The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  Innocent IV was more conciliatory. At the urging of St. Louis he agreed on terms of peace (1244). But the Lombard cities refused to ratify this agreement, and reminded Innocent that Gregory had pledged the papacy against a separate peace. Innocent left Rome secretly, and fled to Lyons. Frederick resumed the war, and no force seemed now capable of preventing his conquest and absorption of the Papal States, and the establishment of his power in Rome. Innocent summoned the prelates of the Church to the Council of Lyons; the Council renewed the excommunication of the Emperor, and deposed him as an immoral, impious, and unfaithful vassal of his acknowledged suzerain the Pope (1245). At the Pope’s urging a group of German nobles and bishops chose Henry Raspe as anti-Emperor; and when he died they named William of Holland to succeed him. Excommunication was pronounced against all supporters of Frederick, and religious services were interdicted in all regions loyal to him; a crusade was proclaimed against him and Enzio, and those who had taken the cross for the redemption of Palestine were granted all the privileges of crusaders if they joined the war against the infidel Emperor.

  Surrendering to a fury of hatred and revenge, Frederick now burned all bridges behind him. He issued a “Reform Manifesto,” denouncing the clergy as “slaves to the world, drunk with self-indulgence; the increasing stream of their wealth has stifled their piety.”46 In the Regno he confiscated the treasures of the Church to finance his war. When a town in Apulia led a conspiracy to capture him he had the ringleaders blinded, then mutilated, then killed. Receiving a call for help from his son Conrad, he set out for Germany; at Turin he learned that Parma had overthrown his garrison, that Enzio was in peril, and that all northern Italy, and even Sicily, were in revolt. He put down rebellion after rebellion in town after town; took hostages from each of them, and slew these men when their towns rebelled. Prisoners found to be messengers of the Pope had their hands and feet cut off; and Saracen soldiers, immune to Christian tears and threats, were used as executioners.47

  During the siege of Parma Frederick, impatient of inaction, went off with Enzio and fifty knights to hunt waterfowl in the neighboring marshes. While they were away the men and women of Parma came out in a desperate sortie, overwhelmed the disordered and leaderless forces of the Emperor, captured the Emperor’s treasury, his “harem,” and his menagerie. He levied heavy taxes, raised a new army, and resumed the struggle. Evidence was brought to him that his trusted premier, Piero delle Vigne, was conspiring to betray him; Frederick had him arrested and blinded; whereupon Piero beat his head against the wall of his jail till he died (1249). In that same year news came that Enzio had been captured by the Bolognese in battle at La Fossalta. About the same time Frederick’s doctor tried to poison him. The quick succession of these blows broke the spirit of the Emperor; he retired to Apulia, and took no further part in the war. In 1250 his generals won many successes, and the tide seemed to have turned. St. Louis, captured by Moslems in Egypt, demanded of Innocent IV an end to the war, so that Frederick might come to the Crusaders’ aid. But even as hope revived, the body failed. Dysentery, the humbling nemesis of medieval kings, struck the proud Emperor down. He asked for absolution, and received it; the freethinker donned the garb of a Cistercian monk, and died at Florentino on December 13, 1250. People whispered that his soul had been borne off by devils through the pit of Mt. Etna into hell.

  His influence was not apparent; his empire soon collapsed, and a greater chaos ruled it than when he came. The unity for which he fought disappeared, even in Germany; and the Italian cities followed liberty, and its creative stimulus, through disorder to the piecemeal tyranny of dukes and condottieri who, hardly knowing it, inherited the unmorality of Frederick, his intellectual freedom, and his patronage of letters and arts. The virtù, or masculine unscrupulous intelligence, of the Renaissance despots was an echo of Frederick’s character and mind, without his grace and charm. The replacement of the Bible with the classics, of faith with reason, of God with Nature, of Providence with Necessity, appeared in the thought and court of Frederick, and, after an orthodox interlude, captured the humanists and philosophers of the Renaissance; Frederick was the “man of the Renaissance” a century before its time. Machiavelli’s Prince had Caesar Borgia in mind, but it was Frederick who had prepared its philosophy. Nietzsche had Bismarck and Napoleon in mind, but he acknowledged the influence of Frederick—“the first of Europeans according to my taste.”48 Posterity, shocked by his morals, fascinated by his mind, and vaguely appreciating the grandeur of his imperial vision, applied to him again and again the epithets coined by Matthew Paris: stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis—“the marvelous transformer and wonder of the world.”

