Over this vertiginous abyss of history, where the memories of antique civilization blend with the growing impulses of modern life in an uninterrupted sequence of national consciousness; through this many-chambered laboratory of conflicting principles, where the ideals of the Middle Age are shaped, and laws are framed for Europe; across this wonder-land of waning and of waxing culture, where Goths, Greeks, Lombards, Franks, and Normans come to form themselves by contact with the ever-living soul of Rome; where Frenchmen, Spaniards, Swiss, and Germans at a later period battle for the richest prize in Europe, and learn by conquest from the conquered to be men; how shall we guide our course? If we follow the fortunes of the Church, and make the Papacy the thread on which the history of Italy shall hang, we gain the advantage of basing our narrative upon the most vital and continuous member of the body politic. But we are soon forced to lose sight of the Italians in the crowd of other Christian races. The history of the Church is cosmopolitan. The Sphere of the Papacy extends in all directions around Italy taken as a local center. Its influence, moreover, was invariably one of discord rather than of harmony within the boundaries of the peninsula. If we take the Empire as our standing-ground, we have to write the annals of a sustained struggle, in the course of which the Italian cities were successful, when they reduced the Emperor to the condition of an absentee with merely nominal privileges. After Frederick II. the Empire played no important part in Italy until its rights were reasserted by Charles V. upon the platform of modern politics. A power so external to the true life of the nation, so successfully resisted, so impotent to control the development of the Italians, cannot be chosen as the central point of their history. If we elect the Republics, we are met with another class of difficulties. The historian who makes the Commune his unit, who confines attention to the gradual development, reciprocal animosities, and final decadence of the republics, can hardly do justice to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papacy, which occupy no less than half the country. Again, the great age of the Renaissance, when all the free burghs accepted the rule of despots, and when the genius of the Italians culminated, is for him a period of downfall and degradation. Besides, he leaves the history of the Italian people before the starting-point of the Republics unexplained. He has, at the close of their career, to account for the reason why these Communes, so powerful in self-development, so intelligent, so wealthy, and so capable of playing off the Pope against the Empire, failed to maintain their independence. In other words he selects one phase of Italian evolution, and writes a narrative that cannot but be partial. If we make the Despots our main point, we repeat the same error in a worse form. The Despotisms imply the Communes as their predecessors. Each and all of them grew up and flourished on the soil of decadent or tired Republics. Though they are all-important at one period of Italian history—the period of the present work—they do but form an episode in the great epic of the nation. He who attempts a general history of Italy from the point of view of the despotisms, is taking a single scene for the whole drama. Finally we might prefer the people—that people, instinctively and persistently faithful to Roman traditions, which absorbed into itself the successive hordes of barbarian invaders, civilized them, and adopted them as men of Italy; that people which destroyed the kingdoms of the Goths and Lombards humbled the Empire at Legnano, and evolved the Communes; that people which resisted alien feudalism, and spent its prime upon eradicating every trace of the repugnant system from its midst; that people which finally attained to the consciousness of national unity by the recovery of scholarship and culture under the dominion of despotic princes. This people is Italy. But the documents that should throw light upon the early annals of the people are deficient. It does not appear upon the scene before the reign of Otho I. Nor does it become supreme till after the Peace of Constance. Its biography is bound up with that of the republics and the despots. Before the date of their ascendency we have to deal with Bishops of Rome, Emperors of the East and West, Exarchs and Kings of Italy, the feudal Lords of the Marches, the Dukes and Counts of Lombard and Frankish rulers. Through that long period of incubation, when Italy freed herself from dependence upon Byzantium, created the Papacy and formed the second Roman Empire, the people exists only as a spirit resident in Roman towns and fostered by the Church, which effectually repelled all attempts at monarchical unity, playing the Lombards off against the Goths, the Franks against the Lombards, the Normans against the Greeks, merging the Italian Kingdom in the Empire when it became German, and resisting the Empire of its own creation when the towns at last were strong enough to stand alone. To speak about the people in this early period is, therefore, to invoke a myth; to write its history is the same as writing an ideal history of mediæval Europe.
The truth is that none of these standpoints in isolation suffices for the student of Italy. Her inner history is the history of social and intellectual progress evolving itself under the conditions of attraction and repulsion generated by the double ideas of Papacy and Empire. Political unity is everywhere and at all times imperiously rejected. The most varied constitutional forms are needed for the self-effectuation of a race that has no analogue in Europe. The theocracy of Rome, the monarchy of Naples, the aristocracy of Venice, the democracy of Florence, the tyranny of Milan are equally instrumental in elaborating the national genius that gave art, literature, and mental liberty to modern society. The struggles of city with city for supremacy or bare existence, the internecine wars of party against party, the never-ending clash of principles within the States, educated the people to multifarious and vivid energy. In the course of those long complicated contests, the chief centers acquired separate personalities, assumed the physiognomy of conscious freedom, and stamped the mark of their own spirit on their citizens. At the end of all discords, at the close of all catastrophes, we find in each of the great towns a population released from mental bondage and fitted to perform the work of intellectual emancipation for the rest of Europe. Thus the essential characteristic of Italy is diversity, controlled and harmonized by an ideal rhythm of progressive movement.[1] We who are mainly occupied in this book with the Italian genius as it expressed itself in society, scholarship, fine art, and literature, at its most brilliant period of renascence, may accept this fact of political dismemberment with acquiescence. It was to the variety of conditions offered by the Italian communities that we owe the unexampled richness of the mental life of Italy. Yet it is impossible to overlook the weakness inflicted on the people by those same conditions when the time came for Italy to try her strength against the nations of Europe.[2] It was then shown that the diversities which stimulated spiritual energy were a fatal source of national instability. The pride of the Italians in their local independence, their intolerance of unification under a single head, the jealousies that prevented them from forming a permanent confederation, rendered them incapable of coping with races which had yielded to the centripetal force of monarchy. If it is true that the unity of the nation under a kingdom founded at Pavia would have deprived the world of much that Italy has yielded in the sphere of thought and art, it is certainly not less true that such centralization alone could have averted the ruin of the sixteenth century which gives the aspect of a tragedy to each volume of my work on the Renaissance.
[1] See Guicciardini (Op. Ined. vol. i. p. 28) for an eloquent demonstration of the happiness, prosperity, and splendor conferred on the Italians by the independence of their several centers. He is arguing against Machiavelli's lamentation over their failure to achieve national unity.
[2] This was the point urged by Machiavelli, in the Principe, the Discorsi, and the Art of War. With keener political insight than Guicciardini, he perceived that the old felicity of Italy was about to fail her through the very independence of her local centers, which Guicciardini rightly recognized as the source of her unparalleled civilization and wealth. The one thing needful in the shock with France and Spain was unity.
Without seeking to attack the whole problem of Italian history, two main topics must be briefly discussed in the present chapter before entering on the proper matter of this work. The first relates to the growth