jurisdiction, sinking lower but never powerless, was itself the playground of city factions and lawless nobles revelling in old traditions of civic pride. But above all the distinction between Northern and Southern Italy was becoming more pronounced. In the North, still subject to the Emperor, growing feudalism ran, although with local variations, a normal but short-lived course. The South, on the other hand, had drawn off into a separate system of small principalities, where inchoate feudalism was to be suddenly developed and made singularly durable by the Normans. But in the North and, as yet, in the South thickly strewn cities were the ruling factor in political life and social progress. For Italy, as for the other great lands, the period was one of beginnings, of formations as yet incomplete. Events on the surface were making national unity hopeless: forces beneath the surface were slowly producing the civic independence which was to be the special glory of later medieval Italy.
The fortunes of the Papacy in these centuries were strangely variable. It is a vast descent from Nicholas I (858–867), who could speak as if “lord of all the earth,” to Formosus (891–896), dug up from his grave, sentenced by a synod, and flung into the Tiber. But the repeated recoveries of the Papacy would be hard to explain if we did not recall its advantages in the traditions of administration, and in the handling of large affairs in a temper mellowed by experience. Roman synods, as a rule, acted with discretion, and long traditions, both administrative and diplomatic, enhanced the influence of the Western Apostolic See; Gregory VII could rightly speak of the gravitas Romana. The Empire of Charlemagne opened up new channels for its power, and the weakness of his successors gave it much opportunity.
On the side of learning, as on that of Imperial rule, Rome had, however, ceased to be the capital. Not even the singular learning of Gerbert, furthered by his experiences in many lands, could do more for Rome than create a memory for future guidance. Before Gerbert’s accession, however, the Papacy had undergone one almost prophetic change, which looked forward to Leo IX, while recalling Nicholas I. For a time under Gregory V (996–999), cousin and chaplain to the Emperor, the first German Pope, it had ceased to be purely Roman, in interests as in ruler. It took up once again its old missionary enterprise and care for distant lands. St Adalbert of Prague, who both as missionary and bishop typified the unrest of his day, wavering between adventurous activity and monastic meditation, had come to Rome and was spending some time in a monastery. He was a Bohemian by birth and had become the second bishop of Prague (983): besides working there he had taken part in the conversion of Hungary, and is said lo have baptized its great king
