IN THE MIDDLE AGES Italy was occupied by a vast number of political communities, some large, others very small, some self-governing, some under despotic rule. These small states were forever contending with each other, often to the death, for independence, or increase of territory, or control of trade-routes, or preponderance. They frequently grouped themselves in unstable alliance to meet some common peril or gratify some common greed. And the domestic politics of Italy were further subject to perturbation, owing to the presence of an authoritative and aspiring Papacy within her gates, and the temptations that the fair land offered to the rapacity of the foreigner without.
Several of the self-governing communities of Italy achieved imperishable lustre and distinction. The eldest children of liberty, they became the mighty mothers of the art, the literature, the commerce, and the civilization of the modern world. To each of the more illustrious of these republics detailed attention will be given in due course. But their relations with surrounding communities were subject to protean transformations and interpenetrating complexities that cannot be adequately comprehended without first surveying the continuous development of the Peninsula as a whole—the higher unfolding of a process which contained and conditioned the life of each individual state. That process begins with the period when the progressive decay of the Roman world led to its disintegration, when Italy experienced successive shocks of invasion by races of barbarians or semi-civilized peoples, some of whom settled on the disorganized land and ruled it; it embraces the struggle of Pope, Lombard, and the Greek representatives of the Roman Empire for supremacy; it includes the occupation of the fairest portion of the country by colonist-soldiers from Mohammedan shores, and its subjugation by Norman adventurers from the fields of Cotentin; it proceeds to the great struggle between the resuscitated empire in the grasp of German Caesars, and the illimitable ambition of the spiritual sovereigns of Europe; it .concerns itself with the degeneracy of the Pontiff into an Italian princelet, with the coalescence of the independent communes into larger states, with the foreign interference which their quarrels caused them to evoke, and with the subjugation of the petty despotisms and enfeebled republics of the Peninsula alike, by the unsuspected power of the great monarchies beyond the Alps; it ends with the diversion and expansion of the main stream of European thought and life from Italy to the North, carrying with it the precious and immortal results of the vigour and vitality of Italian character and intellect.
Imperial Rome had imposed her yoke on the Western World. Corrupted by the increase of wealth that accrued, her citizens supported by the corn of conquered countries, and emasculated by pleasures provided for by the public treasury, she became unfitted either for administration or defence. The decentralization of the Empire by Diocletian, followed by the founding of New Rome in the Orient by Constantine, and the partition of the Roman world into executive and administrative halves by Theodosius, tended towards the isolation of Italy. Constantinople, Alexandria, and Trier became the rivals of Rome, and the establishment of the Court at Milan, the great city that guarded the ingress of the North through the barriers of the Alps, or at Ravenna, surrounded by waterways that rendered her impregnable, dealt heavy blows at the prestige and supremacy of the metropolis, and were a stepping-stone to the disintegration of Italy itself. Hordes of barbarians, pressed forward by the onslaught of wild Mongolian tribes from the steppes of Asia, threatened the northern frontiers. Enfeebled Italy no longer grew a sufficiency of crops to feed a large population, there were no men to repel the invaders, and in a.d. 370 Valentinian I. established colonies of barbarians to cultivate the forsaken plain of Lombardy. The migrating mercenaries that were engaged to defend the country had neither a common language nor a common religion; there was nothing to inspire pride in the legion or secure its sincere attachment to the Emperor, and the hearts of its men were set on booty. And the poorer classes of Italy had been replaced by slaves on the great estates which the great nobles had gathered together, while the squirearchy had fallen info decay.
