safely advanced upon this subject, is that the pacification of Italy was
demanded as a preliminary condition, and that this pacification came to
pass through the action of the princes, checked and equilibrated by the
oligarchies of Venice and Florence. It might further be urged that the
Despots were in close sympathy with the masses of the people, shared
their enthusiasms, and promoted their industry. When the classical
revival took place at the close of the fourteenth century, they divined
this movement of the Italic races to resume their past, and gave it all
encouragement. To be a prince, and not to be the patron of scholarship,
the pupil of humanists, and the founder of libraries, was an
impossibility. In like manner they employed their wealth upon the
development of arts and industries. The great age of Florentine painting
is indissolubly connected with the memories of Casa Medici. Rome owes
her magnificence to the despotic Popes. Even the pottery of Gubbio was a
creation of the ducal house of Urbino.

After the death of Henry VII. and the beginning of the Papal exile at
Avignon, the Guelf party became the rallying-point of municipal
independence, with its headquarters in Florence. Ghibellinism united
the princes in an opposite camp. 'The Guelf party,' writes Giovanni
Villani, 'forms the solid and unalterable basis of Italian liberty, and
is so antagonistic to all tyranny that, if a Guelf become a tyrant, he
must of necessity become at the same moment Ghibelline.' Milan, first to
assert the rights of the free burghs, was now the chief center of
despotism; and the events of the next century resume themselves in the
long struggle between Florence and the Visconti. The chronicle of the
Villani and the Florentine history of Poggio contain the record of this
strife, which seemed to them the all-important crisis of Italian
affairs. In the Milanese annals of Galvano Fiamma and Mussi, on the
other hand, the advantages of a despotic sovereignty in giving national