The rule of her aristocracy was far less corrupt and far more consistent than that of other Italian states. The stability of her Government and her immunity from those revolutions to which the other states of Italy were ever subject excited the envy of her neighbours. The leniency and wisdom with which she governed her dependencies secured her the loyalty of her subjects. Her riches were still great; her patronage of art magnificent; and if the tone of private morality was low, it was not lower than in the rest of Italy. | Mantua and Ferrara. To the south and south-west of Venice lay the two independent territories of Mantua and of Ferrara. Of these Mantua, situated amid the marshy flats of the Mincio, belonged to the warrior family of the Gonzagas, while Ferrara, commanding the mouths of the Po, was ruled by the ancient house of Este. | Florence. Nestling under the Apennines, Florence held the watershed of the Arno with her dependent cities of Volterra, Arezzo, Cortona, Pistoja, and Pisa. To the north-west and to the south of her lay the independent states of Lucca and Siena, long her deadly enemies. Nominally a republic based on a system of trade-guilds, Florence was practically in the hands of the Medici, who, while they left the outward form of the constitution intact, kept the government in the hands of their partisans. From time to time a packed ‘Parliament’ of the citizens elected committees or Balías, under whose control the Signory and other officials were selected. Finally, in 1480, a college of seventy, practically nominated by Lorenzo, took for a time the place of the Balías. This college not only nominated the Signory, but elected the _Consiglio Maggiore_, the legislative body of the republic, and thus became master of the city. A clever manipulation of the taxes, by which they struck at the rich, gained the Medici the support of the lower classes, while the confusion of the public treasury with the finances of their banking-house gave them the final control of the administration.[6] The rule of the Medici was a far more temperate one than that of the Sforza of Milan. Their power was the result of real political genius. By that alone they had succeeded in controlling the most restless, the most acute, and the most brilliant people the world had yet seen since the days of the Athenians. In Florence was concentrated the essence of Italian art and literature, and with it, alas, much of that immorality and licence which stains the glory of the Renaissance. Unfortunately, at this crisis of her history, Lorenzo the Magnificent, the type of a Medicean prince, died (April 1492), and, under the incapable rule of his son Piero, the authority of the family was being rapidly undermined. | The Papal States.