The whole of this system excited the deep and persistent
hatred of the Florentine writers of that epoch. Even the pomp and display with
which the despot was perhaps less anxious to gratify his own vanity than to
impress the popular imagination, awakened their keenest sarcasm. Woe to an
adventurer if he fell into their hands, like the upstart Doge Agnello of Pisa
(1364), who used to ride out with a golden scepter, and show himself at the window
of his house, 'as relics are shown,' reclining on embroidered drapery and
cushions, served like a pope or emperor, by kneeling attendants. More often,
however, the old Florentines speak on this subject in a tone of lofty
seriousness. Dante saw and characterized well the vulgarity and commonplace
which marked the ambition of the new princes. 'What else mean their trumpets
and their bells, their horns and their flutes, but "come, hangmen come,
vultures!"' The castle of the tyrant, as pictured by the popular mind, is
lofty and solitary, full of dungeons and listening-tubes, the home of cruelty
and misery. Misfortune is foretold to all who enter the service of the despot,
who even becomes at last himself an object of pity: he must needs be the enemy
of all good and honest men: he can trust no one and can read in the faces of
his subjects the expectation of his fall. 'As despotisms rise, grow, and are
consolidated, so grows in their midst the hidden element which must produce
their dissolution and ruin.' But the deepest ground of dislike has not been
stated; Florence was then the scene of the richest development of human
individuality, while for the despots no other individuality could be suffered
to live and thrive but their own and that of their nearest dependents. The
control of the individual was rigorously carried out, even down to the
establishment of a system of passports.