From a very early time, when Rome was a small republic, the poorer citizens had been oppressed by the State. In the frequent wars which ravaged the republic the farmers were called forth to fight, and, beyond precarious booty, they got no redress for the burning of their homesteads or the spoiling of their crops. The cruel law of debt also had tended to the extinction of a middle class. Farming was further rendered unremunerative by the competition in food-supplies that came from conquered countries beyond the seas. Large estates grew at the expense of small holdings, wealth accumulated and men decayed, and slaves replaced a population of freemen. Hence, ultimately, the supply of soldiers ran short. After the second Punic War, b.c. 202, even Italy was characterized by a large slave population, with no interest in its defence, and a turbulent, pauperized, and pampered proletariat, kept quiet by “ panem et circenses “ for the comfort and security of a dissolute and degenerate nobility. In the time of the Empire famine further reduced the population, and the State was incessantly weakened by the wars of contending aspirants to the purple. Side by side with the Imperial Government, local self-government had been highly developed by means of the “ curia,” a term still preserved in the Roman Church. The curia consisted of “decurions,” corresponding to our “esquires,” who, under the earlier emperors, exhibited an honourable emulation in the service of the community, and contributed largely from their private purse to public works and their adornment. But the greed of the Emperors and Caesars (who since the time of Diocletian had been multiplied), and still more of their households, together with the requirements of a large bureaucracy, imposed such burdens on the curia that its members gradually became the bond slaves of the Court, compelled to minister to its necessities, and provided with no loophole for escape. The free-will offerings once applied to the public service were converted into a grinding tax, which, by the ruin of one decurion after another, became still more ruinous to the rest. Further, Christianity competed with the curia, and benevolence built churches instead of aqueducts and baths. Inconceivably bad finance impoverished the Empire by taking an excessive share of produce from the cultivators of the soil, and by farming out taxes to the hated “ publicans.” There was no remission granted, but as the agriculturalists were ruined one by one the burthen of taxation became heavier to the survivors in geometrical progression. The old Roman spirit died with the Pagan faith, the ideal city of God replaced the cementing force of belief in the city of the seven hills, and jealousy between the divisions of the Empire prevented either section from helping the other (Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, Book II, Chap. IX.). But Rome, deprived of political supremacy, clung to her position as the metropolis whence Christianity had interpenetrated the Roman world, and as the seat of a long line of bishops that claimed to inherit from St. Peter, and that, through the prestige and erewhile predominance of the ancient mistress of the world, took a natural precedence in the Church. The decay of her imperial prerogative favoured a “ vita nuova,” a rebirth of Roman claims to supremacy no longer supported by the thunder of the legions, but defended by a Divine panoply and a wielding of the sword of the Spirit. Rome underwent a slow, strange metamorphosis, but retained her ascendency. She aspired to become the spiritual mistress of the Western World.
From time to time the barbarians who menaced the Empire were bought off both by the Emperor at Constantinople and his co-ruler in Italy. They were seduced by liberal pay to defend territory which was no longer capable of self-defence. The enemies of the State thus became its defenders against the ravages of the savage Hun and their own brethren across the mountains. Thus a debased copy of Roman civilization naturally got transmitted, by the intercourse of the legionaries with their brethren, to distant nations, and awakened their interest in, and even reverence for, the ancient Mother, while Christian missionaries were successful in converting whole tribes of these heathen to the faith that was now the official religion of the Roman State. The mercenary peoples that defended the Empire felt the blood-ties that bound them to the barbarians of the North as being closer than the allegiance they owed to an Emperor whom they often accused of exhibiting bad faith toward them. The “ fœderati “ of Italy at last had the audacity to claim one-third of the land they defended, and they raised Odovacar (Odoacer), a soldier of fortune, on the shield, and hailed him as their King (a.d. 476). He was wise enough to secure the reality of power by affecting allegiance and subordination to the Eastern Emperor, while he deposed the puppet who reigned in Italy. Hence the Peninsula remained, nominally, an integral part of the Roman Empire, and was, in theory, ruled by authority delegated from the new Rome on the Bosphorus. The Eastern Emperor, impotent to stem the adverse current, bestowed on Odovacar the modest title of Patrician, and one-third of the lands and slaves of Italy were now at the mercy of her so-called defenders. The new protectors were not strong enough to oppose a great nation that, tricked and mismanaged by the Romans of Constantinople, now came pouring across the Eastern passes— men, women, and children, and their belongings, in all 200,000 strong (a.d. 489). Theodoric, the commander of these Ostrogoths, conquered the Peninsula in four years, and showed himself no less firm yet conciliatory as a ruler than brave and capable as a general. He applied himself to the statesman-like task of fusing the barbarian invaders with the old Roman population, and his government was marked by complete religious toleration. The presence of two buildings at Ravenna—the Arian baptistery of the invaders and the Catholic baptistery of the Roman worshippers—bears witness to-day to the prudence of his administration. But Theodoric’s successors were less able and less fortunate. A new Emperor, fond of splendour and renown, ascended the throne at Constantinople. Justinian found a full treasury and an able staff, and he was supported by lavish ministers and great generals. He expended the resources of the Empire, and ground down his people by taxation, in the attempt to recover the lost possessions of Rome. First, the famous warrior Belisarius, and then the crafty strategist Narses, the eunuch, were despatched to Italy, and a sanguinary conflict lasting for eighteen years ended in the complete overthrow of the Goths. Procopius tells us that for six weeks Rome was left desolate without a single inhabitant, and the proud city was three times besieged and twice taken by the Northern barbarians. At last the defeated Goths, preferring the precarious freedom of the wild and uninviting North to the ease of servitude, wended their way back over the mountains, and Italy, from the Alps to Sicily, was again united to the Roman Empire (553 a.d.). In the midst of these troubles, Benedict, a noble Roman who had assumed the garb of a monk, retired to Monte Cassino. With a rare knowledge of the requirements of the human heart, he founded the religious Order that still bears his name, and gave it its rules. Through ages of bloodshed and rapine Benedict’s monastery, with varying fortunes, remained an abode of religious meditation and a centre of serviceable work; his community survived the passing of empires and the crash of conflicting races that aspired to rule the South; it not merely enregistered the hagiology of the period, but it gave peaceful refuge to what of learning retained a precarious vitality through the long lethargy of the dark ages. Through the intercourse of the monks with Constantinople the traditions of Byzantine art and learning passed into the Western Church, and it would seem that even the lore of the far East may have been welcomed by the recluses of Monte Cassino (vide Gay, L’Italie méridionale et l’empire byzantine. Paris, 1904,).
