The whole of this system excited the deep and persistent hatred of the
Florentine writers of that epoch. Even the pomp and display with which
the despot was perhaps less anxious to gratify his own vanity than to
impress the popular imagination, awakened their keenest sarcasm. Woe to
an adventurer if he fell into their hands, like the upstart Doge
Agnello of Pisa (1364), who used to ride out with a golden scepter, and
show himself at the window of his house, 'as relics are shown,'
reclining on embroidered drapery and cushions, served like a pope or
emperor, by kneeling attendants. More often, however, the old
Florentines speak on this subject in a tone of lofty seriousness. Dante
saw and characterized well the vulgarity and commonplace which marked
the ambition of the new princes. 'What else mean their trumpets and
their bells, their horns and their flutes, but "come, hangmen come,
vultures!"' The castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind,
is lofty and solitary, full of dungeons and listening-tubes, the home
of cruelty and misery. Misfortune is foretold to all who enter the
service of the despot, who even becomes at last himself an object of
pity: he must needs be the enemy of all good and honest men: he can
trust no one and can read in the faces of his subjects the expectation
of his fall.
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