DEATH OF FREDERICK; HIS SUCCESSOR
[1183-1198 A.D.]
It was not long, however, before the struggle was renewed between the emperor and most of the towns. It was supported with not less devotion and not fewer sacrifices; it caused not less calamity whilst it endured; and it was crowned, at its close, with results not less happy. But the cities did not, as in the preceding struggle, engage in it for their own immediate interest; they rather seconded the policy of the holy see, which sought the independence of the church and of Italy, and did not cease to fight for the attainment of this object till the extinction of the house of Hohenstaufen.
Frederick I survived the Peace of Constance seven years. During this period he visited Italy with his son Henry VI; he remained some time at Milan, where he was received with respect, and gained the affection of all the inhabitants, towards whom he testified the utmost trust, confidence, and kindness. Instead of endeavouring to intimidate Lombardy, and recover by intrigues his former power, he was occupied only with the marriage of his son Henry, whom he had previously crowned king of Germany, with Constanza, sole heiress of the Norman kings who had conquered the Two Sicilies. The union of this crown with that of Germany and of Lombardy would have reduced the pope to be no more than the first bishop of his states; it would have disarmed the two auxiliary powers which had supported the league of Lombardy against the emperor; and it alarmed the church, in proportion as it flattered his ambition. The endeavours to prevent or dissolve this union gave rise to a series of wars extending over a long period. Frederick Barbarossa did not see the commencement of them. When the news of the taking of Jerusalem by Saladin, on the 2nd of October, 1187, had thrown all Europe into consternation, Frederick, listening only to his religious and chivalric enthusiasm, placed himself at the head of the Third Crusade, which he led into the East by land, and died the 10th of June, 1190, of a stroke of apoplexy, caused by the coldness of the waters of the little river Calycadnus [Salef] in Asia Minor.
Henry VI had worn for five years the German and Italian crowns, when he received in Germany, where he then was with his wife, news of the death of William II, king of the Two Sicilies, to whom Constanza was successor; and a few months after, that of his father Frederick I. He immediately began his journey towards southern Italy. Tancred, a bastard of the race of the Norman kings, put in opposition to him by the Sicilians, defended, for some time with success, the independence of those provinces, but died in 1194; and Henry, who had entered the kingdom as conqueror, and had made himself detested for his cruelty, also died there suddenly, on the 28th of September, 1197. He left by his marriage with Constanza only one son, Frederick II, hardly four years old, who lost his mother in the following year; and was, under the protection of the pope, acknowledged, child as he was, king of the Two Sicilies; but the imperial and Lombard crowns were withheld from him for several years.
GROWING POWER OF THE NOBILITY
From the Peace of Constance to the death of Henry VI the free cities of Italy had, for the space of fifteen years, no contest to maintain against the emperors; but their repose and liberty were during this period constantly endangered by the pretensions of the nobility. The growing grandeur of the cities, and the decay of the imperial power, had left the nobles of Italy in a very ambiguous position.
They in some measure no longer had a country; their only security was in their own strength; for the emperor in resigning his power over the towns had not thought of giving an organisation to the nobles dispersed in castles. All the families of Italian dukes, and almost all those of marquises and counts, had become extinct; those who remained had lost all jurisdiction over their inferiors; no feudal tenure was respected; no vassal appeared at the baronial court, to form the tribunal of his lord. The frontiers of the kingdom of Lombardy were called marches, after a German word adopted into almost all the European languages, and the commander of these frontiers was called marquis; but the families of the powerful Tuscan marquises were extinct, as well as those of the marquises of Ancona, of Fermo, of Camerino, of Ivrea, and of those of the Veronese and Trevisan marches. There remained, however, on these frontiers some families which bore the same title, and had preserved some wrecks of these ancient and powerful marquisates.
The nobles were not united by the hierarchical connection of the feudal system, but by the affections or antipathies of the Guelfs or Ghibellines. In general, the most powerful families among the nobles, those who had castles sufficiently strong, lands sufficiently extensive, and vassals sufficiently numerous to defend themselves, listening only to the ambition of courts, were attached to the Ghibelline party. Those families, on the contrary, who possessed castles capable of but little resistance, situated on accessible eminences, or in plains; those whose castles were near great towns, and too weak to support a contest with them, had demanded to be made citizens of the towns; they had served them in the wars of the league of Lombardy; they had since taken a principal share in the government, and they thus found themselves attached by common interests to the party of the Guelfs. Independent nobles were no more to be found in all the plains of Lombardy; there was not one who had not become citizen of some republic; but every chain of mountain was thick-set with castles where a nobility, choosing obedience to an emperor rather than to citizens, maintained themselves independent; these too, attracted sometimes by the wealth and pleasures of towns, and sometimes desirous of obtaining influence in the counsels of powerful republics, in order to restore them to the emperor, demanded to be made citizens, when they thought it would open the way to a share in the government; and as war was their sole occupation, they were often gladly received by the republics, which stood in need of good captains.
It was thus the Ghibelline family of Visconti, whose fiefs extended from the Alps to the Lago Maggiore, became associated with the republic of Milan. The house of Este, allied to the Guelfs of Saxony and Bavaria, and devoted to the pope, possessors of several castles built on the fertile chain of the Euganean hills, joined the republic of Ferrara; the parallel chain, which serves as a base to the Tyrolese Alps, was crowned with the castles of Ezzel, Ezzelino, or Eccelino, of Romano, a family enriched by the emperors, entirely devoted to the Ghibelline party, and in process of time attached to the republics of Verona and Vicenza. In like manner were situated on the northern side of the Apennines the fortresses of the Ghibelline nobles, who excited revolutions in the republics of Piacenza, Parma, Reggio, and Modena: on the southern side were the castles of other Ghibellines, in turns citizens and enemies of the republics of Arezzo, Florence, Pistoia, and Lucca; lower in the valleys of the Po, or in the upper vale of Arno, were the castles of the Guelfs, who had become decidedly citizens of the same republics.[c]