The name alone of Lombardy calls up visions of continuous strife. There the nations who have made their grave in Italy lie most thickly. The sunny fruitful plains at the foot of the barren mountains have been fattened from the beginning by human blood. The _love of figs_—a phrase which has passed into the language of the Icelanders as an expression for all passionate appetite—has again and again impelled the peoples of the grudging North to storm the barrier of snows and seek the delusive land of promise beyond. Principalities and kingdoms have been founded there one after another, only to perish in turn, as if the soft land of morass and meadow were some unstable quicksand created for the engulfing of men. Etruscans, Insubri, Latins, Visigoths, Lombards, French and Spaniards, have come and gone, in the midst of an almost incessant warfare.
Yet through all the changes, a quiet, continuous labour was going on, restraining and directing the courses of the rivers, draining the marshes, taming the wild luxuriance of the land to fertile use and order, and slowly building up out of the confusion of conflicting elements the solid foundations of the present.
[Illustration: THE DUOMO FROM HOTEL EUROPE]
Seated in the centre of the plain which spreads out at the foot of the Alps, and commanding the natural gateways between Italy and the countries to north and west, Milan seems to have held from the first the chief position among the cities of Lombardy. In the early centuries of our era it was hardly less important in the North of Italy than Rome was in the South. The line of the Po, cutting across the peninsula, or perhaps more correctly, the Apennine chain, originally divided Italy ethnologically and politically, a division which still endures to some degree in the character and sentiments of the respective inhabitants on either side. The Insubri, who drove out the Etruscans and settled in Lombardy about the sixth century (B.C.), were a race of Gallic origin. They had no ties of blood with the Romans, who subjugated them later, and their country—called by the conquerors, Cisalpine Gaul—was as much a foreign province of the Latin dominion as the Gaul beyond the Alps. On the other hand their relationship and familiarity with that Gaul was so close that it has influenced the sympathies of the Milanese people throughout history, and has left a strong impress on their dialect. When some centuries later the capital of the Empire was losing its controlling power, and the bond uniting the members of that immense artificial system was beginning to relax, Milan assumed an almost independent position. As the seat of Diocletian and his colleague Maximian, she could scorn abandoned Rome, looking with compassion from her magnificent palaces and baths, her populous streets and mighty walls, to the silent courts and colonnades of the Palatine Hill. Constantine completed her severance from Rome by dividing Italy into two separate portions of the Empire, and making Milan the capital of the northern half, with a government distinct from Rome. The old racial boundaries were thus restored, and on these lines were built up the many later schemes for the foundation of a Kingdom of Italy. And on these lines there rose within the new ecclesiastical empire which was shaping itself out of the ruins of the old Roman system, an episcopal dominion extending over all Lombardy, and virtually independent of the Church of Rome. Many centuries were to pass, and fierce struggles to take place, before the Church of Milan was brought into subjection to the Papal See. This work of unification, accomplished chiefly by the potent mind of Gregory VII. in the eleventh century, in association with a growing instinct of nationality in the Milanese people themselves, was one of the most important steps in the process by which the various and alien elements of the great Lombard city were converted into a component part of the Italian nation.