J. M. Robertson

THE BEGINNINGS

§ 1

To understand aright the phenomenon of medieval Italian civilisation we need first to realise that it was at bottom a fresh growth on the culture roots of the cities of Romanised Italy. When the imperial centre was shifted to the East, as already remarked, the people of Italy began a fresh adaptation to their conditions; those of Rome, instead of leading, standing most zealously to the old way of things. All the barbarian irruptions did but harass and hinder the new development; they finally counted for little in its upward course. There is a prevalent hallucination, akin to others concerning the "Teutonic race," in the shape of a belief that Italy was somehow "regenerated" by the "free nations of the North." No accepted formula could well be further away from the facts. If the political qualities of the "Teutonic race," whatever that may mean, are to be generalised on the facts of the invasions of Italy by the Germanic tribes, from Theodoric to Frederick Barbarossa, they must be summed up as consisting in a general incapacity for progressive civilisation. The invaders were, in fact, too disparate in their stage of evolution from that of the southern civilisation to be capable of assimilating it and carrying it on. Living a life of strife and plunder like the early Romans, they found in the disarmed Italians, and in their rapidly degenerate predecessors of their own stock, an easier prey than the Romans had ever known till they went to the East; but in the qualities either of military or of civil organisation they were conspicuously inferior to the Romans of the early Republic. Men of the highest executive ability appeared from time to time among their leaders; a circumstance of great interest and importance, as suggesting that a percentage of genius occurs in all stages of human culture; but the mass of the invaders was always signally devoid of the very characteristics so romantically attributed to them by German, English, and even French Teutophiles—to wit, the gifts of union, discipline, order, and self-government. These elements of civilisation depend on the functioning of the nerve centres, and are not to be evolved by mere multiplication of animated flesh, which was the main constructive process carried on in ancient Germania. Precisely because they were, as Tacitus noted, the most homogeneous of the European races of that era,[455] they were incapable of any rapid and durable social development. It is only mixed races that can evolve or sustain a complex civilisation.

"The Germans," as we historically trace them at the beginning of our era, were barbarians (i.e., men between savagery and civilisation) in the most rudimentary stage, making scanty beginnings in agriculture; devoid of the useful arts, save those normally practised by savages; given to drunkenness; chronically at war; and alternating at other times between utter sloth and energetic hunting—the pursuit which best fitted them for war. Because the peoples thus situated were in comparison with the Romans "chaste" and monogamous—a common enough virtue in savage life[456]—they are supposed by their admirers to have been excellent material for a work of racial regeneration. Only in an indirect sense does this hold good. As a new "cross" to the Italian stocks they may indeed have made for beneficial variation; but by themselves they were mere raw material, morally and psychologically. Their reputed virtue of chastity disappeared as soon as the barbarians passed from a northern to a southern climate,[457] their vices so speedily exceeding the measure of paganism that even a degree of physiological degeneration soon set in. Even in their own land, met by a fiercer barbarism than their own, they collapsed miserably before the Huns. As regards the arts and sciences, moral and physical, it is impossible to trace to the invaders any share in the progress of Italy,[458] save in so far as they were doubtless a serviceable cross with the older native stocks. To their own stock, which had been relatively too homogeneous, the gain of crossing was mixed. Aurelian had put the case with rude truth when he told a bragging embassy of Goths that they knew neither the arts of war nor those of peace;[459] and so long as the Empire in any section had resources enough to levy and maintain trained armies, it was able to destroy any combination of the Teutons. There was always generalship enough for that, down till the days of Teutonic civilisation. Claudius the Second routed their swarms as utterly as ever did Marius or CÆsar; Stilicho annihilated Rodogast, and always out-generalled Alaric; Aetius, after routing Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths, overwhelmed the vast host of Attila's Huns; and in a later age the single unsleeping brain of Belisarius, scantily weaponed with men and money by a jealous sovereign, could drive back from Rome in shame and ruin all the barbarian levy of Wittich.[460]

