The Evolution of States Part 22

If there be any real generic and persistent difference of temperament (there is none in variety of moral bias and mental capacity) or of nervous energy, it is presumably to be traced to climate. Some aspects of the problem are discussed at length in _The Saxon and the Celt_, pt. i, ---- 4, 5.

-- 2

The new life of Italy, so to speak, came of the ultimate impotence of the northern invaders for imperialism. Again and again, from the time of Odoaker, we find signs of a growth of new life in the cities, now partly thrown on their own resources; and it is only the too great stress of the subsequent invasions that postpones their fuller growth for so many centuries. It is to be remembered that these invasions wrought absolute devastation where, even under Roman rule, there had been comparative well-being. Thus the province of Illyria, between the Alps and the Danube, whose outlying and exposed character made it unattractive to the senatorial monopolists, was under the Empire well populated by a free peasantry, who abundantly recruited the army.[496] In the successive invasions this population was almost obliterated; and when Odoaker conquered the Rugians, who then held the territory, he brought mult.i.tudes of them into stricken Italy, to people and cultivate its waste lands.[497] Theodoric, in turn, is held to have revived prosperity after overthrowing Odoaker; and we have seen reason to believe that after the loss of Africa even southern Italy perforce revived her agriculture;[498] but early in Theodoric's reign (496) we find Pope Gelasius declaring, doubtless with exaggeration, that in the provinces of Aemilia and Tuscany human life was almost extinct; while Ambrose writes that Bologna, Modena, Reggio, Piacenza, and the adjacent country remained ruined and desolate.[499] After Theodoric, Belisarius, in a struggle that exhausted central Italy, almost annihilated the Goths; and under Na.r.s.es, who finished the conquest, there was again some recovery, the scattered remnants of the population congregating in the towns, so that Milan and others made fresh headway,[500] though the country remained in large part deserted.

This would seem to have been the turning-point in the long welter of Italian history. The Longobard conquest under Alboin forced on the process of driving the older inhabitants into the cities. The Ostrogothic kings, while they unwalled the towns they captured, had fortified Pavia, which was able to resist Alboin for four years, thus giving the other towns their lesson; and as he advanced the natives fled before him to Venice, to Genoa, to the cities of the Pentapolis, to Pisa, to Rome, to Gaeta, to Naples, and to Amalfi.[501] Above all, the cities of the coast, still adhering to the Greek Empire, and impregnable from land, were now allowed to retain for their own defence the revenue they had formerly paid to Constantinople; Naples won the right to elect her own dukes; and Venice won the status of an equal ally of Byzantium.[502] Thus once more there began to grow up, in tendency if not in form and name, republics of civilised and industrious men, in the teeth of barbarism and under the shadow of the name of empire.[503] Even in the eighth and ninth centuries the free populations of Rome and Ravenna were enrolled under the four heads of _clerici_, _optimates militiae_, the _milites_ or _exercitus_, and the _cives onesti_ or free _populus_.[504] Beneath all were the great ma.s.s of unfree; but here at least was a beginning of new munic.i.p.al life. The Longobards had not, as has been so often written, revived the spirit of liberty; conquest is the negation of the reciprocity in which alone liberty subsists; but they had driven other men into the conditions where the idea of liberty could revive; and in so far as "Lombard" civilisation in the next two hundred years distanced that of the Franks,[505] it was owing to the revival of old industries in the towns and the reactions of the other Italian cities, no less than to the renewed growth of rural population and agriculture.

Sismondi (_Republiques_, i, 55, 402-5; _Fall_, i, 242) uses the conventional phrase as to the Longobards reviving the spirit of freedom, while actually showing its fallacy. In his _Short History of the Italian Republics_ (p. 13), he tells in the same breath that the invaders "introduced" several of their sentiments, "particularly the habit of independence and resistance to authority," and that in their conquests they considered the inhabitants "their property equally with the land." Dunham (_Europe in the Middle Ages_, 1835, i, 8) similarly speaks of the Longobards as "infusing a new spirit" into the "slavish minds of the Italians," and then proceeds (p. 9) to show that what happened was a flight of Italians from Longobard tyranny. He admits further (p.

17) that the Longobard code of laws was "less favourable to social happiness than almost any other, the Visigothic, perhaps, alone excepted"; and (p. 19) that the Longobards, wherever they could, "destroyed the [free] munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions by subjecting the cities to the jurisdiction of the great military feudatories, the true and only tyrants of the country." Gibbon decides that the Longobards possessed freedom to elect their sovereign, and sense to decline the frequent use of that dangerous privilege (ch. 45, Bohn ed. v, 125); but p.r.o.nounces their government milder and better than that of the other new barbarian kingdoms (p. 127). Sismondi again (_Fall_, i, 259; so also Boulting in his recast of the _Republiques_, p. 8) declares that their laws, for a barbarian people, were "wise and equal." The midway truth seems to be that the dukes or provincial rulers came to feel some ident.i.ty of interest with their subjects. Later jurists called their laws _asininum jus, quoddam jus quod faciebant reges per se_ (Symonds, _Renaissance in Italy_, 2nd ed. i, 45).

Prof. Butler, in his generally excellent history of _The Lombard Communes_, is unduly receptive of the old formula that "the _infusion of Teutonic blood_ had given new life to the Peninsula"

(p. 37; also p. 38). His own narrative conflicts with the a.s.sertion; for he writes that the long isolation of such cities as Cremona in the midst of Teuton enemies "must have led to a rekindling of military and munic.i.p.al spirit and the power of initiative" (p. 35). He notes, too, that the building up of a new and active "aristocracy" in the cities from plebeian elements was hateful to the Teuton, as represented by Otto of Freisingen in the time of Barbarossa (p. 48). And what had the Teutons to do with the making of Venice? And what of the similar movement in Spain, Africa, Illyria, and Gaul?

If the foregoing criticism be valid, it must be further turned against the expressions of Bishop Stubbs concerning the effect of the Teutonic conquest in setting up the Romance literatures. "The breath of life of the new literatures," he writes (_Const. Hist._ 4th ed. i, 7), "was Germanic.... The poetry of the new nations is that of the leading race ... even in Italy it owes all its sweetness and light to the _freedom_ which has breathed from beyond the Alps." Here the thesis s.h.i.+fts unavowedly from "race" to "freedom," and all the while no data whatever are offered for generalisations which decide in a line some of the root problems of sociology. A laborious scholar can thus write as if in matters of total historic generalisation there were needed neither proof nor argument, while the most patient research is needed to settle a single detail of particular history.

On the whole, it may be psychologically accurate to say that the invaders, by setting up a new caste of freemen where before all cla.s.ses were alike subordinate to the imperial tyranny, created a variation in the direction of a new self-government, the spectacle of privilege stimulating the unprivileged to desire it. But any conquest whatever might do this; and it is a plain paralogism to conclude that where the subjugated people does _not_ react the fault is its own, while where it does the credit is to go to the conquerors. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone to reason that the Norman Conquest of England was as such the bringer of the liberty later achieved there. Yet, as regards the Teutonic invasions of Italy, the principle pa.s.ses current on all sides; and Guizot endorses it in one lecture (_Hist. de la civ. en France_, i, 7ieme lecon, _end_), though in the next he gives an objective account which practically discredits it.

As regards the ideals of justice and freedom in general, the Teutonic laws, being framed not for a normal barbarian state but for a society of conquerors and conquered, were in some respects rather more iniquitous than the Roman. In particular the Ostrogothic laws of Theodoric and his son punish the crimes of the rich by fines, and put to death the poor for the same offences; while the degradation of the slave is in all the early Teutonic codes constantly insisted on. (Cp. Milman, _Hist. Lat. Chr._ 4th ed. ii, 36, and refs. Roman law also, however, differed in practice for rich and poor. Cp. Ca.s.siodorus, l. ii, pp. 24, 25; iii, 20, 36; iv, 39; v, 14, and Finlay, ed. cited. i, 236.) Whether or not Gregory the Great, as has been a.s.serted (Milman, as cited, p. 52), was the first to free slaves on the principle of human equality, he did not get the idea from the Teutons.

It took centuries, in any case, to develop the new upward tendency to a decisive degree. The Frankish conquest, like others, disarmed and unwalled the population as far as possible; and it seems to have been only in the tenth century, when the Hungarians repeatedly raided northern Italy (900-24), and the Saracens the southern coasts and the isles, that a general permission was given to the towns to defend themselves.[506] This time the balance of power lay with the defence; and to the mere disorderliness of the barbarian rule on one hand may in part be attributed the relative success of the cities of the later Empire as compared with those of the earlier. Latin Rome had not only disarmed its cities but accustomed them for centuries to ease and idleness; and before a numerous foe, bent on conquest, they made no resistance. Goths, Longobards, and Franks in turn sought to keep all but their own strong places disarmed; but their system could not wholly prevent the growth of a militant spirit in the industrial towns. On the other hand, the Hungarians and Saracens were bent not on conquest but on mere plunder, and were thus manageable foes. Had the Normans, say, come at this time into Italy, they could have overrun the quasi-Teutonic communities as easily as the Teutons had done the Romans or each other.

But the conditions being as they were, the swing was towards the independence of the cities; at first under the heads.h.i.+p of the bishops, who in the period of collapse of the Carlovingian empire obtained part of the authority previously wielded by counts.[507] At this stage the bishop was by his position partly identified with the people, whom he would on occasion champion against the counts. Thus a new conception of social organisation was shaped by the pressures of the times; and when Otto came in 951 the foundations of the republics were laid. The next stage was the effacement of the authority of the counts within the cities; the next an extension of the bishops' authority over the whole diocese, which was as a rule the old Roman _civitas_ or county. Thus the new munic.i.p.alities came into being partly under the aegis of the Church.

Hallam (_Middle Ages_, ch. iii, pt. i) describes Sismondi as stating that Otto "erected" the Lombard cities into munic.i.p.al communities, and dissents from that view. But Sismondi (_Republiques_, i, 95) expressly says that there are no charters, and that the munic.i.p.al independence of the cities is to be inferred from their subsequent claims of prescription. As there is nothing to show for any regular government from the outside in the preceding period of turmoil, the inference that _some_ self-government existed before and under Otto is really forced upon us. Ranke (_Latin and Teutonic Nations_, Eng. tr. p. 11) p.r.o.nounces that the first _consuls_ of the Italian cities, chosen by themselves, appear at the date of the first Crusade, 1100. "Beyond all question, we meet with them first in Genoa on the occasion of an expedition to the Holy Land." (They appear again in 1117 at a meeting of reconciliation for all Lombardy at Milan. Prof. W.F.

Butler, _The Communes of Lombardy_, 1906, pp. 76-77.) But this clearly does not exclude prior forms of self-government for domestic needs. Consuls of some kind are noted "in Fano and other places in 883; in Rome in 901; Orvieto, 975; Ravenna, 990; Ferrara, 1015; Pisa and Genoa, 1100; Florence, 1101." Boulting-Sismondi, p.

63. (This last date appears to be an error. The doc.u.ment hitherto dated 1102 belongs to 1182. Villari, _Two First Centuries of Florentine History_, Eng. tr. pp. 55, 84. But there is doc.u.mentary evidence for Florentine consuls in 1136. _Id._ p. 115.) Hallam himself points out that in the years 1002-6 the annalists, in recording the wars of the cities, speak "of the people and not of their leaders, which is the true republican tone of history"; and notes that a contemporary chronicle shows the people of Pavia and Milan acting as independent states in 1047.

This state of things would naturally arise when the emperor and the n.o.bles lived in a state of mutual jealousy. Cp. Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_, pp. 127-29, 139-40, 150, 176. Mr. Bryce does not attempt to clear up the dispute, but he recognises that the liberties of the cities would naturally "shoot up in the absence of the emperors and the feuds of the princes." And this is the view finally of Heinrich Leo: "Seit Otto bemerken wir eine auffallende Aenderung in der Politik der ganzen nordlichen Italiens" (_Geschichte von Italien_, 1829, i, 325; Bk. iv, Kap. i, -- 1). Leo points out that the granting of exemptions to the north Italian cities came from the Ottos. "It was not, however," he goes on, "as it has been supposed we must a.s.sume, the blending of Roman _citizens.h.i.+p_ (which in the Lombard cities had never existed[508] in the form of commune or munic.i.p.ality [_Gemeinde_]) with the Lombard and German, but the blending of the survivors and the labourers, mostly of Roman descent, with the almost entirely German-derived free _Gemeinde_, through which the exemptions were obtained, and which gave a new aspect to the Italian cities" (pp. 326-27).

