the great contrasts between the thrusting mercantile affluence and the abject immigrant poverty thrown up by the rapid rise of the towns. The order he fathered was equally revolutionary in its determination to be active in the world while renouncing worldly possessions. In Italy the friars were above all urban orders, living off chiefly urban charity, acting as a focus for urban piety and addressing urban problems, preaching, teaching, and educating at all levels.

It was no accident that the vigour and success of the mendicants was so closely allied to that of the towns. In speaking of the 'miracle' of the triumph of the city-state the great French historian Fernand Braudel was justly admiring perhaps the most spectacular political, economic, and cultural phenomenon of the Middle Ages. The fact that the late medieval history of northern and central Italy is largely the history of its city-states meant that the region underwent a range of political experience and sophistication, of economic innovation and even hegemony, of technical and scientific expertise and cultural ferment on which the rest of Europe would continue to draw for centuries. And Braudel's emphasis on the triumph of these states is also telling. As Machiavelli observed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, political vitality stemmed from the tensions that were inherent in the political systems which the city-states threw up. One can go further. All these achievements stem, in one way or another, from the intense driving forces of conflict and competition within and between the towns, as well as with the rest of society.

The conflict that had led to the rise of these states had initially been that against the city's overlord, be it the bishop, a count, or other representative of the pope or the emperor. The struggle between these two often remote powers was wholly to the advantage of the towns, which were able to play the one off against the other. For a while the growth of the papal or Guelph (from 'Welf') and the imperial or Ghibelline (from 'Waiblingen', the name of a castle, and hence the war-cry, of the Staufen) parties provides some sort of structure to the complex web of internal factions and inter-communal alliances and counter-alliances that characterized urban politics. To a

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