some time not later than 1287. He may possibly have served in some cavalry expedition to check the harrying parties of Aretines in 1288; for, when the great battle of the following year was fought, it found Dante “no novice in arms,” as a fragment of one of his lost letters puts it, _non fanciullo nell’ armi_. POPULAR GOVERNMENT.--Twenty years had now passed since the victory of Colle di Valdelsa in 1269. Great changes had taken place in the meanwhile. The estrangement between Charles of Anjou and the Popes, Gregory X. and Nicholas III., the attempts of these latter to weaken the king’s power by reconciling the Florentine Guelfs with the Ghibelline exiles, and the dissensions among the Guelf magnates themselves within the city, had led, in 1280, to the peace arranged by Cardinal Latino Frangipani. A government was set up of fourteen _buonuomini_, magnates and popolani, eight Guelfs and six Ghibellines. But the city remained strenuously Guelf. Nicholas III. had deprived King Charles of the offices of Senator of Rome and Vicar Imperial and had allowed Rudolph of Hapsburg to establish a vicar in Tuscany (_Inf._ xix. 99). In 1282 came the Vespers of Palermo (_Par._ viii. 75). The Sicilians rose, massacred Charles’s adherents, and received as their king Peter of Aragon, the husband of Manfred’s daughter Constance (_Purg._ iii. 143). The hitherto united kingdom of Sicily, which had been the heritage of the imperial Suabians from the Norman heroes of the house of Hauteville, was thus divided between a French and a Spanish line of kings (_Par._ xx. 63); the former at Naples as kings of “Sicily and Jerusalem,” the latter in the island as kings of “Trinacria.” Charles was henceforth too much occupied in war with the Sicilians and Aragonese to interfere in the internal affairs of Tuscany. In the June of this year a peaceful revolution took place in Florence. Instead of the fourteen _buonuomini_, the government was put into the hands of the Priors of the Arts or Guilds, who, associated with the Captain, were henceforth recognised as the chief magistrates of the Republic, composing the Signoria, during the two months for which they were elected to hold office. Their number, originally three, was raised to six; both _grandi_ and _popolani_ were at first eligible, provided the former left their order by enrolling themselves in one of the Guilds. A thorough organisation of these Guilds, the _Arti maggiori_ (which were mainly engaged in wholesale commerce, exportation and importation, and the mercantile relations of Florence with foreign countries) and _Arti minori_ (which carried on the retail traffic and internal trade of the city), secured the administration in the hands of the trading classes.