Chapter IV: The Thirteenth Century (1)

[Sidenote: [1197-1218 A.D.]]

The death of Henry VI was followed by a general war throughout the empire, which gave fresh activity to the passions of the Italian nobles, and greater animosity to the opposing parties. The two factions in Germany had simultaneously raised to the empire the two chiefs of the houses of Guelf and Ghibelline. Philip I, duke of Swabia, and brother of Henry VI, had been named king of the Romans by the Ghibellines; and Otto IV, son of Henry the Lion, duke of Bavaria and Saxony, by the Guelfs. Their contest was prolonged to the 22nd of June, 1208, when Philip was assassinated by a private enemy. The Germans, wearied with eleven years of civil war, agreed to unite under the sceptre of his rival, Otto IV, whom they crowned anew. The following year he passed into Italy, to receive from the pope the golden crown of the empire.

But though Otto was the legitimate heir of the Guelfs of Bavaria, so long chiefs of the opposition to the imperial prerogatives, yet now wearing himself the crown, he was desirous of possessing it with these disputed rights; every one was denied him, and all his actions controlled by the pope. There was soon a declared enmity between the emperor and the pontiff who, rather than consent to any agreement, or to abate any of his pretensions, raised against the Guelf emperor the heir of the Ghibelline house, the young Frederick II, grandson of Frederick I, hardly eighteen years of age, and till then reigning under the pope’s tutelage over the Two Sicilies only. Frederick, excited and seconded by the pope, boldly passed through Lombardy in 1212, and arrived at Aachen, where the German Ghibellines awaited, and crowned him king of the Romans and Germans. Otto IV in the meantime returned to Germany, and was acknowledged by Saxony.

The civil war, carried on between the two chiefs of the empire, lasted till the 19th of May, 1218, when Otto died, without any attempt by either party to despoil his rival of his hereditary possessions. It was this civil war that caused the names of Guelf and Ghibelline to be exclusively substituted for those of party of the church and party of the empire. In fact, each noble family, and each city, seemed to consult only their hereditary affection, and not their political principles, in ranging themselves under either standard. The Guelfs placed themselves in opposition to the pope, to repel his Ghibelline candidate; and Milan, Piacenza, and Brescia braved even excommunication to resist him; while, on the contrary the Ghibellines of Pavia, Cremona, and of the marches armed themselves with zeal against an emperor of the Guelf blood.

During this period, while the minority of Frederick II left so much time to the cities of Italy to consolidate their independence, and to form real republics, the person most influential and most prominent in history was the pope, Innocent III, who reigned from 1197 to 1216. He caused his power to be felt in the remotest parts of Christendom, but he suffered to be constituted at Rome, under his own eye, a republic, the liberty of which he respected, and over which he assumed no authority. The thirteen districts of Rome each named annually four representatives or _caporioni_; their meeting formed the senate of the republic, who, with the concurrence of the people, exercised the sovereignty, with the exception of the judicial power. This power belonged as in other republics to a foreign military chief, chosen for one year, and assisted by civil judges, dependent on him, but bearing the name of senator, instead of podesta. We have still extant the form of oath taken by the first of these senators, named in 1207. By it he engages to guarantee security and liberty to the pope as well as to his brothers the cardinals, but promises no submission to him for himself.

In the beginning of the pontificate of Innocent III, two German generals, to whom Henry VI had given the titles of duke of Spoleto and marquis of Ancona, held in dependence and subjection the provinces nearest Rome. Innocent, to revive the spirit of liberty, sent thither two legates; and by their interference, the cities of these provinces, built for the most part in the mountains, and without any means of becoming either wealthy or populous, threw off the German yoke, and made alliance with those cities which from the preceding period had entered into the league of Lombardy; thus two Guelf leagues were formed, under the protection of the pope; one in the marches, comprehending the cities of Ancona, Fermo, Osimo, Camerino, Fano, Jesi, Sinigaglia, and Pesaro; the other in the duchy, comprehending those of Spoleto, Rieti, Assisi, Foligno, Nocera, Perugia, Agubbio, Todi, and Città di Castello. These leagues, however, in accustoming the cities of these two provinces to regard the pope as their protector, led them afterwards to submit without resistance to the sovereignty of the church.

Other legates had been about the same time sent into Tuscany by the pope; they convoked at St. Ginasio, a borough situated at the foot of the mountain of San Miniato, the diet of the towns of that country. These provincial diets were in the habit of assembling frequently, and had till then been presided over by an officer belonging to the emperor, in memory of whom the castle in which he resided is still called San Miniato al Tedesco. These diets settled the differences which arose between cities, and had succeeded in saving Tuscany from the civil wars between the Guelfs and Ghibellines. Pisa, which had been loaded with favours by the sovereigns of the house of Hohenstaufen, and which had obtained from them the dominion of sixty-four castles or fortified towns on the shores of Tuscany, and over the isles of Corsica, Elba, Capraia, and Pianosa, proclaimed its determination of remaining faithful to the Ghibelline party, and its consuls withdrew from the diet convoked at St. Ginasio; but those of the cities of Florence, of Siena, of Arezzo, of Pistoia, and of Lucca accepted the protection of the pope, offered by his two legates, and promised to coalesce in defence of their common liberty.[b]

FACTIONS IN FLORENCE

[Sidenote: [1177-1215 A.D.]]

We have already seen that the spirit of political as well as religious party began to rise as early as 1177, and excepting some short intervals of uneasy repose, remained in a state of violence until 1182. From this epoch there are no accounts of actual war within the city of Florence until 1215; but nearly five years of hard fighting between two great factions of undiminished force was unlikely to be followed by a dead calm except from exhaustion; or by any oblivion of injury in an age and country where revenge was a duty, not a crime.

