Transcriber’s Note: As a result of editorial shortcomings in the original, some reference letters in the text don’t have matching entries in the reference-lists, and vice versa.

THE HISTORIANS’ HISTORY OF THE WORLD

MACCHIAVELLI

THE HISTORIANS’
HISTORY
OF THE WORLD

A comprehensive narrative of the rise and development of nations
as recorded by over two thousand of the great writers of
all ages: edited, with the assistance of a distinguished
board of advisers and contributors,
by
HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS, LL.D.

IN TWENTY-FIVE VOLUMES

VOLUME IX—ITALY

T^he Outlook Company
New York

T^he History Association
London

1905

Copyright, 1904,
By HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS.

All rights reserved.

Press of J. J. Little & Co.
New York, U. S. A.

Contributors, and Editorial Revisers.

• Prof. Adolf Erman, University of Berlin.
• Prof. Joseph Halévy, College of France.
• Prof. Thomas K. Cheyne, Oxford University.
• Prof. Andrew C. McLaughlin, University of Michigan.
• Prof. David H. Müller, University of Vienna.
• Prof. Alfred Rambaud, University of Paris.
• Capt. F. Brinkley, Tokio.
• Prof. Eduard Meyer, University of Berlin.
• Dr. James T. Shotwell, Columbia University.
• Prof. Theodor Nöldeke, University of Strasburg.
• Prof. Albert B. Hart, Harvard University.
• Dr. Paul Brönnle, Royal Asiatic Society.
• Dr. James Gairdner, C.B., London.
• Prof. Ulrich von Wilamowitz Möllendorff, University of Berlin.
• Prof. H. Marczali, University of Budapest.
• Dr. G. W. Botsford, Columbia University.
• Prof. Julius Wellhausen, University of Göttingen.
• Prof. Franz R. von Krones, University of Graz.
• Prof. Wilhelm Soltau, Zabern University.
• Prof. R. W. Rogers, Drew Theological Seminary.
• Prof. A. Vambéry, University of Budapest.
• Prof. Otto Hirschfeld, University of Berlin.
• Dr. Frederick Robertson Jones, Bryn Mawr College.
• Baron Bernardo di San Severino Quaranta, London.
• Dr. John P. Peters, New York.
• Prof. Adolph Harnack, University of Berlin.
• Dr. S. Rappoport, School of Oriental Languages, Paris.
• Prof. Hermann Diels, University of Berlin.
• Prof. C. W. C. Oman, Oxford University.
• Prof. I. Goldziher, University of Vienna.
• Prof. W. L. Fleming, University of West Virginia.
• Prof. R. Koser, University of Berlin.

PART XIV

THE HISTORY OF ITALY

BASED CHIEFLY UPON THE FOLLOWING AUTHORITIES

FRANCESCO BERTOLINI, J. BURCKHARDT, PIERRE ANTOINE DARU, S. ASTLEY
DUNHAM, F. GUICCIARDINI, W. C. HAZLITT, HEINRICH LEO, MACHIAVELLI,
F. A. MIGNET, H. E. NAPIER, LORENZO PIGNOTTI, A. VON REUMONT,
WILLIAM ROSCOE, J. C. L. S. DE SISMONDI, J. A. SYMONDS

WITH ADDITIONAL CITATIONS FROM

ADHÉMAR, AMMIRATO, ANAFESTO, GUGLIELMUS APULIENSIS, ANGELO MARIA
BANDINI, CARLO BOTTA, FLAVIUS BLONDUS, BOCCACCIO, POGGIO
BRACCIOLINI, H. B. BRIGGS, LYTTON E. G. BULWER, BURCHARD
(or BURCHARDUS), ISAAC BUTT, CAFFARO, CAPPONI, GIOVANNI
DE CASTRO, BENVENUTO CELLINI, CARLO CIPOLLA, ANNA
COMNENA, ROBERT COMYN, ANTONIO COSCI, ANDREA
DANDOLO, DANTE, CARLO DENINA, G. B. DEPPING,
DUFFY, HUGO FALCANDUS, FICINO, FLODOARDUS, UBERTUS FOLIETA, E. A.
FREEMAN, GALILEO, GEBHARDT, E. GIBBON, P. L. GINGUENÉ, GIOVANNI
DIACONO, HENRY HALLAM, W. HEYD, KARL HILLEBRAND, WILLIAM
HUNT, J. LABARTHE, M. LAFUENTE, RICORDANO MALASPINA,
GOFREDUS MALATERRA, MÉMOIRES DE BAYARD, GIUSEPPE
MONTANELLI, E. MÜNTZ, MURATORI, F. T. PERRENS,
PETRARCH, GIOVANNI PONTANO, W. H. PRESCOTT,
E. PROCTOR, E. QUINET, J. REINACH, W. ROBERTSON, T. DE ROSSI,
JOHN RUSKIN, WILLIAM SPALDING, OTTOBONUS SCRIBA, SCRIBÆ,
MARCHIRIUS ET BARTHOLOMÆUS, ST. MARC, G. STELLA,
TEGRINI, G. B. TESTA, TRAVERSARI, GIORGIO VASARI, G.
VILLANI, M. VILLANI, P. VILLARI, F. M. A. VOLTAIRE,
WILLIAM WHEWELL, JULES ZELLER

Copyright, 1904,
By HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS.

All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
THE SCOPE OF ITALIAN HISTORY: A PREFATORY CHARACTERISATION

THE DARK AGE

It has been observed again and again that the sweep of history is a continuous stream, and that all attempts to divide it into epochs are more or less arbitrary. Nevertheless, one cannot escape the tendency to classify, and memory is greatly aided by such arbitrary divisions. The largest and perhaps the most uniformly accepted of such arbitrary parcelling out of history is the classification into ancient, mediæval, and modern. Everyone is aware that the general historian usually regards ancient history as closing either with the later decades of the fourth century, when the northern barbarians began their invasions, or, perhaps more generally, with the precise date 476, when the last emperor of old Rome was dethroned. The ensuing epoch, comprising a period of about a thousand years, is known as the mediæval period; which epoch is usually considered as closing with the discovery of the New World in 1492. The earlier centuries of this epoch are usually spoken of as constituting the dark age.

Such a division is arbitrary, but not altogether illogical. It has been urged that Rome itself did not know it had fallen in the year 476; and that the Roman Empire—even the Roman Republic, in the phrasing of the time—went on, as the minds of contemporaries conceived it, uninterruptedly for many centuries after the date which we of later time fix for the quietus of Roman imperial life. But few things are better established than the fact that a clear conception of history demands a certain opportunity for the observation of events in perspective. In other words a contemporary judgment is rarely, if ever, the best judgment regarding any epoch. In the multiplicity of details that are thrust necessarily upon the attention of the contemporary observer, large proportions are lost, and a confused mass of little things makes the picture as unintelligible as is the large canvas of the painter when viewed at too short a focus. With the historical view, as with the painting, one must recede to a certain distance before gaining a measurably true conception. And so looking back through the vista of centuries one is able to observe very clearly that the time of the alleged fall of the Western Roman Empire was a time of real crisis in the sweep of historical events. The erection of the one focal date is, to be sure, a quite unjustifiable marking of boundary lines, unless it be regarded in the same way in which one thinks of the parallels of latitude and longitude on the globe. It is a convenient milestone, nothing more. But the epoch which it marks, if not to be limited to the confines of a single year, is none the less a true epoch; as no one can doubt who will consider the history of Rome in the aggregate during the first, second, and third centuries of the Christian era, and then will consider the history of the same city during the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. Obviously, a vast change has come over the spirit of civilisation in this time; the later centuries, contrasted with the earlier ones, may well be considered a dark age.

We have already shown that during its period the eastern division of the later Roman Empire was the seat of a culture which found expression in the production of an elaborate literature. But the West during this period was under quite different auspices. Rome had ceased to be important as a centre of civilisation; its chief citizens had removed to the city of Constantinople. Here in the West the half-civilised Herulians and Ostrogoths held almost undisputed sway from 476 till about the middle of the sixth century. Then for a century the Eastern Empire reasserted control over Rome and the legions of Narses and Longinus upheld the authority of the Byzantine emperors. But in 568 the Lombards under Alboin swept down into Italy and their supremacy was hardly disputed until the Carlovingians took a hand in Italian affairs, with the result that in 774 Charlemagne, capturing Desiderius in Pavia, assumed the title of king of the Lombards and virtually ended the Lombard kingdom.

In 781 Charlemagne crowned his son Pepin king of Italy, and in the memorable year 800 Charlemagne was himself crowned emperor of the West, reviving the title and a semblance of the glory of the old Imperium. Charlemagne’s successors retained nominal control over the empire, and disputed with the popes the real control of Italy. This warfare between the papal monarch and the emperors was a salient feature of the later centuries of the epoch. The power of the church had increased slowly and insidiously until in the ninth and tenth centuries the bishop of Rome aspired to real kingship over Italy,—even over the entire empire.

The five hundred years of Italian history outlined in this period contrast strangely (as has been said) in their world historical meaning with the half millennium of empire that preceded it, or with the other half millennium within which were comprised the events of the Roman commonwealth. Those earlier periods, as we glance back over them in perspective, bristle with great events; whereas this later epoch shows a bare plane of mediocrity, if not of decline. Yet we must not think of these later centuries as representing a time of relapse into actual barbarism. It was rather an epoch when the decadent civilisation was struggling against complete overthrow on the one hand, while the new civilisation was striving to make itself felt,—striving as yet ineffectually as regards the higher culture, yet none the less preparing the way for the future germination of a new life in the old empire.

There is no more fascinating effort open to the historian than to glance back through the mists of the centuries and attempt to penetrate the gloom of this dark age, and visualise its social conditions. At best such an attempt at reconstructing the distant past can be but partially successful. If it be true that “we view the world through our own eyes, each of us, and make from within us the things we see,” as Thackeray tells us regarding our contemporary environment, vastly more distorted must our image be of any past events. Where the monuments, art treasures, and the literature of a great civilisation have been preserved to us, as in the case of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and Greece, and Rome, we have aids and accessories for the reconstruction of the picture that enable us to view our rehabilitation with a certain confidence. But where these mementoes of the past are lost or altogether lacking, the picture must, indeed, be a vague and uncertain one,—the foggy tracery of the impressionist as contrasted with the firm outlines of a Michelangelo.

And such are the disadvantages that beset the task of reconstructing the image of Italy, or indeed of any other part of Europe, in the so-called dark age. It was a time when the wealth of the later empire had been transferred to the East. Western Europe was poverty-stricken; and this practical fact, perhaps more than any other one cause, operated to prevent the construction of such monuments of architecture and of art as the earlier centuries achieved. We have seen illustrated again and again that the seat of the greatest civilisation is almost sure to be the commercial and monetary centre of the world; and we shall see the same thing illustrated again with renewed force at a later day in Italy, when the gold of the Florentine tradesmen, the Medici, stimulates the art development of the later Renaissance. But in these post-imperial times Italy has no wealth in commerce, as compared with the new centre of the empire in Constantinople. Such Romans as remain in Italy are too poor to build palaces and amphitheatres comparable to those of their predecessors. They have enough to do to guard themselves against the invaders from the north. At best they can hardly repair the structures that the earlier civilisation has left them. We read that in Venice it was at one time made a legal offence, punishable with a fine of one thousand florins, to suggest any draft on the public treasury for repairing state buildings. According to the familiar tradition, the doge who finally had the temerity to violate the restriction, came before the council with the thousand florins in his hand when making the suggestion. This story illustrates the financial stress under which the Italian cities laboured even at a comparatively late period of the Middle Ages.

But it would be a very great mistake to suppose that the lapse in the material civilisation which undoubtedly took place in the later day of imperial Rome coincided with an entire change in the social conditions of the people. No trait in human nature is more fixed and more insistent than the tendency to cling to the ways of our forbears. Conservatism is the dominant motive of the mass of humanity. What our fathers thought and believed, we for the most part think and believe. The average man inherits his religion and his politics much as he inherits the colour of his eyes; and has scarcely more likelihood of changing one than the other. In the sweep of the centuries, ideas and customs do change, to be sure; but the changes, in so far as they pertain to long-standing principles or customs, are always slow and gradual.

Geologists of the nineteenth century demonstrated, after long study and much argument, that there are no cataclysmic vaults in the sweep of the geological and biological ages. The lesson thus taught regarding nature at large is one which the sociologist might apply to his own would-be science with advantage. In particular this lesson should be called to the attention of the student of history who would have us believe that there was a sudden and catastrophic change in the mentality of the people of Italy in the fifth century A.D. No one who appreciates the true character of human progress will be disposed to believe, in the absence of confirmatory evidence, that the Italian of the sixth century differed very greatly in his desires and aspirations from his grandparent who lived while Rome was yet nominally governed by an Italian emperor. The successive hordes of barbarians that swept down from the north took booty wherever they could find it, and impoverished the country, but for the most part they were not imbued with the spirit of wanton destruction. We may well believe that they looked rather with awestruck admiration akin to reverence upon the wonderful monuments of a civilisation so different from anything they had previously witnessed. We know that relatively civilised nations of the north sacked Rome in the sixteenth century more disastrously than it was sacked by their alleged barbaric precursors of the earlier millennium. Moreover, these invaders from the north were not omnipresent. They came and went at relatively long intervals, and there were some territories that they did not greatly molest. And the history of invasions everywhere goes to show that after the moment of initial conquest the barbaric vanquisher becomes, in matters of custom and thought, a follower rather than a leader of the vanquished.

In the present case there can be no doubt that this rule held true. The nations of the north were gifted with potentialities that were rapidly developed through imitation of the southern civilisation. Long before the so-called dark ages ended, there began to be centres of civilisation in the north, and here and there a man of real genius—a Roger Bacon or an Abelard—appeared to prove the rapid forward sweep of the culture movement, since the highest genius never towers far above the culture level of its time. But this could not have come to pass if the invader from the north had entered Italy as an all-devastating eliminator of previous civilisations. He came to conquer, but he remained to learn the arts of civilisation.

In a word, then, we shall gain a truer picture of the state of Italy in the so-called dark age if we think of it as differing not so greatly in the ideals of its material civilisation from the Italy of the Roman Empire. There is no great architecture, no great art, no great literature; but we cannot believe that there were absolutely no aspirations towards these antique ideals. When we recall how much that was known to be produced in the earlier day has been utterly lost, we need not doubt that there were some productions even in the field of literature, of which we now have no knowledge, that we would gladly reclaim from oblivion. The cacoethes scribendi is too dominant an impulse to be quite absent from any generation; surely, human nature did not change so utterly in the dark age as to rout this impulse from the human mind. What chiefly did occur, apparently, was the direction of the literary impulse into an unfortunate channel—the channel of ecclesiasticism. This carried it to a maelstrom from which the would-be producer of literature was not able to disengage himself for many generations. A startling evidence of this is found in the fact that as Robinson[1] points out, there was no literary layman of renown from Boetius (d. 524 or 525 A.D.) to Dante (1265-1321 A.D.).

Let us think, then, of the dark age as a time when Italy was impoverished; a time when its material civilisation retrogressed; a time when the stress of new conditions thrust some of the old ideals into the background; but also as a time when the mixture of races was taking place that was to give new strength and fibre to a senescent people; and to make possible the resuscitation of the old ideals, the rehabilitation of the old material civilisation, the regeneration of the race.

THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES

The regeneration is not to be effected, however, for some time to come. The 11th and the 12th centuries are at best to see only the dawning of the new day.

Culture of the creative kind is still in abeyance in Italy; there are still no writers of significance; there is little art except as practised in the illumination of manuscripts, and as foreshadowed in the beginnings of architecture. Nevertheless, there is a germative culture. Here and there a knight brings back a book from the East—for this is the age of the Crusades. Here and there a monk pores over a classic manuscript. Virgil was read and copied all through the dark age, as we know from the incontestable evidence of extant manuscripts. There is no manuscript of Horace in the uncial writing of the early centuries, yet he too must have been read in the West, along with all the other Latin classics that have come down to us, else these works would scarcely have been preserved; for the Greek authors alone found favour in the East. Still it is to be feared that the chief interest felt by many of the monks in the old-time manuscripts was directed towards the material on which they were written rather than towards the text itself. Hagiology often took the place of history and many an ancient manuscript has been partially preserved in palympsest, merely because a monk who wished to write the life of a saint was too careless to complete the erasure of the earlier writing.

Contemplating the monastic life, through which it is often asserted the germs of learning were preserved in the western world in this dark age, one receives an impression of racial stasis which does not really accord with the facts. If the monks were the preservers of the feeble torch of learning, it was the wandering and warring hosts of the outside world who were preparing their generation to receive the new light when it should again burst forth. The Scandinavian and German hosts from the north invaded Italy en masse, from time to time, as we have seen, and successive bands of crusaders made Italy their highway when journeying to and from the East. Many of these invaders found the southern clime congenial and took up their permanent abode there. Thus the Normans established a kingdom in Italy, and if the other hosts settled as individuals rather than as nations, their influence must have been none the less potent in bringing about that mixture of racial elements which makes for racial progress.

Equally important must have been the influence of the commercial spirit. The conquest of the Normans took from the Greek cities of southern Italy, Amalfi, Naples, and Gaeta, the commercial supremacy they had previously enjoyed. They were now superseded by Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. These cities kept fleets on the sea in constant contact with the East. As might have been expected, they led other Italian cities in power and influence, and were the first to show intimations of that quickening of life which presaged the new birth.

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

The first half of the thirteenth century furnishes additional chapters in the old story of the fight between emperor and pope. Frederick II, the present incumbent of the imperial throne, is one of the most picturesque characters of the Middle Ages. He is a man of extraordinary versatility; master of many languages, including Greek and Arabic, patron of the arts, himself a poet, and what perhaps is most remarkable of all, considering his scholarly proclivities, an advocate of the use of the vernacular out of which is developing a new Italian language. Frederick is far too broad and versatile a man to be confined within the narrow boundaries of the church; hence his life is made up of a series of wrangles with the popes. Yet he upholds the religious liberties of his subjects in Sicily; he prosecutes a successful crusade, and restores the influence of the western world in Jerusalem. He is under ban of excommunication when he undertakes this crusade, and now he is again denounced for having undertaken it. He rebels against the papal antagonism, and declares that he will wear his crown and uphold its authority despite ecclesiastical interference. We have seen like threats pronounced before, and have seen such an emperor as Henry IV fail to make good his menace. But Frederick adopts a novel plan which for a time proves expedient; he colonises Luceria with a population of Saracens, which can furnish him a band of thirty thousand infidel warriors to whom papal authority means nothing. Notwithstanding this aid, however, he is barely able to hold his own against the pope in the long run, and he dies just at the middle of the century, worn out in middle life by endless warrings.

