4
BLACKS AND WHITES 1280 – 1302
‘One party began to scoff at the other, and to urge their horses one against the other, whence arose a great conflict… and all the city was moved with apprehension and flew to arms.’
GIOVANNI VILLANI
There were at this time seven major guilds, the arti maggiori, and a large though uncertain number of arti minori, later reduced to fourteen. The guild of greatest esteem was that of the judges and lawyers, the Arte dei Giudici e Notai. Then came the guilds of the city's principal industries, those of the wool, silk and foreign cloth merchants. The headquarters of the wool merchants' guild, the Palazzo dell'Arte della Lana, which was built on the site of a tower house belonging to the Compiobesi family, still stands in Via Calimala.1 This was the street in which the cloth merchants' warehouses were to be found and which gave its name to their guild, the Arte di Calimala. The silk merchants' guild, the Arte di Por Santa Maria, also took its name from a street, the shopping street which led, and still leads, into the city from the Ponte Vecchio and which in turn took its name from the ancient gate in the city wall, the Por Santa Maria.2 The other two major merchants' guilds were the Arte dei Vaccai e Pellicciai, which looked after the interests of both dealers and craftsmen in animal skins and furs, and the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the guild of the doctors and apothecaries and of merchants dealing in medicine, dyes and condiments, whose scales of all sizes, for the weighing of every kind of spice and powder, were regularly checked against the official scales of the commune. This was also the guild of certain craftsmen such as painters and gilders who, buying their materials from members of the guild, were themselves considered eligible for membership of it. Indeed, as time passed, guilds admitted to their membership men whose occupations were far removed from those for whom the guild had originally been established. The Arte di Por Santa Maria, for example, as well as silk merchants, had among its members upholsterers and embroiderers, mercers, feather merchants and even goldsmiths.
Also, many citizens sought membership of guilds purely as a means of becoming eligible for the privileges and rights which membership afforded. Dante, for example, was admitted to the Arte dei Medici e Speziali as a preliminary to his political career; and men like Dante kept up their guild membership for both political and social reasons, whether or not they had ever been involved in the trade with which their guild was connected.
Members of the lesser guilds were regarded with a certain disdain by the richer merchants of the arti maggiori; but five of the arti minori, those of the Beccai, the butchers,3 the shoemakers, builders, blacksmiths and rigattieri, dealers in second-hand goods, were acknowledged as being somewhat superior to the others, and were sometimes referred to as the arti medie. These were granted some of the appearance of power, if not the actual exercise of it, for the major guilds were now arrogating it to themselves. Probably the largest of all the guilds was the Arte dei Maestri di Pietre e di Legname, whose membership included workers in all manner of building crafts besides those in stone and wood.
The major guilds maintained their authority by electing representatives from their number, known as priori. These priori were each to serve for two months, and towards the end of this period they were to appoint their successors with the help of the senior members of the privileged guilds and a council of sapientes, wise men from the city's six districts who might or might not be members of a guild but who were certainly sympathetic towards the guild system.
The self-perpetuating oligarchy thus created, and the militia which was established to safeguard its interests, were not altogether unwelcome to those few of the Parte Guelfa's old guard who belonged to arti maggiori or to those, more numerous, who, while not members themselves, were related by marriage to rich merchants who were. But the old noble families as a whole naturally did not take kindly to the new system of government which the merchants of the guilds were formulating. At first there were mere rumblings of discontent, then rowdy altercations in the street, followed by attacks on citizens by young nobles returning home from wars against the Ghibellines of Arezzo and, later, from an inconclusive campaign against a Pisan army led by Guido da Montefeltro, a skilful commander from an old Ghibelline family of Urbino. The arrogant, violent behaviour of the young Guelph cavalry officers provoked a leading official of the Arte di Calimala, Giano della Bella, himself of noble descent, to recruit a new militia from among the members of those arti minori which till now had not been permitted any part in the government of the city, including the tanners and armourers, the woodworkers and girdle-makers, the innkeepers and wine merchants, the cheesemongers and dealers in salt and oil, and the workers in wood and iron.
