Family-histories and genealogies : containing a series of ...

Michele Diodati, the Decemvir of 1370, had a son Dr. Nicolb^
Diodati, a physician of Venice ;
who
by marriage with Francesca di
Poggio had fifteen children. Among these the third by birth, named
Michele,^ b'orn in 1410, who married Caterina Buonvisi, was a distinguished
Professor in Padua and Pisa— probably of medicine—and afterwards a
physician in Lucca, where he was pensioned on three thousand crowns by the
city. Another, Antonio,^ born in 14 16, held the office of Ancient, and
was Gonfalonier in 1461. Whether it was by influences favorable to liberty,
or adverse, that these members of the family were thus distinguished, cannot
be certainly told. We know, however, that for about thirty years, in the
beginning of the fifteenth century, Lucca was under a usurper, Paolo
Guinigi. The republics of Italy, generally, during that century, were
becoming more and more aristocratic in spirit, from the fact that citizen-
ship in them, not being a gift to be bestowed upon new comers, was
handed down as a privilege belonging to certain famiHes ; while official
position must of course have become, still more, the prerogative of a
favored class.^
7 The race seems to have been continued only through Alessandro^
8 son of the Professor Michele, born in 1459—his son Geronimo^ born in
1465, who was an eminent hterary man, and nine times Ancient, having
died without heirs.
Alessandro (7) was repeatedly Gonfalonier from 1494. The mother
of his children was Angela Balbani, whom he married in 15 10, she being
then fifteen years old, and he fifty-five.
Now began those encroachments upon the fair domain of liberty and
culture in Italy by foreign powers, which culminated in the overthrow of
Italian independence under the Emperor Charles V., in the middle of the
sixteenth century. But with this new political influence, from beyond the
Alps there came, also, the seeds of evangelical truth ; and
• Sismondi's Hist. d. R^publ. Ital., ut supra, xii. 4 ff.
372
" in the first half