FOOTNOTES:

"A century of unparalleled tranquillity and virtuous government is followed immediately by a period of hopeless ruin and dissolution. A century of rest is followed not by renewed vigour, but by incurable exhaustion. Some principle of decay must have been at work; but what principle? We answer: it was a period of sterility or barrenness in human beings; the human harvest was bad. And among the causes of this barrenness we find, in the more barbarous nations, the enfeeblement produced by the too abrupt introduction of civilisation and universally the absence of industrial habits, and the disposition to listlessness which belongs to the military character."[434]

One is tempted to apply the theory of human crops to the case of the chair of history at Cambridge. Prof. Seeley's theory is an edifying variant on that of Mr. Balfour. Where one thesis finds the key to all in the emperor, the other sees failure of the human harvest the moment the imperial succession goes wrong. And while the Professor offers the semblance of a reason for the alleged failure in the human breed, it is really too nugatory for discussion. If the "barbarous nations" alluded to were Gaul and Spain, they had suffered the "abrupt introduction of civilisation" more than two hundred years before. Egypt and Syria and Greece and North Africa had older civilisations than the Roman. Germany was not decadent. The decay of industrial life in Italy had begun long before the Empire. As well might we say that a bad human crop there had preceded the Etruscan conquest, the invasion by Hannibal, and the civil wars. To cite, as does Prof. Seeley, the pestilence of the year 166 as a beginning of depopulation, is to ignore the problem of three hundred years of previous depopulation in Italy, and to set up a misconception as to the rest of the Empire. According to Gibbon, the long pestilence of the years 250-265 was the worst of all.[435]

More plausibly, Prof. Seeley goes on to argue that "what the plague had been to the population, that thefiscuswas to industry. It broke the bruised reed; it converted feebleness into utter and incurable debility. Roman finance had no conception of the impolicy of laying taxation so as to depress enterprise and trade. Thefiscusdestroyed capital in the Roman Empire. The desire of accumulation languished where the Government lay in wait for all savings—locupletissimus quisque in prædam correptus. All the intricate combinations by which man is connected to man in a progressive society disappeared."[436]But this is a finally excessive description of a process which had been in full swing in the time of Cicero, and which subsisted for three hundred years after Marcus Aurelius in the West. A generation after Marcus came the powerful Severus, whose son Caracalla could find millions of money to build his immense baths at Rome, still monstrous in their ruins; and seventy years after Caracalla, Diocletian, wielding the Empire at its utmost extension, could build still vaster baths for the imperial city at which he had ceased to dwell. With a debased silver coinage,[437]the emperors of that day seemed to feel no fatal lack of real revenue, and maintained, at great cost, huge armies for the control and defence of their enormous realm.

It is impossible to see why the age of the Antonines should be taken as a turning point in the Empire's history rather than the age of Diocletian. That great organiser seems to have partly provoked the insurrection of the Bagaudae in Gaul by taxation; but the Bagaudae were ajacquerieoppressed by the nobles, as their fathers had been before Cæsar, and as their posterity was long afterwards; and their wrongs may as well have been at the hands of their lords as at those of the autocrat.[438]However that might be, Roman rule in Gaul survived the revolt of the Bagaudae, yielding a great revenue to Constantine; and at the time of the fall of Rome Gaul was much more productive than Italy. All this is beside the case. To say that "the downfall of the Empire is accounted for" by thefiscus[439]is to raise the question whether the Empire, as such, could have been run by any other method. The Professor himself pronounces that "Government in its helplessness was driven" to fiscal oppression. Then fiscal oppression belonged to the nature of the Empire. Oncemore we return to the true line of sequence and explanation. Every step and stage in decadence belonged to the process of conquest, of confiscation, of subjection of foreign races, who were made to pay for the vast machinery that kept them subject till they were unfit for self-defence.

[What is true of the Roman fisc was true till the other day of the Turkish, another product of militarist imperialism, similarly collateral with mental stagnation. Depopulation and arrest of production in the East under Turkish rule are to be explained in substantially the way in which we have explained them for ancient Rome. And it is significant that the prospect of regeneration for Turkey has begun after the amputation of many of the provinces over which she maintained an alien rule. Her future visibly depends on the continuance of the processes of self-maintenance and development of the principle of self-government throughout the subsisting State.]

There is a danger that, in insisting on the primarily moral causation of the process of social disease and decay, we may on the one hand relapse into a delusive sense of moral superiority, and on the other hand fail to realise how the subjective moral divagation becomes politically effectual in structural and economic change. It is the understood process of causation that is alone truly instructive. But the instruction is deepened in the ratio of our realisation of the decay. Though it is clear that before Rome many a civilisation had gone to violent wreck, there is in recorded history no more overwhelming memory of long triumph and long downfall than that "from the far-distant morning when a small clan of peasants and shepherds felled the forests on the Palatine to raise altars to its tribal deities, down to the tragic hour in which the sun of Græco-Latin civilisation set over the deserted fields, the abandoned cities, the homeless, ignorant, and brutalised peoples of Latin Europe."[440]And this whole tremendous arc of triumph and decline is to be understood as the historic expression of the specially conditioned bias of conquest in one people.

The decline is the due sequence of the "rise": everything roots in the wrong relation of communities throughout the Empire. The extension of such a social disease as slavery is one of the symptoms, one of the sequelæ, of the central malady.[441]A totally progressive State eliminates or minimises slavery; a declining one fails to do so. The economic malady involved affects primarily the dominant orparasitic State or central part, its condition of parasitism being more deadly than its draining effect on the others.Theirmalady lay in their state of subjugation, which was an impoverishment of character and political faculty; and thus it came about that the collapse of the centre of organisation meant the fall of the entire civilisation of Western Europe before the new barbarism.

Rome had so visibly ruined all that we are apt to forget how the process of moral and political retrogression had begun in the Greek world long before. There, however, the Roman conquest was but a consummation; and the economic and political continuance of the Eastern Empire was concurrent with a moral and intellectual contraction which was never recovered from. In a word, varying conditions determined the differences of continuance and evolution in the two spheres. But the causation is none the less clear throughout.

