For the topography of the duchy our chief authority is Cimarelli, who wrote about two centuries ago, and who begins it about forty years after the flood! It was an absurd whim of Italian mediæval authors, which has prevailed almost till the present day, to wander among the traditional or imaginary cycles of remote ages, extolling the antiquity of their theme at a sacrifice of truth and credibility. Into such extravagances we shall not be tempted. It is enough to say that this district formed part of ancient Umbria, and is in some degree identical with that known to Roman history as Gallia Senonia. When the Western Empire crumbled to pieces, it was broken up into many petty communities, some of which adopted for themselves republican institutions, while others fell into the hands of military adventurers, who transmitted their sway to their descendants in hereditary right, founded upon personal enterprise or the consent of their subjects. After the nominal regimen of the occidental empire had been transferred across the Alps, these new communities and counts often sought from its titular emperor a confirmation of their self-constituted rights. This demand, recognising in name a sovereignty already substantially theirs, was willingly accorded as the basis of a transaction flattering to one party, momentous to the other. But the gradually opening ambition of the Church, and the extension of her temporal rule into Romagna and La Marca by the donations of Pepin, Charlemagne, and the Countess Matilda, introduced another competitor for dominion in these provinces. Her claim was made good, in some cases by a voluntary surrender on the part of men whose piety prevailed over their love of power, in others by force of arms; but by most of the mountain chiefs, and by a few of the free towns, loyalty to the emperor's shadowy authority was used as a pretext for resisting a new element which threatened their own sway. The two rival parties which sprang out of these circumstances came to be distinguished as Guelph and Ghibelline, although their watchwords were often adopted by local or temporary factions. Many circumstances tended to an extensive establishment of political independence among the small states thus formed in Italy during the Middle Ages. Distance and the unsettled state of the Peninsula having reduced to little more than a name the direct imperial sovereignty of "That imperious bird, Whose double beak a double prey devours,"[10]