A History of Florence 1200–1575 JOHN M. NAJEMY

A History of Florence 1200–1575

a Marina, alla memoria di Antonio, e ai loro figli, carissimi tutti

A History of Florence 1200–1575 JOHN M. NAJEMY

© 2006 by John M. Najemy BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of John M. Najemy to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Najemy, John M., 1943– A history of Florence 1200–1575 / John M. Najemy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1954-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-1954-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Florence (Italy)—History—1421–1737. 2. Florence (Italy)—History—To 1421. I. Title. DG737.4.N35 2006 945′.51—dc22 2005037147 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10/12pt Sabon by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed and bound in Singapore by COS Printers Pte Ltd The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Maps Acknowledgments Introduction

viii ix x 1

1 The Elite Families Lineages Knighthood and Feuds Political Alignments and Factions Culture and Religion

5 6 11 20 27

2 The Popolo Definitions Guilds Culture and Education: Notaries Religion Critique of Elite Misrule

35 35 39 45 50 57

3 Early Conflicts of Elite and Popolo Before 1250 Primo Popolo Angevin Alliance Priorate of the Guilds Second Popolo and the Ordinances of Justice Elite Resurgence: Black and White Guelfs

63 64 66 72 76 81 88

vi

Contents

4 Domestic Economy and Merchant Empires to 1340 Population: City and Contado Textiles, Building, and Provisioning Merchant Companies and the Mercanzia Taxation and Public Finances

96 96 100 109 118

5 The Fourteenth-Century Dialogue of Power Elite Dominance, 1310–40 Crisis of the 1340s and the Third Popular Government Funded Public Debt and Bankruptcies Elite Recovery and Popular Reaction War against the Church

124 124 132 139 144 151

6 Revolution and Realignment Workers’ Economic Conditions The Ciompi Revolution The Last Guild Government Counterrevolution Fear of the Working Classes Consensus Politics

156 157 161 166 171 176 182

7 War, Territorial Expansion, and the Transformation of Political Discourse First Visconti Wars Territorial Dominion: The Conquest of Pisa Civic Humanism The Civic Family

188 189 194 200 211

8 Family and State in the Age of Consensus The Family Imaginary Households, Marriage, Dowries Women, Property, Inheritance Children, Hospitals, Charity Policing Sodomy

219 219 225 232 238 244

9 Fateful Embrace: The Emergence of the Medici A New Style of Leadership Fiscal Crisis and the Catasto Cosimo’s Money and Friends Showdown

250 250 254 262 269

10 The Medici and the Ottimati: A Partnership of Conflict Part I: Cosimo and Piero Institutional Controls External Supports: Papacy and Sforza Milan

278 280 286

Contents Cosimo’s Coup The Ottimati Challenge Piero

vii 291 298

11 The Luxury Economy and Art Patronage Poverty and Wealth Public and Private Patronage Family Commemoration and Self-Fashioning

307 307 315 323

12 The Medici and the Ottimati: A Partnership of Conflict Part 2: Lorenzo Lorenzo’s Elders Lorenzo’s Volterra Massacre Pazzi Conspiracy and War The (Insecure) Prince in All but Name Building a Dynasty

341 344 348 352 361 369

13 Reinventing the Republic French Invasion and Expulsion of the Medici The Great Council Savonarola’s Holy Republic Domestic Discord and Dominion Crises Soderini, Machiavelli’s Militia, and Pisa

375 375 381 390 400 407

14 Papal Overlords The Cardinal and a Controversial Marriage Fall of the Republic and Return of the Medici A Regime Adrift Aristocratic and Popular Republicanisms The Nascent Principate

414 415 419 426 434 441

15 The Last Republic and the Medici Duchy Revolution Siege Imposition of a New Order Ducal Government Finances and Economy Courtly and Cultural Discipline Victor and Vanquished

446 447 453 461 468 473 478 482

Epilogue: Remembrance of Things Past

486

Index

491

Illustrations

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Palace of the priors (Palazzo Vecchio) The Cathedral–Baptistery complex Florence c.1480: The “Catena map” Porta Romana Palazzo Medici Orsanmichele Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinita Palazzo Rucellai Palazzo Strozzi Santa Maria Novella Fresco of the Siege of Florence, Palazzo Vecchio

88 105 106 107 297 320 324 332 336 338 339 459

Maps

1 Location of towers and/or palaces of prominent Florentine families in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and major civic and ecclesiastical buildings 8 2 Florence’s three circuits of walls with major churches, hospitals, and civic buildings, and family palaces built in the fifteenth century 98 3 Boundaries and principal cities and towns of the contado, district, and the grand ducal state of Tuscany in 1574 472

Acknowledgments

I

t is a pleasure to acknowledge those who made this project possible and sustained it in a variety of ways. My sincerest appreciation and warmest thanks go to Christopher Wheeler, who invited me to write a history of Florence and whose support never wavered even as it took longer to complete than either of us expected. To the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided the means, and to Walter Kaiser, who extended the welcome, I am grateful for a year spent as visiting professor at Villa I Tatti, where, in that most lovely of places and with the many kindnesses of the library staff, I drafted the early chapters. At Blackwell I thank Angela Cohen for her unfailing patience and expert editorial guidance, Tessa Harvey for graciously accepting a somewhat longer book than we had anticipated, and Louise Spencely for perceptive and judicious copy-editing. Special thanks to Greg Tremblay for again generously sharing his expertise in computer technology in connection with the maps, and to Humberto DeLuigi of Art Resource for help in selecting the illustrations. To the team of scholars who created the “Online Tratte” – the amazingly complete computerized database of Florentine officeholders – I am grateful for a remarkable resource that facilitated aspects of research that once required laborious compilations of lists in the archives. But so much remains available only in Florence’s rich archival and manuscript collections, and I thank the staffs of the Archivio di Stato and Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale for efficient and friendly assistance in the many years of research on which this book depends. It would be literally impossible to acknowledge every colleague and friend who has helped with an idea, source, citation, correction, and most of all encouragement. But a few must be mentioned. I extend my sincere apprecia-