The great power and independence of the newly created podesta, together with external hostilities, probably assisted in maintaining peace in a city that prided itself on being founded under the protection and ascendant of Mars, and therefore doomed by fate to everlasting troubles. Hence Roccuzzo de’ Mozzi is made by Dante to say:

“_Io fui della città, che nel Batista_
_Cangiò ’l primo Padrone, onde ei per questo_
_Sempre con l’arte sua la farà trista._”

Disputes which had so long occupied the attention of Italy were not without participation in Florence, where the quarrels of church and empire did not fail to create two adverse opinions, but as yet confined to words; the prevailing politics, being Guelfic and papal, while the opposition led by Uberti was entirely imperial, were accidental circumstances; but combined with and as it were grafted on local politics, drew a distinct line between contending factions and boded mischief.

In the year 1215, according to an ancient manuscript published from the Buondelmonti library, Messer Mazzingo Tegrini de’ Mazzinghi invited many Florentines of high rank to dine at his villa near Campi about six miles from the capital; while at table the family jester snatched a trencher of meat from Messer Uberto degli Infangati who, nettled at this impertinence, expressed his displeasure in terms so offensive that Messer Oddo Arrighi de’ Fifanti as sharply and unceremoniously rebuked him; upon this Uberto gave him the lie and Oddo in return dashed a trencher of meat in his face.

Everything was immediately in confusion; weapons were soon out, and while the guests started up in disorder young Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, the friend and companion of Uberto, severely wounded Oddo Arrighi.

The party then separated and Oddo called a meeting of his friends to consider the offence; amongst them were the counts Gangalandi, the Uberti, Amidei, and Lamberti, who unanimously decided that the quarrel should be quietly settled by a marriage between Buondelmonte and Oddo’s niece, the daughter of Messer Lambertuccio di Capo di Ponte, of the Amidei family. This proposition appears to have been unhesitatingly accepted by the offender’s family as a day was immediately nominated for the ceremony of plighting his troth to the destined bride.

During the interim Madonna Aldruda or Gualdrada, wife of Forese de’ Donati, sent privately for young Buondelmonte and thus addressed him: “Unworthy knight! What! Hast thou accepted a wife through fear of the Fifanti and Uberti? Leave her that thou hast taken, choose this damsel in her place, and be henceforth a brave and honoured gentleman.” In so saying she threw open the chamber door and exposed her daughter to his view; the unexpected apparition of so much beauty, as it were soliciting his love, had its usual consequence; Buondelmonte’s better reason was overcome, yet he had resolution to answer, “Alas! it is now too late!” “No,” replied Aldruda; “thou canst even yet have her; dare but to take the step and let the consequences rest on my head.” “I do dare,” returned the fascinated youth, and stepping forward again plighted a faith no longer his to give.

Early on the 10th of February, the very day appointed for his original nuptials, Buondelmonte passed by the Porta Santa Maria amidst all the kinsfolk of his first betrothed, who had assembled near the dwellings of the Amidei to assist at the expected marriage, yet not without certain misgivings of his faithlessness. With a haughty demeanour he rode forward through them all, bearing the marriage ring to the lady of his choice and leaving her of the Amidei with the shame of an aggravated insult by choosing the same moment for a violation of one contract and the consummation of a second; for in those days, and for centuries after, the old Roman custom of presenting a ring long before the marriage ceremony took place was still in use.

Such insults were then impatiently borne; Oddo Arrighi assembled his kindred in the no longer existing church of Santa Maria sopra Porta to settle the mode of resenting this affront, and the moody aspect of each individual marked the character of the meeting and all the vindictive feeling of an injured family; there were, however, some of a more temperate spirit that suggested personal chastisement or at most the gashing of Buondelmonte’s face as the most reasonable and effectual retribution. The assembly paused, but Mosca de’ Lamberti starting suddenly forward exclaimed, “Beat or wound him as ye list, but first prepare your own graves, for wounds bring equal consequences with death.” “No. Mete him out his deserts and let him pay the penalty; but no delay. Up and be doing.”

This turned the scale and Buondelmonte was doomed, but according to the manners of that age, not in the field, which would have been hazardous, but by the sure though inglorious means of noonday murder; wherefore, at the very place where the insult was offered, beneath the battlements of the Amidei, nay under the casement of the deserted maiden, and in his way to a happy expecting bride, vengeance was prepared by these fierce barons for the perjurer.

[Sidenote: [1215-1239 A.D.]]

On Easter morning, 1215, the murderers concealed themselves within the courts and towers of the Amidei, which the young and heedless bridegroom was sure to pass, and he was soon after seen at a distance carelessly riding alone across the Ponte Vecchio on a milk-white palfrey, attired in a vest of fine woollen cloth, a white mantle thrown across his shoulders and the wedding garland on his head. The bridge was passed in thoughtless gaiety, but scarcely had he reached the time-worn image of the Roman Mars, the last relic of heathen worship then extant, when the mace of Schiatto degli Uberti felled him to the ground, and at the base of this grim idol the daggers of Oddo and his furious kinsmen finished the savage deed; they met him gay and adorned for the altar, and left him with the bridal wreath still dangling from his brow a bloody and ill-omened sacrifice. The tidings of this murder spread rapidly, and disordered the whole community of Florence; the people became more and more excited, because both law and custom had awarded due penalties for faithless men, and death was an unheard-of punishment.

