The Age of Chivalry (33 page)

THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLORENCE

1182
Florentine merchants establish the city's first guild, the
Arte dei Mercanti
.

1210s
The commune is divided between pro-imperial Ghibelline and pro-papal Guelph aristocratic factions.

1250–1260
The
Primo Popolo
: a merchant-dominated form of democracy.

1260
Battle of Montaperti: Ghibelline Siena defeats Florentine forces. Florence's Ghibelline nobles return to power.

1266
Battle of Benevento: Charles of Anjou's victory confirms Guelph dominance in Italian politics.

1267
Ghibelline expulsion from Florence.

1282
The
popolani
regain political predominance.

1293
The Ordinances of Justice adopted by the commune prescribe a republican government for the period of the
Secondo Popolo
.

1378
Marginalized non-guild workers, aided by some members of the lesser guilds, seize power. The
popolo grasso
crush the rebellion.

1397
Giovanni de' Medici establishes the family bank.

Economic development accompanied Florence's population growth. The spread of new suburbs meant that the River Arno, once at the city's perimeter, now became its arterial center of communications and a source of energy for local industries reliant on waterpower. Florence now looked atomized compared with the classical regularity of
Florentia
's intersecting streets, and the landed gentry who had moved in from the countryside reproduced within their urban enclaves the designs of those fortified castle-like compounds, complete with towers, that had been raised to defend their rural estates. The dozens of towers that dominated Florence's skyline symbolized the fragmentation of central authority, since the nobility used them to protect their households in times of civic disorder. With the establishment in 1182 of the
Arte dei Mercanti
, merchants had their own means of representative self-assertion, and in the decades that followed Florence's ever-growing number of artisans and tradesmen established numerous specialist guilds.

By the 1190s, following the example of most other Italian cities, the commune of Florence was using the office of the
podestà
(a magistrate-like official) to allay civic strife. Usually a nobleman, the
podestà
invariably came from another Italian region and was therefore likely to be neutral when adjudicating on local conflicts during his allotted year in office. The innovation worked in Florence
for a generation or so, but by the 1210s the commune's allegiances were divided to noxious effect between the pro-imperial Ghibelline nobility and the equally aristocratic Guelph leadership who often supported the interests of the guilds.

In 1244 the Ghibellines were dominant, and they tried to strengthen their position by bringing elements of the mercantile grouping into government. But in 1250 the merchants turned on their new-found patrons and established a form of democracy during the period of the
Primo Popolo
. The new government ordered that the towers be reduced in height since they symbolized aristocratic factionalism. From 1252 onward the gold florin, which supplemented the silver florin first introduced in 1235, showed the prosperity and ambition of this mercantile society. A new government needed a new building to house its various councils, and in 1255 construction work started on the
Palazzo del Popolo
(now called the
Bargello
) whose crenellated form, complete with a tower, was another instance of the rural fortification being replicated within the city. The Battle of Montaperti (1260) saw the Florentine army's defeat by the forces of Siena, a strongly Ghibelline rival within Tuscany. It also meant the end of the
Primo Popolo
experiment. A resurgent Ghibelline nobility dismantled the democratic structures and ordered the destruction of palaces, towers and houses owned by Guelph aristocrats. This vindictive policy continued until 1266, when the Ghibellines suddenly found themselves in a precarious position following Charles of Anjou's defeat of Manfred, the Staufen king of Sicily, at the Battle of Benevento (February 26).

A
BOVE
The coat of arms of the Arte de' Beccai (the guild of butchers) which, founded in
c.
1236, was one of Florence's 14 minor trade guilds, known as the
arti minori.
The walls of Florence's Orsanmichele, a church associated with the trade guilds, are adorned with their coats of arms
.

Charles's victory was one fraught with Italian implications. The cause of the empire, embraced by the Ghibellines, had received a decisive setback, and since the papacy had used its Florentine bankers to help finance a papal-French-Angevin axis of power in Italy the city's commercial interests as well as its political advantage now lay within that orbit of influence. A Guelph restoration and a Ghibelline expulsion became imperative. By the spring of 1267, and with Pope Clement IV's support, the commune had achieved both measures and that meant the end of the Ghibellines in Florence. Charles of Anjou was made
podestà
for ten years by the commune and, ruling the city through his lieutenants, he imposed a Guelph-dominated regime. Florentine troops were to the fore among Tuscany's combined Guelph forces when they defeated the Ghibellines at the Battle of Campaldino (1289), and that victory lent an additional authority to the Guelph leadership in Florence.

