When the Italian genius manifested itself in art, in letters and in scholarship, national unity was already an impossibility.[133] The race had been broken up into republics and tyrannies. Their political forces were centrifugal rather than centripetal. The first half of the fifteenth century was the period when their division into five great powers, held together by the frail bond of diplomacy, had been accomplished, and when Italy was further distracted by the ambition of unprincipled _condottieri_. Under these conditions of dismemberment, the Renaissance came to perfection, and the ideal unity of the Italians was achieved. The space of forty years' tranquillity and equilibrium, which preceded Charles VIII.'s invasion, marked an epoch of recombination and consolidation, when the two currents of national energy, learned and popular, met to form the culture of the golden age. After being Tuscan and neo-Latin, the literature which expressed the nation now became Italian. Such is the importance of the _Quattrocento_ in Italian history--long denied, late recognized, but now at length acknowledged as necessary and decisive for both Italy and Europe.
In the present chapter I propose to follow the transition from the middle ages effected by writers who, though they used the mother tongue, take rank among cultivated authors. The two succeeding chapters will be devoted to the more obscure branches of vernacular literature which flourished among the people.