The submission, however, was not a lasting one; the quarrel was far from over; and the violent disputes between the faction which supported the Emperor, the Ghibellines – most of whose leaders were descendants of feudal lords – and the popular faction which supported the Pope, the Guelphs – led generally by the descendants of rich merchants – were to convulse Florentine society for generations to come, drawing into the age-long dispute members of rival families and rival groups, many of whom had little idea, had never known or had long forgotten what the supposed reasons for their rivalry were.7
3
MERCHANTS, GUELPHS AND GHIBELLINES 1115 – 1280
‘If he does not obey you well, beat him like a dog, as if he were your own.’
LAPO MAZZEI
When Matilda, La Gran Contessa, died at the beginning of the twelfth century, Florence was becoming recognized as one of the pearls of Tuscany, a town much favoured by the Countess and one whose reputation had been greatly enhanced by the part which it had played in the movement for Church reform and by its support of the Pope and Matilda in their defiance of the Emperor. Once more a flourishing centre on important trade routes, as it had been in the time of the Roman Empire, the days were long since gone when visitors travelling across the lovely valley of the Arno would pass through crumbling walls into a town whose creeper-covered Roman buildings were tumbling into ruins and sinking below such mean shops and habitations as satisfied the needs of a dwindling population. From the 1,000 or so people living here in the sixth century, after a probable decline in the seventh, numbers had risen to about 2,500 in the eighth and to about 20,000 by the middle of the eleventh.
A new town, enclosed by walls reconstructed in 1078, had been built on a level up to ten feet above the old remains. Most of its inhabitants still lived in houses constructed largely of wood, as poky, dark and primitive as others in Europe; but rising above them, all over the town, were tall stone towers, most of them owned by those rich families who now spent as much time in Florence as they did in their castles in the surrounding countryside, the contado. These towers, built as defensive strongholds and entered by means of bridges, had living quarters on the upper floors, into which families and their dependants could withdraw in times of trouble, and wooden balconies supported on beams. By the time of the Gran Contessa's death there were over a hundred of them in Florence, clusters of them allied together for mutual protection in tower societies, their high walls looming over the roofs of the surrounding buildings, like the surviving Torre dei Donati1 opposite the church of Santa Margherita in Santa Maria de' Ricci.2 The river below them was still spanned by the Ponte Vecchio, rebuilt in the twelfth century;3 but this single bridge was soon to be joined by three others, the Ponte alla Carraia, built about 1220; the Ponte Rubaconte, constructed entirely of stone in 1227, and later known as the Ponte alle Grazie; and the Ponte Santa Trinita,4 paid for by a member of the rich Frescobaldi family in 1252.5
It was families such as the Frescobaldi which now effectively ruled the city. Since the decline of feudalism and of the unquestionable power of the great lords in their forbidding stone castles in the still heavily wooded contado, the leading families of Florence had been slowly evolving a commune to organize its civic and mercantile affairs. They had even on occasions raised troops to attack castles occupied by nobles who were antagonistic to the development and growing influence of the town and who arbitrarily imposed tolls and duties on wagons and pack-horses carrying goods in and out of the city. In 1107 a small army marched out of Florence to destroy the castle of Monte Gualandi, which belonged to a branch of the ancient Alberti family; seven years later, in 1114, another small army attacked the nearby castle of Monte Cascioli, whose feudal chatelain was a proclaimed enemy of Florence's commercial prosperity; in 1135 Monte Buoni was assaulted; in 1146 Quoria. Other castles were voluntarily submitted to the commune and their land sold to it. The infantry of the makeshift armies was composed of workers who were summoned to such arms as could be mustered by the ringing of a bell. They marched to battle in their ordinary clothes behind more affluent citizens who could afford a horse, weapons and armour, and thus qualified as cavalrymen. With them, drawn by white oxen, was their Carroccio, a war chariot from whose tall mast flew the flags of the commune. In command were those leading men of the town, the consuls, who were deemed most skilled in military affairs.
Although it seems that the election of these consuls had to be approved by a general meeting of the townspeople – a parlamentum assembled in the church of Santa Reparata – in fact the consuls invariably came from one or other of the leading families of the town, either lesser nobles, who now usually lived within the walls but continued to own land outside it, or successful merchants whose riches enabled them to find husbands for their daughters among the young sons of the nobility. In time the family trees of these prosperous merchants became so entwined with those of the nobles that there emerged a composite ruling class in which trade was no dishonourable occupation. Privileged members of this oligarchy supervised Florence's system of weights and measures, in existence well before the end of the eleventh century; they filled the higher offices in the merchant and craft guilds, the arti, already coming into existence to regulate the trade in hides and cloth, dyes and spices for which Florence was celebrated; and it was they who directed the foreign policy of the town, so far as there could yet be a policy independent of the Emperor and his representative, the Margrave.
Upon the Countess Matilda's death, the new Emperor, Henry V, appointed to the margravate a man of German rather than Italian birth, a man who immediately removed his official residence from Florence to San Miniato, a town several miles to the west overlooking the road to Pisa, which consequently became known as San Miniato del Tedesco, the German San Miniato. In an effort to assert his authority over the Florentines, this German Margrave occupied the castle of Monte Cascioli, which they had recently taken over from its feudal overlord. The Florentines promptly responded by raising an army. They marched out to the fortress, retook it and killed the Margrave in the process.
