CHAPTER II.

ITALIAN HISTORY.

The special Difficulties of this Subject--Apparent Confusion--Want of

leading Motive--The Papacy--The Empire--The Republics--The Despots--The

People--The Dismemberment of Italy--Two main Topics--The Rise of the

Communes--Gothic Kingdom--Lombards--Franks--Germans--The Bishops--The

Consuls--The Podestàs--Civil Wars--Despots--The Balance of Power--The

Five Italian States--The Italians fail to achieve National Unity--The

Causes of this Failure--Conditions under which it might have been

achieved--A Republic--A Kingdom--A Confederation--A Tyranny--The Part

played by the Papacy.

After a first glance into Italian history the student recoils

as from a chaos of inscrutable confusion. To fix the moment of

transition from ancient to modern civilization seems impossible. There

is no formation of a new people, as in the case of Germany or France or

England, to serve as starting-point. Differ as the Italian races do in

their original type; Gauls, Ligurians, Etruscans, Umbrians, Latins,

Iapygians, Greeks have been fused together beneath the stress of Roman

rule into a nation that survives political mutations and the disasters

of barbarian invasions. Goths, Lombards, and Franks blend successively

with the masses of this complex population, and lose the outlines of

their several personalities. The western Empire melts imperceptibly

away. The Roman Church grows no less imperceptibly, and forms the Holy

Roman Empire as the equivalent of its own spiritual greatness in the

sphere of secular authority. These two institutions, the crowning

monuments of Italian creative genius, dominate the Middle Ages, powerful

as facts, but still more powerful as ideas. Yet neither of them controls

the evolution of Italy in the same sense as France was controlled by the

monarchical, and Germany by the federative, principle. The forces of the

nation, divided and swayed from side to side by this commanding dualism,

escaped both influences in so far as either Pope or Emperor strove to

mold them into unity. Meanwhile the domination of Byzantine Greeks in

the southern provinces, the kingdom of the Goths at Ravenna, the kingdom

of the Lombards and Franks at Pavia, the incursions of Huns and

Saracens, the kingdom of the Normans at Palermo, formed but accidents

and moments in a national development which owed important modifications

to each successive episode, but was not finally determined by any of

them. When the Communes emerge into prominence, shaking off the

supremacy of the Greeks in the South, vindicating their liberties

against the Empire in the North, jealously guarding their independence

from Papal encroachment in the center, they have already assumed shapes

of marked distinctness and bewildering diversity. Venice, Milan, Genoa,

Florence, Bologna, Siena, Perugia, Amalfi, Lucca, Pisa, to mention only

a few of the more notable, are indiscriminately called Republics. Yet

they differ in their internal type no less than in external conditions.

Each wears from the first and preserves a physiognomy that justifies our

thinking and speaking of the town as an incarnate entity. The cities of

Italy, down to the very smallest, bear the attributes of individuals.

The mutual attractions and repulsions that presided over their growth

have given them specific qualities which they will never lose, which

will be reflected in their architecture, in their customs, in their

language, in their policy, as well as in the institutions of their

government. We think of them involuntarily as persons, and reserve for

them epithets that mark the permanence of their distinctive characters.

To treat of them collectively is almost impossible. Each has its own

biography, and plays a part of consequence in the great drama of the

nation. Accordingly the study of Italian politics, Italian literature,

Italian art, is really not the study of one national genius, but of a

whole family of cognate geniuses, grouped together, conscious of

affinity, obeying the same general conditions, but issuing in markedly

divergent characteristics. Democracies, oligarchies, aristocracies

spring into being by laws of natural selection within the limits of a

single province. Every municipality has a separate nomenclature for its

magistracies, a somewhat different method of distributing administrative

functions. In one place there is a Doge appointed for life; in another

the government is put into commission among officers elected for a

period of months. Here we find a Patrician, a Senator, a Tribune; there

Consuls, Rectors, Priors, Ancients, Buonuomini, Conservatori. At one

period and in one city the Podestà seems paramount; across the border a

Captain of the People or a Gonfaloniere di Giustizia is supreme. Vicars

of the Empire, Exarchs, Catapans, Rectors for the Church, Legates,

Commissaries, succeed each other with dazzling rapidity. Councils are

multiplied and called by names that have their origin and meaning buried

in the dust of archæology. Consigli del Popolo, Credenza, Consiglio del

Comune, Senato, Gran Consiglio, Pratiche, Parlamenti, Monti, Consiglio

de' Savi, Arti, Parte Guelfa, Consigli di Dieci, di Tre, I Nove, Gli

Otto, I Cento--such are a few of the titles chosen at random from the

constitutional records of different localities.

Not one is insignificant. Not one but indicates some moment of

importance in the social evolution of the state. Not one but speaks of

civil strife, whereby the burgh in question struggled into individuality

and defined itself against its neighbor. Like fossils, in geological

strata, these names survive long after their old uses have been

forgotten, to guide the explorer in his reconstruction of a buried past.

While one town appears to respect the feudal lordship of great families,

another pronounces nobility to be a crime, and forces on its citizens

the reality or the pretense of labor. Some recognize the supremacy of

ecclesiastics. Others, like Venice, resist the least encroachment of the

Church, and stand aloof from Roman Christianity in jealous isolation.

The interests of one class are maritime, of another military, of a third

industrial, of a fourth financial, of a fifth educational. Amalfi, Pisa,

Genoa, and Venice depend for power upon their fleets and colonies; the

little cities of Romagna and the March supply the Captains of adventure

with recruits; Florence and Lucca live by manufacture; Milan by banking;

Bologna, Padua, Vicenza, owe their wealth to students attracted by their

universities. Foreign alliances or geographical affinities connect one

center with the Empire of the East, a second with France, a third with

Spain. The North is overshadowed by Germany; the South is disquieted by

Islam. The types thus formed and thus discriminated are vital, and

persist for centuries with the tenacity of physical growths. Each

differentiation owes its origin to causes deeply rooted in the locality.

The freedom and apparent waywardness of nature, when she sets about to

form crystals of varying shapes and colors, that shall last and bear her

stamp for ever, have governed their uprising and their progress to

maturity. At the same time they exhibit the keen jealousies and mutual

hatreds of rival families in the animal kingdom. Pisa destroys Amalfi;

Genoa, Pisa; Venice, Genoa; with ruthless and remorseless egotism in the

conflict of commercial interests. Florence enslaves Pisa because she

needs a way to the sea. Siena and Perugia, upon their inland altitudes,

consume themselves in brilliant but unavailing efforts to expand. Milan

engulfs the lesser towns of Lombardy. Verona absorbs Padua and Treviso.

Venice extends dominion over the Friuli and the Veronese conquests.

Strife and covetousness reign from the Alps to the Ionian Sea. But it is

a strife of living energies, the covetousness of impassioned and

puissant units. Italy as a whole is almost invisible to the student by

reason of the many-sided, combative, self-centered crowd of numberless

Italian communities. Proximity foments hatred and stimulates hostility.

Fiesole looks down and threatens Florence. Florence returns frown for

frown, and does not rest till she has made her neighbor of the hills a

slave. Perugia and Assissi turn the Umbrian plain into a wilderness of

wolves by their recurrent warfare. Scowling at one another across the

Valdichiana, Perugia rears a tower against Chiusi, and Chiusi builds her

Becca Questa in responsive menace. The tiniest burgh upon the Arno

receives from Dante, the poet of this internecine strife and fierce

town-rivalry, its stigma of immortalizing satire and insulting epithet,

for no apparent reason but that its dwellers dare to drink of the same

water and to breathe the same air as Florence. It would seem as though

the most ancient furies of antagonistic races, enchained and suspended

for centuries by the magic of Rome, had been unloosed; as though the

indigenous populations of Italy, tamed by antique culture, were

reverting to their primal instincts, with all the discords and divisions

introduced by the military system of the Lombards, the feudalism of the

Franks, the alien institutions of the Germans, superadded to

exasperate the passions of a nation blindly struggling against obstacles

that block the channel of continuous progress. Nor is this the end of

the perplexity. Not only are the cities at war with one another, but

they are plunged in ceaseless strife within the circuit of their

ramparts. The people with the nobles, the burghs with the castles, the

plebeians with the burgher aristocracy, the men of commerce with the men

of arms and ancient lineage, Guelfs and Ghibellines, clash together in

persistent fury. One half the city expels the other half. The exiles

roam abroad, cement alliances, and return to extirpate their conquerors.

Fresh proscriptions and new expulsions follow. Again alliances are made

and revolutions accomplished, till the ancient feuds of the towns are

crossed, recrossed, and tangled in a web of madness that defies

analysis. Through the medley of quarreling, divided, subdivided, and

intertwisted factions, ride Emperors followed by their bands of knights,

appearing for a season on vain quests, and withdrawing after they have

tenfold confounded the confusion. Papal Legates drown the cities of the

Church in blood, preach crusades, fulminate interdictions, rouse

insurrections in the States that own allegiance to the Empire. Monks

stir republican revivals in old cities that have lost their liberties,

or assemble the populations of crime-maddened districts in aimless

comedies of piety and false pacification, or lead them barefooted and

intoxicated with shrill cries of 'Mercy' over plain and mountain.

Princes of France, Kings of Bohemia and Hungary, march and countermarch

from north to south and back again, form leagues, establish realms, head

confederations, which melt like shapes we form from clouds to nothing.

At one time the Pope and Emperor use Italy as the arena of a deadly

duel, drawing the congregated forces of the nation into their dispute.

At another they join hands to divide the spoil of ruined provinces.

Great generals with armies at their backs start into being from apparent

nothingness, dispute the sovereignty of Italy in bloodless battles,

found ephemeral dynasties, and pass away like mists upon a mountain-side

beneath a puff of wind. Conflict, ruin, desolation, anarchy are ever

yielding place to concord, restoration, peace, prosperity, and then

recurring with a mighty flood of violence. Construction, destruction,

and reconstruction play their part in crises that have to be counted by

the thousands.

In the mean time, from this hurricane of disorder rises the clear ideal

of the national genius. Italy becomes self-conscious and attains the

spiritual primacy of modern Europe. Art, Learning, Literature,

State-craft, Philosophy, Science build a sacred and inviolable city of

the soul amid the tumult of seven thousand revolutions, the dust and

crash of falling cities, the tramplings of recurrent invasions, the

infamies and outrages of tyrants and marauders who oppress the land.

Unshaken by the storms that rage around it, this refuge of the spirit,

raised by Italian poets, thinkers, artists, scholars, and discoverers,

grows unceasingly in bulk and strength, until the younger nations take

their place beneath its ample dome. Then, while yet the thing of wonder

and of beauty stands in fresh perfection, at that supreme moment when

Italy is tranquil and sufficient to fulfill the noblest mission for the

world, we find her crushed and trampled under foot. Her tempestuous but

splendid story closes in the calm of tyranny imposed by Spain.