It might be supposed that this reverberating lesson could have been read in only one way—as a warning to the nations against taking the Roman road of conquest and dominion. And yet it is doubtful whether modern States have been at all guided by that lesson, as compared with the extent to which they have been overruled by the sheer difficulty of repeating the evolution. The problem has been faced by Lord Cromer, a ripe ruler, in his very scholarly essay onAncient and Modern Imperialism. The experienced administrator is quite alive to the analogy between the part played of old by Rome around the Mediterranean and in Europe, and that played to-day by England in India and, in some measure, in Egypt. Raised in some degree above the ordinary hallucination of mere dominion, the confused pride of the average man in his country's rule over large portions of the earth, the veteran governor notes that, whereas there was a general acquiescence of the subject peoples in the imperial rule of Rome, noimperiumto-day has won any such cordial acceptance.[442]Neither France in Algeria and Tunis nor Britain in India and Egypt is an assimilating and unifying power. We may note the proximate explanation, which he does not at first give—to wit, the sundering force of crystallised religious systems. As he later puts it, following Sir Alfred Lyall, religions make nations, where the Romans had to deal with tribes.[443]But that need not greatly affect our view of the political problem, which would remain if the religious factor were eliminated; and it is over the political problem that Lord Cromer most significantly balances.

Falling back on the method of fatalism, he pronounces, likeothers before him, "that Rome, equally with the modern expansive Powers, more especially Great Britain and Russia, was impelled onwards by the imperious and irresistible necessity of acquiring defensible frontiers; that the public opinion of the world scoffed 2,000 years ago, as it does now, at the alleged necessity; and that each onward move was attributed to an insatiable lust for extended dominion."[444]As in all fatalistic reasoning, we are here faced by radical self-contradiction. The "public opinion of the world," which Lord Cromer allows to include a large part of Roman opinion,[445]could not scoff at an "irresistible necessity": it knew that it was no more irresistibly necessary for A to conquer B than for B to conquer A; and in ascribing to Rome an "insatiable lust for extended dominion" it merely credited Rome with an appetite known to inhere in all States. Rome succeeded in her aim; others failed. Pisa, overborne by Florence, had in her day overborne other communities. Lord Cromer has begged the vital question, which is: Can States, or can they not, live neighbourly? To say that Rome could not because of the ambitions or menaces of others is idle: the menace was reciprocal.

For practical purposes, of course, the thesis is sometimes adequate all round, as when France and Britain, face to face in North America and in India, strove each to oust the other. But at times the plea becomes visibly farcical, as in the recent case of Russia in the Far East, and the earlier case of Britain with regard to Afghanistan. We can all remember the temporary growth of the doctrine of "a scientific frontier." First you want a river; then you need the territory beyond the river; then you need the line of hills commanding that territory; then the territory behind the hills becomes asine qua non.[446]In this case the doctrine has disappeared with the policy, andthatdisappeared simply because it failed. The event has proved that the doctrine was a chimera. And nobody to-day probably will maintain that Russia lay under an imperious and irresistible necessity to go and be defeated by the Japanese in Manchuria; or that she could not conceivably have stopped short of that extremity.

The use sometimes made of the word "cupidity" is apt to obscure the problem. There is cupidity of power and conquest as well as of territory, revenue, plunder. Roman cupidity was of all kinds. But so was that of "the" Greeks. Lord Cromer employsthe old false dichotomy—above discussed—that marks the Greeks as "individualistic" and the Romans as somehow unitary.[447]As we have seen, the original Roman City-State was just the same kind of thing as the Greek: it was opportunity that made "the Romans" expand, whereas "the Greeks," down to Alexander, remained segregated in their States. What was common and fatal to both, what led Greece to dissolution and Rome to downfall, was the primary impulse to combat, the inability to refrain from jealousy, hate, and war. And for the moderns, seeing this, the problem is, Can they refrain?

Either we are thus to learn from history, or all history is as a novel without a purpose. And Lord Cromer, as a man of action, cannot in effect take this attitude, though he recoils from any clear statement of the lesson. On the one hand, he makes the most of the differentia between ancient and modern Imperialism. English rulers in India, he admits, originally aimed at home revenue, and did for a time practise sheer plunder;[448]the British rule no longer does either: which is in effect an admission that one "imperious and irresistible necessity" of the Roman rule has been successfully resisted—shall we say, by modern enlightenment? But he will not frankly take the further step and say that for the ideal of dominion over backward races we should substitute the ideal of their education and purposive evolution. Rather he makes the most of the difficulties, enlarging in the familiar fashion on the dividedness and differentiation of the Indian peoples and the relative stationariness of Islam: two undeniable propositions, of which the first is nothing to the purpose, since we are discussing the lines of progressive policy; while the second merely incurs the rejoinder that Christendom was long as stationary as Islam, and that Christian Abyssinia is so still.

As was, indeed, to be expected, Lord Cromer will rather homologate the whole Roman process, decadence and collapse and all, than pronounce it what it was, a vast divagation in human progress. Ultimately he does not even blench at the proposition that the whole ruin "had to" take place[449]by way of preparing for the civilisation that was to follow, even as he argues that "the" Romans "had to" undertake fresh wars where they (on the urging, as he admits, of their wisest men) had sought to evade further conquest by recognising "buffer States"[450]—as who should say that whatever course a majority or a Government do take "had to" betaken. The answer to such reasoning is the mention of the fact, which he admits, that it was "a supreme principle of the Roman Government to acknowledge no frontier Power with equal rights."[451]Can it be still a question whether that principle is to be transcended?

