CHAPTER IV

THE STORY OF MILAN

F the origin of Milan, ever so tremendous and so strong, whose sound is the sound of iron upon iron, we are as ignorant as we are of the origin of her name. Livy tells us that the city was founded by the Insubres, a village, perhaps, before the Roman conquest, and others speak of two barbarian chiefs, Medo and Olano, who gave her her name Mediolanum; but others, again, derive this from the sudden impression of spring that comes into the heart when having crossed the Alps, out of the northern winter, we come into Mayland, the country of May. The question is undecided and will remain so, for we know as little of the early history of Milan as we do of her foundation or the derivation of her name.

Milan-Mediolanum-enters history in 221 B.C., when the Romans conquered the Insubres, the Cisalpine Gauls of this great district, by the hands, as we have seen, of Cornelius Scipio and Marcus Marcellus; but her real importance only begins at the end of the third century, when in the long administrative decadence of the Empire, on the partition of it by Diocletian in 292 A.D., Milan became the capital of the vicariate of Italy. There Maximinius Hercules, who surrounded the city with a wall, had his residence and there his successor held a splendid court. It was from Milan, too, that Constantine dated his famous edict which permitted to all the exercise of Christianity in 313 A.D., and there S. Ambrose

had his archiepiscopal throne. S. Ambrose (340-397) indeed made of Milan, as it were, the rival of Rome itself, when he faced Theodosius and appeared suddenly at the door of S. Ambrogio as the avenger of Justice, and still more when by the organisation of his diocese he gave her a real independence, a shadow of which may be said to remain even to-day. S. Ambrose, in fact, appears as the first great master of the city, and under him Milan, which since the coming of Valentinian in 364 A.D. had been the capital of the west, became for a moment the religious centre of Italy.

This era of splendour, greatness and prosperity was suddenly interrupted by that appalling series of catastrophes which were repeated during near three hundred years, which would indubitably have destroyed any other civilisation, but which the Empire survived because it was Christian.

We have gone as fully as may be into the causes and the results of these disasters in a previous chapter: here we shall only, and very briefly, take note of them as they directly affected Milan. From this point of view they may be briefly summarised as follows: the raid of Alaric into Italy in 401 which caused Honorius to flee from Milan to Ravenna, and there to establish himself; the passage of Attila in 452; the passage of Belisarius, followed by the sack and destruction of the city in 539 by the Goth Uraias. That appalling horror, in which everything that might have seemed permanent in the city was destroyed, confirmed her fate, already prophesied in the flight of Honorius. Henceforth her importance passed to the following cities, her neighbours in turn: Ravenna, Pavia, Monza and Verona. So utterly was Milan deserted as a capital that she was not even visited by Charlemagne when he brought that great deliverance, and it is not till the Church was able through his act, which she had prompted, to begin the slow re-establishment of Latin power, and we see the

rise of the Bishops to civil domination which, rightly understood, is the birth of the commune, that Milan was rebuilt in 808 by Bishop Anspert, who became the protector of the city, the rebuilder of her walls and the reconstructor of her monuments. Nothing surprises us more, yet nothing should surprise us so little, as the rapidity of that resurrection, which had, in fact, been prepared during some five hundred years and by the Papacy. Nor should its success and its endurance cause us astonishment; for we know that we have in us the seeds of an eternal life, and that Christendom alone in the world can change and yet not pass away.

As for Milan, we see her in 945 as the seat of the Diet which proclaimed Lothair King of Italy, and only fiftyfive years later, in the year 1000, her Bishop is able to profit by the troubles which kept the Emperor in Germany to affirm, rather than to declare merely, the independence of his diocese, and this in the face of the Papal as well as of the Imperial claims, and thus to give back to Milan her greatness and her past. With this act we enter upon the new life of Milan.

If the first act of the Papacy, of the Catholic Church, as the soul, the saviour and the conservator of Europe, after the administrative destruction of the old Empire, was to secure the feudal idea, and the lordship of the Archbishop, her second was the logical development of this, the constitution of the commune. It is true that this was not achieved all at once, that it was a gradual and even a contested development, but it was achieved, and by the age-long conservation and contrivance of the soul of Europe, the Catholic Church.

For the genius of the Church had been "feudal" even from the beginning, and when we see Charlemagne suddenly gather up and apply this system to Europe, it is not in fact an original conception of his own, or even of his time, but rather the application of an idea

fundamental in ecclesiastic government which he found there already tried and ready to his hand. Now feudalism is the framework and the fundamental structure of Europe from his day at least to the Reformation: it stands there and bears up the government and the civilisation of Europe as the arches and buttresses bear up a Gothic cathedral, when all that is merely useful or decorative is swept away: it stands the integral skeleton of the whole, the necessary thing, as these pillars and arches and buttresses would stand, a vast and splendid skeleton, if the walls of a Gothic church, the windows and everything merely accessary were suddenly swept away. Feudalism-this is what in the way of government, of the structure of society, the Church was able to save and to contrive out of the administrative decadence and destruction of the old Empire. The first secular appearance of this is to be found in the establishment of the civil rule of the Bishops: by them the Church declares to the world the new system which was to endure for a thousand years. It is a profound mistake to think of the rise of the commune as the contradiction of this idea it affirms it and develops it. The commune marks merely the entry of the people into the feudal system; nothing more: and the ruin of that system in the fourteenth century means the ruin of Italy.

I say all this was saved and continued by the Church: but not all at once, nor without many misapprehensions. In Milan in the year 1000 the Bishop had dreamed of an independent government. His successors suffered for his fault, and had not his strength or force to recommend them. They dissipated their authority in paltry quarrels about interior discipline in Church government, and had not the great Hildebrand sat in Peter's throne they might have thrown all northern Italy back into the old chaos: but the Pope destroyed them and with them their anarchy. The quarrel began in the matter

of the marriage of the clergy, which the Ambrosian Rule permitted with restrictions. This Hildebrand was determined to destroy. The quarrel became a civil war, tumultuous scenes daily occurred in the churches and one of them had terminated in the assassination of Archbishop Guido by the Patarini-the hereticsin 1066. When Hildebrand became Pope in 1073 he took the matter in hand and ended it at a blow, forbidding for the future the marriage of priests, but tolerating those already married. What chiefly resulted from the years of anarchy and this submission, however, was valuable, for Milan lost her great position. as the centre of religion in northern Italy: it became evident that the Church would not tolerate the power of the Bishops to grow so strong and so independent as to threaten the common structure of Europe, which she had built, and this attitude of hers prepared the way for the new development, the rise of the

communes.

The continual and healthy growth of the civil power was more and more assured by the security which was come again to Milan, and with it material wellbeing, and the need not only of a definitive but of a popular organisation. For the population, which increased daily, numbered already in the eleventh century some 300,000 souls, and certainly in the Patarini tumults had become self-conscious. The Emperor was busy in Germany and both nobles and people were ready to receive a civil and lay constitution, by which they should themselves guarantee their rights and their security. The Milanese Republic which now came to be established was governed by consules named by three orders of electors: the capitani, which were the great nobles; the valvassori, which were the lesser nobility; and the cittadini, which were the better class of the people. Thus we see a new lay government established upon the model of the ancient ecclesiastical system, that