been her strength in the hour of need, took the
first opportunity of throwing off her yoke and helping her enemies. What
Florence spent in recapturing Pisa, after the passage of Charles VIII.
in 1494, is incalculable. And no sooner was she in difficulties during
the siege of 1329, than both Arezzo and Pisa declared for her foes.

It will not do to push historical parallels too far, interesting as it
may be to note a repetition of the same phenomena at distant periods and
under varying conditions of society. At the same time, to observe
fundamental points of divergence is no less profitable. Many of the
peculiarities of Greek history are attributable to the fact that a Greek
commonwealth consisted of citizens living in idleness, supported by
their slaves, and bound to the state by military service and by the
performance of civic duties. The distinctive mark of both Venice and
Florence, on the other hand, was that their citizens were traders. The
Venetians carried on the commerce of the Levant; the Florentines were
manufacturers and bankers: the one town sent her sons forth on the seas
to barter and exchange; the other was full of speculators, calculating
rates of interest and discount, and contracting with princes for the
conduct of expensive wars. The mercantile character of these Italian
republics is so essential to their history that it will not be out of
place to enlarge a little on the topic. We have seen that the
Florentines rendered commerce a condition of burghership. Giannotti,
writing the life of one of the chief patriots of the republic,[1] says:
'Egli stette a bottega, come fanno la maggior parte de' nostri, cosi
nobili come ignobili.' To quote instances in a matter so clear and
obvious would be superfluous: else I might show how Bardi and Peruzzi,
Strozzi, Medici, Pitti, and Pazzi, while they ranked with princes at
the Courts of France, or Rome, or Naples, were money-lenders, mortgagees
and bill-discounters in every great city of Europe. The Palle of the
Medici, which emboss the gorgeous ceilings of the Cathedral of Pisa,
still swing above the pawnbroker's shop in London. And though great
families like the Rothschilds in the most recent days have successfully
asserted the aristocracy of wealth acquired by usury, it still remains a
surprising fact that the daughter of the mediaeval bankers should have
given a monarch to the French in the sixteenth century.

[1] _Sulle azioni del Ferruccio_, vol. i. p. 44