Agnolo Acciaiuoli held a position scarcely inferior to that of Neri Capponi. In the preceding century, his family, which rose with the majority of the plebeian races, attained to unusual splendour. When we descend the high road, leading southward from Florence to Siena, we perceive, three miles from the town, on an isolated height on the banks of the river Ema, the Certosa of Montacuto, convent and fortress at the same time, with towers and pinnacles, with grand colonnades and monuments of sculpture and painting in the splendid church. If we wander farther, quitting the high road to descend to the right into the valley of the Pesa, a tributary of the Arno, we see before us, on a low hill rising from the midst of a green valley, an imposing building, rather resembling a castle than a villa, the extensive mass of building surmounted by a tower resembling the Florentine Palazzo Vecchio—Monte Gufoni, once a splendid country seat, now, after the extinction of the family of its possessors, deprived of its glory, and inhabited by poor peasants. Niccolò Acciaiuoli built convent and villa in the first half of the fourteenth century, when he wished to leave his native country monuments of his affection and piety. Like so many of his fellow-countrymen, having been originally attracted to the south by commercial business, he had become, by talent and good fortune, all-powerful at the court of the Neapolitan Anjous, who made him grand seneschal of the kingdom, and afterwards a mighty ruler in Greece, where his relations became dukes of Athens and Corinth. Agnolo’s grandfather Donato, in former years governor in Corinth for his brother the seneschal, was one of those who put an end to the ochlocracy of the Ciompi, but his attempts to moderate the supremacy of the Albizzi resulted in the exile in which he died. Agnolo had inherited his spirit. He wished, indeed, for the supremacy of a party in Florence, since Florence could no longer exist without the preponderance of one or the other, but he resisted the entire subjection to one family or one man. This opinion, which was held by a number of influential citizens, explains the frequent internal disturbances, the history of which, and consequently that of the whole State, is but half understood, if we do not take into consideration the great number of eminent men who exercised a secondary but yet important influence on the conduct of affairs, as was the case especially under Cosimo de’ Medici, not to speak of later times, after the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico and during the last years of the Republic. Agnolo Acciaiuoli had during Cosimo’s exile engaged in transactions which would have cost him his head if his brother-in-law had not, in the moment of danger, burned the incriminating correspondence, which did actually bring him to the torture, and to banishment to Cephalonia. That he, an active and capable man, afterwards attained to influence and dignity is easily