In these times, and up till the beginning of the eleventh century, a fierce and turbulent nobility had been forming in Corsica, as in Italy--the various families of which held sway throughout the island. This aristocracy was only in a very limited degree of native origin. Italian magnates who had fled from the barbarians, Longobard, Gothic, Greek or Frankish vassals, soldiers who had earned for themselves land and feudal title by their exertions in the wars against the Moors, gradually founded houses and hereditary seigniories. The Corsican chronicler makes all the seigniors spring from the Roman knight Hugo Colonna and his companions. He makes him Count of Corsica, and traces to his son Cinarco the origin of the most celebrated family of the old Corsican nobility, the Cinarchesi; to another son, Bianco, that of the Biancolacci; to Pino, a son of Savelli's, the Pinaschi; and in the same way we have Amondaschi, Rollandini, descendants of Ganelon and others. In later times various families emerged into distinction from this confusion of petty tyrants, the Gentili, and Signori da Mare on Cape Corso; beyond the mountains, the seigniors of Leca, of Istria, and Rocca, and those of Ornans and of Bozio. CHAPTER V. FEUDALISM IN CORSICA--THE LEGISLATOR SAMBUCUCCIO. For a long period the history of the Corsicans presents nothing but a bloody picture of the tyranny of the barons over the lower orders, and the quarrels of these nobles with each other. The coasts became desolate, the old cities of Aleria and Mariana were gradually forsaken; the inhabitants of the maritime districts fled from the Saracens higher up into the hills, where they built villages, strengthened by nature and art so as to resist the corsairs and the barons. In few countries can the feudal nobility have been so fierce and cruel as in Corsica. In the midst of a half barbarous and quite poor population, Nature around them savage as themselves, unchecked by any counterpoise of social morality or activity, unbridled by the Church, cut off from the world and civilizing intercourse--let the reader imagine these nobles lording it in their rocky fastnesses, and, giving the rein to their restless and unsettled natures in sensuality and violence. In other countries all that was humanizing, submissive to law, positive and not destructive in tendency, collected itself in the cities, organized itself into guilds and corporate bodies, and uniting in a civic league, made head against the aristocracy. But it was extremely difficult to accomplish anything like this in Corsica, where trade and manufactures were unknown, where there were neither cities nor a commercial middle-class. All the more note-worthy is the phenomenon, that a nation of rude peasants should, in a manner reminding us of patriarchal times, have succeeded in forming itself into a democracy of a marked and distinctive character.