This proved a bad thing for the liberties of Florence in the end.  The chieftains of these military clubs, usually from the lowest ranks, with no capacity but for bloodshed, and no revenue but rapine, often ended their career by obtaining the seigniory of some petty republic, a small town, or a handful of hamlets, whose liberty they crushed with their own iron, and with the gold obtained, in exchange for their blood, from the city bankers.  In the course of time such seigniories often rolled together, and assumed a menacing shape to all who valued municipal liberty.  Sforza—­whose peasant father threw his axe into a tree, resolving, if it fell, to join, as a common soldier, the roving band which had just invited him; if it adhered to the wood, to remain at home a laboring hind—­becomes Duke of Milan, and is encouraged in his usurpation by Cosmo Vecchio, who still gives himself the airs of first-citizen of Florence.

The serpent, the well-known cognizance of the Visconti, had already coiled itself around all those fair and clustering cities which were once the Lombard republics, and had poisoned their vigorous life.  The Ezzelinos, Carraras, Gonzagas, Scalas, had crushed the spirit of liberty in the neighborhood of Venice.  All this had been accomplished by means of mercenary adventurers, guided only by the love of plunder; while those two luxurious and stately republics—­the one an oligarchy, the other a democracy—­looked on from their marble palaces, enjoying the refreshing bloodshowers in which their own golden harvests were so rapidly ripening.

Meanwhile a gigantic despotism was maturing, which was eventually to crush the power, glory, wealth, and freedom of Italy.

This palazzo of Cosmo the Elder is a good type of Florentine architecture at its ultimate epoch, just as Cosmo himself was the largest expression of the Florentine citizen in the last and over-ripe stage.

The Medici family, unheard of in the thirteenth century, obscure and plebeian in the middle of the fourteenth, and wealthy bankers and leaders of the democratic party at its close, culminated in the early part of the fifteenth in the person of Cosmo.  The Pater Patriae,—­so called, because, having at last absorbed all the authority, he could afford to affect some of the benignity of a parent, and to treat his fellow-citizens, not as men, but as little children,—­the Father of his Country had acquired, by means of his great fortune and large financial connections, an immense control over the destinies of Florence and Italy.  But he was still a private citizen in externals.  There was, at least, elevation of taste, refinement of sentiment in Cosmo’s conception of a great citizen.  His habits of life were elegant, but frugal.  He built churches, palaces, villas.  He employed all the great architects of the age.  He adorned these edifices with masterpieces from the pencils and chisels of the wonderful Quattrocentisti, whose