So long as the Emperor's son, Frederick of Antioch, was established as Podestà in Florence, the leading Ghibelline families, the Uberti, the Amidei, the Lamberti and their friends, were in the ascendant; and in February 1248, after a peculiarly savage fight, those Guelphs who had castles to which they could retire retreated into the contado, abandoning their houses in the city to the Ghibellines, who pulled down no fewer than thirty-six towers, one of which was the exceptionally high tower of the Adimari family, known as il Guardamorto because it stood as though on watch above the graveyard next to the Baptistery. This tower, sent crashing to the ground, would have landed upon the roof of the precious building, so awestruck bystanders reported, had not St John the Baptist himself miraculously appeared to deflect the falling masonry.
After the death in 1250 of the Emperor Frederick II, whose sudden fatal illness overtook him in Apulia, at Fiorentino – thus almost fulfilling a court astrologer's prophecy that he would die in Florence, a warning that had led him to avoid that city as though it were infested by the plague – his illegitimate son, the Podestà, left Florence for good, and the exiled Guelphs, having defeated a Ghibelline force at Figline, south of the city, returned to it to take control, driving the Ghibellines into exile in their turn and afterwards demolishing their houses and towers as thoroughly as their own had been destroyed, leaving the tumbled ruins uncleared as a warning to other erstwhile supporters and as ‘a memorial to their perfidy’.
No sooner had the weight of imperial power been lifted from their shoulders than the Florentines set about establishing a Guelph government of their own, a government acclaimed by the people who paraded through the streets to shouts of ‘Viva il popolo!’ A Capitano del Popolo, a neutral foreigner like the Podestà, was appointed to command the newly formed militia of twenty companies and to act in conjunction with the Podestà in keeping order in the city. A council of twelve anziani (elders) was elected, two from each of the six districts into which the city was divided; a new badge was devised for Florence, a red lily on a white field, as well as an emblem for the militia, the Marzocco, the heraldic lion, whose image was to appear on several buildings in Florence and in the public squares of towns brought under Florentine rule.10 And, as a suitably imposing palace for the Capitano del Popolo, the new government ordered the construction of the Palazzo del Popolo, soon to be renamed the Palazzo del Podestà and later to be known as the Bargello.11
Ostensibly democratic, this government, known as il Primo Popolo, was influenced if not directly controlled by the merchant families which had never been far from the centre of power. Its foreign policy consequently continued to be aggressive and expansionist, designed to bring the whole of Tuscany under Florence's control, in particular to force Pisa to allow Florentine goods to pass down the Arno and out to sea free from all customs duties, to compel the smaller towns between Florence and Siena – Volterra, Poggibonsi and San Gimignano – to accept a Florentine citizen as their Podestà and to submit either to having their walls demolished or to having a fortress built for Florentine troops to keep an eye on them. As for Siena itself, this perverse town, the soi-disant City of the Virgin, which had welcomed the exiled Ghibellines from Florence under the leadership of Farinata degli Uberti, this must be crushed once and for all.
The Florentines spared no efforts in raising an army for war against the Sienese. Not only were their own men between the ages of fifteen and seventy, with few exceptions, told to hold themselves ready to fight, but envoys were sent to all their subject towns with requisitions for troops and even to towns beyond the borders of Tuscany – to Bologna and Orvieto among others – with requests for support. By the end of August 1260 an army of about 70,000 men had been assembled and equipped with pikes and arquebuses, crossbows and swords, thousands of pack-animals and wagons.
Florence's own companies, 16,000 strong, marched out of one of the city's southern gates confident of victory, their white banners and standards, emblazoned with the red lily, fluttering in the summer sunlight. Joined by the companies provided by their allies, by forces from other Tuscan towns, from Prato and Pistoia, Lucca and Arezzo, San Miniato del Tedesco, San Gimignano and Volterra, all under their separate banners, they assembled on the afternoon of 3 September around the castle of Montaperti within sight of the red-brick walls of Siena.
