A History of Florence1200–1575

JOHN M. NAJEMY

A History of Florence1200–1575

a Marina,alla memoria di Antonio,

e ai loro figli,carissimi tutti

A History of Florence1200–1575

JOHN M. NAJEMY

© 2006 by John M. Najemy

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING

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First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1 2006

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Najemy, John M., 1943–

A history of Florence 1200–1575 / John M. Najemy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1954-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4051-1954-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Florence (Italy)—History—1421–1737. 2. Florence

(Italy)—History—To 1421. I. Title.

DG737.4.N35 2006

945′.51—dc22

2005037147

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Contents

List of Illustrations viiiList of Maps ixAcknowledgments x

Introduction 1

1 The Elite Families 5Lineages 6Knighthood and Feuds 11Political Alignments and Factions 20Culture and Religion 27

2 The Popolo 35Definitions 35Guilds 39Culture and Education: Notaries 45Religion 50Critique of Elite Misrule 57

3 Early Conflicts of Elite and Popolo 63Before 1250 64Primo Popolo 66Angevin Alliance 72Priorate of the Guilds 76Second Popolo and the Ordinances of Justice 81Elite Resurgence: Black and White Guelfs 88

4 Domestic Economy and Merchant Empires to 1340 96Population: City and Contado 96Textiles, Building, and Provisioning 100Merchant Companies and the Mercanzia 109Taxation and Public Finances 118

5 The Fourteenth-Century Dialogue of Power 124Elite Dominance, 1310–40 124Crisis of the 1340s and the Third Popular Government 132Funded Public Debt and Bankruptcies 139Elite Recovery and Popular Reaction 144War against the Church 151

6 Revolution and Realignment 156Workers’ Economic Conditions 157The Ciompi Revolution 161The Last Guild Government 166Counterrevolution 171Fear of the Working Classes 176Consensus Politics 182

7 War, Territorial Expansion, and the Transformation ofPolitical Discourse 188First Visconti Wars 189Territorial Dominion: The Conquest of Pisa 194Civic Humanism 200The Civic Family 211

8 Family and State in the Age of Consensus 219The Family Imaginary 219Households, Marriage, Dowries 225Women, Property, Inheritance 232Children, Hospitals, Charity 238Policing Sodomy 244

9 Fateful Embrace: The Emergence of the Medici 250A New Style of Leadership 250Fiscal Crisis and the Catasto 254Cosimo’s Money and Friends 262Showdown 269

10 The Medici and the Ottimati: A Partnership of ConflictPart I: Cosimo and Piero 278Institutional Controls 280External Supports: Papacy and Sforza Milan 286

vi Contents

Cosimo’s Coup 291The Ottimati Challenge Piero 298

11 The Luxury Economy and Art Patronage 307Poverty and Wealth 307Public and Private Patronage 315Family Commemoration and Self-Fashioning 323

12 The Medici and the Ottimati: A Partnership of ConflictPart 2: Lorenzo 341Lorenzo’s Elders 344Lorenzo’s Volterra Massacre 348Pazzi Conspiracy and War 352The (Insecure) Prince in All but Name 361Building a Dynasty 369

13 Reinventing the Republic 375French Invasion and Expulsion of the Medici 375The Great Council 381Savonarola’s Holy Republic 390Domestic Discord and Dominion Crises 400Soderini, Machiavelli’s Militia, and Pisa 407

14 Papal Overlords 414The Cardinal and a Controversial Marriage 415Fall of the Republic and Return of the Medici 419A Regime Adrift 426Aristocratic and Popular Republicanisms 434The Nascent Principate 441

15 The Last Republic and the Medici Duchy 446Revolution 447Siege 453Imposition of a New Order 461Ducal Government 468Finances and Economy 473Courtly and Cultural Discipline 478Victor and Vanquished 482

Epilogue: Remembrance of Things Past 486

Index 491

Contents vii

Illustrations

1 Palace of the priors (Palazzo Vecchio) 882 The Cathedral–Baptistery complex 1053 Florence c.1480: The “Catena map” 1064 Porta Romana 1075 Palazzo Medici 2976 Orsanmichele 3207 Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella 3248 Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinita 3329 Palazzo Rucellai 336

10 Palazzo Strozzi 33811 Santa Maria Novella 33912 Fresco of the Siege of Florence, Palazzo Vecchio 459

Maps

1 Location of towers and/or palaces of prominent Florentine familiesin the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and major civic andecclesiastical buildings 8

2 Florence’s three circuits of walls with major churches, hospitals,and civic buildings, and family palaces built in the fifteenth century 98

3 Boundaries and principal cities and towns of the contado, district,and the grand ducal state of Tuscany in 1574 472

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to acknowledge those who made this project possible andsustained it in a variety of ways. My sincerest appreciation and warmest

thanks go to Christopher Wheeler, who invited me to write a history of Flor-ence and whose support never wavered even as it took longer to completethan either of us expected. To the National Endowment for the Humanities,which provided the means, and to Walter Kaiser, who extended the welcome,I am grateful for a year spent as visiting professor at Villa I Tatti, where, inthat most lovely of places and with the many kindnesses of the library staff,I drafted the early chapters. At Blackwell I thank Angela Cohen for her unfailingpatience and expert editorial guidance, Tessa Harvey for graciously acceptinga somewhat longer book than we had anticipated, and Louise Spencely forperceptive and judicious copy-editing. Special thanks to Greg Tremblay foragain generously sharing his expertise in computer technology in connectionwith the maps, and to Humberto DeLuigi of Art Resource for help in selectingthe illustrations. To the team of scholars who created the “Online Tratte” –the amazingly complete computerized database of Florentine officeholders –I am grateful for a remarkable resource that facilitated aspects of research thatonce required laborious compilations of lists in the archives. But so muchremains available only in Florence’s rich archival and manuscript collections,and I thank the staffs of the Archivio di Stato and Biblioteca Nazionale Centralefor efficient and friendly assistance in the many years of research on which thisbook depends.

