capable of discerning
that power was to be won by other means than by rending and riving, and
by the middle of the fourteenth century we find them risen from their
original condition of _popolani_ to be possessors, by purchase, of lands
and strongholds, and the feudal dignity of Counts of Vernio, disturbing
to the jealousy of their republican fellow-citizens. These lordly
purchases are explained by our seeing the Bardi disastrously signalised
only a few years later as standing in the very front of European
commerce--the Christian Rothschilds of that time--undertaking to furnish
specie for the wars of our Edward the Third, and having revenues "in
kind" made over to them; especially in wool, most precious of freights
for Florentine galleys. Their august debtor left them with an august
deficit, and alarmed Sicilian creditors made a too sudden demand for the
payment of deposits, causing a ruinous shock to the credit of the Bardi
and of associated houses, which was felt as a commercial calamity along
all the coasts of the Mediterranean. But, like more modern bankrupts,
they did not, for all that, hide their heads in humiliation; on the
contrary, they seemed to have held them higher than ever, and to have
been among the most arrogant of those grandees, who under certain
noteworthy circumstances, open to all who will read the honest pages of
Giovanni Villani, drew upon themselves the exasperation of the armed
people in 1343. The Bardi, who had made themselves fast in their street
between the two bridges, kept these narrow inlets, like panthers at bay,
against the oncoming gonfalons of the people, and were only made to give
way by an assault from the hill behind them. Their houses by the river,
to the number of twenty-two (_palagi e case grandi_), were sacked and
burnt, and many among the chief of those who bore the Bardi name were
driven from the city. But an old Florentine family was many-rooted, and
we find the Bardi maintaining importance and rising again and again to
the surface of Florentine affairs in a more or less creditable manner,
implying an untold family history that would have included even more
vicissitudes and contrasts of dignity and disgrace, of wealth and
poverty, than are usually seen on the background of wide kinship. [Note
1.] But the Bardi never resumed their proprietorship in the old street
on the banks of the river, which in 1492 had long been associated with
other names of mark, and especially w