The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century | Page 4

condition of the towns at the time of the
Lombard invasion, a condition of such abasement and such degradation
as literally to have no history; a condition which indeed can truthfully
be said to merit none.
History tells the story of every great nation on the face of the earth in
three short words, growth, supremacy, decline. Vary the theme as you
may in the countless histories of countless peoples; subdivide the
course of its progress as you will, allowing for different local causes
and different local phenomena, the true philosophy of history teaches
that no real departure from this natural development is possible. But
what if by the violent intervention of some new and entirely foreign
force, another development and another life is given to the inanimate
ashes of the old? What if some nation, fresh from the woods and fields
of the childhood of its growth, come with overwhelming yet preserving
strength and infuse new blood into the withered veins of its predecessor?
This is the problem we now have before us. How many writers of
Italian history have entitled this chapter in its development "A new
Italian Nation formed"! It is not the old glories of Rome, which had
been Italy, returning; it is a new Italian nation formed. Each word tells
a story of its own. It is not the old galvanized to a second life; it is the
new superimposed, violently if you will, upon it. We do not hear of
Athens or of Rome, of an Alexander or of a Caesar, of a city or of a
man. It is an "Italian nation." It is the individualism of the independent
spirit of the North, which "forms" a nation from the exhausted remains
of the development of centralization of the South. The new idea of
distinct nationality among races of kindred stock was already at work,
even though it did not reach a formal expression till the Treaty of
Verdun, more than two hundred and fifty years later.
I do not mean to imply that we must in any measure ignore the passive
force and influence of the old forms on the new. The old veins receive
the new blood; the new torrent, overrunning everything at first with the
strength of its new life, will find again, even if it deepen, the channel of
the old river: a vanquished civilization will always subdue and at the
same time raise its barbarous conquerors, if they come of a stock
capable of appreciating civilizing influences. In the present case this

means that the men of the North brought the new ideas that were to
form modern history, and let their growth be directed and assisted,
while they were yet too young to stand alone, by some of the
framework which had been built up by the long experience of their
Southern neighbors.
To focus this thought on the immediate subject of our present study,
this I think is the only and true solution of the tedious question, so
much discussed by the two opposing schools of thought: whether the
government of the Italian communes was purely Roman in its forms
and in its conception, or purely Teutonic. The supporters of neither
theory can be said to be in the right. You cannot say that the average
city government was entirely Roman or entirely Teutonic, either in the
laws which guided it, or in the channels by which these laws were
executed and expressed. I think much time and much learning have
been spent on a discussion both fruitless and unnecessary. We cannot
err if we subject the question to a consideration at once critical and
impartial.
The widely differing opinions eagerly supported by different writers on
this point, form a very good example of the deceiving influence of
national feeling on the judgment in matters of historical criticism. For,
on the one hand, we find many German writers ignoring entirely the
old framework of Roman organization, and recognizing only the new
Teutonic life which gave back to it the strength it had lost; on the other,
a host of lesser Italian writers who magnify certain old names and
forms, and mistake them for the substance, making all the new life of
Italy but the return of a past, which belonged to a greatness that was
dead. Many there are of this school in Italy, where you will often find
to-day a commune of three hundred inhabitants, with its one or two
constables wearing the imperial badge, "_Senatus Populusque
Albanensis_" or "_Verulensis_," as the case may be. Truly a suggestive
anachronism! It is true that in remote ages especially, when the records
of history are few and uncertain--and the period we are considering in
this paper can almost be called the prehistoric age of municipal
institutions in Northern Italy--much