The close community thus formed exhibited very much the same political tendencies as had marked that of early republican Rome. The cities, constantly flouted and menaced by the castled nobility of the surrounding territory, who blackmailed passing traders, soon learned to use the iron hand as against these, who in turn sought the emperor's protection; and cities wont to put down nobles were prompt to seek to coerce each other. On the death of the Emperor Frederick I (1197), Florence set on foot a League of the Tuscan cities, which, while primarily hostile to the Empire, repelled the claim of the Papacy to over-lordship as heir of the Countess Matilda. On such a basis there might conceivably have arisen a new and strong national life; but soon Florence, like old Athens, was oppressing her allies, who gave their sympathy to a town like Semifonte, the refuge of all who fled from places conquered and taxed by her. To individual allies like Sienna, Florence was substantially faithless, and so strengthened from the first the fatal tendency to separatism--this while the inner social sunderance was steadily deepening.[537] None of the forces at work was remedial on this side; the regimen of the _Podestà_, even when he was actually a foreigner, furthered instead of checking strife between communities;[538] and the more "aristocratic" cities were at least as quarrelsome as the less. Bologna played the tyrant city as vigorously as Florence.[539] Rome was among the worst governed of all. In the thirteenth century, under Innocent IV, we find the fighting factions of the nobles using the Coliseum and other ancient monuments as fortresses, garrisoned by bandits in their pay, who pillaged traders and passengers; and not the Papacy, but the "senator" chosen by the people--a Bolognese noble--put them down, hanging nobles and bandits alike.[540] Such was civilisation at the centre of Christendom after a thousand years of Christianity. The notable fact is that through all this wild play of primitive passion there _was_ yet growing up a new Italian civilisation; and it is part of our task to trace its causation. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 455: _Germania_, c. 2.] [Footnote 456: For a good view of the many points in common between Teutonic barbarism and normal savagery, see the synopsis of Guizot, _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, i, 7ième leçon. Lamprecht acquiesces (_What is History?_ 1905, p. 213).] [Footnote 457: "Everything about them [the Longobards], even for many years after they have entered upon the sacred soil of Italy, speaks of mere savage delight in bloodshed and the rudest forms of sensual indulgence" (Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, 2nd ed. v, 156. Cp. Lamprecht, _What is History?_ pp. 48-49.)] [Footnote 458: Ranke's statement (_Latin and Teutonic Nations._ Eng. tr. p. 1) that the "collective German nations at last brought about" a Latino-Teutonic unity is a merely empirical proposition, true in no organic sense.]