All the Italian cities extended their dominion, acquired lands, incorporated baronies, and regulated the relations between the owners of the soil and the tenants. Domestic slavery was altogether extinct; the cities were animated by free labor in their arts, industries and handicrafts, and on the estates, the peasants, serfs and bondmen, _adscripti glebæ_, became vassals obliged to follow the barons or the cities into war; they became free tenants--first paying rent for their land in kind, and then paying in money; and the number of freeholders, and others holding homesteads, continually increased. Hunting for absconded serfs now had an end. The cities and boroughs emancipated all the villagers and serfs around them. In the course of the twelfth century, personally degrading servitude of every kind almost wholly disappeared; and the relations between the proprietor of land and the farmer were established on the basis which, with more or less modification, prevails to the present day. In the ancient classical world, in Greece and Rome, domestic slavery had its seat in the cities, and therefrom expanded over the land, destroying the whole social structure. But now, the first shout for liberty came from the Italian cities; the cities first emancipated the laborers within their own walls, and then emancipated the rural serf. Cities again became the centres of civilization; they nursed its infancy, tended its first footsteps and gave it the free air of heaven: they trained it not amid clanking chains and groaning chattels. Thus does history annihilate the ignorant fallacy about Saxons and Germans being the godfathers of social or political freedom. Many evils and disorders undoubtedly remained and even yet remain; but the sum of all evils--property in man and in his toil--was utterly destroyed. Then came the brilliant epoch of the Italian Lombard cities--the culminating glory of Italian civilization--whose coruscating warmth set free the whole of Western Europe. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 18: Romans as citizens of the empire and not of the city of Rome.] XVIII. FRANKS--FRENCH. AUTHORITIES: _Augustin Thierry, Henry Martin, Bonnemère, etc._