ATRIUM OF ST. AMBROGIO

But when, some years later, Frederick II., grown to manhood, had cast off the bondage in which the Pope had fettered his youth, and seated on the imperial throne proved himself indeed the third blast of Suabia, heir in spirit as in blood of his mighty grandsire, the Communes proved true to one another, and to the newly threatened cause of freedom, and the great Lombard League, with Milan at its head, sprang to life again to face the tyrant. During the long and desolating wars which Frederick’s ambition inflicted upon North Italy, Milan steadfastly fought against him, even when most of her fellows had been induced by fear or self-interest to desert the good cause. Late in 1237 her army, which had marched to the aid of the Brescians, was surprised by the imperial host at Cortenuova and suffered a crushing defeat. Multitudes of her soldiers perished, and the Sacred Car itself, stuck fast in morasses, had to be abandoned in the retreat. Its defenders were able, however, to save the Cross and Banner, and break the car to pieces. Frederick’s exultation over these fragments, upon which he bound the captive Podestà of Milan, Pietro Tiepolo, son of the Doge of Venice, and dragged him, in imitation of a Roman triumph, through the streets of Cremona, is a measure of the importance which he attached to his victory over the Lombard city.

With the defeat of Cortenuova the cause of the Communes seemed lost. All trembled beneath the heel of the conqueror, save Milan and the ‘lioness’ Brescia, and one or two others. To the Emperor’s summons to surrender at discretion the Milanese returned messages of defiance. They had the support of the Pope, whose emissaries, the mendicant friars, mingled everywhere with the masses of the people, exhorting them to resistance. In 1239, Gregory proclaimed a crusade against the oppressor, whose destruction thus became a sacred obligation upon the faithful. The Cross and the Sceptre, irreconcilable emblems, now confronted each other with a clear and definite issue.

A year and a half passed after Cortenuova before Frederick actually invaded the Milanese territory. The Republic, heartened by the magnificent example of Brescia, whose successful resistance to a nine months’ siege had delayed the Emperor’s designs against the chief city and greatly dimmed his military glory, went boldly forth to meet him. A noble of gigantic stature, named Ottobello da Mandello, towering in his mail of proof over friends and foes alike, led the citizen knights undauntedly against Frederick’s Saracen troops from Sicily, whose dark faces and infidel garb, joined to ferocious courage, made them a name of terror throughout Italy. With the Milanese fought Gregorio da Montelungo, papal legate, and the Franciscan Fra Leone da Perego, afterwards Archbishop of Milan, besides a great number of friars, Minor, Preaching and Umiliati, who not only, girding themselves with swords and putting on helmets, displayed the false image of soldiers, but also excited the citizens to the conflict by promising absolution to all who offended the person of the Emperor or of any of his followers, as Frederick himself complained in a letter to the King of England. No regular pitched battle, however, took place. The Republicans fought with the stratagem of those attacked in their own country, and by cunningly entangling the enemy amid their streams and canals, opening dams and loosing the waters upon him, plunging him into hidden pitfalls, and surprising him with sudden attacks in his most embarrassed moments, drove him by the aid of sword and flood out of their territory.

Six years later (1245) the Emperor again invaded the Milanese country, which in the meanwhile had been laid bare by a desolating war of several years with his ally, Pavia. But fortune was still against him. His son Enzo, newly created King of Sardinia, encountering a citizen force one day, ventured himself too boldly in single combat with a Republican knight, and was overthrown and made prisoner. Frederick, having obtained his release, withdrew his army, and made no further attempt to subdue the great Lombard city.

Thus was Milan’s account with the House of Suabia closed for ever. With the failure of Frederick’s fortunes and his death in 1250 was extinguished the last appearance of that great mediæval idea—the Holy Roman Empire—as a dangerous element in Italian politics. The imperial tradition might linger on and cause a temporary disturbance from time to time in the peninsula, influencing the vicissitudes of its internal quarrels, but it had no longer power to revolutionise or molest the settled constitution of the free Lombard Communes. The mediæval triumph of Italy over the foreigner was accomplished. In the course of the last two centuries, Milan, in whose development is mirrored that of all Lombardy, had completely asserted and defined her nationality. In her Church, in her constitution, law and sentiment, she was now one at last with the rest of Italy. It remained for her, leader in the long struggle now happily determined, to produce in the epoch of Strong Men which was about to succeed the epoch of the People, the man strong enough to overthrow all rivals and to weld the many independent cities and States of the peninsula into a united Italy under an Italian king. How she tried to do this and failed will be seen later.

CHAPTER IV
The Reign of Faction

“Factions alone are the cause of our great ills.”—Prato.

So wrote a Milanese chronicler in the sixteenth century. Had the people but one mind, he adds, assuredly no city would be more pleasant and fortunate than theirs. His complaint holds equally good for the thirteenth century. The presence of a foreign invader did indeed produce a temporary union of heart and hand, and so far the earlier generations show a noble contrast to their descendants of three hundred years later. But even while Frederick II. was still in the land, and in response to opportunities of selfish advantage offered by alliance with him, there were constant defections from the League, and we find the whole of North Italy seething with the warfare of city against city. After his death, when the mutual rage and hate was no longer checked by any fear of a general oppressor, the strife was continued with worse fury under the diabolical names of Guelf and Ghibelline, to use the expression of a contemporary writer, the divisions between city and city being repeated within each community itself. The Lombard scene dissolves into a whirling confusion of fratricidal war, in which beneath the cross-currents and blind purposes of individual passion and greed, we may distinguish the two steady principles of the Church and democracy on the one side, and the aristocratic and feudal element, deriving its right from the Empire, on the other. In Milan the issue, which had long before defined itself as a struggle between nobles and people, remains fairly clear. The plebeians had forced their way more and more into the government. Their right to share in the election of the Consuls had been long conceded, and some among them had even taken a place in that august body. In 1198 they had acquired the strength of union and organisation by forming themselves into an association calling itself the Credenza di Saint Ambrogio, with elective magistrates and officers of its own, and a certain share in the government and the revenues of the community. This body consisted of the lesser trades and guilds, but excluded the mass of poorer artisans and labourers. The merchants, bankers, traders in wool, etc., had their corporation also; the lesser nobles were banded in a society called the Motta, and the great nobles formed the Società dei Gagliardi, so that no less than four factions existed in Milan at the opening of the thirteenth century, besides the populace, which threw its weight on one side or another, with the quick inconsistency of irresponsibility and impulse. Each faction had its separate claims and ambitions, but the tendency of the three lower ones was to unite against the great nobles, who, amid continual uproar and conflict, were gradually stripped of their exclusive power and privileges. And in 1258 the last and most sacred enclosure of their caste was stormed and carried by the Vulgar: a decree of the Republic threw open the highest offices of the Ambrosian Church to plebeians. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were, in fact, the Epoch of the People, and though all classes, high and low, fought loyally together against Barbarossa and Frederick II., it was the democratic preponderance in the city which determined its steady opposition to the imperial pretensions. The same principle threw Milan on the Guelf side, which she upheld with ardour in the general Lombard warfare, manifesting her party zeal especially in a fierce intermittent war with Pavia. That city was as necessarily Ghibelline, though the party cry on either side was but the excuse for the efforts of the one to hasten and the other to delay the inevitable absorption of the lesser by the greater.