It would be literally impossible to acknowledge every colleague and friendwho has helped with an idea, source, citation, correction, and most of allencouragement. But a few must be mentioned. I extend my sincere apprecia-

tion to Robert Black for his valuable assessment of several chapters, to CarolLansing and Christine Shaw, who read the manuscript for Blackwell and gavehelpful advice about trimming it, and to Robert Fredona for generously read-ing drafts of all the chapters and making insightful suggestions for improve-ment. They all saved me from mistakes and oversights. To Amy Bloch I owemore than I can say here, even as I offer my deepest thanks for the exquisitecare and critical judgment with which she read the entire manuscript, forindispensable help particularly with chapter 11 and with the illustrations andmaps, for wise advice about nearly every issue and problem, and for thesteadiness of her sustaining support.

I dedicate this book with gratitude and affection to the family that welcomedme to Italy long ago and has indeed been family to me all these years, andespecially to Marina whose extraordinary generosity that first year, amid manyother cares, made all the difference.

JNFlorence

November 2005

A Note on Italian Terms, Abbreviations,and Translations

For reasons of typographic clarity, frequently used words in Italian have beenleft in roman type. Most of these are the names of institutions.

The following abbreviations are used in the text:

ASI = Archivio storico italianoASF = Archivio di Stato di Firenze

Translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy are from Dante Alighieri, The DivineComedy, translated with a commentary by Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols.(Princeton, 1980).

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction

Florence might be thought, of all cities, not to need an introduction, for itslegend always precedes it: the “birthplace” of the Renaissance and the

“cradle” of modern Western Civilization. I hope that many readers will be drawnto this book out of affection for that Florence, an affection I share wheneverI take off my historian’s hat and recall the experience of being captivated,more than forty years ago, like so many others before and since, by Florence’spalaces, churches, sculptures, pictures, books, poetry, speech, and people. Whatneeds introducing here is not of course that seductive Florence, whose powercannot be denied, but rather the following chapters in which I offer an inter-pretation of nearly four centuries of Florentine history, not from the perspect-ive of the legend that makes of this city an inexplicable miracle, an enchantedland of geniuses whose achievements evoke admiration and astonishment, butessentially without history or context. Whenever I reflect that, until Brunelleschibuilt the great dome atop the cathedral, no one knew how it could be done,or that, before Dante wrote the Commedia, nothing like it had even beenattempted in European literature, I feel a sense of awe at such marvels. Butpraise is one thing, and history another, and specialists in the history ofarchitecture, sculpture, painting, and literature have long since integratedthe cultural achievements of Florence and the Renaissance into appropriatehistorical contexts.

A more troublesome effect on historical understanding (and more difficultto eradicate) is the legend’s persistent idealization of the bearers of Florentinewealth and power as enlightened patrons, promoters of culture, and exem-plars of civility. Renaissance princes and self-styled patricians were sometimesthese things, and we are not wrong to admire their role in producing the

2 Introduction

splendid culture of the age. But seen only or chiefly in this light, they becomeindistinguishable from the elegant figures in the paintings they commissioned,decorously presiding over a utopian world of order, proportion, and modera-tion, without conflict or unwelcome noises. In fact, Florence’s history wasreplete with conflicts, both within the elite class and between this class andother classes: the “popolo” that created the guild republic and challenged theelite to justify its power within a normative framework of law and politicalethics; and the artisan and laboring classes, whose exertions and skills pro-duced the material culture that ranged from prized textiles to the stones ofrich men’s homes, and who in turn challenged the popolo to allow the guildrepublic to embrace its full implications. In the course of their tense interac-tions, all three classes underwent major transformations, but none more thanthe elite of great families which experienced several metamorphoses in fourcenturies. Florence’s history and culture evolved through these conflicts andclass antagonisms, through what Machiavelli called (in the preface to hisFlorentine Histories) the “divisioni” that he believed common to all republicsbut that he saw as especially complex in Florence.

From this perspective, Florence was not unique: other Italian city-republicsfrom Padua and Bologna to Siena, Perugia, and even Rome experiencedsimilar divisions and conflicts. Florence thus shared with the rest of com-munal Italy a development that had no precedent in European history. In thethirteenth-century cities of northern and central Italy, the popolo, organizedin guilds and neighborhood military associations and imbued with notions ofcitizenship and the common good absorbed from ancient Rome, launched thefirst politically effective and ideologically sustained challenge to an elite class,a challenge that succeeded, not in displacing the elite, but in transforming it.In Florence this challenge lasted longer and had deeper effects than elsewhere.Indeed, for the first time, a European “nobility” radically revised its politics,culture, and social attitudes in response to constant pressure from anotherclass. Their dialogue of power shaped Florence’s republican experience, engen-dering a rich variety of reflections and reactions from chroniclers, writersof family memoirs, humanists, poets, and political theorists of both classes.I have tried, wherever and as far as possible, to let them speak, and becausethey wrote endlessly about politics, competitions for power, and the shape ofgovernment, there is much political history in this book. But their approach topolitics was typically through the lens of the social, and in at least two senses:through an understanding of collective interests and antagonisms involvingeconomic and fiscal issues, public order, and law; and also and equally throughan intense awareness of family solidarities, factional loyalties, ties of clientageand patronage (in the social sense), and marriage alliances. All these aspects oftheir social, economic, and cultural existence informed Florentine politics anddiscourses of politics. The interpretation offered here thus combines thematic

Introduction 3

treatments of society, economy, and culture, set in precise political contexts,with a political narrative that depends on and regularly refers to society andculture.

