Browning and the Florentine Renaissance

There seem to me to be three distinct causes why Florence rather than any of the other city states was the center of the Italian Renaissance. The first of these is that she preserved her popular government long enough to develop initiative and the spirit of freedom in her citizens; second, she enjoyed a great commercial prosperity; and third, and perhaps most important, she was so fortunate as to have, until almost the middle of the siXteenth century, despots who governed with almost unprecedented justice and who were the most liberal patrons of art in all Italy.