During the ensuing half century Italy is little troubled by the emperors; papal authority is at its height, but a disunited Italy consumes its strength in internal dissensions. The developing civilisation has gradually focalised more and more towards the north and now its centre has come to be Tuscany,—the same geographical location which furnished the pre-Roman civilisation of the Etruscans. Florence is coming to be the chief city of Tuscany; it is the chief centre also of one of the most persistent and disastrous strifes that are convulsing Italy,—the warfare of the Guelf and Ghibellines. This dissension is in no sense confined to Florence, to be sure; it includes all Italy and even extends beyond the national bounds. The factions war with varying success. In 1260 the Guelfs at Florence meet with a signal reverse at the battle of Monteaperto. But eight years later at Theliacozza, the Ghibellines under Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufens, receive a most disastrous set-back.

An important feature of the epoch is the steady development of the half dozen cities; in particular the rivalry between the three chief maritime cities, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa. Pisa has more than held her own until now, but in 1284 she receives her quietus in the duel with Genoa off the isle of Meloria; henceforth, she must yield supremacy to her conqueror and to Venice.

But, as has been said, the maritime cities no longer hold uncontested supremacy. Florence, “The Flower of Tuscany,” though lacking the advantage of geographical position, is able, nevertheless, to take a place among the commercial centres; thanks to her location on the highway between Germany and southern Italy, she perhaps profits more by that all essential mingling of the races to which reference has been made, than any of her sister cities. Just at the close of the century the warfare of the Guelfs and Ghibellines receives a new development in Florence through the strife of the factions that come to be known as the Bianchi and Neri; the dispute which began as a mere personal strife spreads its baneful influence over the entire community.

Notwithstanding all these dissensions, however, there is marked progress in civilisation during this century. The Italian cities can boast that their streets are paved, while the streets of Paris, the foremost city of the north, are mere beds of mud. The growing desire for education is evidenced in the founding of schools and universities in Italy. Just at the close of the century the since famous Palazzo Vecchio and the even more famous Santa Croce were constructed. In the field of pictorial art there were also evidences of the new plane of culture to which Italy had attained, while scholarship found a worthy exponent in the celebrated Thomas Aquinas.

THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

For about a half century Italy has been free from the intrusions of the emperors, but now early in the fourteenth century Henry VII crosses the Alps. Unlike some of his predecessors, he meets a rather hearty welcome from several of the cities and from the pope. The Florentines, on the other hand, do not welcome him, and his coming leads to the usual turmoils. His sudden death—perhaps from poison—dissipates all the hopes based on the imperial presence. His successor, Louis of Bavaria, also comes to Italy and in association with the great general Castruccio makes war upon the Florentines, who have been forced much against their will to put themselves under the leadership of the duke of Naples. The Florentines hold their own fairly well against the outside invaders, but find themselves unable to tolerate the tyranny within their walls, and end by expelling the tyrant.

A striking feature of the century is the abandonment of Rome by the popes, who retire to Avignon for more than seventy years, from 1305 to 1377, an interval famous ever since as the Babylonish captivity. During the absence of the popes the Romans fared but ill. Lacking the papal power which made their city a centre of world influence, they are given over to minor dissensions. The famous Rienzi—“The last of the tribunes”—makes an heroic effort to restore order just at the middle of the century, and for a time dominates the situation; only to be overthrown ingloriously after a brief period of authority.

In the north the Visconti make themselves dominant in Milan and interfere perpetually in general politics, striving to subordinate all Italy to their influence. Florence was brought into repeated conflicts with the successive rulers of this family, and it was in these contests that the great English general, Sir John Hawkwood came to the fore. Leader of a band of mercenaries,—soldier of fortune in the most literal sense of the word,—this famous warrior fought first against the Florentines, and subsequently in their service. Despite some reverses he gained a reputation which led Hallam to consider him the first great commander since Roman times. This estimate perhaps does Hawkwood something more than justice; it overlooks the great Castruccio, to go no further. But undoubtedly Hawkwood was a redoubtable leader, and he was among the first of a series of condottioria who gave distinction to Italian armies during the ensuing century.

Genoa and Venice are drawn into a disastrous warfare; in fact the various dominant cities of Italy are almost perpetually quarrelling. Even the great plague which sweeps over Italy in 1348, despite its devastations—so graphically described by Boccaccio—serves to give scarcely more than a temporary lull to the dissensions. The insurrection of the Ciompi, the Great Schism, and the outbreak of the war of Chioggia are dissensions that mark the later decades of the century.

But all these political dissensions sink quite into insignificance in comparison with the tremendous intellectual development of the time. As we have seen, the western world has been preparing for centuries for the development of an indigenous culture. Now the promise meets fruition. It required but the waft of a breeze from the East to fan the smouldering embers into flame. This vivifying influence came about partly through the emigration of large numbers of scholars from Constantinople; a migration incited chiefly by fear of the Turks. These scholars brought with them their love of the Greek classics and stimulated the nascent scholarship of Italy into a like enthusiasm. Soon there began and developed a great fashion of searching for classical manuscripts, and many half-forgotten authors were brought to light. It became the fashion to copy these manuscripts, as every gentleman’s house must now have a library. The revival of interest came about in time to save more than one classical author from oblivion, whose works would probably have perished utterly had they been subjected to another century of neglect. Such an author as Velleius Paterculus, for example, is known exclusively through a single manuscript, which obviously must have escaped destruction through mere chance; and everyone is aware how large a proportion of classical writers were not accorded even this measure of fortune. No doubt many authors were inadvertently allowed to perish even after this revival of interest, but the number must have been very small in proportion to those that were already lost.

But the revival of interest in the works of antiquity was by no means the greatest literary feature of the time. There came with it a creative impulse which gave the world the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, not to mention the lesser chroniclers. Their work evidenced that spontaneous outbreak of the creative impulse for which the classicism of the East had been preparing. How spontaneous it was, how little understood, even by its originators, is illustrated in the fact that both Dante, the creator of Italian poetry, and Boccaccio, the creator of Italian prose, regarded their work in the vernacular as relatively unimportant; basing their hopes of immortality upon their archaic Latin treatises, which the world promptly forgot. No better illustration could be furnished anywhere of that spontaneity of truly creative art to which we have had occasion more than once to refer.

Nor was it in literature alone that the time was creative. Pictorial art had likewise its new beginning in this epoch. Cimabue, indeed, had made an effort to break with the crude traditions of the eastern school of art in the latter part of the thirteenth century; his greater pupil Giotto developed his idea in the early decades of the fourteenth century, and gathered by him, the school of painters in Florence attempted, following their master, to go to nature and to reproduce what they saw. Their effort was a crude and tentative one, judged according to the canons of the later development; but it was the beginning of great things. In architecture the effort of the time was not doomed to be content with mere beginnings: “Giotto’s tower,” the famous Campanile, still stands in evidence of the relative perfection to which this department of art had attained. All in all, then, the fourteenth century was a time of wonderful development in Italy; the clarion note of Dante has been called the voice of ten silent centuries; it told of a new phase of the Renaissance.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

During the fifteenth century Italy enjoyed a period of relative immunity from outside interference. An emperor was crowned at Rome in the early days of the century, to be sure, and there were various efforts at interference by other powers, including the coming of Charles VIII in 1494. But, as a general thing, it was the Italians themselves who competed with one another, rather than outside powers who quarrelled with Italy as a whole. The great forces were, as before, the few important cities. These were forever quarrelling one with another. Pisa became subordinate to Florence, and the latter city waxed steadily in greatness. In Milan the rule of the Visconti continued till towards the middle of the century, when, on the disappearance of the last member of that important family, the house of Sforza came to the fore and took to itself the task of dictatorship. In Naples King Ladislaus, and later Queen Joanna II, maintained regal influence and made their principality a world power. Thus in the middle of the century the four great powers were Naples, Milan, Venice, and Florence.

In these wars the mercenary leaders were much in evidence. These were men to whom fighting was simply a business,—a means to a livelihood. No question of patriotism was involved in their warfare; they gave their services to the state that offered the most liberal payment in gold or its equivalent. Half a dozen of these men gained particular distinction in the fifteenth century. These were Braccio, Fortebraccio, Sforza Attendola, and his son Francesco Sforza, Carmagnola, Niccolo Piccinino, and Colleno Coleoni. These men were variously matched against one another in the important wars.

Braccio and Sforza Attendola came into prominence in the papal wars, having to do with the Great Schism, and beginning about the close of the first decade of the fifteenth century. Braccio fought for Florence, and Sforza at first for Pope John XXIII, and subsequently for King Ladislaus of Naples, who at this time was the strongest ruler in Italy. This war concerned most of the powers of Italy, and involved Anjou and France as well. The death of Ladislaus helped to terminate the conflict, but at the same time precipitated a new war, by raising the question of succession to the throne of Naples.

In this war of the Neapolitan succession Fillipo Maria, duke of Milan, upheld the cause of the house of Anjou, while Florence sided with Alfonzo. The chief scene of the war was in the north where the forces of Milan and Naples competed with those of Florence and Venice. It was here that Carmagnola (born Francesco Dussone) was given the opportunity to show his genius as a leader. He served first under Fillipo, but subsequently entered the service of Venice and acquired new honours as the opponent of his old employer. In later campaigns his chief opponent was Francesco Sforza. The tragic end of Carmagnola will be recalled by every reader.

After the settlement of this war of the Neapolitan succession Fillipo Maria was soon embroiled again, this time with Pope Eugenius. The pope took refuge in Florence and the Tuscans, again supported by Venice, upheld him. Francesco Sforza now fought for the Florentines, his opponent, the leader of the Visconti’s army, being Niccolo Piccinino. But before the war was over the Visconti had gained Sforza back again. On the death of Fillipo the Milanese established a republic, avowing that they would never again submit to a tyrant. But necessity soon drove them to call on Francesco Sforza to aid them in a war against Venice, and their successful general presently usurped power, and established a new line of tyrants. In the later wars between Milan and Venice Colleno Coleoni appeared, and after bartering his services first to one party and then to the other, became permanently established as generalissimo of the land-forces of Venice in 1454.

One of the most striking features of this warfare was that it came to nothing. So many rival interests were involved, so kaleidoscopic were the shiftings of the various leaders, so utterly lacking is any great central cause of contention, that it is sometimes almost impossible to say where one war ends and another begins. Each petty state is thinking of its own interests. And the only thing approaching a general principle of action is the fear on the part of each state that any other single state might gain too much influence over Italy as a whole. In other words the thought of maintaining a balance of power is in the mind of all such leaders as have no hope of making themselves supreme. As Florence at no time has a hope of becoming politically dominant, her efforts are always directed towards maintaining a balance of power, and where personalities do not enter into the matter, she tends in the main to champion the cause of the weaker party.

But despite the interest which necessarily attaches to all these political jarrings, the really world-historical importance of Florentine history during this period has to do not with wars, but with the marvellous internal culture development. Already in the van of the Renaissance movement Florence holds her proud position securely throughout the fifteenth century, and is incontestably the culture centre of the world.

This was the age of the Medici. It was then that Cosmo the Great and Lorenzo the Magnificent made their influence felt, and enjoyed practical dictatorship, though the form of government continued a democracy. The real source of Florentine influence was founded on the old familiar basis of commercial prosperity. We have seen how Florence in the previous century produced such men as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Giotto. The intellectual supremacy thus evidenced was maintained in the ensuing century, but the early part of that century has no names to show that are comparable to these in artistic greatness. The stamp of the times, at least of the first half of the fifteenth century, is industrial rather than artistic. This is the time when the gradually increasing commercial and industrial importance of Italy has culminated in unequivocal world supremacy. Venice and Florence are now the commercial centres of the world. In Florence various forms of craftsmanship have attained a degree of importance which will make them famous for all time. The guilds of woollen weavers, of cloth merchants, of silk weavers, and of money-changers have become institutions of world-wide influence. The money lenders of Florence are found plying their trade in every capital of Europe. Despite their extortions they are regarded everywhere as a necessary evil; and Florentine gold in this century exercises an influence almost as wide as the quondam influence of Roman arms. The Florentine money-changer holds almost unchallenged the position that the Jew occupied at a later day. Oddly enough, it may be noted that the Jew himself is barred from plying the trade of money lender in Florence until about the end of the first third of the fifteenth century when, paradoxical as it may seem, he is legally granted the privilege, to protect the borrower from the extortions of the native usurers of the city.

The rapid development of commerce and industry brings with it, not unnaturally, a great change in the habits of the Florentine people. Early in the century the houses in Florence are still simple and relatively plain in their equipment. The windows are barred by shutters, glass not being yet in common use; the stairways are narrow; the entrances unostentatious. But before the close of the century all this is changed. The power of wealth makes itself felt in the houses, equipments, and costumes of the people; in their luxurious habits of living; their magnificent banquets and demonstrations; and all that goes to make up a life of sensuous pleasure.

Most significant of all, however, is the influence which wealth has enabled one family to attain; for the power of the Medici is, in its essentials, the power of gold. It is a power wielded deftly in the hands of prominent representatives of the family; a power that seems to make for the good of the city. Under Lorenzo the Magnificent every form of art is patronised and cultivated, and Florence easily maintains its supremacy as the culture centre of Italy. Such sculptors as Donatello, Berrochio, and their fellows; such painters as Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Ghirlandajo, not to mention a varied company of almost equal attainments; and a company of distinguished workmen in all departments of the lesser arts, lend their influence to beautify the city under the patronage of Lorenzo. The school of art thus founded is to give the world such names as Michelangelo and Raphael in the succeeding generations. Curiously enough, by some unexplained oversight, the greatest painter of the century, Leonardo da Vinci, was led to make his greatest efforts in Milan and not in Florence during the life of Lorenzo, though he returned to the latter city not long after the death of the great patron of art.

As a patron of literature Lorenzo was no less active. He founded and developed a wonderful library in which the treasures of antiquity were collected, in the original or in copies, without regard to expense, from all parts of Europe. The art of book-making was carried to its highest development in this period. The manuscripts of the time are marvels of beauty. The ornamentation is beautiful, and the letters themselves are printed with a degree of regularity closely rivalling the uniformity of a printed page. And then not long after the middle of the century, just when this art of the scribe was at its height, the printing-press was introduced from Germany, and an easy mechanical means was at hand by which the most perfect technique could be attained. True, the connoisseur did not at first recognise the printed book as a possible rival of the old hand-made work. For a long time the collector continued to employ the hand workman, and the dilettante looked upon the printed book with much the same scornful glance which the modern collector of paintings bestows upon a chromo or lithograph. The first printing-press was set up, according to Von Reumont, at Subiaco in a Benedictine monastery in 1465. Some fifteen years later Vespasiano da Bisticci, writing about the library of the duke of Urbino, could proudly state that “All the volumes are of the most faultless beauty, written by hand, with elegant miniatures, and all on parchment. There are no printed books among them; the duke would have been ashamed to have them.”[2]

Notwithstanding the scornful attitude of the connoisseur, however, the art of printing books made its way rapidly. Hitherto the cost of production had rendered even the most ordinary book a luxury not to be possessed by any but the relatively wealthy. Naturally enough, an eager band of book lovers hailed the advent of the new method, despite its supposed artistic shortcomings; and before the end of the century there were printing-presses in all the important centres of Italy, and numberless classics, beginning with Virgil, had been given a vastly wider currency than had ever previously been possible. It is needless here to dwell upon the remoter influences of this rapid diffusion of classical treasures; but nowhere was the influence more important than in Italy.

Summarising in a few words the influences of the fifteenth century in Italy, it may be repeated that, as a whole, it is an epoch of industrial and commercial progress rather than of the greatest art. The culminating achievements of the century, the invention of the printing-press and the discovery of America were not Italian triumphs; though as the birthplace of Columbus and the home of Amerigo Vespucci, Italy cannot well be denied a share in the finding of the New World. Indeed, the association of Italy with this great achievement is perhaps closer than might at first sight appear. For on the one hand, it is held that the geographical work of Toscanelli was directly instrumental in stimulating Columbus to the conception of a western passage to India; while, in another view, the influence of the spirit of exploration and discovery fostered by the commercial relations of Italy in making possible the feat of Columbus, must have been inestimable. Be all that as it may, the discovery of the New World—made in the last decade of the century, and, as it chanced in the same year in which Lorenzo de’ Medici died—may well be considered not merely as a culminating achievement of the century, but as symbolical of that commercial and industrial spirit for which the century is chiefly remarkable.

We have now advanced to the date which is usually named as closing the mediæval epoch, but what has been said about the arbitrary character of this classification should be borne in mind. The discovery of America in 1492 did indeed mark the beginning of a new era in one sense, since it opened up a new hemisphere to the observation and residence of civilised man. That discovery, too, prepared the way for the demonstration of the fact that the world is round; hence it became an important corner-stone in the building of that new structure of man’s conception of cosmology of which the master builders were Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. But the building of this new structure,—a revolutionising of man’s conception of the cosmos,—did not come about in a year or a century; the superstitions based on the old conception of cosmology have not lost their hold on mankind even in our own day. It has even been suggested that the year 1859, when the promulgation of thought occurred which gave the death-blow to the old ideas of cosmogony, and which may be said for the first time to have rendered the old superstitions truly obsolescent,—that this year rather than the year 1492 might well be named as limiting the mediæval epoch. So perhaps it may be with more remote generations of the future, but for the twentieth century observer the older date will doubtless seem the better one. But, after all, the question is one of no moment. Considering the recognised arbitrariness of all such divisions it does not in the least matter as to the exact bounds given to the mediæval epoch.

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

The sixteenth century is a time of peculiar contrasts in Italy. The invasions which began with the coming of Charles VIII in 1494 continue and become more and more harassing. Italy comes to be regarded as the proper prey of the French and Spanish rulers. The Italian principalities, warring as ever with one another, welcome or repel the invaders in accordance with their own selfish interests. All this time there has been no unified government of Italy as a whole. Nominally the empire included all, but this was a mere theory which, for the most part, would not bear examination. Venice all along has claimed allegiance to the Eastern Empire, which since the middle of the fifteenth century has ceased to exist. Florence owes no allegiance to any outside power; it is strictly autonomous. The democratic feeling is still strong there notwithstanding the usurpations of the Medici. Venice and Florence with Siena and Lucca are the only republics remaining at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Of the scores of cities which formerly were republics, all the rest have come under the influence of tyrants, or have been brought into unwilling subordination to neighbouring cities. And now an even greater humiliation is in store for many of them at the hands of the transalpine conquerors.