The Visigoth, the Hun, the Vandal, and the Ostrogoth had swept over the land and devastated it. Their presence had destroyed all the luxurious culture and nearly every social vestige of the proud old Roman days; but they had failed to reconstruct—they left no permanent memorial of their sway. But now, in the great movement of peoples that had been started by Mongolian pressure, there was creeping along the valleys of the Eastern Alps a rude and violent horde of barbarians, whose forefathers hailed from the foggy fens of the lower Elbe, and who had never received the least tincture of polish or refinement from contact or intercourse with Rome. “ Everything about them,” says Hodgkin, “ 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; they are the anarchists of the Völkerwanderung, whose delight is only in destruction and who seem incapable of culture. Yet this is the race from which, in the fulness of time, under the transmuting power of the old Italian civilization, were to spring Anselm and Lanfranc, Hildebrand and Dante Alighieri.” Mingled with the Lombards were Saxons, conquered Gepidae, Bulgarians, and Sclavs. Not merely did the presence of so many different tribes tend to disorder, but the Lombards themselves had but a feeble impulse to obey central authority. The motley horde marched in regiments, each of a thousand men, led by a duke, subdivided into companies of a hundred officered by sculdahis, and all conducted by Alboin the King. They came to a land enfeebled by the miseries of a series of foreign invasions that had been witnessed by six successive generations; they met only with the resistance of a weakened people, and the Eastern power that had been exhausted by the boundless ambition, the reckless extravagance, and the crushing taxation of Justinian. The Lombards occupied Venetia in 568 a.d. By 572 they were in possession of Pavia and Lombardy, and had, it is believed, laid the foundations of their rule in Central and Southern Italy. But, an inland people, unaccustomed to maritime enterprise, they were unable to cope with the degenerate “ Romans “ of Constantinople, who held the coast and the great waterways without fear of dislodgment. Ravenna and the five cities round it, known as the Pentapolis—in other phraseology, the “ Exarchate “—still maintained obedience to the Emperor, as did the maritime cities around Naples, the extreme South, and Genoa, as well as the people who dwelt on the melancholy sandbanks of the Venetian lagoons. Rome, and some other cities situated on navigable rivers, also continued to owe allegiance to Constantinople. The ruthless Lombard ravaged the Peninsula; he had lived by war, and for him warfare alone gave dignity and zest to life. He drove the inhabitants before him like sheep, or slew the land-owners, and reduced the masses to servitude, and, following the example of previous conquerors, he demanded one-third of the produce of the lands that he did not seize. Unlike the Germanic tribes who had preceded him, the Lombards settled in the cities that still retained some remnants of the old civilization; and even when matters had begun to improve, Pope Gregory wrote that “ the condition of this country does not forebode the end of the world; it realizes it.” The uncompliant, unsubmissive character of the Lombards is shown in the fact that they renounced the authority of their King, and split up into thirty-six separate governments under dukes, whereof the Duchies of Friuli and Trient in the North, and Benevento and Spoleto in the South, were the most important. Not merely was their power enfeebled by this centrifugal tendency, but by the fact that the great duchies of the South were separated by the Apennines from the duchies of the “ waveless plain,” and liable to be cut off by expeditions from Ravenna. They had to defend their acquisitions against other Lombard hordes who attempted to pierce the Western Alps, and they were unable to capture Naples, or make serious headway against the Greeks who held the “ toe “ of Italy. Finally, Maurice, the Eastern Emperor, bent on the recovery of the Peninsula, subsidized the Franks to invade it, and the fear of external foes, and, perhaps, the presence of internal danger, compelled the Lombard dukes again to choose a monarch. Authari, the son of the last King was elected by common consent. The unquenchable influence of Rome was beginning to bear on the barbarian; he desired to legitimatize his position, and Authari called himself “ Flavius,” from some nebulous tradition of the distant glory that surrounds the great Flavian line. The loosely aggregated body of Lombard States had, however, small notion of obedience and little respect for authority; revolt was the rule, and the great duchies seized on every opportunity favourable to their independence. Yet the dangers and disasters due to the division of authority among the conquerors were not disadvantageous to the vanquished. The Roman cultivator of the ground was, indeed, tied to a master and to the soil he tilled, but he was granted protection against the arbitrary increase of rent, nor could he be sold as a slave, while he was allowed to apply the old Roman law to his own affairs (Hodgkin, VI., C. xiv). Nor was this all. The presence of so many centres of government in Lombard Italy, of great ports, like Amalfi and Genoa, that had acquired practical autonomy under the enfeebled headship of Constantinople, and, lastly, the continuance of the great Roman tradition under the altered form of a Supreme Bishop, elected, not merely by the clergy, but by the clergy conjoined with the senate and people of Rome, introduced a principle of struggle and therefore of vitality into the Peninsula, and prepared the way to the peculiar development of its subsequent history.
