leged position to the importance of the city as the former centre of the Empire; his political influence was increased by the fact that the sovereign, the Greek Emperor, lived far from Rome, and was possessed of no power. From the time of Gregory the Great (590-604) the Pope became the true ruler of Rome. The prohibition of the worship of images, and the troubles that consequently arose in Italy (726), completely severed the connection with Constantinople, and made the Pope independent. The spread of Christianity among all the Germanic tribes caused him to be universally regarded in the West as the Supreme Head of the Christian Church; and Italy, which had lost her supremacy in politics, regained it in matters of religion. However much Rome may have been declining outwardly, she maintained her lofty, ideal importance for mankind-she was the Holy City. But the price Italy had to pay for this spiritual supremacy was the fluctuation of her political destinies. The Popes, seeing their independence threatened by the Lombard Kings, called in the Frankish Kings, whose supremacy appeared to them less oppressive because it was far removed. Charles the Great destroyed the empire of the Lombards (774), and subjected the country to his own sway. When Leo III. crowned him Emperor in the year 800, he thought that, by doing so, he was merely renewing the Roman Empire, which, in the eyes of the Popes, continued to exist in the abstract, as the Power that ruled the world, dispensing justice and protecting the Church-an Empire, the existence of which had only been interrupted, not ended, by the invasions, and the idea of which was now realised anew in the shape of the Frankish Kings. This conception of the Empire as a continuation or restoration of the Roman universal monarchy reigned supreme till the end of the Middle Ages.

The long-enduring and terrible struggles which followed the downfall of the Lombards soon destroyed the literary life that had begun to flourish again under the Ostrogoth dynasty, and a period of general confusion set in. Weightier cares drove from men's minds all thoughts of poetry and philosophy. Added to this, there came religious fanaticism. Though the Fathers of the Church had, in the early ages of persecution, violently opposed Pagan art and literature as works of the devil, they became reconciled to them when Christianity

won the day, and the Church herself made use of classical culture as an instrument with which to rule the world. The Christian ideas were expressed in the ancient artistic forms, and in many writers a veritable mingling of Christian and Pagan elements may be remarked. Ennodius, who was

Bishop of Pavia, and author of hymns, did not scruple to speak of Venus and Cupid in epithalamia, panegyrics and epigrams, seeing that classical mythology had become merely a rhetorical ornament, and that people had grown accustomed to putting an allegorical interpretation on its figures. This state of things was changed under Gregory the Great, who was hostile, or, at any rate, not favourably disposed to Pagan learning. Some sayings of his that have often been quoted even testify to the greatest contempt for the rules of grammar. This, however, was mere momentary exaggeration on his part, for he was not without culture, nor, certainly, was he filled with such a blind passion for destroying the relics of antiquity as was, later on, imputed to him. Still the fact remains that, at that time and for long after, it was just at Rome that the most abject ignorance reigned supreme. On the other hand, in the eighth century, scientific studies found a home among the Lombards. Their last Kings bestowed honours and gifts on grammarians and artists. Paulus Diaconus, the son of Warnefrid, of a noble family of Friuli, was a Lombard, who occupied an important position at the court of Desiderius at Pavia, and subsequently under the protection of Arichis, Duke of Benevento, and of his wife, Adelperga, Desiderius's daughter. He wrote his Roman History at the instigation of the latter, who is extolled by him for her acquaintance with poets, philosophers and historians. Later he entered the monastery of Monte Cassino, which he left for a few years (782) only at the wish of Charles the Great. Paulus and another Italian, the grammarian Peter of Pisa, who taught at Pavia, belonged to those scholars whom the Emperor attracted to his court, so that they might serve as instruments in the revival of studies on which he was bent. Here, at the Emperor's court, Paulus Diaconus aroused great admiration by the extent of his knowledge, which embraced the Greek tongue, and by the elegance of his verses. Thus some of his poems (such as the impassioned petition for his captive brother, the distichs on the

Lake of Como, the religious mood of which is mingled with a feeling for the beauty of nature, or the three fables), are not lacking in poetic charm. His most important work, the

History of the Lombards," Paulus wrote after he had returned to the peaceful life of the monastery of Monte Cassino.

successors.

