[Illustration: Fig. 34.--View of St. Mark's Place, Venice, Sixteenth
Century, after Cesare Vecellio.]
The eleventh century, during which feudal power rose to its height, was
also the period when a reaction set in of the townspeople against the
nobility. The spirit of the city revived with that of the bourgeois (a
name derived from the Teutonic word _burg_, habitation) and infused a
feeling of opposition to the system which followed the conquest of the
Teutons. "But," says M. Henri Martin, "what reappeared was not the Roman
municipality of the Empire, stained by servitude, although surrounded with
glittering pomp and gorgeous arts, but it was something coarse and almost
semi-barbarous in form, though strong and generous at core, and which, as
far as the difference of the times would allow, rather reminds us of the
small republics which existed previous to the Roman Empire."
|