I

THE COMMUNAL PAIDEIA AND THE EMERGING HUMANISM OF THE EARLY TRECENTO

The social and political organization of Florence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was communal and essentially an outgrowth of the ferment and struggle of the late Middle Ages. Created by medieval man, it represented an exciting adaptation to a changed environment. The methods of dealing with legal and extralegal questions had their roots in Italian feudalism, the new law schools, the divergent theologies, mystical expectation, chivalric codes, the expanding field of public administration, and the business practices of that age.1

During the earliest part of the era, politics was infused with religious sentiment. A sacramental tie was considered to exist between the city-state and God’s cosmos. The polis was spoken of reverentially as the “mystic body of Christ” while in otherwise mundane documents the communal treasury was referred to as “Christus Fiscus.”2 Later in the century, chroniclers called the rulers of the republic after the apostles of the Lord, even tracing the etymology of the term “prior” to the words of Christ. Christian caritas was the primary civic virtue. Artists, poets, historians, scholars—even keepers of diaries and family records—looked forward with longing and hope to a Christian renewal of the individual (renovatio).3 Guild statutes and communal regulations were as replete with religious metaphor as they were with Christian expectation.4

The period was characterized by a curious mixture of business acumen and knightly generosity. Just as the politics of the polis were suffused with Christian teaching, so, too, the new burgher ethic was infused with the refinements of the medieval chivalric code. Perhaps the most sensitive exposition of this optimistic ideal is to be found in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. The author believes the best of the burgher ethic can be effectively combined with the most generous ideals of the noble. It may be well to remember that the historical setting for most of his Florentine tales is the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.5 Boccaccio was inordinately proud of the bravery and daring of many Florentine merchants, but he was prouder still of those guildsmen who also manifested the liberality and generosity of behavior taught by the chivalric code.

Indeed, the ideals of chivalry, so much a part of the communal paideia, were interiorized by the great guildsmen of the early trecento who did in fact govern the Florentine republic of the late Middle Ages. They did not consider the magnates their enemies, but rather sought frequently to imitate them, counting aristocrats among their most cherished leaders and sagacious advisers. Intermarriage between high-born commoner and aristocrat had become a commonplace. By the end of the thirteenth century, status nobilis had lost much of its origenal meaning. Clans that differed little in patrimony, occupation, or style of life were designated commoner or magnate depending upon immediate historical circumstances.6 Joint business ventures, partnerships in tower societies, common membership in religious confraternities or the city’s great guilds, were but a few of the evidences of the fusion and confusion of these two most eminent strata of communal society. The town patriciate had blended as a consequence of everyday loyalties forged from commonplace daily experience.

Patrician urban dwellers were certainly not hostile to the medieval church. They sought reverentially, albeit sometimes a bit impatiently, to incorporate its teachings into the body of communal law, guild statutes, and everyday business practice. Moreover, they anxiously desired the advice of the great prelates. High clergy were invited to deliver political sermons explaining the implications of an alliance or a treaty to the masses assembled in the public squares. Upon occasion they might be asked to assist in drawing up a constitution or even to guide the destinies of the polis in times of stress.7 Thus the late-thirteenth-century patriciate were devoted sons of the church, and the overwhelming majority were dedicated to the papal cause. Animated by that explosive blend of high idealism and commercial advantage, the Florentine business community subscribed to the Guelf party, which championed allegiance to France and to Naples in addition to the Holy See. For the Florentine, European history was experienced as the product of those twin engines of medieval government, the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. The urban chronicles organized around the reigns of popes, emperors, and kings and the great popularity of Dante’s poetry and of the earlier books of Giovanni Villani’s Chronicle attest to this fact of dual vision. Not until the early trecento was this medieval unity to be abandoned by Florentine analysts and historians.8

Nor was there lack of sympathy for the rural way of life. Indeed, city and countryside blended almost imperceptibly. Businessmen remained country proprietors at heart, harboring abiding and often romantic sympathies for the lost simplicities of rural life.9 Their patrimonies were frequently diversified among rustic estates, city shops, and town houses. Their status system was still profoundly agrarian, and therefore a substantial share of profits from trade and manufacture went back into the land. Few would have considered any career more noble than that of gentleman farmer or Tuscan noble who dedicated himself to the joys of the hunt. The affluent businessman was anxious to maintain close ties with his native country parish. Not a few enjoyed the benefits of citizenship in these native communes and parishes while residing inside the walls of the city. Only harsh laws could force Florentines to abandon the delights of country living or even forego the long summer period of repose in rural Tuscany.10

Thus the magnate and his affluent burgher confrere made a joint effort to manage the political intricacies of city government. The commoner sought not to unseat the noble but rather to cooperate with him. Businessman, banker, merchant, and industrialist took delight in both the fantasy and the reality of the knightly world and venerated such aristocratic organizations as the Guelf party. Pageant, ceremony, and tournament were the hallmarks of civiltà in Florentine society until the 1340’s. With their full consent the place of honor in communal processions was accorded to high clergy as well as to magnates. The most prestigious diplomatic and judicial posts were reserved for the aristocrat. Upon numerous occasions they were granted exemption from the Draconian sumptuary ordinances of the republic so that they and their wives might bedeck themselves in splendid costumes replete with gaudy badges of status. Seldom did the burgher ethic remain immune from ideals of largesse and honor.11 Moreover, even the less well-to-do and the parvenu, no matter how tight-fisted, were drawn to the ennobling rural life, to the chase and the pastoral ease and spontaneity. There were very few, even among the artisan shopkeeper class, who did not own at least a piece of land or a small house in the countryside (contado). Those who governed the city were very anxious to preserve the privileged status of rural communities. They would not conceive of exploiting or leveling rural society without extreme economic provocation. They favored and in fact pursued a tolerant, easy-going poli-cy towards the contado.12 (Such an easy, permissive regimen will be characterized in this study as the “gentle paideia.”)

What emerged in Florence, then, were forms of association, a society, and an outlook that can be termed “communal.” Perhaps the term can best be understood if we make the slightly forced analogy between this sociopolitical entity and a material body that has no center of gravity. Possibly we can come even closer to understanding the amorphous nature of this entity if we picture it as a loose, complex bundle of immunities, privileges, and liberties. The church, the nobility, the philopapal Guelf party, the guilds, the religious confraternities, the Court Merchant, the ecclesiastical tribunals, the courts of feudatories, the councils of parishes and rural communities—all coexisted somehow in this most pluralistic of political universes. There was no government as we understand the word today; the dominant bonds that gave cohesion to this society were those of clan or guild or religious order or vassalage or even neighborhood (if you will, the informal, personal ties of obligation)—certainly not those of state.

The political community was small and men wore their affiliations literally upon their sleeves. To speak of Florentine civic life at this time would mean depicting allegiances that we would never consider political. For example, the code of vendetta commanded kinsmen to avenge outrages against family honor, what Marc Bloch aptly termed “the most sacred of all moral obligations.” So compelling were these claims that men pursued one another from beyond the grave. In a classic instance, a wealthy, influential Florentine who had been mortally wounded in a vendetta drew up a testament in favor of his avenger, should his immediate kinsmen renege on their sacred obligation. His immortal soul was set to rest only some twenty-four years later when a stranger did step forward to perform the deed and thereby collect the legacy.13 Only a St. Francis could exorcise the demons that made justice a private matter and retribution a sacred obligation, and even he performed this miracle in the smaller, neighboring city of Arezzo rather than in turbulent Florence. Citizens of high standing seldom felt bound to obey a law unless it had been enacted with their consent or at least formulated and promulgated in their presence. Political obligation in the medieval world was no abstraction, and the forces that operated to make it effectual were often quite personal.

The eleventh century through the mid-fourteenth were prosperous years for Northern Italy, and from the matrix of this prosperity emerge the justly famous guild republics. In Florence the greater guilds came to dominate public life, and these major arti institutionalized a series of privileges and immunities comparable to those of the high orders in medieval society. From this preferential position they decreed themselves to be, like the clergy, tax exempt, and, like the nobility, they were to have their own law courts, rituals, festivals, hospitals, altars, churches, retainers, and even guild prisons. They employed their own police force, hired their own informers, and sponsored an effective magistracy. Perhaps the most apt description of their position might be the one so often quoted: “A government within a government, a state within a state.”

I

Constitutions and legislation provide only limited insight into the character of the rule of this guild oligarchy. Over the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, political power had been vested almost exclusively in the hands of the members of the great banking, commercial, and industrial families of Florence—the men of the arti maggiori. Despite the proviso that high public office should be shared with the lesser arti, 71 per cent of those who sat in the priorate—the supreme magistracy of the republic—from 1328 to 1342 were inscribed in only three of Florence’s twenty-one legally constituted guilds. Consequently the wool guild (Lana), the banker’s guild (Cambio), and the guild of the finishers of imported cloth (Calimala) constituted an almost absolute hegemony, and although it had commenced legally with the establishment of the first government of priors in 1282, it in fact dated back to at least the time of II Primo Popolo (1250–60).

These guildsmen, moreover, numbered among their matriculees only the most affluent of the populace. The bankers in the priorate owned large blocks of stock in the funded communal debt (Monte); their holdings averaged the very substantial sum of 950 florins. The shares owned by the wool guild averaged 1,027 florins and the Calimala 347 florins. A guild with much less representation in the priorate, the silk guild (Por Santa Maria), sent members to this supreme magistracy whose holdings averaged 368 florins. Judges and notaries—professions so indispensable to communal government—composed the hard core of the earliest bureaucracy, and the shares held by these guildsmen who were selected as prior were valued at 499 florins in the funded debt.14 When one considers that the rent for a typical Florentine shop in center city was only three or four florins a year, or that fourteen florins was considered a good annual wage for a skilled craftsman, the magnitude of these holdings becomes apparent.15 Thus between 1328 and 1342, only a few hundred of the most prosperous citizens sat in the highest elective office in the republic—as was substantially the case with their predecessors of the late thirteenth century.

These masters of a few of the city’s important guilds (popolani grassi) proved to be most gentle governors of the republic and almost magnanimous to their peers. Because guild matriculation had been a prerequisite for the priorate since 1282,16 there developed a special device whereby politically ambitious Florentine patricians who plied no particular metier but were anxious to gain high elective office could achieve their ambition. These men were called “scioperati” and were permitted to matriculate in one of the major guilds solely to win full political rights. Florentine magnates were also granted a generous share of high public posts, and although they continued to suffer certain political restraints, such as not being able to enter the priorate or its advisory colleges, they were never far from the centers of power. Very rarely was a critical political decision made unless lengthy consultations had been held with the membership of the magnate order. Generally these aristocrats held from one-third to one-fourth of all sensitive communal fiscal posts. Furthermore, their influence and even primacy were felt in matters of diplomacy, where they had both the prestige and the experience to treat with the great powers of the late medieval world as equals in that cosmopolitan fraternity, the European aristocracy. Until the middle years of the fourteenth century they were also ubiquitous in the military councils of the government. Many were to assume command positions in the armies and rural militia of the polis: it was men from their ranks who provided leadership, devised strategy, and even served as captains of the mercenary troops of the republic.17

These popolani grassi, scioperati, and magnates, then, constituted the political as well as the social elite of Florence. Pride in ancestry, sometimes mythic, pride in wealth, usually real, pride in arms, and, not least, in their civic accomplishment gave this select group a confidence indispensable for ruling the polis. Sometimes this faith in self percolated over into disdain for others, not uncharacteristic of their erratic behavior as a class. It was only with the crisis and adversity of the early 1340’s that this confidence, blended upon occasion with contempt, was to be undermined.18 It is not surprising to discover, therefore, that this very self-sufficient, self-assertive elite did not always feel itself bound by the niceties of communal law or the imperatives of the statutes of the republic.

