Not one is insignificant. Not one but indicates some moment of importance in the social evolution of the state. Not one but speaks of civil strife, whereby the burgh in question struggled into individuality and defined itself against its neighbor. Like fossils, in geological strata, these names survive long after their old uses have been forgotten, to guide the explorer in his reconstruction of a buried past. While one town appears to respect the feudal lordship of great families, another pronounces nobility to be a crime, and forces on its citizens the reality or the pretense of labor. Some recognize the supremacy of ecclesiastics. Others, like Venice, resist the least encroachment of the Church, and stand aloof from Roman Christianity in jealous isolation. The interests of one class are maritime, of another military, of a third industrial, of a fourth financial, of a fifth educational. Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice depend for power upon their fleets and colonies; the little cities of Romagna and the March supply the Captains of adventure with recruits; Florence and Lucca live by manufacture; Milan by banking; Bologna, Padua, Vicenza, owe their wealth to students attracted by their universities. Foreign alliances or geographical affinities connect one center with the Empire of the East, a second with France, a third with Spain. The North is overshadowed by Germany; the South is disquieted by Islam. The types thus formed and thus discriminated are vital, and persist for centuries with the tenacity of physical growths. Each differentiation owes its origin to causes deeply rooted in the locality. The freedom and apparent waywardness of nature, when she sets about to form crystals of varying shapes and colors, that shall last and bear her stamp for ever, have governed their uprising and their progress to maturity. At the same time they exhibit the keen jealousies and mutual hatreds of rival families in the animal kingdom. Pisa destroys Amalfi; Genoa, Pisa; Venice, Genoa; with ruthless and remorseless egotism in the conflict of commercial interests. Florence enslaves Pisa because she needs a way to the sea. Siena and Perugia, upon their inland altitudes, consume themselves in brilliant but unavailing efforts to expand. Milan engulfs the lesser towns of Lombardy. Verona absorbs Padua and Treviso. Venice extends dominion over the Friuli and the Veronese conquests. Strife and covetousness reign from the Alps to the Ionian Sea. But it is a strife of living energies, the covetousness of impassioned and puissant units. Italy as a whole is almost invisible to the student by reason of the many-sided, combative, self-centered crowd of numberless Italian communities. Proximity foments hatred and stimulates hostility. Fiesole looks down and threatens Florence. Florence returns frown for frown, and does not rest till she has made her neighbor of the hills a slave. Perugia and Assissi turn the Umbrian plain into a wilderness of wolves by their recurrent warfare. Scowling at one another across the Valdichiana, Perugia rears a tower against Chiusi, and Chiusi builds her Becca Questa in responsive menace. The tiniest burgh upon the Arno receives from Dante, the poet of this internecine strife and fierce town-rivalry, its stigma of immortalizing satire and insulting epithet, for no apparent reason but that its dwellers dare to drink of the same water and to breathe the same air as Florence. It would seem as though the most ancient furies of antagonistic races, enchained and suspended for centuries by the magic of Rome, had been unloosed; as though the indigenous populations of Italy, tamed by antique culture, were reverting to their primal instincts, with all the discords and divisions introduced by the military system of the Lombards, the feudalism of the Franks, the alien institutions of the Germans, superadded to exasperate the passions of a nation blindly struggling against obstacles that block the channel of continuous progress. Nor is this the end of the perplexity. Not only are the cities at war with one another, but they are plunged in ceaseless strife within the circuit of their ramparts. The people with the nobles, the burghs with the castles, the plebeians with the burgher aristocracy, the men of commerce with the men of arms and ancient lineage, Guelfs and Ghibellines, clash together in persistent fury. One half the city expels the other half. The exiles roam abroad, cement alliances, and return to extirpate their conquerors. Fresh proscriptions and new expulsions follow. Again alliances are made and revolutions accomplished, till the ancient feuds of the towns are crossed, recrossed, and tangled in a web of madness that defies analysis. Through the medley of quarreling, divided, subdivided, and intertwisted factions, ride Emperors followed by their bands of knights, appearing for a season on vain quests, and withdrawing after they have tenfold confounded the confusion. Papal Legates drown the cities of the Church in blood, preach crusades, fulminate interdictions, rouse insurrections in the States that own allegiance to the Empire. Monks stir republican revivals in old cities that have lost their liberties, or assemble the populations of crime-maddened districts in aimless comedies of piety and false pacification, or lead them barefooted and intoxicated with shrill cries of 'Mercy' over plain and mountain. Princes of France, Kings of Bohemia and Hungary, march and countermarch from north to south and back again, form leagues, establish realms, head confederations, which melt like shapes we form from clouds to nothing. At one time the Pope and Emperor use Italy as the arena of a deadly duel, drawing the congregated forces of the nation into their dispute. At another they join hands to divide the spoil of ruined provinces. Great generals with armies at their backs start into being from apparent nothingness, dispute the sovereignty of Italy in bloodless battles, found ephemeral dynasties, and pass away like mists upon a mountain-side beneath a puff of wind. Conflict, ruin, desolation, anarchy are ever yielding place to concord, restoration, peace, prosperity, and then recurring with a mighty flood of violence. Construction, destruction, and reconstruction play their part in crises that have to be counted by the thousands.
In the mean time, from this hurricane of disorder rises the clear ideal of the national genius. Italy becomes self-conscious and attains the spiritual primacy of modern Europe. Art, Learning, Literature, State-craft, Philosophy, Science build a sacred and inviolable city of the soul amid the tumult of seven thousand revolutions, the dust and crash of falling cities, the tramplings of recurrent invasions, the infamies and outrages of tyrants and marauders who oppress the land. Unshaken by the storms that rage around it, this refuge of the spirit, raised by Italian poets, thinkers, artists, scholars, and discoverers, grows unceasingly in bulk and strength, until the younger nations take their place beneath its ample dome. Then,