This people is Italy.
But the documents that should throw light upon the early annals of the people are deficient.

It does not appear upon the scene before the reign of Otho I.Nor does it become supreme till after the Peace of Constance.
Its biography is bound up with that of the republics and the despots.
Before the date of their ascendency we have to deal with Bishops of Rome, Emperors of the East and West, Exarchs and Kings of Italy, the feudal Lords of the Marches, the Dukes and Counts of Lombard and Frankish rulers.

Through that long period of incubation, when Italy freed herself from dependence upon Byzantium, created the Papacy and formed the second Roman Empire, the people exists only as a spirit resident in Roman towns and fostered by the Church, which effectually repelled all attempts at monarchical unity, playing the Lombards off against the Goths, the Franks against the Lombards, the Normans against the Greeks, merging the Italian Kingdom in the Empire when it became German, and resisting the Empire of its own creation when the towns at last were strong enough to stand alone.

To speak about the people in this early period is, therefore, to invoke a myth; to write its history is the same as writing an ideal history of mediaeval Europe.
The truth is that none of these standpoints in isolation suffices for the student of Italy.

Her inner history is the history of social and intellectual progress evolving itself under the conditions of attraction and repulsion generated by the double ideas of Papacy and Empire.
Political unity is everywhere and at all times imperiously rejected.