VOLUME XV SLICE I Italy to Jacobite Church (continued 4)

The only highroad of importance which left Rome and ran eastwards, the Via Valeria, was not completed as far as the Adriatic before the time of Claudius; but on the north and north-west started the main highways which communicated with central and northern Italy, and with all that part of the Roman empire which was accessible by land. The Via Salaria, a very ancient road, with its branch, the Via Caecilia, ran north-eastwards to the Adriatic coast and so also did the Via Flaminia, which reached the coast at Fanum Fortunae, and thence followed it to Ariminum. The road along the east coast from Fanum Fortunae down to Barium, which connected the terminations of the Via Salaria and Via Valeria, and of other roads farther south crossing from Campania, had no special name in ancient times, as far as we know. The Via Flaminia was the earliest and most important road to the north; and it was soon extended (in 187 B.C.) by the Via Aemilia running through Bononia as far as Placentia, in an almost absolutely straight line between the plain of the Po and the foot of the Apennines. In the same year a road was constructed over the Apennines from Bononia to Arretium, but it is difficult to suppose that it was not until later that the Via Cassia was made, giving a direct communication between Arretium and Rome. The Via Clodia was an alternative route to the Cassia for the first portion out of Rome, a branch having been built at the same time from Florentia to Lucca and Luna. Along the west coast the Via Aurelia ran up to Pisa and was continued by another Via Aemilia to Genoa. Thence the Via Postumia led to Dertona, Placentia and Cremona, while the Via Aemilia and the Via Julia Augusta continued along the coast into Gallia Narbonensis.

The road system of Cisalpine Gaul was mainly conditioned by the rivers which had to be crossed, and the Alpine passes which had to be approached.

Cremona, on the north bank of the Po, was an important meeting point of roads and Postilia (Ostiglia) another; so also was Patavium, farther east, and Altinum and Aquileia farther east still. Roads, indeed, were almost as plentiful as railways at the present day in the basin of the Po.

As to the roads leading out of Italy, from Aquileia roads diverged northward into Raetia, eastward to Noricum and Pannonia, and southwards to the Istrian and Dalmatian coasts. Farther west came the roads over the higher Alpine passes—the Brenner from Verona, the Septimer and the Splügen from Clavenna (Chiavenna), the Great and the Little St Bernard from Augusta Praetoria (Aosta), and the Mont Genèvre from Augusta Taurinorum (Turin).

Westward two short but important roads led on each side of the Tiber to the great harbour at its mouth; while the coast of Latium was supplied with a coast road by Septimius Severus. To the south-west the roads were short and of little importance.

On ancient Italian geography in general see articles in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie (1899, sqq.); Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1862 sqq.); G. Strafforello, Geografia dell’ Italia (Turin, 1890-1892); H. Nissen, Italische Landeskunde (Berlin, 1883-1902); also references in articles Rome, Latium, &c.

(T. As.)

C. From 476 to 1796

The year 476 opened a new age for the Italian people. Odoacer, a chief of the Herulians, deposed Romulus, the last Augustus of the West, and placed the peninsula beneath the titular sway of the Byzantine emperors. At Pavia the barbarian conquerors of Italy proclaimed him king, and he received from Zeno the dignity of Roman patrician. Thus began that system of mixed government, Teutonic and Roman, which, in the absence of a national monarch, impressed the institutions of new Italy from the earliest date with dualism. The same revolution vested supreme authority in a non-resident and inefficient autocrat, whose title gave him the right to interfere in Italian affairs, but who lacked the power and will to rule the people for his own or their advantage. Odoacer inaugurated that long series of foreign rulers—Greeks, Franks, Germans, Spaniards and Austrians—who have successively contributed to the misgovernment of Italy from distant seats of empire.

I. Gothic and Lombard Kingdoms.—In 488 Theodoric, king of the East Goths, received commission from the Greek emperor, Zeno, to undertake the affairs of Italy. He defeated Odoacer, drove him to Ravenna, besieged him there, and in 493 completed the conquest of the country by murdering the Herulian chief with his own hand. Theodoric respected the Roman institutions which he found in Italy, held the Eternal City sacred, and governed by ministers chosen from the Roman population. He settled at Ravenna, which had been the capital of Italy since the days of Honorius, and which still testifies by its monuments to the Gothic chieftain’s Romanizing policy. Those who believe that the Italians would have gained strength by unification in a single monarchy must regret that this Gothic kingdom lacked the elements of stability. The Goths, except in the valley of the Po, resembled an army of occupation rather than a people numerous enough to blend with the Italic stock. Though their rule was favourable to the Romans, they were Arians; and religious differences, combined with the pride and jealousies of a nation accustomed to imperial honours, rendered the inhabitants of Italy eager to throw off their yoke. When, therefore, Justinian undertook the reconquest of Italy, his generals, Belisarius and Narses, were supported by the south. The struggle of the Greeks and the Goths was carried on for fourteen years, between 539 and 553, when Teias, the last Gothic king, was finally defeated in a bloody battle near Vesuvius. At its close the provinces of Italy were placed beneath Greek dukes, controlled by a governor-general, entitled exarch, who ruled in the Byzantine emperor’s name at Ravenna.

This new settlement lasted but a few years. Narses had employed Lombard auxiliaries in his campaigns against the Goths; and when he was recalled by an insulting message from the empress in 565, he is said to have The Lombards. invited this fiercest and rudest of the Teutonic clans to seize the spoils of Italy. Be this as it may, the Lombards, their ranks swelled by the Gepidae, whom they had lately conquered, and by the wrecks of other barbarian tribes, passed southward under their king Alboin in 568. The Herulian invaders had been but a band of adventurers; the Goths were an army; the Lombards, far more formidable, were a nation in movement. Pavia offered stubborn resistance; but after a three years’ siege it was taken, and Alboin made it the capital of his new kingdom.

In order to understand the future history of Italy, it is necessary to form a clear conception of the method pursued by the Lombards in their conquest. Penetrating the peninsula, and advancing like a glacier or half-liquid stream of mud, they occupied the valley of the Po, and moved slowly downward through the centre of the country. Numerous as they were compared with their Gothic predecessors, they had not strength or multitude enough to occupy the whole peninsula. Venice, which since the days of Attila had offered an asylum to Roman refugees from the northern cities, was left untouched. So was Genoa with its Riviera. Ravenna, entrenched within her lagoons, remained a Greek city. Rome, protected by invincible prestige, escaped. The sea-coast cities of the south, and the islands, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, preserved their independence. Thus the Lombards neither occupied the extremities nor subjugated the brain-centre of the country. The strength of Alboin’s kingdom was in the north; his capital, Pavia. As his people pressed southward, they omitted to possess themselves of the coasts; and what was worse for the future of these conquerors, the original impetus of the invasion was checked by the untimely murder of Alboin in 573. After this event, the semi-independent chiefs of the Lombard tribe, who borrowed the title of dukes from their Roman predecessors, seem to have been contented with consolidating their power in the districts each had occupied. The duchies of Spoleto in the centre, and of Benevento in the south, inserted wedge-like into the middle of the peninsula, and enclosing independent Rome, were but loosely united to the kingdom at Pavia. Italy was broken up into districts, each offering points for attack from without, and fostering the seeds of internal revolution. Three separate capitals must be discriminated—Pavia, the seat of the new Lombard kingdom; Ravenna, the garrison city of the Byzantine emperor; and Rome, the rallying point of the old nation, where the successor of St Peter was already beginning to assume that national protectorate which proved so influential in the future.

It is not necessary to write the history of the Lombard kingdom in detail. Suffice it to say that the rule of the Lombards proved at first far more oppressive to the native population, and was less intelligent of their old customs, than that of the Goths had been. Wherever the Lombards had the upper hand, they placed the country under military rule, resembling in its general character what we now know as the feudal system. Though there is reason to suppose that the Roman laws were still administered within the cities, yet the Lombard code was that of the kingdom; and the Lombards being Arians, they added the oppression of religious intolerance to that of martial despotism and barbarous cupidity. The Italians were reduced to the last extremity when Gregory the Great (590-604), having strengthened his position by diplomatic relations with the duchy of Spoleto, and brought about the conversion of the Lombards to orthodoxy, raised the cause of the remaining Roman population throughout Italy. The fruit of his policy, which made of Rome a counterpoise against the effete empire of the Greeks upon the one hand and against the pressure of the feudal kingdom on the other, was seen in the succeeding century. When Leo the Isaurian published his decrees against the worship of images in 726, Gregory II. allied himself with Liudprand, the Lombard king, threw off allegiance to Byzantium, and established the autonomy of Rome. This pope initiated the dangerous policy of playing one hostile force off against another with a view to securing independence. He used the Lombards in his struggle with the Greeks, leaving to his successors the duty of checking these unnatural allies. This was accomplished by calling the Franks in against the Lombards. Liudprand pressed hard, not only upon the Greek dominions of the exarchate, but also upon Rome. His successors, Rachis and Aistolf, attempted to follow the same game of conquest. But the popes, Gregory III., Zachary and Stephen II., determining at any cost to espouse the national cause and to aggrandize their own office, continued to rely upon the Franks. Pippin twice crossed the Alps, and forced Aistolf to relinquish his acquisitions, including Ravenna, Pentapolis, the coast towns of Romagna and some cities in the duchy of Spoleto. These he handed over to the pope of Rome. This donation of Pippin in 756 confirmed the papal see in the protectorate of the Italic party, and conferred upon it sovereign rights. The virtual outcome of the contest carried on by Rome since the year 726 with Byzantium and Pavia was to place the popes in the position held by the Greek exarch, and to confirm the limitation of the Lombard kingdom. We must, however, be cautious to remember that the south of Italy was comparatively unaffected. The dukes of the Greek empire and the Lombard dukes of Benevento, together with a few autonomous commercial cities, still divided Italy below the Campagna of Rome (see Lombards).