Caption
Bas-relief panels by Andrea Pisano (c. 1270 – 1349) made for the lower part of the cathedral campanile, which was begun by Giotto in 1334. The originals are now in the Museo dell'Opera, the frames in the Campanile being occupied by casts.
With the backing of this militia, of the militia already formed by the major guilds and of the citizens' militia, which had long existed, the priori elected by the guilds in 1293, prompted by the popular leader, Giano della Bella, promulgated the celebrated Ordinances of Justice which set down the principles and practice of the new constitution and instituted the office of a senior priore, the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia, as standard-bearer of the city republic. The Ordinances of Justice thus effectively destroyed the power of the old, once-feudal families, though they did not transfer this power to the ordinary people of Florence, the families designated as popolani generally being quite as rich and often as socially distinguished as the magnati.
By the Ordinances all male members of families referred to as magnati or grandi were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the priori and to pay over large sums of money as surety for their future good behaviour. While they were allowed to be members of the guilds, they could not hold positions of responsibility within them, nor were they to be eligible for election as priori. As many as 150 families were thus penalized; and as an early demonstration of the punishments which they might expect were they to breach the provisions of the Ordinances of Justice, the new Gonfaloniere, on receiving information that a member of one of these families had murdered two citizens, marched out with his militia, his white silk flag emblazoned with a red cross flying above his head, to the guilty family's house in Via Por Santa Maria, and, to the sound of trumpets, demolished it on the spot.
Disunited though they were by family squabbles, the grandi did not, of course, accept the Ordinances of Justice without protest; and regarding the popular leader, Giano della Bella, as being largely responsible for them, they consulted among themselves as to how to bring about his downfall. He was no longer a priore and, in accordance with one of the provisions of the Ordinances, he was not eligible for election again for two years after he had left office; but he still exercised great influence in the priorate and it was hoped that his disgrace might eventually lead to the repeal of the Ordinances which he had inspired. A campaign of slander and vilification was accordingly mounted not only by the grandi but also by various lawyers in the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, the most conservative of the guilds and one with several members connected by marriage to the older families. It was a member of one of these families, the Donati, who was to be indirectly responsible for Giano della Bella's fall.
Corso Donati was a brash, hearty, quarrelsome soldier, gregarious and bombastic. He had fought bravely at Campaldino as a cavalry commander against the Ghibellines of Arezzo; and, with some of the more impressionable citizens, he had achieved a popularity which he liked to cultivate, riding fully armed through the streets with a clatter of hooves to shouts of ‘Viva il Barone!’
One day towards the end of 1294 he was trotting along when he came by chance upon a cousin, Simone, with whom he had a long-standing quarrel. There was an argument which soon became a fight. Simone was wounded and one of his grooms was killed. The matter was brought to the jurisdiction of the Podestà, who, to t
he public astonishment, found in favour of the blustering Corso Donati and sentenced his injured cousin, Simone, not merely to the loss of his property but to death. When this extraordinary judgement became known, friends of the murdered groom, crowds of popolani and their supporters among the working people, armed with sticks, knives and spears, marched angrily to the Palazzo del Podestà. Finding the great doors locked against them, they burned them down, burst inside and ransacked the building as the Podestà clambered up into a garret and escaped across the roofs of the adjoining houses.
At the subsequent inquiry it transpired, or was at least alleged, that Giano della Bella's brother, a noted demagogue, had encouraged the mob in their attack upon the Palazzo del Podestà. Other witnesses maintained that Giano himself had appeared on the scene, not however to incite the crowd but rather in an attempt to prevent trouble. The mob had, however, as mobs will, turned upon the interloper and threatened to kill him as well as the Podestà. Encouraged by this display of antagonism towards him, his rivals in the priorate ordered Giano's arrest. Rather than face the consequences, he fled from Florence and went to live in France, where he abandoned politics for the more rewarding occupation of commerce.
