destruction. The pope and the Sicilian are united in an impious
league to oppose our liberty and your coronation. With the
blessing of God, our zeal and courage has hitherto defeated
their attempts. Of their powerful and factious adherents, more
especially the Frangipani, we have taken by assault the houses
and turrets; some of these are occupied by our troops, and some
are levelled with the ground. The Milvian bridge, which they
had broken, is restored and fortified for your safe passage; and
your army may enter the city without being annoyed from the
castle of St. Angelo. All that we have done, and all that we
design, is for your honour and service, in the loyal hope that
you will speedily appear in person to vindicate those rights
which have been invaded by the clergy, to revive the dignity
of the empire, and to surpass the fame and glory of your pre-
decessors. May you fix your residence in Rome, the capital of
the world; give laws to Italy and the Teutonic kingdom; and
imitate the example of Constantine and Justinian, who, by the
vigour of the senate and people, obtained the sceptre of the
earth." 67
But these splendid and fallacious wishes were not
cherished by Conrad the Franconian, whose eyes were fixed on
the Holy Land, and who died without visiting Rome soon after
his return from the Holy Land.67%

66

I. A.D. 1155

June 7, &c.]

His nephew and successor, Frederic Barbarossa, was more Frederick ambitious of the Imperial crown; nor had any of the successors of Otho acquired such absolute sway over the kingdom of Italy. Surrounded by his ecclesiastical and secular princes, he gave (At Sutri, audience in his camp at Sutri 68 to the ambassadors of Rome, who thus addressed him in a free and florid oration: "Incline your ear to the queen of cities; approach with a peaceful and friendly mind the precincts of Rome, which has cast away the yoke of the clergy, and is impatient to crown her legitimate emperor. Under your auspicious influence, may the primitive times be restored. Assert the prerogatives of the eternal city,

66 We desire (said the ignorant Romans) to restore the empire in eum statum, quo fuit tempore Constantini et Justiniani, qui totum orbem vigore senatus et populi Romani suis tenuere manibus.

67 Otho Frising. de Gestis Frederici I. 1. i. c. 28, p. 662-664.

67 [Mr. E. Harrison has pointed out that the repetition of "the Holy Land" in this sentence is un-Gibbonian in style and rhythm. He suggests that the author meant to write "Palestine" in the first clause.]

68 [For the meeting with Pope Hadrian at Sutri, and the following events, see Giesebrecht's Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, v. p. 60 sqq.]

69

and reduce under her monarchy the insolence of the world. You are not ignorant that, in former ages, by the wisdom of the senate, by the valour and discipline of the equestrian order, she extended her victorious arms to the East and West, beyond the Alps, and over the islands of the ocean. By our sins, in the absence of our princes, the noble institution of the senate has sunk in oblivion; and, with our prudence, our strength has likewise decreased. We have revived the senate and the equestrian order; the counsels of the one, the arms of the other, will be devoted to your person and the service of the empire. Do you not hear the language of the Roman matron? You were a guest, I have adopted you as a citizen; a Transalpine stranger, I have elected you for my sovereign; and given you myself, and all that is mine. Your first and most sacred duty is, to swear and subscribe that you will shed your blood for the republic; that you will maintain in peace and justice the laws of the city and the charters of your predecessors; and that you will reward with five thousand pounds of silver the faithful senators who shall proclaim your titles in the Capitol. With the name, assume the character, of Augustus." The flowers of Latin rhetoric were not yet exhausted; but Frederic, impatient of their vanity, interrupted the orators in the high tone of royalty and conquest. "Famous, indeed, have been the fortitude and wisdom of the ancient Romans; but your speech is not seasoned with wisdom, and I could wish that fortitude were conspicuous in your actions. Like all sublunary things, Rome has felt the vicissitudes of time and fortune. Your noblest families were translated to the East, to the royal city of Constantine; and the remains of your strength and freedom have long since been exhausted by the Greeks and Franks. Are you desirous of beholding the ancient glory of Rome, the gravity of the senate, the spirit of the knights, the discipline of the camp, the valour of the legions? you will find them in the German republic. It is not empire, naked and alone, the ornaments and virtues of empire have likewise migrated beyond the Alps to a more deserving people; 70 they will

69 Hospes eras, civem feci. Advena fuisti ex Transalpinis partibus; principem

constitui.

