The Despotisms imply the Communes as their predecessors.

Each and all of them grew up and flourished on the soil of decadent or tired Republics.

Though they are all-important at one period of Italian history--the period of the present work--they do but form an episode in the great epic of the nation.

He who attempts a general history of Italy from the point of view of the despotisms, is taking a single scene for the whole drama.

Finally we might prefer the people--that people, instinctively and persistently faithful to Roman traditions, which absorbed into itself the successive hordes of barbarian invaders, civilized them, and adopted them as men of Italy; that people which destroyed the kingdoms of the Goths and Lombards humbled the Empire at Legnano, and evolved the Communes; that people which resisted alien feudalism, and spent its prime upon eradicating every trace of the repugnant system from its midst; that people which finally attained to the consciousness of national unity by the recovery of scholarship and culture under the dominion of despotic princes.