by these noble
families, potent through their territorial possessions and foreign
connections, and trained from boyhood in the use of arms, to recover
the place from which the new laws thrust them: but their menacing
attitude, instead of intimidating the burghers, roused their anger and
drove them to the passing of still more stringent laws. In 1293, after
the Ghibellines had been defeated in the great battle of Campaldino, a
series of severe enactments, called the Ordinances of Justice, were
decreed against the unruly Grandi. All civic rights were taken from
them; the severest penalties were attached to their slightest
infringement of municipal law; their titles to land were limited; the
privilege of living within the city walls was allowed them only under
galling restrictions; and, last not least, a supreme magistrate, named
the Gonfalonier of Justice, was created for the special purpose of
watching them and carrying out the penal code against them.
Henceforward Florence was governed exclusively by merchants and
artisans. The Grandi hastened to enrol themselves in the guilds,
exchanging their former titles and dignities for the solid privilege
of burghership. The exact parallel to this industrial constitution for
a commonwealth, carrying on wars with emperors and princes, holding
haughty captains in its pay, and dictating laws to subject cities,
cannot, I think, be elsewhere found in history. It is as unique as the
Florence of Dante and Giotto is unique. While the people was guarding
itself thus stringently against the Grandi, a separate body was
created for the special purpose of extirpating the Ghibellines. A
permanent committee of vigilance, called the College or the Captains
of the Guelf Party, was established. It was their function to
administer the forfeited possessions of Ghibelline rebels, to hunt out
suspected citizens, to prosecute them for Ghibellinism, to judge them,
and to punish them as traitors to the commonwealth. This body, like a
little State within the State, proved formidable to the republic
itself through the unlimited and undefined sway it exercised over
burghers whom it chose to tax with treason. In course of time it
became the oligarchical element within the Florentine democracy, and
threatened to change the free constitution of the city into a
government conducted by a few powerful families.

There is no need to dwell in detail on the internal difficulties of
Florence during the first half o