Acknowledgments

xi

tion to Robert Black for his valuable assessment of several chapters, to Carol Lansing and Christine Shaw, who read the manuscript for Blackwell and gave helpful advice about trimming it, and to Robert Fredona for generously reading drafts of all the chapters and making insightful suggestions for improvement. They all saved me from mistakes and oversights. To Amy Bloch I owe more than I can say here, even as I offer my deepest thanks for the exquisite care and critical judgment with which she read the entire manuscript, for indispensable help particularly with chapter 11 and with the illustrations and maps, for wise advice about nearly every issue and problem, and for the steadiness of her sustaining support. I dedicate this book with gratitude and affection to the family that welcomed me to Italy long ago and has indeed been family to me all these years, and especially to Marina whose extraordinary generosity that first year, amid many other cares, made all the difference. JN Florence November 2005

A Note on Italian Terms, Abbreviations, and Translations For reasons of typographic clarity, frequently used words in Italian have been left in roman type. Most of these are the names of institutions. The following abbreviations are used in the text: ASI = Archivio storico italiano ASF = Archivio di Stato di Firenze Translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy are from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, translated with a commentary by Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols. (Princeton, 1980).

Introduction

F

lorence might be thought, of all cities, not to need an introduction, for its legend always precedes it: the “birthplace” of the Renaissance and the “cradle” of modern Western Civilization. I hope that many readers will be drawn to this book out of affection for that Florence, an affection I share whenever I take off my historian’s hat and recall the experience of being captivated, more than forty years ago, like so many others before and since, by Florence’s palaces, churches, sculptures, pictures, books, poetry, speech, and people. What needs introducing here is not of course that seductive Florence, whose power cannot be denied, but rather the following chapters in which I offer an interpretation of nearly four centuries of Florentine history, not from the perspective of the legend that makes of this city an inexplicable miracle, an enchanted land of geniuses whose achievements evoke admiration and astonishment, but essentially without history or context. Whenever I reflect that, until Brunelleschi built the great dome atop the cathedral, no one knew how it could be done, or that, before Dante wrote the Commedia, nothing like it had even been attempted in European literature, I feel a sense of awe at such marvels. But praise is one thing, and history another, and specialists in the history of architecture, sculpture, painting, and literature have long since integrated the cultural achievements of Florence and the Renaissance into appropriate historical contexts. A more troublesome effect on historical understanding (and more difficult to eradicate) is the legend’s persistent idealization of the bearers of Florentine wealth and power as enlightened patrons, promoters of culture, and exemplars of civility. Renaissance princes and self-styled patricians were sometimes these things, and we are not wrong to admire their role in producing the

2

Introduction

splendid culture of the age. But seen only or chiefly in this light, they become indistinguishable from the elegant figures in the paintings they commissioned, decorously presiding over a utopian world of order, proportion, and moderation, without conflict or unwelcome noises. In fact, Florence’s history was replete with conflicts, both within the elite class and between this class and other classes: the “popolo” that created the guild republic and challenged the elite to justify its power within a normative framework of law and political ethics; and the artisan and laboring classes, whose exertions and skills produced the material culture that ranged from prized textiles to the stones of rich men’s homes, and who in turn challenged the popolo to allow the guild republic to embrace its full implications. In the course of their tense interactions, all three classes underwent major transformations, but none more than the elite of great families which experienced several metamorphoses in four centuries. Florence’s history and culture evolved through these conflicts and class antagonisms, through what Machiavelli called (in the preface to his Florentine Histories) the “divisioni” that he believed common to all republics but that he saw as especially complex in Florence. From this perspective, Florence was not unique: other Italian city-republics from Padua and Bologna to Siena, Perugia, and even Rome experienced similar divisions and conflicts. Florence thus shared with the rest of communal Italy a development that had no precedent in European history. In the thirteenth-century cities of northern and central Italy, the popolo, organized in guilds and neighborhood military associations and imbued with notions of citizenship and the common good absorbed from ancient Rome, launched the first politically effective and ideologically sustained challenge to an elite class, a challenge that succeeded, not in displacing the elite, but in transforming it. In Florence this challenge lasted longer and had deeper effects than elsewhere. Indeed, for the first time, a European “nobility” radically revised its politics, culture, and social attitudes in response to constant pressure from another class. Their dialogue of power shaped Florence’s republican experience, engendering a rich variety of reflections and reactions from chroniclers, writers of family memoirs, humanists, poets, and political theorists of both classes. I have tried, wherever and as far as possible, to let them speak, and because they wrote endlessly about politics, competitions for power, and the shape of government, there is much political history in this book. But their approach to politics was typically through the lens of the social, and in at least two senses: through an understanding of collective interests and antagonisms involving economic and fiscal issues, public order, and law; and also and equally through an intense awareness of family solidarities, factional loyalties, ties of clientage and patronage (in the social sense), and marriage alliances. All these aspects of their social, economic, and cultural existence informed Florentine politics and discourses of politics. The interpretation offered here thus combines thematic

