e for more extended power, increased in proportion
to the failing strength of their adversaries. The majority bore in
silence the yoke which they could not shake off preferring the
advantages secured to them by prompt submission to the danger of losing
in the unequal struggle every vestige of their former independence.

Lombardy, it is true, was an appanage of the Germanic empire, but the
sovereignty of the Emperor was almost nominal, and only acknowledged by
the turbulent Lombards, when forced so to do by his victorious arms;
and whenever a war broke out between the Monarch, his great
feudatories, or the Church, the smouldering embers of rebellion at once
burst forth into open insurrection.

Scarcely had Frederic the First, of Hohenstauffen, mounted the throne,
when his attention was attracted to Italy by an event of grave and
unusual importance.

In 1158, whilst Barbarossa, as the Emperor was usually surnamed by the
Italians, was presiding over a High Court of Justice at Kossnitz, and
listening to the various cases submitted for his decision, two men,
wearing upon their backs a wooden cross as a symbol of their
misfortune, presented themselves before the throne with a long list of
grievances against the Milanese, by whom, they alleged, the city of
Lodi had been destroyed after the pillage and the exile of its
citizens. They had come now to implore the intervention of the Emperor,
whose power alone, they urged, could check the tyranny of the Milanese
and save from utter ruin the other cities of Lombardy.

Frederic at once dispatched one of his nobles, Schwicker, of Aspremont,
with a letter of reproof and menace to Milan. But on his arrival the
consuls and the people refused to listen to the message. They tore the
despatch to pieces, trampled it underfoot, and obliged the ambassador
to seek safety in flight.

Such a crime could not go unpunished, and Frederic, at the head of a
powerful army, crossed the Alps and appeared, when least expected, in
the plains of Lombardy. Meanwhile the Milanese were putting into
execution their perfidious designs against Como and Lodi, and offered
to the Emperor the sum, enormous for that age, of four hundred gold
_marks_, on condition that he would recognize their sovereignty over
these cities.

But the proposition was indignantly rejected. "Wretches," said he to
the Milanese ambassadors, "do you presume to bribe me to palliate your
treachery? Do you propose to the Emperor of Germa