HOUSES OP FRANCE AND AUSTRIA 259 tunes awakened the patriotism of the Italians, just as the English invasion had aroused French patriotism. The Italians felt themselves more learned, more civil- ized than their invaders; they groaned at seeing their fatherland subject to these "Barbarians/' for so they called the French and the Spaniards. "Turn out the Barbarians!" said Pope Julius II. It was he who organized a general league against the King of France, who then appeared the most powerful and most dan- gerous of the two kings, for he held the Milanese coun- try, he had occupied Genoa, and could, if he so pleased, send armies into Italy. The Italian states remained independent, Florence, Venice, the pope were not strong enough to struggle alone against the King of France. The pope had two foreign sovereigns enter into the league, the King of Spain and the Emperor Maximilian, and the Swiss, a small nation, but at that time very powerful, because it furnished the best foot-soldiers in Europe; he even employed "spiritual arms/' he excommunicated Louis XII. and his partisans (1511). "The Holy League" succeeded in driving the French from Italy; the Duke of Milan was reinstated in his duchy; the pope made himself master of all the towns of central Italy, and organized the "States of the Church" (1513). The King of Spain in Italy—But the Italians gained nothing by being rid of the French. They fell into the hands of the Spaniards. The King of Spain, already master of the whole of southern Italy, wanted to take the place that the King of France had lost in the north, and under pretext of protecting the Duke of Milan against the attacks of the French, he occupied