But we are soon forced to lose sight of the Italians in the crowd of other Christian races.

The history of the Church is cosmopolitan.

The Sphere of the Papacy extends in all directions around Italy taken as a local center.

Its influence, moreover, was invariably one of discord rather than of harmony within the boundaries of the peninsula.

If we take the Empire as our standing-ground, we have to write the annals of a sustained struggle, in the course of which the Italian cities were successful, when they reduced the Emperor to the condition of an absentee with merely nominal privileges.