I have chosen chronological parameters that embrace a “long history” ofrepublican Florence, from the medieval commune dominated by feudal fam-ilies, to the emergence of the autonomous republic with its internal politicalconflicts and growing territorial dominion, to the wars and crises of the earlysixteenth century which imposed a principate under imperial tutelage that inturn refashioned Florentine society and culture. I begin in the early thirteenthcentury when the great families dominated the city center as a warrior classwith their towers and fortified enclaves, and the popolo was already con-structing the associations that produced the guild republic in the century’s lasttwo decades. By the fourteenth century Florence was a theater of triangularstruggles among an elite that had discovered a new identity as internationalmerchants and bankers, the guild-based popolo, and the working classes, mainlyin the huge textile industry, whose brief conquest of a share of power in1378–82 proved to be a transforming moment that frightened the popolo intorelinquishing its historic challenge and cooperating in regimes led by an elitethat now styled itself as a civic and patriarchal aristocracy. For the next cen-tury, elite regimes, including the unofficial rule of the Medici family, dominatedFlorentine politics and culture. Because they increasingly represented thepotential for the kind of princely order that had ended communal govern-ment in other Italian cities (and thus embodied the danger of “tyranny”), theMedici eventually alienated much of the very elite from which they emergedand were exiled and replaced by a broadly based republic in 1494. For thenext forty tumultuous years, Florence was again the scene of a triangularconflict, this time among popular republicans, elite families with their ownbrand of aristocratic republicanism, and the Medici. The last and most radi-cally popular of all Florentine republics, that of 1527–30, frightened the elite(much as the participation of the working classes in government had frightenedthe popolo 150 years earlier) into abandoning the republic and accepting,however reluctantly, the Medici principate they had resisted for decades.

It has been more than thirty-five years since Gene Brucker, teacher to us all,published the most recent English-language general introduction to Renais-sance Florence.1 It would be presumptuous folly to think of “replacing” thatwonderful and still vibrant book. Thus the intended justification of the presentwork is that it adopts a different approach in covering a longer periodand analyzing politics, society, and culture within a diachronic framework.Indeed, there has been no attempt in English at a narrative history of Florencesince Ferdinand Schevill’s treatment seventy years ago of an even longer

1 G. A. Brucker, Renaissance Florence (New York, 1969; reprint edn. Berkeley, 1983).

4 Introduction

period of the city’s history.2 Mountains of new scholarship have appearedin the last two generations, and one more justification for a book of thiskind (whether or not this one meets it) is the need for a synthesis of whathas become an entire mountain range of specialized scholarship on Florence.However, in order not to make this book longer than it already is, I have notcited everything that might deserve to be mentioned. Besides those works fromwhich I borrow specific data or whose analyses I summarize, I have restrictedbibliographical citations to particularly significant items, mentioning whereverpossible works in English together with what I consider the most importantcontributions of our European colleagues.

That there has been and continues to be so much attention to Florence isnot, as some suspect, a function of the old myths and legends. Historians aredrawn to Florence because of the unparalleled riches (and this is no myth) ofthe archival and manuscript sources that permit in-depth inquiries into moreand more varied questions than is possible anywhere else. All this scholarship,which has grown beyond the realistic possibility of both mastering the workof the past and keeping up with what emerges every month, sometimes feelsmore like an avalanche in which one can easily be buried. Trying to stay ontop of all the new work as I wrote these chapters has been a humbling andultimately futile experience. Even as I decide to close the shop and not furthertest the patience of a very patient publisher, the latest new books are onmy desk, demanding revision of this or that argument. I can only ask theirforgiveness; they will have to wait for the next history of Florence.

2 F. Schevill, History of Florence from the Founding of the City through the Renais-sance (New York, 1936), reprinted as Medieval and Renaissance Florence, 2 vols.(New York, 1963).

1

The Elite Families

From at least the early thirteenth century Florence’s history was dominatedby a competition, more intense and longer-lasting than similar confronta-

tions elsewhere in Italy, between two distinct but overlapping political culturesand classes: an elite of powerful, wealthy families of international bankers,traders, and landowners organized as agnatic lineages; and a larger commu-nity of economically more modest local merchants, artisans, and professionalgroups organized in guilds and called the popolo. Although both classesoriginated in the economic expansion and political fragmentation of Italyin the eleventh and twelfth centuries, only after about 1200 do their socialphysiognomies emerge with clarity. It is not easy, or perhaps necessary, tosay which of them took shape first. The early commune was an associationof self-selected citizens from mostly elite families that did not embrace theentire population, and the early growth of the popolo took place outside thecommune’s formal structures. When, in the early and mid-thirteenth century,the popolo began to challenge the elite and recast the commune in its ownimage, its political culture and institutions displayed strength and sophisticationsuggesting an already long development. This chapter offers a portrait of theearly elite (its family structures, modes of behavior, self-image, and culture),as the next chapter will do for the popolo. They are thus presented separatelyfor purposes of analysis, but elite and popolo in fact emerged and developedin constant dialogue and conflict.

