ciated with the aristocracy. The consuls of the twelfth century were succeeded, by the end of the twelfth and in the early thirteenth centuries, by the podestà , a non-citizen official appointed on a short-term contract with extensive executive powers. In opposition to the excesses of these magnates there also grew in many cities a rival pressure group known as the popolo. Often, especially in Tuscany, it was aligned with the Guelph faction, and its triumph, by the mid-thirteenth century, is usually seen as the moment at which the aristocratic tradition of violence was brought under some control. The culmination of this control can be seen in reforms such as the Florentine Ordinances of Justice ( 1293), whereby families named as magnates were barred in perpetuity from civic office.
The 'triumph' of the popolo is of great significance in those towns in which it occurred. In its wake developed much of the most sophisticated government and many of the finest monuments to the civic spirit of the time. But certain features must be stressed. It was class-based, a broad coalition particularly of guild members, be it of major guilds such as those of bankers, merchants, and professionals or of minor guilds of artisans and petty traders. And it was easy for the popolo, having subdued the magnates, to develop factionalism and violent behaviour of its own; in Florence, where the Guelph party triumphed along with the popolo, it soon divided into rival parties of Black and White Guelphs. The debarred magnatial families were soon replaced by others; by merchant families attaining nobility by wealth and by manufactured family trees, by gente nuova, new families, much scorned by the old ones. The influence of the aristocracy continued in other ways. In Siena, where many of those debarred were banking dynasties, their real power continued, indispensably, outside the formal political forum. Aristocratic culture--adaptations of troubadour traditions, ideals of nobility, and the whole complex of snobbish attitudes--continued to permeate urban life.
Just as the city-states saw perpetual social and political changes, so too with their institutions. The thirteenth century saw the addition of two new levels of government which effectively superseded them: the General Council, often three hun-
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