Buondelmonte’s corpse was placed on a bier, with its head resting in the lap of his affianced bride, the young and beautiful Donati, who hung like a lily over the pallid features of her husband; and thus united were they borne through the streets of Florence. It was the gloomy dawning of a tempestuous day, for in that bloody moment was unchained the demon of Florentine discord; the name of Guelf and Ghibelline were then for the first time assumed by noble and commoner as the cry of faction; and long after the original cause of enmity had ceased, they continued to steep all Italy in blood.

It has been shown that there were already two parties existing in the commonwealth; but it was not until after this outrage that the whole community divided under the above appellations, one part siding with the Buondelmonti, who were for the most part Guelfic chiefs and adherents of the church; the other with the Uberti, leaders of the Ghibellines and partisans of the empire. Of seventy-two powerful families mentioned by Malespini, thirty-nine joined the Buondelmonti banner and thirty-three fought under the colours of their enemies; but many more houses of distinction took part in the civil war; many afterwards changed sides through quarrels with their chiefs; many of the Buondelmonti who before were Ghibellines now became Guelfs; the former were stigmatised with the epithet of “_Paterini_,” and the latter with that of “_Traditori_.”

Nevertheless an attempt at reconciliation was made in 1239, by marrying Neri Piccolino degli Uberti to the daughter of Rinieri Zingani de’ Buondelmonti, a lady celebrated for her wisdom, beauty, and talents. Trusting to this tie the Uberti and some friends repaired with confidence to visit Bertaldi de’ Buondelmonti of Campi, but were treacherously attacked and beaten back with some bloodshed; this renewed the war with greater violence and Neri dismissed his wife to her own relatives, declaring that he disdained to become the propagator of a traitorous brood from a deceitful stock. The unfortunate lady was then compelled by her father to marry Count Pannochino de’ Pannochieschi, on whose mercy she threw herself, imploring permission to retire into a convent; for though abandoned by her husband she protested that she was still his wife and therefore never could belong to another. Her motives were respected, her prayer generously granted, and she immediately took the veil in the convent of Montecelli.

[Sidenote: [1215-1225 A.D.]]

Immediately after Buondelmonte’s death a low and angry murmur rolled sullenly through the whole Florentine population, and instinctive preparations were everywhere in progress for some dimly apprehended danger; as yet all was calm, but dark clouds were gathering around and the echo of distant thunder marked the coming storm. Each house was armed and fortified, towers were again mounted with warlike engines, _serragli_ (barricades) were erected, the shops all closed, the people in painful doubt, and ancient citizens who remembered the troubles of other times looked on and trembled. Nor was their apprehension vain; the curse of heaven seemed to rest on this devoted city, and with but little cessation during three and thirty years did Florence reek with the blood of her children.[c]

The death of Innocent III [1216] and, two years afterwards, of Otto IV broke the unnatural alliance between a pope and the heir of a Ghibelline family. The Milanese, excommunicated by Innocent for having fought against Frederick II, did not the less persist in making war on his partisans; well convinced that the new pope, Honorius III, would soon thank them for it. They refused Frederick the iron crown of Lombardy, preserved at Monza, and contracted an alliance with the count Thomas of Savoy, and with the cities of Crema, Piacenza, Lodi, Vercelli, Novara, Tortona, Como, and Alessandria, to drive the Ghibellines from Lombardy. The Ghibellines defeated them on the 6th of June, 1218, in a great battle fought against the militias of Cremona, Parma, Reggio, and Modena, before Ghibello. This reverse of fortune calmed for some time their military ardour. The citizens of every town accused the nobles of having led them into war from family enmities and interests foreign to the city; at Milan, Piacenza, Cremona, and Modena, there were battles between the nobles and the people. Laws were proposed to divide the public magistracy in due proportions between them; finally the Milanese, in the year 1221, expelled all the nobles from their city.

FREDERICK II CROWNED EMPEROR

The young Frederick re-entered Italy; and, after some differences with Honorius III, received from him, on the 22nd of November, 1220, the crown of the empire. He afterwards occupied himself in establishing order in his kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where, during his minority, the popes had encouraged a universal insubordination. Born in the march of Ancona, at Jesi, in December, 1194, he was Italian as well by language as by affection and character. The Italian language, spoken at his court, first rose above the _patois_ in common use throughout Italy, regarded only as a corruption of Latin; he expressed himself with elegance in this language, which, from his time, was designated by the name of _lingua cortigiana_; he encouraged the first poets, who employed it at his court, and he himself made verses; he loved literature and encouraged learning; he founded schools and universities; he promoted distinguished men; he spoke, with equal facility, Latin, Italian, German, French, Greek, and Arabic; he had the intellectual suppleness and finesse peculiar to the men of the south, the art of pleasing, a taste for philosophy, and great independence of opinion, with a leaning to infidelity; hence he is accused of having written a book against the three revelations of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, entitled _De Tribus Impostoribus_, which no one has ever seen, and which perhaps never existed. His want of faith in the sacred character of the Roman church, and the sanctity of popes, is less doubtful; he was suspicious of them, and he employed all his address to defend himself against their enterprises. Honorius III, desirous of engaging him to recover the Holy Land from the Saracens, made him, in 1225, marry Yolande de Lusignan, heiress of the kingdom of Jerusalem; after which, Honorius and his successor Gregory IX pressed him to pass into Palestine. A malady stopped him, in 1227, just as he was about to depart; the pope, to punish him for this delay, excommunicated him. He still pursued him with his anathema when he went to the Holy Land the year following, and haughtily testified his indignation, because Frederick, in the year 1229, recovered Jerusalem from the hands of the sultan by treaty, rather than exterminate the infidels with the sword.