Florentines typically called these powerful families the “grandi,” whoseliteral translation as the “great” is clumsy and potentially misleading. Since“grandi” were not a legally defined order with titles, “nobility” would be evenmore misleading, and “aristocracy,” apart from implying judgments that

6 The Elite Families

may be unwarranted, suggests long-term hegemony that cannot account forthe mobility and conflict within Florence’s volatile class structure. Thus I use“elite” as the best, but not perfect, English equivalent.

Lineages

In canto 16 of Paradiso Dante has his ancestor Cacciaguida look back withnostalgia to the great families of the smaller and allegedly more virtuousFlorence of the mid-twelfth century. Dante wrote at the height of Florentineeconomic power and demographic expansion in the early fourteenth century,and in the aftermath of one of the greatest explosions of violence perpetratedby elite factions. His purpose in fashioning the myth of an earlier, simpler,more tranquil Florence was to highlight the corruption and devastation thatgreat wealth and political rivalries had inflicted on the city.1 By contrast,Cacciaguida describes an elite still uncontaminated by either wealth or power.While this picture of early civic and moral purity is largely invented, thefamilies mentioned in Paradiso 16 are not at all fictional. But to a Florentineof Dante’s generation most of them would have seemed echoes of a verydistant past. Some were extinct and others, so Cacciaguida himself points out,were shadows of what they once were. Except for a few (Donati, Della Bella,Visdomini, Tosinghi, Lamberti, and Adimari) still politically active at the endof the thirteenth century, Cacciaguida’s families were no longer the elite ofDante’s day, most having fallen into decline by at least the middle of thethirteenth century. The list of once great families highlights the fact that, inlittle more than a century, economic growth and political turbulence hadconsigned much of the old elite to oblivion and generated a new one.

The new elite, formed in the middle of the thirteenth century, madeFlorence the economic giant of Europe and dominated the life of the republicfor the next two centuries and more. The thirteenth century was thus a crucialtime of consolidation for these emerging families and for the institutions andpractices that made them resilient and durable, above all the agnatic lineages,or patrilineal descent groups, that allowed wealthy families to preserve andshare material resources and thus encouraged cooperation among kin. Agnaticlineages were communities of kinsmen descended from a common paternalancestor.2 In practice they were also limited to the males of the patriline: thesons, nephews, grandsons, great-grandsons and so on of an ancestor recognizedas having established the family’s wealth and status. Members of a lineage

1 C. T. Davis, “Il Buon Tempo Antico,” in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society inRenaissance Florence, ed. N. Rubinstein (Evanston, 1968), pp. 45–69.2 C. Lansing, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune(Princeton, 1991), pp. 29–105.

The Elite Families 7

did not live together, although they might live near one another, sometimesin contiguous houses. Nor were lineages associations with legal standing or aformal constitution. The most direct manifestation of the concept of familyrepresented by the agnatic lineage was inheritance, normally limited to maleheirs in the male line. Cognatic kin (blood relatives on one’s mother’s side)and affinal kin (relatives through marriage) were excluded from inheritance.Women were considered members of their fathers’ lineages and were notlegally barred from inheriting; indeed, there are examples of men without sonswho bequeathed property to daughters. But most elite Florentines feared thatproperty left to daughters would eventually find its way into the patrimoniesof the families into which these daughters married, most obviously throughtheir sons who belonged to their fathers’ lineages. In lieu of a share of inheri-tance, daughters were instead provided with often quite substantial dowriesthat were essential to negotiating a prestigious marriage. Although entrustedto a woman’s husband for the lifetime of the marriage, the dowry remainedher property and could be reclaimed when her husband died.

A second feature of elite inheritance practices was partible inheritance. Pri-mogeniture was not practiced in Florence, and fathers divided their estates inequal shares among all sons (except those who became professional religious).In the case of the large urban residences (palazzi) and towers that every elitefamily possessed, and which were crucial to its prestige and political presence(see Map 1), the equally inherited shares also remained undivided joint prop-erty, which meant that no one was allowed to alienate his share without acollective decision of the co-owners. These customs reveal the central purposeof the agnatic lineage: to accumulate resources, manage them jointly, andprevent the fragmentation and dispersal of property. Not all inherited wealthwas necessarily constituted by fractions of jointly owned property, but forpalaces and towers it was a common arrangement meant to enhance the statusof kinsmen who otherwise would each have had less power than they allenjoyed as members of the lineage.

Pooling such resources within the lineage made upper-class families morevisible to friends, neighbors, and rivals and more conscious of themselvesas collectivities of interests, ambitions, and memories, even if not always inperfect harmony. Elite families began to use surnames as a sign of status.Some evolved from the given name of the lineage’s “founder,” others from thelocalities in the surrounding countryside (the contado) from which familiestypically emerged. The Abati took their name from an ancestor called Abbas(in Latin) in the late twelfth century, and the Nerli derived theirs from thenotary ser Nerlo, also of the twelfth century.3 The family of the Visdomini,who managed the estates of the Florentine bishopric during vacancies, tooktheir surname from the title attached to their role as “vice-lords” (vicedomini)

3 Ibid., pp. 40–72.

8 The Elite Families

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Map 1 Location of towers and/or palaces of prominent Florentine families inthe thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (some families had more than one toweror palace), and major civic and ecclesiastical buildings (based on the maps inG. Fanelli, Firenze [Rome and Bari, 1980, seventh edn. 2002])

The Elite Families 9

4 Ibid., pp. 65–6; G. Dameron, Episcopal Power and Florentine Society, 1000–1320(Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 64–6 and passim.

of episcopal property.4 But the surnames of most elite families were eitherpatronymics denoting a purported lineage founder (e.g., Strozzi, Alberti) ortoponyms indicating place of origin (Dell’Antella, Quaratesi). Some lineagesbecame so large after a few generations that their many branches were nolonger closely related and the original strategy of accumulating joint propertybecame impracticable across the entire lineage. There were at least 116 adultmales sharing the Bardi name in 1342, but the banking company of that namewas owned and controlled by a much smaller group of Bardi. Occasionally,branches established new lineages and their own names, but kinsmen sharinga common surname (consorterie) usually maintained a kind of loose and the-oretical solidarity for generations and even centuries. While large consorteriesometimes attempted to act in concert, or were feared for the potential powerof their numbers, it was clearly impossible for all their members to participatein joint property or business arrangements.

