of the State for his own ends, substituting the will of a single ruler for the clash of hostile passions in the factions, the tyrant imposed a forcible tranquillity upon the city he had grasped.  The Captaincy of the people was conferred upon him.[2] The Councils were suffocated and reduced to silence.  The aristocracy was persecuted for the profit of the plebs.  Under his rule commerce flourished; the towns were adorned with splendid edifices; foreign wars were carried on for the aggrandizement of the State without regard to factious rancors.  Thus the tyrant marked the first emergence of personality supreme within the State, resuming its old forces in an autocratic will, superseding and at the same time consciously controlling the mute, collective, blindly working impulses of previous revolutions.  His advent was welcomed as a blessing by the recently developed people of the cities he reduced to peace.  But the great families and leaders of the parties regarded him with loathing, as a reptile spawned by the corruption and disease of the decaying body politic.  In their fury they addressed themselves to the two chiefs of Christendom.  Boniface VIII., answering to this appeal, called in a second Frenchman, Charles of Valois, with the titles of Marquis of Ancona, Count of Romagna, Captain of Tuscany, who was bidden to reduce Italy to order on Guelf principles.  Dante in his mountain solitudes invoked the Emperor, and Italy beheld the powerless march of Henry VII.  Neither Pope nor Emperor was strong enough to control the currents of the factions which were surely whirling Italy into the abyss of despotism.  Boniface died of grief after Sciarra Colonna, the terrible Ghibelline’s outrage at Anagni, and the Papal Court was transferred to Avignon in 1316.  Henry VII. expired, of poison probably, at Buonconvento, in 1313.  The parties tore each other to fragments.  Tyrants were murdered.  Whole families were extirpated.  Yet these convulsions bore no fruit of liberty.  The only exit from the situation was in despotism—­the despotism of a jealous oligarchy as at Florence, or the despotism of new tyrants in Lombardy and the Romagna.[3]

[1] Not to mention the republics of Lombardy and Romagna, which took the final stamp of despotism at the beginning of the fourteenth century, it is noticeable that Pisa submitted to Uguccione da Faggiuola, Lucca to Castruccio Castracane, and Florence to the Duke of Athens.  The revolution of Pisa in 1316 delivered it from Uguccione; the premature death of Castruccio in 1328 destroyed the Tuscan duchy he was building up upon the basement of Ghibellinism; while the rebellion of 1343 averted tyranny from Florence for another century.

[2] Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio Castracane, though it is rather a historical romance than a trustworthy biography, illustrates the gradual advances made by a bold and ambitious leader from the Captaincy of the people, conferred upon him for one year, to the tyranny of his city.

    [3] The Divine comedy is, under one of its aspects, the Epic of
    Italian tyranny, so many of its episodes are chosen from the history
    of the civil wars: