Of this kind of "reflux" Vico mentions and examines only one instance: the period of European history which had in his own days for the first time been marked out definitely by historians and given the name (though Vico does not use it) of the "Middle Ages." That this was a period of decadence and barbarism was certainly not a new thought for consciousness: for, especially in the humanistic period, a general feeling of estrangement and repulsion had been felt towards these centuries of "middle and low Latinity" in which the treasures of the classical literatures were neglected and scattered, and humane studies either lost their vigour or disappeared completely. This consciousness, general on the part of cultivated Europe, was especially full and vivid in Italy; for that country could never forget that though for other peoples the Middle Ages had seen the rise of their fortunes, power and civilisation, for her they had meant the end of Rome's greatness, the humiliation of her name before the arrogant Vandal, Visigoth and Lombard, the devastation of rich cities, and the destruction of majestic monuments whose miserable wreckage could be seen on every hand. Machiavelli had opened his _Histories_ with a famous and striking picture of the general change which followed the fall of the Western Empire. But to pass in review the ruins or to collect the antiquities of the Middle Ages was not the way to penetrate into the spirit of the period, any more than to note a man's faults and the marks which distinguish him from another is the same thing as understanding the soul of either. Vico was the first to understand the soul of the Middle Ages, that is to say, the mental, social and cultural constitution of the period.