Venice, recovering from her duel to the death with Genoa—the war of Chioggia—continues to hold closely to her old traditions. Her commercial prosperity continues for a time, but is gradually lessened through the loss of eastern territories and through the rivalry brought about by the discovery of America and of a sea route to India. Florence, having thrown off in 1494 the thraldom imposed by the Medici, makes spasmodic efforts to return to the old purely democratic system; but fails in the end. In 1569 Cosmo de’ Medici is made Grand Duke of Tuscany, a position which his successors will continue to hold for seven generations (till 1737). In a word the spirit of democracy is virtually dead in Italy, and as yet no local tyrant arises who has the genius to unite the petty principalities into a unified kingdom.

But if political Italy is chaotic and unproductive in this century the case is quite different when we consider the civilisation of the time. The vivifying influences of the previous century produced a development particularly in the field of art, which now shows great results. The early decades of the sixteenth century constitute an epoch of the greatest art development in Italy. This is the age of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, of Raphael, and of Titian, and of the host of disciples of these masters. Under the patronage of successive popes, the master painters are stimulated to their best efforts, and those wonderful decorations of the Vatican are undertaken which have been the delight of all later times.

The literary development, if it does not quite keep pace with the pictorial, nevertheless attains heights which it has only once before reached since classical times. All this culture development in a time of turmoil and political disaster seems anomalous, and, as just intimated, can only be explained as the fruitage of a development which had its origin in an earlier epoch. The validity of this explanation is illustrated in the rapid decline that takes place in Italy after the middle of the sixteenth century—an intellectual decline which is scarcely to be interrupted until the nineteenth century.

THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

After the wonderful development of the sixteenth century it is amazing to consider this time of deterioration. The day of great men is not altogether past—witness Galileo—but there are no such great poets, historians, artists, as in past generations. Even the events of the political world have small world-historical importance. Italy is the battle-ground of nations; it is a geographical territory but it is scarcely a state. It has no unity, it has no individuality; it has no important autonomous states as a whole that command the attention of the historian. The intellectual sceptre which Italy so long swayed has been passed on to the nations of the north. The ecclesiastical spirit is everywhere dominant.

The burning of Giordano Bruno in the last year of the sixteenth century and the persecution of Galileo for daring to uphold the new Copernican conception of cosmogony are typical features of the epoch. Chronologically the mediæval era is past, but the spirit of mediævalism still pertains in Italy; rather let us say that this unfortunate country has lapsed back into an archaic cast of thought after having led the world for generations.

The historian must note the play and counterplay of outside nations who use the territory of Italy as their chess-board, but as regards the Italian himself the world historian might virtually disregard his existence during many generations. It is only towards the close of the eighteenth century when Italy came under the sway of Napoleon that there came about a reaction from the overbearing policy of this new tyrant; then a desire for liberty began to make itself felt in Italy, and to prepare the way for that struggle of a half century later which was to weld the disunited subject principalities into a unified and autonomous kingdom. But the intimations of this later development could hardly be appreciated by the contemporary observer who saw Italy ground beneath the heel of Napoleon, with no seeming chance of ever escaping from this humiliating position.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

With the overthrow of Napoleon there was but slight betterment in the immediate condition of Italy. An attempt was made by the powers that had overthrown the French usurper to restore the Italian principalities to something like their ante-revolutionary status. But, as has just been noted, the spirit of liberty was taking possession of the land and its long enslaved people began to dream of better things than they had known for centuries. But their efforts to secure the freedom so long renounced were at first only attempts; one petty rebellion after another seemed to come to nothing. But, at last, under the guidance of such leaders as Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emmanuel, the seemingly impossible was accomplished: outside influences were subordinated; the papal power over secular affairs was restricted and at last virtually overthrown; and for the first time in something like fourteen centuries the geographical territory of Italy came politically under the sway of a single ruler who owed no allegiance to alien lands: the dream of the visionaries was accomplished: an Italian kingdom ruled by an Italian king took the place of the enslaved, disunited principalities of the earlier centuries.

True, this achievement was not the culmination that some of the most ardent patriots, with Mazzini at their head, had dreamed of. The aim of that leader, as of many another, had been to achieve not a monarchical but a republican unity. In their enthusiastic estimate the monarchical form of government was obsolescent. Their enthusiasm harked back to the days when Venice and Florence had carried out with so much success the precepts of democracy. Their imagination was fired also by the example of that newer republic of the West, whose free institutions have inspired so much of emulation and so much of hatred in the minds of different classes of people among the older governments of Europe. But if the dreams of these enthusiasts were not to be realised, it sufficed for the more conservative reformers that the constitutional monarchy, embodying many of the precepts and principles of democracy, had at last brought Italy under the sway of a single sceptre.

FOOTNOTES

[1] [An Introduction to the History of Western Europe.]

[2] Quoted by Von Reumont, Lorenzo de’ Medici il magnifico.

CHAPTER I. ITALY IN THE DARK AGE

[476-ca. 1100 A.D.]

In taking up the history of Italy we shall, for convenience, go back to the year 476, when the last legitimate emperor of old Rome in the West was overthrown, and briefly recapitulate the story of events during the period of invasion that immediately followed. It will be recalled that we have already covered the period from 476 to 1024 in much detail in our study of the Western Empire, in Volume VII. It will be unnecessary, therefore, to treat this epoch here in anything but the barest outline; and even this will involve unavoidable repetitions. Since the later emperors of the Holy Roman Empire continued for some centuries to invade Italy periodically, and to claim control over its affairs, it will be almost impossible to avoid repetition here also; but inasmuch as such monarchs as Conrad II, Henry IV, and Frederick II are necessarily given full treatment in the volumes devoted to Germany, we shall deal somewhat briefly with their Italian incursions in the present connection. A similar duplication of matter will necessarily be involved in dealing with the mediæval popes, whose history has already been chronicled in the previous volume.

The story of temporal affairs in Italy lacks unity from the beginning of the period under consideration till well towards the close of the nineteenth century. For the most part, except during the relatively brief periods when a strong emperor claimed dominion over all Italy, the territory of the Italian peninsula was divided into numerous petty kingdoms, no one of which attained supremacy over the others. First one and then another became prominent, but often contemporaneous events of local importance, having but slight world-historical importance, confuse the picture, and make the presentation of the history of Italy extremely difficult. We must necessarily overlook a large number of such petty details, endeavouring to select such events as have real importance, and to weld them into a continuous narrative. But at best the story of Italian history lacks dramatic unity; the scene shifts from one principality to another too frequently to make possible a really harmonious presentation. We have really to do with a collection of cities rather than with a nation. It is the old story of Greece over again; only here there are more cities competing for supremacy, with no one at any time quite so near success as Athens and Sparta respectively were at successive periods. Yet Milan, Venice, and Florence at times approached the goal if they did not quite attain it.[a]

Most of these cities were very old; the greater number flourished in at least equal splendour in the time of the Roman Empire; some, such as Milan, Verona, Bologna, Capua, were so considerable as to present an image of Rome, with their circus, their amphitheatre, their tumultuous and idle population, their riches and their poverty. Their administration was nearly republican, most commonly composed, after the example of Rome, of a curia, or municipal senate elected by the people, and of duumvirs, or annual consuls. In all these towns, among the first class of inhabitants were to be found the proprietors of the neighbouring land, lodged in palaces with their slaves and freedmen; secondly, the artisans and shopkeepers whom their necessities established around them; lastly, a crowd of idle people, who had preserved just enough of land to supply, with the strictest economy, the means of existence. It does not appear that there was any prosperous manufactory in Italy. All manual labour, as well in towns as in the country, was executed by slaves. Objects of luxury, for the most part, came from Asia. War had for a long time been the only occupation of the Italians; for a long period, too, the legions had been levied partly among the Romans, and partly among their allies in Italy: but, under the emperors, the distrust of the master seconded the luxurious effeminacy of the subject, the Italians finally renounced even war, and the legions were recruited only in Pannonia, Gaul, and the other provinces bordering on the Rhine and the Danube.

At a later period, the barbarians who menaced Rome were seduced by liberal pay to engage in its defence; and in the Roman armies the enemies of Rome almost entirely replaced the Romans. The country could not, as in modern states, supply the place of cities in recruiting the armies with a class of men accustomed to the inclemencies of the weather and inured to toil. The only labourers to be found were an oppressed foreign race, who took no interest in public affairs. The Romans cultivated their land either by slaves purchased from the barbarians and forced by corporal punishment to labour, or by coloni partiarii, to whom was given a small share in the harvest as wages; but, in order to oblige these last to content themselves with the least possible share, they were attached to the land, and nearly as much oppressed as slaves themselves. The proprietors of land varied as between these two systems, according as the price of slaves varied, or the colons (peasants, labourers) were more or less numerous; no cultivator of the land had any property in it.

The greater part was united in immense domains, sometimes embracing whole provinces, the administration of which was intrusted to freedmen, whose only consideration was, how to cultivate the land with the least possible expense, and how to extract from their labourers the greatest degree of work with the smallest quantity of food. The agriculturists, as well what were called freedmen as slaves, were almost all barbarians by birth, without any interest in a social order which only oppressed them, without courage for its defence, and without any pecuniary resources for themselves; their numbers also diminished with an alarming rapidity, partly from desertion, partly from new invasions of barbarians, who carried them off to sell as slaves in other Roman provinces, and finally from a mortality, the necessary consequence of poverty and starvation.

Italy, nevertheless, was supposed to enjoy a constant prosperity. During the entire ages of Trajan and the Antonines, a succession of virtuous and philosophic emperors followed each other; the world was in peace; the laws were wise and well administered; riches seemed to increase; each succeeding generation raised palaces more splendid, monuments and public edifices more sumptuous, than the preceding; the senatorial families found their revenues increase; the treasury levied greater imposts. But it is not on the mass of wealth, it is on its distribution, that the prosperity of states depends; increasing opulence continued to meet the eye, but men became more miserable; the rural population, formerly active, robust, and energetic, were succeeded by a foreign race, while the inhabitants of towns sank in vice and idleness, or perished in want, amidst the riches they had themselves created.

THE BARBARIAN INVADERS

[476-814 A.D.]

It was into this Italy, such as despotism had made it, that the barbarians penetrated. Eager for the booty which it contained and could not defend, they repeatedly ravaged it during the last two centuries of the Western Empire. The mercenary troops that Rome had levied amongst them for its defence, preferring pillage to pay, frequently turned their arms against those they were engaged to defend. They vied with the Romans in making and unmaking emperors; and generally chose them from their own ranks, in order to secure to the soldier a greater share of the property of the citizen. The booty diminished as the avidity of these foreigners increased. The pomp of the Western Empire soon appeared, to an army thus formed, a useless expense. Odoacer, of the nation of the Heruli, chief of the mercenaries who then served in Italy, suppressed it by deposing, in 476, the last emperor. He took upon himself the title of king, and distributed among his soldiers one-third of the land in the most fertile provinces; he governed during seventeen years this still glorious country, as a rich farm which the barbarians had a right to cultivate for their sole use.

The mercenaries united under the sceptre of Odoacer were not sufficiently strong to defend Italy against a new invasion of barbarians. The Ostrogoths, encouraged by the Grecian sovereign of new Rome, the emperor of the East, arrived in 489, under the command of Theodoric, from the countries north of the Euxine to the borders of Italy; they completed the conquest of it in four, and retained possession of the peninsula sixty-four years, under eight successive kings. These new barbarians, in their turn, demanded and obtained a portion of land and slaves; they multiplied, it is true, but became rapidly enervated in a delicious climate where they had suddenly passed from the severest privations to the enjoyment of every luxury. They were at last conquered and subdued in the year 553 by the Romans of Constantinople, whom they despised as the degenerate successors of the same nation which their ancestors had vanquished.

The invasion of the Lombards in 568 soon followed the destruction of the monarchy of the Ostrogoths. Amongst the various hordes which issued from the north of Germany upon the southern regions, the Lombards were reputed the most courageous, the most cruel, and the proudest of their independence; but their number was inconsiderable, and they scarcely acknowledged any social tie sufficient to keep them united: accordingly, they never completed the conquest of Italy. From 568 to 774, twenty-one Lombard kings during 206 years succeeded each other without establishing their dominion either on the lagunes, at the extremity of the Adriatic Gulf, where such of the inhabitants of upper Italy as were personally the most exposed had taken refuge and founded the Venetian Republic; or on the shores of the Adriatic, now called Romagna, governed by a lieutenant of the emperor of Constantinople, under the title of exarch of the five cities of Pentapolis; or on Rome, defended only by the spiritual arms of the patriarch of the Western church; or on the southern coast, where the Greek municipalities of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi governed themselves almost as independent republics. The Lombards, nevertheless, founded a kingdom in northern Italy, of which Pavia was the capital; and in southern Italy the duchy of Benevento, which still maintained its independence two centuries after the kingdom was subjugated.

From the middle of the eighth century the Lombards, masters of a country where the great towns still contained much wealth, where the land had lost nothing of its fertility, where the example of the vanquished had taught the vanquishers the advantage of reviving some agricultural industry, excited the envy of their neighbours the Franks, who had conquered and oppressed the Gauls, who despised all occupation but war, and desired no wealth but what the sword could give. They by repeated invasions devastated Italy; and at length, in 774, completed the destruction of the Lombard monarchy.

For more than twenty years the popes or bishops of Rome had been in the habit of opposing the kings of France to the monarchs of Lombardy, who were odious to them, at first as pagans, and afterwards as heretics. Chief of the clergy of the ancient capital, where the power of the emperors of Constantinople had been nominally established but never felt, they confounded their pretensions with those of the empire; and the Lombards having recently conquered the exarchate of Ravenna, and the Pentapolis, they demanded that these provinces should be restored to Rome. The Frankish kings made themselves the champions of this quarrel, which gave them an opportunity of conquering the Lombard monarchy; but Charles, the king who accomplished this conquest, and who was the greatest man that barbarism ever produced, in treating with Rome, in subjugating Italy, comprehended all the beauty of a civilisation which his predecessors had seen only to destroy; he conceived the lofty idea of profiting by the barbarian force at his disposal to put himself at the head of the civilisation which he laboured to restore. Instead of considering himself as the king of the conquerors, occupied only in enriching a barbarous army with the spoils of the vanquished, he made it his duty and his glory to govern the country for its best interests, and for the common good. He did more: in concert with Pope Leo III, he re-established the monarchy of the conquered as a western Roman empire, which he considered the representative of right, in opposition to barbaric force; he received from the same pope, and from the Roman people, on Christmas Day in the year 800, the title of Roman emperor, and the name of Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, which no one before had ever so well deserved.

CHARLEMAGNE AND HIS SUCCESSORS

[814-1039 A.D.]

As king, and afterwards as emperor, he governed Italy, together with his other vast states, forty years; he pursued with constancy, and with increasing ability, the end he proposed to himself, viz., establishing the reign of the laws, and a flourishing civilisation: but barbarism was too strong for him; and when he died in 814 it was re-established throughout the empire.

Italy had eight kings of the family of Charlemagne, reckoning his son and grandson, who reigned under him, and were, properly speaking, his lieutenants. Charles the Fat, great-grandson of Charlemagne, was deposed in 888; after which ten sovereigns, either Italian or Burgundian, but allied to the race of the Franks, disputed for seventy years more the crown of Italy and the empire. In 951 Otto I of Saxony, king of Germany, forced Berenger II, who then reigned, to acknowledge himself his vassal; in 961 Otto entered Italy a second time with his Germans, was crowned at Rome with the title of emperor, and sent Berenger II to end his days in a fortress in Germany.

Nearly five centuries elapsed from the fall of the ancient Roman Empire to the passing over of the renewed empire to the Germans. For a long space of time Italy had been pillaged and oppressed in turn by barbarians of every denomination, who wantonly overran the country only to plunder, and believed themselves valiant because, though in small numbers, they spread terror over a vast extent, and imagined by bloodshed to give a dignity to their depredations. The country, thus exposed to so many outrages, did not remain such as the Romans had left it. The Goth, Lombard, Frank, and German warriors, who had successively invaded Italy, introduced several of the opinions and sentiments of the barbarian race, particularly the habit of independence and resistance to authority. They divided with their kings the country conquered by their valour. They caused to be ceded to them vast districts, the inhabitants of which they considered their property equally with the land. The Lombard monarchy comprehended thirty dukedoms, or marquisates; their number diminished under Charlemagne and his successors; but at the same time there rose under them a numerous class of counts and vavaseurs, amongst whom every duke divided the province that had been ceded to him, under condition that they should swear fealty and homage, and follow him to the wars. The counts, in their turn, divided among the warriors attached to their colours the land apportioned to them. Thus was the feudal system, which made the possession of land the warrior’s pay, and constituted an hereditary subordination founded on interest and confirmed by oath from the king down to the lowest soldier, established at the same time throughout Europe. The Lombards had carried into Italy the first germs of this system which had been developed by the Franks and invigorated by the civil wars of Charlemagne and his successors; these wars rendered it necessary that every feudatory should fortify his dwelling to preserve his allegiance to his lord; and the country, which till then had been open and without defence, became covered with castles, in which these feudal lords established their residence.

About the same time—that is to say, in the ninth century—cities began to rebuild their ancient walls; for the barbarian kings who had everywhere levelled these walls to the ground no longer opposed their reconstruction, and the danger of being invaded by the rival princes who disputed the throne made them necessary; besides, at this epoch new swarms of barbarians from all parts infested Europe; the inhabitants of Scandinavia, under the name of Danes and Normans, ravaged England and France; the Hungarians devasted Germany and upper Italy; the Saracens, masters of Africa, infested the southern coasts of Italy and the isles: conquest was not the purpose of any of these invaders; plunder and massacre were their only objects. Permission to guard themselves against continual outrages could not be withheld from the inhabitants of towns. Several thousand citizens had often been obliged to pay ransom to little more than a hundred robbers; but, from the time they were permitted by their emperors to rebuild their walls, to purchase or manufacture arms, they felt themselves in a state to make themselves respected. Their long suffering had hardened them, had accustomed them to privations and danger, and had taught them it was better to defend their lives than yield them up to every contemptible aggressor; at the same time, the population of cities, no longer living in idleness at the expense of the provinces of the empire, addicted themselves to industry for their own profit: they had, accordingly, some wealth to defend. The ancient curiæ and municipalities had been retained in all the towns of Italy by their barbarian masters, in order to distribute more equally the burdens imposed by the conquerors, and reach individuals more surely. The magistrates were the chiefs of a people who demanded only bread, arms, and walls.

