e midst of feudalism" (23). In the expanding economy of the cities, informal forms of government called communes were established by the members of the craft guilds. Commerce and trade directed the growth of the cities where there was a relative absence of central power. But the nobles of the surrounding countryside were often needed for wars with rival cities and most communes gradually came under the despotic control of particular families or ruling cliques. The bubonic plague, which killed thousands in the mid-fourteenth century, reinforced the need for organized control of the towns. Even the Papal States were subject to this kind of disorder because central authority disappeared when the popes moved themselves to Avignon from 1309 to 1378. The rise of the despots only increased warfare among the cities, yet their rule eventually contributed to the advances that were made by Italian civilization.
Plumb describes Perugia, with its constant bloody fighting between the Baglioni and Oddi factions, as an example of the state of affairs in most Italian cities. But there was not only "violence and sickness, suffering and death," for the arts also flourished in Perugia despite the terrible conditions (34). In a city such as Mantua, however, which was relatively very peaceful, due to the great leadership of Lodovico Gonzaga and his heirs, the arts and learning were able to achieve even greater heights than in terrible conditions in towns such as Perugia.
In the courts of Italy classical learning was also flourishing. At Mantua, Vittorino da Feltre developed a program of education in which the body was nourished by exercise and the development of physical skills, the senses were nourished by appreciation of the arts, and the mind was fed by the study of classical literature. In consulting classical writers, the men of the Renaissance had headed away from the authority of the Church and its theologians to look for their own a...