Chapter I: Italy in the Dark Age (1)

[Sidenote: [476-_ca._ 1100 A.D.]]

In taking up the history of Italy we shall, for convenience, go back to the year 476, when the last legitimate emperor of old Rome in the West was overthrown, and briefly recapitulate the story of events during the period of invasion that immediately followed. It will be recalled that we have already covered the period from 476 to 1024 in much detail in our study of the Western Empire, in Volume VII. It will be unnecessary, therefore, to treat this epoch here in anything but the barest outline; and even this will involve unavoidable repetitions. Since the later emperors of the Holy Roman Empire continued for some centuries to invade Italy periodically, and to claim control over its affairs, it will be almost impossible to avoid repetition here also; but inasmuch as such monarchs as Conrad II, Henry IV, and Frederick II are necessarily given full treatment in the volumes devoted to Germany, we shall deal somewhat briefly with their Italian incursions in the present connection. A similar duplication of matter will necessarily be involved in dealing with the mediæval popes, whose history has already been chronicled in the previous volume.

The story of temporal affairs in Italy lacks unity from the beginning of the period under consideration till well towards the close of the nineteenth century. For the most part, except during the relatively brief periods when a strong emperor claimed dominion over all Italy, the territory of the Italian peninsula was divided into numerous petty kingdoms, no one of which attained supremacy over the others. First one and then another became prominent, but often contemporaneous events of local importance, having but slight world-historical importance, confuse the picture, and make the presentation of the history of Italy extremely difficult. We must necessarily overlook a large number of such petty details, endeavouring to select such events as have real importance, and to weld them into a continuous narrative. But at best the story of Italian history lacks dramatic unity; the scene shifts from one principality to another too frequently to make possible a really harmonious presentation. We have really to do with a collection of cities rather than with a nation. It is the old story of Greece over again; only here there are more cities competing for supremacy, with no one at any time quite so near success as Athens and Sparta respectively were at successive periods. Yet Milan, Venice, and Florence at times approached the goal if they did not quite attain it.[a]

Most of these cities were very old; the greater number flourished in at least equal splendour in the time of the Roman Empire; some, such as Milan, Verona, Bologna, Capua, were so considerable as to present an image of Rome, with their circus, their amphitheatre, their tumultuous and idle population, their riches and their poverty. Their administration was nearly republican, most commonly composed, after the example of Rome, of a curia, or municipal senate elected by the people, and of duumvirs, or annual consuls. In all these towns, among the first class of inhabitants were to be found the proprietors of the neighbouring land, lodged in palaces with their slaves and freedmen; secondly, the artisans and shopkeepers whom their necessities established around them; lastly, a crowd of idle people, who had preserved just enough of land to supply, with the strictest economy, the means of existence. It does not appear that there was any prosperous manufactory in Italy. All manual labour, as well in towns as in the country, was executed by slaves. Objects of luxury, for the most part, came from Asia. War had for a long time been the only occupation of the Italians; for a long period, too, the legions had been levied partly among the Romans, and partly among their allies in Italy: but, under the emperors, the distrust of the master seconded the luxurious effeminacy of the subject, the Italians finally renounced even war, and the legions were recruited only in Pannonia, Gaul, and the other provinces bordering on the Rhine and the Danube.

At a later period, the barbarians who menaced Rome were seduced by liberal pay to engage in its defence; and in the Roman armies the enemies of Rome almost entirely replaced the Romans. The country could not, as in modern states, supply the place of cities in recruiting the armies with a class of men accustomed to the inclemencies of the weather and inured to toil. The only labourers to be found were an oppressed foreign race, who took no interest in public affairs. The Romans cultivated their land either by slaves purchased from the barbarians and forced by corporal punishment to labour, or by _coloni partiarii_, to whom was given a small share in the harvest as wages; but, in order to oblige these last to content themselves with the least possible share, they were attached to the land, and nearly as much oppressed as slaves themselves. The proprietors of land varied as between these two systems, according as the price of slaves varied, or the _colons_ (peasants, labourers) were more or less numerous; no cultivator of the land had any property in it.

The greater part was united in immense domains, sometimes embracing whole provinces, the administration of which was intrusted to freedmen, whose only consideration was, how to cultivate the land with the least possible expense, and how to extract from their labourers the greatest degree of work with the smallest quantity of food. The agriculturists, as well what were called freedmen as slaves, were almost all barbarians by birth, without any interest in a social order which only oppressed them, without courage for its defence, and without any pecuniary resources for themselves; their numbers also diminished with an alarming rapidity, partly from desertion, partly from new invasions of barbarians, who carried them off to sell as slaves in other Roman provinces, and finally from a mortality, the necessary consequence of poverty and starvation.

Italy, nevertheless, was supposed to enjoy a constant prosperity. During the entire ages of Trajan and the Antonines, a succession of virtuous and philosophic emperors followed each other; the world was in peace; the laws were wise and well administered; riches seemed to increase; each succeeding generation raised palaces more splendid, monuments and public edifices more sumptuous, than the preceding; the senatorial families found their revenues increase; the treasury levied greater imposts. But it is not on the mass of wealth, it is on its distribution, that the prosperity of states depends; increasing opulence continued to meet the eye, but men became more miserable; the rural population, formerly active, robust, and energetic, were succeeded by a foreign race, while the inhabitants of towns sank in vice and idleness, or perished in want, amidst the riches they had themselves created.

