7⅛ Dante Sexcentenary Lectures
castles and take up their residence inside the city itself, and
to register as members of one of the various guilds if they
wished to run for a public office. This broke up their power
of interfering with traffic on the highways, but enabled them
to become disturbing factors in the life of the cities them-
selves. For once inside the city, they built fortified resi-
dences, surmounted by those lofty battlemented towers
which thrust themselves so conspicuously on the eye in con-
temporary pictures of all these medieval Italian towns.
The nobles brought with them their habits of lawless
strife, jealous feuds, and private warfare. Worse still,
they involved the whole mass of the citizenry in these strug-
gles, the richer merchants and the proletariat taking sides
with one or the other of the co !testants. These family in-
terests, furthermore, became involved in the strife of polit-
ical parties already sufficiently rabid and violent in them-
selves, for the guilds of the artisans were already at strife
with the older and wealthier organizations of the merchants
over matters of suffrage and the spoils of office. Hence
arose a crisscrossing of party lines and a welter of party
strife that render the internal history of any one of these
Italian cities a series of kaleidoscopic changes most puzzling
and baffling to him who seeks to present any connected nar-
rative of their development.
Yet the conquest of the bishop and the noble did not
exhaust the list of the city’s enemies. The removal of these
foes brought the cities face to face with each other. The
rivalry of trade, so fruitful a cause of wars from the earliest
recorded times down through the fateful days of July, 1914,
and on to the present moment, operated with its fullest
effect among these miniature commonwealths. The desire
to control routes of trade, markets, and sources for the
supply of raw material, the determination to crush a trade