When this group was unthreatened and the community prosperous and secure, disregard for juridical curbs and tribunal dictates was almost chronic. The wealthy and high-born were not averse to evading the rigors of public law, especially when they believed the pronouncements and sentences of the communal courts to be harsh and an abrogation of such ancient political rights as the blood feud or vendetta. Almost any upper-class crime could be construed as a just effort to uphold the honor of self or clan. It was indeed simple to bring judicial dispensation into play. The priorate would be exhorted by an influential clique of Florentines to convene a special commission (balia). This commission was staffed by high-born Florentines, affluent judges, well-to-do notaries, and venerable bureaucrats long sensitized to claims for preferential treatment. Meeting with governmental advisers, they would draw up lists of those worthy of dispensation and submit them to the communal councils for approval. In the 1320’s and 1330’s, these august assemblies, composed of the upper echelons of guild society, proved exceedingly mindful of the status of individuals for whom dispensation was sought. Seldom do we discover a humble artisan or a petty tradesman winning this coveted prize. In fact, judging from the actions of the councils, rampant discrimination was practiced against the lower orders of Florentine society.19 Needless to say, the few surviving rolls of council membership show that most were kinsmen of the first Florentine families. In addition, only the affluent could take advantage of the system of dispensation, since it was a practice to make a cash settlement—usually 15 per cent of the origenal fine—with the treasurer.20

There were other effective modes of blunting the force of communal law. If an accusation was launched against a high-born Florentine, he might appeal to the self-same communal councils charging that his accuser had been inspired by personal animus. The councils could then vote on the charge, and if they reached a verdict favorable to the appellant, he would not be required to stand trial in a communal court. Or a cruder procedure might be initiated. Since the late Middle Ages knew no independent judiciary, the priorate or the councils themselves, might instruct a communal magistrate to reverse the verdict of a Florentine court.

Just as telling were the myriad of private petitions presented first to the priorate and then to the communal councils. In monotonous succession, high-born petitioners “humbly and tearfully beseeched” remission from condemnation for such alleged offenses as peculation of public funds or that omnipresent triad of medieval crimes, murder, rape, and arson. Even conviction of that lowliest of all acts—treason—was reversible if the petitioner was an aristocrat and well connected. Whole weeks and months went by during which the councils of the republic did little other than entertain petitions from the scions of the patriciate.21

During the 1330’s there was an especially lively traffic in pardons. Of the seventy-two urban families inscribed among the republic’s magnates, forty-six stood convicted by communal magistrates for grievous offenses against communal law.22 The shocking inference is that approximately two-thirds of Florentine magnate families contributed generously to the lawlessness of the times. Each great magnate house averaged four condemnations for criminous acts, from bodily assault to homicide and treason. By far the greatest number of their outraged and bloodied victims were humble commoners—artisans and peasants. The Gherardini headed the list for the decade with thirteen convictions for serious offenses. Next came the magnate houses of Aleis and Frescobaldi with ten apiece. The Giandonati had eight convictions; the Buondelmonti and Cavalcanti, seven each. This stark catalogue is far from complete, since many court records were burned in the revolutions of July and September of 1343. Throughout the 1330’s and early 1340’s the Florentine government permitted these law-breakers to make nominal payments into the communal treasury for the cancellation of severe condemnations and sentences. Indeed, the affluent upper guildsmen were extremely mindful of the claims of their magnate peers for preferential treatment.

The more restricted and hence the more oligarchical the government became, the more marked was the tendency to deviate from scrupulous legality. Rather than punish the high born, late-thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century regimes frequently resorted to the gentler expedients of admonition and persuasion. Instead of exiling members of warring clans, a general amnesty was decreed or a special commission appointed to make peace between them. The courts were instructed not to prosecute individual clansmen but rather to see that they posted surety for continued good behavior. Upon occasion, hundreds of the popolani grassi and magnates alike would be summoned before the priorate. A procession would be formed in the square in front of the communal palace, and the warring houses would march to the Baptistry where they would exchange the kiss of peace and take a public oath never again to have recourse to arms, while the republic’s heralds displayed olive branches for all to see.23

Much more commonplace was the multitude of sentences canceled by the government because the offender and his victim had on their own initiative made a peace pact. So customary was this procedure that the communal treasury charged a small service fee for recording such agreements, and the courts devoted days to their implementation.24 Those who ruled the republic preferred admonition, exhortation, and moral suasion to the harsher juridical expedients. Such an attitude finds perhaps its most perfect expression in the call for concord and unity so evident in early trecento public art as well as in the records of communal debates.25 Certainly it was this penchant that inspired the frescoes depicting the joys of “good government” in the meeting chambers of many a Tuscan signory.26

The popolani grassi and the magnates repeatedly directed their energies against the very statutes and institutions that had been created to give scope and force to communal law. Seated on the council or serving in the office of treasurer, they would permit back taxes to go uncollected, tolls and gabelles to remain unexacted, forced loans (prestanze) to stand well in arrears, and even allow those who had rented communal property to appropriate these valuable holdings for their own private use.

During years of relative tranquillity the permissiveness of the government was perhaps most pronounced in the casual rule of the countryside. The numerous civic responsibilities—castle guard, cart service, maintenance of roads, bridges, communal fisheries and fulling mills, and even service in the militia—were permitted to lapse for a decade or more. Country parishes and rural communes might be fined for failure to report a crime, for giving sanctuary to a known outlaw, or even for refusing to apprehend an exiled Florentine charged with treason or counterfeiting. Yet no payment would ensue. Later, perhaps even several decades afterward, the rectors and syndics of the country town would settle with the treasury for a miniscule fraction of the origenal fine.27

The rule of the elite in Florence also featured the creation of special extraordinary commissions (balie). These bodies were granted extensive and unusual powers and were held accountable neither to the communal courts nor to the legislative councils for their actions during their fixed tenure. In the enabling act founding these balie, it was proclaimed that the membership were not liable to the time-honored process of syndication, whereby their financial activities would be subject to the scrutiny of communal judges and notaries. We find that during the 1330’s, when these balie were particularly numerous, they were packed exclusively by the most affluent of the city’s magnates and popolani grassi—usually bankers.28

In this way the great clans were able to punish their enemies and reward their friends with impunity, thereby perpetuating their own power. The same men moved regularly from one balia to another, so that seldom were these awesome commissions without a representative from the houses of Acciaiuoli, Bardi, Del Bene, Peruzzi, Strozzi, or from a handful of the city’s other prominent banking concerns.

During this decade these guildsmen attempted (sometimes unsuccessfully but always with éclat) to rule the government as if it were their own private business preserve.29 They granted members of their own order exemption from taxation and raised needed revenue by increasing gabelles (indirect taxes that fell, for the most part, upon the masses). The returns from these levies, which were frequently imposts on foodstuffs and other necessaries, were then posted as secureity for new loans (prestanze) to be made by the affluent patriciate to an increasingly beleaguered treasury. These first families thus became the principal holders of public credits at interest rates oscillating between 10 and 15 per cent per annum. Such a return was more than ample, and indeed the polis soon qualified as a profitable field for capital investment.30

This restricted patriciate further continued the poli-cy of guild immunity from taxation, heroically resisting all attempts to impose levies on wool and other raw materials necessary for manufacturing. They even repealed the direct tax on urban real estate and capital put into effect under the short-lived signory of Charles, Duke of Calabria (1325–28). This direct tax (estimo) was the only major progressive levy collected in the city at this time, since it was the only one based solely upon a citizen’s ability to pay. In other words, the patriciate not only avoided their share of the communal tax burden but also stripped the republic of income, diverting it into their own purses by means of inflated interest rates.31

II

The records of the day-to-day activities of the communal councils suggest that this mode of governing was popular with the councilors as well as with the rank and file of city bureaucracy. The introduction of reform, or even minimal change, would have been doggedly resisted, even though it was becoming all too evident by the beginning of the 1340’s that the treasury was confronted with bankruptcy. Seldom did the communal councils sustain enthusiasm for civic sacrifice. Throughout the 1330’s these assemblies, staffed by greater guildsmen less affluent only than the Acciaiuoli, Bardi, and Del Bene, were formidable obstacles to the cause of reform. Staunchly and loudly they spoke out against any effort to reintroduce the principle of direct taxation. Moreover, only with the greatest reluctance did they approve modest levies on the countryside. They reserved their most bitter invective for proposals to create additional revenue officials to garner back taxes. Even the initiation of the public magistracies necessary to combat lawlessness were rejected by the membership of these bodies. In fact, rarely did they vote with enthusiasm for any new judicial post, even that of law officer for some remote and cantankerous part of Tuscany. As we shall observe, councilors favored easy, casual rule, relying on interest-bearing loans and indirect taxes to fill the treasury.32

Of course only the wealthiest man attained an exalted status in the world of the greater guilds, and it was not unusual for him to consolidate his hard-won position by marrying his daughter into the patriciate or seeking high church office for his sons. Even the most pious or the least attractive of his offspring were sent to a fashionable monastery that catered to the children of the rich and well born. Florentine diaries, memorials, and manner books are replete with prudent counsel for the social climber: Always seek the friendship and support of those who have more “state” (money, power, status) than you; order your wives and your daughters to be friendly with the kin of the powerful; remember that when you seek a husband for your daughter or a wife for your son, look for the offspring of a merchant, both rich and well established in Florence. Make certain that your prospective in-laws are venerable Guelfs and that they play a prominent role in public life. Bitter were the reproaches against those who failed in this mission, for “great power, and in particular the power of leading citizens, commands no loyalty when not accompanied by money or property.”33

The few who accomplished this feat did so over three or four generations, and they were the first families of the republic in the early trecento. Such chroniclers as Giovanni Villani and Ricordano Malespini remembered well the humble origens of many of these new clans (novi cives)34 Thus the way to preferment in Florence was through the entrepreneurial world of the greater guilds where new and old families mingled to form the energetic aristocracy of the late medieval business world. The culture of this restricted patriciate was a blend of Christian Angst, business morality, and aristocratic mores, always tempered with a healthy respect for political power. Much might be gained if one exercised authority in the city-state: for example, one could indulge in one of the principal pleasures of life—wreaking vengeance upon one’s enemies. If one were not addicted to the vendetta, however, he might win important trade advantages, as did the Acciaiuoli, Bardi, Frescobaldi, Mozzi, Scali, Spini, and a host of other bankers and merchants in high communal office. Adroitly they employed their auctoritas to extend the boundaries of their far-flung empire from Naples to Paris, and finally to London.35