The revival of scientific studies through Charles the Great, in which Italy also took part, suffered by reason of its purely religious tendency. The so-called liberal arts of the Trivium and Quadrivium were regarded only as aids to the study of theology, and the classics were read chiefly with a view to arriving at a better understanding of the Holy Scripture by reason of a closer acquaintance with the language. Besides, these tendencies of the great Emperor were personal and not supported by a general current of popular feeling, nor were they continued by his His work was consequently not permanent in its results. The schools, concerning the erection of which in Florence and other towns of Northern Italy Lothair I. passed a decree in the "Constitutiones Olonnenses" (825), were intended only for the education of priests. In the following year Pope Eugene II. made a similar order for the Roman province, in which he required, as Charles the Great had done, that the instruction in the liberal arts should be carried on hand in hand with theology; but in the ratification of the edict by Leo IV. (853) it is confirmed only for sacred instruction, on the ground that no teachers could be found for the liberal arts, which, however, does not imply the cessation of grammatical instruction generally. The growing disorder in the state in the second half of the ninth and the first half of the tenth centuries could not fail to increase the intellectual stagnation. The Saracens invaded the country from Africa, conquered Sicily (from 828), ravaged the coasts of the mainland, and, advancing as far as Rome, plundered the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul. The importance of the emperors had decreased already under Lothair, and still more under Lewis II., with whom the line of Carolingians ruling in Italy terminated (875). Thereupon the most pernicious political influences began to make themselves felt. The Popes and the nobles of the land could not brook the growth of a mighty power

in the state. In order to be able to maintain their independence or to pursue ambitious projects, they called in a distant ruler against the one that was present in their midst, and on his gaining the upper hand, they saw themselves threatened by a new one, and called in yet another, so that there was no end to turmoil and faction: semper Italienses geminis uti dominis volunt, quatinus alterum alterius terrore coerceant, wrote the penetrating historian Liutprand (" Antapod." i. 36). This is followed by the struggles of the German and French Carolingians for the Italian crown; by the unsuccessful efforts to found a native kingdom, made by Guido and Lambert of Spoleto, and by Berengar of Friuli, who had to fight against Lewis of Provence and Rudolph of Upper Burgundy; and by the somewhat longer rule of Count Hugo of Provence, who was in his turn supplanted by the Margrave Berengar of Ivrea. At length, in 962, Otto the Great united the empire and the Italian kingdom with the empire of Germany. During these struggles for the crown the Saracens of Spain became masters of the district of Frassineto in Liguria, while those of Sicily settled on the banks of the Garigliano and again infested the neighbourhood of Rome. Meanwhile, Lombardy was ravaged by the Hungarians, who, in 994, burnt Pavia. It was only temporarily that the Papal power increased through the decline of that of the Emperor; it had thereby deprived itself of its protection, and degenerated in its own city into a degrading state of dependence, becoming the tool of parties, threatened by the infidels and by the powerful nobles of Italy. The person of the Chief Pontiff lost its sanctity, and the history of that age is full of cases of deposition and captivity, of terrible ill-treatment and murder to which the popes were exposed. The period of the deepest humiliation was the first third of the tenth century, when courtesans of high rank, the senator's wife Theodora, and her daughters Marozia and the younger Theodora, disposed of the Papal chair at their pleasure, and filled it with their tools, their lovers, and their natural sons. At the same time, the angry feeling against the priestly rule began to make itself felt among the Roman people, as well as the patriotic pride which was kindled by misty conceptions of antiquity and by vague recollections of former greatness. Alberic, the son

of Marozia, already made use of these feelings of the Romans, when he stirred them up against King Hugo, and set up in the city a completely secular and aristocratic republic, at the head of which he placed himself with the title of Princeps et Senator omnium Romanorum, leaving to the Popes nothing but the spiritual power (932-954). And so there was, till the appearance of Otto the Great, no power in Italy which would have been able to check the prevailing anarchy.

However, even in this wretched period of Italian history, it is still possible to follow the traces of a scientific and literary tradition. The study to which the Italians were always especially addicted, and which they never entirely neglected, was that of grammar, which was regarded as the basis and starting-point of all intellectual culture: ratio et origo et fundamentum omnium artium liberalium it was called by Hilderic of Monte Cassino, a pupil of Paulus Diaconus, in the first half of the ninth century.1 Names of grammarians are also preserved from the ninth and tenth centuries, and the existence of schools intended for this study cannot be doubted. As people wrote, and on all public occasions spoke, a tongue, namely, Latin, that was becoming more and more a dead language, some grammatical instruction was indispensable. This was, it is true, restricted to what was absolutely essential, to imparting a scanty, lifeless, and pedantic knowledge; but it had, at least, the merit of preserving by a slender thread the classical tradition; and of transmitting the names of the authors and a superficial acquaintance with their works, which people read in the schools without grasping their spirit. The Italians of that time were so much taken up with the language and perusal of the ancient poets, that they neglected all other studies, especially that of theology, which was the real science of the time, and in which they were behind the other nations. The theological scholars who taught and wrote in Italy, such as Ratherius of Verona or Hatto of Vercelli, were foreigners. Soon pious men begin to com"Storia della Badia di Monte-Cassino," i. 280. Napoli,

1 Tosti,

1842.

2 Cf. Comparetti, "Virgilio nel Medio Evo," i. 100, 104. Livorno,