THE BARBARIAN INVADERS

[Sidenote: [476-814 A.D.]]

It was into this Italy, such as despotism had made it, that the barbarians penetrated. Eager for the booty which it contained and could not defend, they repeatedly ravaged it during the last two centuries of the Western Empire. The mercenary troops that Rome had levied amongst them for its defence, preferring pillage to pay, frequently turned their arms against those they were engaged to defend. They vied with the Romans in making and unmaking emperors; and generally chose them from their own ranks, in order to secure to the soldier a greater share of the property of the citizen. The booty diminished as the avidity of these foreigners increased. The pomp of the Western Empire soon appeared, to an army thus formed, a useless expense. Odoacer, of the nation of the Heruli, chief of the mercenaries who then served in Italy, suppressed it by deposing, in 476, the last emperor. He took upon himself the title of king, and distributed among his soldiers one-third of the land in the most fertile provinces; he governed during seventeen years this still glorious country, as a rich farm which the barbarians had a right to cultivate for their sole use.

The mercenaries united under the sceptre of Odoacer were not sufficiently strong to defend Italy against a new invasion of barbarians. The Ostrogoths, encouraged by the Grecian sovereign of new Rome, the emperor of the East, arrived in 489, under the command of Theodoric, from the countries north of the Euxine to the borders of Italy; they completed the conquest of it in four, and retained possession of the peninsula sixty-four years, under eight successive kings. These new barbarians, in their turn, demanded and obtained a portion of land and slaves; they multiplied, it is true, but became rapidly enervated in a delicious climate where they had suddenly passed from the severest privations to the enjoyment of every luxury. They were at last conquered and subdued in the year 553 by the Romans of Constantinople, whom they despised as the degenerate successors of the same nation which their ancestors had vanquished.

The invasion of the Lombards in 568 soon followed the destruction of the monarchy of the Ostrogoths. Amongst the various hordes which issued from the north of Germany upon the southern regions, the Lombards were reputed the most courageous, the most cruel, and the proudest of their independence; but their number was inconsiderable, and they scarcely acknowledged any social tie sufficient to keep them united: accordingly, they never completed the conquest of Italy. From 568 to 774, twenty-one Lombard kings during 206 years succeeded each other without establishing their dominion either on the lagunes, at the extremity of the Adriatic Gulf, where such of the inhabitants of upper Italy as were personally the most exposed had taken refuge and founded the Venetian Republic; or on the shores of the Adriatic, now called Romagna, governed by a lieutenant of the emperor of Constantinople, under the title of exarch of the five cities of Pentapolis; or on Rome, defended only by the spiritual arms of the patriarch of the Western church; or on the southern coast, where the Greek municipalities of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi governed themselves almost as independent republics. The Lombards, nevertheless, founded a kingdom in northern Italy, of which Pavia was the capital; and in southern Italy the duchy of Benevento, which still maintained its independence two centuries after the kingdom was subjugated.

From the middle of the eighth century the Lombards, masters of a country where the great towns still contained much wealth, where the land had lost nothing of its fertility, where the example of the vanquished had taught the vanquishers the advantage of reviving some agricultural industry, excited the envy of their neighbours the Franks, who had conquered and oppressed the Gauls, who despised all occupation but war, and desired no wealth but what the sword could give. They by repeated invasions devastated Italy; and at length, in 774, completed the destruction of the Lombard monarchy.

For more than twenty years the popes or bishops of Rome had been in the habit of opposing the kings of France to the monarchs of Lombardy, who were odious to them, at first as pagans, and afterwards as heretics. Chief of the clergy of the ancient capital, where the power of the emperors of Constantinople had been nominally established but never felt, they confounded their pretensions with those of the empire; and the Lombards having recently conquered the exarchate of Ravenna, and the Pentapolis, they demanded that these provinces should be restored to Rome. The Frankish kings made themselves the champions of this quarrel, which gave them an opportunity of conquering the Lombard monarchy; but Charles, the king who accomplished this conquest, and who was the greatest man that barbarism ever produced, in treating with Rome, in subjugating Italy, comprehended all the beauty of a civilisation which his predecessors had seen only to destroy; he conceived the lofty idea of profiting by the barbarian force at his disposal to put himself at the head of the civilisation which he laboured to restore. Instead of considering himself as the king of the conquerors, occupied only in enriching a barbarous army with the spoils of the vanquished, he made it his duty and his glory to govern the country for its best interests, and for the common good. He did more: in concert with Pope Leo III, he re-established the monarchy of the conquered as a western Roman empire, which he considered the representative of right, in opposition to barbaric force; he received from the same pope, and from the Roman people, on Christmas Day in the year 800, the title of Roman emperor, and the name of Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, which no one before had ever so well deserved.

CHARLEMAGNE AND HIS SUCCESSORS

[Sidenote: [814-1039 A.D.]]

As king, and afterwards as emperor, he governed Italy, together with his other vast states, forty years; he pursued with constancy, and with increasing ability, the end he proposed to himself, _viz._, establishing the reign of the laws, and a flourishing civilisation: but barbarism was too strong for him; and when he died in 814 it was re-established throughout the empire.