II. Frankish Emperors.—The Franko-Papal alliance, which conferred a crown on Pippin and sovereign rights upon the see of Rome, held within itself that ideal of mutually supporting papacy and empire which exercised so Charles the Great and the Carolingians. powerful an influence in medieval history. When Charles the Great (Charlemagne) deposed his father-in-law Desiderius, the last Lombard king, in 774, and when he received the circlet of the empire from Leo III. at Rome in 800, he did but complete and ratify the compact offered to his grandfather, Charles Martel, by Gregory III. The relations between the new emperor and the pope were ill defined; and this proved the source of infinite disasters to Italy and Europe in the sequel. But for the moment each seemed necessary to the other; and that sufficed. Charles took possession of the kingdom of Italy, as limited by Pippin’s settlement. The pope was confirmed in his rectorship of the cities ceded by Aistolf, with the further understanding, tacit rather than expressed, that, even as he had wrung these provinces for the Italic people from both Greeks and Lombards, so in the future he might claim the protectorate of such portions of Italy, external to the kingdom, as he should be able to acquire. This, at any rate, seems to be the meaning of that obscure re-settlement of the peninsula which Charles effected. The kingdom of Italy, transmitted on his death by Charles the Great, and afterwards confirmed to his grandson Lothar by the peace of Verdun in 843, stretched from the Alps to Terracina. The duchy of Benevento remained tributary, but independent. The cities of Gaeta and Naples, Sicily and the so-called Theme of Lombardy in South Apulia and Calabria, still recognized the Byzantine emperor. Venice stood aloof, professing a nominal allegiance to the East. The parcels into which the Lombards had divided the peninsula remained thus virtually unaltered, except for the new authority acquired by the see of Rome.

Internally Charles left the affairs of the Italian kingdom much as he found them, except that he appears to have pursued the policy of breaking up the larger fiefs of the Lombards, substituting counts for their dukes, and adding to the privileges of the bishops. We may reckon these measures among the earliest advantages extended to the cities, which still contained the bulk of the old Roman population, and which were destined to intervene with decisive effect two centuries later in Italian history. It should also here be noticed that the changes introduced into the holding of the fiefs, whether by altering their boundaries or substituting Frankish for Lombard vassals, were chief among the causes why the feudal system took no permanent hold in Italy. Feudalism was not at any time a national institution. The hierarchy of dukes and marquises and counts consisted of foreign soldiers imposed on the indigenous inhabitants; and the rapid succession of conquerors, Lombards, Franks and Germans following each other at no long interval, and each endeavouring to weaken the remaining strength of his predecessor, prevented this alien hierarchy from acquiring fixity by permanence of tenure. Among the many miseries inflicted upon Italy by the frequent changes of her northern rulers, this at least may be reckoned a blessing.

The Italians acknowledged eight kings of the house of Charles the Great, ending in Charles the Fat, who was deposed in 888. After them followed ten sovereigns, some of whom have been misnamed Italians by writers too eager Frankish and Italian kings. to catch at any resemblance of national glory for a people passive in the hands of foreign masters. The truth is that no period in Italian history was less really glorious than that which came to a close in 961 by Berengar II.’s cession of his rights to Otto the Great. It was a period marked in the first place by the conquests of the Saracens, who began to occupy Sicily early in the 9th century, overran Calabria and Apulia, took Bari and threatened Rome. In the second place it was marked by a restoration of the Greeks to power. In 890 they established themselves again at Bari, and ruled the Theme of Lombardy by means of an officer entitled Catapan. In the third place it was marked by a decline of good government in Rome. Early in the 10th century the papacy fell into the hands of a noble family, known eventually as the counts of Tusculum, who almost succeeded in rendering the office hereditary, and in uniting the civil and ecclesiastical functions of the city under a single member of their house. It is not necessary to relate the scandals of Marozia’s and Theodora’s female reign, the infamies of John XII. or the intrigues which tended to convert Rome into a duchy. The most important fact for the historian of Italy to notice is that during this time the popes abandoned, not only their high duties as chiefs of Christendom, but also their protectorate of Italian liberties. A fourth humiliating episode in this period was the invasion of the Magyar barbarians, who overran the north of Italy, and reduced its fairest provinces to the condition of a wilderness. Anarchy and misery are indeed the main features of that long space of time which elapsed between the death of Charles the Great and the descent of Otto. Through the almost impenetrable darkness and confusion we only discern this much, that Italy was powerless to constitute herself a nation.

The discords which followed on the break-up of the Carolingian power, and the weakness of the so-called Italian emperors, who were unable to control the feudatories (marquises of Ivrea and Tuscany, dukes of Friuli and Spoleto), from whose ranks they sprang, exposed Italy to ever-increasing misrule. The country by this time had become thickly covered over with castles, the seats of greater or lesser nobles, all of whom were eager to detach themselves from strict allegiance to the “Regno.” The cities, exposed to pillage by Huns in the north and Saracens in the south, and ravaged on the coast by Norse pirates, asserted their right to enclose themselves with walls, and taught their burghers the use of arms. Within the circuit of their ramparts, the bishops already began to exercise authority in rivalry with the counts, to whom, since the days of Theodoric, had been entrusted the government of the Italian burghs. Agreeably to feudal customs, these nobles, as they grew in power, retired from the town, and built themselves fortresses on points of vantage in the neighbourhood. Thus the titular king of Italy found himself simultaneously at war with those great vassals who had chosen him from their own class, with the turbulent factions of the Roman aristocracy, with unruly bishops in the growing cities and with the multitude of minor counts and barons who occupied the open lands, and who changed sides according to the interests of the moment. The last king of the quasi-Italian succession, Berengar II., marquis of Ivrea (951-961), made a vigorous effort to restore the authority of the regno; and had he succeeded, it is not impossible that now at the last moment Italy might have become an independent nation. But this attempt at unification was reckoned to Berengar for a crime. He only won the hatred of all classes, and was represented by the obscure annalists of that period as an oppressor of the church and a remorseless tyrant. In Italy, divided between feudal nobles and almost hereditary ecclesiastics, of foreign blood and alien sympathies, there was no national feeling. Berengar stood alone against a multitude, unanimous in their intolerance of discipline. His predecessor in the kingdom, Lothar, had left a young and beautiful widow, Adelheid. Berengar imprisoned her upon the Lake of Como, and threatened her with a forced marriage to his son Adalbert. She escaped to the castle of Canossa, where the great count of Tuscany espoused her cause, and appealed in her behalf to Otto the Saxon. The king of Germany descended into Italy, and took Adelheid in marriage. After this episode Berengar was more discredited and impotent than ever. In the extremity of his fortunes he had recourse himself to Otto, making a formal cession of the Italian kingdom, in his own name and that of his son Adalbert, to the Saxon as his overlord. By this slender tie the crown of Italy was joined to that of Germany; and the formal right of the elected king of Germany to be considered king of Italy and emperor may be held to have accrued from this epoch.

III. The German Emperors.—Berengar gained nothing by his act of obedience to Otto. The great Italian nobles, in their turn, appealed to Germany. Otto entered Lombardy in 961, deposed Berengar, assumed the crown in San Saxon and Franconian emperors. Ambrogio at Milan, and in 962 was proclaimed emperor by John XII. at Rome. Henceforward Italy changed masters according as one or other of the German families assumed supremacy beyond the Alps. It is one of the strongest instances furnished by history of the fascination exercised by an idea that the Italians themselves should have grown to glory in this dependence of their nation upon Caesars who had nothing but a name in common with the Roman Imperator of the past.

The first thing we have to notice in this revolution which placed Otto the Great upon the imperial throne is that the Italian kingdom, founded by the Lombards, recognized by the Franks and recently claimed by eminent Italian feudatories, virtually ceased to exist. It was merged in the German kingdom; and, since for the German princes Germany was of necessity their first care, Italy from this time forward began to be left more and more to herself. The central authority of Pavia had always been weak; the regno had proved insufficient to combine the nation. But now even that shadow of union disappeared, and the Italians were abandoned to the slowly working influences which tended to divide them into separate states. The most brilliant period of their chequered history, the period which includes the rise of communes, the exchange of municipal liberty for despotism and the gradual discrimination of the five great powers (Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papacy and the kingdom of Naples), now begins. Among the centrifugal forces which determined the future of the Italian race must be reckoned, first and foremost, the new spirit of municipal independence. We have seen how the cities enclosed themselves with walls, and how the bishops defined their authority against that of the counts. Otto encouraged this revolution by placing the enclosures of the chief burghs beyond the jurisdiction of the counts. Within those precincts the bishops and the citizens were independent of all feudal masters but the emperor. He further broke the power of the great vassals by redivisions of their feuds, and by the creation of new marches which he assigned to his German followers. In this way, owing to the dislocation of the ancient aristocracy, to the enlarged jurisdiction of a power so democratic as the episcopate, and to the increased privileges of the burghs, feudalism received a powerful check in Italy. The Italian people, that people which gave to the world the commerce and the arts of Florence, was not indeed as yet apparent. But the conditions under which it could arise, casting from itself all foreign and feudal trammels, recognizing its true past in ancient Rome, and reconstructing a civility out of the ruins of those glorious memories, were now at last granted. The nobles from this time forward retired into the country and the mountains, fortified themselves in strong places outside the cities, and gave their best attention to fostering the rural population. Within the cities and upon the open lands the Italians, in this and the next century, doubled, trebled and quadrupled their numbers. A race was formed strong enough to keep the empire itself in check, strong enough, except for its own internecine contests, to have formed a nation equal to its happier neighbours.

The recent scandals of the papacy induced Otto to deprive the Romans of their right to elect popes. But when he died in 973, his son Otto II. (married to Theophano of the imperial Byzantine house) and his grandson, Otto III., who descended into Italy in 996, found that the affairs of Rome and of the southern provinces were more than even their imperial powers could cope with. The faction of the counts of Tusculum raised its head from time to time in the Eternal City, and Rome still claimed to be a commonwealth. Otto III.’s untimely death in 1002 introduced new discords. Rome fell once more into the hands of her nobles. The Lombards chose Ardoin, marquis of Ivrea, for king, and Pavia supported his claims against those of Henry of Bavaria, who had been elected in Germany. Milan sided with Henry; and this is perhaps the first eminent instance of cities being reckoned powerful allies in the Italian disputes of sovereigns. It is also the first instance of that bitter feud between the two great capitals of Lombardy, a feud rooted in ancient antipathies between the Roman population of Mediolanum and the Lombard garrison of Alboin’s successors, which proved so disastrous to the national cause. Ardoin retired to a monastery, where he died in 1015. Henry nearly destroyed Pavia, was crowned in Rome and died in 1024. After this event Heribert, the archbishop of Milan, invited Conrad, the Franconian king of Germany, into Italy, and crowned him with the iron crown of the kingdom.

