In spite of public prosperity there were signs, however, that this rule of a few families could not last.  Their government was only maintained by continual revision of the lists of burghers, by elimination of the disaffected, and by unremitting personal industry.  They introduced no new machinery into the Constitution whereby the people might be deprived of its titular sovereignty, or their own dictatorship might be continued with a semblance of legality.  Again, they neglected to win over the new nobles (nobili popolani) in a body to their cause; and thus they were surrounded by rivals ready to spring upon them when a false step should be made.  The Albizzi oligarchy was a masterpiece of art, without any force to sustain it but the craft and energy of its constructors.  It had not grown up, like the Venetian oligarchy, by the gradual assimilation to itself of all the vigour in the State.  It was bound, sooner or later, to yield to the renascent impulse of democracy inherent in Florentine institutions.

VII

Maso degli Albizzi died in 1417.  He was succeeded in the government by his old friend, Niccolo da Uzzano, a man of great eloquence and wisdom, whose single word swayed the councils of the people as he listed.  Together with him acted Maso’s son, Rinaldo, a youth of even more brilliant talents than his father, frank, noble, and high-spirited, but far less cautious.

The oligarchy, which these two men undertook to manage, had accumulated against itself the discontent of overtaxed, disfranchised, jealous burghers.  The times, too, were bad.  Pursuing the policy of Maso, the Albizzi engaged the city in a tedious and unsuccessful war with Filippo Maria Visconti, which cost 350,000 golden florins, and brought no credit.  In order to meet extraordinary expenses they raised new public loans, thereby depreciating the value of the old Florentine funds.  “What was worse, they imposed forced subsidies with grievous inequality upon the burghers, passing over their friends and adherents, and burdening their opponents with more than could be borne.  This imprudent financial policy began the ruin of the Albizzi.  It caused a clamour in the city for a new system of more just taxation, which was too powerful to be resisted.  The voice of the people made itself loudly heard; and with the people on this occasion sided Giovanni de’ Medici.  This was in 1427.

It is here that the Medici appear upon that memorable scene where in the future they are to play the first part.  Giovanni de’ Medici did not belong to the same branch of his family as the Salvestro who favoured the people at the time of the Ciompi Tumult.  But he adopted the same popular policy.  To his sons Cosimo and Lorenzo he bequeathed on his deathbed the rule that they should invariably adhere to the cause of the multitude, found their influence on that, and avoid the arts of factious and ambitious leaders.