Europe: A History (82 page)

Traditionally, Florence was a Guelph city resistant to imperial authority. But the Emperor’s absence turned the city’s energies in new directions. Relations with the Papacy were strained, and the Florentine Guelphs were themselves riven by faction. Florence gained local supremacy after the Battle of Campaldino, where on 11 June 1289 the forces of Ghibelline Arezzo were overcome following the earlier defeat by the Sienese at Montaperti (1260). But then the feud between ‘the Blacks’ and ‘the Whites’ took over. In 1301, after the failure of a papal arbiter in the person of Charles de Valois, the Whites, like the Ghibellines before them, were banished. This factionalism was the sure precursor of despotic power, subsequently exercised by the Medici. Florence was so full of poison, says one of the inhabitants of Dante’s Hell, ‘that the sack brims o’er … Three sparks from Hell — Avarice, Envy, Pride— I In all men’s bosoms sowed the fiery seed.’
¹⁰

Yet social and political turbulence seems to have stimulated cultural life. The three great writers of the era—Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—were all Florentines. The city’s buildings reflected its progress to opulent self-confidence: the Bargello (begun in 1254), the new city walls (1284–1310), the Palazzo Vecchio (begun in 1298), the rebuilt Ponte Vecchio (1345), and the Loggia della Signoria (1381); the palaces of the Arte della Lana or Wool Guild (1300), of the Guelph Party, of the Pazzi, Pitti, Strozzi, Antinori, and Medici-Riccardi (1444); and, above all, the religious art—the romanesque church of San Miniato al Monte, the Gothic Santa Croce (1294), the marble-plated octagon of the Baptistery of St John (1296), the Duomo (begun in 1294), Giotto’s Campanile (1339), Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome (1436), Ghiberti’s baptistery doors (1452), and the frescos of Fra Angelico in the Dominican convent of San Marco.

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was the greatest of the poets of Christendom. He was deeply involved in Florentine politics, and walked the city’s streets when its finest monuments were under construction. His literary and visionary powers are unsurpassed. As a youth, he had charged in the front ranks at Campaldino. He served as one of the municipal priors in the regime of the White Guelphs, only to be banished for life by the Blacks. Embittered by twenty years in exile, he died in Ravenna at the court of Can Grande da Polenta, who placed the laurel wreath on his fading brow. His
Vita Nuova
(The New Life) makes a rare medieval excursion into a man’s internal emotions. His
De Monarchia
(On Monarchy) makes an impassioned plea for the restoration of imperial rule. In
De Vulgari Eloquentia
, his reasoned advocacy of the vernacular makes him the father of modern European literature.

Dante’s masterwork, the
Commedia
, a poem of 100 cantos, acquired the epithet of ‘Divine’ from its admiring readers. It describes the poet’s journey through the three realms of the afterlife—through the Pit of Hell in the
Inferno
, the Mount of Expiation in the
Purgatorio
, and the sunlit Circles of Heaven in the
Paradiso
. At one level, like the
Odyssey
or the
Aeneid
, it is a voyage of fictional adventure, where Virgil is Dante’s initial guide, and where a convincing setting is created for meeting the shades of people past and present. At another level it is an extended allegory of the spiritual journey of a Christian soul from sin to salvation, rewarded by a blinding vision of God. At yet another level it is an elaborate exercise in moral architecture, whose teeming inhabitants are precisely located according to their vices and virtues among the Damned, the Hopeful, or the Blessed. The language dazzles by its beautiful economy. The tales enrapture both by the quaint detail of the poet’s encounters and by the grandeur of the moral landscape in which they occur. Appropriately, the lowest point of human experience is to be found where all Love is lost—in the icy infernal depths round the frozen figure of Judas. The Earthly Paradise is reached in a fragrant grove atop Mount Purgatory, ‘where pain gives way to hope’. The ultimate pinnacle is reached beyond the Primum Mobile, in the heart of the heavenly Rose of Light, in ecstasy too intense for words. This is the source of ‘the Love that moves the Sun and other stars’, ‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle’.

Dante was equally the source of vivid legend. One story tells how the poet heard a donkey-driver singing one of his songs, interspersed with shouts of
Arri, arri!
, ‘Giddy-up!’ The furious poet then made to strike the donkey-driver, shouting ‘Cotesto arri non vi misi io’ (That there ‘giddy-up’ was not put in by
me
!).
¹¹

Dante’s prime overlapped with the youth of Francesco Petrarca (1304–74). Petrarch’s exquisite love poems, the
Canzonieri
, echo the spirit of the
Vita Nuova
, just as his devotion to Laura mirrors Dante’s devotion to Beatrice. Both looked back to the founders of the
dolce stil nuovo
, such as the Bolognese poet Guido Guinicelli (1230–76), whom Dante called his literary ‘father’; and their ‘sweet new style’ was only one step removed from the troubadours. It is only the pedantry of critics which would categorize Dante as ‘profoundly medieval’ and Petrarch as ‘the harbinger of the Renaissance’:

Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte,
mi guida Amor; ch’ogni segnato calle
provo contrario alia tranquilla vita.
Se ’n solitaria piaggia, rivo, o fonte,
Se ’n fra duo poggi siede ombrosa valle,
ivi s’acquieta l’alma sbigottita;
e, com’Amor la ’nvita,
or ride, or piange, or teme, or s’assicura:
e ’l volto che lei segue, ov’ella il mena
si turba e rasserena,
ed in un esser picciol tempo dura;
onde alia vista uom di tal vita esperto
diria: questi arde, e di suo stato è incerto.

