[1] Mur.  Scr.  R. It. xv. 826.  Compare what G. Merula wrote about
    Azzo Visconti:  ’He conciliated the people to him by equal justice
    without distinction of Guelf or Ghibelline.’

    [2] Discorsi. i. 17.

It was the universal policy of the Despots to disarm their subjects.  Prompted by considerations of personal safety, and demanded by the necessity of extirpating the factions, this measure was highly popular.  It relieved the burghers of that most burdensome of all public duties, military service.  A tax on silver and salt was substituted in the Milanese province for the conscription, while the Florentine oligarchs, actuated probably by the same motives, laid a tax upon the country.  The effect of this change was to make financial and economical questions all-important, and to introduce a new element into the balance of Italian powers.  The principalities were transformed into great banks, where the lords of cities sat in their bureau, counted their money, and calculated the cost of wars or the value of towns they sought to acquire by bargain.  At first they used their mercenary troops like pawns, buying up a certain number for some special project, and dismissing them when it had been accomplished.  But in course of time the mercenaries awoke to the sense of their own power, and placed themselves beneath captains who secured them a certainty of pay with continuity of profitable service.  Thus the Condottieri came into existence, and Italy beheld the spectacle of moving despotisms, armed and mounted, seeking to effect establishment upon the weakest, worst-defended points of the peninsula.  They proved a grave cause of disquietude alike to the tyrants and the republics; and until the settlement of Francesco Sforza in the Duchy of Milan, when the employers of auxiliaries had come to understand the arts of dealing with them by perfidy, secret assassination, and a system of elaborate counter-checks, the equilibrium of power in Italy was seriously threatened.  The country suffered at first from marauding excursions conducted by piratical leaders of adventurous troops, by Werner of Urslingen, the Conte Lando, and Fra Moriale; afterwards from the discords of Braccio da Montone and Sforza Attendolo, incessantly plotting to carve duchies for themselves from provinces they had been summoned by a master to subdue.  At this period gold ruled the destinies of Italy.  The Despots, relying solely on their exchequer for their power, were driven to extortion.  Cities became bankrupt, pledged their revenues, or sold themselves to the highest bidder.[1] Indescribable misery oppressed the poorer classes and the peasants.  A series of obscure revolutions in the smaller despotic centers pointed to a vehement plebeian reaction against a state of things that had become unbearable.  The lower classes of the burghers rose against the ’popolani grassi,’ and a new class of princes emerged at the close of the crisis.  Thus the plebs forced the Bentivogli on Bologna and the Medici on Florence, and Baglioni on Perugia and the Petrucci on Siena.