On the final issue as to what the ruling nations "have to" do to-day as regards the subject peoples, the disinterested student can hardly hesitate, however the ex-administrator may feel bound to balance. "The Englishman," Lord Cromer tells us, truly enough as regards the average citizen, "would be puzzled to give any definite answer" to the questionQuo vadis?in matters imperial.[452]He may well be, when Lord Cromer visibly is, despite the ostensible emphasis with which he exhorts his countrymen to keep "theanimus manendistrong within them."[453]The danger is that, noting the formal conclusion rather than the implicit lesson of Lord Cromer's very able survey, "the Englishman" may turn from his puzzle to some new insanity of imperialism. Not many years have passed since English wiseacres were speculating on a "break-up" of China, and a dominion of some other State over her huge area and multitudinous millions. He would be a bad sample of modernity who should now regret that China is apparently on the way, like Japan, to build up a new progressive civilisation in the "unchanging East."[454]But it is perhaps as much to the sheer impracticability of further great conquests as to any alert and conscious reading of the lesson of history that we owe the growing disposition of modern States to seek their good in their own development. If so, provided that the ideal be changed, "it is well, if notsowell."

FOOTNOTES:[429]Decadence.(Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture.) By the Right Hon. A.J. Balfour, 1908, p. 8.[430]See above, pp. 23-24. On the whole question see the very full survey of W.R. Patterson,The Nemesis of Nations, 1907, p. 265sq.[431]Gibbon's generalisation (end of ch. 10) as to a "diminution of the human species" throughout the Empire is confessedly founded on very imperfect evidence, applying only to Alexandria, and very doubtful even at that point.[432]History, vol. v (The Provinces). Cp. Merivale,General History, p. 682.[433]See Gibbon, ch. 31, end. On Gibbon's and Guizot's interpretation of the scheme, see Prof. Bury's note on Gibbon,in loc.[434]Lectures and Essays, 1870: Lecture on "Roman Imperialism," p. 54.[435]Ch. 10,end.[436]Essay cited, p. 56.[437]Prof. Bury (note to Gibbon in his ed. i, 281) cites the debased silver coinage as a proof of the "distress of the Empire" and the "bankruptcy of the Government." This is an unwarranted inference. See above, p. 80.[438]Cp. Gibbon, ch. 13, Bohn ed. i, 427-28; Merivale,General History, pp. 572-74. Bagaudae seem to have recruited the army of Julian. (Ed. note on Gibbon, as cited, ii, 474.)[439]Seeley, as cited, p. 57.[440]Ferrero,Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. tr. 1907, vol. i, pref.[441]Cp. Patterson,Nemesis of Nations, as cited.[442]Ancient and Modern Imperialism, 1910, pp. 37-38, 73-91.[443]Id.p. 91.[444]Ancient and Modern Imperialism, pp. 19-20.[445]Id.p. 22.[446]Compare Lord Cromer's mention (p. 32) of the doubt as to whether the Himalayas made a secure frontier.[447]Ancient and Modern Imperialism, p. 14.[448]Id.pp. 43, 65-68.[449]Id.p. 62.[450]Id.p. 22.[451]Ancient and Modern Imperialism, p. 26, citing Mommsen.[452]Id.p. 118.[453]Id.p. 126.[454]Mr. Balfour, using this egregious expression in his lecture on Decadence (p. 35), explains that "the 'East' is a term most loosely used. It does not here include China and Japan, anddoesinclude parts of Africa." At the same time it does not refer to the ancient Jews and Phœnicians. One is moved to ask, Does it include the Turks and the Persians? If not, in view of all the other exceptions, might it not be well to drop the "unchanging" altogether?

[429]Decadence.(Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture.) By the Right Hon. A.J. Balfour, 1908, p. 8.

[430]See above, pp. 23-24. On the whole question see the very full survey of W.R. Patterson,The Nemesis of Nations, 1907, p. 265sq.

[431]Gibbon's generalisation (end of ch. 10) as to a "diminution of the human species" throughout the Empire is confessedly founded on very imperfect evidence, applying only to Alexandria, and very doubtful even at that point.

[432]History, vol. v (The Provinces). Cp. Merivale,General History, p. 682.

[433]See Gibbon, ch. 31, end. On Gibbon's and Guizot's interpretation of the scheme, see Prof. Bury's note on Gibbon,in loc.

[434]Lectures and Essays, 1870: Lecture on "Roman Imperialism," p. 54.

[435]Ch. 10,end.

[436]Essay cited, p. 56.

[437]Prof. Bury (note to Gibbon in his ed. i, 281) cites the debased silver coinage as a proof of the "distress of the Empire" and the "bankruptcy of the Government." This is an unwarranted inference. See above, p. 80.

[438]Cp. Gibbon, ch. 13, Bohn ed. i, 427-28; Merivale,General History, pp. 572-74. Bagaudae seem to have recruited the army of Julian. (Ed. note on Gibbon, as cited, ii, 474.)

[439]Seeley, as cited, p. 57.

[440]Ferrero,Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. tr. 1907, vol. i, pref.

[441]Cp. Patterson,Nemesis of Nations, as cited.

[442]Ancient and Modern Imperialism, 1910, pp. 37-38, 73-91.

[443]Id.p. 91.

[444]Ancient and Modern Imperialism, pp. 19-20.

[445]Id.p. 22.

[446]Compare Lord Cromer's mention (p. 32) of the doubt as to whether the Himalayas made a secure frontier.

[447]Ancient and Modern Imperialism, p. 14.

[448]Id.pp. 43, 65-68.

[449]Id.p. 62.

[450]Id.p. 22.

[451]Ancient and Modern Imperialism, p. 26, citing Mommsen.

[452]Id.p. 118.

[453]Id.p. 126.

[454]Mr. Balfour, using this egregious expression in his lecture on Decadence (p. 35), explains that "the 'East' is a term most loosely used. It does not here include China and Japan, anddoesinclude parts of Africa." At the same time it does not refer to the ancient Jews and Phœnicians. One is moved to ask, Does it include the Turks and the Persians? If not, in view of all the other exceptions, might it not be well to drop the "unchanging" altogether?

