Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  The Capitol, raised on a platform about fifteen feet high, was crowned by an impressive white marble temple enclosed by Corinthian columns. It was dedicated to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, statues of whom were displayed in imposing tabernacles. There were other temples dedicated to the Emperor Augustus, revered after his death in AD 14 as Augustus the Divine; and by the third century, to Isis, goddess of the Nile. In early times the market was held in the Forum, where drinking troughs for beasts of burden were supplied from the well; but in the days of the Empire the market was transferred to the suburbs, and the Forum, by then paved with marble slabs, was being used for political and social gatherings.

  Scarcely anything of this Roman town is now to be seen, except the scattered stones which were used in the construction of later buildings, like the Corinthian capitals of the columns in San Miniato al Monte. Beneath the Baptistery of San Giovanni is part of a black and white Roman mosaic pavement, perhaps that of a bakery. But the Baptistery itself, for centuries supposed to have been originally a Roman temple dedicated to Mars in honour of a Florentine victory over the Etruscan city of Fiesole, is, in fact, a Romanesque building begun perhaps in the sixth or seventh century.9 Yet there are street names in Florence to remind us that a Roman town once stood here – Via delle Terme, for example, the ‘street of the baths’,10 Via del Campidoglio, ‘street of the Capitol’, near the Piazza della Repubblica, where the Forum once stood,11 Via Capaccio, supposed to be a corruption of caput aquae12 and Via Calimala, which took its name from the cardo major, the street that ran from south to north through the centre of Florentia.13

  By the time of the Emperor Hadrian, who reigned from AD 117 to 138 and who seems to have been commemorated by a statue raised in his honour in the Forum, Florentia had become a prosperous commercial town.

  Soon to be the seat of the Governor of Tuscany and Umbria, it was already becoming well known for its copper vessels and woollen goods, which were taken by road and river to Pisa for onward transmission by sea, as well as for the timber cut down in the surrounding forests and embarked at Pisa for delivery to the builders' merchants in Rome. In former times Florence had been encircled by forests, but these were gradually giving way to cornfields, olive groves, orchards and vineyards, and to the gardens of handsome villas with marble colonnades, mosaic floors and courtyards adorned with statuary imported from Greece or Rome.

  For generation after generation the people of Roman Florence, and of the lovely contado which surrounded it, seem to have lived in pleasant and peaceful obscurity, rarely appearing in such chronicles of the time as have come down to us. But darker days were soon to come as the Empire crumbled into ruins under the persistent invasions of the barbarians from the north and as the population of Florence fell from an estimated 10,000 in the second century to little more than 1,000 in the sixth.

  2

  MARAUDERS, EMPERORS AND MARGRAVES 405 – 1115

  ‘No longer Pope but false monk.’

  EMPEROR HENRY IV

  In AD 405 a host of marauding Ostrogoths besieging Florentia were defeated and massacred outside Fiesole by Flavius Stilicho, a skilful professional general, half-Vandal by birth, in command of an army of mercenaries in Roman pay. But this was the last decisive defeat which Roman forces were able to inflict upon the barbarian invaders.

  By now the Roman Empire had been divided into two by the Emperor Diocletian, who had decided that Rome could no longer serve as the capital, being too far removed from the Empire's eastern and northern borders. The greatest of Diocletian's successors, the Emperor Constantine, who had been born in what was to be called Yugoslavia and had spent most of his youth in the eastern part of the Empire, removed his court from Rome to Byzantium and there founded a new capital which was to become known as Constantinople. For a time the Emperor Constantine was able to maintain his rule over the whole of the Empire, East and West; but after his death the Empire of the West began to disintegrate. The invasions of the Germanic Ostrogoths and Visigoths were followed by those of the Huns under the restless, savage-tempered Attila, ‘Scourge of God’, and the Vandals, fierce Germanic warriors who attacked by night, blackening their faces and their shields. When the boy Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476, the German warlord, Odoacer, became King of Italy, establishing his capital at Ravenna. After the death of Odoacer's successor as King of Italy, the Ostrogoth Theodoric, there were further catastrophic upheavals in the land. The Byzantine Emperor, Justinian I, resolved to drive the Ostrogoths out of the peninsula once and for all, and to re-establish direct imperial rule; but, once the Ostrogoths had been finally defeated, another Germanic people, the Lombards, invaded Italy in 568 and settled down in that part of the country to which they have given their name.

