Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/326

304 THE DECLINE AND FALL rapine of the fiscal officers. The obstinate cities were reduced by the terror or the force of his arms ; his captives were delivered to the executioner, or shot from his military engines ; and, after the siege and surrender of Milan, the buildings of that stately capital were rased to the ground, three hundred host- ages were sent into Germany, and the inhabitants were dispersed in four villages, under the yoke of the inflexible conqueror,^"^ But Milan soon rose from her ashes ; and the league of Lom- bardy was cemented by distress ; their cause was espoused by Venice, pope Alexander the Third, and the Greek emperor ; the fabric of oppression was overturned in a day ; and in the treaty of Constance, Frederic subscribed, with some reservations, the freedom of four-and-twenty cities. His grandson contended v/ith their vigour and maturity ; but Frederic the Second ^^'^ was endowed with some personal and peculiar advantages. His birth and education recommended him to the Italians ; and, in the implacable discord of the two factions, the Ghibelins were attached to the emperor, while the Guelfs displayed the banner of liberty and the church. The court of Rome had slumbered, when his father Henry the Sixth was permitted to unite with the empire the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily ; and from these hereditary realms the son derived an ample and ready supply of troops and treasure. Yet Frederic the Second was finally op- pressed by the arms of the Lombards and the thunders of the Vatican ; his kingdom was given to a stranger, and the last of his family was beheaded at Naples on a public scaffold. During sixty years no emperor appeared in Italy, and the name was remembered only by the ignominious sale of the last relics of sovereignty. The barbarian conquerors of the West were pleased to decorate their chief with the title of emperor ; but it was not their design to invest him with the despotism of Constantine and Justinian. The persons of the Germans were free, their conquests were their own, and their national character was animated by a spirit which scorned the servile jurisprudence of the new or the ancient Rome. It would have been a vain and dangerous attempt to impose a monarch on the armed free- 155 Solus imperator facieni suam firmavit ut petram (Burcard. de Excidio Mediolani, Script. Ital. torn. vi. p. 917). This volume of Muratori contains the originals of the history of Frederic the First, which must be compared with due regard to the circumstances and prejudices of each German or Lombard writer. 15U por the history of Frederic II. and the house of Swabia at Naples, see Giannone, Istoria Civile, torn. ii. 1. xiv.-xix.