that powerless as they
were before the united forces of the whole people the nobles were strong
enough by simply biding their time and availing themselves of popular
divisions to crush one opponent after another. And yet the struggle
against them was one of life and death for the city. No atom of the new
civilization, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to have
penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls of their city fortresses
they remained the mere murderous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. "I
counsel, lords, that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto
Frescobaldi to his brother nobles in the church of San Jacopo; "let us
arm ourselves and run on to the Piazza, and there kill friend and foe
alike as many as we find, so that neither we nor our children be ever
subject to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the sternness
of the laws which pressed upon the nobles forget what wild beasts they
were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of
mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens
was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and
lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the
'Inferno.'

From the hopeless task of curbing the various elements of disorder by
the single force of each isolated city the wiser and more patriotic
among the men of that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and
Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which as Dante saw had
now lost their old meaning. In the twelfth century the Emperor was at
once the foe of religion and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of
the towns. In the fourteenth that freedom had either perished by its own
excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong enough to defy even an Imperial
assailant. Religion found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface
VIII., or the church over which he ruled. Whatever might have been its
fortune under happier circumstances, the great experiment of democratic
self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed,
whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that
rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its
old sanctity was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day.
On the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Barbarossa, of the
terrible struggle by which the peace of Constance had been won, had
grown faint and dim in the cours