As against the "Teutonic" theory of Italian regeneration, a hearing may reasonably be claimed for the "Etruscan," thus set forth:—"The Etruscans were undoubtedly one of the most remarkable nations of antiquity—the great civilisers of Italy—and their influence not only extended over the whole of the ancient world but has affected every subsequent age.... That portion of the Peninsula where civilisation earliest flourished, whence infant Rome drew her first lessons, has in subsequent ages maintained its pre-eminence.... It was Etruria which produced Giotto, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Luca Signorelli, Fra Bartolomeo, Michael Angelo, Hildebrand, 'the starry Galileo,' and such a noble band of painters, sculptors and architects as no other country of modern Europe can boast. Certainly no other region of Italy has produced such a galaxy of brilliant intellects.... Much may be owing to the natural superiority of the race, which, in spite of the revolutions of ages, remains essentially the same, and preserves a distinctive character." (G. Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, 3rd ed. 1883, Introd. vol. i, pp. cii-iv.) Assumption for assumption, this is as defensible as the others.

What happened in Italy after Odoaker was that, for sheer lack of unitary government on the part of the invaders, the cities, which preserved the seeds and norms of the old civilisation, gradually grew into new organic life. Under the early Empire they had been disarmed and unwalled, to make them incapable of revolt. Aurelian, stemming the barbarian tide, began to wall them afresh; but, as we have seen, the withdrawal of the seat of empire left Italy economically incapable of action on an imperial scale; and the personal imbecility of such emperors as Honorius filled up the cup of the humiliation of what once was Rome. But the invaders on the whole did little better; and the material they brought was more hopeless than what they found. The passage from full barbarism to order and civilisation cannot conceivably be made in one generation or one age. Athaulf, the able successor of Alaric, passed his competent judgment on the matter in words which outweigh all the rhetoric of modern romanticism: "He was wont to say that his warmest wish had at first been to obliterate the Roman name, and to make one sole Gothic empire, so that all that which had been Romania should be called Gothia, and that he, Athaulf, should play the same part as did CÆsar Augustus. But when by much experience he was convinced that the Goths were incapable of obedience to laws, because of their unbridled barbarism, and that the State without laws would cease to be a State, he had chosen to seek glory in rebuilding its integrity and increasing the Roman power by Gothic forces, so that posterity should at least regard him as the restorer of the empire which he was unable to replace. Therefore he strove to avoid war and to establish peace."[461]

It needed only command of the machinery of systematic government—if indeed the same qualities had not been in full play long before—to develop in the Teutons every species of evil that could be charged against the Southerns. The fallacy of attributing the crimes of Byzantium to the physiological degeneration of an "old" race is exposed the moment we compare the record with the history of the Franks, as told by Gregory of Tours. Christian writers continue to hold up Nero as a typical product of decadent paganism, saying nothing of the Christian Chilperic, "the Nero of France," or of his father, less ill-famed, Clothaire, the slayer of children, the polygamist, the strictly orthodox Churchman, "certain that Jesus Christ will remunerate us for all the good we do" to his priests.[462] Odious women were as powerful in Frankish courts as in Byzantine; and the tale of the end of Brunehild is not to be matched in pagan annals. Savage treachery, perjury, parricide, fratricide, filicide, assassination, massacre, debauchery, are if possible more constant notes in the tale of the young barbarism, as told by the admiring saint, than in that of the long-descended civilisation of Constantinople; and the rank and file seem to have been worthy of the heads.

One note of Gibbon's, on "barbaric virtue," Àpropos of the character of Totila, has given one of his editors (Bohn ed. iv, 505) the opportunity to assert that the "natural superiority" of the invaders was manifest wherever they came in contact with their civilised antagonists. As if Aurelian and Belisarius were not the moral equals of Totila. Yet in a previous note (ch. 38, ed. cited, iv, 181) on the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours, Gibbon had truly remarked that "it would not be easy, within the same historical space, to find more vice and less virtue." On that head Sismondi declares (Histoire des FranÇais, ed. 1821, i, 403-4; Fall of the Roman Empire, i, 263) that "there was not a Merovingian king that was not a father before the age of fifteen and decrepit at thirty." Dunham (History of the Germanic Empire, 1834, i, 10) improves on this to the extent of asserting that "those abominable princes generally—such were their premature vices—died of old age before thirty." It is a fair surmise that, Clovis being a barbarian of great executive genius (cp. Guizot, Essais sur l'histoire de France, p. 43), his stock was specially liable to degeneration through indulgence. But Motley, whose Teutophile and Celtophobe declamation at times reaches nearly the lowest depth touched by his school, will have it (Rise of the Dutch Republic, ed. 1863, p. 12) that later "the Carlovingian race had been exhausted by producing a race of heroes." Any formula avails to support the dogma that "the German was loyal as the Celt was dissolute" (id. p. 6).

