Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries Florence was
still a relatively modest centre compared with others in Tuscany. Although it
was already clear that she was overtaking Arezzo, Volterra and other cities
that were more illustrious in point of age, she was still decidedly inferior in
point of population size, wealth and power to Lucca and Pisa, which also
preceded her in acquiring free local government systems. Even nearby Pistoia
and Prato still looked to the important centres of western Tuscany rather than
to Florence; and the fact that the Via Francigena continued to bye-pass her was
a disadvantage that had still not been overcome. The great Florentine buildings
of the time – from the baptistery to the San Miniato monastery – with their
strong, serene Romanesque lines and their characteristic combination of white
and green marble, rendered homage to the aesthetics and technology of Pisa and
Lucca.
Manufacture and commerce did not rise much above subsistence
level; they did little more than satisfy the financial needs of the city,
though there was a sign or two of coming opulence on the horizon, reflected in
the beautiful religious buildings and perhaps supported by the aristocratic
life of the families clustering round the House of Canossa and the Episcopal
administration. Land was still the real backbone of Florentine wealth, in spite
of the fact that the terrain was rough, hilly and here and there marshy and
produced little in the way of cereal crops, though it did yield wine and olive
oil (not highly esteemed for the table at that date).
Like the other cities of the Italian proto-Communal world,
twelfth-century Florence set out to conquer the county, subdue the castles of
the surrounding territories and gain ascendancy over the land-owning families
and knights who dominated the territory from their strongholds. In the space of
two years, between 1113 and 1115, the Cadolingi family, who controlled Valdarno
to the west of Florence, petered out and the Countess Matilda died. Ten years
after Matilda’s death the Emperor Henry V also died, and there followed a long
interregnum. Together these events facilitated Florentine opposition to the
power of the feudal landowners who were among the supporters of the Emperor and
of the Marquesses of Lorraine. They also made it comparatively easy for
Florence to impose her will on smaller towns and cities.
It is symptomatic that in those decades one is much less
conscious of the Florentine people than of their army. In 1125 the city
expressed its unity for the first time in a firm collective action, the capture
and destruction of Fiesole. Only the cathedral was spared, but the Bishop of
Fiesole was forced to take up residence within the city boundaries of Florence.
In the same way, as the castles were conquered and destroyed, the knightly
families that owned them were obliged to become townspeople and live, for at
least some months of the year, within what Dante called “the ancient circle”.
Many ironical comments have been made on Dante’s nostalgic
memories of the Florence of that time, all sobriety and modesty. It is said
that that sobriety was chiefly abject poverty, and that modesty first and
foremost coarseness. Furthermore, it is asserted that the reactionary and
factious Alighieri pretended to forget (and perhaps really was not entirely
aware) that the Florence of that time “lived in peace” only up to a certain
point. Towards the end of the twelfth century the city dominated the whole of
the middle part of Valdarno, from Figline to Empoli, and had by now entered
several times into direct conflict, or at least into some sort of close
political relations, with the surrounding cities: Arezzo, Pistoia, Pisa and
Siena. Among the powerful feudal lords who lived between the county of Florence
and the counties of those other cities, only the Alberti to the north and west
and the Guidi above all to the east could oppose her. But her ruling class
contained families who came from the surrounding county and were proud of their
warrior traditions; they had carried into the city streets the impregnable
military buildings dedicated to their defence – the case-torri (house-towers,
the towers that were dwellings as well as defence works) – and the custom of
violence and feuding, that is, revenge.
By this time the Florentine county enjoyed peace and
security, for the most part, because those who had once ruled it had not
abandoned their possessions when they went to live in the city, but had seen
that living together under the city’s colours gave them a new collective
strength.
This being so, trade was able to prosper: the easy river
passage between Florence and Pisa – which between the towns of Fucecchio and
San Miniato allowed a connection with the Via Francigena – was an excellent
link with the outside world. A closely knit organisation of merchants, a
“Guild”, is on record as early as 1182. The budding Commune entrusted the
maintenance of the beautiful great buildings such as the baptistery and the
church of San Miniato, which were by now the very symbols of the city, to the
merchants, although it did not allow them to take part in politics.
