MONUMENTS OF THE CAVALLI FAMILY 135

12. For the three preceding centuries, Milan, the oldest archbishopric of Lombardy, had been the central point at which the collision between the secular and ecclesiastical power took place in Europe. The Guelph and Ghibelline naturally met and warred throughout the plain of Lombardy; but the intense civic stubbornness and courage of the Milanese population formed a kind of rock in their tideway, where the quarrel of burgher with noble confused itself with, embittered, and brought again and again to trial by battle, that of pope with emperor. In 1035 their warrior archbishop,¹ heading their revolt against Conrad of Franconia, organized the first disciplined resistance of foot-soldiers to cavalry by his invention and decoration of the Carroccio; and the contest was only closed, after the rebuilding of the walls of ruined Milan, by the wandering of Barbarossa, his army scattered, through the maize fields, which the traveller now listlessly crosses at speed in the train between Milan and Arona, little noting the name of the small station, “Legnano,” where the fortune of the Lombard republic finally prevailed. But it was only by the death of Frederick II. that the supremacy of the Church was secured; and when Innocent IV., who had written, on hearing of that death, to his Sicilian clergy, in words of blasphemous exultation, entered Milan, on his journey from Lyons to Perugia, the road, for ten miles before he reached the gates, was lined by the entire population of the city, drawn forth in enthusiastic welcome; as they had invented a sacred car for the advance of their standard in battle, they invented some similar honour for the head of their Church as the harbinger

¹ [Archbishop Heribert. The Carroccio-a huge car drawn by oxen, bearing the standard of the town, and carrying an altar with the host-served, like the ark of the Israelites, for a rallying-point in battle; for its introduction, see Sismondi, ch. vi. (vol. i. p. 380, Paris edition of 1826). At the battle of Legnano, in 1176, the Lombard League routed the army of Frederick Barbarossa, who escaped alone to Pavia, whence he opened negotiations with the Pope. For the conflict between Frederick II. and the Popes, and the death of the emperor in 1250, see Val d’Arno, (Vol. XXIII. pp. 12, 39, 56). Innocent IV. wrote of the emperor’s death as causing joy in earth and heaven at the passing away of “the thunderbolt and the tempest with which Almighty God had so long menaced your heads,” etc. This letter, and the particulars about the baldachino which Ruskin goes on to give, are in Sismondi, ch. xviii. (vol. iii. pp. 123-127 of the Paris edition of 1826).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]