RENEWAL OF THE LOMBARD LEAGUE

[Sidenote: [1225-1233 A.D.]]

Meanwhile the Guelf party again raised their standard in Lombardy; the republics of Milan, Bologna, Piacenza, Verona, Brescia, Faenza, Mantua, Vercelli, Lodi, Bergamo, Turin, Alexandria, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso assembled their consuls in council at San Zenone in the Mantuan territory, on the 2nd of March, 1226. They renewed the ancient league of Lombardy for twenty-five years; and engaged to defend in concert, their own liberty and the independence of the court of Rome. Three years afterwards, they sent succour to Gregory IX, when he was attacked by Frederick II on his return from the Holy Land; and they were included in the treaty of peace between the pope and the emperor in 1230.

The pope, however, though defended by the arms of the Lombards, made them pay dearly for the favour which he showed in naming them to the emperor as his allies. He consented to protect their civil liberty only so far as they sacrificed to him their liberty of conscience. The same spirit of reformation which animated the Albigenses had spread throughout Europe; many Christians, disgusted with the corruption and vices of the clergy, or whose minds revolted against the violence on their reason exercised by the church, devoted themselves to a contemplative life, renounced all ambition and the pleasures of the world, and sought a new road to salvation in the alliance of faith with reason. They called themselves _cathari_, or the purified; _paterini_, or the resigned. The free towns had, till then, refused permission to the tribunals of the Inquisition, instituted by Innocent III, to proceed against them within their walls; but Gregory IX declared the impossibility of acknowledging as allies of the holy see republicans so indulgent to the enemies of the faith; at the same time, he sent among them the most eloquent of the Dominicans, to rouse their fanaticism. Leo da Perego, whom he afterwards made archbishop of Milan, had an only too fatal success in that city, where he caused a great number of _paterini_ to be burned. St. Peter Martyr, and the monk Roland of Cremona, obtained an equal triumph in the other cities of Lombardy.

The monk John of Vicenza had the cities of the march assigned to him as a province, where the heretics were in still greater numbers than in Lombardy, and included in their ranks some of the most powerful nobles in the country; among others, Ezzelino II, of Romano. The monk John announced himself the minister of peace, not of persecution. After having preached successively in every town, he assembled, on the plain of Paquara, the 28th of August, 1233, almost the whole population of the towns of the march; he exhorted them to peace in a manner so irresistible, that the greatest enemies, setting aside their animosities, pardoned and embraced each other; and all, with tears of joy, celebrated the warm charity of this man of God. This man of God, however, celebrated the festival of this reconciliation by judging and condemning to the flames sixty _cathari_ in the single town of Verona, whose sufferings he witnessed in the public square; and afterwards obtained full power from the towns of Vicenza and Padua to act there in the like manner.

FREDERICK II AND THE LOMBARD LEAGUE

[Sidenote: [1233-1236 A.D.]]

It was only a short period after the Peace of Paquara that Frederick II, believing he had sufficiently re-established his power in southern Italy, began to turn his attention towards Lombardy; he had no intention of disputing the rights guaranteed by his grandfather at the Peace of Constance; but it was his will that the cities should remain, what they ought to be by the treaty, members of the empire, and not enemies of the emperor. He had raised an army, over which he feared neither the influence of the monks nor the pope. He had transported from the mountains of Sicily, into the city of Luceria, in the capitanate, and into that of Nocera, in the principato, two strong colonies of Saracens, which could supply him with thirty thousand Mussulman soldiers, strangers, by their language and religion, to all the intrigues of the court of Rome. There was in the Veronese march a man endowed with great military talents, ambitious, intrepid, and entirely devoted to the emperor--Ezzelino III, of Romano, already powerful by the great fiefs he held in the mountains, and the number of his soldiers, whom Frederick made still more so, by placing him at the head of the Ghibelline party in all the cities. Ezzelino, born on the 4th of April, 1194, was precisely of the same age as the emperor. The pope had summoned him to arrest his father, and deliver him to the tribunal of the Inquisition as a _paterino_; but though Ezzelino knew neither virtue, pity, nor remorse, he was not sufficiently depraved for such a crime.

As Frederick was on the point of attacking the Guelfs of Lombardy on the south with the Saracens, while Ezzelino advanced on the east, he learned that his son Henry, whom he had in the year 1220 crowned king of Germany, in spite of his extreme youth, seduced by the Guelfs and the agents of the pope, had revolted against him. The Milanese, in 1234, sent deputies to offer him the iron crown, which they had refused to his father. The latter hastened into Germany, and ordered his son to meet him at Worms, where he threw himself at the feet of his father, and entreated forgiveness. Frederick deprived him of the crown, and sent him to Apulia, where he died a few years afterwards. The emperor was obliged to employ two years in restoring order in Germany; he after that returned into Italy by the valley of Trento, and arrived, on the 16th of August, 1236, at Verona with three thousand German cavalry. A senate of eighty members, nobles and Ghibellines, then governed that republic; Frederick, by his address in managing men, engaged them to name Ezzelino captain of the people; this committed to him at the same time the command of the militia and the judicial power; and, in the state of excitement in which parties were much more occupied with the triumph of their faction than with the security of their liberty, gave him almost sovereign power. Frederick, obliged to return to Germany, left under the command of Ezzelino a body of German soldiers, and another of Saracens, with which this able captain made himself, the same year, master of Vicenza, which he barbarously pillaged, and the following year of Padua. This last was the most powerful city of the province, that in which the form of government was the most democratic, and in which the Guelfs had always exercised the most influence. Ezzelino judged it necessary to secure obedience by taking hostages from the richest and most powerful families; he employed his spies to discover the malcontents, whom he punished with torture, and redoubled his cruelty in proportion to the hatred which he excited.