THE CASE OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLICS

Note on Literature

No quite satisfactory history of Italy has appeared in English. The standard modern Italian history, that of Cesare Cantù, has been translated into French; but in English there has been no general history of any length since Procter and Spalding. Col. Procter'sHistory of Italy(published as by G. Perceval, 1825; 2nd ed. 1844) has merit, but is not abreast of modern studies. Spalding'sItaly and the Italian Islands(3 vols. 3rd ed. 1845) is an excellent work of its kind, covering Italian history from the earliest times, but is also in need of revision. The comprehensive work of Dr. T. Hodgkin,Italy and her Invaders(2nd ed. 1892-99, 8 vols.) comes down to the death of Charlemagne.Of special histories there are several. One of the best and latest is that ofThe Lombard Communes, by Prof. W.F. Butler (1906). Captain H.E. Napier, in the preface to hisFlorentine History(1846, 6 vols.) rightly contended that "no people can be known by riding post through their country against time"; but his six learned volumes are ill-written and ill-assimilated. The best complete history of Florence, the typical Italian Republic, is the longHistoire de Florenceby F.T. Perrens (9 tom. 1877-84; Eng. tr. of one vol. by Hannah Lynch, 1892). T.A. Trollope'sHistory of the Commonwealth of Florence(1865, 4 vols.) is less indigestible than Napier's, but is gratuitously diffuse, and is written in large part in unfortunate imitation of the pseudo-dramatic manner of Carlyle. It is further blemished by an absurd index. Neither this nor Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt'sHistory of the Venetian Republic(1860, 4 vols.; new ed. in two large vols. 1900) has much sociological value, though the latter is copious and painstaking, albeit also diffuse. TheGenoaof J. Theodore Bent (1881) is an interesting sketch; but the well-read author fails in orderly construction.A good short manual is theItalyof Mr. Hunt (Macmillan's Historical Course); and an excellent compendium is supplied by the two treatises of Oscar Browning (1894-95),Guelphs and Ghibellines(covering the period 1250-1409) andThe Age of the Condottieri, covering the Renaissance, to 1530. Bryce and Hallam are alike helpful to general views; and it is stillprofitable to return to the condensedHistory of the Italian Republicsby Sismondi (written for the English "Cabinet Cyclopædia" in 1832), though it needs revision in detail. In his two volumes entitledThe Fall of the Roman Empire(1834) that author has given a useful conspectus of the period covered by Gibbon's great work. Sismondi's larger and earlierHistoire des républiques italienneshas never ceased to be well worth study, though theGeschichte von Italienof H. Leo (1829) improves upon it in several respects. It has been revised and condensed (Routledge, 1 large vol. 1906) by Mr. William Boulting. For the early period the most comprehensive survey is theGeschichte Italiens im Mittelalterof Ludo Moritz Hartmann (3 Bde. in 5, 1897-1911) which comes down to the tenth century.Among modern monographs that of Alfred von Reumont onLorenzo de' Medici(Eng. tr. 1876, 2 vols.) in nearly every way supersedes the old work of Roscoe, whoseLeo X, again, is practically superseded by later works on the Renaissance, in particular those of Burckhardt (Eng. tr. of Geiger's ed. in 1 vol. 1892) and the late J.A. Symonds. Miss Duffy has a good chapter on Florentine trade and finance in herStory of the Tuscan Republics, 1892; and the short work of F.T. Perrens,La civilisation florentine du 13e au 16e siècle(1892—in theBibliothèque d'histoire illustrée) is luminous throughout; but Ranke'sHistory of the Latin and Teutonic Nations(Eng. tr. 1887), which deals with the Italy of 1494-1514, is little more than a sand-heap of incident. On the economic side there is a good research in Pignotti's essay on Tuscan Commerce in hisHistory of Tuscany(Eng. tr. 1823, vol. iii). Much interesting detail is given, with much needless rhetoric, inThe Guilds of Florence, by Edgcumbe Staley, 1906.Of great general value is the elaborate work of Gregorovius,Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter(4te Aufl. 8 Bde. 1886-96; Eng. tr. by Mrs. Hamilton, 8 vols. 1895-1902), which, however, suffers from the disparity of its purposes, combining as it does, a topographical history of the city of Rome with a full history of its politics. It remains a valuable mass of materials rather than a history proper. The same criticism applies to the very meritoriousGeschichte der Stadt Romof A. von Reumont (3 Bde. 1867-70), which begins with the very origin of the city, and comes down to our own time.But there has risen in contemporary Italy a school of historical students who are rewriting the history of the great period in the light of the voluminous archives which have been preserved by municipalities. One outcome of this line of investigation is Prof. Villari'sThe Two First Centuries of Florentine History(Eng. tr. of first 2 vols. 1894). New light, further, has been thrown on the commercial history of Italy in the Dark Ages and early Middle Ages by the admirable researchof Prof. W. von Heyd, of which the French translation by Furcy Raynaud,Histoire du commerce du Levant an moyen age(1886, 2 tom.) is recast and considerably enlarged by the author, while the Renascence period is illuminated by R. Pöhlmann's treatise,Die Wirthschafts Politik der Florentiner Renaissance und das Princip der Verkehrsfreiheit(Leipzig, 1878).

Of special histories there are several. One of the best and latest is that ofThe Lombard Communes, by Prof. W.F. Butler (1906). Captain H.E. Napier, in the preface to hisFlorentine History(1846, 6 vols.) rightly contended that "no people can be known by riding post through their country against time"; but his six learned volumes are ill-written and ill-assimilated. The best complete history of Florence, the typical Italian Republic, is the longHistoire de Florenceby F.T. Perrens (9 tom. 1877-84; Eng. tr. of one vol. by Hannah Lynch, 1892). T.A. Trollope'sHistory of the Commonwealth of Florence(1865, 4 vols.) is less indigestible than Napier's, but is gratuitously diffuse, and is written in large part in unfortunate imitation of the pseudo-dramatic manner of Carlyle. It is further blemished by an absurd index. Neither this nor Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt'sHistory of the Venetian Republic(1860, 4 vols.; new ed. in two large vols. 1900) has much sociological value, though the latter is copious and painstaking, albeit also diffuse. TheGenoaof J. Theodore Bent (1881) is an interesting sketch; but the well-read author fails in orderly construction.

