No garden, though, ever looked half as fine
As the Mercato Vecchio does when spring is here.
It feeds the eye and taste of every Florentine…’
ANTONIO PUCCI
Durante Alighieri, whose first name was later contracted to Dante, ‘that singular splendour of the Italian race’, as his fellow Tuscan writer, Boccaccio, was to call him, was born in Florence in 12651 and baptized in the Baptistery, ‘il mio bel San Giovanni' as he called it, a building still surrounded by graves and by the sarcophagi in which many of the older families of Florence chose to bury their dead. His great-great-grandfather, who had died on the Second Crusade, could trace his ancestry, so Dante himself proudly claimed, to the days when Florence was a Roman city. His family was certainly old, but by no means rich, owning no more than a few scattered properties in the contado. His grandfather was a moneylender with a counting-house in Florence and a branch in Prato; and his father carried on this family business. Dante himself was drawn to study rather than to commerce and from an early age he fell under the influence of Brunetto Latini, an elderly scholar and notary who had been exiled from Florence as a Guelph in 1260 and had not returned until the year after Dante's birth. Brunetto was a much respected figure in Florentine politics and a master of rhetoric and of both verse and prose written in vernacular Italian rather than in the Latin more usually adopted for such exercises. Later, in the Divina Commedia, a vision ‘of purgatory, hell and heaven' as well as a work of moral edification full of symbolism and of philosophical and historical allusions, Dante wrote affectionately of Brunetto:
The dear, benign, paternal image, such
As thine was, when so lately thou didst teach me
The way for man to win eternity:
And how I prized the lesson, it behoves
That… my tongue should speak.
The young Dante also revered the merchant and chronicler, Dino Compagni, who was several years older than himself, and the poet, Guido Cavalcanti, much of whose verse, written in what Dante called the ‘dolce stil nuove’, the sweet new style, seems so at variance with the character of the militant Guelph who had thrown his javelin at Corso Donati.
It was at the age of about nine that Dante first set eyes upon ‘the glorious lady of his heart, Beatrice’, for whom he conceived a passion that was to remain unquenched throughout his life, outliving his marriage to a girl to whom he had been betrothed when a boy and Beatrice's own death in 1290, when this angelic creature, of whom he could ask nothing but to praise her beauty, ‘soared to heaven on high, to the kingdom where the angels have peace’.
The year before her death, Dante had fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines of Arezzo at Campaldino and had subsequently served in the army sent against the Pisans; but for over two years after Beatrice died he devoted himself to study before being admitted to the Arte dei Medici e Speziali. By then a committed Guelph, he was elected to the priorate in 1300; and by 1301, when Charles of Valois entered Florence, he had been sent on a diplomatic mission to the Pope and never returned to the city. One of the first of the Whites to be condemned to exile by the triumphant Blacks, he was accused of all manner of offences, including misappropriation of public funds, and in his absence was condemned to be burned alive.
His departure from Florence may have been welcomed by some of its inhabitants. His near contemporary, the poet Franco Sacchetti, recounted the story of how Dante, passing by the Porta di San Piero one day, ‘saw a smith at work upon his anvil singing one of Dante's poems, but so muddling up the verses, cutting bits here and adding words there, that he seemed to Dante to be doing him much harm’. Dante entered the shop, picked up a hammer and threw it into the street. Then he took up a pair of scales and threw them into the street, too, followed by many of the smith's other tools. The smith cried, ‘What the devil are you doing? Are you mad?’
‘What are you doing?’ Dante asked him.
‘I am trying to do my job. But you are spoiling my tools and throwing them into the street.’
‘Well,’ said Dante, ‘if you don't like me spoiling your things, don't spoil mine.’
Caption
A detail from Paradise in the chapel of the Podestà in the Bargello, attributed to Giotto. The portrait is a likeness of Dante, who was born in Florence in 1265.
‘What am I spoiling of yours?’
‘You are singing out of my book, and not singing it as I wrote it. I have no other trade but this, and you are ruining it for me.’
