Emperor, duly provided with an antipope, * marched on Rome with a great army. The Pope
fled, and his cause seemed desperate, but pestilence destroyed Frederick's army, and he returned
to Germany a solitary fugitive. Although not only Sicily, but the Greek Emperor, now sided
with the Lombard League, Barbarossa made another attempt, ending in his defeat at the battle of
Legnano in 1176. After this he was compelled to make peace, leaving to the cities an the
substance of liberty. In the conflict between Empire and papacy, however, the terms of peace
gave neither party complete victory.
Barbarossa's end was seemly. In 1189 he went on the third Crusade, and in the following year
he died.
The rise of free cities is what proved of most ultimate importance in this long strife. The power
of the Emperor was associated with the decaying feudal system; the power of the Pope, though
still growing, was largely dependent upon the world's need of him as an antagonist to the
Emperor, and therefore decayed when the Empire ceased to be a menace; but the power of the
cities was new, a result of economic progress, and a source of new political forms. Although
this does not appear in the twelfth century, the Italian cities, before long, developed a non-
clerical culture which reached the very highest levels in literature, in art, and in science. All this
was rendered possible by their successful resistance to Barbarossa.
All the great cities of Northern Italy lived by trade, and in the twelfth century the more settled
conditions made traders more prosperous than before. The maritime cities, Venice, Genoa, and
Pisa, never had to fight for their liberty, and were therefore less hostile to the Emperor than the
cities at the foot of the Alps, which were important to him as the gateways to Italy. It is for this
reason that Milan is the most interesting and important of Italian cities at this time.
Until the time of Henry III, the Milanese had usually been content to follow their archbishop.
But the Patarine movement, mentioned in an earlier chapter, changed this: the archbishop sided
with the nobility, while a powerful popular movement opposed him and
* There was an antipope throughout most of this time. At the death of Hadrian IV, the two
claimants, Alexander III and Victor IV, had a tug-ofwar for the papal mantle. Victor IV
(who was the antipope), having failed to snatch the mantle, obtained from his partisans a
substitute which he had had prepared, but in his haste he put it on inside-out.