It is this unity of Venetian society which makes Venetian history so unlike the history of other Italian towns, and to which Venice owes the peculiar picturesqueness and brightness which charms us still in its decay. Elsewhere the history of mediæval Italy sprang from the difference of race and tradition between conquered and conquerors, between Lombard noble and Italian serf. The communal revolt of the twelfth century, the democratic constitutions of Milan or of Bologna, were in effect a rising of race against race, the awakening of a new people in the effort to throw off the yoke of the stranger. The huge embattled piles which flung their dark shadows over the streets of Florence tell of the ceaseless war between baronage and people. The famous penalty by which some of the democratic communes condemned a recreant cobbler or tinker to "descend" as his worst punishment "into the order of the _noblesse_," tells of the hate and issue of the struggle between them. But no trace of struggle or of hate breaks the annals of Venice. There is no people, no democratic Broletto, no Hall of the Commune. And as there was no "people," so in the mediæval sense of the word there was no "baronage." The nobles of Venice were not Lombard barons but Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions or by the strong instinct of personal independence which created feudalism. The shadow of the Empire is always over them, they look for greatness not to independent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in the government of the State. Their instinct is administrative, they shrink from disorder as from a barbaric thing, they are citizens, and nobles only because they are citizens. Of this political attitude of its patricians Venice is itself the type. The palaces of Torcello or Rialto were houses, not of war, but of peace; no dark masses of tower and wall, but bright with marbles and frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted masonry.