In the meantime the dukes, marquises, counts, and prelates, who looked on these cities as their property, on the inhabitants as men who belonged to them, and laboured only for their use, soon perceived that these citizens were ill disposed to obey, and would not suffer themselves to be despoiled, since they had arms, and could defend themselves under the protection of their walls: residence in towns thus became disagreeable to the nobles, and they left them to establish themselves in their castles. They became sensible that to defend these castles they had need of men devoted to them; that, notwithstanding the advantage which their heavy armour gave them when fighting on horseback, they were the minority; and they hastened to enfranchise the rural population, to encourage their growth, to give them arms, and to endeavour to gain their affections. The effect of this change of rule was rapid: the rural population in the tenth and eleventh centuries increased, doubled, quadrupled in exact proportion to the land which they had to cultivate.

Otto I, his son Otto II, and his grandson Otto III were successively acknowledged emperors and kings of Italy, from 961 to 1002. When this branch of the house of Saxony became extinct, Henry II of Bavaria and Conrad the Salian of Franconia filled the throne from 1004 to 1039. During this period of nearly eighty years, the German emperors twelve times entered Italy at the head of their armies, which they always drew up in the plains of Roncaglia near Piacenza: there they held the states of Lombardy, received homage from their Italian feudatories, caused the rents due to be paid, and promulgated laws for the government of Italy. A foreign sovereign, however, almost always absent, known only by his incursions at the head of a barbarous army, could not efficaciously govern a country which he hardly knew, and where his yoke was detested. During these five reigns, the social power became more and more weak in Italy. The emperors were too happy to acknowledge the local authorities, whatever they were, whenever they could obtain from them their pecuniary dues: sometimes they were dukes or marquises, whose dignities had survived the disasters of various invasions and of civil wars; sometimes the archbishops and bishops of great cities, whom Charlemagne and his successors had frequently invested with duchies and counties escheated to the crown, reckoning that lords elected for life would remain more dependent than hereditary lords; sometimes, finally, they were the magistrates themselves, who, although elected by the people, received from the monarch the title of imperial vicars, and took part with the nobles and prelates in the plaids (placita), or diets of Roncaglia.

In the time of Conrad the Salian, the prelates almost throughout Lombardy joined the cities against the nobles; and from 1035 to 1039 there was a general war between these two orders of society. Conrad put an end to it, by a constitution which is considered to be the basis of feudal law. By this the inheritance of fiefs was protected from the caprices of the lords and of the crown,—the most oppressive conditions of feudal dependence were suppressed or softened,—and the few remaining slaves of the land were set free.

THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY

The crown of Conrad the Salian passed in a direct line to his son, grandson, and great-grandson. The first, Henry III, reigned from 1039 to 1056; the second, Henry IV, from 1056 to 1106; the third, Henry V, from 1106 to 1125. The last two reigns were troubled by the bloody quarrel between the empire and the court of Rome, called the war of investitures. Rome had never made part of the monarchy of the Lombards. This ancient capital of the world, with the territory appertaining to it, had, since the conquest of Alboin, formed a dukedom, governed by a patrician or Greek duke, sent from Constantinople. The bishop of Rome, however, who, according to the ancient canonical forms, was elected by the clergy, the senate, and the people of his diocese, had much more authority over his flock than this foreign magistrate.

[717-1125 A.D.]

The pontiff, however, who now began to take exclusively the name of pope, had more than once successfully defended Rome with his spiritual arms when temporal ones had failed. When, in the year 717, an iconoclast, or enemy of images, filled the throne of Constantinople, the popes under the pretence of heresy rejected his authority altogether; a municipality, at the head of which were a senate and consuls, then governed Rome nearly as an independent state; the Greeks, occupied with their own dissensions, seemed to forget it; and Rome owed to this forgetfulness fifty years of a sort of liberty. The Romans found once more a faint image of their past glory; sometimes even the title of Roman Republic was revived. They approved, notwithstanding, of Pope Stephen II conferring on the princes of the Franks the dignity of patricians, in order to transfer to them the authority which the Greek magistrate exercised in their city in the name of the emperor of Constantinople; and the people gladly acquiesced when, in the year 800, Leo III crowned Charlemagne as augustus, and restorer of the Western Empire. From that period Rome became once more the capital of the empire. At Rome the chiefs of the empire were henceforth to receive the golden crown from the hands of the pope, after having received the silver one of the kingdom of Germany at Aachen, and the iron crown of Lombardy at Milan.

Great wealth and much feudal power were, by the gratitude of the emperors, attached to the see of Rome. The papacy became the highest object of ambition to the whole sacerdotal order; and, in an age of violence and anarchy, barons notorious for their robberies, and young libertines recommended only by the favour of some Roman ladies, not unfrequently filled the pontifical chair. The other bishops selected were often no better. The German emperors, on arriving at Rome, were sometimes obliged to put an end to such a scandal, and choose among the competitors, or depose a pope who put all Christendom to the blush. Henry III obliged the people to renounce the right which they had hitherto exercised, and so greatly abused, to take part in the election of popes. He, himself, named four successively, whom he chose from among the most learned and the most pious of the clergy of Italy and Germany; and thus powerfully seconded the spirit of reform which began to animate the church from the eleventh century.

THE DISUNITED MUNICIPALITIES

[1046-1122 A.D.]

The war of investitures, which lasted more than sixty years, accomplished the dissolution of every tie between the different members of the kingdom of Italy. Civil wars have at least this advantage—that they force the rulers of the people to consult the wishes of their subjects, oblige them to gain affections which constitute their strength, and to compensate, by the granting of new privileges, the services which they require. The prelates, nobles, and cities of Italy obeyed, some the emperor, others the pope; not from a blind fear, but from choice, from affection, from conscience, according as the political or religious sentiment was predominant in each. The war was general, but everywhere waged with the national forces. Every city armed its militia, which, headed by the magistrates, attacked the neighbouring nobles or towns of a contrary party. While each city imagined it was fighting either for the pope or the emperor, it was habitually impelled exclusively by its own sentiments: every town considered itself as a whole, as an independent state, which had its own allies and enemies; each citizen felt an ardent patriotism, not for the kingdom of Italy, or for the empire, but for his own city.

At the period when either kings or emperors had granted to towns the right of raising fortifications, that of assembling the citizens at the sound of a great bell, to concert together the means of their common defence, had been also conceded. This meeting of all the men of the state capable of bearing arms was called a parliament. It assembled in the great square, and elected annually two consuls, charged with the administration of justice at home, and the command of the army abroad. The militia of every city was divided into separate bodies, according to local partitions, each led by a gonfalonière, or standard-bearer. They fought on foot, and assembled round the carroccio, a heavy car drawn by oxen, and covered with the flags and armorial bearings of the city. A high pole rose in the middle of this car, bearing the colours and a Christ, which seemed to bless the army, with both arms extended. A priest said daily mass at an altar placed in the front of the car. The trumpeters of the community, seated on the back part, sounded the charge and the retreat. It was Heribert, archbishop of Milan,[3] contemporary of Conrad the Salian, who invented this car in imitation of the ark of alliance, and caused it to be adopted at Milan. All the free cities of Italy followed the example: this sacred car, entrusted to the guardianship of the militia, gave them weight and confidence. The nobles who committed themselves in the civil wars, and were obliged to have recourse to the protection of towns, where they had been admitted into the first order of citizens, formed the only cavalry.

The parliament, which named the consuls, appointed also a secret council, called a consilio di credenza, to assist the government, composed of a few members taken from each division; besides a grand council of the people, who prepared the decisions to be submitted to the parliament. The consilio di credenza was, at the same time, charged with the administration of the finances, consisting chiefly of entrance duties collected at the gates of the city, and voluntary contributions asked of the citizens in moments of danger. As industry had rapidly increased, and had preceded luxury, as domestic life was sober, and the produce of labour considerable, wealth had greatly augmented. The citizens allowed themselves no other use of their riches than that of defending or embellishing their country. It was from the year 900 to the year 1200 that the most prodigious works were undertaken and accomplished by the towns of Italy. They began by surrounding themselves with thick walls, ditches, towers, and counter guards at the gates; immense works, which a patriotism ready for every sacrifice could alone accomplish. The maritime towns at the same time constructed their ports, quays, canals, and custom-houses, which served also as vast magazines for commerce. Every city built public palaces for the signoria, or municipal magistrates, and prisons; and constructed also temples, which to this day fill us with admiration by their grandeur and magnificence. These three regenerating centuries gave an impulse to architecture, which soon awakened the other fine arts.

[568-1200 A.D.]

The republican spirit which now fermented in every city, and gave to each of them constitutions so wise, magistrates so zealous, and citizens so patriotic and so capable of great achievements, had found in Italy itself the models which had contributed to its formation. The war of investitures gave wing to this universal spirit of liberty and patriotism in all the municipalities of Lombardy, in Piedmont, Venetia, Romagna, and Tuscany. But there existed already in Italy other free cities, of which the experience had been sufficiently long to prove that a petty people finds, in its complete union and devotion to the common cause, a strength often wanting in great states. The free cities which flourished in the eleventh century rose from the ruins of the Western Empire; as those in Italy which preceded them in the career of liberty rose from the ruins of the empire of the East.

When the Greeks resigned to the Lombards Italy, which a few years before they had conquered from the Ostrogoths, they still preserved several isolated ports and fortified places along the coast. Venice, at the extremity of the Adriatic; Ravenna, at the south of the mouth of the Po; Genoa, at the foot of the Ligurian Mountains; Pisa, towards the mouths of the Arno; Rome, Gaeta, Naples, Amalfi, Bari, were either never conquered by the Lombards, or were in subjection too short a time to have lost their ancient walls and the habit of guarding them. These cities served as the refuge of Roman civilisation. All those who had preserved any fortune, independence of mind, or hatred of oppression, assembled in them to concert the means of resisting the insolence of their barbarian masters. The Grecian Empire maintained itself at Constantinople in all its ancient pride; but, with oriental apathy, it regarded these remains as still representing its province of Italy, while it did nothing for their defence. From time to time, a duke, an exarch, a patrician, a catapan, or other magistrate, was sent, with a title announcing the highest pretensions, but unaccompanied by any real force. The citizens of these towns demanded money and soldiers to repair and defend their fortifications; whilst the emperors, on the contrary, demanded that the money and soldiers of Italy should be sent to Constantinople. After some disputes, the Greek government found it prudent to abandon the question, and shut its eyes to the establishment of a liberty it despised, but which perhaps might be useful in the defence of these distant possessions; finally, the magistrates, whom these towns themselves nominated, became the acknowledged depositories of the imperial authority. The disposal of their own money and soldiers was allowed them, on condition that nothing should be demanded of the emperors, who were satisfied to see their names at the head of every act, and their image on the coin, without exacting other acts of submission. This policy was not, however, exactly followed with respect to Ravenna, or afterwards to Bari. In these cities the representative of the emperor had fixed his residence with a Greek garrison. Ravenna, as well as the cities appertaining to it, denominated the Pentapolis, was conquered by the Lombards between 720 and 730. Bari became then the capital of the thema of Lombardy, which extended over a great part of Apulia. We have already shown how Rome passed from the Greek to the Western Empire: we suspect, rather than know, that Genoa and Pisa, after having been occupied by the Lombards, preserved their relations with Constantinople. The pallium, or silk flag, presented for some time to the emperors, was considered by them as a sort of tribute; but Venice on the upper sea, Gaeta, Naples, and Amalfi, on the lower, advanced more openly to independence.

Venice

THE ORIGIN OF VENICE

[452-730 A.D.]

From the invasion by Attila in 452, the marshes called Lagune, formed at the extremity of the Adriatic by the slime deposited by seven or eight great rivers, amidst which arose innumerable islands, had been the refuge of all the rich inhabitants of Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Treviso, and other great cities of Venetia, who fled from the sabres of the Huns. The Roman Empire of the West survived this great calamity twenty-four years; but it was only a period of expiring agony, during which fresh disasters continually forced new refugees to establish themselves in the Lagune. A numerous population was at length formed there, supported by fishing, the making of salt, some other manufactories, and the commerce carried on by means of these many rivers. Beyond the reach of the barbarians, who had no vessels, forgotten by the Romans, and their successors the Ostrogoths, they maintained their independence under the administration of tribunes, named by an assembly of the people in each of the separate isles.[b]

The authentic record of maritime Venice commences with the arrival of the Lombards in Italy. Of the time previous to this period, the records are the work of posterior chroniclers written in an adulatory spirit towards the republican powers.

As Babbo rightly said with regard to the vaunted very ancient origin and liberty of Venice, it was flattering to the republics to be credited with such old and sovereign power, “but the truth is that liberty and power do not rise to full force at once, but they gradually gain ground in obscurity and difficulty.” But criticism has for some time directed its attention to these inventions, and has finally silenced the Venetian traditions with their pretended foundations.

However, it is not to be inferred that the Venetian islands were uninhabited before the invasion of the Lombards, for there are documents which prove the contrary. But, as anyone can see, there is a great difference between the islands having inhabitants and being seats of an organised and free state as we are asked to believe.

It is now generally granted that, during the Roman sway and at the time of the temporary invasions, the stable populations of the islands remained subject to continental Venetia, and more particularly to the mother-city from which it received its magistrates. But when the foreign invasions became more lasting, the bonds of independence were necessarily loosened towards the mother-country, when they were not utterly broken.

[538-600 A.D.]

The first document showing the emancipation of the islands from continental Venetia is the letter written by Cassiodorus to the tribune of the maritime places, in the year 538, in which he asks him to provide a transport to Ravenna for the wines and oils belonging to the Istrians. But if this letter shows that the inhabitants of the islands at the time of the Gothic rule had begun to elect their own magistrates instead of receiving them from the mother-country, it does not prove that the islands thenceforward had full political power, as Graswinkel of antiquity and Crivello of modern times would have us to believe. Because in this case the letter would not have been written in the name of the prefect of the place as well as in the name of the king, as it was customary with foreigners; neither would Cassiodorus have dared to use to the Venetian tribune the same language as he used in his letters to the provinciali of Istria, to the consulare of Liguria, and to the possessori of Syracuse, who were never thought to be independent magistrates. Moreover, Balbo notes that the vicinity of the lagunes to Ravenna, the capital and seat of the Gothic kings of Italy, renders every other supposition absurd.

Hence Romanin shows that this dependence of the islands on the Gothic dominion was more nominal than real. It is indisputable that it was changed into a sort of protectorate before it became a real republic, the rule of the east Goths being of too short duration to permit the confirmation of their own power, and moreover the nominal amnesty of the islands to the kingdom sufficiently satisfied the ambition of the Gothic kings and relieved them of undertaking their conquest. When Italy passed into the hands of the Greeks through the victories of Belisarius, the Venetian islands followed the fate of the mother-country; and it relapsed subsequently into the power of the Greeks after the short restoration of the Gothic rule. Moreover, the Greek sovereignty of the islands seemed to have become a mere military occupation; at least it appears so in the second half of the sixth century, when the migrations were made definitive to confirm the Lombard power in Italy.

To show how far removed from dependence on Constantinople the islands were at that time, we quote the authority of the chronicler Giovanni Diacono,[h] who dates the origin of the tribunal government and the conformation of the rank to the metropolises of the islands from the arrival of the Lombards. This fact, whilst showing on one side the autonomous position assumed by the islands towards the Byzantine Empire, proves on the other that the dependence of the islands on the mother-country had now virtually ceased. Hence the tribunes after the second half of the sixth century assume the solemn title of tribunes of the islands of the maritime lagunes proposed by the corporations of the same, to show that their election had been made with the full authority of the islands without regard to the mother-cities. The form of the political relations of the islands with Constantinople can be gathered from the account given by the chronicler Altinate of Longinus’ visit to the islands in the year (584) before returning to his country.

Altinate relates that when Longinus asked the islanders to receive him into the lagunes, and thence to transport him to Constantinople in their ships, he tried to persuade them by saying that he required no oath of fidelity, but, if they wished to show themselves good servants of the empire and ready to fight their enemies, he would make known or send for what they wanted at Constantinople; he would ask the emperor for whatever they wanted by means of a writing which he himself would place in the hands of the emperor, which would increase the concessions to the islands to have open and free entry to all the ports of the empire in the ways of commerce. The Venetians, satisfied with such promises, after having announced to the exarch how they were situated, how they had made this sanctuary in the lagunes so as not to fear being subjugated by any emperor, or king, or any prince whatsoever in the world, they received him with great honour, and sent with him to Constantinople a deputation to ask the emperor for the things promised by the exarch. And the emperor gave to the Venetians a diploma by which they were to be held in honour by all the authorities of the capital and the state, and to receive the protection of the imperial forces for all the maritime district and complete security for their commerce in the kingdom; and thus the Venetians became subject to his dominion and became proud of the honour. We see from this account of the chronicler Altinate, which was confirmed by subsequent chroniclers, that the primary political relation of the Venetians with the empire was, like that with the Gothic kings of Italy, a relation of protection more than servitude.

“They recognised,” says Romanin, “the emperor as their lord, they bowed to servile formulas, ordained by the proud vanity of the Eastern court, they accepted the general custom of heading their acts with the name and the year of the reigning cæsar; but they continued to rule themselves with their own laws and with their own magistrates. They made wars and concluded treaties, which they could not have done in a state of subjection.”

And, supported by the authority of the Byzantine records, by the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus at Calcondila, this condition of political autonomy, enjoyed by the Venetians in the second half of the sixth century (according to the author of the Storia documentata di Venezia), reassumed the diverse conditions of life by which maritime Venice passed from her first appearance upon the theatre of history until the conquest of Italy by the Lombards. From the facts appearing among this accumulated matter he had to conclude that the islands were at first dependent on the Venetian territory to which they were annexed, that in the confusion arising from the barbaric invasions in which they found themselves cut off from the mother-country they had to provide for themselves and nominate their own magistrates, that they recognised the Gothic dominion which caused them no inconvenience, and they were left in possession of their own municipal government; and that finally, at the time of the Lombards, their constitution assumed a stable form, and their first relations with the kings of Italy and with the emperors corresponded rather to those of a protectorate than to a real dependency. Impartial examination of subsequent events proves this fact, for full liberty in the reforms of their own government and laws without the intervention of any foreign power is evident; the wars were spontaneously undertaken and the treaties independently concluded. By such means everything went on naturally and progressively, as is seen by the records before us, and as we learn from the national history and story of events.

THE ORIGIN OF THE DOGESHIP

[600-713 A.D.]

There are but few records of the period between the stipulation of the compromise with the emperor Maurice to the foundation of the Venetian dukedom, but they suffice to confirm the autonomous policy enjoyed by the Venetian islands at that time. The majority of these records refer to the wars engaged in by the Venetians with the Lombards. By these they became masters of Padua. At the time of King Agilulf they turned their arms against the islands to get them under their own sway. The increasing prosperity of the islands, and the idea that the wealth accumulated there had been mostly imported from the continent to protect it from the usurpation of conquerors, kindled a strong desire to complete its conquest. The external dangers of the islands were attended by the internal disputes from the ambitions and jealousies of the tribunes.

An imminent invasion of the Lombards was feared when the greater part of the country, recognising the gravity of the danger menacing them, summoned a general council to Heraclea under the presidency of the chief patriarch Aristoforo. And here it was unanimously agreed to introduce a stricter form of government by preventing the rivalries of the magistrates who were the chief fomenters of the internal dissensions. And following the example of great cities like Rome, Genoa, and Naples, which were saved by dukes, they agreed to appoint a chief magistrate with jurisdiction over all the islands with the title of “duke” (doge). Then, proceeding to the election of the person on whom this dignity was to be conferred, their choice fell upon Paolu Lucio, or Paoluccio Anafesto. Such was the origin of the Venetian dukedom as it is recorded by chroniclers. But if there is unity among them as to the causes which gave rise to the ducal power in maritime Venetia, there is none with regard to the time in which it was instituted. Some put it in the year 697, others relegate it to the first years of the next century. Among them there is Giovanni Diacono,[h] who puts the election of Paoluccio at the time of Anastasius II, emperor, and of Liutprand king of the Lombards. And as, according to the most ancient Venetian chronicler, Liutprand succeeded to the throne in 712 and Anastasius in 713, the election of Paoluccio could not have been before the latter year.

[713-900 A.D.]

Therefore between the two extreme dates quoted by the chroniclers there is a difference of sixteen years, sufficient time to afford material for criticism. But the different points were defended and contested without result. Muratiri Leo defended the date of 697, which is the date given by Dandolo and his followers; Romanin oscillated between the two dates; Filiasi and Balbo were inclined to the medium course and put the election of Paoluccio in the year 706 or 707. But as neither the one nor the other adduces more authentic proofs in support of the closer date, we will remain firm in preferring that of 713, which is according to the most eminent author on Venetian matters. We are the more led to this preference by the cause to which the chroniclers generally attribute the foundation of Venetian dukedom. For if it is true that the imminence of the Lombards led the inhabitants of the islands to institute a supreme magistrate, it could not have referred to the time preceding Liutprand in which the Lombards, either through flaccidness of purpose or through internal disputes, were incapable of thinking of new conquests or exercising fears or apprehensions among their neighbours. The chronicler Giovanni says nothing of the attributes of the new magistrate, and his silence on such an important subject is the more deplorable, as in the computations made by posterior chroniclers on the ducal authority we find names used of matters more contemporaneous to them than to the time of which they speak.

Andrea Dandolo,[g] the most authentic among them, describes in the following words the attributes of the first Venetian dukes: “They had,” says the doge chronicler, “the power and right to convoke the general meeting for public affairs, to appoint tribunes and judges to administer all matters private, lay, and ecclesiastical, save the mere spiritual; they had power in everything befitting the title of duke; and by their orders there the councils of the clergy took place and the election to the prelature was made by the clergy and the people, the election and the investiture being from their hands, as they had the power of appointment.” It is very doubtful whether the ducal attributes were originally so defined in detail. Anyhow, from the appearance of a military magistrate with the title of master of the militia alongside of the first duke, it can be inferred that the jurisdiction of the duke was limited to civil affairs. For the chronicler Giovanni,[h] in speaking of Paoluccio Anafesto, says that he judged his own with temperate justice. And here the verb to judge is used in a more definite and proper sense than in that used by the Lombard histories and documents respecting their dukes. It expresses that which is solely civil jurisdiction, whilst the jurisdiction of the Lombard dukes included the military jurisdiction as well as the civil.

We have an important document of the dogedom of Anafesto,[i] which shows how beneficial the institution of the ducal power was to the Venetians. This document is a convention of the doge with Liutprand, by which the Lombard king conceded to the Venetians the trade of the territories of the kingdom proper, and, defining the limits between the two states, it declared to be Venetian the territories between the Piave Major and the Piavicelli on the side of Heraclea. Such, according to the chronicler Giovanni, was the tenor of the treaty of peace concluded between Liutprand and the first doge of Venice. And we have authentic confirmation of its truth in its verification, made by Barbarossa in the year 1177, of that which pertained to the designation of the Venetian confines on the part of Italy.[c]

It was in 809 [or 810], in a war against Pepin, son of Charlemagne, that the Venetians made choice of the Island of the Rialto, near which they assembled their fleet bearing their wealth, and built the city of Venice, the capital of their republic. Twenty years afterward they transported thither from Alexandria the body of St. Mark, the evangelist, their chosen patron. His lion figured in their arms, and his name in their language whenever they would designate with peculiar affection their country or government.

VENICE IN THE TENTH CENTURY

[900-996 A.D.]

While the Venetians disputed with the Lombards, the Frank and the German emperors, the little land on which stood their houses, they had also to dispute the sea that bathed them, with the Slavonians, who had established themselves for the purpose of piracy on the eastern side of the Adriatic.[b] It was hardly five hundred years since the fugitives from Padua and Aquileia had sought refuge in the lagunes. Content with having found safety there and freedom to enlarge their town and extend their commerce, they had hitherto only made just wars, having only taken to arms to repulse pirates, help oppressed neighbours, or to defend their liberty against Pepin and the Hungarians.

Although many victories had given them a just appreciation of their strength, they had no aggression to reproach themselves with, unless perhaps that against the Saracens, but this war was undertaken at the solicitation of the Italian people, and on the request of the Eastern emperor. Moreover, in generally received ideas of this epoch, the Saracens, in their quality as infidels, were beyond the pale of common rights. The republic had never made incursions on the continent, for it would not be just to lay to its account the short expeditions of the two doges, who had no other object than their own interests.

A Doge of Venice

This union of exiles and fishers had become a rich, powerful, warlike, yet at the same time a peaceful nation. The fruit of this moderation had been if not an existence exempt from trouble, at least a medium to the creation of an independent state, freeing itself little by little from the influence of the two empires between which it found itself—a state, moreover, which treated with its neighbours, counted many illustrious families, whose princes married kings’ daughters, yet in its entity did not extend beyond the lagunes and several points of the neighbouring coast. A new scene was to open up.

Commerce, that profession in which fortunes are continually being tried, is not a school of moderation. Successes inspire greediness and jealousy, and these latter the spirit of domination. Maritime commerce wanted ports where her ships could be gathered, authority where she bought, privileges where she sold, safety for navigation, and, above all, no rivals. This ambitious spirit is really the same as that of conquest. Venice will show us an example of it.

No choice of the Venetians was more justified by its great and lasting results than that of Doge Pietro Orseolo II in 991. He was the son of him who had abdicated the dogate fifteen years before. As in the life of all great men there is something of the marvellous, it was spread abroad that his father had announced that his son would be the glory of his country, and the holiness of Orseolo I gave to these paternal hopes all the authority of a prophecy.

Hardly was the new doge on the throne, than the factions which had torn Venice during the reign of his feeble predecessor calmed down or at any rate were quiet. Deliberations had been frequently troubled ones; the palace had more than once been stained with blood. Orseolo made a law by which all acts of violence in the public assembly should be punished by a fine of twenty gold livres or the death of those who had not the wherewithal to pay. A statesman as well as a clever warrior, he occupied himself with forwarding commercial prosperity. He treated with all the Italian states for goods. He obtained from the emperor of the East that all subjects of the republic should be exempt from dues throughout the empire, not only in ports but inland, or at least that the dues should be reduced in the proportion of thirty gold sols to two. Finally he assured himself, by an embassy and presents, of the favour of Egyptian and Syrian sultans. The interior commerce of the Adriatic was itself an abundant source of riches for the Venetians. Favoured by concessions from the patriarch of Aquileia and the Italian kings, their ships went the whole length of Lombardy and Friuli to sell all sorts of foreign wares. They were welcome in the ports of Apulia and Calabria; on the eastern coast of the gulf they enjoyed some privileges, bought, it is true, by a tribute, but which were none the less profitable.

They got from Dalmatia firewood, wines, oils, hemp, linen, all kinds of grain and cattle. The eastern coast offered lead, mercury, and metals of every kind, wood for building, wools, cloth, house linen, cordage, dried fruits, and even slaves and eunuchs. Everywhere they possessed themselves of the exclusive commerce in salt and salted fish, and carried into every country the merchandise of the East. It was owing to a so extended commerce that Venice, until then without territory, armed fleets, and placed between two empires, knew how to resist one and make herself necessary to the other. These advantages were considerable, but to enjoy them peaceably it was necessary to be delivered from these Narentine pirates, who for one hundred and fifty years annoyed Venetian commerce with their continual inroads. They furnished no immediate cause for attack, only demanded the annual tribute which the republic had promised them, to which the doge answered that he would soon bring it himself. Their attacks were at that time directed against the peoples established the length of the Adriatic; the Istrians, Liburnians, and the Dalmatians.

[996-997 A.D.]

Various nations had established themselves one after another on these coasts; at first they depended on their chiefs for protection; then those in Dalmatia came under the sway of the Eastern emperor, while those farther north looked to the ruler of the West. These two empires became feeble; various commercial towns sprang up on the sea coast which came by little and little to regard themselves as independent, and these would have found an assured source of prosperity in maritime pursuits were it not for the interference of the neighbouring Narentines. It would not be unreasonable to conjecture that Venice was not without some anxiety, even jealousy, with regard to these people settled on the east coast of the Adriatic, for they were independent, industrious, and good sailors.

Venetian historians relate that all these people, as if moved unanimously, sent deputies to Venice to implore help against the pirates, offering to give themselves to the republic if she would deliver them. There are very few people who will give themselves away, and there are no magistrates who have the right of giving away people. This deputation, if it be true that it took place, did more honour to the politics of those who received it than to the wisdom of those who sent it. However that may be, the Venetians hastened to collect a considerable armament to go and help, or overthrow, their neighbours, and the doge, after having received from the bishop’s hands the standard of the republic, went to sea in the spring of the year 997.[d]

[997-998 A.D.]

It was on the 18th of May, 997, that the fleet left its moorings, and pointed its prows toward Grado, where it was met by the patriarch Vitali Sanudo, followed by a solemn procession of the clergy and the people. From Grado the whole armament sailed successively to Pirano, Omago, Emonia, Parenzo, Rovigno, Pola, Zara, Spalatro, Trau, Ossero, Arbo, Veglia, Sebenigo, Belgrado, Lenigrado, and Curzola. All those places appeared to welcome the Venetians as their deliverers, and each readily took an oath of allegiance to its suzerain. At Zara, where the merchants of Venice had formed their earliest settlements, and where the people exhibited peculiar fervour, Orseolo spent six days; and during that period arrived a deputation from Dircislaus, king of Croatia, whose alarm at the successful progress of the expedition rendered him desirous of conciliating the republic. The ambassadors of Dircislaus were dismissed without an audience. At Trau, he found the brother of the king, Cresimir by name, who implored his Serenity to aid him in establishing a joint claim to the throne of his father, from which he stated that he had been recently driven by the perfidy of Dircislaus. Orseolo entertained the matter favourably, and even consented shortly afterward (998), as a mark of his friendship and esteem, as well as on grounds of commercial policy, to the union of his own daughter, Hicela, with the son of the Croatian prince.

But the campaign was far from being at a close. A great impediment was still to be conquered. Lesina, the principal member of the Illyrican group, and the chief resort of the pirates, still remained untaken; and the doge, having sent ten galleys from Trau to ravage the coast of Narenta, hastened with the main squadron to accomplish that object. Orseolo entered the harbour without hesitation; and the usual summons to surrender having produced no effect, an order was given to commence the assault. The Lesinese shrank in dismay from the tempest of stones and darts which poured without cessation over their walls; the escarpment was scaled; a tower was invested and taken; the Venetians entered the town; and, after a brief interval of license and confusion, the arrival of the doge restored order. The judicious clemency of Orseolo conciliated the esteem of the vanquished; and such was the powerful effect which the reduction of a place, generally thought to be unassailable, produced on its neighbours that, so soon as she heard of the fall of Lesina, the little republic of Ragusa despatched an embassy to offer her allegiance to the conqueror. At the same time, the ten galleys which had undertaken to lay waste the coast of Narenta, rejoined the main squadron with forty Croatian prizes; and this collateral success, which might be partly instrumental in humiliating King Dircislaus, afforded no slight satisfaction to Orseolo. Having thus, in the course of a few months, completed the object of his expedition, the doge concluded the campaign by dictating terms to the sea-robbers of Narenta; and Orseolo, having returned to the capital, and communicated to the national Arrengo the wonderful success which had attended the arms of the republic, was proclaimed Doge of Venice and Dalmatia (998). The assumption of this lofty appellation seems to have been entirely in harmony with the notions of sovereignty generally prevalent at that epoch. The incomplete conquest and precarious tenure of a few hundred miles of the Dalmatian seaboard sufficed, in the eyes of the Venetians, to constitute Dalmatia itself into an integral portion of their dominions; and it is a circumstance strikingly characteristic of the age, that, in conferring new honours upon the crown, no attempt was made to discriminate between an immense tract of country in which the republic had little or no territorial interest and over a small portion only of which she exercised the barest of feudal rights, and the islands, to which she enjoyed the fullest prescriptive and possessory title.[4][k]

[998-1198 A.D.]

In the intervals of peace Orseolo nobly employed his fortune raising public monuments. His father had founded a hospital and rebuilt at his own expense the palace and church of St. Mark. The son had the cathedral of Grado rebuilt, others say the whole city, and many buildings in Heraclea. This magnificence may give an idea to what degree of splendour the great families had arrived. This particular one had only been raised to ducal dignity one generation.[d]

It would have been to expect from the illustrious citizens of Venice more than one could expect from the human race to ask them to forget the glory and splendour of their house, to raise themselves above domestic interests, to work only for the grandeur of the state, and make this generation consist in the equality of all the citizens. The tendency towards aristocracy was for a long time only the result of influence given by riches, office, the remembrance of service rendered, and the respect which attaches itself naturally to an illustrious name. This kind of aristocracy existed long before the legal one. In the political order there was no distinction between nobles and plebeians, and when a foreigner, or a prince even, was admitted to the quality of Venetian, they said to him, “Civem nostrum creamus”—“We make you our fellow-citizen.”

But the Venetian nobles had frequented the society of high French barons, and naturally took some of their opinions. On their side the people and the middle class, like the nobles, were also interested. If the very legitimate pride of the aristocrats made them desire power, the good sense of the other party advised them to claim a share. It was from the struggle between these interests that a new form of government arose. One historian has forgotten himself so far as to say that this revolution led things back to “a natural order, in which the lower orders were dominated by the upper.” The language has no more sense than dignity.[c]

PROSPERITY AND POLITICAL REFORMS

[1198-1202 A.D.]

The settlement of the Venetian constitution prepared the republic for her brilliant career of commercial and political grandeur; and a new source of wealth and power had meanwhile been unfolding itself in her cupidity and ambition. No circumstance contributed more effectually to her subsequent prosperity than the religious wars of the Europeans for the recovery of the Holy Land from the Mohammedan infidels.

From the epoch of the Peace of Constance to the end of the twelfth century, the history of Venice is occupied by no occurrence which deserves to be recorded. But the first years of the thirteenth century are the most brilliant and glorious in the long annals of the republic. They are filled with the details of a romantic and memorable enterprise—the equipment of a prodigious naval armament, the fearless pursuit of a distant and gigantic adventure, the conquest of an ancient empire, the division of the spoil, and the consummation of commercial grandeur.

In the year 1198, Pope Innocent III, by the preaching of Fulk Neuilly, a French priest, had stirred up the greatest nobles of that kingdom to undertake a crusade for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. Baldwin, count of Flanders, enrolled himself in the same cause, and Boniface, marquis of Montferrat, accepted the command of the confederates. They were warned by the sad experience of former crusades not to attempt the passage to Asia by land; and the maritime states of Italy were the only powers which could furnish shipping for the transport of a numerous army. The barons therefore sent a deputation to Venice to entreat the alliance and negotiate for the assistance of the republic (1201 A.D.).

Henry Dandolo, who, at the extraordinary age of ninety-three, and in almost total blindness, still preserved the vigorous talents and heroism of youth, had been for nine years doge of Venice. He received the illustrious ambassadors with distinction; and after the object of their mission had been regularly laid before the councils of the state, announced to them in the name of the republic the conditions upon which a treaty would be concluded. As the aristocracy had not yet perfected the entire exclusion of the people from a voice in public affairs, the magnitude of the business demanded the solemn assent of the citizens, and a general assembly was convened in the square of St. Mark. There, before the multitude of more than ten thousand persons, the proud nobles of France threw themselves upon their knees to implore the assistance of the commercial republicans in redeeming the sepulchre of Christ. Their tears and eloquence prevailed. The terms of alliance had been left to the dictation of the doge and his counsellors; and for 85,000 marks of silver, less than £200,000 ($1,000,000), and not an unreasonable demand, the republic engaged to transport 4,500 knights with their horses and arms, 9,000 esquires, and 20,000 infantry, to any part of the coasts of the East which the service of God might require, to provision them for nine months, and to escort and aid them with a fleet of fifty galleys; but with the farther conditions that the money should be paid before embarkation, and that whatever conquests might be made, should be equally shared between the barons and the republic.

The Venetians demanded a year of preparation; and before that period had expired, both their fidelity to the engagement and the extent of their resources were conspicuously displayed. But all the crusaders were not equally true to their faith; many whose ardour had cooled, shamefully deserted their vows; others had taken ship for Palestine in Flanders, at Marseilles, and at other Mediterranean ports; and when the army had mustered at Venice, their numbers fell very short of expectation, and they were utterly unable to defray the stipulated cost of the enterprise. Though their noble leaders made a generous sacrifice of their valuables, above 30,000 marks were yet wanted to complete the full payment; and the republic, with true mercantile caution, refused to permit the sailing of the fleet until the amount of the deficiency should have been lodged in their treasury. The timid and the lukewarm already rejoiced that the crusade must be abandoned, when Dandolo suggested an equivalent for the remainder of the debt, by the condition that payment should be deferred if the barons would assist the republic in reducing the city of Zara, which had again revolted, before they pursued the ulterior objects of their voyage.

The citizens of Zara had committed themselves to the sovereignty of the king of Hungary, and the pope forbade the crusaders to attack the Christian subjects of a monarch who had himself assumed the cross. But the desire of honourably discharging their obligations prevailed with the French barons over the fear of papal displeasure, and, after some scruples, the army embarked for Zara (1202 A.D.). The aged doge having obtained permission from the republic to take the cross and lead the fleet, many of the citizens followed his example in ranging themselves under the sacred banner, and the veteran hero sailed with the expedition of nearly five hundred vessels, the most magnificent armament, perhaps, which had ever covered the bosom of the Adriatic. Though Zara was deemed in that age one of the strongest cities in the world, the inhabitants were terrified or compelled into a surrender after a siege of only five days: their lives were spared, but their houses were pillaged, and their defences razed to the ground.

