consider herself as a feudatory of the Empire, not of
the Church.

But though this struggle might have been foreseen it is futile, it has
no life in it, it is without any real importance, it leads nowhere and
fails to interest us. All that really concerns us in the confused
story of Ravenna from the time of the resurrection of the empire till
our own day are two strange incidents that have nothing fundamentally
to do with her, that befell her by chance; I mean the apparition of
Dante, when we see the most eager mediaeval apologist of the imperial
idea fortunately and rightly find in her a refuge and a tomb; and the
battle of 1512 in which fell Gaston de Foix and which cost the lives
of twelve thousand men and achieved nothing.

Nevertheless Ravenna, for so long the citadel of the empire in the
West, of all the cities of Italy was least likely to forget her origin
or to forsake her memories, and it is both curious and interesting to
watch her entry, little splendid though that entry be, into the
marvellously vital world of the Middle Age in Italy.

The slow re-establishment of Latin power which followed the crowning
of Charlemagne, and which the Church secured by that act, first began
to come to its own with the rise of the bishops to civil power in the
cities of Italy. Now Ravenna had certainly been governed by her
archbishop ever since Pepin in 754 had forced Aistulf to place the
keys of the city upon the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles. If
nowhere else in the Cisalpine plain, Latin civilisation and law, then,
never failed in Ravenna, and whatever may have happened elsewhere it
might seem certain that here in Ravenna and probably throughout the
exarchate the curia existed and endured throughout the barbarian
confusion.

This would explain the early and extraordinary development of communal
institutions in Ravenna. And since, one may believe, the Roman legions
were replaced throughout the empire by the religious orders, it is
interesting to know that in the tenth century her Latin energy is
borne witness to by the fact that in 956 she produced S. Romuald of
the Onesti family of Ravenna, who was educated in the Benedictine
monastery of Classe and who founded the Order of Camaldoli, and toward
the end of the same century, in 988, she produced S. Peter Damian, the
brother of the arch-priest of Ravenna, cardinal-bishop of Ostia and
papal legate in Milan.

Nor with the rise of the "spirito italico" everywhere in Ita