Despite representations from Florence, the Emperor appointed another German as Margrave and, after his departure, yet other Germans were sent to fill his place. The Florentines, however, paid them as little attention or respect as they had paid the Countess Matilda's immediate successor; and it was only when an imperial army marched into Tuscany that the Emperor was able to enforce his will upon his supposed subjects.
In the days of the Emperor Henry V and of his two immediate successors, Lothar III and Conrad III, imperial troops were rarely to be seen in Italy; and the commune of Florence, like other communes in Tuscany, was able to increase its influence at the expense of those feudal families who were the Emperor's natural allies and who still possessed numerous castles throughout the Florentine contado and beyond. One after the other, these once powerful families were brought to heel by the Florentine commune and were required to make a token of submission to the cathedral church of Florence, through whose doors they were asked to parade in solemn procession, with lighted candles in their hands, on the annual festival of St John the Baptist.
As well as these feudal lords, the Florentine commune was anxious to bring to submission those Tuscan towns which were seen as rivals or impediments to the expansion of Florentine trade. The small town of Prato was attacked and almost destroyed before it was recognized as a useful ally in Florence's rivalry with the growing town of Pistoia, which in those days commanded the road to Bologna. Then Fiesole was besieged and captured in 1125, when most of its walls were pulled down and many of its buildings destroyed, apart from its Romanesque cathedral.6 And, four years later, the Florentines turned upon Siena in quarrels over the limits of their respective contadi, and over rival commercial interests, which were to last for centuries.
Florence's conflicts with her neighbours and rivals continued more or less unchecked throughout the first half of the twelfth century until in 1154
A fresco by Spinello Aretino
(fl. 1373 – 1410), a painter who was probably trained in Florence. His cycle of frescoes in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, is devoted to the Sienese Pope Alexander III, a stern advocate of papal supremacy, here shown being escorted by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who was obliged to pay homage to him after the Pope's defeat of imperial forces at Legnano in 1176.
a recently crowned Emperor marched into Italy to reassert his rights in the peninsula. This was Frederick I of the House of Hohenstaufen, who, because of the luxuriance of his red beard, came to be known and feared in Italy as Barbarossa.
Determined to accept neither the rights of investiture of bishops and abbots which the Pope had won in the reigns of his predecessors, nor the growing independences of the Italian communes, the Emperor Frederick, autocratic, energetic and a firm believer in the feudal system, crossed the Alps into Lombardy, ravaged Milan, whose commune had dared to resist him, and, advancing south, engineered the election in Rome of an anti-Pope as a rival to Pope Alexander III, a dedicated exponent of papal authority. Pope Alexander, however, proved a formidable opponent. Organizing a Lombard League of several cities, including Milan and Venice, he brought about the decisive defeat of the Emperor Frederick at Legnano in 1176; and in Venice the next year he sat in state in St Mark's Basilica and, in the words of a German prelate who was present, received the homage of the Emperor who ‘threw off the red cloak he was wearing and prostrated himself before the Pope and kissed his feet and then his knees’.
The success of the Lombard towns in gaining for themselves a large measure of self-government by the subsequent Peace of Constance induced the towns of Tuscany to assert similar rights; and when the Emperor Frederick, by then over sixty years old, travelled through the area on his way to marry his son to the daughter of the King of Sicily, he was dismayed to discover that several Tuscan towns, including Florence, were arrogating to themselves privileges which it was not their right to assume but his to bestow. Indeed, Florence, ignoring imperial authority, pursued a policy entirely her own, subjugating several smaller towns in the contado, including Figline and Certaldo; completely wiped out another, Semifonte; and, after a brief alliance with Pisa, quarrelled with that town also, while making overtures to Pisa's traditional enemy, Lucca.
Turbulent as were her relations with her neighbours, Florence continued to grow and to flourish, contriving to diminish the uproar which generally accompanied the election of consuls and the violent vendettas which frequently erupted upon their taking office, and to limit the fights between families, factions and tower associations by inviting a foreigner from a city at least fifty miles distant from Florence to become Podestà. This foreigner, preferably with some legal training, was to combine the offices of chief of police and governing magistrate and would, it was hoped, be more effective in the administration of justice than the naturally partial native officials he was to replace.