For the rest of his life, moving in poverty from city to city, refusing to take up arms against the city of his birth, proclaiming his innocence of the charges which the Blacks had brought against him, Dante endeavoured to explain to others as well as to himself the reasons why Florence was rent by so many factions, quarrels within families, quarrels between neighbourhoods and guilds, political parties and social groups. In the Inferno he has Brunetto Latini find an explanation in the evil seeds sown by ‘that ungrateful race who, in old times, came down from Fiesole’:
Ay and still smack of their rough mountain flint
Will for thy good deeds show thee enmity.
Nor wonder, for amongst ill-savour'd crabs
It suits not the sweet fig tree lay her fruit.
Old fame reports them in the world for blind,
Covetous, envious, proud. Look to it well,
Take heed thou cleanse thee of their ways…
Brunetto himself, recognizing factional discord as a universal problem, believed that it might be overcome in communes everywhere provided that officials were impartial and uncorrupt, and the people were trained in obedience to just laws. For his part, Dino Campagni could see little hope for Florence so long as those citizens who held office were governed by self-interest and by the demands of friends and families, and failed to earn either the obedience or the respect of the popolani. For Dante, Guelph though he had been, the only hope for the city – where ‘avarice, envy, pride, those fatal sparks [had] set the hearts of all on fire’ – was firm autocratic rule. The people, he was convinced, must submit to imperial government; and in his Purgatorio he begged the German rulers to return to claim their just inheritance:
Come and behold thy people, how they love!
And if no pity our distress inspires
Let blushes for thyself thy pity move.
‘Rejoice, oh, Italy,’ he wrote when it was announced that the Count of Luxembourg – who had been chosen King by the German electoral princes and who was to become the Emperor Henry VII – had decided to lead an expedition across the Alps. ‘Thy bridegroom cometh, the hope of the world, the glory of the people, the ever-clement Henry, who is Caesar and Augustus.’
On his arrival in Italy, Henry was acclaimed not only by the Ghibelline towns of the north but also by the Guelphs, since his coming had been approved by the French Pope, Clement V, who, having removed the papal
Dante holding a copy of his Divina Commedia, which throws light on Florence. A painting in the Duomo by Domenico di Michelino, 1465.
residence from Rome to Avignon, was anxious not to become a mere dependant of the French court. Welcomed as a liberator in Piedmont and Lombardy, Henry was crowned King in Milan in January 1311.
The Florentine government, however, firmly declined to take part in the general submission. Their spokesman announced that his countrymen had never yet bowed their sharp horns to any master, and did not intend to do so now; and true to his word, the Florentines began to prepare their defences to resist the man whom they regarded, not as their saviour as the exiled Dante did, but as a German interloper. Orders were issued for the new city walls, begun some years before, to be completed as soon as possible, for missions to be sent to other Tuscan towns to enlist support for resistance, for pardons to be issued to such White exiles in these towns whose return to Florence on the payment of reasonable fines would not endanger the security of the priorate, and, as a gesture of defiance, for representations of the German imperial eagle, whether in p
aintwork or in stone, to be removed from all buildings in Florence both public and private.
Henry responded by declaring the Florentine people to be outlaws, their goods and lands throughout Italy to be forfeit, and a fine amounting to 5,000 pounds of gold to be levied upon them. In September 1312, having been crowned Emperor in Rome by a delegation of cardinals nominated by the Pope for that purpose, he marched on Florence intent upon its submission to his will.
The Florentines were ready to defy him. They had dispatched further diplomatic missions to towns from which help might be expected; they had also sent a delegation to France; they had brought military stores into the city, had taken over buildings as barracks, and built towers overlooking the walls, which now stretched as far to the south as the present Porta Romana at the west end of the Boboli Gardens and as far north as the Fortezza da Basso between the Porta al Prato and the Porta San Gallo.
Well supplied and armed, the Florentine army was far better placed to defend the city than the Emperor Henry was to take it. The imperial forces, heavily outnumbered, had suffered severe losses from disease; while scavenging parties, sent for miles into the countryside on either side of the flooded Arno, brought back to their camp around the monastery of San Salvi2 scarcely enough to feed the horses, let alone the men. When Henry himself contracted malaria, he decided not to risk an assault but to withdraw his forces to Pisa. Soon afterwards he died at Buonconvento on his way south towards Naples.
