Florence, a city of merchants, was the last power in Italy to make war for the pleasure of fighting, yet in turn she conquered every city in Tuscany, save Lucca alone.[137] What can have been the overmastering necessity that drove her on so bloody a path?  Certainly not a love of empire, for she, who was so unfortunate in the art of government, was not likely to lust for dominion.  Like all the Florentine wars, that which at last brought Pisa under her yoke was a war on behalf of the guilds of Florence, a war of merchants.  Florence humbled Pisa because Pisa held the way to the sea, she brought Arezzo and Siena low and bought Cortona because they stood on the roads to Rome, whose banker she was.[138] And did not Pistoja guard the way to the north, to Bologna, to Milan, to Flanders, and England, whence came the wool that was her wealth?[139] Thus in those days as to-day, war was not a game which one might play or not as one pleased, but the inexorable result of the circumstances of life.  When Bologna closed the passes, Florence was compelled to fight or to die; when Pisa taxed Florentine merchandise she signed her own death.

On the other hand, the passionate desire of Pistoja was to be free.  Liberty—­it was the dream of her life; not the liberty of the people, but the essential liberty of the State, of the city.  So she was Ghibelline because Florence was Guelph.  All her life long she feared lest Florence should eat her up:  that death was ever before her eyes.  This and this alone is the cause of the hate of the great Florentine:  he hated Florence with an intolerable love because she thrust him out; he hated Pisa, Arezzo, Siena, and Pistoja because they feared or rivalled Florence, and would not be reconciled.  His dream of an Italy united under a foreign Emperor, the ghost of the Roman Empire, remained a dream, noble and yet ignoble too.  For it is for this that we may accuse him of a lack of clairvoyance, a real failure to appreciate the future, which in the innumerable variety of her cities gave Italy an intellectual life less sustained and clear than the intellectual life of Greece, but more spiritual and more various.  In Italy Antiquity and Hebraism became friends, to our undoubted benefit, to the gain of the whole world.

But little is left in the smiling, gracious city to-day to recall those bitter quarrels so long ago.  Pistoja, beyond any other Tuscan town perhaps, is full of grace, and gives one always, as it were, a smiling salutation.  La Ferrignosa she was called of old, but it is the last title that fits her now, for the clank of her irons has long been silent, and nothing any longer disturbs the quiet of her days.  S. Atto is her saint, and it is by his street that you enter the city, walled still, coming at last into the Piazza Cino, Cino da Pistoja, one of the sweetest and least fortunate of Tuscan poets.  Turning thence into Via Cavour, you come to S. Giovanni Evangelista, once without the walls, but now not far from the middle