 To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire".The ancestors of Napoleon descended from minor Italian nobility of Tuscan origin who had come to Corsica from Liguria in the 16th century.Napoleon boasted of his Italian heritage saying "I am of the race that founds empires", and he referred to himself as "more Italian or Tuscan than Corsican".