It naturally follows that their relations with the authorities were greatly modified in the towns in which they created, or were themselves, the authorities. Such was the case at Florence, where, from the year 1293, twenty-one _Arti_ or unions of craft guilds nominated the Priors and the other supreme magistrates of the city; at Strasburg, where, during the fourteenth century, the City Council was formed from the delegates of twenty-five _Zünfte_, having the same constitution as the Arti of Florence; at Ghent, where at about the time of James van Artevelde the three _members_[80] of the State were formed by the weavers, the fullers, and the "small" crafts; at Boulogne, Siena, Bruges, Zurich, Liége, Spire, Worms, Ulm, Mayence, Augsburg, Cologne, etc.; where within sixty years similar revolutions occurred, putting the power into the hands of the guilds. In those days the guilds were the units for elections, for the militia, and for taxation; they judged their dependents without appeal; they expelled, or reduced to the rank of passive citizens, those who were not inscribed on their registers; they decided questions of taxation, peace, and war, and directed the policy of their town, whose internal and even external history is essentially one with their own. In these little corporate republics, the principal question became that of deciding how the different groups of guilds should apportion the government among themselves. But first, on what principle were the guilds classified? Was it according to the vital importance of the needs they existed to supply? This would seem reasonable enough, but apparently it was nothing of the kind, or else the provision trades would have been in the first rank. _Primum vivere_, said the old adage, and to live it is necessary to eat and drink, more necessary even than to be housed and clothed, and to trade, and certainly more necessary than to draw up notaries' deeds or go to law. Now the crafts which provided for the inner man, for Messer Gaster, as Rabelais calls him (butchers, wine merchants, bakers), were almost everywhere placed in the second or third rank; the only exceptions were the grocer-druggists, and it will be seen why this was so. We must look elsewhere, then, for the reasons which determined the order of social importance assigned to the guilds by public opinion in the Middle Ages. It appears that this classification was based on three different principles which I will call the _aristocratic_, the _plutocratic_, and the _historical_; that is to say, the status of a profession seems to have depended on whether it was more or less _honourable_, _lucrative_, or _ancient_.[81]