But even when lineages ceased to function principally as consortia for thejoint ownership of property, the social and emotional dimension of belongingto such a family was of enormous importance to elite Florentines, who tookgreat pride in having names like Uberti, Donati, Adimari, Bardi, and severaldozen others. Because of the prestige they conferred, surnames spread quicklyamong wealthy elite families, and from there to the popolo, but they werenever as common outside the elite as within. Among slightly over 2,000citizens listed as government creditors in 1345 in the quarter of Santo Spiritosouth of the Arno, only 258 (13%) had family names. The list contains fifty-

Key to map 1

Location Families2C 1. Abati4B 2. Acciaiuoli2CD 3. Adimari2B 4. Agli5–6F 5. Alberti3F 6. Albizzi3F, 4B 7. Altoviti5C 8. Amidei4B 9. Ardinghelli5B 10. Barbadori6C 11. Bardi4D 12. Baroncelli4BC 13. Buondelmonti7D 14. Canigiani3C 15. Caponsacchi7D 16. Capponi5D 17. Castellani3C 18. Cavalcanti6B, 3D 19. Cerchi1C 20. Cerretani4E 21. Covoni

Location Buildings4B 22. Davanzati3DE 23. Della Bella4D 24. Dell’Antella2C 25. Della Tosa3DE, 3G 26. Donati4–5D 27. Foraboschi5A 28. Frescobaldi2C 29. Galligai4–5C 30. Giandonati4A 31. Gianfigliazzi4–5C 32. Girolami4D 33. Giugni3D 34. Gondi6B 35. Guicciardini4CD 36. Infangati4E 37. Magalotti6B 38. Mannelli2–3C 39. Medici7E 40. Mozzi6B 41. Nerli3E, 3F 42. Pazzi

Location Families4–5F 43. Peruzzi6B 44. Pitti3D 45. Ricci5–6B 46. Ridolfi3C 47. Rondinelli6B 48. Rossi3A 49. Rucellai4E 50. Sacchetti3G 51. Salviati3B 52. Sassetti4B 53. Scali2A, 4B 54. Soldanieri4A 55. Spini3BC 56. Strozzi3BC 57. Tornaquinci2C 58. Tosinghi4D 59. Uberti2D 60. Visdomini3B 61. Vecchietti6A 62. Velluti

1–2CD A. Baptistery1–2DE B. Cathedral3E C. Badia3–4E D. Palazzo del Primo

Popolo (Bargello)4D E. Palazzo dei Priori

(Palazzo Vecchio)3DE F. Torre della Castagna4D G. Mercanzia3CD H. Orsanmichele5D I. San Pier Scheraggio4C J. Santa Cecilia1A K. Santa Maria Novella5G L. Santa Croce4A M.Santa Trinita1F N. Santa Maria Nuova3C O. Arte della Lana6–7E P. Ponte Rubaconte5BC Q. Ponte Vecchio4–5A R. Ponte Santa Trinita

Location Families

10 The Elite Families

two different surnames, but just four (Bardi, Frescobaldi, Nerli, and Rossi)account for 60% of the 258. In 1427, by contrast, 37% of all householdheads in the tax rolls had surnames, and in 1480 almost half. By the fifteenthcentury there were some 1,200 family names in Florence.5 In the thirteenthand fourteenth centuries, surnames were among the signs distinguishing elitefrom non-elite. Pride in the name and the need to preserve an exact recordof ancestors generated the idea that families had histories; genealogical recon-structions produced narratives linking the generations. An early example ofthe genre is the Cronichetta of Neri Strinati, written in 1312, and based, so hesays, in large part on the memory of family events recounted to him overmany years by various elders, especially Madonna Ciaberonta, who, havingdied in 1267 at the astonishing age of 115, was presumably able to providedetails going back to the last third of the twelfth century. For every male inthe family, Neri was interested in recording, above all, sons and property.6

The genre of the family chronicle evolved quickly in the fourteenth century,eventually producing in large numbers the ricordi and ricordanze that becameperhaps the most characteristic expression of the elite’s sense of social place.7

An illuminating example of the elite’s concern for family origins and historyis the chronicle of Donato Velluti.8 Born in 1313 and writing in the late 1360s,Velluti reveals both the typical upper-class thirst for information about originsand ancestors and the acute consciousness of how little even solidly establishedfamilies of the time actually knew about themselves before the mid-thirteenthcentury. “Because men desire to know of their birth [di sua nazione] andancestors, and how marriage alliances with other families have occurred, andhow wealth has been acquired,” Velluti begins, “I have thought to make arecord and memorial [ricordanza e memoria] of what I have heard about suchthings from my father and from family members older than myself, and ofwhat I have seen in legal documents, account books, or other writings, few asthey may be, and of what I myself have seen or experienced.” Because thewritten sources were few and mostly recent, Velluti, like Neri Strinati, relied ingreat part on the memory of family elders. He could not confirm the familylegend that the Velluti had migrated to Florence from Semifonte in the Valdelsa.The earliest documents he found concerned business dealings of his great-grandfather Bonaccorso and his three brothers in 1244. Of Bonaccorso’s

