We shall say nothing
of the piety of the masses, and of their firm belief in the indulgences
of an Alexander VI. But the State itself, after absorbing the Church to
a degree unknown elsewhere, had in truth a certain ecclesiastical
element in its composition, and the Doge, the symbol of the State,
appeared in twelve great processions ('andate') in a half-clerical
character. They were almost all festivals in memory of political
events, and competed in splendor with the great feasts of the Church;
the most brilliant of all, the famous marriage with the sea, fell on
Ascension Day.
The most elevated political thought and the most varied forms of human
development are found united in the history of Florence, which in this
sense deserves the name of the first modern State in the world. Here
the whole people are busied with what in the despotic cities is the
affair of a single family. That wondrous Florentine spirit, at once
keenly critical and artistically creative, was incessantly transforming
the social and political condition of the State, and as incessantly
describing and judging the change. Florence thus became the home of
political doctrines and theories, of experiments and sudden changes,
but also, like Venice, the home of statistical science, and alone and
above all other States in the world, the home of historical
representation in the modern sense of the phrase.
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