life.  After prevailing upon Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici to leave Florence in 1527, he failed to execute his trust of getting Pisa from their grasp (moved, it is said, by a guilty fondness for the young and handsome Ippolito), nor did he afterwards share any of the hardships and responsibilities of the siege.  Indeed, he then found it necessary to retire into exile in France, on the excuse of superintending his vast commercial affairs at Lyons.  After the restoration of the Medici he returned to Florence as the courtier of Duke Alessandro, whom he aided and abetted in his juvenile debaucheries.  Quarreling with Alessandro on the occasion of an insult offered to his daughter Luisa, and the accusation of murder brought against his son Piero, he went into opposition and exile, less for political than for private reasons.  After the murder of Alessandro, he received Lorenzo de’ Medici, the fratricide, with the title of ‘Second Brutus’ at Venice.  Meanwhile it was he who paid the dowry of Catherine de’ Medici to the Duke of Orleans, helping thus to strengthen the house of princes against whom he was plotting, by that splendid foreign alliance which placed a descendant of the Florentine bill-brokers on the throne of France.  After all these vicissitudes Filippo Strozzi headed an armed attack upon the dominions of Duke Cosimo, was taken in the battle of Montemurlo, and finally was murdered in that very fortress, outside the Porto a Faenza, which he had counseled Alessandro to construct for the intimidation of the Florentines.[1] The historians with the exception of Nerli agree in describing him as a pleasure-loving and self-seeking man, whose many changes of policy were due, not to conviction, but to the desire of gaining the utmost license of disorderly living.  At the same time we cannot deny him the fame of brilliant mental qualities, a princely bearing, and great courage.

[1] See Varchi, vol. iii. p. 61, for the first stone laid of this castle.  It should be said that accounts disagree about Filippo’s death.  Nerli very distinctly asserts that he committed suicide.  Segni inclines to the belief that he was murdered by the creatures of Duke Cosimo.

The moral and political debility which proved the real source of the ruin of Florence is accounted for in different ways by the historians of the siege.  Pitti, whose insight into the situation is perhaps the keenest, and who is by far the most outspoken, does not refer the failure of the Florentines to the cowardice or stupidity of the popular party, but to the malignity of the Palleschi, the double-dealing and egotism of the wealthy nobles, who to suit their own interests favored now one and now another of the parties.  These Ottimati—­as he calls them, by a title borrowed from classical phraseology—­whether they professed the Medicean or the popular cause, were always bent on self-aggrandizement at the expense of the people or their princes.[1] The sympathies