Special difficulties, moreover, lay in the way of confederation.

The Communes were not districts, like the Swiss Cantons, but towns at war with the Contado round them and at war among themselves.

Mutually jealous and mistrustful, with a country population that but partially obeyed their rule, these centers of Italian freedom were in a very different position from the peasant communities of Schwytz, Uri, Untenvalden.

Italy, moreover, could not have been federally united without the consent of Naples and the Church.

The kingdom of the Two Sicilies, rendered definitely monarchical by the Norman Conquest, offered a serious obstacle; and though the Regno might have been defied and absorbed by a vigorous concerted movement from the North and center, there still remained the opposition of the Papacy.