The two great factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines were tearing the very heart of Italy; and without going into any detail, we must try to point out the central ideas of each party. The Ghibellines, then, appear to have represented an aristocratic principle of order, constantly in danger of becoming oppressive, while the Guelfs represented a democratic principle of progress, ever verging upon chaotic and unbridled licence. The Ghibellines longed for a national unity, resting on centralisation; the Guelfs aimed at a local independence which tended to national disintegration. The Ghibellines, regarding the German Empire as the heir and representative of the Empire of Rome, and as the symbol of Italian unity, espoused the Emperor's cause against the Pope, declared the temporal power independent of the spiritual, and limited the sphere of the priests entirely to the latter. The Guelfs found in the political action of the Pope a counterpoise to the influence of the Emperor; the petty and intriguing spirit of the politics of the Vatican made its ruler the natural ally of the disintegrating Guelfs rather than the centralising Ghibellines, and accordingly the Guelfs ardently espoused the cause of the Pope's temporal power, and often sought in the royal house of France a further support against Germany. These broad lines, however, were constantly blurred and crossed by personal intrigue or ambition, by family jealousies, feuds, and rivalries, by unnatural alliances or by corruption and treachery. Now Dante was by family tradition a Guelf. Florence too was nominally the head quarters of Guelfism, and Dante had fought bravely in her battles against the Ghibellines. But the more he reflected upon the sources of the evils by which Italy was torn, the more profoundly he came to distrust the unprincipled meddling of the greedy princes of the house of France in Italian politics, and the more jealously did he watch the temporal power of the Pope. Perhaps the political opinions he afterwards held were not as yet fully consolidated, but his votes and proposals--which we read with a strange interest in the city archives of Florence nearly six hundred years after the ink has dried--show that in 1300 he was at any rate on the highway to the conclusions he ultimately reached. And we may therefore take this occasion of stating what they were. It appeared to Dante that Italy was sunk in moral, social, and political chaos, for want of a firm hand to repress the turbulent factions that rent her bosom; and that no hand except an Emperor's could be firm enough. The Empire of Rome was to him the most imposing and glorious spectacle offered by human history. God had guided Rome by miracles and signs to the dominion of the world that the world might be at peace.