Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/201

Rh same kind of independence that the great nobles had. In Germany the policy of Frederick fostered the free-cities and multiplied them as a counterpoise to the nobility. But the city development was more marked in Italy than in Germany. All over the northern portion of Italy, which was now called Lombardy, there had developed a large number of city states almost on the ancient model. One great city, Venice, still stood outside the western Empire; it had persistently professed allegiance to the eastern. It had already grown great in its isolation, and the Venetian fleets were the most effective opponents of the Saracens in the Mediterranean.

Venice and Lombardy.

Venice however stood outside the Imperial quarrels, though it was one of the greatest of the Italian cities. Milan, Pavia, Parma, Modena, and Bologna in Lombardy, Genoa, Pisa, and Florence, were some of the cities which had attained to the highest prosperity. Naturally there were rivalries between the cities, and Milan was beginning to hold an ascendency which threatened to become oppressive. In short the position of affairs is extremely suggestive of the political conditions of Greece and of Italy fifteen hundred years before. Among these cities the emperor appears as the paramount power, responsible for order, to whom obedience is due. But as a matter of fact the emperor is in the eyes of the Italians a foreigner and a barbarian, almost as the Persian monarch was a foreigner and a barbarian in the eyes of the Ionian Greeks.

Frederick and the Lombard League.

Frederick intervened in Italy partly at least at the call of the cities which were threatened by the growing power of Milan. But his intervention was a vigorous assertion of his own authority. The emperor was more dangerous than Milan, and this fact was emphasised when Frederick returned to Italy and laid the obstinate city in ruins.

The friendship between emperor and pope had been short-lived. Hadrian himself reasserted the claim of the Holy Sea to stand above the emperor, and Hadrian's successor Alexander. proved himself a very effective antagonist. Frederick was no less determined to assert the Imperial supremacy as it had been exercised by Charlemagne and Otto. The whole moral