THE BATTLE OF LEGNANO; THE PEACE OF CONSTANCE
[1175-1177 A.D.]
The negotiations were broken off, and Frederick sent to Germany for another army, which, in the spring of 1176, entered the territory of Como by the Grisons. The emperor joined it about the end of May, after traversing, without being recognised, the territory of Milan. It was against this great town that he entertained the most profound resentment, and meditated a new attack. He flattered himself that he should find the citizens still trembling under the chastisement which he had before inflicted on their city. On the 29th of May, he met the Milanese army between Legnano and Barano, about fifteen miles from Milan. Only a few auxiliaries from Piacenza, Verona, Brescia, Novara, and Vercelli had yet joined them. An impetuous charge of the German cavalry made that of the Lombards give way. The enemy pressed forward so near the carroccio, as to give great alarm lest this sacred car should fall into their hands. But in the army of the Milanese there was a company of nine hundred young men, who had devoted themselves to its defence, and were distinguished by the name of “the company of death.” These brave youths, seeing the Germans gain ground, knelt down; and invoking God and St. Ambrose, renewed their vow to perish for their country; then rising, they advanced with such impetuosity that the Germans were disconcerted, divided, and driven back. The whole army, reanimated by this example, hastily pressed forward. The Germans were put to flight; their camp was pillaged; Frederick was separated from his companions in arms, and obliged to conceal himself, and it was not till he had passed several days, and encountered various dangers, that he succeeded in reaching Pavia, where the empress was already mourning his death.
[1177-1183 A.D.]
The defeat of Legnano at length determined Frederick to think seriously of peace, and to abandon pretensions which the Lombards resisted with so much energy. New negotiations were opened with the pope; and Venice was chosen, in concert with him, as the place for holding a congress. This town had withdrawn its signature from the league of Lombardy; it was acknowledged foreign to the Western Empire, and might be considered neutral and indifferent in the quarrel between the emperor and the free towns. The pope, Alexander III, arrived at Venice on the 24th of March, 1177. The emperor, whose presence the Venetians feared, first fixed his residence at one of his palaces, near Ravenna; approached afterwards as far as Chioggia, and finally came even to Venice. The negotiation bore upon three different points—to reconcile the emperor to the church, by putting an end to the schism; to restore peace between the empire of the West and that of the East, and the king of the Two Sicilies; and finally to define the constitutional rights of the emperor and of the cities of Lombardy.[c] Frederick was obliged to bend before the angry countenance of a proud priest, and offer his head as a footstool to the Roman bishop!
“I will tread upon the aspic and basilisk,” said the pontiff as he placed his foot upon the emperor’s neck, “and the lion and the dragon will I trample beneath my feet.” “Non tibi sed Petro,” replied the prince. “Et mihi et Petro,”[8] haughtily returned the priest while he pressed more firmly on the humbled monarch.[b] So at least the story goes. But unfortunately it is a narrative that cannot be accepted without many grains of allowance. Contemporary accounts do not give these picturesque details, and we are forced to conclude that the story of Frederick’s humiliation was embellished in after times with incidents quite foreign to the reality. But, divested of all apocryphal incidents, Frederick’s concessions to the pope constituted a distinct abasement of the imperial authority. If Alexander did not literally tread upon the neck of the emperor, he was certainly entitled to feel that he was figuratively grinding the secular “aspic and basilisk,” the royal “lion and dragon,” beneath his spiritual heel.[a]
Frederick had few subjects of dispute with the Grecian emperor, or the Norman king of the Sicilies; these parts of the treaty were not difficult to terminate. But that part which related to the league of Lombardy must be founded on a new order of ideas; it was the first pact that Europe had seen made between a monarch and his subjects; the first boundary line traced between authority and liberty. After long and vain attempts, the negotiators separated, contenting themselves only with obliging the emperor and the Lombards to conclude a truce of six years, bearing date from the 1st of August, 1177. During its existence, the rights on each side were to remain suspended; and the freedom of commerce was re-established between the cities which remained faithful to the emperor, and those which drew still closer their bonds of union by a renewal of the league of Lombardy.
The six years of repose, however, which this truce guaranteed, accustomed the emperor to submit to limitations of his authority. Thirty years had passed since the contest had begun between him and the Italian nation; age had now tempered his activity and calmed his pride. New incidents had arisen in Germany to fix his attention. His son, Henry VI, demanded to be associated in the sovereignty of his two kingdoms of Germany and Italy. A definitive peace only could restore to Frederick his rights and revenues in Lombardy, which his subjects there did not dispute, but which the truce held suspended. The adverse claims were honestly weighed at the Diet of Constance; reciprocal concessions were made both by the monarch and his subjects, and the Peace of Constance, the basis of new public rights for Italy, was at length signed on the 25th of June, 1183. By this peace the emperor renounced all regal privileges which he had hitherto claimed in the interior of towns. He acknowledged the right of the confederate cities to levy armies, to enclose themselves within fortifications, and to exercise by their commissioners within their own walls both civil and criminal jurisdiction. The consuls of towns acquired by the simple nomination of the people all the prerogatives of imperial vicars. The cities of Lombardy were further authorised to strengthen their confederation for the defence of their just rights, recognised by the Peace of Constance. But, on the other side, they engaged to maintain the just rights of the emperor, which were defined at the same time; and in order to avoid all disputes, it was agreed that these rights might always be bought off by the annual sum of two thousand marks of silver. Thus terminated, in the establishment of a legal liberty, the first and most noble struggle which the nations of modern Europe have ever maintained against despotism.
An Italian Officer, Twelfth Century
The generous resistance of the Lombards, during a war of thirty years, had conquered from the emperors political liberty for all the towns of the kingdom of Italy. The right of obeying only their own laws, of being governed by their own magistrates, of contracting alliances, of making peace or war, and, in fine, of administering their own finances, with the exception only of a certain revenue payable into the imperial treasury, was more particularly secured by the Peace of Constance to the confederate cities of the league of Lombardy.
But the Germans easily comprehended the impossibility of refusing to their allies the privileges which their enemies had gained by conquest; the liberties, therefore, stipulated by the Peace of Constance, were rendered common to all the towns of Italy; and those which had been most distinguished by their attachment to the Ghibelline party were often found the most zealous for the establishment and preservation of all the rights of the people. The cities, however, did not consider themselves independent. They were proud of the title of members of the empire; they knew they must concur in its defence, as well as in the maintenance of internal peace; reserving only that it must be in pursuance of their free choice and deliberation. They were in a manner confederates of an emperor, who acted on them rather by persuasion than orders, rather as a party chief than as a monarch; and as he was habituated to this compromise with public opinion in his relations with the princes of the empire, he yielded with the less repugnance to his Italian subjects. It is a circumstance highly honourable to the princes of the house of Hohenstaufen, which continued to reign sixty-seven years after the Peace of Constance, that during this long period they made no attempt to infringe the conditions of the compact. They admitted, with good faith, all the consequences of the concessions made; they pardoned liberty, which the vulgar order of kings always regarded as a usurpation by the subjects of the rights of the crown.