The kingdom of the Lombards endured two centuries, and left ineffaceable marks upon Italy. A cordon of military cities was drawn round the old Roman centers in Lombardy, Tuscany, and the Duchy of Spoleto. Pavia rose against Milan, which had been a second Rome, Cividale against Aquileia, Fiesole against Florence, Lucca against Pisa. The country was divided into Duchies and Marches; military service was exacted from the population, and the laws of the Lombards, asininum jus, quoddam jus quod faciebant reges per se, as the jurists afterwards defined them, were imposed upon the descendants of Roman civilization. Yet the outlying cities of the sea-coast, as we have already seen, were independent; and Rome remained to be the center of revolutionary ideas, the rallying-point of a policy inimical to Lombard unity. Not long after their settlement, the princes of the Lombard race took the fatal step of joining the Catholic communion, whereby they strengthened the hands of Rome and excluded themselves from tyrannizing in the last resort over the growing independence of the Papal See. The causes of their conversion from Arianism to orthodox Latin Christianity are buried in obscurity. But it is probable that they were driven to this measure by the rebelliousness of their great vassals and the necessity of resting for support upon the indigenous populations they had subjugated. Rome, profiting by the errors and the weakness of her antagonists, extended her spiritual dominion by enforcing sacraments, ordeals, and appeals to ecclesiastical tribunals, organized her hierarchy under Gregory the Great, and lost no opportunity of enriching and aggrandizing her bishoprics. In 718 she shook off the yoke of Byzantium by repelling the heresies of Leo the Isaurian; and when this insurrection menaced her with the domestic tyranny of the Lombard Kings, who possessed themselves of Ravenna in 728, she called the Franks to her aid against the now powerful realm. Stephen II. journeyed in 753 to Gaul, named Pippin Patrician of Rome, and invited him to the conquest of Italy. In the war that followed, the Franks subdued the Lombards, and Charles the Great was invested with their kingdom and crowned Emperor in 800 by Leo III. at Rome.
The famous compact between Charles the Great and the Pope was in effect a ratification of the existing state of things. The new Emperor took for himself and converted into a Frankish Kingdom all the provinces that had been wrested from the Lombards. He relinquished to the Papacy Rome with its patrimony, the portions of Spoleto and Benevento that had already yielded to the See of S. Peter, the southern provinces that owned the nominal ascendency of Byzantium, the islands and the cities of the Exarchate and Pentapolis which formed no part of the Lombard conquest. By this stipulation no real temporal power was accorded to the Papacy, nor did the new Empire surrender its paramount rights over the peninsula at large. The Italian kingdom, transferred to the Franks in 800, was the kingdom founded by the Lombards; while the outlying and unconquered districts were placed beneath the protectorate of the power which had guided their emancipation. Thus the dualism introduced into Italy by Theodoric's veneration for Rome, and confirmed by the failure of the Lombard conquest, was ratified in the settlement whereby the Pope gave a new Empire to Western Christendom. Venice, Pisa, Genoa, and the maritime Republics of the south, excluded from the kingdom, were left to pursue their own course of independence; and this is the chief among many reasons why they rose so early into prominence. Rome consolidated her ancient patrimonies and extended her rectorship in the center, while the Frankish kings, who succeeded each other through eight reigns, developed the Regno upon feudal principles by parceling the land among their Counts. New marches were formed, traversing the previous Lombard fabric and introducing divisions that decentralized the kingdom. Thus the great vassals of Ivrea, Verona, Tuscany, and Spoleto raised themselves against Pavia. The monarchs, placed between the Papacy and their ambitious nobles, were unable to consolidate the realm; and when Berengar, the last independent sovereign strove to enforce the declining authority of Pavia, he was met with the resistance and the hatred of the nation.