No sooner had the Florentines been released from the attentions of one enemy than they were subjected to those of another. In Pisa an ambitious Ghibelline nobleman, Ugoccione della Faggiuola, whose wide military experience included command in the recent wars, had made himself master of the city after the death of the Emperor Henry VII. He had also taken over Lucca; and, in command of forces from both cities, he had attacked Pistoia as a preliminary to an assault upon Florence. At Montecatini in August 1315 he had decisively defeated an alliance of Tuscan Guelphs. Fortunately for Florence, though, disputes had broken out at Ugoccione's headquarters, where one of his commanders, an equally ambitious young soldier from Lucca, Castruccio Castracani, having made up his mind to take over the control of his city from his general, contrived Ugoccione's downfall.
Once firmly established in Lucca, Castruccio made it plain that he was determined to conquer Florence. First he took Pistoia; and the Florentines could have no doubt that his army would soon appear before their own walls.
The days of Florence's citizen army were now past. Men who had formerly made up the ranks of the infantry were more and more disinclined to leave their work and their homes for the camp and the battlefield, while the decline of the grandi had made it more difficult to raise competent cavalry. Richer citizens were traditionally obliged to maintain a horse and buy armour; but the well-to-do merchants of the arti medie, the popolani grassi, were no more willing to leave their counting-houses than their social inferiors were to leave their workshops, and few of them looked in the least warlike when they did so. Accordingly, as elsewhere in Tuscany, reliance was increasingly being placed upon mercenaries and upon professional soldiers, condottieri, usually of noble birth, who were paid to lead them and who had to be carefully watched lest their ambitions led them into political as well as military fields.
When Castruccio's army threatened Florence, the priorate appointed a Capitano di Guerra to take over from the Podestà as commander of their army. This Capitano, a Spaniard, Raymond of Cardona, enlisted a polyglot force of cavalry from his own country and from Italy, as well as from Germany, France and England. These cavalry companies numbered 2,500 men, of whom fewer than 400 were Florentines. There were, however, far more Florentine citizens among the infantry when Raymond of Cardona's army marched out of the city in June 1325 to face the enemy on the slopes of Altopascio. All the church bells of Florence rang loudly to wish them well, so a chronicler recorded, and a replica of the old war chariot, the Carroccio, the original having been captured at Montaperti, rattled along beside the soldiers, the city's standard flying from its mast, its own bell, the Martinella, clanging in the din.
A few weeks later the whole army was in flight, leaving the Carroccio a trophy in the hands of Castruccio, whose men pursued Florence's defeated army back towards the city. Those who had escaped slaughter outside Altopascio and in the retreat across the Arno's tributaries reached safety within the now completed walls of the city. Yet, so insecure did the priorate feel that they decided to seek the assistance of a protector. When under threat from the Emperor Henry VII they had tentatively turned to Robert I, the King of Naples. Now they sought the help of King Robert's son, the Duke of Calabria, who, for an extremely large allowance and for the right to appoint not only the Podestà but also the priori, agreed to garrison the city with a thousand knights. He arrived in July 1326 and established himself in the Palazzo del Podestà renamed in his honour the Palazzo Ducale.
He did not, however, remain there long. Recalled to the south by a threat to his birthright, he died in Naples in November 1328, two months after the death in Lucca of Florence's enemy, Castruccio.
Freed from both predator and protector, the Florentines resumed their old, slightly modified system of government, which, with further modifications in later years, was to survive until the fall of the republic. The names of all guild members eligible for office were placed in leather bags, known as borse, which were kept in the sacristy of the Franciscan church of Santa Croce. Every two months they were taken from the church for a public ceremony in which names were drawn out at random. The names of men who had served a recent term were thrown aside; so were those of members of families already drawn; so were debtors. When the names of nine satisfactory men had been extracted from the borse, six of them from the arti maggiori, two from the arti minori and the ninth to serve as Gonfaloniere, the election of the priorate, or, as it became known, the Signoria, was completed. For their two months of office, the priori were required to live as well as to deliberate together, consulting as needs be the members of two other elected councils known as Collegi, the twelve members of the Dodici Buonomini or the sixteen of the Sedici Gonfalonieri. When necessary, the priori took advice also from such occasionally summoned bodies as the Six of Commerce, the Eight of Security or the Ten of War and, more often, from the advisory council known as the Pratica. They were paid a very modest salary but were provided with the services of green-liveried attendants, an excellent cook and a jester to sing to them and to tell them funny stories at their meals. They wore crimson cloaks lined with ermine, the Gonfaloniere's being embroidered with golden stars.
