In the second half of the fourteenth century the Medici had removed into the neighbourhood of San Lorenzo’s church, where their residence occupied the ground adjoining Cosimo’s palace on the north, and remained in the possession of his brother Lorenzo, the founder of the subsequent ducal line.[2] Their original dwelling-place was in the centre of the old town, on the market-place, inside the first wall. Many of the foremost families were once settled here, and even now the lover of history and antiquity will find among the damp stalls of the butcher, fishmonger, and dealer in vegetables, sparse remains of past and, so far as concerns this part of the town, better days. The little church of San Tommaso in this place was in the patronage of the Medici from time immemorial.
The Medici did not belong to the historic families of the city on the Arno. The first trace of them is to be found about the end of the twelfth century in Giambuono, of whose extraction nothing is known. The coat of arms exhibits red balls in a gold field, whose number and arrangement were different at different times, until, under Cosimo’s son, the coat of arms assumed the form which it has ever since retained. From these balls (palle) the dependents of the family bore the name of Palleschi. From whence the Medici came, what was the meaning of the coat of arms, no one knew. Genealogical dreams have gone as far back as Perseus and the apples of the Hesperides, whilst modest historians have contented themselves with the time of Charlemagne, and the mountainous land north of Florence, known by the name of Mugello, where the family had always held important possessions, designated as their home.
The only dispute now is whether they descend from a knight who in days of yore received on his shield the blows of a giant’s iron flail, or from a physician who chose for his sign, in his small beginnings, three pills or cupping-glasses.
Giambuono’s son Chiarissimo sat in the Council of the Commune in 1201, when an alliance was formed with the town of Siena for the purpose of attacking the castle Semifonte in the Elsethal, which lay between the territories of the two towns, and was soon after destroyed. This was the first step towards the extension of territory and the overthrow of the landed aristocracy. The thirteenth century, at the beginning of which the Medici first stand forward in history, was the period in which the community of Florence, after many vicissitudes, received its definitive form. Just at the time of the first attempts of the Florentines to acquire an independent self-government do we meet with the first of that race which three centuries later strove successfully to transform what had become a powerful republic into a monarchy.
The province of Tuscany, divided into two duchies, in the time of the Longobards formed, first under dukes, then under margraves, a part of the Roman Teutonic kingdom, whose dependence on the later powerful emperors, and also on margraves ruling over wide stretches of land to the north of the Apennines, was more nominal than real, yet still existed according to right.
In the summer of 1115, after the death of the great Countess Mathilda—daughter and heiress to the last Margrave Bonifacius, who lived mostly in Lucca—first began the freer movement of the Tuscan Commune. At this time the men who afterwards attained to the lordship over the greater part of the country occupied anything but a prominent position. The great changes in the strength and extent of the imperial power in Italy as it was under the last of the Franconians, under Lothair of Saxony, and the two first Hohenstaufen, necessarily affected the position of these Communes. Their form of government under consuls changed just as their dependence or independence of the imperial authority was affected by the prevailing political condition of the empire. The landed nobility, of Germanic origin for the most part, were supported by Frederic Barbarossa against the Commune of Florence, with which several great families, headed by the Uberti, had engaged in a bloody and protracted feud on account of their claims to an authority which was not compatible with consular government. Henry VI. exercised his imperial rights and privileges in Tuscany still more vigorously than his father had done. His brother Philip, invested with this province as a dukedom, maintained a command such as, perhaps, no other vice-emperor had possessed. In a part of the country claimed by the Popes as the patrimony of Mathilda, Philip’s power overcame the Guelfic element which was so much opposed to the ‘Imperium,’ and which in most of the towns was the predominant principle.
Suddenly, however, all was changed, when the Emperor died in the prime of his manhood, leaving behind him an infant son, three years old, and a distracted kingdom, which never fully resumed its ancient greatness. In the Papal chair, on the other hand, sat one of the most aspiring and successful of the Pontiffs—Innocent III., who at once assumed that authority in the legations which Henry VI. had taken so much pains to put down. The Tuscans, however, were not more disposed to submit patiently to the Papal sovereignty than they had been to that of the Emperor, and this the Pope was not slow to perceive. But while he avoided all direct assertions of sovereign power over the towns, he made use of his influence to form a Tuscan Union, that should be closely allied with the ecclesiastical government at Rome, and firmly opposed to the Imperial authority. In 1198 a Union was formed at San Genesio, which lies at the foot of the hills in the lower valley of the Arno, and within sight of the venerable towers of San Miniato. The negotiators on this occasion were two Cardinals representing the Pope on one side, and on the other deputies elected by the several towns interested. Pisa, which was Ghibelline, alone of the great towns held aloof. The federation was intended to form a bulwark against Imperial encroachments, and all matters of internal administration and municipal government were left untouched. The supremacy of the Papacy was felt to be a lighter yoke than that of the Empire.
