Yet this profitable independence was not won without struggles so fierce and continuous that they finally endangered the political freedom in whose interests they had originally been waged. At first the struggle was with barbarian invaders; and here, as in the case of Rome and the Popes, it was often the local bishops who, when emperors at Constantinople ceased to govern except in name, fostered the young life of the city states and educated their citizens in a rough knowledge of war and statecraft. With the dawn of feudalism bishops degenerated into tyrants, and municipalities began to elect consuls and advisory councils and under their leadership to rebel against their former benefactors, and to establish governments independent of their control. The next danger was from within: cities are swayed more easily than nations, and too often the ‘communes’ of Lombardy became the prey of private factions or of more powerful city neighbours. Class warred against class and city against city; and out of their struggles arose leagues and counter-leagues, bewildering to follow like the ever-changing colours of a kaleidoscope. Into this atmosphere of turmoil the quarrel between Popes and Holy Roman Emperors, begun by Henry IV and Hildebrand and carried on by the Hohenstaufen and the inheritors of Hildebrand’s ideals, entered from the ‘communes’ point of view like a heaven-sent opportunity for establishing their independence. In the words of a tenth-century bishop: ‘The Italians always wish to have two masters that they may keep one in check by the other.’ The cities that followed the Hohenstaufen were labelled ‘Ghibelline’, those that upheld the Pope ‘Guelf’; and at first, and indeed throughout the contest where cruelty and treachery were concerned, there was little to choose between the rivals. Later, however, the fierce imperialism of Frederick I was to give to the warfare of his opponents, the Guelfs, a patriotic aspect. Frederick I, the ‘Barbarossa’ of the Third Crusade, was a Hohenstaufen on his father’s side, a Welf on his mother’s; and it had been the hope of those who elected him Emperor that ‘like a corner-stone he would bind the two together ... that thus with God’s blessing he might end their ancient quarrel’. At first it appeared this hope might be realized, for the new Emperor made a friend of his cousin Henry the Lion who, as Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, was heir of the Welf ambitions. Frederick also, by his firm and business-like rule, established what the chroniclers called such ‘unwonted peace’ that ‘men seemed changed, the world a different one, the very Heaven milder and softer’.