  Although no longer in control of Italy, the Byzantine Emperors in Constantinople still claimed to rule it, keeping their hold over much of its coastal area through the power of their fleet and maintaining a presence in the persons of their viceroys or exarchs living in Byzantine splendour in Ravenna. In 751, however, the Lombard king, Aistulf, captured Ravenna, thus ending Byzantine dominion in northern and central Italy; and, two years later, when Rome itself was threatened, the Pope, Stephen II, travelled north across the Alps and made his way to St-Denis near Paris to the Christian ruler of the Franks, a Germanic people who had established their rule over a vast territory between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, including the land named after them, France. At St-Denis, the Pope, in return for a promise of support against the Lombards, anointed the Frankish leader, Pepin the Short, King of the Franks. Soon afterwards the Lombards were defeated and forced to restore to Rome the patrimony of St Peter, those extensive tracts of land in central Italy which they had seized from the Church and which, together with former Byzantine territory, were to be known as the Papal States.

  In 800, Pepin's son and successor, Charlemagne, arrived in Rome where, on Christmas Day, the Pope placed a crown upon his head and the congregation rose to acclaim him with shouts that rang round the walls: ‘Long life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned by God, the great and pacific Emperor of the Romans!’ The Roman Empire of the West had been revived and with it a rivalry between Pope and Emperor which was to last for centuries, bedevilling the early history of Florence.

  The Empire was not now just a Roman Empire: under Charlemagne's successors it was to become known as a Holy Roman Empire. For Christianity had, generation by generation, been gaining converts all over the world that Charlemagne knew. Long before 325 when Constantine the Great, the first of the Roman Emperors to profess Christianity, had presided over a General Council of the Church at Nicaea, merchants and traders from the eastern Mediterranean, Greeks and Syrians and Jews, had been riding into Florence not only with pack-animals laden with goods for sale and barter but also with the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian faith had spread slowly in Florence at first; yet by the time that Ambrose, a leading churchman and former Governor of Aemilia-Liguria, had come to the town in 393 as an exile from Milan, Christianity had gained a hold over the people which was to prove unbreakable. It was Bishop Ambrose who dedicated a small church in the northern suburbs of the city to San Lorenzo and who traditionally installed in this church a man named Zenobius as Bishop of Florence.1 Zenobius was still bishop when the Ostrogoths were defeated outside Fiesole in 405, a mercy which he took care to proclaim as being due to the intervention of the Christians' God. He died in 433; and as his body was being taken for burial, so legend has it, the coffin knocked against a dead elm tree which thereupon burst into life, a miracle commemorated by the column which still stands in the Piazza San Giovanni.2

  Soon afterwards the seat of the Bishop of Florence was moved inside the Roman walls to the church of San Giovanni and from there to a larger nearby church dedicated to Santa Reparata, an obscure early martyr from Asia Minor upon whose feast day victories had been won over invading barbarian armies. Many years later, towards the end of the thirteenth century, Santa Reparata in Florence was re-dedicated to Sant
a Maria del Fiore and as such it remains the cathedral of Florence today.3

  In these days of the early Middle Ages, when so little is known about Florence for sure, it is at least certain that monasteries such as the Benedictine house of San Miniato al Monte – both within and outside the town's walls – helped to preserve the old culture of Florence when the town was intermittently under the jurisdiction of various foreign masters, Lombard dukes and Frankish counts or margraves of Tuscany. Yet, as the lands of these monasteries were extended and their riches increased, the more worldly of their abbots became almost indistinguishable in their ways of life from the self-indulgent bishops, whose behaviour in turn resembled that of the great landowning nobles, the owners of the castles which could be seen on every eminence between Florence and Bologna.

  The growing impiety and materialism of the Church deeply distressed many Christians, whose disapproval was voiced by evangelists such as St Romuald, who travelled from town to town denouncing the wickedness of those who should have been guiding their flocks away from the paths of wickedness. The son of a nobleman from Ravenna, Romuald had entered a monastery of which he was soon appointed abbot; but, finding the rules of the order insufficiently severe, he had wandered off into the countryside where he had led a life of the most extreme asceticism, spending hours on end in prayer interspersed with bouts of self-flagellation. Having purified himself to the best of his ability, he set out upon his travels, preaching against the wickedness of the clergy and urging the foundation of monasteries and hermitages as a means of reviving Christian zeal. And in this work he created a deep impression upon the mother of the Margrave of Tuscany.

