Although business was transacted not in the house of Medici but in the palace of the Signoria, where Lorenzo passed many hours as a member of councils and committees, still the government was becoming more and more a personal one. The constant change in the members of the Signoria, intended to prevent the authority of individuals from increasing, necessarily promoted this personal government; so much the more as a regular and consistent treatment became necessary for the direction of foreign affairs, ever increasing in continuity and importance. Only in this manner could Florence maintain her position against the larger Italian and foreign states—all monarchic except Venice, who preserved her constitution almost unchanged. Naturally, however, such a personal government had the grave defects of all political arrangements where legal right and hereditary prescription are not the fundamental principles, and whose internal nature is a negation of their external form. This State, apparently constituted on a broad basis, was in reality ruled by a comparatively small party with a recognised chief at their head. Lorenzo’s contemporaries said that he had greater authority and more personal power than any despotic ruler.[370] Nothing was done without his initiative and approval. Popes, kings, and princes applied to him; ambassadors corresponded with him; thousands besieged him with petitions for offices, posts of honour, favours, remission of taxes and imposts, and personal interests of all kinds both at home and in the neighbouring states. Each found him willing to listen; the letters he wrote were innumerable, many of them written by his own hand, to different parties of high and low rank, some personally known to him, others quite strangers. He would willingly help merchants, stewards, farmers, countrymen, and people of all sorts and positions in life. Besides the countless clients of the family there were those recommended by them—as he called them, ‘my good old friends.’ He applied to the Duke of Ferrara on behalf of the money-changers in the Prato, ‘these Jews, my friends.’[371] His correspondence contains the strangest medley of subjects, events, and persons; contraventions of the toll-regulations at the passage of the flocks coming down for the winter from the Casentino and the Pistojan hills to the Sienese Maremma; frauds by merchants; thefts from Florentine subjects; differences with the administration of salt; deeds of violence and murder, are all mixed up with recommendations for judicial offices, especially the office of Podestà, judge of the court of appeal, capitano, &c., and for spiritual dignities and benefices; settlement of boundary disputes; concessions about the corn trade; mediation on the passage of troops; and the affairs of the petty dynasties seated around the Siena district, the Sforzas of Santafiora, the Orsini of Pitigliano, and many others. His constant desire was