[2] _Discorsi_. i. 17.

It was the universal policy of the Despots to disarm their subjects.
Prompted by considerations of personal safety, and demanded by the
necessity of extirpating the factions, this measure was highly popular.
It relieved the burghers of that most burdensome of all public duties,
military service. A tax on silver and salt was substituted in the
Milanese province for the conscription, while the Florentine oligarchs,
actuated probably by the same motives, laid a tax upon the country. The
effect of this change was to make financial and economical questions
all-important, and to introduce a new element into the balance of
Italian powers. The principalities were transformed into great banks,
where the lords of cities sat in their bureau, counted their money, and
calculated the cost of wars or the value of towns they sought to acquire
by bargain. At first they used their mercenary troops like pawns, buying
up a certain number for some special project, and dismissing them when
it had been accomplished. But in course of time the mercenaries awoke to
the sense of their own power, and placed themselves beneath captains who
secured them a certainty of pay with continuity of profitable service.
Thus the Condottieri came into existence, and Italy beheld the spectacle
of moving despotisms, armed and mounted, seeking to effect establishment
upon the weakest, worst-defended points of the peninsula. They proved a
grave cause of disquietude alike to the tyrants and the republics; and
until the settlement of Francesco Sforza in the Duchy of Milan, when the
employers of auxiliaries had come to understand the arts of dealing with
them by perfidy, secret assassination, and a system of elaborate
counter-checks, the equilibrium of power in Italy was seriously
threatened. The country suffered at first from marauding excursions
conducted by piratical leaders of adventurous troops, by Werner of
Urslingen, the Conte Lando, and Fra Moriale; afterwards from the