We have seen the brilliant side of feudalism; we have now to speak of the state in which the inhabitants of the cities and the country groaned. Most of the villages and cities depended upon some baron, whose protection they purchased, and who exercised an arbitrary jurisdiction over them. Man, reduced to servitude, or rather slavery, had no law which guarded him against oppression; the produce of labour, the wages of his sweat, did not belong to him; he was himself a property which could be claimed anywhere, if he fled away from his home. Chained to the glebe, he must often have envied the animal who helped him to trace the furrow, or the palfrey, the noble companion of his master. The serf had no other hope but that which religion afforded him, and left nothing to his children but the example of his patience in suffering. He could neither make a contract during his lifetime, nor a testament at the hour of death. His last will was not recognised by law; it died with him. To excuse the barbarity of this gross age, we must remember the still more frightful fate of slaves among the Greeks and Romans. We have no need to point out the obstacles this state of things must have opposed to the development of the industry and the social faculties of man. Thus the country was covered with forests, and most of the cities presented nothing but an aspect of poverty and misery. The cities of Lombardy, and a great part of Italy, were the first places that shook off the yoke of feudalism. The emperors of Germany, as we have seen, were almost always at variance with the popes. The cities took advantage of these quarrels, to arrogate rights which no one disputed. Others purchased them of the emperors, who believed they made a good bargain when they sold that which they had not the power to refuse. Towards the middle of the eleventh century, the clergy and nobility had already no more influence in the cities of Italy. According to the evidence of Otho of Freisengen, a contemporary author, Italy was full of free cities, all of which had obliged their bishops to reside within their walls; there was scarcely a noble who was not subject to the laws and government of a city. In Germany the cities obtained their freedom at a later period. These Germans, who, according to Tacitus, considered dwelling in cities as a mark of servitude, not only in the end built cities, but sought liberty in them. The cities of the Rhine appear to have been made free by the emperors in the eleventh century. But most of these cities were poor, they contained but few inhabitants, and were not able to defend themselves against the German oligarchy. At the commencement of the fourteenth century, several free cities, enriched by the commerce of the East, and by the communications opened by the crusades, formed a confederation, and by that means made their independence respected.