republic; that you will maintain in peace and justice the laws of the city, and the charters of your predecessors; and that you will reward with five thousand pounds of silver, the faithful senators who shall proclaim your titles in the Capitol. With the name, assume the character of Augustus. The flowers of Latin rhetoric were not yet exhausted; but Frederic, impatient of their vanity, interrupted the orators in the high tone of royalty and conquest. "Famous indeed have been the fortitude and wisdom of the ancient Romans; but your speech is not seasoned with wisdom, and I could wish that fortitude were conspicuous in your actions. Like all sublunary things, Rome has felt the vicissitudes of time and fortune. Your noblest families were translated to the East, to the royal city of Constanține; and the remains of your strength and freedom have long since been exhausted by the Greeks and Franks. Are you desirous of beholding the ancient glory of Rome, the gravity of the senate, the spirit of the knights, the discipline of the camp, the valour of the legions? you will find them in the German republic. It is not empire, naked and alone; the ornaments and virtues of empire have likewise migrated beyond the Alps to a more deserving people.* They will be employed in your defence, but they claim your obedience. You pretend that myself or my predecessors have been invited by the Romans; you mistake the word; they were not invited; they were implored. From its foreign and domestic tyrants, the city was rescued by Charlemagne and Otho, whose ashes repose in our country; and their dominion was the price of your deliverance. Under that dominion your ancestors lived and died. I claim by the right of inheritance and possession, and who shall dare to extort you from my hands? Is the hand of the Franks and Germans enfeebled by age? Am I van * Non cessit nobis nudum imperium, virtute sua amictum venit, ornamenta sua secum traxit. Penes nos sunt consules tui, &c. Cicero or Livy would not have rejected these images, the eloquence of a Barbarian, born and educated in the Hercynian forest. Otho of Frisingen, who surely understood the language of the court and diet of Germany, speaks of the Franks in the twelfth century as the reigning nation (Proceres Franci, equites Franci, manus Francorum); he adds, however, the epithet of Teutonici. [The Franks who conquered Gaul were but a small portion of that people. The main body remained in Germany, and occupied extensive territories. VOL. VII. 2 B quished? Am I a captive? Am I not encompassed with the banners of a potent and invincible army? You impose conditions on your master; you require oaths; if the conditions are just, an oath is superfluous; if unjust, it is criminal. Can you doubt my equity? It is extended to the meanest of my subjects. Will not my sword be unsheathed in the defence of the Capitol? By that sword the northern kingdom of Denmark has been restored to the Roman empire. You prescribe the measure and the objects of my bounty, which flows in a copious but a voluntary stream. All will be given to patient merit; all will be denied to rude importunity." ""** Neither the emperor nor the senate could maintain these lofty pretensions of dominion and liberty. United with the pope, and suspicious of the Romans, Frederic continued his march to the Vatican; his coronation was disturbed by a sally from the Capitol; and if the numbers and valour of the Germans prevailed in the bloody conflict, he could not safely encamp in the presence of a city of which he styled himself the sovereign. About twelve years afterwards, he besieged Rome, to seat an anti-pope in the chair of St. Peter; and twelve Pisan galleys were introduced into the Tiber; but the senate and people were saved by the arts of negotiation and the progress of disease; nor did Frederic or his successors reiterate the hostile attempt. Their laborious reigns were exercised by the popes, the crusades, and the independence of Lombardy and Germany; they courted the alliance of the Romans; and Frederic the Second offered in the Capitol (See note, p. 94.) These were in time distinguished from their great Western colony by the designation of Ost Franken, Eastern Franks, and after the breaking up of Charlemagne's empire, gave their name (latinized into Austrasia) to the Germanic portion, which was allotted to his grandson Louis. In the subsequent partitions of this kingdom, the Ost Franken continued to be prominent actors; their wars with the Saxons, Thuringians, &c. and their other transactions, are recorded in the Chronicles of Engelhuis and Botho (Leibnitz, Script. Bruns. i. 1093; and iii. 368). In A.D. 912 they constituted, under Eberhard, the duchy of Franken or Franconia, which from A.D. 1024 to 1138, gave to Germany a dynasty of emperors. Barbarossa and his historian might, therefore, very appropriately set forth the courage and pre-eminence of the German Frauks.