[It is unnecessary to follow further the remarkable fortunes of the Venetians and crusaders. The story of the capture of Constantinople has already been told in the history of the Eastern Empire and of the Crusades.]

[1032-1204 A.D.]

The talents and heroism of the venerable Dandolo had won for the doges of Venice the splendid and accurate title of dukes of three-eighths of the Roman Empire; he died at Constantinople almost immediately after the Latin conquest, full of years and glory; and bequeathed to the republic the difficult office of governing a greater extent of dominion than had ever fallen to the inhabitants of a single city. All the islands of the Ionian, and most of those in the Ægean seas, great part of the shores of continental Greece, many of the ports in the Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, the city of Adrianople, and one-fourth of the eastern capital itself were all embraced in her allotment, and the large and valuable island of Candia was added to her possessions by purchase from the marquis of Montferrat to whom it had been assigned. But the prudence of her senate awakened Venice to a just sense of her own want of intrinsic strength to preserve these immense dependencies; and it was wisely resolved to retain under the public government of the state only the colony at Constantinople, with the island of Candia and those in the Ionian Sea. The subjects of the republic were not required to imitate the forbearance of the senate, and many of the great Venetian families were encouraged, or at least permitted, to found principalities among the ruins of the Eastern Empire, with a reservation of feudal allegiance to their country. In this manner most of the islands of the Ægean Archipelago were granted in fief to ten noble houses of Venice, and continued for several centuries subject to their insular princes.[o]

It was by slow and artfully disguised encroachments that the nobility of Venice succeeded in substituting itself for the civic power, and investing itself with the sovereignty of the republic. During the earlier period, the doge was an elective prince, the limit of whose power was vested in assemblies of the people. It was not till 1032 that he was obliged to consult only a council, formed from amongst the most illustrious citizens, whom he designated.[5] Thence came the name given them of pregadi (invited). The grand council was not formed till 1172, 140 years later, and was from that time the real sovereign of the republic. It was composed of 480 members, named annually on the last day of September by twelve tribunes, or grand electors, of whom two were chosen by each of the six sections of the republic. No more than four members from one family could be named. The same counsellors might be re-elected each year. As it is in the spirit of a corporation to tend always towards an aristocracy, the same persons were habitually re-elected, and when they died their children took their places. The grand council, neither assuming to itself nor granting to the doge the judicial power, gave the first example of the creation of a body of judges, numerous, independent, and irremovable; such, nearly, as was afterwards the parliament of Paris. In 1179, it created the criminal quarantia; called, also, the vecchia quarantia, to distinguish it from two other bodies of forty judges created in 1229.[d]

OTHER MARITIME CITIES

[589-1229 A.D.]

The first magistrate of the republics of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi bore likewise the title of doge. These three cities, forgotten by the Greek emperors, and receiving no aid from them, still held by the ties of commerce to Greece. The inhabitants had devoted themselves with ardour to navigation; they trafficked in the Levant, and covered southern Italy with its rich merchandise. The country situated beyond the Tiber had been exposed to fewer invasions than upper Italy. It had not, however, entirely escaped. A Lombard chief entered it in 589, and founded the great duchy of Benevento, which comprehended nearly the whole southern part of the peninsula. This dukedom maintained itself independent of the kingdom of the Lombards at Pavia, and had not been involved in its fall. It defended itself with valour against Charlemagne and his successors, who attempted its conquest; but in 839, at the end of a civil war, it was divided into the three principalities of Benevento, Salerno, and Capua. The Saracens had established colonies, in the year 828, in Sicily, which till then had been subject to the Greek Empire; these Saracens, a few years afterwards, passed into southern Italy. The three republics of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi preserved their independence by exciting enmity between the Lombards and Saracens, who equally menaced them; but these barbarians soon sank into the languor produced by the charms of a southern climate. It seemed as if they had no longer courage to risk a life to which so many enjoyments were attached. When they fought, it was with effeminacy; and they hastened the termination of every war to plunge again into the voluptuous ease from which it had roused them. The citizens of the republics had the advantage over them of walls and defiles; and without being braver than the Lombards, maintained their independence against them for six centuries.

[936-1195 A.D.]

The republic of Pisa, which vainly sought to save from ruin these first Italian republics of the Middle Ages, was a city which navigation and commerce had enriched. Genoa, which soon became its rival, had escaped the pillage of these northern conquerors, and had preserved a constant intercourse with Constantinople and with Syria, from whence the citizens brought the rich merchandise which they afterwards dispersed throughout Lombardy. The Pisans and Genoese, invigorated by a seafaring life, were accustomed to defend with the sword the merchandise which they conveyed from one extremity to the other of the Mediterranean. They were often in conflict with the Saracens, like them addicted to maritime commerce, to which these last frequently added piracy. The Saracens pillaged Genoa in the year 936. In 1004 they entered a suburb of Pisa, and again invested that city in the year 1011. Their colonies in Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic Isles constantly menaced Italy. The Pisans, seconded by the Genoese, in their turn attacked Sardinia, in the year 1015; but completed the conquest only in 1050. They established colonies there, and divided it into fiefs between the most illustrious families of Pisa and Genoa. They also conquered the Balearic Isles from the Saracens, between the years 1114 and 1116.[e] The Pisan fleet of three hundred sail, commanded by the archbishop Pietro Moriconi, attacked the Balearic Isles, where as many as twenty thousand Christians were said to be held captive by the Moslems, and returned loaded with spoil and with a multitude of Christian and Moslem prisoners. The former were set at liberty or ransomed, and among the latter was the last descendant of the reigning dynasty. The chief eunuch, who had governed Majorca, perished in the siege. Immediately afterwards the fourteen years’ war with Genoa broke out. The two republics contested the dominion of the sea, and both claimed supreme power over the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. A papal edict awarding the supremacy of Corsica to the Pisan church proved sufficient cause for the war, which went on from 1118 to 1132. Then Innocent II transferred the supremacy over part of Corsica to the Genoese church, and compensated Pisa by grants in Sardinia and elsewhere. Accordingly, to gratify the pope and the emperor Lothair II, the Pisans entered the Neapolitan territory to combat the Normans. They aided in the vigorous defence of the city of Naples, and twice attacked and pillaged Amalfi, in 1135 and 1137, with such effect that the town never regained its prosperity. It has been said that the copy of the Pandects then taken by the Pisans from Amalfi was the first known to them, but in fact they were already acquainted with those laws. The war with Genoa never came to a real end. Even after the retaking of Jerusalem by the Moslems (1187), the Pisans and Genoese again met in conflict in the East, and performed many deeds of valour. They were always ready to come to blows, and gave still more signal proofs of their enmity during the Sicilian war in behalf of the emperor Henry VI. There could be no lasting peace between these rival powers until the one or the other should be crushed.[l]

When, towards the end of the eleventh century, the western world took up the dispute with the Saracens for the sepulchre of Jesus Christ, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa had already reached a high point of commercial power; these three cities had more vessels on the Mediterranean than the whole of Christendom besides. They seconded the crusaders with enthusiasm. They provisioned them when arrived off the coast of Syria, and kept up their communication with the West. The Venetians assert that they sent a fleet of two hundred vessels, in the year 1099, to second the First Crusade. The Pisans affirm that their archbishop Daimbert, who was afterwards patriarch of Jerusalem, passed into the East with one hundred and twenty vessels. The Genoese claim only twenty-eight galleys and six vessels; but all concurred with equal zeal in the conquest of the Holy Land; and the three maritime republics obtained important privileges, which they preserved as long as the kingdom of Jerusalem lasted.[e]

THE LOMBARD CITIES AND THEIR ALLIES

[1010-1125 A.D.]

In the early days the Italian towns were only as yet larger groups of dwelling-houses, without political significance, such as every place acquires by more abundant and brisker communications, and by being the seat of some sort of government administration; in short, when it becomes the centre of a certain district. The three principal classes of inhabitants were as a rule: (1) free Lombards; (2) tributary Romans; (3) serfs and villeins. There were as yet not sufficient noble retainers in the individual towns to form a class by themselves.

Among the Franks this state seemingly subsisted for some time, but the foundations upon which it rested were undermined. The tributary Romans became gradually either entirely free or really serfs; many of the free Lombards took knightly service with the kings of the Franks or their counts, and many more with bishops and abbots. Thus there grew up new class distinctions, and once more the population seemed to fall into three distinct classes: (1) noble retainers; (2) freemen; (3) bondsmen, villeins, and the remainder of the tributaries who tended more and more to become absorbed by the other classes. Simultaneously, however, there arose another kind of distinction. It gradually came to pass when the royal prerogative had become subjected to many changes, and could at best be regarded but as an uncertain protection, that the bishops counted far more noble retainers and serfs than the kings; and as the bishops at the same time exercised feudal authority over their retainers and villeins, a feeling of hostility sprang up between the nobles, freemen, and tributaries under the king’s official magistrates (the counts and gastalds) and the nobles, serfs, and tributaries under the bishop’s magistrates (the vogts). What had been established under the Franks then developed more fully under the Germans. The bishops also acquired authority over the freemen, exercising the same power as the counts, and began to assemble in one township men possessing quite different rights, but having the same claims to distinction, i.e., noble retainers and freemen of knightly descent. The serfs and villeins forming the third class still remained for a long time politically minors.

A great deal of friction between the noble retainers and the freemen of knightly descent was caused by their having to hold their lands in fief, to enter into the feudal service of the bishops, or to renounce knightly honours. Sanguinary fights took place without either party gaining any decisive victory; compacts were made between the different classes of citizens, and this was the origin of the common municipal constitution. From that time the importance of the aldermen as representatives of all the classes grew apace, whereas that of the episcopal magistrates sensibly decreased. This representative administration had no sooner been founded than it was again upset by a rupture between the spiritual and temporal powers; the strife was no longer between counts and bishops, or between the freemen and the retainers of the church, but between the king and the pope. The spiritual power became divided against itself; many bishops took up the cause of the king, and others that of the pope. The same thing happened with the temporal power, for there were as many princes and lords fighting against as for the king.

The representative administration of the cities was not attacked, but that body found it difficult to decide by which party they were to be governed, for each party, that of the king as well as that of the pope, presently had its own bishops in each city and its adherents among both nobles and freemen. The bishops were the only losers in this struggle, for in each faction they strove to outdo each other in the matter of liberality and in conceding their rights in order to win and retain more partisans. The victorious party, however, when the struggle was at an end, maintained the established representative administration, enriched by the many liberties and rights conceded by the bishops. The aldermen found their sphere of action greatly enlarged and enriched, so that henceforth they assumed a position at the head of the municipality as councillors and magistrates. This government had developed on similar lines in all the cities, although the victory had remained sometimes with the papal and sometimes with the royal party; therefore the strife had been banished from the cities only to break out finally in the country, which became divided into two factions, at the head of which were the rival cities of Pavia and Milan.

At first Pavia belonged to the papal faction and Milan to the royal; but when the former realised that she needed more temporal assistance than the pope could afford her, and the latter city found that the king’s protection brought with it interference in internal affairs, which in a city of Milan’s power and wealth was soon felt to be oppressive, both parties changed badges, and Pavia followed the royal faction, while Milan flaunted the papal colours.

j

[1125-1155 A.D.]

This change of parties occurred during the reigns of Lothair II and Conrad III, who, from the year 1125 to 1152, placed in opposition the two houses of Guelfs and Ghibellines in Germany. Milan, having during the first half of the twelfth century experienced some resistance from the towns of Lodi and Como, razed the former, dispersing the inhabitants in open villages, and obliged the latter to destroy its fortifications. Cremona and Novara adhered to the party of Pavia; Tortona, Crema, Bergamo, Brescia, Piacenza, and Parma to that of Milan. Among the towns of Piedmont, Turin took the lead, and disputed the authority of the counts of Savoy, who called themselves imperial vicars in that country. Montferrat continued to have its marquises. They were among the few great feudatories who had survived the civil wars; but the towns and provinces were not in subjection to them, and Asti was more powerful than they were.

The family of the Veronese marquises, on the contrary, who from the time of the Lombard kings had to defend the frontier against the Germans, were extinct; and the great cities of Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, and Mantua, nearly equal in power, maintained their independence. Bologna held the first rank among the towns south of the Po, and had become equally formidable on the one side to Modena and Reggio, and on the other to Ferrara, Ravenna, Imola, Faenza, Forlì, and Rimini. Tuscany, which had also had its powerful marquises, saw their family become extinct with the countess Matilda, the contemporary and friend of Gregory VII. Florence had since risen in power, destroyed Fiesole, and, without exercising dominion over the neighbouring towns of Pistoia, Arezzo, San Miniato, and Volterra, or the more distant towns of Lucca, Cortona, Perugia, and Siena, was considered the head of the Tuscan League; and the more so that Pisa at this period thought only of her maritime expeditions. The family of the dukes of Spoleto had also become extinct, and the towns of Umbria regained their freedom; but their situation in the mountains prevented them from rising into importance. In fine, Rome herself indulged the same spirit of independence. An eloquent monk, the disciple of Abelard, who had made himself known throughout Europe, preached in 1139 a twofold reform in the religious and political orders; the name borne by him was Arnold of Brescia. He spoke to men of the ancient liberty which was their right, of the abuses which disfigured the church. Driven out of Italy by Pope Innocent II and the Council of Lateran, he took refuge in Switzerland, and taught the town of Zurich to frame a free constitution; but in the year 1143 he was recalled to Rome, and that city again heard the words, “Roman Republic,” “Roman senate,” “comitia of the people.” The pope branded his opinions with the name of “heresy of the politicians”; and Arnold of Brescia, having been given up to him by the emperor, was burned alive before the gate of the castle of St. Angelo, in the year 1155. But his precepts survived and the love of liberty in Rome did not perish with him. In southern Italy, the conquests of the Normans had finally smothered the spirit of liberty; and the town of Aquileia in the Abruzzi alone preserved any republican privileges.[b]

FLORENCE

[800-1207 A.D.]

It appears that of all the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, the one which was to play the principal part in the history of civilisation was the last to appear on the world’s stage. Florence was still a mere unknown parish when Pisa, her neighbour, already covered the Mediterranean with her vessels; and while Milan and the towns of Lombardy were engaged in deadly fight against the empire, the Tuscan city stood perfectly aloof from the struggle of the two parties, which were dividing not only Italy, but the whole of Europe, and, from the Alps to the Sicilian straits, covering the peninsula with ruins and deluging it in blood.

Florence long had pursued her career in silence, growing rich by trade, increasing in size by the reduction of her neighbours, becoming powerful by the submission of the great, and she was neither more nor less powerful than all those small political centres which contributed so largely in bringing to light Italy’s exhaustless fertility in great men. In fact, it was owing to this large number of small states, to this multitude of diverse interests, that so many men were enabled to distinguish themselves, and found a scene for their activity, and that the curious medley which forms the Italian character was able to develop freely, and to bear its finest fruits. In this respect all the small towns of Italy are deeply interesting; to the historian as sources of valuable research, to the philosopher as subjects of observation of human nature. It is, however, natural that the state which exercised its influence for the longest period, in the most powerful manner, and over the widest extent of territory, should also attract the greatest attention from posterity. Great interest is always felt in the childhood of a famous man, even when it does not actually present so many curious details as the childhood of many men who have remained unknown; we like to see his first gropings, and in the features of some childish whim we imagine that we can perceive the plan of the great acts which illustrated his riper age.

In the same way the first symptoms of political life in Athens or in Rome have always attracted attention, while certain towns of Hellas or Latium, though probably far more developed in those obscure times, only interest us as far as they enable us to find traces of the road which these great centres of civilisation pursued when they first arose. So, in the dearth which exists of authentic documents on the origin and early centuries of Florence, in order to obtain a just and complete idea of what she was before the beginning of the thirteenth century, we are often obliged to illuminate the facts which have come down to us by the knowledge we have of Lucca, Pisa, Fiesole, Siena, Arezzo, and other towns of Tuscany.

The chroniclers, by surrounding the origin of Florence with numerous fables, have singularly concealed the real facts. However, it is probable that they were right in assigning it a Roman origin, and it is evident that in this first period and later on, Florence passed, as did the other states, through the successive phases which were experienced by the entire peninsula. Growing under the protection of the imperial eagle, and submitting to the power of the bishop, like her sister-states, like them, also, she knew how, both to free herself from episcopal dominion and to oppose the empire. Although somewhat late, she followed the example of all the great towns of Italy in subduing the small surrounding towns and the country nobles, so as to increase her territory; she profited, but to a less extent than Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, by the commercial advantages of the Crusades. After undergoing the influence of the German invasion, she supported, more than any other state, the reaction of communal tendency against the Germanic tendency which was everywhere felt during the twelfth century. When, later on, tyranny (in the Greek sense of the word) confiscated democratic liberty, in every town, in favour of a powerful family or a superior individual, Florence produced the most accomplished type of the Italian tyrant.

However, turning back to the earliest historical facts proved by unimpeachable witnesses, we see by the very importance which the chroniclers attach to the traditions of Charlemagne, the second founder of their city, how significant for the whole of Italy, and especially for Florence, was the coronation of this emperor in Rome. They attribute the new wall round the city to him also, as well as the establishment of consular government; and their instinct was correct; for if these acts were not the direct work of Charlemagne, they certainly were the consequences of his work. The re-establishment of the Roman Empire must infallibly be followed by the restoration of the ancient municipalities, and in general by the whole of the Roman legislation, wherever it has been destroyed by the invasion. The town was henceforth governed by a marquis of Tuscany, as lieutenant of the empire, which was again re-established by Otto the Great, who appears to have particularly favoured the town of Florence.

At this period the solemn power of the imperial name was so great that the city, whose rule already extended over a great part of the surrounding country, and especially over the important town of Fiesole, would never have dared to oppose the emperor, if the disputes which arose towards the end of the eleventh century between the empire and the holy see, had not offered it the long-wished-for opportunity to escape from the marquisate of Tuscany. The majority of Florentines, for there were already two parties in the city, enthusiastically espoused the cause of the pope and the countess Matilda against the emperor Henry IV. A long siege could not shatter their fidelity. It is from this period, probably, that the establishment of consular government in Florence dates, which the old chroniclers attributed to Charlemagne, and which the other towns of Italy had long since adopted from Rome. This early constitution, which united justice and government in the hands of two, later on of four, and still later of six consuls, aided by a council of one hundred senators, was maintained almost intact till 1207, when the example of the other republics was followed and a podesta was intrusted with the jurisdiction. Although all the free inhabitants co-operated in the election of the magistrates, these latter were only chosen from among the urban nobility, composed indeed of ancient middle-class families who had long been wealthy, and of the descendants of Germanic immigrants.