  VI. THE DISMEMBERMENT OF ITALY

  Frederick’s will left the Empire to his son Conrad IV, and appointed his illegitimate son Manfred regent of Italy. Revolts against Manfred broke out almost everywhere in Italy. Naples, Spoleto, Ancona, Florence submitted to papal legates; “let the heavens rejoice and the earth be glad!” exclaimed Innocent IV. The victorious Pope returned to Italy, made Naples his military headquarters, moved to annex the Regno to the Papal States, and planned a less direct suzerainty over the northern Italian towns. But these cities, while joining the Pope in his Te Deum, were resolved to defend their independence against pontiffs as well as emperors. Meanwhile Ezzelino and Uberto Pallavicino held several of the cities in fealty to Conrad; neither of these men had any respect for religion; heresy flourished under their rule; there was danger that all northern Italy would be lost to the Church. Suddenly young Conrad, with a fresh army of Germans, came down over the Alps, reconquered disaffected towns, and entered the Regno in triumph-only to die of malaria (May, 1254). Manfred assumed charge of the imperial forces, and routed a papal army near Foggia (December 2). Innocent was on his deathbed when the news of this defeat reached him; he died in despair (December 7), murmuring, “Lord, because of his iniquity Thou hast corrupted man.”

  The rest of the tale is a brilliant chaos. Pope Alexander IV (1254–6) organized a crusade against Ezzelino; the tyrant was wounded and captured; he refused doctors, priests, and food, and died of self-starvation, impenitent and unshrived (1259). His brother Alberigo, likewise guilty of brutalities and crimes, was also captured, and was made to witness the torture of his family; then his flesh was torn from his body with pincers, and while he was still alive he was tied to a horse and dragged to death.49 Christians and atheists alike now ran to savagery, except for the gay and charming bastard Manfred. Having defeated the papal troops again at Montaperto (1260), he remained for the next six years master of South Italy; he had time to hunt and sing and write poetry, and “had not his like in the world,” said Dante, “for playing of stringed instruments.”50 Pope Urban IV (1261–4), despairing of finding in Italy a corrective for Manfred, and perceiving that the papacy must henceforth rely on France for protection, appealed to Louis IX to accept the Two Sicilies as a fief. Louis refused, but allowed his brother, Charles of Anjou, to receive from Urban the “kingdom of Naples and Sicily” (1264). Charles marched through Italy with 30,000 French troops, and routed Manfred’s lesser force; Manfred leaped amid the enemy and died a nobler death than his sire’s. In the following year a lad of fifteen, Conradin, son of Conrad, came down from Germany to challenge Charles; he was defeated at Tagliacozzo, and was publicly beheāded in the market square of Naples in 1268. With him, and the death of the long-imprisoned Enzio four years later, the House of Hohenstaufen reached a pitiful end; the Holy Roman Empire became a ceremonious ghost, and the leadership of Europe passed to France.

  Charles made Naples his capital, established in the Two Sicilies a French nobility and bureaucracy, French soldiery, monks and priests, and ruled and taxed with a scornful absolutism that made the region long for a resurrected Frederick, and inclined Pope Clement IV to mourn the papal victory. On Easter Monday of 1282, as Charles was preparing to lead his fleet to conquer Constantinople, the populace of Palermo, their hatred unleashed by the insulting familiarity of a French gendarme with
a Sicilian bride, rose in violent revolt and killed every Frenchman in the city. The accumulated bitterness may be judged from the savagery with which Sicilian men ripped open with their swords the wombs of Sicilian women made pregnant by French soldiers or officials, and trampled the alien embryos to death under their feet.51 Other cities followed Palermo’s lead, and over 3000 Frenchmen in Sicily were slaughtered in a massacre known as the “Sicilian Vespers” because it began at the hour of evening prayer. French ecclesiastics in the island were not spared; churches and convents were invaded by the normally pious Sicilians, and monks and priests were slain without benefit of clergy. Charles of Anjou swore “a thousand years” of revenge, and promised to leave Sicily “a blasted, barren, uninhabited rock”;52 Pope Martin IV excommunicated the rebels, and proclaimed a crusade against Sicily. Unable to defend themselves, the Sicilians offered their island to Pedro III of Aragon. Pedro came with an army and a fleet, and established the House of Aragon as kings of Sicily (1282). Charles made futile efforts to recapture the island; his fleet was destroyed; he died of exhaustion and chagrin at Foggia (1285); and his successors, after seventeen years of vain struggle, contented themselves with the kingdom of Naples.