  This Margrave, ‘il gran barone’ as Dante was to call him, was named Ugo. His mother, Willa, was evidently persuaded by Romuald to found an abbey within the walls of Florence. She did so in 978; and to this abbey, La Badia, her son Ugo gave much wealth and property, decreeing that he should be buried there when the time came, as indeed he was, near the church's altar in a Roman sarcophagus, which was later replaced by a tomb created in his honour by Mino da Fiesole.4

  In Ugo's days the seat of the Margrave of Tuscany was at Lucca, not being officially moved to Florence until the middle of the next century. Ugo, however, frequently visited Florence, of which he was clearly fond, staying in his palace on the site of the present-day Palazzo Arcivescovile.5 When he was in Lucca or elsewhere on the Emperor's business in Tuscany, the Margrave's authority was left largely in the hands of the Bishop of Florence, an arrangement far from satisfactory when most bishops seemed more intent upon the personal appropriation of their episcopal estates than upon the discharge of their lay and ecclesiastical duties.

  Even Bishop Hildebrand, who founded San Miniato al Monte and certainly took some interest in church reform, was said to have lived in unseemly luxury, having obtained his bishopric by bribery, and to have attended upon the Emperor accompanied by numerous retainers. He did not surround himself with concubines as many of the higher clergy in Tuscany were alleged to have done; but he had a mistress whom he eventually married, an extremely bossy woman, the mother of his many children, named Alberga who, so a medieval chronicler assures us, sat by her husband when he was called upon to receive petitioners or pronounce judgement, and did not hesitate to speak in his name.

  Guarinus [abbot of a monastery at Settimo in the Florentine diocese] made a practice of speaking openly against simoniacs [clergy who sold or bought ecclesiastical preferments, as Hildebrand had done]. On one occasion, having some business in hand, he sought the presence of the Bishop of Florence and, having presented his case, awaited the episcopal decision. Thereupon the wife of the Bishop, Alberga, who was seated at his side, made answer, ‘My Lord Abbot, concerning this business you have brought forward, my Lord the Bishop has not yet been advised. He will take council with his fideles and inform you of his pleasure.’ At these words the Abbot, fired with the zeal of God, poured out vehement maledictions upon her, saying, ‘You accursed, sinful Jezebel, how do you dare open your mouth before this assembly of chosen representatives and priests? You ought to be burned at the stake for having presumed to speak thus to a priest of God.’

  After this outburst Guarinus thought it as well to go immediately to Rome to explain himself personally to the Pope, who agreed to remove his abbey from the control of Hildebrand's diocese and place it directly under papal jurisdiction, although it was only about five miles from Florence.

  It was against such worldly prelates as Bishop Hildebrand that Giovanni Gualberto now began to preach in the manner of St Romuald. Giovanni Gualberto, born about 990, was the son of a nobleman from the Tuscan countryside south of Florence. Trained as a soldier, he seems to have spent a youth characteristic of his class and time, but was persuaded to take the cowl when, having the murderer of his brother at his mercy, he was moved to spare the man's life by a vision of Christ on the Cross. He sought admittance to the monastery of San Miniato al Monte; but no sooner had he been accepted there than he denounced both his abbot for having given the usual presents to the Bishop of Florence on being appointed to the abbacy and the bishop for having accepted them. Not content with condemning them in the hearing of his brother monks, Giovanni Gualberto castigated them in the Mercato Vecchio in Florence and wherever else crowds gathered to listen to him, until he was beaten up by a gang of the bishop's supporters and driven from the town. He sought safety at Camaldoli, where St Romuald had founded his monastery some twenty years before, and then moved on to the place later known as Vallombrosa, about twenty miles east of Florence where he founded a monaster of his own.