Italy had eight kings of the family of Charlemagne, reckoning his son and grandson, who reigned under him, and were, properly speaking, his lieutenants. Charles the Fat, great-grandson of Charlemagne, was deposed in 888; after which ten sovereigns, either Italian or Burgundian, but allied to the race of the Franks, disputed for seventy years more the crown of Italy and the empire. In 951 Otto I of Saxony, king of Germany, forced Berenger II, who then reigned, to acknowledge himself his vassal; in 961 Otto entered Italy a second time with his Germans, was crowned at Rome with the title of emperor, and sent Berenger II to end his days in a fortress in Germany.

Nearly five centuries elapsed from the fall of the ancient Roman Empire to the passing over of the renewed empire to the Germans. For a long space of time Italy had been pillaged and oppressed in turn by barbarians of every denomination, who wantonly overran the country only to plunder, and believed themselves valiant because, though in small numbers, they spread terror over a vast extent, and imagined by bloodshed to give a dignity to their depredations. The country, thus exposed to so many outrages, did not remain such as the Romans had left it. The Goth, Lombard, Frank, and German warriors, who had successively invaded Italy, introduced several of the opinions and sentiments of the barbarian race, particularly the habit of independence and resistance to authority. They divided with their kings the country conquered by their valour. They caused to be ceded to them vast districts, the inhabitants of which they considered their property equally with the land. The Lombard monarchy comprehended thirty dukedoms, or marquisates; their number diminished under Charlemagne and his successors; but at the same time there rose under them a numerous class of counts and _vavaseurs_, amongst whom every duke divided the province that had been ceded to him, under condition that they should swear fealty and homage, and follow him to the wars. The counts, in their turn, divided among the warriors attached to their colours the land apportioned to them. Thus was the feudal system, which made the possession of land the warrior’s pay, and constituted an hereditary subordination founded on interest and confirmed by oath from the king down to the lowest soldier, established at the same time throughout Europe. The Lombards had carried into Italy the first germs of this system which had been developed by the Franks and invigorated by the civil wars of Charlemagne and his successors; these wars rendered it necessary that every feudatory should fortify his dwelling to preserve his allegiance to his lord; and the country, which till then had been open and without defence, became covered with castles, in which these feudal lords established their residence.

About the same time--that is to say, in the ninth century--cities began to rebuild their ancient walls; for the barbarian kings who had everywhere levelled these walls to the ground no longer opposed their reconstruction, and the danger of being invaded by the rival princes who disputed the throne made them necessary; besides, at this epoch new swarms of barbarians from all parts infested Europe; the inhabitants of Scandinavia, under the name of Danes and Normans, ravaged England and France; the Hungarians devasted Germany and upper Italy; the Saracens, masters of Africa, infested the southern coasts of Italy and the isles: conquest was not the purpose of any of these invaders; plunder and massacre were their only objects. Permission to guard themselves against continual outrages could not be withheld from the inhabitants of towns. Several thousand citizens had often been obliged to pay ransom to little more than a hundred robbers; but, from the time they were permitted by their emperors to rebuild their walls, to purchase or manufacture arms, they felt themselves in a state to make themselves respected. Their long suffering had hardened them, had accustomed them to privations and danger, and had taught them it was better to defend their lives than yield them up to every contemptible aggressor; at the same time, the population of cities, no longer living in idleness at the expense of the provinces of the empire, addicted themselves to industry for their own profit: they had, accordingly, some wealth to defend. The ancient curiæ and municipalities had been retained in all the towns of Italy by their barbarian masters, in order to distribute more equally the burdens imposed by the conquerors, and reach individuals more surely. The magistrates were the chiefs of a people who demanded only bread, arms, and walls.

In the meantime the dukes, marquises, counts, and prelates, who looked on these cities as their property, on the inhabitants as men who belonged to them, and laboured only for their use, soon perceived that these citizens were ill disposed to obey, and would not suffer themselves to be despoiled, since they had arms, and could defend themselves under the protection of their walls: residence in towns thus became disagreeable to the nobles, and they left them to establish themselves in their castles. They became sensible that to defend these castles they had need of men devoted to them; that, notwithstanding the advantage which their heavy armour gave them when fighting on horseback, they were the minority; and they hastened to enfranchise the rural population, to encourage their growth, to give them arms, and to endeavour to gain their affections. The effect of this change of rule was rapid: the rural population in the tenth and eleventh centuries increased, doubled, quadrupled in exact proportion to the land which they had to cultivate.

Otto I, his son Otto II, and his grandson Otto III were successively acknowledged emperors and kings of Italy, from 961 to 1002. When this branch of the house of Saxony became extinct, Henry II of Bavaria and Conrad the Salian of Franconia filled the throne from 1004 to 1039. During this period of nearly eighty years, the German emperors twelve times entered Italy at the head of their armies, which they always drew up in the plains of Roncaglia near Piacenza: there they held the states of Lombardy, received homage from their Italian feudatories, caused the rents due to be paid, and promulgated laws for the government of Italy. A foreign sovereign, however, almost always absent, known only by his incursions at the head of a barbarous army, could not efficaciously govern a country which he hardly knew, and where his yoke was detested. During these five reigns, the social power became more and more weak in Italy. The emperors were too happy to acknowledge the local authorities, whatever they were, whenever they could obtain from them their pecuniary dues: sometimes they were dukes or marquises, whose dignities had survived the disasters of various invasions and of civil wars; sometimes the archbishops and bishops of great cities, whom Charlemagne and his successors had frequently invested with duchies and counties escheated to the crown, reckoning that lords elected for life would remain more dependent than hereditary lords; sometimes, finally, they were the magistrates themselves, who, although elected by the people, received from the monarch the title of imperial vicars, and took part with the nobles and prelates in the _plaids_ (_placita_), or diets of Roncaglia.

