Che le terre d’ Italia tutte piene
      Son di tiranni; ed un Marcel diventa
      Ogni villan che parteggiando viene.

    Those lines occur in the apostrophe to Italy (Purg. vi.) where
    Dante refers to the Empire, idealized by him as the supreme
    authority in Europe.

Meanwhile the perils to which the tyrants were exposed taught them to employ cruelty and craft in combination.  From the confused and spasmodic efforts of the thirteenth century, when Captains of the people and leaders of the party seized a momentary gust of power, there arose a second sort of despotism, more cautious in its policy, more methodic in its use of means to ends, which ended by metamorphosing the Italian cities and preparing the great age of the Renaissance.  It would be sentimental to utter lamentations over this change, and unphilosophical to deplore the diminution of republican liberty as an unmixed evil.  The divisions of Italy and the weakness of both Papacy and Empire left no other solution of the political problem.  All branches of the municipal administration, strained to the cracking-point by the tension of party conflict, were now isolated from the organism, abnormally developed, requiring the combining effort of a single thinker to reunite their scattered forces in one system or absorb them in himself.  The indirect restraints which a calmer period of municipal vitality had placed upon tyrannic ambition, were removed by the leveling of classes and the presentation of an equal surface to the builder of the palace-dome of monarchy.  Moreover, it must be remembered that what the Italians then understood by freedom was municipal autonomy controlled by ruling houses in the interest of the few.  These considerations need not check our sympathy with Florence in the warfare she carried on against the Milanese tyrants.  But they should lead us to be cautious in adopting the conclusions of Sismondi, who saw Italian greatness only in her free cities.  The obliteration of the parties beneath despotism was needed, under actual conditions, for that development of arts and industry which raised Italy to a first place among civilized nations.  Of the manners of the Despots, and of the demoralization they encouraged in the cities of their rule, enough will be said in the succeeding chapters, which set forth the social conditions of the Renaissance in Italy.  But attention should here be called to the general character of despotic authority, and to the influence the Despots exercised for the pacification of the country.  We are not justified by facts in assuming that had the free burghs continued independent, arts and literature would have risen to a greater height.  Venice, in spite of an uninterrupted republican career, produced no commanding men of letters, and owed much of her splendor in the art of painting to aliens from Cadore, Castelfranco, and Verona.  Genoa remained silent and irresponsive to the artistic movement of