The Evolution of States Part 24

[Footnote 508: _Note by Leo._--"Except in the cities acquired latest, and by capitulation from the Romans"--_i.e._ the Greek Empire.]

[Footnote 509: Guizot, _Essais_, pp. 199-201; Stubbs, i, 277. Cp. refs.

in Buckle, author's ed. p. 348-49.]

[Footnote 510: _Europe during the Middle Ages_, ch. ii, pt. ii, _end_.

Compare Hodgkin on "the Feudal Anarchy which history has called, with unintended irony, the Feudal System," and on the fashion in which, in the capitularies of Charlemagne, "we have imperial sanction given to that most anti-social of all feudal practices, the levying of private war" (_Italy and her Invaders_, viii, 301-2).]

[Footnote 511: _Short History_, p. 15. "The liberated agricultural cla.s.ses multiplied rapidly, and brought vast tracts of abandoned soil under cultivation" (Boulting, p. 27). It probably needed such an expansion, we may note, to make possible the Crusades.]

[Footnote 512: Sismondi finally decides that in the tenth century feudalism had induced in the main rather a dissolution than an organisation of society (_Republiques_, i, 85-91). Cp. Guizot, _History de la civ. en France_, as cited, iii, 103, 272-75, iv, 77-79; _Essais_, v; and Boulting, p. 17.]

[Footnote 513: Cp. Sismondi, _Republiques_, i, 105-14.]

[Footnote 514: See Neander, _Church History_, Eng. tr., vii, 128 _sq._ and Milman, _Hist. Latin Christ._, lv, 61 _sq._, as to Hildebrandt's efforts to win public opinion to his side against clerical marriage, and the resulting growth of private judgment.]

[Footnote 515: "Die Abtheilung in Zunfte und die daran sich anknupfende Markt-polizei mogen die einzigen Inst.i.tute aus romischer Zeit sein, die sich auch unter den Longobarden erhielten" (Leo, i, 85; cp. p. 335). Cp.

Villari, _Two First Centuries_, Eng. trans, pp. 95-99.]

[Footnote 516: Leo decides (i, 335) that in Ravenna between 1031 and 1115 there appear "gar keine Stadtconsuln in Urkunden, aber wohl Leute, die sich _ex genere consulum_ nennen." Cp. Boulting-Sismondi, p. 58.]

[Footnote 517: As the general governor elected by the Venetians to stay their dissensions (697) bore the t.i.tle of doge or duke, which was that borne by the Greek governors of Italian provinces, the influence of imperial example must be admitted, especially as Venice continued to profess allegiance to the Greek empire. The cities of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi, again, while connected only nominally and commercially with Byzantium, gave the t.i.tle of doge to their first magistrate likewise (Sismondi, _Short History_, pp. 25, 26).]

[Footnote 518: Nys. _Researches in the History of Economics_, Eng.

trans. 1899, p. 61.]

[Footnote 519: _Id._ p. 59.]

[Footnote 520: Cp. Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. trans. 1823, iii, 256; Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th ed. iii, 328, 332. It is clear that the polarity of the magnet was known long before the practical use of it in the compa.s.s.]

[Footnote 521: Hallam, iii, 441; Pignotti, iii, 256-58.]

[Footnote 522: Sismondi, _Republiques_, i, 384, 385.]

[Footnote 523: Pignotti, iii, 262-64; Dante, _Paradiso_, xv, 116.]

[Footnote 524: Pignotti, iii, 265.]

[Footnote 525: "The citizens (900-1200) allowed themselves no other use of their riches than that of defending or embellishing their country"

(Sismondi, _Short History_, p. 23).]

[Footnote 526: Butler, _The Communes of Lombardy_, pp. 58-70.]

[Footnote 527: _Id._ p. 71.]

[Footnote 528: _Id._ P.55.]

[Footnote 529: Leo, as cited, i, 417.]

[Footnote 530: Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 74 _sq._]

[Footnote 531: _Id._ p. 79.]

[Footnote 532: _Id._ pp. 84-92.]

[Footnote 533: _Id._ p. 91.]

[Footnote 534: _Id._ p. 142.]

