The Age of Chivalry

by Hywel Williams

  c.1080s–c.1400

  Like many European towns, Florence adapted and survived in the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman empire. Florentia (“the flourishing one”) was founded by Julius Caesar in 59 BC, and its position at the confluence of the Arno and Mugnone rivers, as well as road links to the Po valley region, gave the town important trading advantages. But early medieval Florence first needed to re-establish its primacy as a regional center, since the Lombard monarchy—which controlled most of seventh-century central and northern Italy—decided that Lucca should be the capital of its duchy of Tuscany. Florence’s position further inland also exposed it to attack from the Byzantines, who were still established in Italy’s northeast. Lucca moreover offered a more direct land route to the Lombard capital of Pavia. Florence overcame these disadvantages and attained a cultural and financial pre-eminence during the central middle ages.

  The march (or margraviate) of Tuscany was established following Charlemagne’s conquest of the Lombard kingdom in 774, and this frontier area to the Carolingian empire’s south consisted of a collection of counties that included Florence. Lucca remained the seat of the margrave—who owed allegiance to the Holy Roman emperors—until the mid-11th century, and by then Florence was fast evolving as the Tuscan region’s main administrative center. Bureaucracy, however, went hand in hand with Florence’s emerging intellectual and cultural role, with the city’s ruling élite being strongly committed to the Gregorian reform and therefore supporting the papacy against the empire. Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) was backed by Matilda, margrave of Tuscany from 1076 onward and owner of the castle at Canossa where the emperor made his temporary submission to the papacy in 1077. Although many of Tuscany’s cities—including Lucca—rebelled sporadically in favor of the empire, Florence’s loyalty to Matilda was never in doubt. Her marriage in c.1189 to the future Welf II, duke of Bavaria (r. 1101–20), brought a trans-alpine cohesion to the anti-imperial cause. Although her husband left the margrave after a few years on discovering that her lands were bequeathed to the Church, the marriage contributed to Florence’s fateful association with the Guelph faction—the Italian political expression of the German Welfs’ pro-papal policy.

  RIGHT Florence’s massive cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, with its red tiled dome, is closely flanked by the octagonal Baptistery and by the campanile designed by Giotto di Bondone in the 1330s.

  Florentine solidarity, evident when the city defended itself successfully against Henry’s army in 1082, bound Matilda to her subjects, and she was correspondingly generous in the granting of local liberties and privileges. By the time of Matilda’s death in 1115 Florence, entrenched behind fortified walls that had been greatly extended during the imperial siege, had all the appearance of a typically independent Italian commune. In 1125, a defensive collective identity turned into opportunistic aggression; following the death of the emperor Henry V, who had no legitimate direct heirs, Florentine forces attacked and conquered the neighboring city of Fiesole. During its early history as a commune Florence was run by the local nobility with merchant support, and although the emperor Frederick Barbarossa tried to limit Florentine political autonomy by re-establishing the margraviate of Tuscany in 1185, that proved to be a short-lived experiment. Barbarossa had deprived Florence of its contado, the territories surrounding the city, but in 1197 it regained control of its lands by once again taking advantage of a hiatus in imperial affairs following the death of Barbarossa’s successor, Henry VI.

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  THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLORENCE

  1182 Florentine merchants establish the city’s first guild, the Arte dei Mercanti.

  1210s The commune is divided between pro-imperial Ghibelline and pro-papal Guelph aristocratic factions.

  1250–1260 The Primo Popolo: a merchant-dominated form of democracy.

  1260 Battle of Montaperti: Ghibelline Siena defeats Florentine forces. Florence’s Ghibelline nobles return to power.

  1266 Battle of Benevento: Charles of Anjou’s victory confirms Guelph dominance in Italian politics.

  1267 Ghibelline expulsion from Florence.

  1282 The popolani regain political predominance.

  1293 The Ordinances of Justice adopted by the commune prescribe a republican government for the period of the Secondo Popolo.

  1378 Marginalized non-guild workers, aided by some members of the lesser guilds, seize power. The popolo grasso crush the rebellion.