Similarly Karl Hegel, after noting the a.n.a.logies between Roman _collegia_ and German gilds, decides that "the German gilds were of native (_einheimischen_) origin, the same needs setting up the same order of inst.i.tutions." He adds that the Christian Church first evoked in the gilds a real brotherly feeling. (_Stadte und Gilden der germanischen Volker in Mittelalter_, 1891, Einleit. p. 10.) He admits, however, that the gilds, when first traced under Charlemagne, are forbidden under the name _Gildonia_, as oath-societies; and that they seem to have been unknown among the Franks (pp. 4, 6).

-- 3

Almost concurrently with the new growth of political life in the cities, rural life readjusted itself under a system concerning the merits of which there has been as much dispute as concerning its origins--the system of feudalism. Broadly speaking, that began in the relation between the leaders of the Germanic invasion and their chief followers, who, receiving lands as their share, or at another time as a reward, were expected as a matter of course to back the king in time of war, and in their turn ruled their lands and retainers on that principle. When the principle of heredity was established as regarded the crown, it was necessarily affirmed as regards land tenures; and soon it was applied as a matter of course to nearly all the higher royal offices and "benefices" in the Frankish empire,[509] which after Charlemagne became the model for the Germanic and the French and English kingdoms. Thus "the aristocratic system was in possession of society"; and the conflict which inevitably arose between the feudal baronage and the monarchic power served in time to aggrandise the cities, whose support was so important to both sides.

[See Stubbs, _Const.i.tutional History of England_, 4th ed. i, 273-74, _note_, for a sketch of the discussion as to the rise of feudalism. It has been obscured, especially among the later writers, by lack of regard for exact and consistent statement. Thus Bishop Stubbs endorses Waitz's dictum that "the gift of an estate by the king involved no _defined_ obligation of service"; going on to say (p. 275) that a king's _beneficium_ was received "with a _special undertaking_ to be faithful"; and again adding the footnote: "Not a _promise_ of _definite_ service, but a _pledge_ to _continue faithful in the conduct in consideration of which the reward is given_." Again, the bishop admits that by this condition the giver had a hold on the land, "through which he was able to enforce fidelity" (p. 275, _note_); yet goes on to say (p. 277) that homage and fealty "depended on conscience only for their fulfilment." Bishop Stubbs further remarks (i, 278) that there was a "_great difference in social results_ between French (= Frankish) and German feudalism," by reason of the prostrate state of the old Gallic population; going on however to add: "But the _result was the same_, feudal government, a graduated system of jurisdiction based on land tenure, in which every lord judged, taxed, and commanded the cla.s.s next below him; in which abject slavery formed the lowest, and irresponsible tyranny the highest grade; in which private war, private coinage, private prisons, took the place of the imperial inst.i.tutions of government." Of course the bishop has previously (p. 274, _note_) endorsed Waitz's view, that "_all_ the people were bound to be faithful to the king"; but the pa.s.sage above cited seems to be his final generalisation.]

Whatever its social value, the feudal system is essentially a blend of Roman and barbarian points of polity; and in France, the place of its development, Gallic usage played a modifying part. It is dubiously described as growing up "from two great sources--the _beneficium_ and the practice of commendation"--the first consisting (_a_) in gifts of land by the kings out of their own estates, and (_b_) in surrenders of land to churches or powerful men, on condition that the surrenderer holds it as tenant for rent or service; while commendation consisted in becoming a va.s.sal without any surrender of t.i.tle. "The union of the beneficiary tie with that of commendation completed the idea of feudal obligation." The _beneficium_ again, "is partly of Roman, partly of German origin," and "the reduction of a large Roman population,"

nominally freemen under the Roman system, "to dependence," placed it on a common footing with the German semi-free cultivator, "and conduced to the wide extension of the inst.i.tution. Commendation, on the other hand, may have had a Gallic or Celtic origin...." In one or other of these developments, the German _comitatus_ or chief's war-band, originally so different, "ultimately merged its existence." On the whole, then, the Teutons followed Gallo-Roman leads.

