Here, then, as regards imaginative and artistic literature, we find the beginnings made in the sphere of the beneficent prince or "tyrant." But, exactly as in Greece, it is only in the struggling and stimulating life of the free cities that there arises, after the period of primary song, the great reflective literature, the great art: and, furthermore, the pursuit of letters at the courts of the princes is itself a result of outside stimulus. It needed the ferment of Moorish culture--itself promoted by the special tolerance of the earlier Ommiades towards Jews and Christians--to produce the literary stir in Sicily and Provence. Again, while the Provençal life, like the Moorish, included a remarkable development of free thought, the first great propagation of quasi-rational heresy in the south occurring in Provence, it was in the free Italian cities, where also many _Cathari_ and _Paterini_ were found for burning, that there arose the more general development of intelligence. That is to say, the intellectual climate, the mental atmosphere, in which great literature grows, is here as elsewhere found to be supplied by the "free" State, in which men's wills and ideas clash and compromise.[572] In turbulent Florence of the thirteenth century was nourished the spirit of Dante. And it is with art as with literature. Modern painting begins in the thirteenth century in Florence with Cimabue, and at Siena with Duccio, who, trained like previous Italian painters of other towns in the Byzantine manner, transcended it and led the Renaissance.