Faesulae was not one of the great Etrurian cities, not one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan League. Volterra occupies the site of the large Tuscan town which lorded it over this part of the Lower Apennines. But Faesulae must still have been a considerable place, to judge by the magnitude and importance of its fortifications, and it must have gathered into itself the entire population of all the little Arno plain. As long as _fortis Etruria crevit_, Faesulae must always have held its own as a frontier post against the Ligurian foe. But when _fortis Etruria_ began to decline, and Rome to become the summit of all things, the glory of Faesulae received a severe shock. Not indeed by conquest--that counts for little--but the Roman peace introduced into Italy a new order of things, fatal to the hill-tops. Sulla, who humbled Faesulae, did far worse than that: he planted a Roman colony in the valley at its foot--the colony of Florentia--at the point where the road crossed the Arno--the colony that was afterwards to become the most famous commercial and artistic town of the mediaeval world as Florence. The position of the new town marks the change that had come over the conditions of life in Upper Italy. Florence was a Fiesole descended to the plain. And it descended for just the selfsame reason that made Bishop Poore thirteen centuries later bring down Sarum from its lofty hill-top to the new white minster by the ford of Avon. Roads, communications, internal trade were henceforth to exist and to count for much; what was needed now was a post and trading town on the river to guard the passage from north to south against possible aggression. Fiesole had been but a mountain stronghold; Florence was marked from the very beginning by its mere position as a great commercial and manufacturing town.