5 A. Molho, “Names, Memory, Public Identity in Late Medieval Florence,” inArt, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. G. Ciappelli and P. L. Rubin(Cambridge, 2000), pp. 237–52 (239–42).6 Lansing, Magnates, pp. 46–8.7 An overview: P. J. Jones, “Florentine Families and Florentine Diaries in the Four-teenth Century,” Papers of the British School at Rome 24 (1956): 183–205.8 Ch. M. de la Roncière, “Une famille florentine au XIVe siècle: Les Velluti,” inFamille et parenté dans l’occident médiéval, ed. G. Duby and J. Le Goff (Rome, 1977).

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father Piero and grandfather Berto he knew only their names. But aboutBonaccorso and his brothers Velluti knew that they lived together in theOltrarno, that they had a small tower whose location he specified, and thatthey were engaged in business with a shop in Borgo San Jacopo. Three ofthe brothers had children, and Donato reports their names and those of alltheir descendants. Although Velluti could not find the name of his great-grandfather’s wife, he did not ignore either the Velluti women or those whomarried into the family, regularly naming the daughters and mothers of Vellutimen. It was thus not for lack of interest or effort that he was unable to namehis paternal great-grandmother, which presumably means that Donato’sfather could not name his grandmother. Family memory was precious, nodoubt all the more because it was fleeting. Part of the problem was that,despite the desire to appear old and established, many lineages, the Vellutiincluded, were of fairly recent origin. Another problem for the preservationof memory was the length of generations in the male line. Velluti’s fatherLamberto, born in 1268, was forty-five years old when Donato was born.Donato never knew his paternal grandfather Filippo and was unsure of theyear of his death. And the portrait he gives of his great-grandfather Bonaccorsohas about it an aura of inflated legend: that he lived to the age of 120, was abold and strong warrior who fought heretics and whose body was all “stitchedtogether” from the many wounds he suffered in battles and skirmishes, andwho, after losing his sight at the age of one hundred, kept himself vigorous bywalking three to four miles every day on his balcony for another twentyyears.9 All of this could have been true, but it could also have emerged fromthe need for a heroic and virile founder of the family’s fortunes.

Knighthood and Feuds

Velluti’s comments on his great-grandfather’s physical strength and prowessin combat reflect the prominence of martial valor in the elite’s early self-image:“Very sure of himself in matters of arms, he was a great combattitore.” By thetime Velluti was writing, the great families were no longer a warrior aristocracy,and their pride in military deeds became entirely a matter of nostalgia. EvenDante in the early fourteenth century knew that he was invoking a lost pastwhen he fashioned his distant ancestor Cacciaguida as a crusading knight. Butthirteenth-century elite families, both the newer lineages and the older onesthat traced their prominence back to the twelfth century, actively cultivatedthe practice and culture of war, and most elite families counted in their ranksmany knights. Knighthood was a formal title, originally bestowed by imperial

9 La cronica domestica di messer Donato Velluti, ed. I. Del Lungo and G. Volpi(Florence, 1914), pp. 3–7, 72–3.

12 The Elite Families

authority (Cacciaguida says that the emperor Conrad “girt me with his knight-hood”), although city-state governments also created knights and expectedmilitary service from them. Trained in mounted combat and providing theirown horses and armor, knights formed the cavalry of the communal army.10

In the thirteenth century, knights performed this service themselves insteadof hiring replacements, as would happen in the fourteenth century. Becauseof the considerable cost, most knights came from elite families, and, to judgefrom their numbers, the military and cultural ethos of knighthood was univer-sal throughout the elite. The chronicler Giovanni Villani estimated that therewere 250 knights in Florence in the 1280s. But by the 1330s he could countno more than 65.11

The Florentine elite were never a professional warrior class; they were notfull-time fighters and they typically combined the ceremonial and culturaltrappings of knighthood, and occasional participation in actual warfare, withmore prosaic business careers as merchants or bankers. Even the bellicoseBonaccorso Velluti, according to his great-grandson, “was an expert in busi-ness,” in his case the business of importing cloth and having it dyed inFlorence. In keeping with Donato’s ideal portrait of him, he is of coursedescribed as a pillar of uncompromising rectitude in mercantile dealings. Butthe part-time quality of the elite’s military activities in no way lessened theirdedication to it as the most visible symbol of their status, and as one of theways in which they made themselves a distinct class and advertised theirconsciousness of the fact by putting cultural and ritual distance between them-selves and the popolo. Elite and popolo were both primarily merchants and inmany cases members of the same guilds; thus economic activities alone did notsuffice to mark the distinction between the classes. The culture of knighthoodserved this purpose well, because it carried with it the courtly ethos that linkedthe elite to the social world of the upper classes in both the Lombard princi-palities to the north and the Neapolitan kingdom to the south. It is a strikingfeature of the Florentine elite’s response to the emerging republican polity intheir own midst that they turned with greater insistence and ostentation to theemulation of a courtly culture that was imported from elsewhere.