In the time of Conrad the Salian, the prelates almost throughout Lombardy joined the cities against the nobles; and from 1035 to 1039 there was a general war between these two orders of society. Conrad put an end to it, by a constitution which is considered to be the basis of feudal law. By this the inheritance of fiefs was protected from the caprices of the lords and of the crown,--the most oppressive conditions of feudal dependence were suppressed or softened,--and the few remaining slaves of the land were set free.

THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY

The crown of Conrad the Salian passed in a direct line to his son, grandson, and great-grandson. The first, Henry III, reigned from 1039 to 1056; the second, Henry IV, from 1056 to 1106; the third, Henry V, from 1106 to 1125. The last two reigns were troubled by the bloody quarrel between the empire and the court of Rome, called the war of investitures. Rome had never made part of the monarchy of the Lombards. This ancient capital of the world, with the territory appertaining to it, had, since the conquest of Alboin, formed a dukedom, governed by a patrician or Greek duke, sent from Constantinople. The bishop of Rome, however, who, according to the ancient canonical forms, was elected by the clergy, the senate, and the people of his diocese, had much more authority over his flock than this foreign magistrate.

[Sidenote: [717-1125 A.D.]]

The pontiff, however, who now began to take exclusively the name of pope, had more than once successfully defended Rome with his spiritual arms when temporal ones had failed. When, in the year 717, an iconoclast, or enemy of images, filled the throne of Constantinople, the popes under the pretence of heresy rejected his authority altogether; a municipality, at the head of which were a senate and consuls, then governed Rome nearly as an independent state; the Greeks, occupied with their own dissensions, seemed to forget it; and Rome owed to this forgetfulness fifty years of a sort of liberty. The Romans found once more a faint image of their past glory; sometimes even the title of Roman Republic was revived. They approved, notwithstanding, of Pope Stephen II conferring on the princes of the Franks the dignity of patricians, in order to transfer to them the authority which the Greek magistrate exercised in their city in the name of the emperor of Constantinople; and the people gladly acquiesced when, in the year 800, Leo III crowned Charlemagne as augustus, and restorer of the Western Empire. From that period Rome became once more the capital of the empire. At Rome the chiefs of the empire were henceforth to receive the golden crown from the hands of the pope, after having received the silver one of the kingdom of Germany at Aachen, and the iron crown of Lombardy at Milan.

Great wealth and much feudal power were, by the gratitude of the emperors, attached to the see of Rome. The papacy became the highest object of ambition to the whole sacerdotal order; and, in an age of violence and anarchy, barons notorious for their robberies, and young libertines recommended only by the favour of some Roman ladies, not unfrequently filled the pontifical chair. The other bishops selected were often no better. The German emperors, on arriving at Rome, were sometimes obliged to put an end to such a scandal, and choose among the competitors, or depose a pope who put all Christendom to the blush. Henry III obliged the people to renounce the right which they had hitherto exercised, and so greatly abused, to take part in the election of popes. He, himself, named four successively, whom he chose from among the most learned and the most pious of the clergy of Italy and Germany; and thus powerfully seconded the spirit of reform which began to animate the church from the eleventh century.

THE DISUNITED MUNICIPALITIES

[Sidenote: [1046-1122 A.D.]]

The war of investitures, which lasted more than sixty years, accomplished the dissolution of every tie between the different members of the kingdom of Italy. Civil wars have at least this advantage--that they force the rulers of the people to consult the wishes of their subjects, oblige them to gain affections which constitute their strength, and to compensate, by the granting of new privileges, the services which they require. The prelates, nobles, and cities of Italy obeyed, some the emperor, others the pope; not from a blind fear, but from choice, from affection, from conscience, according as the political or religious sentiment was predominant in each. The war was general, but everywhere waged with the national forces. Every city armed its militia, which, headed by the magistrates, attacked the neighbouring nobles or towns of a contrary party. While each city imagined it was fighting either for the pope or the emperor, it was habitually impelled exclusively by its own sentiments: every town considered itself as a whole, as an independent state, which had its own allies and enemies; each citizen felt an ardent patriotism, not for the kingdom of Italy, or for the empire, but for his own city.

