History of Piedmont

00142153 ^ BOMBAY BRANCH | I OF THB . I i ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY. 1 ^ T own B all , G ombav . | Digitized with financial assistance from the Government of Maharashtra on 26 June, 2018 HISTORY OF PIEDMONT.- ANTONIO GALLENGA. VOLUME I. 00142153 00142153 .LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193,.. PICCADILLY. 1855. r n i:( T S D n r JOnK- BDtÂBD TATLOS, 5TBBST> ¿IKOOtK'S 12fX » B1 ID8. PREFACE. P iedmont is a State of God’s own making. The bar rier which Providence reared up for the defence of Italy stands yet unconquered after the enslavement of the whole Peninsula. The Alps, which failed to make one State of the land they encompassed, gave at least rise to a border State, which may perhaps yet work out.the deliverance of the conntry. It is the purpose of the present Work to study the causes wliich led to the formation of the State of Piedmont and gave it stability .; to bring the whole Past to bear on the whole Present; to inquu-e how far the long-continued success and advancement of that country bas been owing to the mel*e advantages of geographical position, and to what extent it may also be ascribed to the pecuhar genius of its Princes, and the rare temper of its People. Out of the various mongrel communities made up rather by fortuitous aggregation of tenitoiy than from' development of national elements/ in the eleventh cen tury,—at the time, that is, when the European families VIU P REFACI has become one with Italy: it has ‘a sacred, a fearful pledge to redeem. Italy cannot fail to take the field once more; and no blindness of partisanship', no local jealousy can hinder Piedmont from again being—what it was called by way of contempt in the days of Charles Albert—“ the Sword of Italy.” The day of strife may yet be distant, and it were idle to dwell upon that. But there is another—a moral contest—waging at this moment. Every day in which Piedmont reconciles freedom with order, in which it proves the capability'of the Italian people for self-government; it wins a battle for itself, for Italy, for humanity. This rehabilitation of at least a part of the ItaUan nation, is a preliminary step towards, the eman cipation of the whole country. The independence, of Italy is half accomplished, when it is established by facts that she is not unworthy of it. It conveys to'o flat a contradiction to the ungenerous assertions of those who would‘doom a nation to eternal death on the ground of pievious abuse of life. The contrast we have long witnessed between western and eastern or southern Italy,—between the peaceful debate on laws at Turin, and the sanguinary state of siege ât Milan, is edifying to all Europe. Thus, it may now be said, do the Italians govern themselves; thus are they governed by foreigners! • It is important to look this great fact in tlie face; to refer to the causes which led to it, and the means which achieved it. PEEFACE. IX The Histoiy of Piedmont receives a fresh import ance from the new attitude assumed by that State in Italy and in Europe. Up to a very recent period Piedmont had no real existence,—men talked only of the State or monarchy of Savoy. The annals of the country were merely those of a moimtain-chief and his clan, or rather of a general and his regiment. But the People was nevertheless slowly forming,.—de-. veloping tendencies, aspirations, forces of its own. Only for a long course of time the prince and the people were so strongly identified, that men used to speak of the former as an abstraction, and the latter was scarcely noticed. But all- sublunary things pro ceed by action and reaction. If it Avas the sovereign here who made the nation, the nation by turns exer cised its influence on the sovereign. It is not witli thè destinies of the House of Savoy that we are concerned. It is the edifice\ Avhich those princes reared that interests us ; apd that edifice Avill endure, even were the builders to fall. Whatever re-' quital the descendants of Charles Albert may nieet with at the hands of Italy, there is no dpubt but the predecessors of that King Avill be found to have Avell deserved of the country. The History of Piedm'ont is therefore distinct from, though ins'eparably connected with, that of the House of Savoy. There is enough that is intrinsically beautiful and heart-stirring in the annals of the reigning House it self. Por a hneal succession of forty sovereign princes in PREFACE. twenty-seven generations-—Counts, Dukes, and Kings — during the lapse of eight centuries and a half, that. House has stood its ground.