A good short manual is theItalyof Mr. Hunt (Macmillan's Historical Course); and an excellent compendium is supplied by the two treatises of Oscar Browning (1894-95),Guelphs and Ghibellines(covering the period 1250-1409) andThe Age of the Condottieri, covering the Renaissance, to 1530. Bryce and Hallam are alike helpful to general views; and it is stillprofitable to return to the condensedHistory of the Italian Republicsby Sismondi (written for the English "Cabinet Cyclopædia" in 1832), though it needs revision in detail. In his two volumes entitledThe Fall of the Roman Empire(1834) that author has given a useful conspectus of the period covered by Gibbon's great work. Sismondi's larger and earlierHistoire des républiques italienneshas never ceased to be well worth study, though theGeschichte von Italienof H. Leo (1829) improves upon it in several respects. It has been revised and condensed (Routledge, 1 large vol. 1906) by Mr. William Boulting. For the early period the most comprehensive survey is theGeschichte Italiens im Mittelalterof Ludo Moritz Hartmann (3 Bde. in 5, 1897-1911) which comes down to the tenth century.

Among modern monographs that of Alfred von Reumont onLorenzo de' Medici(Eng. tr. 1876, 2 vols.) in nearly every way supersedes the old work of Roscoe, whoseLeo X, again, is practically superseded by later works on the Renaissance, in particular those of Burckhardt (Eng. tr. of Geiger's ed. in 1 vol. 1892) and the late J.A. Symonds. Miss Duffy has a good chapter on Florentine trade and finance in herStory of the Tuscan Republics, 1892; and the short work of F.T. Perrens,La civilisation florentine du 13e au 16e siècle(1892—in theBibliothèque d'histoire illustrée) is luminous throughout; but Ranke'sHistory of the Latin and Teutonic Nations(Eng. tr. 1887), which deals with the Italy of 1494-1514, is little more than a sand-heap of incident. On the economic side there is a good research in Pignotti's essay on Tuscan Commerce in hisHistory of Tuscany(Eng. tr. 1823, vol. iii). Much interesting detail is given, with much needless rhetoric, inThe Guilds of Florence, by Edgcumbe Staley, 1906.

Of great general value is the elaborate work of Gregorovius,Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter(4te Aufl. 8 Bde. 1886-96; Eng. tr. by Mrs. Hamilton, 8 vols. 1895-1902), which, however, suffers from the disparity of its purposes, combining as it does, a topographical history of the city of Rome with a full history of its politics. It remains a valuable mass of materials rather than a history proper. The same criticism applies to the very meritoriousGeschichte der Stadt Romof A. von Reumont (3 Bde. 1867-70), which begins with the very origin of the city, and comes down to our own time.

But there has risen in contemporary Italy a school of historical students who are rewriting the history of the great period in the light of the voluminous archives which have been preserved by municipalities. One outcome of this line of investigation is Prof. Villari'sThe Two First Centuries of Florentine History(Eng. tr. of first 2 vols. 1894). New light, further, has been thrown on the commercial history of Italy in the Dark Ages and early Middle Ages by the admirable researchof Prof. W. von Heyd, of which the French translation by Furcy Raynaud,Histoire du commerce du Levant an moyen age(1886, 2 tom.) is recast and considerably enlarged by the author, while the Renascence period is illuminated by R. Pöhlmann's treatise,Die Wirthschafts Politik der Florentiner Renaissance und das Princip der Verkehrsfreiheit(Leipzig, 1878).

THE BEGINNINGS

§ 1

To understand aright the phenomenon of medieval Italian civilisation we need first to realise that it was at bottom a fresh growth on the culture roots of the cities of Romanised Italy. When the imperial centre was shifted to the East, as already remarked, the people of Italy began a fresh adaptation to their conditions; those of Rome, instead of leading, standing most zealously to the old way of things. All the barbarian irruptions did but harass and hinder the new development; they finally counted for little in its upward course. There is a prevalent hallucination, akin to others concerning the "Teutonic race," in the shape of a belief that Italy was somehow "regenerated" by the "free nations of the North." No accepted formula could well be further away from the facts. If the political qualities of the "Teutonic race," whatever that may mean, are to be generalised on the facts of the invasions of Italy by the Germanic tribes, from Theodoric to Frederick Barbarossa, they must be summed up as consisting in a general incapacity for progressive civilisation. The invaders were, in fact, too disparate in their stage of evolution from that of the southern civilisation to be capable of assimilating it and carrying it on. Living a life of strife and plunder like the early Romans, they found in the disarmed Italians, and in their rapidly degenerate predecessors of their own stock, an easier prey than the Romans had ever known till they went to the East; but in the qualities either of military or of civil organisation they were conspicuously inferior to the Romans of the early Republic. Men of the highest executive ability appeared from time to time among their leaders; a circumstance of great interest and importance, as suggesting that a percentage of genius occurs in all stages of human culture; but the mass of the invaders was always signally devoid of the very characteristics so romantically attributed to them by German, English, and even French Teutophiles—to wit, the giftsof union, discipline, order, and self-government. These elements of civilisation depend on the functioning of the nerve centres, and are not to be evolved by mere multiplication of animated flesh, which was the main constructive process carried on in ancient Germania. Precisely because they were, as Tacitus noted, the most homogeneous of the European races of that era,[455]they were incapable of any rapid and durable social development. It is only mixed races that can evolve or sustain a complex civilisation.