THE BATTLE OF CORTENUOVA

[Sidenote: [1236-1237 A.D.]]

The same year, 1237, Frederick approached Mantua, and thus giving courage to the Ghibelline party, made them triumph over the Guelfs, who had, till then, the ascendant in that city; he was joined there by ten thousand Saracens, whom he summoned from Apulia, and afterwards advanced into the Cremonese territory to attack the confederate army of the Guelfs, commanded by the consuls of Milan, who knew no other art of war but the bravery evinced in battle. Frederick was a more able captain; by manœuvring between Brescia and Cremona, he drew the Milanese beyond the Oglio, and finally succeeded, as they believed the campaign finished, in placing himself between them and their country at Cortenuova near Crema. The Guelfs, although thus cut off from retreat, boldly accepted battle on the 27th of November, 1237, and long disputed the victory. Their defeat was only the more bloody; it cost them ten thousand men killed or taken prisoners, with the loss of the _carroccio_. The fugitives followed during the night the course of the Oglio to enter the Bergamasque Mountains; they would all, however, have fallen into the hands of the Ghibellines, if Pagan della Torre, the lord of Valsassina, and a Guelf noble, had not hastened to their assistance, opened the defiles covered by his fortresses, and brought them thus safely to Milan. The citizens of this town never forgot so important a service; and they contracted with the house of della Torre an alliance which subsequently proved dangerous to their freedom.

The defeat of the Guelfs at Cortenuova alarmed the towns of Lombardy, the greater number of which detached themselves from Milan. Frederick, entering Piedmont the following year, gave preponderance to the Ghibelline party in the cities of Turin, Asti, Novara, Alexandria, and several others. The constitution was not changed when the power in council passed from one party to another; but the emperor generally reckoned his partisans among the nobility, while the people were devoted to the church; accordingly, the triumph of the aristocracy generally accompanied that of the Ghibelline party. Four cities only, Milan, Brescia, Piacenza, and Bologna, remained at the end of the year opposed to the imperial power. Frederick began his attack on them by laying siege to Brescia; but the Brescians dared to face the storm; they supported, during sixty-eight days, the repeated attacks of the emperor, rendered all his efforts fruitless, and forced him at last to raise the siege with an army weakened and discouraged.

POPE AGAINST EMPEROR

[Sidenote: [1238-1243 A.D.]]

In the meantime, Gregory IX redoubled his efforts to save the Guelf party from ruin. He saw, with alarm, an emperor, master of the Two Sicilies and of Germany, on the point of vanquishing all resistance in upper Italy. He anticipated that this monarch, whose Mussulman soldiers were constantly passing through the states of Rome, would escape the influence of the church, and soon evince no respect whatever for a religion which he was accused of not believing. Gregory had recourse to the two maritime republics of Venice and Genoa, which, in general occupied with their conquests and commerce in the East, seldom took any part in the politics of Italy. He represented to them that they would be soon deprived of the freedom of the seas, if they did not make some effort to save the champions of liberty and of the church in Lombardy. He at length obtained their agreement to contract an alliance with the four only surviving cities of the league of Lombardy; and finally, towards the beginning of the year 1239, he fulminated another sentence of excommunication against Frederick. This had a greater effect than Gregory ventured to hope. A considerable number of nobles of Guelf origin, seduced by court favours, had been won over to the imperial party. They perceived that, after the anathema of the pope, the emperor distrusted them. The marquis d’Este and the count di San Bonifazio were even warned that their heads were in danger, and they made their escape from the imperial camp; all the other Guelf nobles followed their example, and the Guelf cities gained captains habituated to arms and familiarised with higher ideas of politics.

Gregory began to think he should give still greater weight to the anathemas which he launched against the emperor if they were sanctioned by a council. In the year 1241 he convoked at Rome all the prelates of Christendom. Frederick, who had been established at Pisa since the autumn of the year 1239, exerted himself to prevent the meeting of a council which he dreaded. While the two other maritime republics had declared for the Guelfs, Pisa was entirely of the Ghibelline party. The people were enthusiastically attached to the emperor; and among the nobles, a few only, proprietors of fiefs in Sardinia, headed by the Visconti of Gallura, had forsaken him for the Guelfs. The Pisans, further excited by their jealousy of the Genoese, promised Frederick that they would brave for him all the thunders of the church, and assured him they knew well how to hinder the meeting of the council. A considerable number of French prelates had embarked at Nice for Ostia, on board Genoese galleys. Ugolino Buzzacherino de Sismondi, admiral of the Pisans, lay in wait with a powerful fleet before Meloria, attacked them on the 3rd of May, 1241, sunk three vessels, took nineteen, and made prisoners all the French prelates who were to join the council at Pisa. The republic loaded them with chains, but they were chains made of silver, and imprisoned them in the chapter house of the cathedral. Gregory, alarmed at this reverse of fortune, survived only a few months; he died the 21st of August, 1241; and the college of cardinals, reduced to a very small number, passed nearly two years before they could agree on a new choice. At last, on the 24th of June, 1243, Senibaldi de’ Fieschi, of Genoa, who took the name of Innocent IV, was elected to the chair of St. Peter. His family, powerful in Genoa and in the Ligurian Mountains, was also allied to many noble families, who possessed castles on the northern side of the Apennines; and this position gave him great influence in the neighbouring cities of Placentia, Parma, Reggio, and Modena. The elevation of a Fieschi to the pontificate gave courage to the Guelf party in all these cities.

