The rulers of Italy before the Romans were the "Etruscans", although it should be noted that the Etruscan dominance of the region was not even close to the Romans' in terms of power and political nature.
It set the stage for further war rather than ensuring longstanding peace
The poor standing of Leopold the 2nd is most probably attributed to the role he had in the extermination of huge amounts of people in Belgian colonies at the time. This wasn't known at the time, but today we known that Leopold the 2nd had ordered a genocide over the Congonese people.
In 1493, Pope Alexander VI settled the conflict between Spain and Portugal over the newly discovered lands outside Europe in the Treaty of Tordesillas. It was the Pope who had to settle the argument because Spain didn't have enough military power in the Atlantic to fight the Portuguese, so they preferred a diplomatic settlement. The Pope divided the lands along an imaginary line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands; the lands of the East were to belong to Portugal, and the lands of the West were for Spain.