It is worthy of remark that this practical protest against Imperial domination should have its starting-point in a spot where the Guelfs, especially the Florentines, were reminded that their liberties depended on the pleasure of the Emperors. For the lofty towers that from the hill of San Miniato look down upon the Val d’Arno, and across the well-watered plain that stretches to the borders of Lucca, formed part of the palace of Barbarossa, and from it his high decrees were sent forth in the name of the Arch-chancellor of the Empire, the Archbishop of Cologne. Here tarried Henry VI. and Frederick II., and here the Vicar of the Empire, under Rudolf of Hapsburg, received the oath of allegiance. At a later period, in March 1355, Charles IV. revived the ancient dignity by stopping at San Miniato both before and after his coronation. The deputies of the place, called from these circumstances San Miniato the German (al Tedesco), had gone to Pisa to pay their obeisance to Charles.
Events like those enumerated above were favourable to the territorial extension of the Florentine Commune. Their progress would have been greater, had not an ancient feud among the nobles come to a bloody outbreak in the second decade of the thirteenth century. The effect of this factious contest, which was embittered by religious animosity and the quarrel of Frederic II. with the Pope, was to enfeeble the nobility, and react mischievously on the people. The murder of Messer Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti at the entrance of the old bridge in 1215 is celebrated in history and poetry as the presumed origin of the hostile factions of Guelf and Ghibelline. A stone cross in the small square, called, from the junction of three streets, the Trebbio, commemorates the victory of the orthodox citizens, led by Peter Martyr of Verona, against the Patarian heretics. About 1247 the most violent civil war raged. Although the Ghibelline faction had the upper hand at first, and Frederick of Antioch, the Emperor’s son and Imperial Vicar in Tuscany, drove out the Guelf nobility, the tables were turned when heavy losses overtook Frederick in Lombardy and were followed by his death. The year of Frederick’s death, 1250, marks the victory of the Guelfic cause in Florence, for although their adversaries had a momentary triumph they could not hold out, and the city so famous under the Salieri for its devotion to the Emperor, became the stronghold of the Guelfs. This decisive change, which brought constitutional changes with it, took place towards the end of October 1250, a little before the Emperor’s death.
Up to that time, from the beginning of the twelfth century, the city had been governed by a magistracy consisting of first four and then six consuls, assisted by a council of one hundred good men (Buonuomini). From 1207 the administration was entrusted to a foreign knight, learned in the law, and called the Podestà. After the fashion of the Lombard cities, he was elected for six months, then for twelve, and had the assistance of a general council. Encouraged by the factiousness and weakness of the nobility, who had till then been supreme in the place, the citizen class banded together in an organised insurrection, and initiated great political reforms. The town was divided into sixths, (Sestieri), each sixth into twenty militia companies (the number being subject to change, under different standard-bearers, or gonfaloniers, each of whom had a distinguishing mark). At the head of all, in place of the Ghibelline Podestà, who was done away with, was a captain of the people (Capitano del Popolo), assisted by a council of twelve elders, two for every sixth, and six and thirty corporals. At a later period these institutions developed into the small and the great councils. The standard of the people, put into the hands of the captain, was half red, half white, and was subsequently replaced by one bearing a red cross on a white ground. The banner of the Commune, displayed by the Podestà, bore first a white lily on a field of red, then a red lily on white ground. The civic militia were called to arms by the tolling of a bell from the Lion’s Tower, which has long disappeared, but stood probably near the palace of the Capitano, on the site of which the palace of the Signoria, now the Palazzo Vecchio, was erected in the sixteenth century. The country districts also received a military organisation. To the Capitano was attributed authority over both the civil and criminal administration, with the co-operation of the elders, but the Podestà subsequently resumed his criminal jurisdiction. The latter also occupied the palace, built originally in 1255 as a council-chamber for the Capitano and his assessors, but much enlarged in the following century. It is still called after the Podestà, and, restored after long neglect to somewhat of its ancient dignity, now looks down in lofty grandeur upon the bustle of modern life going on around its walls.