Introduction

3

treatments of society, economy, and culture, set in precise political contexts, with a political narrative that depends on and regularly refers to society and culture. I have chosen chronological parameters that embrace a “long history” of republican Florence, from the medieval commune dominated by feudal families, to the emergence of the autonomous republic with its internal political conflicts and growing territorial dominion, to the wars and crises of the early sixteenth century which imposed a principate under imperial tutelage that in turn refashioned Florentine society and culture. I begin in the early thirteenth century when the great families dominated the city center as a warrior class with their towers and fortified enclaves, and the popolo was already constructing the associations that produced the guild republic in the century’s last two decades. By the fourteenth century Florence was a theater of triangular struggles among an elite that had discovered a new identity as international merchants and bankers, the guild-based popolo, and the working classes, mainly in the huge textile industry, whose brief conquest of a share of power in 1378–82 proved to be a transforming moment that frightened the popolo into relinquishing its historic challenge and cooperating in regimes led by an elite that now styled itself as a civic and patriarchal aristocracy. For the next century, elite regimes, including the unofficial rule of the Medici family, dominated Florentine politics and culture. Because they increasingly represented the potential for the kind of princely order that had ended communal government in other Italian cities (and thus embodied the danger of “tyranny”), the Medici eventually alienated much of the very elite from which they emerged and were exiled and replaced by a broadly based republic in 1494. For the next forty tumultuous years, Florence was again the scene of a triangular conflict, this time among popular republicans, elite families with their own brand of aristocratic republicanism, and the Medici. The last and most radically popular of all Florentine republics, that of 1527–30, frightened the elite (much as the participation of the working classes in government had frightened the popolo 150 years earlier) into abandoning the republic and accepting, however reluctantly, the Medici principate they had resisted for decades. It has been more than thirty-five years since Gene Brucker, teacher to us all, published the most recent English-language general introduction to Renaissance Florence.1 It would be presumptuous folly to think of “replacing” that wonderful and still vibrant book. Thus the intended justification of the present work is that it adopts a different approach in covering a longer period and analyzing politics, society, and culture within a diachronic framework. Indeed, there has been no attempt in English at a narrative history of Florence since Ferdinand Schevill’s treatment seventy years ago of an even longer 1

G. A. Brucker, Renaissance Florence (New York, 1969; reprint edn. Berkeley, 1983).

4

Introduction

period of the city’s history.2 Mountains of new scholarship have appeared in the last two generations, and one more justification for a book of this kind (whether or not this one meets it) is the need for a synthesis of what has become an entire mountain range of specialized scholarship on Florence. However, in order not to make this book longer than it already is, I have not cited everything that might deserve to be mentioned. Besides those works from which I borrow specific data or whose analyses I summarize, I have restricted bibliographical citations to particularly significant items, mentioning wherever possible works in English together with what I consider the most important contributions of our European colleagues. That there has been and continues to be so much attention to Florence is not, as some suspect, a function of the old myths and legends. Historians are drawn to Florence because of the unparalleled riches (and this is no myth) of the archival and manuscript sources that permit in-depth inquiries into more and more varied questions than is possible anywhere else. All this scholarship, which has grown beyond the realistic possibility of both mastering the work of the past and keeping up with what emerges every month, sometimes feels more like an avalanche in which one can easily be buried. Trying to stay on top of all the new work as I wrote these chapters has been a humbling and ultimately futile experience. Even as I decide to close the shop and not further test the patience of a very patient publisher, the latest new books are on my desk, demanding revision of this or that argument. I can only ask their forgiveness; they will have to wait for the next history of Florence.

2

F. Schevill, History of Florence from the Founding of the City through the Renaissance (New York, 1936), reprinted as Medieval and Renaissance Florence, 2 vols. (New York, 1963).

1

The Elite Families

F

rom at least the early thirteenth century Florence’s history was dominated by a competition, more intense and longer-lasting than similar confrontations elsewhere in Italy, between two distinct but overlapping political cultures and classes: an elite of powerful, wealthy families of international bankers, traders, and landowners organized as agnatic lineages; and a larger community of economically more modest local merchants, artisans, and professional groups organized in guilds and called the popolo. Although both classes originated in the economic expansion and political fragmentation of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, only after about 1200 do their social physiognomies emerge with clarity. It is not easy, or perhaps necessary, to say which of them took shape first. The early commune was an association of self-selected citizens from mostly elite families that did not embrace the entire population, and the early growth of the popolo took place outside the commune’s formal structures. When, in the early and mid-thirteenth century, the popolo began to challenge the elite and recast the commune in its own image, its political culture and institutions displayed strength and sophistication suggesting an already long development. This chapter offers a portrait of the early elite (its family structures, modes of behavior, self-image, and culture), as the next chapter will do for the popolo. They are thus presented separately for purposes of analysis, but elite and popolo in fact emerged and developed in constant dialogue and conflict. Florentines typically called these powerful families the “grandi,” whose literal translation as the “great” is clumsy and potentially misleading. Since “grandi” were not a legally defined order with titles, “nobility” would be even more misleading, and “aristocracy,” apart from implying judgments that

6

The Elite Families

may be unwarranted, suggests long-term hegemony that cannot account for the mobility and conflict within Florence’s volatile class structure. Thus I use “elite” as the best, but not perfect, English equivalent.

