but obeying the high priest—the simple secular arm of ecclesiastical power.
In the sixteenth century, the long work of the two conspirators is already in full force. A king already rules over the barons, his rivals, and that force will alight on the free cities to crush them in their turn.
Besides, the towns of the sixteenth century were not what they were in the twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.
They were born out of a libertarian revolution. But they had not the courage to extend their ideas of equality, neither to the neighbouring rural districts nor even to those citizens who had later on established themselves in their enclosures, refuges of liberty, there to create industrial arts. A distinction between the old families who had made the revolution of the twelfth century—or curtly "the families"—and the others who established themselves later on in the city, is to be met with in all towns. The old "Merchant Guild" had no desire to receive the new-comers. It refused to incorporate the "young arts" for commerce. And from simple clerk of the city, it became the go-between, the intermediary, who enriched himself by distant commerce, and who imported oriental ostentation. Later on, the "Merchant Guild" allied itself to the lord and the priest, or it went and sought the support of the nascent king, to maintain its monopoly, its right to enrichment. Having thus become personal, instead of communal, commerce killed the free city.
Besides, the guilds of ancient trades, of which the city and its government were composed at the outset, would not recognise the same rights to the young guilds, formed later on by the younger trades. These had to conquer their rights by a revolution. And that is what they did everywhere. But while that revolution became, in most big cities, the starting of a renewal of life and arts (this is so well seen in Florence), in other cities it ended in the victory of the richer orders over the poorer ones—of the "fat people" (popolo grasso) over the "low people (popolo basso)—in a despotic crushing of the masses, in numberless transportations and executions, especially when lords and priests took part in it.
And—need we say it?—it was "the defence of the poorer orders" that the king, who had received Macchiavelli's lessons, took later on as a pretext when he came to knock at the gates of the free cities!
And then the cities had to die, because the ideas themselves of men had changed. The teaching of canonical and Roman law had perverted them.
The twelfth century European was essentially a federalist. A man
