The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century | Page 9

the
city was to prepare itself again to claim, and eventually, by the growth
of internal resources, to gain the lost function of sovereignty. The
condition of the people during this time we have seen to be wretched in
the extreme; the dismantled city but a bunch of comfortless dwellings;
its inhabitants but a semi-servile population, with a small admixture of

refugees of a better class; the city occupying but a subordinate place as
part of the rural holding within whose limits it stood; whatever of
wealth it contained an easy if not a legitimate prey to the turbulent
spirits, whose mutual contests kept the surrounding country in a
continual state of disturbance. The only men of any influence in the
community we have seen to be the bishops, who, while steadily gaining
in rank and power, stood forth as defenders of the people. During all
this time, however, the new sap brought by the northern conquerors has
been slowly but steadily entering into and forming the constitution of
the people. The chaste and uncorrupted Northmen have by means of
legitimate intermarriage with the best of the enervated inhabitants of
the land, raised up an almost new race, who combine in their nature the
humanizing effects of the old civilization with the love of independence
and the temperate virtues of the northern conquerors, a race willing to
benefit by the experience of the past, and resolved to carve out for itself
a new and independent future.

PART II.
ELEMENTARY SOURCES OF MUNICIPAL UNITY IN LOMBARD
AND FRANKISH TIMES.
In the second part of this paper we have to consider a period of
development rather than one of transition, of growth rather than of
change. We have before us the task of tracing the advance from a
period of barbarism to one when the feudal system had obtained an
almost complete domination over the social system of Europe.
Considering the principles which lay at the base of the society of new
Europe, this system is a natural, indeed an unavoidable evolution from
the stage of barbarism and social disorganization. The confusion in all
social and economic relations consequent on the combination of the old
and the new elements in European life, had led to a state of
disintegration that could not continue. A new regulative force was
required which would at the same time have power sufficient to control
the various warring elements with which it had to deal and reduce them

to some sort of harmony, and yet which would not in its nature be in
opposition to the decentralizing spirit and the idea of individual
independence, which formed the most marked characteristic of the
dominant element of the new society. Feudalism sprang from the midst
of barbarism not by a sudden birth, but by a growth at once natural and
necessary: natural, because it was but a regulation by law of conditions
produced by the character of the people and their mode of life;
necessary, because the progress of civilization was carrying society
ahead of the stage of anarchy and barbarism in which the overthrow of
the old regime had left it.
The economic changes which were produced by the transition to the
new principles represented by the feudal system, are as great and in
their way as important as the political ones. When we say that
feudalism represents the transfer of the dominant power from a central
head to scattered members, from the capital to the castles, we speak of
it in its most prominent, its political character. But we must not forget
that this transfer also meant a great economic change in the
organization of society: that it meant a transfer of the seat of economic
importance from the city to the country; the spirit of the times requiring,
especially in the earlier stages of the development of the institution,
that the seat of wealth should follow the seat of power. I note this now
because we shall soon have occasion to consider how important a factor,
in the earliest period of the development of the cities, their entire lack
of prominence in both political and economic affairs was to prove itself.
Under the old Roman system, as we have seen, the city was the
important unit: Rome was a subduer and an upbuilder of cities. Under
the new Teutonic element the land is what is brought into prominence,
and the possessor of it into power. The dominant member of society is
the landowner and not the citizen. In ancient society the "citizen" need
own no land; in the modern society of the feudal age, the "gentleman"
could not be such without owning land.
This opposition between the citizen, the burgher, and the landowner,
the baron, leads us to a conclusion of the utmost importance to the
whole