  North of Rome the Italian cities played Empire against papacy and maintained a heady liberty. At Milan the Delia Torre family ruled to the general satisfaction for twenty years; a coalition of nobles under Otto Visconti captured office in 1277, and the Visconti, as capitani or duci, gave Milan competent oligarchic government for 170 years. Tuscany—including Arezzo, Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca—had been bequeathed to the papacy by the Countess Matilda (1107), but this theoretical papal tenure seldom interfered with the right of the cities to rule themselves, or to find their own despots.

  Siena, like so many Tuscan towns, had a proud past, going back to Etruscan days. Ruined in the barbarian invasions, it revived in the eighth century as a midway stop on the road of pilgrimage and commerce between Florence and Rome. We hear of merchant guilds there in 1192, then of craft guilds, then of bankers. The House of Buonsignori, founded in 1209, became one of the leading mercantile and financial institutions in Europe; its agents were everywhere; its loans to merchants, cities, kings, and popes totaled an enormous sum. Florence and Siena contested the control of the Via Francesa that connected them; the two commercial cities fought exhausting wars with each other intermittently from 1207 to 1270; and as Florence supported the popes in the struggles between Empire and papacy, Siena supported the emperors. The victory of Manfred at Montaperto (1260) was chiefly a victory of Siena over Florence. The Sienese, though fighting against the pope, ascribed their success in that battle to their patron saint, the Virgin Mother of God. They gave Siena to Mary as a fief, placed the proud legend Civitas Virginis on their coins, and laid the keys of the city at the feet of the Virgin in the great cathedral which they had dedicated to her name. Every year they celebrated the feast of her Assumption into heaven with a solemn and stirring ceremony. On the eve of the festival all the citizens, from the age of eighteen to seventy, each holding a lighted candle, formed in procession, according to their parishes, behind their priests and their magistrates, marched to the duomo, and renewed their vows of fealty to the Virgin. On the feast day itself another procession came—of representatives from conquered or dependent cities, villages, and monasteries; these delegates too marched to the cathedral, brought gifts, and repeated their oath of allegiance, to the commune of Siena and its Queen. In the city square, Il Campo, a great fair was held on this day; goods from a hundred cities could be bought there; acrobats, singers, and musicians performed; and the booth provided for gambling was second in attendance only to Mary’s shrine.

  The century from’ 1260 to 1360 saw the apogee of Siena. In those hundred years it built the cathedral (1245–1339), the massive Palazzo pubblico (1310–20), and the lovely campanile (1325–44). Niccolô Pisano carved a lordly fountain for the duomo in 1266; and by 1311 Duccio di Buoninsegna was adorning Sienese churches with some of the earliest masterpieces of Renaissance painting. But the proud city undertook more than it could finance. The victory of Montaperto was fatal to Siena; the defeated Pope laid an interdict upon the town, forbidding the entry of goods or the payment of debts; and many Sienese banks failed. In 1270 Charles of Anjou incorporated the chastened city into the Guelf (or Papal) League. Thereafter Siena was dominated and outshone by her ruthless rival in the north.

  VII. THE RISE OF FLORENCE: 1095–1308

  Florentia, named for its flowers, had begun some two centuries before Christ as a trading post on the Arno where it received the Mugnone. Ruined by the barbarian invasions, it recovered in the eighth century as a crossroads on the Via Francesa between France and Rome. Ready access to the Mediterranean encouraged maritime trade. Florence acquired a large mercantile fleet, which brought in dyes and silk from Asia, wool from England and Spain, and exported finished textiles to half the world. A zealously guarded trade secret enabled Florentine dyers to color silks and woolens in shades of beauty unsurpassed even in the long-skilled East. The great wool guilds—the Arte della Lana and the Arte de’ Calimala*—imported their own materials, and made lush profits in transforming them into finished goods. Most of the work was done in small factories, some of it in city or rural homes. The merchants provided the materials, collected the marketable product, and paid by the piece. The competition of home workers—chiefly women-kept factory wages low; the weavers were not allowed to take united action to raise their wages or better their working conditions; and they were forbidden to emigrate. To further promote discipline, the employers persuaded the bishops to issue pastoral letters, to be read from all pulpits four times a year, threatening with ecclesiastical censure, even excommunication, the worker who repeatedly wasted wool.53