Wide-ranging Florentine merchants bought cloth from Flanders and France, and
precious dyes and alum from the Levant; they then had the cloth dyed in their
workshops, so that they could re-export it at a heavily marked-up price. They
combined commerce and manufacture with money-lending. This was risky, for they
might at any time have been accused of usury by the Church, but it yielded a
handsome and immediate profit. Trade, banking activities and the search for raw
materials obliged the Florentines not only to travel continually but also to
gather, assess and sort out information relating to the political and economic
situation of various countries. In the twelfth century this was easy enough in
ports, such as Pisa, Venice and Genoa; it was not usual, however, in inland
cities, with the possible exception of Milan; so Florence was ahead of her time
in enjoying this advantage.
But within the “ancient circle” the political climate was
anything but peaceful. The institutions of the Commune were to take off not
long after the deaths of Matilda and the Emperor Henry V, and hence to profit
by the power vacuum they had left: the first verifiable piece of information
about the existence of two consuls, however, goes back to 1138. Later the
college of consuls increased to twelve; they took it in turns to rule, two at a
time, and changed every two months, so that the whole year was covered. They
were supported by a council of a hundred to a hundred and fifty boni homines
(good men) and, four times a year, by a “parliament”, an assembly of all the
citizens of Florence. We do not know for certain what were the qualifications
for taking part in the assembly, nor how it was conducted. Its function seems
to have been to ratify the decisions made by the consuls and council; but what
we know of the citizenry at that time, and of how any regime based on
assemblies works, leads us to believe that it was the great families and their
armed retainers who led the Commune.
The importation of stuffs and dyes, and the processing of
textiles, admitted Florence to the trade circuits of Europe and the
Mediterranean, but her trade nevertheless was dependent on access to ports,
enabling her to receive raw materials and other goods and send out her finished
products to foreign markets. As road transport was difficult, the Arno and
therefore the port of Pisa were of the first importance to Florentines.
When, round about 1171, Pisa, in difficulty with Genoa and
the Emperor, asked for help, Florence did not miss her opportunity: she did
give military assistance – which cost her a long war against Lucca and Siena,
who had allied themselves to the other side – but it was in exchange for
substantial recompense in the shape of a share in the profits of the Pisan mint
(and from that time the silver currency of Pisa became the Florentine currency
too), the concession of favourable conditions for the transport of goods and of
Florentine merchants on Pisan ships and for the payment of tolls in Pisan territory,
and the availability of anchorage to Florentine merchandise in that prestigious
port
The city’s wealth increased in every direction; and so did
the population, because the prospect of making money in the city attracted
people from the rest of the county. They were not so much “fugitive servants”,
as has so often been said, as a robust class of property owners, people with
solid assets, who, arriving in the city without, however, cutting themselves
off from their roots, reinforced the domination of Florence over the
surrounding country. It was guaranteed as much by the social participation of
the milites turned city-dwellers as by their arms and castles. But the city was
by now completely filled with stone, brick and wooden buildings.
The free spaces characteristic of urban centres in the late
middle ages were used as orchards or even as small pastures, but by now they
had disappeared under the welter of feverish building rendered necessary by
circumstances. Newcomers settled along the roads which radiated from the gates
towards the country, usually choosing to live where they could look out towards
the places they came from. That was how the borghi (villages or suburbs) came
into being, back to back with the “ancient circle”, while a substantial
residential nucleus grew up on the left bank of the Arno. Emporiums and
workshops, but also the case-torri of notable families, had been built outside
the walls, and it may be presumed that altogether the population was about
25,000. The threat of the Emperor Federico Barbarossa induced the Florentines
to provide themselves hastily with new defences, for the most part wooden
stockades, which enclosed the borghi too. The Emperor was determined to contain
the independent cities and subdue if not crush them; moreover, there was
tension between him and Florence’s ally, Pisa, so her fears were not unfounded.
The enormous task of bringing the borghi into the shelter of the city walls
took from 1172 to 1175. They formed irregular triangles which had as a base the
sides of the Roman perimeter walls. The new walls that included them maintained
a shape that was very roughly quadrangular, but changed its orientation by
about 45 degrees.
The city now had as its eastern limit the present-day Via
de’ Fossi (the course of the River Mugnone had recently been moved eastward)
and the Trebbio gate was north of the present-day Piazza di San Lorenzo. There
the walls curved towards the west, more or less to where the Arch of San Piero
(all that is left of that part of the walls) now is. Turning south, they then
reached the river again, after having encircled the entire area corresponding
to the Roman amphitheatre, an area which previously lay outside the city
limits. Later, in the early thirteenth century, three new bridges were built to
connect the right bank of the Arno, where the city arose, with the left bank –
that is, with the busy, turbulent, populous Oltrarno which from the “Roman
Gate” (as they then called what was later called Porta San Nicolò) extended as
far as today’s Porta Romana (known then as the “Porta di San Pietro in
Gattolino”) and Porta San Frediano. The road to Pisa started at that gate,
running along beside the river. When the construction of the new defensive
walls was complete, the area of the city, which in Roman times was 24 hectares,
had risen to 75.
