It is this simple continuance of the old social organization which the barbarians elsewhere overthrew that explains the peculiar character of the Venetian patriciate. In all other countries of the West the new feudal aristocracy sprang from the Teutonic invaders. In Italy itself the nobles were descendants of Lombard conquerors, or of the barons who followed Emperor after Emperor across the Alps. Even when their names and characters had alike been moulded into Southern form, the "Seven Houses" of Pisa boasted of their descent from the seven barons of Emperor Otto. But the older genealogies of the senators whose names stood written in the Golden Book of Venice ran, truly or falsely, not to Teutonic but to Roman origins. The Participazii, the Dandoli, the Falieri, the Foscari, told of the flight of their Roman fathers before the barbarian sword from Pavia, Gaeta, Fano, Messina. Every quarter of Italy had given its exiles, but above all the coast round the head of the Gulf from Ravenna to Trieste. It was especially a flight and settlement of nobles. As soon as the barbaric hordes had swept away to the South the farmer or the peasant would creep back to his fields and his cabin and submit to the German master whom the conquest had left behind it. But the patrician had filled too great a place in the old social order to stoop easily to the new. He remained camped as before in his island-refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his fishermen, his dock-labourers. Throughout the long ages which followed, this original form of Venetian society remained unchanged. The populace of dependents never grew into a people. To the last fisherman and gondolier clung to the great houses of which they were the clients, as the fishers of Torcello had clung to the great nobles of Altinum. No difference of tradition or language or blood parted them. Tradition, on the contrary, bound them together. No democratic agitator could appeal from the present to the past, as Rienzi invoked the memories of the Tribunate against the feudal tyranny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and present were one. The patrician of Venice simply governed the State as his fathers, the curials of Padua or Aquileia, had governed the State ten centuries before him.