The slave-trade was now confined principally to non-baptized prisoners—whom the Christians of that epoch regarded as the progeny of the evil one. Mahomedans, heathen, Germans, as the Anglo-Saxons and others, from various nations and tribes, were more numerous in the slave marts than were those born on the soil of Italy.
Under the Longobards, Italy again began to be more commonly cultivated by numerous colons with very limited rights, but still in better condition than those of the preceding epoch; copyholders and freeholders also began to increase, as has been already mentioned. So that when the heavy clouds of the mediæval times began to break, the condition of Italy was slightly improving; and when Karl, or Charlemagne, put an end to the dominion of the Longobards, more land was under culture, and the free though tributary population was greater, both in the cities and the country, than on their first invasion.
The rule of the Franks, which succeeded that of the Longobards, did not impair the condition of the Italians. Peace was beneficial to labor, labor stimulated emancipation. Thus the number of chattels was more and more reduced, while the serfs, adscripti glebæ, increased. But the disorders which succeeded the dismembering of the empire of Charlemagne again ruined many free yeomen, ahrimans, and others owning small homesteads, and obliged them to submit to the oppression of the mighty nobles. Many of the dispossessed and impoverished, however, sought refuge in the cities, where industry flourished in proportion with the freedom of the workmen and operatives. Finally, about the eleventh century, the cities began to strike for their independence. This was the time of the revival of the communal franchises in other parts of Europe also; but the first spark was struck in Italy. Around the standard raised by the cities crowded the serfs, rural and domestic chattels, and all other kinds of bondmen and oppressed. This was, in fact, the insurrection of these against the landed barons, nobles, and oligarchs. All runaways found refuge and protection in the cities; and hence arose the energy, the strength, and the democratic rancor of the cities against the nobility and their strongholds.
In the second part of the mediæval epoch, throughout Italy and Western Europe, prisoners of war were no more sold as slaves, but were ransomed or exchanged. The Moors and Arabs (Mahomedans) were the sole marketable chattels.
All the Italian cities extended their dominion, acquired lands, incorporated baronies, and regulated the relations between the owners of the soil and the tenants. Domestic slavery was altogether extinct; the cities were animated by free labor in their arts, industries and handicrafts, and on the estates, the peasants, serfs and bondmen, adscripti glebæ, became vassals obliged to follow the barons or the cities into war; they became free tenants—first paying rent for their land in kind, and then paying in money; and the number of freeholders, and others holding homesteads, continually increased. Hunting for absconded serfs now had an end. The cities and boroughs emancipated all the villagers and serfs around them. In the course of the twelfth century, personally degrading servitude of every kind almost wholly disappeared; and the relations between the proprietor of land and the farmer were established on the basis which, with more or less modification, prevails to the present day.
In the ancient classical world, in Greece and Rome, domestic slavery had its seat in the cities, and therefrom expanded over the land, destroying the whole social structure. But now, the first shout for liberty came from the Italian cities; the cities first emancipated the laborers within their own walls, and then emancipated the rural serf. Cities again became the centres of civilization; they nursed its infancy, tended its first footsteps and gave it the free air of heaven: they trained it not amid clanking chains and groaning chattels.
Thus does history annihilate the ignorant fallacy about Saxons and Germans being the godfathers of social or political freedom.
Many evils and disorders undoubtedly remained and even yet remain; but the sum of all evils—property in man and in his toil—was utterly destroyed. Then came the brilliant epoch of the Italian Lombard cities—the culminating glory of Italian civilization—whose coruscating warmth set free the whole of Western Europe.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Romans as citizens of the empire and not of the city of Rome.