"The Germans," as we historically trace them at the beginning of our era, were barbarians (i.e., men between savagery and civilisation) in the most rudimentary stage, making scanty beginnings in agriculture; devoid of the useful arts, save those normally practised by savages; given to drunkenness; chronically at war; and alternating at other times between utter sloth and energetic hunting—the pursuit which best fitted them for war. Because the peoples thus situated were in comparison with the Romans "chaste" and monogamous—a common enough virtue in savage life[456]—they are supposed by their admirers to have been excellent material for a work of racial regeneration. Only in an indirect sense does this hold good. As a new "cross" to the Italian stocks they may indeed have made for beneficial variation; but by themselves they were mere raw material, morally and psychologically. Their reputed virtue of chastity disappeared as soon as the barbarians passed from a northern to a southern climate,[457]their vices so speedily exceeding the measure of paganism that even a degree of physiological degeneration soon set in. Even in their own land, met by a fiercer barbarism than their own, they collapsed miserably before the Huns. As regards the arts and sciences, moral and physical, it is impossible to trace to the invaders any share in the progress of Italy,[458]save in so far as they were doubtless a serviceable cross with the older native stocks. To their own stock, which had been relatively too homogeneous, the gain of crossing was mixed. Aurelian had put the case with rude truth when he told a bragging embassy of Goths that they knew neither the arts of war nor those of peace;[459]and so long as the Empire in any section had resourcesenough to levy and maintain trained armies, it was able to destroy any combination of the Teutons. There was always generalship enough for that, down till the days of Teutonic civilisation. Claudius the Second routed their swarms as utterly as ever did Marius or Cæsar; Stilicho annihilated Rodogast, and always out-generalled Alaric; Aetius, after routing Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths, overwhelmed the vast host of Attila's Huns; and in a later age the single unsleeping brain of Belisarius, scantily weaponed with men and money by a jealous sovereign, could drive back from Rome in shame and ruin all the barbarian levy of Wittich.[460]

As against the "Teutonic" theory of Italian regeneration, a hearing may reasonably be claimed for the "Etruscan," thus set forth:—"The Etruscans were undoubtedly one of the most remarkable nations of antiquity—the great civilisers of Italy—and their influence not only extended over the whole of the ancient world but has affected every subsequent age.... That portion of the Peninsula where civilisation earliest flourished, whence infant Rome drew her first lessons, has in subsequent ages maintained its pre-eminence.... It was Etruria which produced Giotto, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Luca Signorelli, Fra Bartolomeo, Michael Angelo, Hildebrand, 'the starry Galileo,' and such a noble band of painters, sculptors and architects as no other country of modern Europe can boast. Certainly no other region of Italy has produced such a galaxy of brilliant intellects.... Much may be owing to the natural superiority of the race, which, in spite of the revolutions of ages, remains essentially the same, and preserves a distinctive character." (G. Dennis,The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, 3rd ed. 1883, Introd. vol. i, pp. cii-iv.) Assumption for assumption, this is as defensible as the others.

What happened in Italy after Odoaker was that, for sheer lack of unitary government on the part of the invaders, the cities, which preserved the seeds and norms of the old civilisation, gradually grew into new organic life. Under the early Empire they had been disarmed and unwalled, to make them incapable of revolt. Aurelian, stemming the barbarian tide, began to wall them afresh; but, as we have seen, the withdrawal of the seat of empire left Italy economically incapable of action on an imperial scale; and the personal imbecility of such emperors as Honorius filled up the cup of the humiliation of what once was Rome. But the invaders on the whole did little better; and the material they brought was morehopeless than what they found. The passage from full barbarism to order and civilisation cannot conceivably be made in one generation or one age. Athaulf, the able successor of Alaric, passed his competent judgment on the matter in words which outweigh all the rhetoric of modern romanticism: "He was wont to say that his warmest wish had at first been to obliterate the Roman name, and to make one sole Gothic empire, so that all that which had been Romania should be called Gothia, and that he, Athaulf, should play the same part as did Cæsar Augustus. But when by much experience he was convinced that the Goths were incapable of obedience to laws, because of their unbridled barbarism, and that the State without laws would cease to be a State, he had chosen to seek glory in rebuilding its integrity and increasing the Roman power by Gothic forces, so that posterity should at least regard him as the restorer of the empire which he was unable to replace. Therefore he strove to avoid war and to establish peace."[461]

It needed only command of the machinery of systematic government—if indeed the same qualities had not been in full play long before—to develop in the Teutons every species of evil that could be charged against the Southerns. The fallacy of attributing the crimes of Byzantium to the physiological degeneration of an "old" race is exposed the moment we compare the record with the history of the Franks, as told by Gregory of Tours. Christian writers continue to hold up Nero as a typical product of decadent paganism, saying nothing of the Christian Chilperic, "the Nero of France," or of his father, less ill-famed, Clothaire, the slayer of children, the polygamist, the strictly orthodox Churchman, "certain that Jesus Christ will remunerate us for all the good we do" to his priests.[462]Odious women were as powerful in Frankish courts as in Byzantine; and the tale of the end of Brunehild is not to be matched in pagan annals. Savage treachery, perjury, parricide, fratricide, filicide, assassination, massacre, debauchery, are if possible more constant notes in the tale of the young barbarism, as told by the admiring saint, than in that of the long-descended civilisation of Constantinople; and the rank and file seem to have been worthy of the heads.

