107. "And as the people had now taken state and signory on themselves,
they ordered, for greater strength of the people, that all the towers
of Florence--and there were many 180 feet high [1]--should be cut down
to 75 feet, and no more; and so it was done, and with the stones of
them they walled the city on the other side Arno."

[Footnote: 120 braccia.]

108. That last sentence is a significant one. Here is the central
expression of the true burgess or townsman temper,--resolute
maintenance of fortified peace. These are the walls which modern
republicanism throws down, to make boulevards over their ruins.

109. Such new order being taken, Florence remained quiet for full two
months. On the 13th of December, in the same year, died the Emperor
Frederick II.; news of his death did not reach Florence till the 7th
January, 1251. It had chanced, according to Villani, that on the actual
day of his death, his Florentine vice-regent, Rinieri of Montemerlo,
was killed by a piece of the vaulting [1] of his room falling on him as
he slept. And when the people heard of the Emperor's death, "which was
most useful and needful for Holy Church, and for our commune," they
took the fall of the roof on his lieutenant as an omen of the
extinction of Imperial authority, and resolved to bring home all their
Guelphic exiles, and that the Ghibellines should be forced to make
peace with them. Which was done, and the peace really lasted for full
six months; when, a quarrel chancing with Ghibelline Pistoja, the
Florentines, under a Milanese podesta, fought their first properly
communal and commercial battle, with great slaughter of Pistojese.
Naturally enough, but very unwisely, the Florentine Ghibellines