The different conditions are as different as the nature of the community was varied. Larger cities naturally made their importance felt. A whole series of treaties were concluded with Pistoja, beginning with the peace made after the death of Castruccio Castracane on May 11, 1329, at the time of the confusion caused by Louis the Bavarian’s Roman expedition. In the summer of 1331 the Florentine Signoria received full powers for a year for ‘the security of freedom’ and the government of city and territory. These temporary powers were repeatedly prolonged: commissions of Florentine citizens were appointed for the revision of statutes; the powers of the sovereign Signoria, and those of the magistrates of the subject town, were carefully limited in such a way that the actual decision in local government remained to the latter, which limited the supreme government. Volterra, which acknowledged the supremacy of the Duke of Athens, but had asserted its own independence after his fall, preserved it nominally up to the end of the fourteenth century; but the Republic of Florence had attained to such extensive rights that scarcely more independence remained to the commune than to subject States, especially after a rebellion excited by the introduction of the _Cadastre_ had ended to the disadvantage of the people of Volterra. As can easily be understood, quite peculiar circumstances followed, when places were obtained through agreement with foreign powers. By the repeated interference of the Neapolitan Angevin princes in Tuscan affairs, and the increasing military weakness of the communes, this occurred only too frequently. Prato, in the midst of the wars of the Ghibellines and Guelphs, in the times of the emperors of the houses of Bavaria and Luxembourg, powerless to protect itself, had acknowledged King Robert of Naples as its Signore in 1313, and remained under the rule of Neapolitan viceroys till Robert’s granddaughter Johanna gave up the town to the Republic of Florence, in the year 1350, for the sum of 13,500 gold florins, which a citizen of Florence, Francesco Rinuccini, advanced without interest. Florence thus succeeded to the king’s rights, and appointed the superior officers, while the town retained her own municipal government. It had happened most strangely of all with Arezzo. Unable to assert herself against the superior powers of the Guelphs, she had acknowledged the supremacy of Florence in 1337, and while retaining her own territories, statutes, and privileges, received only the higher magistrates, Podestà and Capitano, from Florence, to whom she promised fidelity and assistance in peace and war. The oppressions, and especially the building of fortresses, by which the ruling community here, as elsewhere, sought to secure itself, went so far, that when, after the fall of the Duke of Athens, the majority of the larger towns revolted from Florence, Arezzo also regained her independence, which she preserved till 1380, when