The Revolt of Pisa; The Cruel Ruse of Baldaccio
This raised the public spirits; but meanwhile the whole rural population of Pisa revolted, and elected ten persons of a superior class with authority to govern and tax them for all the purposes of war, resolving to strike for Visconti while his forces were engaged in regular hostilities; besides which a strong body of rustic youth were completely armed and fought under their countryman Count Antonio da Pontedera, the most active of Visconti’s partisans. Thus in addition to foreign war an extensively organised rebellion pervaded the whole Pisan state, and these untrained clowns battled with such valour and bitterness as shows the excessive and universal detestation of Florentine rule, for no justly governed though conquered people would have fought so rancorously. “Like mad dogs, their bite is mortal,” said the men-at-arms: “we have not to grapple with village clowns, but with demons of hell.” Wherefore none of them were bold enough to meet this furious peasantry on equal terms; “unless,” says Cavalcanti, “it were those who loved rather the requiem of death than the pleasures of this world.”
Giovanni Fiesco, lord of Pontremoli, feeling the awkward position of his states, which were alternately the prey of both parties, now sold that town to Visconti; the war then became universal, malignant, destructive, and attended with far more than common horrors; there was no present mercy, and a dismal prospect for the future: famine stalked with withering footsteps over all the land; fear and suspicion lurked in every eye; and town and country, hamlet and village, castle and cottage, were promiscuously overwhelmed in one vast flood of unutterable woe.
The condition of Pisa was lamentable: Giuliano di Guccio was the Florentine captain or governor; Giuliano de’ Ricci the archbishop; both of them men of stern, determined, and implacable natures, and the city was pining from want. In this state, and probably fearful of a siege, Guccio issued a hard command, “which for him was extreme cruelty and for others tears.”
All the women, and their young and innocent children, without distinction, were sternly driven from the town and their own homes. “This unjust command was obeyed by the wretched victims, whose bitter cries drew tears of pity even from the depths of the earth. Alas, what a sight to behold these poor defenceless women and their nurslings thus cast forth: some with an infant on each arm and on the back behind, other little creatures clinging to their mothers’ skirts, naked and barefoot; and thus they hastened along tripping and weeping with the pain of their tender feet, and crying out with streaming eyes and uplifted faces, ‘Where are we going to, mother?’ and making all beholders weep to hear their sobbing voices and infantile questions, while the wretched women answered, ‘We are going where our own evil fortune and the cruelty of perverse men are sending us. O earth! Why art thou so hard-hearted as to sustain a life which compared to death is sharpness? O profound abyss, send forth thy messengers and let them drag us to thy dark recesses, for thy bowels are sweeter than honey when placed beside the bitterness of man! From some of us they have torn our husbands, from some brothers, from others fathers; and now they cast us out desolate among strange contending people, and we know not where to go! O God, provide for thy creatures and punish us according to our sins, proportion the punishment to the crime, and vouchsafe that support which will give us patience to bear this unmitigated woe.’” Uttering such lamentations they wandered towards Genoa but finally spread in all directions, and settled particularly about Porto Venere and Pontremoli.
[1431-1432 A.D.]
The archbishop also had his share of this and other cruelties of a similar nature; the times made people hard, but it becomes a priest’s duty to try and soften them rather than ride by night, as this prelate is described in the memoirs of his own family, on a powerful war-horse, armed cap-à-pie, patrolling the streets to watch over the public tranquillity; and if any wretch came under his suspicion in these nocturnal rounds a waxen taper was instantly lighted and death and confiscation of property, or else exile, submitted to his choice before it had finished burning.
But the soldiers outdid even the priests. Baldaccio d’Anghiari was one of those favourite generals of the Florentines that rendered war more terrible by his natural or acquired ferocity. “He called homicide boldness and resolution; the want of audacity he described as fearfulness at alarming and doubtful things; fidelity was in his mind to be always subservient to the cause he advocated, and sheer brutality was designated as virtuous audacity. By such maxims he was led, and led others after him with wonderful fortune to the most perilous achievements, and he often put to death the enemies of Florence with his own hand, leaving others to linger away a life which he had made worse than death itself.” This man, thus described by a contemporary, took Collegioli, and in a sally that he made from that place captured, amongst a crowd of prisoners, one named Guasparri da Lucignano, who in person exactly resembled himself; it gave rise to a strange notion which he hastened to realise thus.