The Two First Centuries of Florentine History / The Republic and Parties at the Time of Dante. Fourth Impression.

by Pasquale Villari

XII.

These concluding words from the chronicle of a skilled observer such as Villani enable us to understand more completely the general character of the revolution described; for as this was the natural outcome of many preceding disturbances, its study throws a new light on earlier events.

When the Florentines succeeded in destroying the castles of feudal and Ghibelline nobles scattered over their territory, and in forcing the conquered to inhabit the city, the Republic became split, as we have seen, in two parties, constantly at strife: the one composed of Ghibelline lords, the other of Guelph popolani. When the Hohenstauffens of Naples and Palermo called all the Ghibellines of Italy to arms, the magnates of the party took the lead in Tuscany, with Frederic and Manfred to back them, again dominated Florence and drove out the Guelphs. But when the Swabians fell and were replaced by the House of Anjou, the Empire became weakened, and Italian policy took a new turn. The Guelphs once more triumphed in Florence, and the democratic element, already constituting the real strength of the State, wreaked vengeance on the Ghibellines, who seemed to be almost annihilated. Only as it chanced, at this moment, the Guelphs were split into two factions, the nobles on one side, the people on the other; and this division led to another and equally bitter struggle, undertaken for the purpose of crushing the magnates outright. Thus the latter were driven to crave admission to the guilds, to assume democratic habits, and even to discard their old family names, unless resigned to exclusion from the government. After a prolonged series of different legal measures and revolutions, the Enactments of Justice finally achieved the aim that the Florentine Republic had so long—and, indeed, from its birth—kept in view, namely, the triumph of democracy.

RIOT IN CORN MARKET, FLORENCE.

(From an old MS. in the Laurentian Library.)

[To face page 476.

But the Republic comprised the populace as well as the people; and although both orders were united in fighting the nobles, they split apart as soon as their common victory was assured. Thus the party of the rich burghers, or Greater Guilds, gradually sprang into being. At first there were twelve of these guilds, and they seemed to be at one with the nine Lesser Trades, afterwards increased to fourteen; but, as time went on, these fell more widely apart from the remaining seven, and strictly Greater, Guilds, and began to struggle against them, thus constituting the party of the rich burghers or popolo grasso. The formation and successful career of this party, so long at the head of the Government, dates, as Villani tells us, from the defeat of Giano della Bella, whose downfall was caused by the temporary alliance of the nobles and the more powerful section of the people. The latter soon divided both from the nobles and lower class, was equally victorious over either party, and constituted one of the most energetic, sharp-witted, and intelligent democracies of which history has record. It comprised the richest and most vigorous section of the people, known for that reason as the popolo grasso, and gradually became master of the city. And albeit this state of things was a natural result of past revolutions, it was undoubtedly precipitated by the Enactments of Justice. These had been promoted by Giano, with the aid of the people, to be used as a weapon against the nobles. He fell a victim to the latter, when they hoodwinked the people by feigning to unite with them for the nonce. It was certainly altogether against his own will that Giano helped to promote the formation of a party, that, issuing from the wreck of the nobles and populace, finally excluded both alike from all participation in the government of Florence.

For a long time, at any rate, this party raised the power of the Republic to a very lofty height, and directed its policy for more than a century. The moment of its consolidation coincided with that in which Florence became the seat of Italian culture, and hence of the general culture of Europe. Nor is there any cause to be surprised by the vast intellectual, political, and moral success of the commercial democracy of Florence. In the days of the Hohenstauffen, the Italian aristocracy undoubtedly constituted the most cultivated and civilised part of the nation; all great political questions, and the great struggles between the Papacy and the Empire, in which the whole of Europe took so lively a share, were alike carried on by that class. The Court of Frederic II. had been the headquarters of those contests, and the most dazzling centre of mental light in the world at the time. The language spoken there was the language of courtiers; the Court was sceptical, and the first poets were princes or barons. The Emperor Frederic, his son Enzo, and his secretary, Pier della Vigna, gave voice to the first notes of the Italian muse. It was a privileged and limited order, in which literature and science still retained the characteristics of chivalry and scholasticism. In imitation of their French and Provençal masters, these poets lauded some imaginary woman or some fantastic and unreal love in obstinately artificial verse. They were never able to cast off mediæval and conventional forms. At the same time, however, the merchants and working men of our republics, more especially of Florence, were scouring the world, founding banks and business firms throughout the East and the West; they were studying jurisprudence, always and everywhere demonstrating a special aptitude for framing laws, creating new institutions, and directing vast concerns. By this means they acquired that practical knowledge of mankind and the universe, that sense of truth and reality, so entirely absent from pre-existent literatures, and precisely required to originate the first literature of the modern world.

