subject to Papal ratification.  In 1073 Hildebrand assumed the tiara as Gregory VII., and declared a war that lasted more than forty years against the Empire.  At its close in 1122 the Church and the Empire were counterposed as mutually exclusive autocracies, the one claiming illimitable spiritual sway, the other recognized as no less illimitably paramount in civil society.  From the principles raised by Hildebrand and contested in the struggles of this duel, we may date those new conceptions of the two chief powers of Christendom which found final expression in the theocratic philosophy of the Summa and the imperial absolutism of the De Monarchia.  Meanwhile the Empire and the Papacy, while trying their force against each other, had proved to Italy their essential weakness.  What they gained as ideas, controlling the speculations of the next two centuries, they lost as potentates in the peninsula.  It was impossible for either Pope or Emperor to carry on the war without bidding for the support of the cities; and therefore, at the end of the struggle, the free burghs found themselves strengthened at the expense of both powers.  Still it must not be forgotten that the wars of Investitures, while they developed the independent spirit and the military energies of the Republics, penetrated Italy with the vice of party conflict.  The ineradicable divisions of Guelf and Ghibelline were a heavy price to pay for a step forward on the path of emancipation; nor was the ecclesiastical revolution, which tended to Italianize the Papacy, while it magnified its cosmopolitan ascendency, other than a source of evil to the nation.

The forces liberated in the cities by these wars brought the Consuls to the front.  The Bishops had undermined the feudal fabric of the kingdom, depressed the Counts, and restored the Roman towns to prosperity.  During the war both Popolo and Commune grew in vigor, and their Consuls began to use the authority that had been conquered by the prelates.  At first the Consuls occupied a subordinate position as men of affairs and notaries, needed to transact the business of the mercantile inhabitants.  They now took the lead as political agents of the first magnitude, representing the city in its public acts, and superseding the ecclesiastics.  The Popolo was enlarged by the admission of new burgher families, and the ruling caste, though still oligarchical, became more fairly representative of the inhabitants.  This progress was inevitable, when we remember that the cities had been organized for warfare, and that, except their Consuls, they had no officials who combined civil and military functions.  Under the jurisdiction of the Consuls Roman law was everywhere substituted for Lombard statutes, and another strong blow was thus dealt against decaying feudalism.  The school of Bologna eclipsed the university of Pavia.  Justinian’s Code was studied with passionate energy, and the Italic people enthusiastically reverted to the institutions of their past.  In the fable of the Codex of the Pandects brought by Pisa from Amalfi we can trace the fervor of this movement, whereby the Romans of the cities struggled after resurrection.