The elder of the two daughters, Bianca, was married in Cosimo’s lifetime to Guglielmo de’ Pazzi. The great influence which the Pazzi family had on the fortunes of the Medici and of the State makes it necessary to dwell awhile upon their history.[110] Their origin is veiled in obscurity. Some have considered them as identical with the lordly family of the same name in the Arno valley, which was connected with the Donati, frequently mentioned in the heroic days of Florence, and related to Dante Alighieri. Others have traced them from Fiesole, whence the old family arms are said to be derived—six moons, alternately blue and red, in a silver field, a device which they exchanged in 1388 for that granted by the dukes of Bar, two golden barbs in a blue field, and at present changed into dolphins with four small double crosses. According to unauthenticated tradition, Pazzo de’ Pazzi went to Jerusalem in Godfrey de Bouillon’s army, and the people of Florence preserved a fragment of stone which he is said to have brought home from the Saviour’s tomb. At one time placed in Sta. Maria del Fiore, and then in Sant’Apostolo, this stone was used to strike the sparks from which the tapers were lighted, and in Sta. Maria del Fiore, during the mass, it set alight the Columbina, a squib in the shape of a dove, which ignited a cart full of rockets and other fireworks exploded between the church and baptistery. This cart, called the Carro de’ Pazzi, drives round a part of the inner town, and stops at the entrance of the Borgo degli Albizzi, named after the family, where one of their palaces forms the corner. About the middle of the twelfth century we meet with the name of the Pazzi in documents; towards the close they became divided into three principal branches. In the bloody battle of Montaperti, Jacopo de’ Pazzi bore the banner of Florence, which, when the traitor Bocca degli Abati hewed his hands off, he pressed to his breast with the stumps till he sank down dead. His son Pazzino stood at the head of the Black party in the desolating party strife which preceded the Roman expedition of the Emperor Henry of Luxemburg. At the beginning of the fifteenth century the still flourishing line was strictly aristocratic, and only passed over to the plebeian families in 1434. This change arose out of the circumstance that so many of the families hitherto admitted to hold office were proscribed by being ranked among ‘the great,’ so that Cosimo feared to increase their numbers and consequently their power. He therefore caused the old noble families, if they did not exactly oppose him and his family, to be ranked among the plebeians. Thus it happened with Andrea de’ Pazzi, who was born in 1372, and with whom the importance of the family in civic affairs commences. He was already experienced in embassies, and had treated with Pope John XXIII. When, as has been already related, King René resided in Florence in 1442, Andrea de’