[Footnote 535: _Id._ pp. 143, 148, 151, 153.]

[Footnote 536: _Id._ pp. 119, 121.]

[Footnote 537: Villari, _Two First Centuries_, pp. 158-72.]

[Footnote 538: _Id._ p. 173.]

[Footnote 539: Sismondi, _Short History_, p. 77.]

[Footnote 540: _Id._ p. 82.]

Chapter II

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EVOLUTION

-- 1

In the twelfth century, then, we find in the full flush of life a number of prosperous Italian republics or "communes," closely resembling in many respects the City-States of ancient Greece. The salient differences were (1) the Christian Church, with its wealth[541] and its elaborate organisation; (2) the pretensions of the Empire; and (3) the presence of feudal n.o.bles, some of whom were first imposed by the German emperors on the cities, and who, after their exodus and their life as castle-holders, had in nearly every case compromised with the citizens, spending some months of every year in their town palaces by stipulation of the citizens themselves. All of these differentia counted for the worse to Italy, in comparison with h.e.l.las, as aggravations of the uncured evil of internal strife. The source of their strength--separateness and the need to struggle--was at the same time the source of their bane; for at no time do we find the Italian republics contemplating durable peace even as an ideal, or regarding political union as aught save a temporary expedient of the state of war.

On the familiar a.s.sumption of "race character" we should accordingly proceed to decide that the Italians, by getting mixed with the Teutons, had lost the "instinct of union" which built up Rome. Those who credit "Teutonic blood" with the revival never think of saddling it with the later ruinous strifes of cities and parties, or with the vices of the "Italian character." The rational explanation is, of course, that there was now neither a sufficient preponderance of strength in any one State to admit of its unifying Italy by conquest, nor such a concurrence of conditions as could enable any State to become thus preponderant; while on the other hand the Empire and the Church, each fighting for its own hand, were perpetual fountains of discord. The factions of Guelph (papal) and Ghibelline[542] (imperial) stereotyped and intensified for centuries every proclivity to strife inherent in the Italian populations.

All the cities alike were at once industrial and military, with the exception of Rome; and for all alike a career of mere plunder was out of the question, though every city sought to enlarge its territory.

Forcible unification could conceivably be wrought only by the emperor or the Papacy; and in the nature of things these powers became enemies, carrying feud into the heart of every city in Italy, as well as setting each on one or the other side according as the majority swayed for the moment. At times, as after the destruction of Milan by Frederick Barbarossa, hatred of the foreigner and despot could unite a number of cities in a powerful league; but though the emperor was worsted there was no excising the trouble of the separate interests of the bishops and the n.o.bles, or that of the old jealousies and hatreds of many of the cities for each other. Pope Innocent IV, after the death of Frederick II in 1250, turned against the Papacy many of the Milanese by his arrogance. They had made immense sacrifices for the Guelph cause; and their reward was to be threatened with excommunication for an ecclesiastical dispute.[543] The Christian religion not only did not avail to make Italians less madly quarrelsome than pagan Greeks: it embittered and complicated every difference; and if the cities could have agreed to keep out the Germans, the Papacy would not have let them.

Commonly it played them one against the other, preaching union only when there was a question of a crusade.

Some writers, even non-Catholics, have spoken of the Papacy as a unifying factor in Italian life. Machiavelli, who was pretty well placed for knowing where the shoe pinched, repeatedly (_Istorie fiorentine_, l. i; _Discorsi sopra t.i.to Livio_, i, 12) speaks of it bitterly as being at all times the source of invasion and of disunion in Italy. This is substantially the view of Gregorovius (_Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, B. iv, cap. iii, -- 3) as to the process in the city of Rome to begin with. So also Symonds: "The whole history of Italy proves that Machiavelli was right when he a.s.serted that the Church had persistently maintained the nation in disunion for the furtherance of her own selfish ends" (_Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots_, ed. 1907, p. 75).

