The truce between the two men lasted for almost a decade after 1230, but the pope did not relinquish his ambitions to remove the Hohenstaufen from Sicily and to promote a new dynasty for the empire. Frederick’s invasion of Sardinia in 1239 gave him a pretext to excommunicate the emperor once again and build alliances with the pro-Guelph cities of the north. Gregory died in 1241, yet his vendetta was continued, with matching vindictiveness, by a successor, Innocent IV, who deposed Frederick, called him a precursor of the anti-Christ and urged the German electors to supply a new emperor.
Stupor mundi may have been unlucky in his relations with the papacy but he was unwise in his dealings with the Lombard cities. Claiming that northern Italy legally belonged to him, he was determined to succeed where Barbarossa, his paternal grandfather, had failed. In 1226 he summoned an imperial assembly to Cremona, most loyal of Ghibelline towns, and announced his intention ‘to restore regalian rights’. His ambitions predictably led to a revival of the Lombard League, and most of the Po Valley cities banded together to resist him for the last quarter-century of his life. Frederick defeated the League at the Battle of Cortenuova in 1237 but then overplayed his hand by demanding an unconditional surrender, which the cities refused to give him; the following year he was humiliated by his failure to capture Brescia after a lengthy siege. Despite military successes in 1240–41, when he captured parts of the Papal States, and in 1246, when he suppressed a rebellion in the south, the campaigns achieved nothing durable. Even more humiliating than Brescia was the siege of Parma in 1248, when the apparently beleaguered garrison unexpectedly stole out of the town and ransacked Frederick’s camp while he was out hunting.
The emperor died in 1250 and, after the brief reign of his son Conrad, his southern territories were claimed by his bastard child Manfred. Another talented descendant of the Hautevilles, Manfred was a poet, a scientist and a diplomat wiser than his father in his dealings with northern Italy. Yet Frederick’s death had not halted the papacy’s efforts to eliminate the house of Hohenstaufen and to find a new monarch for the kingdom of Sicily. In 1266, after the entreaties of several popes, Charles of Anjou, a brother of the French king, victoriously invaded: Manfred was killed in battle, and the last male Hohenstaufen, Conrad’s teenage son Conradin, was executed.
Charles made himself unpopular in Sicily, chiefly by transferring his capital from Palermo to Naples, and he was ejected by the islanders following the uprising in 1282 known as the Sicilian Vespers. In his place the throne was offered to King Peter of Aragon, whose wife was a daughter of Manfred. Peter’s acceptance and reign may have given some solace to supporters of the Hohenstaufen, but Aragonese rule presaged the long decline of the island. Already cut off from north Africa and the Arab world, it was now detached from France and Italy, although over the centuries the southern mainland – known as ‘continental Sicily’ – was from time to time reunited with island Sicily to be called eventually the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Yet from the end of the thirteenth century the island was effectively an outpost of Spain, tied torpidly to Iberia for over 400 years. Like Sardinia, it received viceroys but little attention from its Hispanic rulers.
Frederick’s rule had resulted in the extinction of his dynasty and the impoverishment of Sicily, which had to pay for his wars. Another casualty was the idea of uniting Italy under a single ruler, which is what he wanted and which no one tried to make a reality again for another six centuries. The beneficiaries of his failure were the cities of Tuscany and the north, which could now pursue their cultural and communal development – as well as their local rivalries – without much external interference. The defeat of a cultured monarch of the south thus led to a cultural efflorescence of the north.
3
Cities and Powers
COMMUNAL DREAMS
If you were a petitioner to the government of Siena in the later Middle Ages, you would enter the Sala della Pace, a painted room in the city’s great Gothic town hall, the Palazzo Pubblico. There you would face the nine governing councillors, known as the noveschi, seated on a dais beneath a large fresco representing Good Government. The fresco would be encouraging because it depicts the winged figures of Faith, Hope and Charity flying above the six female virtues, who include Peace and Magnanimity. The figure of Justice is especially reassuring: her scales are even, and each one carries an angel. Standing there, you might feel you were before a just and more or less ideal government, which is what the noveschi thought they were.