Over this vertiginous abyss of history, where the memories of antique

civilization blend with the growing impulses of modern life in an

uninterrupted sequence of national consciousness; through this

many-chambered laboratory of conflicting principles, where the ideals of

the Middle Age are shaped, and laws are framed for Europe; across this

wonder-land of waning and of waxing culture, where Goths, Greeks,

Lombards, Franks, and Normans come to form themselves by contact with

the ever-living soul of Rome; where Frenchmen, Spaniards, Swiss, and

Germans at a later period battle for the richest prize in Europe, and

learn by conquest from the conquered to be men; how shall we guide our

course? If we follow the fortunes of the Church, and make the Papacy the

thread on which the history of Italy shall hang, we gain the advantage

of basing our narrative upon the most vital and continuous member of the

body politic. But we are soon forced to lose sight of the Italians in

the crowd of other Christian races. The history of the Church is

cosmopolitan. The Sphere of the Papacy extends in all directions around

Italy taken as a local center. Its influence, moreover, was invariably

one of discord rather than of harmony within the boundaries of the

peninsula. If we take the Empire as our standing-ground, we have to

write the annals of a sustained struggle, in the course of which the

Italian cities were successful, when they reduced the Emperor to the

condition of an absentee with merely nominal privileges. After Frederick

II. the Empire played no important part in Italy until its rights were

reasserted by Charles V. upon the platform of modern politics. A power

so external to the true life of the nation, so successfully resisted,

so impotent to control the development of the Italians, cannot be chosen

as the central point of their history. If we elect the Republics, we are

met with another class of difficulties. The historian who makes the

Commune his unit, who confines attention to the gradual development,

reciprocal animosities, and final decadence of the republics, can hardly

do justice to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papacy, which

occupy no less than half the country. Again, the great age of the

Renaissance, when all the free burghs accepted the rule of despots, and

when the genius of the Italians culminated, is for him a period of

downfall and degradation. Besides, he leaves the history of the Italian

people before the starting-point of the Republics unexplained. He has,

at the close of their career, to account for the reason why these

Communes, so powerful in self-development, so intelligent, so wealthy,

and so capable of playing off the Pope against the Empire, failed to

maintain their independence. In other words he selects one phase of

Italian evolution, and writes a narrative that cannot but be partial. If

we make the Despots our main point, we repeat the same error in a worse

form. The Despotisms imply the Communes as their predecessors. Each and

all of them grew up and flourished on the soil of decadent or tired

Republics. Though they are all-important at one period of Italian

history--the period of the present work--they do but form an episode in

the great epic of the nation. He who attempts a general history of Italy

from the point of view of the despotisms, is taking a single scene for

the whole drama. Finally we might prefer the people--that people,

instinctively and persistently faithful to Roman traditions, which

absorbed into itself the successive hordes of barbarian invaders,

civilized them, and adopted them as men of Italy; that people which

destroyed the kingdoms of the Goths and Lombards humbled the Empire at

Legnano, and evolved the Communes; that people which resisted alien

feudalism, and spent its prime upon eradicating every trace of the

repugnant system from its midst; that people which finally attained to

the consciousness of national unity by the recovery of scholarship and

culture under the dominion of despotic princes. This people is Italy.

But the documents that should throw light upon the early annals of the

people are deficient. It does not appear upon the scene before the reign

of Otho I. Nor does it become supreme till after the Peace of Constance.

Its biography is bound up with that of the republics and the despots.

Before the date of their ascendency we have to deal with Bishops of

Rome, Emperors of the East and West, Exarchs and Kings of Italy, the

feudal Lords of the Marches, the Dukes and Counts of Lombard and

Frankish rulers. Through that long period of incubation, when Italy

freed herself from dependence upon Byzantium, created the Papacy and

formed the second Roman Empire, the people exists only as a spirit

resident in Roman towns and fostered by the Church, which effectually

repelled all attempts at monarchical unity, playing the Lombards off

against the Goths, the Franks against the Lombards, the Normans against

the Greeks, merging the Italian Kingdom in the Empire when it became

German, and resisting the Empire of its own creation when the towns at

last were strong enough to stand alone. To speak about the people in

this early period is, therefore, to invoke a myth; to write its history

is the same as writing an ideal history of mediæval Europe.

The truth is that none of these standpoints in isolation suffices for

the student of Italy. Her inner history is the history of social and

intellectual progress evolving itself under the conditions of attraction

and repulsion generated by the double ideas of Papacy and Empire.

Political unity is everywhere and at all times imperiously rejected. The

most varied constitutional forms are needed for the self-effectuation of

a race that has no analogue in Europe. The theocracy of Rome, the

monarchy of Naples, the aristocracy of Venice, the democracy of

Florence, the tyranny of Milan are equally instrumental in elaborating

the national genius that gave art, literature, and mental liberty to

modern society. The struggles of city with city for supremacy or bare

existence, the internecine wars of party against party, the never-ending

clash of principles within the States, educated the people to

multifarious and vivid energy. In the course of those long complicated

contests, the chief centers acquired separate personalities, assumed the

physiognomy of conscious freedom, and stamped the mark of their own

spirit on their citizens. At the end of all discords, at the close of

all catastrophes, we find in each of the great towns a population

released from mental bondage and fitted to perform the work of

intellectual emancipation for the rest of Europe. Thus the essential

characteristic of Italy is diversity, controlled and harmonized by an

ideal rhythm of progressive movement.[1] We who are mainly occupied in

this book with the Italian genius as it expressed itself in society,

scholarship, fine art, and literature, at its most brilliant period of

renascence, may accept this fact of political dismemberment with

acquiescence. It was to the variety of conditions offered by the Italian

communities that we owe the unexampled richness of the mental life of

Italy. Yet it is impossible to overlook the weakness inflicted on the

people by those same conditions when the time came for Italy to try her

strength against the nations of Europe.[2] It was then shown that the

diversities which stimulated spiritual energy were a fatal source of

national instability. The pride of the Italians in their local

independence, their intolerance of unification under a single head, the

jealousies that prevented them from forming a permanent confederation,

rendered them incapable of coping with races which had yielded to the

centripetal force of monarchy. If it is true that the unity of the

nation under a kingdom founded at Pavia would have deprived the world of

much that Italy has yielded in the sphere of thought and art, it is

certainly not less true that such centralization alone could have

averted the ruin of the sixteenth century which gives the aspect of a

tragedy to each volume of my work on the Renaissance.

[1] See Guicciardini (_Op. Ined._ vol. i. p. 28) for an eloquent

demonstration of the happiness, prosperity, and splendor conferred

on the Italians by the independence of their several centers. He is

arguing against Machiavelli's lamentation over their failure to

achieve national unity.

[2] This was the point urged by Machiavelli, in the _Principe_, the

_Discorsi_, and the _Art of War_. With keener political insight than

Guicciardini, he perceived that the old felicity of Italy was about

to fail her through the very independence of her local centers,

which Guicciardini rightly recognized as the source of her

unparalleled civilization and wealth. The one thing needful in the

shock with France and Spain was unity.

Without seeking to attack the whole problem of Italian history, two main

topics must be briefly discussed in the present chapter before entering

on the proper matter of this work. The first relates to the growth of

the Communes, which preceded, necessitated, and determined the

despotisms of the fifteenth century. The second raises the question why

Italian differs from any other national history, why the people failed

to achieve unity either under a sovereign or in a powerful

confederation. These two subjects of inquiry are closely connected and

interdependent. They bring into play the several points that have been

indicated as partially and imperfectly explanatory of the problem of

Italy. But, since I have undertaken to write neither a constitutional

nor a political history, but a history of culture at a certain epoch, it

will be enough to treat of these two questions briefly, with the special

view of showing under what conditions the civilization of the

Renaissance came to maturity in numerous independent Communes, reduced

at last by necessary laws of circumstance to tyranny; and how it was

checked at the point of transition to its second phase of modern

existence, by political weakness inseparable from the want of national

coherence in the shock with mightier military races.

Modern Italian history may be said to begin with the retirement of

Honorius to Ravenna and the subsequent foundation of Odoacer's Kingdom

in 476. The Western Empire ended, and Rome was recognized as a Republic.

When Zeno sent the Goths into Italy, Theodoric established himself at

Ravenna, continued the institutions and usages of the ancient Empire,

and sought by blending with the people to naturalize his alien

authority. Rome was respected as the sacred city of ancient culture and

civility. Her Consuls, appointed by the Senate, were confirmed in due

course by the Greek Emperor; and Theodoric made himself the vicegerent

of the Cæsars rather than an independent sovereign. When we criticise

the Ostro-Gothic occupation by the light of subsequent history, it is

clear that this exclusion of the capital from Theodoric's conquest and

his veneration for the Eternal City were fatal to the unity of the

Italian realm. From the moment that Rome was separated from the

authority of the Italian Kings, there existed two powers in the

Peninsula--the one secular, monarchical, with the military strength of

the barbarians imposed upon its ancient municipal organization; the

other ecclesiastical, pontifical, relying on the undefined ambitions of

S. Peter's See and the unconquered instincts of the Roman people

scattered through the still surviving cities.[1] Justinian, bent upon

asserting his rights as the successor of the Cæsars, wrested Italy from

the hands of the Goths; but scarcely was this revolution effected when

Narses, the successor of Belisarius, called a new nation of barbarians

to support his policy in Italy. Narses died before the advent of the

Lombards; but they descended, in forces far more formidable than the

Goths, and established a second kingdom at Pavia. Under the Lombard

domination Rome was left untouched. Venice, with her population gathered

from the ruins of the neighboring Roman cities, remained in

quasi-subjection to the Empire of the East. Ravenna became a Greek

garrison, ruling the Exarchate and Pentapolis under the name of the

Byzantine Emperors. The western coast escaped the Lombard domination;

for Genoa grew slowly into power upon her narrow cornice between hills

and sea, while Pisa defied the barbarians intrenched in military

stations at Fiesole and Lucca. In like manner the islands, Sicily,

Sardinia, and Corsica, were detached from the Lombard Kingdom; and the

maritime cities of Southern Italy, Bari, Naples, Amalfi, and Gaeta

asserted independence under the shadow of the Greek ascendency. What the

Lombards achieved in their conquest, and what they failed to accomplish,

decided the future of Italy. They broke the country up into unequal

blocks; for while the inland regions of the north obeyed Pavia, while

the great duchies of Spoleto in the center and of Benevento in the south

owned the nominal sway of Alboin's successors,[2] Venice and the

Riviera, Pisa and the maritime republics of Apulia and Calabria,

Ravenna and the islands, repelled their sovereignty. Rome remained

inviolable beneath the ægis of her ancient prestige, and the decadent

Empire of the East was too inert to check the freedom of the towns which

recognized its titular supremacy.

[1] When I apply the term Roman here and elsewhere to the

inhabitants of the Italian towns, I wish to indicate the indigenous

Italic populations molded by Roman rule into homogeneity. The

resurgence of this population and its reattainment of intellectual

consciousness by the recovery of past traditions and the rejection

of foreign influence constitutes the history of Italy upon the close

of the Dark Ages.

