POLITICAL SCIENCE.
guild-feeling was greatly increased. The number of guilds
already existing was twelve. The first seven were the judges
and notaries, the merchants of French woollens or the art
of Calimala, the exchangers, the guild of wool, the physi-
cians and druggists, the silk weavers and mercers, and the
furriers. The five next guilds, sometimes called the middle
ones, meszani, which were incorporated somewhat later, con-
sisted of butchers, shoemakers, carpenters, masters of wood
and stone, and " rigattieri" or second-hand dealers, with
whom subsequently linen drapers were united. The nine
inferior arts, which strove for political power at a later period,
constituted the lowest of the industries which assumed a cor-
porate form. Within some of the leading arts there were
companies of workmen who seem to have depended, in part,
on the officers of the arts for settlements of disputes. There
were, at one time, twenty-five industries thus subordinate to
the great art or guild of wool. This lower stratum of the
people consisted, in part, of persons who were without civil
rights, from the district and county, or from places beyond
the jurisdiction of Florence.
The Ghibellines at Florence thought that the " thirty-six"
were inclined to favor the Guelphs, whom the people also
favored as the less aristocratic of the two,* and the pope's
friends. Disturbances, therefore, arose, in which king Man-
fred's podesta, Count Guido Novcllo, made a cowardly escape
from the city, although supported by fifteen hundred horsemen.
With him the principal Ghibellines flccl, and never afterwards
did this faction hold the republic under its control. Charles
of Anjou, now king of Naples, and appointed vicar imperial
in Tuscany, comes to the help of the Florentines, and the
signoria is given to him for ten years, f.
* Comp. Ammirato, i., 133, book ii.
t Power was conceded to Charles of Anjou the more readily,
because an imperial vicar accorded with the theory of the emperor's
supremacy, which was still admitted in words. So the vicars and
others to whom the signoria was granted afterwards on certain con-
ditions, by vote of the city for a time, did not seem to be inconsistent
with the idea of a practically independent republic.