The elite families transferred much of this same attitude to their political behavior and style. From as early as the twelfth century, elite politics turned on factional conflict, on fierce rivalries between groups of families who did not hesitate to appeal to outside powers for help in their struggles against domestic rivals. The chroniclers represent an early eruption of conflict in 117780 as an uprising by the pro-imperial Uberti in protest against their exclusion from the early commune’s chief magistracy, the consulate. According to the anonymous late thirteenth-century account, it was a veritable “war” that lasted over two years because “the Uberti obeyed neither the consuls nor any other authority.”16 Villani describes the Uberti as the “most powerful and greatest citizens of Florence” (6.9) and says that, with their followers among “both the nobles and the popolo, they made war on the consuls” because the government was not to their liking. The parties “fought from neighborhood to neighborhood” and “armed their towers, which were numerous and from 100 to 120 braccia high. Indeed, because of this war many new towers were built at that time by the communities of the contrade, with money raised from the neighborhoods, and they were called the towers of the companies.” Evidently the factions were organized through neighborhood associations that even had the power to collect funds and build towers for defense. The civil war resulted in many deaths and several great fires that destroyed entire sections of the city. Apparently the Uberti made their point: from 1180, they and their allies appeared regularly in the consulate.
It is difficult to say if these events were the origin of the great division that dominated the history of the Florentine elite for the next century. Each conflict built on earlier antagonisms, and the search for a precise moment of origin is necessarily futile. But the split certainly became deeper and increasingly irreconcilable in the first half of the thirteenth century. Our sources for these early factional conflicts are the chroniclers of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and they tended to superimpose the later history and structure of upper-class factionalism onto earlier episodes like the Uberti uprising and the Buondelmonti murder. The Uberti may indeed have been a pro-imperial family even in the late twelfth century, but whether the fighting of 1177-80 “gave birth,” as Villani puts it, “to the accursed parties” is more
Cronica fiorentina, ed. Schiaffini, p. 104.
Problematic. The “parties” to which Villani alludes here are the Guelfs and Ghibellines (which he later claims arose in the aftermath of the Buondelmonti murder of 1216). But the names Guelf and Ghibelline, denoting respectively the papal and imperial parties, did not come into common use until the 1240s. Villani provides a guide to the early divisions within the elite in his survey of thirty-eight Guelf and thirty-one Ghibelline families that he claims constituted the core of the parties after 1216. Many of these families belonged to the old ruling group of the consular commune, and fifteen of the Guelf and thirteen of the Ghibelline families are present in Cacciaguida’s roll-call in Paradiso 16. It is unclear whether Villani borrowed from Dante or the other way around. But it is also possible that they both drew on earlier and now lost sources, or that the collective memory of family participation in the early feuds was still quite precise around 1300. Almost all the families in Villani’s list went on to play leading roles in the great mid-century civil war between Guelfs and Ghibellines: twenty of the Guelf and twenty-one of the Ghibelline families are among those he lists as combatants in the 1240s, and fifteen of the Ghibelline families and no fewer than thirty-three of the Guelf families will appear in his lists of exiles in, respectively, 1258 and 1260. The overwhelming majority of these families (thirty-three Guelf and twenty-seven Ghibelline) were subjected to magnate status by popular governments in the 1280s and 1290s and deprived of the right to hold communal offices, and they account for sixty of the seventy-three city lineages designated as magnates. Although a few of these sixty magnate families, in particular the Bardi, Frescobaldi, Scali, and Cerchi, remained powerful despite magnate status, most of the others disappeared from the ranks of the ruling class by 1300. The names continued to evoke a memorable past, but little more, and by the time Villani compiled his 1216 list of families they were a nearly vanished elite. The history of the thirteenth-century elite is thus the story of the decline, and in part the self-destruction, of the ruling families of the first half of the century, and their replacement by new families whose power was more solidly anchored in trade and banking.
The internecine strife that erupted in the 1240s between the factions led to repeated banishments and confiscations over the next two decades: Ghibellines exiled and confiscated the property of Guelfs in 1248 and 1260; and Guelfs exiled Ghibellines in 1258 and banished and plundered many more in 12678. In the process, the entirety of the old elite was weakened politically and economically. After 1267 the victorious Guelfs compiled a register of families and individuals of their party whose property had been confiscated or damaged by the Ghibellines in 1260-6,17 as well as a roster of the Ghibellines that they in turn sent into exile.18 From these compilations a reasonably complete
The Liber extimationum, ed. O. Bratto (Goteborg, 1956).
H Libro del Chiodo, ed. F. Klein with S. Sartini (Florence, 2004).