Villani describes a two-month party, or “corte” (8.89), held in 1283 by theelite family of the Rossi and their neighbors in the parish of Santa Felicita inthe Oltrarno. The Rossi were a leading elite family and were later includedamong the politically disenfranchised magnates by the popular government,whose unfavorable view of them may have stemmed from the conviction in

10 As was true all over communal Italy: J.-C. Maire Vigueur, Cavaliers et citoyens:guerre, conflits, et société dans l’Italie communale, XIIe–XIIIe siècles (Paris, 2003).11 Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, ed. G. Porta, 3 vols. (Parma, 1990–1), vol. 3,12.94, pp. 197–8; hereafter cited by book and chapter (according to Porta’s division ofthe work into 13 rather than 12 chapters).

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1284 of one of the family’s young men for armed assault against an Oltrarnoneighbor from the Ubriachi family, also subsequently relegated to magnatestatus. The lavish “corte” of the previous year may have been just as offensiveto the republican popolo that generally detested such elite ostentation. Thefestivities opened in June for the celebration of Florence’s patron saint Johnthe Baptist and lasted throughout the summer. Villani says that a “thousandor more men” took part, all dressed in white robes and forming a “company”or “brigade” led by a “lord of Love.” The estimate may be excessive, but evenhalf that number would have been an astonishing gathering spilling out fromfamily palaces and courtyards into the narrow streets and still small publicspaces of the thirteenth-century city. Many women also took part, as thebrigade engaged in games and amusements and “dances of ladies and knights,”who paraded through the city playing musical instruments and going fromone banquet to another. Villani calls it the “most noble and renowned courtever held in Florence or Tuscany,” adding that many noble courtiers andcourt entertainers from Lombardy and all Italy came to participate. In suchfestivities the Florentine elite families loudly advertised their emulation offoreign cultural styles, the patronal and proprietary domination they exercisedwithin their parishes and neighborhoods, and the central place of knight-hood in their image of themselves as bearers of idealized notions of both loveand war.

The popolo viewed the elite’s fondness for knighthood and courtly ritualswith suspicion and hostility. One indication of this is the role assigned to thesecultural factors in the famous story of the murder in 1216 of Buondelmontede’ Buondelmonti, the event that allegedly divided the elite into warring factionsand plunged the city into the chaos of civil war. The earliest extant versionof the story is contained in an anonymous chronicle written toward the endof the century.12 If the author was not an actual partisan of the popolo, hisaccount of the already legendary event was certainly heavily influenced by itscritique of the elite’s social style. No reader of the chronicle would have failedto notice that all the major protagonists in the story belonged to families thatwere made magnates. Whatever the actual facts of the episode, this writerembellished them with an anti-aristocratic twist in which the elite’s propensityfor violence emerges from its very predilection for the courtly rituals sur-rounding knighthood. The account functions in a sense as a parable of theoriginal sin that required the popolo’s punishment of the elite.

The setting is a celebration, six miles from Florence in the village of Campi,of the knighthood of Mazzingo Tegrimi dei Mazzinghi, to which “all the bestpeople of Florence” – the city’s knightly aristocracy, all identified by thehonorific “messer” accorded to knights – “were invited.” The author calls it a

12 Cronica fiorentina compilata nel secolo XIII, in Testi fiorentini del Dugento e deiprimi del Trecento, ed. A. Schiaffini (Florence, 1954), pp. 82–150 (117–19).

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“corte,” complete with the required buffoon or jester, who, no doubt doingwhat he thought was expected of him (or what someone told him to do),approached the tables where the knights were seated and snatched up theplate of messer Uberto degli Infangati, who became intensely angry. Seeingthis, messer Oddo Arrighi dei Fifanti berated Infangati, who called Arrighia liar. The latter picked up a plate of food and shoved it in Infangati’s face.The chronicler underscores the gap between the pretensions of this self-styledaristocracy and its actual behavior: although introduced as “valorous,” OddoArrighi is described as berating Infangati “villanamente” – rudely, roughly,with overtones of boorish rusticity, and thus the opposite of the courtly valorand refinement expected of the “best people” – and escalating the confronta-tion from words to actions. The entire “corte” was now in an uproar: in theensuing fight, with tables cleared away and weapons introduced, Buondelmontede’ Buondelmonti, who had had no part in the original altercation, woundedOddo Arrighi in the arm with a knife. The chronicler says that he too did this“villanamente,” thus extending his negative judgment to both sides of theconflict and suggesting that they were all a failed would-be courtly aristocracywhose behavior more nearly resembled that of loutish peasants than that of atrue court. The wounding of Oddo Arrighi escalated and politicized the con-flict. Arrighi “held a meeting of his friends and relatives,” including the Countsof Gangalandi, and the Uberti, Lamberti, and Amidei families. In moments ofconfrontation and conflict, the account reminds us, elite families appealed totheir allies, including families with which they had established marriage alli-ances. And marriage was also their preferred solution to the conflict at hand.The assembly decided that peace could be ensured through the marriage toBuondelmonte of Arrighi’s niece, the daughter of a sister who had marriedinto the Amidei. The plan was destined to fail, and the anonymous writermocks the elite’s methods of conflict resolution by using explicitly politicallanguage for their attempt at peacemaking: the assembly convened by Arrighiis described as a “council,” and the marriage alliance as a “treaty.” Theimplication is clearly that great families were as inept at politics as they wereat courtly self-discipline.