The town over which the Podestà presided had grown considerably in size over the past century. The suburbs, the borghi beyond the old Roman walls, had become so crowded with buildings that they constituted a threat not only to public health but also to the safety of the town should it come under attack from an enemy determined to set it alight. In the 1170s therefore, when the population had risen to about 30,000, new walls, pierced by several gates and overlooked by watch-towers, were built to encompass these suburbs, circumscribing an area well over twice the size of the Roman town and divided into six neighbourhoods, known as sestieri, each with a militia responsible for guarding its own section of the fortifications. These walls included within their boundaries the church of San Lorenzo in the north and extended southwards to take under their protection the area now occupied by the Piazza Pitti and the Piazza Santo Spirito on the far bank of the Arno. By the middle of the following century the Order of Augustinian Canons had established the church and convent of Santo Spirito in this part of the Oltrarno beyond the Ponte Santa Trinita. 7 By then two other religious orders had also founded monasteries and churches just outside the new walls. Friars of the order established by St Francis, son of a rich cloth merchant from Assisi, who was said to have often preached in Florence, began to build their church of Santa Croce in 1228 beyond the eastern gates, in a swampy, slummy area where many wool-workers lived.8 The Dominicans, an order founded by the severe Spaniard, Domingo de Guzman, which had been granted an old church and lands just outside the western gates, started in 1246 to build their church of Santa Maria Novella, known at first as Santa Maria tra le Vigne, St Mary among the Vineyards.9
Both the Dominicans – in particular Fra Pietro da Verona, later St Peter Martyr, who came to Florence in 1243 – and the Franciscans were warm in their support of the papacy against the pretensions of the Emperor, whom they denounced in their sermons in the streets of Florence, as well as from the pulpits of their churches, as a heretic, even as the anti-Christ. When the Dominicans began to build their church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Frederick Barbarossa's grandson, Frederick II, had been Emperor for a quarter of a century. A forceful, highly intelligent and contradictory man, at once sensual and pious, by turns cruel and forgiving, he was twice excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX, a close friend of St Francis of Assisi, and then not only excommunicated but also deposed by Gregory's successor, the forthright Genoese, Innocent IV
In defiance of papal objections, the Emperor advanced into Italy in 1237 intent upon putting an end to what he took to be the increasing insubordination of the Italian communes. After overwhelming the forces of the Lombard League at Cortenuova, he appointed one of his illegitimate sons, Frederick of Antioch, Viceroy of Tuscany and Podestà of Florence, with instructions to take up residence in the town rather than in the old imperial headquarters at San Miniato del Tedesco.
The arrival of this imperial bastard naturally provoked renewed quarrels and disturbances among the leading families of Florence, savage arguments between the pro-imperial party of the Ghibellines and the papal party of the Guelphs. Already in 1216 there had been a ferocious altercation involving several rival families, which the fourteenth-century chronicler, Giovanni Villani, described as marking the beginning of ‘that accursed division of Florence into Guelph and Ghibelline… and much evil and ruination befell our city as a consequence’.
This altercation, if not actually inaugurating the ‘accursed division’, was certainly characteristic of the quarrels which divided the old aristocratic houses of feudal tradition from those more closely connected with the commercial life of the city, and of its claim to independence from the Emperor with the support of the Pope. The trouble began during a feast at a rich man's country house five or six miles beyond the city walls. As was the custom then, the dishes were presented so that two guests shared one dish between them, helping themselves to the food piled upon it as fancy dictated. One of the pairs of guests happened unfortunately to consist of two members of rival families, one a young man of the Buondelmonti and the other from the Uberti. When a jester with reckless joviality snatched their dish away, there was an immediate uproar in which the Uberti youth was hit over the head with a plate and Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti wounded another guest with a knife. After order had been restored and the guests had returned to their homes, it was decided that to prevent yet another prolonged vendetta, Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti should marry a girl from the Amidei family, with which the Uberti were closely connected. ‘Thereupon,’ so an anonymous chronicler related,
Madonna Gualnada, the wife of Messer Forese Donati, sent secretly for Messer Buondelmonte and when he came spoke to him as follows: ‘You will for ever be disgraced by taking a wife through fear of the Uberti. Abandon her and take instead [my own daughter] and your honour will be restored.’ As soon as he heard this he resolved to do as he was told without consulting his own family. And when on the following day the guests of both parties had assembled, Messer Buondelmonte passed through the gate of Santa Maria and he went to pledge troth to the girl of the Donati family; and her of the Amidei he left waiting at the church door.<
br />
The insult enraged [the Amidei and their relations and supporters] and thus it came about that when Messer Buondelmonte, in doublet of silk and mantle, came riding over the bridge, Messer Schiatta degli Uberti rushed upon him and striking him on the head with his mace brought him to the ground. At once [another of the Amidei's friends] was on top of him and opened his veins with a knife and having killed him they fled… Immediately there was a tremendous tumult. The body of the murdered man was placed on a bier and the bride took her place on the seat of the bier, holding his head in her lap and weeping aloud; and in this manner the procession moved through all Florence.
For generations thereafter the vendetta between the families involved was intermittently resumed; other feuds were pursued with equally virulent animosity; quarrels erupted; fights broke out in the streets and on the bridges between families and factions; cries of ‘Guelfi!’ and ‘Ghibellini!’ echoed round the grey stone walls as the partisans of the opposing factions took shelter behind the massive gates of their tall towers. Even those who would have been hard put to it to explain why they were of one party or the other took to wearing the cut of clothes by which a Guelph or a Ghibelline could be recognized, to sporting a Guelph or Ghibelline feather in their hats, and acknowledging a fellow supporter by a Guelph or Ghibelline sign or watchword.
Florence Page 3