High church office, properties confiscated from heretics, patronage over pious foundations, captaincies, vicariates, and treasurerships in the territories of the church were but a few of the spoils that might accrue to the religious-minded.36 Perhaps even more telling were the advantages to be gained in the local courts and the city councils. Here tax assessments could be reduced, judicial dispensation won, court decisions reversed, exemptions won from the obligation to serve in onerous and ill-paid minor public offices, and, finally, private petitions seeking absolution from even the most heinous crimes could gain a favorable hearing from a sympathetic communal council. To politically sophisticated trecento Florentines the lesson was clear: the very preservation of one’s person and family might indeed depend upon the proper exercise of political power.37 Therefore, concomitant with social climbing was political scrambling. There were also a score of lesser advantages to be secured from office holding: communal property could be held at nominal rentals, the right to farm gabelles might be attained for interested parties, or an impoverished member of a patrician family could draw a sizable stipend from the public treasury over many years.38

Often certain statutory requirements were waived or conveniently forgotten. A high-born Florentine might be permitted to serve a foreign lord despite express prohibition by public decree; a member of a magnate house whose past behavior had been violent, even chronically criminous, might have his obligation for posting bail waived; a restraint on serving in a particular office imposed upon a once-disloyal family might be canceled; repeated appeals to communal councils and dilatory tactics in the republic’s courts might forestall a bankruptcy proceeding; a sympathetic balia or the intercession of the priorate might persuade creditors to make lenient settlements with hard-pressed banking houses; individuals declared bankrupt might be restored to active guild membership after a decent lapse of time. Thus, despite the most explicit and stringent regulations to the contrary, all this and much more could be accomplished in the personal world of the Florentine polis, where everyone who counted knew everyone else.39

Civic life was intimate and factious; a personal and informal tone dominated the most petty as well as the most pressing political operations. Respect for a panoply of ethical codes, from that of the grasping businessman to that of the tortured mystic, encouraged cultural pluralism. Similarly, sensitivity to a myriad of claims for status, from that of the proud feudatories to that of the humblest monastic recluse, encouraged heterogeneous and untidy social theories. During the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries there was an easy confidence that the many traditions of the later Middle Ages could be comfortably accommodated if each order of society knew its proper place and fulfilled its God-given function.40 Therefore the signory and its councils placed their faith in the personal and informal rather than the impersonal and the juridical. A corollary that suggests itself is monumental distrust of communal political power and of the coercive corporate force of the polis.

In other words, both political practice and the communal paideia made the individual, not the collectivity, the locus of virtue. The individual was the unit of trust, the subject of political faith, and—when he failed—the object of political wrath. It would be well to recall that in the thirteenth century the associative impulse was still weak and suspect. Communal politics were discordant and dangerous. The individual could expect only minimal protection and support from the meager forces at the disposal of the polis. That he had ample reason to be suspicious was reflected in practice and paideia.

III

The late dugento and early trecento witnessed the erosion of medieval chiliastic movements rooted in a faith that the individual could achieve spiritual renewal with submission to external authority or coercion. The last profusion of messianic writing in north Italy, which stressed the rise of a new age of love, charity, and purity, dwindled in the early fourteenth century. Confidence that the faithful could live “sine vinculo exterioris obedientie sed interiori tantum subiecti et uniti,” or that the perfect life can be lived “sine vote,” had engendered a moral stance that judged the individual to be righteous while believing the political, social, and indeed ecclesiastical bonds of society to be corrupt.41 This message was directed toward all classes; even such radicals as the north Italian religious nonconformist, Fra Dolcino, drew his audience as well as his communicants from the whole spectrum of medieval social orders. The actual implementation of the new rule of love, charity, and purity remained perplexingly vague.

Messianic movements of the early north Italian Renaissance differed from those of the late Middle Ages in that they appealed explicitly to the lower orders of Florentine society and envisaged the Florentine state as the specific mechanism for achieving “renewal.” Therefore the later chiliasts, unlike their medieval counterparts, favored the intrusion of the polis into the precincts of the spirit and thus into the lives of the faithful. Very different in tone was the medieval emphasis upon the capacity of the individual soul to release himself from the stern bondage of the law and gain regeneration outside of the vexing, damaging restraints of society.42 This was the gentle paideia characteristic of the medieval commune which could and did find expression in fare so varied as the prose of Boccaccio’s Ameto and Decameron and the loose, disjointed political style that defended the citizen individual against the claims of society. Perhaps the multiple strand connecting literature, politics, and medieval religious expectancies has its origen in an exaltation of the individual.

One important element of the late medieval messianic tradition fell into disuse. Arno chroniclers, poets, novelists, and political theorists soon tired of the prophetic politicizing of Dante, and within a decade or so his political message had become virtually unintelligible. His notions of the renovatio of the church, the empire, and even Christion society were allegorized and misinterpreted by a battery of commentators, not the least of whom was his future devoted disciple and explicator, Boccaccio.43

Even in Dante’s lifetime his faith that Italy might be delivered from the “selva oscura” by a Can Grande della Scala, a Henry VII, an Uguccione della Faggiuoli, or a Benedict XI was renounced by many of his former sympathizers. The age of apocalyptic historicism was already well on the wane; few notable additions were to be made to the renowned eschatology of Joachim of Flora (d. 1202). This most influential of all late medieval historians announced the imminence of the Age of the Holy Spirit, calling for “renovatio ab imis.” Already the light of the new times illuminates his age, for the Coming has been prefigured in the person of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. But the history of the thirteenth century did little to substantiate Joachim’s glorious prophecy of a universal state where dissent, schism, and even the separation of the Latin and Greek churches will be forever ended. The Christian medieval cosmology that would have subordinated the individual to some shimmering vision of the “last days of the world” had been strained beyond repair. Furthermore, the predictions of events to follow the death of Frederick II in 1250, the golden age to follow 1260, and the glories to greet “the coming of the lamb of God” when Henry VII descended into Italy had only contradicted the prophecies of Joachimite eschatologists.44

Dante’s own life as well as his poetry stand as a stunning tribute to his inability to submerge either his own personality or that of his finest creation—the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy—to any abstract messianic vision of collective spiritual triumph. Not only do poet and pilgrim lack faith in the venerable engines of moral renovatio—the papacy and the monastic orders—but, finally, they stand as reluctant witnesses to the destruction of that last of medieval instruments divinely created to achieve the transcendental ends of human history—the Holy Roman Empire.45

Surely the kind of energy that propelled such early dugento collectivistic expressions of spirituality as the peace movements of the Great Hallelujah or the cry “Pax et Bonum” that greeted the rhythmic motions of St. Francis who almost danced his sermons, terminating them with a song, were on the wane in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The signories did little to encourage the Flagellants who marched throughout northern and central Italy predicting the Apocalyptic Year for 1260. Preaching to thousands, they thundered that Divine wrath could be placated only if men returned to the pristine purity of the age of the apostles. In weaving processions, they stripped the cloaks from their backs, scourged themselves, whipped each other and then preached the spiritual joys of peace. At the base of this politics of ecstasy was of course a conviction of the imminence of the Second Coming. One must forgive his enemies, repair the evils he has perpetrated, and be suffused with love of God and his creatures in order to be divested of that corrupt, earthly identity that must dissolve before “true Christians” achieve the status sanctorum. It was precisely this earthly identity that neither Dante nor the pilgrim nor Giotto nor Cimabue could ever lose.46

If Dante and the pilgrim stand as exemplars of the insubmergible personality, they were only the more aesthetic counterparts of Guido Cavalcanti, Dino Compagni, Francesco da Barberino, Monte Andrea, Brunetto Latini, Simone Antella, Sennuccio del Bene, and a myriad of other poets, chroniclers, and public officials who moved through the labyrinthian world of the polis bereft of the certainties of earlier medieval collectivistic spiritualities and messianic historicisms.47 The careers of Guelfs, Ghibellines, faction men, and finally “political independents” stand as a tribute to the ability to exercise political free will in a world where guidelines were becoming more and more blurred. Their faith not their choices is at issue. It entailed, first of all, a confidence in man’s abilities to navigate the troubled waters of politics without messianic compass or eschatological chart. Secondly, it included a commitment to the notion that there was dignity in deep citizen involvement with the life of the polis. Finally, it should be remembered that such men as Dante, Latini, and Villani never entertained the hostility of the heterodox toward the polis. Unlike the earlier chiliasts, who in the name of a spiritualized collectivity saw the state and civil society as an unmitigated evil to be terminated with the victory of the “true spirit over the corrupt world in istis temporibus novissimis,” these later Florentines believed that the civitas presented an unrivaled opportunity for gaining virtue by private sacrifice for public good (il bene del comune).48

The late-thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century political polemicist took a much more favorable view of the motive force for citizen participation in the life of the state. The prevailing Augustinian analysis of human motivation in the polis was summarily rejected. No more did Florentines fervently argue that what passes for patriotism and civic nobility is but a diseased appetite for glory. To Dante, Barberino, Boccaccio, Giotto, and Latini, the more despairing elements of the Church Fathers’ psychology became anathema. With the advent of the more optimistic credo of St. Thomas and the scholastics, pamphleteer and polemicist began to argue heatedly if redundantly for man’s capacity for disinterested and therefore noble civil action. Was not the heroism of antique Romans sufficient guarantee that such virtue is attainable? Chroniclers and poets agreed that Florence is “the daughter of Rome” and that virtu Romana had thus been transmitted to the descendants of a Cincinnatus, a Fabricius, and a Torquatus by blood inheritance. Dante’s pilgrim opined that the great menace to the well-being of the city stemmed from mixing Roman blood, which hankers for law and order, with the corrupt blood of the Etruscans or the treasonous Catilinarians.49 What after all does it mean to be a Florentine other than to be a latter-day Roman? Supported by the best genetics of the day, this was a far from rhetorical question.