The intervention of this man, Heribert, compels us to turn a closer glance upon the cities of North Italy. It is here, at the present epoch and for the next two centuries, that the pith and nerve of the Italian nation must be sought; Heribert and the Lombard burghs. and among the burghs of Lombardy, Milan, the eldest daughter of ancient Rome, assumes the lead. In Milan we hear for the first time the word Comune. In Milan the citizens first form themselves into a Parlamento. In Milan the archbishop organizes the hitherto voiceless, defenceless population into a community capable of expressing its needs, and an army ready to maintain its rights. To Heribert is attributed the invention of the Carroccio, which played so singular and important a part in the warfare of Italian cities. A huge car drawn by oxen, bearing the standard of the burgh, and carrying an altar with the host, this carroccio, like the ark of the Israelites, formed a rallying point in battle, and reminded the armed artisans that they had a city and a church to fight for. That Heribert’s device proved effectual in raising the spirit of his burghers, and consolidating them into a formidable band of warriors, is shown by the fact that it was speedily adopted in all the free cities. It must not, however, be supposed that at this epoch the liberties of the burghs were fully developed. The mass of the people remained unrepresented in the government; and even if the consuls existed in the days of Heribert, they were but humble legal officers, transacting business for their constituents in the courts of the bishop and his viscount. It still needed nearly a century of struggle to render the burghers independent of lordship, with a fully organized commune, self-governed in its several assemblies. While making these reservations, it is at the same time right to observe that certain Italian communities were more advanced upon the path of independence than others. This is specially the case with the maritime ports. Not to mention Venice, which has not yet entered the Italian community, and remains a Greek free city, Genoa and Pisa were rapidly rising into ill-defined autonomy. Their command of fleets gave them incontestable advantages, as when, for instance, Otto II. employed the Pisans in 980 against the Greeks in Lower Italy, and the Pisans and Genoese together attacked the Saracens of Sardinia in 1017. Still, speaking generally, the age of independence for the burghs had only begun when Heribert from Milan undertook the earliest organization of a force that was to become paramount in peace and war.

Next to Milan, and from the point of view of general politics even more than Milan, Rome now claims attention. The destinies of Italy depended upon the character which the see of St Peter should assume. Even the liberties Rome. of her republics in the north hung on the issue of a contest which in the 11th and 12th centuries shook Europe to its farthest boundaries. So fatally were the internal affairs of that magnificent but unhappy country bound up with concerns which brought the forces of the civilized world into play. Her ancient prestige, her geographical position and the intellectual primacy of her most noble children rendered Italy the battleground of principles that set all Christendom in motion, and by the clash of which she found herself for ever afterwards divided. During the reign of Conrad II., the party of the counts of Tusculum revived in Rome; and Crescentius, claiming the title of consul in the imperial city, sought once more to control the election of the popes. When Henry III., the son of Conrad, entered Italy in 1046, he found three popes in Rome. These he abolished, and, taking the appointment into his own hands, gave German bishops to the see. The policy thus initiated upon the precedent laid down by Otto the Great was a remedy for pressing evils. It saved Rome from becoming a duchy in the hands of the Tusculum house. But it neither raised the prestige of the papacy, nor could it satisfy the Italians, who rightly regarded the Roman see as theirs. These German popes were short-lived and inefficient. Their appointment, according to notions which defined themselves within the church at this epoch, was simoniacal; and during the long minority of Henry IV., who succeeded his father in 1056, the terrible Tuscan monk, Hildebrand of Soana, forged weapons which he used with deadly effect against the presumption of the empire. The condition of the church seemed desperate, unless it could be purged of crying scandals—of the subjection of the papacy to the great Roman nobles, of its subordination to the German emperor and of its internal demoralization. It was Hildebrand’s policy throughout three papacies, during which he controlled the counsels of the Vatican, and before he himself assumed the tiara, to prepare the mind of Italy and Europe for a mighty change. His programme included these three points: (1) the celibacy of the clergy; (2) the abolition of ecclesiastical appointments made by the secular authority; (3) the vesting of the papal election in the hands of the Roman clergy and people, presided over by the curia of cardinals. How Hildebrand paved the way for these reforms during the pontificates of Nicholas II. and Alexander II., how he succeeded in raising the papal office from the depths of degradation and subjection to illimitable sway over the minds of men in Europe, and how his warfare with the empire established on a solid basis the still doubtful independence of the Italian burghs, renewing the long neglected protectorate of the Italian race, and bequeathing to his successors a national policy which had been forgotten by the popes since his great predecessor Gregory II., forms a chapter in European history which must now be interrupted. We have to follow the fortunes of unexpected allies, upon whom in no small measure his success depended.

In order to maintain some thread of continuity through the perplexed and tangled vicissitudes of the Italian race, it has been necessary to disregard those provinces which did not immediately contribute to the formation of its history. Norman conquest of the Two Sicilies. For this reason we have left the whole of the south up to the present point unnoticed. Sicily in the hands of the Mussulmans, the Theme of Lombardy abandoned to the weak suzerainty of the Greek catapans, the Lombard duchy of Benevento slowly falling to pieces and the maritime republics of Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi extending their influence by commerce in the Mediterranean, were in effect detached from the Italian regno, beyond the jurisidiction of Rome, included in no parcel of Italy proper. But now the moment had arrived when this vast group of provinces, forming the future kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was about to enter definitely and decisively within the bounds of the Italian community. Some Norman adventurers, on pilgrimage to St Michael’s shrine on Monte Gargano, lent their swords in 1017 to the Lombard cities of Apulia against the Greeks. Twelve years later we find the Normans settled at Aversa under their Count Rainulf. From this station as a centre the little band of adventurers, playing the Greeks off against the Lombards, and the Lombards against the Greeks, spread their power in all directions, until they made themselves the most considerable force in southern Italy. William of Hauteville was proclaimed count of Apulia. His half-brother, Robert Wiskard or Guiscard, after defeating the papal troops at Civitella in 1053, received from Leo IX. the investiture of all present and future conquests in Apulia, Calabria and Sicily, which he agreed to hold as fiefs of the Holy See. Nicholas II. ratified this grant, and confirmed the title of count. Having consolidated their possessions on the mainland, the Normans, under Robert Guiscard’s brother, the great Count Roger, undertook the conquest of Sicily in 1060. After a prolonged struggle of thirty years, they wrested the whole island from the Saracens; and Roger, dying in 1101, bequeathed to his son Roger a kingdom in Calabria and Sicily second to none in Europe for wealth and magnificence. This, while the elder branch of the Hauteville family still held the title and domains of the Apulian duchy; but in 1127, upon the death of his cousin Duke William, Roger united the whole of the future realm. In 1130 he assumed the style of king of Sicily, inscribing upon his sword the famous hexameter—

“Appulus et Calaber Siculus mihi servit et Afer.”

This Norman conquest of the two Sicilies forms the most romantic episode in medieval Italian history. By the consolidation of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily into a powerful kingdom, by checking the growth of the maritime republics and by recognizing the over-lordship of the papal see, the house of Hauteville influenced the destinies of Italy with more effect than any of the princes who had previously dealt with any portion of the peninsula. Their kingdom, though Naples was from time to time separated from Sicily, never quite lost the cohesion they had given it; and all the disturbances of equilibrium in Italy were due in after days to papal manipulation of the rights acquired by Robert Guiscard’s act of homage. The southern regno, in the hands of the popes, proved an insurmountable obstacle to the unification of Italy, led to French interference in Italian affairs, introduced the Spaniard and maintained in those rich southern provinces the reality of feudal sovereignty long after this alien element had been eliminated from the rest of Italy (see Normans; Sicily: History).

For the sake of clearness, we have anticipated the course of events by nearly a century. We must now return to the date of Hildebrand’s elevation to the papacy in 1073, when he chose the memorable name of Gregory VII. In War of investitures. the next year after his election Hildebrand convened a council, and passed measures enforcing the celibacy of the clergy. In 1075 he caused the investiture of ecclesiastical dignitaries by secular potentates of any degree to be condemned. These two reforms, striking at the most cherished privileges and most deeply-rooted self-indulgences of the aristocratic caste in Europe, inflamed the bitterest hostility. Henry IV., king of Germany, but not crowned emperor, convened a diet in the following year at Worms, where Gregory was deposed and excommunicated. The pope followed with a counter excommunication, far more formidable, releasing the king’s subjects from their oaths of allegiance. War was thus declared between the two chiefs of western Christendom, that war of investitures which out-lasted the lives of both Gregory and Henry, and was not terminated till the year 1122. The dramatic episodes of this struggle are too well known to be enlarged upon. In his single-handed duel with the strength of Germany, Gregory received material assistance from the Countess Matilda of Tuscany. She was the last heiress of the great house of Canossa, whose fiefs stretched from Mantua across Lombardy, passed the Apennines, included the Tuscan plains, and embraced a portion of the duchy of Spoleto. It was in her castle of Canossa that Henry IV. performed his three days’ penance in the winter of 1077; and there she made the cession of her vast domains to the church. That cession, renewed after the death of Gregory to his successors, conferred upon the popes indefinite rights, of which they afterwards availed themselves in the consolidation of their temporal power. Matilda died in the year 1115. Gregory had passed before her from the scene of his contest, an exile at Salerno, whither Robert Guiscard carried him in 1084 from the anarchy of rebellious Rome. With unbroken spirit, though the objects of his life were unattained, though Italy and Europe had been thrown into confusion, and the issue of the conflict was still doubtful, Gregory expired in 1085 with these words on his lips: “I loved justice, I hated iniquity, therefore in banishment I die.”