At the period when either kings or emperors had granted to towns the right of raising fortifications, that of assembling the citizens at the sound of a great bell, to concert together the means of their common defence, had been also conceded. This meeting of all the men of the state capable of bearing arms was called a parliament. It assembled in the great square, and elected annually two consuls, charged with the administration of justice at home, and the command of the army abroad. The militia of every city was divided into separate bodies, according to local partitions, each led by a _gonfalonière_, or standard-bearer. They fought on foot, and assembled round the _carroccio_, a heavy car drawn by oxen, and covered with the flags and armorial bearings of the city. A high pole rose in the middle of this car, bearing the colours and a Christ, which seemed to bless the army, with both arms extended. A priest said daily mass at an altar placed in the front of the car. The trumpeters of the community, seated on the back part, sounded the charge and the retreat. It was Heribert, archbishop of Milan,[3] contemporary of Conrad the Salian, who invented this car in imitation of the ark of alliance, and caused it to be adopted at Milan. All the free cities of Italy followed the example: this sacred car, entrusted to the guardianship of the militia, gave them weight and confidence. The nobles who committed themselves in the civil wars, and were obliged to have recourse to the protection of towns, where they had been admitted into the first order of citizens, formed the only cavalry.

The parliament, which named the consuls, appointed also a secret council, called a _consilio di credenza_, to assist the government, composed of a few members taken from each division; besides a grand council of the people, who prepared the decisions to be submitted to the parliament. The _consilio di credenza_ was, at the same time, charged with the administration of the finances, consisting chiefly of entrance duties collected at the gates of the city, and voluntary contributions asked of the citizens in moments of danger. As industry had rapidly increased, and had preceded luxury, as domestic life was sober, and the produce of labour considerable, wealth had greatly augmented. The citizens allowed themselves no other use of their riches than that of defending or embellishing their country. It was from the year 900 to the year 1200 that the most prodigious works were undertaken and accomplished by the towns of Italy. They began by surrounding themselves with thick walls, ditches, towers, and counter guards at the gates; immense works, which a patriotism ready for every sacrifice could alone accomplish. The maritime towns at the same time constructed their ports, quays, canals, and custom-houses, which served also as vast magazines for commerce. Every city built public palaces for the _signoria_, or municipal magistrates, and prisons; and constructed also temples, which to this day fill us with admiration by their grandeur and magnificence. These three regenerating centuries gave an impulse to architecture, which soon awakened the other fine arts.

[Sidenote: [568-1200 A.D.]]

The republican spirit which now fermented in every city, and gave to each of them constitutions so wise, magistrates so zealous, and citizens so patriotic and so capable of great achievements, had found in Italy itself the models which had contributed to its formation. The war of investitures gave wing to this universal spirit of liberty and patriotism in all the municipalities of Lombardy, in Piedmont, Venetia, Romagna, and Tuscany. But there existed already in Italy other free cities, of which the experience had been sufficiently long to prove that a petty people finds, in its complete union and devotion to the common cause, a strength often wanting in great states. The free cities which flourished in the eleventh century rose from the ruins of the Western Empire; as those in Italy which preceded them in the career of liberty rose from the ruins of the empire of the East.

When the Greeks resigned to the Lombards Italy, which a few years before they had conquered from the Ostrogoths, they still preserved several isolated ports and fortified places along the coast. Venice, at the extremity of the Adriatic; Ravenna, at the south of the mouth of the Po; Genoa, at the foot of the Ligurian Mountains; Pisa, towards the mouths of the Arno; Rome, Gaeta, Naples, Amalfi, Bari, were either never conquered by the Lombards, or were in subjection too short a time to have lost their ancient walls and the habit of guarding them. These cities served as the refuge of Roman civilisation. All those who had preserved any fortune, independence of mind, or hatred of oppression, assembled in them to concert the means of resisting the insolence of their barbarian masters. The Grecian Empire maintained itself at Constantinople in all its ancient pride; but, with oriental apathy, it regarded these remains as still representing its province of Italy, while it did nothing for their defence. From time to time, a duke, an exarch, a patrician, a catapan, or other magistrate, was sent, with a title announcing the highest pretensions, but unaccompanied by any real force. The citizens of these towns demanded money and soldiers to repair and defend their fortifications; whilst the emperors, on the contrary, demanded that the money and soldiers of Italy should be sent to Constantinople. After some disputes, the Greek government found it prudent to abandon the question, and shut its eyes to the establishment of a liberty it despised, but which perhaps might be useful in the defence of these distant possessions; finally, the magistrates, whom these towns themselves nominated, became the acknowledged depositories of the imperial authority. The disposal of their own money and soldiers was allowed them, on condition that nothing should be demanded of the emperors, who were satisfied to see their names at the head of every act, and their image on the coin, without exacting other acts of submission. This policy was not, however, exactly followed with respect to Ravenna, or afterwards to Bari. In these cities the representative of the emperor had fixed his residence with a Greek garrison. Ravenna, as well as the cities appertaining to it, denominated the Pentapolis, was conquered by the Lombards between 720 and 730. Bari became then the capital of the _thema_ of Lombardy, which extended over a great part of Apulia. We have already shown how Rome passed from the Greek to the Western Empire: we suspect, rather than know, that Genoa and Pisa, after having been occupied by the Lombards, preserved their relations with Constantinople. The _pallium_, or silk flag, presented for some time to the emperors, was considered by them as a sort of tribute; but Venice on the upper sea, Gaeta, Naples, and Amalfi, on the lower, advanced more openly to independence.

THE ORIGIN OF VENICE

[Sidenote: [452-730 A.D.]]