Social Conditions

The population of Florence was then formed, as was that of the greater number of Italian towns, of two very distinct classes—the patricians and the people; the former included the descendants of noble families and the burghers free since the conquest; the latter included all the other inhabitants of the town, the ancient tributaries of the bishop or the clients of the nobles whom they had freed. The descendants of these freed men, and also those of immigrants from other towns, were born free, earned much by the luxury of the upper classes, and were soon as rich as the patricians. So, later on, they desired, and were able to obtain for their special functionaries, entrance into the posts of the republic, and thus it was that popular revolutions took place in the thirteenth century. Before this time, the people were satisfied to assist in the election of magistrates without dreaming of claiming the honour for themselves. As for the nobles of the surrounding country who refused to submit to the government, they were pursued, their lands devastated and burned, even their fortresses were destroyed, so that in a short time Florence had sole rule over the neighbouring land. The entire century during which this constitution was in force, is filled with the sound of strife with the nobles. At one time the young republic subdued the rock of Fiesole, a veritable retreat of brigands; then the powerful family of the Buondelmonti, of Monte Buono. This family, so famous and so fatal to Florentine happiness, possessed a small castle about five miles distant from the town which, commanding the Siena road, enabled them to impose a toll upon all merchandise in its passage. Florence complained of this imposition, and being refused redress destroyed their castle, obliging them without further spoliation to become Florentine citizens; others followed; and so they continued adding bit after bit to their possessions by money, conquest, or persuasion, but still maintaining a close alliance with Pisa, which at this period, although the most commercial and military nation of Tuscany, was rivalled by Florence in ambition and warlike propensities if not in power and celebrity.

Municipal Wars

[1144-1146 A.D.]

In the year 1144 all Tuscany was in arms, partly on account of these republics, but more from those dissensions that spring from mutual jealousy in rising states commencing the race of ambition and of blood, who league for war as a pastime, and regard the butchery of their fellow-creatures as legitimate amusement. Lucca and Pisa were in constant collision, and the friendship of the former with Siena, of the latter with Florence, occasioned a quadruple war between those states, each jealous of the other’s ascendency; the necessities of commerce, untouched as yet by its rivalry, kept peace between Pisa and Florence; and the distance of the other two diminished their points of contact and consequently their chances of quarrel.

Ulric, marquis or vice-marquis of Tuscany and imperial vicar, commanded the Florentine army, with which he advanced to the gates of Siena and burned a suburb; the Sienese demanded assistance from Lucca, who answered by declaring war on Florence, not only to draw the enemy from her ally, but also in aid of Count Guido Guerra of Modigliana, a Ghibelline chief and confederate of Siena, who had already suffered from Florentine aggression. Pisa on the other hand took the field at the request of the Florentines and Count Guido’s possessions were devastated by these combined forces while the Sienese, covertly advancing on Florence, fell into an ambuscade and were nearly all made prisoners. More bitter was the struggle between Pisa and Lucca where no exchange of prisoners took place, no ransom was accepted, and where a strong personal feeling of hatred pervaded every class; perpetual incarceration was with them the consequence of defeat, and we are told by the bishop of Fresingen that several years afterwards he saw “the Lucchese officers, wasted, squalid, and miserable, in the dungeons of Pisa, drawing tears of compassion from every passing stranger.”

At this period, however, not Tuscany alone but all northern Italy seems to have been in similar confusion from similar causes; from jealousy, faction, and that ever boisterous passage between comparative bondage and complete independence, for Conrad with full employment in Germany was forced to leave Italy uncontrolled, a prey to angry passions, unsettled institutions, and political anarchy. The particular causes of discord between the Tuscan cities are now difficult to trace; vicinity, by multiplying the points of contact, increased the chances and was always a source of dissension; but the peculiar enmity between Siena and Florence, according to the Sienese historians, originated in the assistance given to Henry IV during the siege of 1081; an injury in itself not easily forgiven, but which, fostered as it was by national emulation, lasted until long after the ruin of both republics.

[1146-1204 A.D.]

Elated by success and jealous of the counts Guidi by whose possessions she was nearly surrounded, Florence assembled an army in February, 1146, and besieged Monte Croce, a castello about nine miles distant which belonged to that family; but confidence in superiority of force created carelessness of conduct, and Count Guido aided by the people of Arezzo defeated them with great loss. For a time they were quieted by this sharp military lesson, and a crusade the following year under the emperor Conrad III carried off some of their more enterprising and devout spirits to Palestine; amongst them Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida, who, after having been knighted by Conrad, fell in battle against the infidels.[e]

So while the towns of Lombardy were leaguing together boldly to defend the most cherished interests of independence, the little Tuscan republic was only busy extending her territory, and increasing at the expense of her neighbours, she was already the cunning Florence of the fifteenth century, for whom egoism is the fundamental principle of politics. However, it will not do to be unjust; while fighting and subduing the neighbouring nobles she was also striking a blow at expiring Germanism; it was the municipality triumphing over the members of the feudal body, as at Legnano it triumphed over their chief. The emperor Frederick Barbarossa was well aware of it; and when he came to Florence in 1184, after the Peace of Constance, he listened with interest to the complaints of the nobles, and was well pleased to take from the city the sovereignty which she had violently assumed over the surrounding country, contrary to written law. The Florentines submitted without a murmur to this severe sentence; they knew that they had only to wait and to let the storm pass over. In fact, four years later all the surrounding districts had once more submitted to the burghers.

Ten years later they gained still further advantage by the interregnum which left Germany a prey to the struggles of Otto IV and Philip of Swabia and made Italy “a widow of her king.” It was then that they formed a Guelf league on the model of the Lombard League, and succeeded in subduing that part of the rural nobility which had till then remained independent. The nobles were forced to take an oath of fidelity to the republic and to promise to live peacefully and quietly in the town.

In the midst of these political disturbances the trade and wealth of the city constantly increased. She had till then depended on Pisa, a much richer and more flourishing town, to which she acted, so to say, as bank; after destroying Fiesole, which dominated her completely by its position and hindered her commerce, in the twelfth century, she made a swift step forward and became, first the rival of Siena, later on that of Pisa itself.

[1138-1239 A.D.]

This is the period which the Florentines of the following century were in the habit of lauding as the golden age of the republic. The people were still chivalrous and industrious; their manners were simple; dresses were made of coarse material, women were honest and modest; young girls were not married before the age of twenty; and men did not seek “the largest dowry, but the best reputation.”

It would, however, be a great mistake to think that this period of virtuous patriarchal customs, sobriety, and simple living was free from disturbance. This people of Florence was a passionate race who had not yet passed through two centuries of revolution, nor yet experienced the paternal and enervating despotism of the Medicis, nor seen the armies of Charles V. The state of the town was far from being a calm one, and whether, because judiciary affairs had increased to too great an extent, or because the consuls were lacking in requisite authority, it soon became necessary, in order to maintain order and justice in the town, to follow the example of the other republics and call in a foreign podesta.

“Vice increasing in the town,” says Malaspina,[n] “and cases of ill-will and disputes becoming more frequent among the citizens, it was decided in the interest of the republic, in order to facilitate the punishment of crime and to prevent all interception, bribery, or intimidation of justice, that a foreigner of gentle birth should be appointed to the office of podesta for one year, to decide all trials with his judges, to render justice, pronounce condemnation of wealth and body, and to carry out the laws of the republic of Florence. Nevertheless the government of the consuls did not cease, since it kept the direction of all other business, and in this manner the town was governed till the period when the first nation of Florence was formed.”[m]

As the two famous names of Guelf and Ghibelline originated in these two rival houses of Bavaria and Franconia, and by their pernicious influence destroyed Italian prosperity and happiness, a short account of them will not here be irrelevant, especially as they were the principal though remote source of that inveterate disunion which has left the peninsula a constant prey to transalpine ambition. For many ages these factions prowled over Italy like lions seeking whom they could devour; they divided city from city, house from house, family from family; they tore asunder all domestic ties, undermined the dearest affections, and scattered duty, obligations, and humanity to the winds. But these fatal appellations were originally nothing more than the distinctive names of two princely German families whose chiefs were rivals in personal ambition and feudal power. The enmity of one to the popes was reason sufficient for the other’s determined adherence to the holy see; and though mere leaders of a petty feud, their names became from circumstances the rallying cry of two great opinions which, penetrating with the wonted subtilty of religious and political rancour into the smallest branches of national life, affected Italy and Germany to the quick.

When Conrad III was crowned king of Italy, the last four emperors had been chosen from the house of Franconia, a family that received its name from the castle of Waiblingen, or Gueibelinga, situated amongst the Hertfeld Mountains in the diocese of Augsburg and which was called indiscriminately “Salic” or “Gueibelinga.” The rival house, originally of Altdorf, at this period governed Bavaria, and in consequence of several of its princes being named “Guelfo” or “Welf,” both the family and its partisans received that appellation. The two last Henrys of the Ghibelline house of Franconia had long contests with the church, as already related, while the Bavarian Guelfs on the contrary always declared themselves its protectors from the days of Guelf IV, son of Albert Azzo, lord of Este, in 1076. From this branch is descended in a direct line the royal family of England and from his brother Folco the ancient marquises of Este, dukes of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio.

These things, springing as they did from rivalry and disappointment, sharpened hereditary feuds, while the pontiff’s support of Lothair augmented the Ghibellines’ enmity to holy church; these names were not, however, permanently attached to the two factions until 1210, when Innocent III drove the fourth Otto from the imperial throne and took young Frederick of Sicily under his charge. The pope was then supported by the Ghibellines; but when the same Frederick turned to rend the church, the Guelfic banner again waved over it, and there continued until the final dissolution of these adverse factions, long after the original cause of their quarrels had melted entirely away.[e]

[476-1250 A.D.]

Such were the changes which the space of seven centuries from the fall of the Roman Empire accomplished in Italy. Towards the end of the fifth century the social tie, which had made of the empire one body, became dissolved, and was succeeded by no other. The citizen felt nothing for his fellow-citizen; he expected no support from him, and offered him none. He could nowhere invoke protection; he everywhere saw only violence and oppression. Towards the beginning of the twelfth century the citizens of the towns of Italy had as little to expect from abroad. The emperor of the Germans, who called himself their sovereign, was, with his barbarian army, only one enemy more. But universally, where the circle of the same wall formed a common interest, the spirit of association was developed. The citizens promised each other mutual assistance. Courage grew with liberty; and the Italians, no longer oppressed, found at last in themselves their own defence.

When the inhabitants of the cities of Italy associated for their common defence, their first necessity was to guard against the brigandage of the barbarian armies, which invaded their country and treated them as enemies; the second, to protect themselves from the robberies of other barbarians who called themselves their masters. Their united efforts soon insured their safety; in a few years they found themselves rich and powerful; and these same men, whom emperors, prelates, and nobles considered only as freed serfs, perceived that they constituted almost the only public force in Italy. Their self-confidence grew with their power; and the desire of domination succeeded that of independence. Those cities which had accumulated the most wealth, whose walls enclosed the greatest population, attempted, from the first half of the twelfth century, to secure by force of arms the obedience of such of the neighbouring towns as did not appear sufficiently strong to resist them. These greater cities had no intention to strip the smaller of their liberty; their sole purpose was to force them into a perpetual alliance, so as to share their good or evil fortune, and always place their armed force under the standard of the dominant city.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[3] [“The archbishop of Milan was the most powerful prince when there was not an Italian emperor or king of Italy in the north of the peninsula. Milan owes almost all her glory to her archbishops.”—Milman, History of Latin Christianity.]

[4] [The famous and splendid ceremony of the espousal of the doge with the Adriatic was instituted to symbolise this conquest.]

[5] The following is a list of the doges of Venice from about the beginning of the eighth to the close of the thirteenth centuries:

713, Paoluccio Anafesto; 717, Marcello Tegliano; 726, Orleo Orso; 737, Orso killed—the republic ruled by annually elected maestro della milizia; 742, Diodato Orso; 755, Galla Catanio; 756, Domenico Monegaro; 764, Maurizio Galbaio; 787, Giovanni Galbaio; 796, Maurizio Galbaio II (associated); 804, Banishment of the Galbaii—Obelerio di Antenori, Beato and Valentino di Antenori associated; 809, Angelo Badoer; 827, Giustiniano Badoer; 829, Giovanni Badoer; 836, Pietro Tradenigo; 864, Orso Badoer; 881, Giovanni Badoer II; 887, Pietro Sanudo; 888, Giovanni Badoer II; Pietro Tribuno; 912, Orso Badoer II; 932, Pietro Sanudo II; 939, Pietro Badoer; 942, Pietro Sanudo III; 959, Pietro Sanudo IV; 976, Pietro Orseolo I; 978, Vitale Sanudo; 979, Tribuno Memo; 991, Pietro Orseolo II; 1008, Ottone Orseolo; 1026, Pietro Barbolano; 1033, Domenico Flabenigo; 1043, Domenico Contarini; 1071, Domenico Selvo; 1084, Vitale Falieri; 1096, Vitale Michieli; 1102, Orlando Falieri; 1117, Domenico Michieli; 1130, Pietro Polani; 1148, Domenico Morosini; 1156, Vitale Michieli II; 1173, Sebastiano Ziani; 1179, Orlio Malipiero; 1192, Henry Dandolo; 1205, Pietro Ziani; 1229, Jacopo Tiepolo; 1249, Marino Morosini; 1252, Reniero Zeno; 1268, Lorenzo Tiepolo; 1275, Jacopo Contarini; 1280, Giovanni Dandolo.

CHAPTER II. IMPERIAL AGGRESSIONS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY

FREDERICK BARBAROSSA IN ITALY

The long war of the investitures, between the Franconian emperors and the popes, had given the first impulse to the ambition of the Lombard cities for alliance; as general interests were involved, as it was a question of distant operations and common danger, the cities felt the necessity of alliances and of an active correspondence, which soon extended from one extremity of Italy to the other. The smaller towns soon found that this general policy was beyond their means, and that the great cities, in which commerce and wealth had accumulated knowledge, and which alone received the communications of the pope or of the emperor, naturally placed themselves at the head of the league formed in their provinces, either for the empire or for the church. These two leagues were not yet known in Italy by the names of Guelf and Ghibelline, which in Germany had been the war-cry of the two parties at the battle of Winsberg, fought on the 21st of December, 1140, and which had previously distinguished, the former the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria, devoted to the pope, the latter, the emperors of the house of Franconia. But although these two names, which seem since to have become exclusively Italian, had not yet been adopted in Italy, the hereditary affection respectively for the two parties already divided the minds of the people for more than a century, and faction became to each a second country, often served by them with not less heroism and devotion than their native city.[b]

[1152-1155 A.D.]

Such was the state of Italy, when the Germanic diet, assembled at Frankfort in 1152, conferred the crown on Frederick Barbarossa, duke of Swabia, and of the house of Hohenstaufen. This prince was nephew to Conrad III, whom he succeeded; he was allied to the two houses of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, which had contended with each other for the empire, and was regarded, with good reason, by the Germans as their most distinguished chief. Frederick Barbarossa was not only brave, but understood the art of war, at least so far as it could be understood in an age so barbarous. He made himself beloved by the soldiers, at the same time that he subjected them to a discipline which others had not yet thought of establishing. He held his word sacred; he abhorred gratuitous cruelty, although the shedding of human blood had in general nothing revolting in it to a prince of the Middle Ages; but the prerogatives of his crown appeared to him sacred rights, which from pride, and even from conscience, he was disposed to preserve and extend. The Italians he considered in a state of revolt against the imperial throne and the German nation, and he believed it to be his first duty to reduce them to subjection.

A Venetian Soldier, Twelfth Century

(Based on Vicellio)

Frederick Barbarossa, accordingly, in the month of October, 1154, entered Italy with a powerful German army, by the valley of Trent. He proposed to himself not only receiving there the crowns of Italy and the empire and reducing to obedience subjects who appeared to him to forget their duty to their sovereign, but also to punish in particular the Milanese for their arrogance, to redress the complaints which the citizens of Pavia and Cremona had brought against them, and to oblige Milan to render to the towns of Lodi and Como, which it had dismantled, all the privileges which Milan itself enjoyed. On arriving at Roncaglia, where the diets of the kingdom of Italy were held, he was assailed by complaints from the bishop and nobles against the towns, as well as by complaints against the Milanese from the consuls of Pavia, of Cremona, of Como, and of Lodi; while those of Crema, of Brescia, of Piacenza, of Asti and Tortona vindicated them. Before giving judgment on the differences submitted to his decision, Frederick announced his intention of judging for himself the state of the country, by visiting in person Piedmont and Montferrat. Having to pass through the Milanese territory on his way to Novara, he commanded the consuls of Milan to supply him with provisions on the road. The towns acknowledged that they owed the emperors upon their journeys the dues designated by the feudal words “foderum, parata, mansionaticum” (forage, food, and lodging); but the Germans, retarded in their march by heavy and continued rain, took two days to reach a stage which the Milanese supposed they would reach in one; provisions of course failed; and the Germans avenged themselves on the unhappy inhabitants by pillaging and burning the villages wherever sufficient rations were not found.

Frederick treated with kindness the towns of Novara and Turin, but those of Chieri and Asti had been denounced to him as entertaining the same sentiments as Milan; the inhabitants fled at his approach, and he plundered and burned their deserted houses. Arrived next before Tortona, he ordered the inhabitants to renounce their alliance with the Milanese; but they, trusting to the strength of the upper town, into which they had retreated, while Frederick occupied the lower part, had the courage to refuse. The Germans began the siege of Tortona on the 13th of February, 1155. They could not prevent the entrance of two hundred Milanese, to assist in its defence. For sixty-two days did this brave people resist the attacks of the formidable army of Frederick, the numbers of which had been increased by the armed force of Pavia, and the other Ghibelline towns. The want of water compelled them at last to surrender; and the emperor allowed them to retire to Milan, taking only the few effects which each individual could carry away. Everything else was given up to the pillage of the soldiers, and the houses became a prey to the flames. The Milanese received with respect these martyrs of liberty, and every opulent house gave shelter and hospitality to some of the unhappy inhabitants of Tortona. Frederick meanwhile placed on his head, in the temple of Pavia, the iron crown of the kings of Lombardy, and began his march on Rome, to receive there the golden crown of the empire.

