 As previously noted, Baron posited that the birth of civic humanism occurred precisely out of the 1402 crisis in Florence. This position has been challenged on various historical grounds, most notably by Seigel (1966). One problem with Baron’s claim stems from his evident lack of familiarity with the political philosophy of preceding centuries. Long before the beginning of the quattrocento, political authors (some of Florentine origin) had undertaken the defense of the republican system of government generally and of the Roman Republic in particular in terms redolent of civic humanism. Writing c. 1265, a Florentine civil servant exiled to France, Brunetto Latini (1948), argued for the superiority of republics (communes) over other types of constitution and also described in detail the mechanisms of republican governance. Around 1300, another Italian, the Paris-educated scholastic philosopher Ptolemy of Lucca (1997), composed an extensive brief favoring the Roman Republic as the ideal form of government. The size of the list of pro-republican political theorists writing before 1402 could be multiplied many times over.