It is perhaps arguable that the early Teuton had a moral code peculiar to himself. Sismondi (Fall, i, 246) remarks, concerning Clothaire's son Gontran, called by Gregory "the good king Gontran," as compared with his brothers: "His morality indeed passed for good; he is only known to have had two wives and one mistress, and he repudiated the first before he married the second; his temper was, moreover, reputed to be a kindly one, for, with the exception of his wife's physician, who was hewn in pieces because he was unable to cure her; of his two brothers-in-law, whom he caused to be assassinated; and of his bastard brother, Gondebald, who was slain by treachery, no other act of cruelty is recorded of him than that he razed the town of Cominges to the ground and massacred all the inhabitants, men, women, and children." Sismondi has also appreciated (p. 205) what Gibbon has missed, the point of the letter of St. Avitus to Gondebald of Burgundy, who had killed his three brothers, exhorting him "to weep no longer with such ineffable piety the death of his brothers, since it was the good fortune of the kingdom which diminished the number of persons invested with royal authority, and preserved to the world such only as were necessary to rule it." Cp. Sismondi's Hist. des FranÇais, i, 173.

A great name, such as Theodoric's, tends to dazzle the eye that looks on the history of the time; but the great name, on scrutiny, is seen to stand for all the progress made in a generation. Theodoric, though he would never learn to read,[463] had a civilised education as regards the arts of government, and what was masterly in his rule may at least as well be attributed to that as to his barbaric stock.[464] It is important to note that in his reign, by reason of being forced to live on her own products, Italy actually attains the capacity to export grain after feeding herself[465]—a result to which the king's rule may conceivably have contributed.[466] In any case, the able ruler represents but a moment of order in an epic of anarchy.[467] After Theodoric, four kings in turn are assassinated, each by his successor; and the new monarchy begins to go the way of the old. What Belisarius began Narses finished, turning to his ends the hatreds between the Teutonic tribes. Narses gone, a fresh wave of barbarism flowed in under Alboin the Longobard, who in due course was assassinated by his outraged wife; and his successor was assassinated in turn. Yet again, the new barbarism began to wear all the features of disorderly decay; and the Longobard kingdom subsisted for over two hundred years, under twenty-one kings, without decisively conquering Venetia, or the Romagna, or Rome, or the Greek municipalities of the south.[468] Then came the Frankish conquest, completed under Charlemagne, on the invitation of the Pope, given because the Franks were good Athanasians and the Longobards Arians. The great emperor did what a great man could to civilise his barbarian empire; but instead of fitting it to subsist without him he destroyed what self-governing power it had.[469] Soon after his death, accordingly, the stone rolled downhill once more; and when Otto of Saxony entered Rome in 951, Italy had undergone five hundred years of Teutonic domination without owing to Teuton activity, save indirectly, one step in civil progress.

It thus appears that, while barbaric imperialism has different aspects from that of "civilisation," having a possible alterative virtue where the conditions are in themselves stagnant, even then its work is at best negative, and never truly constructive. Charlemagne's work, being one of personal ambition, was in large part destructive even where it ostensibly made for civilisation; and at his death the Germanic world was as literally degenerate, in the sense of being enfeebled for self-defence, as was the Roman world in the period of its imperial decay.[470] It is true that, despite the political chaos which followed on the disintegration of his system, there is henceforth no such apparent continuity of decadence as had followed on the Merovingian conquest,[471] and his period shows a new intellectual activity.[472] But it is a fallacy to suppose that he created this activity, which is traceable to many sources. At most, Charlemagne furthered general civilisation by forcing new culture contacts in Central Europe[473], and bringing capable men from other countries, notably Alcuin, but also many from Ireland.[474] But these favourable conditions were not permanent; there was no steady evolution; and we are left asking whether progress might not have occurred in a higher degree had the emperor's work been left unattempted.[475] In any case, it is long after his time that civilisation is seen to make a steady recovery; and there is probably justice in the verdict of Sismondi, that Otto, an administrator of no less capacity than Charlemagne, did more for it than he.[476] Guizot, while refusing to admit that the work of Charlemagne passed away, admits Sismondi's proposition that in the tenth century civilised society in Europe was dissolving in all directions.[477] The subsequent new life came not of imperialism but of the loosening of empire, and not from the Teuton world but from the Latin. It is from the new municipal developments inferribly set up before and under Otto[478] that the fresh growth derives.

