of the Popes to support the free burghs in their war with Frederick.  But they did this only because they could not tolerate a rival near their base of spiritual power; and the very reasons which had made them side with the cities in the wars of liberation would have roused their hostility against a federative union.  To have encouraged an Italian Bund, in the midst of which they would have found the Church unarmed and on a level with the puissant towns of Lombardy and Tuscany, must have seemed to them a suicidal error.  Such a coalition, if attempted, could not but have been opposed with all their might; for the whole history of Italy proves that Machiavelli was right when he asserted that the Church had persistently maintained the nation in disunion for the furtherance of her own selfish ends.  We have furthermore to add the prestige which the Empire preserved for the Italians, who failed to conceive of any civilized, human society whereof the representative of Caesar should not be the God-appointed head.  Though the material power of the Emperors was on the wane, it still existed as a dominant idea.  Italy was still the Garden of the Empire no less than the Throne of Christ on earth.  After the burghs had wrung what they regarded as their reasonable rights and privileges from Frederick, they laid down their arms, and were content to flourish beneath the imperial shadow.  To raise up a political association as a bulwark against the Holy Roman Empire, and by the formation of this defense to become an independent and united nation, instead of remaining an aggregate of scattered townships, would have seemed to their minds little short of sacrilege.  Up to this point the Church and the Empire had been, theoretically at least, concordant.  They were the sun and moon of a sacred social system which ruled Europe with light and might.  But the Wars of Investiture placed them in antagonism, and the result of that quarrel was still further to divide the Italians, still further to remove the hope of national unity into the region of things unattainable.  The great parties accentuated communal jealousies and gave external form and substance to the struggles of town with town.  So far distant was the possibility of confederation on a grand scale that every city strove within itself to establish one of two contradictory principles, and the energies of the people were expended in a struggle that set neighbor against neighbor on the field of war and in the market-place.  The confusion, exhaustion, and demoralization engendered by these conflicts determined the advent of the Despots; and after 1400 Italy could only have been united under a tyrant’s iron rule.  At such an universal despotism Gian Galeazzo Visconti was aiming when the plague cut short his schemes.  Cesare Borgia played his highest stakes for it.  Leo X. dreamed of it for his family.  Machiavelli, at the end of the Principe, when the tragedy of Italy was almost accomplished, invoked it.  But even for this last chance of unification it was