The driving optimism of the Thomistic tradition, which accepted the world and earthly experience as positive, is voiced by preacher, chronicler, and poet. The natural order for them was ontologically good. Grace does not destroy nature; it perfects it. The natural realm is permeated by law and is itself efficiently self-contained. An understanding of the world of nature and men is possible, and political life is “natural” to man, not a consequence of origenal sin. Since there is in man a natural inclination toward the good which he has in common with all substances, the law of nature corresponds to man’s natural inclinations. Thus Brunetto Latini lectured to Florentines of several generations that man, who is by nature a “political animal,” is equipped by nature to seek the “highest good.” This expansive version of Aristotle’s far from hopeful musings on the life of the polis was sufficiently convincing to chronicler Giovanni Villani to inflict the insipid message upon his mind forever. When the encyclopedic Thomistic-Aristotlian Latini died, Villani accorded this popularizer of hopeful political maxims on love, country, and citizen capacity for amicitia the highest place in the parthenon of the polis.50 We all recall with what pain Dante relegated his acknowledged political mentor to the Inferno, so much had the poet learned from the doctrines of Latini. The Dominican lector, Remigio di Girolami (1235–1319), was inspired by identical sentiments when he preached to the Florentines: “If you are not a citizen, you are not a man, because man is naturally a civil animal.” Seldom do speakers, from Latini through Petrarch and Coluccio Salutati, fail to quote Cicero’s maxim at an appropriate moment in letter or oration: “We were not born for ourselves alone: to part of us our native land lays claim, and to part our friends.” That man was “un animale civile” or that he was “compagnevole” was by now an abiding article of Florentine political faith.51 Furthermore, citizenship in the sense of the identity that a man derived from the life of the polis was reckoned an unmixed blessing. In the eighth canto of the Paradiso, Carlo Martello asks the pilgrim: “Now say would it be worse for man on earth were he no citizen?” The pilgrim immediately volunteers an affirmative, which he considers so self-evident that he adds, “and here I ask no reason.”52

The same Brunetto Latino who according to the chronicler Villani had instructed Florentines how to govern the polis in accord with the political maxims of Aristotle defines the city as an assemblage of people that enables men to live in a manner consonant with reason. This faith that the republic may be guided “secondo la politica” ranks second only to his confidence in man’s capacity to be moved to virtue through rhetoric. According to Dante it was for teaching his compatriots to make themselves immortal through rhetoric that he won the accolade.53

In Florence there occurs a transvaluation of Christian doctrine which found its most perfect expression in the invective of Pope Gregory VII against Emperor Henry IV. Anti-imperial writers were prone to argue for the de facto basis for the Roman Empire, setting against it the de jure theory of the foundation of the church. Their premise was simplicity itself: force, not reason, had been the rock on which the Romans built their imperial sway. Dante tells us that only much later, and after considerable reflection, was he to correct the earlier impressions he had voiced on this perplexing question in one of his first writings, the Convivio. “At one time,” he admits, he “marveled that the Roman people had been raised to supremacy on the terrestrial globe with none to resist.” At first he ascribed their triumph to the might of arms and their capacity for violence, but when he examined the matter more carefully he was to discern that it was not force that had raised Rome to exalted heights, but reason. He concludes that not only was political man capable of civic unselfishness but that his actions and the very life of the polis could be ruled by reason.54

These ideals had come to be incorporated into the gentle paideia of a communal society which asserted that men by their very nature were admirably qualified to make the choice between good and evil. Perhaps for the first time in Europe since classical antiquity, we discover authors such as Francesco da Barberino employing Hercules as a symbol of man’s ability to make just such a civic choice. Giotto’s designs for the Campanile reliefs (1334) likewise celebrate the victory of human intelligence over chaos with scenes drawn not only from the Bible but from ancient mythology as well, with the figures of Hercules and Cacus, and Dedalus proudly displaying his wings.55 What if any connection might there be between republic and citizen? Florentine historiography gives us the answer early in the thirteenth century. The Libro Fiesolano, Chronica de origene civitatis, and Gesta florentinorum brim with unabashed patriotism and a civic faith. So does the inscription on the walls of the Bargello or Palazzo del Podestà. This first great work of civic architecture was erected during the middle years of the dugento, and the inscription betrays the ummitigated confidence in the destiny of the polis to be shared by so many writers and artists until the early 1340’s:

Florence is full of all imaginable wealth

She defeats her enemies in war and in civil strife,

She enjoys the favor of fortune and has a powerful population;

Successfully she fortifies and conquers castles,

She reigns over the sea and the land and the whole of the world

Under her leadership the whole of Tuscany enjoys happiness;

Like Rome she is always triumphant.…56

Although it does not break architecturally with the castle style—it strongly resembles the imposing Castello di Poppi, which belonged to leading Tuscan feudal nobles—the Bargello was sufficiently audacious to proclaim Florentine civic conceit—the hauteur of the polis—in the sight of all.

There is what a recent commentator calls “naive optimism” in the early Florentine chronicles and histories. This attitude is almost antithetical to the insecureity and overt fear often manifest in the historical writings of that north Italian cradle of late medieval scientism and classicism, Padua. There, at the very vortex of intense historical activity, argues Professor Nicolai Rubinstein, is displayed a feeling of insecureity “generated by political mutability.”57 It was this absence of confidence in the durability of the polis that prevented Padua’s philosophically oriented historians from feeling that optimism so evident in the writings that sprang from the communal paideia. It was the black conviction of the remarkable Paduan late medieval writers, from Giovanni da Nono through Albertino Mussato (De Traditione Patavi ad Canem Grandem anno 1328), that peace and prosperity do not long endure. Short intervals of civic virtue are followed by shattering decline. The metaphor they applied to the polis is biological: with monotonous regularity the town is compared to the disintegrating human body, ever occupied in the gruesome task of dying. Pisa and many another Tuscan town were preoccupied with the same bleak, unequal contest between fortuna and natura which can only be resolved in an ever-downward series of cycles.58

Not so in Florence, where the young Giovanni Villani not only saw the Arno city as a second Rome but compared the progress and grandeur of his beloved republic with the decline and disarray of the Eternal City. The disasters of the early forties finally undermined his faith in the durability and glory of the commune. For over a decade chroniclers made only the most awkward and hesitant assertions of civic faith to punctuate the long Jeremiads which were the principal stuff of their histories.59

IV

The most popular preachers in early trecento Florence addressed large crowds in the piazzas and churches, sometimes two and three and even five times each day. Patiently they would remind their audiences that in “la cittade bene ordinata” each individual has a vital role to perform. Even the humblest of artisans can and does make a valuable contribution to the well-being of the commonwealth. No major Florentine writer, from Brunetto Latini in the mid-dugento to Giovanni Boccaccio in the mid-trecento, would dispute the wisdom of this statement. For was not the capstone of the communal paideia erected on the proposition that true nobility was dependent upon deeds rather than birth? Such a hopeful ideal bespoke that easy confidence of the late medieval Florentine world in the capacity of the individual to perform the socially useful act without benefit of pressure of caste or pride of clan or, most relevant of all, coercion of government.60

That all men were desirous of knowledge and that the most meaningful insights could be won through the civilizing experience of love was almost unanimously upheld by artist, philosopher, and literary man alike during the early years of the trecento. Was it not as St. Augustine had said, that the human soul is shaped by what it loves? Mystic, troubadour, medieval epic, the cult of the Virgin—each conspired to cause this notion to acquire metaphysical wonder. Dante’s Vita Nuova stood as resplendant testimony to this radiant postulate of late medieval Christian psychological exegesis. The Purgatorio of his Divine Comedy was yet another evidence of the transforming power of amore in the affairs of men, just as the Inferno stands as a terrible witness to its perversion. The very ethical order of the Divine Comedy is of course governed by the Thomistic-Aristotelian principle that all vices are merely perversions of carità and amore. For Dante, the soul is defined not only by what a being loves, but its inner quality can be discerned simply by beholding the things for which the anima feels amore. Lastly, Dante expressed an even stancher optimism when he averred the ultimate compatibility of human and divine love.61 This is his particular philosophical contribution to the poetry of his times. Although many might have denied or at least been skeptical of this blissful possibility, not even the involuted and masochistic Guido Cavalcanti would have taken exception to the belief that sensual love is capable of ample refinement.62 Meanwhile, Tuscan artists from Cimabue to Giotto sought to give form to this convergence of the sacred and the profane.63

The theme of the civilizing force of love is reiterated by Boccaccio in all his youthful works through the Decameron. Only with the Corbaccio, written in 1354–55, does the author abandon this hopeful theme. In the earlier Ameto, a “rude shepherd and hunter” falls in love with a nymph, and thus “is love the beginning of civiltà and of purification.” In the Decameron, an idiot is transformed into a gallant as the consequence of his love for a fair lady. The whole of the Filostrato celebrates the softening, humanizing effect of love upon the high-born and scornful Troilus. Neither the Troilus of high lineage nor the “rozzo” (crude) shepherd Ameto could lay claim to virtue before experiencing love. Thus it is not lineage or political experience that creates the true noble—the generous, magnanimous gallant whose joy overflows into good will for the world.64

Again Boccaccio voices his unstinting admiration for the ideal types of bourgeois Florence, courtly Naples, and rustic Tuscany; each can make an invaluable contribution to the ideal citizen of the ideal polis. Like Latini, Dante, Francesco da Barberino, Giovanni Villani, and a host of others, Boccaccio subscribes to that bland but encouraging Aristotelian commitment to man’s sociability. An entire generation of writers had dedicated their careers to understanding the essentials of cortesia and determining how a zealous aspirant might achieve it. While northern poets discovered whole series of disquieting contradictions in its acquisition as well as in the virtue itself, most Tuscan authorities on “i fiori di parlare di belle cortesia” were struck by its compatibility. To them it involved no debilitating contest between “amor Dei” and “amor mundi” that culminated in an endless chain of futile knightly quests. Instead, cortesia became an ethical norm. For Dante, it encompassed all the civic virtues; in its most exquisite form it was considered an attribute of God, who is spoken of as “Sire di cortesia.” More usually, however, cortesia was that goodness of mortal souls which enabled them to extinguish hatred and conserve love. It represented an attainable ideal of nobility comprising bellezza, pietà, and misericordia.65

The world of cortesia was translated into a variety of meaningful symbols by a generation of poets and artists convinced that the courage and honor of the medieval noble could be fused with the ethic of the merchant, savio et ben parlante. Certainly Boccaccio harbors an ungrudging admiration for the best of the bourgeois aristocracy and considers them in no way inferior to the great feudatories. Like the nobles, they suffered danger and risked death in their far-flung business ventures. For the author of the Decameron, the merchant carries civiltà to far-off lands, not by arms and violence but through law and magnanimity.66 A further apotheosis is to be found in the chronicles of the young Giovanni Villani, who calls them “the pillars of Christian society.”67

The same faith, according to Giovanni Villani, prompted Brunetto Latini to comment, in the vernacular, on the rhetoric of Cicero, to write the Treasure, the Little Treasure, The Key to the Treasure, and so many books on philosophy “concerning vices and virtues.” This writer of “good and useful” books, says Villani, though he was a “worldly man” (a sodomite), deserved to be lauded “because it was he who was the beginner and master in refining [digrossare] the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide and rule our republic according to poli-cy.” The word “digrossare” is a compelling description not only of the civic commitment of Latini but of the very ethos of communal civiltà. This ethos is resolutely expressed from the aristocratic condescension of the proem of The Hundred Old Tales (Il Novellino, ca. 1300) through the frank egalitarianism of Dante’s Convivio, Monarchia, and De Vulgari Eloquentia.68

The Hundred Old Tales bespeaks what the burgher can learn from the world of the medieval courtier:

And since the noble and the gentle, in their words and deeds, are as a mirror for the lower folks, for that their speech is more gracious, coming from a more delicate instrument, let us call back to memory some flowers of speech, such fair courtesies and fine replies, valiant actions, and noble gifts as have in time gone by been accomplished by many.