Mommsen, in one of those primitively biassed anti-Celtic passages which bar his pretensions to rank as a philosophic historian, declares of the elusive CeltÆ of antiquity, in dogged disregard of the question (so often put by German scholars and so often answered against him[479]) whether they were not Germans, that, "always occupied with combats and heroic actions, they were scattered far and wide, from Ireland to Spain and Asia Minor; but all their enterprises melted like snow in spring; they created nowhere a great State, and developed no specific civilisation."[480] The passage would be exactly as true if written of the Teutons. Every tendency and quality which Mommsen in this context[481] specifies as Celtic is strictly applicable to the race supposed to be so different from the Celts. "Attachment to the natal soil, so characteristic of the Italians and Germans, was foreign to them.... Their political constitution was imperfect; not only was their national unity feebly recognised,[482] as happens with all nations at their outset, but the separate communities were lacking in unity of aim, in solid control, in serious political sentiment, and in persistence. The sole organisation of which they were capable was the military,[483] in which the ties of discipline dispensed the individual from personal efforts." "They preferred the pastoral life to agriculture." "Always we find them ready to roam, or, in other words, to begin the march ... following the profession of arms as a system of organised pillage"; and so on. Such were in strict truth the peculiarities of the Germani, from Tacitus to the Middle Ages; while, on the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that not merely the Gauls but the Britons of CÆsar's day were much better agriculturists than the Germani.[484]

In the early stage the Germani actually shifted their ground every year;[485] and for every migration or crusade recorded of CeltÆ, three are recorded of Teutons. The successive swarms who conquered Italy showed an almost invincible repugnance to the practice of agriculture; in the mass they knew no law and no ideal save the military; they were constantly at tribal war with each other, Frank with Longobard and Goth with Burgundian; Ostrogoths and GepidÆ fought on the side of Attila at Chalons against Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, and Saxons; they had no idea of racial unity; and not one of their kingdoms ever went well for two successive generations. The story of the Merovingians is one nightmare of ferocious discord; that of the Suevi in Spain, and of the Visigoths in Aquitaine, is mainly a memory of fratricide. As regards organisation, the only Teutonic kings who ever made any headway were those who, like Theodoric, had a civilised education, or, like the great Charles and Louis the Second, eagerly learned all that Roman tradition could teach them. The main stock were so incapable of political combination that, after the deposition of the last incapable Carlovingian (888), they could not arrest their anarchy even to resist the Huns and Saracens. Their later conquests of Italy came to nothing; and in the end, by the admission of Teutonic men of science,[486] there is nothing to show, in all the southern lands they once conquered, that they had ever been there. The supposed type has disappeared; the language never imposed itself; the Vandal kingdom in Africa went down like a house of cards before Belisarius;[487] the Teutondom of Spain was swept away by the Moors, and it was finally the mixed population that there effected the reconquest. No race had ever a fairer opportunity than the Visigoths in Spain, with a rich land and an undivided monarchy. "Yet after three centuries of undisputed enjoyment, their rule was overthrown at once and for ever by a handful of marauders from Africa. The Goth ... had been weighed in the balance and found wanting."[488] In Spain, France, and Italy alike, the language remained Romance; "not a word is to be found in the local nomenclature of Castile, nor yet of the Asturias, to tell the tale of the Visigoth";[489] even in England, where also the Teutonic peoples for six hundred years failed to attain either progressive civilisation or political order, the Norman conquerors, speaking a Romance language, vitally modified by it the vocabulary of the conquered. So flagrant are the facts that Savigny and Eichhorn in their day both gave the opinion that "the German nations have had to run through their history with an ingrained tendency in their character towards political dismemberment and social inequality." The contrary theory was a later development.[490]

