, we have to
write the annals of a sustained struggle, in the course of which the
Italian cities were successful, when they reduced the Emperor to the
condition of an absentee with merely nominal privileges. After Frederick
II. the Empire played no important part in Italy until its rights were
reasserted by Charles V. upon the platform of modern politics. A power
so external to the true life of the nation, so successfully resisted,
so impotent to control the development of the Italians, cannot be chosen
as the central point of their history. If we elect the Republics, we are
met with another class of difficulties. The historian who makes the
Commune his unit, who confines attention to the gradual development,
reciprocal animosities, and final decadence of the republics, can hardly
do justice to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papacy, which
occupy no less than half the country. Again, the great age of the
Renaissance, when all the free burghs accepted the rule of despots, and
when the genius of the Italians culminated, is for him a period of
downfall and degradation. Besides, he leaves the history of the Italian
people before the starting-point of the Republics unexplained. He has,
at the close of their career, to account for the reason why these
Communes, so powerful in self-development, so intelligent, so wealthy,
and so capable of playing off the Pope against the Empire, failed to
maintain their independence. In other words he selects one phase of
Italian evolution, and writes a narrative that cannot but be partial. If
we make the Despots our main point, we repeat the same error in a worse
form. The Despotisms imply the Communes as their predecessors. Each and
all of them grew up and flourished on the soil of decadent or tired
Republics. Though they are all-important at one period of Italian
history--the period of the present work--they do but form an episode in
the great epic of the nation. He who attempts a general history of Italy
from the point of view of the despotisms, is taking a single scene for
the whole drama. Finally we might prefer the people--that people,
instinctively and persistently faithful to Roman traditions, which
absorbed into itself the successive hordes of barbarian invaders,
civilized them, and adopted them as men of Italy; that people which
destroyed the kingdoms of the Goths and Lombards humbled the Empire at
Legnano, and evolved the Communes; that people which resisted alien
feudalism