CHAPTER XI
TRADE AGAINST FEUDALISM (1152-1190)
The last chapter dealt with the struggle between the two great mediæval institutions, the Empire and the Papacy. This deals with the contest between the Empire, representing the feudal system, and a new social force, the spirit of trade, represented by the Lombard cities. Naturally the Papacy joined in the fray and sided with the Lombard cities; and, before the end, all Italy was divided into two great parties designated by terms derived from Germany: Guelfs, which indicated those opposed to the Empire, and Ghibellines, which indicated friends to the Empire. But the particular issue here fought out was that between feudalism and trade, and the triumph of trade indicates the close of the Middle Ages.
The Emperor Frederick I (1152-90) of the great house of Hohenstaufen is the hero of this period. He was a noble specimen of the knight of the Middle Ages, such as Sir Walter Scott conceived a knight to be. He had a bright, open countenance, fair hair, that curled a little on his forehead, and a red beard (Barbarossa) which impressed the Italian imagination. Valiant, resolute, energetic, bountiful in almsgiving, attentive to religious duties, he was a kind friend and a stern enemy. To his misfortune he was born too late; he belonged to a chivalric generation out of place in a world which had begun to deem buying and selling matters of greater consequence than chivalry and crusades. He thought himself entitled to all the Imperial rights that had been exercised by the Ottos; and, measuring his own prerogatives by their standard, resolved to make good the deficiencies of his immediate predecessors, who for one reason or another had neglected to assert those prerogatives in their plenitude. Barbarossa's situation may be compared to that of Charles I of England, who believed himself lawful heir to all the prerogatives of the Tudors.
Opposed to these old-fashioned views was the hard-headed spirit of commercial Italy. Barbarossa's particular enemies were the Lombard cities, but that was because they were nearest to him. The same mercantile spirit animated all the cities of the peninsula; in fact, it pervaded the maritime cities before it pervaded the Lombard cities, and can best be described by means of a description of them.
The southern cities bloomed earlier than their northern sisters. Amalfi, now a little fishing village which clings to the steep slopes of the Gulf of Salerno, in the eleventh century was an independent republic of 50,000 inhabitants. She traded with Sicily, Egypt, Syria, and Arabia; she decked her women with the ornaments of the East; she built monasteries at Jerusalem, also a hospital from which the Knights Hospitallers of St. John took their name; she gave a maritime code to the Mediterranean and Ionian seas, and circulated coin of her own minting throughout the Levant. Salerno, her near neighbour, had already become famous for her knowledge of medicine, acquired from the Arabs. The speculations of her physicians upon the medicinal properties of herbs went all over Europe. She abounded in attractions. Vineyards, apple orchards, nut trees, flourished round about the city; within there were handsome palaces; "the women did not lack beauty, nor the men honesty." The Normans must have found themselves very comfortable. Naples, Gaeta, and the Greek cities of the heel and toe were also important and prosperous. But these southern cities were soon outdone by their sturdier northern rivals, Pisa, Genoa, Venice.
Pisa, which now lies at the mouth of the Arno like a forsaken mermaid on the shore, is said to have been a free commune before the year 900. She traded east and west; she waged wars with the Saracens, drove them from Sardinia, captured the Balearic Islands (1114), and carried the war into Africa. Rich with booty and commercial gains, she erected (according to a traveller's estimate) ten thousand towers within the city walls, completed her dome-crowned, many-columned, queenly cathedral, and built the attendant baptistery, within whose marble walls musical notes rise and fall, circle and swell, as if angels were singing in mid-air. She received many privileges from the Emperors; her maritime usages were to be respected; she was to enact her own laws, and to judge her citizens. No Imperial Marquess was to enter Tuscany until he had received approval from twelve men of Pisa, to be elected at a public meeting, called together by the city's bells (1085). She spread her power in the Levant. Jaffa, Acre, Tripoli, Antioch were in great part under her dominion, and her factories were scattered along the coasts of Syria and Asia Minor.
Further to the north, mounting hillward from her curving bay, lay Genoa the Proud, who for a time was Pisa's ally against the Saracens, and then became her rival and enemy. Genoa, too, was devoted to commerce and established settlements in Constantinople, in the Crimea, in Cyprus and Syria, in Majorca and Tunis. She, too, had obtained from the Empire a charter of municipal privileges and was a republic, free in all but name.