If, instead of seeking simply for the scientific truth, we sought to meet Teutomania with Celtomania, we might argue that it was only where there was a Celtic basis that civilisation prospered in the tracks of the Roman Empire.[491] Mommsen, in the passage first above cited, declares that the Celts, meaning the Cisalpine Galli, "loved to assemble in towns and villages, which consequently grew and gained in importance among the Celts sooner than in the rest of Italy"—this just after alleging that they preferred pastoral life to agriculture, and just before saying that they were always on the march. If the first statement be true, it would seem to follow that the Celts laid the groundwork of medieval Italian civilisation; for it was in the towns of what had been Cisalpine Gaul that that civilisation flourished. Parts of Northern Italy had in fact been comparatively unaffected by the process which rooted out the peasantry in the South; and there was agriculture and population in the valley of the Po when they had vanished from large areas around and south of Rome.[492] It is certain that "Celtic" Gaul—whence Charlemagne (semi-civilised by the old environment) wrought hard, but almost in vain, to impose civilisation on Germany—reached unity and civilisation in the Middle Ages, while Germany remained divided and semi-barbaric; that Ireland preserved classical learning and gave it back to the rest of Europe when it had well-nigh disappeared thence;[493] that England was civilised only after the Norman Conquest; and that Germany, utterly disrupted by the Reformation where France regained unity, was so thrown back in development by her desperate intestine strifes that only in the eighteenth century did she begin to produce a modern literature. One of the most flagrant of modern fables is that which credits to "Teutonic genius" the great order of church architecture which arose in medieval and later France.[494] "That sublime manifestation of 'poetry in stone' so strangely called Gothic architecture is not only not Visigothic, but it was unknown in Spain for four hundred years after the destruction of the Goths."[495] The Goth was not a builder but a wrecker.

But if anything has been proved by the foregoing analyses, it is that race theories are, for the most part, survivals of barbaric pseudo-science; that culture stage and not race (save as regards the need for mixture), conditions and not hereditary character, are the clues to the development of all nations, "race" being a calculable factor only where many thousands of years of given environments have made a conspicuous similarity of type, setting up a disadvantageous homogeneity. It was simply their prior and fuller contact with Greece and Rome, and further their greater mixture of stocks, that civilised the Galli so much earlier than the Germani. On the other hand, the national failure in Spain and Italy of the Teutonic stocks, as such, proves only that idle northern barbarians, imposing themselves as a warrior caste on an industrious southern population, were (1) not good material for industrial development, and (2) were probably at a physiological disadvantage in the new climate. Southerners would doubtless have failed similarly in Scandinavia.

I know of no thorough investigation of the amalgamation of the stocks, or the absorption or disappearance of the northern. There is some reason to suppose that early in Rome's career of conquest there began in the capital a substitution of more southerly physiological types—eastern and Spanish—for those of the early Latins. But the Italians at all times seem to have undergone a climatic selection which adapted them to Italy, where the northerners, whether Celt or Teuton, were not so adapted. The supposed divergence of character between northern and southern Italians, insisted on by the former in our own time, certainly cannot be explained by any Teutonic intermixture; for the Teutons were settled in all parts of Italy, and nowhere does the traditional blond type remain. Exactly such differences, it should be remembered, are locally alleged as between Norwegians and Danes, northern and southern Germans, and northern and southern English. If there be any real generic and persistent difference of temperament (there is none in variety of moral bias and mental capacity) or of nervous energy, it is presumably to be traced to climate. Some aspects of the problem are discussed at length in The Saxon and the Celt, pt. i, §§ 4, 5.

§ 2

The new life of Italy, so to speak, came of the ultimate impotence of the northern invaders for imperialism. Again and again, from the time of Odoaker, we find signs of a growth of new life in the cities, now partly thrown on their own resources; and it is only the too great stress of the subsequent invasions that postpones their fuller growth for so many centuries. It is to be remembered that these invasions wrought absolute devastation where, even under Roman rule, there had been comparative well-being. Thus the province of Illyria, between the Alps and the Danube, whose outlying and exposed character made it unattractive to the senatorial monopolists, was under the Empire well populated by a free peasantry, who abundantly recruited the army.[496] In the successive invasions this population was almost obliterated; and when Odoaker conquered the Rugians, who then held the territory, he brought multitudes of them into stricken Italy, to people and cultivate its waste lands.[497] Theodoric, in turn, is held to have revived prosperity after overthrowing Odoaker; and we have seen reason to believe that after the loss of Africa even southern Italy perforce revived her agriculture;[498] but early in Theodoric's reign (496) we find Pope Gelasius declaring, doubtless with exaggeration, that in the provinces of Aemilia and Tuscany human life was almost extinct; while Ambrose writes that Bologna, Modena, Reggio, Piacenza, and the adjacent country remained ruined and desolate.[499] After Theodoric, Belisarius, in a struggle that exhausted central Italy, almost annihilated the Goths; and under Narses, who finished the conquest, there was again some recovery, the scattered remnants of the population congregating in the towns, so that Milan and others made fresh headway,[500] though the country remained in large part deserted.