  1397 Giovanni de’ Medici establishes the family bank.

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  THE COUNTRY COMES TO TOWN

  Economic development accompanied Florence’s population growth. The spread of new suburbs meant that the River Arno, once at the city’s perimeter, now became its arterial center of communications and a source of energy for local industries reliant on waterpower. Florence now looked atomized compared with the classical regularity of Florentia’s intersecting streets, and the landed gentry who had moved in from the countryside reproduced within their urban enclaves the designs of those fortified castle-like compounds, complete with towers, that had been raised to defend their rural estates. The dozens of towers that dominated Florence’s skyline symbolized the fragmentation of central authority, since the nobility used them to protect their households in times of civic disorder. With the establishment in 1182 of the Arte dei Mercanti, merchants had their own means of representative self-assertion, and in the decades that followed Florence’s ever-growing number of artisans and tradesmen established numerous specialist guilds.

  By the 1190s, following the example of most other Italian cities, the commune of Florence was using the office of the podestà (a magistrate-like official) to allay civic strife. Usually a nobleman, the podestà invariably came from another Italian region and was therefore likely to be neutral when adjudicating on local conflicts during his allotted year in office. The innovation worked in Florence for a generation or so, but by the 1210s the commune’s allegiances were divided to noxious effect between the pro-imperial Ghibelline nobility and the equally aristocratic Guelph leadership who often supported the interests of the guilds.

  In 1244 the Ghibellines were dominant, and they tried to strengthen their position by bringing elements of the mercantile grouping into government. But in 1250 the merchants turned on their new-found patrons and established a form of democracy during the period of the Primo Popolo. The new government ordered that the towers be reduced in height since they symbolized aristocratic factionalism. From 1252 onward the gold florin, which supplemented the silver florin first introduced in 1235, showed the prosperity and ambition of this mercantile society. A new government needed a new building to house its various councils, and in 1255 construction work started on the Palazzo del Popolo (now called the Bargello) whose crenellated form, complete with a tower, was another instance of the rural fortification being replicated within the city. The Battle of Montaperti (1260) saw the Florentine army’s defeat by the forces of Siena, a strongly Ghibelline rival within Tuscany. It also meant the end of the Primo Popolo experiment. A resurgent Ghibelline nobility dismantled the democratic structures and ordered the destruction of palaces, towers and houses owned by Guelph aristocrats. This vindictive policy continued until 1266, when the Ghibellines suddenly found themselves in a precarious position following Charles of Anjou’s defeat of Manfred, the Staufen king of Sicily, at the Battle of Benevento (February 26).

  ABOVE The coat of arms of the Arte de’ Beccai (the guild of butchers) which, founded in c.1236, was one of Florence’s 14 minor trade guilds, known as the arti minori. The walls of Florence’s Orsanmichele, a church associated with the trade guilds, are adorned with their coats of arms.

  Charles’s victory was one fraught with Italian implications. The cause of the empire, embraced by the Ghibellines, had received a decisive setback, and since the papacy had used its Florentine bankers to help finance a papal-French-Angevin axis of power in Italy the city’s commercial interests as well as its political advantage now lay wit
hin that orbit of influence. A Guelph restoration and a Ghibelline expulsion became imperative. By the spring of 1267, and with Pope Clement IV’s support, the commune had achieved both measures and that meant the end of the Ghibellines in Florence. Charles of Anjou was made podestà for ten years by the commune and, ruling the city through his lieutenants, he imposed a Guelph-dominated regime. Florentine troops were to the fore among Tuscany’s combined Guelph forces when they defeated the Ghibellines at the Battle of Campaldino (1289), and that victory lent an additional authority to the Guelph leadership in Florence.

