To prevent the people of Lunigiana from revolting he destroyed all their fenced towns and augmented his army with the garrisons; the works of Montale near Pistoia were dismantled, and Montefalcone shared the same fate; for he used to say that those strongholds were the best which could make long marches and keep themselves near or distant according as they were wanted. The awe which his character impressed on the Guelfic lords of Italy caused Robert to be blamed for opposing the inexperience of his son to the power of so accomplished a general and exposing the descendant of a line of illustrious princes to the disgrace of being killed, defeated, or made prisoner by a simple gentleman of Lucca. Such was the “form and pressure of the time”! In consequence of this, as was supposed, Charles had instructions to tell the Florentines that unless they would consent to take eight hundred of his foreign cavalry into the pay of the confederacy he must return to Naples. This unexpected demand and infringement of every compact, after all their exertions, astonished the citizens; but there was no help and 30,000 florins were added to the 450,000 they had already thrown away upon the duke of Calabria, because few of the allies would submit to the extortion. Yet this was not all, and, as if to deride their weakness, he at the capricious request of the duchess repealed some of their sumptuary laws, the solemn decrees of the state, to which the citizens held with extreme tenacity; and they had the mortification to see their wives and daughters in the midst of the country’s misery, when they should rather have been clothed in mourning for her slaughtered citizens, puffed up with such excess of vanity as to adorn their heads, says Villani,[d] with “long tresses of white and yellow silk instead of hair, which they wore in front; this decoration, because it displeased the Florentines as immodest and unnatural, they had already taken from the females and had made laws against it and other disorderly ornaments; but thus the inordinate appetite of women overcame the good sense of men.” THE GHIBELLINES CALL ON LUDWIG OF BAVARIA [Sidenote: [1322-1327 A.D.]]