On the same day Cosimo took his departure.  His journey northward resembled a triumphant progress.  He left Florence a simple burgher; he entered Venice a powerful prince.  Though the Albizzi seemed to have gained the day, they had really cut away the ground beneath their feet.  They committed the fatal mistake of doing both too much and too little—­too much because they declared war against an innocent man, and roused the sympathies of the whole people in his behalf; too little, because they had not the nerve to complete their act by killing him outright and extirpating his party.  Machiavelli, in one of his profoundest and most cynical critiques, remarks that few men know how to be thoroughly bad with honour to themselves.  Their will is evil; but the grain of good in them—­some fear of public opinion, some repugnance to committing a signal crime—­paralyses their arm at the moment when it ought to have been raised to strike.  He instances Gian Paolo Baglioni’s omission to murder Julius II., when that Pope placed himself within his clutches at Perugia.  He might also have instanced Rinaldo degli Albizzi’s refusal to push things to extremities by murdering Cosimo.  It was the combination of despotic violence in the exile of Cosimo with constitutional moderation in the preservation of his life, that betrayed the weakness of the oligarchs and restored confidence to the Medicean party.

IX

In the course of the year 1434 this party began to hold up its head.  Powerful as the Albizzi were, they only retained the government by artifice; and now they had done a deed which put at nought their former arts and intrigues.  A Signory favourable to the Medici came into office, and on September 26th, 1434, Rinaldo in his turn was summoned to the palace and declared a rebel.  He strove to raise the forces of his party, and entered the piazza at the head of eight hundred men.  The menacing attitude of the people, however, made resistance perilous.  Rinaldo disbanded his troops, and placed himself under the protection of Pope Eugenius IV., who was then resident in Florence.  This act of submission proved that Rinaldo had not the courage or the cruelty to try the chance of civil war.  Whatever his motives may have been, he lost his hold upon the State beyond recovery.  On September 29th, a new parliament was summoned; on October 2nd, Cosimo was recalled from exile and the Albizzi were banished.  The intercession of the Pope procured for them nothing but the liberty to leave Florence unmolested.  Einaldo turned his back upon the city he had governed, never to set foot in it again.  On October 6th, Cosimo, having passed through Padua, Ferrara, and Modena like a conqueror, reentered the town amid the plaudits of the people, and took up his dwelling as an honoured guest in the Palace of the Republic.  The subsequent history of Florence is the history of his family.  In after years the Medici loved to remember this return of Cosimo.  His triumphal reception was painted in fresco on the walls of their villa at Cajano under the transparent allegory of Cicero’s entrance into Rome.