  ARCHITECTURE: THE ILLUSTRATION OF GLORY

  By the end of the 13th century Florence was one of Western Europe’s largest cities. Its population of some 100,000 had been boosted by immigration from the surrounding countryside, and reserves of capital accumulated through trade and financial services were being used to give architectural expression to Florentine glory. Medieval Europe’s major cities required the presence of a castle and a cathedral in order to control the urban environment and to regulate citizens’ lives. In the case of Florence its first major public building, the Bargello, fulfilled the role of a castle, and construction work started on the city’s new cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in the mid-1290s. But the monastery was quite as important for the medieval city, and Florence was a major center for the new religious Orders who built in the Gothic style—the city’s vernacular school of architecture.

  In the second quarter of the 13th century the Franciscans started construction work on their monastery dedicated to the Holy Cross, and it was re-designed in the 1290s to assume its present form. The great church of the Dominicans, Santa Maria Novella, having been first raised on the site of an earlier church in 1246, was completed by the 1350s. Along with the monasteries of the Augustinian, Servite and Carmelite Orders, these substantial complexes exerted huge social influences on their immediate localities; they contributed culturally and economically as well as having a religious purpose.

  DEFINING FLORENCE’S GOVERNMENT

  Nonetheless, Florence’s intra-mural politics continued to be fractious. The period after the Primo Popolo witnessed the renewed self-assertion of the popolani—those merchants and trades-people who were organized into the more significant guilds and who defined themselves in conscious opposition to the magnati or nobility. In 1282 the Popolo movement became the dominant element within the commune, and the constitutional transformation it effected 11 years later included the magnati’s formal exclusion from Florence’s political life.

  ABOVE Construction began on the Palazzo della Signoria, now known as the Palazzo Vecchio, in 1299. The palace was built upon the site of an older tower belonging to the Foraboschi family, which is now marked by the location of the present tower.

  The Ordinances of Justice (1293), as adopted by the commune, provided a republican constitution for the city’s signoria or government. Its nine members, the priori, were chosen from the guilds at two-monthly intervals. The head of those elected was the gonfaloniere, who served the republic as its chief public representative during his brief period in office. In governing Florence the signoria had to consult two other elected councils: that of the dodici (12) and of the sedici (16). They could also call on the expertise of councils specializing in matters such as warfare, security and commerce, and which would be formed by election as and when the need arose. In 1299 work started on constructing the Palazzo della Signoria (now the Palazzo Vecchio) that housed the government of the Secondo Popolo, and its fortified appearance showed the defensiveness of the attitudes accompanying the republican assertion. From the time of its formation onward this structure of government was subjected to internal strains, with the lesser commercial classes or popolo minuto differentiating themselves from greater ones or popolo grasso who were dominant in the arti maggiori (major guilds).

  Florence’s chronic tendency to fragment could also be seen in the tensions that became endemic in the 1290s between the “Blacks” and the “Whites” (the Neri and Bianchi) who adhered to the aristocratic families of the Donati and the Cerchi respectively in the struggle for influence. Following the Ghibellines’ expulsion the victorious Guelphs had split: the Black Guelphs stuck to a pro-papal line while the White Guelphs were critical of the papacy and more likely than their adversaries to embrace the new constitution. After the priori forced both the Donati and the Cerchi leaders into exile in 1300 the Blacks appealed to the pope. The mediator he chose, the French prince Charles of Valois, occupied the city with an army. Charles then delivered Florence to Corso Donati, who established the Black government that sent many of the White Guelphs, including Dante Alighieri (c.1265–1321), into exile.

  Fourteenth-century Florence was exposed to external threats from Ghibelline-controlled Milan as well as from Lucca and Pisa. When Castruccio Castracani, duke of Lucca, inflicted a military defeat on the Florentines in 1325, the administration turned for support to the Anjevin rulers of the kingdom of Naples, who shared their antipathy to the empire. In 1326 the city placed itself under the direct rule of Duke Charles of Calabria, heir to the Neapolitan kingdom, by electing him to be its signore (lord) for ten years, though that experiment ended when the duke died unexpectedly two years later and the commune found that its liberty had been restored. Florence again had to call on Naples for support when it was threatened by Mastino II della Scala, signore of Verona and north Italy’s most successful warrior-prince in the 1330s. This resulted in a brief period of imposed tyranny in 1342, which ended in a popular uprising and the restoration of the traditional liberties.

