The evil which was for ever
troubling the peace of the city was its rule over once powerful and now
conquered rivals like Pisa-a rule of which the necessary consequence
was a chronic state of violence. The only remedy, certainly an extreme
one and which none but Savonarola could have persuaded Florence to
accept, and that only with the help of favourable chances, would have
been the well-timed dissolution of Tuscany into a federal union of free
cities. At a later period this scheme, then no more than the dream of a
past age, brought (1548) a patriotic citizen of Lucca to the scaffold.
From this evil and from the ill-starred Guelph sympathies of Florence
for a foreign prince, which familiarized it with foreign intervention,
came all the disasters which followed. But who does not admire the
people which was wrought up by its venerated preacher to a mood of such
sustained loftiness that for the first time in Italy it set the example
of sparing a conquered foe while the whole history of its past taught
nothing but vengeance and extermination? The glow which melted
patriotism into one with moral regeneration may seem, when looked at
from a distance, to have soon passed away; but its best results shine
forth again in the memorable siege of 1529-30. They were 'fools,' as
Guicciardini then wrote, who drew down this storm upon Florence, but he
confesses himself that they achieved things which seemed incredible;
and when he declares that sensible people would have got out of the way
of the danger, he means no more than that Florence ought to have
yielded itself silently and ingloriously into the hands of its enemies.
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