[Sidenote: [1243-1245 A.D.]]

Frederick had recourse in vain to the new pope to be reconciled to the church; Innocent IV was determined to see in him only an enemy of religion and of the pontifical power, and a chief of barbarians, who in turns summoned his Germans and his Saracens to tyrannise over Italy. He drew closer his alliance with the cities of the league of Lombardy, and promised them to cause the emperor to be condemned and deposed by an ecumenical council, as his predecessor would have done; but instead of convoking the council in Italy, he fixed for that purpose on the city of Lyons, one-half of which belonged to the empire and the other to the kingdom of France. He determined on placing himself with the prelates whom he had summoned under the protection of St. Louis, who then reigned in France. He went from Rome to Genoa by sea, escaping the Pisan fleet which watched to intercept his passage; he excited by his exhortations the enthusiasm of the Guelfs of Genoa, and of the cities of Lombardy and Piedmont, which he visited on his passage; and arriving at Lyons, he opened, on the 28th of June, 1245, in the convent of St. Just, the council of the universal church. He found the bishops of France, England, and Germany eager to adopt his passions; so that he obtained from them at their third sitting, on the 17th of July, a sentence of condemnation against Frederick II. The council declared that for his crimes and iniquities God had rejected him, and would no longer suffer him to be either emperor or king. In consequence, the pope and the council released his subjects from their oath of allegiance; forbade them under pain of excommunication to obey him under any title whatever; and invited the electors of the empire to proceed to the election of another emperor, while the pope reserved to himself the nomination of another king of the Two Sicilies.

Frederick at first opposed all his strength of soul against the sentence of excommunication pronounced by the council on him. Causing his jewels to be brought him, and placing the golden crown of the empire on his head, he declared before a numerous assembly that he would still wear it, and knew how to defend it; but, notwithstanding the enthusiasm of the Ghibelline party, the devotion of his friends, and the progress of philosophical opinions, which he had himself encouraged, the man whom the church had condemned was in constant danger of being abandoned or betrayed. The mendicant monks everywhere excited conspiracies against him. They took advantage of the terrors inspired by sickness and age, to make sinners return, as they said, to the ways of salvation, and desired them to make amends for their past transgressions by delivering the church of God from its most dangerous enemy. Insurrections frequently broke forth in one or other of the Two Sicilies; still oftener the emperor discovered amongst his courtiers plots to destroy him, either by the dagger or poison; even his private secretary, his intimate friend, Pietro delle Vigne, whom he had raised from abject poverty, to whom he had entrusted his most important affairs, gave ear to the counsel of the monks, and promised to poison his master.

[Sidenote: [1245-1248 A.D.]]

Frederick, on his part, became suspicious and cruel; his distrust fell on his most faithful friends; and the executions which he ordered sometimes preceded the proofs of guilt. He had confided Germany to his son Conrad, and the exclusive government of the Veronese marches to Ezzelino. The hatred which this ferocious man excited by his crimes fell on the emperor. Ezzelino imprisoned in the most loathsome dungeons those whom he considered his enemies, and frequently put them to death by torture, or suffered them to perish by hunger; he was well aware that the relatives of these victims must also be his enemies; they were, in their turn, arrested; and the more he sacrificed to his barbarity, the more he was called upon to strike. The citizens of Milan, Mantua, Bergamo, and Brescia every day heard of new and horrible crimes committed by the governor of the marches; they conceived the greater detestation of the Ghibelline party, and entertained the firmer determination to repel Frederick. He, on the contrary, had no thoughts of attacking them; he established himself during the Council of Lyons at Turin, and thence entered into a negotiation with St. Louis, to obtain by his mediation a reconciliation with the church to which he made, in token of his submission, the offer to accompany Louis to the Holy Land.

The revolt of Parma, on the 16th of June, 1247, obliged Frederick to resume his arms at a moment when he was least disposed. The friends and relatives of Pope Innocent IV, the Guelf nobles of the houses of Corregio, Lupi, and Rossi, re-entering Parma, whence they had been exiled, triumphed over their adversaries, and in their turn expelled them from the city. Frederick was determined at any price to recover Parma. He sent for a numerous band of Saracens from Apulia, commanded by one of his natural sons, named Frederick, to whom he gave the title of king of Antioch. He assembled the Lombard Ghibellines, under the command of another of his illegitimate sons, named Hans or Hensius, called by him king of Sardinia, and whom he had made imperial vicar in Lombardy. Ezzelino arrived, too, at his camp from the Veronese march, with the militias of Padua, Vicenza, and Verona, and the soldiers whom he had raised in his hereditary fiefs.

On the other side, the Guelfs of Lombardy hastened to send succour to a city which had just sacrificed itself for them. The Milanese set the example; the militias of Mantua, Piacenza, and Ferrara followed it; and the Guelfs, who had been exiled from Reggio, Modena, and other Ghibelline cities, thinking they served their country in fighting for their faction, arrived in great numbers to shut themselves up in Parma. Frederick was prevented from hanging the hostages given previous to the revolt, before the walls of the city, by the militia of Pavia, who declared it was with the sword of Ghibelline soldiers only, and not with that of the executioner, that they would secure the throne of the emperor. The siege made little progress; the winter had begun, but Frederick persisted in his attempt. He proclaimed his determination to raze Parma to the ground, and to transfer those of the inhabitants who should be spared into his fortified camp, of which he would make a new town, called Vittoria. This camp, which he quitted on a hawking party, on the 8th of February, 1248, was in his absence surprised by a sortie of a Guelf army from Parma, taken, and pillaged; his soldiers were dispersed, and the emperor had the humiliation of being forced to raise the siege.