Lineages In canto 16 of Paradiso Dante has his ancestor Cacciaguida look back with nostalgia to the great families of the smaller and allegedly more virtuous Florence of the mid-twelfth century. Dante wrote at the height of Florentine economic power and demographic expansion in the early fourteenth century, and in the aftermath of one of the greatest explosions of violence perpetrated by elite factions. His purpose in fashioning the myth of an earlier, simpler, more tranquil Florence was to highlight the corruption and devastation that great wealth and political rivalries had inflicted on the city.1 By contrast, Cacciaguida describes an elite still uncontaminated by either wealth or power. While this picture of early civic and moral purity is largely invented, the families mentioned in Paradiso 16 are not at all fictional. But to a Florentine of Dante’s generation most of them would have seemed echoes of a very distant past. Some were extinct and others, so Cacciaguida himself points out, were shadows of what they once were. Except for a few (Donati, Della Bella, Visdomini, Tosinghi, Lamberti, and Adimari) still politically active at the end of the thirteenth century, Cacciaguida’s families were no longer the elite of Dante’s day, most having fallen into decline by at least the middle of the thirteenth century. The list of once great families highlights the fact that, in little more than a century, economic growth and political turbulence had consigned much of the old elite to oblivion and generated a new one. The new elite, formed in the middle of the thirteenth century, made Florence the economic giant of Europe and dominated the life of the republic for the next two centuries and more. The thirteenth century was thus a crucial time of consolidation for these emerging families and for the institutions and practices that made them resilient and durable, above all the agnatic lineages, or patrilineal descent groups, that allowed wealthy families to preserve and share material resources and thus encouraged cooperation among kin. Agnatic lineages were communities of kinsmen descended from a common paternal ancestor.2 In practice they were also limited to the males of the patriline: the sons, nephews, grandsons, great-grandsons and so on of an ancestor recognized as having established the family’s wealth and status. Members of a lineage 1

C. T. Davis, “Il Buon Tempo Antico,” in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. N. Rubinstein (Evanston, 1968), pp. 45–69. 2 C. Lansing, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Princeton, 1991), pp. 29–105.

The Elite Families

7

did not live together, although they might live near one another, sometimes in contiguous houses. Nor were lineages associations with legal standing or a formal constitution. The most direct manifestation of the concept of family represented by the agnatic lineage was inheritance, normally limited to male heirs in the male line. Cognatic kin (blood relatives on one’s mother’s side) and affinal kin (relatives through marriage) were excluded from inheritance. Women were considered members of their fathers’ lineages and were not legally barred from inheriting; indeed, there are examples of men without sons who bequeathed property to daughters. But most elite Florentines feared that property left to daughters would eventually find its way into the patrimonies of the families into which these daughters married, most obviously through their sons who belonged to their fathers’ lineages. In lieu of a share of inheritance, daughters were instead provided with often quite substantial dowries that were essential to negotiating a prestigious marriage. Although entrusted to a woman’s husband for the lifetime of the marriage, the dowry remained her property and could be reclaimed when her husband died. A second feature of elite inheritance practices was partible inheritance. Primogeniture was not practiced in Florence, and fathers divided their estates in equal shares among all sons (except those who became professional religious). In the case of the large urban residences (palazzi) and towers that every elite family possessed, and which were crucial to its prestige and political presence (see Map 1), the equally inherited shares also remained undivided joint property, which meant that no one was allowed to alienate his share without a collective decision of the co-owners. These customs reveal the central purpose of the agnatic lineage: to accumulate resources, manage them jointly, and prevent the fragmentation and dispersal of property. Not all inherited wealth was necessarily constituted by fractions of jointly owned property, but for palaces and towers it was a common arrangement meant to enhance the status of kinsmen who otherwise would each have had less power than they all enjoyed as members of the lineage. Pooling such resources within the lineage made upper-class families more visible to friends, neighbors, and rivals and more conscious of themselves as collectivities of interests, ambitions, and memories, even if not always in perfect harmony. Elite families began to use surnames as a sign of status. Some evolved from the given name of the lineage’s “founder,” others from the localities in the surrounding countryside (the contado) from which families typically emerged. The Abati took their name from an ancestor called Abbas (in Latin) in the late twelfth century, and the Nerli derived theirs from the notary ser Nerlo, also of the twelfth century.3 The family of the Visdomini, who managed the estates of the Florentine bishopric during vacancies, took their surname from the title attached to their role as “vice-lords” (vicedomini) 3

Ibid., pp. 40–72.

8

The Elite Families A

K

B

C

D

E

F

G 1

1

20 60

N

A B 3

4

2

25

4

54

29 1

49

61 57

57

2

58 15

39

60

3

39 39

42

45

57 52 56

61

34

26

47 O H

56

56 54 M 53 9

31

4

55

19

42

30 7

J

C

13

R 30

12 32

4 37 43 43

27 I

32

8

21

G

59 E 27

36

13 2

3

51

D 50

36

26

42

33 24

22

6

F

19

18

18

7

26

23

3

5

60 3 3

43 L

5

28 Q

5

10

17

46 38

19 62

41

6

44

48

11

5

6

35

16

P

0

200 metres

14 0

7 A

B

C

D

E

40

500 feet

F

Map 1 Location of towers and/or palaces of prominent Florentine families in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (some families had more than one tower or palace), and major civic and ecclesiastical buildings (based on the maps in G. Fanelli, Firenze [Rome and Bari, 1980, seventh edn. 2002])

