The animosity was internecine and persistent.

Life or death hung in the balance.

It was a conflict for ascendency that brought the sternest passions into play, and decided the survival of the fittest among hundreds of competing cities.

The deeply rooted jealousies of Roman and feudal centers, the recent partisanship of Papal and Imperial principles, imbittered this strife.

But what lay beneath all superficial causes of dissension was the economic struggle of communities, for whom the soil of Italy already had begun to seem too narrow.