187. A question of free trade in corn, then, arose between Florence and Rome. The Pope's legate in Bologna stopped the supply of polenta, the Florentines depending on that to eat with their own oil. Very wicked, you think, of the Pope's legate, acting thus against quasi-Protestant Florence? Yes; just as wicked as the--not quasi-Protestants--but intensely positive Protestants, of Zurich, who tried to convert the Catholic forest-cantons by refusing them salt. Christendom has been greatly troubled about bread and salt: the then Protestant Pope, Zuinglius, was killed at the battle of Keppel, and the Catholic cantons therefore remain Catholic to this day; while the consequences of this piece of protectionist economy at Bologna are equally interesting and direct. 188. The legate of Bologna, not content with stopping the supplies of maize to Florence, sent our own John Hawkwood, on the 24th June, 1375, to burn all the maize the Florentines had got growing; and the abbot of Montemaggiore sent a troop of Perugian religious gentlemen-riders to ravage similarly the territory of Siena. Whereupon, at Florence, the Gonfalonier of Justice, Aloesio Aldobrandini, rose in the Council of Ancients and proposed, as an enterprise worthy of Florentine generosity, the freedom of all the peoples who groaned under the tyranny of the Church. And Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, and Arezzo,--all the great cities of Etruria, the root of religion in Italy,--joined against the tyranny of religion. Strangely, this Etrurian league is not now to restore Tarquin to Rome, but to drive the Roman Tarquin into exile. The story of Lucretia had been repeated in Perugia; but the Umbrian Lucretia had died, not by suicide, but by falling on the pavement from the window through which she tried to escape. And the Umbrian Sextus was the Abbot of Montemaggiore's nephew. 189. Florence raised her fleur-de-lys standard: and, in ten days, eighty cities of Romagua were free, out of the number of whose names I will read you only these--Urbino, Foligno, Spoleto, Narni, Camerino, Toscanella, Perugia, Orvieto. And while the wind and the rain still beat the body of Manfred, by the shores of the Rio Verde, the body of Pope Urban was torn from its tomb, and not one stone of the carved work thereof left upon another. 190. I will only ask you to-day to notice farther that the Captain of Florence, in this war, was a 'Conrad of Suabia,' and that she gave him, beside her own flag, one with only the word 'Libertas' inscribed on it. I told you that the first stroke of the bell on the Tower of the Lion began the carillon for European civil and religious liberty. But perhaps, even in the fourteenth century, Florence did not understand, by that word, altogether the same policy which is now preached in France, Italy, and England. What she did understand by it, we will try to ascertain in the course of next lecture. LECTURE VIII. FRANCHISE.