Emblem of the Arte della Lana by Luca della Robbia, in the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo.
During his brief time in office the Duke of Athens had allowed it to be supposed that he would permit the poorly paid proletarian labouring classes of Florence – the spinners and dyers, the carders and weavers of the wool industry, many of whom were former peasants who had left the contado to find work in the city – to form their own guilds. Hitherto any attempt at organization of their labour had been regarded as a crime and punished as such. The statutes of the Arte della Lana, for example, declared that meetings of more than ten men employed in the industry for any purpose was illegal and that the transgressors would be punished by having their names added to a list of proscribed workers, a sentence, in effect, to virtual starvation for the men and their families. Other guilds had similar rules and offences against their regulations were punished with the utmost severity. When Ciuto Brandini, a wool-carder, attempted to organize his fellow workers in a guild, he was dragged from his bed in the middle of the night and taken into custody. A deputation of his friends in the Santa Croce quarter then ‘went to the priori and urged them to restore Ciuto safe and sound,’ a diarist recorded at the time. ‘They said they also wished to be better paid. Ciuto was then hanged by the neck.’ And when later the dyers dared to go on strike after the high price of bread had led to riots in the grain market and to the plundering of sacks of wheat, the striking workers were immediately locked out of their workshops and obliged either to abandon their strike or return to their families with no bread at all.
The increase in wages following the Black Death proved to be short-lived, since workers coming in from the countryside to take advantage of the labour shortage soon filled all the vacancies and wages fell again; the population of the city, devastated by the horrors of 1348, increased with such rapidity that it rose by about 30,000 – to 70,000 – in thirty years.
The working day began early with the ringing of bells and the shouts of men calling the hour; and the week was long, Saturday being a full working day, though on that day an indulgent foreman might allow his men to knock off rather earlier than usual. But there were many religious holidays, apart from Sundays, on average about one a week, so that, with his morning break for a meal, the worker had almost as much time off as his modern counterpart, although there were no paid holidays and if he were ill he had to look to charity, not to his employer, to survive.
As well as the food for his morning meal, he was expected to carry his tools to work. Sometimes he might be provided with wine and, on special occasions, with a meal. At Santo Spirito, for example, when the last column had been erected in the nave, the stonecutters were given a dinner of bread, sausages and wine; and at the Palazzo da Gagliano, when the roof of the loggia was finished, they were served with macaroni, cheese and fruit. Some institutions paid part of their workers' wages in kind, but most paid cash, gold florins and lesser silver and copper coins, usually lire and soldi, a few by drafts which could be cashed at one or other of the city's banks. A full-time, experienced and responsible foreman overseeing the construction of a palace in the fifteenth century might expect to receive about 400 lire or 80 florins a year, as compared with the 150 florins which a senior government official could expect. But ordinary stonecutters or wool-workers were, of course, paid far less than this, 200 lire at the most and this only if they were working full time throughout the year as few workers were able to do. The average wage of the poorest families was barely enough to keep them in food, let alone rent or clothing. However, an industrious man, skilled at his work, could contrive to live quite comfortably, paying modest amounts for his rent and clothing, possibly saving up enough to provide his daughters with small dowries, and treating his family, on occasions, to meals which would not have disgraced the tables of palaces.
It was rarely in ordinary times that meat was eaten on days other than Sundays, or that black pudding or the liver sausages known as fegatelli would be served as well as pasta. On these special occasions, however, there would be veal or chicken, pigeon and trout, melons and berlingozzi, rich and sweet cakes made with plenty of sugar and eggs, cheese and fruit, and, if the women of the household were up to it, one of those exotic confections served at the suppers of the artists' club known as the Company of the Saucepan, representations of subjects taken from La Divina Commedia – the Inferno perhaps, complete with suffering souls sculpted in marzipan and with devils made of spiced cherries.
While the labouring classes still struggled to make a satisfactory living at the bottom of the social scale, the members of the lesser guilds did manage to improve their lot, despite the continuing economic crisis, after the departure from Florence of the Duke of Athens. Many contemporary observers, from the chronicler Marchionne di Coppo Stefani to Giovanni Boccaccio, the son of a well-to-do merchant, who returned to Florence from a course of business studies in Naples in 1340, lamented the influence that mere shopkeepers and others of the petite bourgeoisie were now exercising in the government. Matteo Villani, who continued the Cronica fiorentina after his brother's death, complained that ‘every vile craftsman of the city [now aspired] to reach the priorate and the great offices of the commune’.
