Manumissions were promoted, in various ways, by the civil and clerical authorities. Many free yeomen were created from manumitted slaves, as well as from poor vassals or followers. But such were soon impoverished by wars and devastations, and were, from various causes, reduced to the condition of _liti_ and chattels. Serfdom and slavery were generally more severe in the northern portion of Germany, as Saxony, etc., than in the southern; but in both, the peasantry were crushed, oppressed, and, when it was feasible, enslaved. When Lothair I., grandson of Charlemagne, revolted against his father, Louis the Pious, he appealed for help to the oppressed peasantry, tenants, and chattels. The centuries of the _faustrecht_--"right of the fist," that is of the sword, of brute force--soon succeeding all over Germany to Charlemagne's orderly rule, the strongholds of dynasts, barons, nobles and robbers, shot out everywhere like mushrooms; and from them radiated oppressions and exactions of every kind. The ancient practice of ruining the poor freemen and tenants, then transforming them into serfs, and then the serfs into chattels, went on as of old. In proportion as the forests were cleared, however, the baron found he could not profitably work the extensive estates with schalks alone, and that it would be more economical to transform these chattels into serfs, tenants, etc., and establish them on small parcels of his property. This was the first feeble sign of amelioration. Villages formed in this way by dynasts, or princes, and by barons, then received some rudiments of communal, rural organization. A more powerful engine of emancipation, however, were the cities. In the course of the tenth century, dynasts, princes and emperors began everywhere to found cities, endowing them with various franchises and privileges. The legitimate flow of events, the necessities created by a settled organic existence which could only be supplied by the regular movements of industry and commerce, together with the influence of Gaul, and above all, of Italy, stimulated the German rulers. To the emperor Henry I., of the house of Saxony, belongs the glory of having given the first impulse to commerce, and thus the first blow to chattelhood and serfdom. The population of the newly-founded cities consisted of inferior people of all kinds--laborers, operatives, small traders, poor freemen, and persons manumitted on condition of residing in the cities--the founders of the cities originally peopling them with their own retainers and with vagabonds of all kinds. Of course no nobles even of the lowest kind became burghers, and thus the first municipal patricians were of very inferior birth. Thus antagonism to barons and feudal nobles generally formed the very cornerstone of the cities.