We may well ask how it was that a city so solitary, so inaccessible, and so remote should have played so great a part in the history of Europe.  It is to answer this question that I have set myself to write this book, which is rather an essay in memoriam of her greatness, her beauty, and her forlorn hope, than a history properly so called of Ravenna.  But if we are to come to any real understanding of what she stood for, of what she meant to us once upon a time, we must first of all decide for ourselves what was the fundamental reason of her great renown.  I shall maintain in this book that the cause of her greatness, of her opportunity for greatness, was always the same, namely, her geographical position in relation to the peninsula of Italy, the Cisalpine plain, and the sea.  Let us then consider these things.

Italy, the country we know as Italy, properly understood, is fundamentally divided into two absolutely different parts by a great range of mountains, the Apennines, which stretches roughly from sea to sea, from Genoa almost but not quite to Rimini.

The country which lies to the south of that line of mountains is Italy proper, and it consists as we know of a long narrow mountainous peninsula, while its history throughout antiquity may be said to be altogether Roman.

What lies to the north of the Apennines is not Italy at all, but Cisalpine Gaul.

In its nature this country is altogether continental.  It consists for the most part of a vast plain divided from west to east by a great river, the Po, and everywhere it is watered and nourished by its two hundred tributaries.

Shut off as it is on the south from Italy proper by the Apennines, this plain is defended from Gaul and the Germanics, on the west and the north, by the mightiest mountains in Europe, the Alps, which here enclose it in a vast concave rampart that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic.  On the east it is contained by the sea.

[Illustration:  Sketch Map of northern Italy]

The history of this vast country before the Roman Conquest is, as is history everywhere in the West before that event, vague and obscure.  But this at least may be said:  it was first in the occupation of the Etruscans, who in time were turned out, destroyed, or enslaved by the Gauls, those invaders who crossed the Alps from the west and who during nearly two hundred years, continually, though never with an enduring success, invaded Italy, and in 388 B.C. actually captured the City.  Rome, however, had by the year 223 B.C. succeeded in planting her fortresses at Placentia and Cremona and in fortifying Mutina (Modena), when suddenly in 218 B.C.  Hannibal unexpectedly descended into the Cisalpine plain and destroyed all she had achieved.  With his defeat, however, the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul was undertaken anew, and at some time after 183 B.C.—­we do not know exactly when—­the whole of this vast lowland country passed into Roman administration, to become the chief province of Caesar’s great triple command, and one of the most valuable parts of the empire.