G

7

The Elite Families

9

Key to map 1 Location 2C 4B 2CD 2B 5–6F 3F 3F, 4B 5C 4B 5B 6C 4D 4BC 7D 3C 7D 5D 3C 6B, 3D 1C 4E

Families 1. Abati 2. Acciaiuoli 3. Adimari 4. Agli 5. Alberti 6. Albizzi 7. Altoviti 8. Amidei 9. Ardinghelli 10. Barbadori 11. Bardi 12. Baroncelli 13. Buondelmonti 14. Canigiani 15. Caponsacchi 16. Capponi 17. Castellani 18. Cavalcanti 19. Cerchi 20. Cerretani 21. Covoni

Location 4B 3DE 4D 2C 3DE, 3G 4–5D 5A 2C 4–5C 4A 4–5C 4D 3D 6B 4CD 4E 6B 2–3C 7E 6B 3E, 3F

Families 22. Davanzati 23. Della Bella 24. Dell’Antella 25. Della Tosa 26. Donati 27. Foraboschi 28. Frescobaldi 29. Galligai 30. Giandonati 31. Gianfigliazzi 32. Girolami 33. Giugni 34. Gondi 35. Guicciardini 36. Infangati 37. Magalotti 38. Mannelli 39. Medici 40. Mozzi 41. Nerli 42. Pazzi

Location 4–5F 6B 3D 5–6B 3C 6B 3A 4E 3G 3B 4B 2A, 4B 4A 3BC 3BC 2C 4D 2D 3B 6A

Families 43. Peruzzi 44. Pitti 45. Ricci 46. Ridolfi 47. Rondinelli 48. Rossi 49. Rucellai 50. Sacchetti 51. Salviati 52. Sassetti 53. Scali 54. Soldanieri 55. Spini 56. Strozzi 57. Tornaquinci 58. Tosinghi 59. Uberti 60. Visdomini 61. Vecchietti 62. Velluti

Location Buildings 1–2CD A. Baptistery 1–2DE B. Cathedral 3E C. Badia 3–4E D. Palazzo del Primo Popolo (Bargello) 4D E. Palazzo dei Priori (Palazzo Vecchio) 3DE F. Torre della Castagna 4D G. Mercanzia 3CD H. Orsanmichele 5D I. San Pier Scheraggio 4C J. Santa Cecilia 1A K. Santa Maria Novella 5G L. Santa Croce 4A M.Santa Trinita 1F N. Santa Maria Nuova 3C O. Arte della Lana 6–7E P. Ponte Rubaconte 5BC Q. Ponte Vecchio 4–5A R. Ponte Santa Trinita

of episcopal property.4 But the surnames of most elite families were either patronymics denoting a purported lineage founder (e.g., Strozzi, Alberti) or toponyms indicating place of origin (Dell’Antella, Quaratesi). Some lineages became so large after a few generations that their many branches were no longer closely related and the original strategy of accumulating joint property became impracticable across the entire lineage. There were at least 116 adult males sharing the Bardi name in 1342, but the banking company of that name was owned and controlled by a much smaller group of Bardi. Occasionally, branches established new lineages and their own names, but kinsmen sharing a common surname (consorterie) usually maintained a kind of loose and theoretical solidarity for generations and even centuries. While large consorterie sometimes attempted to act in concert, or were feared for the potential power of their numbers, it was clearly impossible for all their members to participate in joint property or business arrangements. But even when lineages ceased to function principally as consortia for the joint ownership of property, the social and emotional dimension of belonging to such a family was of enormous importance to elite Florentines, who took great pride in having names like Uberti, Donati, Adimari, Bardi, and several dozen others. Because of the prestige they conferred, surnames spread quickly among wealthy elite families, and from there to the popolo, but they were never as common outside the elite as within. Among slightly over 2,000 citizens listed as government creditors in 1345 in the quarter of Santo Spirito south of the Arno, only 258 (13%) had family names. The list contains fifty4

Ibid., pp. 65–6; G. Dameron, Episcopal Power and Florentine Society, 1000–1320 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 64–6 and passim.

10

The Elite Families

two different surnames, but just four (Bardi, Frescobaldi, Nerli, and Rossi) account for 60% of the 258. In 1427, by contrast, 37% of all household heads in the tax rolls had surnames, and in 1480 almost half. By the fifteenth century there were some 1,200 family names in Florence.5 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, surnames were among the signs distinguishing elite from non-elite. Pride in the name and the need to preserve an exact record of ancestors generated the idea that families had histories; genealogical reconstructions produced narratives linking the generations. An early example of the genre is the Cronichetta of Neri Strinati, written in 1312, and based, so he says, in large part on the memory of family events recounted to him over many years by various elders, especially Madonna Ciaberonta, who, having died in 1267 at the astonishing age of 115, was presumably able to provide details going back to the last third of the twelfth century. For every male in the family, Neri was interested in recording, above all, sons and property.6 The genre of the family chronicle evolved quickly in the fourteenth century, eventually producing in large numbers the ricordi and ricordanze that became perhaps the most characteristic expression of the elite’s sense of social place.7 An illuminating example of the elite’s concern for family origins and history is the chronicle of Donato Velluti.8 Born in 1313 and writing in the late 1360s, Velluti reveals both the typical upper-class thirst for information about origins and ancestors and the acute consciousness of how little even solidly established families of the time actually knew about themselves before the mid-thirteenth century. “Because men desire to know of their birth [di sua nazione] and ancestors, and how marriage alliances with other families have occurred, and how wealth has been acquired,” Velluti begins, “I have thought to make a record and memorial [ricordanza e memoria] of what I have heard about such things from my father and from family members older than myself, and of what I have seen in legal documents, account books, or other writings, few as they may be, and of what I myself have seen or experienced.” Because the written sources were few and mostly recent, Velluti, like Neri Strinati, relied in great part on the memory of family elders. He could not confirm the family legend that the Velluti had migrated to Florence from Semifonte in the Valdelsa. The earliest documents he found concerned business dealings of his greatgrandfather Bonaccorso and his three brothers in 1244. Of Bonaccorso’s 5

