[571] "The union of Provence, during two hundred and thirteen years, under a line of princes who ... never experienced any foreign invasion, but, by a fraternal government, augmented the population and riches of the State, and favoured commercial pursuits ... consolidated the laws, the language, and the manners of Provence" (Sismondi, as last cited, i, 75).
[572] See above, p. 135 sq., as to the theory of the culture-value of the despot.
[573] Sismondi, Républiques, xii, 38-41. The land was already cultivated on the métayer system, half the crop going to the tenant—a state of things advantageous all round. Villari (Two First Centuries, p. 315) pronounces that the Florentines looked sagaciously to trade, but harassed agriculture. This does not seem to be true of Italian polity in general.
[574] As to these, consult M'Crie, History of the Reformation in Italy, ed. 1856, pp. 23-25.
[575] See Sismondi, Républiques, xii, 39, as to the utter ruin of the Pisan territory by Florence.
[576] J.A. Symonds, The Age of the Despots, ed. 1897, pp. 61-62.
[577] Sismondi, Républiques italiennes, iv, 174-77.
[578] Villari, Two First Centuries, p. 239. So Perrens: "Its glory belonged to the democratic period" (Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. vii, p. 171).
[579] Cp. Zeller, Histoire d'Italie, 1853, p. 309.
[580] Roscoe (Life of Leo X, ii, 318) attributes to the rivalry of Leonardo and Michel Angelo at Florence (in 1500, while the Medici were in exile, and the city was self-governed) the kindling of the art life of the greatest period. And see Perrens (Histoire de Florence, Eng. trans. of vol. cited, p. 457, also as cited below, p. 249) on the decay of architecture and the check to art through the policy of Lorenzo. "Art under the grandfather," he declares (p. 434), "completed a remarkable evolution which has no equivalent under the grandson." Previously (p. 200) he had noted that "many works of which the fifteenth century gets the glory because it finished them, were ordered and begun amid the confusion and terrible agitation of the demagogy." As to Cosimo's expenditure on building see p. 166, and on letters p. 168.