Italian powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression, and disorder, within and without,—­full of intrigue, anguish, and shame,—­each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal rivalries, and lusts,—­is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day, passing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from one famous city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up.  Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua Vicenza, Verona, Bassano,—­all are now at peace with each other, and firmly united in the national sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten alive by Italians.  Poor old cities! it is hard to conceive of their bygone animosities; still harder to believe that all the villages squatting on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your diligence passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars.  Municipal pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we have to thank these intensely local little states for genius triply crowned with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy might not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states had loved themselves less and Italy more.  Though, after all, there is the doubt whether it is not better to bless one’s obscure and happy children with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of great names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery.

Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had troubles on a much larger scale,—­troubles, indeed, which the Emperor Barbarossa laid out for all Italy.  In Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great you can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor’s business at Roncaglia about this time than our Italian chroniclers will give you.  Carlyle loves a tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully, and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that historian will not go in praise of him.  Truly, one would hardly guess, from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Roncaglia, with the standard set before his tent, inviting all men to come and have justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at Roncaglia for the purpose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every vestige of liberty and independence from miserable Italy.  Among other cities Mantua lost her freedom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial governor and by consuls of Frederick’s nomination till 1167, when she joined the famous Lombard League against him.  The leagued cities beat the Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the treaty of Costanza in 1183; after which, Frederick having withdrawn to Germany, they fell to fighting among themselves again with redoubled zeal, and rent their league into as many pieces as there had been parties to it.  In 1236 the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under Frederick II.; and aided by the troops of the Ghibelline cities, Verona, Padua, Vicenza,