"
We cannot but notice one great effect brought about by traveling in
those days, especially by pilgrimages and by the Crusades formed in
defence of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and that is, that there arose on
all sides a desire for liberty and the growth of a spirit of nationality
that worked to the destruction of absolute government. The power of the
common people began to assert itself. In 1215, England forced from John
Lackland the Magna Charta, the foundation of all the liberty of English
speaking people even in modern times. The very year in which Dante was
born, representatives of the townspeople were admitted as members of the
English Parliament. In France, during the thirteenth century, the
centralization of power in the hands of the kings went forward with the
gradual diminution of the influence of the nobility--a fact operating to
the people's advantage.
In 1222 the nobles forced Andrew II of Hungary to issue the Golden Bull,
the instrument which Blackstone later declared turned "anarchy into
law." In Germany and Sicily Frederick II published laws giving a larger
measure of popular freedom. In Italy, the existence of the city
republics--especially those of Florence, Sienna, Pisa--showed how
successfully the ferment of liberty had penetrated the mass of the
body-politic.
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