If you glanced at the walls to the right and left, you would quickly understand the difference between good government and bad government and thus be in a position to select the sensible path to follow. The fresco to the right, The Well-Governed City, illustrates the benefits you would expect from such a title. The elegant city is inhabited by happy dancers, industrious artisans, people with good food and fine garments and leisure to chat and read and play board-games. Outside the city gate their rustic compatriots are also merry, usefully employed threshing corn and gathering the harvest, and prosperous as well, owning chickens and donkeys and saddlebacked pigs. Such joys are absent in the fresco to the left, The Ill-Governed City, where a horned Tyranny presides over a dark, spectral landscape beyond the walls and scenes of violence and insecurity within: a dagger is drawn, a woman is seized by soldiers, a corpse lies on the ground. Fear stalks the countryside with a sword, while Justice is vanquished, hands bound and scales broken.1
The frescoes were painted between 1337 and 1340 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, late products of the golden age of Sienese painting that was begun sixty years earlier by Duccio di Buoninsegna, continued with Simone Martini and terminated by the Black Death in 1348 that carried off Lorenzetti, his brother Piero and every established Sienese artist except Lippo Memmi. Whereas Duccio’s rich, translucent works were painted in the service of religion, and the town hall’s most famous painting, the Guidoriccio, portrays a Sienese general, Lorenzetti’s most celebrated works are the mesmerizing political allegories that cover the walls of the Sala della Pace. In The Well-Governed City everyday scenes of rural and urban life were depicted with a skill and love of detail unmatched by anyone until Pieter Brueghel, who must surely have seen them when he visited Siena 200 years later. Guided by the city’s rulers, Lorenzetti’s role was less the contemporary chronicler than the propagandist of communal government and advocate of a civil life unsubordinated to religion. Symbolism in such matters was important. When the councillors constructed the tower of the Palazzo Pubblico in 1338, they ensured that, although it was built at the bottom of a slope, it would be higher than the tower of the cathedral, which is on a hill.
Siena still seems one of the blessed places of the Earth, a town whose beauty alone might justify the claim inscribed on the Camollia Gate: cor magis tibi Sena pandit – ‘Siena opens her heart wide to you’. From the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo, the three terzi (districts) spread along the town’s three curving ridges, their harmonious buildings constructed in the bricks of that warm hue known to artists as ‘burnt sienna’. In the prosperous years before the Black Death, ‘the city of the Virgin’, as it was called, had a population of over 50,000 in addition to another 50,000 in its contado, the country districts and small towns it controlled to its south and west. By the time of Lorenzetti’s frescoes, Siena had added Grosseto and Massa Marittima to its domains.
The city owed much of its wealth to bankers: the Bonsignori were the papacy’s principal money men in the thirteenth century, and the Monte dei Paschi has claims to be the oldest bank in the world, functioning without interruption since 1472. Its chief disadvantages – common to most hill-towns founded by the Etruscans – were its distance from a river and a water supply too meagre to support manufacturing and the labour it required: Siena could thus never hope to compete with the great woollen industries of Lucca and Prato, towns built next to rivers on the plains of northern Tuscany. Yet the Sienese – whom Dante dismissed as vain and derided for their expensive search for an underground stream that did not ex
ist2 – were unable to grasp there might be a limit to the size of their population. By the 1330s Florence had twice as many inhabitants as Siena, yet it was at this time that the smaller city, already possessor of the striking zebra-striped cathedral we see today, decided to erect the largest church in Christendom. The project was halted by the Black Death, which killed half the town’s population, and was abandoned soon afterwards, but some of its pillars and arches still stand as testament to monumental ambition. The existing cathedral, which is pretty large itself, would have become merely the transept of the greater glory.
