Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/495

1183-1284.] ITALY 475 league, and had been defeated by the Ghibellines in a battle near Ghibello. Italy seemed to lie prostrate before the emperor, who commanded her for the first time from the south as well as from the north. In 1227 Frederick, who had promised to lead a crusade, was excommunicated by Gregory IX. because he was obliged by illness to defer his undertaking; and thus the spiritual power declared war upon its rival. The Guelf towns of Lombardy again raised their levies. Frederick enlisted his Saracen troops at Nocera and Luceria, and appointed the terrible Ezzelino da Romano his vicar in the Marches of Verona to quell their insurrection. It was 1236, however, before he was able to take the field himself against the Lombards. Having established Ezzelino in Verona, Vicenza, and Padua, he de feated the Milanese and their allies at Cortenuova in 1237, and sent their carroccio as a trophy of his victory to Rome. Gregory IX. feared lest the Guelf party would be ruined by this check. He therefore made alliance with Venice and Genoa, fulminated a new excommunication against Frederick, and convoked a council at Rome to ratify his ban in 1241. The Genoese undertook to bring the French bishops to this council. Their fleet was attacked at Me- loria by the Pisans, and utterly defeated. The French prelates went in silver chains to prison in the Ghibelline capital of Tuscany. So far Frederick had been successful at all points. In 1243 a new pope, Innocent IV., was elected, who prosecuted the war with still bitterer spirit. Forced to fly to France, he there, at Lyons, in 1245, con vened a council, which enforced his condemnation of the emperor. Frederick s subjects were freed from their allegiance, and he was declared dethroned and deprived of all rights. Five times king and emperor as he was, Frederick, placed under the bin of the church, led hence forth a doomed existence. The mendicant monks stirred up tha populace to acts of fanatical enmity. To plot against him, to attempt his life by poison or the sword, was accounted virtuous. His secretary, Piero delle Vigne, conspired against him. The crimes of his vicar Ezzelino, who laid whole provinces waste and murdered men by thousands in his Paduan prisons, increased the horror with which he was regarded. Parma revolted from him, and he spent months in 1247-8 vainly trying to reduce this one time faithful city. The only gleam of success which shone on his ill fortune was the revolution which placed Florence in the hands of the Ghibellines in 1248. Next year Bologna rose against him, defeated his troops, and took his son Enzi:>, king of Sardinia, prisoner at Fossalta. Hunted to the ground and broken-hearted, Frederick expired at the end of 1250 in his Apulian castle of Fiorentino. It is difficult to judge his career with fairness. The only prince who could, with any probability of success, have es tablished the German rule in Italy, his ruin proved the impossibility of that long-cherished scheme. The nation had outgrown dependence upon foreigners, and after his death no German emperor interfered with anything but miserable failure in Italian affairs. Yet from many points of view it might be regretted that Frederick was not suffered to rule Italy. By birth and breeding an Italian, highly gifted and widely cultivated, liberal in his opinions, a patron of literature, a founder of universities, he antici pated the spirit of the Renaissance, At his court Italian started into being as a language. His laws were wise. He was capable of giving to Italy a large and noble culture. But the commanding greatness of his position proved his ruin. Emperor and king of Sicily, he was the natural enemy of popes, who could not tolerate so overwhelming a rival. After Frederick s death, the popes carried on their war for eighteen years against his descendants. The cause of his son C>>nrad was sustained in Lower Italy by Manfred, one of Frederick s many natural children ; and, when Con- Papal rad died in 1254, Manfred still acted as vicegerent for the war . Swabians, who were now represented by a boy Conradin. ^^[ Innocent IV. and Alexander IV. continued to make head r i e k s against the Ghibelline party. The most dramatic incident succes- in this struggle was the crusade preached against Ezzelino. sors - This tyrant had made himself justly odious; and when he was hunted to death in 1259, the triumph was less for the Guelf cause than for humanity outraged by the iniquities of such a monster. The battle between Guelf and Ghibel line raged with unintermitting fury. While the former faction gained in Lombardy by the massacre of Ezzelino, the latter revived in Tuscany after the battle of Montaperti, which in 1260 placed Florence at the discretion of the Ghibellines. Manfred, now called king of Sicily, headed the Ghibellines, and there was no strong counterpoise against him. In this necessity Urban IV. and Clement IV. invited Charles of Anjou to enter Italy and take the Guelf command. They made him senator of Rome, and vicar of Tuscany, and promised him the investiture of the regno provided he stipulated that it should not be held in combination with the empire. Charles accepted these terms, and was welcomed by the Guelf party as their chief throughout Italy. He defeated Manfred in a battle at Grandella near Benevento in 1266. Manfred was killed; and, when Conradin, a lad of sixteen, descended from Ger many to make good his claims to the kingdom, he too was defeated at Tagliacozzo in 1267. Less lucky than his uncle, Conradin .escaped with his life, to die upon a scaffold at Naples. His glove was carried to his cousin Constance, wife of Peter of Aragon, the last of the great Norman- Swabian family. Enzio died in his prison four years later. The popes had been successful ; but they had purchased their bloody victory at a great cost. This first invitation to French princes brought with it incalculable evils. Charles of Anjou, supported by Rome, and recognized Civil as chief in Tuscany, was by far the most formidable of the wars of Italian potentates. In his turn he now excited the Guelfs jealousy of the popes, who began, though cautiously, to (jidbel- cast their weight into the Ghibelline scale. Gregory initi- n n es. ated the policy of establishing an equilibrium between the parties, which was carried out by his successor Nicholas III. Charles was forced to resign the senatorship of Rome and the signoria of Lombardy and Tuscany. In 1282 he received a more decided check, when Sicily rose against him in the famous rebellion of the Vespers. He lost the island, which gave itself to Aragon ; and thus the kingdom of Sicily was severed from that of Naples, the dynasty in the one being Spanish and Ghibelline, in the other French and Guelf. Meanwhile a new emperor had been elected, the prudent Rudolf of Hapsburg, who abstained from interference with Italy, and who confirmed the territorial pretensions of the popes by solemn charter in 1278. Henceforth Emilia, Romagna, the March of Ancona, the patrimony of St Peter, and the Campagna of Rome held of the Holy See, and not of the empire. The imperial chancery, without inquiring closely into the deeds furnished by the papal curia, made a deed of gift, which placed the pope in the position of a temporal sovereign. While Nicholas III. thus bettered the position of the church in Italy, the Guelf party grew stronger than ever, through the crushing defeat of the Pisans by the Genoese at Meloria in 1284. Pisa, who had ruined Amalfi, was now ruined by Genoa. She never held her head so high again after this victory, which sent her best and bravest citizens to die in the Ligurian dungeons. The Mediterranean was left to be fought for by Genoa and Venice, while Guelf Florence grew still more powerful in Tuscany. Not long after the battle of Meloria Charles of Anjou died, and was succeeded by his son Charles II. of Naples, who played no prominent