[2] It will be remembered by students of early Italian history that

Benevento and Spoleto joined the Church in her war upon the Lombard

kingdom. Spoleto was broken up. Benevento survived as a Lombard

duchy till the Norman Conquest.

The kingdom of the Lombards endured two centuries, and left ineffaceable

marks upon Italy. A cordon of military cities was drawn round the old

Roman centers in Lombardy, Tuscany, and the Duchy of Spoleto. Pavia rose

against Milan, which had been a second Rome, Cividale against Aquileia,

Fiesole against Florence, Lucca against Pisa. The country was divided

into Duchies and Marches; military service was exacted from the

population, and the laws of the Lombards, _asininum jus, quoddam jus

quod faciebant reges per se_, as the jurists afterwards defined them,

were imposed upon the descendants of Roman civilization. Yet the

outlying cities of the sea-coast, as we have already seen, were

independent; and Rome remained to be the center of revolutionary ideas,

the rallying-point of a policy inimical to Lombard unity. Not long after

their settlement, the princes of the Lombard race took the fatal step of

joining the Catholic communion, whereby they strengthened the hands of

Rome and excluded themselves from tyrannizing in the last resort over

the growing independence of the Papal See. The causes of their

conversion from Arianism to orthodox Latin Christianity are buried in

obscurity. But it is probable that they were driven to this measure by

the rebelliousness of their great vassals and the necessity of resting

for support upon the indigenous populations they had subjugated. Rome,

profiting by the errors and the weakness of her antagonists, extended

her spiritual dominion by enforcing sacraments, ordeals, and appeals to

ecclesiastical tribunals, organized her hierarchy under Gregory the

Great, and lost no opportunity of enriching and aggrandizing her

bishoprics. In 718 she shook off the yoke of Byzantium by repelling the

heresies of Leo the Isaurian; and when this insurrection menaced her

with the domestic tyranny of the Lombard Kings, who possessed themselves

of Ravenna in 728, she called the Franks to her aid against the now

powerful realm. Stephen II. journeyed in 753 to Gaul, named Pippin

Patrician of Rome, and invited him to the conquest of Italy. In the war

that followed, the Franks subdued the Lombards, and Charles the Great

was invested with their kingdom and crowned Emperor in 800 by Leo III.

at Rome.

The famous compact between Charles the Great and the Pope was in effect

a ratification of the existing state of things. The new Emperor took for

himself and converted into a Frankish Kingdom all the provinces that had

been wrested from the Lombards. He relinquished to the Papacy Rome with

its patrimony, the portions of Spoleto and Benevento that had already

yielded to the See of S. Peter, the southern provinces that owned the

nominal ascendency of Byzantium, the islands and the cities of the

Exarchate and Pentapolis which formed no part of the Lombard conquest.

By this stipulation no real temporal power was accorded to the Papacy,

nor did the new Empire surrender its paramount rights over the peninsula

at large. The Italian kingdom, transferred to the Franks in 800, was the

kingdom founded by the Lombards; while the outlying and unconquered

districts were placed beneath the protectorate of the power which had

guided their emancipation. Thus the dualism introduced into Italy by

Theodoric's veneration for Rome, and confirmed by the failure of the

Lombard conquest, was ratified in the settlement whereby the Pope gave a

new Empire to Western Christendom. Venice, Pisa, Genoa, and the maritime

Republics of the south, excluded from the kingdom, were left to pursue

their own course of independence; and this is the chief among many

reasons why they rose so early into prominence. Rome consolidated her

ancient patrimonies and extended her rectorship in the center, while the

Frankish kings, who succeeded each other through eight reigns, developed

the Regno upon feudal principles by parceling the land among their

Counts. New marches were formed, traversing the previous Lombard fabric

and introducing divisions that decentralized the kingdom. Thus the great

vassals of Ivrea, Verona, Tuscany, and Spoleto raised themselves against

Pavia. The monarchs, placed between the Papacy and their ambitious

nobles, were unable to consolidate the realm; and when Berengar, the

last independent sovereign strove to enforce the declining authority of

Pavia, he was met with the resistance and the hatred of the nation.

The kingdom Berengar attempted to maintain against his vassals and the

Church was virtually abrogated by Otho I., whom the Lombard nobles

summoned into Italy in 951. When he reappeared in 961, he was crowned

Emperor at Rome, and assumed the title of the King of Italy. Thus the

Regno was merged in the Empire, and Pavia ceased to be a capital.

Henceforth the two great potentates in the peninsula were an unarmed

Pontiff and an absent Emperor. The subsequent history of the Italians

shows how they succeeded in reducing both these powers to the condition

of principles, maintaining the pontifical and imperial ideas, but

repelling the practical authority of either potentate. Otho created new

marches and gave them to men of German origin. The houses of Savoy and

Montferrat rose into importance in his reign. To Verona were intrusted

the passes between Germany and Italy. The Princes of Este at Ferrara

held the keys of the Po, while the family of Canossa accumulated fiefs

that stretched from Mantua across the plain of Lombardy, over the

Apennines to Lucca, and southward to Spoleto. Thus the ancient Italy of

Lombards and Franks was superseded by a new Italy of German feudalism,

owing allegiance to a suzerain whose interests detained him in the

provinces beyond the Alps. At the same time the organization of the

Church was fortified. The Bishops were placed on an equality with the

Counts in the chief cities, and Viscounts were created to represent

their civil jurisdiction. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance

of Otho's concessions to the Bishops. During the preceding period of

Frankish rule about one third of the soil of Italy had been yielded to

the Church, which had the right of freeing its vassals from military

service; and since the ecclesiastical sees were founded upon ancient

sites of Roman civilization, without regard to the military centers of

the barbarian kingdoms, the new privileges of the Bishops accrued to the

benefit of the indigenous population. Milan, for example, down-trodden

by Pavia, still remained the major See of Lombardy. Aquileia, though a

desert, had her patriarch, while Cividale, established as a fortress to

coerce the neighboring Roman towns, was ecclesiastically but a village.

At this epoch a third power emerged in Italy. Berengar had given the

cities permission to inclose themselves with walls in order to repel the

invasions of the Huns.[1] Otho respected their right of self-defense,

and from the date of his coronation the history of the free burghs

begins in Italy. It is at first closely connected with the changes

wrought by the extinction of the kingdom of Pavia, by the exaltation of

the clergy, and by the dislocation of the previous system of

feud-holding, which followed upon Otho's determination to remodel the

country in the interest of the German Empire. The Regno was abolished.

The ancient landmarks of nobility were altered and confused. The cities

under their Bishops assumed a novel character of independence. Those of

Roman origin, being ecclesiastical centers, had a distant advantage over

the more recent foundations of the Lombard and the Frankish monarchs.

The Italic population everywhere emerged and displayed a vitality that

had been crushed and overlaid by centuries of invasion and military

oppression.

[1] It is worthy of notice that to this date belongs the war-chant

of the Modenese sentinels, with its allusions to Troy and Hector,

which is recognized as the earliest specimen of the Italian

hendecasyllabic meter.

The burghs at this epoch may be regarded as luminous points in the dense

darkness of feudal aristocracy.[1] Gathering round their Cathedral as a

center, the towns inclose their dwellings with bastions, from which they

gaze upon a country bristling with castles, occupied by serfs, and

lorded over by the hierarchical nobility. Within the city the Bishop

and the Count hold equal sway; but the Bishop has upon his side the

sympathies and passions of the burghers. The first effort of the towns

is to expel the Count from their midst. Some accident of misrule

infuriates the citizens. They fly to arms and are supported by the

Bishop. The Count has to retire to the open country, where he

strengthens himself in his castle.[2] Then the Bishop remains victor in

the town, and forms a government of rich and noble burghers, who control

with him the fortunes of the new-born state. At this crisis we begin to

hear for the first time a word that has been much misunderstood. The

_Popolo_ appears upon the scene. Interpreting the past by the present,

and importing the connotation gained by the word _people_ in the

revolutions of the last two centuries, students are apt to assume that

the Popolo of the Italian burghs included the whole population. In

reality it was at first a close aristocracy of influential families, to

whom the authority of the superseded Counts was transferred in

commission, and who held it by hereditary right.[3] Unless we firmly

grasp this fact, the subsequent vicissitudes of the Italian

commonwealths are unintelligible, and the elaborate definitions of the

Florentine doctrinaires lose half their meaning. The internal

revolutions of the free cities were almost invariably caused by the

necessity of enlarging the Popolo, and extending its franchise to the

non-privileged inhabitants. Each effort after expansion provoked an

obstinate resistance from those families who held the rights of

burghership; and thus the technical terms _primo popolo_, _secondo

popolo_, _popolo grasso_, _popolo minuto_, frequently occurring in the

records of the Republics, indicate several stages in the progress from

oligarchy to democracy. The constitution of the city at this early

period was simple. At the head of its administration stood the Bishop,

with the Popolo of enfranchised burghers. The _Commune_ included the

Popolo, together with the non-qualified inhabitants, and was represented

by Consuls, varying in number according to the division of the town into

quarters.[4] Thus the Commune and the Popolo were originally separate

bodies; and this distinction has been perpetuated in the architecture of

those towns which still can show a Palazzo del Popolo apart from the

Palazzo del Commune. Since the affairs of the city had to be conducted

by discussion, we find Councils corresponding to the constituent

elements of the burgh. There is the _Parlamento_, in which the

inhabitants meet together to hear the decisions of the Bishop and the

Popolo, or to take measures in extreme cases that affect the city as a

whole; the _Gran Consiglio_, which is only open to duly qualified

members of the Popolo; and the _Credenza_, or privy council of specially

delegated burghers, who debate on matters demanding secrecy and

diplomacy. Such, generally speaking, and without regard to local

differences, was the internal constitution of an Italian city during the

supremacy of the Bishops.

[1] It is not necessary to raise antiquarian questions here relating

to the origin of the Italian Commune. Whether regarded as a survival

of the ancient Roman _municipium_ or as an offshoot from the Lombard

_guild_, it was a new birth of modern times, a new organism evolved

to express the functions of Italian as different from ancient Roman

or mediæval Lombard life. The affection of the people for their past

induced them to use the nomenclature of Latin civility for the

officers and councils of the Commune. Thus a specious air of

classical antiquity, rather literary and sentimental than real, was

given to the Commune at the outset. Moreover, it must be remembered

that Rome herself had suffered no substantial interruption of

republican existence during the Dark Ages. Therefore the free

burghs, though their vitality was the outcome of wholly new

conditions, though they were built up of guilds and associations

representing interests of modern origin, flattered themselves with

an uninterrupted municipal succession from the Roman era, and

pointed for proof to the Eternal City.

[2] The Italian word _contado_ is a survival from this state of

things. It represents a moment in the national development when the

sphere of the Count outside the city was defined against the sphere

of the municipality. The _Contadini_ are the people of the Contado,

the Count's men.

