Italy in the fifteenth century was becoming a more coherent political area and it is hard to confine discussion to the northern part of the peninsula, without reference to the pope or to the king of Naples. Rising levels of taxation and borrowing, increasing expenditure on state enterprises, eroded the instinctive capitalistic interests of individual entrepreneurs and distorted the economies of the Italian states. In the early fifteenth century the hegemonic aspirations of first the Visconti and then Ladislas of Naples appeared to be the controlling factors in Italian politics. Of the three main states of northern Italy it is Florence which has attracted most interest from historians in the first half of the fifteenth century. Florentine republicanism was edging gradually towards oligarchy in the later years of the fourteenth century. The corollary to the emergence of class and cultural division within the individual societies of Renaissance Italy was a tendency for the elites to seek links with each other.