Excerpt from A Family Party in the Piazza of St. Peter, and Other Stories, Vol. 3 of 3
Tuscany was in a very deplorable condition in those days. Cosmo II., the father of Fer dinand II., had not been altogether a bad prince, as far as the material prosperity of the mass of his subjects was concerned. Nor could Ferdinand, looked at from the same point of view, be accused of much worse than deplorable and mischievous weakness. But circumstances were all against him. The extinction of the elder branch of the family of Gonzaga, dukes of Mantua, in the person of the Duke Vincenzo, in 1626, had led, as usual, to war in Italy, and to the passing of the Alps by the armies of the French king and the emperor, whose rapacity was excited by the hope of appropriating an heritage to which there was no immediate heir. The Grand Duke of Tuscany did his best to observe an evenhanded neutrality between the rival claimants, but it was impossible to prevent Tuscany from sumering greatly from the war. Then the Old Florentine commerce, especially that in woollen goods, which had for so long a period made the prosperity of the duchy, was being very rapidly ruined by the progress of English industry; and bad political economy.
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