[3] Even Petrarch, in his letter to four Cardinals (Lett. Fam. xi.

16, ed. Fracassetti) on the reformation of the Roman Commonwealth,

recommends the exclusion of the neighboring burghs and all

strangers, inclusive of the Colonna and Orsini families, from the

franchise. None but pure Romans, how to be discovered from the

_colluviet omnium gentium_ deposited upon the Seven Hills by

centuries of immigration he does not clearly say, should be chosen

to revive the fallen majesty of the Republic. See in particular the

peroration of his argument (op. cit. vol. iii. p. 95). In other

words, he aims at a narrow Popolo, a _pura cittadinanza_, in the

sense of Cacciaguida Par. xvi.

[4] In some places we find as many as twelve Consuls. It appears

that both the constituent families of the Popolo and the numbers of

the Consuls were determined by the Sections of the city, so many

being told off for each quarter.

In the North of Italy not a few of the greater vassals, among whom may

be mentioned the houses of Canossa, Montferrat, Savoy, and Este,

creations of the Salic Emperors, looked with favor upon the development

of the towns, while some nobles went so far as to constitute themselves

feudatories of Bishops.[1] The angry warfare carried on against Canossa

by the Lombard barons has probably to be interpreted by the jealousy

this popular policy excited. At the same time, while Lombardy and

Tuscany were establishing their municipal liberties, a sympathetic

movement began in Southern Italy, which resulted in the conquest of

Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily by the Normans. Omitting all the details of

this episode, than which nothing more dramatic is presented by the

history of modern nations, it must be enough to point out here that the

Normans finally severed Italy from the Greek Empire, gave a monarchical

stamp to the south of the peninsula, and brought the Regno they

consolidated into the sphere of national politics under the protection

of the Pope. Up to the date of their conquest Southern Italy had a

separate and confused history. It now entered the Italian community, and

by the peculiar circumstances of its cession to the Holy See was

destined in the future to become the chief instrument whereby the Popes

disturbed the equilibrium of the peninsula in furtherance of their

ambitious schemes.

[1] The Pelavicini of S. Donnino, for example, gave themselves to

Parma.

The greatness of the Roman cities under the popular rule of their

Bishops is illustrated by Milan, second only to Rome in the last days of

the Empire. Milan had been reduced to the condition of abject misery by

the Kings, who spared no pains to exalt Pavia at the expense of her

elder sister. After the dissolution of the kingdom, she started into a

new life, and in 1037 her archbishop, Heribert, was singled out by

Conrad II. as the protagonist of the episcopal revolution against

feudalism.[1] Heribert was in truth the hero of the burghs in their

first strife for independence. It was he who devised the _Carroccio_, an

immense car drawn by oxen, bearing the banner of the Commune, with an

altar and priests ministrant, around which the pikemen of the city

mustered when they went to war. This invention of Heribert's was soon

adopted by the cities throughout Italy. It gave cohesion and confidence

to the citizens, reminded them that the Church was on their side in the

struggle for freedom, and served as symbol of their military strength in

union. The first authentic records of a Parliament, embracing the nobles

of the Popolo, the clergy, and the multitude, are transmitted to us by

the Milanese Chronicles, in which Heribert figures as the president of a

republic. From this date Milan takes the lead in the contests for

municipal independence. Her institutions like that of the Carroccio,

together with her tameless spirit, are communicated to the neighboring

cities of Lombardy, cross the Apennines, and animate the ancient burghs

of Tuscany.

[1] He was summoned before the Diet of Pavia for having dispossessed

a noble of his feud.

Having founded their liberties upon the episcopal presidency, the cities

now proceeded to claim the right of choosing their own Bishops. They

refused the prelates sent them by the Emperor, and demanded an election

by the Chapters of each town. This privilege was virtually won when the

war of Investitures broke out in 1073. After the death of Gregory VI. in

1046, the Emperors resolved to enforce their right of nominating the

Popes. The two first prelates imposed on Rome, Clement II. and Damatus

II., died under suspicion of poison. Thus the Roman people refused a

foreign Pope, as the Lombards had rejected the bishops sent to rule

them. The next Popes, Leo IX. and Victor II., were persuaded by

Hildebrand, who now appears upon the stage, to undergo a second

election at Rome by the clergy and the people. They escaped

assassination. But the fifth German, Stephen X., again died suddenly;

and now the formidable monk of Soana felt himself powerful enough to

cause the election of his own candidate, Nicholas II. A Lateran council,

inspired by Hildebrand, transferred the election of Popes to the

Cardinals, approved by the clergy and people of Rome, and confirmed the

privilege of the cities to choose their bishops, subject to Papal

ratification. In 1073 Hildebrand assumed the tiara as Gregory VII., and

declared a war that lasted more than forty years against the Empire. At

its close in 1122 the Church and the Empire were counterposed as

mutually exclusive autocracies, the one claiming illimitable spiritual

sway, the other recognized as no less illimitably paramount in civil

society. From the principles raised by Hildebrand and contested in the

struggles of this duel, we may date those new conceptions of the two

chief powers of Christendom which found final expression in the

theocratic philosophy of the _Summa_ and the imperial absolutism of the

_De Monarchiâ_. Meanwhile the Empire and the Papacy, while trying their

force against each other, had proved to Italy their essential weakness.

What they gained as ideas, controlling the speculations of the next two

centuries, they lost as potentates in the peninsula. It was impossible

for either Pope or Emperor to carry on the war without bidding for the

support of the cities; and therefore, at the end of the struggle, the

free burghs found themselves strengthened at the expense of both powers.

Still it must not be forgotten that the wars of Investitures, while they

developed the independent spirit and the military energies of the

Republics, penetrated Italy with the vice of party conflict. The

ineradicable divisions of Guelf and Ghibelline were a heavy price to pay

for a step forward on the path of emancipation; nor was the

ecclesiastical revolution, which tended to Italianize the Papacy, while

it magnified its cosmopolitan ascendency, other than a source of evil to

the nation.

The forces liberated in the cities by these wars brought the Consuls to

the front. The Bishops had undermined the feudal fabric of the kingdom,

depressed the Counts, and restored the Roman towns to prosperity. During

the war both Popolo and Commune grew in vigor, and their Consuls began

to use the authority that had been conquered by the prelates. At first

the Consuls occupied a subordinate position as men of affairs and

notaries, needed to transact the business of the mercantile inhabitants.

They now took the lead as political agents of the first magnitude,

representing the city in its public acts, and superseding the

ecclesiastics. The Popolo was enlarged by the admission of new burgher

families, and the ruling caste, though still oligarchical, became more

fairly representative of the inhabitants. This progress was inevitable,

when we remember that the cities had been organized for warfare, and

that, except their Consuls, they had no officials who combined civil

and military functions. Under the jurisdiction of the Consuls Roman law

was everywhere substituted for Lombard statutes, and another strong blow

was thus dealt against decaying feudalism. The school of Bologna

eclipsed the university of Pavia. Justinian's Code was studied with

passionate energy, and the Italic people enthusiastically reverted to

the institutions of their past. In the fable of the Codex of the

_Pandects_ brought by Pisa from Amalfi we can trace the fervor of this

movement, whereby the Romans of the cities struggled after resurrection.

One of the earliest manifestations of municipal vitality was the war of

city against city, which began to blaze with fury in the first half of

the twelfth century, and endured so long as free towns lasted to

perpetuate the conflict. No sooner had the burghs established themselves

beneath the presidency of their Consuls than they turned the arms they

had acquired in the war of independence, against their neighbors. The

phenomenon was not confined to any single district. It revealed a new

necessity in the very constitution of the commonwealths. Penned up

within the narrow limits of their petty dependencies, throbbing with

fresh life, overflowing with a populace inured to warfare, demanding

channels for their energies in commerce, competing with each other on

the paths of industry, they clashed in deadliest duels for breathing

space and means of wealth. The occasions that provoked one Commune to

declare war upon its rival were trivial. The animosity was internecine

and persistent. Life or death hung in the balance. It was a conflict for

ascendency that brought the sternest passions into play, and decided the

survival of the fittest among hundreds of competing cities. The deeply

rooted jealousies of Roman and feudal centers, the recent partisanship

of Papal and Imperial principles, imbittered this strife. But what lay

beneath all superficial causes of dissension was the economic struggle

of communities, for whom the soil of Italy already had begun to seem too

narrow. So superabundant were the forces of her population, so vast were

the energies emancipated by her attainment of municipal freedom, that

this mighty mother of peoples could not afford equal sustenance to all

her children. New-born, they had to strangle one another as they hung

upon the breast that gave them nourishment. It was impossible for the

Emperor to overlook the apparent anarchy of his fairest province.

Therefore, when Frederick Barbarossa was elected in 1152, his first

thought was to reduce the Garden of the Empire to order. Soon after his

election he descended into Lombardy and formed two leagues among the

cities of the North, the one headed by Pavia, the center of the

abrogated kingdom, the other by Milan, who inherited the majesty of Rome

and contained within her loins the future of Italian freedom. It is not

necessary to follow in detail the conflict of the Lombard burghs with

Frederick, so enthusiastically described by their historian, Sismondi,

It is enough for our present purpose to remember that in the course of

that contention both leagues made common cause against the Emperor, drew

the Pope Alexander III. into their quarrel, and at last in 1183, after

the victory of Legnano had convinced Frederick of his weakness, extorted

by the Peace of Constance privileges whereby their autonomy was amply

guaranteed and recognized. The advantages won by Milan who sustained the

brunt of the imperial onslaughts, and by the splendor of her martyrdom

surmounted the petty jealousies of her municipal rivals, were extended

to the cities of Tuscany. After the date of that compact signed by the

Emperor and his insurgent subjects, the burghs obtained an assured

position as a third power between the Empire and the Church. The most

remarkable point in the history of this contention is the unanimous

submission of the Communes to what they regarded as the just suzerainty

of Cæsar's representative. Though they were omnipotent in Lombardy, they

took no measures for closing the gates of the Alps against the Germans.

The Emperor was free to come and go as he listed; and when peace was

signed, he reckoned the burghers who had beaten him by arms and policy,

among his loyal vassals. Still the spirit of independence in Italy had

been amply asserted. This is notably displayed in the address presented

to Frederick, before his coronation, by the senate of Rome. Regenerated

by Arnold of Brescia's revolutionary mission, the Roman people assumed

its antique majesty in these remarkable words: 'Thou wast a stranger; I

have made thee citizen; thou camest from regions from beyond the Alps; I

have conferred on thee the principality.'[1] Presumptuous boast as this

sounded in the ears of Frederick, it proved that the Italic nation had

now sharply defined itself against the Church and the barbarians. It

still accepted the Empire because the Empire was the glory of Italy, the

crown that gave to her people the presidency of civilization. It still

recognized the authority of the Church because the Church was the eldest

daughter of Italy emergent from the wrecks of Roman society. But the

nation had become conscious of its right to stand apart from either.