Siena’s rulers, whom their subjects might meet beneath Lorenzetti’s frescoes, were titled ‘the Nine Governors and Defenders of the Commune’, whose regime, buttressed by councils and committees, lasted from 1287 to 1355. Although the Nine themselves were a self-perpetuating oligarchy, choosing their successors from some sixty families, they were supported by a wide coalition of classes and interests and directed one of the most stable city-states of the Middle Ages.
On taking office, the Nine swore to provide ‘a good peace and concord’ to the people of ‘the magnificent city of Siena’. The wording of the oath was laudable, and so was the constitution of 1309 which enforced planning permission. Serious and resolute about their cultural duties, the Nine ordered the building of the Palazzo Pubblico and later its huge tower; they paved the Piazza del Campo in roseate brick in a herringbone pattern; and they commissioned Duccio’s great Maestà as an altarpiece for the cathedral. They also compelled citizens to embellish their city: houses required building permits and final inspections, they had to be built with loam with façades of brick, and they were supposed to have columns and arches – though evidently many did not.3
Harmony and uniformity were priorities. Streets were widened and straightened, thoroughfares paved, overhanging buildings forbidden. The Nine employed officials ‘in charge of the beauty of the city’ as well as firemen and night-watchmen to preserve it. They were strict also about rubbish, requiring shopkeepers to sweep the street in front of their shops on Saturdays and sending out enforcers to ensure that this was done. Less civic-minded citizens may sometimes have been irked by the regulations. Prostitutes were excluded from certain areas, especially around the cathedral, while in the Campo no one was allowed to carry weapons, feed babies or even eat figs.4 The Nine would evidently not have tolerated the gum-chewers of today.
Siena with its commune, its culture and its civic pride resembled other city-states that speckled northern and central Italy in the Middle Ages. The inhabitants of these places shared both a loyalty to their cities and a pride in their achievements that helped define who they were and how they behaved. They might fight and riot with their fellow townsfolk but they revered their cities. In his Purgatorio Dante stresses the personal identification with a city when one character declares ‘Siena made me’ and another embraces a stranger on discovering he is a fellow Mantuan.5 The Florentine Boccaccio, the literary colourist of his age, demonstrated his loyalty in the Decameron by disparaging citizens of nearly all Italian cities except his own and Bologna. The Sienese are credulous and the Venetians untrustworthy, Pisan women are ugly and Perugian men are sodomites, in the Marches the males are uncouth and mean-hearted, like those from Pistoia, who are also rogues. The south contributes its share of wickedness with assassins from Sicily and thieves and grave-robbers from Naples, but no people rival the ‘rapacious and money-grubbing’ Genoese, who are depicted as pirates, misers and murderers. Boccaccio’s happy fornicators and shameless adulterers come from all over Italy, but the only consistently good people live in Florence, where the women are all beautiful and the men are noble, chivalrous, agreeable and wise.
Life was communal; there was not much of a barrier between public and private lives. People identified themselves with the commune and its symbols, above all with the local patron saints such as St Nicholas in Bari, St Ambrose in Milan and St Januarius (the blood-liquefying San Gennaro) in Naples. The patron saints of Venice (St Mark) and Siena (St Catherine) had devotional parity with the Virgin. Other symbols were the campanile, the bell-tower with magnetic appeal, and the carroccio, the ox-drawn wagon carrying flags and a cross into battle. It was embarrassing and humiliating to be unable to defend your carroccio and lose it to the enemy. The Milanese lost theirs in 1150 to the Cremonese and again in 1237 to the emperor, when it got stuck in the mud at the Battle of Cortenuova.
Medieval Italians talked of their city as if it were a kind of paradise, its life regulated by sublime statutes framed by lawyers at the new University of Bologna. They were proud of its appearance, especially as culture was then chiefly civic and communal; the great age of individual patronage, both noble and ecclesiastic, came later. Entire populations would turn out with trumpets and pipes to celebrate an artistic event, as the people of Siena did in 1311 when they escorted Duccio’s Maestà from the painter’s workshop outside the city through the gate in the walls and up to the cathedral. Since things were constructed in their name – and not, as later, in that of the Medici in Florence or the Gonzaga in Mantua – they could take a proprietorial interest in the paving of streets, the laying out of squares, the building of stone bridges.