But with the enlargement and enrichment of the city came the
loss of the peace, sobriety and modesty lamented by Dante. Things were not
really as bad as he made out. The point is that the differentiation of the
social and financial status of the citizens, the increased volume of trade and
consequently the ever more quickly whirling circulation of wealth, the influx
of aristocratic families and members of an upstanding middle class from the
country had produced – with the growth of the city’s dimensions – a
considerable divarication and complication of social and political life. The
appearance of consuls, from 1138, marks, among other things, the first definite
proof that by then Florence had started on the road to city government. She was
de facto independent, even if de iure subject to the sovereignty of the
Roman-Germanic Empire, which had, however, since the death of Matilda, lacked
the most important intermediate public institution, the marquisate of Tuscany.
The consular type of government is always the product of a collective wish to
rule on the part of a more or less extended group of aristocratic families who
combine the practice of arms and the possession of land with a certain
entrepreneurial bent for trade, which includes an ability to make use of
connections with non-aristocratic entrepreneurs. The other side of the coin is
the objective difficulty of collective government, and therefore a continual
tension that bursts out from time to time in episodes of violence. Florence
became a continual battlefield as a result of the use of arms, the existence in
the city of belligerent buildings (the case-torri) inspired by the families’
warlike past in the country, and the privilege of the right to carry on feuds,
which set off a spiral of revenge until the entire ruling class was involved.
What was at stake was power, and more immediately the mastery of one family by
another. Family groups got together in actual “associations” (the statutes of
some of them have survived) based on marriage, business dealings, friendship
and neighbourhood. The neighbourhood concerned would be fortified by means of
such connections between buildings as wooden galleries or passages which could
be used or taken down at need.
The towers that crowned these fortifications could be as
much as 130 “arms” (that is, 75 metres) in height. By the middle of the
thirteenth century, Florence contained more than 150 of them. Little wonder
that the family associations were called “tower societies”. It is said that the
impression Florence made then, with her centre surrounded by walls, must have
been like the impression Manhattan makes today; but while that is true as far
as the look of it is concerned, it must not be forgotten that that way of
planning and building the city indicated above all that living there was like
living in a fortress where the enemy was not outside by within.
Before long Florence’s links with the rest of Italy and with
the European and Mediterranean world ensured that the struggle between rival
family groups became connected with wider reasons for conflict. The incursions
of Federico Barbarossa and his allies into Italy in the third quarter of the
century provoked various different reactions. The Florentine reaction, by and
large (meaning that of the Florentine consular class), was to maintain a
cautious line where Imperial policy was concerned, but in many episodes this
caution turned into hostility. The Florentines had always shown unquestionable
loyalty and formal respect towards the Holy Roman Empire, and would continue to
do so until the end of the eighteenth century, but it was indeed a formal
respect, a fictio iuris which, even though it had a high spiritual and cultural
value and a deep juridical significance, meant little in the field of political
decisions, which were determined rather by the complex network of alliances.
Moreover, since the direction of political decisions was
determined by the group of family alliances that controlled the college of
consuls, putting its members turn and turn about at the head of government, it
was clear that the other groups, who felt excluded from it, aimed to get into
it or to destroy its means of retaining power. Between 1177 and 1179 the
precarious equilibrium of consular government was violently destroyed by a
rebellion led by the powerful Uberti family, which from then on was accused of
being seditious and enjoying the divisive support of the Empire, in the name of
which it had rebelled.
In Florence, as elsewhere, the struggles between the Papacy
and the Empire served as alibis to mask the internal struggles for power or to
claim loftier and nobler motives for them. As time went on, however, these
supposed motives acquired, in the partisan ardour of the conflict, a
fascination and a fame destined to last and to have some effect on the
practical plane.