[1]: 'Hospes eras, civem feci. Advena fuisti ex transalpinis

partibus, principem constitui. Quod meum jure fuit, tibi dedi.' See

_Ottonis Episcopi Frisingensis Chronicon_, De Rebus Gestis Frid. i.

Imp. Lib. ii. cap. 21. Basileæ, 1569. The Legates appointed by the

Senate met the Emperor at Sutri, and delivered the oration of which

the sentence just quoted was part. It began: 'Urbis legati nos, rex

optime, ad tuam a Senatu, populoque Romano destinati sumus

excellentiam,' and contained this remarkable passage: 'Orbis

imperium affectas, coronam præbitura gratanter assurgo, jocanter

occurro ... indebitum clericorum excussurus jugum.' If the words are

faithfully reported, the Republic separates itself abruptly from the

Papacy, and claims a kind of precedence in honor before the Empire.

Frederick is said to have interrupted the Legates in a rage before

they could finish their address, and to have replied with angry

contempt. The speech put into his mouth is probably a rhetorical

composition, but it may have expressed his sentiments. 'Multa de

Romanorum sapientia seu fortitudine hactenus audivimus, magis tamen

de sapientia. Quare satis mirari non possumus, quod verba vestra

plus arrogantiæ tumore insipida quam sale sapientiæ condita

sentimus.... Fuit, fuit quondam in hac Republica virtus. Quondam

dico, atque o utinam tam veracitur quam libenter nunc dicere

possemus,' etc.

Strengthened by their contest with Frederick Barbarossa, recognized in

their rights as belligerent powers, and left to their own guidance by

the Empire, the cities were now free to prosecute their wars upon the

remnants of feudalism. The town, as we have learned to know it, was

surrounded by a serried rank of castles, where the nobles held still

undisputed authority over serfs of the soil. Against this cordon of

fortresses every city with singular unanimity directed the forces it had

formed in the preceding conflicts. At the same time the municipal

struggles of Commune against Commune lost none of their virulence. The

Counts, pressed on all sides by the towns that had grown up around them,

adopted the policy of pitting one burgh against another. When a noble

was attacked by the township near his castle, he espoused the

animosities of a more distant city, compromised his independence by

accepting the captaincy or lieutenancy of communes hostile to his

natural enemies, and thus became the servant or ally of a Republic. In

his desperation he emancipated his serfs, and so the folk of the Contado

profited by the dissensions of the cities and their feudal masters. This

new phase of republican evolution lasted over a long and ill-defined

period, assuming different characters in different centers; but the end

of it was that the nobles were forced to submit to the cities. They were

admitted to the burghership, and agreed to spend a certain portion of

every year in the palaces they raised within the circuit of the walls.

Thus the Counts placed themselves beneath the jurisdiction of the

Consuls, and the Italic population absorbed into itself the relics of

Lombard, Frank, and German aristocracy. Still the gain upon the side of

the republics was not clear. Though the feudal lordship of the nobles

had been destroyed, their wealth, their lands, and their prestige

remained untouched. In the city they felt themselves but aliens. Their

real home was still the castle on the neighboring mountain. Nor, when

they stooped to become burghers, had they relinquished the use of arms.

Instead of building peaceable dwelling-houses in the city, they filled

its quarters with fortresses and towers, whence they carried on feuds

among themselves and imperiled the safety of the streets. It was

speedily discovered that the war against the Castles had become a war

against the Palaces, and that the arena had been transferred from the

open Contado to the Piazza and the barricade. The authority of the

consuls proved insufficient to maintain an equilibrium between the

people and the nobles. Accordingly a new magistrate started into being,

combining the offices of supreme justiciary and military dictator. When

Frederick Barbarossa attempted to govern the rebellious Lombard cities

in the common interest of the Empire, he established in their midst a

foreign judge, called Podestà _quasi habens potestatem Imperatoris in

hâc parte_. This institution only served at the moment to inflame and

imbitter the resistance of the Communes: but the title of Podestà was

subsequently conferred upon the official summoned to maintain an equal

balance between the burghers and the nobles. He was invariably a

foreigner, elected for one year, intrusted with summary jurisdiction in

all matters of dispute, exercising the power of life and death, and

disposing of the municipal militia. The old constitution of the Commune

remained to control this dictator and to guard the independence of the

city. All the Councils continued to act, and the Consuls were fortified

by the formation of a College of Ancients or Priors. The Podestà was

created with the express purpose of effecting a synthesis between two

rival sections of the burgh. He was never regarded as other than an

alien to the city, adopted as a temporary mediator and controller of

incompatible elements. The lordship of the burgh still resided with the

Consuls, who from this time forward began to lose their individuality in

the College of the _Signoria_--called _Priori_, _Anziani_, or _Rettori_,

as the case might be in various districts.

The Italian republics had reached this stage when Frederick II. united

the Empire and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It was a crisis of the

utmost moment for Italian independence. Master of the South, Frederick

sought to reconquer the lost prerogatives of the Empire in Lombardy and

Tuscany; nor is it improbable that he might have succeeded in uniting

Italy beneath his sway but for the violent animosity of the Church. The

warfare of extermination carried on by the Popes against the house of

Hohenstauffen was no proof of their partiality for the cause of freedom.

They dreaded the reality of a kingdom that should base itself on Italy

and be the rival of their own authority. Therefore they espoused the

cause of the free burghs against Frederick, and when the North was

devastated by his Vicars, they preached a crusade against Ezzelino da

Romano. In the convulsions that shook Italy from North to South the

parties of Guelf and Ghibelline took shape, and acquired an ineradicable

force. All the previous humors and discords of the nation were absorbed

by them. The Guelf party meant the burghers of the consular Communes,

the men of industry and commerce, the upholders of civil liberty, the

friends of democratic expansion. The Ghibelline party included the

naturalized nobles, the men of arms and idleness, the advocates of

feudalism, the politicians who regarded constitutional progress with

disfavor. That the banner of the Church floated over the one camp, while

the standard of the Empire rallied to itself the hostile party, was a

matter of comparatively superficial moment. The true strength of the war

lay in the population, divided by irreconcilable ideals, each eager to

possess the city for itself, each prepared to die for its adopted

principles. The struggle is a social struggle, played out within the

precincts of the Commune, for the supremacy of one or the other moiety

of the whole people. A city does not pronounce itself either Guelf or

Ghibelline till half the burghers have been exiled. The victorious

party organizes the government in its own interest, establishes itself

in a Palazzo apart from the Commune, where it develops its machinery at

home and abroad, and strengthens its finance by forced contributions and

confiscations.[1] The exiles make common cause with members of their own

faction in an adverse burgh; and thus, by the diplomacy of Guelfs and

Ghibellines, the most distant centers are drawn into the network of a

common dualism. In this way we are justified in saying that Italy

achieved her national consciousness through strife and conflict; for the

Communes ceased to be isolated, cemented by temporary leagues, or

engaged in merely local conflicts. They were brought together and

connected by the sympathies and antipathies of an antagonism which

embraced and dominated the municipalities, set Republics and Regno on

equal footing, and merged the titular leaders of the struggle, Pope and

Emperor, in the uncontrollable tumult. The issue was no vulgar one; no

merely egotistic interests were at stake. Guelfs and Ghibellines alike

interrogated the oracle, with perfect will to obey its inspiration for

the common good; but they read the utterances of the Pythia in adverse

senses. The Ghibelline heard Italy calling upon him to build a citadel

that should be guarded by the lance and shield of chivalry, where the

hierarchies of feudalism, ranged beneath the dais of the Empire, might

dispense culture and civil order in due measure to the people. The Guelf

believed that she was bidding him to multiply arts and guilds within the

burgh, beneath the mantle of the Pope, who stood for Christ, the

preacher of equality and peace for all mankind, in order that the

beehive of industry should in course of time evolve a civil order and a

culture representative of its own freely acting forces.

[1] It is enough to refer to the importance of the _Parte Guelfa_ in

the history of Florence.

During the stress and storm of the fierce warfare carried on by Guelfs

and Ghibellines, the Podestà fell into the second rank. He had been

created to meet an emergency; but now the discord was too vehement for

arbitration. A new functionary appears, with the title of _Captain of

the People_. Chosen when one or other of the factions gains supreme

power in the burgh, he represents the victorious party, takes the lead

in proscribing their opponents, and ratifies on his responsibility the

changes introduced into the constitution. The old magistracies and

councils, meanwhile, are not abrogated. The Consiglio del Popolo, with

the Capitano at its head, takes the lead; and a new member, called the

Consiglio della Parte, is found beside them, watchful to maintain the

policy of the victorious faction. But the Consiglio del Comune, with the

Podestà, who has not ceased to exercise judicial functions, still

subsists. The Priors form the signory as of old. The Credenza goes on

working, and the Gran Consiglio represents the body of privileged

burghers. The party does but tyrannize over the city it has conquered,

and manipulates the ancient constitution for its own advantage. In this

clash of Guelf with Ghibelline the beneficiaries were the lower classes

of the people. Excluded from the Popolo of episcopal and consular

revolutions, the trades and industries of the great cities now assert

their claims to be enfranchised. The advent of the _Arti_ is the chief

social phenomenon of the crisis.[1] Thus the final issue of the conflict

was a new Italy, deeply divided by factions that were little understood,

because they were so vital, because they represented two adverse

currents of national energy, incompatible, irreconcilable, eternal in

antagonism as the poles. But this discordant nation was more commercial

and more democratic. Families of merchants rose upon the ruins of the

old nobility. Roman cities of industry reduced their military rivals of

earlier or later origin to insignificance. The plain, the river, and the

port asserted themselves against the mountain fastness and the

barrackburgh. The several classes of society, triturated, shaken

together, leveled by warfare and equalized by industry, presented but

few obstacles to the emergence of commanding personalities, however

humble, from their ranks. Not only had the hierarchy of feudalism

disappeared; but the constitution of the city itself was confused, and

the Popolo, whether 'primo' or 'secondo or even 'terzo,' was diluted

with recently franchised Contadini and all kinds of 'novi homines.'[2]

The Divine Comedy, written after the culmination of the Guelf and

Ghibelline dissensions, yields the measure of their animosity. Dante

finds no place in Hell Heaven, or Purgatory for the souls who stood

aloof from strife, the angels who were neither Guelf nor Ghibelline in

Paradise. His Vigliacchi, 'wretches who never lived,' because they never

felt the pangs or ecstasies of partisanship, wander homeless on the

skirts of Limbo, among the abortions and offscourings of creation. Even

so there was no standing-ground in Italy outside one or the other

hostile camp. Society was riven down to its foundation. Rancors dating

from the thirteenth century endured long after the great parties ceased

to have a meaning. They were perpetuated in customs, and expressed

themselves in the most trivial details. Banners, ensigns, and heraldic

colors followed the divisions of the factions. Ghibellines wore the

feathers in their caps upon one side, Guelfs upon the other. Ghibellines

cut fruit at table crosswise, Guelfs straight down. In Bergamo some

Calabrians were murdered by their host, who discovered from their way of

slicing garlic that they sided with the hostile party. Ghibellines drank

out of smooth, and Guelfs out of chased, goblets. Ghibellines wore

white, and Guelfs red, roses. Yawning, passing in the street, throwing

dice, gestures in speaking or swearing, were used as pretexts for

distinguishing the one half of Italy from the other. So late as the

middle of the fifteenth century, the Ghibellines of Milan tore Christ

from the high-altar of the Cathedral at Crema and burned him because he

turned his face to the Guelf shoulder. Every great city has a tale of

love and death that carries the contention of its adverse families into

the region of romance and legend. Florence dated her calamities from the

insult offered by Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti to the Amidei in a

broken marriage. Bologna never forgot the pathos of Imelda Lambertazzi

stretched in death upon her lover Bonifazio Gieremei's corpse. The story

of Romeo and Juliet at Verona is a myth which brings both factions into

play, the well-meaning intervention of peace-making monks, and the

ineffectual efforts of the Podestà to curb the violence of party

warfare.

