The historian who makes the Commune his unit, who confines attention to the gradual development, reciprocal animosities, and final decadence of the republics, can hardly do justice to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papacy, which occupy no less than half the country.  Again, the great age of the Renaissance, when all the free burghs accepted the rule of despots, and when the genius of the Italians culminated, is for him a period of downfall and degradation.  Besides, he leaves the history of the Italian people before the starting-point of the Republics unexplained.  He has, at the close of their career, to account for the reason why these Communes, so powerful in self-development, so intelligent, so wealthy, and so capable of playing off the Pope against the Empire, failed to maintain their independence.  In other words he selects one phase of Italian evolution, and writes a narrative that cannot but be partial.  If we make the Despots our main point, we repeat the same error in a worse form.  The Despotisms imply the Communes as their predecessors.  Each and all of them grew up and flourished on the soil of decadent or tired Republics.  Though they are all-important at one period of Italian history—­the period of the present work—­they do but form an episode in the great epic of the nation.  He who attempts a general history of Italy from the point of view of the despotisms, is taking a single scene for the whole drama.  Finally we might prefer the people—­that people, instinctively and persistently faithful to Roman traditions, which absorbed into itself the successive hordes of barbarian invaders, civilized them, and adopted them as men of Italy; that people which destroyed the kingdoms of the Goths and Lombards humbled the Empire at Legnano, and evolved the Communes; that people which resisted alien feudalism, and spent its prime upon eradicating every trace of the repugnant system from its midst; that people which finally attained to the consciousness of national unity by the recovery of scholarship and culture under the dominion of despotic princes.  This people is Italy.  But the documents that should throw light upon the early annals of the people are deficient.  It does not appear upon the scene before the reign of Otho I. Nor does it become supreme till after the Peace of Constance.  Its biography is bound up with that of the republics and the despots.  Before the date of their ascendency we have to deal with Bishops of Rome, Emperors of the East and West, Exarchs and Kings of Italy, the feudal Lords of the Marches, the Dukes and Counts of Lombard and Frankish rulers.  Through that long period of incubation, when Italy freed herself from dependence upon Byzantium, created the Papacy and formed the second Roman Empire, the people exists only as a spirit resident in Roman towns and fostered by the Church, which effectually repelled all attempts at monarchical unity, playing the Lombards off against the Goths, the Franks against the Lombards, the Normans against the Greeks, merging the Italian Kingdom in the Empire when it became German, and resisting the Empire of its own creation when the towns at last were strong enough to stand alone.  To speak about the people in this early period is, therefore, to invoke a myth; to write its history is the same as writing an ideal history of mediaeval Europe.