The consular regime soon showed itself to be incapable of
absorbing and containing these factious disturbances. Between 1193 and 1197 a
new rebellion, provoked as before by the Uberti family, led, with the approval
of the Emperor Henry VI, to its abolition. This time the Uberti had the support
of many representatives of the merchant and craftsman classes, who had no
reason to side with the consular establishment, having always been debarred by
them from any form of participation in city government. However, in practice
the abolition of the consular system simply meant the substitution of one group
of family alliances for another as rulers of the city; there was no real
difference between the two, as to social composition, outlook or way of life.
The consular system was re-established in 1197, once Henry VI was dead, but by
then it was clear that the government of the city must be redefined on some new
and different basis if it was to have greater stability.
Between 1197 and 1203 the Florentines embarked on an
energetic series of actions aimed at consolidating the city’s power over the
county, especially in the south-west part of it, towards Valdelsa and the lower
Valdarno; they were the key parts of the central Tuscan communication system,
which included the Via Francigena and the River Arno. Meanwhile, consular
government gave way to the system that depended on a podestà, the head of the
Commune. The power which we would today call executive was in the hands of a
single magistrate, who had, moreover, to be a foreigner because that seemed to
offer a better chance of his being above factional rivalries. He had to be of
the knightly class and to possess the qualities of a good leader in war. In his
work as governor he was supported by a small council, which meant that the
principle of the aristocratic college of consuls had been re-introduced into
the new system. However, there was a second and larger council, whose members
included the heads of the professional associations or guilds. (The Florentines
called them le Arti.) From the fact that the podestà had to be a knight and
possess both military ability and knowledge of the law (which could be acquired
at the University of Bologna, attended by the sons of the great aristocratic
families) it was clear that he had to belong to some noble house. The first
podestà of Florence of whom we know anything was Gualfredotto da Milano, in
1207.
In the meantime something of the first importance happened:
the social classes made up of shopkeepers and manufacturers, who in the
traditions of the city were to become known as the (people), made their
appearance on the scene. Ever since 1182 the merchants, excluded from sharing
the consular power which was the monopoly of the aristocratic families, had
founded a professional association on the model of the aristocratic groups.
This was the origin of the body which was known as the Arte di Calimala (Guild
of Calimala) because they had most of their shops in the “calle maia” (the widest
street), which was based on the Roman cardo maximus. In the first twenty years
of the thirteenth century other guilds had been formed: that of the bankers,
the wool merchants, silk merchants (theirs went by the name of Por Santa Maria
(St Mary’s Gate), after the area in which most of the silk workers lived), and
others too. All this conveys an impression of the vitality of the Florence of
that time, and of the specialised sectors into which her economy was divided.
That was a phase in which a sense of civic duty was splendidly fulfilled: the
work to be done around San Miniato, the baptistery, the cathedral of Santa
Reparata, the churches of San Pier Scheraggio and the Santi Apostoli were
completed or at least substantially advanced. The decorative façades in bands
of white marble from Lucca and green marble from Prato linked the aesthetic
sense and taste of the Florentines with those of Pistoia and Prato and, through
them, of Lucca and Pisa; but there is much in the detail and ornamentation of
these churches to remind us that Florentine art bore, from the beginning, the
imprint of the classical world, which was to continue and bear splendid fruit
in future centuries. The mosaic facing of the baptistery interior, begun in
1228, sets a seal on the first of those great periods, so radiant with
marvellous achievements, that made Florence into a city of art without parallel
in the world.
But the entry of the “people” into the public and political
life of the city, though not yet into participation in government, had done
nothing to lessen the violence of the clashes between different factions of the
dominant class. Usually, when something succeeded in briefly breaking the
spiral of revenge which spread death and bitterness among the various family
groups, there was a return to the old system of sealing new alliances with
marriages, either to reinforce old bonds that had been broken or to create new
ones. In 1216, during a wedding feast, a riot broke out between the members of
two great families, the Buondelmonti and the Fifanti. To put an end to the
incident, in which people had been hurt, the powerful Uberti offered to act as
mediators. A Buondelmonti was to have married a daughter of the House of
Amidei, allies of the family which he had injured in the course of the riot.