The position of Rome, with the duchy of Spoleto between it and the Exarchate, was perilous in the extreme. In 592 the throne of St. Peter was occupied by a man who has not only the great distinction of having been, perhaps, the ablest of the most capable line of monarchs the world has ever seen, but the far more exceptional fame of being possessed by as great holiness as he was remarkable for power. St. Gregory was Pope when the Lombard Duke of Spoleto threatened Rome. Gregory contrived to secure a separate peace with the invader, and so incurred the wrath of his overlord the Emperor. Soldiers were sent from Ravenna against the Lombards, and their success roused the wrath of all the nation, and brought their King before the walls of Rome (593). Gregory was compelled to abandon the seclusion of his study and his meditations on Holy Writ, in order to superintend the defences of the city of which he was first magistrate. He received the invader on the steps of the basilica of St. Peter’s, which was without the walls, and is said to have wholly vanquished the truculent Lombard by his serene and saintly presence. (Codex Haoniensis, quoted by Hodgkin, V., 371). The Lombard King withdrew his army and Rome was saved. The Papacy was by this time possessed of much landed property around Rome, in Southern Italy and Sicily, m Illyria and Gaul, called the Patrimony of St. Peter, and derived from bequests by the faithful. The Pope had become a vast landed proprietor, but he still owed allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople But communications between the Pope and the Exarch, the Imperial representative at Ravenna, or intercourse with the Imperial Duke of Naples, were liable to be cut off, and were becoming increasingly difficult Whatever his views might be on the matter, circumstances were forcing the spiritual pastor into temporal sovereignty; and Gregory himself began to question whether his function as Roman Bishop was that of spiritual shepherd or worldly prince. Gregory insisted on the universal supremacy of the bishopric that had been the fortress of Catholicism against the Arian and other heresies; a supremacy threatened by the Patriarch of Constantinople, and even by the Bishop of Ravenna, now that Rome had become a distant provincial town of the Empire of the Orient. He assumed the role of protector of the Italians by defending the inhabitants of Southern Italy against the oppressions of their Greek rulers; and, by his skill as a diplomatist, he became the arbitrator between the Lombard kingdom and the Empire, and laid the foundations of Rome as an independent state; he was unwearied in the conversion of the Lombards to the Catholic form of faith, and died leaving Rome not merely still free from Lombard rule, but demanding deference and consideration from her nominal overlord, and possessed of supreme influence over the nations of the West.
Consequently, when the Papacy insisted on the celibacy of the clergy, Pope Sergius was able to refuse to accept the decrees of Justinian II. (a.d. 692); and the populace showed their contempt for the Imperial authority by rejecting the Imperial coinage and treading the Imperial likeness under their feet. When the stress of the spread of Islamism was felt in Constantinople, and the manner in which its emphatically spiritual conception of the Deity appealed to the Oriental mind (so deeply persuaded, from of old time, of the opposition of spirit to matter) was recognised there, the Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, prohibited the worship of images throughout the Empire, and the Exarch tried to execute his orders (715). The Romans, armed in the name of the Pope, called their Pontiff the Father of the Roman Republic, and obliged the Imperial officer to retire from the city. A council, assembled at Rome, excommunicated the iconoclasts; the Papacy threw off the yoke of the East, and resolved to secure itself against any attempt to reimpose it; and the Greek fugitives from the monasteries of the South, bearing their mosaics and paintings with them, were received in Rome. Splendour of pigment and glittering gold gave adornment meet to the Metropolis of Catholic Christianity.
The iconoclastic controversy was a signal of revolt to discontented cities. The Lombards were becoming civilized, and, on the whole, their rule was just. Masons of Como raised churches in the North; enfranchisement was made easy to the serf. Bologna and other towns withdrew their allegiance from Constantinople and bestowed it on Luitprand, the Lombard King, on condition of keeping their own Roman law. The two peoples, possessing a common faith and common interests, became almost fused, all the more readily that conqueror and conquered had come to speak the same language. The Lombards, with the adaptability of their northern blood, imitated Italian refinement; they allowed Catholic Bishops to rule side by side with their own Arian Prelates; and although Catholicism was the profession of an inferior race, it was not long before they became fervently Catholic themselves.