This would seem to have been the turning-point in the long welter of Italian history. The Longobard conquest under Alboin forced on the process of driving the older inhabitants into the cities. The Ostrogothic kings, while they unwalled the towns they captured, had fortified Pavia, which was able to resist Alboin for four years, thus giving the other towns their lesson; and as he advanced the natives fled before him to Venice, to Genoa, to the cities of the Pentapolis, to Pisa, to Rome, to Gaeta, to Naples, and to Amalfi.[501] Above all, the cities of the coast, still adhering to the Greek Empire, and impregnable from land, were now allowed to retain for their own defence the revenue they had formerly paid to Constantinople; Naples won the right to elect her own dukes; and Venice won the status of an equal ally of Byzantium.[502] Thus once more there began to grow up, in tendency if not in form and name, republics of civilised and industrious men, in the teeth of barbarism and under the shadow of the name of empire.[503] Even in the eighth and ninth centuries the free populations of Rome and Ravenna were enrolled under the four heads of clerici, optimates militiÆ, the milites or exercitus, and the cives onesti or free populus.[504] Beneath all were the great mass of unfree; but here at least was a beginning of new municipal life. The Longobards had not, as has been so often written, revived the spirit of liberty; conquest is the negation of the reciprocity in which alone liberty subsists; but they had driven other men into the conditions where the idea of liberty could revive; and in so far as "Lombard" civilisation in the next two hundred years distanced that of the Franks,[505] it was owing to the revival of old industries in the towns and the reactions of the other Italian cities, no less than to the renewed growth of rural population and agriculture.

It took centuries, in any case, to develop the new upward tendency to a decisive degree. The Frankish conquest, like others, disarmed and unwalled the population as far as possible; and it seems to have been only in the tenth century, when the Hungarians repeatedly raided northern Italy (900-24), and the Saracens the southern coasts and the isles, that a general permission was given to the towns to defend themselves.[506] This time the balance of power lay with the defence; and to the mere disorderliness of the barbarian rule on one hand may in part be attributed the relative success of the cities of the later Empire as compared with those of the earlier. Latin Rome had not only disarmed its cities but accustomed them for centuries to ease and idleness; and before a numerous foe, bent on conquest, they made no resistance. Goths, Longobards, and Franks in turn sought to keep all but their own strong places disarmed; but their system could not wholly prevent the growth of a militant spirit in the industrial towns. On the other hand, the Hungarians and Saracens were bent not on conquest but on mere plunder, and were thus manageable foes. Had the Normans, say, come at this time into Italy, they could have overrun the quasi-Teutonic communities as easily as the Teutons had done the Romans or each other. But the conditions being as they were, the swing was towards the independence of the cities; at first under the headship of the bishops, who in the period of collapse of the Carlovingian empire obtained part of the authority previously wielded by counts.[507] At this stage the bishop was by his position partly identified with the people, whom he would on occasion champion against the counts. Thus a new conception of social organisation was shaped by the pressures of the times; and when Otto came in 951 the foundations of the republics were laid. The next stage was the effacement of the authority of the counts within the cities; the next an extension of the bishops' authority over the whole diocese, which was as a rule the old Roman civitas or county. Thus the new municipalities came into being partly under the Ægis of the Church.

§ 3

Almost concurrently with the new growth of political life in the cities, rural life readjusted itself under a system concerning the merits of which there has been as much dispute as concerning its origins—the system of feudalism. Broadly speaking, that began in the relation between the leaders of the Germanic invasion and their chief followers, who, receiving lands as their share, or at another time as a reward, were expected as a matter of course to back the king in time of war, and in their turn ruled their lands and retainers on that principle. When the principle of heredity was established as regarded the crown, it was necessarily affirmed as regards land tenures; and soon it was applied as a matter of course to nearly all the higher royal offices and "benefices" in the Frankish empire,[509] which after Charlemagne became the model for the Germanic and the French and English kingdoms. Thus "the aristocratic system was in possession of society"; and the conflict which inevitably arose between the feudal baronage and the monarchic power served in time to aggrandise the cities, whose support was so important to both sides.

