After the death of Boniface the lordship of Mantua fell to his famous daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard.  She was a woman of strong will and strong mind; she held her own, and rent from others with a mighty hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her rule.  She was not much given to the domestic affections; she had two husbands (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them both:  one because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp it; and the other because he was not warm enough friend of religion.  She had no children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was expressly provided that the spouses were to live in chastity together, and as much asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples.  She was a great friend to learning,—­founded libraries, established the law schools at Bologna, caused the codification of the canon law, corresponded with distant nations, and spoke all the different languages of her soldiers.  More than literature, however, she loved the Church; and fought on the side of Pope Gregory VII in his wars with the Emperor Henry IV.  Henry therefore took Mantua from her in 1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kind of republican government under his protection.  In that year Henry made peace with Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy; but the Mantuans, after twenty years of freedom, were in no humor to feel the weight of the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady.  She was then, moreover, nigh to her death; and, hearing that her physicians had given her up, the Mantuans refused submission.  The great Countess rose irefully from her deathbed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as she always did, laid siege to Mantua by land and water, entered the city in 1114, and did not die till a year after.  Such is female resolution.

The Mantuans now founded a republican government, having unlimited immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them extended merely to the investure of their consuls.  Their republic was democratic, the legislative council of nine rectors and three curators being elective by the whole people.  This government, or something like it, endured for more than a century, during which period the Mantuans seem to have done nothing but war with their neighbors in every direction,—­with the Veronese chiefly, with the Cremonese a good deal, with the Paduans, with the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the Bolognese:  indeed, we count up twelve of these wars.  Like the English of their time, the Mantuans were famous bowmen, and their shafts took flight all over Lombardy.  At the same time they did not omit to fight each other at home; and it must have been a dullish kind of day in Mantua when there was no street-battle between families of the factious nobility.  Dante has peopled his Hell from the Italy of this time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a type of the infernal state.  The spectacle of these countless little