In Florence the disintegration went on apace. A new emperor, Charles IV, charged the city 100,000 florins (1355) for her immunities, leaving all men hopeless as ever of the Empire as a political solution; and when the crimes of the Viscontis drove cities and Papacy to call Charles in against them (1368), he did but use the opportunity to levy blackmail wherever he went. Later (1375), the Papacy combined with Florence against the reigning Visconti, but only to betray its ally. And now occurred what for a time must have seemed a vital revolution in Italian affairs; the infuriated Florentines suddenly allying themselves with Visconti, the enemy of the day before, against the treacherous Pope, and framing a league with Siena, Lucca, and Pisa against the Church that Florence had so long sustained. Eighty towns in ten days drove out their legates; and furious reprisals broke out on all hands, till the very Pope at Avignon was fain to come to stay the universal warfare. Now, however, an aristocratic and papalist party in Florence bitterly opposed "The Eight" who managed the war, the aristocracy having gravitated to the papal side; and at length exhaustion and the absolute instability of all alliances brought about a peace in which most of the cities, freed from the Papacy--now become an affair of two mutually anathematising heads--fell once more under local tyrants. In the hour of extreme need the Papacy was, if possible, a worse influence than the emperor; nowhere was to be found a force of stability save in the tyrannies, which were merely unstable with a difference. Florence, still republican and still obstinately prosperous, stood as a strange anomaly in the general transformation. But she had now reached the stage when the long-ignored populace--the multitude beneath the _popolo_--made up of handworkers with no nominal incorporation or franchise, was able to press its claims as against the other orders, which in turn were divided, as of old, by the jealousies between the major and minor middle-class guilds and between the new nobility of capital and their former equals. Refused the status of incorporation, the _ciompi_ ("chums" or "mates," from the French _compère_) made _their_ insurrection in turn, finding for the nonce in a wool-carder a leader of the best quality the time could show, who carried his point, was chosen head magistrate, enforced order among his own partisans, and established a new magistracy, with three representatives of the major arts, three of the minor (1378).