The heroic age of Florence terminated with the first decade of the fourteenth century. The city, at the head of the Tuscan league, which bound together the Anjous and the Guelfs of Rome and Upper Italy, had manfully resisted Henry of Luxemburg, but succumbed to Louis of Bavaria and the Ghibellines, spite of the aid of foreign auxiliaries. At the same time the rulers from Naples, as well as the foreigners who were appointed to enforce established ordinances, were in a certain measure above the law, and in the exercise of arbitrary power. Fortune smiled on none of their undertakings, nor was the State guided to any better state of things by what the poet of the ‘Divine Comedy’ called ‘the new people and the sudden gains.’ Strength in arms began to decline, and an undue preponderance of material interests to prevail. No period of Florentine history is so poor in men distinguished by arms or policy as that which followed the repulse of Henry VII. Material interests even were not adequately protected. For although the springs of gain had yielded copiously, and still continued partially to flow, the cost of war and the taxes pressed with proportionate weight; and in the third decade of the century began the failures of the great banking houses, from which they did not recover for a long time, if they ever did completely. To this must be added distressing losses occasioned by inundations and epidemics. Confusion in the government, due on the one hand to the resentment of the aristocracy, on the other to the ill-feeling of the lower classes, brought matters at length to a crisis in 1342. A foreign adventurer, closely connected with the house of Anjou, Walter de Brienne, Count of Lecce and Duke of Athens, was enabled by the assistance of the lowest class of artisans, and some adherents of the nobler families, to make himself for a short time absolute master of Florence. The tyranny, indeed, was overthrown in the following year by a union of the upper and lower classes, who were not, however, long in falling out again, to the great detriment of the nobility. On the pretext of purging the Guelf party the system of _Ammonirism_—_i.e._ exclusion from public offices—was put in practice. It was directed against the decaying nobility on the one hand, and on the other against certain suspected persons in the lower classes. In this way, some thirty years after the expulsion of the Duke, the supreme power was vested in an oligarchy, at the head of which was the Captain of the Guelf faction. They had the whole machinery of government under their control, and were mainly supported by a few families of the wealthier burghers.[4] Among these were the Albizzi, who, originally from Arezzo, having acquired great riches and a high position, stood first in the city of Florence.