It was when the practice of war grew more and more systematic under Frederick II, and the policy of cities became more and more capricious for or against the Emperor, that their mutual animosities became more commonly savage. Thus we read that in 1250 "the Parmesans were overthrown by the Cremonese, losing 3,000 men. The captives were bound in the gravel-pit near the Taro ... the whole population seemed to have been captured. The Cremonese tortured them shamefully, drawing their teeth and ramming toads into their mouths. The exiles from Parma were more cruel to their countrymen than the Cremonese were."[563] And, indeed, the Parmesans a century before had burned Borgo San Donnino and led away all its inhabitants as prisoners.[564] Now the Cremonese threw into prison 1,575 of their Parmesan enemies; and when after a year the dungeons were thrown open, only 318 remained alive.[565] Thus civilisation in effect went backwards on several lines at once, the spirit of internecine strife growing step by step with the economic process under which the community divided into rich and poor, as formerly into noble and plebeian. Up till the end of the thirteenth century, however, the growth of capital went on slowly,[566] and the division between rich and poor was not deep, the less so because thus far the middle and upper classes held by the sentiment of civic patriotism to the extent of being ready to spend freely for civic purposes, while they spent little on themselves as compared with the rich of a later period. So that, although the republics were from the first, in differing degrees, aristocratic rather than democratic--the _popolo_ being the body of upper-class and middle-class citizens with the franchise, not the mass of the population--and though the workers had later to struggle for their political privileges very much as did the plebs of ancient Rome, the economic conditions were for a considerable period healthy enough. A rapid expansion of upper-class wealth seems to have begun in the thirteenth century, in connection, apparently, with the new usury[567] and the new monopolist commerce connected with the Crusades; and it is from this time that the economic conditions so markedly alter as to infect the political unity and independence of the republics without substituting any ideal of a wider union.