During the stress and storm of the fierce warfare carried on by Guelfs and Ghibellines, the Podestà fell into the second rank. He had been created to meet an emergency; but now the discord was too vehement for arbitration. A new functionary appears, with the title of Captain of the People. Chosen when one or other of the factions gains supreme power in the burgh, he represents the victorious party, takes the lead in proscribing their opponents, and ratifies on his responsibility the changes introduced into the constitution. The old magistracies and councils, meanwhile, are not abrogated. The Consiglio del Popolo, with the Capitano at its head, takes the lead; and a new member, called the Consiglio della Parte, is found beside them, watchful to maintain the policy of the victorious faction. But the Consiglio del Comune, with the Podestà, who has not ceased to exercise judicial functions, still subsists. The Priors form the signory as of old. The Credenza goes on working, and the Gran Consiglio represents the body of privileged burghers. The party does but tyrannize over the city it has conquered, and manipulates the ancient constitution for its own advantage. In this clash of Guelf with Ghibelline the beneficiaries were the lower classes of the people. Excluded from the Popolo of episcopal and consular revolutions, the trades and industries of the great cities now assert their claims to be enfranchised. The advent of the Arti is the chief social phenomenon of the crisis.[1] Thus the final issue of the conflict was a new Italy, deeply divided by factions that were little understood, because they were so vital, because they represented two adverse currents of national energy, incompatible, irreconcilable, eternal in antagonism as the poles. But this discordant nation was more commercial and more democratic. Families of merchants rose upon the ruins of the old nobility. Roman cities of industry reduced their military rivals of earlier or later origin to insignificance. The plain, the river, and the port asserted themselves against the mountain fastness and the barrackburgh. The several classes of society, triturated, shaken together, leveled by warfare and equalized by industry, presented but few obstacles to the emergence of commanding personalities, however humble, from their ranks. Not only had the hierarchy of feudalism disappeared; but the constitution of the city itself was confused, and the Popolo, whether 'primo' or 'secondo or even 'terzo,' was diluted with recently franchised Contadini and all kinds of 'novi homines.'[2] The Divine Comedy, written after the culmination of the Guelf and Ghibelline dissensions, yields the measure of their animosity. Dante finds no place in Hell Heaven, or Purgatory for the souls who stood aloof from strife, the angels who were neither Guelf nor Ghibelline in Paradise. His Vigliacchi, 'wretches who never lived,' because they never felt the pangs or ecstasies of partisanship, wander homeless on the skirts of Limbo, among the abortions and offscourings of creation. Even so there was no standing-ground in Italy outside one or the other hostile camp. Society was riven down to its foundation. Rancors dating from the thirteenth century endured long after the great parties ceased to have a meaning. They were perpetuated in customs, and expressed themselves in the most trivial details. Banners, ensigns, and heraldic colors followed the divisions of the factions. Ghibellines wore the feathers in their caps upon one side, Guelfs upon the other. Ghibellines cut fruit at table crosswise, Guelfs straight down. In Bergamo some Calabrians were murdered by their host, who discovered from their way of slicing garlic that they sided with the hostile party. Ghibellines drank out of smooth, and Guelfs out of chased, goblets. Ghibellines wore white, and Guelfs red, roses. Yawning, passing in the street, throwing dice, gestures in speaking or swearing, were used as pretexts for distinguishing the one half of Italy from the other. So late as the middle of the fifteenth century, the Ghibellines of Milan tore Christ from the high-altar of the Cathedral at Crema and burned him because he turned his face to the Guelf shoulder. Every great city has a tale of love and death that carries the contention of its adverse families into the region of romance and legend. Florence dated her calamities from the insult offered by Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti to the Amidei in a broken marriage. Bologna never forgot the pathos of Imelda Lambertazzi stretched in death upon her lover Bonifazio Gieremei's corpse. The story of Romeo and Juliet at Verona is a myth which brings both factions into play, the well-meaning intervention of peace-making monks, and the ineffectual efforts of the Podestà to curb the violence of party warfare.
[1] The history of Florence illustrates more clearly than that of any other town the vast importance acquired by trades and guilds in politics at this epoch of the civil wars.