Until the recommendation for peace through marriage, the story hasexclusively male protagonists, even as the marriage “treaty” implies the readycooperation of the women whose lives it affected. Elite honor depended ondocile women willing to be married off for political reasons. Here too thechronicler points to the gap between the elite’s pretensions and the chaoticreality of its behavior. As soon as the marriage was agreed to, MadonnaGualdrada, wife of messer Forese Donati, secretly sent for Buondelmonteand talked him out of the engagement. Once again the conflict escalates withthe introduction of another great family name. The Donati would have beenfamiliar to contemporary readers as a leading family in the factional warsaround 1300, one whose only apparent connection to the other families of the

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story is an implied familiarity with the Buondelmonti. In fact, it is not actuallythe Donati who enter the story – no Donati men play any role – but rather oneof their wives. Families that counted upon the passivity of women, so theepisode implies, in fact put women in precarious and liminal situations inwhich their loyalties and ambitions might be neither predictable nor control-lable. The intervention of Madonna Gualdrada destabilized the dubious peaceconstructed by the men. Her seduction by proxy of Buondelmonte played onhis sense of insecurity as a proud young man being pushed around by hiselders. Addressing him as a “shamed knight,” she underscores both his claimto honor as a knight and the denial to him of the full measure of that honorby the overriding needs and interests of the family as defined by its collectivefathers. Yet again the author points to an inherent contradiction in elite familystructure. Lineages presupposed a convergence of interests and outlooks amongmen, especially between fathers and sons. Yet they constantly produced cohortsof young men who had to wait too long for their share of family honor andwho were as much under the thumb of patriarchy as were the women. It isno accident that the author invents, or dramatizes, a secret entente between amarried woman and a young unmarried man as the cause of the unravelingof the plan worked out by the male elders. Madonna Gualdrada tauntsBuondelmonte by telling him he has brought shame on himself in agreeing tomarry Arrighi’s niece out of fear of the Fifanti and the Uberti, and she urgeshim to renounce the agreement and marry instead one of the Donati women,perhaps her own daughter. If he does so, she assures him, “you will always bea knight of honor.” Buondelmonte quickly agreed, the narrator says, “with-out any counsel,” and without having taken the matter, as he ought to have,to his elders. He thus broke the cardinal rule of elite lineages by acting on hisown, as a free agent, without getting advice and support from his family’sleaders and allies.

By breaking this rule Buondelmonte sealed his own fate. The next day, withcrowds gathered from both groups of families for the wedding, he failed toappear and went instead to pledge his engagement to the Donati woman. Theinsult to the Amidei and their allies might as well have been a declarationof war. An incensed Oddo Arrighi called another “council,” this time “of allhis friends and relatives,” who met in a church, presumably because of theirincreased numbers. He lamented the dishonor done to him by Buondelmonte,and from the assembled elders came a variety of recommendations: some saidthat Buondelmonte should be beaten and others that he should be wounded inthe face. But Mosca dei Lamberti warned that anyone resorting to such halfmeasures would be inviting even worse retaliation and that, this being a casein which “a thing done cannot be undone,” Buondelmonte would have to bekilled. This advice, made famous by Dante in Inferno 28 (in which he placedMosca), assumed that, whereas humiliation or injury would surely entail fur-ther acts of revenge, murder would not. The most likely explanation for such

16 The Elite Families

an apparently odd argument is that Buondelmonte had angered and alienatedhis own family by acting unilaterally. If he remained alive, his family couldnot have avoided the obligation to avenge him; but once he was killed, soMosca seems to have reasoned, his exasperated friends and relatives wouldnot have retaliated. A month and a half later on Easter morning, at the veryspot where the planned engagement was to have taken place in front of theAmidei palace, the “vendetta” was carried out. Buondelmonte, accompaniedby his new Donati bride on his wedding day, was knocked from his horse bymesser Schiatta degli Uberti (the first action in the story by anyone from thispowerful family) and killed by Oddo Arrighi himself.

According to this and other accounts, the Buondelmonti murder was thespark that ignited the war of Guelfs and Ghibellines, the great conflict thatdominated Florentine and Italian history for most of the thirteenth century.The explanations for the rivalries and antagonisms that divided Florentineelite families over many decades are certainly more complex than this tradi-tion allows. But the story’s importance lies in what it reveals of the familystructures, social conventions, and collective self-image of the elite, and also ofthe popolo’s critique of the elite. If the account is in part parody and exag-geration, it parodies and exaggerates attitudes and institutions central to thelife of these families: the expectation of family solidarity and the leadership ofthe elders; the networks of “friends and relatives” mobilized in times of crisis;the marginal position of women between their natal and marital families; thecontrol of neighborhoods and churches by families or clusters of families;coalitions of family groups in political factions with their “councils”; the roleof marriage in consolidating factions; knighthood and the emulation of thecourts; and the easy and frequent recourse to violence and vendetta. The pointof the story is surely the close and even causal connection between thesestructural features of elite family life and the constant episodes of violence andrevenge that they inflicted on the city. At every stage of the story, the elite’spreferred methods of containing violence and resolving conflicts only led tomore and more violent conflicts. The story portrays the elite, with its preten-sions to being a ruling class, as a disastrous failure that could not even controlits women and young men. Such implications were no doubt polemical andtendentious, but not entirely unfounded. The elite’s propensity for violenceand vendetta was always the popolo’s first article of indictment in its list ofgrievances against these overmighty families. Most of the thirteenth-centurydescriptions of this behavior come from chroniclers sympathetic to the popoloor from legislation passed by popular governments seeking to curb it, butfourteenth-century court records and elite memoirs confirm the picture of theelite families as a generally unruly lot, given to frequent acts of aggressionagainst their fellow citizens. Most contemporaries accepted as axiomatic thatthe greatest threat to public order came, not from the poor or the working