  Giovanni Gualberto continued to preach against simony and corruption; and when it became known that the new Bishop of Florence, Peter Mezzabarba, had acknowledged his appointment by the Emperor with the usual presents, he came down from Vallombrosa with his monks to continue his campaign against corruption in the Church in the streets of Florence, demanding that the bishop should prove his worthiness to remain in office by submitting himself to the judgement of God, that was to say to an ordeal by fire.

  The bishop naturally declined to undergo any such test, so Giovanni Gualberto, unabashed, declared that the ordeal would take place anyway on 13 February 1068, that one of his monks would walk through fire and that if he did so unharmed then surely this must be taken as God's sign that the bishop was unworthy of taking his seat in Santa Reparata ever again.

  Faggots were lit; the watching crowds waited expectantly; the monk chosen to walk through the fire prepared himself for the ordeal; he moved forward into the smoke. The chroniclers record how he came through the experience unharmed; how the onlookers rushed upon him and mobbed him almost to death; how he later became a cardinal and was revered as a saint; how Giovanni Gualberto, his abbot, did become a saint; and how, having had the satisfaction of seeing Bishop Peter deposed by papal decree, and having founded Santa Trinita, the mother church of the Vallombrosian Order in Florence,6 Giovanni died in 1073, the year in which that great Church reformer, his fellow Tuscan, Gregory VII, was consecrated Pope in St Peter's.

  At the time of Pope Gregory's election, the throne of St Peter had been occupied by a succession of inconceivably disreputable pontiffs. Yet when an attempt was made to elect a Pope sympathetic to the growing movement of reform which was spreading throughout Tuscany, imperial troops intervened and installed the Emperor's own candidate by force.

  The reformers' quarrel with the Emperor was still unresolved when Gregory VII became Pope in 1073. The bright son of a Tuscan labourer, he had been taken to Rome for his education and had become an influential figure among the reformers, whose programme was being extended from attacks on abuses in the Church to demands for complete freedom from political and foreign interference and for the right of the Church to be solely responsible for the election of popes and the investiture of bishops. Indeed, soon after his election, Gregory, a brave and uncompromising man, went so far as to claim that the Pope had not only the right to overrule Church councils but to depose emperors
and to wear a papal tiara as a symbol of his government of the world by ordinance of God. Such assertions were bound to anger the Emperor, who considered that he himself held office ‘by the pious ordination of God’.

  Pope Gregory VII's rival, the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV (1050 – 1106) from an illuminated manuscript of c. 1113.

  The Emperor at this time was Henry IV, an impulsive, mercurial young man, twenty-three years old when Gregory became Pope. Provoking Gregory by nominating his court chaplain as Archbishop of Milan, he then announced that Gregory, ‘no longer Pope but false monk’, was deposed and called upon an assembly of bishops convened at Worms to refuse obedience to Rome. Gregory promptly responded to this provocation by excommunicating the Emperor and releasing his subjects from their oaths of allegiance, so alarming clergy and laity alike that the Emperor began to fear he had gone too far and decided he must make a gesture of submission.

  Caption

  Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, a detail of a miniature from a twelfth-century life of La Gran Contessa by Donizo of Canossa.

  Pope Gregory had a warm supporter in his quarrel with the Emperor in the person of Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, La Gran Contessa, who had been born in 1046 at Lucca, where her forebears had long held sway over Tuscany in the name of the Emperor. Her father, head of the powerful Canossa family, whose great castle stood behind triple walls in the foothills of the Apennines, had been appointed Margrave of Tuscany by Henry IV's grandfather. He had been assassinated when she was a young girl; her elder brother had since died; and she herself had come into possession of the vast estates of her family as well as the margravate of Tuscany. Her brief and unhappy marriage to an ugly hunchback, the heir to a French dukedom, ended abruptly when her husband was assassinated, and Matilda returned to Italy, where she became a celebrated figure, renowned for her bravery in the hunting field, the glittering armour which she wore when inspecting her troops and the subservience with which her inferiors addressed her on their bended knees. She was by all accounts revered in Florence: Dante was to praise her virtues in his Divina Commedia. It was in her time that the Margrave's official residence was moved here from Lucca; and it was in her family castle at Canossa that the Pope, as her guest, accepted the submission of the Emperor who, after waiting for three cold January days outside the walls, was admitted to receive absolution on condition that he gave up his crown into Gregory's hands, and that if he were restored to the throne, he would swear obedience to the Pope's will.