Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/216

 204 THE LATER MIDDLE AGES kings, who for the most part gave up the attempt to revive the old idea of the supreme empire, and only occasionally assumed the Imperial title. Their authority in Italy almost disappeared. But while the power of the German princes grew, so also did that of the free cities who owned no lord but the emperor. The commercial energy of these cities, united in leagues for the main- tenance of interests common to all, made them immensely wealthy, and thereby rendered them extremely valuable as allies. In Italy the city states which we have there seen developing followed a course not unlike that of the Greek city states of old. Ti _ Each of the great cities became the mistress of a Italy. ° group of minor cities. Venice stands as typical of government under a close oligarchy ; Florence was an advanced democracy. In other cases the republican forms were displaced by monarchy, hereditary in one great family ; such as the Visconti, who had the title of Dukes of Milan. Rome itself after a republican period finally passed under the control of the popes. The kingdoms of Sicily and Naples were periodically a battle- ground, where rival dynasties strove to assert their respective claims. In Spain the chief powers were the Moorish kingdom of Granada in the south and the Christian kingdoms of Portugal, Spain Castile, and Aragon. The Crowns of the two latter kingdoms were united at the close of our period by the marriage of Isabella, Queen of Castile, with Ferdinand, King of Aragon, who together achieved the conquest of Granada. This, however, belongs to our next period. We have seen the papacy at the height of its power. We shall now see it cast down and brought into the grip not of the The German emperor, but of the French king, and then Papacy. ren t between rival popes. The first period is known as that of the Babylonish captivity at Avignon, which took the place of Rome as the papal residence. The second period is that of the Great Schism, during which Protestantism had its birth in the teaching of John Wycliffe, the Englishman, and John Huss, the Bohemian. The schism was brought to a close, and the papacy restored to something of its former splendour, after the Council of Constance in 141 5.