-ED.] * Otho Frising. de Gestis Frederici I. 1. 2, c. 22, p. 720-723. These original and authentic acts I have translated and abridged with freedom, yet with fidelity. After the the great standard, the Caroccio of Milan.* extinction of the house of Swabia, they were banished beyond the Alps; and their last coronations betrayed the impotence and poverty of the Teutonic Cæsars.† Under the reign of Adrian, when the empire extended from the Euphrates to the ocean, from mount Atlas to the Grampian hills, a fanciful historian‡ amused the Romans with the picture of their infant wars. "There was a time," says Florus, "when Tibur and Præneste, our summer retreats, were the objects of hostile vows in the Capitol, when * From the chronicles of Ricobaldo and Francis Pipin, Muratori (dissert. 26, tom. ii. p. 492, has transcribed this curious fact, with the doggerel verses that accompanied the gift. Urbs, decus orbis, ave! victus tibi destinor, ave! Currus ab Augusto Frederico Cæsare justo. Fle, Mediolanum! jam sentis spernere vanum Imperii vires, proprias tibi tollere vires. Ergo triumphorum potes, urbs, memor esse priorum Ne si dee tacere (I now use the Italian Dissertations, tom. i. p. 444) che nell' anno 1727, una copia desso Caroccio in marmo dianzi ignoto si scopri nel Campidoglio, presso alle carcere di quel luogo, dove Sisto V. l'avea fatto rinchiudere. Stava esso posto sopra quatro colonne di marmo fino colla sequente inscrizione, &c. to the same purpose as the old inscription. [The Caroccio was the car on which, adhering to the ancient custom of their Lombard forefathers, the Milanese raised and transported their standard. Refer to Gibbon's note (ch. 49, vol. v. p. 427), which elucidates what is here obscurely expressed. The other Lombard cities used the same. The Caroccium is described by Muratori (Ant. Ital. 2. 489), as drawn by yokes of oxen, with housings of scarlet cloth, and surmounted by a "vexillum longissimum et rubeum," or "igneum." This again explains the application of the term flamma to standards. See note, ch. 59, vol. vi. p. 480.-ED.] + The decline of the imperial arms and authority in Italy is related with impartial learning in the Annals of Muratori (tom. x.-xii.); and the reader may compare his narrative with the Histoire des Allemands (tom. iii. iv.), by Schmidt, who has deserved the esteem of his countrymen. [Gibbon has here very justly acknowledged his obligations to Schmidt, from whose history Mr. Hallam has also derived great advantage. It ought to be studied by all who wish to obtain clear conceptions of the struggles which prepared Germany to be what it is now becoming. For the transactions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ranke's History of the Popes (3 vols. Bohn, 1853-4) is the best authority.-ED.] Tibur nunc suburbanum, et æstivæ Præneste deliciæ, nuncupatis in capitolio votis petebantur. The whole passage of Florus (1. 1, c. 11) may be read with pleasure, and has deserved the praise of a man of genius. (Euvres de Montesquieu, tom. iii. p. 634, 635, quarto edition.) we dreaded the shades of the Arician groves, when we could triumph without a blush over the nameless villages of the Sabines and Latins, and even Corioli could afford a title not unworthy of a victorious general." The pride of his contemporaries was gratified by the contrast of the past and the present; they would have been humbled by the prospect of futurity; by the prediction, that after a thousand years, Rome, despoiled of empire, and contracted to her primæval limits, would renew the same hostilities on the same ground which was then decorated with her villas and gardens. The adjacent territory on either side of the Tiber was always claimed, and sometimes possessed, as the patrimony of St. Peter; but the barons assumed a lawless independence, and the cities too faithfully copied the revolt and discord of the metropolis. