inviolable beneath the ægis of her ancient prestige, and the decadent
Empire of the East was too inert to check the freedom of the towns which
recognized its titular supremacy.

[1] When I apply the term Roman here and elsewhere to the
inhabitants of the Italian towns, I wish to indicate the indigenous
Italic populations molded by Roman rule into homogeneity. The
resurgence of this population and its reattainment of intellectual
consciousness by the recovery of past traditions and the rejection
of foreign influence constitutes the history of Italy upon the close
of the Dark Ages.

[2] It will be remembered by students of early Italian history that
Benevento and Spoleto joined the Church in her war upon the Lombard
kingdom. Spoleto was broken up. Benevento survived as a Lombard
duchy till the Norman Conquest.

The kingdom of the Lombards endured two centuries, and left ineffaceable
marks upon Italy. A cordon of military cities was drawn round the old
Roman centers in Lombardy, Tuscany, and the Duchy of Spoleto. Pavia rose
against Milan, which had been a second Rome, Cividale against Aquileia,
Fiesole against Florence, Lucca against Pisa. The country was divided
into Duchies and Marches; military service was exacted from the
population, and the laws of the Lombards, _asininum jus, quoddam jus
quod faciebant reges per se_, as the jurists afterwards defined them,
were imposed upon the descendants of Roman civilization. Yet the
outlying cities of the sea-coast, as we have already seen, were
independent; and Rome remained to be the center of revolutionary ideas,
the rallying-point of a policy inimical to Lombard unity. Not long after
their settlement, the princes of the Lombard race took the fatal step of