[1] The history of Florence illustrates more clearly than that of

any other town the vast importance acquired by trades and guilds in

politics at this epoch of the civil wars.

[2] This is the sting of Cacciaguida's scornful lamentation over

Florence Par. xvi.

Ma la cittadinanza, ch' è or mista

Di Campi e di Certaldo e di Figghine,

Pura vedeasi nell' ultimo artista.

Tal fatto è fiorentino, e cambia e merca,

Che si sarebbe volto a Semifonti,

Là dove andava l' avolo alia cerca.

Sempre la confusione delle persone

Principio fu del mal della cittade,

Come del corpo il cibo che s' appone.

So deep and dreadful was the discord, so utter the exhaustion, that the

distracted Communes were fain at last to find some peace in tyranny. At

the close of their long quarrel with the house of Hohenstauffen, the

Popes called Charles of Anjou into Italy. The final issue of that policy

for the nation at large will be discussed in another portion of this

work. It is enough to point out here that, as Ezzelino da Romano

introduced despotism in its worst form as a party leader of the

Ghibellines, so Charles of Anjou became a typical tyrant in the Guelf

interest. He was recognized as chief of the Guelf party by the

Florentines, and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was conferred upon him

as the price of his dictatorship. The republics almost simultaneously

entered upon a new phase. Democratized by the extension of the

franchise, corrupted, to use Machiavelli's phrase, in their old

organization of the Popolo and Commune, they fell into the hands of

tyrants, who employed the prestige of their party, the indifference of

the Vigliacchi, and the peace-loving instincts of the middle class for

the consolidation of their selfish autocracy.[1] Placing himself above

the law, manipulating the machinery of the State for his own ends,

substituting the will of a single ruler for the clash of hostile

passions in the factions, the tyrant imposed a forcible tranquillity

upon the city he had grasped. The Captaincy of the people was conferred

upon him.[2] The Councils were suffocated and reduced to silence. The

aristocracy was persecuted for the profit of the plebs. Under his rule

commerce flourished; the towns were adorned with splendid edifices;

foreign wars were carried on for the aggrandizement of the State without

regard to factious rancors. Thus the tyrant marked the first emergence

of personality supreme within the State, resuming its old forces in an

autocratic will, superseding and at the same time consciously

controlling the mute, collective, blindly working impulses of previous

revolutions. His advent was welcomed as a blessing by the recently

developed people of the cities he reduced to peace. But the great

families and leaders of the parties regarded him with loathing, as a

reptile spawned by the corruption and disease of the decaying body

politic. In their fury they addressed themselves to the two chiefs of

Christendom. Boniface VIII., answering to this appeal, called in a

second Frenchman, Charles of Valois, with the titles of Marquis of

Ancona, Count of Romagna, Captain of Tuscany, who was bidden to reduce

Italy to order on Guelf principles. Dante in his mountain solitudes

invoked the Emperor, and Italy beheld the powerless march of Henry VII.

Neither Pope nor Emperor was strong enough to control the currents of

the factions which were surely whirling Italy into the abyss of

despotism. Boniface died of grief after Sciarra Colonna, the terrible

Ghibelline's outrage at Anagni, and the Papal Court was transferred to

Avignon in 1316. Henry VII. expired, of poison probably, at

Buonconvento, in 1313. The parties tore each other to fragments. Tyrants

were murdered. Whole families were extirpated. Yet these convulsions

bore no fruit of liberty. The only exit from the situation was in

despotism--the despotism of a jealous oligarchy as at Florence, or the

despotism of new tyrants in Lombardy and the Romagna.[3]

[1] Not to mention the republics of Lombardy and Romagna, which took

the final stamp of despotism at the beginning of the fourteenth

century, it is noticeable that Pisa submitted to Uguccione da

Faggiuola, Lucca to Castruccio Castracane, and Florence to the Duke

of Athens. The revolution of Pisa in 1316 delivered it from

Uguccione; the premature death of Castruccio in 1328 destroyed the

Tuscan duchy he was building up upon the basement of Ghibellinism;

while the rebellion of 1343 averted tyranny from Florence for

another century.

[2] Machiavelli's _Vita di Castruccio Castracane_, though it is

rather a historical romance than a trustworthy biography,

illustrates the gradual advances made by a bold and ambitious leader

from the Captaincy of the people, conferred upon him for one year,

to the tyranny of his city.

[3] The Divine comedy is, under one of its aspects, the Epic of

Italian tyranny, so many of its episodes are chosen from the history

of the civil wars:

Chè le terre d' Italia tutte piene

Son di tiranni; ed un Marcel diventa

Ogni villan che parteggiando viene.

Those lines occur in the apostrophe to Italy (_Purg._ vi.) where

Dante refers to the Empire, idealized by him as the supreme

authority in Europe.

Meanwhile the perils to which the tyrants were exposed taught them to

employ cruelty and craft in combination. From the confused and spasmodic

efforts of the thirteenth century, when Captains of the people and

leaders of the party seized a momentary gust of power, there arose a

second sort of despotism, more cautious in its policy, more methodic in

its use of means to ends, which ended by metamorphosing the Italian

cities and preparing the great age of the Renaissance. It would be

sentimental to utter lamentations over this change, and unphilosophical

to deplore the diminution of republican liberty as an unmixed evil. The

divisions of Italy and the weakness of both Papacy and Empire left no

other solution of the political problem. All branches of the municipal

administration, strained to the cracking-point by the tension of party

conflict, were now isolated from the organism, abnormally developed,

requiring the combining effort of a single thinker to reunite their

scattered forces in one system or absorb them in himself. The indirect

restraints which a calmer period of municipal vitality had placed upon

tyrannic ambition, were removed by the leveling of classes and the

presentation of an equal surface to the builder of the palace-dome of

monarchy. Moreover, it must be remembered that what the Italians then

understood by freedom was municipal autonomy controlled by ruling houses

in the interest of the few. These considerations need not check our

sympathy with Florence in the warfare she carried on against the

Milanese tyrants. But they should lead us to be cautious in adopting the

conclusions of Sismondi, who saw Italian greatness only in her free

cities. The obliteration of the parties beneath despotism was needed,

under actual conditions, for that development of arts and industry which

raised Italy to a first place among civilized nations. Of the manners of

the Despots, and of the demoralization they encouraged in the cities of

their rule, enough will be said in the succeeding chapters, which set

forth the social conditions of the Renaissance in Italy. But attention

should here be called to the general character of despotic authority,

and to the influence the Despots exercised for the pacification of the

country. We are not justified by facts in assuming that had the free

burghs continued independent, arts and literature would have risen to a

greater height. Venice, in spite of an uninterrupted republican career,

produced no commanding men of letters, and owed much of her splendor in

the art of painting to aliens from Cadore, Castelfranco, and Verona.

Genoa remained silent and irresponsive to the artistic movement of Italy

until the last days of the republic, when her independence was but a

shadow. Pisa, though a burgh of Tuscany, displayed no literary talent,

while her architecture dates from the first period of the Commune.

Siena, whose republican existence lasted longer even than that of

Florence, contributed nothing of importance to Italian literature. The

art of Perugia was developed during the ascendency of despotic families.

The painting of the Milanese School owed its origin to Lodovico Sforza,

and survived the tragic catastrophes of his capital, which suffered more

than any other from the brutalities of Spaniards and Frenchmen. Next to

Florence, the most brilliant centers of literary activity during the

bright days of the Renaissance were princely Ferrara and royal Naples.

Lastly, we might insist upon the fact that the Italian language took its

first flight in the court of imperial Palermo, while republican Rome

remained dumb throughout the earlier stage of Italian literary

evolution. Thus the facts of the case seem to show that culture and

republican independence were not so closely united in Italy as some

historians would seek to make us believe. On the other hand it is

impossible to prove that the despotisms of the fifteenth century were

necessary to the perfecting of art and literature. All that can be

safely advanced upon this subject, is that the pacification of Italy was

demanded as a preliminary condition, and that this pacification came to

pass through the action of the princes, checked and equilibrated by the

oligarchies of Venice and Florence. It might further be urged that the

Despots were in close sympathy with the masses of the people, shared

their enthusiasms, and promoted their industry. When the classical

revival took place at the close of the fourteenth century, they divined

this movement of the Italic races to resume their past, and gave it all

encouragement. To be a prince, and not to be the patron of scholarship,

the pupil of humanists, and the founder of libraries, was an

impossibility. In like manner they employed their wealth upon the

development of arts and industries. The great age of Florentine painting

is indissolubly connected with the memories of Casa Medici. Rome owes

her magnificence to the despotic Popes. Even the pottery of Gubbio was a

creation of the ducal house of Urbino.

After the death of Henry VII. and the beginning of the Papal exile at

Avignon, the Guelf party became the rallying-point of municipal

independence, with its headquarters in Florence. Ghibellinism united

the princes in an opposite camp. 'The Guelf party,' writes Giovanni

Villani, 'forms the solid and unalterable basis of Italian liberty, and

is so antagonistic to all tyranny that, if a Guelf become a tyrant, he

must of necessity become at the same moment Ghibelline.' Milan, first to

assert the rights of the free burghs, was now the chief center of

despotism; and the events of the next century resume themselves in the

long struggle between Florence and the Visconti. The chronicle of the

Villani and the Florentine history of Poggio contain the record of this

strife, which seemed to them the all-important crisis of Italian

affairs. In the Milanese annals of Galvano Fiamma and Mussi, on the

other hand, the advantages of a despotic sovereignty in giving national

coherence, the crimes of the Papacy, which promoted anarchy in its

ill-governed States, and the prospect of a comprehensive Italian tyranny

under the great house of the Visconti, are eloquently pleaded. The terms

of the main issue being thus clearly defined, we may regard the warfare

carried on by Bertrand du Poiet and Louis of Bavaria in the interests of

Church and Empire, the splendid campaigns of Egidio d'Albornoz, and the

delirious cruelty of Robert of Geneva, no less than the predatory

excursions of Charles IV., as episodical. The main profits of those

convulsions, which drowned Italy in blood during nearly all the

fourteenth century, accrued to the Despots, who held their ground in

spite of all attempts to dispossess them. The greater houses, notably

the Visconti, acquired strength by revolutions in which the Church and

Empire neutralized each other's action. The lesser families struck firm

roots into cities, infuriated rather than intimidated by such acts of

violence as the massacres of Faenza and Cesena in 1377. The relations of

the imperial and pontifical parties were confused; while even in the

center of republican independence, at Florence, social changes,

determined in great measure by the exhaustion of the city in its

conflict, prepared the way for the Medicean tyranny. Neither the Church

nor the Empire gained steady footing in Italy, while the prestige of

both was ruined.[1] Municipal freedom, instead of being enlarged, was

extinguished by the ambition of the Florentine oligarchs, who, while

they spent the last florin of the Commune in opposing the Visconti,

never missed an opportunity of enslaving the sister burghs of Tuscany.