  Florentines had long been accustomed to both domestic turbulence and external threats, but the mid-14th century saw new environmental dangers as well as a terrifying public health crisis. New bridges (which include the Ponte Vecchio) had to be built across the Arno after major flooding destroyed the earlier structures in 1333. And the epidemic known as the “Black Death” hit Florence particularly hard from the late 1340s onward. A far greater catastrophe, however, was the collapse in the 1340s of Florence’s banks. This followed their involvement in shadily speculative financial instruments and entrapment in a bubble of currency speculation created and controlled by Venetian high finance. That financial cataclysm led to a continent-wide banking crisis, collapse of credit, and trade contraction that lasted for decades.

  AN INSTRUCTIVE INSURRECTION

  Florence’s democratic structures were based on the great guilds, and this fact alone meant that popolani could be a synonym for an oligarchy dominated by the popolo grasso. In 1378 the commercial élite were quarreling among themselves, and specialist wool workers known as the ciompi—who were not affiliated to any guild—seized their moment. Large numbers of the disenfranchised working groups, such as the tanners and dyers, joined the ciompi in petitioning the signoria for the right to establish guilds that would protect their interests. In late July these dissidents, backed by radical elements within the marginalized minor guilds (arti minori), such as those of the bakers and mill-workers, seized the government by force. But although new guilds were formed, including one for the ciompi, the insurrection leaders failed to maintain their solidarity. By the end of the summer an alliance of the greater and lesser guilds had crushed the ciompi leadership, whose guild was subsequently disbanded. In the following years the popolo grasso re-established its dominance.

  ABOVE A marble portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici from c.1464, believed to have been sculpted by Andrea del Verrocchio. This is the oldest surviving portrait of the Medici patriarch.

  The events of 1378 lived on in the memory of the Florentines and contributed to a mounting and general disillusion with both the theory and the practice of the city’s republican constitution. Victories were still possible, however, and Florence’s conquest of Pisa in 1406 made the republic a maritime power for the first time in its history. But workers in the arti minori continued to be alienated from the popolo grasso, and important elements within an élite haunted by the recollection of civil disorder concluded that
they needed better protection. Different sectors of Florentine society therefore had their own, albeit mutually contradictory, reasons for allowing the local de’ Medici family (who were also Europe’s premier bankers) to effect an early 15th-century revolution in government by keeping the republican constitution while denuding it of significance. That Medicean transformation needed to be subtle, since Florentines were proud of their city’s history and conscious of its grounding in republican values that had produced greatness as well as violence. Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1463) ran the bank established by his father Giovanni (1360–1429) and rarely held public office, but connections acquired through patronage and money meant that he could control Florence by exerting his personal influence. Just like his grandson, Lorenzo (1449–92), Cosimo was Florence’s sole ruler, and the Medicis’ sedulous avoidance of the title of “prince” allowed Florentines to maintain their communal self-esteem and to pretend that the link with the republican past was still in place.

  GIOTTO AND REALISM IN ART

  Although Florence is the city that defines the rinascimento, its history also challenges the idea that “renaissance” and “medieval” are mutually exclusive categories.

  The career of Giotto di Bondone (c.1267–1337) is a case in point. He was born either in Florence or its surrounding rural hinterland, and tales of his preternatural skill form part of the Giotto tradition—as in the case of the fly he drew on a canvas being worked on by Cimabue (c.1240–c.1302) and which looked so lifelike that the painter tried to wave it away. The story was first related by Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters (1550), a work written over two centuries after Giotto’s death and which sought to demonstrate that Florentine artists were the best and earliest exemplars of renaissance originality. In Vasari’s account of the matter Giotto’s naturalistic style is contrasted with the stiffness of earlier Tuscan artists, who were still working in a tradition influenced by the icons of Byzantium—as in the case of Cimabue and Duccio (c.1255/60–c.1318). Their stylized and mosaic-like approach to painting can thus be labeled “medieval” and even “Gothic.”