The main profits of those convulsions, which drowned Italy in blood during nearly all the fourteenth century, accrued to the Despots, who held their ground in spite of all attempts to dispossess them.

The greater houses, notably the Visconti, acquired strength by revolutions in which the Church and Empire neutralized each other's action.

The lesser families struck firm roots into cities, infuriated rather than intimidated by such acts of violence as the massacres of Faenza and Cesena in 1377.

The relations of the imperial and pontifical parties were confused; while even in the center of republican independence, at Florence, social changes, determined in great measure by the exhaustion of the city in its conflict, prepared the way for the Medicean tyranny.

Neither the Church nor the Empire gained steady footing in Italy, while the prestige of both was ruined.[1] Municipal freedom, instead of being enlarged, was extinguished by the ambition of the Florentine oligarchs, who, while they spent the last florin of the Commune in opposing the Visconti, never missed an opportunity of enslaving the sister burghs of Tuscany.
In a word, the destiny of the nation was irresistibly impelling it toward despotism.
[1] Machiavelli, in his _Istorie Fiorentine_ (Firenze, 1818, vol.i.
pp.