will in all that time, so full of trouble for the Church!  The Pope sent him to S. Domenico at Fiesole and told the Florentines their Archbishop was at their gates.  So, with Cosimo de’ Medici at their head, they went out to meet him, but he refused to enter the city till Eugenius threatened him with excommunication.  He was consecrated Archbishop of Florence in March 1446 borne in procession from S. Piero down Borgo degli Albizzi to the Duomo.[98] As a boy, it is said, he would pray before the Madonna of Or San Michele, and, indeed, in his Chronicle he defends his Order against the charges of scepticism as to the miracles worked there, with a certain eloquence.  Many are the stories told of him, and Poccetti has painted the story of his life round the first cloister of S. Marco, where he was buried in May 1459.  S. Antonino was a saint and a theologian, not a politician or an historian.  Certainly he did not foresee the tragedy that was already opening, and that was to end, not in the lenten fires of Piazza Signoria, nor even in the death of Savonarola, but in the siege of Florence, the establishment of the House of Medici, the tombs of S. Lorenzo.  How often in those days Cosimo would walk with him and Fra Angelico in the cloisters on a summer night, after listening may be to Marsilio Ficino or to the vague and wonderful promises of Argyropolis.  “To serve God is to reign,” Antonino told him, not without a certain understanding of those restless ambitions which at that time seemed to promise the city nothing but good.  And then, was it not Cosimo who had rebuilt the convent, was it not Cosimo who had built S. Lorenzo and S. Spirito too, by the hand of Michelozzo?

Antonino was not a politician; the Chronicon Domini Antonini Archipraesulis Florentini is the work rather of a theologian than of an historian:  the friend of Leonardo Bruni, or at least well acquainted with his work, he cared rather for charity than for learning; and it was as the father of the poor that Florence loved him.  He lived by love.  An in those days of uncertain fortune, amid the swift political changes of the time, there were many whom, doubtless, he saved from degradation or suicide.  I poveri vergognosi—­the poor who are ashamed, it was these he first took under his protection.  We read of him sending for twelve men of all classes and various crafts, and, laying the case before them, refounded a charity—­Provveditori dei poveri vergognosi, which soon became in the mouth of Florence I Buonomini di S. Martino, the good men of S. Martin, for the society had its headquarters in the Church S. Martino; and, was not S. Martino himself, as it were, the first of this company?