs Florence would have to yield her independence. Cosmo's antagonists achieved his banishment, and thereby added to his strength. Venice welcomed him, Florence missed him. Friends and poor citizens suffered for want of access to the purse by which he made himself beloved. A signory favourable to the Medici was voted into office; the aristocratic faction failed in an attempt at armed resistance; and Cosmo was recalled, to enter Florence in great triumph as the father of his country. His first care was for the exile, fine, imprisonment, or death of the stronger men of the opposite side. Having weeded out enemies, or suspected enemies, he and his comrades strengthened new men into serviceable friends, divided the goods of the outlawed, made new and convenient laws, suppressed elections of unfriendly magistrates, and took means, by bribing and by tampering with the purses from which names of magistrates were drawn, to confine to men of their own faction all offices in which power of life and death was vested. Power of life and death was given to the eight; chance of return was almost wholly cut off from the exiles. Thus the faction led by Cosmo was supreme. It has been said that to a remonstrance on the ruin caused to the city by so many deaths and fines and banishments of worthy citizens, Cosmo replied that a city ruined was better than a city lost, and that it cost only a few yards of red cloth to make more citizens worshipful. Twenty families, says one old historian, were banished by the Medici for every one that suffered with them. The exiled leader of the aristocratic faction invited the arms of the tyrant of Milan to an attack on Florence; and the city again fought manfully against foreign despotism while her liberties were sickening at home. Then came the time when the fall of Constantinople was impending. Greek Christians, who sought aid from the nations of the West, made politic effort to heal the division upon points of ceremonial between the Eastern and the Western Churches. The Council of Basle, transferred to Ferrara, and again to Florence, brought together in Florence, in the year 1439, the Pope Eugenius IV. and the Patriarch Joseph of Constantinople, with many Greek bishops and scholars, and also the unfortunate Greek Emperor, John Palæologus. Talk of Plato thus first became familiar to the chiefs of Florentine society. The Eastern Church assented in five articles to Western opinion, and united itself to the Church of Rome. But as this act of union did not secure the desired end of saving Constantinople from the Turk, after the fall of the Eastern capital the two Churches fell back into their old state of schism. More came of the intellectual appetite of the rich merchants and bankers of Florence for commerce with men who had something new to traffic in-Greek manuscripts worth reading, and the skill to read them. 25. The Byzantine Empire had in 1425, by a treaty of the Emperor John Palæologus II., been reduced to Constantinople and its environs, with some outlying places. These were held subject to a yearly tribute, which transferred the larger part of their revenues to the Turk. The treaty was observed by TO A.D. 1453] FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE 193 Sultan Amurath II. But his son Mohammed II.. in the third year of his reign, began, at the age of about three-and-twenty, his career of conquest by overthrowing all that remained of the Roman Empire in the East. After fifty-eight days' siege, he took Constantinople by storm, on the 29th of May, in the year 1453. Five years later he made himself master of the Morea. Occupation of Greece by the Turks drove the Greek patriots and scholars into exile. They sought a livelihood in foreign capitals by teaching their old language, and diffusing knowledge of the treasures of its literature. Thus Greek became a part of European scholarship, and Plato lived again, to join the ranks of the reformers. It was of a Spartan in Paris, who supported himself also by skill with his pen as a copyist, that John Reuchlin had learnt, before he sought more at Florence from Argyropoulos its first famous teacher there, Greek enough to surprise the patriot with speech in his own tongue from a German, and cause him to say, "Alas, Greece is already banished beyond the Alps." Argyropoulos, fugitive to Florence after the capture of Constantinople, had been welcomed by Cosmo de' Medici, appointed tutor to his sons Lorenzo and Pietro, and established as a professor of Greek, with pupils, among whom was Politian. Among other Greeks who came to Florence was the venerable George Gemisthus Pletho, whose long life had been spent in enthusiastic study of Plato, and who lectured upon him to the Italians, maintaining his philosophy as partisan of Plato against Aristotle. Cosmo de' Medici, his constant hearer, received his opinions. While he was steadily pursuing his design to become sovereign in Florence, the head of the great banking-house which spread its branches over Europe set a fashion for the collecting of Greek manuscripts, proceeded towards the estab lishment of a Platonic academy in Florence, and educated young Marsilio Ficino specially in Platonism, that he might become its head. John Argyropoulos worked at Aristotle; but the new teachers were generally Platonists, reading their Plato with the glosses of the mystical school of Neoplatonists, whose philosophy had been in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries at war with Christianity; but in this fifteenth century became indirectly an aid in the reformation of the Christian Church. To the corrupt society of Italy Platonism gave some grace of heathendom and many affectations. To men of the Teutonic or English race, and others who H more. went to Florence to learn Greck, the new study gave something Earnest minds that were battling with the strong animal nature of the Church passed, through the new study, to works of a heathen philosopher who saw a divine soul in the world towards which by heavenward aspiration souls of men could rise. "But if the company will be persuaded by me,” wrote Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, "considering the soul to be immortal and able to bear all evil and good, we shall always persevere in the road which leads upwards, and shall by all means follow justice with prudence; that so we may be friends to ourselves and to the gods, both while we remain here, and when we afterwards receive its rewards, like victors assembled together; and so both here and in that journey of a thousand years we shall be happy." The Neoplatonists had grafted extreme doctrines of purification and subjection of man's animal nature upon the teaching in Plato's "Phædo," that a soul given to fleshly pleasures takes taint of the flesh. They were connected by their faith with the divine essence, and upon many of the best minds of Europe the new study of Greek through such reading of Plato came as a new impulse to conflict with the sensuality which had become the scandal of the Church of Rome. Plato was thus associated among such men with the cause of progress; while Aristotle, of whose teaching the knowledge had been long since diffused by the Arabians through translation, supplied forms for conventional thought, and, eager pioneer as he had been, was made the idol of the schoolmen who stood on the ancient ways. The fall of Constantinople made Plato a power in Europe. So it was that those of the clergy who shrank from the quickened tendency among good scholars to attack their flesh-pots, gave currency to the proverb, "Beware of the Greeks, lest you be made a heretic." 26. It was at this time that the future influence of every wise thought was enlarged by the Invention of Printing. In the year of the battle of St. Albans, 1455, the Bible called the Mazarin Bible, because it was first found in the library of Cardinal Mazarin, was printed at Mayence by John Gutenberg. In the year of the condemnation of Reginald Pecock for declaring that all truth would bear the test of reason and inquiry, John Fust, or Faust, and Peter Schaeffer printed a magnificent edition of the Psalter. Stamping with ink from blocks on which letters had been carved in relief had already been tried when, in 1438, John TO A.D. 14691 INVENTION OF PRINTING. CAXTON 195 Gutenberg, of Mayence, first thought of the use of movable types to save the great labour of cutting a fresh block for every page. He had gone from Mayence to Strasburg as a block printer, become impoverished by a lawsuit, returned to Mayence, and worked at his press in partnership with a wealthy goldsmith, named John Faust, or Fust. After many experiments, so much success was obtained that, as before said, the printing of the Mazarin Bible was completed with movable type in 1455. The partnership was dissolved, and Gutenberg, unable to repay advances of money, made over his types to Faust, who at first printed copies of the Bible to imitate those sold as MSS., and gave for sixty crowns what copyists required five hundred for producing. Then he took into partnership his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer; and in the colophon to the Psalter produced by them in 1457, Faust and Schoffer boasted openly the power of their new art. In 1462 Mayence, which had been for some years a free imperial city, was taken and sacked by its archbishop, Adolphus. This event, by scattering the pupils and workmen of Faust and Schoeffer, dispersed through Europe the knowledge of their art. It was carried from Mayence to Haarlem and Strasburg; from Haarlem to Rome, in 1466, by Sweynheym and Pannartz, the first users of Roman type. It reached Paris in 1469; Cologne in 1470; and England, through William Caxton, about 1475. There was no printer in Scotland until after the close of the fifteenth century. 27. William Caxton, born about 1421, in the Weald of Kent, was apprenticed to a wealthy London mercer. After his master's death, in 1441, he lived chiefly at Bruges, where he was Governor of the English merchants from 1462 till 1469. In 1464 he was employed as one of two commissioners for the settlement of a treaty of commerce with Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. That Philip was succeeded, in 1467, by his eldest son Charles, called the Bold, who in the following year, 1468, married Edward IV.'s sister Margaret. Caxton was then in Margaret's service, and received from her a yearly fee. On the 1st of March, 1469, he began a translation from Raoul le Fevre, of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a work suspended by him for two years, and then finished at Margaret's command. In October, 1470, when Warwick, the Kingmaker, was moving Henry VI. up from the Tower to the Palace of Westminster, Edward IV., paying his fur gown for his passage, came as a fugitive to Bruges, with seven or eight hundred hungry |