Picture of the composition of the elite factions emerges. Eligible for compensation for damages were 626 households from some sixty Guelf lineages, representing perhaps 2,500 individuals, from both city (about 1,500) and contado (1,000). About a third of these sixty families came from the old elite that until the 1270s provided the leadership of the Guelf party, but whose wealth was mostly in land, not in commerce or banking: the Buondelmonti, Donati, Rossi, Cavalcanti, Gherardini, Sacchetti, Giandonati, Vecchietti, Arrigucci, Tosinghi, Della Bella, Adimari, and others. The remaining two-thirds were families with greater involvement in trade or banking, and they included some older houses (Bardi, Mozzi, Scali) and a larger number of families that had more recently entered the economic elite (Canigiani, Alberti del Giudice, Magalotti, Mancini, Acciaiuoli, Altoviti, Spini, and others).15 Remarkably, the number of Ghibelline families exiled in 1267 (62, with a total of perhaps 1,400 individuals) was almost exactly that of the Guelf families seeking compensation for damages. Those with the largest number of exiles, and presumably therefore the largest and most powerful families of their faction, were the Ubriachi (35), Uberti (28), Scolari (27), Tedaldini (18), Amidei (16), and Lamberti (16). But of the leading Ghibelline families only the Ubriachi, Mannelli, Brunelleschi, Strinati, and Abati were moderately prominent in banking and commerce. Other smaller and less powerful Ghibelline families had more of an economic role (Bonizzi, Macci, Dell’Antella, Pulci, Portinari, Strozzi, and Saltarelli), and they largely survived the change of regime and eventually merged with the prosperous Guelf elite of the last third of the century. Their Ghibellinism may have been more a matter of pragmatic accommodation than deep conviction. The preference for the Guelf cause (under some pressure from the papacy in the 1260s) of most of the rising commercial and banking families sealed the fate of Florentine Ghibellinism. Within a year, the core of the old Ghibelline elite was in exile and never returned to the city.16
Shorn of its Ghibelline component, the Florentine elite after 1267 consisted of a combination of the triumphant Guelf wing of the old upper class and the newer merchant families. Until about 1280, the older families maintained their leadership role. The politically most influential lineages were all from the old elite (Adimari, Cavalcanti, Della Tosa, Rossi, Tornaquinci, Bardi, Buondelmonti, and Pazzi), as were eleven of the sixteen families with the largest claims for damages. Some older Guelf families began to establish themselves in the expanding commercial and banking sector. The Bardi and Mozzi had already formed major companies; the Bostichi, Pazzi, and one branch of the Rossi engaged in moneylending; and the Gherardini and Sacchetti had members in the Calimala guild. But with the exception of the Bardi and the Mozzi, the leading families of the 1270s were enjoying their last generation of real power and prestige, and nearly all of them (including the Bardi and the Mozzi) were declared magnates by popular governments. Just behind them in political influence in the 1270s was a large and expanding group of merchant families, mostly of recent prominence, who constituted the emerging plutocracy that became the new Florentine elite of the next seventy or so years. Slightly older families in this group were the Cerchi, Frescobaldi, and Scali, who built some of the biggest banking enterprises of the late thirteenth century. Newer ones included the Spini, who collaborated with the Mozzi as bankers in England; the Canigiani and Ridolfi, who engaged in moneylending; the Acciaiuoli, who formed a major merchant company of the next generation; and others like the Altoviti, Mancini, Magalotti, Medici, and Velluti, who all gained a foothold in the elite in these years. They were joined in the 1280s by the Cerretani, Girolami, Pitti, Albizzi, and the Peruzzi (who founded a banking firm second in size and importance only to the Bardi), by some formerly Ghibelline merchant houses that quietly and successfully merged with the dominant Guelf faction (Ardinghelli, Dell’Antella, Portinari, and Strozzi), and by still others that emerged over the next two decades (Baroncelli, Biliotti, Bonciani, Bordoni, Capponi, Castellani, Corsini, Covoni, Davanzati, Guadagni, Guasconi, Ricci, Rondinelli, and Rucellai).17
The emergence of this new plutocracy made Florentines acutely conscious of the difference within the elite between older families with limited connection to commerce and newer ones whose wealth exceeded anything previously seen and whose mercantile activities were radically transforming Florentine society and the city’s relationship to the outside world. Dante’s Cacciaguida points to this awareness in Paradiso 15 and 16. The chronicler Dino Compagni’s account of the origins of the feud between the Cerchi and Donati in the late 1290s is grounded in the perception of this same distinction. Although the Cerchi had been prominent from early in the century, they were not as old as the Donati. Compagni calls the Cerchi “men of low estate, but good merchants and very rich; they dressed well, [and] kept many servants.” In 1280 some Cerchi bought the palazzo of the old Ghibelline family of the Counts Guidi, which was “near to the houses of the Pazzi and Donati, who were of more ancient lineage [piu antichi di sangue] but not as rich. The Donati, seeing the Cerchi rising - they had walled the palace and increased its height, and lived in high style - began to nurse a great hatred of them.”18 The Cerchi, Donati, and Pazzi were all old Guelfs from the same area of the city, and the Cerchi’s purchase of a Ghibelline family’s palazzo was in no obvious way a slight to their neighbors. The resentment of the Donati, who were not a mercantile family, focused on the conspicuous display of wealth by a family of more recent and greater prosperity. Moreover, the Cerchi, unlike older families generally rooted in one neighborhood, owned property all over the city and had begun to act (so their enemies believed) as though the city itself were somehow theirs. For a number of years around 1290 the communal priors resided in a house rented from the Cerchi in the area north of the Bargello, then the palace of the communal military and judicial official known as the podesta. Older but less wealthy families like the Donati resented this combination of wealth and the influence it could buy. Rivalries spawned or inflamed by the flaunting of disproportionate wealth, influence, and power by one family within the elite were a recurrent source of factional division.