The greatest of the popes thus breathed his last; but the new spirit he had communicated to the papacy was not destined to expire with him. Gregory’s immediate successors, Victor III., Urban II. and Paschal II., carried on his struggle with Henry IV. and his imperial antipopes, encouraging the emperor’s son to rebel against him, and stirring up Europe for the first crusade. When Henry IV. died, his own son’s prisoner, in 1106, Henry V. crossed the Alps, entered Rome, wrung the imperial coronation from Paschal II. and compelled the pope to grant his claims on the investitures. Scarcely had he returned to Germany when the Lateran disavowed all that the pope had done, on the score that it had been extorted by force. France sided with the church. Germany rejected the bull of investiture. A new descent into Italy, a new seizure of Rome, proved of no avail. The emperor’s real weakness was in Germany, where his subjects openly expressed their discontent. He at last abandoned the contest which had distracted Europe. By the concordat of Worms, 1122, the emperor surrendered the right of investiture by ring and staff, and granted the right of election to the clergy. The popes were henceforth to be chosen by the cardinals, the bishops by the chapters subject to the pope’s approval. On the other hand the pope ceded to the emperor the right of investiture by the sceptre. But the main issue of the struggle was not in these details of ecclesiastical government; principles had been at stake far deeper and more widely reaching. The respective relations of pope and emperor, ill-defined in the compact between Charles the Great and Leo III., were brought in question, and the two chief potentates of Christendom, no longer tacitly concordant, stood against each other in irreconcilable rivalry. Upon this point, though the battle seemed to be a drawn one, the popes were really victors. They remained independent of the emperor, but the emperor had still to seek the crown at their hands. The pretensions of Otto the Great and Henry III. to make popes were gone for ever (see Papacy; Investiture).

IV. Age of the Communes.—The final gainers, however, by the war of investitures were the Italians. In the first place, from this time forward, owing to the election of popes by the Roman curia, the Holy See remained in the hands Rise of free cities. of Italians; and this, though it was by no means an unmixed good, was a great glory to the nation. In the next place, the antagonism of the popes to the emperors, which became hereditary in the Holy College, forced the former to assume the protectorate of the national cause. But by far the greatest profit the Italians reaped was the emancipation of their burghs. During the forty-seven years’ war, when pope and emperor were respectively bidding for their alliance, and offering concessions to secure their support, the communes grew in self-reliance, strength and liberty. As the bishops had helped to free them from subservience to their feudal masters, so the war of investitures relieved them of dependence on their bishops. The age of real autonomy, signalized by the supremacy of consuls in the cities, had arrived.

In the republics, as we begin to know them after the war of investitures, government was carried on by officers called consuls, varying in number according to custom and according to the division of the town into districts. These magistrates, as we have already seen, were originally appointed to control and protect the humbler classes. But, in proportion as the people gained more power in the field the consuls rose into importance, superseded the bishops and began to represent the city in transactions with its neighbours. Popes and emperors who needed the assistance of a city, had to seek it from the consuls, and thus these officers gradually converted an obscure and indefinite authority into what resembles the presidency of a commonwealth. They were supported by a deliberative assembly, called credenza, chosen from the more distinguished citizens. In addition to this privy council, we find a gran consiglio, consisting of the burghers who had established the right to interfere immediately in public affairs, and a still larger assembly called parlamento, which included the whole adult population. Though the institutions of the communes varied in different localities, this is the type to which they all approximated. It will be perceived that the type was rather oligarchical than strictly democratic. Between the parlamento and the consuls with their privy council, or credenza, was interposed the gran consiglio of privileged burghers. These formed the aristocracy of the town, who by their wealth and birth held its affairs within their custody. There is good reason to believe that, when the term popolo occurs, it refers to this body and not to the whole mass of the population. The comune included the entire city—bishop, consuls, oligarchy, councils, handicraftsmen, proletariate. The popolo was the governing or upper class. It was almost inevitable in the transition from feudalism to democracy that this intermediate ground should be traversed; and the peculiar Italian phrases, primo popolo, secondo popolo, terzo popolo, and so forth, indicate successive changes, whereby the oligarchy passed from one stage to another in its progress toward absorption in democracy or tyranny.

Under their consuls the Italian burghs rose to a great height of prosperity and splendour. Pisa built her Duomo. Milan undertook the irrigation works which enriched the soil of Lombardy for ever. Massive walls, substantial edifices, commodious seaports, good roads, were the benefits conferred by this new government on Italy. It is also to be noticed that the people now began to be conscious of their past. They recognized the fact that their blood was Latin as distinguished from Teutonic, and that they must look to ancient Rome for those memories which constitute a people’s nationality. At this epoch the study of Roman law received a new impulse, and this is the real meaning of the legend that Pisa, glorious through her consuls, brought the pandects in a single codex from Amalfi. The very name consul, no less than the Romanizing character of the best architecture of the time, points to the same revival of antiquity.

The rise of the Lombard communes produced a sympathetic revolution in Rome, which deserves to be mentioned in this place. A monk, named Arnold of Brescia, animated with the spirit of the Milanese, stirred up the Romans to shake Republic in Rome. off the temporal sway of their bishop. He attempted, in fact, upon a grand scale what was being slowly and quietly effected in the northern cities. Rome, ever mindful of her unique past, listened to Arnold’s preaching. A senate was established, and the republic was proclaimed. The title of patrician was revived and offered to Conrad, king of Italy, but not crowned emperor. Conrad refused it, and the Romans conferred it upon one of their own nobles. Though these institutions borrowed high-sounding titles from antiquity, they were in reality imitations of the Lombard civic system. The patrician stood for the consuls. The senate, composed of nobles, represented the credenza and the gran consiglio. The pope was unable to check this revolution, which is now chiefly interesting as further proof of the insurgence of the Latin as against the feudal elements in Italy at this period (see Rome: History).

Though the communes gained so much by the war of investitures, the division of the country between the pope’s and emperor’s parties was no small price to pay for independence. It inflicted upon Italy the ineradicable Municipal wars. curse of party-warfare, setting city against city, house against house, and rendering concordant action for a national end impossible. No sooner had the compromise of the investitures been concluded than it was manifest that the burghers of the new enfranchised communes were resolved to turn their arms against each other. We seek in vain an obvious motive for each separate quarrel. All we know for certain is that, at this epoch, Rome attempts to ruin Tivoli, and Venice Pisa; Milan fights with Cremona, Cremona with Crema, Pavia with Verona, Verona with Padua, Piacenza with Parma, Modena and Reggio with Bologna, Bologna and Faenza with Ravenna and Imola, Florence and Pisa with Lucca and Siena, and so on through the whole list of cities. The nearer the neighbours, the more rancorous and internecine is the strife; and, as in all cases where animosity is deadly and no grave local causes of dispute are apparent, we are bound to conclude that some deeply-seated permanent uneasiness goaded these fast growing communities into rivalry. Italy was, in fact, too small for her children. As the towns expanded, they perceived that they must mutually exclude each other. They fought for bare existence, for primacy in commerce, for the command of seaports, for the keys of mountain passes, for rivers, roads and all the avenues of wealth and plenty. The pope’s cause and the emperor’s cause were of comparatively little moment to Italian burghers; and the names of Guelph and Ghibelline, which before long began to be heard in every street, on every market-place, had no meaning for them. These watchwords are said to have arisen in Germany during the disputed succession of the empire between 1135 and 1152, when the Welfs of Bavaria opposed the Swabian princes of Waiblingen origin. But in Italy, although they were severally identified with the papal and imperial parties, they really served as symbols for jealousies which altered in complexion from time to time and place to place, expressing more than antagonistic political principles, and involving differences vital enough to split the social fabric to its foundation.

Under the imperial rule of Lothar the Saxon (1125-1137) and Conrad the Swabian (1138-1152), these civil wars increased in violence owing to the absence of authority. Neither Swabian emperors. Lothar nor Conrad was strong at home; the former had no influence in Italy, and the latter never entered Italy at all. But when Conrad died, the electors chose his nephew Frederick, surnamed Barbarossa, who united the rival honours of Welf and Waiblingen, to succeed him; and it was soon obvious that the empire had a master powerful of brain and firm of will. Frederick immediately determined to reassert the imperial rights in his Frederick Barbarossa and the Lombard cities. southern provinces, and to check the warfare of the burghs. When he first crossed the Alps in 1154, Lombardy was, roughly speaking, divided between two parties, the one headed by Pavia professing loyalty to the empire, the other headed by Milan ready to oppose its claims. The municipal animosities of the last quarter of a century gave substance to these factions; yet neither the imperial nor the anti-imperial party had any real community of interest with Frederick. He came to supersede self-government by consuls, to deprive the cities of the privilege of making war on their own account and to extort his regalian rights of forage, food and lodging for his armies. It was only the habit of inter-urban jealousy which prevented the communes from at once combining to resist demands which threatened their liberty of action, and would leave them passive at the pleasure of a foreign master. The diet was opened at Roncaglia near Piacenza, where Frederick listened to the complaints of Como and Lodi against Milan, of Pavia against Tortona and of the marquis of Montferrat against Asti and Chieri. The plaintiffs in each case were imperialists; and Frederick’s first action was to redress their supposed grievances. He laid waste Chieri, Asti and Tortona, then took the Lombard crown at Pavia, and, reserving Milan for a future day, passed southward to Rome. Outside the gates of Rome he was met by a deputation from the senate he had come to supersede, who addressed him in words memorable for expressing the republican spirit of new Italy face to face with autocratic feudalism: “Thou wast a stranger, I have made thee a citizen”; it is Rome who speaks: “Thou earnest as an alien from beyond the Alps, I have conferred on thee the principality.” Moved only to scorn and indignation by the rhetoric of these presumptuous enthusiasts, Frederick marched into the Leonine city, and took the imperial crown from the hands of Adrian IV. In return for this compliance, the emperor delivered over to the pope his troublesome rival Arnold of Brescia, who was burned alive by Nicholas Breakspear, the only English successor of St Peter. The gates of Rome itself were shut against Frederick; and even on this first occasion his good understanding with Adrian began to suffer. The points of dispute between them related mainly to Matilda’s bequest, and to the kingdom of Sicily, which the pope had rendered independent of the empire by renewing its investiture in the name of the Holy See. In truth, the papacy and the empire had become irreconcilable. Each claimed illimitable authority, and neither was content to abide within such limits as would have secured a mutual tolerance. Having obtained his coronation, Frederick withdrew to Germany, while Milan prepared herself against the storm which threatened. In the ensuing struggle with the empire, that great city rose to the altitude of patriotic heroism. By their sufferings no less than by their deeds of daring, her citizens showed themselves to be sublime, devoted and disinterested, winning the purest laurels which give lustre to Italian story. Almost in Frederick’s presence, they rebuilt Tortona, punished Pavia, Lodi, Cremona and the marquis of Montferrat. Then they fortified the Adda and Ticino, and waited for the emperor’s next descent. He came in 1158 with a large army, overran Lombardy, raised his imperial allies, and sat down before the walls of Milan. Famine forced the burghers to partial obedience, and Frederick held a victorious diet at Roncaglia. Here the jurists of Bologna appeared, armed with their new lore of Roman law, and expounded Justinian’s code in the interests of the German empire. It was now seen how the absolutist doctrines of autocracy developed in Justinian’s age at Byzantium would bear fruits in the development of an imperial idea, which was destined to be the fatal mirage of medieval Italy. Frederick placed judges of his own appointment, with the title of podestà, in all the Lombard communes; and this stretch of his authority, while it exacerbated his foes, forced even his friends to join their ranks against him. The war, meanwhile, dragged on. Crema yielded after an heroic siege in 1160, and was abandoned to the cruelty of its fierce rival Cremona. Milan was invested in 1161, starved into capitulation after nine months’ resistance, and given up to total destruction by the Italian imperialists of Frederick’s army, so stained and tarnished with the vindictive passions of municipal rivalry was even this, the one great glorious strife of Italian annals. Having ruined his rebellious city, but not tamed her spirit, Frederick withdrew across the Alps. But, in the interval between his second and third visit, a league was formed against him in north-eastern Lombardy. Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Treviso, Venice entered into a compact to defend their liberties; and when he came again in 1163 with a brilliant staff of German knights, the imperial cities refused to join his standards. This was the first and ominous sign of a coming change.

