Florence could not but fall.

Yet every generous heart will throb with sympathy while reading the story of that final stand for independence, in which a handful of burghers persisted, though congregated princes licked the dust from feet of Emperor and Pontiff.
Charles had come to assume the iron and the golden crowns in Italy.

He ought to have journeyed to Monza or to S.Ambrogio at Milan for the first, and to the Lateran in Rome for the second of these investitures.
An Emperor of the Swabian House would have been compelled by precedent and superstition to observe this form.

It is true that the coronation of a German prince as the successor of Lombard kings and Roman Augusti, had always been a symbolic ceremony rather than a rite which ratified genuine Imperial authority.

Still the ceremony connoted many mediaeval aspirations.