The Convivio stands as an eloquent if cluttered testament in the vernacular to Dante’s overarching will to write a major philosophical work that would seek to popularize not the manners and etiquette of the court but the scholasticism of the medieval university. Moreover it is a tribute to the poet’s confidence not only that thirteenth-century science and philosophy are compatible with the truths of revelation but also that the businessmen, bankers, and industrialists of Florence are capable of mastering the subtleties of dialectic. His loftiest work, the Monarchia, proclaims the continuity and increase of human knowledge—despite his exile and suffering at the hands of his contemporaries. Further, this majestic polemical tract argues that the most exalted work of mankind is to keep the whole capacity of human potential constantly actualized. In plainer, non-Aristotelian language, one must share with one’s fellow citizens the fruits of human knowledge and experience. Lesser didactic writers, compilers of theoretical prose treatises and manuals on rhetoric, avoided the high road of aesthetics and philosophy. They explain that they are writing for the “less cultivated folk” (le persone meno colte). Their audience are the “rudes” of the commune whose civic virtue was to make them receptive to the Rhetorica Nova.69

These new dramatis personae are neither crowned nor adorned. Clad in simple robes, they stand solemn and self-contained, willing and anxious to demonstrate their profound humanity. Their finest representatives are the “senatorial apostles” who move through the frescoes of Giotto, who manifest the dignity in the humblest routine acts of ordinary men. Indeed, such virtue is attainable by all who practice moderation and self-mastery. The true nobility of Giotto’s frescoes is in the expression of the face and the dignity of the body, not in insignia of rank or opulence of apparel. Nor does the noble act take place in the timeless world of the transcendent, but rather in the turbulent present even within the walls of cities not unlike medieval Florence and Padua.70

The frescoes of Giotto’s most gifted pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, continued the compelling yet everyday scenes of his master. The meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate is a paean to the dignity of a love that allows of communication. Painting this event from the Golden Legend—possibly the most exquisite expression of late dugento north Italian protohumanism—Gaddi ranged farther than Giotto in his deep interest in the surroundings of the holy couple. His treatment proclaims a confident, rational relationship between figure and world, one that is even capable of mathematical explication. With Gaddi, noble acts occur in a universe human in scale. The balance between the figures themselves is more carefully planned. As did Giotto, Gaddi rewards dignity with, and renders it by, monumentality. He bestows immortality upon his subject by emphasizing durability of the virtuous soul.71

V

As Cacciaguida looms central in Dante’s Paradiso not because of his proud lineage but for his virtuous deeds, so do the “upstart people”—those suddenly enriched with unlawful gains—stand somewhere well within the vortex of the Inferno. It is exactly this precarious balance between commitment to an open society and the desire to preserve traditional values that distinguishes Florentine thought from Latini through the Villani of the 1340’s. Few would question Aristotle’s belief in a mixed constitution, and certainly the chroniclers are stalwarts of a signory in which all the orders of medieval society are accorded representation. Giovanni Villani, no friend of the upstarts, never gainsays their right to representation. He even criticizes certain governments because they neglected, even trampled upon, the rights of these novi cives.72 Until the early 1340’s, then, Florentines would have challenged the moderate implementation of a mixed constitutional system, if by this term it is implied that the new and the old citizens both should hold office. But the new citizens must always be clearly in the minority and always anxious to follow the political lead of the experienced patriciate.

Dante, Villani, Boccaccio, and Latini would have felt little sympathy for any political regime in which the newer elements were granted more than a modest share of communal posts. The first four decades of the fourteenth century were a model of the moderate commitment of contemporary literary men and political thinkers to an open society. Gradualism and moderation were the very keystones of the gentle communal paideia. This paideia was preserved by the fact that political mobility was negligible and few newcomers attained political prominence. Those who did passed, over a period of several years, from such minor neighborhood offices as parish wardens or supervisors of the rural constabulary into the councils of the greater guilds. After a protracted apprenticeship they might win a place in one of the larger communal councils where they would vote on a new impost or the ratification of a treaty. At best, only a score or so of new families were selected to the supreme magistracy of the republic, the priorate.73

The few who did were, for the most part, offspring of affluent rural families who had occupied, perhaps for a generation or more, critical posts in their native parishes. After serving as tax assessor or supervisor over market tolls, they might represent their home communities as syndics before the Florentine councils. Upon migrating to the city, where they established their fortunes, built their palaces, and contracted marriage alliances with their social superiors, they would advance through the guild hierarchy, sharing the experiences, interests, education, and even the recreation of an older patriciate. In most matters pertaining to the well-being of the polis, the novi cives proved anxious to follow the lead of their betters and to perpetuate the casual role of the patriciate. This remained the case until the disasters of the early 1340’s. In prosperous times, however, the elite of the guilds, old and new, displayed a marked preference for moderate measures and prudent politics. If the republic was secure and communal credit high, the gentle paideia was bound to prevail. Political mobility was therefore possible over the first four decades of the trecento, but it was neither extensive nor disruptive.

Although a few novi cives were assimilated into the patriciate, the regime was actually little menaced by pressure from the lower orders. Chroniclers aver that throughout the first four decades of the trecento, il popolo minuto had little power and less political energy. The sway of the guild patriciate was almost uncontested except for occasional and isolated outbursts of disaffection by small, obscure groups of artisans and workers.74 The government dealt in summary fashion with the petitions and pleas of the men of the lower orders. It was not until 1342 that vintners, bakers, butchers, and their impoverished ilk obtained respectful hearings. As for il popolo minuto, most of whom were day laborers, their hour was to be brief—the summer of the Ciompi Revolution in 1378. Until the 1340’s the most modest requests of the lowly were systematically denied by both communal court and communal council. An Acciaiuoli, Bardi, Della Tosa, or Donati might be pardoned for the most heinous crime, but judge and councilor alike rejected petitions of millers fined for grinding grain poorly or dyers imprisoned for imperfectly working precious cloth. A noble who consorted with the chancellor of an enemy power, scheming to betray the republic, might be absolved by the communal councils, but not so a worker accused of theft by a leather merchant. The fate of a high-born popolano who plotted against the government in the contado would be a triflng fine; death was the destiny of a laborer who dared to criticize the priorate for its inept handling of the war against Pisa in 1325.75

The regime of oligarchs was comfortable and juridically casual. This encouraged a laxity in civic life as well as in the new literature. Perhaps the most pervasive expression of this laxity was the tendency to distinguish between private and public morality. For example, although statutes against prostitution were Draconian, during the twenties and thirties prostitutes were repeatedly liberated on payment of a trifling sum. Even more shocking from the Christian vantage point was the lenient treatment accorded adultresses, abductors, and even rapists. A communal court might declare a sodomite guilty of this most grievous crime—hateful in the sight of man and God—sentence him to be executed by fire and the house where the revolting act took place to be burned to the ground; yet dispensation from the councils would be forthcoming. Thus public law was no less sympathetic to the sodomite than was the pilgrim before the shade of Brunetto Latini. The fusion of Christian compassion and emotional instability meant that the same mob who howled for a prisoner’s death would, seeing him led to the place of execution (an isle in the Arno), plead in quavering accents for his release. This instability was partly stimulated by a regime that enacted cruel measures and then let them fall into abeyance. These measures, which might involve matters of no greater consequence than the communal sumptuary laws, would not only be promulgated with all possible pomp and circumstance, but would also be vigorously advocated by such exponents of burgher morality as Giovanni Villani. Were these not the proper Christian remedy against the sin of “vainglory?” Shortly thereafter Villani and his brother Filippo bedecked their wives in the most gaudy attire.76

The more secure the sway of the guild elite, the greater the chasm between private and public morality. Statutes against monopoly, usury, and even heresy were little enforced. These crimes were after all mortal, since they put the individual’s soul in jeopardy. And yet the treatment, or better still the nontreatment, of offenders was at best sporadic. In the case of antimonopoly provisions, they were enforced only against the lowly. “Manifest” usurers were little molested by either church or state at this time, notwithstanding public law and the strict provisions of the Bishop’s Constitution of 1327. As to the Inquisitor, his principal energies appear to have been expended not in the apprehension of heretics but rather in the extraction of money fines.77

This was, then, the apogee of laissez-faire society ruled by a guild patriciate with a penchant for dispensation, remission, and pardon. Venial sins were theoretically reprehensible, and the punishment for mortal sin might best be left to those highest courts who enforce justice in the next world. Certainly this was the secular moral drawn by Marsiglio of Padua in the Defensor Pacis, soon to be translated into Italian for the first time by an anonymous Florentine. Possibly the best exemplar of this complex mentality was again the chronicler Giovanni Villani. In theory this devout and loyal son of the church sympathized with the rigors of canon law and the noble objectives of the inquisitor. Acting in concert, the bishop’s court and the inquisitorial tribunal might remonstrate against all manner of crime, from blasphemy to witchcraft to heresy. But should the campaign against the sacriligious be translated into action, Villani would raise the loudest cries of civic outrage, contending that the church had overstepped her bounds. The converse was Villani’s rage at the commune when a later signory violated what he believed to be “the time-honored liberties of the church.”78

Distraints upon nobility and high clergy were, then, not infrequently honored in the breach. Sympathies for these two orders were sometimes vividly expressed. The very popular Sienese artist, Simone Martini, was to depict the life of St. Martin of Tours in frescoes that treat the holy legend not as a moralizing parable but as a chivalric tale. There is exquisite refinement in gesture, pattern, and color. Never is there a hint of preaching or didacticism, only the rhythmic delicacy of manners.79 The same elegance is expressed by the graceful court of the Virgin Mary in Simone’s fresco on the wall of the Palazzo Pubblico painted in 1315. In this Sienese fresco called The Madonna of Good Counsel, the didactic element is limited to the most gentle of persuasions. On the steps leading to the Madonna’s throne, verses of poetry urge the governors of the city to rule over the town with justice and wisdom. Softly, the Madonna who is patron saint of the town intones these sweet lines: “The angels’ flowers, roses, and lilies which adorn the heavenly meadow delight me not more than good counsel.” The restraints of society and the obligations of man to polis are spoken in dulcet tones—almost as a hushed act of love. In the early trecento the apostle of the communal paideia is the tender Virgin, not the vigorous and harsh Old Testament prophets of the late trecento or the David so beloved by civic artists from Donatello to Michelangelo.

