The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

§ 1

Given the monarchic and feudal environment, the chronic strife within and between the Italian cities can be seen to be sufficient in time to undo them;[598] and some wonder naturally arises at their failure to frame some system of federal government that should restrain their feuds. It was their supreme necessity; but though the idea was now and then broached,[599] there is no sign that the average man ever came nearer planning for it than did the Ghibelline Dante, with his simple theory that Cæsar should ride the horse,[600] or than did the clear brain of Machiavelli, with its longing for a native ruler[601] like Cesare Borgia, capable of beating down the rival princes and the adventurers, and of holding his own against the Papacy. One of the statesmen who harboured the ideal was Rienzi; but he never wrought for its realisation, and his devotion to the Papacy as well as to the headship of Rome would have made it miscarry had he set it on foot.[602] The failure of Cesare Borgia, who of all Italians of his day came nearest to combining the needed faculties for Italian unification, is the proof of the practical impossibility of that solution. But a federation of States, it has been reasoned, was relatively feasible; why then was it never attempted? As usual, the question has been answered in the simple verbalist way, by the decision that the Italians did not strike out a political philosophy or science because they were not that way given. They lacked the "faculty" for whatever they did not happen to do; whereas the ancient Greeks, on the contrary, did theorise because that faculty was theirs, though they had not the faculty to work out the theories.

E.g. the reasoning of so intelligent a thinker as Heeren: "Among those countries in which [political speculation] might have been expected to give the earliest sign of life, Italy was undoubtedly the first: all the ordinary causes appear to have united here; a number of small states arose near each other; republican constitutions were established; political parties were everywhere at work and at variance; and with all this, the arts and sciences were in the full splendour of their revival. The appearance of Italy in the fifteenth century recalls most fully the picture of ancient Greece. And yet in Italy, political theories were as few as in Greece they had been many!—a result both unexpected and difficult to explain. Still, however, I think that this phenomenon may be in great part accounted for, if we remember that there never was a philosophical system of character or influence which prospered under the sky of Italy. No nation of civilised Europe has given birth to so few theories as the Italian: none has had less genius for such pursuits. The history of the Roman philosophy, a mere echo of the Grecian, proves this of its earlier ages, nor was it otherwise in its later." (Essay "On the Rise and Progress of Political Theories," in Historical Treatises, Eng. tr. 1836, p. 118.)

To say nothing of the looseness of the generalisation, which ignores alike Thomas Aquinas and Vico, Leonardo and Galileo, Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno, it may suffice to note once more that on this principle the Germans must be pronounced to have been devoid of theoretical faculty before Leibnitz. On that view it does not become any more intelligible how "they" acquired it.

Seeking a less vacuous species of explanation, we are soon led to recognise (1) that the case of medieval Italy was to the extent of at least two factors more complicated than that of ancient Greece; and that these factors alone might suffice to explain their non-production of a "theory" which should avail for the need; (2) that the theories of the Greeks did not avail to solve their problem; and (3) that the Italians all the while had really two theories too many. At the very emergence of their republics they were already possessed or wrought upon by the embodied theories of the Empire and the Papacy, two elements never represented in the Greek problem, where empire was an alien and barbarian thing suddenly entering into the affairs of civilised Hellas, and where there was nothing in the nature of the Papacy. These two forces in Italian life were all along represented by specific theories; and their clash was a large part of the trouble. Their pressure set up a chronic clash of parties; and the theorist of to-day may be challenged to frame a theory which could have worked well for Italy otherwise than by setting those forces aside—a thing quite impossible in the Middle Ages. If mere system-making on either side could have availed, Thomas Aquinas might have rendered the service.[603]

The economic and political destiny of the Church may be said to have been determined in the eleventh century, when, after a desperate struggle, begun by Pope Hildebrandt, celibacy was forced on the secular clergy. The real motive to this policy was of course not ascetic but economic, the object being to prevent at once the appropriation of church property by married priests for family purposes, and the creation of hereditary titles to church benefices. An evolution of that kind had actually begun; and there can be no question that had it not been checked it would have been fatal to the Papacy. Naturally the married clergy on their part resisted to the uttermost. Only the desperate policy of Hildebrandt, withdrawing popular obedience and ecclesiastical protection from those who would not give up their wives, broke down the resistance; and even thereafter Urban II, as we saw, had to resort to the odious measure of making priests' wives slaves.[604] From that period we may date the creation of the Church as a unitary political power. Sacerdotal celibacy took many generations to establish; but when once the point was carried it involved a force of incorporation which only the strongest political forces—as at the Reformation—could outdo, and which since the Reformation has kept the Church intact.

