Take e. g. the realm of the Franks. The victorious Salians had not only come into possession of the extensive Roman state dominions, but also of all the large tracts that had not been assigned to the more or less small mark communities, especially of all large forest tracts. The first thing which the king of the Franks, now a real monarch, did was to change this national property into royal property, to steal it from the people and to donate or give it in lien to his retainers. This retinue, originally composed of his personal war followers and of the subcommanders of the army, was increased by Romans, i. e., romanized Gauls who quickly became invaluable to the king through their knowledge of writing, their education and their familiarity with the language and laws of the country, and with the language of Latin literature. But slaves, serfs and freed slaves also became his courtiers. From among all these he chose his favorites. At first they received donations of public land, and later on these benefits were generally conferred for the lifetime of the king. The foundation of a new nobility was thus laid at the expense of the people. But this was not all. The wide expanse of the empire could not be governed by means of the old gentile constitution. The council of chiefs, if it had not become obsolete long ago, could not have held any more meetings. It was soon displaced by the standing retinue of the king. A pretense at the old public meeting was still kept up, but it also was more and more limited to the meeting of the subcommanders of the army and the rising nobles. Just as formerly, the Roman farmers during the last period of the republic, so now the free land-owning peasants, the mass of the Frank people, were exhausted and reduced to penury by continual civil feuds and wars of conquest. They who once had formed the whole army and, after the conquest of France, its picked body, were so impoverished at the end of the ninth century that hardly more than every fifth man could go to war. The former army of free peasants, convoked directly by the king, was replaced by an army composed of dependents of the new nobles. Among these servants were also villeins, the descendants of the peasants who had acknowledged no master but the king and a little earlier not even a king. Under Charlemagne's successors the ruin of the Frank peasantry was aggravated by internal wars, weakness of the royal power and corresponding overbearance of the nobles. The latter had received another addition to their ranks through the installation by Charlemagne of "Gau"[35] (district) counts who strove to make their offices hereditary. The invasions of the Normans completed the wreck of the peasantry. Fifty years after the death of Charlemagne, France lay as resistless at the feet of the Normans, as four hundred years previous the Roman empire had lain at the feet of the Franks.