[See Stubbs, i, 275, 276; cp. p. 4; and Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_, pp. 123-24. Under Otto, observes Mr. Bryce (p. 125), "the inst.i.tutions of primitive Germany were almost all gone." Elsewhere Bishop Stubbs decides (p. 10) that "the essence of feudal law is custom," and again (p. 71), that "no creative genius can be expected among the rude leaders of the tribes of North Germany. The new life started at the point at which the old had been broken off." Then in the matter of the feudal system, "the old" must have been mainly the Gallo-Roman, for feudalism arose in Frankish Gaul, not in Germany. In an early pa.s.sage (p. 3) Dr. Stubbs confuses matters by describing the government of France as "originally little more than a simple adaptation of the old German polity to the government of a conquered race," but proceeds to admit that "the Franks, gradually uniting in religion, blood, and language with the [Romanised] Gauls, retained and developed the idea of feudal subordination...." The rest of the sentence again introduces error. For a good general view of the evolution of feudalism see Prof. Abdy's _Lectures on Feudalism_, 1890, lect. v-vii.]

To pa.s.s a moral judgment on this system, either for or against, is to invert the problem. It was simply the most stable, or rather the most elastic arrangement possible in the species of society in which it arose; and we are now concerned with it merely as a conditioning influence in European civilisation. Hallam, severe towards all other men's generalisations, lightly p.r.o.nounces that "in the reciprocal services of lord and va.s.sal, there was ample scope for every magnanimous and disinterested energy," and that "the heart of man, when placed in circ.u.mstances which have a tendency to excite them, will seldom be deficient in such sentiments." On the other hand he concedes that "the bulk of the people, it is true, were degraded by servitude," though he affirms that "this had no connection with the feudal tenures"; and he is forced to decide that "the peace and good order of society were not promoted by this system. Though private wars did not originate in the feudal customs, it is impossible to doubt that they were perpetuated by so convenient an inst.i.tution, which indeed owed its universal establishment to no other cause."[510] The latter judgment sufficiently countervails the others; and the claim that feudalism was a school of moral discipline, which gradually subst.i.tuted good faith for bad, will be endorsed by few students of the history of feudal times. A more plausible plea is that of Sismondi, that the feudal n.o.bles of Italy, finding themselves resisted in the cities, which they had been wont to regard as their property, and finding the need of retainers for the defence of their castles, affranchised and protected their peasants as they had never done before. There resulted, he believes, an extension of agriculture which greatly increased the population in the tenth and eleventh centuries.[511] This is partially provable, and it gives us the standpoint most favourable to feudalism; which on the other hand is seen in the main to have soon reached its constructive limits, and to have promoted division no less than union.[512]

It is important here to realise how in the new civilisation, with its new language, there subsisted simultaneously all of the forms of spontaneous aggregation which had been evolved in the older Roman life.

The aristocratic families in their very nomenclature exhibited anew the old evolution of the system of _gentes_, men being named "of the Uberti," "of the Buondelmonti," and so on. At the same time the industrial groups formed _their_ communities, as the _scholae_ of workers had done of old; and in the political history of Florence we see const.i.tution after const.i.tution built out of political units so formed.

First came the primary patriotism of the family stock; then that of the trade or industrial group; and only as a balance of these separate and largely hostile interests did the City-State subsist. Thus the new Italian civilisation was on its political side fundamentally and organically atomistic, civic union being never a primary but always a secondary adjustment among groups whose first loyalty was to the primary fraternity. It was hard enough to evolve out of all this a common civic interest: to rise yet higher was impossible to the men of that era. And all the while the separate corporation of the Church, despite its inner feuds, tended to seek its separate interest as against all others.