A. Molho, “Names, Memory, Public Identity in Late Medieval Florence,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. G. Ciappelli and P. L. Rubin (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 237–52 (239–42). 6 Lansing, Magnates, pp. 46–8. 7 An overview: P. J. Jones, “Florentine Families and Florentine Diaries in the Fourteenth Century,” Papers of the British School at Rome 24 (1956): 183–205. 8 Ch. M. de la Roncière, “Une famille florentine au XIVe siècle: Les Velluti,” in Famille et parenté dans l’occident médiéval, ed. G. Duby and J. Le Goff (Rome, 1977).

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father Piero and grandfather Berto he knew only their names. But about Bonaccorso and his brothers Velluti knew that they lived together in the Oltrarno, that they had a small tower whose location he specified, and that they were engaged in business with a shop in Borgo San Jacopo. Three of the brothers had children, and Donato reports their names and those of all their descendants. Although Velluti could not find the name of his greatgrandfather’s wife, he did not ignore either the Velluti women or those who married into the family, regularly naming the daughters and mothers of Velluti men. It was thus not for lack of interest or effort that he was unable to name his paternal great-grandmother, which presumably means that Donato’s father could not name his grandmother. Family memory was precious, no doubt all the more because it was fleeting. Part of the problem was that, despite the desire to appear old and established, many lineages, the Velluti included, were of fairly recent origin. Another problem for the preservation of memory was the length of generations in the male line. Velluti’s father Lamberto, born in 1268, was forty-five years old when Donato was born. Donato never knew his paternal grandfather Filippo and was unsure of the year of his death. And the portrait he gives of his great-grandfather Bonaccorso has about it an aura of inflated legend: that he lived to the age of 120, was a bold and strong warrior who fought heretics and whose body was all “stitched together” from the many wounds he suffered in battles and skirmishes, and who, after losing his sight at the age of one hundred, kept himself vigorous by walking three to four miles every day on his balcony for another twenty years.9 All of this could have been true, but it could also have emerged from the need for a heroic and virile founder of the family’s fortunes.

Knighthood and Feuds Velluti’s comments on his great-grandfather’s physical strength and prowess in combat reflect the prominence of martial valor in the elite’s early self-image: “Very sure of himself in matters of arms, he was a great combattitore.” By the time Velluti was writing, the great families were no longer a warrior aristocracy, and their pride in military deeds became entirely a matter of nostalgia. Even Dante in the early fourteenth century knew that he was invoking a lost past when he fashioned his distant ancestor Cacciaguida as a crusading knight. But thirteenth-century elite families, both the newer lineages and the older ones that traced their prominence back to the twelfth century, actively cultivated the practice and culture of war, and most elite families counted in their ranks many knights. Knighthood was a formal title, originally bestowed by imperial 9

La cronica domestica di messer Donato Velluti, ed. I. Del Lungo and G. Volpi (Florence, 1914), pp. 3–7, 72–3.

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authority (Cacciaguida says that the emperor Conrad “girt me with his knighthood”), although city-state governments also created knights and expected military service from them. Trained in mounted combat and providing their own horses and armor, knights formed the cavalry of the communal army.10 In the thirteenth century, knights performed this service themselves instead of hiring replacements, as would happen in the fourteenth century. Because of the considerable cost, most knights came from elite families, and, to judge from their numbers, the military and cultural ethos of knighthood was universal throughout the elite. The chronicler Giovanni Villani estimated that there were 250 knights in Florence in the 1280s. But by the 1330s he could count no more than 65.11 The Florentine elite were never a professional warrior class; they were not full-time fighters and they typically combined the ceremonial and cultural trappings of knighthood, and occasional participation in actual warfare, with more prosaic business careers as merchants or bankers. Even the bellicose Bonaccorso Velluti, according to his great-grandson, “was an expert in business,” in his case the business of importing cloth and having it dyed in Florence. In keeping with Donato’s ideal portrait of him, he is of course described as a pillar of uncompromising rectitude in mercantile dealings. But the part-time quality of the elite’s military activities in no way lessened their dedication to it as the most visible symbol of their status, and as one of the ways in which they made themselves a distinct class and advertised their consciousness of the fact by putting cultural and ritual distance between themselves and the popolo. Elite and popolo were both primarily merchants and in many cases members of the same guilds; thus economic activities alone did not suffice to mark the distinction between the classes. The culture of knighthood served this purpose well, because it carried with it the courtly ethos that linked the elite to the social world of the upper classes in both the Lombard principalities to the north and the Neapolitan kingdom to the south. It is a striking feature of the Florentine elite’s response to the emerging republican polity in their own midst that they turned with greater insistence and ostentation to the emulation of a courtly culture that was imported from elsewhere. Villani describes a two-month party, or “corte” (8.89), held in 1283 by the elite family of the Rossi and their neighbors in the parish of Santa Felicita in the Oltrarno. The Rossi were a leading elite family and were later included among the politically disenfranchised magnates by the popular government, whose unfavorable view of them may have stemmed from the conviction in 10

