This act of
allegiance to the emperor was repeated when Barbarossa appeared, and
indeed the archbishops of Ravenna soon became the most eager if not
most the serious supporters of the emperors in all the great plain and
perhaps in all Italy. Ravenna, once the imperial capital, though
fallen was imperial still. She was haunted, haunted by ghosts that
were restless in those marvellous tombs, that litter her churches,
loom out of the grey curtain of mist like a fortress, or shine and
glitter with imperishable colours and are full of memories as
imperishable as themselves.
Yet though it was to her the emperors so often looked for aid and
succour and rest, it was not always so. The present, even with her,
was more than the past. With the great development of communal
institutions which marked especially the twelfth century, compelled
too to face, though never with success, the increasing state of
Venice, which, indeed, and successfully, had usurped her place in the
world and had realised what she had failed to achieve, she was ready
and able in 1198 to place herself at the head of the league of the
cities of the Romagna and the Marches against the imperial power then
both oppressive and feeble; so that pope Innocent III.
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