As regards Italy, then, the value of the imperial feudal system, operating through the machinery of the bishoprics, was that it freed the energies of the cities, where alone the higher civilisation could germinate; but on the other hand it fostered in them a spirit of localism and separatism[513] that was ultimately fatal. The old Roman unity had been completely broken up by the invasions, by the strifes of Goths and Byzantines, by the sheer need for individual defence; and the empire, warring with the Papacy, fixed the tendency. Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Milan, and the smaller cities alike felt and acted as independent States, each against the other, forming occasional alliances only as separate nations or kings might do. In the ever-changing conflict of n.o.bles, emperor, pope, cities, and bishops, all parties alike developed the spirit of self-a.s.sertion,[514] and wrought for their own special incorporation. At times prelates and cities combined against n.o.bles, as under Conrad the Salic (1035-39), who was forced to revise the feudal law and free the remaining serfs; later, members of each species sided with pope or emperor in the strifes of Hildebrandt and Henry IV and their successors over the question of invest.i.tures, till the general interest compelled a peace. During these ages of inconclusive conflict the cities, thus far acting mainly in conjunction with their bishops or archbishops, developed their militia; their _caroccio_ or banner-bearing fighting-car; and their inst.i.tution of public election of consuls. Here the very name tells of the power of the Roman tradition, as against the supposed capacity of the Teutonic races for spontaneous free organisation and self-government--tells too of the survival of a majority of Roman-speaking people even in the upper and middle cla.s.ses of the cities. We may readily grant, as against Savigny and his disciples, that the Roman inst.i.tution of the _curia_ had not been preserved in the cities of Lombardy. There was no reason why it should have been, even if the Longobard kings had been inclined to use it as a means of extorting taxation; for in the last ages of the Empire it had become detestable to the upper citizens themselves.

[Savigny's proposition seems to be sufficiently confuted in a page or two by Leo, _Geschichte von Italien_, 1829, i, 82, 83. Karl Hegel later wrote a whole treatise to the same effect, _Geschichte der Stadtverfa.s.sung von Italien_, Leipzig, 1847. See also F. Morin, _Origines de la democratie_, 3e ed. 1865, pp. 34-35, 59, 94, 122, etc. Guizot uncritically followed Raynouard, who held with or antic.i.p.ated Savigny. As to the general revolt against the _curia_, cp. Leo, i, 47, and Guizot, _Civilisation en France_, i, 52-63. As to the theory of a Roman basis for the early civic organisation of Saxon Britain, cp. Pearson, _History of England during the Early and Middle Ages_, 1867, i, 264; Scarth, _Roman Britain_, App. i; Stubbs, _Const.i.tutional History of England_, 4th ed. i, 99; and Karl Hegel, _Stadte und Gilden der germanischen Volker im Mittelalter_, 1891, Einleit. pp. 10, 33, 34.]

But other Roman inst.i.tutions remained even in the Lombard cities, in respect of the organisation of trades and commerce;[515] and apart from the Roman survivals at Ravenna,[516] the free cities of the coast, which had remained nominally attached to Byzantium, had _their_ elective inst.i.tutions, not specially democratic, but sufficiently "free" to incite the Lombard towns to similar procedure.[517] Venice in particular was moulded from the first by Byzantine influences. "Industry, commerce, economic methods, and financial inst.i.tutions were affected as much as manners, the arts, and even religious life. Greek was the language of eastern trade, and served many Venetians as a second tongue."[518]

Venice and Genoa alike developed a national police on Byzantine lines, prescribing the shape, construction, and manning of vessels[519] in the very spirit of late imperial Rome. And the cities of the peninsula could not but be similarly influenced. At all events it was in the train of these earlier developments, and perhaps in some degree on stimulus from papal Rome, that the new organic life of the Lombard and Tuscan cities began to develop itself in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The first seats of new commerce were in those cities to which, as we have seen, numbers of the old Italian population had fled before the Gothic invaders. Amalfi was such a seat even in the ninth century; and to its merchants is credited the first traffic with the East in the Saracen period, as well as the first employment of the mariner's compa.s.s in navigation.[520] Next flourished Pisa, where also, perhaps, the ancient commerce had never wholly died out;[521] then her successful rivals, Genoa and Venice. And always commerce formed the basis of the revival.

