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 the city against itself.  Guelf and Ghibelline tore Ravenna as they tore Florence and Siena in pieces.

The two great Ghibelline families were the Ubertini and the Mainardi and these at first gained the mastery of the city; but in 1218 Pietro Traversari with the aid of the Mainardi turned the Ubertini out and, what is more, made himself master.

Pietro Traversari was succeeded as Podesta in 1225 by his son Paolo, who became Guelf and fought in Innocent IV.’s quarrel against the emperor Frederick II.; Frederick was able to turn the Traversari out of Ravenna in 1240 and to hold the city for eight years, but in 1248 the pope retook it and the Traversari were restored though not I think to the chief power.  They remained in power till in the last year of the reign of Gregory X., 1275, Guido da Polenta appears.

Rudolph of Hapsburg was now king—­not emperor, for he was never crowned by the pope.  He had been a partisan of the second Frederick’s, but pope Nicholas III. did not find in the founder of the Hapsburg dynasty the stuff of the Hohenstaufen.  In 1278 he forced Rudolph to secure to him by an “irrevocable decree” all that the papacy had ever claimed in the Exarchate and the Pentapolis.  The empire renounced all its claims in the Romagna and the Marches; the confines of the states of the Church were defined anew, and the cities of which the pope was absolute lord were named one by one.  Of course among these was Ravenna.