From the invasion by Attila in 452, the marshes called Lagune, formed at the extremity of the Adriatic by the slime deposited by seven or eight great rivers, amidst which arose innumerable islands, had been the refuge of all the rich inhabitants of Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Treviso, and other great cities of Venetia, who fled from the sabres of the Huns. The Roman Empire of the West survived this great calamity twenty-four years; but it was only a period of expiring agony, during which fresh disasters continually forced new refugees to establish themselves in the Lagune. A numerous population was at length formed there, supported by fishing, the making of salt, some other manufactories, and the commerce carried on by means of these many rivers. Beyond the reach of the barbarians, who had no vessels, forgotten by the Romans, and their successors the Ostrogoths, they maintained their independence under the administration of tribunes, named by an assembly of the people in each of the separate isles.[b]

The authentic record of maritime Venice commences with the arrival of the Lombards in Italy. Of the time previous to this period, the records are the work of posterior chroniclers written in an adulatory spirit towards the republican powers.

As Babbo rightly said with regard to the vaunted very ancient origin and liberty of Venice, it was flattering to the republics to be credited with such old and sovereign power, “but the truth is that liberty and power do not rise to full force at once, but they gradually gain ground in obscurity and difficulty.” But criticism has for some time directed its attention to these inventions, and has finally silenced the Venetian traditions with their pretended foundations.

However, it is not to be inferred that the Venetian islands were uninhabited before the invasion of the Lombards, for there are documents which prove the contrary. But, as anyone can see, there is a great difference between the islands having inhabitants and being seats of an organised and free state as we are asked to believe.

It is now generally granted that, during the Roman sway and at the time of the temporary invasions, the stable populations of the islands remained subject to continental Venetia, and more particularly to the mother-city from which it received its magistrates. But when the foreign invasions became more lasting, the bonds of independence were necessarily loosened towards the mother-country, when they were not utterly broken.

[Sidenote: [538-600 A.D.]]

The first document showing the emancipation of the islands from continental Venetia is the letter written by Cassiodorus to the tribune of the maritime places, in the year 538, in which he asks him to provide a transport to Ravenna for the wines and oils belonging to the Istrians. But if this letter shows that the inhabitants of the islands at the time of the Gothic rule had begun to elect their own magistrates instead of receiving them from the mother-country, it does not prove that the islands thenceforward had full political power, as Graswinkel of antiquity and Crivello of modern times would have us to believe. Because in this case the letter would not have been written in the name of the prefect of the place as well as in the name of the king, as it was customary with foreigners; neither would Cassiodorus have dared to use to the Venetian tribune the same language as he used in his letters to the _provinciali_ of Istria, to the _consulare_ of Liguria, and to the _possessori_ of Syracuse, who were never thought to be independent magistrates. Moreover, Balbo notes that the vicinity of the lagunes to Ravenna, the capital and seat of the Gothic kings of Italy, renders every other supposition absurd.

Hence Romanin shows that this dependence of the islands on the Gothic dominion was more nominal than real. It is indisputable that it was changed into a sort of protectorate before it became a real republic, the rule of the east Goths being of too short duration to permit the confirmation of their own power, and moreover the nominal amnesty of the islands to the kingdom sufficiently satisfied the ambition of the Gothic kings and relieved them of undertaking their conquest. When Italy passed into the hands of the Greeks through the victories of Belisarius, the Venetian islands followed the fate of the mother-country; and it relapsed subsequently into the power of the Greeks after the short restoration of the Gothic rule. Moreover, the Greek sovereignty of the islands seemed to have become a mere military occupation; at least it appears so in the second half of the sixth century, when the migrations were made definitive to confirm the Lombard power in Italy.

To show how far removed from dependence on Constantinople the islands were at that time, we quote the authority of the chronicler Giovanni Diacono,[h] who dates the origin of the tribunal government and the conformation of the rank to the metropolises of the islands from the arrival of the Lombards. This fact, whilst showing on one side the autonomous position assumed by the islands towards the Byzantine Empire, proves on the other that the dependence of the islands on the mother-country had now virtually ceased. Hence the tribunes after the second half of the sixth century assume the solemn title of tribunes of the islands of the maritime lagunes proposed by the corporations of the same, to show that their election had been made with the full authority of the islands without regard to the mother-cities. The form of the political relations of the islands with Constantinople can be gathered from the account given by the chronicler Altinate of Longinus’ visit to the islands in the year (584) before returning to his country.

Altinate relates that when Longinus asked the islanders to receive him into the lagunes, and thence to transport him to Constantinople in their ships, he tried to persuade them by saying that he required no oath of fidelity, but, if they wished to show themselves good servants of the empire and ready to fight their enemies, he would make known or send for what they wanted at Constantinople; he would ask the emperor for whatever they wanted by means of a writing which he himself would place in the hands of the emperor, which would increase the concessions to the islands to have open and free entry to all the ports of the empire in the ways of commerce. The Venetians, satisfied with such promises, after having announced to the exarch how they were situated, how they had made this sanctuary in the lagunes so as not to fear being subjugated by any emperor, or king, or any prince whatsoever in the world, they received him with great honour, and sent with him to Constantinople a deputation to ask the emperor for the things promised by the exarch. And the emperor gave to the Venetians a diploma by which they were to be held in honour by all the authorities of the capital and the state, and to receive the protection of the imperial forces for all the maritime district and complete security for their commerce in the kingdom; and thus the Venetians became subject to his dominion and became proud of the honour. We see from this account of the chronicler Altinate, which was confirmed by subsequent chroniclers, that the primary political relation of the Venetians with the empire was, like that with the Gothic kings of Italy, a relation of protection more than servitude.

