ly do we
find Ravenna exhausted. Far from it, she is as ardent as any other
city of the peninsula whatsoever. Only always she is anti-papal, as
though, living in her memories, as she could not but do, and this was
her greatest strength, she remembered her old allegiance to the
emperor and could not forget that when the pope became his heir in
Italy she had fallen from her old eminence. Thus as early as the first
years of the eleventh century her archbishop obtains confirmation from
the emperor of his temporal powers, in which confirmation no
recognition of the sovereignty of the pope appears at all. This act of
allegiance to the emperor was repeated when Barbarossa appeared, and
indeed the archbishops of Ravenna soon became the most eager if not
most the serious supporters of the emperors in all the great plain and
perhaps in all Italy. Ravenna, once the imperial capital, though
fallen was imperial still. She was haunted, haunted by ghosts that
were restless in those marvellous tombs, that litter her churches,
loom out of the grey curtain of mist like a fortress, or shine and
glitter with imperishable colours and are full of memories as
imperishable as themselves.

Yet though it was to her the emperors so often looked for aid and
succour and rest, it was not always so. The present, even with her,
was more than the past. With the great development of communal
institutions which marked especially the twelfth century, compelled
too to face, though never with success, the increasing state of
Venice, which, indeed, and successfully, had usurped her place in the
world and had realised what she had failed to achieve, she was ready
and able in 1198 to place herself at the head of the league of the
cities of the Romagna and the Marches against the imperial power then
both oppressive and feeble; so that pope Innocent III. found it easy
to restore the unforgotten rights of the Holy See there and these were
ratified by Otto IV. and by Frederick II. as the price of papal
support.

It will thus be readily understood that if, at the opening of the
thirteenth century, there was one city in Italy more certain than
another to be at the mercy of the universal quarrel of Guelf and
Ghibelline, that city was Ravenna. In its larger sense that quarrel
was her inheritance. It was the one thought which filled her mind. But
here, as elsewhere, the great quarrel was insoluble or at any rate not
to be solved. It merely bred faction and divided t