The Communes of Lombardy from the VI. to the X. Century / An Investigation of the Causes Which Led to the Development of Municipal Unity Among the Lombard Communes.

The study traces how the Lombard conquest of northern Italy led to durable rural and urban institutions, arguing that invading warriors settled as landholders, retained military character, redistributed land to soldiers, used existing cultivators as tributary tenants paying a share of produce, and thereby initiated social arrangements that evolved into feudal milites and dukes. It analyzes effects on existing towns and the slow, often unrecorded emergence of municipal unity, notes the scarcity and bias of sources, and reconstructs municipal offices, fiscal arrangements centered on the royal curtis and its officers, and legal references in codes to explain the gradual growth of communal autonomy.