Florence in the 14th century

In Florence, the other great republic of northern Italy, the key constitutional moment came in 1293 with the Ordinances of Justice. Though modified somewhat two years later, they preserved a system in which sovereignty explicitly rested with the popolo, an elite class drawn from the seven major guilds, or arti maggiori—that is, the judges and notaries, the Calimala (bankers and international traders in cloth), the money changers, the silk merchants, the doctors and apothecaries, the wool merchants, and the dealers in furs. Together with dominant figures from five guilds of lesser status (the arti medie, or middle guilds, consisting of the butchers, the shoemakers, the smiths, the stonemasons, and the secondhand dealers), the popolo gathered every two months to elect six priors who ruled Florence as supreme magistrates.

Behind these forms, the men who effectively ruled were members of the popolo grasso (“fat people”), consisting of bankers and businessmen of great wealth, who professed allegiance to the Guelf party. Yet the survival of guild government was, in these years, often precarious. Fierce rivalries often split the dominant faction. So in 1302 the “Black” Guelfs, in alliance with Pope Boniface VIII, succeeded in expelling the “Whites.” Among the White Guelfs at this time was Dante (1265–1321), who had held public office. Doomed to spend the rest of his life in exile, he wrote La commedia (c. 1308–21), later named La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), whose pages still offer eloquent testimony to the extreme bitterness of domestic conflict in these years. Moreover, external pressures forced the city to accept the lordship between 1313 and 1322 of King Robert of Naples and then again, between 1325 and 1328, of Robert’s son, Charles of Calabria. It was perhaps fortunate for the continuance of the commune that Robert was too preoccupied with his own kingdom to establish any full and permanent control and that Charles died prematurely.

Yet, despite such political difficulties, Florence probably reached the apogee of its prosperity during the first three decades of the 14th century. Its population grew to about 95,000 people, and a third circle of walls, constructed between 1284 and 1333, enclosed an area that the city was not to surpass until the middle of the 19th century. In the 1290s, construction began on the new cathedral (Duomo) of Santa Maria del Fiore (the dome was not completed until 1436) and the fortress-residence of the Palazzo Vecchio—both potent symbols of the commune, to which was soon added a third, Giotto’s campanile.

Up to the beginning of the 1340s, Florence reigned supreme in long-distance trade and in international banking. From that time, grave shocks struck its economy, and these, combined with failure in war, led to another brief experiment in signorial rule; in 1342 a protégé of King Robert, Walter of Brienne, titular duke of Athens, was appointed signore for one year. Almost immediately on his accession, Walter changed this grant to that of a life dictatorship with absolute powers. But his attempt to ally himself with the men of the lower guilds and disenfranchised proletariat, combined with the introduction of a luxuriant cult of personality, soon brought disillusion. An uprising in the following year restored, though in a rather more broadly based form than hitherto, the rule of the popolo grasso.

Guild rule then continued virtually unchallenged until 1378. In that year the regime was overthrown not by a signore but by factions within the ruling class, which in turn provoked the remarkable proletarian Revolt of the Ciompi. In the wool-cloth industry, which dominated the manufacturing economy of Florence, the lanaioli (wool entrepreneurs) worked on the putting-out system: they employed large numbers of people (9,000, by some calculations) who worked in their own homes with tools supplied by the lanaioli and received wages by the piece. Largely unskilled and semiskilled, these men and women had no rights within the guild and in fact were subjected to harsh controls by the guild. In the Arte della lana (the wool-cloth guild), a “foreign” official was responsible for administering discipline and had the right to beat and even torture or behead workers found guilty of acts of sabotage and theft. The employees, who were often in debt (frequently to their employers), subsisted precariously from day to day, at the mercy of the trade cycle and the varying price of bread. With them, among the ranks of the popolo minuto (“little people”), were day labourers in the building trades as well as porters, gardeners, and poor and dependent shopkeepers. On occasion these poor, in Florence as all over Italy, rioted when bread was scarce, but they were normally powerless to organize efficiently against guilds and governments—both of which could impose extreme penalties on anyone who defied their authority.

In effect, the poor rose to revolt only at the prompting of members of the ruling class. So it was in the Revolt of the Ciompi of 1378. In June of that year Salvestro de’ Medici, in an attempt to preserve his own power in government, stirred up the lower orders to attack the houses of his enemies among the patriciate. That action, coming at a time when large numbers of ex-soldiers were employed in the cloth industry, many of them as ciompi (wool carders), provoked an acute political consciousness among the poor. In their clamour for change, the workers were joined by small masters resentful of their exclusion from the wool guild, by skilled artisans, and by petty shopkeepers. Expectation of change and discontent fed upon each other. In the third week of July, new outbreaks of violence, probably fomented by Salvestro, brought spectacular change: the appointment of a ruling committee (balìa) composed of a few patricians, a predominating number of small masters, and 32 representatives of the ciompi. Michele di Lando, foreman in a cloth factory, was appointed to the balìa as “standard-bearer of justice.”

In their six-week period of rule, the men of the balìa sought to meet the demands of the insurgents. The balìa approved the formation of guilds for the wool carders and other workers to give standing to their members, established more-equitable taxation between rich and poor, and declared a moratorium on debt. Yet, angry at the slow pace of change, the poor remained restive. On August 27 a vast crowd assembled and proceeded to the election of the “Eight Saints of God’s People.” Then they marched on the Palazzo Vecchio with a petition that the Eight Saints should have the right to veto or approve all legislation. But by now all the temporary allies of the poor were alienated from the spirit of revolt. The rich resisted, won over Michele di Lando with a bribe, called out the guild militias, and drove the protesters from the scene.

Normality was reestablished within a few days. The new guilds were abolished, and the poor returned to the impotence that was, throughout Italy, their lot. Malnutrition quenched rebellion, leadership was lacking, and the limited horizons of their lives made any ideal of betterment short-lived. The main effect of the revolt was to introduce at the top of society a regime that was narrower and more oligarchic than that which had ruled for the previous 30 years.