Much of the wealth of Florence must in early republican times have been drawn from the agriculture of the surrounding plains, which had a large population. Machiavelli (_Istorie fiorentine_, 1. ii) states that when at the death of Frederick II the city reorganised its military, there were formed twenty companies in the town and sixty-six in the country. Cp. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 365. Dante (_Paradiso_, xv, 97-129) pictures the Florentine upper class as living frugally in the reign of Conrad III (d. 1152). Borghini and Giovanni Villani decide that the same standards still prevailed till the middle of the thirteenth century. (Cited by Villari, p. 200, and Testa, pp. 89-91: cp. Riccobaldi of Ferrara, there cited from Muratori; Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. tr. iii, 293; Trollope, _History of Florence_, i, 34; and Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th ed. iii, 342-44.) If these testimonies can be in any degree trusted, the growth of wealth and luxury may be inferred to have taken place in part through the money-lending system developed by the Florentines in the period of the later Crusades, in part through the great commercial developments. The wool-trade, in which Florentines soon surpassed Pisa by reason of their skill in dyeing, was a basis for capitalistic commerce, inasmuch as the wool they dyed and manufactured was mostly foreign, the Tuscan region being better suited for the growing of corn, wine, and olives than for pasture. Already in 1202 the Florentine wool trade had its consuls. (Villari puts these much earlier. He traces them in 1182, and thinks they were then long established. _Two First Centuries_, pp. 124, 313.) Woollen-weaving was first noticeably improved by the lay order of the Umiliati at Milan about 1020; and this order was introduced about 1210 into Florence, where it received special privileges. Thenceforward the city became the great emporium for the finer cloths till the Flemings and English learned to compete. (Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, as cited, iii, 265-70.)