But other Roman institutions remained even in the Lombard cities, in respect of the organisation of trades and commerce;[515] and apart from the Roman survivals at Ravenna,[516] the free cities of the coast, which had remained nominally attached to Byzantium, had _their_ elective institutions, not specially democratic, but sufficiently "free" to incite the Lombard towns to similar procedure.[517] Venice in particular was moulded from the first by Byzantine influences. "Industry, commerce, economic methods, and financial institutions were affected as much as manners, the arts, and even religious life. Greek was the language of eastern trade, and served many Venetians as a second tongue."[518] Venice and Genoa alike developed a national police on Byzantine lines, prescribing the shape, construction, and manning of vessels[519] in the very spirit of late imperial Rome. And the cities of the peninsula could not but be similarly influenced. At all events it was in the train of these earlier developments, and perhaps in some degree on stimulus from papal Rome, that the new organic life of the Lombard and Tuscan cities began to develop itself in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The first seats of new commerce were in those cities to which, as we have seen, numbers of the old Italian population had fled before the Gothic invaders. Amalfi was such a seat even in the ninth century; and to its merchants is credited the first traffic with the East in the Saracen period, as well as the first employment of the mariner's compass in navigation.[520] Next flourished Pisa, where also, perhaps, the ancient commerce had never wholly died out;[521] then her successful rivals, Genoa and Venice. And always commerce formed the basis of the revival.