The rapid sketch which we have given in our first chapter of the seigneuries and communities of Central Italy may suffice to exhibit the general condition of Umbria, the March of Ancona, and Romagna as far as the Po. In Tuscany, democratic institutions had taken deeper root, among a population addicted rather to arts than to arms, and preferring wealth earned by industry and commercial enterprise to the precarious glory and profits of the sword. Their peaceful habits permitted capital to accumulate; its increase gave them a stake in its security; leisure and consequent intelligence enabled them to mature ideas of liberty beyond those of neighbouring states. It was in Florence especially that a more perfect system of municipal institutions established communal freedom upon a firmer basis, which, amid the ceaseless convulsions of domestic factions, and even through the long atrophy of later Medicean domination, has preserved for that city a political and intellectual pre-eminence, finely acknowledged by old Sanzi in his exclamation, "For to curtail fair Florence of her freedom, Were to pluck forth an eye from Italy, And cause her orb to wane." In the adjacent commonwealths of Pisa, Lucca, and Siena, similar results sprang from somewhat analogous causes, although they were from time to time, in the words of Dante, "O'erthronged With tyrants, and a great Marcellus made Of any petty factious villager," until, by degrees encroached on by their more powerful neighbour, they were finally absorbed in the state which owned the Arno's queen as its capital.[*58] [Footnote *58: Lucca was never absorbed. It is true she was sold to Florence, but the City of the Lily could never get her. Cf. Ammirato, Muratori, Sismondi.] Lombardy was no longer the emporium whence commercial wealth circulated over Europe, but her cities, surrounded by plains of unequalled fertility, gave no signs of decay, her universities were crowded by transalpine students. She had fully realised the stinging reproaches of Alighieri,-- "Thy living ones In thee abide not without war, and one Malicious gnaws another, ay, of those Whom the same wall and the same moat contain;"