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 th