THE STATE the life of free cities; it was established in Westminster, at the gates of populous London; it was established in the Kremlin which was built in the midst of rich villages on the banks of the Moskva, after having failed at Souzdal and Vladimir. But never in Novgorod or Pskov, in Nuremberg or Florence could royal authority be consolidated. The neighbouring peasants supplied them with grain, horses and men; and commerce-royal, not communal-increased the wealth of the growing tyrants. The Church looked after their interests. It protected them, came to their succour with its treasure chests; it invented saints and miracles for their royal towns. It encircled with its veneration Notre-Dame of Paris or the Virgin of Iberia at Moscow. And while the civilization of free cities, emancipated from the bishops, took its youthful bound, the Church worked steadily to reconstitute its authority by the intermediary of nascent royalty, it surrounded with its tender care, its incense and its ducats, the family cradle of the one whom it had finally chosen, in order to rebuild with him, and through him, the ecclesiastical authority. Hardworking, strong in its State education, leaning on the man of will or cunning whom it sought out in any class of society, learned in intrigue as well as in Roman and Byzantine law-the Church marched without respite towards its ideal, the Hebrew King, absolute but obeying the high priest, the mere secular arm of ecclesiastical power. In the sixteenth century, the long work of the two conspirators is already in full force. A king already rules over the barons, his rivals, and that force will alight on the free cities to crush them in their tum. Besides, the towns of the sixteenth cenrury were not what they had been in the twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth cenruries. They were born out of a libertarian revolution. But they had not the courage to extend their ideas of equality, either to the neighbouring rural districts or even to those citizens who had later oli established themselves in their enclosures, refuges of liberty, to create industrial arts. A distinction between the old families who had made the revolution of the twelfth cenrury and the others who established themselves later in the city, is to be met with in all towns. The old "Merchant Guild" had no desire to receive new-comers. It refused to incorporate the "young arts" for commerce. And from simple clerk of the city, it became the go-between, the intermediary, who enriched himself by distant commerce and imported oriental ostenta• tion. Later, the "Merchant Guild" allied itself to the lord and the priest, or it sought the support of the nascent King to maintain its monopoly, its right to enrichment. Having thus become personal, instead of communal, commerce killed the free city. The guilds of ancient trades, of which the city and its government were composed at the outset, would not recognise the same rights to the young guilds, formed later by the younger trades, Thesa had 27 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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