Gradual indeed was the process. Italy, under stress of struggle, was still relatively backward at a time when Germany and France, and even England, under progressive conditions quickened with studious life;[550] and there was a great intellectual movement in France, in particular, in the twelfth century, when Italy had nothing of the kind to show, save as regarded the important part played by the law school of Bologna in educating jurists for the whole of western Europe. For other developments there still lacked the needed conditions, both political and social. The first economic furtherance given to mental life by the cities seems to have been the endowment of law schools and chronicle-writers; the schools of Ravenna and Bologna, and the first chronicles, dating from the eleventh century. Salerno had even earlier had a medical school, long famous, which may or may not have been municipally endowed.[551] To the Church, as against her constant influence for discord and her early encouragement of illiteracy,[552] must be credited a share in these beginnings. After the law school of Bologna (whence in 1222 was founded that of Padua, by a secession of teachers and students at strife with the citizens) had added medicine and philology to its chairs, the Papacy gave it a faculty of theology; and in Rome itself the Church had established a school of law. The first great literary fruit of this intellectual ferment is the _Summa Theologiae_ of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), a performance in which the revived study of Aristotle, set up by the stimulus of Saracen culture, is brought by a capacious and powerful mind to the insuperable task of philosophising at once the Christian creed and the problems of Christendom. Close upon this, the Latin expression of accepted medieval thought, comes the great achievement of Dante, wherein a new genius for the supreme art of rhythmic speech has preserved for ever the profound vibration of all the fierce and passionate Italian life of the Middle Ages. In his own spirit he carries it all, save its vice and levity. Its pitiless cruelty, its intellectuality, its curious observation, its ingrained intolerance, its piercing flashes of tenderness, its capacity for intense and mystic devotion, its absolute dogmatism in every field of thought, the whole pell-mell of its vehement experience, throbs through every canto of his welded strain. And no less does he incarnate for ever its fatal incapacity for some political compromise. For Dante, politics is first and last a question of the dominance of his faction: his fellow-citizens are for him Guelphs or Ghibellines, and he shares the Florentine rabies against rival or even neighbouring towns; his imperialism serving merely to extend the field of blind strife, never to subject strife to the play of reason. Exiled for faction by the other faction, he foreshadows the doom of Florence. § 2