It is true that the monk Arnold of Brescia, burned alive by the Papacy in 1155, fought a long battle (1139-55) against the papal power, creating an immense ferment in Lombardy, and rousing a strong anti-papal movement in Rome itself (Sismondi, Républiques italiennes, i, chs. 7, 8; Gibbon, ch. 69); and that, as noted by M'Crie (Reformation in Italy, p. 1), "the supremacy claimed by the bishops of Rome was resisted in Italy after it had been submitted to by the most remote churches of the west"; but once papalised, Italy necessarily remained so in her own pecuniary interest. Cp. Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, p. 79. Arnold's movement led even to a revolution in Rome; but after he had ruled there for ten years, overbearing two successive popes, one of greater energy, Adrian IV, excommunicated the city, so expelling Arnold. Adrian then, making a bargain with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa at his coronation, got the republican leader in his power; and the movement ended with Arnold's life. The Papacy was now an irremovable element of division in Italy; and disunion was thenceforth the lot of the land.

If we seek to localise the disease, however, we find that no one factor is specially responsible. The alien emperor, coming in from outside, and setting city against city, Pavia against Milan, and nobles against burghers, is clearly a force of strife. Again, whereas the cities might on the whole have combined successfully against the emperor, to the point of abolishing his rule, the Papacy, calling him in to suit its own purposes, and calling in yet other aliens at a pinch, is still more a force of discord. At times the emperors, in the worst days of Roman corruption, had to choose among the competitors nominated to the Papacy by the intrigues of courtesans and nobles and the venal votes of the people, thus identifying the man they chose with their cause. Hildebrandt, again, after securing that the popes should be elected by the cardinals, became the fiercest of autocrats. By his strife with Henry IV he set up civil war through all Italy and Germany; and when in his despair he called in the Normans against Rome, they sold most of the people into slavery.[605] Later, in the minority of Frederick II, Innocent III so strengthened the Church that it was able by sheer slaughter to crush for a generation all Provençal heresy, and was able to prevail against Frederick in its long struggle with him; in so doing, however, deepening to the uttermost the passion of faction in all the cities, and so preparing the worst and bloodiest wars of the future.

Yet, on the other hand, if we make abstraction of pope and emperor, and consider only the nobles and the citizens, it is clear that they had among them the seeds of strife immeasurable. The nobles were by training and habit centres of violence.[606] Their mutual feuds, always tending to involve the citizens, were a perpetual peril to order; and their disregard of law kept them as ready to make war on citizens or cities as on each other. Again and again they were violently expelled from every Lombard city, on the score of their gross and perpetual disorders; but they being the chief experts in military matters, they were always welcomed back again, because the burghers had need of them as leaders in the feuds of city with city, and of Guelphs with Ghibellines. So that yet again, if we put the nobles out of sight, the spirit of strife as between city and city was sufficient, as in ancient Greece, to make them all the prey of any invader with a free hand. They could not master the science of their problem, could not rise above the plane of primary tribal or local passion and jealousy; though within each city were faction hatreds as bitter as those between the cities as wholes. Already in the twelfth century we find Milan destroying Lodi and unwalling Como. Later, in the thirteenth century, Genoa ruins the naval power of Pisa,[607] then under the tyranny of Ugolino, in a war of commercial hatred, such as Pisa had before waged with Amalfi and with Lucca; in the fourteenth, Genoa and Venice again and again fight till both are exhausted, and Genoa accepts a lord to aid her in the struggle, Pisa doing likewise, and so recovering strength on land;[608] in the fifteenth and sixteenth, Florence spares no cost or effort to keep Pisa in subjection. This fatal policy, in turn, was the result of the frequent attempts of the Pisans to destroy Florentine trade by closing their port to it.[609] All along, inter-civic hates are in full flow through all the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines; and the menace of neither French nor Spanish tyranny can finally unify the mutually repellent communities.