The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century | Page 5

can be learned and much truth
inferred from the evidence of a name. But this is a species of evidence

we can never be too cautious in using, as the temptation is always to
infer too much rather than too little.
In the following pages I will try to sift the evidence obtainable, with the
impartiality of one trammeled by the support of no particular theory;
always bearing in mind, however, one fact, all-important in a study
where so much depends on nomenclature, namely, to give that shade of
meaning and that amount of weight to any term which it possessed in
the age in which it was used, carefully distinguishing this from its use
in any earlier or later age. The importance of this caution will be soon
seen when we come to discuss the origin of corporate life in the
communes, where many have been misled by attaching to the words
respublica and _civitas_, for example, so continually recurring in the
old laws and charters, a meaning which was entirely foreign to the
terms at the period of their use. With this warning, we will turn to a
consideration of the first effects of the inroad of the northern barbarians
on the cities, whose exhausted and defenseless state has already been
pointed out.
One of the chief characteristics of the Teutonic tribes which overran
Italy during the fifth and sixth centuries, was an innate hatred of cities,
of enclosing walls and crowded habitations. Children of the field and
the forest, they had their village communities and their hundreds, their
common land and their allotted land, but these were small restrictions
on their free life, and left an extended "air-space" for each individual
and his immediate household. Homestead was not too near homestead,
each man being separated from his neighbor by the extent of half the
land belonging to each. The centralization of population in city life was
a thing undreamed of, and an idea abhorred, alike for its novelty and for
the violence it did to the as yet untrained instincts of the people. The
strong, independent individualism of the Teutonic freeman rebelled
against anything which would in any way limit his freedom of action:
"ne pati quidem inter se junctas sedes," says Tacitus.[3] An
agriculturist in his rude way, he lived on the land which supported him
and his family, and feeling no further need, his untrained intelligence
could form no conception of the necessities and the advantages of the
social union and interdependence of a more civilized state of society;

nor could he comprehend the mutual relations of the individual to the
immediate community in which he lived.
He could understand his own relation to and dependence on the state as
a whole; alone he could not repel the attacks of neighboring tribes,
alone he could not go forth to conquer new lands or increase the
number of his herds. But why he should associate with others and so
limit the freedom which was his birthright, for other purposes than
those of attack and defense, of electing a leader for war, or getting his
allotment of land in peace, was altogether beyond the horizon of his
comprehension. He was sufficient unto himself for all the purposes of
his daily life; to the product of his own plough and hunting-spear he
looked for the maintenance of himself and his family, and the loose
organization which we may call the state existed simply so as to enable
him to live in comparative peace, or gain advantage in war--perhaps the
first example of the new power in state-craft which was to revolutionize
the political principles of the world; the individual lived no longer
simply to support the state, but the state existed solely to protect and
aid the individual.
If all this be true of the Teutonic nations in general, in the earlier stages
of their development, particularly true is it of the Lombards,[4] a wild
tribe of the Suevic stock, whose few appearances in history, previous to
their invasion of Italy, are connected only with the fiercest strife and
the rudest forms of barbarism. History seems to have proved that
tradition has maligned the Vandal; the Goth can boast a ruler raised at
the centre of Eastern civilization and refinement; but the Lombard of
the invasion can never appear as other than the rude barbarian rushing
from his wild northern home, and forcing on a defenseless people the
laws and the customs suited to his own rugged nature and the unformed
state of society in which he lived.
Such being the case, there is little cause for wonder that the invading
Lombard directed his fury with particular violence against the corporate
towns, whose strength was not sufficient to resist the attacks of his
invading host. Like all other Teutonic tribes