In Florence the sagacious Cosimo I (1537-74) ruled with prudence and severity. He understood that his position depended on his fidelity to Spain and the Papacy, and acted accordingly. He married a Spanish lady, Eleanora of Toledo, daughter to the viceroy of Naples, took up his ducal residence first in the Palazzo Vecchio, where there are many remembrances of his duchess, and afterwards in the great palace, begun by Luca Pitti, across the Arno. He reduced Siena, once Florence's dangerous rival, to subjection, and crushed out the last traces of republican sentiment in his duchy. He employed Vasari to design the Uffizi, completed the edifice that holds the Laurentian library, and led as magnificent a life as a due regard for his purse would allow. In short, he was what one would expect an unrefined member of the _Casa Medici_ to be; and when one recollects that his grandmother was a Sforza of Milan, all expectations based on heredity are amply satisfied. Cosimo I left a long line of descendants to sit upon his grand-ducal throne. Their marble effigies at the head of the stairway in the Uffizi tell their story. The brutal Sforza vigour and the elegant Medicean astuteness could not save them from sharing in the general degeneracy that spread like a blight over all Italy. However, one must remember that they did collect the finest picture gallery in the world and housed it in the Uffizi and Pitti palaces. North of Tuscany the petty duchies of Ferrara, Urbino, Modena, Parma, and Mantua formed a little ducal coterie, very characteristic of the next two centuries. The Papacy indeed swallowed up Ferrara (1598) and Urbino (1631), but the House of Este of Ferrara moved on to Modena, and remained there till Napoleon's time. In Parma, Pope Paul III (1534-50), our old acquaintance Alexander Farnese, a careful father as well as a lucky brother, established his son as duke. This son was bad, and believed to be worse, so the nobles of Parma murdered him; but his descendants made good their title, and the little duchy of Parma, with its palace, its custom-house, its barracks, and its pictures, stepped forth as one of the petty states of the peninsula, and endured till the Union of Italy. Genoa and Lucca were permitted to remain republics.