The Sienese were greatly outnumbered. A few companies had joined them from their own small subject towns, but they had been unable to enlist help from any other Ghibelline city, even from Pisa, which would have welcomed a Florentine defeat. To support them in the battle now imminent, the Sienese were forced to rely upon some mercenaries who had been sent from Germany and the south of Italy by the Emperor Frederick's illegitimate son, Manfred, the self-proclaimed King of Sicily, and the Florentine Ghibelline exiles under Farinata degli Uberti.
Small as their army was, the Sienese did not hesitate to attack the host drawn up outside their walls. They marched down to the banks of the river Arbia, waded through the shallow stream and advanced towards the Florentine ranks, which were not yet ready to receive them. According to the Florentine chronicler, Giovanni Villani, whose version of the subsequent battle is wildly at variance with those of the Sienese annalists, their unpreparedness was largely due to Ghibelline traitors in Florence's army who,
when they saw the enemy approach took to flight, as had been agreed beforehand… Moreover, they did not permit the Florentines and their allies to form rank and join battle.
And just as the squadron of German mercenaries violently struck the Florentine knights, their banner-bearer, Jacopo del Nacca of the [pro-Guelph] family of the Pazzi, and a man of great valour, was violently struck by that vile traitor, Messer Bocca degli Abbati, who rode close to his side and, hitting him with his sword, cut off the hand which supported the Florentine banner. And immediately Bocca was set on and killed. Seeing the banner on the ground and themselves betrayed at the very moment when they were powerfully assaulted by the Germans, the Florentine knights and foot soldiers were soon put to flight.
Whether or not there was treachery within the Florentine ranks, the Sienese victory was certainly quick and decisive. It appears that the foot soldiers both of Florence and of Lucca stood their ground for a time after the more highly born cavalry had galloped off the field. But their resistance was brief and even Villani admitted that ‘a great butchery ensued of the Florentine infantry as well as of the Lucchese and Orvietans who had shut themselves up in the castle of Montaperti. And such as were not killed were taken.’
It has since been estimated that as many as ten thousand men were killed and that some twenty thousand Florentines and allied prisoners were led away to be crammed into the cellars and dungeons of Siena.
Once again the Ghibellines, accompanied by the German mercenaries from Montaperti, rode into Florence, and the defeated Guelph leaders slunk away, first to Lucca, and then – driven from there – to seek the protection of the Guelphs of the Romagna, abandoning their houses and towers to the fate which was then becoming all too familiar in the city: over a hundred Guelph palazzi were demolished, and almost six hundred houses, nearly ninety towers and numerous workshops, foundries, mills and cloth-drying sheds. The ten-year-old government of il Primo Popolo collapsed, and the Palazzo del Popolo, by then nearing completion, became the headquarters of the Ghibelline leader, Farinata degli Uberti, and of King Manfred's newly appointed Ghibelline Viceroy in Tuscany, Count Guido Novello. He was the husband of an illegitimate daughter of the late Emperor Frederick II and member of an ancient Tuscan family, several of whose members were Guelphs and one of whom, Count Guido's brother, had fought on the Guelph side at Montaperti.
Count Guido Novello seems to have owed his appointment to his family connections rather than to his efficiency and character: his prompt response to demonstrations against the German mercenaries by the people of Flor-ence was to ride out of the city taking the Germans with him. The Ghibellines remained, however; and, in an effort to bring an abiding peace to the city,
they asked the exiled Guelphs, as fellow Florentines, to come back. This overture was, however, roundly condemned by the Pope, who wanted no rapprochement between the two factions but rather the complete discomfiture of the Ghibellines.
The Pope was now Clement IV, a strong-willed, decisive Frenchman, as intent upon the destruction of Hohenstaufen influence in Italy as he was upon the extinction of the Hohenstaufens' friends, the Ghibellines.
Declining to recognize the Hohenstaufen Manfred as King of Sicily, the Pope supported the rival claims to the Sicilian throne of the King of France's brother, Charles of Anjou, who marched into Italy, gave battle to Manfred near Benevento, defeated and killed him, and had himself crowned king in his place. Then, with the Pope's encouragement, Charles of Anjou sent several troops of his French knights north into Tuscany; and, accompanied by numerous Florentine Guelphs riding beside them, these knights entered Florence in the Easter week of 1267. Once more the Ghibellines fled, never again to wrest control of the city from their rivals.