Peace was made. However, his double-dealing or indecision led to more violence:
after accepting the terms of reconciliation, he succumbed to flattery on the
part of another great family, the Donati, and accepted their offer of one of
their women as his wife, thereby setting off the inexorable sequence of
revenge. The outraged Amidei, with their allies the Uberti and Lamberti,
organised an ambush on the morning of Easter Day 1216, the very day on which
the Buondelmonti-Donati marriage was to have taken place. Buondelmonti fell,
arrayed like a sacrificial victim in his festive clothes and crown of flowers,
at the foot of the ancient “statue of Mars”, the pagan palladium of Florence,
erected near the Ponte Vecchio. From then on, the old enmities were polarised
and rationalised in two files: on one side the Uberti, the Lamberti and the
Amidei, whose houses were all in the area in the centre of the city around the
church of Santo Stefano in Ponte, between Ponte Vecchio and today’s Piazza
Signoria, and on the other side the Buondelmonti, the Pazzi and the Donati,
whose area lay between the present-day Via del Corso and Porta San Piero.
The warlike Ubertis raised this bipartite vendetta to a
higher plane, linking it to the loftiest level of authority. Their loyalty to
the Empire, which had shortly before returned to the House of Swabia, gave them
the battle-cry Weiblingen! (from the name of one of the Swabia castles), and
this led to their being called the “Ghibelline” party. Members of the opposing
alliance were called the “Guelphs”; this was supposed to mean partisans of the
House of Welf, that is to say the Duchy of Bavaria and later of Saxony,
traditionally rivals of the House of Swabia. But at that time the House of
Saxony, when Otto IV of Braunschweig died, had no hope of competing for the
imperial crown. The term “Guelph”, shorn of its original meaning, signified
simply “anti-Ghibelline”, and, as time went on and relations between the Pope
and the Emperors of the House of Swabia got worse and worse, it came to mean
“supporters of the pontiff”.
For a long time the legend – dear to the Risorgimento and
its romantic pseudo-history – continued that the Ghibelline party was composed
of the nobles who were faithful to the Empire, reactionary and hostile to the
liberty of the Commune, in the interests of a nostalgic plan to restore
feudalism, while the Guelph faction were ranged – with the intelligent support
of the Papal curia – on the side of all the good, honest and practical
“bourgeois” entrepreneurs and manufacturers, who were tired of aristocratic
privilege and feudal obstacles to the expansion of their activities.
Unfortunately this legend persists in many school textbooks and works of
popular history. Nothing could be further from the truth. Guelphs and
Ghibellines originated as parties of the military nobility who derived the
basis of their power, prestige and wealth from possession of case-torri in the
city and land in the country, even if they did not disdain to take a hand in
the trade and profits that could be extracted from them.
The “People”, that is to say the manufacturers and
entrepreneurs together, united in the Guilds, did not participate directly in
the struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, although during the thirteenth
century they were always deeply involved in it. They were quite distinct from
the humbler classes of workers, who were employed in the various kinds of
workshops. (These were the have-nots, whose wages barely reached subsistence
level, a level often only attained with the help of almshouses and Church
charities.) One reason for the involvement of the “People” in the struggles of
their betters was the fact that their upper echelons were ambitious to achieve
something like an aristocratic life style and allied themselves with families
that were more distinguished in birth but short of goods and, above all, money.
To be short of money was a serious disadvantage at a time when the circulation
of money had become more and more rapid, the use of coin more and more
necessary, and a share in the commercial and banking sectors more and more
profitable. Together, these two groups formed a new class which united the
pride, luxury and refinement of aristocratic customs with economic power
derived from commercial and banking activities.
To this new class contemporary historical sources attribute
names to which it is difficult to make precise and substantial outlines
correspond, but which are, all the same, very expressive and eloquent: “the
powerful,” “the great people”, “magnates”. And terms like “greatness” and the
verb grandeggiare (meaning both to tower or dominate and to put on airs) seem
to have remained for a long time key words to describe not so much the elusive
social and institutional substance of being “magnates” as the attitudes the
magnates assumed, their way of behaving, of living, which was a mixture of
warlike arrogance and chivalrous generosity, contempt for others and boasting,
audacity and high-handedness.
But the Florentine dialect bears many signs of that tough
period of life in the city, the era of the Commune, with its freedoms and its
factions. Even today someone who does not have a clearly defined role in
society, who does not have the energy to achieve a position and command
respect, and who does not possess qualifications is said to have “né arte né
parte” (to be good for nothing). Not being able to see yourself as part of some
social or professional group, not having any party membership and therefor not
having a direction to go in, an objective to aim for, is considered equal to
having no part in the collective life of the city. Florentines have a name for
the group and the faction within it: harking back to the terms which designated
them in the past and have almost become archetypes in the collective memory, they
call them l’Arte and la Parte.