Whatever its social value, the feudal system is essentially a blend of Roman and barbarian points of polity; and in France, the place of its development, Gallic usage played a modifying part. It is dubiously described as growing up "from two great sources—the beneficium and the practice of commendation"—the first consisting (a) in gifts of land by the kings out of their own estates, and (b) in surrenders of land to churches or powerful men, on condition that the surrenderer holds it as tenant for rent or service; while commendation consisted in becoming a vassal without any surrender of title. "The union of the beneficiary tie with that of commendation completed the idea of feudal obligation." The beneficium again, "is partly of Roman, partly of German origin," and "the reduction of a large Roman population," nominally freemen under the Roman system, "to dependence," placed it on a common footing with the German semi-free cultivator, "and conduced to the wide extension of the institution. Commendation, on the other hand, may have had a Gallic or Celtic origin...." In one or other of these developments, the German comitatus or chief's war-band, originally so different, "ultimately merged its existence." On the whole, then, the Teutons followed Gallo-Roman leads.

To pass a moral judgment on this system, either for or against, is to invert the problem. It was simply the most stable, or rather the most elastic arrangement possible in the species of society in which it arose; and we are now concerned with it merely as a conditioning influence in European civilisation. Hallam, severe towards all other men's generalisations, lightly pronounces that "in the reciprocal services of lord and vassal, there was ample scope for every magnanimous and disinterested energy," and that "the heart of man, when placed in circumstances which have a tendency to excite them, will seldom be deficient in such sentiments." On the other hand he concedes that "the bulk of the people, it is true, were degraded by servitude," though he affirms that "this had no connection with the feudal tenures"; and he is forced to decide that "the peace and good order of society were not promoted by this system. Though private wars did not originate in the feudal customs, it is impossible to doubt that they were perpetuated by so convenient an institution, which indeed owed its universal establishment to no other cause."[510] The latter judgment sufficiently countervails the others; and the claim that feudalism was a school of moral discipline, which gradually substituted good faith for bad, will be endorsed by few students of the history of feudal times. A more plausible plea is that of Sismondi, that the feudal nobles of Italy, finding themselves resisted in the cities, which they had been wont to regard as their property, and finding the need of retainers for the defence of their castles, affranchised and protected their peasants as they had never done before. There resulted, he believes, an extension of agriculture which greatly increased the population in the tenth and eleventh centuries.[511] This is partially provable, and it gives us the standpoint most favourable to feudalism; which on the other hand is seen in the main to have soon reached its constructive limits, and to have promoted division no less than union.[512]

It is important here to realise how in the new civilisation, with its new language, there subsisted simultaneously all of the forms of spontaneous aggregation which had been evolved in the older Roman life. The aristocratic families in their very nomenclature exhibited anew the old evolution of the system of gentes, men being named "of the Uberti," "of the Buondelmonti," and so on. At the same time the industrial groups formed their communities, as the scholÆ of workers had done of old; and in the political history of Florence we see constitution after constitution built out of political units so formed. First came the primary patriotism of the family stock; then that of the trade or industrial group; and only as a balance of these separate and largely hostile interests did the City-State subsist. Thus the new Italian civilisation was on its political side fundamentally and organically atomistic, civic union being never a primary but always a secondary adjustment among groups whose first loyalty was to the primary fraternity. It was hard enough to evolve out of all this a common civic interest: to rise yet higher was impossible to the men of that era. And all the while the separate corporation of the Church, despite its inner feuds, tended to seek its separate interest as against all others.

