but powerless without it; while
outside the town reigned feudalism, with its robber nobles, free
companies, and bands of outlawed peasants, from whom the merchant
princes of Bruges and Nuernberg could scarcely protect their wares. To
this political feebleness and narrowness corresponded an intellectual
weakness and pettiness: the burghers were mere self-ruling tradesfolk;
their interests did not extend far beyond their shops and their houses;
literature was cramped in guilds, and reflection and imagination were
confined within the narrow limits of town life. Everything was on a
small scale; the Renaissance was moderate and inefficient, running no
great dangers and achieving no great conquests. There was not enough
action to produce reaction; and, while the Italian free States were
ground down by foreign tyrannies, the German and Flemish cities
insensibly merged into the vast empire of the House of Austria. While
also the Italians of the sixteenth century rushed into moral and
religious confusion, which only Jesuitism could discipline, the Germans
of the same time quietly and comfortably adopted the Reformation.

The main cause of this difference, the main explanation of the fact that
while in the North the Renaissance was cramped and enfeebled, in Italy
it carried everything before it, lies in the circumstance that feudalism
never took deep root in Italy. The conquered Latin race was enfeebled,
it is true, but it was far more civilized than the conquering Teutonic
peoples; the Barbarians came down, not on to a previous layer of
Barbarians, but on to a deep layer of civilized men; the nomads of the
North found in Italy a people weakened and corrupt, but with a long and
inextinguishable habit of independence, of order, of industry. The
country had been cultivated for centuries, the Barbarians could not turn
it into a desert; the inhabitants had been organized as citizens for a
thousand years, the Barbarians could not reorganize them feudally. The
Barbarians who settled in Italy, especially the latest of them, the
Lombards, were not only in a minority, but at an immense disadvantage.
They founded kingdoms and dukedoms, where German was spoken and German
laws were enacted; but whenever they tried to communicate with their
Italian subjects, they found themselves forced to adopt the Latin
language, manners, and laws; their domination became real only in
proportion as it ceased to be Teutonic, and the Barbarian element was
sw