POLITICAL IDEAS, IDEALS, INSTITUTIONS 13 contextvS1 wo have already observed that the effective local revival of a Late Roman absolutism in the Kingdom of Sicily, which did not avail in Frederick ll's lifetime to serve the King-Emperor as an instrument for making the same resuscitated absolutism likewise elfeetive on an oecu- menical scale, did stimulate a host of Late Medieval and Early Modern Western parochial diadochi and epigoni of the Stupor Mundi to honour his memory by taking his autocracy as their cnsamplc on the less am- bitious Siculo-Neapolitan geographical scale on which it hud achieved so brilliant a success. The earliest of these successful experiments in establishing counter- parts of a Byzantine Kingdom of Sicily in other provinces of Western Christendom were the work of despots who, in the course of the quarter of a millennium following Frederick's death in A.I). 1250, swept up the seventy or eighty self-governing city-states of Central and Northern Italy into not more than ten miniature empires that were, all of them, faithful reproductions of their Sicilian prototype in proving to be so many local graves of Medieval Italian civic liberties.2 This local Sicilian culture of an antediluvian weed which had thus been bedded out in Late Medieval North Italian nursery gardens3 was one of the principal Italian exports to the Transmarine and Transalpine parts of Western Christen- dom in the diffusion of the Late Medieval Italian sub-civilization at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and in this wider field the propagators of an inauspiciously resuscitated Late Hellenic autocracy did not have to reperfonn their North Italian instructors' arduous task of fencing in new political enclosures for the cultivation of the exotic plant of absolutism. Beyond the Alps and the Tyrrhene Sea the North Italian cuttings of a Late I lellenic poison-ivy that had been successfully recultivated in Sicily found ready-made garden-beds in the existing feudal kingdoms and principalities; and in another context4 we have scon how, under the impact of this imported autocracy, the medieval parliamentary liberties of the non-Italian parts of Western Christendom came within an ace of suilering the fate that had already overtaken the medieval civic liberties of Italy. Jn the ex-feudal Kingdom of Kngland alone the challenge presented to an indigenous medieval parliamentarism by the infiltration of an exotic, luilianate autocracy was successfully met by a marriage between parliamentary liberties and autocratic efficiency which bore fruit in the creation of a Late Modern Western form of parliamentary constitutional government. This was, however, merely a local exception to the general * In VII, vii. »m' *V, »v« 353, it, a. In Southern Italy these civic liberties* had been extin^uHieil ?»ome two hundred yuu's earlier hv Norman pupils of Jiyxmititte nviuarti of Uommt Ju-ninianN imd Diodetiam. The vivk liUerUe.?* of the once aelf-Kovern- the m*dtM ol' *v'-3»