burghs. During the forty-seven years’ war, when pope and
emperor were respectively bidding for their alliance, and offering
concessions to secure their support, the communes grew in
self-reliance, strength and liberty. As the bishops had helped
to free them from subservience to their feudal masters, so the
war of investitures relieved them of dependence on their bishops.
The age of real autonomy, signalized by the supremacy of consuls
in the cities, had arrived.
In the republics, as we begin to know them after the war of investitures, government was carried on by officers called consuls, varying in number according to custom and according to the division of the town into districts. These magistrates, as we have already seen, were originally appointed to control and protect the humbler classes. But, in proportion as the people gained more power in the field the consuls rose into importance, superseded the bishops and began to represent the city in transactions with its neighbours. Popes and emperors who needed the assistance of a city, had to seek it from the consuls, and thus these officers gradually converted an obscure and indefinite authority into what resembles the presidency of a commonwealth. They were supported by a deliberative assembly, called credenza, chosen from the more distinguished citizens. In addition to this privy council, we find a gran consiglio, consisting of the burghers who had established the right to interfere immediately in public affairs, and a still larger assembly called parlamento, which included the whole adult population. Though the institutions of the communes varied in different localities, this is the type to which they all approximated. It will be perceived that the type was rather oligarchical than strictly democratic. Between the parlamento and the consuls with their privy council, or credenza, was interposed the gran consiglio of privileged burghers. These formed the aristocracy of the town, who by their wealth and birth held its affairs within their custody. There is good reason to believe that, when the term popolo occurs, it refers to this body and not to the whole mass of the population. The comune included the entire city—bishop, consuls, oligarchy, councils, handicraftsmen, proletariate. The popolo was the governing or upper class. It was almost inevitable in the transition from feudalism to democracy that this intermediate ground should be traversed; and the peculiar Italian phrases, primo popolo, secondo popolo, terzo popolo, and so forth, indicate successive changes, whereby the oligarchy passed from one stage to another in its progress toward absorption in democracy or tyranny.
Under their consuls the Italian burghs rose to a great height of prosperity and splendour. Pisa built her Duomo. Milan undertook the irrigation works which enriched the soil of Lombardy for ever. Massive walls, substantial edifices, commodious seaports, good roads, were the benefits conferred by this new government on Italy. It is also to be noticed that the people now began to be conscious of their past. They recognized the fact that their blood was Latin as distinguished from Teutonic, and that they must look to ancient Rome for those memories which constitute a people’s nationality. At this epoch the study of Roman law received a new impulse, and this is the real meaning of the legend that Pisa, glorious through her consuls, brought the pandects in a single codex from Amalfi. The very name consul, no less than the Romanizing character of the best architecture of the time, points to the same revival of antiquity.
The rise of the Lombard communes produced a sympathetic
revolution in Rome, which deserves to be mentioned in this place.
A monk, named Arnold of Brescia, animated with the
spirit of the Milanese, stirred up the Romans to shake
off the temporal sway of their bishop. He attempted,
Republic
in Rome.
in fact, upon a grand scale what was being slowly and quietly
effected in the northern cities. Rome, ever mindful of her
unique past, listened to Arnold’s preaching. A senate was
established, and the republic was proclaimed. The title of
patrician was revived and offered to Conrad, king of Italy, but
not crowned emperor. Conrad refused it, and the Romans
conferred it upon one of their own nobles. Though these institutions
borrowed high-sounding titles from antiquity, they were
in reality imitations of the Lombard civic system. The patrician
stood for the consuls. The senate, composed of nobles, represented
the credenza and the gran consiglio. The pope was
unable to check this revolution, which is now chiefly interesting
as further proof of the insurgence of the Latin as against the
feudal elements in Italy at this period (see Rome: History).
Though the communes gained so much by the war of investitures, the division of the country between the pope’s and emperor’s parties was no small price to pay for independence. It inflicted upon Italy the ineradicable curse of party-warfare, setting city against city, house Municipal wars. against house, and rendering concordant action for a national end impossible. No sooner had the compromise of the investitures been concluded than it was manifest that the burghers of the new enfranchised communes were resolved to turn their arms against each other. We seek in vain an obvious motive for each separate quarrel. All we know for certain is that, at this epoch, Rome attempts to ruin Tivoli, and Venice Pisa; Milan fights with Cremona, Cremona with Crema, Pavia with Verona, Verona with Padua, Piacenza with Parma, Modena and Reggio with Bologna, Bologna and Faenza with Ravenna and Imola, Florence and Pisa with Lucca and Siena, and so on through the whole list of cities. The nearer the neighbours, the more rancorous and internecine is the strife; and, as in all cases where animosity is deadly and no grave local causes of dispute are apparent, we are bound to conclude that some deeply-seated permanent uneasiness goaded these fast growing communities into rivalry. Italy was, in fact, too small for her children. As the towns expanded, they perceived that they must mutually exclude each other. They fought for bare existence, for primacy in commerce, for the command of seaports, for the keys of mountain passes, for rivers, roads and all the avenues of wealth and plenty. The pope’s cause and the emperor’s cause were of comparatively little moment to Italian burghers; and the names of Guelph and Ghibelline, which before long began to be heard in every street, on every market-place, had no meaning for them. These watchwords are said to have arisen in Germany during the disputed succession of the empire between 1135 and 1152, when the Welfs of Bavaria opposed the Swabian princes of Waiblingen origin. But in Italy, although they were severally identified with the papal and imperial parties, they really served as symbols for jealousies which altered in complexion from time to time and place to place, expressing more than antagonistic political principles, and involving differences vital enough to split the social fabric to its foundation.
Under the imperial rule of Lothar the Saxon (1125–1137) and
Conrad the Swabian (1138–1152), these civil wars increased
in violence owing to the absence of authority. Neither
Lothar nor Conrad was strong at home; the former
had no influence in Italy, and the latter never entered
Swabian emperors.
Frederick Barbarossa and the Lombard cities.
Italy at all. But when Conrad died, the electors chose his
nephew Frederick, surnamed Barbarossa, who united the rival
honours of Welf and Waiblingen, to succeed him; and it was
soon obvious that the empire had a master powerful
of brain and firm of will. Frederick immediately
determined to reassert the imperial rights in his
southern provinces, and to check the warfare of the
burghs. When he first crossed the Alps in 1154,
Lombardy was, roughly speaking, divided between two parties,
the one headed by Pavia professing loyalty to the empire,
the other headed by Milan ready to oppose its claims. The
municipal animosities of the last quarter of a century gave
substance to these factions; yet neither the imperial nor the
anti-imperial party had any real community of interest with
Frederick. He came to supersede self-government by consuls,
to deprive the cities of the privilege of making war on their own
account and to extort his regalian rights of forage, food and
lodging for his armies. It was only the habit of inter-urban
jealousy which prevented the communes from at once combining
to resist demands which threatened their liberty of action, and
would leave them passive at the pleasure of a foreign master.
The diet was opened at Roncaglia near Piacenza, where Frederick
