himself at Cesena and Castelnuovo, and had to be assassinated by Pandolfo Malatesta at the instigation of Venice.  After the death of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, in 1402, the generals whom he had employed in the consolidation of his vast dominions attempted to divide the spoil among themselves.  Naples, Venice, Milan, Rome, and Florence were in course of time made keenly alive to the risk of suffering a captain of adventure to run his course unchecked.

There remains the sixth and last class of despots to be mentioned.  This again is large and of the first importance.  Citizens of eminence, like the Medici at Florence, the Bentivogli at Bologna, the Baglioni of Perugia, the Vitelli of Citta di Castello, the Gambacorti of Pisa, like Pandolfo Petrucci in Siena (1502), Romeo Pepoli, the usurer of Bologna (1323), the plebeian, Alticlinio, and Agolanti of Padua (1313), Giovanni Vignate, the millionaire of Lodi (1402), acquired more than their due weight in the conduct of affairs, and gradually tended to tyranny.  In most of these cases great wealth was the original source of despotic ascendency.  It was not uncommon to buy cities together with their Signory.  Thus the Rossi bought Parma for 35,000 florins in 1333; the Appiani sold Pisa; Astorre Manfredi sold Faenza and Imola in 1377.  In 1444 Galeazzo Malatesta sold Pesaro to Alessandro Sforza, and Fossombrone to Urbino; in 1461 Cervia was sold to Venice by the same family.  Franceschetto Cibo purchased the County of Anguillara.  Towns at last came to have their market value.  It was known that Bologna was worth 200,000 florins, Parma 60,000, Arezzo 40,000 Lucca 30,000, and so forth.  But personal qualities and nobility of blood might also produce despots of the sixth class.  Thus the Bentivogli claimed descent from a bastard of King Enzo, son of Frederick II., who was for a long time an honorable prisoner in Bologna.  The Baglioni, after a protracted struggle with the rival family of Oddi, owed their supremacy to ability and vigor in the last years of the fifteenth century.  But the neighborhood of the Papal power, and their own internal dissensions, rendered the hold of this family upon Perugia precarious.  As in the case of the Medici and the Bentivogli, many generations might elapse before such burgher families assumed dynastic authority.  But to this end they were always advancing.

The history of the bourgeois despots proves that Italy in the fifteenth century was undergoing a natural process of determination toward tyranny.  Sismondi may attempt to demonstrate that Italy was ’not answerable for the crimes with which she was sullied by her tyrants.’  But the facts show that she was answerable for choosing despots instead of remaining free, or rather that she instinctively obeyed a law of social evolution by which princes had to be substituted for municipalities at the end of those fierce internal conflicts and exhausting wars of jealousy which closed the Middle Ages.  Machiavelli, with