The monarchy was elective, but the Lombards chose their King from certain families; and to the Crown belonged all lands not in private possession and the confiscated property of traitors. The King, when crowned at Pavia, the capital, with the famous iron crown of Lombardy, became the chief representative of the States, the president of their select councils and tribunals, and supreme guardian of all the states and of all their inhabitants. The Lombard dukedoms, like the kingship, tended to become hereditary. It would seem, at first, difficult to understand why the rulers of the Lombard states were styled “ dukes,” for the Roman count ranked higher than the duke, and the latter title literally means “ companion “ of the chief ruler. But the difficulty disappears when we remember how mixed was the horde that accompanied the Lombards into Italy and the prior victories of the Lombards over the Gepidae and other tribes: the duke (dux) was often a subjugated chief, always a princelet, either by heredity or election; and although subordinate to the King, he did not represent him, as did the Roman count. The dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, separated from Pavia by the Apennines, and constantly threatened by Imperial troops along the Flaminian Way, were practically independent sovereigns. Below the duke was the gastald, who administered the royal domain situate in the dukedom; the sculdahis appears to have been the chief man in each little town, entrusted with the duties of justice of the peace. Very little is known of the condition of the indigenous Italians; but they probably bore a similar relation to their Lombard masters that the rayah does to his Turkish conqueror. And, while most Italians were half-free aldii, or tenants, tied to the soil under superior (Lombard) holders, this state of things must have presented many exceptions, especially in remote districts and where the Lombards were few in number.
There is no hatred so intense as the hatred of a civilized people for their barbarian conquerors, who often surpass them as much in manliness as they are inferior to them in manners. Hence, in spite of the severity of Italian accounts, it is better to judge of the Lombards from their legislation, and it is clear, from the code of King Rothari, published a.d. 643, and the laws passed by the yearly assemblies under King Luitprand (a.d. 712-744), that there was a sincere desire on their part to govern equitably and impartially. While the Roman retained his own code for his own purposes, Lombard laws were sensibly modified by Roman legislature. In order to understand the position of the aldii and the serf, we must go back to the condition of the people in Imperial times (Hegel, C, Geschichte der Städteverfassung von Italien — Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vol. vi.).
Quite apart from and before the introduction of Christianity, moral ideas began to operate in favour of the slave. These ideas were intensified when Christianity became a power in the state; and some measure of legal protection was given to the slave class. When the Empire had ceased to expand and began to decay, there was no fresh importation of slaves by conquest: the slave-market being thus closed, slaves became of more value, and although bound to their master, were not usually sold by him; and, owing to the same cause, free labour became more and more employed. Diocletian commenced an organization of the Empire, not unlike the caste system of modern India. Everyone was treated as the servant of the State; for he had to give of his labour, or of his means, or of both,· and professions became fixed in families. Thus, public servants could not marry out of the collegium to which they belonged; the members of the curia were bound to their posts; and the responsibility of the individual was transmitted to his family. By these means the public coffers were maintained: the State was organized against invasion at the expense of personal freedom. But the difference between the freeman and the slave was conspicuously lessened thereby. In the country, too, many leaseholders who could not pay their rent, and poor men who wished for an assured living, as well as captives or immigrants, became attached to the soil, yielding a portion of their produce to their master, but remaining personally free. It was found that slaves worked better on the same conditions. These changes took place with great rapidity in the fourth century after Christ, and it is safe to say that by the seventh century there was very little practical difference between serfs and slaves. In fact, the freemen had fallen and the slaves had risen to the condition of serfs. In cities serfs were converted into freemen by the operation of several causes. Many men purchased their freedom out of their savings; other slaves worked so ill that they were not worth their salt; freemen were found to work better than serfs, and were needed for the defence of the city; for a freeman who has something of his own to defend will always fight better than a slave; the Church exercised its influence in getting masters to manumit their bondsmen; often by a public ceremony they gave freedom to their helots, to come into effect at their death; or they bequeathed a portion of their property to the Church, with the provisio that their bondsmen should become freemen and have a small allotment given to them out of the land thus bequeathed for their support; or they simply handed them over with estates to the Church. But the Church retarded as well as advanced manumission: it was unable to release, being a legal body, bound by acceptance; at all events, the Church found it convenient to retain its serf on this or any excuse, for, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, slavery is natural to some men and ordained by God. This, then, was the condition of the people at the time of the Lombard Conquest; and during the Lombard occupation the same processes went on. The fact that master and slave were equally subject to the conqueror had a tendency to obliterate the distinction between bond and free. But, since the lords hated paying widrigild, or fined compensation for injury, and preferred private warfare at which they were adepts, and in which they were eternally engaged, they depended on their vassals during their frequent absence on the war-path; and this, together with the advantages of free-labour manifested by neighbouring towns and the absence of the lords from their estates (for they resided partly in towns), tended to liberate or improve the condition of the country serf, though he was to be found in Italy even in the fifteenth century.
The Papacy now found itself confronted by a relatively strong monarchy at the very time when the Eastern power, which it had lukewarmly supported and even opposed, was enfeebled by the results of the great contest concerning images. Weary of religious strife and the puritanism of iconoclasts, religion was replaced in the East by hypocrisy, and the earnestness of both parties by the reaction of indifference and laxity of morals. The series of Exarchs of Ravenna, who were entrusted with regal power, was corrupt; they thought only of squeezing a fortune out of their subjects and returning with it to Constantinople. The Duke of Naples held almost independent rule over Gaeta, Naples, Calabria, and Otranto, territories separated from each other by lands that formed part of the great Lombard duchy of Benevento. Sicily, oppressed for her adherence to the Papal side during the iconoclastic disputes, was mulcted by increased taxation. There was an increasing tendency on the part of provincial governors to assume independent powers; and the great trading ports, such as Amalfi, were practically autonomous. The connection between the component parts of the Empire was one of sentiment, and, while the possessions of Constantinople in South Italy were in the position of Crown Colonies, the tie that bound them to her was hardly stronger than that which binds the French of Montreal to the English King: they looked to the Emperor for what small defence he could supply; they were content with a light yoke, and proud of the Roman name so long as they were let alone.
The sway of the Eastern Empire over Italy had been focussed at Ravenna, whence the Ostrogoths had been expelled some years after the able and tolerant reign of its conqueror, the great Goth, Theodoric. Admirably situated for communication with Constantinople, the city was defended on the land side by almost impassable marshes. The natural features of Ravenna remind us of that later Queen of the Adriatic—Venice. It was, indeed, the Venice of its time, though the original harbour had been silted up, and was now transferred to Classis, some little distance off. But there was still a water-way up to the city. The Exarch, representing the Imperial authority, delegated his powers to the governors of Rome, Naples, and those of Southern Italy. Ravenna was resplendent with fine churches and baptisteries adorned with those sumptuous mosaics which still feast the eye of the Italian traveller. Shortly after the middle of the sixth century the Lombards succeeded in establishing themselves in Spoleto, thus cutting off the direct communication between Ravenna and Rome; and, with a view to the acquisition of Naples, they took Benevento, which became the capital of a great duchy.
The historian is often supplied with full accounts of unimportant periods, while great events remain unrecorded or barely registered or the chronicles that reported them have disappeared. Such unwelcome ignorance is all that the ages have spared us concerning the fall of Ravenna.
From the bare chronicles we only know that this last transformed remnant of ancient Roman power north of the Apennines fell to Aistulf the Lombard in a.d. 751, fourteen hundred years after the traditional building of Rome. The meagre chronicles suffice to
“ shroud a ruin, and, below,
The rotting bones of dead antiquity.”
