Dante refers to the Empire, idealized by him as the supreme
authority in Europe.

Meanwhile the perils to which the tyrants were exposed taught them to
employ cruelty and craft in combination. From the confused and spasmodic
efforts of the thirteenth century, when Captains of the people and
leaders of the party seized a momentary gust of power, there arose a
second sort of despotism, more cautious in its policy, more methodic in
its use of means to ends, which ended by metamorphosing the Italian
cities and preparing the great age of the Renaissance. It would be
sentimental to utter lamentations over this change, and unphilosophical
to deplore the diminution of republican liberty as an unmixed evil. The
divisions of Italy and the weakness of both Papacy and Empire left no
other solution of the political problem. All branches of the municipal
administration, strained to the cracking-point by the tension of party
conflict, were now isolated from the organism, abnormally developed,
requiring the combining effort of a single thinker to reunite their
scattered forces in one system or absorb them in himself. The indirect
restraints which a calmer period of municipal vitality had placed upon
tyrannic ambition, were removed by the leveling of classes and the
presentation of an equal surface to the builder of the palace-dome of
monarchy. Moreover, it must be remembered that what the Italians then
understood by freedom was municipal autonomy controlled by ruling houses
in the interest of the few. These considerations need not check our
sympathy with Florence in the warfare she carried on against the
Milanese tyrants. But they should lead us to be cautious in adopting the
conclusions of Sismondi, who saw Italian greatness only in her free
cities. The obliteration of the parties beneath despotism was needed,
under actual conditions, for that development of arts and industry which
raised Italy to a first place among civilized nations. Of the manners of