But in a year she was once
more in the hold of Florence and helping that republic fight her enemies
the Pisans, and her other enemies under the Emperor Maximilian of
Germany.
More fortifying, embellishing, and pestilence followed, and in 1429
Michelangelo came to inspect the new fortifications which the Florentine
republic had built at Leghorn to repair the damages she had suffered.
The next year the republic fell, and Alessandro de' Medici, who came in
master at Florence, took Leghorn into the favor which his family
continued to show her to the end. The first Cosimo greatly improved her
harbor, dug canals, and built forts, but he let the Spaniards, for a
pleasure to Charles V., place garrisons in Florence, Pisa, and Leghorn,
and the Spaniards remained six years at Leghorn. In the last year of the
sixteenth century Ferdinand erected to himself the superb monument with
the four captive corsairs at the corners, whose noses I had failed to
get in range, and in the meanwhile many great public works had been
constructed and the city desolated by another plague. It was now time
for the English to appear in those waters, and in 1652 they were
defeated by the Dutch off Leghorn. About seventy-five years later the
grippe paid Leghorn a first visit, and not long after a violent
earthquake shook down many buildings and killed many women and children;
but the authorities did what they could to secure the city in future by
declaring the day a perpetual fast, and forbidding masking and dancing
on it.
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