This presumption on the part of such people naturally aroused the anger of the rich merchants and in particular those who were members of the Parte Guelfa, which, since it had in the past taken over so much property from the exiled Ghibellines, was by now inordinately rich as well as staunchly conservative. Having decided that the ambitions of the minor guilds must be thwarted as firmly as the workers' demands for higher wages, the Parte Guelfa resolved to inspire a series of measures to combat them. First they persuaded the priori to enact legislation that made it unlawful for any citizen to hold office unless his father and he himself had both been born in Florence. This would deal satisfactorily with any ambitious troublemaker who came to the city from the surrounding countryside to find work. They then decided to take measures against importunate upstarts in Florence by a law which declared that those of Ghibelline sympathies were also ineligible for office. Since they themselves were to decide who was and who was not a Ghibelline, this meant in effect that anyone suspected of democratic sympathies could be debarred from the priorate; and since the original differences between Guelphs and Ghibellines had, for all practical purposes, long ago been resolved, it might have been supposed that to condemn a man for Ghibellinism was no longer relevant. But the word had taken on so sinister a meaning that to be accused of Ghibelline sentiments was to be charged with holding views and condoning behaviour of the most disgraceful kind, rather as in our own day the extreme left will condemn certain attitudes as ‘Fascist’ with little regard to what Fascism originally meant. In any event the campaign against supposed Ghibellines served its purpose, in that hundreds of men considered unsuitable for the priorate were held to be ineligible for election. It also, however, had the effect of creating a large body of dissidents strongly opposed to the continuance of the regime.
In peaceful and prosperous times this opposition might well have been contained. But the peace of Florence was disrupted in 1375 when a band of mercenaries, dismissed from service in the Papal States, invaded Florentine territory with the intention of extracting large bribes for refraining from plunder or of plundering if bribes were not forthcoming.
They were commanded by Sir John Hawkwood, an Englishman, the son of an Essex landowner who had been in a good way of business as a tanner. Sir John had fought in France as well as in Italy, and had achieved fame as the commander of a band of several hundred freelances known as the White Company, a marauding force of cavalry and infantry heavily armed with lances, swords and daggers, and with long bows of yew slung across their backs. They also carried ladders which, tied together, could reach the top of all but the highest walls, over which they would scramble by night into towns foolhardy enough to refuse them ransom money, and would then punish the inhabitants by killing men, raping women and carrying off anything that took thei
r fancy. In Piedmont and Lombardy, in the Papal States and in Tuscany, Hawkwood's White Company had become a dreaded army, sometimes in the pay of government, sometimes acting on their own account. Later to be appointed captain-general by the Florentines – whose interests he was to serve faithfully in exchange for a lavish salary – Hawk-wood now appeared to them as a brigand.1 Convinced that he had invaded their territory at the instigation of the Pope's representative in the Papal States, Florence declared war on the Papacy.
The war – warmly supported by the Florentine dissidents who hoped it might bring about the fall of the Pope's friends, the Parte Guelfa – was fought with neither skill nor enthusiasm by Florence's mercenary army, several troops of which were evidently much perturbed when the Pope placed their paymasters under interdict. Yet, far from bringing the Florentines to heel, the Pope's interdict merely provoked them to further efforts: an emergency war committee of eight military advisers was appointed, the Eight of War, soon referred to by the enthusiastic citizens as I Otto Santi. Ecclesiastical property was appropriated and sold; Florence's clergy were ordered to ignore the Pope's ban and celebrate mass as in the past.
Caption
Muralled cenotaph in the Duomo by Paolo Uccello of Sir John Hawkwood, the English mercenary who became Captain-General of Florence and died in the city in 1394.
It was not long, however, before the rising costs of the war, and the sacrifices which the people were called upon to make for its prosecution, led to revulsion. Long before peace was signed, the Parte Guelfa concluded that the changing mood of the citizens, fickle as always, justified them in mounting a counter-offensive against their opponents. But their plans to gain direct control of the government by a coup d'état soon became known to their enemies, who thereupon decided to make the first strike themselves.
It so happened that the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia at this time was Salvestro de' Medici, a member of one of Florence's older families. Forebears of his had been elected Gonfaloniere in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; but in more recent years the family had suffered a decline, a decline much lamented by a cousin of Salvestro, Filigno de' Medici, who, while thankful at least that they were still quite well off, complained that their social position ‘ought to have been higher’. Gone were the days when ‘it used to be said, “You are like one of the Medici”, and every man feared them’. In those days it was held that the Medici were descended from a brave knight, one Averardo, who had fought under the banner of Charlemagne. Riding one day through the district north of Florence known as the Mugello, this knight had come upon a ferocious giant. He had fought the monster on behalf of the peasants of the neighbourhood, and slain him. In the battle his shield had been dented in several places by the giant's mace. Charlemagne had rewarded his courage by allowing him to commemorate his victory by representing the dents by red balls, or palle, on a field of gold, thereafter the insignia of the Medici, which were in the distant future to appear on so many buildings in Florence.2
When Salvestro became Gonfaloniere in 1378 the Medici still owned ‘half a palazzo with houses round it’ at Cafaggiolo in the Mugello, where the fight with the giant had taken place; they also had two modest palazzi in Florence and several smaller houses. But their name and reputation were not such as to rival those of the Gianfigliazzi, the Soderini and the Albizzi who, discrediting the story of Averardo and the giant, maintained that the balls represented pills or cupping glasses – the Medici, as their name suggested, having originally been mere doctors or apothecaries, descendants of a charcoal burner who had moved into Florence from the Mugello. Or if not pills, the Medic's palle no doubt represented coins, the traditional emblems of pawnbrokers.
