Yet these convulsions bore no fruit of liberty.

The only exit from the situation was in despotism--the despotism of a jealous oligarchy as at Florence, or the despotism of new tyrants in Lombardy and the Romagna.[3] [1] Not to mention the republics of Lombardy and Romagna, which took the final stamp of despotism at the beginning of the fourteenth century, it is noticeable that Pisa submitted to Uguccione da Faggiuola, Lucca to Castruccio Castracane, and Florence to the Duke of Athens.

The revolution of Pisa in 1316 delivered it from Uguccione; the premature death of Castruccio in 1328 destroyed the Tuscan duchy he was building up upon the basement of Ghibellinism; while the rebellion of 1343 averted tyranny from Florence for another century.
[2] Machiavelli's _Vita di Castruccio Castracane_, though it is rather a historical romance than a trustworthy biography, illustrates the gradual advances made by a bold and ambitious leader from the Captaincy of the people, conferred upon him for one year, to the tyranny of his city.
[3] The Divine comedy is, under one of its aspects, the Epic of Italian tyranny, so many of its episodes are chosen from the history of the civil wars: Che le terre d' Italia tutte piene Son di tiranni; ed un Marcel diventa Ogni villan che parteggiando viene.
Those lines occur in the apostrophe to Italy (_Purg._ vi.) where Dante refers to the Empire, idealized by him as the supreme authority in Europe.
Meanwhile the perils to which the tyrants were exposed taught them to employ cruelty and craft in combination.

From the confused and spasmodic efforts of the thirteenth century, when Captains of the people and leaders of the party seized a momentary gust of power, there arose a second sort of despotism, more cautious in its policy, more methodic in its use of means to ends, which ended by metamorphosing the Italian cities and preparing the great age of the Renaissance.

It would be sentimental to utter lamentations over this change, and unphilosophical to deplore the diminution of republican liberty as an unmixed evil.