various mine:
the first labor of extracting the materials was already performed; the
metals were purified and cast; the marbles were hewn and polished; and
after foreign and domestic rapine had been satiated, the remains of
the city, could a purchaser have been found, were still venal. The
monuments of antiquity had been left naked of their precious
ornaments; but the Romans would demolish with their own hands the
arches and walls, if the hope of profit could surpass the cost of the
labor and exportation. If Charlemagne had fixt in Italy the seat of
the Western Empire, his genius would have aspired to restore, rather
than to violate, the works of the Caesars: but policy confined the
French monarch to the forests of Germany; his taste could be gratified
only by destruction; and the new palace of Aix-la-Chapelle was
decorated with the marbles of Ravenna and Rome. Five hundred years
after Charlemagne, a king of Sicily, Robert--the wisest and most
liberal sovereign of the age--was supplied with the same materials by
the easy navigation of the Tiber and the sea; and Petrarch sighs an
indignant complaint that the ancient capital of the world should adorn
from her own bowels the slothful luxury of Naples.

But these examples of plunder or purchase were rare in the darker
ages; and the Romans, alone and unenvied, might have applied to their
private or public use the remaining structures of antiquity, if in
their present form and situation they had not been useless in a great
measure to the city and its inhabitants. The walls still described the
old circumference, but the city had descended from the seven hills
into the Campus Martius; and some of the noblest monuments which had
braved the injuries of time were left in a desert, far remote from the
habitations of mankind....

IV. I have reserved for the last the most potent and forcible cause of
destruction, the domestic hostilities of the Romans themselves. Under
the dominion of the Greek and French emperors, the peace of the city
was disturbed by accidental tho frequent seditions: it is from the
decline of the latter, from the beginning of the tenth century, that
we may date the licentiousness of private war, which violated with
impunity the laws of the Code and the gospel, without respecting the
majesty of the absent sovereign or the presence and person of the
vicar of Christ.

In a dark period of five hundred years, Rome was perpetually afflicted
by the sanguinary quarr