An Italian Soldier of the Twelfth Century

But the Germans who accompanied the emperor, notwithstanding the ardour with which they had undertaken this distant expedition, began to grow tired of so long an absence from their home. The license extended to their pillage and debauchery no longer appeared to them a sufficient compensation for tedious marches and the dangers of war. They pressed the emperor to advance towards Rome, and to avoid all quarrel with the great towns by which they passed, although almost all refused to admit them within their walls—providing subsistence and lodging for them in the suburbs only. The impossibility of maintaining discipline in a rapacious army, which beheld for the first time the unknown riches of commerce and the arts; the difficulty of avoiding quarrels between two nations, neither of which understood the language of the other, perhaps justified this precaution. Frederick thus passed by Piacenza, Parma, Bologna, and Florence. He was not received even into Rome; his troops occupied what was styled the Leonine city, or the suburb built round the Vatican; he was there crowned by the pope, Adrian IV, while his army was obliged to repel the Romans, who advanced by the bridge of St. Angelo and the Borgo[6] of Trastevere to disturb the ceremony. Frederick withdrew from Rome the following day; conducting his army into the mountains to avoid the great heat of summer. The citizens of Spoleto, not having supplied with sufficient haste the provisions he demanded, he attacked, took, and burned their city; sickness, however, began to thin the ranks of his soldiers; many also deserted, to embark at Ancona. Frederick, with a weakened army, directed his march on Germany by the valleys of the Tyrol. The citizens of Verona, who would not admit the Germans within their walls, constructed for him a bridge of boats on the Adige, which he hastily passed over, but had hardly gained the opposite bank, when enormous pieces of wood, carried down by the impetuosity of the current, struck and destroyed the bridge. Frederick had no doubt that the Lombards had laid this snare for him, and flattered themselves with the breaking of the bridge whilst he should be in the act of passing over; but he was no longer sufficiently strong to avenge himself.

[1155-1158 A.D.]

The emperor at length returned into Germany with his barbarian soldiers. He everywhere on his passage spread havoc and desolation; the line by which he marched through the Milanese territory was marked by fire; the villages of Rosate, Trecale, and Galiata, the towns of Chieri, Asti, Tortona, and Spoleto were burned. But whilst he thus proved his barbarism, he also proved his weakness. He did not dare to attack the stronger and more populous cities, which congratulated themselves on having shut their gates, and refused submission to him. Thus a year’s campaign sufficed to destroy one of the most formidable armies that Germany had ever poured into Italy; and the example of ancient times encouraged the belief that it would be long before the emperor could again put the Germans in motion. The Milanese felicitated themselves on having preserved their liberty by their courage and patriotism. Their treasury was indeed empty; but the zeal of their opulent citizens, who knew no other luxury than that of serving their country, soon replenished it. These men, who poured their wealth into the treasury of the republic, contented themselves with black bread, and cloaks of coarse stuff. At the command of their consuls, they left Milan to join their fellow-citizens in rebuilding, with their own hands, the walls and houses of Tortona, Rosate, Trecale, Galiata, and other towns, which had suffered in the contest for the common cause. They next attacked the cities of Pavia, Cremona, and Novara, which had embraced the party of the emperor, and subjected them to humiliating conditions; while they drew closer their bonds of alliance with the towns of Brescia and Piacenza, which had declared for liberty.

But Frederick had more power over Germany than any of his predecessors; he was regarded there as the restorer of the rights of the empire and of the German nation. He obtained credit for reducing Italy from what was called a state of anarchy and revolt, to order and obedience. His vassals accordingly flocked with eagerness to his standard, when he summoned them at the feast of Pentecost, 1158, to compel the submission of Italy. The battalions of Germany entered Lombardy at the same time by all the passes of the Alps. Their approach to Brescia inspired the inhabitants with so much terror, that they immediately renounced their alliance with Milan, and paid down a large sum of money for their ransom. The Milanese, on the contrary, prepared themselves for resistance. They had either destroyed or fortified all the bridges of the Adda, flattering themselves that this river would suffice to stop the progress of the emperor; but a body of German cavalry dashed boldly into the stream, and, swimming across the river, gained in safety the opposite bank. They then made themselves masters of the bridge of Cassano, and the whole army entered into the Milanese territory. Frederick, following the course of the Adda, made choice of a situation about four miles from the ruins of the former Lodi.[7] Here he ordered the people of Lodi to rebuild their town, which would in future secure to him the passage of the Adda. He summoned thither also the militias of Pavia and Cremona, with those of the other towns of Lombardy, which their jealousy of Milan had attached to the Ghibelline party; and it was not till after they had joined him that he encamped, on the 8th of August, 1158, before Milan.

His engines of war, however, were insufficient to beat down the walls of so strong and large a town; and he resolved to reduce the Milanese by famine. He seized their granaries, burned their stacks of corn, mowed down the autumnal harvests, and announced his resolution not to raise the siege till the Milanese had returned to their duty. The few nobles, however, who had preserved their independence in Lombardy, proceeded to the camp of the emperor. One of them, the count of Blandrate, who had before given proofs of his attachment to the town of Milan, offered himself as a mediator, was accepted, and obtained terms not unfavourable to the Milanese. They engaged to pay a tribute to Frederick of nine thousand marks of silver, to restore to him his regal rights, and to the towns of Lodi and Como their independence. On their side, they were dispensed from opening their gates to the emperor. They preserved the right of electing their consuls, and included in their pacification their allies of Tortona and Crema. This treaty was signed the 7th of September, 1158.

An Italian Nobleman, Thirteenth Century

Frederick, in granting an honourable capitulation to revolted subjects, whom he had brought back to their obedience, had no intention of renouncing the rights of his empire. He considered that he had preserved, untouched, the legislative authority of the diet of his kingdom of Italy. The Milanese, on the contrary, regarded their treaty as definitive; and were both astonished and indignant when Frederick, having assembled, towards the 11th of November following, the placita or diets of the kingdom at Roncaglia, promulgated by this diet a constitution which overthrew their most precious rights. It took the administration of justice from the hands of the consuls of towns, to place it in those of a single judge, and a foreigner, chosen by the emperor, bearing the name of podesta; it fixed the limits of the regal rights, giving them much more importance than had been contemplated by the Milanese when they agreed to acknowledge them; it deprived cities, as well as the other members of the empire, of the right of making private war; it changed the boundaries of territories appertaining to towns, and in particular took from Milan the little town of Monza, and the counties of Seprio and of Martesana, which the inhabitants had always regarded as their own property.

[1158-1161 A.D.]

Just motives had made the emperor and the diet consider these innovations necessary for the public peace and prosperity; but the Milanese regarded them only as perfidious violations of the treaty. When the podesta of the emperor arrived at Milan to take possession of the tribunal, he was sent contemptuously away. The Milanese flew to arms; and making every effort to repossess the different passes of the Adda, prepared to defend themselves behind this barrier. Frederick, on his side, assembled a new diet of the kingdom of Italy at Bologna, in the spring of 1159, and placed Milan under the ban of the empire.

The emperor did not yet attempt to reduce the Milanese by a regular siege. His army was neither sufficiently numerous to invest so large a town, nor his engines of war of sufficient force to make a breach in such strong walls; but he proclaimed his determination to employ all his power, as monarch of Germany and Italy, to ruin that rebellious town. The Milanese, accordingly, soon saw their corn mowed down, their autumn harvests destroyed, their vine stocks cut, the trees which covered their country either cut down or barked, their canals of irrigation broken; but the generous citizens of this new republic did not allow themselves to be discouraged by the superior force of such an enemy, or by the inevitable issue of such a contest. They saw clearly that they must perish; but it would be for the honour and the liberty of Italy; they were resolved to leave a great example to their countrymen, and to future generations.

The Siege of Crema

The people of Crema had remained faithful to the Milanese in their good and evil fortune; but the siege of that town presented fewer difficulties to the emperor than the siege of Milan. Crema was of small extent, and could be invested on every side; it was also more accessible to the engines of war, though surrounded by a double wall and a ditch filled with water. The Cremonese began the siege on the 4th of July, 1159; and on the 10th, Frederick arrived to direct it in person.[c]

The emperor regarded the inhabitants of the town as revolted subjects and he probably expected to have little difficulty in accomplishing their overthrow. Contrary to his expectations, however, the Cremascans proved not only brave but stubborn, and despite his best efforts they held out against him for about six months. The siege gave rise to many picturesque incidents and furnished typical illustrations of the methods of warfare of the time. Even before the first attack Frederick sought to frighten the Cremascans into submission by the barbarous execution of several of their citizens who had previously been sent to him as hostages. Nothing daunted, the inhabitants of the besieged city retaliated in kind; moreover, they gave proof of their intrepidity by sallying forth and attempting to defeat a portion of the besieging army in open combat. Their small numbers rendered this an act of hardihood, but it evidenced the spirit in which they were prepared to repel the assault.

Frederick, on his part, began the construction of the usual machines employed against walled cities. The chief of these consisted of great towers called cats, which were tower-like structures provided with battering-rams and with grappling-irons for tearing down walls. When these were ready, a road-bed was made for them by filling in the outer ditch with some two hundred casks and two hundred car-loads of gravel. Over this improvised causeway the largest cat was slowly rolled preparatory to the assault.

The Cremascans marshalled themselves on the walls opposite this point of attack and assailed the cat with great stones hurled by catapults, and with showers of blazing arrows which had been dipped in a composition of oil, pitch, lard, and sulphur. These burning arrows were cut from the walls of the cat with scythes, but it was with difficulty that the flames could be extinguished, while the enemy’s projectiles threatened the complete destruction of the invading engine before it could be brought within close range of the walls.

Further enraged at the heroic resistance, Frederick resorted to one of those measures of barbarity which seem almost incredible when rehearsed to modern ears. He brought forth the Cremascan prisoners whom he had previously spared, bound them in chains and suspended them by ropes beneath their arms from the front of the cat. The Cremascans beheld with horror their friends and relatives thus used to shield the foe; but at length the needs of the many were held by the consul, Giovanni de Medici, to outweigh the interests of the unfortunate few, and the missiles of defence were again brought to bear upon the cat. Nine of the unfortunate Cremascans dangling from the cat were killed, and others were frightfully injured; but the occupants of the structure also suffered to such an extent that they were glad presently to retire and for the moment to acknowledge themselves beaten.

A German Officer, Twelfth Century

Where the invaders had failed by open attack, they in the end succeeded through the treachery of a Cremascan, one Marchisio, a mechanic of great ingenuity, whose skill had largely aided the besieged garrison in repulsing the enemy’s attack. Frederick found a way to approach this man and through bribery to gain him over. The importance laid upon this incident by the chroniclers of the siege illustrates the value that attached to individual effort in the warfare of those times. The reader of Roman history will recall how Archimedes long saved Syracuse from destruction by the ingenuity with which he contrived means to repel the assaults of the Romans. Warfare had but little changed in the interval of about fourteen hundred years—had, indeed, but little changed since the early days of the Egyptians and Babylonians—and the presence of one inventive mind might seemingly suffice to turn the tide for or against the besieged city. So now Marchisio, as the story goes, was able to point out at once to Frederick the inadequacy of his method of attack. He caused the emperor to abandon his cats, and to build in their place gigantic towers, the largest being, it is said, about one hundred cubits in height, and having attached to one of its upper stories a bridge no less than forty-six cubits long, which would enable its occupants to reach the wall of a city while their machine was yet at a considerable distance. The tower itself was further guarded from missiles by brass and iron plates.

In due course of time, these new machines being in readiness, a fresh attack was begun. The largest tower approached within grappling distance of the walls; the invaders poured over the bridge, despite the shower of missiles that assailed them, and accomplished heroic deeds on the walls where they grappled with the Cremascans. Tradition usually preserves the names of one or two among the hardy warriors who figure in such a scene as this. In the present case the chroniclers have loved to record the deeds of one Berthold von Arach, represented as a giant in strength, who was said to have sprung down from the wall with a small band of followers and recklessly to have invaded the city itself. After performing the usual deeds of prowess, he at last succumbed to superior numbers, and the conqueror proudly affixed his scalp with its waving hair as a trophy to his own helmet.

Another warrior who was said to have distinguished himself on that day was Otto, count palatine of Bavaria. He it was whose efforts were held to have turned the tide of battle against the Cremascans on the wall and to have decided the fate of the day; though Conrad, his brother, who with him led the assault, performed equal deeds of daring and barely escaped with his life.

At last the Cremascans were driven to abandon their outer wall. On the morrow, despairing of further defence, they offered to capitulate, throwing themselves on the mercy of Frederick. “Sad is ever the lot of the vanquished,” cried the despairing consul as he approached the emperor. “Oh, sire, the hand of the Almighty is heavy upon us. We surrender and throw ourselves upon your mercy. But if our prayers can touch your heart let us not be delivered into the hands of the Cremonese, whose many false accusations have wrought our ruin.” The emperor accepted the capitulation, and extended more merciful terms than his attack in the earlier part of the siege might have led one to expect. He permitted the Cremascans with their wives and children to depart, as also the militias of Brescia and Milan; the Cremascans taking with them so much as they could carry, their allies going empty handed.[a]

“The surrender of Crema,” says Testa,[d] “took place on January 27th, 1160. When that unhappy multitude, which amounted to more than twenty thousand persons, came forth, some with a few household goods, some with little children in their arms, some carrying or supporting the women, the infirm, and the wounded, it is said that, to avoid the quarters of the Cremonese, they went close by the pavilion of the emperor; and that he, at the sight of so much sorrow and distress, became thoughtful and sad; until at last, seeing in the crowd an old and infirm Cremascan who, having come to a difficult place, could hardly get any further, moved by irresistible compassion, he went up to him, offered him his hand, and helped him to go forward with the rest. So strongly can the most opposite affections prevail in turn over the same heart!”

[1161-1163 A.D.]

The siege of Crema exhausted the patience of the German army. At this period, soldiers were unaccustomed to such protracted expeditions. When they had accomplished their feudal service, they considered they had a right to return home. The greater number, accordingly, departed; but Frederick, with immovable constancy, declared he would remain, with the Italians only of the Ghibelline towns, to make war against the Milanese; and placing himself at the head of the militias of Pavia, Cremona, and Novara, carried on the war a whole year, during which his sole object was to destroy the harvests, and prevent the entrance of any kind of provision into Milan. In the month of June, 1161, a new army arrived from Germany to his aid. His subjects began to feel ashamed of having abandoned their monarch in a foreign country, amongst a people whom they accused of perfidy and rebellion. They returned with redoubled animosity, which was soon manifested by ferocious deeds; they tortured and put to death every peasant whom they surprised carrying provisions of any kind into Milan.

The rich citizens of the republic had aided the government in making large magazines, which were already in part exhausted; an accidental fire having consumed the remainder, hunger triumphed over courage and the love of liberty. For three entire years had the Milanese, since they had been placed under the ban of the empire, supported this unequal contest; when, in the beginning of March, 1162, they were reduced to surrender at discretion. In deep despair they yielded up their arms and colours, and awaited the orders of the emperor. Frederick, harsh and haughty, was not ferocious; never had he put to death by the executioner rebels or enemies whom he had vanquished. He suffered nearly a month to elapse before he pronounced his final determination; perhaps to augment the anxiety of the subdued, perhaps, also, to pacify his own wrath, which he at last vented on walls and inanimate objects, while he pardoned man. He ordered the town to be completely evacuated, so that there should not be left in it a single living being. On the 25th of March, he summoned the militias of the rival and Ghibelline cities, and gave them orders to raze to the earth the houses as well as the walls of the town, so as not to leave one stone upon another.

Those of the inhabitants of Milan whom their poverty, labour, and industry attached to the soil, were divided into four open villages, built at a distance of at least two miles from the walls of their former city. Others sought hospitality in the neighbouring towns of Italy; even in those which had shown most attachment to the emperor. Their sufferings, the extent of their sacrifices, the recollection of their valour, and the example of their noble sentiments, made proselytes to the cause of liberty in every city into which they were received. The delegates of the emperor also (for he himself had returned to his German dominions), the podestas whom he had established in every town, soon made those Lombards who had fought with him feel only shame and regret at having lent their aid to rivet his yoke on their own necks. All the privileges of the nation were violated; justice was sacrificed to party interest. Taxes continually augmenting had increased sixfold; and hardly a third part of the produce of the land remained to the cultivator. The Italians were universally in a state of suffering and humiliation; tyranny at length reached even their consciences.

RIVAL POPES

On the death of Pope Adrian IV, in September, 1159, the electing cardinals had been equally divided between two candidates; the one a Sienese, the other a Roman. Both were declared duly elected by their separate parties; the first, under the name of Alexander III; the second, under that of Victor III. Frederick declared for the latter, who had shown himself ready to sacrifice to him the liberties and independence of the church. The former had been obliged to take refuge in France, though almost the whole of Christendom did not long hesitate to declare for him. While one council assembled by Frederick at Pavia rejected him, another assembled at Beauvais not only rejected but anathematised Victor. Excommunication at length reached even the emperor; and Alexander, to strengthen himself against Frederick, endeavoured to gain the affections of the people, by ranging himself among the protectors of the liberties of Italy.

[1163-1167 A.D.]

Frederick re-entered Italy in the year 1163, accompanied not by an army, but by a brilliant retinue of German nobles. He did not imagine that in a country which he now considered subdued, he needed a more imposing force; besides, he believed that he could at all times command the militias of the Ghibelline towns; and, in fact, he made them this year raze to the ground the walls of Tortona. He afterwards directed his steps towards Rome, to support by his presence his schismatic pontiff; but, in the meantime, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso, the most powerful towns of the Veronese marches, assembled their consuls in congress, to consider the means of putting an end to a tyranny which overwhelmed them. The consuls of these four towns pledged themselves by oath in the name of their cities to give mutual support to each other in the assertion of their former rights, and in the resolution to reduce the imperial prerogatives to the point at which they were fixed under the reign of Henry IV. Frederick, informed of this association, returned hastily into northern Italy, to put it down. He assembled the militias of Pavia, Cremona, Novara, Lodi, and Como, with the intention of leading them against the Veronese marches; but he soon perceived that the spirit of liberty had made progress in the Ghibelline cities as well as in those of the Guelfs; that the militias under his command complained as much of the vexations inflicted by his podestas as those against whom he led them; and that they were ill-disposed to face death only to rivet the chains of their country. Obliged to bend before a people which he considered only as revolted subjects, he soon renounced a contest so humiliating, and returned to Germany, to levy an army more submissive to him.

Other and more pressing interests diverted his attention from this object till the autumn of 1166. During this interval his anti-pope, Victor III, died; and the successor whom he caused to be named was still more strongly rejected by the church. On the other side, Alexander III had returned from France to Rome; contracted an alliance with William, the Norman king of the Two Sicilies; and armed the whole of southern Italy against the emperor.