Meanwhile the election of Alexander III. to the papacy in 1159 added a powerful ally to the republican party. Opposed by an anti-pope whom the emperor favoured, Alexander found it was his truest policy to rely for support upon the anti-imperialist communes. They in return gladly accepted a champion who lent them the prestige and influence of the church. When Frederick once more crossed the Alps in 1166, he advanced on Rome, and besieged Alexander in the Coliseum. But the affairs of Lombardy left him no leisure to persecute a recalcitrant pontiff. In April 1167 a new league was formed between Cremona, Bergamo, Brescia, Mantua and Ferrara. In December of the same year this league allied itself with the elder Veronese league, and received the addition of Milan, Lodi, Piacenza, Parma, Modena and Bologna. The famous league of Lombard cities, styled Concordia in its acts of settlement, was now established. Novara, Vercelli, Asti and Tortona swelled its Lombard League. ranks; only Pavia and Montferrat remained imperialist between the Alps and Apennines. Frederick fled for his life by the Mont Cenis, and in 1168 the town of Alessandria was erected to keep Pavia and the marquisate in check. In the emperor’s absence, Ravenna, Rimini, Imola and Forli joined the league, which now called itself the “Society of Venice, Lombardy, the March, Romagna and Alessandria.” For the fifth time, in 1174, Frederick entered his rebellious dominions. The fortress town of Alessandria stopped his progress with those mud walls contemptuously named “of straw,” while the forces of the league assembled at Modena and obliged him to raise the siege. In the spring of 1176 Frederick threatened Milan. His army found itself a little to the north of the town near the village of Legnano, when the troops of the city, assisted only by a few allies from Piacenza, Verona, Brescia, Novara and Vercelli, met and overwhelmed it. The victory was complete. Frederick escaped alone to Pavia, whence he opened negotiations with Alexander. In consequence of these transactions, he was suffered to betake himself unharmed to Venice. Here, as upon neutral ground, the emperor met the pope, and a truce for six years was concluded with the Lombard burghs. Looking back from the vantage-ground of history upon the issue of this long struggle, we are struck with the small results which satisfied the Lombard communes. They had humbled and utterly defeated their foreign lord. They had proved their strength in combination. Yet neither the acts by which their league was ratified nor the terms negotiated for them by their patron Alexander evince the smallest desire of what we now understand as national independence. The name of Italy is never mentioned. The supremacy of the emperor is not called in question. The conception of a permanent confederation, bound together in Offensive and defensive alliance for common objects, has not occurred to these hard fighters and stubborn asserters of their civic privileges. All they claim is municipal autonomy; the right to manage their own affairs within the city walls, to fight their battles as they choose, and to follow their several ends unchecked. It is vain to lament that, when they might have now established Italian independence upon a secure basis, they chose local and municipal privileges. Their mutual jealousies, combined with the prestige of the empire, and possibly with the selfishness of the pope, who had secured his own position, and was not likely to foster a national spirit that would have threatened the ecclesiastical supremacy, deprived the Italians of the only great opportunity they ever had of forming themselves into a powerful nation.

When the truce expired in 1183, a permanent peace was ratified at Constance. The intervening years had been spent by the Lombards, not in consolidating their union, but in attempting to secure special privileges for their Peace of Constance. several cities. Alessandria della Paglia, glorious by her resistance to the emperor in 1174, had even changed her name to Cesarea! The signatories of the peace of Constance were divided between leaguers and imperialists. On the one side we find Vercelli, Novara, Milan, Lodi, Bergamo, Brescia, Mantua, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Treviso, Bologna, Faenza, Modena, Reggio, Parma, Piacenza; on the other, Pavia, Genoa, Alba, Cremona, Como, Tortona, Asti, Cesarea. Venice, who had not yet entered the Italian community, is conspicuous by her absence. According to the terms of this treaty, the communes were confirmed in their right of self-government by consuls, and their right of warfare. The emperor retained the supreme courts of appeal within the cities, and his claim for sustenance at their expense when he came into Italy.

The privileges confirmed to the Lombard cities by the peace of Constance were extended to Tuscany, where Florence, having ruined Fiesole, had begun her career of freedom and prosperity. The next great chapter in the history of War of cities against nobles. Italian evolution is the war of the burghs against the nobles. The consular cities were everywhere surrounded by castles; and, though the feudal lords had been weakened by the events of the preceding centuries, they continued to be formidable enemies. It was, for instance, necessary to the well-being of the towns that they should possess territory round their walls, and this had to be wrested from the nobles. We cannot linger over the details of this warfare. It must suffice to say that, partly by mortgaging their property to rich burghers, partly by entering the service of the cities as condottieri (mercenary leaders), partly by espousing the cause of one town against another, and partly by forced submission after the siege of their strong places, the counts were gradually brought into connexion of dependence on the communes. These, in their turn, forced the nobles to leave their castles, and to reside for at least a portion of each year within the walls. By these measures the counts became citizens, the rural population ceased to rank as serfs, and the Italo-Roman population of the towns absorbed into itself the remnants of Franks, Germans and other foreign stocks. It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of this revolution, which ended by destroying the last vestige of feudality, and prepared that common Italian people which afterwards distinguished itself by the creation of European culture. But, like all the vicissitudes, of the Italian race, while it was a decided step forward in one direction, it introduced a new source of discord. The associated nobles proved ill neighbours to the peaceable citizens. They fortified their houses, retained their military habits, defied the consuls, and carried on feuds in the streets and squares. The war against the castles became a war against the palaces; and the system of government by consuls proved inefficient to control the clashing elements within the state. This led to the establishment of podestàs, who represented a compromise between two radically hostile parties in the city, and whose business it was to arbitrate and keep the peace between them. Invariably a foreigner, elected for a year with power of life and death and control of the armed force, but subject to a strict account at the expiration of his office, the podestà might be compared to a dictator invested with limited authority. His title was derived from that of Frederick Barbarossa’s judges; but he had no dependence on the empire. The citizens chose him, and voluntarily submitted to his rule. The podestà marks an essentially transitional state in civic government, and his intervention paved the way for despotism.

The thirty years which elapsed between Frederick Barbarossa’s death in 1190 and the coronation of his grandson Frederick II. in 1220 form one of the most momentous epochs in Italian history. Barbarossa, perceiving the advantage Innocent III. that would accrue to his house if he could join the crown of Sicily to that of Germany, and thus deprive the popes of their allies in Lower Italy, procured the marriage of his son Henry VI. to Constance, daughter of King Roger, and heiress of the Hauteville dynasty. When William II., the last monarch of the Norman race, died, Henry VI. claimed that kingdom in his wife’s right, and was recognized in 1194. Three years afterwards he died, leaving a son, Frederick, to the care of Constance, who in her turn died in 1198, bequeathing the young prince, already crowned king of Germany, to the guardianship of Innocent III. It was bold policy to confide Frederick to his greatest enemy and rival; but the pope honourably discharged his duty, until his ward outgrew the years of tutelage, and became a fair mark for ecclesiastical hostility. Frederick’s long minority was occupied by Innocent’s pontificate. Among the principal events of that reign must be reckoned the foundation of the two orders, Franciscan and Dominican, who were destined to form a militia for the holy see in conflict with the empire and the heretics of Lombardy. A second great event was the fourth crusade, undertaken in 1198, which established the naval and commercial supremacy of the Italians in the Mediterranean. The Venetians, who contracted for the transport of the crusaders, and whose blind doge Dandolo was first to land in Constantinople, received one-half and one-fourth of the divided Greek empire for their spoils. The Venetian ascendancy in the Levant dates from this epoch; for, though the republic had no power to occupy all the domains ceded to it, Candia was taken, together with several small islands and stations on the mainland. The formation of a Latin empire in the East increased the pope’s prestige; while at home it was his policy to organize Countess Matilda’s heritage by the formation of Guelph leagues, over which he presided. This is the meaning of the three leagues, in the March, in the duchy of Spoleto and in Tuscany, which now combined the chief cities of the papal territory into allies of the holy see. From the Tuscan league Pisa, consistently Ghibelline, stood aloof. Rome itself again at this epoch established a republic, with which Innocent would not or could not interfere. The thirteen districts in their council nominated four caporioni, who acted in concert with a senator, appointed, like the podestà of other cities, for supreme judicial functions. Meanwhile the Guelph and Ghibelline factions were beginning to divide Italy into minute parcels. Not only did commune range itself against commune under the two rival flags, but party rose up against party within the city walls. The introduction of the factions into Florence in 1215, owing to a private quarrel between the Buondelmonti, Amidei and Donati, is a celebrated instance of what was happening in every burgh.