The kingdom Berengar attempted to maintain against his vassals and the Church was virtually abrogated by Otho I., whom the Lombard nobles summoned into Italy in 951. When he reappeared in 961, he was crowned Emperor at Rome, and assumed the title of the King of Italy. Thus the Regno was merged in the Empire, and Pavia ceased to be a capital. Henceforth the two great potentates in the peninsula were an unarmed Pontiff and an absent Emperor. The subsequent history of the Italians shows how they succeeded in reducing both these powers to the condition of principles, maintaining the pontifical and imperial ideas, but repelling the practical authority of either potentate. Otho created new marches and gave them to men of German origin. The houses of Savoy and Montferrat rose into importance in his reign. To Verona were intrusted the passes between Germany and Italy. The Princes of Este at Ferrara held the keys of the Po, while the family of Canossa accumulated fiefs that stretched from Mantua across the plain of Lombardy, over the Apennines to Lucca, and southward to Spoleto. Thus the ancient Italy of Lombards and Franks was superseded by a new Italy of German feudalism, owing allegiance to a suzerain whose interests detained him in the provinces beyond the Alps. At the same time the organization of the Church was fortified. The Bishops were placed on an equality with the Counts in the chief cities, and Viscounts were created to represent their civil jurisdiction. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Otho's concessions to the Bishops. During the preceding period of Frankish rule about one third of the soil of Italy had been yielded to the Church, which had the right of freeing its vassals from military service; and since the ecclesiastical sees were founded upon ancient sites of Roman civilization, without regard to the military centers of the barbarian kingdoms, the new privileges of the Bishops accrued to the benefit of the indigenous population. Milan, for example, down-trodden by Pavia, still remained the major See of Lombardy. Aquileia, though a desert, had her patriarch, while Cividale, established as a fortress to coerce the neighboring Roman towns, was ecclesiastically but a village. At this epoch a third power emerged in Italy. Berengar had given the cities permission to inclose themselves with walls in order to repel the invasions of the Huns.[1] Otho respected their right of self-defense, and from the date of his coronation the history of the free burghs begins in Italy. It is at first closely connected with the changes wrought by the extinction of the kingdom of Pavia, by the exaltation of the clergy, and by the dislocation of the previous system of feud-holding, which followed upon Otho's determination to remodel the country in the interest of the German Empire. The Regno was abolished. The ancient landmarks of nobility were altered and confused. The cities under their Bishops assumed a novel character of independence. Those of Roman origin, being ecclesiastical centers, had a distant advantage over the more recent foundations of the Lombard and the Frankish monarchs. The Italic population everywhere emerged and displayed a vitality that had been crushed and overlaid by centuries of invasion and military oppression.
[1] It is worthy of notice that to this date belongs the war-chant of the Modenese sentinels, with its allusions to Troy and Hector, which is recognized as the earliest specimen of the Italian hendecasyllabic meter.
The burghs at this epoch may be regarded as luminous points in the dense darkness of feudal aristocracy.[1] Gathering round their Cathedral as a center, the towns inclose their dwellings with bastions, from which they gaze upon a country bristling with castles, occupied by serfs, and lorded over by the hierarchical nobility. Within the city the Bishop and the Count hold equal sway; but the Bishop has upon his side the sympathies and passions of the burghers. The first effort of the towns is to expel the Count from their midst. Some accident of misrule infuriates the citizens. They fly to arms and are supported by the Bishop. The Count has to retire to the open country, where he strengthens himself in his castle.[2] Then the Bishop remains victor in the town, and forms a government of rich and noble burghers, who control with him the fortunes of the new-born state. At this crisis we begin to hear for the first time a word that has been much misunderstood. The Popolo appears upon the scene. Interpreting the past by the present, and importing the connotation gained by the word people in the revolutions of the last two centuries, students are apt to assume that the Popolo of the Italian burghs included the whole population. In reality it was at first a close aristocracy of influential families, to whom the authority of the superseded Counts was transferred in commission, and who held it by hereditary right.[3] Unless we firmly grasp this fact, the subsequent vicissitudes of the Italian commonwealths are unintelligible, and the elaborate definitions of the Florentine doctrinaires lose half their meaning. The internal revolutions of the free cities were almost invariably caused by the necessity of enlarging the Popolo, and extending its franchise to the non-privileged inhabitants. Each effort after expansion provoked an obstinate resistance from those families who held the rights of burghership; and thus the technical terms primo popolo, secondo popolo/i>, popolo grasso, popolo minuto, frequently occurring in the records of the Republics, indicate several stages in the progress from oligarchy to democracy. The constitution of the city at this early period was simple. At the head of its administration stood the Bishop, with the Popolo of enfranchised burghers. The Commune included the Popolo, together with the non-qualified inhabitants, and was represented by Consuls, varying in number according to the division of the town into quarters.[4] Thus the Commune and the Popolo were originally separate bodies; and this distinction has been perpetuated in the architecture of those towns which still can show a Palazzo del Popolo apart from the Palazzo del Commune. Since the affairs of the city had to be conducted by discussion, we find Councils corresponding to the constituent elements of the burgh. There is the Parlamento, in which the inhabitants meet together to hear the decisions of the Bishop and the Popolo, or to take measures in extreme cases that affect the city as a whole; the Gran Consiglio, which is only open to duly qualified members of the Popolo; and the Credenza, or privy council of specially delegated burghers, who debate on matters demanding secrecy and diplomacy. Such, generally speaking, and without regard to local differences, was the internal constitution of an Italian city during the supremacy of the Bishops.
