with frowning towers hundreds of feet high, machicolated battlements, donjon keeps, oubliettes, and all other appurtenances of a feudal stronghold, exists no longer.  With the expulsion of the imperial faction, and the advent of the municipal Guelphs,—­that proudest, boldest, most successful, and most unreasonable bourgeoisie which ever assumed organized life,—­the nobles were curtailed of all their privileges.  Their city castles, too, were shorn of their towers, which were limited to just so many ells, cloth measure, by the haughty shopkeepers who had displaced the grandees.  The first third of the thirteenth century—­the epoch of the memorable Buondelmonti street fight which lasted thirty years—­was the period in which this dreadful architecture was fixed upon Florence.  Then was the time in which the chains, fastened in those huge rings which still dangle from the grim house-fronts, were stretched across the street; thus enclosing and fettering a compact mass of combatants in an iron embrace, while from the rare and narrow murder-windows in the walls, and from the beetling roofs, descended the hail of iron and stone and scalding pitch and red-hot coals to refresh the struggling throng below.

After this epoch, and with the expiration of the imperial house of the Hohenstaufen, the nobles here, as in Switzerland, sought to popularize themselves, to become municipal.

  Der Adel steigt von seinen alten Burgen,
  Und schwoert den Staedten seinen Buerger-Eid,

said the prophetic old Attinghausen, in his dying moments.  The change was even more extraordinary in Florence.  The expulsion of some of the patrician families was absolute.  Others were allowed to participate with the plebeians in the struggle for civic honors, and for the wealth earned in commerce, manufactures, and handicraft.  It became a severe and not uncommon punishment to degrade offending individuals or families into the ranks of nobility, and thus deprive them of their civil rights.  Hundreds of low-born persons have, in a single day, been declared noble, and thus disfranchised.  And the example of Florence was often followed by other cities.

The result was twofold upon the aristocracy.  Those who municipalized themselves became more enlightened, more lettered, more refined, and, at the same time, less chivalrous and less martial than their ancestors.  The characters of buccaneer, land-pirate, knight-errant could not be conveniently united with those of banker, exchange broker, dealer in dry goods, and general commission agents.

The consequence was that the fighting business became a specialty, and fell into the hands of private companies.  Florence, like Venice, and other Italian republics, jobbed her wars.  The work was done by the Hawkwoods, the Sforzas, the Bracciones, and other chiefs of the celebrated free companies, black bands, lance societies, who understood no other profession, but who were as accomplished in the arts of their own guild as were any of the five major and seven minor crafts into which the Florentine burgesses were divided.