As a civilising lore or social science the religion of professed love and fraternity, itself a theatre of divisions and discords,[544] counted literally for less than nothing against the pa.s.sions of ignorance, egoism, and patriotism; for ignorant all orders of the people still were--more ignorant than the Greeks of Athens--in the main matters of political knowledge and self-knowledge.[545] Yet such is the creative power of free intelligence even in a state of strife--given but the conditions of economic furtherance and variety of life and of culture-contact--that in this warring Italy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there grew up a civilisation almost as manifold as that of h.e.l.las itself. The elements of variety, of culture, and of compet.i.tion were present in nearly as potent a degree. In the north, in particular, the Lombard, and Tuscan, and other cities differed widely in their industries. Florence, besides being one of the great centres of European banking, was eminently the city of various occupations, manufacturing and trading in woollens and silks and gold brocades, working in gold and jewelry, the metals, and leather, and excelling in dyes. In 1266 the reformed const.i.tution specified twelve _arti_ or crafts, seven major and five minor, the latter list being later increased to fourteen.[546] Pisa, beginning as a commercial seaport, trading with the East, whither she exported the iron of Elba, became the first great seat of the woollen manufacture.[547] Milan, besides silks and woollens, manufactured in particular weapons and armour. Genoa had factories of wool, cotton, silk, maroquin, leather, embroidery, and silver and gold thread.[548] Bologna was in a special degree a culture city, with its school of law, and as such would have its special minor industries. But indeed every one of the countless Italian republics, with its specialty of dialect, of life, and of outward aspect, must have had something of its own to contribute to the complex whole.[549]

In the south the Norman kingdom set up in the eleventh century meant yet another norm of life, for there Frederick II established the University of Naples; and Saracen contact told alike on thought and imagination.

All through these regions there now reigned something like a common speech, the skeleton of old Latin newly suppled and newly clothed upon; and for all educated men the Latin itself was the instrument of thought and intercourse. For them, too, the Church and the twofold law const.i.tuted a common ground of culture and discipline. On this composite soil, under heats of pa.s.sion and stresses of warring energies, there gradually grew the many-seeded flower of a new literature.

Gradual indeed was the process. Italy, under stress of struggle, was still relatively backward at a time when Germany and France, and even England, under progressive conditions quickened with studious life;[550]

and there was a great intellectual movement in France, in particular, in the twelfth century, when Italy had nothing of the kind to show, save as regarded the important part played by the law school of Bologna in educating jurists for the whole of western Europe. For other developments there still lacked the needed conditions, both political and social. The first economic furtherance given to mental life by the cities seems to have been the endowment of law schools and chronicle-writers; the schools of Ravenna and Bologna, and the first chronicles, dating from the eleventh century. Salerno had even earlier had a medical school, long famous, which may or may not have been munic.i.p.ally endowed.[551] To the Church, as against her constant influence for discord and her early encouragement of illiteracy,[552]

must be credited a share in these beginnings. After the law school of Bologna (whence in 1222 was founded that of Padua, by a secession of teachers and students at strife with the citizens) had added medicine and philology to its chairs, the Papacy gave it a faculty of theology; and in Rome itself the Church had established a school of law. The first great literary fruit of this intellectual ferment is the _Summa Theologiae_ of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), a performance in which the revived study of Aristotle, set up by the stimulus of Saracen culture, is brought by a capacious and powerful mind to the insuperable task of philosophising at once the Christian creed and the problems of Christendom. Close upon this, the Latin expression of accepted medieval thought, comes the great achievement of Dante, wherein a new genius for the supreme art of rhythmic speech has preserved for ever the profound vibration of all the fierce and pa.s.sionate Italian life of the Middle Ages. In his own spirit he carries it all, save its vice and levity. Its pitiless cruelty, its intellectuality, its curious observation, its ingrained intolerance, its piercing flashes of tenderness, its capacity for intense and mystic devotion, its absolute dogmatism in every field of thought, the whole pell-mell of its vehement experience, throbs through every canto of his welded strain. And no less does he incarnate for ever its fatal incapacity for some political compromise. For Dante, politics is first and last a question of the dominance of his faction: his fellow-citizens are for him Guelphs or Ghibellines, and he shares the Florentine rabies against rival or even neighbouring towns; his imperialism serving merely to extend the field of blind strife, never to subject strife to the play of reason. Exiled for faction by the other faction, he foreshadows the doom of Florence.