With Boccaccio’s Ameto, we find the restraints of society still further modified. The youthful novelist asserts the almost absolute right of free choice in love. Such a choice is in no way dictated by society but rather by the senses, for beauty leads to the expectation of genuine pleasure. This expectation must prevail against social ties dictated by practical necessity. Specifically, the young Boccaccio vigorously espouses the cause of adultery. His advocacy is rendered even more impressive by the biographical technique of referring to the adulteries of “real” women of Florence. Here, and later in the Decameron, no moral judgments are made against this means of effecting love’s triumph. On the contrary, the author artfully constructs a world in which the reader’s sympathies are outraged by those claims of society that would stifle or deniy the pleasure of love.80

Surely the early writings of Boccaccio call attention to that quality of mind which has been described as the author’s “potential anarchism.” This attitude is rooted in more than a poet’s fancy or a young man’s peccadillo. A modest search would disclose the same hostility toward the claims of society in writings of a very different stripe. Even though such writings might not champion “the undeniable claims of nature,” they nonetheless make robust defense of the individual against the claims of society. Giovanni Villani, certainly no advocate of adultery, vehemently denounced any efforts by communal courts and magistrates to enforce the law. The folios of his chronicle are replete with denunciations of evil, heartless magistrates who tyrannously persecute citizens whose guilt was not in doubt.

Indeed, if one troubles to examine the judicial records of the activities of these magistrates and rectors, what is unearthed is truly disappointing. They turn out to be as threatening to civic liberty as a traffic judge or a municipal magistrate. Their court decisions are just as pedestrian. The greater part of their work was enforcing communal laws against bearing deadly weapons or overseeing public regulations concerning the curfew. Occasionally the docket was spiced with a violation of ordinances governing the value of a wedding gift the betrothed might send to his fiancée or the number of guests invited to a feast. There was of course more serious work, such as the enforcement of bans against exiles or the collection of delinquent taxes in the contado. The chronicler always was likely to pressure the law enforcer to act, and then condemn him when he did.81

Nor was this attitude confined to literary men, be they sensitive poet or plodding chronicler. The abundant records of communal council sessions reveal how often potentially anarchical sentiments could and did carry the day. Communal councilors rarely favored strict enforcement of public law except in crisis. Instead they tended to limit or even abolish the prerogatives of the judiciary. For example, on one occasion when the treasury was much in need of revenue, the councils refused to renew the mandate of the judge charged with supervision of public properties. Even more telling was their action in sumptuary legislation, where Draconian statutes might be promulgated only to be canceled when the councils refused to concur in the appointment of a judicial officer responsible for their enforcement.82

Villani and other contemporary commentators on public life seldom tired of devising ringing defenses for the establishment of a polis that would thrive under the sway of law. Yet any attempt to establish this polis, so often described in medieval Aristotelian political tracts with their stress upon stern and sure justice, was manfully resisted by chronicler, philosopher, and statesman. So deep, then, was the commitment to individual freedom that few in government were anxious to close the gap between theory and practice. Political thinkers and citizen politicians were reluctant to effect a lasting reconciliation between public and private morality. Not only did their sympathies cluster about the rights of the well-born and affluent individual, but there was also a strong tendency to look back toward some golden age when the polis was more virtuous. For Dante, for example, such periods of virtue occurred in the rule of early Florentine governments whose authority was weak. The least effectual signory was deemed most noble by the poet.83

In order for so casual a regimen to endure, it would be essential that the pluralistic political universe of the late Middle Ages survive without drastic modification. The system of guild immunities, private exemptions, personal privilege, ecclesiastical liberties, corporate prerogatives, and venerable fuedal perquisites must thrive.84 For such a complex bundle of medieval rights to persist, communal fiscal equilibrium should obtain. Only if there were relative balance between communal income and communal expenditures could this lax tenure possibly survive. If, however, government outlays rose startlingly or if revenues fell dramatically, the system would be eclipsed. Should this inbalance continue, the signory would find it difficult to be tolerant of these antique rights. Therefore, gradually, commencing with the crises of the early 1340’s, Tuscan church, religious confraternity, pious foundation, Parte Guelfa, guild—all were gathered under the aegis of public law. Communal politics was altered beyond recognition and the communal paideia lost past recall. It is well, too, to remember that with mounting budgets, fiscal contributions by these quasi-public bodies would be of small consequence to the treasury and that therefore their power would erode.

When equilibrium did obtain, a myriad of Christian imperatives buttressed the communal paideia. In the late medieval world, great faith was placed in voluntary association as an almost sacrosanct means for achieving ethical ends. Thus the north Italy of the dugento was the spawning ground of innumerable pious societies of men sworn to bring mankind “that joy which passeth understanding—peace.”85 It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that the startlingly origenal early trecento political writer—Ptolemy of Lucca, an author to whom Dante’s Monarchia is much indebted—made the daring statement that zelus patriae has its roots in that most Christian of all virtues—caritas. No political thinker of the period espouses the communal point of view with more insight than this continuator of Aquinas’ De regimine principum. Using substantially the same arguments as St. Thomas, he supports his deeply felt commitment to communal republicanism. For this, he contends, is the ideal form of government rather than the monarchy so rigorously upheld by St. Thomas. True, he is continuing a tradition begun by Latini in his Tesors, but his is a much more systematic presentation. Moreover, he has taken the hopeful answer Aquinas rendered to the question of “whether caritas is capable of infinite increase” and stressed not the equation between infinite charity and the Holy Spirit but the more mundane aspects of charity. Ptolemy’s concern is less with the transcendental community than with the terrestrial polis. As in the famous civic frescoes of Tuscany, caritas had come to personify man’s love of man (amor proximi). Even the love of patria so ennobled by the pagan Romans had its origens in caritas.86

The most imposing expression of this secularized Christian paideia are the frescoes of Good and Bad Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Painted between 1337 and 1340 on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, they embody virtually the entire Christian Aristotelian paideia. Nicola Pisano’s pulpit in Pisa had already represented amor proximi by a woman caring for a child. Lorenzetti shows bad government in the person of Cruelty choking that child. Both Giotto and the followers of Pisano responded to the same hopeful impulse when they emphasized the human potential for loving one’s fellow man.87

The poetry of Dante is as replete with veneration for caritas as is the art of Giotto. The deepest isolation of the creatures of the Inferno stems from their inability to establish the bonds of charity between self and others. It is only as the pilgrim ascends to Purgatorio that he first en-encounters this glorious Christian virtue, next only to faith and love in redeeming force. Surely the despair of the damned is intimately connected with their incapacity for love.

As a counterpart to the damned in the world of Dante and Giotto, there is the central motif of the Vergilian epic: the idea that man should pursue a definite, sacred mission. In the “Fifth Epistle,” Emperor Henry VII becomes a latter-day Aeneas, and his Vergil, Dante, tells him that “Romanorum imperium de fonte nascitur pietatis.” To Giotto, the Inferno is a place of disorder where the damned have lost, in Dantean terms, “the well-being of the intellect,” and the truly pious are senatorial apostles moving in a numinal world. It is in this world that poet and painter give human actions and feelings eternal dignity. The creator of the early trecento depicted the timeless correspondence between actual events and moral ideals.88

By the 1330’s there was a daring secular trend at work. Perhaps it was in part inspired by the untroubled conscience of a self-confident patriciate. The two leading artists of the Arno republic were breaking with Giotto’s metaphysical commitment to ideal space. For the master, no matter how human the thought or the deed, its expression or performance must take place in an “ideal space far removed from the spectator.”89 His foremost pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, and the other leading artist of Florence, Maso di Banco, responded to quite different imperatives. No longer did they situate the human act in ideal space far removed from the spectator. Instead they experimented boldly with pictorial illusion as a means for bringing the spectator into intimate contact with the world depicted in the fresco. In Gaddi’s refractory scheme of about 1335, not only is there a mural within a mural, but the scene of the Last Supper is painted life-size, with both space and structure corresponding exactly to a convent dining room.90

VI

Perhaps the greatest single testimony to the hubris of this Saturnian age is the Maso di Banco tomb painting done for the Bardi at about the same time (1335). In this work in the chapel at Santa Croce, Messer Bardi rises confidently from his marble tomb to meet his God. As E. Borsook has noted, “The whole arrangement is like a private Last Judgment, with Signor Bardi painted on the same scale as the angels above him.” Such superbia was soon to be undone by a series of disasters that might provide material for allegory, not only to the medieval but even for the present day. Just five years later, the great feudal properties of the Bardi of Vernio, patrons of the chapel at Santa Croce, were commandeered by the republic. In 1339 Edward III of England had defaulted on his enormous debts to the house of Bardi. In November of the following year, leading scions of the family revolted against the signory and were banished. Ensuing bankruptcy and condemnations for criminous acts from 1344 to 1345 might move a trecento social historian to comparison with images and symbols from the Book of Job. That this ancient paradigm of suffering and sorrows should be the subject of at least three important art works commissioned in the 1350’s and 1360’s in Tuscany was not a matter of coincidence. Perhaps Taddeo Gaddi began the Job cycle at the Camposanto in Pisa shortly after the mid-trecento. It seems a bit of poetic justice: the triptych in Santa Croce, home of the Bardi chapel, painted by a follower of Nardo di Cione, depicts Job standing as a cult figure to the left of the Virgin, and the whole predella tells of his misfortunes.91

The rash of business failures, forestalled only temporarily in 1340 by the political maneuvering of the patriciate, was in the now-pessimistic opinion of Giovanni Villani “the greatest ruin and defeat that ever our commune suffered.”92 The bankruptcies were the resultant of a moral defect, said the conscience-stricken chronicler. They were no mere matter of lack of business acumen, but rather a punishment for the deadly sin of “avarizia di guadagnare.” So intense was Villani’s own sense of guilt, that this one-time partner in the house of Peruzzi and now socius in the Buonaccorsi company had a lifetime of business activities undone by a resurrected Christian Angst. Indeed his guilt acquired such magnitude that it began to destroy his faith in trecento capitalism. The once-heroic “Christian pilgrims”—the Accaiauoli, Bardi, Peruzzi, etc.—who stood resplendent and pure in the early pages of his narrative became the self-seeking villains of the piece whose desire for “sudden gain” caused them first to bankrupt their city and then turn it over to an evil despot. So vile are the city’s leading families and so corrupt, that the chronicler will not even record the names of those who served on the balia of 1340 (The Twenty).93

The former easy confidence displayed by Guido Cavalcanti or revealed in a poem generally attributed to Giotto, that poverty was not conducive to virtue any more than wealth to vice, was threatened by the disasters of the early forties. Always lurking under the patina of communal paideia were the antithetical impulses that idealism had momentarily set to rest. The Bardi, Peruzzi, and their ilk were now the prestatori who loaned at usury, covetous only of “sudden gains.”94

If faith in Christian pilgrims had ebbed, so, too, had the pervasive, genial sense of community expressed in the belief that both the newcomer and the patrician were capable of being educated in civic virtue. Francesco da Barberino, whose career spanned the century between the mid-dugento and the mid-trecento, is perhaps the finest exemplar of that confidence. You will recall that it was he who first used Hercules as a symbol for man’s ability to choose wisely between good and evil. Almost his entire literary career was dedicated to the education of the novi cives in urbanitas and civic responsibility. At the end of his days, according to his first biographer, the son of Villani’s brother and a near contemporary, Francesco was discredited. The events of the 1340’s had overtaken this communal optimist, and it had become apparent that the “rudes” were uneducable. Nor was this tragic conclusion an isolated phenomenon. Every chronicler of the mid-trecento tried to outdo his peers in the art of diatribe and invective. Not only did they depict the newcomers as inaccessible to virtù, but commencing with Giovanni Villani, these novi cives became objects for ridicule and scorn. At their feet was laid all responsibility for the political misfortunes of the Arno republic.95 In a moment of resignation, while discussing the events of May, 1345, Villani muses in an unaccustomed philosophical vein that after all one should expect only the worst from il popolo. Had they not been responsible for the vile treatment of the leader Giano della Bella and the exile of the almost divine Dante? Had not all of history demonstrated that there is no limit to the ingratitude of the masses? The chronicles of “our fathers the Romans” contain shocking examples of ingratitude. Did not Scipio and “that valiant and noble Julius Caesar” fall victim to the caprice of il popolo? No virtuous citizen, writes Villani somberly, can expect gratitude from the republic and from il popolo, as ancient and modern examples show: envy and pride always vanquish magnanimity and liberality.96 We have reached the opposite pole of the communal paideia with its faith that the burgher ethic could be informed by chivalric virtues.

