Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/226

 2i 4 THE LATER MIDDLE AGES of the fourteenth century a member of the Angevin house became, through marriage, King of Hungary. This Angevin dynasty of Hungary lasted until Mary, a daughter of the last king of the house, became queen, and the Crown passed to her husband Sigismund, whom we have seen as emperor. In the fifteenth century the Crown of Naples was secured by another branch of the house of Aragon, although the French house of Anjou still made attempts to claim it. Towards the middle of the fifteenth century the representative of the house of Anjou was King Rene of Provence, who called himself King of Sicily and of Jerusalem; whose Provence daughter, known as Margaret of Anjou, was wife of Henry vi. of England, and whose realm of Provence was desired by Charles the Bold of Burgundy, but was in fact absorbed into the kingdom of Louis xi. of France. We shall presently find the successor of Louis on the French throne taking upon himself the Angevin claim to the throne of Naples. The kingdom of Naples was the largest single dominion in Italy, but the states of the north achieved a more abiding fame. Venice during this period was at the height of her glory, and her fleets were the great defence of the western world against the maritime power of the Turks. She retained her republican government for centuries, and her position as a first-class maritime power in the Mediterranean long after Spain and Portugal, England and Holland, had be- come rivals in the greater ocean beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. On the sea the Genoese republic stood second. In art she was rivalled and in letters surpassed by the great democratic republic of Florence. But the time was coming when a single family, Florence and that of the Medici, were to become masters of the Milan. Florentine democracy, though without any formal appropriation of the supreme power. In the eyes of Europe Milan came to count for more politically than any other Italian state except Venice ; first, under the rule of the Visconti, and then under the Sforza dynasty founded by a captain of mer- cenaries, Francesco Sforza, who married a daughter of one of the Visconti. Another Visconti married a French prince, the Duke of Orleans, whose grandson afterwards succeeded to the French