When the Emperor Henry IV crossed the ice-bound Alps on his journey of submission to Canossa he was accompanied by a faithful knight, Frederick of Buren, whom he later rewarded for his loyalty with the hand of his daughter and the title Duke of Suabia. Frederick’s son was elected Emperor as Conrad III,[17] the first of the imperial line of Hohenstaufen that was destined to carry on through several generations the war between Empire and Papacy.
The Hohenstaufen received their name from a hill on which stood one of Frederick of Buren’s strongest castles, but they were also called ‘Waiblingen’ after a town in their possession; while the House of Bavaria, their chief rivals, was called ‘Welf’ after an early ancestor. The feud of the Waiblingen and the Welfs that convulsed Germany had no less devastating an effect upon Italy, always exposed to influence from beyond the Alps, and the names of the rivals, corrupted on Italian tongues into ‘Ghibellines’ and ‘Guelfs’, became party cries throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The Italian Communes
In our last chapter we spoke of French ‘communes’, municipalities that rebelled against their overlords, setting up a government of their own: the same process of emancipation was at work in North Italy only that it was able to act with greater rapidity and success for a time on account of the national tendency towards separation and the vigour of town life.
‘In France’, says a thirteenth-century Italian, in surprise, ‘only the townspeople dwell in towns: the knights and noble ladies stay ... on their own demesnes.’ Certainly the contrast with his native Lombardy was strong. There each city lived like a fortified kingdom on its hill-top, or in the midst of wide plains, cut off from its neighbours by suspicion, by jealousy, by competition. In the narrow streets noble and knight jostled shoulders perforce with merchants, students, mountebanks, and beggars. The limits of space dictated that many things in life must be shared in common, whether religious processions or plagues, and if street fighting flourished in consequence so also did class intimacy and a sharpening of wits as well as of swords. Thus the towns of North Italy, like flowers in a hot-house, bore fruits of civilization in advance of the world outside, whether in commerce, painting, or the art of self-government; and visitors from beyond the Alps stared astonished at merchants’ luxurious palaces that made the castles of their own princes seem mere barbarian strongholds.
Yet this profitable independence was not won without struggles so fierce and continuous that they finally endangered the political freedom in whose interests they had originally been waged. At first the struggle was with barbarian invaders; and here, as in the case of Rome and the Popes, it was often the local bishops who, when emperors at Constantinople ceased to govern except in name, fostered the young life of the city states and educated their citizens in a rough knowledge of war and statecraft.
With the dawn of feudalism bishops degenerated into tyrants, and municipalities began to elect consuls and advisory councils and under their leadership to rebel against their former benefactors, and to establish governments independent of their control.
The next danger was from within: cities are swayed more easily than nations, and too often the ‘communes’ of Lombardy became the prey of private factions or of more powerful city neighbours. Class warred against class and city against city; and out of their struggles arose leagues and counter-leagues, bewildering to follow like the ever-changing colours of a kaleidoscope.
Into this atmosphere of turmoil the quarrel between Popes and Holy Roman Emperors, begun by Henry IV and Hildebrand and carried on by the Hohenstaufen and the inheritors of Hildebrand’s ideals, entered from the ‘communes’ point of view like a heaven-sent opportunity for establishing their independence. In the words of a tenth-century bishop: ‘The Italians always wish to have two masters that they may keep one in check by the other.’
The cities that followed the Hohenstaufen were labelled ‘Ghibelline’, those that upheld the Pope ‘Guelf’; and at first, and indeed throughout the contest where cruelty and treachery were concerned, there was little to choose between the rivals. Later, however, the fierce imperialism of Frederick I was to give to the warfare of his opponents, the Guelfs, a patriotic aspect.