- There must have been something more than chance thus to chain the -wheel of fortune in favour of a dynasty : and the historians of Savoy find an adequate reason in the fact, that “ no royal family has produced so long and, uninterrupted a series of brave, able menor we might say, with more modesty but greater certainty, none has been so remarkable for the absence of bad, idiotic, or craven men, and of profligate women,—in none have the in stances of startling crimes or hideous vices’ been more unfrequent; several of those princes may claim the reputation of distinguished warriors and legislators at home, and two of them at least played a most con spicuous part, and exercised a paramount influence on general events abroad. But, as we said, it is not the rulers, but the people of Piedmont that interest us. We distinguish the work from the artificers : it is with the materials those princes had to work upon, that we busy ourselves. All that is merely dynastic belongs but indirectly to our subject. The History of Piedmont is from this very fact di vided into two separate epochs. For a whole lapse of five centuries Savoy was a stranger in Italy. The princely mantle of the House was made up at first chiefly of Burgundian and Helvetian patches; it spread over the fine districts bordering on the Rhone and Lake Leman. For a time it even seemed as if the scheme PREFACE. XI of keeping together what nature had eternally sun dered, struck its veiy originators as something too daring and monstrous; it seemed as if the hope of subjugating both the northern and southern valleys w'as abandoned, and for the best part of two centuries the reigning House was spht into two branches,-ôf Savoy, and Piedmont or Achaia,— and the two States held together only by flimsy ties of feudal compact. During the whole of this period Piedmont was Italy. Its half-feudal, half-municipal organization, or disor ganization, had *not much to distinguish it from any Other district of Lombardy. It was a prey to fhe long struggles which brought about the ruin of Italy ; and from those sthiggles the House of Savoy either pru dently kept aloof, or, even more craftily, only engaged in them when it saw they presented safe chances of its own aggrandisement.' But when the result of these contests was to lay • Italy prostrate, and to. make it an easy prey to foreign aggressors, then the Princes of Savoy came in for their own share of the spoils. That share they seized with all the tenacity of men of the hills: they fastened upon it, impressed' it with thîr own character, made it morally as well as materially their own. Prom 1002 to 1559, history tells us the conquest j from 1559 to 1796, the union and nationalization, of Piedmont. The last sixty or seventy yeai's give us the result of all the previous work, the standing up of a complete edifice. The History of Savoy, as considered apart from XU PREFACE. that of Piedmontj’ has been repeatedly, and not un skilfully, written-. ■ Guichenon, a gentleman of Bresse, who flourished in the seventeenth century, illustrated the genealogy of the reigning House with an indus try-and judgment, that made his work a supreme au thority with the numerous writers who came after hiip. The most able of these, the Marquis Costa de Beauregard, produced, in 1816, three volumes, in which he attempted to give his subject as much order and comprehensiveness as it would admit of. Still all these were merely “ Histories of the Housethey were written by Savoyards and with Savoyard views • and Costa^- at the utmost, kept as it were astride the A lps ; he was not aware, nor. was any man before the reign of Charles Albert, that the House of Savoy had almost unconsciously estranged itself from the home of its ancestors, and committed itself to an Italian career. On the other hand. Piedmont, as. an Italian pro vince, has been long neglected by national writers. Only two or three chronicles of Asti and Chieri found place in the vast treasures of historical erudition col lected by Muratori. Tiii’in, Ivrea, Saluzzo, qtc. could hardly be said to belong to the sisterhood of Italian cities: up to the close of the- last century, notwith standing the crude essays of Pingon," of .Ludovico and Agostino della Chiesa, and other obscure wri ters, the History of Piedmont remained to be written. Denina endeavoured indeed to supply the deficiency, iri his wôrk on the liistory of Western Italy. But he PREFACE. xm Avent too far beyond the subject. The limits of the re gions he thus designated are vague and shifting : that history was undertaken at a late period in life ; it was ill digested and conducted tltroughout, and in Pied mont itself it is by no means so extensively known and read as the work on the ‘ Revolutions of Italy/ to which the author owes his reputation.

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