The fall of the Exarchate, and the decay of the Imperial power in Southern Italy, left the Pope at the mercy of Lombardy. But, as always happened in times of dire extremity, a strong man then sat in the chair of St. Peter. Pope Stephen II. was resolved to defend his patrimony in and about Rome from trespass; and, as true representative of the city of Rome, he claimed the inheritance that had dropped from the grasp of the Emperor. Aistulf’s reply was an invasion of Roman territory. He demanded the overlordship of the city and the fruits of a poll-tax to be levied therein. With all hope of aid from the East torn away, the Pope, in his extremity, had recourse to that fatal policy which his successors so frequently followed to the ruin of Italy. He called in a Sovereign of the West to redress the balance; he cried to Pepin, lord of the Franks, for aid; he crossed the Alps, and to purchase assistance, consecrated and legitimatized the crown which Pepin had won by ability. In return, Pepin, with the title of Patrician, promised to defend the Pope, and crossed over Mont Cenis at the head of an army. Aistulf submitted, but his submission was insincere. He besieged Rome (a.d. 756), and Pepin, at the Pope’s summons, again appeared, and handed the Exarchate over to Stephen. Henceforth the Pope claims this temporality by a double title—as successor to the Imperial representative of the ancient Roman power, and by a deed which the conqueror compelled Aistulf to execute. But the Lombards, though defeated, still continued to intrigue and threaten, and Charles, the son of Pepin, known to history as Charlemagne, crossed the mountains from Geneva. Desiderius, the Lombard King, had failed to win the affections of his people; there was, as usual, a fatal want of cohesion between the Lombard states, and the antipathy of the Roman aldus to his arrogant master prevented him, perhaps, from giving his sovereign right soldierly support. Pavia fell (a.d. 774), and the reign of the Lombard in Italy, which had lasted for two centuries, came to an end. Charles took the title of “ King of the Lombards and Patrician of the Romans “; but he adopted the statesman-like policy of interfering as little as possible with his new people. He left the laws practically unaltered, and he put their administration mainly in Lombard hands. But he replaced the great authority of semi-independent dukes by that of counts, men who either were Franks or those Lombards on whose good faith he could rely. To these he delegated his kingly authority. The Lombard chieftains fretted under the light curb, and Charles found it desirable to place the iron crown on the head of his son, Pepin (781). The authority of the Frank extended over the north of the Peninsula only; and, indeed, it did not embrace the whole of that region; for Venice, never subdued by the Lombards, and theoretically a part of the Empire, still kept her independence. Across the Apennines the great Lombard duchy of Benevento, protected by the mountain masses of the Abruzzi, still remained free, though later she allowed the effigies of the King to appear on her coinage. Sicily and the extreme South were still integral parts of the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, governed by the Patrician of Sicily, but over Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi the Eastern Empire exercised only the shadow of authority, and while loyal to their overlord, these cities, with their territories, enjoyed practical autonomy. Italy was thus politically divided into three great regions—Frankish Italy, the Italy which still remained practically Lombard (Benevento, and, to a less extent, Spoleto), and Byzantine Italy, to which must be added the Pontifical State, under the protection of the Frankish power. In vain did the Greeks attempt to recover their hold of the Peninsula: the wise and generous policy of Charles had prevailed, and the united armies of the Franks and Lombards, aided by the troops of Benevento, repelled them (788).
In a.d. 799 a momentous event occurred in Rome, an event that has bound Italy and the North together for weal and woe, that was the exciting cause of the reconstitution of the Roman Empire of the West under a Teutonic Sovereign, and that originated the great political theory which occupied the imaginations of thinkers and influenced the practice of statesmen through the whole course of the Middle Ages. The slight source whence flowed so great a change in the speculation and polity of the world was a disturbance in Rome. Already the Popes had come to loggerheads with the turbulent nobility of the city of which they claimed to be First Magistrates. A sudden and brutal attack was made on the Pope, Leo III. The Romans tore out his tongue, an attempt was made to blind him, and he was confined in a monastery. Thence he contrived to escape, and took refuge across the Alps in the camp of Charles. The shock of such an outrage to the Vicar of Christ made it clear that Rome must be firmly governed; that Charles must be clad with an authority more awe-inspiring, and must assume a dignity commensurate with his power. In Constantinople the Empress Irene had seized, deposed, and blinded the Emperor Constantine, her own son; and this deed of wickedness, shocked even the callous inured Constantinopolitans and roused the indignation of Western Christendom. Alcuin and the learned men of the West and North were full of what had been retained of the literature of Rome and the traditions of the great past; they bemoaned that the Eastern fragment of the Empire had fallen into the hands of a wily, ambitious, and criminal woman. Milan, Trier, Ravenna, once capitals of the Empire, were now ruled by Charles, and was he not the protector of its heart—Rome itself ? Alcuin wrote to Charles, pointing out that hitherto three people in the world had had station higher than all others— the Apostolic Sublimity, the Imperial Dignity and power of the second Rome, now deposed, and the Royal Dignity of Charles himself, more powerful, wise and sublime than the other twain; on him now reposed the whole salvation of the Churches of Christ (Alcuin, Ep. 120). The times were ripe for the assumption of the Imperial title by the man who possessed its power; who ruled so many of the lands comprised in the Western Empire; and who was monarch of a country never visited by Caesar’s eagles; one, moreover, who was the loyal defender of orthodox Christianity, and a friend to the Holy See. The age was ready for the consolidation, under temporal and spiritual headships, of the new social order that had grown up from the introduction of Christianity and the movement of the Teutonic races into the enfeebled Empire of the West; those ruins could be repaired and reconstructed into a temple fairer than before, so men thought, because consecrated to the service of a God that the great race of early Emperors, Augustus and Trajan and Hadrian and the Antonines, had never known. Leo, and afterwards Charles, returned to Rome, the first in 799, Charles in 800 a.d. ; both were received by the great dignitaries of Rome, civil and ecclesiastical, by the body that called itself the Senate, by the militia and the members of religious houses, by the guilds of Franks, Frisians, English, and Lombards resident in the city, with waving of banners and singing of psalms. The keys of Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre and the banner of Jerusalem were sent by Haroun al Raschid to the great King for there was an “ entente cordiale “ between the Saracens of the East and the Frank as opposed to a similar understanding between the Emir at Cordova and Constantinople. “ It was in a certain sense a recognition that the holiest place in Christendom was under the protection of the great monarch of the West, and in so far it helped to prepare men’s minds for the impending revolution “ (Hodgkin).
