ue, for the most part a show of some central and coordinating
power, nominally supreme over these independent and often hostile
magistrates, such as the body of Ancients. But this central government
had little effective power.

To understand the course of Florentine history, however, we must turn
back for a moment to the informal internal organization of the two
bodies thus opposed to each other. The struggle is between the
military and territorial aristocracy on the one hand, and the
mercantile democracy of the city on the other; and we have seen that
the clan system and the Tower-clubs were the germ cells of the one
order, and the Craft-guilds those of the other. Now the Craft-guilds
were obviously capable of supporting a higher form of political
development than could ever come out of the rival system. The officers
of the Florentine Crafts were compelled to exercise all the higher
functions of government. They preserved a strict discipline within
their own jurisdiction--(and the aggregation of the trades in certain
streets and districts made that jurisdiction roughly correspond to
local divisions)--they had to coordinate their industries one with
another, and regulate their complicated relations one with another,
and they sent their representatives to all the great trading cities of
the world, where they had to conduct such delicate and important
negociations that they became the most skilful diplomatists in Italy.
Indeed, the training of ambassadors may almost be considered as a
Florentine industry! Add to this the vast financial concerns which
they had to conduct, and it will readily be seen that as statesmen
the merchants of Florence must eventually prove more than a match for
their military rivals and opponents. The merchant people was the
progressive and constructive element in Florentine society.

Accordingly the constitutional history of Florence resolves itself
into a progressive, though chequered, advance of the people against
the nobles (or, as they were afterwards called, the magnates) along
two lines. In the first place, they had to make the _de facto_ trade
organization of the city into its _de jure_ constitution--a movement
which culminated in 1282 in the formal recognition of the Priors of
the Crafts as the supreme magistrates of Florence. And, in the second
place, they must attempt to bring the magnates effectively within the
control of the laws and constitution of the mercantile community,
which th