(From thought to thought, from mountain to mountain, | Love leads me on; since every marked path | I find contrary to a tranquil life. | Where’er a river or fountain [adorns] a lonely slope, | Or ’twixt two hills a shady vale [is hid], | There the disturbed soul can calm itself, | And, as Love bids, | Either laughs or weeps or fears or is assured. | And the face, which follows the soul where’er it leads | Is tormented and serene by turns, | And stays little time in any one state. | Whence, on seeing it, a man learned in such a life | Would say: this one burns, and is unsure of his condition.)
¹²

Fourteenth-century Italy provided the breeding-ground both for violent municipal blood-feuds and for Europe’s first merchant bankers. The former gave rise to the incessant depredations of the Free Companies—largely foreign mercenaries such as those of Conrad von Wolfort, of the ex-hospitaller Fra Moriale, of the knight errant John of Bohemia, or of the Englishman Sir John Hawkwood. Venice and Genoa were locked in perpetual maritime warfare over the Levantine trade. Rome, shorn of its popes, was racked by the oppression of its aristocratic factions and by the revolts of its citizens, notably in 1347–54 under its visionary popular dictator Cola di Rienzo. Angevin Naples raged through the anarchy presided over by Joanna I (r. 1343–82) and her four husbands.

Italian bankers learned how to profit from the conflicts. They devised all manner of modern financial techniques, from letters of exchange to insurance and accountancy; and by using the network of the Church hierarchy they extended their activities throughout Latin Christendom. Florence was rocked in 1339–49 by the bankruptcy of its leading houses, ruined by overextended credit; but it recovered. Somewhere, in the midst of the wealth and the misery, the world of capitalism was born,
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COMPUTATIO
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The late medieval Papacy, after a brief paroxysm of self-assertion under Boniface VIII, relapsed into dependency and exile. Boniface VIII (1294–1303) has been described as ‘the last medieval pope’. He was elected in succession to the miserable hermit Pietro del Morrone (Celestine V), whom he had advised to abdicate and later imprisoned for life. He was intent on enriching his family, the Gaetani, on beggaring the rival Colonnas, and on restoring the Angevins to Sicily in the endless ‘War of the Vespers’. None the less, he was responsible for the
Sextus
(1298), the third part of the corpus of canon law; and in 1300 he launched a jubilee year, with plenary indulgence for the million pilgrims who flocked to Rome. His Bull
Unam Sanctam
(1302) contained an extreme statement of papal supremacy, claiming that no creature could attain salvation without it. However, having picked a quarrel with France, for whose benefit
Unam Sanctam
was framed, he overreached himself. He died from the shock of being kidnapped at his native Anagni by the French King’s agent. Dante, who may have met Boniface in person during a Florentine embassy to Rome, was totally unforgiving, calling him ‘the prince of the new Pharisees’. In
Inferno
he consigned him to hell for simony. In
Paradiso
he puts the words of denunciation into the mouth of St Peter himself:

Quegli ch’usurpa in terra il luogo mio
,

il luogo mio, il luogo mio
…

He who on earth usurps my see,

my see, my see, which now stands vacant

before the Son of God

Has made a sewer from my sepulchre

full of blood and pus—at which the Perverse One,

who fell from here, takes pleasure down below….

In shepherd’s guise, rapacious wolves

are seen among the pastures. Oh, why

do God’s defenders lie so low?

Gascons and Cahorsines prepare to drink

our blood. Oh, fine principle,

to what foul end is it fit for you to fall?
¹³

The ‘foul end’ of the Papacy turned out to be the long exile of the popes in Avignon, begun by the Gascon, Bertrand de Got, who reigned as Clement V (1305–14).

The Babylonish captivity of the Avignon popes lasted from 1309 to 1377. It began at the instigation of Philippe le Bel, who pressured Clement V mercilessly; it ended at the instigation of St Catherine of Siena, who confirmed Gregory IX (1370–8) in his resolve to return to Rome. In the mean time all seven popes were Frenchmen, elected by a French-dominated College of Cardinals. Avignon, on the Rhone, did not lie in French territory but in an enclave of the Venaissin granted to the Papacy by its Angevin clients, and bought outright in 1348 for 80,000 gold crowns. But French influence was paramount; and many acts of policy, such as the dissolution of the Templars, were dictated by it. The authority of the Avignon popes was not accepted in all countries. Latin Christendom was divided against itself in the most blatant manner possible.

The manifest abuses of ecclesiastical power inevitably provoked strong reactions. One such reaction lay in the retreat into mysticism, with its emphasis on religious ecstasy and on the experience of direct communion with God (see pp. 436–7). Another lay in the proliferation of popular sects—all more or less unconventional in their theology. What they shared was a sense of betrayal by the established Church. Such were the
Fraticelli
, or Franciscan Spirituals, who held property to be contrary to salvation, the wandering mendicants, known as ‘Beghards and Beguines’, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the German Luciferans, who were Pantheists, the mystical
Gottesfreunde
or Friends of God, and the Lollards in England. All were bitterly persecuted by the Inquisition.

Church reform could not be widely discussed given the political chaos and fear of the Inquisition. It had both theological and organizational aspects. The Englishman John Wyclif (c.1330–84), sometime Master of Balliol College, railed against the wealth of the Church, rejected papal supremacy, and denied the doctrine of transubstantiation of the Eucharist. He was burned as a heretic, but only posthumously. The Czech Jan Hus (c.1372–1415), sometime Rector of the University at Prague, was much influenced by Wyclif. He stressed the concept of predestination, and the Church of the Elect. In Bohemia he became the focus of
Czech resentment against the largely German hierarchy. Hus, excommunicated, appealed to a General Council of the Church. Though they lacked the name, Wyclif and Hus were the pioneer Protestants,
[
MAGIC
]