Once begun, the new life was extraordinarily energetic on the industrial and constructive side, the independence and rivalry of so many communities securing for the time the maximum of effort. Already in the seventh century, indeed, their industry stood for a new era in history.[522] Where before even the men of the cities had gone clad in skins after the manner of the barbarian conquerors, they now began to weave for themselves woollen cloths like the civilised ancients.[523]

Soon the art of weaving the finer cloths, which had hitherto been imported from Greece in so far as they were used at all, followed the simpler craft of wool-weaving.[524] It was in these cities that architecture may be said to have had its first general revival in western Europe since the beginning of the decay of Rome. Walls, towers, ports, quays, ca.n.a.ls, munic.i.p.al palaces, prisons, churches, cathedrals--such were the first outward and visible signs of the new era in Italian civilisation.[525] On these foundations were to follow the literature and the art and science which began the civilisation of modern Europe, the whole presided over and in part ordered and inspired by the recovered use of the great system of ancient Roman law, which too began to be redelivered to Europe early in the twelfth century from Italian Bologna.

[The public buildings of the eleventh century are to this day among the greatest in Italy. Cp. Sismondi with Testa, _History of the War of Frederick I against the Communes of Lombardy_, Eng. trans, p.

101. Before the tenth century the houses were mostly of wood, and thatched with straw or s.h.i.+ngles (Testa, p. 11). It seems highly probable that the great development of building in the eleventh century was due to the sense of a new lease of life which came upon Christendom when it was found that the world did not come to an end, as had been expected, with the year 1000. That expectation must have gone far to paralyse all activity towards the end of the tenth century.]

And whereas the common political path to independence had been originally by way of the heads.h.i.+p of the bishop as against the count, that heads.h.i.+p in turn disappears during the eleventh century without any visible or general cataclysm. It would seem as if, when the obsessing fear of the end of the world with which men entered the year 1000 had pa.s.sed away, the secular spirit recovered new life; and the intimate tyranny of the feudal representative of the military monarch being no longer a danger, the hand of the bishop was in turn thrown off. For a time the combination of city and prelate was politically valid, as in the case of Archbishop Aribert of Milan, under whose nominal rule the civic _caroccio_ seems to have made its appearance; but even Aribert was shelved before his death, in the course of a civil strife between the people and the n.o.bles. Thenceforward, for an age, the great Lombard city practically ruled itself, the n.o.bles being included in a compromise brought about by Lanzone, who, himself a n.o.ble, had led the faction of the burghers. Fresh strifes followed, in which the succeeding archbishops bore part; but the virtual autonomy of the city remained.[526]

A similar evolution took place throughout northern Italy, in a sufficiently simple fas.h.i.+on. The bishops were still in large measure elected by the people, and rival candidates for vacant sees were always ready to outbid each other in surrendering political functions which were becoming ever harder to fulfil.[527] Beyond this, the course of the final stage of the emanc.i.p.ation of the cities is not traceable. "All that we can say is that at the opening of the eleventh century the bishops exercised in the cities the authority which had formerly been vested in the counts: at the close the cities have reduced the prelates to insignificance, and stand before us as so many free republics."[528]

"The power of the bishops was the calyx which for a certain time had kept the flower of Italian life close-packed within the bud. Then the calyx weakened and opened, and Italian civic life unfolded itself to the eye to form and bear fruit."[529]

To this, however, we should add that in Florence the process was somewhat different. Under the Franks, Florence was ruled, like other cities, by a count, who replaced the Longobard duke; and under the later Germanic empire all Tuscany, and some further territory, is found ruled by a Marquis, or Markgraf, Ugo, in the tenth century. In the latter part of the tenth century his descendant Matilda sided with Hildebrandt against the Emperor. At this period Florence was a centre of the papal movement of monastic reform; and the people actually rose against a simoniacal bishop, whom they fought for five years[530] (1063-68). Here, under the rule of Countess Matilda, the republic or "commune" is seen growing up rather of its own faculty than by help of the bishop; it already calls itself _Populus Florentinus_;[531] and after Matilda's death in 1115, it speedily develops the self-governing functions which it had partially exercised in her lifetime.[532] And Florence, be it noted, was the most democratic in population of the northern cities from the beginning.[533]