One note of Gibbon's, on "barbaric virtue,"àproposof the character of Totila, has given one of his editors (Bohn ed.iv, 505) the opportunity to assert that the "natural superiority" of the invaders was manifest wherever they came in contact with their civilised antagonists. As if Aurelian and Belisarius were not the moral equals of Totila. Yet in a previous note (ch. 38, ed. cited, iv, 181) on the Frankish history of Gregory of Tours, Gibbon had truly remarked that "it would not be easy, within the same historical space, to find more vice and less virtue." On that head Sismondi declares (Histoire des Français, ed. 1821, i, 403-4;Fall of the Roman Empire, i, 263) that "there was not a Merovingian king that was not a father before the age of fifteen and decrepit at thirty." Dunham (History of the Germanic Empire, 1834, i, 10) improves on this to the extent of asserting that "those abominable princes generally—such were their premature vices—died of old age before thirty." It is a fair surmise that, Clovis being a barbarian of great executive genius (cp. Guizot,Essais sur l'histoire de France, p. 43), his stock was specially liable to degeneration through indulgence. But Motley, whose Teutophile and Celtophobe declamation at times reaches nearly the lowest depth touched by his school, will have it (Rise of the Dutch Republic, ed. 1863, p. 12) that later "the Carlovingianracehad been exhausted byproducing a raceof heroes." Any formula avails to support the dogma that "the German was loyal as the Celt was dissolute" (id.p. 6).It is perhaps arguable that the early Teuton had a moral code peculiar to himself. Sismondi (Fall, i, 246) remarks, concerning Clothaire's son Gontran, called by Gregory "the good king Gontran," as compared with his brothers: "His morality indeed passed for good; he is only known to have had two wives and one mistress, and he repudiated the first before he married the second; his temper was, moreover, reputed to be a kindly one, for, with the exception of his wife's physician, who was hewn in pieces because he was unable to cure her; of his two brothers-in-law, whom he caused to be assassinated; and of his bastard brother, Gondebald, who was slain by treachery, no other act of cruelty is recorded of him than that he razed the town of Cominges to the ground and massacred all the inhabitants, men, women, and children." Sismondi has also appreciated (p. 205) what Gibbon has missed, the point of the letter of St. Avitus to Gondebald of Burgundy, who had killed his three brothers, exhorting him "to weep no longer with such ineffable piety the death of his brothers, since it was the good fortune of the kingdom which diminished the number of persons invested with royal authority, and preserved to the world such only as were necessary to rule it." Cp. Sismondi'sHist. des Français, i, 173.

It is perhaps arguable that the early Teuton had a moral code peculiar to himself. Sismondi (Fall, i, 246) remarks, concerning Clothaire's son Gontran, called by Gregory "the good king Gontran," as compared with his brothers: "His morality indeed passed for good; he is only known to have had two wives and one mistress, and he repudiated the first before he married the second; his temper was, moreover, reputed to be a kindly one, for, with the exception of his wife's physician, who was hewn in pieces because he was unable to cure her; of his two brothers-in-law, whom he caused to be assassinated; and of his bastard brother, Gondebald, who was slain by treachery, no other act of cruelty is recorded of him than that he razed the town of Cominges to the ground and massacred all the inhabitants, men, women, and children." Sismondi has also appreciated (p. 205) what Gibbon has missed, the point of the letter of St. Avitus to Gondebald of Burgundy, who had killed his three brothers, exhorting him "to weep no longer with such ineffable piety the death of his brothers, since it was the good fortune of the kingdom which diminished the number of persons invested with royal authority, and preserved to the world such only as were necessary to rule it." Cp. Sismondi'sHist. des Français, i, 173.

A great name, such as Theodoric's, tends to dazzle the eye thatlooks on the history of the time; but the great name, on scrutiny, is seen to stand for all the progress made in a generation. Theodoric, though he would never learn to read,[463]had a civilised education as regards the arts of government, and what was masterly in his rule may at least as well be attributed to that as to his barbaric stock.[464]It is important to note that in his reign, by reason of being forced to live on her own products, Italy actually attains the capacity to export grain after feeding herself[465]—a result to which the king's rule may conceivably have contributed.[466]In any case, the able ruler represents but a moment of order in an epic of anarchy.[467]After Theodoric, four kings in turn are assassinated, each by his successor; and the new monarchy begins to go the way of the old. What Belisarius began Narses finished, turning to his ends the hatreds between the Teutonic tribes. Narses gone, a fresh wave of barbarism flowed in under Alboin the Longobard, who in due course was assassinated by his outraged wife; and his successor was assassinated in turn. Yet again, the new barbarism began to wear all the features of disorderly decay; and the Longobard kingdom subsisted for over two hundred years, under twenty-one kings, without decisively conquering Venetia, or the Romagna, or Rome, or the Greek municipalities of the south.[468]Then came the Frankish conquest, completed under Charlemagne, on the invitation of the Pope, given because the Franks were good Athanasians and the Longobards Arians. The great emperor did what a great man could to civilise his barbarian empire; but instead of fitting it to subsist without him he destroyed what self-governing power it had.[469]Soon after his death, accordingly, the stone rolled downhill once more; and when Otto of Saxony entered Rome in 951, Italy had undergone five hundred years of Teutonic domination without owing to Teuton activity, save indirectly, one step in civil progress.

It thus appears that, while barbaric imperialism has different aspects from that of "civilisation," having a possible alterative virtue where the conditions are in themselves stagnant, even then its work is at best negative, and never truly constructive. Charlemagne's work, being one of personal ambition, was in large part destructive even where it ostensibly made for civilisation; and at his death the Germanic world was as literally degenerate, in the sense of being enfeebled for self-defence, as was the Roman world in the period of its imperial decay.[470]It is true that, despite the political chaos which followed on the disintegration of his system, there is henceforth no such apparent continuity of decadence as had followed on the Merovingian conquest,[471]and his period shows a new intellectual activity.[472]But it is a fallacy to suppose that he created this activity, which is traceable to many sources. At most, Charlemagne furthered general civilisation by forcing new culture contacts in Central Europe[473], and bringing capable men from other countries, notably Alcuin, but also many from Ireland.[474]But these favourable conditions were not permanent; there was no steady evolution; and we are left asking whether progress might not have occurred in a higher degree had the emperor's work been left unattempted.[475]In any case, it is long after his time that civilisation is seen to make a steady recovery; and there is probably justice in the verdict of Sismondi, that Otto, an administrator of no less capacity than Charlemagne, did more for it than he.[476]Guizot, while refusing to admit that the work of Charlemagne passed away, admits Sismondi's proposition that in the tenth century civilised society in Europe was dissolving in all directions.[477]The subsequent new life came not of imperialism but of the loosening of empire, and not from the Teuton world but from the Latin. It is from the new municipal developments inferribly set up before and under Otto[478]that the fresh growth derives.