“They recognised,” says Romanin, “the emperor as their lord, they bowed to servile formulas, ordained by the proud vanity of the Eastern court, they accepted the general custom of heading their acts with the name and the year of the reigning cæsar; but they continued to rule themselves with their own laws and with their own magistrates. They made wars and concluded treaties, which they could not have done in a state of subjection.”

And, supported by the authority of the Byzantine records, by the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus at Calcondila, this condition of political autonomy, enjoyed by the Venetians in the second half of the sixth century (according to the author of the _Storia documentata di Venezia_), reassumed the diverse conditions of life by which maritime Venice passed from her first appearance upon the theatre of history until the conquest of Italy by the Lombards. From the facts appearing among this accumulated matter he had to conclude that the islands were at first dependent on the Venetian territory to which they were annexed, that in the confusion arising from the barbaric invasions in which they found themselves cut off from the mother-country they had to provide for themselves and nominate their own magistrates, that they recognised the Gothic dominion which caused them no inconvenience, and they were left in possession of their own municipal government; and that finally, at the time of the Lombards, their constitution assumed a stable form, and their first relations with the kings of Italy and with the emperors corresponded rather to those of a protectorate than to a real dependency. Impartial examination of subsequent events proves this fact, for full liberty in the reforms of their own government and laws without the intervention of any foreign power is evident; the wars were spontaneously undertaken and the treaties independently concluded. By such means everything went on naturally and progressively, as is seen by the records before us, and as we learn from the national history and story of events.

THE ORIGIN OF THE DOGESHIP

[Sidenote: [600-713 A.D.]]

There are but few records of the period between the stipulation of the compromise with the emperor Maurice to the foundation of the Venetian dukedom, but they suffice to confirm the autonomous policy enjoyed by the Venetian islands at that time. The majority of these records refer to the wars engaged in by the Venetians with the Lombards. By these they became masters of Padua. At the time of King Agilulf they turned their arms against the islands to get them under their own sway. The increasing prosperity of the islands, and the idea that the wealth accumulated there had been mostly imported from the continent to protect it from the usurpation of conquerors, kindled a strong desire to complete its conquest. The external dangers of the islands were attended by the internal disputes from the ambitions and jealousies of the tribunes.

An imminent invasion of the Lombards was feared when the greater part of the country, recognising the gravity of the danger menacing them, summoned a general council to Heraclea under the presidency of the chief patriarch Aristoforo. And here it was unanimously agreed to introduce a stricter form of government by preventing the rivalries of the magistrates who were the chief fomenters of the internal dissensions. And following the example of great cities like Rome, Genoa, and Naples, which were saved by dukes, they agreed to appoint a chief magistrate with jurisdiction over all the islands with the title of “duke” (_doge_). Then, proceeding to the election of the person on whom this dignity was to be conferred, their choice fell upon Paolu Lucio, or Paoluccio Anafesto. Such was the origin of the Venetian dukedom as it is recorded by chroniclers. But if there is unity among them as to the causes which gave rise to the ducal power in maritime Venetia, there is none with regard to the time in which it was instituted. Some put it in the year 697, others relegate it to the first years of the next century. Among them there is Giovanni Diacono,[h] who puts the election of Paoluccio at the time of Anastasius II, emperor, and of Liutprand king of the Lombards. And as, according to the most ancient Venetian chronicler, Liutprand succeeded to the throne in 712 and Anastasius in 713, the election of Paoluccio could not have been before the latter year.

[Sidenote: [713-900 A.D.]]

Therefore between the two extreme dates quoted by the chroniclers there is a difference of sixteen years, sufficient time to afford material for criticism. But the different points were defended and contested without result. Muratiri Leo defended the date of 697, which is the date given by Dandolo and his followers; Romanin oscillated between the two dates; Filiasi and Balbo were inclined to the medium course and put the election of Paoluccio in the year 706 or 707. But as neither the one nor the other adduces more authentic proofs in support of the closer date, we will remain firm in preferring that of 713, which is according to the most eminent author on Venetian matters. We are the more led to this preference by the cause to which the chroniclers generally attribute the foundation of Venetian dukedom. For if it is true that the imminence of the Lombards led the inhabitants of the islands to institute a supreme magistrate, it could not have referred to the time preceding Liutprand in which the Lombards, either through flaccidness of purpose or through internal disputes, were incapable of thinking of new conquests or exercising fears or apprehensions among their neighbours. The chronicler Giovanni says nothing of the attributes of the new magistrate, and his silence on such an important subject is the more deplorable, as in the computations made by posterior chroniclers on the ducal authority we find names used of matters more contemporaneous to them than to the time of which they speak.