70 Non cessit nobis nudum imperium, virtute suâ amictum venit, ornamenta sua secum traxit. Penes nos sunt consules tui, &c. Cicero or Livy would not have rejected these images, the eloquence of a barbarian born and educated in the Hercynian forest.

be employed in your defence, but they claim your obedience. You pretend that myself or my predecessors have been invited by the Romans: you mistake the word; they were not invited, they were implored. From its foreign and domestic tyrants, the city was rescued by Charlemagne and Otho, whose ashes repose in our country; and their dominion was the price of your deliverance. Under that dominion your ancestors lived and died. I claim by the right of inheritance and possession, and who shall dare to extort you from my hands? Is the hand of the Franks 71 and Germans enfeebled by age? Am I vanquished? Am I a captive? Am I not encompassed with the banners of a potent and invincible army? You impose conditions on your master; you require oaths: if the conditions are just, an oath is superfluous; if unjust, it is criminal. Can you doubt my equity? It is extended to the meanest of my subjects. Will not my sword be unsheathed in the defence of the Capitol ? By that sword the northern kingdom of Denmark has been restored to the Roman empire. You prescribe the measure and the objects of my bounty, which flows in a copious but a voluntary stream. All will be given to patient merit; all will be denied to rude importunity.' Neither the emperor nor the senate could maintain these lofty pretensions of dominion and liberty. United with the pope, and suspicious of the Romans, Frederic continued his march to the Vatican: his coronation was disturbed by a [June 18] sally 73 from the Capitol; and, if the numbers and valour of the Germans prevailed in the bloody conflict, he could not safely encamp in the presence of a city of which he styled himself the sovereign. About twelve years afterwards he besieged Rome, [A.D. 1167, to seat an antipope in the chair of St. Peter; and twelve Pisan galleys were introduced into the Tiber; but the senate and people were saved by the arts of negotiation and the progress of disease; nor did Frederic or his successors reiterate the hostile attempt. Their laborious reigns were exercised by the popes, the crusades, and the independence of Lombardy and Germany; they courted the alliance of the Romans; and Frederic the

972

71 Otho of Frisingen, who surely understood the language of the court and diet of Germany, speaks of the Franks in the xiith century as the reigning nation (Proceres Franci, equites Franci, manus Francorum); he adds, however, the epithet of Teutonici.

72 Otho Frising. de Gestis Frederici I. 1. ii. c. 22, p. 720-723. These original and authentic acts I have translated with freedom, yet with fidelity. [The coronation ceremony was over when the sally was made.]

July]

Wars of the
Romans

neighbour

Second offered in the Capitol the great standard, the Caroccio of Milan.74 After the extinction of the house of Swabia, they were banished beyond the Alps; and their last coronations betrayed the impotence and poverty of the Teutonic Cæsars.75

Under the reign of Hadrian, when the empire extended from against the the Euphrates to the ocean, from Mount Atlas to the Grampian ing cities Hills, a fanciful historian 76 amused the Romans with the picture of their infant wars. "There was a time," says Florus, "when Tibur and Præneste, our summer-retreats, were the objects of hostile vows in the Capitol, when we dreaded the shades of the Arician groves, when we could triumph without a blush over the nameless villages of the Sabines and Latins, and even Corioli could afford a title not unworthy of a victorious general." The pride of his contemporaries was gratified by the contrast of the past and the present: they would have been humbled by the prospect of futurity; by the prediction that after a thousand years Rome, despoiled of empire and contracted to her primæval limits, would renew the same hostilities on the same ground which was then decorated with her villas and gardens. The adjacent territory on either side of the Tiber was always claimed, and sometimes possessed, as the patrimony of St. Peter; but the barons assumed a lawless independence, and the cities too faithfully copied the revolt and discord of the metropolis. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Romans incessantly laboured

74 From the Chronicles of Ricobaldo and Francis Pipin, Muratori (dissert. xxvi. tom. ii. p. 492) has transcribed this curious fact, with the doggrel verses that accompanied the gift.

