Sismondi (_Républiques_, i, 55, 402-5; _Fall_, i, 242) uses the conventional phrase as to the Longobards reviving the spirit of freedom, while actually showing its fallacy. In his _Short History of the Italian Republics_ (p. 13), he tells in the same breath that the invaders "introduced" several of their sentiments, "particularly the habit of independence and resistance to authority," and that in their conquests they considered the inhabitants "their property equally with the land." Dunham (_Europe in the Middle Ages_, 1835, i, 8) similarly speaks of the Longobards as "infusing a new spirit" into the "slavish minds of the Italians," and then proceeds (p. 9) to show that what happened was a flight of Italians from Longobard tyranny. He admits further (p. 17) that the Longobard code of laws was "less favourable to social happiness than almost any other, the Visigothic, perhaps, alone excepted"; and (p. 19) that the Longobards, wherever they could, "destroyed the [free] municipal institutions by subjecting the cities to the jurisdiction of the great military feudatories, the true and only tyrants of the country." Gibbon decides that the Longobards possessed freedom to elect their sovereign, and sense to decline the frequent use of that dangerous privilege (ch. 45, Bohn ed. v, 125); but pronounces their government milder and better than that of the other new barbarian kingdoms (p. 127). Sismondi again (_Fall_, i, 259; so also Boulting in his recast of the _Républiques_, p. 8) declares that their laws, for a barbarian people, were "wise and equal." The midway truth seems to be that the dukes or provincial rulers came to feel some identity of interest with their subjects. Later jurists called their laws _asininum jus, quoddam jus quod faciebant reges per se_ (Symonds, _Renaissance in Italy_, 2nd ed. i, 45). Prof. Butler, in his generally excellent history of _The Lombard Communes_, is unduly receptive of the old formula that "the _infusion of Teutonic blood_ had given new life to the Peninsula" (p. 37; also p. 38). His own narrative conflicts with the assertion; for he writes that the long isolation of such cities as Cremona in the midst of Teuton enemies "must have led to a rekindling of military and municipal spirit and the power of initiative" (p. 35). He notes, too, that the building up of a new and active "aristocracy" in the cities from plebeian elements was hateful to the Teuton, as represented by Otto of Freisingen in the time of Barbarossa (p. 48). And what had the Teutons to do with the making of Venice? And what of the similar movement in Spain, Africa, Illyria, and Gaul?