KROPOTKIN to conquer their rights by revolution. That is what they did everywhere. But while that revolution became, in most large cities, the ~tarting of a renewal of life and arts (this is so well seen in Florence), jn other cities it ended in the victory of the 'richer orders over the poorer ones--of the "fat people" (popolo grasso) over the "low people" (popolo basso)-in a despotic crushing of the masses, in numberless transportations and executions, especially when lords and J'riests took part in it. And it was "the defence of the poorer orders" that the king, who had received Macchiavelli's lessons, later took as Jl pretext when he came to knock at the gates of the free cities! The cities had to die, because the ideas of men had themselves &hanged perverted by the teaching of canonical and Roman law. The twelfth century European was essentially a federalist, a man of free initiative, of free agreement, of unions freely consented to. He saw in the individual the starting point of all society. He did not seek salvation in obedience or ask for a saviour of society. The idea of Christian or Roman discipline was unknown to him. But under the influence of the Christian Church-always fond of authority, always zealous to impose its rule on the souls and especially on the arms of the faithful, and, on the other hand, under the influence of Roman law, which already, since the twelfth century, invaded the courts of the powerful lords, the kings and the popes, and soon became Jl favourite study in the universities, minds grew depraved in proportion as priest and legist triumphed. Men became enamoured of authority. If a revolution of the lower trades was accomplished in a commune, the commune called in fl saviour. It gave itself a dictator, a municipal Cresar, and endowed him with full powers to exterminate the opposite party. And the dictator profited by it, with all the refinement of cruelties inspired by the Church or the examples brought from the desoptic kingdoms of the East. The Church, of course, supported that Cresar. Had it not always dreamt of the biblical king, who kneels before the high priest, and is his docile tool? Had it not, with all its might, hated the ideas of rationalism which inspired the free towns during the first Renaissance, that of the Twelfth century, and those "pagan" ideas which brought Jl)an back to Nature under the influence of the rediscovery of Greek civilisation, and, later on, those ideas which in the name of primitive Christianity incited men against the Pope, the priest and Faith in general? Whoever was the tool, pope, king or_dictator, it was of littla importance to the Church, so long as the wheel and the gibbet worked ;igainst the heretics. . Under the twofold teaching of the Roman legist and the priest, the old federalist spirit, the spirit of free initiative and free agreement, was dying out to make room for the spirit of discipline, organisation 28 Bibl,oteca G no Bianco
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