The end of the thirteenth century marks the opening of a new era in the history of Italy and of Europe. During the period of political disorder prevailing throughout Northern Europe ever since the days of Charlemagne, a literary culture was nevertheless developed, which, although little heeded in past times, has been most clearly elucidated by recent learned research. The literature of Provence, the romance of chivalry, the poems arranged in the cycles of Charlemagne, the Round Table, the Nibelungen Lied, the innumerable ballads, the splendid cathedrals reared on both banks of the Rhine and constituting an art never to be surpassed by its countless imitators, were one and all the offspring of the mighty, primitive culture of the Middle Ages, in which, for a long time, Italy had no share. In Northern Europe, where conquerors and conquered amalgamated with less difficulty, national art and literature were sooner able to spring into being. In Italy, on the contrary, the conquered were oppressed, but never entirely fused with their conquerors; gradually, rather, they began to assert their individuality and their rights. The original rise of the communes was the result of this struggle. Accordingly, at the time when France was composing love-songs and poems of chivalry, Italy was absorbed in founding political institutions and preparing to win freedom. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the scene was completely changed. Every branch of mediæval literature seemed smitten with an instantaneous decay, northern imagination and fancy to be suddenly withered. Even there, in the north, men begin to strive, slowly and painfully, at the task of political organisation. Meanwhile, the Italian communes being already constituted, our country had already given birth to a national literature, of so dazzling a splendour as to banish all others from view, and relegate to centuries of oblivion the fruits of earlier culture elsewhere. It was precisely at this moment that Florence, then the chief seat and centre of the new Italian culture, was subject to the rule of the greater guilds. The Empire seemed to have abandoned its pretensions with regard to Italy; the Papacy, weakened and menaced, no longer dared to impose its commands on the secular world in its former imperious fashion; the struggle between conquerors and conquered had come to an end, all distinction between the German and Latin races having utterly disappeared, and Italy being peopled by Italians alone.