Now that the popolani had lost their most prominent leader, Corso Donati and his like-minded friends among the grandi supposed that they could soon dispose of his impertinent Ordinances. They were quickly disillusioned. An ill-planned uprising against the new constitution was promptly put down by the militia of the priori, assisted by working men; and when Corso's associates endeavoured to gain support for their views among the rich merchants of the guilds, they found that even those who had previously been covertly sympathetic to the complaints and aspirations of the grandi were now inclining to the majority view that attempts to get rid of the Ordinances were a waste of time and doomed to failure so long as the popolani and the workers were prepared to fight for their retention. This was certainly the opinion of one of Corso Donati's fellow grandi, Vieri de' Cerchi, who had also fought bravely in the cavalry action at Campaldino, and who, although a soldier, was also a banker, the director indeed of one of the most successful and prosperous banking houses in Florence. Corso Donati naturally despised him for this close connection with commerce and despised him also because the Cerchi were not even a Florentine family by origin, but nouveaux riches interlopers from Acone in the Sieve valley whose riches had been based not upon land but upon trade.
Scorned though he was by such proud and ancient families as the Donati, Vieri de' Cerchi had widespread influence in Florence, particularly in the Arte dei Giudici e Notai; and although excluded as a grande from the priorate by the Ordinances of Justice, he knew well enough how to manipulate their members without being one of their number. By the end of 1295 a powerful Cerchi faction had emerged in Florence in opposition to the faction led by the Donati, and before the following year was out the two sides were at loggerheads. A former priore and friend of the exiled Giano della Bella recorded a characteristic fracas between them:
One day [in December 1296] many citizens gathered in the Piazza de' Frescobaldi [named after the family whose palace dominated the northern end of the Ponte Santa Trinita] to attend the funeral of a woman, it being the custom of the country on such occasions for the men of title to sit on wooden benches while the ordinary people sat on the ground on straw mats. With the Cerchi partisans on one side and the Donati supporters on the other, someone stood up either to smooth his dress or for some other reason. Immediately suspicious, the men opposite stood up, their hands upon their swords. The opposing party did the same and fighting broke out until stopped by those who took neither side. Then many people rushed to the Cerchi's palace demanding to be led against the Donati. But the Cerchi refused.
Soon afterwards, however, Corso Donati's enemies did attack him. The attack was led by Guido Cavalcanti, a gifted poet, ‘courteous and brave’, in Dino Compagni's words, ‘but contemptuous of the common people and given to solitude and study’. Knowing how much Guido disliked him, Corso planned to have him murdered while he was on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella. Learning of the plot, Guido returned to Florence
and incited many youths against Corso, pledging them to come to his aid. And being one day in company with some youths of the house of Cerchi, mounted and armed with javelins, Guido spurred his horse against messer Corso [and threw his javelin at him] but missed. Then Corso and his companions, all armed with swords, pursued Guido; but unable to reach him, they threw stones at him and wounded him in the hands.
Incidents such as these became ever more commonplace in the growing hatred between the rival factions until Corso Donati overreached himself: he used his influence to have one of his pliant friends appointed Podestà and then persuaded this creature of his to find against his mother-in-law in an action which he had brought against her, declaring her property forfeit. This went far beyond the tolerance of priori and popolani alike: the Podestà was dismissed and Corso Donati fined and sent into exile.
No sooner had he left, however, than his fellow exiles, his remaining friends in the city and the old reactionaries in the Parte Guelfa turned to the Pope to help them dislodge the Cerchi, who were now in unrivalled command of the city.
