Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. ITALY AND THE WESTERN NATIONS OF EUROPE IN THE MIDDLE AGES?THEIR POETRY AND THEIR REAL LIFE. The period, commonly spoken of as The Middle Ages, is bounded at either end by two great catastrophes?the first being that irruption of the Northern barbarians which overwhelmed the Greece-Latin civilization? the second, the invasion of the Turks, which destroyed the Byzantine Empire and brought Asiatic barbarism into Europe. In the interval between these two calamities, the domestic life of Christendom was one long term of suffering that seems like a chastisement. The old towns and ruined monuments of Europe bear pathetic witness to the saddened lives that must have been led by the men of former days. We cannot see all these evidences of the care they took to hide their goods and fortify their dwellings, without the conviction that they must have suffered the torments of continual mistrust, and occasional terror. Observe the labyrinths of narrow, tortuous streets, some of them looking like cul-de-sacs but always communicating with each other?notice the vaulted passages where only a glimmering twilight struggles in at mid-day?the dreary wastes by the river-sides, like that by the Ghetto, from which the benighted wayfarer saw the corpse of Giovanni Borgia thrown into the Tiber?mark the covered bridges connecting the palace with the prison or citadel, like that by which Clement VII. took refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo from the sack of Rome; note the massive signorial strongholds, like those at Florence, fit to brave any assault?the castles perched like eagles’ nests on the summits of a mountain-peak, like Acqua-pendente, or ranged along a wall of rock, as at Narni, or protected by Pelasgic ramparts, as at Cortona, or squeezed between the sides of some ravine, as a…