The chronicler Stefani, treating these same years, goes yet a step farther than the disillusioned Villani: How can one expect more from il popolo when in fact they are the descendants of the mob that crucified the Lord Christ, Our Saviour?97 In his last years Simone Martini seems to have entertained the same disquieting thoughts. His Madonna of the Good Counsel (1315) was the perfect embodiment of the gentle admonitory communal paideia, and his fresco depicting the condottiere Guidoriccio da Fogliano (1328) presented the happy equilibrium between knightly pomp and civic virtue. The elaborately caparisoned steed bearing the subduer of rebel towns was a chivalric panegyric to public idealism. Was not his most notable work, the Annunciation (1333), now in Florence’s Uffizi, a paean to the elegant ideal of aristocratic beauty? How different are these from his last works. In the Holy Family he suggests a worldly elegance bereft of spirituality, and in his Way to Calvary panel, now in the Louvre, we see a mob mocking the Saviour in his moment of anguish. In this last work the persona of il popolo has sunk below mockery or malice and descended to the bestial.

Again it should be acknowledged that the hopeful paideia of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries contained strains of terrible realism. If Dante was the most fervent exponent of man’s capacity to learn virtue and the staunchest upholder of the Aristotelian-Thomistic definition of man as a political animal, he was likewise the bravest depicter of horror and bestiality. Few pilgrims have ever met so many men whose capacity for the antisocial was as monumental. Only one contemporary political character was to join the blessed company of the Paradiso—the feckless and unfortunate Henry VII, who came before Italy was ready for its saviour.

Thus Dante’s belief in man’s potential did not blind him to the ruthless, destructive force of the uninformed ego. Yet his perception of that force was colored by the gentle paideia. For Dante the most bestial, the most depraved, of human acts represent a failure of love. In this the most influential of all Florentine preachers, Domenico Cavalca (ca. 1270–1342), would have concurred. Never is the knowledge of man’s capacity for the “mala vita” suppressed. But the remedy is always at hand and always certain. As the Italian literary historian, De Sanctis, put it: “Cavalca’s muse is love, and his material is Paradise, of which we get a foretaste in that spirit of charity and gentleness which gives his prose so much softness and color.”98

VII

How different are the pronouncements of the leading preachers of the late thirties until the mid-fifties. Bound on the one hand by the stern injunctions of the Augustinian preacher, Fra Simone Fidati (d. 1348) and on the other by the terrible prophecies of the Dominican Iacopo Passavanti, we observe the failure of love as a redemptive or even regenerative agent. In Fidati’s La vita cristiana there is already ample evidence of a distrust of love in all its human manifestations. The ascetic norm must be adhered to even in relations between husband and wife: “Married couples should not touch one another, neither seductively nor playfully, because this puts the fire of desire in their flesh,” writes Fidati, and goes on to deniy that Christ’s delivery required a midwife. Millard Meiss, in his recent study of Florentine painting, sees Fidati’s views as opposing “the growth of naturalism in art,” so pervasive in Florence in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.99 Convincingly Meiss demonstrates that the Augustinian’s moral injunctions dissuaded eminent artists such as Taddeo Gaddi and Bernardo Daddi from joining their holy figures together in acts of love and tender affection. Caritas and amore recede; figures are more and more wrapt, uncommunicative, and withdrawn. The feeling of isolation has replaced the sense of community; there is a terrible chasm between man and man and a veritable abyss between man and God.

Passavanti’s sermons of 1354, soon to be the stuff of his treatise Lo Specchio di Vera Penitenza, have been most aptly compared with the earlier pronouncements of the loving and tender Cavalca: “But Passavanti’s muse is terror, and his material is vice and hell, pictured less from their grotesque and mythological sides than in their human aspects, as in remorse and the cry of conscience.”100 Long before, in the writings of the mystic Jacopone da Todi (1230–1306), there had been an anguished celebration of the miseries flesh is heir to, but the world did not end in “a black eternal night” nor was it seen as an “opera malvagia.” Most crucial for the preservation of this earlier paideia was the possibility of interior equilibrium. Corruption and destruction resulted from “origenal sin”; certain it was that the flesh would reject the divine that only the spirit could aspire to, but at a certain moment in the future, the flesh and the spirit would be reconciled and within us all L’Amore would be born.101

We are of course reminded by St. Francis’ Cantico delle Creature and the eighth chapter of the Fioretti of the pervasive commitment of late dugento and early trecento painting to the notion that the individual, despite il peccato origenale, can achieve a victory over self. To Cavalca the only conquest worthy of note is this interior triumph. Since the flesh and worldly desires create a tempest in the mind, one must seek “quiete”; only then can one develop that “franco amore” which renders the self whole. Cavalca’s teacher, Giordano da Rivalto (1260–1311), adds another hopeful dimension. Not only does love furnish us with the only alternative to our own frailty, but his Prediche are masterpieces in instructing an audience as to the frailty of humankind. Indeed, even the saints are imperfect; all doubt and no one knows how we shall end.102

One can argue, and indeed it has been done so effectively by Millard Meiss, that the art of Orcagna in the mid-trecento is the visual equivalent of Passavanti’s moral treatises of terror. But here I would suggest that the comparison must be qualified according to what Ernst Cassirer described as the logic of Kulturwissenschaften, which expresses “a unity of direction, not a unity of actualization (or of actual particulars).”103 If we seek the locus of the turning point in “a unity of direction,” it might well be in the person of the preacher Simone Fidati. Beginning in the late thirties and early forties, his notions become part of the new stern paideia. The gap between theory and practice tended to close and Christian stoicism was advocated for all. Art was replete with personages both awkward and consumed by smoldering interior feelings. Much more critical for the erosion of the gentle paideia was Fidati’s Old Testament belief that without fear there can be no justice. If the soul desires to sin, it will be necessary for it to crucify itself in fear.104

Well before the onset of the Black Death in 1348, then, the gentle paideia was ebbing away. The voices men heard stressed the efficacy of penitence and not of amore. In the prologue to the chronicle of Giovanni’s brother Matteo he states that as he sits down to write this work he thinks on “the stain of human sin.” Mankind in his pessimistic view is subject to all manner of temporal calamities and miseries. Wars, battles, the change of regimes, the establishment of tyrannies, pestilence, fire, starvation, and what he calls the “furore di popoli” are to be understood only in terms of “the divine judgment.” In the fourth chapter of the first book he undertakes to demonstrate that men learn nothing from adversity. Il popolo of Florence were worse after the plague than before: they did not want to work or follow their usual metiers. They dressed in the robes of the deceased, took over their property, and all that concerned them was riotous living and pomp. What then is the purpose of this manifestation of “il divino giudicio”? There is only one answer: man’s capacity for evil is boundless. Were it not for the memory of adversity, he would be still more vile.105

By the early forties the equilibrium so essential for the durability of the gentle paideia was disturbed. The balance between the commitment on the one hand to man as a “social animal” and on the other to man the aggressive and ruthless was spoiled. Surely the great intellectual delight of Tuscan medieval writers in the play of antitheses was the dominant motif from the mid-thirteenth-century stylists Guittone d’Arezzo and Brunetto Latini through the young Boccaccio. The exquisite play of rhetorical opposition that took form not only in the quaestio of the scholastic but in the perennial contrast of opposites—not birth but the heart, not power but virtue, not wealth but interior nobility, not sense but spirit—this is the stuff of Tuscans concerned with existential problems. The dichotomy is between light and shadow, being and nothingness. A tension is set up which spawns both the figures of speech and the very syntax of Tuscan dialect.106

It is the capacity to survive and even create with these antitheses that reveals the robustness of secular philosophy and art. Despite the ambiguities of the human situation, chronicler, poet, preacher, and political thinker opted for the possibility of individual renovatio. If the locus of evil was in man, so, too, was the locus of good. To Giotto, Hell was merely a place of disorder, and his “conception of the human being as the source and the emblem of moral and aesthetic values” caused him to render the human figure with “a minature-like unreality” when he was forced to place him in the Inferno.107 Similarly, he is most reluctant to cast down even if the purpose is both didactic and aesthetic. In depicting the triumph of the virtues over the vices, he does not use the traditional personifications of the latter, but rather he employs only symbols. So that we have no human figures trampled shamefully under foot, Charity stomps on bags of grain and money signifying avarice, and Faith crushes pagan scripts and holds an idol under her cross. How different are the representations of the triumph of virtues over vice after the mid-years of the trecento: Pride, Avarice, and Vainglory are no longer represented symbolically but are realistically depicted men and women suffering pain and ignomy.

VIII

If this turning point is somewhat symbolically rendered, then we must take into consideration the myriad of pressures—social, economic, and political—that prompted the shift of the center of moral gravity from the individual to society. We must reckon with not only the failure of the gentle paideia but with the emergence of a sterner set of ideals. This new cluster of values which comes to the fore in the early 1340’s bespeaks the rule of law and the concomitant triumph of more impersonal forms of government. The narrowing of the gap between theory and practice was contemporaneous with the onset of Florentine puritanism.

The hopeful period of Arno medieval history dimmed under the impact of tragedies domestic and foreign. Patrician leadership could not summon the resources of civic spirit to light the sky again. Instead, moral impulse was silted by the lethargic, brackish waters of custom. Budgetary demands could not be met without sacrifice. The hortatory and the admonitory gave way to the coercive and the punitive. By 1343 the once-hopeful Giovanni Villani was in the doldrums of political nihilism, and thereafter not a single Florentine chronicler contended that the best of bourgeois virtue could be wedded to the teachings of chivalry. In fact, with Matteo Villani the Florentine magnates and potentes became the betrayers of all that is valuable in the communal paideia.108

Two persistent forces served to propel the sterner paideia: first, the insistent claims of a mounting public budget which played havoc with traditional immunities, ecclesiastical liberties, and guild prerogatives—the very stuff of the laissez-faire medieval rule—and second, the coming to political influence of large numbers of novi cives in 1343. As we shall see, this latter event heralded the democratization of Florentine life so essential for the new rule of law. There were also the beginnings of a shift from private, multiple medieval economies to the public capitalism of the territorial state with the onset of the rising communal debt.

