ntury resume themselves in the
long struggle between Florence and the Visconti. The chronicle of the
Villani and the Florentine history of Poggio contain the record of this
strife, which seemed to them the all-important crisis of Italian
affairs. In the Milanese annals of Galvano Fiamma and Mussi, on the
other hand, the advantages of a despotic sovereignty in giving national
coherence, the crimes of the Papacy, which promoted anarchy in its
ill-governed States, and the prospect of a comprehensive Italian tyranny
under the great house of the Visconti, are eloquently pleaded. The terms
of the main issue being thus clearly defined, we may regard the warfare
carried on by Bertrand du Poiet and Louis of Bavaria in the interests of
Church and Empire, the splendid campaigns of Egidio d'Albornoz, and the
delirious cruelty of Robert of Geneva, no less than the predatory
excursions of Charles IV., as episodical. The main profits of those
convulsions, which drowned Italy in blood during nearly all the
fourteenth century, accrued to the Despots, who held their ground in
spite of all attempts to dispossess them. The greater houses, notably
the Visconti, acquired strength by revolutions in which the Church and
Empire neutralized each other's action. The lesser families struck firm
roots into cities, infuriated rather than intimidated by such acts of
violence as the massacres of Faenza and Cesena in 1377. The relations of
the imperial and pontifical parties were confused; while even in the
center of republican independence, at Florence, social changes,
determined in great measure by the exhaustion of the city in its
conflict, prepared the way for the Medicean tyranny. Neither the Church
nor the Empire gained steady footing in Italy, while the prestige of
both was ruined.[1] Municipal freedom, instead of being enlarged, was
extinguished by the ambition of the Florentine oligarchs, who, while
they spent the last florin of the Commune in opposing the Visconti,
never missed an opportunity of enslaving the sister burghs of Tuscany.
In a word, the destiny of the nation was irresistibly impelling it
toward despotism.

[1] Machiavelli, in his _Istorie Fiorentine_ (Firenze, 1818, vol. i.
pp. 47, 48), points out how the competition of the Church and
Empire, during the Papacies of Benedict XII. and Clement VI. and the
reign of Louis strengthened the tyrants of Lombardy, Romagna, and
the March. Each of the two contending power