Nine centuries after their emergence, the city-states remain embedded in Italy’s psyche, the crucial component of its people’s identity and of their social and cultural inheritance. Modern inhabitants of these cities are still proud of their heritage and feel responsibility for its retention. That is why the town centres – though not unfortunately much of the country outside them – are so well preserved today.
Yet for all their culture and prosperity and the participation of their citizens, the city-states were predestined to fall. Their failure was inherent in the circumstances of their formation and development, scores of little towns living close together, anxious about spies and plotters inside the walls, nervous of large and predatory neighbours without. Fear and suspicion led to alliances and pre-emptive moves and an endless succession of little wars. The cities needed a benign protector such as Rome had once been and the Holy Roman emperors never were – until the eighteenth century, when it was too late. It was the endemic factionalism and violence in Italy that made Dante plead not for a state or a nation but for a strong and universal empire.
Nationalist historians later hailed the Florentine poet as the ‘father of the nation’, but Dante cannot objectively be seen as a proto-nationalist. He never visited the south nor indeed much of the north but, even in the central areas that he knew, he noticed little that the Italians had in common, acknowledging (in Latin) only that they shared ‘certain very simple standards of customs and manners and speech’. As he wandered about in his exile, the great Florentine decided there were just two possible forms of government, the communal and the imperial, and, much as his work was imbued with a municipal spirit, he recommended the latter because it was more likely to establish peace and order. He did not consider Italian unification as a conceivable third way. Sovereignty and secular authority, he believed, should belong exclusively to the Holy Roman emperor, who derived his powers not from the pope but from God. Dante wanted rulers who were ‘illustrious heroes’ like Frederick II and his son Manfred, and towards the end of his life he put his faith in the Emperor Henry VII, whom he acclaimed as the ‘lieutenant of God’, ‘the consolation of the world’, a modern Augustus to whom the Almighty had entrusted ‘the governance of human affairs so that mankind might have peace under the cloudless sky that such a protection affords’.6
COMMUNAL REALITIES
Italy’s self-governing communes had their origins in the ancient polis, in the cities that the Greeks had established in Sicily in the middle of the eighth century BC. Such entities also existed under Rome, autonomous though not independent, and it has been estimated that in the age of Hadrian there were 1,500 of them, containing about half the population of the empire.7
Italy’s communes emerged in the late eleventh century into the vacuum left by absentee emperors whic
h bishops and imperial officials were unable to fill. By 1150 all the larger towns of Tuscany and Lombardy had communes, though there were few in feudal Piedmont and none in the south. The empire’s delegates were replaced by elected consuls, laws were made by councils, and administration was directed by committees. Communes differed over the details of elections – secret ballots, terms of office, eligibility and so on – but their institutions, like their ethos, corresponded. They governed their cities through similar sets of officials and they all set out to control their surrounding countryside, establishing their contadi by conquest or purchase and ensuring that their nobles lived in towers or palaces in the city rather than in threatening castles outside.
As populations grew and city walls were extended during the twelfth century, defects in communal government began to show. Power struggles among the elites, feuds among the nobility and civil strife among all classes brought problems that were seldom solved by part-time amateur governments. Short terms of office and complicated balloting procedures seemed admirable in theory, but they led to inexperienced officials and administrative inefficiency. People were loyal to their commune but not on the whole to its leaders, whom they regarded as simply the chiefs of the faction currently in power. As the absence of impartiality became more blatant and more critical, communes of the late twelfth century began appointing a new official, the podestà, to deal with problems of justice, civil disorder and fractious aristocrats. The significance of this figure was that he was neutral, a nobleman usually from another city who might be expected to stay impartial and above faction. For some decades in some cities the system worked up to a point, but the innate instability of the city-state, which the Greeks themselves had been unable to stabilize, left the role of the podestà increasingly irrelevant and eventually redundant.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 9