In a word, the destiny of the nation was irresistibly impelling it

toward despotism.

[1] Machiavelli, in his _Istorie Fiorentine_ (Firenze, 1818, vol. i.

pp. 47, 48), points out how the competition of the Church and

Empire, during the Papacies of Benedict XII. and Clement VI. and the

reign of Louis strengthened the tyrants of Lombardy, Romagna, and

the March. Each of the two contending powers gave away what did not

belong to them, bidding against each other for any support they

might obtain from the masters of the towns.

In order to explain the continual prosperity of the princes amid the

clash of forces brought to bear against them from so many sides, we must

remember that they were the partisans of social order in distracted

burghs, the heroes of the middle classes and the multitude, the quellers

of faction, the administrators of impartial laws, and the aggrandizers

of the city at the expense of its neighbors. Ser Gorello, singing the

praises of the Bishop Guido dei Tarlati di Pietra Mala, who ruled Arezzo

in the first half of the fourteenth century, makes the Commune say:[1]

'He was the lord so valiant and magnificent, so full of grace and

daring, so agreeable to both Guelfs and Ghibellines. He, for his virtue,

was chosen by common consent to be the master of my people. Peace and

justice were the beginning, middle, and end of his lordship, which

removed all discord from the State. By the greatness of his valor I grew

in territory round about. Every neighbor reverenced me, some through

love and some through dread; for it was dear to them to rest beneath his

mantle.' These verses set forth the qualities which united the mass of

the populations to their new lords. The Despot delivered the industrial

classes from the tyranny and anarchy of faction, substituting a reign of

personal terrorism that weighed more heavily upon the nobles than upon

the artisans or peasants. Ruling more by perfidy, corruption, and fraud

than by the sword, he turned the leaders of parties into courtiers,

brought proscribed exiles back into the city as officials, flattered

local vanity by continuing the municipal machinery in its functions of

parade, and stopped the mouths of unruly demagogues by making it their

pecuniary interest to preach his benefits abroad. So long as the

burghers remained peaceable beneath his sway and refrained from

attacking him in person, he was mild. But at the same moment the

gallows, the torture-chamber, the iron cage suspended from the giddy

height of palace-roof or church tower, and the dreadful dungeons, where

a prisoner could neither stand nor lie at ease, were ever ready for the

man who dared dispute his authority. That authority depended solely on

his personal qualities of will, courage, physical endurance. He held it

by intelligence, being as it were an artificial product of political

necessities, an equilibrium of forces, substituted without legal title

for the Church and Empire, and accumulating in his despotic

individuality the privileges previously acquired by centuries of

consuls, Podestàs, and Captains of the people. The chief danger he had

to fear was conspiracy; and in providing himself against this peril he

expended all the resources suggested by refined ingenuity and heightened

terror. Yet, when the Despot was attacked and murdered, it followed of

necessity that the successful conspirator became in turn a tyrant.

'Cities,' wrote Machiavelli,[2] 'that are once corrupt and accustomed to

the rule of princes, can never acquire freedom, even though the prince

with all his kin be extirpated. One prince is needed to extinguish

another; and the city has no rest except by the creation of a new lord,

unless it chance that one burgher by his goodness and great qualities

may during his lifetime preserve its temporary independence.' Palace

intrigues, therefore, took the place of Piazza revolutions, and

dynasties were swept away to make room for new tyrants without material

change in the condition of the populace.

[1] _Mur. Scr. R. It._ xv. 826. Compare what G. Merula wrote about

Azzo Visconti: 'He conciliated the people to him by equal justice

without distinction of Guelf or Ghibelline.'

[2] _Discorsi_. i. 17.

It was the universal policy of the Despots to disarm their subjects.

Prompted by considerations of personal safety, and demanded by the

necessity of extirpating the factions, this measure was highly popular.

It relieved the burghers of that most burdensome of all public duties,

military service. A tax on silver and salt was substituted in the

Milanese province for the conscription, while the Florentine oligarchs,

actuated probably by the same motives, laid a tax upon the country. The

effect of this change was to make financial and economical questions

all-important, and to introduce a new element into the balance of

Italian powers. The principalities were transformed into great banks,

where the lords of cities sat in their bureau, counted their money, and

calculated the cost of wars or the value of towns they sought to acquire

by bargain. At first they used their mercenary troops like pawns, buying

up a certain number for some special project, and dismissing them when

it had been accomplished. But in course of time the mercenaries awoke to

the sense of their own power, and placed themselves beneath captains who

secured them a certainty of pay with continuity of profitable service.

Thus the Condottieri came into existence, and Italy beheld the spectacle

of moving despotisms, armed and mounted, seeking to effect establishment

upon the weakest, worst-defended points of the peninsula. They proved a

grave cause of disquietude alike to the tyrants and the republics; and

until the settlement of Francesco Sforza in the Duchy of Milan, when the

employers of auxiliaries had come to understand the arts of dealing with

them by perfidy, secret assassination, and a system of elaborate

counter-checks, the equilibrium of power in Italy was seriously

threatened. The country suffered at first from marauding excursions

conducted by piratical leaders of adventurous troops, by Werner of

Urslingen, the Conte Lando, and Fra Moriale; afterwards from the

discords of Braccio da Montone and Sforza Attendolo, incessantly

plotting to carve duchies for themselves from provinces they had been

summoned by a master to subdue. At this period gold ruled the destinies

of Italy. The Despots, relying solely on their exchequer for their

power, were driven to extortion. Cities became bankrupt, pledged their

revenues, or sold themselves to the highest bidder.[1] Indescribable

misery oppressed the poorer classes and the peasants. A series of

obscure revolutions in the smaller despotic centers pointed to a

vehement plebeian reaction against a state of things that had become

unbearable. The lower classes of the burghers rose against the 'popolani

grassi,' and a new class of princes emerged at the close of the crisis.

Thus the plebs forced the Bentivogli on Bologna and the Medici on

Florence, and Baglioni on Perugia and the Petrucci on Siena.

[1] Perugia, for example, farmed out the tax upon her country

population for 12,000 florins, upon her baking-houses for 7,266,

upon her wine for 4,000, upon her lake for 5,200, upon contracts for

1,500. Two bankers accepted the Perugian loan at this price in 1388.

The emergence of the Condottieri at the beginning of the fourteenth

century, the anarchy they encouraged for their own aggrandizement, and

the financial distress which ensued upon the substitution of mercenary

for civic warfare, completed the democratization of the Italian cities,

and marked a new period in the history of despotism. From the date of

Francesco Sforza's entry into Milan as conqueror in 1450, the princes

became milder in their exercise of power and less ambitious. Having

begun by disarming their subjects, they now proceeded to lay down arms

themselves, employing small forces for the protection of their person

and the State, engaging more cautiously in foreign strife, and

substituting diplomacy, wherever it was possible, for warfare. Gold

still ruled in politics, but it was spent in bribery. To the ambitious

military schemes of Gian Galeazzo Visconti succeeded the commercial

cynicism of Cosimo de' Medici, who enslaved Florence by astute

demoralization.[1] The spirit of the age was materialistic and positive.

The Despots held their state by treachery, craft, and corruption. The

element of force being virtually eliminated, intelligence at last gained

undivided sway; and the ideal statecraft of Machiavelli was realized

with more or less completeness in all parts of the peninsula. At this

moment and by these means Italy obtained a brief but golden period of

peace beneath the confederation of her great powers. Nicholas V. had

restored the Papal court to Rome in 1447; where he assumed the manners

of despotism and counted as one among the Italian Signori. Lombardy

remained tranquil under the rule of Francesco Sforza, and Tuscany under

that of the Casa Medici. The kingdom of Naples, conquered by Alfonso of

Aragon in 1442, was equally ruled in the spirit of enlightened

despotism, while Venice, who had so long formed a state apart, by her

recent acquisition of a domain on terra firma, entered the community of

Italian politics. Thus the country had finally resolved itself into five

grand constituent elements--the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of S. Mark,

Florence, Rome, and the kingdom of Naples--all of them, though widely

differing in previous history and constitutional peculiarities, now

animated by a common spirit.[2] Politically they tended to despotism;

for though Venice continued to be a republic, the government of the

Venetian oligarchy was but despotism put into commission.

Intellectually, the same enthusiasm for classical studies, the same

artistic energy, and the same impulse to revive Italian literature

brought the several centers of the nation into keener sympathy than they

had felt before. A network of diplomacy embraced the cities; and round

the leaders of the confederation were grouped inferior burghs,

republican or tyrannical as the case might be, like satellites around

the luminaries of a solar system. When Constantinople was taken by the

Turks in 1453, Italy felt the need of suppressing her old jealousies,

and Nicholas V. induced the four great powers to sign with him a treaty

of peace and amity. The political tact and sagacity of Lorenzo de'

Medici enabled him to develop and substantiate the principle of balance

then introduced into Italian politics; nor was there any apparent reason

why the equilibrium so hardly won, so skillfully maintained, should not

have subsisted but for Lodovico Sforza's invitation to the French in

1494. Up to that date the more recent wars of Italy had been principally

caused by the encroachments of Venice and the nepotism of successive

Popes. They raised no new enthusiasm hostile to the interests of peace.

The Empire was eliminated and forgotten as an obsolete antiquity. Italy

seemed at last determined to manage her own affairs by mutual agreement

between the five great powers.

[1] I have attempted to analyze Cosimo's method in the article on

'Florence and the Medici,' _Studies and Sketches in Italy_.

[2] This centralization of Italy in five great powers was not

obtained without the depression or total extinction of smaller

cities. Ferrari counts seventeen towns, who died, to use his

forcible expression, at the close of the civil wars. _Storia delle

Rivoluzioni d' Italia_, iii. 239.

Still the ground beneath this specious fabric of diplomacy rung hollow.

