From Sarzana, a Bonaparte emigrates to Corsica, where he establishes himself and lives after 1529. The following year Florence is taken and subjugated for good. Henceforth, in Tuscany, under Alexander de Medici, then under Cosmo I. and his successors, in all Italy under Spanish rule, municipal independence, private feuds, the great exploits of political adventures and successful usurpations, the system of ephemeral principalities, based on force and fraud, all give way to permanent repression, monarchical discipline, external order, and a certain species of public tranquility. Thus, just at the time when the energy and ambition, the vigorous and free sap of the Middle Ages begins to run down and then dry up in the shriveled trunk,[1108] a small detached branch takes root in an island, not less Italian but almost barbarous, amidst institutions, customs, and passions belonging to the primitive medieval epoch,[1109] and in a social atmosphere sufficiently rude for the maintenance of all its vigor and harshness.--Grafted, moreover, by frequent marriages, on the wild stock of the island, Napoleon, on the maternal side, through his grandmother and mother, is wholly indigenous. His grandmother, a Pietra-Santa, belonged to Sarténe,[1110] a Corsican canton par excellence where, in 1800, hereditary vendettas still maintained the system of the eleventh century; where the permanent strife of inimical families was suspended only by truces; where, in many villages, nobody stirred out of doors except in armed bodies, and where the houses were crenellated like fortresses. His mother, Laetitia Ramolini, from whom, in character and in will, he derived much more than from his father,[1111] is a primitive soul on which Civilization has taken no hold. She is simple, all of a piece, unsuited to the refinements, charms, and graces of a worldly life; indifferent to comforts, without literary culture, as parsimonious as any peasant woman, but as energetic as the leader of a band. She is powerful, physically and spiritually, accustomed to danger, ready in desperate resolutions. She is, in short, a "rural Cornelia," who conceived and gave birth to her son amidst the risks of battle and of defeat, in the thickest of the French invasion, amidst mountain rides on horseback, nocturnal surprises, and volleys of musketry.[1112] "Losses, privations, and fatigue," says Napoleon, "she endured all and braved all. Hers was a man's head on a woman's shoulders." Thus fashioned and brought into the world, he felt that, from first to the last, he was of his people and country.