(1) The continued conflict of empire and papacy;(2) The rise of the Lombard cities;(3) The Crusades; and(4) The growth of scholasticism.All these four continued into the following century. The Crusades gradually came to an
inglorious end; but, as regards the other three-428-movements, the thirteenth century, marks the culmination of what, in the twelfth, is in a
transitional stage. In the thirteenth century, the Pope definitively triumphed over the Emperor, the
Lombard cities acquired secure independence, and scholasticism reached its highest point. All
this, however, was an outcome of what the twelfth century had prepared.
Not only the first of these four movements, but the other three also, are intimately bound up with
the increase of papal and ecclesiastical power. The Pope was in alliance with the Lombard cities
against the Emperor; Pope Urban II inaugurated the first Crusade, and subsequent popes were the
main promoters of the later ones; the scholastic philosophers were all clerics, and Church councils
took care to keep them within the bounds of orthodoxy, or discipline them if they strayed.
Undoubtedly, their sense of the political triumph of the Church, in which they felt themselves
participants, stimulated their intellectual initiative.
One of the curious things about the Middle Ages is that they were original and creative without
knowing it. All parties justified their policies by antiquarian and archaistic arguments. The
Emperor appealed, in Germany, to the feudal principles of the time of Charlemagne; in Italy, to
Roman law and the power of ancient Emperors. The Lombard cities went still further back, to the
institutions of republican Rome. The papal party based its claims partly on the forged Donation of
Constantine, partly on the relations of Saul and Samuel as told in the Old Testament. The
scholastics appealed either to the Scriptures or at first to Plato and then to Aristotle; when they
were original, they tried to conceal the fact. The Crusades were an endeavour to restore the state
of affairs that had existed before the rise of Islam.
We must not be deceived by this literary archaism. Only in the case of the Emperor did it
correspond with the facts. Feudalism was in decay, especially in Italy; the Roman Empire was a
mere memory. Accordingly, the Emperor was defeated. The cities of North Italy, while, in their
later development, they showed much similarity to the cities of ancient Greece, repeated the
pattern, not from imitation, but from analogy of circumstances: that of small, rich, highly civilized
republican commercial communities surrounded by monarchies at a lower level of culture. The
scholastics, however they might revere