Anagni, and the Papal Court was transferred to
Avignon in 1316. Henry VII. expired, of poison probably, at
Buonconvento, in 1313. The parties tore each other to fragments. Tyrants
were murdered. Whole families were extirpated. Yet these convulsions
bore no fruit of liberty. The only exit from the situation was in
despotism--the despotism of a jealous oligarchy as at Florence, or the
despotism of new tyrants in Lombardy and the Romagna.[3]

[1] Not to mention the republics of Lombardy and Romagna, which took
the final stamp of despotism at the beginning of the fourteenth
century, it is noticeable that Pisa submitted to Uguccione da
Faggiuola, Lucca to Castruccio Castracane, and Florence to the Duke
of Athens. The revolution of Pisa in 1316 delivered it from
Uguccione; the premature death of Castruccio in 1328 destroyed the
Tuscan duchy he was building up upon the basement of Ghibellinism;
while the rebellion of 1343 averted tyranny from Florence for
another century.

[2] Machiavelli's _Vita di Castruccio Castracane_, though it is
rather a historical romance than a trustworthy biography,
illustrates the gradual advances made by a bold and ambitious leader
from the Captaincy of the people, conferred upon him for one year,
to the tyranny of his city.

[3] The Divine comedy is, under one of its aspects, the Epic of
Italian tyranny, so many of its episodes are chosen from the history
of the civil wars:

Che le terre d' Italia tutte piene
Son di tiranni; ed un Marcel diventa
Ogni villan che parteggiando viene.

Those lines occur in the apostrophe to Italy (_Purg._ vi.) where
Dante refers to the Empire, idealized by him as the supreme
authority in Europe.

Meanwhile the perils to which the tyrants were exposed taught them to
employ cruelty and craft in combination. From the confused and spasmodic
efforts of the thirteenth century, when Captains of the people and
leaders of the party seized a momentary gust of power, there arose a
second sort of despotism, more cautious in its policy, more methodic in
its use of means to ends, which ended by metamorphosing the Italian
cities and preparing the great age of the Renaissance. It would be
sentimental to utter lamentations over this change, and unphilosophical
to deplore the diminution of republican liberty as an unmixed evil. The
divisions of Italy and the weakness of both Papa