At this moment also there were special causes tending to provoke a war of an unusually sanguinary kind. The counties, or _contadi_, of the two cities, as sometimes occurred elsewhere, had been carved out of the territories of bishoprics, based, in their turn, on ancient Roman partitions of the soil. Accordingly, these counties being not only adjacent, but wedged in and almost tangled one with the other, and their respective bishops having never wielded, as in Lombardy, the authority or power of counts they had ended by forming a single, combined jurisdiction. In fact, many documents refer to the county or jurisdiction of Fiesole and Florence, as though it were one and the same thing. Hence it was only natural that on becoming an independent Commune, after Matilda's death, Florence should seek to dominate over both counties, and equally natural that Fiesole should be violently opposed to the idea, and, notwithstanding the inferior size of the town, should have trusted to the superior strength of its fortified position, and, making alliance with the nobles of the _contado_, should have harboured them in the citadel, and joined them in continual attacks on Florentine traders or in raiding Florentine lands. This was the beginning of the war. Its details are unknown to us, those supplied by Sanzanome being too extravagant for belief,[123] and other chroniclers furnishing none at all. Seeing the strength of Fiesole's position, the campaign could have been neither short nor easy, and undoubtedly ended in cruel slaughter and the almost total destruction of the town. The chroniclers are not the only authorities for this fact. Shortly afterwards, the Abbot Atto of Vallombrosa implored a pardon from Pope Honorius II., _pro Florentinorum excessibus_, urging in their favour that there were many aged persons, women, and children, in Florence, who had assuredly taken no part in the _destruccio fesulana_, and also that many participants in the war now confessed the error of their ways, and sincerely repented all the excesses that "non meditata nequitia commisere."[124] The event was long remembered in Florence, is frequently recorded in documents,[125] and, together with the rout of the Imperial vicar at Monte Cascioli, undoubtedly contributed to establish the independence of the Commune on a firmer basis. VIII.