can
Leagues were in full vigor before the Guelf and Ghibelline factions had
confused the mainsprings of political activity, and while the national
militia was still energetic, the Communes did not advance from the
conception of local and municipal independence to that of national
freedom in a confederacy similar to the Swiss Bund. The Italians, it may
be suggested, saw no immediate necessity for a confederation that would
have limited the absolute autonomy of their several parcels. Only the
light cast by subsequent events upon their early history makes us
perceive that they missed an unique opportunity at this moment. What
they then desired was freedom for expansion each after his own political
type, freedom for the development of industry and commerce, freedom for
the social organization of the city beloved by its burghers above the
nation as a whole. Special difficulties, moreover, lay in the way of
confederation. The Communes were not districts, like the Swiss Cantons,
but towns at war with the Contado round them and at war among
themselves. Mutually jealous and mistrustful, with a country population
that but partially obeyed their rule, these centers of Italian freedom
were in a very different position from the peasant communities of
Schwytz, Uri, Untenvalden. Italy, moreover, could not have been
federally united without the consent of Naples and the Church. The
kingdom of the Two Sicilies, rendered definitely monarchical by the
Norman Conquest, offered a serious obstacle; and though the Regno might
have been defied and absorbed by a vigorous concerted movement from the
North and center, there still remained the opposition of the Papacy. It
had been the recent policy of the Popes to support the free burghs in
their war with Frederick. But they did this only because they could not
tolerate a rival near their base of spiritual power; and the very
reasons which had made them side with the cities in the wars of
liberation would have roused their hostility against a federative union.
To have encouraged an Italian Bund, in the midst of which they would
have found the Church unarmed and on a level with the puissant towns of
Lombardy and Tuscany, must have seemed to them a suicidal error. Such a
coalition, if attempted, could not but have been opposed with all their
might; for the whole history of Italy proves that Machiavelli was right
when he asserted that the Church had persistently maintained the nation
in disunion for t