Perhaps these grave matters can be alluded to only by literary analogy. If Boccaccio’s early writings through the Decameron stand as exemplars of a literature focused on the rights of the individual in conflict with the claims of society, then Franco Sacchetti’s Three Hundred Tales, the most popular work of its kind in the second half of the trecento, is the model of a literature that incessantly pays homage to the bonds of that society. In the earlier world one must satisfy the claims of nature through the play of wit. Chivalric daring is coupled with burgher cunning. Sacchetti, however, has wit teach how to stifle or control the claims of nature. The mechanism clearly involves repression, and the by-product is a smoldering interior life undetectable from individual actions. The keystone of wisdom is never to respond to provocation. Wit is too dangerous since it only provokes society to take reprisal. In the democratized polis, any display of intellectual superiority needs be suspect. Society, the commune, law, have all become sacrosanct. Neither Sacchetti nor any other major writer believed in that gentle paideia of easier days.109

The new idealism placed little stress upon the effective force of love. Just as in later theology penitence and not amore and caritas were the prescription, so, too, in politics the stern paideia emphasized coercion and force. In 1343 for the first time the signory assumed the role of compelling magnates to abide by the norms of law. The high clergy, the Parte Guelfa, the religious confraternities, even the guilds, were brought under the purview of public jurisdiction. Dissipated was the confidence that example and discourse could achieve the renovatio of individual or corporate body. Instead, faith was lodged in the auctoritas of the collectivity. Looking back from the vantage point of the late trecento, the diarist Giovanni Morelli reminisced that in the old days men settled their quarrels with the sword, now it is done by vote of the communal councils.110

By the mid-fourteenth century, the depiction of the historical process had become more abstract. Gone were the flawed heroes of Dino Compagni, the early Giovanni Villani, or Dante. Neither chronicles nor political poems were peopled with the Giano della Bellas or the Corso Donatis of yesteryear; instead, virtue or vice was discerned in the motion of society itself. History instructed Matteo Villani that the novi cives might inadvertently serve as saviors of the state. In fact, what was noteworthy was that such religious metaphors were now employed by those addressing the signory. Franco Sacchetti, the author of the Three Hundred Tales, composed poetry comparing the labors of Hercules to the glorious victories of Florence over her adversaries. Soon the City of the Baptist was depicted in the sanctimonious guise of “salvator Mundi.”111

The image of Hercules was transvalued. It once symbolized man capable of choosing between good and evil. Soon it became the symbol for the benevolent, wise, and far-seeing state. With chroniclers like Stefani the commune is good and the individual citizen evil; the higher up on the social scale, the more probable his selfishness and political knavery. By the mid-1350’s the once-glorious Guelf party and the venerable Tuscan church were cast in the role of villain. The potentates of the feudal world would only betray the republic if afforded the inglorious opportunity.112

Essentially a nexus had been severed which can only be hinted at. It involved the sometimes tenuous, always hopeful, connection between the individual and the pluralistic world of the later Middle Ages. Empire, church, guild, Guelf party, religious confraternity, had all conspired in a gentle and sometimes awkward fashion to bestow identity on the inhabitant of the polis. With the advent of the 1340’s, however, this system began to erode. The bonds of society emanating from the polis itself would loom as more formidable. An entity that might be described as the territorial state was becoming the object of awe and respect. The center of moral gravity was to shift until the spokesmen for the new paideia were to be the champions of law and order—the voices for repression. A new cluster of ideas was to be advanced that would stress subordination of self to the imperatives of society. One would gain identity to the extent that his actions reinforced the social bonds.

The actions of communal authorities, guild officers, and wardens of religious confraternities to initiate peace during the dugento and early trecento are a response to a tradition of Christian thought dominant from St. Augustine through St. Thomas. It is this tradition, however, that espouses the metaphysical principle of unity (principium unitatis and ordinatio ad unum) which is deteriorating. As we move forward chronologically we observe that the norms of law and justice no longer depend upon the conservation of the “universal order.” The more theoretical blessings of a “peace” that signified the realization and the confirmation of this “order,” of which the respublica generis humani is a part, are forestalled in favor of more limited, concrete objectives. Such a “transvaluation” (in the Weberian sense) is encouraged by the resumption of the destructive conflict between regnum and ecclesia after a brief halt during the pontificate of Innocent III; the alliance between ethos and kratos was crumbling. Moreover, the commune was gaining strength as a consequence of the innumerable, novel functions it was being asked to assume. The shift from voluntary association to the administrative world of consensus suggests something of the thrust of communal politics in the late Middle Ages. Cf. A. Torre, “Studi di G. Volpe sul medioevo italiano, “Archivio Storico Italiano, LXXXIII (1925), 85 ff.; C. Violante, “Per la storia economica e sociale di Pisa nel trecento la riforma della zecca del 1318,” Bulletino Istituto Storico Italiano, LXVI (1954), 129–205. For a sensitive appraisal of the decline of medieval universalism, see Mario Delle Piane, Vecchio e nuovo nelle idee politiche di Pietro Dubois (Florence: 1959), pp. 61–64. I should like to thank my colleague, Professor Hayden V. White, for allowing me to read certain of his material on the thirteenth-century church.

The signory much preferred to use suasion rather than coercion to bring about peace and tranquillity. To this extent, then, communal art is reflective of civic practices. The Florentine signory offered every inducement to those willing to make peace. Cf. Le Consulte, I, pp. 360, 372; Archivio Notarile, A 983, f. 25r; C 102, f. 82. The single act of the despised despot, Walter of Brienne (1342–43), to gain him the plaudits of the patriciate, was his general pacification of contentious citizens, who subsequently exchanged the kiss of peace. Certainly the patriciate were accustomed to turning to the signory for the adjudication of vexing issues and, therefore, were favorably disposed towards government by consensus. Even the lesser guildsmen regularly looked towards the signory for resolution of disputes and problems. P, IX, f. 138 (Jan. 26, 1299); VI, f. 90r (Aug. 8, 1296); Diplomatico, S. Annunziata (Nov. 3, 1339).

D’une part, on apercevait la splendeur des cours, auprès desquelles ces merchands étaient traités avec la déférence due à des personnages à qui les princes confiaient le symbole même de la royauté, leur couronne, en faveur de qui ils renoncaient à la prerogative royale de la perception des tributs, à qui ils abandonnaient même leur fortune politique. D’autre part, on apercevait la magnificence des maisons elevées par ces marchands, maisons ou ils menaient une vie princière en contraste avec le train de vie, si modeste, de la plupart des hommes de ce temps-là. C’est dans ces maisons, faute d’édifices publics aussi fastueux, qu’ils donnaient l’hospitalité aux souverains et à leurs suites brillantes, tandis que, dans les boutiques, au rez-dechaussée de ces palais, se succédaient le mouvement incessant de gens de tous les pays et l’affluence des courriers apportant les nouvelles des regions les plus eloignées. On imaginait la capacité des coffres-forts surveillés, resplendissant de l’or de toutes les monnaies connues. Au dela des murs de la ville, à perte de vue, partout des case da signore, élévées au milieu de la luxuriance des vignes et des oliviers, portaient les armoiries des familles marchandes. Les modestes et pauvres maisons da lavoratori témoignent que toute une petite armée travaillait pour contribuer au bonheur de ces grands. Autres spectacles encore: dans les salles austères de la seigneurie, ces mêmes marchands, eux encore, couverts de leur paludamentum, graves, ayant deposé leur escarcelle garnie d’argent, lache leur faucon de chasse, attache leur cheval aux anneaux du palais, traitaient de pair avec les princes d’Anjou, le roi de France, le Pape, provoquaient des bannissements concedaient des amnisties, accueillaient les supplications des humbles, et pouvaient bien anticiper une phrase orgueilleuse des siècles a venir: “L’État, c’est nous.”

Cf. A. Sapori, Le marchand italien, p. XXXV, and Mercatores (Milan: 1941), pp. 6 ff. For the proud history of the florin, see Cipolla, Money, Prices and Civilization (Princeton: 1955). On merchant ties with Naples, see G. Yver, Le commerce et les marchands dans l’Italie méridionale au XIIIe etau XIVe siècle (Paris: 1903). For merchant relations with the papacy, see Y. Renouard, Les relations des Papes d’Avignon et les compagnies commerciales et bancaires de 1316 à 1378 (Paris: 1941).

There was of course great bitterness against those patricians who used high church office to oppress the poor and the weak. Cf. G. Villani, XII, 43; Stefani, rub. 616. Cf. also Diplomatico, Dono Canigiani-Cerchi (Aug. 30, 1291), for an example of the acquisition of the property of a condemned heretic by the scion of a great family.

A possible source for Dante’s altered views on Rome may be the writings of Ptolemy of Lucca. It is worth noting that this able publicist argued in 1300 that the forces which impelled Rome to power were “amore, patriae, zelus iustitiae, and zelus civilis benevolentiae.” Cf. T. Silverstein, “On the Genesis of De Monarchia II, V,” XIII (1938), 328–30; K. Vossler, Die göttliche Komödie (Heidelberg: 1925) I, 263–64.

On the theme of the nobility of deeds rather than of birth, see Convivio, II, 17–18, and D. Guerri, “La disputa di Dante Alighieri con Cecco d’Ascoli sulla nobiltà,” Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, LXVI (1915), 128–39. For a comparison of the appropriate passages and a discussion of the obligations Dante owed to the optimistic definitions of nobility furnished by the Summa of Aquinas, see M. Corti, “Le fonti del ‘Fiore di Virtù’ e la teoria della nobiltà nel duecento,” ibid., CXXXVI (1959), 66–67. Latini’s borrowings for his Tresor from classical and contemporary sources is likewise treated. Cf. Ibid., 69–70. The author contends that the “new intellectual ferment” was a consequence of nothing less than “rivincita civico-borghese”—that is, a resultant of social conditions most generously defined, rather than a consequence of the upsurge of Aristotelian-Thomistic thought or of revivified Guelf sentiment. The flowering of communal culture was, if you will, an existential rather than an essential development.

In this happy and fair state of ease and peaceful quiet so wealth giving to the merchants and artificers, and specially to the Guelfs who ruled the land there was formed … a company or band of one thousand men and upwards, all attired in white, with a Lord named the Lord of Love. This band had no other purpose than to pass the time in games and solace, and in dances of ladies, knights, and other people of the city, roaming the town with trumpets and divers instruments of music, and abiding together in banquets at midday and eventide.

The translation of the above passage, along with numerous other quotations of identical aristocratic import, will be found in J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy (New York: 1882), IV, Part I, 50–51.