EARLY HISTORY.
order and to subdue, if not wholly to destroy, a barbarous
aristocracy. But the growth of riches among themselves, ac¬
companied with greater luxury and its attendant vices, prepared
the way for the entire destruction of civic liberty. The struggles
between noble and plebeian, Guelph and Ghibelline, Bianchi
and Neri, ended with the ascendency of unscrupulous ambition
combined with subtlety, in the person of Cosimo de’ Medici,
and of his descendants for four generations.
The most brilliant period of Florentine history dates from
the beginning of the twelfth century to the year 1530, before
the city fell into the hands of the younger branch of the
Medici family, who destroyed the Commonwealth to establish
a tyranny ; and, though after the extinction of the Medi¬
cean Grand-Dukes, the Government assumed a milder form
in the hands of the Austro-Lorraine dynasty, despotic rule
did not entirely cease until the expulsion of Leopold II. in
1860.
Many barbarous acts of cruelty were perpetrated by the
Florentines in the halcyon days of their Republic, both towards
citizens who happened to belong to a vanquished minority, and
towards captives taken in war, especially if natives of a rival
city ; but the Florentines were nevertheless great in patriotic
virtue, and capable of noble devotion and heroic self-sacrifice
for the sake of Florence. Names as great as and even greater
than that of Medici, such as Capponi, Ridolfi, Strozzi, Albizzi,
are still preserved, not only in history but in their descendants,
who inhabit the palaces of their ancestors, and thus keep alive
the memory of those of whom Dante wrote :
Con queste genti, e con altre con esse
Vid io Fiorenza in à fatto riposo
Che non avea cagione onde piangesse ;
Con queste genti vid’ io glorioso
E giusto il popol suo tanto che il giglio
Non era ad asta mai posto a ritroso
Nè per division fatto vermiglio.
Paradiso, xvi. 148-154