Whatever his origins, Salvestro de' Medici was known to be sympathetic towards the popolo minuto and, as an opponent of the diehard conservatives in the Parte Guelfa, towards the men whom that party had contrived to exclude from office. As a demonstration of their support for him, and in the hopes of what might be done for them while he was Gonfaloniere, a large crowd of the poorer people of Florence gathered outside the Palazzo della Signoria on 18 June 1378 to loud shouts of ‘Viva il popolo! Viva il popolo!’ Soon afterwards they made a direct attack upon the palaces and houses of the leading members of the Parte Guelfa and its officials, setting them on fire and forcing their occupants to flee for their lives. In submission to the demands of the mob, Salvestro de' Medici and the other priori now exiled the Parte Guelfa leaders, released their victims from the restrictions imposed upon them and rescinded all the laws which the Guelphs had recently inspired. They would, it seems, have been content to do no more; but the popolo minuto, mostly wool-workers, were determined to bring about a more radical revolution.
For some years now the workers in Florence's wool industry, and by later extension the great mass of the popolo minuto, had been known as ciompi, a word derived from the French, compère, pal or mate, which the Duke of Athens's French soldiers had used when addressing the people they encountered in the city. It was these so-called ciompi who in July took the revolt in Florence into its second stage. By then Salvestro de' Medici had been replaced as Gonfaloniere by Luigi Guicciardini; and so it was he and his fellow priori who on 21 July had to face a forceful demonstration in the Piazza della Signoria of huge crowds of ciompi demanding the right to form a guild and thus be eligible for election to the priorate. Bursting out of the piazza, the demonstrators, who had already burned down the Palazzo dell'Arte della Lana, the headquarters of the wool guild, and hanged the Podestà, rampaged through the streets, and then streamed once more towards the Palazzo della Signoria, shouting their demands as they burst through the gates, driving out the priori, their guards and councillors, and acclaiming as the Gonfaloniere a wool-comber by the name of Michele di Lando who, standing in the hall of the palace in a torn shirt and with sandals on his otherwise bare legs, held aloft the banner of the republic.
Confirmed in office by a Parlamento summoned to the piazza by the great, booming bell in the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria, the proletarian Gonfaloniere and his chosen priori immediately set about the creation of three new guilds, the tintori, the dyers, the farsettai, the doublet makers, and the guild of the popolo minuto, commonly known as the guild of the ciompi, since most of its members were workers in the clothing industry.
Determined not to allow so potentially ruinous a revolution in the organization of the city's workforce, the merchants immediately had their premises locked up. Turning to their Gonfaloniere, the former wool-comber, for support, the ciompi once more streamed into the Piazza della Signoria, demanding firm action against their employers; and, when Michele di Lando hesitated to accept their demands, a caucus of the more extreme of them marched off to the Piazza Santa Maria Novella where they set up an alternative government and sent two messengers back to the Palazzo della Signoria demanding that power should be shared between the two rival factions.
The Gonfaloniere, bent upon retaining power in his own hands, brandished a sword in the face of the messengers, chased them out of the palace and, leaping astride a horse, called upon all true Florentines to follow him in driving the usurpers out of the city.
This was soon done. But the more moderate lesser guilds were by now becoming alarmed by the revolutionary activities of the ciompi; and when the term of office of the wool-comber, Michele di Lando, and his fellow priori had run its two months' course, the newly elected government felt strong enough to dissolve the radical guild of the popolo minuto, while allowing the two other recently created and more amenable guilds of the tintori and the farsettai to remain in existence. Thereafter, though there were disturbances and plots enough in Florence throughout the remaining years of the century, the triumph of the oligarchy was assured, much to the relief of respectable merchants, one of whom had feared that the triumph of the ciompi would have meant that ‘every good citizen would have been kicked out of his home, and the cloth worker would have taken everything he had’. Secure as the oligarchy now was in Florence, however,
there were enemies to be faced abroad.
The first of these enemies was the clever, scheming Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan and Count of Pavia, who was well on the way to becoming master of all northern Italy. Brushing aside Florence's declaration of war as a matter of little importance, he gained control of Pisa and Siena in 1399 and of Perugia in 1400. Having annexed Bologna in 1402, he was on the point of mounting an assault on Florence three months later when he died of the plague at Melegnano.
Saved as they had been before and were to be again by a sudden, unexpected death in their enemy's camp, the Florentines now turned upon Pisa, which Gian Galeazzo had bequeathed to one of his illegitimate sons, the heartily disliked Gabriele Maria Visconti, to whom they paid 200,000 florins for the title. Outraged by this commercial transaction, the Pisans refused to recognize it, turned away the Florentine commissioners who came to take possession of their purchase and prepared their city for siege. But so thoroughly did the Florentine army prevent all supplies from entering the city that the population were soon on the verge of starvation; and at the end of the first week of October 1346, Pisa was forced to surrender, leaving Florence in possession not only of this important city on the lower Arno but also of the harbour of Porto Pisano, which the Pisans had built further downstream. The Florentines' later purchase of Livorno from Genoa strengthened their hold on the Tuscan coast and provided them with another port through which goods could pass to and from the Mediterranean world, Constantinople and the countries of the East.
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