Fossombrone to Urbino; in 1461 Cervia was sold to Venice by the same
family. Franceschetto Cibo purchased the County of Anguillara. Towns at
last came to have their market value. It was known that Bologna was
worth 200,000 florins, Parma 60,000, Arezzo 40,000 Lucca 30,000, and so
forth. But personal qualities and nobility of blood might also produce
despots of the sixth class. Thus the Bentivogli claimed descent from a
bastard of King Enzo, son of Frederick II., who was for a long time an
honorable prisoner in Bologna. The Baglioni, after a protracted struggle
with the rival family of Oddi, owed their supremacy to ability and vigor
in the last years of the fifteenth century. But the neighborhood of the
Papal power, and their own internal dissensions, rendered the hold of
this family upon Perugia precarious. As in the case of the Medici and
the Bentivogli, many generations might elapse before such burgher
families assumed dynastic authority. But to this end they were always
advancing.

The history of the bourgeois despots proves that Italy in the fifteenth
century was undergoing a natural process of determination toward
tyranny. Sismondi may attempt to demonstrate that Italy was 'not
answerable for the crimes with which she was sullied by her tyrants.'
But the facts show that she was answerable for choosing despots instead
of remaining free, or rather that she instinctively obeyed a law of
social evolution by which princes had to be substituted for
municipalities at the end of those fierce internal conflicts and
exhausting wars of jealousy which closed the Middle Ages. Machiavelli,
with all his love of liberty, is forced to admit that in his day the
most powerful provinces of Italy had become incapable of freedom. 'No
accident, however weighty and violent, could ever restore Milan or
Naples to liberty, owing to their utter corruption. This is clear from
the fact that after the death of Filippo Visconti, when Milan tried to