It was the fourth visit of Charlemagne to Rome. On Christmas morning (a.d. 800) Charles proceeded to worship in the basilica of St. Peter’s. Around him were gathered his son Pepin, his daughters, the chivalry of the North, the native nobles that boasted their descent from Roman senators, the great ecclesiastics, and no small sprinkling of the leading spirits of a realm that extended from the Atlantic to the Baltic, from the Oder to the Ebro. Mass was said, and at the moment of Sacrifice, the Pope approached the commanding martial figure of the great warrior and placed a golden crown on his brow. The Roman citizens hailed Charles with shouts of “ Augustus, Emperor of the Romans, crowned by the hand of God !” The momentous link between the Middle Ages and the ancient world had been forged.
It is possible that, as Hodgkin suggests, Charles, before taking the great step, like Julius Caesar, like Cromwell, experienced much swaying of mind and many misgivings. For since, in theory, the Empire remained one and indivisible, his assumption of the title of Emperor was a challenge to the ruler of the New Rome. Constantinople still claimed the authority it was powerless to enforce. While the Empire came to be considered as a resuscitation of that of Romulus Augustulus, this may not have entered into the mind of the practical Charles. It was repudiated as soon as formulated by the Byzantine monarchs. So great a statesman must have been aware of the unsupportable offence that the Imperial assumption would give to the Eastern Court; he would foresee how dangerous a precedent the bestowal of the Imperial crown by the Church would institute. On the other hand, he must have realized the need of re-establishing the fundamental principles of the Roman administration in Rome, its disorganized centre, and that the authority of the actual monarch would be supported by his bearing the Imperial name. Moreover, it was desirable to weld and cement power that spread over such a wide area, over such diverse races, and that had been so recently acquired. From this deed of Leo III. arose the political ideas and ideal of so many centuries, that it is necessary to suspend our narrative while we consider the results of the scene that was enacted in the gloom of the apsidal tribune, above the reputed tomb of Rome’s first Pope, St. Peter, on that fateful December morning.
1. The advent of the barbarian hosts brought fresh and disturbing elements both of blood and organization into Italy. The great work attempted by Charlemagne was to reduce his Empire to some measure of systematized government. Early Teutonic society was markedly individualistic: individualism is the dominating characteristic of the Germanic temperament. The early political organization of the Northern barbarians was personal in character: every free man had his alod or freehold; occupation gave him his arable share, not necessarily an equal share, in the lands of the tribe, with rights of forest and pasture; the only obligations he owed were service in war and presence at the tribal council. But become conquerors, this primitive organization no longer served; personal became changed into a territorial constitution; individual liberty was modified; tribal autonomy disappeared. Charlemagne gathered up the growing tendencies of his time and systematized them; divided his Empire into districts which he placed under counts; made these responsible for the good government of their countries; placed Margraves on the Marches, or borders, with troops to defend them; and sent inspectors, clerical and lay (missi dominici), all over the Empire to supervise and tighten the constituent elements of his realm. It is a proof of how effective this system of Charlemagne’s was, that, disorganized and dissolved as the Empire became in the hands of his heirs, Otho I. was called in by Italy to re-establish the old order a century and a half after Charles’s time.
But the feudal system thus initiated by Charlemagne rooted that spirit of individualism characteristic of the Northern tribes; neither Otho nor the Church succeeded in quelling the results of the discord that reigned in Italy before and after Charlemagne. The old Latin spirit was different; it was a spirit of association. We shall find in our examination of the Italian communes or republics the resuscitation of Latin race and Latin traditions in the cities; we shall find them taking the first place in feudal Italy, because their spirit of association enabled them to take advantage of anarchy due to the importation of individualism from beyond the Alps; but we shall also find that individualistic spirit has entered within the walls of the commune itself, and between the several communes. Charlemagne introduced a clever compromise—which, however, only endured for a short season—between these two opposed principles of individualism and association. These two forces will be discovered maintaining themselves and acting in perpetual opposition.
The crowning of Charlemagne increased the influence and power of the Church. From it flowed the pretentions of the Papacy to the homage and obedience of the Imperial Crown and of all Christian Princes. The great political concept of the Middle Ages derives from “ this one ceremony wherein the first Emperor received his crown from the hand of the Roman Pope “ (Dahn, Bausteine).