And portance in my travel's history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle;
Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak."[5]
These Lombards told of the prosperity of their cities and the liberties they enjoyed, narrations that sounded like fairy tales in the ears of the Northmen. And when the Crusades broke out, and many of them saw with their own eyes the glories of the southern cities, when German merchants who had followed in the train of the emperor's Roman campaign returned, confirming all they had heard from the Italians about commercial liberties and privileges, their determination not to be left behind was strengthened.
Freiburg (Free City) was the first town founded as the outcome of the new liberty, an enlightened prince lending his help and means to that end.
Further individual aid was given to the new idea of personal liberty for all conditions of men by an apostle of freedom, Arnold of Brescia. This eloquent pupil of the French monk Abelard, the enlightened philosopher, the lover of Heloïse, himself a priest, was the most powerful opponent of the clerical ideas in the twelfth century, which tried to keep down the people in order that through their ignorance and dependence they might be ruled with absolute and unquestioned sway—ideas by no means wholly extinct to this day among this class of men. Banished by the Pope as a political and ecclesiastical heretic, Arnold fled to Southern Germany, where he preached his doctrines to eager ears, and roused an enthusiasm that laid the train for a later Church reformation, and helped towards the development of a new social state. He awakened or fostered the thought of personal liberty, a liberty not only consistent with corporate union, but part and parcel of the same; a condition alone worthy a rational human being, who, while doing whatever pleases him best, never loses sight of the fact that he has only a right to follow this desire so long as his liberty does not trench upon that of his neighbour and brother man.