As regards Italy, then, the value of the imperial feudal system, operating through the machinery of the bishoprics, was that it freed the energies of the cities, where alone the higher civilisation could germinate; but on the other hand it fostered in them a spirit of localism and separatism[513] that was ultimately fatal. The old Roman unity had been completely broken up by the invasions, by the strifes of Goths and Byzantines, by the sheer need for individual defence; and the empire, warring with the Papacy, fixed the tendency. Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Milan, and the smaller cities alike felt and acted as independent States, each against the other, forming occasional alliances only as separate nations or kings might do. In the ever-changing conflict of nobles, emperor, pope, cities, and bishops, all parties alike developed the spirit of self-assertion,[514] and wrought for their own special incorporation. At times prelates and cities combined against nobles, as under Conrad the Salic (1035-39), who was forced to revise the feudal law and free the remaining serfs; later, members of each species sided with pope or emperor in the strifes of Hildebrandt and Henry IV and their successors over the question of investitures, till the general interest compelled a peace. During these ages of inconclusive conflict the cities, thus far acting mainly in conjunction with their bishops or archbishops, developed their militia; their caroccio or banner-bearing fighting-car; and their institution of public election of consuls. Here the very name tells of the power of the Roman tradition, as against the supposed capacity of the Teutonic races for spontaneous free organisation and self-government—tells too of the survival of a majority of Roman-speaking people even in the upper and middle classes of the cities. We may readily grant, as against Savigny and his disciples, that the Roman institution of the curia had not been preserved in the cities of Lombardy. There was no reason why it should have been, even if the Longobard kings had been inclined to use it as a means of extorting taxation; for in the last ages of the Empire it had become detestable to the upper citizens themselves.

But other Roman institutions remained even in the Lombard cities, in respect of the organisation of trades and commerce;[515] and apart from the Roman survivals at Ravenna,[516] the free cities of the coast, which had remained nominally attached to Byzantium, had their elective institutions, not specially democratic, but sufficiently "free" to incite the Lombard towns to similar procedure.[517] Venice in particular was moulded from the first by Byzantine influences. "Industry, commerce, economic methods, and financial institutions were affected as much as manners, the arts, and even religious life. Greek was the language of eastern trade, and served many Venetians as a second tongue."[518] Venice and Genoa alike developed a national police on Byzantine lines, prescribing the shape, construction, and manning of vessels[519] in the very spirit of late imperial Rome. And the cities of the peninsula could not but be similarly influenced. At all events it was in the train of these earlier developments, and perhaps in some degree on stimulus from papal Rome, that the new organic life of the Lombard and Tuscan cities began to develop itself in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The first seats of new commerce were in those cities to which, as we have seen, numbers of the old Italian population had fled before the Gothic invaders. Amalfi was such a seat even in the ninth century; and to its merchants is credited the first traffic with the East in the Saracen period, as well as the first employment of the mariner's compass in navigation.[520] Next flourished Pisa, where also, perhaps, the ancient commerce had never wholly died out;[521] then her successful rivals, Genoa and Venice. And always commerce formed the basis of the revival.

Once begun, the new life was extraordinarily energetic on the industrial and constructive side, the independence and rivalry of so many communities securing for the time the maximum of effort. Already in the seventh century, indeed, their industry stood for a new era in history.[522] Where before even the men of the cities had gone clad in skins after the manner of the barbarian conquerors, they now began to weave for themselves woollen cloths like the civilised ancients.[523] Soon the art of weaving the finer cloths, which had hitherto been imported from Greece in so far as they were used at all, followed the simpler craft of wool-weaving.[524] It was in these cities that architecture may be said to have had its first general revival in western Europe since the beginning of the decay of Rome. Walls, towers, ports, quays, canals, municipal palaces, prisons, churches, cathedrals—such were the first outward and visible signs of the new era in Italian civilisation.[525] On these foundations were to follow the literature and the art and science which began the civilisation of modern Europe, the whole presided over and in part ordered and inspired by the recovered use of the great system of ancient Roman law, which too began to be redelivered to Europe early in the twelfth century from Italian Bologna.

And whereas the common political path to independence had been originally by way of the headship of the bishop as against the count, that headship in turn disappears during the eleventh century without any visible or general cataclysm. It would seem as if, when the obsessing fear of the end of the world with which men entered the year 1000 had passed away, the secular spirit recovered new life; and the intimate tyranny of the feudal representative of the military monarch being no longer a danger, the hand of the bishop was in turn thrown off. For a time the combination of city and prelate was politically valid, as in the case of Archbishop Aribert of Milan, under whose nominal rule the civic caroccio seems to have made its appearance; but even Aribert was shelved before his death, in the course of a civil strife between the people and the nobles. Thenceforward, for an age, the great Lombard city practically ruled itself, the nobles being included in a compromise brought about by Lanzone, who, himself a noble, had led the faction of the burghers. Fresh strifes followed, in which the succeeding archbishops bore part; but the virtual autonomy of the city remained.[526]

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.