Mommsen, in one of those primitively biassed anti-Celtic passages which bar his pretensions to rank as a philosophic historian, declares of the elusive Celtæ of antiquity, in dogged disregard of the question (so often put by German scholars and so often answered against him[479]) whether they were not Germans, that, "always occupied with combats and heroic actions, they were scattered far and wide, from Ireland to Spain and Asia Minor; but all their enterprises melted like snow in spring; they created nowhere a great State, and developed no specific civilisation."[480]The passage would be exactly as true if written of the Teutons. Every tendency and quality which Mommsen in this context[481]specifies as Celtic is strictly applicable to the race supposed to be so different from the Celts. "Attachment to the natal soil, so characteristic of the Italians andGermans, was foreign to them.... Their political constitution was imperfect; not only was their national unity feebly recognised,[482]as happens with all nations at their outset, but the separate communities were lacking in unity of aim, in solid control, in serious political sentiment, and in persistence. The sole organisation of which they were capable was the military,[483]in which the ties of discipline dispensed the individual from personal efforts." "They preferred the pastoral life to agriculture." "Always we find them ready to roam, or, in other words, to begin the march ... following the profession of arms as a system of organised pillage"; and so on. Such were in strict truth the peculiarities of the Germani, from Tacitus to the Middle Ages; while, on the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that not merely the Gauls but the Britons of Cæsar's day were much better agriculturists than the Germani.[484]

In the early stage the Germani actually shifted their ground every year;[485]and for every migration or crusade recorded of Celtæ, three are recorded of Teutons. The successive swarms who conquered Italy showed an almost invincible repugnance to the practice of agriculture; in the mass they knew no law and no ideal save the military; they were constantly at tribal war with each other, Frank with Longobard and Goth with Burgundian; Ostrogoths and Gepidæfought on the side of Attila at Chalons against Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, and Saxons; they had no idea of racial unity; and not one of their kingdoms ever went well for two successive generations. The story of the Merovingians is one nightmare of ferocious discord; that of the Suevi in Spain, and of the Visigoths in Aquitaine, is mainly a memory of fratricide. As regards organisation, the only Teutonic kings who ever made any headway were those who, like Theodoric, had a civilised education, or, like the great Charles and Louis the Second, eagerly learned all that Roman tradition could teach them. The main stock were so incapable of political combination that, after the deposition of the last incapable Carlovingian (888), they could not arrest their anarchy even to resist the Huns and Saracens. Their later conquests of Italy came to nothing; and in the end, by the admission of Teutonic men of science,[486]there is nothing to show, in all the southern lands they once conquered, that they had ever been there. The supposed type has disappeared; the language never imposed itself; the Vandal kingdom in Africa went down like a house of cards before Belisarius;[487]the Teutondom of Spain was swept away by the Moors, and it was finally the mixed population that there effected the reconquest. No race had ever a fairer opportunity than the Visigoths in Spain, with a rich land and an undivided monarchy. "Yet after three centuries of undisputed enjoyment, their rule was overthrown at once and for ever by a handful of marauders from Africa. The Goth ... had been weighed in the balance and found wanting."[488]In Spain, France, and Italy alike, the language remained Romance; "not a word is to be found in the local nomenclature of Castile, nor yet of the Asturias, to tell the tale of the Visigoth";[489]even in England, where also the Teutonic peoples for six hundred years failed to attain either progressive civilisation or political order, the Norman conquerors, speaking a Romance language, vitally modified by it the vocabulary of the conquered. So flagrant are the facts that Savigny and Eichhorn in their day both gave the opinion that "the German nations have had to run through their history with an ingrained tendency in their character towards political dismemberment and social inequality." The contrary theory was a later development.[490]

If, instead of seeking simply for the scientific truth, we sought to meet Teutomania with Celtomania, we might argue that it was only where there was a Celtic basis that civilisation prospered in the tracks of the Roman Empire.[491]Mommsen, in the passage first above cited, declares that the Celts, meaning the Cisalpine Galli, "loved to assemble in towns and villages, which consequently grew and gained in importance among the Celts sooner than in the rest of Italy"—this just after alleging that they preferred pastoral life to agriculture, and just before saying that they were always on the march. If the first statement be true, it would seem to follow that the Celts laid the groundwork of medieval Italian civilisation; for it was in the towns of what had been Cisalpine Gaul that that civilisation flourished. Parts of Northern Italy had in fact been comparatively unaffected by the process which rooted out the peasantry in the South; and there was agriculture and population in the valley of the Po when they had vanished from large areas around and south of Rome.[492]It is certain that "Celtic" Gaul—whence Charlemagne (semi-civilised by the old environment) wrought hard, but almost in vain, to impose civilisation on Germany—reached unity and civilisation in the Middle Ages, while Germany remained divided and semi-barbaric; that Ireland preserved classical learning and gave it back to the rest of Europe when it had well-nigh disappeared thence;[493]that England was civilised only after the Norman Conquest; and that Germany, utterly disrupted by the Reformation where France regained unity, was so thrown back in development by her desperate intestine strifes that only in the eighteenth century did she begin to produce a modern literature. One of the most flagrant of modern fables is that which credits to "Teutonic genius" the great order of church architecture which arose in medieval and later France.[494]"That sublime manifestation of 'poetry in stone' so strangely called Gothic architecture is not only not Visigothic, but it was unknown in Spain for four hundredyears after the destruction of the Goths."[495]The Goth was not a builder but a wrecker.

But if anything has been proved by the foregoing analyses, it is that race theories are, for the most part, survivals of barbaric pseudo-science; that culture stage and not race (save as regards the need for mixture), conditions and not hereditary character, are the clues to the development of all nations, "race" being a calculable factor only where many thousands of years of given environments have made a conspicuous similarity of type, setting up a disadvantageous homogeneity. It was simply their prior and fuller contact with Greece and Rome, and further their greater mixture of stocks, that civilised the Galli so much earlier than the Germani. On the other hand, the national failure in Spain and Italy of the Teutonic stocks, as such, proves only that idle northern barbarians, imposing themselves as a warrior caste on an industrious southern population, were (1) not good material for industrial development, and (2) were probably at a physiological disadvantage in the new climate. Southerners would doubtless have failed similarly in Scandinavia.

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