When the government of the Albizzi came to an end, the domain of the Republic had, with the exception of some smaller territories and villages in the mountainous regions of the Casentino and the valley of the Tiber, attained pretty nearly the same extent which she preserved up to the union of the Sienese State with that of Florence, and the consequent formation of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The enlargement of this territory had proceeded of course gradually, but constantly. Dante Alighieri says once it would have been far better for Florence had the inhabitants of Campi, Figline, and Certaldo remained her neighbours, instead of becoming her fellow-citizens, and corrupting the pure Latin blood of her old families. Two centuries after the writer of the ‘Divina Commedia,’ the most famous statesman of modern Italy expressed pretty nearly the same opinions. ‘Venice and Florence’—such are Niccolò Machiavelli’s words in his reflections on the first ten books of Titus Livius—‘were far weaker when the first had attained the supremacy over Lombardy the latter over Tuscany, than when Venice was content with the sea and Florence with six miles of territory.’ The increase of subjects by the absorption of other communities is certainly of small advantage: when it once exceeds due measure it is ruinous. While it cannot contribute to the strength of warlike States, it has a most hurtful influence on unwarlike ones, of which the Italian republics give evidence: an opinion which would sound paradoxical if we did not consider that he who expressed it had before his eyes the spectacle of a State, without unity in itself, consisting of the most different elements, united only by an outward bond, whose laws, founded on systematic oppression of the nobles, appeared to him as the reason of its evident helplessness in the second half of the fourteenth century.