From the sixth to the fourteenth century the science of government, as laid down by Justinian, was illustrated by the labors and comments of numerous celebrated jurisconsults. The Byzantine legislation yielded on two essential points to the influence of Christianity. The institution of marriage, which in the Code and Pandects was only directed by motives of policy, assumed, in 911, a legal religious character; and domestic slavery disappeared gradually, to be replaced by serfdom. A charter was even granted to the serfs by the emperor Emanuel Comnenus in 1143. Irnerius, at the beginning of the twelfth century, opened the first law-school in his native city, Bologna, and thenceforth that science absorbed republican intellects, and led to a clearer defining of civil rights. A passion for this study possessed even the gentler sex; as in the case of Novella Andrea da Bologna, who was competent to fill the professor's chair, during her father's absence, and delivered eloquent lectures on arid law. Sybil-like, she took care to screen her lovely face behind a curtain, "lest her beauty should turn those giddy young heads she was appointed to edify and enlighten." Modeled after this pattern, law-schools spread widely, and the study of the Lombard and Tuscan municipal constitutions eventually roused the European communities to break the bonds of feudalism. The principle of personal and political freedom so indelibly rooted in each individual consciousness respecting the equal rights of the whole human race, is by no means the discovery of recent times. At the darkest hour of the middle period of history this idea of "humanity" in no mean degree existed and began to act slowly but continuously in realizing a vast brotherhood in the midst of our race, a unit impelled by the purpose of attaining one particular object, namely, the free development of all the latent powers of man, and the full enjoyment of all his rights.