THE GUELFS EXPELLED FROM FLORENCE; THE BATTLE OF FOSSALTA

[Sidenote: [1248-1249 A.D.]]

Before this event, he had sent his son, the king of Antioch, into Tuscany with sixteen hundred German cavalry, to secure Florence to his party; where, since the death of Buondelmonte, the Guelfs and Ghibellines, always in opposition, had not ceased fighting. There was seldom an assembly, a festival, a public ceremony, without some offence given, either by one or other of the parties. Both flew to arms; chains were thrown across the streets; barricades were immediately formed, and in every quarter, round every noble family; the more contiguous, who had the most frequent causes of quarrel, fought at the same time in ten different places. Nevertheless the republic was supposed to lean towards the Guelf party; and the Florentine Ghibellines, in their relations with other people, had never sought to separate from their fellow-countrymen, or to place themselves in opposition to their magistrates. Frederick, fearing to lose Florence, wrote to the Uberti, the chiefs of the Ghibelline faction, to assemble secretly in their palace all their party, to attack afterwards in concert and at once all the posts of the Guelfs; whilst his son, the king of Antioch, should present himself at the gates, and thus expel their adversaries from the city. This plan was executed on the night of Candlemas, 1248; the barricades of the Guelfs were forced in every quarter, because they defended themselves in small bands against the whole of the opposite party. The Ghibellines, masters of the town, ordered all the Guelfs to quit it. They afterwards demolished thirty-six palaces belonging to the same number of the most illustrious families of that party; and intimidating the other cities of Tuscany, they constrained them to follow their example, and declare for the emperor.

Frederick II, after the check experienced by him at Parma, returned to his kingdom of Naples and Sicily, and left to his son Hensius, who established himself at Modena, the direction of the war in Lombardy. The pope, however, had sent a legate, the cardinal Octavian degli Ubaldini, to the Guelf cities, to engage them to pursue their victory, and punish the imperial party for what he called their revolt against the church. The powerful city of Bologna, already celebrated for its university, and superior to the neighbouring ones by its wealth, its population, and the zeal which a democratic government excites, undertook to make the Guelf party triumph throughout the Cispadane region. Bologna first attacked Romagna, and forced the towns of Imola, Faenza, Forlì, and Cervia to expel the Ghibellines, and declare for the church. The Bolognese next turned their arms against Modena. The Modenese cavalry, entering Bologna one day by surprise, carried off from a public fountain a bucket, which henceforth was preserved in the tower of Modena as a glorious trophy. The war which followed furnished Tassoni with the subject of his mock-heroic poem, _La Secchia Rapita_. The vengeance of the Bolognese was, however, anything but burlesque; after several bloody battles, the two armies finally met at Fossalta on the 26th of May, 1249. Philip Ugoni of Brescia, who was this year podesta of Bologna, commanded the Guelf army, in which was united a detachment from the militias of all the cities of the league of Lombardy. The Ghibellines were led by king Hensius; each army consisted of from fifteen to twenty thousand combatants. The battle was long and bloody, but ended with the complete defeat of the Ghibelline party; King Hensius himself fell into the hands of the conquerors; he was immediately taken to Bologna, and confined in the palace of the podesta. The senate of that city rejected all offers of ransom, all intercession in his favour. He was entertained in a splendid manner, but kept a prisoner during the rest of his life, which lasted for twenty-two years.

DEATH OF FREDERICK II: THE SUCCESSION

[Sidenote: [1249-1250 A.D.]]

This last check overwhelmed Frederick. He had now during thirty years combated the church and the Guelf party; his bodily as well as mental energy was worn out in this long contest. His life was embittered by the treason of those whom he believed his friends, by the disasters of his partisans, and by the misfortunes which had pursued him even in his own family. He saw his power in Italy decline; while the crown of Germany was disputed with his son Conrad, by competitors favoured by the church. He appeared to be at length himself disturbed by the excommunications of the pope, and the fear of that hell with which he had been so incessantly menaced. He implored anew the assistance and mediation of St. Louis of France, who was then in the isle of Cyprus. He provided magnificently for the wants of the crusade army, which this king commanded; he solicited leave to join it. He offered to engage never to return from the Holy Land, and to submit to the most humiliating expiations which the church could impose. He succeeded in inspiring St. Louis with interest and gratitude. Frederick, while waiting the effect of St. Louis’ good offices, seemed occupied solely in the affairs of his kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where he restored order, and established a prosperity not to be seen elsewhere in Europe. On the 13th of December, 1250, he was seized with a dysentery, of which he died, in the fifty-sixth year of his age, at his castle of Florentino, in the capitanate where he had fixed his residence.