As was true all over communal Italy: J.-C. Maire Vigueur, Cavaliers et citoyens: guerre, conflits, et société dans l’Italie communale, XIIe–XIIIe siècles (Paris, 2003). 11 Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, ed. G. Porta, 3 vols. (Parma, 1990–1), vol. 3, 12.94, pp. 197–8; hereafter cited by book and chapter (according to Porta’s division of the work into 13 rather than 12 chapters).

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1284 of one of the family’s young men for armed assault against an Oltrarno neighbor from the Ubriachi family, also subsequently relegated to magnate status. The lavish “corte” of the previous year may have been just as offensive to the republican popolo that generally detested such elite ostentation. The festivities opened in June for the celebration of Florence’s patron saint John the Baptist and lasted throughout the summer. Villani says that a “thousand or more men” took part, all dressed in white robes and forming a “company” or “brigade” led by a “lord of Love.” The estimate may be excessive, but even half that number would have been an astonishing gathering spilling out from family palaces and courtyards into the narrow streets and still small public spaces of the thirteenth-century city. Many women also took part, as the brigade engaged in games and amusements and “dances of ladies and knights,” who paraded through the city playing musical instruments and going from one banquet to another. Villani calls it the “most noble and renowned court ever held in Florence or Tuscany,” adding that many noble courtiers and court entertainers from Lombardy and all Italy came to participate. In such festivities the Florentine elite families loudly advertised their emulation of foreign cultural styles, the patronal and proprietary domination they exercised within their parishes and neighborhoods, and the central place of knighthood in their image of themselves as bearers of idealized notions of both love and war. The popolo viewed the elite’s fondness for knighthood and courtly rituals with suspicion and hostility. One indication of this is the role assigned to these cultural factors in the famous story of the murder in 1216 of Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, the event that allegedly divided the elite into warring factions and plunged the city into the chaos of civil war. The earliest extant version of the story is contained in an anonymous chronicle written toward the end of the century.12 If the author was not an actual partisan of the popolo, his account of the already legendary event was certainly heavily influenced by its critique of the elite’s social style. No reader of the chronicle would have failed to notice that all the major protagonists in the story belonged to families that were made magnates. Whatever the actual facts of the episode, this writer embellished them with an anti-aristocratic twist in which the elite’s propensity for violence emerges from its very predilection for the courtly rituals surrounding knighthood. The account functions in a sense as a parable of the original sin that required the popolo’s punishment of the elite. The setting is a celebration, six miles from Florence in the village of Campi, of the knighthood of Mazzingo Tegrimi dei Mazzinghi, to which “all the best people of Florence” – the city’s knightly aristocracy, all identified by the honorific “messer” accorded to knights – “were invited.” The author calls it a 12

Cronica fiorentina compilata nel secolo XIII, in Testi fiorentini del Dugento e dei primi del Trecento, ed. A. Schiaffini (Florence, 1954), pp. 82–150 (117–19).

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“corte,” complete with the required buffoon or jester, who, no doubt doing what he thought was expected of him (or what someone told him to do), approached the tables where the knights were seated and snatched up the plate of messer Uberto degli Infangati, who became intensely angry. Seeing this, messer Oddo Arrighi dei Fifanti berated Infangati, who called Arrighi a liar. The latter picked up a plate of food and shoved it in Infangati’s face. The chronicler underscores the gap between the pretensions of this self-styled aristocracy and its actual behavior: although introduced as “valorous,” Oddo Arrighi is described as berating Infangati “villanamente” – rudely, roughly, with overtones of boorish rusticity, and thus the opposite of the courtly valor and refinement expected of the “best people” – and escalating the confrontation from words to actions. The entire “corte” was now in an uproar: in the ensuing fight, with tables cleared away and weapons introduced, Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, who had had no part in the original altercation, wounded Oddo Arrighi in the arm with a knife. The chronicler says that he too did this “villanamente,” thus extending his negative judgment to both sides of the conflict and suggesting that they were all a failed would-be courtly aristocracy whose behavior more nearly resembled that of loutish peasants than that of a true court. The wounding of Oddo Arrighi escalated and politicized the conflict. Arrighi “held a meeting of his friends and relatives,” including the Counts of Gangalandi, and the Uberti, Lamberti, and Amidei families. In moments of confrontation and conflict, the account reminds us, elite families appealed to their allies, including families with which they had established marriage alliances. And marriage was also their preferred solution to the conflict at hand. The assembly decided that peace could be ensured through the marriage to Buondelmonte of Arrighi’s niece, the daughter of a sister who had married into the Amidei. The plan was destined to fail, and the anonymous writer mocks the elite’s methods of conflict resolution by using explicitly political language for their attempt at peacemaking: the assembly convened by Arrighi is described as a “council,” and the marriage alliance as a “treaty.” The implication is clearly that great families were as inept at politics as they were at courtly self-discipline. Until the recommendation for peace through marriage, the story has exclusively male protagonists, even as the marriage “treaty” implies the ready cooperation of the women whose lives it affected. Elite honor depended on docile women willing to be married off for political reasons. Here too the chronicler points to the gap between the elite’s pretensions and the chaotic reality of its behavior. As soon as the marriage was agreed to, Madonna Gualdrada, wife of messer Forese Donati, secretly sent for Buondelmonte and talked him out of the engagement. Once again the conflict escalates with the introduction of another great family name. The Donati would have been familiar to contemporary readers as a leading family in the factional wars around 1300, one whose only apparent connection to the other families of the