When danger threatened, an emergency committee, a Balia, was chosen and granted dictatorial powers until the crisis was passed; but a Balia could only be formed, according to the theory of the constitution, with the agreement of all the male citizens of Florence over the age of fourteen who were summoned by a bell to gather in a Parlamento. At the ringing of this bell the men of the city, by now divided into four quartieri of four wards each, were expected to march behind their banners and their heraldic beasts to signify their approval of the emergency measures, having first acknowledged that at least two thirds of their total number were present.
The Florentine constitution was acclaimed by those whom it favoured as uniquely just and equitable, much to be preferred to the systems of government of other Italian states which were in the hands of despots or, in the case of Venice, a so-called republic ruled by an oligarchy of rich nobles, only those of impeccable parentage being eligible for membership of the Great Council. In fact, Florence, too, was an oligarchy. Just as, in Venice, the names of the older families, the Foscari, the Morosini, the Grimani and the Loredan, appear constantly in the lists of consigli, so do the names of the old merchant families of Florence in the lists of priori: the Peruzzi and the Soderini, the Strozzi, the Albizzi and the Acciaiuoli. In Florence, though, the people were more restless than they were in Venice, less ready to allow power to rest with those who assumed authority as a matter of
right, particularly, of course, in times of hardship and want.
The decades which followed upon the deaths of Castruccio Castracani and the Duke of Calabria were, however, exceptionally prosperous in Florence; and they are years in which the form and life of the medieval city can first be clearly seen, thanks to the curiosity and industry of its most assiduous chronicler.
Giovanni Villani was born in Florence about 1275. His father was a partner in the great mercantile house of the Cerchi family, and Giovanni himself became a partner in the banking firm of the Peruzzi, for whom he travelled widely in Italy as well as in France, Switzerland and Flanders. On his return to Florence he left the Peruzzi for another firm, the Buonaccorsi; and, as a senior member of the Arte di Calimala, he was three times elected to the Signoria. In 1308 he began writing his great book, a history of events from the earliest times until his own day, spending much of his time upon it for the next forty years, until his death in 1348.
It is a story of disasters as well as triumphs and prosperity. In its pages there are glimpses of a city racked by feuds and faction, of fighting in the streets, of murders such as that of the grande, Betto de' Brunelleschi, stabbed to death by two youths of the Donati family as he was playing chess in his own house, of the bankruptcies of unfortunate merchants, of hunger after poor harvests in the contado, when wagons sent to fetch grain from other towns were plundered by marauding bands of discharged mercenaries or sank into the mud by the banks of flooded rivers.
There were disastrous floods from time to time in Florence when the waters of the Arno cascaded down from the east, ‘so that a great part of the city became a lake… in which many persons were drowned and many houses ruined’. In November 1333, after four days and nights of rain, the swollen waters, dammed by the high city wall
covered the whole plain of San Salvi to a depth of from ten to fifteen feet… wherefore everyone was filled with great fear and all the church bells throughout the city were rung continuously as an invocation to heaven that the water rise no higher. And in the houses they beat kettles and brass basins, raising loud cries to God of ‘misericordia, misericordia’, the while those in peril fled from roof to roof and house to house on improvised bridges. And so great was the human din and tumult that it almost drowned out the crash of the thunder… And at the first sleep of night [on 4 November] the water washed away the city wall above the Corso de' Tintori… In the Baptistery of St John the water rose above the altar and reached to more than half the height of the columns of porphyry before the entrance. And in [the Bargello] it rose in the courtyard to a height often feet.
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