As a civilising lore or social science the religion of professed love and fraternity, itself a theatre of divisions and discords,[544] counted literally for less than nothing against the passions of ignorance, egoism, and patriotism; for ignorant all orders of the people still were--more ignorant than the Greeks of Athens--in the main matters of political knowledge and self-knowledge.[545] Yet such is the creative power of free intelligence even in a state of strife--given but the conditions of economic furtherance and variety of life and of culture-contact--that in this warring Italy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there grew up a civilisation almost as manifold as that of Hellas itself. The elements of variety, of culture, and of competition were present in nearly as potent a degree. In the north, in particular, the Lombard, and Tuscan, and other cities differed widely in their industries. Florence, besides being one of the great centres of European banking, was eminently the city of various occupations, manufacturing and trading in woollens and silks and gold brocades, working in gold and jewelry, the metals, and leather, and excelling in dyes. In 1266 the reformed constitution specified twelve _arti_ or crafts, seven major and five minor, the latter list being later increased to fourteen.[546] Pisa, beginning as a commercial seaport, trading with the East, whither she exported the iron of Elba, became the first great seat of the woollen manufacture.[547] Milan, besides silks and woollens, manufactured in particular weapons and armour. Genoa had factories of wool, cotton, silk, maroquin, leather, embroidery, and silver and gold thread.[548] Bologna was in a special degree a culture city, with its school of law, and as such would have its special minor industries. But indeed every one of the countless Italian republics, with its specialty of dialect, of life, and of outward aspect, must have had something of its own to contribute to the complex whole.[549] In the south the Norman kingdom set up in the eleventh century meant yet another norm of life, for there Frederick II established the University of Naples; and Saracen contact told alike on thought and imagination. All through these regions there now reigned something like a common speech, the skeleton of old Latin newly suppled and newly clothed upon; and for all educated men the Latin itself was the instrument of thought and intercourse. For them, too, the Church and the twofold law constituted a common ground of culture and discipline. On this composite soil, under heats of passion and stresses of warring energies, there gradually grew the many-seeded flower of a new literature.