The tyrannies represented a transient political necessity. They were not

the product of progressive social growth, satisfying and regulating

organic functions of the nation. Far from being the final outcome of a

slow, deliberate accretion in the states they had absorbed, we see in

them the climax of conflicting humors, the splendid cancers and

imposthumes of a desperate disease. That solid basis of national

morality which grounds the monarch firm upon the sympathies and

interests of the people whom he seems to lead, but whom he in reality

expresses, failed them. Therefore each individual despot trembled for

his throne, while Italy, as in the ominous picture drawn by her

historian, felt that all the elements were combining to devour her with

a coming storm. The land of earthquakes divined a cataclysm, to cope

with which she was unable. An apparently insignificant event determined

the catastrophe. The Sforza appealed to France, and after the disastrous

descent of Charles VIII. the whole tide of events turned. Instead of

internal self-government by any system of balance, Italy submitted to a

succession of invasions terminating in foreign tyranny.

The problem why the Italians failed to achieve the unity of a coherent

nation has been implicitly discussed in the foregoing pages upon the

history of the Communes and the development of despotism. We have

already seen that their conception of municipal independence made a

narrow oligarchy of enfranchised burghers lords of the city, which in

its turn oppressed the country and the subject burghs of its domain.

Every conquest by a republic reduced some village or center of civil

life to the condition of serfdom. The voices of the inhabitants were no

longer heard debating questions that affected their interests. They

submitted to dictation from their masters, the enfranchised few in the

ascendant commonwealth. Thus, as Guicciardini pointed out in his

'Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli,' the subjection of

Italy by a dominant republic would have meant the extinction of

numberless political communities and the sway of a close oligarchy from

the Alps to the Ionian Sea.[1] The 3,200 burghers who constituted

Florence in 1494, or the nobles of the Golden Book at Venice, would by

such unification of the country under a victorious republic have become

sovereigns, administering the resources of the nation for their profit.

The dread of this catastrophe rendered Venice odious to her sister

commonwealths at the close of the fifteenth century, and justified,

according to Guicciardini's views of history, the action taken by Cosimo

de' Medici in 1450, when he rendered Milan strong by supporting her

despot, Francesco Sforza.[2] In a word republican freedom, as the term

is now understood, was unknown in Italy. Municipal autonomy, implying

the right of the municipality to rule its conquests for its own

particular profit, was the dominant idea. To have advanced from this

stage of thought to the highly developed conception of a national

republic, centralizing the forces of Italy and at the same time giving

free play to its local energies, would have been impossible. This kind

of republican unity implies a previous unification of the people in some

other form of government. It furthermore demands a system of

representation extended to all sections of the nation. Their very

nature, therefore, prevented the republican institutions won by the

Italians in the early Middle Ages from sufficing for their independence

in a national republic.

[1] _Op. Ined._ vol. i. p. 28.

[2] _Ib._ vol. iii. p. 8.

It may with more reason be asked in the next place why Italy did not

become a monarchy, and again why she never produced a confederation,

uniting the Communes as the Swiss Cantons were combined for mutual

support and self-defense. When we attack the first of these two

questions, our immediate answer must be that the Italians had a rooted

disinclination for monarchical union.[1] Their most strenuous efforts

were directed against it when it seemed to threaten them. It may be

remembered that they were not a new people, needing concentration to

secure their bare existence. Even during the great days of ancient Rome

they had not been what we are wont to call a nation, but a confederacy

of municipalities governed and directed by the mistress of the globe.

When Rome passed away, the fragments of the body politic in Italy,

though rudely shaken, retained some portion of the old vitality that

joined them to the past. It was to the past rather than the future that

the new Italians looked; and even as they lacked initiative forces in

their literature, so in their political systems they ventured on no

fresh beginning. Though Rome herself was ruined, the shadow of the name

of Rome, the mighty memory of Roman greatness, still abode with them.

Instead of a modern capital and a modern king, they had an idea for

their rallying-point, a spiritual city for their metropolis. Nor was

there any immediate reason why they should have sacrificed their local

independence in order to obtain the security afforded by a sovereign. It

was not till a later epoch that Italy learned by bitter experience that

unity at any cost would be acceptable, face to face with the organized

armies of modern Europe. But when the chance of securing that safeguard

was offered in the Middle Ages, it must have been bought by subjection

to foreigners, by toleration of feudalism, by the extinction of Roman

culture in the laws and customs of barbarians. Thus it is not too much

to say that the Italians themselves rejected it. Moreover, the problem

of unifying Italy in a monarchy was never so practically simple as that

of forming nations out of the Teutonic tribes. Not only was the instinct

of clanship absent, but before the year 800 all attempts to establish a

monarchical state were thwarted by the still formidable proximity of

the Greek Empire and by the growing power of ecclesiastical Rome. We

have seen how the Goths erred by submitting-to the Empire and merging

their authority in a declining organization. We have seen again how the

Lombards erred by adopting Catholic Christianity and thus entangling

themselves in the policy of Papal Rome. Both Goths and Lombards

committed the mistake of sparing the Eternal City; or it may be more

accurate to say that neither of them were strong enough to lay hands of

violence upon the sacred and mysterious metropolis and hold it as their

seat of monarchy against the world. So long as Rome remained

independent, neither Ravenna nor Pavia could head a kingdom in the

peninsula. Meanwhile Rome lent her prestige to the advancement of a

spiritual power which, subject to no dynastic weakness, with the

persistent force of an idea that cannot die, was bent on subjugating

Europe. The Papacy needed Italy as the basis of its operations, and

could not brook a rival that might reduce the See of S. Peter to the

level of an ordinary bishopric. Rome therefore, generation after

generation, upheld the so-called liberties of Italy against all comers;

and when she summoned the Franks, it was to break the growing power of

the Lombard monarchs. The pact between the Popes and Charles the Great,

however we may interpret its meaning, still further removed the

possibility of a kingdom by dividing Italy into two sections with

separate allegiances; and since the sway of neither Pope nor Emperor,

the one unarmed, the other absent, was stringent enough to check the

growth of independent cities, a third and all-important factor was added

to the previous checks upon national unity.

[1] Guicciardini (_Op. Ined._ i. 29) remarks: 'O sia per qualche

fato d' Italia, o per la complessione degli uomini temperata in modo

che hanno ingegno e forze, non è mai questa provincia stata facile a

ridursi sotto uno imperio.' He speaks again of her disunion as

'quello modo di vivere che è più secondo la antiquissima

consuetudine e inclinazione sua.' But Guicciardini, with that defect

of vision which rendered him incapable of appreciating the whole

situation while he analyzed its details so profoundly, was reckoning

without the great nations of Europe. See above, pp. 40, 41.

After 1200 the problem changes its aspect. We have now to ask ourselves

why, when the struggle with the Empire was over, when Frederick

Barbarossa had been defeated at Legnano, when the Lombard and the Tuscan

Leagues were in full vigor before the Guelf and Ghibelline factions had

confused the mainsprings of political activity, and while the national

militia was still energetic, the Communes did not advance from the

conception of local and municipal independence to that of national

freedom in a confederacy similar to the Swiss Bund. The Italians, it may

be suggested, saw no immediate necessity for a confederation that would

have limited the absolute autonomy of their several parcels. Only the

light cast by subsequent events upon their early history makes us

perceive that they missed an unique opportunity at this moment. What

they then desired was freedom for expansion each after his own political

type, freedom for the development of industry and commerce, freedom for

the social organization of the city beloved by its burghers above the

nation as a whole. Special difficulties, moreover, lay in the way of

confederation. The Communes were not districts, like the Swiss Cantons,

but towns at war with the Contado round them and at war among

themselves. Mutually jealous and mistrustful, with a country population

that but partially obeyed their rule, these centers of Italian freedom

were in a very different position from the peasant communities of

Schwytz, Uri, Untenvalden. Italy, moreover, could not have been

federally united without the consent of Naples and the Church. The

kingdom of the Two Sicilies, rendered definitely monarchical by the

Norman Conquest, offered a serious obstacle; and though the Regno might

have been defied and absorbed by a vigorous concerted movement from the

North and center, there still remained the opposition of the Papacy. It

had been the recent policy of the Popes to support the free burghs in

their war with Frederick. But they did this only because they could not

tolerate a rival near their base of spiritual power; and the very

reasons which had made them side with the cities in the wars of

liberation would have roused their hostility against a federative union.

To have encouraged an Italian Bund, in the midst of which they would

have found the Church unarmed and on a level with the puissant towns of

Lombardy and Tuscany, must have seemed to them a suicidal error. Such a

coalition, if attempted, could not but have been opposed with all their

might; for the whole history of Italy proves that Machiavelli was right

when he asserted that the Church had persistently maintained the nation

in disunion for the furtherance of her own selfish ends. We have

furthermore to add the prestige which the Empire preserved for the

Italians, who failed to conceive of any civilized, human society whereof

the representative of Cæsar should not be the God-appointed head. Though

the material power of the Emperors was on the wane, it still existed as

a dominant idea. Italy was still the Garden of the Empire no less than

the Throne of Christ on earth. After the burghs had wrung what they

regarded as their reasonable rights and privileges from Frederick, they

laid down their arms, and were content to flourish beneath the imperial

shadow. To raise up a political association as a bulwark against the

Holy Roman Empire, and by the formation of this defense to become an

independent and united nation, instead of remaining an aggregate of

scattered townships, would have seemed to their minds little short of

sacrilege. Up to this point the Church and the Empire had been,

theoretically at least, concordant. They were the sun and moon of a

sacred social system which ruled Europe with light and might. But the

Wars of Investiture placed them in antagonism, and the result of that

quarrel was still further to divide the Italians, still further to

remove the hope of national unity into the region of things

unattainable. The great parties accentuated communal jealousies and gave

external form and substance to the struggles of town with town. So far

distant was the possibility of confederation on a grand scale that every

city strove within itself to establish one of two contradictory

principles, and the energies of the people were expended in a struggle

that set neighbor against neighbor on the field of war and in the

market-place. The confusion, exhaustion, and demoralization engendered

by these conflicts determined the advent of the Despots; and after 1400

Italy could only have been united under a tyrant's iron rule. At such an

universal despotism Gian Galeazzo Visconti was aiming when the plague

cut short his schemes. Cesare Borgia played his highest stakes for it.

Leo X. dreamed of it for his family. Machiavelli, at the end of the

_Principe_, when the tragedy of Italy was almost accomplished, invoked

it. But even for this last chance of unification it was now too late.

The great nations of Europe were in movement, and the destinies of Italy

depended upon France and Spain. When Charles V. remained victor in the

struggle of the sixteenth century, he stereotyped and petrified the

divisions of Italy in the interest of his own dynastic policy. The only

Italian power that remained unchangeable throughout all changes was the

Papacy--the first to emerge into prominence after the decay of the old

Western Empire, the last to suffer diminution in spite of vicissitudes,

humiliations, schisms, and internal transformation. As the Papacy had

created and maintained a divided Italy, as it had opposed itself to

every successive prospect of unification, so it survived the extinction

of Italian independence, and lent its aid to that imperial tyranny

whereby the disunion of the nation was confirmed and prolongated till

the present century.