Naturally, however, those merchants, solely versed in commerce and petty local politics, lacked the breadth and loftiness of thought, the mental culture and refinement needed to solve the hard problem without help. At the same moment, Florence, the most active and intelligent of Italian republics, was enduring the series of great and radical changes, already described, which after much sanguinary strife and a new rearrangement of social conditions, suddenly raised her to a truly fortunate position. Owing to her successes in war, Florence now commanded every highway of commerce, and, by the amazingly rapid extension of her trade, was enabled to acquire mighty and no longer contested preponderance in Tuscany and become its chief as well as its central city. The actual antagonism between the Pope and the Angevins, together with the altered conditions of the Empire, enabled her to steer cautiously between those rival powers and assume for the first time great and genuine political importance in Italy. Thus the extent of her concerns and the circle of her ideas were simultaneously enlarged. The two most intelligent and most hostile classes of her citizens, namely, the now powerful traders and the nobles now reduced to equality with them, became transformed and definitely fused in one class during the course of their fierce conflict, excluding, on the one hand, the lowest order of the people, and on the other, those of the nobles who, whether aspiring to absolute rule or obstinately clinging to feudal customs and the authority of the Empire, remained blindly opposed to municipal institutions which were nevertheless predestined to triumph. Need we then feel surprised if at this moment art and literature put forth their fairest blossoms, and in the life-giving air of freedom were seen to expand their leaves and shed their fragrance through the world? It is enough to read the records and glance at the laws of the Republic in order to discern that in the closing years of the fourteenth century a new spirit was stirring the people and a new sun, as it were, rising in the sky.

Every page of the chronicles records the undertaking of very important public works, the erection of city squares, canals, bridges, and walls. And simultaneously with these, the most enduring monuments of modern art were springing up from the ground. During the same period Arnolfo di Cambio worked on the Baptistery, began the church of Santa Croce, and, according to the chroniclers, received from the Signory a solemnly worded order to reconstruct the old cathedral from the foundations by erecting a new one "of the most magnificent design the mind of man could conceive, rendering it worthy of a heart expanded to much greatness by the union of many spirits in one."[486] Undoubtedly it was then that Arnolfo laid the first stone of the fane considered by many the finest church in the world. At the same time a great number of monumental buildings and public works were being also carried on: Santo Spirito, for instance, Orsammichele, and Santa Maria Novella. In 1299 Arnolfo likewise began the Palace of the Signoria, another marvel of modern architecture, that seems to be so thoroughly in character with the Republic and expressive of the youthful vigour then animating the Florentine people. In the same year the construction of new walls, suspended since 1285, was also resumed. And while churches, public buildings, and private palaces were rising on all sides, Giotto's brush was employed to cover their walls with a lavish profusion of lofty and immortal compositions; sculpture rivalled painting in decorating temples with imperishable works, and gave birth to the Tuscan school that was afterwards to culminate in Donatello, Ghiberti, the Della Robbia, and Michelangelo. What, too, are the names most frequently occurring in the records of those times, and amid the struggles promoting or following the Enactments of Justice? At every turn, among the Priors, the Gonfaloniers, and ambassadors, or at hot debates in council, we meet with Dante Alighieri, Brunetto Latini, Giovanni Villani, Dino Compagni, and Guido Cavalcanti, the creators of Italian poetry and prose. The Divine Comedy bristles with continual allusions to the events, amid which it was conceived, and which all seem to be informed by the same spirit, since, even in a thousand varying garbs, it always asserts its identity. Therefore the Enactments of Justice are neither the work of a single individual, nor suddenly improvised by Giano della Bella, but rather the outcome of many revolutions: a body of statutes proving and explaining the definite form and character of the Florentine Republic. The same character, albeit less splendidly displayed, appertained in varying degree to the other Italian communes. But of them all Florence was ever the most original and brilliant example.