The condition of society was no less desperate. During the last years of the republic, the Roman rulers had already contrived the pitiless exploitation of the conquered provinces. The emperors had not abolished, but organized this exploitation. The more the empire fell to pieces, the higher rose the taxes and tithes, and the more shamelessly did the officials rob and blackmail. Commerce and industry had never been a strong point of the domineering Romans. Only in usury they had excelled all other nations before and after them. What commerce had managed to exist, had been ruined by official extortion. Only in the East, in the Grecian part of the empire, some commerce still vegetated, but this is outside of the scope of our study. Universal reduction to poverty, decrease of traffic, of handicrafts, of art, of population, decay of the towns, return of agriculture to a lower stage--that had been the final result of Roman world supremacy. But now agriculture, the most prominent branch of production in the whole Old World, was again supreme, and more than ever. In Italy, the immense estates (latifundiae) that comprised nearly the whole country since the end of the republic, had been utilized in two ways: either as pastures on which the population had been replaced by sheep and oxen, the care of which required only a few slaves; or as country seats, on which masses of slaves carried on horticulture on a large scale, partly for the luxury of the owner, partly for sale on the markets of the towns. The great pastures had been preserved and even extended in certain parts. But the country seats and their horticulture had gone to ruin through the impoverishment of their owners and the decay of the towns. Latifundian economy based on slave labor was no longer profitable; but in its time it had been the only possible form of agriculture on a large scale. Now, however, small production had again become the only lucrative form. One country seat after the other was parceled and leased in small lots to hereditary tenants who paid a fixed rent, or to partiarii, more administrators than tenants who received one-sixth or even only one-ninth of a year's product in remuneration for their work. But these little lots were principally disposed of to colonists who paid a fixed sum annually and could be transferred by sale together with their lots. Although no slaves, still these colonists were not free; they could not marry free citizens, and marriages with members of their own class were not regarded as valid, but as mere concubinages like those of the slaves. The colonists were the prototypes of the medieval serfs.