Frederick II. was left without a rival for the imperial throne in 1218 by the death of Otto IV., and on the 22nd of November 1220, Honorius III., Innocent’s successor, crowned him in Rome. It was impossible for any section of the Frederick II. Emperor. Italians to mistake the gravity of his access to power. In his single person he combined the prestige of empire with the Crowns of Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Germany and Burgundy; and in 1225, by marriage with Yolande de Brienne, he added that of Jerusalem. There was no prince greater or more formidable in the habitable globe. The communes, no less than the popes, felt that they must prepare themselves for contest to the death with a power which threatened their existence. Already in 1218, the Guelphs of Lombardy had resuscitated their old league, and had been defeated by the Ghibellines in a battle near Ghibello. Italy seemed to lie prostrate before the emperor, who commanded her for the first time from the south as well as from the north. In 1227 Frederick, who had promised to lead a crusade, was excommunicated by Gregory IX. because he was obliged by illness to defer his undertaking; and thus the spiritual power declared war upon its rival. The Guelph towns of Lombardy again raised their levies. Frederick enlisted his Saracen troops at Nocera and Luceria, and appointed the terrible Ezzelino da Romano his vicar in the Marches of Verona to quell their insurrection. It was 1236, however, before he was able to take the field himself against the Lombards. Having established Ezzelino in Verona, Vicenza and Padua, he defeated the Milanese and their allies at Cortenuova in 1237, and sent their carroccio as a trophy of his victory to Rome. Gregory IX. feared lest the Guelph party would be ruined by this check. He therefore made alliance with Venice and Genoa, fulminated a new excommunication against Frederick, and convoked a council at Rome to ratify his ban in 1241. The Genoese undertook to bring the French bishops to this council. Their fleet was attacked at Meloria by the Pisans, and utterly defeated. The French prelates went in silver chains to prison in the Ghibelline capital of Tuscany. So far Frederick had been successful at all points. In 1243 a new pope, Innocent IV., was elected, who prosecuted the war with still bitterer spirit. Forced to fly to France, he there, at Lyons, in 1245, convened a council, which enforced his condemnation of the emperor. Frederick’s subjects were freed from their allegiance, and he was declared dethroned and deprived of all rights. Five times king and emperor as he was, Frederick, placed under the ban of the church, led henceforth a doomed existence. The mendicant monks stirred up the populace to acts of fanatical enmity. To plot against him, to attempt his life by poison or the sword, was accounted virtuous. His secretary, Piero delle Vigne, was wrongly suspected of conspiring. The crimes of his vicar Ezzelino, who laid whole provinces waste and murdered men by thousands in his Paduan prisons, increased the horror with which he was regarded. Parma revolted from him, and he spent months in 1247-1248 vainly trying to reduce this one time faithful city. The only gleam of success which shone on his ill fortune was the revolution which placed Florence in the hands of the Ghibellines in 1248. Next year Bologna rose against him, defeated his troops and took his son Enzio, king of Sardinia, prisoner at Fossalta. Hunted to the ground and broken-hearted, Frederick expired at the end of 1250 in his Apulian castle of Fiorentino. It is difficult to judge his career with fairness. The only prince who could, with any probability of success, have established the German rule in Italy, his ruin proved the impossibility of that long-cherished scheme. The nation had outgrown dependence upon foreigners, and after his death no German emperor interfered with anything but miserable failure in Italian affairs. Yet from many points of view it might be regretted that Frederick was not suffered to rule Italy. By birth and breeding an Italian, highly gifted and widely cultivated, liberal in his opinions, a patron of literature, a founder of universities, he anticipated the spirit of the Renaissance. At his court Italian started into being as a language. His laws were wise. He was capable of giving to Italy a large and noble culture. But the commanding greatness of his position proved his ruin. Emperor and king of Sicily, he was the natural enemy of popes, who could not tolerate so overwhelming a rival.

After Frederick’s death, the popes carried on their war for eighteen years against his descendants. The cause of his son Conrad was sustained in Lower Italy by Manfred, one of Frederick’s many natural children; and, when Papal war against Frederick’s successors. Conrad died in 1254, Manfred still acted as vicegerent for the Swabians, who were now represented by a boy Conradin. Innocent IV. and Alexander IV. continued to make head against the Ghibelline party. The most dramatic incident in this struggle was the crusade preached against Ezzelino. This tyrant had made himself justly odious; and when he was hunted to death in 1259, the triumph was less for the Guelph cause than for humanity outraged by the iniquities of such a monster. The battle between Guelph and Ghibelline raged with unintermitting fury. While the former faction gained in Lombardy by the massacre of Ezzelino, the latter revived in Tuscany after the battle of Montaperti, which in 1260 placed Florence at the discretion of the Ghibellines. Manfred, now called king of Sicily, headed the Ghibellines, and there was no strong counterpoise against him. In this necessity Urban IV. and Clement IV. invited Charles of Anjou to enter Italy and take the Guelph command. They made him senator of Rome and vicar of Tuscany, and promised him the investiture of the regno provided he stipulated that it should not be held in combination with the empire. Charles accepted these terms, and was welcomed by the Guelph party as their chief throughout Italy. He defeated Manfred in a battle at Grandella near Benevento in 1266. Manfred was killed; and, when Conradin, a lad of sixteen, descended from Germany to make good his claims to the kingdom, he too was defeated at Tagliacozzo in 1267. Less lucky than his uncle, Conradin escaped with his life, to die upon a scaffold at Naples. His glove was carried to his cousin Constance, wife of Peter of Aragon, the last of the great Norman-Swabian family. Enzio died in his prison four years later. The popes had been successful; but they had purchased their bloody victory at a great cost. This first invitation to French princes brought with it incalculable evils.

Charles of Anjou, supported by Rome, and recognized as chief in Tuscany, was by far the most formidable of the Italian potentates. In his turn he now excited the jealousy of the popes, who began, though cautiously, to cast their weight into Civil War of Guelphs and Ghibellines. the Ghibelline scale. Gregory initiated the policy of establishing an equilibrium between the parties, which was carried out by his successor Nicholas III. Charles was forced to resign the senatorship of Rome and the signoria of Lombardy and Tuscany. In 1282 he received a more decided check, when Sicily rose against him in the famous rebellion of the Vespers. He lost the island, which gave itself to Aragon; and thus the kingdom of Sicily was severed from that of Naples, the dynasty in the one being Spanish and Ghibelline, in the other French and Guelph. Meanwhile a new emperor had been elected, the prudent Rudolf of Habsburg, who abstained from interference with Italy, and who confirmed the territorial pretensions of the popes by solemn charter in 1278. Henceforth Emilia, Romagna, the March of Ancona, the patrimony of St Peter and the Campagna of Rome held of the Holy See, and not of the empire. The imperial chancery, without inquiring closely into the deeds furnished by the papal curia, made a deed of gift, which placed the pope in the position of a temporal sovereign. While Nicholas III. thus bettered the position of the church in Italy, the Guelph party grew stronger than ever, through the crushing defeat of the Pisans by the Genoese at Meloria in 1284. Pisa, who had ruined Amalfi, was now ruined by Genoa. She never held her head so high again after this victory, which sent her best and bravest citizens to die in the Ligurian dungeons. The Mediterranean was left to be fought for by Genoa and Venice, while Guelph Florence grew still more powerful in Tuscany. Not long after the battle of Meloria Charles of Anjou died, and was succeeded by his son Charles II. of Naples, who played no prominent part in Italian affairs. The Guelph party was held together with a less tight hand even in cities so consistent as Florence. Here in the year 1300 new factions, subdividing the old Guelphs and Ghibellines under the names of Neri and Bianchi, had acquired such force that Boniface VIII., a violently Guelph pope, called in Charles of Valois to pacify the republic and undertake the charge of Italian affairs. Boniface was a passionate and unwise man. After quarrelling with the French king, Philip le Bel, he fell into the hands of the Colonna family at Anagni, and died, either of the violence he there received or of mortification, in October 1303.

After the short papacy of Benedict XI. a Frenchman, Clement V., was elected, and the seat of the papacy was transferred to Avignon. Thus began that Babylonian exile of the popes which placed them in subjection to the French Translation of the Papacy to Avignon. crown and ruined their prestige in Italy. Lasting seventy years, and joining on to the sixty years of the Great Schism, this enfeeblement of the papal authority, coinciding as it did with the practical elimination of the empire from Italian affairs, gave a long period of comparative independence to the nation. Nor must it be forgotten that this exile was due to the policy which induced the pontiffs, in their detestation of Ghibellinism, to rely successively upon the houses of Anjou and of Valois. This policy it was which justified Dante’s fierce epigram—the puttaneggiar co regi.