By the end of the 13th century Florence was one of Western Europe's largest cities. Its population of some 100,000 had been boosted by immigration from the surrounding countryside, and reserves of capital accumulated through trade and financial services
were being used to give architectural expression to Florentine glory. Medieval Europe's major cities required the presence of a castle and a cathedral in order to control the urban environment and to regulate citizens' lives. In the case of Florence its first major public building, the
Bargello
, fulfilled the role of a castle, and construction work started on the city's new cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in the mid-1290s. But the monastery was quite as important for the medieval city, and Florence was a major center for the new religious Orders who built in the Gothic style—the city's vernacular school of architecture.

In the second quarter of the 13th century the Franciscans started construction work on their monastery dedicated to the Holy Cross, and it was re-designed in the 1290s to assume its present form. The great church of the Dominicans, Santa Maria Novella, having been first raised on the site of an earlier church in 1246, was completed by the 1350s. Along with the monasteries of the Augustinian, Servite and Carmelite Orders, these substantial complexes exerted huge social influences on their immediate localities; they contributed culturally and economically as well as having a religious purpose.

Nonetheless, Florence's intra-mural politics continued to be fractious. The period after the
Primo Popolo
witnessed the renewed self-assertion of the
popolani
—those merchants and trades-people who were organized into the more significant guilds and who defined themselves in conscious opposition to the
magnati
or nobility. In 1282 the
Popolo
movement became the dominant element within the commune, and the constitutional transformation it effected 11 years later included the
magnati
's formal exclusion from Florence's political life.

A
BOVE
Construction began on the
Palazzo della Signoria,
now known as the
Palazzo Vecchio,
in 1299. The palace was built upon the site of an older tower belonging to the Foraboschi family, which is now marked by the location of the present tower
.

The Ordinances of Justice (1293), as adopted by the commune, provided a republican constitution for the city's
signoria
or government. Its nine members, the
priori
, were chosen from the guilds at two-monthly intervals. The head of those elected was the
gonfaloniere
, who served the republic as its chief public representative during his brief period in office. In governing Florence the
signoria
had to consult two other elected
councils: that of the
dodici
(12) and of the
sedici
(16). They could also call on the expertise of councils specializing in matters such as warfare, security and commerce, and which would be formed by election as and when the need arose. In 1299 work started on constructing the
Palazzo della Signoria
(now the
Palazzo Vecchio
) that housed the government of the
Secondo Popolo
, and its fortified appearance showed the defensiveness of the attitudes accompanying the republican assertion. From the time of its formation onward this structure of government was subjected to internal strains, with the lesser commercial classes or
popolo minuto
differentiating themselves from greater ones or
popolo grasso
who were dominant in the
arti maggiori
(major guilds).

Florence's chronic tendency to fragment could also be seen in the tensions that became endemic in the 1290s between the “Blacks” and the “Whites” (the
Neri
and
Bianchi
) who adhered to the aristocratic families of the Donati and the Cerchi respectively in the struggle for influence. Following the Ghibellines' expulsion the victorious Guelphs had split: the Black Guelphs stuck to a pro-papal line while the White Guelphs were critical of the papacy and more likely than their adversaries to embrace the new constitution. After the
priori
forced both the Donati and the Cerchi leaders into exile in 1300 the Blacks appealed to the pope. The mediator he chose, the French prince Charles of Valois, occupied the city with an army. Charles then delivered Florence to Corso Donati, who established the Black government that sent many of the White Guelphs, including Dante Alighieri (
c
.1265–1321), into exile.

Fourteenth-century Florence was exposed to external threats from Ghibelline-controlled Milan as well as from Lucca and Pisa. When Castruccio Castracani, duke of Lucca, inflicted a military defeat on the Florentines in 1325, the administration turned for support to the Anjevin rulers of the kingdom of Naples, who shared their antipathy to the empire. In 1326 the city placed itself under the direct rule of Duke Charles of Calabria, heir to the Neapolitan kingdom, by electing him to be its
signore
(lord) for ten years, though that experiment ended when the duke died unexpectedly two years later and the commune found that its liberty had been restored. Florence again had to call on Naples for support when it was threatened by Mastino II della Scala,
signore
of Verona and north Italy's most successful warrior-prince in the 1330s. This resulted in a brief period of imposed tyranny in 1342, which ended in a popular uprising and the restoration of the traditional liberties.

Florentines had long been accustomed to both domestic turbulence and external threats, but the mid-14th century saw new environmental dangers as well as a terrifying public health crisis. New bridges (which include the Ponte Vecchio) had to be built across the Arno after major flooding destroyed the earlier structures in 1333. And the epidemic known as the “Black Death” hit Florence particularly hard from the late 1340s
onward. A far greater catastrophe, however, was the collapse in the 1340s of Florence's banks. This followed their involvement in shadily speculative financial instruments and entrapment in a bubble of currency speculation created and controlled by Venetian high finance. That financial cataclysm led to a continent-wide banking crisis, collapse of credit, and trade contraction that lasted for decades.