Florence, wrote Machiavelli in 1519 or 1520 in his Discursus on the reform of the Florentine government, has never been a ‘repubblica … che abbi avute le debite qualità sue’ – an observation which recapitulates the statement made a few years earlier in his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio that ‘per dugento anni che si ha di vera memoria’, Florence had never possessed a ‘stato, per il quale la possa veramente essere chiamata republica’. In the Discorsi, he attributes this to the fact that before acquiring its independence from the Hohenstaufen Empire, Florence had always lived ‘sotto il governo d'altrui’. That it had never been a true republic, he states in the Discursus, is borne out by the regime, the stato, it had had since 1393, when under Maso degli Albizzi's leadership the city became a ‘repubblica governata da ottimati’ and thus acquired an oligarchical regime, which lasted until 1434, when it was replaced with the Medici regime. Its ‘difetti’ were the excessive power, and yet insufficient ‘reputazione’, of the Signoria, the long intervals between the electoral scrutinies which qualified citizens for office-holding, the influence which private citizens exercised over the decisions of the government through their membership of advisory bodies, the pratiche, the lack of institutional safeguards against the formation of factions or sètte – ‘le quali sono la rovina di uno stato’ – by great citizens, ‘uomini grandi’.