While industry and trade had accumulated great wealth in Florence, the spirit of the community accorded well with it. In spite of the many wars and other disturbances the city rose to such prosperity in the first decades of the fourteenth century (when its territory included only Pistoja, Colle, and Arezzo, and therefore scarcely a third of Tuscany in later times) that Giovanni Villani could remark in 1336-1338 that her revenues exceeded those of the kings of Naples, of Sicily, and of Aragon. With all the changes after the rise of the new wealthy families at the beginning of the century the style of living had remained simple, and even continued so after the luxury of the court of Anjou, partly supported by Florentine money, had affected Florentine manners unfavourably; yet there was no stinting for public works. The citizens were in general beneficent: the number and importance of the charitable institutions prove it. As with the Government, so with the corporations, a lively sense was always displayed of the dignity and grandeur of the city and community. And even if that oft-mentioned decree of the republic of the year 1294,[49] according to which the architect Arnolfo shall be charged to design the model of a cathedral church ‘of such splendour that human power should be unable to invent anything grander or more beautiful, in consideration that a people of noble origin ought so to arrange its affairs that even in the exterior works a wise and lofty mind may be recognised’—even if this decree appears to be a production of the sixteenth instead of the thirteenth century, there are not wanting reliable records which announce the same spirit, and, still more, works which testify to it. In the year 1296, legacies in aid of this church were made a duty for every one; notaries were obliged to enjoin them in drawing up wills, and omissions were punished.[50] In 1338 the community granted subsidies for this same building, ‘that a work so beautifully and honourably begun might be continued and completed still more beautifully, and the grants made by the community appear liberal and considerable.’ When a pavement for the Piazza della Signoria was ordered in June 1351 it was especially insisted upon that the dignity and importance of the whole town were concerned, as well as the stateliness and beauty of the palace of the chief magistrate of state. When in August 1373 the public reading and exposition of the _Divina Commedia_ was applied for and permitted, the petitioners assigned as the ground of their request the wish that, even if otherwise unlearned, they themselves, their fellow-citizens, children, and posterity, be instructed in eloquence, guided to virtue, and warned against vice. When in 1409 the fabrication of the bronze gates of the shrine of St. Zanobius was entrusted to Lorenzo Ghiberti, it was said that he must have regard to the ancient veneration for the saint, as well as to the high dignity of the community, and respect to