[2] This is the sting of Cacciaguida's scornful lamentation over Florence Par. xvi.
Ma la cittadinanza, ch' è or mista
Di Campi e di Certaldo e di Figghine,
Pura vedeasi nell' ultimo artista.
Tal fatto è fiorentino, e cambia e merca,
Che si sarebbe volto a Semifonti,
Là dove andava l' avolo alia cerca.
Sempre la confusione delle persone
Principio fu del mal della cittade,
Come del corpo il cibo che s' appone.
So deep and dreadful was the discord, so utter the exhaustion, that the distracted Communes were fain at last to find some peace in tyranny. At the close of their long quarrel with the house of Hohenstauffen, the Popes called Charles of Anjou into Italy. The final issue of that policy for the nation at large will be discussed in another portion of this work. It is enough to point out here that, as Ezzelino da Romano introduced despotism in its worst form as a party leader of the Ghibellines, so Charles of Anjou became a typical tyrant in the Guelf interest. He was recognized as chief of the Guelf party by the Florentines, and the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was conferred upon him as the price of his dictatorship. The republics almost simultaneously entered upon a new phase. Democratized by the extension of the franchise, corrupted, to use Machiavelli's phrase, in their old organization of the Popolo and Commune, they fell into the hands of tyrants, who employed the prestige of their party, the indifference of the Vigliacchi, and the peace-loving instincts of the middle class for the consolidation of their selfish autocracy.[1] Placing himself above the law, manipulating the machinery of the State for his own ends, substituting the will of a single ruler for the clash of hostile passions in the factions, the tyrant imposed a forcible tranquillity upon the city he had grasped. The Captaincy of the people was conferred upon him.[2] The Councils were suffocated and reduced to silence. The aristocracy was persecuted for the profit of the plebs. Under his rule commerce flourished; the towns were adorned with splendid edifices; foreign wars were carried on for the aggrandizement of the State without regard to factious rancors. Thus the tyrant marked the first emergence of personality supreme within the State, resuming its old forces in an autocratic will, superseding and at the same time consciously controlling the mute, collective, blindly working impulses of previous revolutions. His advent was welcomed as a blessing by the recently developed people of the cities he reduced to peace. But the great families and leaders of the parties regarded him with loathing, as a reptile spawned by the corruption and disease of the decaying body politic. In their fury they addressed themselves to the two chiefs of Christendom. Boniface VIII., answering to this appeal, called in a second Frenchman, Charles of Valois, with the titles of Marquis of Ancona, Count of Romagna, Captain of Tuscany, who was bidden to reduce Italy to order on Guelf principles. Dante in his mountain solitudes invoked the Emperor, and Italy beheld the powerless march of Henry VII. Neither Pope nor Emperor was strong enough to control the currents of the factions which were surely whirling Italy into the abyss of despotism. Boniface died of grief after Sciarra Colonna, the terrible Ghibelline's outrage at Anagni, and the Papal Court was transferred to Avignon in 1316. Henry VII. expired, of poison probably, at Buonconvento, in 1313. The parties tore each other to fragments. Tyrants were murdered. Whole families were extirpated. Yet these convulsions bore no fruit of liberty. The only exit from the situation was in despotism—the despotism of a jealous oligarchy as at Florence, or the despotism of new tyrants in Lombardy and the Romagna.[3]
[1] Not to mention the republics of Lombardy and Romagna, which took the final stamp of despotism at the beginning of the fourteenth century, it is noticeable that Pisa submitted to Uguccione da Faggiuola, Lucca to Castruccio Castracane, and Florence to the Duke of Athens. The revolution of Pisa in 1316 delivered it from Uguccione; the premature death of Castruccio in 1328 destroyed the Tuscan duchy he was building up upon the basement of Ghibellinism; while the rebellion of 1343 averted tyranny from Florence for another century.
[2] Machiavelli's Vita di Castruccio Castracane, though it is rather a historical romance than a trustworthy biography, illustrates the gradual advances made by a bold and ambitious leader from the Captaincy of the people, conferred upon him for one year, to the tyranny of his city.
