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, and spent its prime upon eradicating every trace of the
repugnant system from its midst; that people which finally attained to
the consciousness of national unity by the recovery of scholarship and
culture under the dominion of despotic princes. This people is Italy.
But the documents that should throw light upon the early annals of the
people are deficient. It does not appear upon the scene before the reign
of Otho I. Nor does it become supreme till after the Peace of Constance.
Its biography is bound up with that of the republics and the despots.
Before the date of their ascendency we have to deal with Bishops of
Rome, Emperors of the East and West, Exarchs and Kings of Italy, the
feudal Lords of the Marches, the Dukes and Counts of Lombard and
Frankish rulers. Through that long period of incubation, when Italy
freed herself from dependence upon Byzantium, created the Papacy and
formed the second Roman Empire, the people exists only as a spirit
resident in Roman towns and fostered by the Church, which effectually
repelled all attempts at monarchical unity, playing the Lombards off
against the Goths, the Franks against the Lombards, the Normans against
the Greeks, merging the Italian Kingdom in the Empire when it became
German, and resisting the Empire of its own creation when the towns at
last were strong enough to stand alone. To speak about the people in
this early period is, therefore, to invoke a myth; to write its history
is the same as writing an ideal history of mediæval Europe.