The period we have briefly traversed was immortalized by Dante in an epic which from one point of view might be called the poem of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. From the foregoing bare narration of events it is impossible to estimate the importance of these parties, or to understand their bearing on subsequent Italian history. We are therefore forced to pause awhile, and probe beneath the surface. The civil wars may be regarded as a continuation of the previous municipal struggle, intensified by recent hostilities between the burghers and the nobles. The quarrels of the church and empire lend pretexts and furnish war-cries; but the real question at issue is not the supremacy of pope or emperor. The conflict is a social one, between civic and feudal institutions, between commercial and military interests, between progress and conservatism. Guelph democracy and industry idealize the pope. The banner of the church waves above the camp of those who aim at positive prosperity and republican equality. Ghibelline aristocracy and immobility idealize the emperor. The prestige of the empire, based upon Roman law and feudal tradition, attracts imaginative patriots and systematic thinkers. The two ideals are counterposed and mutually exclusive. No city calls itself either Guelph or Ghibelline till it has expelled one-half of its inhabitants; for each party is resolved to constitute the state according to its own conception, and the affirmation of the one programme is the negation of the other. The Ghibelline honestly believes that the Guelphs will reduce society to chaos. The Guelph is persuaded that the Ghibellines will annihilate freedom and strangle commerce. The struggle is waged by two sets of men who equally love their city, but who would fain rule it upon diametrically opposite principles, and who fight to the death for its possession. This contradiction enters into the minutest details of life—armorial bearings, clothes, habits at table, symbolize and accentuate the difference. Meanwhile each party forms its own organization of chiefs, finance-officers and registrars at home, and sends ambassadors to foreign cities of the same complexion. A network of party policy embraces and dominates the burghs of Italy, bringing the most distant centres into relation, and by the very division of the country augmenting the sense of nationality. The Italians learn through their discords at this epoch that they form one community. The victory in the conflict practically falls to the hitherto unenfranchised plebeians. The elder noble families die out or lose their preponderance. In some cities, as notably in Florence after the date 1292, it becomes criminal to be scioperato, or unemployed in industry. New houses rise into importance; a new commercial aristocracy is formed. Burghers of all denominations are enrolled in one or other of the arts or gilds, and these trading companies furnish the material from which the government or signoria of the city is composed. Plebeian handicrafts assert their right to be represented on an equality with learned professions and wealthy corporations. The ancient classes are confounded and obliterated in a population more homogeneous, more adapted for democracy and despotism.

In addition to the parliament and the councils which have been already enumerated, we now find a council of the party established within the city. This body tends to become a little state within the state, and, by controlling New constitution of the free cities. the victorious majority, disposes of the government as it thinks best. The consuls are merged in ancients or priors, chosen from the arts. A new magistrate, the gonfalonier of justice, appears in some of the Guelph cities, with the special duty of keeping the insolence of the nobility in check. Meanwhile the podestà still subsists; but he is no longer equal to the task of maintaining an equilibrium of forces. He sinks more and more into a judge, loses more and more the character of dictator. His ancient place is now occupied by a new functionary, no longer acting as arbiter, but concentrating the forces of the triumphant party. The captain of the people, acting as head of the ascendant Guelphs or Ghibellines, undertakes the responsibility of proscriptions, decides on questions of policy, forms alliances, declares war. Like all officers created to meet an emergency, the limitations to his power are ill-defined, and he is often little better than an autocrat.

V. Age of the Despots.—Thus the Italians, during the heat of the civil wars, were ostensibly divided between partisans of the empire and partisans of the church. After the death of Frederick II. their affairs were managed by Manfred Origin of Tyrannies. and by Charles of Anjou, the supreme captains of the parties, under whose orders acted the captains of the people in each city. The contest being carried on by warfare, it followed that these captains in the burghs were chosen on account of military skill; and, since the nobles were men of arms by profession, members of ancient houses took the lead again in towns where they had been absorbed into the bourgeoisie. In this way, after the downfall of the Ezzelini of Romano, the Della Scala dynasty arose in Verona, and the Carraresi in Padua. The Estensi made themselves lords of Ferrara; the Torriani headed the Guelphs of Milan. At Ravenna we find the Polenta family, at Rimini the Malatestas, at Parma the Rossi, at Piacenza the Scotti, at Faenza the Manfredi. There is not a burgh of northern Italy but can trace the rise of a dynastic house to the vicissitudes of this period. In Tuscany, where the Guelph party was very strongly organized, and the commercial constitution of Florence kept the nobility in check, the communes remained as yet free from hereditary masters. Yet generals from time to time arose, the Conte Ugolino della Gheradesca at Pisa, Uguccione della Faggiuola at Lucca, the Conte Guido di Montefeltro at Florence, who threatened the liberties of Tuscan cities with military despotism.

Left to themselves by absentee emperors and exiled popes, the Italians pursued their own course of development unchecked. After the commencement of the 14th century, the civil wars decreased in fury, and at the same time it was perceived that their effect had been to confirm tyrants in their grasp upon free cities. Growing up out of the captain of the people or signore of the commune, the tyrant annihilated both parties for his own profit and for the peace of the state. He used the dictatorial powers with which he was invested to place himself above the law, resuming in his person the state-machinery which had preceded him. In him, for the first time, the city attained self-consciousness; the blindly working forces of previous revolutions were combined in the will of a ruler. The tyrant’s general policy was to favour the multitude at the expense of his own caste. He won favour by these means, and completed the levelling down of classes, which had been proceeding ever since the emergence of the communes.

In 1309 Robert, grandson of Charles, the first Angevine sovereign, succeeded to the throne of Naples, and became the leader of the Guelphs in Italy. In the next year Henry VII. of Luxembourg crossed the Alps soon after his Decline of civil wars. Advent of the bourgeoisie. election to the empire, and raised the hopes of the Ghibellines. Dante from his mountain solitudes passionately called upon him to play the part of a Messiah. But it was now impossible for any German to control the “Garden of the Empire.” Italy had entered on a new phase of her existence, and the great poet’s De monarchia represented a dream of the past which could not be realized. Henry established imperial vicars in the Lombard towns, confirming the tyrants, but gaining nothing for the empire in exchange for the titles he conferred. After receiving the crown in Rome, he died at Buonconvento, a little walled town south of Siena, on his backward journey in 1313. The profits of his inroad were reaped by despots, who used the Ghibelline prestige for the consolidation of their own power. It is from this epoch that the supremacy of the Visconti, hitherto the unsuccessful rivals of the Guelphic Torriani for the signory of Milan, dates. The Scaligers in Verona and the Carraresi in Padua were strengthened; and in Tuscany Castruccio Castracane, Uguccione’s successor at Lucca, became formidable. In 1325 he defeated the Florentines at Alto Pascio, and carried home their carroccio as a trophy of his victory over the Guelphs. Louis of Bavaria, the next emperor, made a similar excursion in the year 1327, with even greater loss of imperial prestige. He deposed Galeazzo Visconti on his downward journey, and offered Milan for a sum of money to his son Azzo upon his return. Castruccio Castracane was nominated by him duke of Lucca; and this is the first instance of a dynastic title conferred upon an Italian adventurer by the emperor. Castruccio dominated Tuscany, where the Guelph cause, in the weakness of King Robert, languished. But the adventurer’s death in 1328 saved the stronghold of republican institutions, and Florence breathed freely for a while again. Can Grande della Scala’s death in the next year inflicted on the Lombard Ghibellines a loss hardly inferior to that of Castruccio’s on their Tuscan allies. Equally contemptible in its political results and void of historical interest was the brief visit of John of Bohemia, son of Henry VII., whom the Ghibellines next invited to assume their leadership. He sold a few privileges, conferred a few titles, and recrossed the Alps in 1333. It is clear that at this time the fury of the civil wars was spent. In spite of repeated efforts on the part of the Ghibellines, in spite of King Robert’s supine incapacity, the imperialists gained no permanent advantage. The Italians were tired of fighting, and the leaders of both factions looked exclusively to their own interests. Each city which had been the cradle of freedom thankfully accepted a master, to quench the conflagration of party strife, encourage trade, and make the handicraftsmen comfortable. Even the Florentines in 1342 submitted for a few months to the despotism of the duke of Athens. They conferred the signory upon him for life; and, had he not mismanaged matters, he might have held the city in his grasp. Italy was settling down and turning her attention to home comforts, arts and literature. Boccaccio, the contented bourgeois, succeeded to Dante, the fierce aristocrat.

The most marked proof of the change which came over Italy towards the middle of the 14th century is furnished by the companies of adventure. It was with their own militia that the burghers won freedom in the war of independence, subdued the nobles, and fought the battles of the parties. But from this time forward they laid down their arms, and played the game of warfare by the aid of mercenaries. Ecclesiastical overlords, interfering from a distance in Italian politics; prosperous republics, with plenty of money to spend but no leisure or inclination for camp-life; cautious tyrants, glad of every pretext to emasculate their subjects, and courting popularity by exchanging conscription for taxation—all combined to favour the new system. Mercenary troops are said to have been first levied from disbanded Germans, together with Breton and English adventurers, whom the Visconti and Castruccio took into their pay. They soon appeared under their own captains, who hired them out to the highest bidder, or marched them on marauding expeditions up and down the less protected districts. The names of some of these earliest captains of adventure, Fra Moriale, Count Lando and Duke Werner, who styled himself the “Enemy of God and Mercy,” have been preserved to us. As the companies grew in size and improved their discipline, it was seen by the Italian nobles that this kind of service offered a good career for men of spirit, who had learned the use of arms. To leave so powerful and profitable a calling in the hands of foreigners seemed both dangerous and uneconomical. Therefore, after the middle of the century, this profession fell into the hands of natives. The first Italian who formed an exclusively Italian company was Alberico da Barbiano, a nobleman of Romagna, and founder of the Milanese house of Belgiojoso. In his school the great condottieri Braccio da Montone and Sforza Attendolo were formed; and henceforth the battles of Italy were fought by Italian generals commanding native troops. This was better in some respects than if the mercenaries had been foreigners. Yet it must not be forgotten that the new companies of adventure, who decided Italian affairs for the next century, were in no sense patriotic. They sold themselves for money, irrespective of the cause which they upheld; and, while changing masters, they had no care for any interests but their own. The name condottiero, derived from condotta, a paid contract to supply so many fighting men in serviceable order, sufficiently indicates the nature of the business. In the hands of able captains, like Francesco Sforza or Piccinino, these mercenary troops became moving despotisms, draining the country of its wealth, and always eager to fasten and found tyrannies upon the provinces they had been summoned to defend. Their generals substituted heavy-armed cavalry for the old militia, and introduced systems of campaigning which reduced the art of war to a game of skill. Battles became all but bloodless; diplomacy and tactics superseded feats of arms and hard blows in pitched fields. In this way the Italians lost their military vigour, and wars were waged by despots from their cabinets, who pulled the strings of puppet captains in their pay. Nor were the people only enfeebled for resistance to a real foe; the whole political spirit of the race was demoralized. The purely selfish bond between condottieri and their employers, whether princes or republics, involved intrigues and treachery, checks and counterchecks, secret terror on the one hand and treasonable practice on the other, which ended by making statecraft in Italy synonymous with perfidy.