For a time the Ghibellines maintained their ascendancy elsewhere in Italy; but after Charles of Anjou's defeat of the Emperor Frederick's grandson, Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufens, at Tagliacozzi in the Abruzzi, east of Rome, in August 1268, they were no longer a power in Tuscany. Following a mock trial, Conradin was beheaded in the market square at Naples; the next summer a Guelph army of Florentines and French knights defeated the Sienese and their Ghibelline allies outside the small town of Colle di Val d'Elsa near Poggibonsi; and in 1270 Pisa, as well as Siena, accepted the inevitability of Guelph supremacy, both towns agreeing to the appointment of a Guelph Podestà.
In Florence the Guelphs now organized themselves into a party, the Parte Guelfa, which, with Charles of Anjou's representative as Podestà, successfully excluded all outsiders from office, filling the city's councils with their own nominees and directing the domestic policies of the government, while content to leave the formulation of its foreign policy in the hands of Charles of Anjou. The six capitani comprising the executive committee of the government were all from old Guelph families; so were the fourteen members of the Credentia, the advisory body to which the capitani brought matters for consideration. There were government departments, notably the treasury, to which were admitted such merchants as had influenced the policies of il Primo Popolo; but these were invariably rich merchants. The Parte Guelfa, like Charles of Anjou himself, regarded men of the people, however talented, as inferiors to be kept in their place. They also, like Charles, regarded former Ghibellines and crypto-Ghibellines with hatred and suspicion. One of the principal officials of the Parte Guelfa, the head of its secret police, was known as the Accuser of the Ghibellines. In the near future he had much work to do in rooting out troublesome Ghibellines and in ensuring that they were sent into and remained in exile as confinati, and that their properties and possessions were sold for the benefit of the commune, of those Guelph families which had previously suffered at their hands and, of course, of the Parte Guelfa.12
Under the government of the Guelphs, Florence grew and prospered. All its main streets, formerly of brick, had been paved in the time of a Milanese Podestà, Rubaconte da Mandello, and were now, in the words of a contemporary chronicler, ‘more clean, more beautiful and more healthy’. By the end of the thirteenth century the city's population, spreading into new suburbs beyond the walls of the previous century, seems to have increased to about 45,000, considerably more than London's and some eight times that of Oxford, even though the university there was by that time well established. The city's banking houses were making immense profits through their dealings with foreign powers, in particular with the Kings of France and Sicily and with the Pope; and the trade of the city was increasing in volume year by year. Merchants dealt in spices and dyes, hides and silks, sendal and taffeta, gold brocades and braid, and above all in wool. Vast quantities of woollen cloth and bales of raw wool were imported from northern Europe, mainly from France, the Low Countries, the Algarve, Spain and, by the end of the thirteenth century, from England. The wool was refined and dyed in the numerous workshops of Florence, the finished bolts of cloth being sold through so many agents beyond Tuscany's borders, in French fairs and English markets, Flemish towns and Mediterranean ports, that Pope Boniface VIII was to say that the Florentines had become a kind of fifth element: wherever earth, air, fire and water were to be found there were sure to be Florentines as well. In all weathers flat-bottomed barges piled high with cloth could be seen drifting down towards Pisa on the Arno, whose waters – polluted with dyestuffs, tannin and rubbish, when not dried up – drove the workshops' mills and filled the tanks in which the wool was washed and dyed. The dyes used were faster, and of purer, brighter colour, than any to be found elsewhere in Europe. Some were of local origin: yellow dyes came from the crocus fields near San Gimignano; but the ingredients for others had to be transported from far away, insects for cochineal from the shores of the Mediterranean, lichen for the red dye known as oricello from Majorca, cinnabar for vermilion from the Holy Land. The bitter juice of aloes which made the dyes fast came from Alexandria and the Levant.
