Louis VII of France 1137-47 Henry II of England 1154-89 Philip II of France 1180-1223 John, King of England 1199-1216 Battle of Bouvines 1214 XIV EMPIRE AND PAPACY When the Emperor Henry IV crossed the ice-bound Alps on his journey of submission to Canossa he was accompanied by a faithful knight, Frederick of Buren, whom he later rewarded for his loyalty with the hand of his daughter and the title Duke of Suabia. Frederick’s son was elected Emperor as Conrad III,[17] the first of the imperial line of Hohenstaufen that was destined to carry on through several generations the war between Empire and Papacy. The Hohenstaufen received their name from a hill on which stood one of Frederick of Buren’s strongest castles, but they were also called ‘Waiblingen’ after a town in their possession; while the House of Bavaria, their chief rivals, was called ‘Welf’ after an early ancestor. The feud of the Waiblingen and the Welfs that convulsed Germany had no less devastating an effect upon Italy, always exposed to influence from beyond the Alps, and the names of the rivals, corrupted on Italian tongues into ‘Ghibellines’ and ‘Guelfs’, became party cries throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. [Sidenote: The Italian Communes] In our last chapter we spoke of French ‘communes’, municipalities that rebelled against their overlords, setting up a government of their own: the same process of emancipation was at work in North Italy only that it was able to act with greater rapidity and success for a time on account of the national tendency towards separation and the vigour of town life. ‘In France’, says a thirteenth-century Italian, in surprise, ‘only the townspeople dwell in towns: the knights and noble ladies stay ... on their own demesnes.’ Certainly the contrast with his native Lombardy was strong. There each city lived like a fortified kingdom on its hill-top, or in the midst of wide plains, cut off from its neighbours by suspicion, by jealousy, by competition. In the narrow streets noble and knight jostled shoulders perforce with merchants, students, mountebanks, and beggars. The limits of space dictated that many things in life must be shared in common, whether religious processions or plagues, and if street fighting flourished in consequence so also did class intimacy and a sharpening of wits as well as of swords. Thus the towns of North Italy, like flowers in a hot-house, bore fruits of civilization in advance of the world outside, whether in commerce, painting, or the art of self-government; and visitors from beyond the Alps stared astonished at merchants’ luxurious palaces that made the castles of their own princes seem mere barbarian strongholds.