municipium, which we have learnt to consider as overthrown, from a constitutional standpoint as annihilated; but that the new principle introduced into state life by the northern conquerors of Italy, the principle of administration by county rather than by urban divisions, relegated the city to an inferior place as part of a rural holding, instead of leaving it the centre of a circle of rural dependencies.  Having demonstrated the absence of all constitutional recognition of the municipal unit as such, I have attempted to show how a condition of such legal insignificance became generally a condition of actual importance; how from a position of such negative interest, the advance of the city was commenced along a road which was ultimately to restore it its old pre-eminence, even adding to this in time the almost forgotten attribute of sovereignty.  The motives for this advance we have seen to be no higher ones than convenience and expediency, which made the urbs of every civitas the natural centre of its local administration, thereby in fact, if in no way by law, restoring to it some of the elements of individuality, if not of pre-eminence, which it had lost.  The means employed we have seen to be the functions of the various officers of state:  the dux, the count and the gastald, who connected the city with the state, and the scabinus and the bishop, who represented this connection to the consciousness of the people.  We have noted the marked effects produced on the development of a more popular feeling, by the changes introduced by the great emperor of the Franks; which, by diminishing the power of the local lords, accomplished a double benefit; on the one hand by saving the people from the arbitrary rule of a feudal superior; on the other, by causing the city to become more of a dependence and more of a support to the state as a whole.  And finally we have left the city prepared, on the return of another dynasty of native kings, to accept, at least in a large number of cases, the domination of another kind of lord, a spiritual one; who was to serve as a medium for breaking up the power of the old lords of the civitas, and from whom it would be an easier task for the commune of the future to wrest the power and the sovereignty which was to make it a free and independent autonomy.

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AUTHORITIES REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT AND FOOT-NOTES.

Anastasius Bibliothecarius:  Vitae Romanorum Pontificum. v. Muratori:  Script.  Rer.  Ital., Tom.  III., Pars I.

Baluzii, Stephanus:  Capitular.  Regum Francorum additae sunt Marculfi Monachi et aliorum formulae veteres.  Parisiis, 1780. 2 vols. fol.

Bethmann-Hollweg:  Schrift ueber den Ursprung der lombardischen Staedtefreiheit.

Bouquet, Martin:  Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, etc.  Paris, 1738-1855. 21 vols. fol.