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 the Lombards were entirely unskilled in the art of attacking fortified towns; hence the only mode of siege with which they were acquainted was that of starving out the inhabitants, by cutting off all source of supply by ravaging 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.