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story is an implied familiarity with the Buondelmonti. In fact, it is not actually the Donati who enter the story – no Donati men play any role – but rather one of their wives. Families that counted upon the passivity of women, so the episode implies, in fact put women in precarious and liminal situations in which their loyalties and ambitions might be neither predictable nor controllable. The intervention of Madonna Gualdrada destabilized the dubious peace constructed by the men. Her seduction by proxy of Buondelmonte played on his sense of insecurity as a proud young man being pushed around by his elders. Addressing him as a “shamed knight,” she underscores both his claim to honor as a knight and the denial to him of the full measure of that honor by the overriding needs and interests of the family as defined by its collective fathers. Yet again the author points to an inherent contradiction in elite family structure. Lineages presupposed a convergence of interests and outlooks among men, especially between fathers and sons. Yet they constantly produced cohorts of young men who had to wait too long for their share of family honor and who were as much under the thumb of patriarchy as were the women. It is no accident that the author invents, or dramatizes, a secret entente between a married woman and a young unmarried man as the cause of the unraveling of the plan worked out by the male elders. Madonna Gualdrada taunts Buondelmonte by telling him he has brought shame on himself in agreeing to marry Arrighi’s niece out of fear of the Fifanti and the Uberti, and she urges him to renounce the agreement and marry instead one of the Donati women, perhaps her own daughter. If he does so, she assures him, “you will always be a knight of honor.” Buondelmonte quickly agreed, the narrator says, “without any counsel,” and without having taken the matter, as he ought to have, to his elders. He thus broke the cardinal rule of elite lineages by acting on his own, as a free agent, without getting advice and support from his family’s leaders and allies. By breaking this rule Buondelmonte sealed his own fate. The next day, with crowds gathered from both groups of families for the wedding, he failed to appear and went instead to pledge his engagement to the Donati woman. The insult to the Amidei and their allies might as well have been a declaration of war. An incensed Oddo Arrighi called another “council,” this time “of all his friends and relatives,” who met in a church, presumably because of their increased numbers. He lamented the dishonor done to him by Buondelmonte, and from the assembled elders came a variety of recommendations: some said that Buondelmonte should be beaten and others that he should be wounded in the face. But Mosca dei Lamberti warned that anyone resorting to such half measures would be inviting even worse retaliation and that, this being a case in which “a thing done cannot be undone,” Buondelmonte would have to be killed. This advice, made famous by Dante in Inferno 28 (in which he placed Mosca), assumed that, whereas humiliation or injury would surely entail further acts of revenge, murder would not. The most likely explanation for such

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an apparently odd argument is that Buondelmonte had angered and alienated his own family by acting unilaterally. If he remained alive, his family could not have avoided the obligation to avenge him; but once he was killed, so Mosca seems to have reasoned, his exasperated friends and relatives would not have retaliated. A month and a half later on Easter morning, at the very spot where the planned engagement was to have taken place in front of the Amidei palace, the “vendetta” was carried out. Buondelmonte, accompanied by his new Donati bride on his wedding day, was knocked from his horse by messer Schiatta degli Uberti (the first action in the story by anyone from this powerful family) and killed by Oddo Arrighi himself. According to this and other accounts, the Buondelmonti murder was the spark that ignited the war of Guelfs and Ghibellines, the great conflict that dominated Florentine and Italian history for most of the thirteenth century. The explanations for the rivalries and antagonisms that divided Florentine elite families over many decades are certainly more complex than this tradition allows. But the story’s importance lies in what it reveals of the family structures, social conventions, and collective self-image of the elite, and also of the popolo’s critique of the elite. If the account is in part parody and exaggeration, it parodies and exaggerates attitudes and institutions central to the life of these families: the expectation of family solidarity and the leadership of the elders; the networks of “friends and relatives” mobilized in times of crisis; the marginal position of women between their natal and marital families; the control of neighborhoods and churches by families or clusters of families; coalitions of family groups in political factions with their “councils”; the role of marriage in consolidating factions; knighthood and the emulation of the courts; and the easy and frequent recourse to violence and vendetta. The point of the story is surely the close and even causal connection between these structural features of elite family life and the constant episodes of violence and revenge that they inflicted on the city. At every stage of the story, the elite’s preferred methods of containing violence and resolving conflicts only led to more and more violent conflicts. The story portrays the elite, with its pretensions to being a ruling class, as a disastrous failure that could not even control its women and young men. Such implications were no doubt polemical and tendentious, but not entirely unfounded. The elite’s propensity for violence and vendetta was always the popolo’s first article of indictment in its list of grievances against these overmighty families. Most of the thirteenth-century descriptions of this behavior come from chroniclers sympathetic to the popolo or from legislation passed by popular governments seeking to curb it, but fourteenth-century court records and elite memoirs confirm the picture of the elite families as a generally unruly lot, given to frequent acts of aggression against their fellow citizens. Most contemporaries accepted as axiomatic that the greatest threat to public order came, not from the poor or the working