Page:Val d'Arno (Ruskin, 1890).djvu/110

88 or townsman temper,—resolute maintenance of fortified peace. These are the walls which modern republicanism throws down, to make boulevards over their ruins.

109. Such new order being taken, Florence remained quiet for—full two months. On the 13th of December, in the same year, died the Emperor Frederick II.; news of his death did not reach Florence till the 7th January, 1251. It had chanced, according to Villani, that on the actual day of his death, his Florentine vicegerent, Rinieri of Montemerlo, was killed by a piece of the vaulting of his room falling on him as he slept. And when the people heard of the Emperor's death, "which was most useful and needful for Holy Church, and for our commune," they took the fall of the roof on his lieutenant as an omen of the extinction of Imperial authority, and resolved to bring home all their Guelphic exiles, and that the Ghibellines should be forced to make peace with them. Which was done, and the peace really lasted for full six months; when, a quarrel chancing with Ghibelline Pistoja, the Florentines, under a Milanese podesta, fought their first properly communal