Ave decus orbis ave! victus tibi destinor, ave!
Currus ab Augusto Frederico Cæsare justo.
Ve Mediolanum! jam sentis spernere vanum
Imperii vires, proprias tibi tollere vires.

Ergo triumphorum urbs potes memor esse priorum
Quos tibi mittebant reges qui bella gerebant.

Ne si dee tacere (I now use the Italian Dissertations, tom. i. p. 444) che nell' anno
1727, una copia desso Caroccio in marmo dianzi ignoto si scopri, nel Campidoglio
presso alle carcere di quel luogo, dove Sisto V. l'avea falto [leg. fatto] rinchiudere.
Stava esso posto sopra quatro colonne di marmo fina colla sequente inscrizione,
&c., to the same purpose as the old inscription.

75 The decline of the Imperial arms and authority in Italy is related with impartial learning in the Annals of Muratori (tom. x. xii.); and the reader may compare his narrative with the Histoire des Allemands (tom. iii. iv.) by Schmidt, who has deserved the esteem of his countrymen.

76 Tibur nunc suburbanum et æstivæ Præneste deliciæ nuncupatis in Capitolio votis petebantur. The whole passage of Florus (1. i. c. 11) may be read with pleasure, and has deserved the praise of a man of genius (Oeuvres de Montesquieu, tom. iii. p. 634, 635, quarto edition).

to reduce or destroy the contumacious vassals of the church and senate; and, if their headstrong and selfish ambition was moderated by the pope, he often encouraged their zeal by the alliance of his spiritual arms. Their warfare was that of the first consuls and dictators, who were taken from the plough. They assembled in arms at the foot of the Capitol; sallied from the gates, plundered or burnt the harvests of their neighbours, engaged in tumultuary conflict, and returned home after an expedition of fifteen or twenty days. Their sieges were tedious and unskilful : in the use of victory, they indulged the meaner passions of jealousy and revenge; and, instead of adopting the valour, they trampled on the misfortunes, of their adversaries. The captives, in their shirts, with a rope round their necks, solicited their pardon. The fortifications and even the buildings of the rival cities were demolished, and the inhabitants were scattered in the adjacent villages. It was thus that the seats of the cardinal bishops, Porto, Ostia, Albanum, Tusculum, Præneste, and Tibur, or Tivoli, were successively overthrown by the ferocious hostility of the Romans." Of these,78 Porto and Ostia, the two keys of the Tiber, are still vacant and desolate: the marshy and unwholesome banks are peopled with herds of buffaloes, and the river is lost to every purpose of navigation and trade. The hills, which afford a shady retirement from the autumnal heats, have again smiled with the blessings of peace; Frascati has arisen near the ruins of Tusculum; Tibur, or Tivoli, has resumed the honours of a city; 79 and the meaner towns of Albano and Palestrina are decorated with the villas of the cardinals and princes of Rome. In the work of destruction, the ambition of the Romans was often checked and repulsed by the neighbouring cities and their allies; in the first siege of Tibur, they were driven from their

77 Ne a feritate Romanorum, sicut fuerant Hostienses, Portuenses, Tusculanenses, Albanenses, Labicenses, et nuper Tiburtini destruerentur (Matthew Paris, p. 757). These events are marked in the Annals and Index (the xviiith volume) of Muratori.

78 For the state or ruin of these suburban cities, the banks of the Tiber, &c., see the lively picture of the P. Labat (Voyage en Espagne et en Italie), who had long resided in the neighbourhood of Rome; and the more accurate description of which P. Eschinard (Roma, 1750, in octavo) has added to the topographical map of Cingolani.

79 Labat (tom. iii. p. 233) mentions a recent decree of the Roman government, which has severely mortified the pride and poverty of Tivoli in civitate Tiburtin& non vivitur civiliter.