The Italian cities, which for the most part date the commencement of their liberty from the conflicts between the sovereigns of Italy and Germany, or the invasion of Otto the Great, in 951, had already, at the death of Frederick II, enjoyed for three centuries the protection and progressive improvement of their municipal constitutions. These three centuries, with reference to the rest of Europe, are utterly barbarous. Their history is everywhere obscure and imperfectly known. It records only some great revolution, or the victories and calamities of princes; the people are always left in the shade: a writer would have thought it beneath him to occupy himself about the fate of plebeians; they were not supposed to be worthy of history. The towns of Italy, so prodigiously superior to all others in wealth, intelligence, energy, and independence, were equally regardless of preserving any record of past times. Some grave chroniclers preserved the memory of an important crisis, but in general the cities passed whole centuries without leaving any written memorial; thinking it perhaps good policy not to attract notice, and to envelope themselves in obscurity. They, however, of necessity departed from this system in the last century, owing to the two conflicts, in both of which they remained victorious. From 1150 to 1183, they had fought to obtain the Peace of Constance, which they regarded as their constitutional charter. From 1183 to 1250, they preserved the full exercise of the privileges which they had so gloriously acquired; but while they continually advanced in opulence, while intelligence and the arts became more and more developed, they were led by two passions, equally honourable, to range themselves under two opposite banners. One party, listening only to their faith, their attachment, and their gratitude to a family which had given them many great sovereigns, were ready to venture their all for the cause of the Ghibellines; the other, alarmed for the independence of the church, and the liberty of Italy, by the always increasing grandeur of the house of Hohenstaufen, were not less resolute in their endeavours to wrest from it the sceptre which menaced them. The cities of the Lombard League had reached the summit of their power at the period of this second conflict. During the interregnum which lasted from the death of Frederick II to the entrance into Italy of Henry VII in 1310, the Lombard republics, a prey to the spirit of faction, and more intent on the triumph of either the Guelf or Ghibelline parties, than on securing their own constitutions, all submitted themselves to the military power of some nobles to whom they had intrusted the command of their militias, and thus lost all their liberty.

[Sidenote: [1250-1257 A.D.]]

On the death of Frederick II, his son, Conrad IV, king of Germany, did not feel himself sufficiently strong to appear in Italy, and place on his head, in succession, the iron crown at Monza, and the golden crown at Rome. He wished first of all to secure that of the Two Sicilies; and embarked at some port in Istria for Naples, in a Pisan vessel, during the month of October, 1251. The remainder of his short life was passed in combating and vanquishing the Neapolitan Guelfs. He died suddenly at Lavello, on the 21st of May, 1254. His natural brother, Manfred, a young hero, hardly twenty years of age, succeeded by his activity and courage in recovering the kingdom which Innocent IV had already invaded, with the intention of subduing it to the temporal power of the holy see. But Manfred, beloved by the Saracens of Luceria, who were the first to defend him, and admired by the Ghibellines of the Two Sicilies, was for a long time detained there by the attacks of the Guelfs, before he could in his turn pursue them through the rest of Italy. Conrad had left in Germany a son, still an infant, afterwards known under the name of Conradin; he was acknowledged king of Germany, under the name of Conrad V, by a small party only. The electors left the empire without a head; and when they afterwards proceeded to elect one in the year 1257, their suffrages were divided between two princes, strangers to Germany, where they had never set foot; one, an Englishman, Richard, earl of Cornwall; the other a Spaniard, Alfonso X of Castile.

THE POPE AND THE CITIES

[Sidenote: [1251-1253 A.D.]]

Innocent IV was still in France when he learned of the death of Frederick II; he returned thence in the beginning of the spring of 1251; wrote to all the towns to celebrate the deliverance of the church; gave boundless expression to his joy; and made his entry into Milan, and the principal cities of Lombardy, with all the pomp of a triumph. He supposed that the republicans of Italy had fought only for him, and that he alone would henceforth be obeyed by them; of this he soon made them but too sensible. He treated the Milanese with arrogance, and threatened to excommunicate them for not having respected some ecclesiastical immunity. It was the moment in which the republic, like a warrior reposing himself after battle, began to feel its wounds. It had made immense sacrifices for the Guelf party; it had emptied the treasury, obtained patriotic gifts from every citizen who had anything to spare; pledged its revenues, and loaded itself with debt to the extent of its credit. For the discharge of their debts, the citizens resigned themselves to the necessity of giving to their podesta, Beno de’ Gozzadini of Bologna, unlimited power to create new imposts, and to raise money under every form he found possible. The ingratitude of the pope, at a moment of universal suffering, deeply offended the Milanese; and the influence of the Ghibellines in a city where, till then, they had been treated as enemies, might be dated from that period.

Innocent IV pursued his journey towards Rome; but found the capital of Christendom still less disposed than the first city of Lombardy to obey him. The Romans in 1253 called another Bolognese noble, named Brancaleone d’Andolo, to the government of their republic; and gave him, with the title of senator, almost unlimited authority. The citizens, continually alarmed by the quarrels and battles of the Roman nobles, who had converted the Colosseum, the tombs of Adrian, Augustus, and Cæcilia Metella, the arches of triumph and other monuments of ancient Rome, into so many fortresses, whence issued banditti, whom they kept in pay, to pillage passengers and peaceable merchants, demanded of the government above all things vigour and severity. They forgot the guarantee due to the accused, in their attention to those only which were required by the public peace. The senator Brancaleone, at the head of the Roman militia, successively attacked these monuments, become the retreat of robbers and assassins; he levelled to the ground the towers which surmounted them; he hanged the adventurers who defended them, with their commanders the nobles, at the palace windows of the latter; and thus established by terror security in the streets of Rome. He hardly showed more respect to Innocent than to the Roman nobility. The pope, in order to be at a distance from him, had transferred his court to Assisi. Brancaleone sent him word that it was not decorous in a pope to be wandering like a vagabond from city to city; and that, if he did not immediately return to the capital of Christendom of which he was the bishop, the Romans, with their senator at their head, would march to Assisi and send him out of it by setting fire to the town.