[5] P. 125.

    [6] P. 175.

The charm of a treatise like that of Pandolfini on the family evaporates as soon as we try to make a summary of its contents.  Enough, however, has been quoted to show the thoroughly bourgeois tone which prevailed among the citizens of Florence in the fifteenth century.[1] Very important results were the natural issue of this commercial spirit in the State.  Talking of the Ordinanze di Giustizia, Varchi observes:  ’While they removed in part the civil discords of Florence, they almost entirely extinguished all nobility of feeling in the Florentines, and tended as much to diminish the power and haughtiness of the city as to abate the insolence of the patriciate.’[2] A little further on he says:  ’Hence may all prudent men see how ill-ordered in all things, save only in the Grand Council, has been the commonwealth of Florence; seeing that, to speak of nought else, that kind of men who in a wisely constituted republic ought not to fulfill any magistracy whatever, the merchants and artisans of all sorts, are in Florence alone capable of taking office, to the exclusion of all others.’  Machiavelli, less wordy but far more emphatic than Varchi, says of the same revolution:  ’This caused the abandonment by Florence not only of arms, but of all nobility of soul.’[3] The most notable consequence of the mercantile temper of the republics was the ruinous system of mercenary warfare, with all its attendant evils of ambitious captains of adventure, irresponsible soldiery, and mock campaigns, adopted by the free Italian States.  It is true that even if the Italians had maintained their national militias in full force, they might not have been able to resist the shock of France and Spain any better than the armies of Thebes, Sparta, and Athens averted the Macedonian hegemony.  But they would at least have run a better chance, and not perhaps have perished so ignobly through the treason of an Alfonso d’Este (1527), of a Marquis of Pescara (1525), of a Duke of Urbino (1527), and of a Malatesta Baglioni (1530).[4] Machiavelli, in a weighty passage at the end of the first book of his Florentine History, sums up the various causes which contributed to the disuse of national arms among the Italians of the Renaissance.  The fear of the despot for his subjects, the priest-rule of the Church, the jealousy of Venice for her own nobles, and the commercial sluggishness of the Florentine burghers, caused each and all of these powers, otherwise so different, to intrust their armies to paid captains.  ’Di questi adunque oziosi principi e di queste vilissime armi sara piena la mia istoria,’ is the contemptuous phrase with which he winds up his analysis.[5]

    [1] Varchi (book x. cap. 69) quotes a Florentine proverb:  ’Chiunque
    non sta a bottega e ladro.’  See above, p. 239.

    [2] Varchi, vol. i. p. 168; compare vol. ii. p. 87, however.

    [3] Ist.  Fior. lib. ii. end.  Aristotle’s contempt for the [Greek: 
    technitai] emerges in these comments of the doctrinaires.