What was the political and economic situation in Italy during the Renaissance.?
The forms of government that the various city-states assumed was as varied as the number of states. The Kingdom of Naples, consisting of the entire southern half of the Italian peninsula, was a standard monarchy. Milan and Savoy, however, were autonomous duchies; the area around Rome and the northeastern Italian peninsula, Romagna, were a series of semi-autonomous states under the control of the pope—the Papal States. The popes of the later middle ages and the Italian Renaissance could scarcely be considered churchmen; drawn from the nobility, they were ruthless politicians whose central goal was the expansion of their political power. Finally, Venice and Florence were republics, nominally ruled by senates but in reality ruled by a small group of nobility and wealthy capitalists. The phenomenal growth of wealth in the Italian cities eventually led to the growth of a series of city-states, that is, individual regions ruled centrally from a single city. In contrast to cities in central a