[3] The Divine comedy is, under one of its aspects, the Epic of Italian tyranny, so many of its episodes are chosen from the history of the civil wars:
Chè le terre d' Italia tutte piene
Son di tiranni; ed un Marcel diventa
Ogni villan che parteggiando viene.
Those lines occur in the apostrophe to Italy (Purg. vi.) where Dante refers to the Empire, idealized by him as the supreme authority in Europe.
Meanwhile the perils to which the tyrants were exposed taught them to employ cruelty and craft in combination. From the confused and spasmodic efforts of the thirteenth century, when Captains of the people and leaders of the party seized a momentary gust of power, there arose a second sort of despotism, more cautious in its policy, more methodic in its use of means to ends, which ended by metamorphosing the Italian cities and preparing the great age of the Renaissance. It would be sentimental to utter lamentations over this change, and unphilosophical to deplore the diminution of republican liberty as an unmixed evil. The divisions of Italy and the weakness of both Papacy and Empire left no other solution of the political problem. All branches of the municipal administration, strained to the cracking-point by the tension of party conflict, were now isolated from the organism, abnormally developed, requiring the combining effort of a single thinker to reunite their scattered forces in one system or absorb them in himself. The indirect restraints which a calmer period of municipal vitality had placed upon tyrannic ambition, were removed by the leveling of classes and the presentation of an equal surface to the builder of the palace-dome of monarchy. Moreover, it must be remembered that what the Italians then understood by freedom was municipal autonomy controlled by ruling houses in the interest of the few. These considerations need not check our sympathy with Florence in the warfare she carried on against the Milanese tyrants. But they should lead us to be cautious in adopting the conclusions of Sismondi, who saw Italian greatness only in her free cities. The obliteration of the parties beneath despotism was needed, under actual conditions, for that development of arts and industry which raised Italy to a first place among civilized nations. Of the manners of the Despots, and of the demoralization they encouraged in the cities of their rule, enough will be said in the succeeding chapters, which set forth the social conditions of the Renaissance in Italy. But attention should here be called to the general character of despotic authority, and to the influence the Despots exercised for the pacification of the country. We are not justified by facts in assuming that had the free burghs continued independent, arts and literature would have risen to a greater height. Venice, in spite of an uninterrupted republican career, produced no commanding men of letters, and owed much of her splendor in the art of painting to aliens from Cadore, Castelfranco, and Verona. Genoa remained silent and irresponsive to the artistic movement of Italy until the last days of the republic, when her independence was but a shadow. Pisa, though a burgh of Tuscany, displayed no literary talent, while her architecture dates from the first period of the Commune. Siena, whose republican existence lasted longer even than that of Florence, contributed nothing of importance to Italian literature. The art of Perugia was developed during the ascendency of despotic families. The painting of the Milanese School owed its origin to Lodovico Sforza, and survived the tragic catastrophes of his capital, which suffered more than any other from the brutalities of Spaniards and Frenchmen. Next to Florence, the most brilliant centers of literary activity during the bright days of the Renaissance were princely Ferrara and royal Naples. Lastly, we might insist upon the fact that the Italian language took its first flight in the court of imperial Palermo, while republican Rome remained dumb throughout the earlier stage of Italian literary evolution. Thus the facts of the case seem to show that culture and republican independence were not so closely united in Italy as some historians would seek to make us believe. On the other hand it is impossible to prove that the despotisms of the fifteenth century were necessary to the perfecting of art and literature. All that can be safely advanced upon this subject, is that the pacification of Italy was demanded as a preliminary condition, and that this pacification came to pass through the action of the princes, checked and equilibrated by the oligarchies of Venice and Florence. It might further be urged that the Despots were in close sympathy with the masses of the people, shared their enthusiasms, and promoted their industry. When the classical revival took place at the close of the fourteenth century, they divined this movement of the Italic races to resume their past, and gave it all encouragement. To be a prince, and not to be the patron of scholarship, the pupil of humanists, and the founder of libraries, was an impossibility. In like manner they employed their wealth upon the development of arts and industries. The great age of Florentine painting is indissolubly connected with the memories of Casa Medici. Rome owes her magnificence to the despotic Popes. Even the pottery of Gubbio was a creation of the ducal house of Urbino.