Throughout the year, thousands of ill-paid men were hard at work in the city's shops, in wash-houses and stretching-sheds, as well as in their own cramped houses, undertaking the numerous processes through which the imported wool had to pass, the fulling, spinning and carding, the combing, weaving, stretching and trimming, as well as the washing and dyeing and drying. Nor was it only textiles that left Florence by river or on the backs of pack-horses which made their slow way to the coast or ambled north across the Apennines to Venice for shipment to the ports of the eastern Mediterranean; grain was exported, too, oil and livestock, timber and the fine wines of Tuscany.
In this commerce the banks of Florence played an essential part, not only in supplying capital and in the investment of money for their clients, but in all manner of other activities, including the insuring of ships and cargoes. As inventors of double-entry bookkeeping and of the forerunner of the cheque, and as creators of the gold florin, and lire, soldi and denari, later the LSD of British capitalism, the Florentines were already regarded as the world's leading experts in international commerce; and their banks had the reputation of being safer and more solid business houses than any others. These banks, operating on their own or in associations of compagni, were in the hands of Florence's great families such as the Albizzi and the Bardi, the Baroncelli, Peruzzi, Pulci and Strozzi; and it was rarely that young men less well connected who worked for them as salaried employees, fattori, were able to rise to senior partnerships.
The training of a banker was an arduous one. Care was taken to ensure that a boy destined for a commercial career was not indulged in his earliest years. A handbook written for the guidance of parents enjoined them to be strict in the upbringing of their children, to ensure that they did not speak to adults unless spoken to, that they knelt down upon entering a room where grown-ups were gathered and knelt again when leaving it. Mothers must refrain from combing small children's hair too often, from ‘making them embroidered little hats and silvered capes and little beribboned skirts, carved cradles, painted slippers or soled hose, from giving them little wooden horses, pretty cymbals, toy birds or gilded drums… from holding them in [their] arms, kissing them, licking them, singing them songs or telling them fairy stories’.
At the age of seven, boys were expected to be able to read and write, to speak a little Latin and to count with an abacus, and at the age often, they would be sent to a scuola d'abaco for specialist training in arithmetic and bookkeeping. Then, when they were thirteen or fourteen, they would be apprenticed to a merchant in Florence and would probably be beaten for laziness or disobedience. ‘If he does not obey you well,’ wrote Lapo Mazzei to the manager of the firm in which his son was learning the business, ‘beat him like a dog, as if he were your own.’
Before he was twenty the trainee banker would probably be sent to work abroad in one or other of his company's bran
ches in a foreign city.13 Here he would be expected to learn the language of the country and the manners and customs of the people with whom he was to transact business, as well as to inform himself of all that he needed to know about local markets, exchange and interest rates, trade routes and customs duties, government regulations and local business practices. Some Florentine merchants, like Bernardo Davanzati, who worked in Venice for forty-five years, spent most of their life abroad; and it was not an easy life, as they were always ready to point out. ‘We can do nothing at present,’ runs one characteristic letter of grievance from a merchant at the mercy of often antagonistic local authorities. ‘Foreigners have to endure ill treatment every day. I am one of those who have to suffer constantly at the hands of marshals, captains and anyone disposed to inflict such punishment. There is always someone ready to make trouble for us poor foreigners.’
Despite the habitual grumbles of merchants, late-thirteenth-century Florence flourished so healthily under the Guelphs that they felt justified in relaxing the penalties imposed upon the Ghibellines. Under pressure from the new Pope, Gregory X, a Visconti from Piacenza, and from his successor, the Roman-born noble, Nicholas III, both of whom were anxious to weaken Charles of Anjou's influence over the Guelph towns of Italy, the Guelphs in Florence agreed to allow certain Ghibellines to return to the city, knowing that they were, as they proved to be, too weakened and impoverished to offer any resistance to the power of the Parte Guelfa in the organization of Florentine government and society, a society in which the guilds or arti were assuming an authority which was to eclipse that of Ghibellines and Guelphs alike.
Florence Page 4