Pope Boniface VIII was more than inclined to help them. Born into an old Roman family, the Caetani, he was anxious to establish the absolute authority of the Pope in Europe. He was also anxious to do as much for the Caetani as Pope Nicholas III had done for his own family, the Orsini, and as several members of the Colonna family were vainly to hope that their relative Pope Martin V would do for them. So, just as Gregory X had induced Rudolf of Habsburg, heir to the Holy Roman Empire, to allow the Romagna to become part of the Papal States, so Boniface VIII hoped to be able to incorporate Tuscany into them also. With this end in view he listened attentively to the overtures of the Donati, whom he considered less likely to stand in his way than the Cerchi, instructing the leaders of the Cerchi party to come to terms with the Donati and to readmit them to the Florentine government. At the same time Pope Boniface decided to send a trusted cardinal to the Florentines to enlist their support in his quarrel with the powerful anti-papal Roman family, the Colonna; and he entered into negotiations with the French King, Philip IV, with the intention of securing the help of the King's brother, Charles of Valois, in the furtherance of his designs in Italy.
When reports of these complicated negotiations reached Florence the quarrel between the Cerchi and the Donati became more bitter than ever; and the two factions and their respective supporters came to blows as frequently and as violently, and often for as trivial reasons, as had the Guelphs and the Ghibellines in the past. Florence, indeed, became a battleground in which the partisans of the Cerchi, who became known as the Whites, were in perpetual conflict with the Donati and their allies, the Blacks. On one typical occasion, a group of Whites were watching some girls dancing in the Piazza Santa Trinita when they were suddenly set upon by a gang of Blacks, and in the ensuing fight one of the Blacks cut off the nose of Ricoverino de' Cerchi with his sword. Fights like this had become commonplace by the time that Charles of Valois arrived with his French knights outside the walls of Florence in the supposed role of peacemaker.
No one could doubt that Charles had really come to Florence as an emissary of the Pope, who considered the Blacks his natural allies rather than the Whites, nor that the French were not so much peacemakers as predators. Yet, even so, the leaders of the Whites, notably the rich banker, Vieri de' Cerchi, persuaded themselves that it would be wiser to appease the visitors rather than offend them. The gates were opened and the French marched in.
They were very soon followed by Corso Donati and other exiled Blacks, who rode into the town as though they had won it by right of victory in battle. Gathering support from their fellow Blacks within the city, they strolled and trotted about the streets as though to give notice that they were now the party of power. This, indeed, they shortly became. Beginning by entering and ransacking the houses of th
eir intimidated enemies, and by releasing several of their supporters who had been imprisoned by the Whites, together with a number of common criminals to add to the confusion, they then forcibly removed the Podestà and the priori from office, replacing them with their own nominees. For several days Florence was in uproar. Witnesses sympathetic to the Whites afterwards described scenes of pillage, kidnapping and rape which might have been witnessed in a town at the mercy of enemy troops at the end of a long and bitter siege.
This outcome the Pope had neither wanted nor expected. Certainly he had hoped to see the Blacks in control of Florence; but not at the cost of forcing the Whites to seek safety and help among the Ghibellines and other rivals of the papacy elsewhere in Italy. His orders to Charles of Valois had been to oversee a change in the balance of power, not to preside over a bloody revolution. Yet Charles was powerless to prevent the complete rout of the Whites, most of whose leaders, summoned to stand trial, fled into exile. Those who remained received little mercy after Charles's departure. Sentenced to death either by hanging, decapitation or burning at the stake, a few actually suffered one or other of these fates. Most chose to leave Florence and join the other Whites in their exile. One of these was the thirty-six-year-old scholar and poet who had once been a White priore, Dante Alighieri.
5
LIFE IN DANTE'S FLORENCE 1265 – 1348
‘And when the time comes for fruit to be sold at fairs
Girls from the country pack their baskets high
With ripe round figs and grapes, peaches and pears.
If you try repartee with them, they won't be shy,
And some of them, brighter than florins, shine
With flowers from gardens that they tend near by.
Florence Page 5
