What I have already stated upon the history of the boroughs, and the manner in which they were formed, will be recollected. Their establishment was more precocious and powerful in Italy than anywhere else; the towns there were much more numerous and wealthy than in Gaul, Britain, or Spain, and the Roman municipal system had remained there in greater force and regularity. {174} The districts of Italy, besides, were much less suited for the habitation of its new masters than those of the rest of Europe. They had been all cleared, drained, and cultivated, and were no longer covered by forests, so that the barbarians were unable to follow the exciting hazards of the chase, or to lead a life at all analogous to that of their old Germany. Furthermore, a part of that territory did not belong to them. The south of Italy, the Campagna di Romagna, and Ravenna, continued to depend upon the Greek emperors. In this portion of the country the republican system very early gained strength and development, favoured as it was by the distance of the sovereign, and by the vicissitudes of almost constant war. But in addition to the circumstance of Italy not being wholly in the power of the barbarians, those hordes that overran it never remained its undisturbed and definitive possessors. The Ostrogoths were hunted down and destroyed by Belisarius and Narses. The Lombards had little better success with regard to their kingdom: the Franks destroyed it; and at the period of their overthrow, Pepin and Charlemagne judged it expedient, instead of exterminating the Lombard population, to form an alliance with the old Italian population to keep down the recently-subdued Lombards. Therefore the barbarians never were exclusive and tranquil masters of the territory and society of Italy, as they were elsewhere. For this reason, only a very feeble, thin, and scattered feudalism was established beyond the Alps. The preponderance, instead of passing to the inhabitants of the country districts, as had happened in Gaul, for example, continued to adhere to the towns. When this fact unequivocally declared itself, a considerable proportion of the fief-holders, either of their own accord, or impelled by necessity, forsook the country, and settled within the walls of the cities. The barbarian nobles then became burghers. It may be easily imagined how great was the strength and superiority which the towns of Italy gained by this single circumstance, in comparison with the other boroughs in Europe. What was chiefly remarkable in the latter, as has been observed, was the inferior condition and the timidity of their inhabitants. Those burghers, we have seen, were like desperate freedmen, courageously but painfully struggling against a master always at their gates. Very different was the lot of the Italian burghers; the conquering and the conquered populations were mingled together within the same walls; they had no neighbouring master to defend themselves against; and the