But in the North this rudimentary Renaissance was never suffered to spread beyond the walls of single towns; it was hemmed in on all sides by feudal and ecclesiastical institutions, which restrained it within definite limits. The free towns of Germany were mostly dependent upon their bishops or archbishops; the more politically important cities of Flanders were under the suzerainty of a feudal family; they were subject to constant vexations from their suzerains, and their very existence was endangered by an attempt at independence; Liege was well-nigh destroyed by the supporters of her bishop, and Ghent was ruined by the revenge of the Duke of Burgundy. In these northern cities, therefore, the commonwealth was restricted to a sort of mercantile corporation—powerful within the town, but powerless without it; while outside the town reigned feudalism, with its robber nobles, free companies, and bands of outlawed peasants, from whom the merchant princes of Bruges and Nürnberg could scarcely protect their wares. To this political feebleness and narrowness corresponded an intellectual weakness and pettiness: the burghers were mere self-ruling tradesfolk; their interests did not extend far beyond their shops and their houses; literature was cramped in guilds, and reflection and imagination were confined within the narrow limits of town life. Everything was on a small scale; the Renaissance was moderate and inefficient, running no great dangers and achieving no great conquests. There was not enough action to produce reaction; and, while the Italian free States were ground down by foreign tyrannies, the German and Flemish cities insensibly merged into the vast empire of the House of Austria. While also the Italians of the sixteenth century rushed into moral and religious confusion, which only Jesuitism could discipline, the Germans of the same time quietly and comfortably adopted the Reformation.
The main cause of this difference, the main explanation of the fact that while in the North the Renaissance was cramped and enfeebled, in Italy it carried everything before it, lies in the circumstance that feudalism never took deep root in Italy. The conquered Latin race was enfeebled, it is true, but it was far more civilized than the conquering Teutonic peoples; the Barbarians came down, not on to a previous layer of Barbarians, but on to a deep layer of civilized men; the nomads of the North found in Italy a people weakened and corrupt, but with a long and inextinguishable habit of independence, of order, of industry. The country had been cultivated for centuries, the Barbarians could not turn it into a desert; the inhabitants had been organized as citizens for a thousand years, the Barbarians could not reorganize them feudally. The Barbarians who settled in Italy, especially the latest of them, the Lombards, were not only in a minority, but at an immense disadvantage. They founded kingdoms and dukedoms, where German was spoken and German laws were enacted; but whenever they tried to communicate with their Italian subjects, they found themselves forced to adopt the Latin language, manners, and laws; their domination became real only in proportion as it ceased to be Teutonic, and the Barbarian element was swallowed up by what remained of Roman civilization. Little by little these Lombard monarchies, without roots in the soil, and surrounded by hostile influences, died out, and there remained of the invaders only a certain number of nobles, those whose descendants were to bear the originally German names of Gherardesca, Rolandinghi, Soffredinghi, Lambertazzi, Guidi, and whose suzerains were the Bavarian and Swabian dukes and marquises of Tuscan. Meanwhile the Latin element revived; towns were rebuilt; a new Latin language was formed; and the burghers of these young communities gradually wrested franchises and privileges from the weak Teutonic rulers, who required Italian agriculture, industry, and commerce, without which they and their feudal retainers would have starved. Feudalism became speedily limited to the hilly country; the plain became the property of the cities which it surrounded; the nobles turned into mere robber chieftains, then into mercenary soldiers, and finally, as the towns gained importance, they gradually descended into the cities and begged admission into the guilds of artizans and tradesfolk. Thus they grew into citizens and Italians; but for a long time they kept hankering after feudalism, and looking towards the German emperors who claimed the inheritance of the Lombard kings. The struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, between the German feudal element and the Latin civic one, ended in the complete annihilation of the former in all the north and centre of Italy. The nobles sank definitely into merchants, and those who persisted in keeping their castles were speedily ousted by the commissaries of the free towns. Such is the history of feudalism in Italy—the history of Barbarian minority engulphed in Latin civilization; of Teutonic counts and dukes turned into robber nobles, hunted into the hills by the townsfolk, and finally seeking admission into the guilds of wool-spinners or money-changers; and in it is the main explanation of the fact that the Italian republics, instead of remaining restricted within their city walls like those of the North, spread over whole provinces, and became real politically organized States. And in such States having a free political, military, and commercial life, uncramped by ecclesiastic or feudal influence, in them alone could the great revival of human intelligence and character thoroughly succeed. The commune was the only species of free government possible during the Middle Ages, the only form which could resist that utterly prostrating action of later mediævalism. Feudalism stamped out civilization; monasticism warped it; in the open country it was burnt, trampled on, and uprooted; in the cloister it withered and shrank and perished; only within the walls of a city, protected from the storm without, and yet in the fresh atmosphere of life, could it develope, flourish, and bear fruit.
But this system of the free town contained in itself, as does every other institution, the seed of death—contained it in that expanding element which developes, ripens, rots, and finally dissolves all living organisms. A little town is formed in the midst of some feudal state, as Pisa, Florence, Lucca, and Bologna were formed in the dominions of the lords of Tuscany; the elders govern it; it is protected from without; it obtains privileges from its suzerain, always glad to oppose anything to his vassals, and who, unlike them, is too far removed in the feudal scale to injure the commune, which is under his supreme jurisdiction but not in his land. The town can thus develope regularly, governing itself, taxing itself, defending itself against encroaching neighbours; it gradually extends beyond its own walls, liberates its peasantry, extends its commerce, extinguishes feudalism, beats back its suzerain or buys privileges from him; in short, lives the vigorous young life of the early Italian commonwealths. But now the danger begins. The original system of government, where every head of a family is a power in the State, where every man helps to govern, without representation or substitution, could exist only as long as the commune remained small enough for the individual to be in proportion with it; as long as the State remained small enough for all its citizens to assemble in the market-place and vote, for every man to know every detail of the administration, every inch of the land. When the limits were extended, the burgher had to deal with towns and villages and men and things which he did not know, and which he probably hated, as every small community hated its neighbour; witness the horrible war, lasting centuries, between the two little towns of Dinant and Bouvines on the Meuse. Still more was this the case with an important city: the subjugated town was hated all the more for being a rival centre; the burghers of Florence, inspired only by their narrow town interest, treated Pisa according to its dictates, that is, tried to stamp it out. Thence the victorious communes came to be surrounded by conquered communes, which they dared not trust with any degree of power;