Some writers, even non-Catholics, have spoken of the Papacy as a unifying factor in Italian life. Machiavelli, who was pretty well placed for knowing where the shoe pinched, repeatedly (Istorie fiorentine, l. i; Discorsi sopra Tito Livio, i, 12) speaks of it bitterly as being at all times the source of invasion and of disunion in Italy. This is substantially the view of Gregorovius (Geschichte der Stadt Rom, B. iv, cap. iii, § 3) as to the process in the city of Rome to begin with. So also Symonds: "The whole history of Italy proves that Machiavelli was right when he asserted that the Church had persistently maintained the nation in disunion for the furtherance of her own selfish ends" (Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots, ed. 1907, p. 75).
As a civilising lore or social science the religion of professed love and fraternity, itself a theatre of divisions and discords,[544] counted literally for less than nothing against the passions of ignorance, egoism, and patriotism; for ignorant all orders of the people still were—more ignorant than the Greeks of Athens—in the main matters of political knowledge and self-knowledge.[545] Yet such is the creative power of free intelligence even in a state of strife—given but the conditions of economic furtherance and variety of life and of culture-contact—that in this warring Italy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there grew up a civilisation almost as manifold as that of Hellas itself. The elements of variety, of culture, and of competition were present in nearly as potent a degree. In the north, in particular, the Lombard, and Tuscan, and other cities differed widely in their industries. Florence, besides being one of the great centres of European banking, was eminently the city of various occupations, manufacturing and trading in woollens and silks and gold brocades, working in gold and jewelry, the metals, and leather, and excelling in dyes. In 1266 the reformed constitution specified twelve arti or crafts, seven major and five minor, the latter list being later increased to fourteen.[546] Pisa, beginning as a commercial seaport, trading with the East, whither she exported the iron of Elba, became the first great seat of the woollen manufacture.[547] Milan, besides silks and woollens, manufactured in particular weapons and armour. Genoa had factories of wool, cotton, silk, maroquin, leather, embroidery, and silver and gold thread.[548] Bologna was in a special degree a culture city, with its school of law, and as such would have its special minor industries. But indeed every one of the countless Italian republics, with its specialty of dialect, of life, and of outward aspect, must have had something of its own to contribute to the complex whole.[549]
In the south the Norman kingdom set up in the eleventh century meant yet another norm of life, for there Frederick II established the University of Naples; and Saracen contact told alike on thought and imagination. All through these regions there now reigned something like a common speech, the skeleton of old Latin newly suppled and newly clothed upon; and for all educated men the Latin itself was the instrument of thought and intercourse. For them, too, the Church and the twofold law constituted a common ground of culture and discipline. On this composite soil, under heats of passion and stresses of warring energies, there gradually grew the many-seeded flower of a new literature.
Gradual indeed was the process. Italy, under stress of struggle, was still relatively backward at a time when Germany and France, and even England, under progressive conditions quickened with studious life;[550] and there was a great intellectual movement in France, in particular, in the twelfth century, when Italy had nothing of the kind to show, save as regarded the important part played by the law school of Bologna in educating jurists for the whole of western Europe. For other developments there still lacked the needed conditions, both political and social. The first economic furtherance given to mental life by the cities seems to have been the endowment of law schools and chronicle-writers; the schools of Ravenna and Bologna, and the first chronicles, dating from the eleventh century. Salerno had even earlier had a medical school, long famous, which may or may not have been municipally endowed.[551] To the Church, as against her constant influence for discord and her early encouragement of illiteracy,[552] must be credited a share in these beginnings. After the law school of Bologna (whence in 1222 was founded that of Padua, by a secession of teachers and students at strife with the citizens) had added medicine and philology to its chairs, the Papacy gave it a faculty of theology; and in Rome itself the Church had established a school of law. The first great literary fruit of this intellectual ferment is the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), a performance in which the revived study of Aristotle, set up by the stimulus of Saracen culture, is brought by a capacious and powerful mind to the insuperable task of philosophising at once the Christian creed and the problems of Christendom. Close upon this, the Latin expression of accepted medieval thought, comes the great achievement of Dante, wherein a new genius for the supreme art of rhythmic speech has preserved for ever the profound vibration of all the fierce and passionate Italian life of the Middle Ages. In his own spirit he carries it all, save its vice and levity. Its pitiless cruelty, its intellectuality, its curious observation, its ingrained intolerance, its piercing flashes of tenderness, its capacity for intense and mystic devotion, its absolute dogmatism in every field of thought, the whole pell-mell of its vehement experience, throbs through every canto of his welded strain. And no less does he incarnate for ever its fatal incapacity for some political compromise. For Dante, politics is first and last a question of the dominance of his faction: his fellow-citizens are for him Guelphs or Ghibellines, and he shares the Florentine rabies against rival or even neighbouring towns; his imperialism serving merely to extend the field of blind strife, never to subject strife to the play of reason. Exiled for faction by the other faction, he foreshadows the doom of Florence.
