Part 22 (2/2)
[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.]
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