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?

Born in Ferrara in 1452, the gran