§ 2
With Dante we are already in the fourteenth century, close upon Petrarch and Boccaccio; and already the whole course of political things is curving back to tyranny, for lack of faculty in the cities, placed as they were, to learn the lesson of politics. Their inhabitants could neither combine as federations to secure well-being for all of their own members, nor cease to combine as groups against each other. Always their one principle of union remained negative—animal hatred of city to city, of faction to faction. It is important then to seek for a clear notion of the forces which fostered mental life and popular prosperity alongside of influences which wrought for demoralisation and dissolution. Taking progress to consist on one hand in increase and diffusion of knowledge and art, and on the other in better distribution of wealth, we find that slavery, to begin with, was substantially extinguished in the time of conflict between cities, barons, and emperor.
Already in the fifth century the process had begun in Gaul. Guizot treats the change from slave to free labour as a mystery. "Quand et comment il s'opéra au sein du monde romain, je ne le sais pas; et personne, je crois, ne l'a découvert; mais ... au commencement du Ve siècle, ce pas était fait; il y avait, dans toutes les grandes villes de la Gaule, une classe assez nombreuse d'artisans libres; déjà même ils étaient constitués en corporations.... La plupart des corporations, dont on a continué d'attribuer l'origine au moyen âge, remontent, dans le midi de la Gaule surtout et en Italie, au monde romain" (Civilisation en France, i, 57). But a few pages before (p. 51) we are told that at the end of the fourth century free men commenced in crowds to seek the protection of powerful persons. On this we have the testimony of Salvian (De gubernatione Dei, lib. v). The solution seems to be that the "freed" class in the rural districts were the serfs of the glebe, who, as we have seen, were rapidly substituted for slaves in Italy in the last age of the Empire; and that in the towns in the same way the crumbling upper class slackened its hold on its slaves. Both in town and country such detached poor folk would in time of trouble naturally seek the protection of powerful persons, thus preparing the way for feudalism.
At the same time the barbarian conquerors maintained slavery as a matter of course, so that in the transition period slaves were perhaps more numerous than ever before (cp. Milman, Hist. Lat. Christ. 4th ed. ii, 45-46; Lecky, European Morals, ed. 1884, ii, 70). Whatever were the case in the earlier ages of barbarian irruption, it seems clear that during the Dark Ages the general tendency was to reduce "small men" in general to a servile status, whether they were of the conquering or the conquered stock. Cp. Guizot, Essais, as cited, pp. 161-72; Civilisation, iii, 172, 190-203 (leçons 7, 8). The different grades of coloni and servi tended to approximate to the same subjection in Europe as in the England of the twelfth century. But in France and Italy betterment seems to have set in about the eleventh century; and the famous ordinance of Louis the Fat in 1118 (given by Guizot, iii, 204) tells of a general movement, largely traceable to the Crusades, which in this connection wrought good for the tillers of the soil in the process of squandering the wealth of their masters. Cp. Duruy, Hist. de France, ed. 1880, i, 291.
The process of causation is still somewhat obscure, and is further beclouded by a priori views and prepossessions as to the part played by religion in the change. The fact that the Catholic Church everywhere, though the last to free her own slaves,[553] encouraged penitents to free theirs, is taken as a phenomenon of religion, though we have seen slavery of the worst description[554] flourishing within the past century in a devoutly Protestant community. Pope Urban II actually reduced to slavery the wives of priests who refused to submit to the law of celibacy, handing them over to the nobles or bishops.[555] The rational inference is that the motives in the medieval abandonment of slavery, as in its disuse towards the end of the Roman Empire, and as in its later re-establishments in Christian States, were economic—that (1) nobles on the one hand and burghers on the other found it to their advantage to free their slaves for military purposes,[556] by way of getting money; (2) that the Church in the Dark Ages actually had to enrol many serfs as priests, the desire of freemen to escape military service by taking orders having made necessary a prohibitory law;[557] and (3) that the Church further promoted the process,[558] especially during the crusading period, because a free laity was to her more profitable than one of slaves—as apart from her own serfs. Freemen could be made to pay clerical dues: slaves could not, save on a very small scale.
See Larroque, as cited, ch. ii. The claim of Guizot (Essais, p. 167; Civ. en Europe, leç. 6) that the religious character of most of the formulas of enfranchisement proves them to have had a specially Christian motive, is pure fallacy. Before Christianity the process of manumission was a religious solemnity, being commonly carried out in the pagan temples (cp. A. Calderini, La manomissione e la condizione dei liberti in Grecia, 1908, p. 96 sq.), and there were myriads of freedmen. It appears from Cicero (Philipp. viii, 11, cited by Wallon, Hist. de l'esclavage dans l'antiquité, ii, 419) that a well-behaved slave might expect his liberty in six years. Among the acts of Constantine to establish Christianity was the transference of this function of manumission from the pagan temples to the churches. Thus Christianity took over the process, like the idea of "natural equality" itself, from the pagans.