92. Observe, first, the exact relations at that time of Christian and Profane Chivalry. St. Louis, in the winter of 1248-9, lay in the isle of Cyprus, with his crusading army. He had trusted to Providence for provisions; and his army was starving. The profane German emperor, Frederick II., was at war with Venice, but gave a safe-conduct to the Venetian ships, which enabled them to carry food to Cyprus, and to save St. Louis and his crusaders. Frederick had been for half his life excommunicate,—and the Pope (Innocent IV.) at deadly spiritual and temporal war with him;—spiritually, because he had brought Saracens into Apulia; temporally, because the Pope wanted Apulia for himself. St. Louis and his mother both wrote to Innocent, praying him to be reconciled to the kind heretic who had saved the whole crusading army. But the Pope remained implacably thundrous; and Frederick, weary of quarrel, stayed quiet in one of his Apulian castles for a year. The repose of infidelity is seldom cheerful, unless it be criminal. Frederick had much to repent of, much to regret, nothing to hope, and nothing to do. At the end of his year's quiet he was attacked by dysentery, and so made his final peace with the Pope, and heaven,—aged fifty-six.
93. Meantime St. Louis had gone on into Egypt, had got his army defeated, his brother killed, and himself carried captive. You may be interested in seeing, in the leaf of his psalter which I have laid on the table, the death of that brother set down in golden letters, between the common letters of ultramarine, on the eighth of February.
94. Providence, defied by Frederick, and trusted in by St. Louis, made such arrangements for them both; Providence not in anywise regarding the opinions of either king, but very much regarding the facts, that the one had no business in Egypt, nor the other in Apulia.
No two kings, in the history of the world, could have been happier, or more useful, than these two might have been, if they only had had the sense to stay in their own capitals, and attend to their own affairs. But they seem only to have been born to show what grievous results, under the power of discontented imagination, a Christian could achieve by faith, and a philosopher by reason. {1}
{Footnote 1: It must not be thought that this is said in disregard of the nobleness of either of these two glorious Kings. Among the many designs of past years, one of my favorites was to write a life of Frederick II. But I hope that both his, and that of Henry II. of England, will soon be written now, by a man who loves them as well as I do, and knows them far better.}
95. The death of Frederick II. virtually ended the soldier power in Florence; and the mercantile power assumed the authority it thenceforward held, until, in the hands of the Medici, it destroyed the city.
We will now trace the course and effects of the three revolutions which closed the reign of War, and crowned the power of Peace.
96. In the year 1248, while St. Louis was in Cyprus, I told you Frederick was at war with Venice. He was so because she stood, if not as the leader, at least as the most important ally, of the great Lombard mercantile league against the German military power.
That league consisted essentially of Venice, Milan, Bologna, and Genoa, in alliance with the Pope; the Imperial or Ghibelline towns were, Padua and Verona under Ezzelin; Mantua, Pisa, and Siena. I do not name the minor towns of north Italy which associated themselves with each party: get only the main localities of the contest well into your minds. It was all concentrated in the furious hostility of Genoa and Pisa; Genoa fighting really very piously for the Pope, as well as for herself; Pisa for her own hand, and for the Emperor as much as suited her. The mad little sea falcon never caught sight of another water-bird on the wing, but she must hawk at it; and as an ally of the Emperor, balanced Venice and Genoa with her single strength. And so it came to pass that the victory of either the Guelph or Ghibelline party depended on the final action of Florence.
97. Florence meanwhile was fighting with herself, for her own amusement. She was nominally at the head of the Guelphic League in Tuscany; but this only meant that she hated Siena and Pisa, her southern and western neighbours. She had never declared openly against the Emperor. On the contrary, she always recognized his authority, in an imaginative manner, as representing that of the Caesars. She spent her own energy chiefly in street-fighting,—the death of Buondelmonti in 1215 having been the root of a series of quarrels among her nobles which gradually took the form of contests of honour; and were a kind of accidental tournaments, fought to the death, because they could not be exciting or dignified enough on any other condition. And thus the manner of life came to be customary, which you have accurately, with its consequences, pictured by Shakspeare. Samson bites his thumb at Abraham, and presently the streets are impassable in battle. The quarrel in the Canongate between the Leslies and Seytons, in Scott's 'Abbot,' represents the same temper; and marks also, what Shakspeare did not so distinctly, because it would have interfered with the domestic character of his play, the connection of these private quarrels with political divisions which paralyzed the entire body of the State.—Yet these political schisms, in the earlier days of Italy, never reached the bitterness of Scottish feud, {1} because they were never so sincere. Protestant and Catholic Scotsmen faithfully believed each other to be servants of the devil; but the Guelph and Ghibelline of Florence each respected, in the other, the fidelity to the Emperor, or piety towards the Pope, which he found it convenient, for the time, to dispense with in his own person. The street fighting was therefore more general, more chivalric, more good-humoured; a word of offence set all the noblesse of the town on fire; every one rallied to his post; fighting began at once in half a dozen places of recognized convenience, but ended in the evening; and, on the following day, the leaders determined in contended truce who had fought best, buried their dead triumphantly, and better fortified any weak points, which the events of the previous day had exposed at their palace corners. Florentine dispute was apt to centre itself about the gate of St. Peter, {2} the tower of the cathedral, or the fortress-palace of the Uberti, (the family of Dante's Bellincion Berti and of Farinata), which occupied the site of the present Palazzo Vecchio. But the streets of Siena seem to have afforded better barricade practice. They are as steep as they are narrow—extremely both; and the projecting stones on their palace fronts, which were left, in building, to sustain, on occasion, the barricade beams across the streets, are to this day important features in their architecture.