However, the lowering of the empire and the kingdom meant the green light left to the political energies of the country, free development of city life and city state. Italy, the Italy of the kingdom, was about to become “indomitable and wild”. Political unity was moving away, the spontaneous creative activity of the Italian nation was reinvigorated and made fruitful, the feeling of a nation began to sparkle, as if one were beginning to become aware of the new reality. According to Rrrjewelry, the long struggle with Barbarossa and with the Germans had hastened its becoming and stimulated it, especially thanks to the major cities, those which felt the greatest contrast between their political interest and the policy of the German kings. It forms and spreads, building on what had already begun to be built in the century. XI, the sense of unity that is no longer just a reflection of the Roman one, but more truly intrinsic and proper, deriving from a certain commonality of events, from the similarity of life and customs, from the determination of the inhabited territory, from the solidarity of interests now that a grave threat looms. There was a real cooperation of Sicilians, of popes, of cities, around a great non-particular or municipal problem. Between the municipalities, a real constitutional bond was forged. The Lombard league, with its college of rectors formed by the consuls or podestà of the connected municipalities, deliberating however as rectors of the league, collegially, and not as consuls or podestà of the respective cities, represented a federal body that limited the autonomy of the individual members and dictated his own law, superior to the special laws of the city: a fact that will be repeated a few years later in Tuscany, with the league of San Genesio, captained by Florence, like the other by Milan, and revolted against Henry VI and, even more, against the great feudatories of his partisans. A public opinion was formed which condemned the side of Italians with an enemy who came from outside and who appeared adverse to all the Italian people ‘and those wars between cities heard and denounced almost civil wars. The Roman curia spoke the language of the associates of Lombardy and Tuscany: a sign of the times and of the environment in which the curia acted and from which it drew food of various kinds for its own purposes, if it, seeking the solidarity of others forces around him, he spoke of the “profit and honor of Italy”, of the “common good of the Holy See and of Italy”. All this explains how and why the history of the decades that culminated in the Lombard league, in the victory of Legnano and in the Treaty of Constance, was given by the Italians of the century. XIX raised to the honor of national history, history of precursors. Insufficient interpretation: but not to be rejected as a whole. Legnano and Costanza well enter the ideal orbit of the Italian nation.
However, 1177 and 1183, that is, the Venice truce and the Peace of Constance did not at all mark the end of the action of the German kings and emperors in Italy. There were always many interests in supporting the emperor, cities, jurists and law schools headed by Bologna, feudatars who by now, after alienating themselves from the empire due to his episcopal policy, had come close to him and expected from him salvation against the city. In the Piedmont region, in Tuscany and in central Italy, where the participation in the struggle against him had not been great, Barbarossa was able to send and hold vicars and officials, to begin organizing a kind of bureaucracy that was not so much a royal as an imperial one. The same cities of the Lombard league, with Milan at the head, disarmed a little. Finally William II of Sicily, all engaged in his North African and Eastern expeditions, aiming at a crusade, he too was led to a policy of understanding with the Western Emperor. Thus there was in Milan, ten years after Legnano, the engagement of Costanza, daughter of Ruggiero II, with Enrico, son of Barbarossa. The latter was also crowned king of Italy by the patriarch of Aquileia, one of the great props of the German kingdom in Italy, to be used, possibly, also against the pope, given his power and his vast metropolitan dominion. How it was this time. Since Urban III, already on bad terms with Frederick, also due to his action in central Italy, got even more excited about this marriage which created the possibility of the union of the two crowns. Indeed, a new war came. Henry entered the state of the Church.