Andrea Dandolo,[g] the most authentic among them, describes in the following words the attributes of the first Venetian dukes: “They had,” says the doge chronicler, “the power and right to convoke the general meeting for public affairs, to appoint tribunes and judges to administer all matters private, lay, and ecclesiastical, save the mere spiritual; they had power in everything befitting the title of duke; and by their orders there the councils of the clergy took place and the election to the prelature was made by the clergy and the people, the election and the investiture being from their hands, as they had the power of appointment.” It is very doubtful whether the ducal attributes were originally so defined in detail. Anyhow, from the appearance of a military magistrate with the title of master of the militia alongside of the first duke, it can be inferred that the jurisdiction of the duke was limited to civil affairs. For the chronicler Giovanni,[h] in speaking of Paoluccio Anafesto, says that he judged his own with temperate justice. And here the verb to judge is used in a more definite and proper sense than in that used by the Lombard histories and documents respecting their dukes. It expresses that which is solely civil jurisdiction, whilst the jurisdiction of the Lombard dukes included the military jurisdiction as well as the civil.

We have an important document of the dogedom of Anafesto,[i] which shows how beneficial the institution of the ducal power was to the Venetians. This document is a convention of the doge with Liutprand, by which the Lombard king conceded to the Venetians the trade of the territories of the kingdom proper, and, defining the limits between the two states, it declared to be Venetian the territories between the Piave Major and the Piavicelli on the side of Heraclea. Such, according to the chronicler Giovanni, was the tenor of the treaty of peace concluded between Liutprand and the first doge of Venice. And we have authentic confirmation of its truth in its verification, made by Barbarossa in the year 1177, of that which pertained to the designation of the Venetian confines on the part of Italy.[c]

It was in 809 [or 810], in a war against Pepin, son of Charlemagne, that the Venetians made choice of the Island of the Rialto, near which they assembled their fleet bearing their wealth, and built the city of Venice, the capital of their republic. Twenty years afterward they transported thither from Alexandria the body of St. Mark, the evangelist, their chosen patron. His lion figured in their arms, and his name in their language whenever they would designate with peculiar affection their country or government.

VENICE IN THE TENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: [900-996 A.D.]]

While the Venetians disputed with the Lombards, the Frank and the German emperors, the little land on which stood their houses, they had also to dispute the sea that bathed them, with the Slavonians, who had established themselves for the purpose of piracy on the eastern side of the Adriatic.[b] It was hardly five hundred years since the fugitives from Padua and Aquileia had sought refuge in the lagunes. Content with having found safety there and freedom to enlarge their town and extend their commerce, they had hitherto only made just wars, having only taken to arms to repulse pirates, help oppressed neighbours, or to defend their liberty against Pepin and the Hungarians.

Although many victories had given them a just appreciation of their strength, they had no aggression to reproach themselves with, unless perhaps that against the Saracens, but this war was undertaken at the solicitation of the Italian people, and on the request of the Eastern emperor. Moreover, in generally received ideas of this epoch, the Saracens, in their quality as infidels, were beyond the pale of common rights. The republic had never made incursions on the continent, for it would not be just to lay to its account the short expeditions of the two doges, who had no other object than their own interests.

This union of exiles and fishers had become a rich, powerful, warlike, yet at the same time a peaceful nation. The fruit of this moderation had been if not an existence exempt from trouble, at least a medium to the creation of an independent state, freeing itself little by little from the influence of the two empires between which it found itself--a state, moreover, which treated with its neighbours, counted many illustrious families, whose princes married kings’ daughters, yet in its entity did not extend beyond the lagunes and several points of the neighbouring coast. A new scene was to open up.

Commerce, that profession in which fortunes are continually being tried, is not a school of moderation. Successes inspire greediness and jealousy, and these latter the spirit of domination. Maritime commerce wanted ports where her ships could be gathered, authority where she bought, privileges where she sold, safety for navigation, and, above all, no rivals. This ambitious spirit is really the same as that of conquest. Venice will show us an example of it.

No choice of the Venetians was more justified by its great and lasting results than that of Doge Pietro Orseolo II in 991. He was the son of him who had abdicated the dogate fifteen years before. As in the life of all great men there is something of the marvellous, it was spread abroad that his father had announced that his son would be the glory of his country, and the holiness of Orseolo I gave to these paternal hopes all the authority of a prophecy.

Hardly was the new doge on the throne, than the factions which had torn Venice during the reign of his feeble predecessor calmed down or at any rate were quiet. Deliberations had been frequently troubled ones; the palace had more than once been stained with blood. Orseolo made a law by which all acts of violence in the public assembly should be punished by a fine of twenty gold livres or the death of those who had not the wherewithal to pay. A statesman as well as a clever warrior, he occupied himself with forwarding commercial prosperity. He treated with all the Italian states for goods. He obtained from the emperor of the East that all subjects of the republic should be exempt from dues throughout the empire, not only in ports but inland, or at least that the dues should be reduced in the proportion of thirty gold sols to two. Finally he assured himself, by an embassy and presents, of the favour of Egyptian and Syrian sultans. The interior commerce of the Adriatic was itself an abundant source of riches for the Venetians. Favoured by concessions from the patriarch of Aquileia and the Italian kings, their ships went the whole length of Lombardy and Friuli to sell all sorts of foreign wares. They were welcome in the ports of Apulia and Calabria; on the eastern coast of the gulf they enjoyed some privileges, bought, it is true, by a tribute, but which were none the less profitable.