[1] It is not necessary to raise antiquarian questions here relating to the origin of the Italian Commune. Whether regarded as a survival of the ancient Roman municipium or as an offshoot from the Lombard guild, it was a new birth of modern times, a new organism evolved to express the functions of Italian as different from ancient Roman or mediæval Lombard life. The affection of the people for their past induced them to use the nomenclature of Latin civility for the officers and councils of the Commune. Thus a specious air of classical antiquity, rather literary and sentimental than real, was given to the Commune at the outset. Moreover, it must be remembered that Rome herself had suffered no substantial interruption of republican existence during the Dark Ages. Therefore the free burghs, though their vitality was the outcome of wholly new conditions, though they were built up of guilds and associations representing interests of modern origin, flattered themselves with an uninterrupted municipal succession from the Roman era, and pointed for proof to the Eternal City.
[2] The Italian word contado is a survival from this state of things. It represents a moment in the national development when the sphere of the Count outside the city was defined against the sphere of the municipality. The Contadini are the people of the Contado, the Count's men.
[3] Even Petrarch, in his letter to four Cardinals (Lett. Fam. xi. 16, ed. Fracassetti) on the reformation of the Roman Commonwealth, recommends the exclusion of the neighboring burghs and all strangers, inclusive of the Colonna and Orsini families, from the franchise. None but pure Romans, how to be discovered from the colluviet omnium gentium deposited upon the Seven Hills by centuries of immigration he does not clearly say, should be chosen to revive the fallen majesty of the Republic. See in particular the peroration of his argument (op. cit. vol. iii. p. 95). In other words, he aims at a narrow Popolo, a pura cittadinanza, in the sense of Cacciaguida Par. xvi.
[4] In some places we find as many as twelve Consuls. It appears that both the constituent families of the Popolo and the numbers of the Consuls were determined by the Sections of the city, so many being told off for each quarter.
In the North of Italy not a few of the greater vassals, among whom may be mentioned the houses of Canossa, Montferrat, Savoy, and Este, creations of the Salic Emperors, looked with favor upon the development of the towns, while some nobles went so far as to constitute themselves feudatories of Bishops.[1] The angry warfare carried on against Canossa by the Lombard barons has probably to be interpreted by the jealousy this popular policy excited. At the same time, while Lombardy and Tuscany were establishing their municipal liberties, a sympathetic movement began in Southern Italy, which resulted in the conquest of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily by the Normans. Omitting all the details of this episode, than which nothing more dramatic is presented by the history of modern nations, it must be enough to point out here that the Normans finally severed Italy from the Greek Empire, gave a monarchical stamp to the south of the peninsula, and brought the Regno they consolidated into the sphere of national politics under the protection of the Pope. Up to the date of their conquest Southern Italy had a separate and confused history. It now entered the Italian community, and by the peculiar circumstances of its cession to the Holy See was destined in the future to become the chief instrument whereby the Popes disturbed the equilibrium of the peninsula in furtherance of their ambitious schemes.