advantage: when it once exceeds due measure it is ruinous. While it cannot contribute to the strength of warlike States, it has a most hurtful influence on unwarlike ones, of which the Italian republics give evidence: an opinion which would sound paradoxical if we did not consider that he who expressed it had before his eyes the spectacle of a State, without unity in itself, consisting of the most different elements, united only by an outward bond, whose laws, founded on systematic oppression of the nobles, appeared to him as the reason of its evident helplessness in the second half of the fourteenth century.
With the aid of many hundreds of documents in the Tuscan archives[73] we can closely follow the history of the growth of the Florentine territory, as it increased in all directions above the valley of the Arno, often with difficulty and with the most violent struggles, beyond Prato, Pistoja, on the shore of the Mediterranean towards Leghorn, through the Elsa and Chiana valley, where the conflicts took place with Siena, beyond Arezzo; finally, by way of Cortona, to the upper valley of the Tiber, and towards the Umbrian frontier, as along the Apennines to that of Romagna, including, on the other side, Volterra and the long-contested Pisa. The forms under which the villages and territories were annexed were very various. First of these, was the submission (submissio), a result generally of war, but which sometimes was brought about by compacts with other commonwealths and rulers, and at times occurred spontaneously. The submitting commune assembled in such case a parliament to appoint a syndicus, who repaired to Florence to settle affairs with the Signoria, after which the Chapter was consulted, and a commissary of the Republic was sent to the place in question to receive homage, and complete the so-called act of taking bodily possession. These things were very simple in small communes. They expressed to the Signoria by their syndics and procurators the hope that they might be well governed by them, and live in peace; promised faith and obedience—appointing a fine in case of a breach of this promise; received a podestà and judge from Florence; retained free choice of their presidents from their own citizens; stipulated conditions in respect to markets, customs, weights and measures, etc., as well as observance of their own statutes, such as even the smallest communes possessed. For if, with the decline of the imperial power towards the time of the Swabian emperors, the legal power once pertaining to the empire might be considered as having passed actually to princes and commonwealths, the case now occurred that princes and larger towns claimed the former rights of the empire over little towns, which defended themselves as far as they could by reservations. In such cases the statute of the chief town represented towards the subject communes the common law, to which there was an appeal from the separate municipal statutes where appeal to the Roman law was not stipulated. After the subjection of Pisa, the Pisan statutes remained valid for all the dependencies of this town; but in Florence such dependencies had always a hearing if they appealed to the Florentine statute law. But where there was a special fortress in the stipulating place (Rocca, Cassero), the garrisoning of it was decided by the ruling commune.
The different conditions are as different as the nature of the community was varied. Larger cities naturally made their importance felt. A whole series of treaties were concluded with Pistoja, beginning with the peace made after the death of Castruccio Castracane on May 11, 1329, at the time of the confusion caused by Louis the Bavarian’s Roman expedition. In the summer of 1331 the Florentine Signoria received full powers for a year for ‘the security of freedom’ and the government of city and territory. These temporary powers were repeatedly prolonged: commissions of Florentine citizens were appointed for the revision of statutes; the powers of the sovereign Signoria, and those of the magistrates of the subject town, were carefully limited in such a way that the actual decision in local government remained to the latter, which limited the supreme government. Volterra, which acknowledged the supremacy of the Duke of Athens, but had asserted its own independence after his fall, preserved it nominally up to the end of the fourteenth century; but the Republic of Florence had attained to such extensive rights that scarcely more independence remained to the commune than to subject States, especially after a rebellion excited by the introduction of the Cadastre had ended to the disadvantage of the people of Volterra. As can easily be understood, quite peculiar circumstances followed, when places were obtained through agreement with foreign powers. By the repeated interference of the Neapolitan Angevin princes in Tuscan affairs, and the increasing military weakness of the communes, this occurred only too frequently. Prato, in the midst of the wars of the Ghibellines and Guelphs, in the times of the emperors of the houses of Bavaria and Luxembourg, powerless to protect itself, had acknowledged King Robert of Naples as its Signore in 1313, and remained under the rule of Neapolitan viceroys till Robert’s granddaughter Johanna gave up the town to the Republic of Florence, in the year 1350, for the sum of 13,500 gold florins, which a citizen of Florence, Francesco Rinuccini, advanced without interest. Florence thus succeeded to the king’s rights, and appointed the superior officers, while the town retained her own municipal government. It had happened most strangely of all with Arezzo. Unable to assert herself against the superior powers of the Guelphs, she had acknowledged the supremacy of Florence in 1337, and while retaining her own territories, statutes, and privileges, received only the higher magistrates, Podestà and Capitano, from Florence, to whom she promised fidelity and assistance in peace and war. The oppressions, and especially the building of fortresses, by which the ruling community here, as elsewhere, sought to secure itself, went so far, that when, after the fall of the Duke of Athens, the majority of the larger towns revolted from Florence, Arezzo also regained her independence, which she preserved till 1380, when she fell into the power of Duke Charles of Durazzo, in his expedition against Queen Johanna. Four years later the town was taken by the French army under Duke Louis of Anjou, marching to the assistance of the queen; and the commander, Enguerraud de Coney, sold it four years afterwards to the Florentines for 50,000 gold florins.
But there were other political connections beside that of subjection. The Accomandigia, or assumption of a protectorate, was an act, more or less solemn, by which a possession, either of the Church or the commune, was recommended to protection, that might extend to the person of the possessor, who was then called Raccomandato. It was a very old connection, which united Florence with other communes, as for instance with Siena. As in the earliest times of the commonwealth, the distinguished family of the Buondelmonti recommended their castle, Montebuoni, to the Florentine bishop for protection, so did numerous and powerful lords of the commune recommend themselves afterwards. A kind of homage was always combined with the Accomandigia; it usually consisted of a pallium or banner of brocade or gold and silver cloth, presented on St. John’s day. Those recommended for protection promised to be friendly to the commune, to assist it at its summons in its feuds, to share friendship and enmity with it, to grant free passage through their territories, not to hinder the transport of provisions and merchandise, and to grant refuge to none who had been banished by the commune. The commune, on the other hand, allowed the Raccomandati law of arms on their own territory, promised defence or compensation for loss, and empowered the planting of the Florentine banner on their castles. The second half of the fourteenth century and the first of the following were exceedingly rich in such Accomandigie, because the smaller landowners felt themselves more and more weakened and threatened in their independence, in consequence of the great diminution of the number of independent communes, and thereby the accession of power to those still remaining, as Florence, Siena, and Lucca. Florence had begun by drawing the nobles in the nearer vicinity of the Arno valley into such a connection with herself, and also to absorb the smaller communes. Then the Accomandigia expanded more and more, till all the great noble families, so to say, for the most part originally free, imperial and Ghibellines, had lost their independence in the higher sense of the word. At last the turn came to others, even distant, where the relation of protection was essentially altered, as with the Grimaldi of Monaco, the Genoese Campofregoso, the Appiani of Piombino, the Marchese of Monte Sta. Maria, the numerous Malaspine, who resided at their imperial fiefs in the Lunigiana, but naturally looked more to Florence and Genoa, to the Visconti and the Esti, than to the empire. Even Roman barons entered into connections of this kind. In 1395 the Colonna of Palestrina placed themselves, with all their castles, for five years under the protection of the Republic, whose service they entered. The Orsini of Savona whose relations, the Counts of Pitigliano, stood in the same relation to Siena, had preceded them. More important for Florence was the protection of many dynasties of Romagna and Umbria, of which we shall speak farther on. With regard to the landowners settled in Tuscany, if we except a few independent imperial vassals, who remained