The family retired into exile; their houses were plundered and burnt. One of the branches, in a quarrel with relations, had discarded the name and altered the coat of arms, and flourishes still under the name of the Alessandri. The reaction of the year 1381 brought the exiles back, and they were soon more powerful than ever. Maso (Tommaso), Piero’s nephew, had been first banished to Barletta, on the Apulian coast, and then made a ‘Grande,’ _i.e._ disqualified for holding communal offices. He now attained almost dictatorial power, and exercised it with political insight, and a consistency which essentially aided in raising the republic to that height of power and repute on which it remained thenceforward, and long after his own faction was destroyed, till the revolution in Italian affairs at the end of the fifteenth century. If he acted intolerantly in home affairs; if proscriptions did not cease, and the prosecution of the Alberti, who were concerned in the insurrection of 1378 and in the execution of Piero degli Albizzi, showed cruelty in the enactment which commanded their houses to be razed to the ground, their coats of arms to be destroyed, and their property confiscated; a law that punished alliances by marriage and commercial transactions with them, extended even to their posterity;[57] it is less the fault of the man than of the spirit which had prevailed in the republics for centuries, and which led even the most discerning to make the commonwealth ever subservient to party policy, and to look upon their own faction as the State. Embassies to Gian Galeazzo Visconti, to King Rupert of the Palatinate, Pope Gregory XII., &c., alternated for Maso with a continuous series of the most important offices. Even when he was out of office, nothing was done without him. When the republic manfully resisted the progress of Gian Galeazzo in Central Italy, enlarged and secured her own territory by the conquest of Pisa, actively contributed to ecclesiastical union, and brought the dangerous war with King Ladislaus to a successful end, it was all really due to Albizzi. He was a rich man; the street outside the oldest district of the town, still named after his family, was almost entirely occupied by their houses and those of the Pazzi; and in our time, the palace belonging to his descendants, as well as that of the Alessandri, the half-ruined tower, the walled-up loggia, the passage to the market of San Piero, with the portico of the demolished church built by a descendant of Maso, remind us of the brilliant days of the family, whose coat of arms is still to be seen on the buildings—two concentric golden circles on a black field, and above it on a silver field the cross of the German order granted to Maso. In the lower valley of the Arno, on the right bank of the river, where a low range of hills stretches between the Lake of Bientina, reaching to the foot of the mountains of Pisa, and the green