In no case, however, should we be right in supposing that "republic" or "commune" or "free city" meant a population united in devotion to a civic ideal. The eternal impulses of strife and repulsion had in no degree been eliminated by the formation of new State units. In Florence we find all the elements of Greek _stasis_ at work in the first century of the commune.[534] Among the _grandi_ were men who had risen from the people, and men descended from old feudal houses; and these spontaneously ranged themselves in factions. Such a division furthered imperialism by inclining groups to take the side of the emperor, who, wherever he could, set up his _Podesta_ (_potestas_ or "authority") in the cities.[535] Imperialistic n.o.bles further formed groups called "Societies of the Towers," each of which had its common defensive tower or fort, communicating with the houses of neighbouring members; the officials of these societies were at times called consuls; and from these were usually chosen, in the early days, the consuls of the commune.[536] At times they were also consuls of trade guilds, a state of things proving a certain amount of a.s.similation between the trading and the n.o.ble cla.s.s, who together formed the enfranchised "people," the town artisans and the rural cultivators of the surrounding _contado_ or "county" being excluded.

The close community thus formed exhibited very much the same political tendencies as had marked that of early republican Rome. The cities, constantly flouted and menaced by the castled n.o.bility of the surrounding territory, who blackmailed pa.s.sing traders, soon learned to use the iron hand as against these, who in turn sought the emperor's protection; and cities wont to put down n.o.bles were prompt to seek to coerce each other. On the death of the Emperor Frederick I (1197), Florence set on foot a League of the Tuscan cities, which, while primarily hostile to the Empire, repelled the claim of the Papacy to over-lords.h.i.+p as heir of the Countess Matilda. On such a basis there might conceivably have arisen a new and strong national life; but soon Florence, like old Athens, was oppressing her allies, who gave their sympathy to a town like Semifonte, the refuge of all who fled from places conquered and taxed by her. To individual allies like Sienna, Florence was substantially faithless, and so strengthened from the first the fatal tendency to separatism--this while the inner social sunderance was steadily deepening.[537]

None of the forces at work was remedial on this side; the regimen of the _Podesta_, even when he was actually a foreigner, furthered instead of checking strife between communities;[538] and the more "aristocratic"

cities were at least as quarrelsome as the less. Bologna played the tyrant city as vigorously as Florence.[539] Rome was among the worst governed of all. In the thirteenth century, under Innocent IV, we find the fighting factions of the n.o.bles using the Coliseum and other ancient monuments as fortresses, garrisoned by bandits in their pay, who pillaged traders and pa.s.sengers; and not the Papacy, but the "senator"

chosen by the people--a Bolognese n.o.ble--put them down, hanging n.o.bles and bandits alike.[540]

Such was civilisation at the centre of Christendom after a thousand years of Christianity. The notable fact is that through all this wild play of primitive pa.s.sion there _was_ yet growing up a new Italian civilisation; and it is part of our task to trace its causation.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 455: _Germania_, c. 2.]

[Footnote 456: For a good view of the many points in common between Teutonic barbarism and normal savagery, see the synopsis of Guizot, _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, i, 7ieme lecon. Lamprecht acquiesces (_What is History?_ 1905, p. 213).]

[Footnote 457: "Everything about them [the Longobards], even for many years after they have entered upon the sacred soil of Italy, speaks of mere savage delight in bloodshed and the rudest forms of sensual indulgence" (Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, 2nd ed. v, 156. Cp.

Lamprecht, _What is History?_ pp. 48-49.)]

[Footnote 458: Ranke's statement (_Latin and Teutonic Nations._ Eng. tr.

p. 1) that the "collective German nations at last brought about" a Latino-Teutonic unity is a merely empirical proposition, true in no organic sense.]

[Footnote 459: Gibbon, ch. 11, Bohn ed. i, 365.]

[Footnote 460: It is true that none of the generals mentioned was an Italian. Stilicho was indeed a Vandal; Aetius was a Scythian; Belisarius was a Thracian; and Na.r.s.es probably a Persian. But they handled armies made up of all races; and their common qualification was a military science to be learned only from Roman tradition. Cp. Finlay, _History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans_, ed. 1877, i, 211.]

[Footnote 461: Paulus Orosius, vii, 43. The record has every appearance of trustworthiness, the historian premising that at Bethlehem he heard the blessed Jerome tell how he had known a wise old inhabitant of Narbonne, who was highly placed under Theodosius, and had known Athaulf intimately; and who often told Jerome how that great and wise king thus delivered himself.]

[Footnote 462: Sismondi, citing the _Diplomata_, tom. iv, p. 616.]