The attentive reader cannot fail to have noticed how scant has been the mention in these pages of the condition of the Jews in Italy. Little has been recorded of them, except that under the rule of the Lombard kings they were uniformly treated with humanity and justice, and that some few of the popes had issued decrees, advising what in these times we should regard as stern measures to be adopted for their conversion, while others forbade any such severities to be employed. But the silence of history respecting them is in itself significant, showing that no social convulsions disturbed the order of their daily lives, no flagrant wrongs and cruelties called out for mention. This is, at first sight at least, surprising. Considering that the clergy throughout what are called the Middle Ages were the persistent adversaries of the Jews, and that Italy was the very centre and source whence the clergy derived their inspiration, we should certainly have expected that the Jews of that country would experience the very extremity of intolerance and harshness. The fact that they received milder treatment than their neighbours is due to a variety of causes, which may be briefly touched on. In the first place, the condition of Italy was different, during those ages, from that of other European countries. The feudal system, the source, as we have seen, of so many of the wrongs and miseries of the Jews, was never so firmly established there as in the other European countries, and it died out much earlier. The great free cities exercised an authority of their own, independent of any feudal superior, and in these the rights of the Jews were maintained almost as inflexibly as those of the Christians. The continued strife between Pope and Emperor, Guelf and Ghibelline, so largely engaged the attention of the Italian nation as to allow them little leisure to trouble themselves with the affairs of a people who were contented to live in peace, and whose aid was often found extremely serviceable by the dominant party. It is certain again, whatever may have been the reason, that the fanatical spirit which was so easily roused, and in such fatal excess, in France and Germany, languished and soon died out on the Italian side of the Alps. The cry that the Holy Sepulchre had again fallen into the possession of the infidels found but a feeble echo in the streets of Naples,[135] Rome, and Florence; nor do the people seem to have argued, as they did throughout France and Germany, and even occasionally in Spain, that the outrages charged upon the Mahometans of Palestine were to be expiated by the Jews of Europe.