ll
is said, was the most beneficent, as it was the most universal,
government that Europe has ever known. In the first years of that
government Ravenna became, and through the four hundred years of its
unhampered life she remained, one of its greatest bulwarks. While upon
its failure, as I have said, she suddenly assumed a position which for
some three hundred and fifty years was unique not only in Italy but in
Europe. And when with the re-establishment of an universal government
her importance declined and at length passed away, she yet lived on in
the minds and the memory of men as something fabulous and still,
curiously enough, as a refuge, the refuge of the great poet of the new
age; so that to-day, beside the empty tombs of Galla Placidia and
Theodoric, there stands the great sarcophagus which holds the dust of
Dante Alighieri.

We may well ask how it was that a city so solitary, so inaccessible,
and so remote should have played so great a part in the history of
Europe. It is to answer this question that I have set myself to write
this book, which is rather an essay _in memoriam_ of her greatness,
her beauty, and her forlorn hope, than a history properly so called of
Ravenna. But if we are to come to any real understanding of what she
stood for, of what she meant to us once upon a time, we must first of
all decide for ourselves what was the fundamental reason of her great
renown. I shall maintain in this book that the cause of her greatness,
of her opportunity for greatness, was always the same, namely, her
geographical position in relation to the peninsula of Italy, the
Cisalpine plain, and the sea. Let us then consider these things.

Italy, the country we know as Italy, properly understood, is
fundamentally divided into two absolutely different parts by a great
range of mountains, the Apennines, which stretches roughly from sea to
sea, from Genoa almost but not quite to Rimini.

The country which lies to the south of that line of mountains is Italy
proper, and it consists as we know of a long narrow mountainous
peninsula, while its history throughout antiquity may be said to be
altogether Roman.

What lies to the north of the Apennines is not Italy at all, but
Cisalpine Gaul.

In its nature this country is altogether continental. It consists for
the most part of a vast plain divided from west to east by a great
river, the Po, and everywhere it is watered and nourished by its two
hundred tributaries.

Shu