and most unreasonable _bourgeoisie_ which ever assumed organized
life,--the nobles were curtailed of all their privileges. Their city
castles, too, were shorn of their towers, which were limited to just
so many ells, cloth measure, by the haughty shopkeepers who had
displaced the grandees. The first third of the thirteenth century--the
epoch of the memorable Buondelmonti street fight which lasted thirty
years--was the period in which this dreadful architecture was fixed
upon Florence. Then was the time in which the chains, fastened in
those huge rings which still dangle from the grim house-fronts, were
stretched across the street; thus enclosing and fettering a compact
mass of combatants in an iron embrace, while from the rare and narrow
murder-windows in the walls, and from the beetling roofs, descended
the hail of iron and stone and scalding pitch and red-hot coals to
refresh the struggling throng below.

After this epoch, and with the expiration of the imperial house of the
Hohenstaufen, the nobles here, as in Switzerland, sought to popularize
themselves, to become municipal.


Der Adel steigt von seinen alten Burgen,
Und schwört den Städten seinen Bürger-Eid,


said the prophetic old Attinghausen, in his dying moments. The change
was even more extraordinary in Florence. The expulsion of some of the
patrician families was absolute. Others were allowed to participate
with the plebeians in the struggle for civic honors, and for the
wealth earned in commerce, manufactures, and handicraft. It became a
severe and not uncommon punishment to degrade offending individuals or