Cloisters of Santa Maria Novella, Florence
Innocent IV pursued his journey towards Rome; but found the capital of Christendom still less disposed than the first city of Lombardy to obey him. The Romans in 1253 called another Bolognese noble, named Brancaleone d’Andolo, to the government of their republic; and gave him, with the title of senator, almost unlimited authority. The citizens, continually alarmed by the quarrels and battles of the Roman nobles, who had converted the Colosseum, the tombs of Adrian, Augustus, and Cæcilia Metella, the arches of triumph and other monuments of ancient Rome, into so many fortresses, whence issued banditti, whom they kept in pay, to pillage passengers and peaceable merchants, demanded of the government above all things vigour and severity. They forgot the guarantee due to the accused, in their attention to those only which were required by the public peace. The senator Brancaleone, at the head of the Roman militia, successively attacked these monuments, become the retreat of robbers and assassins; he levelled to the ground the towers which surmounted them; he hanged the adventurers who defended them, with their commanders the nobles, at the palace windows of the latter; and thus established by terror security in the streets of Rome. He hardly showed more respect to Innocent than to the Roman nobility. The pope, in order to be at a distance from him, had transferred his court to Assisi. Brancaleone sent him word that it was not decorous in a pope to be wandering like a vagabond from city to city; and that, if he did not immediately return to the capital of Christendom of which he was the bishop, the Romans, with their senator at their head, would march to Assisi and send him out of it by setting fire to the town.
Thus, although the power of kings had given way to that of the people, liberty was in general ill understood and insecure. The passions were impetuous; a certain point of honour was attached to violence; the nobles believed they gave proof of independence by rapine and outrage; and the friends of order believed they had attained the highest purpose of government, when they made such audacious disturbers tremble. The turbulence and number of the noble criminals, the support which their crimes found in a false point of honour, form an excuse for the judicial institutions of the Italian republics, which were all more calculated to strike terror into criminals too daring to conceal themselves, than to protect the accused against the unjust suspicion of secret crimes. Order could be maintained only by an iron hand; but this iron hand soon crushed liberty. Nevertheless, among the Italian cities there was one which above all others seemed to think of justice more than of peace, and of the security of the citizen more than of the punishment of the guilty. It was Florence; its judicial institutions are, indeed, far from meriting to be held up as models; but they were the first in Italy which offered any guarantee to the citizen; because Florence was the city where the love of liberty was the most general and the most constant in every class; where the cultivation of the understanding was carried farthest; and where enlightenment of mind soonest appeared in the improvement of the laws.
FLORENTINE AFFAIRS; THE GUELFS RECALLED
[1250-1260 A.D.]
The Ghibelline nobles had taken possession of the sovereignty of Florence with the help of the king of Antioch, two years before the death of his father, Frederick II; but their power soon became insupportable to the free and proud citizens of that republic, who had already become wealthy by commerce and who reckoned amongst them some distinguished literary men, such as Brunetto Latini, and Guido Cavalcanti, without having lost simplicity of manners, their sobriety of habits, or their bodily vigour.
Frederick II still lived, when by a unanimous insurrection, on the 20th of October, 1250, they set themselves free. All the citizens assembled at the same moment in the square of Santa Croce; they divided themselves into fifty groups, of which each group chose a captain and thus formed companies of militia: a council of these officers was the first-born authority of this newly revived republic. The podesta by his severity and partiality had rendered himself universally detested: they deposed him, and supplied his place by another judge, under the name of captain of the people, but soon afterwards decreed that the podesta and the captain should each have an independent tribunal, in order that they should exercise upon each other a mutual control; at the same time, they determined that both should be subordinate to the supreme magistracy of the republic, which was charged with the administration, but divested of the judicial power. They decreed that this magistracy, which they called the signoria, should be always present, always assembled in the palace of the republic, ever ready to control the podesta or the captain, to whom they had been obliged to delegate so much power. The town was divided into six parts, each sestier, as it was called, named two anziani. These twelve magistrates ate together, slept at the public palace, and could never go out but together; their function lasted only two months. Twelve others, elected by the people, succeeded them; and the republic was so rich in good citizens, and in men worthy of its confidence, that this rapid succession of anziani did not exhaust their number. The Florentine militia at the same time attacked and demolished all the towers which served as a refuge to the nobles, in order that all should henceforth be forced to submit to the common law.
The new signoria was hardly informed of the death of Frederick, when by a decree of the 7th of January, 1251, they recalled all the Guelf exiles to Florence. They henceforth laboured to give that party the preponderance throughout Tuscany. They declared war against the neighbouring cities of Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, and Volterra; not to subjugate them, or to impose hard conditions, but to force them to rally round the party which they considered that of the church and of liberty. The year 1254, when the Florentines were commanded by their podesta, Guiscardo Pietra Santa, a Milanese, is distinguished in their history by the name of the “Year of Victories.” They took the two cities of Pistoia and Volterra; they forced those of Pisa and Siena to sign a peace favourable to the Guelf party; they refused to profit by a treason which had given them possession of the citadel of Arezzo and they restored it to the Aretini; lastly, they built in the Lunigiana, beyond the territory of Lucca, a fortress destined to shut the entry of Tuscany on the Ligurian side, which in memory of their podesta bears to this day the name of Pietra Santa. The signoria also showed themselves worthy to be the governors of a city renowned for commerce, the arts, and liberty. The whole monetary system of Europe was at this period abandoned to the depredations of sovereigns who continually varied the title and weight of coins—sometimes to defraud their creditors, at other times to force their debtors to pay more than they had received, or the tax-payers more than was due. During 150 years more the kings of France violated their faith with the public, making annually with the utmost effrontery some important change in the coins. But the republic of Florence, in the year 1252, coined its golden florin, of twenty-four carats fine, and of the weight of one drachma. It placed the value under the guarantee of publicity and of commercial good faith; and that coin remained unaltered as the standard for all other values as long as the republic itself endured.