It must further be noticed that the rise of mercenaries was synchronous with a change in the nature of Italian despotism. The tyrants, as we have already seen, established themselves as captains of the people, vicars of the empire, vicars for the Change in type of despotism. church, leaders of the Guelph and Ghibelline parties. They were accepted by a population eager for repose, who had merged old class distinctions in the conflicts of preceding centuries. They rested in large measure on the favour of the multitude, and pursued a policy of sacrificing to their interests the nobles. It was natural that these self-made princes should seek to secure the peace which they had promised in their cities, by freeing the people from military service and disarming the aristocracy. As their tenure of power grew firmer, they advanced dynastic claims, assumed titles, and took the style of petty sovereigns. Their government became paternal; and, though there was no limit to their cruelty when stung by terror, they used the purse rather than the sword, bribery at home and treasonable intrigue abroad in preference to coercive measures or open war. Thus was elaborated the type of despot which attained completeness in Gian Galeazzo Visconti and Lorenzo de’ Medici. No longer a tyrant of Ezzelino’s stamp, he reigned by intelligence and terrorism masked beneath a smile. He substituted cunning and corruption for violence. The lesser people tolerated him because he extended the power of their city and made it beautiful with public buildings. The bourgeoisie, protected in their trade, found it convenient to support him. The nobles, turned into courtiers, placemen, diplomatists and men of affairs, ended by preferring his authority to the alternative of democratic institutions. A lethargy of well-being, broken only by the pinch of taxation for war-costs, or by outbursts of frantic ferocity and lust in the less calculating tyrants, descended on the population of cities which had boasted of their freedom. Only Florence and Venice, at the close of the period upon which we are now entering, maintained their republican independence. And Venice was ruled by a close oligarchy; Florence was passing from the hands of her oligarchs into the power of the Medicean merchants.

Between the year 1305, when Clement V. settled at Avignon, and the year 1447, when Nicholas V. re-established the papacy upon a solid basis at Rome, the Italians approximated more nearly to self-government than at any other Discrimination of the five great powers. epoch of their history. The conditions which have been described, of despotism, mercenary warfare and bourgeois prosperity, determined the character of this epoch, which was also the period when the great achievements of the Renaissance were prepared. At the end of this century and a half, five principal powers divided the peninsula; and their confederated action during the next forty-five years (1447-1492) secured for Italy a season of peace and brilliant prosperity. These five powers were the kingdom of Naples, the duchy of Milan, the republic of Florence, the republic of Venice and the papacy. The subsequent events of Italian history will be rendered most intelligible if at this point we trace the development of these five constituents of Italian greatness separately.

When Robert of Anjou died in 1343, he was succeeded by his grand-daughter Joan, the childless wife of four successive husbands, Andrew of Hungary, Louis of Taranto, James of Aragon and Otto of Brunswick. Charles of The Two Sicilies. Durazzo, the last male scion of the Angevine house in Lower Italy, murdered Joan in 1382, and held the kingdom for five years. Dying in 1387, he transmitted Naples to his son Ladislaus, who had no children, and was followed in 1414 by his sister Joan II. She too, though twice married, died without issue, having at one time adopted Louis III. of Provence and his brother René, at another Alfonso V. of Aragon, who inherited the crown of Sicily. After her death in February 1435 the kingdom was fought for between René of Anjou and Alfonso, surnamed the Magnanimous. René found supporters among the Italian princes, especially the Milanese Visconti, who helped him to assert his claims with arms. During the war of succession which ensued, Alfonso was taken prisoner by the Genoese fleet in August 1435, and was sent a prisoner to Filippo Maria at Milan. Here he pleaded his own cause so powerfully, and proved so incontestably the advantage which might ensue to the Visconti from his alliance, if he held the regno, that he obtained his release and recognition as king. From the end of the year 1435 Alfonso reigned alone and undisturbed in Lower Italy, combining for the first time since the year 1282 the crowns of Sicily and Naples. The former he held by inheritance, together with that of Aragon. The latter he considered to be his by conquest. Therefore, when he died in 1458, he bequeathed Naples to his natural son Ferdinand, while Sicily and Aragon passed together to his brother John, and so on to Ferdinand the Catholic. The twenty-three years of Alfonso’s reign were the most prosperous and splendid period of South Italian history. He became an Italian in taste and sympathy, entering with enthusiasm into the humanistic ardour of the earlier Renaissance, encouraging men of letters at his court, administering his kingdom on the principles of an enlightened despotism, and lending his authority to establish that equilibrium in the peninsula upon which the politicians of his age believed, not without reason, that Italian independence might be secured.

The last member of the Visconti family of whom we had occasion to speak was Azzo, who bought the city in 1328 from Louis of Bavaria. His uncle Lucchino succeeded, but was murdered in 1349 by a wife against whose life he Duchy of Milan. had been plotting. Lucchino’s brother John, archbishop of Milan, now assumed the lordship of the city, and extended the power of the Visconti over Genoa and the whole of north Italy, with the exception of Piedmont, Verona, Mantua, Ferrara and Venice. The greatness of the family dates from the reign of this masterful prelate. He died in 1354, and his heritage was divided between three members of his house, Matteo, Bernabò and Galeazzo. In the next year Matteo, being judged incompetent to rule, was assassinated by order of his brothers, who made an equal partition of their subject cities—Bernabò residing in Milan, Galeazzo in Pavia. Galeazzo was the wealthiest and most magnificent Italian of his epoch. He married his daughter Violante to our duke of Clarence, and his son Gian Galeazzo to a daughter of King John of France. When he died in 1378, this son resolved to reunite the domains of the Visconti; and, with this object in view, he plotted and executed the murder of his uncle Bernabò. Gian Galeazzo thus became by one stroke the most formidable of Italian despots. Immured in his castle at Pavia, accumulating wealth by systematic taxation and methodical economy, he organized the mercenary troops who eagerly took service under so good a paymaster; and, by directing their operations from his cabinet, he threatened the whole of Italy with conquest. The last scions of the Della Scala family still reigned in Verona, the last Carraresi in Padua; the Estensi were powerful in Ferrara, the Gonzaghi in Mantua. Gian Galeazzo, partly by force and partly by intrigue, discredited these minor despots, pushed his dominion to the very verge of Venice, and, having subjected Lombardy to his sway, proceeded to attack Tuscany. Pisa and Perugia were threatened with extinction, and Florence dreaded the advance of the Visconti arms, when the plague suddenly cut short his career of treachery and conquest in the year 1402. Seven years before his death Gian Galeazzo bought the title of duke of Milan and count of Pavia from the emperor Wenceslaus, and there is no doubt that he was aiming at the sovereignty of Italy. But no sooner was he dead than the essential weakness of an artificial state, built up by cunning and perfidious policy, with the aid of bought troops, dignified by no dynastic title, and consolidated by no sense of loyalty, became apparent. Gian Galeazzo’s duchy was a masterpiece of mechanical contrivance, the creation of a scheming intellect and lawless will. When the mind which had planned it was withdrawn, it fell to pieces, and the very hands which had been used to build it helped to scatter its fragments. The Visconti’s own generals, Facino Cane, Pandolfo Malatesta, Jacopo dal Verme, Gabrino Fondulo, Ottobon Terzo, seized upon the tyranny of several Lombard cities. In others the petty tyrants whom the Visconti had uprooted reappeared. The Estensi recovered their grasp upon Ferrara, and the Gonzaghi upon Mantua. Venice strengthened herself between the Adriatic and the Alps. Florence reassumed her Tuscan hegemony. Other communes which still preserved the shadow of independence, like Perugia and Bologna, began once more to dream of republican freedom under their own leading families. Meanwhile Gian Galeazzo had left two sons, Giovanni Maria and Filippo Maria. Giovanni, a monster of cruelty and lust, was assassinated by some Milanese nobles in 1412; and now Filippo set about rebuilding his father’s duchy. Herein he was aided by the troops of Facino Cane, who, dying opportunely at this period, left considerable wealth, a well-trained band of mercenaries, and a widow, Beatrice di Tenda. Filippo married and then beheaded Beatrice after a mock trial for adultery, having used her money and her influence in reuniting several subject cities to the crown of Milan. He subsequently spent a long, suspicious, secret and incomprehensible career in the attempt to piece together Gian Galeazzo’s Lombard state, and to carry out his schemes of Italian conquest. In this endeavour he met with vigorous opponents. Venice and Florence, strong in the strength of their resentful oligarchies, offered a determined resistance; nor was Filippo equal in ability to his father. His infernal cunning often defeated its own aims, checkmating him at the point of achievement by suggestions of duplicity or terror. In the course of Filippo’s wars with Florence and Venice, the greatest generals of this age were formed—Francesco Carmagnola, who was beheaded between the columns at Venice in 1432; Niccolò Piccinino, who died at Milan in 1444; and Francesco Sforza, who survived to seize his master’s heritage in 1450. Son of Attendolo Sforza, this Francesco received the hand of Filippo’s natural daughter, Bianca, as a reward for past service and a pledge of future support. When the Visconti dynasty ended by the duke’s death in 1447, he pretended to espouse the cause of the Milanese republic, which was then re-established; but he played his cards so subtly as to make himself, by the help of Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence, duke de facto if not de jure. Francesco Sforza was the only condottiero among many aspiring to be tyrants who planted themselves firmly on a throne of first-rate importance. Once seated in the duchy of Milan, he displayed rare qualities as a ruler; for he not only entered into the spirit of the age, which required humanity and culture from a despot, but he also knew how to curb his desire for territory. The conception of confederated Italy found in him a vigorous supporter. Thus the limitation of the Milanese duchy under Filippo Maria Visconti, and its consolidation under Francesco Sforza, were equally effectual in preparing the balance of power to which Italian politics now tended.