A similar evolution took place throughout northern Italy, in a sufficiently simple fashion. The bishops were still in large measure elected by the people, and rival candidates for vacant sees were always ready to outbid each other in surrendering political functions which were becoming ever harder to fulfil.[527] Beyond this, the course of the final stage of the emancipation of the cities is not traceable. "All that we can say is that at the opening of the eleventh century the bishops exercised in the cities the authority which had formerly been vested in the counts: at the close the cities have reduced the prelates to insignificance, and stand before us as so many free republics."[528] "The power of the bishops was the calyx which for a certain time had kept the flower of Italian life close-packed within the bud. Then the calyx weakened and opened, and Italian civic life unfolded itself to the eye to form and bear fruit."[529]
To this, however, we should add that in Florence the process was somewhat different. Under the Franks, Florence was ruled, like other cities, by a count, who replaced the Longobard duke; and under the later Germanic empire all Tuscany, and some further territory, is found ruled by a Marquis, or Markgraf, Ugo, in the tenth century. In the latter part of the tenth century his descendant Matilda sided with Hildebrandt against the Emperor. At this period Florence was a centre of the papal movement of monastic reform; and the people actually rose against a simoniacal bishop, whom they fought for five years[530] (1063-68). Here, under the rule of Countess Matilda, the republic or "commune" is seen growing up rather of its own faculty than by help of the bishop; it already calls itself Populus Florentinus;[531] and after Matilda's death in 1115, it speedily develops the self-governing functions which it had partially exercised in her lifetime.[532] And Florence, be it noted, was the most democratic in population of the northern cities from the beginning.[533]
In no case, however, should we be right in supposing that "republic" or "commune" or "free city" meant a population united in devotion to a civic ideal. The eternal impulses of strife and repulsion had in no degree been eliminated by the formation of new State units. In Florence we find all the elements of Greek stasis at work in the first century of the commune.[534] Among the grandi were men who had risen from the people, and men descended from old feudal houses; and these spontaneously ranged themselves in factions. Such a division furthered imperialism by inclining groups to take the side of the emperor, who, wherever he could, set up his Podestà (potestas or "authority") in the cities.[535] Imperialistic nobles further formed groups called "Societies of the Towers," each of which had its common defensive tower or fort, communicating with the houses of neighbouring members; the officials of these societies were at times called consuls; and from these were usually chosen, in the early days, the consuls of the commune.[536] At times they were also consuls of trade guilds, a state of things proving a certain amount of assimilation between the trading and the noble class, who together formed the enfranchised "people," the town artisans and the rural cultivators of the surrounding contado or "county" being excluded.
The close community thus formed exhibited very much the same political tendencies as had marked that of early republican Rome. The cities, constantly flouted and menaced by the castled nobility of the surrounding territory, who blackmailed passing traders, soon learned to use the iron hand as against these, who in turn sought the emperor's protection; and cities wont to put down nobles were prompt to seek to coerce each other. On the death of the Emperor Frederick I (1197), Florence set on foot a League of the Tuscan cities, which, while primarily hostile to the Empire, repelled the claim of the Papacy to over-lordship as heir of the Countess Matilda. On such a basis there might conceivably have arisen a new and strong national life; but soon Florence, like old Athens, was oppressing her allies, who gave their sympathy to a town like Semifonte, the refuge of all who fled from places conquered and taxed by her. To individual allies like Sienna, Florence was substantially faithless, and so strengthened from the first the fatal tendency to separatism—this while the inner social sunderance was steadily deepening.[537]
None of the forces at work was remedial on this side; the regimen of the Podestà, even when he was actually a foreigner, furthered instead of checking strife between communities;[538] and the more "aristocratic" cities were at least as quarrelsome as the less. Bologna played the tyrant city as vigorously as Florence.[539] Rome was among the worst governed of all. In the thirteenth century, under Innocent IV, we find the fighting factions of the nobles using the Coliseum and other ancient monuments as fortresses, garrisoned by bandits in their pay, who pillaged traders and passengers; and not the Papacy, but the "senator" chosen by the people—a Bolognese noble—put them down, hanging nobles and bandits alike.[540]
Such was civilisation at the centre of Christendom after a thousand years of Christianity. The notable fact is that through all this wild play of primitive passion there was yet growing up a new Italian civilisation; and it is part of our task to trace its causation.
FOOTNOTES:
[455] Germania, c. 2.
[456] For a good view of the many points in common between Teutonic barbarism and normal savagery, see the synopsis of Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en France, i, 7ième leçon. Lamprecht acquiesces (What is History? 1905, p. 213).
[457] "Everything about them [the Longobards], even for many years after they have entered upon the sacred soil of Italy, speaks of mere savage delight in bloodshed and the rudest forms of sensual indulgence" (Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, 2nd ed. v, 156. Cp. Lamprecht, What is History? pp. 48-49.)