WHILE these things were going on at home, the exigencies of war for many years made serious demands on the State and its resources, and more than once the contest was carried into the territory of the Republic. To the dangers which arose from the fact that two ambitious and warlike princes governed the north and south of Italy, was added the unfavourable circumstance, that a Pope sat in St. Peter’s chair who was constantly drawn into the din of war, less, perhaps, from his own restlessness, than from the hopeless confusion in the States of the Church. The principal scene of the war was Romagna, a country which, by its distracted condition, by the number of its petty lords, and the violent character of its inhabitants—still more by its geographical position and the vicinity of powerful States—seemed destined to be the general battle-field. The hereditary enmity of Filippo Maria Visconti was aggravated by the hatred of the Florentine exiles, who, despairing of a return to their country on peaceful terms, stirred up the Duke of Milan to strife with her, under the usual pretext that it was not a war against their country, but against a faction. The want of success which attended the troops of Visconti in the territory of Lucca, under Niccolò Piccinino, was an enticement for Cosimo de’ Medici to strive to obtain possession of this town, as he did six years later, but with no greater success than before. The war, begun in the Lucchese territory, was continued in the Romagna, where Florence and Venice, with the aid of Pope Eugenius IV., resisted Visconti. The Milanese army did indeed once again cross the Apennines, but only to suffer a decisive defeat, on June 29, 1440, at Anghiari, between Arezzo and the valley of the Tiber. This defeat led to peace in the following year, and enlarged the Florentine territory by the mountain region of the Casentino, where the supremacy of the counts Guidi, allied with Milan, who, since the days of imperial power in Italy, had had dominion here, came to an end. Scarcely was the Milanese war at an end than Florence, like Venice, was drawn into the contest with Naples which Renè of Anjou was carrying on against King Alfonso of Aragon; both representatives of the dualism which the fall of the Hohenstaufen had bequeathed to South Italy. The Sienese country, the territory of Volterra and the Pisan Maremma, were the scenes of a struggle which might have been dangerous to the Republic, if the king had not been detained by besieging smaller places—though he was not unskilled in war; he suffered moreover from the malaria of the plains, and wasting the years 1447 and 1448 in inglorious and fruitless undertakings, was obliged for a while to lay down his arms without concluding peace, with the intention of taking them up again under more favourable circumstances. The opportunity was not long delayed.