The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century | Page 6

and destroying the surrounding country. This fact, unimportant as it may seem at the first glance, materially affected the whole course of the later history of some of the Italian cities. By this means we are enabled, even at this early epoch, to divide them into two classes. First, those cities which, after a more or less short resistance, yielded to the rude tactics of the barbarians and were made subject by them, for example Milan and Pavia.[5] Second, those cities like Venice and Ravenna,[6] which, by means of a connection with the sea which the invaders could not cut off, were enabled to gain supplies by water, and so resist all efforts of the besieging host to capture them. They never fell completely under the Lombard yoke, and either retained a sort of partial autonomy or yielded allegiance to some other power. It is the cities of the former class that are the subject of this investigation.
The condition of these inland towns at the time of the invasion was, as we have seen, weak in the extreme. The defenses, where they existed, were of a character to afford little protection, and the bulk of the inhabitants were so enervated from a life of poverty and oppression that they were almost incapable of offering any resistance in their own defense. They were reduced to such a condition as to be only too grateful if their rough conquerors, after an easy victory, disdainfully spared their lives, and left them to occupy their dismantled dwellings.
This seems to have been the almost universal method of procedure. The Lombards did not in any sense, at first, think of occupying the conquered cities; for the reasons already given they despised, because they could not yet comprehend, the life of the civilian. They contented themselves with pulling down the walls, razing the fortifications, and destroying every mark which would make of the city anything but an aggregate of miserable dwellings. The inhabitants were for the most part spared, and left to enjoy, if the term can be used for such an existence, what the conquerors did not think worth the having. These felt the fruits of their victory to lie in the rich arable lands of the surrounding plains, and here they settled down, each in his own holding, portioned out by lot to every soldier; the town being considered but as a part of the civitas or district, if I may use the term, of the dux or overlord, from whom the several _milites_, or landholders of the surrounding territory, had their tenure, and who himself held directly from the king.
It is the very insignificance of the municipal unit at this time that makes it so difficult to determine anything accurate of its position. It existed, but little more can be said of it; indeed, even this statement might be questioned, if we make that term signify a corporate existence, as will be seen further on when we come to discuss the question of the unbroken corporate existence of the towns. In a feudal age, or in an age of incipient feudalism, obligation, either claimed from an inferior or yielded to a superior, is a good index of rank and importance. Until we find the cities fulfilling certain obligations required by a higher power, we can learn little to tell of their condition or of their internal history. On the other hand, when we find the time come for fulfilling certain obligations, we can safely argue that the cities have acquired certain functions which put them in a position to meet the obligations which their growing importance has caused to be exacted of them. To trace these steps accurately and satisfactorily is impossible, but by the aid of collateral evidence a rough idea of the epochs at least of their progress can be gained.
For this first period, then, we see the towns reduced to the lowest depths of wretchedness and disintegration; critically speaking hardly existing, but simply holding together. In studying institutions and tracing the course of their development, we must always remember that the uninterrupted continuance of their history may depend as much on the moral force of their existence as on the more limited and defined fact of their accurate and legal recognition by others. In every society a state of fact must in time become a state of law, as wise legislation is more the recognition by law of existing conditions than the formulating of new codes. So the towns, even at the period immediately succeeding their conquest by the Lombards, though their corporate existence cannot be claimed, nevertheless cannot be said in any measure to have ceased to exist; for as collections of individuals and of dwellings they were there, with an individuality uneffaced though as yet unrecognized.
It was a period