  This industry and trade needed ready supplies of investment capital; and soon the bankers contested with the merchants the control of Florentine life. They acquired large estates through foreclosures; they became indispensable to the pope through financial control of ecclesiastical properties mortgaged to them; and in the thirteenth century they had almost a monopoly of papal finance in Italy.54 The general alliance of Florence with the popes in their struggle against the emperors was motivated partly by this financial nexus, partly by fear of imperial and aristocratic encroachments upon municipal and mercantile liberties. The bankers were therefore the chief supporters of the papal party in Florence. It was they who financed the invasion of Italy by Charles of Anjou through a loan of 148,000 livres ($29,600,000) to Pope Urban IV. When Charles seized Naples the Florentine bankers, to secure repayment, were allowed to mint the coin and collect the taxes of the new kingdom, to monopolize the trade in armor, silk, wax, oil, and grain, and the supply of arms and provisions to the troops.55 These Florentine bankers, if we may believe Dante, were not the polished manipulators of our age, but coarse and greedy buccaneers of lucre, who made fortunes by foreclosures and charged unconscionable interest on loans—like that Folco Portinari who fathered Dante’s Beatrice.56 They spread their operations over a wide region. About 1277 we find two Florentine banking firms—the Brunelleschi and the Medici—controlling finance in Nîmes. The Florentine House of Franzesi financed the wars and intrigues of Philip IV; and from his reign Italian bankers dominated French finance till the seventeenth century. Edward I of England borrowed 200,000 gold florins ($2,160,000) from the Frescobaldi of Florence in 1295. Such loans were risky, and subjected the economic life of Florence to distant and apparently irrelevant events. A multiplication of political investments and governmental defaults, capped by the fall of Boniface VIII and the removal of the papacy to Avignon (1307), brought a series of bank failures to Italy, a general depression, and intensified class war.

  Three classes divided the secular life of Florence: the popolo minuto or “little people”—shopkeepers and artisans; the popolo grasso or “fat people”—employers or businessmen; and the grandi or nobles. The artisans, grouped in arti minori or lesser guilds, were largely manipulated in
politics by the masters, merchants, and financiers who filled the arti maggiori or major guilds. In the competition to control the government the “little” and the “fat” people united for a time as popolani against the nobles, who claimed ancient feudal dues from the city, and supported first the emperors and then the popes against municipal liberties. The popolani organized a militia in which every able-bodied resident of the city had to serve and to learn the arts of war; so prepared, they captured and demolished the castles of the nobles in the countryside, and forced the nobles to come and dwell within the city walls under municipal law. The nobles, still rich with rural rents, built palace-castles in the town, divided into factions, fought one another in the streets, and competed to see which faction should overthrow the limited democracy of Florence and set up an aristocratic constitution. In 1247 the Uberti faction led a Ghibelline revolt to establish in Florence a government favorable to Frederick; the popolani resisted bravely, but a detachment of German knights routed them, and the Florentine democracy fell. The leading Guelfs fled from the city; their homes were torn down in unforgetting revenge for their destruction of feudal castles a century before; thereafter each fluctuation of victory in the war of the classes and factions was celebrated by the exile of the defeated leaders and the confiscation or destruction of their property.57 For three years the Ghibelline aristocracy, backed by a garrison of German soldiers, ruled the city; then, as an aftermath of Frederick’s death, a Guelf revolt of the middle and lower classes captured the government (1250), and appointed a capitano del popolo to check the podesta, as the ancient tribunes of the people had checked the consuls of Rome. The exiled Guelfs were recalled, and the triumphant bourgeoisie cemented its domestic success with wars against Pisa and Siena to control the road of Florentine commerce to the sea and to Rome. The richer merchants became a new nobility, and sought to confine state offices to their class.