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Romans incessantly laboured to reduce or destroy the contumacious vassals of the Church and senate; and if their headstrong and selfish ambition was moderated by the pope, he often encouraged their zeal by the alliance of his spiritual arms. Their warfare was that of the first consuls and dictators, who were taken from the plough. They assembled in arms at the foot of the Capitol; sallied from the gates, plundered or burnt the harvests of their neighbours, engaged in tumultuary conflict, and returned home after an expedition of fifteen or twenty days. Their sieges were tedious and unskilful; in the use of victory, they indulged the meaner passions of jealousy and revenge; and instead of adopting the valour, they trampled on the misfortunes, of their adversaries. The captives, in their shirts, with a rope round their necks, solicited their pardon; the fortifications, and even the buildings, of the rival cities, were demolished, and the inhabitants were scattered in the adjacent villages. It was thus that the seats of the cardinal bishops, Porto, Ostia, Albanum, Tusculum, Præneste, and Tibur or Tivoli, were successively overthrown by the ferocious hostility of the Romans.* Of these,+ Porto and Ostia, the two keys of Ne a feritate Romanorum sicut fuerant Hostienses, Portuenses, Tusculanenses, Albanenses, Labicenses, et nuper Tiburtini, destruerentur. (Matthew Paris, p. 757.) These events are marked in the Annals and Index (the eighteenth volume) of Muratori. For the state or ruin of these suburban cities, the banks of the Tiber, &c. see the lively picture of the P. Labat (Voyage en Espagne et en Italie), who had long resided in the neighbourhood of Rome; the Tiber, are still vacant and desolate; the marshy and unwholesome banks are peopled with herds of buffaloes, and the river is lost to every purpose of navigation and trade. The hills, which afford a shady retirement from the autumnal heats, have again smiled with the blessings of peace; Frascati has arisen near the ruins of Tusculum; Tibur or Tivoli has resumed the honours of a city,* and the meaner towns of Albano and Palestrina are decorated with the villas of the cardinals and princes of Rome. In the work of destruction, the ambition of the Romans was often checked and repulsed by the neighbouring cities and their allies; in the first siege of Tibur, they were driven from their camp; and the battles of Tusculum,† and Viterbo ‡ might be compared, in their relative state, to the memorable fields of Thrasymene and Cannæ. In the first of these petty wars, thirty thousand Romans were overthrown by a thousand German horse, whom Frederic Barbarossa had detached to the relief of Tusculum; and if we number the slain at three, the prisoners at two, thousand, we shall embrace the most authentic and moderate account. Sixty-eight years afterwards they marched against Viterbo in the ecclesiastical and the more accurate description of which P. Eschinard (Roma, 1750, in octavo) has added to the topographical map of Cingolani. [The present state of these cities may be seen in Bohn's enlarged edition (1846) of Sir W. Gell's Topography of Rome and its Vicinity; Albano, p. 36-39; Ostia, p. 336-338; Porto, p. 361-364; Præneste (now Palestrina), p. 364-367; Tibur or Tivoli, with a list of its ancient villas, p. 415-420; and Tusculum, p. 424-433. See also Lord Byron's note (Childe Harold, Canto iv. stanza 174) on the site of Horace's Sabine farm near Tibur.-ED.] * Labat (tom. iii. p. 233) mentions a recent decree of the Roman government, which has severely mortified the pride and poverty of Tivoli in civitate Tiburtina non vivitur civiliter. +I depart from my usual method, of quoting only by the date the Annals of Muratori, in consideration of the critical balance in which he has weighed nine contemporary writers, who mention the battle of Tusculum (tom. x. p. 42-44). Matthew Paris, p. 345. This bishop of Winchester was Peter de Rupibus, who occupied the see thirty-two years (A.D. 1206–1238), and is described, by the English historian, as a soldier and a statesman (p. 178.399). [This prelate is generally known in English history as Peter des Roches. On the death of the earl of Pembroke in 1219, he became, with Hubert de Burg, joint guardian of Henry III., and regent. He was a native of Poitou, and brought over so many of his countrymen, to whom he gave offices and preferments, that he offended the people of England, and was banished in 1234, when Gregory IX. employed him to defend Viterbo. But Muratori (Annal. xvii. 80 says |