When he died his mourning fellow citizens inscribed on his tomb the words _Pater Patriae_, ‘Father of his Country’. They had felt the benefits received through Cosimo’s government: they had not realized, or were indifferent to, the chains with which he had bound them. Some bitter enemies he had, of course, aroused, but these with quiet but remorseless energy he had swept from his path. It was his custom to sap the fortunes of possible rivals by immense exactions--to make them pay in fact for the liberal government, for which he would afterwards receive the praise, while drawing away their friends and supporters by bribery and threats. At last, ruined and deserted, they would be driven from the city; and here even Cosimo did not rest, since his influence at foreign courts enabled him to hunt his prey from one refuge to another until they died, impotently cursing the name of Medici, a warning to malcontents of the length and breadth of a private citizen’s revenge. The Medici, it has been said, ‘used taxes as other men use their swords’, and the charge of deliberate corruption that has been brought against them is undeniable. ‘It is better to injure the city than to ruin it,’ once declared Cosimo himself, adding cynically, ‘It takes more to direct a government than to sit and tell one’s beads.’ Neither he nor his descendants were the type of ruler represented by Charlemagne or Alfred the Great. Their ideals were frankly low, with self-interest in the foreground, however skilfully disguised. When this has been admitted, however, it should be also remembered that Cosimo employed no army of hired ruffians to terrorize fellow citizens as the Visconti had done. Florence was willing to be corrupted, and if she lost the freedom she had loved in theory, yet she rose under the benevolent despotism of the Medici to a greater height of material and political prosperity than ever before or since in her history. ‘The authority that they possessed in Florence and throughout Christendom’, says Machiavelli, ‘was not obtained without being merited.’ [Sidenote: The New Learning]