It is well known how hostile Savonarola was to an institution which had lent itself so easily to despotism.

This couplet he inscribed on the walls of the Council Chamber, in 1495:-- 'E sappi che chi vuol parlamento Vuol torti dalle mani il reggimento.' Compare the proverb, 'Chi disse parlamento disse guastamento.' This tyranny of a commercial family, swaying the republic without the title and with but little of the pomp of princes, subsisted until the hereditary presidency of the state was conferred upon Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Civita di Penna, in 1531.

Cosimo his successor, obtained the rank of Grand Duke from Pius V.in 1569, and his son received the imperial sanction to the title in 1575.

The re-establishment at two different periods of a free commonwealth upon the sounder basis of the Consiglio Grande (1494-1512 and 1527-30) formed but two episodes in the history of this masked but tenacious despotism.

Had Savonarola's constitution been adopted in the thirteenth instead of at the end of the fifteenth century, the stability of Florence might have been secured.
But at the latter date the roots of the Medicean influence were too widely intertwined with private interests, the jealousies of classes and of factions were too inveterate, for any large and wholesome form of popular government to be universally acceptable.