They in some measure no longer had a country; their only security was in their own strength; for the emperor in resigning his power over the towns had not thought of giving an organisation to the nobles dispersed in castles. All the families of Italian dukes, and almost all those of marquises and counts, had become extinct; those who remained had lost all jurisdiction over their inferiors; no feudal tenure was respected; no vassal appeared at the baronial court, to form the tribunal of his lord. The frontiers of the kingdom of Lombardy were called _marches_, after a German word adopted into almost all the European languages, and the commander of these frontiers was called marquis; but the families of the powerful Tuscan marquises were extinct, as well as those of the marquises of Ancona, of Fermo, of Camerino, of Ivrea, and of those of the Veronese and Trevisan marches. There remained, however, on these frontiers some families which bore the same title, and had preserved some wrecks of these ancient and powerful marquisates. The nobles were not united by the hierarchical connection of the feudal system, but by the affections or antipathies of the Guelfs or Ghibellines. In general, the most powerful families among the nobles, those who had castles sufficiently strong, lands sufficiently extensive, and vassals sufficiently numerous to defend themselves, listening only to the ambition of courts, were attached to the Ghibelline party. Those families, on the contrary, who possessed castles capable of but little resistance, situated on accessible eminences, or in plains; those whose castles were near great towns, and too weak to support a contest with them, had demanded to be made citizens of the towns; they had served them in the wars of the league of Lombardy; they had since taken a principal share in the government, and they thus found themselves attached by common interests to the party of the Guelfs. Independent nobles were no more to be found in all the plains of Lombardy; there was not one who had not become citizen of some republic; but every chain of mountain was thick-set with castles where a nobility, choosing obedience to an emperor rather than to citizens, maintained themselves independent; these too, attracted sometimes by the wealth and pleasures of towns, and sometimes desirous of obtaining influence in the counsels of powerful republics, in order to restore them to the emperor, demanded to be made citizens, when they thought it would open the way to a share in the government; and as war was their sole occupation, they were often gladly received by the republics, which stood in need of good captains.