But the factions do not neatly conform to the distinction between older and newer families, or between those more or less involved in big business, and the precise causes of the fierce antagonisms between the factions remain obscure. Curiously, the protagonists themselves did not leave accounts or justifications of these conflicts. The descriptions we have come from the chroniclers of the popolo, whose motivation was to highlight the irrationality and irresponsibility of elite factionalism. They thus make little effort to explain how and why the feuds made any coherent sense even to those who participated in them. It is difficult to see class or socio-economic factors behind the eruption of these feuds. Relatively older and newer families, and families with greater and lesser involvement in trade and banking, can be found on both sides of the factional divides. The long view of thirteenth-century elite factionalism does of course show that the victorious Guelfs of the last third of the century consisted predominantly of newer and mostly mercantile families, although in the decade after the Guelf restoration of 1267 the party’s leaders still came mainly from older families with less involvement in trade or banking. Florence’s economic expansion does indeed explain why an elite of merchant families emerged as a dominant and even ruling class by the early fourteenth century. But it does not explain why certain families or groups of families fell on one side or the other of either the Guelf-Ghibelline conflict of the mid-thirteenth century or the split among the Guelfs around 1300.
We must not underestimate the wider pan-Italian ideological dimension of the Guelf-Ghibelline split and the attempts of emperors from Frederick Barbarossa in the twelfth century to Henry VII in the early fourteenth century to bring the Italian cities under imperial overlordship. No doubt many Ghibellines supported the imperial cause with the same passionate intensity with which Guelfs opposed it. Less clear is why certain families supported the Ghibellines and others joined the opposition. Only in the 1260s does an economic rationale emerge: the alliance among the Guelf commercial elite, the papacy, and the house of Anjou (who united to defeat the Ghibellines) opened broad avenues for economic profits in the south of Italy conquered by the Angevins. But party antagonisms long predated this development, and the general impression is that until then Guelf-Ghibelline alignments were influenced more by local issues than by international politics or ideologies. And what can explain the violent divisions around 1300 between two groups of families that were all nominally Guelf? How did such local antagonisms become so entrenched and fierce?
If elite feuding and violence are placed in the context of relations between elite and popolo, elite conflicts appear above all as competitions for followers and clients from the non-elite classes. A powerful family was by definition one with a large number of men from the middling ranks of society willing to support their patrons in neighborhood or city councils, to walk with (or behind) them on ritual and festive occasions, and to gather in the streets in front of the family’s palazzo and tower in times of tension or conflict. We know much more about the modalities of patron-client relations in later periods of Florentine history than we do for the thirteenth century, but the underlying motivation on the part of the elite patrons was no doubt similar: rivalries between upper-class families were fundamentally contests for the support and allegiance of the lesser families and individuals of their quarters or neighborhoods. What made a family great and powerful in the eyes of Florentines was not only its wealth, antiquity, and political offices, but also the perception that it commanded the loyalty and support of a greater number of allies, clients, and “lesser” neighbors than did its rivals. Compagni illuminates the search for allies by powerful families in times of danger in his account of the growing animosity between the Donati and the Cerchi around 1300 (1.20). As “the hatred grew day by day,” the Cerchi began to stay away from meetings of the Guelf Party and to “align themselves with the popolani.” “They drew with them many citizens. . . and other powerful clans,” and “the popolo minuto loved [the Cerchi] because they disapproved of the conspiracy against [the popular leader] Giano della Bella.” Of Corso Donati Compagni says that he had many armed men in his service and a “great entourage” (2.20). He was called “the Baron” because of his haughty demeanor, and when he rode through the city “many cried ‘long live the Baron,’ and the city seemed to belong to him.” A visibly large armed following and recognition from the streets of such strength were the measure and manifestation of a family’s or factional leader’s power.
Compagni’s description of the riot that nearly occurred at the funeral of a Frescobaldi woman (1.20) assumes that factional flare-ups, typically occurring in public settings and before an audience, were meant to make the greatest possible impression on ordinary Florentines. The funeral took place in the piazza that still carries the family name on the Oltrarno side of the Santa
Trinita bridge in front of the Frescobaldi palace. Temporary seating was provided for citizens and neighbors, with knights, doctors, and jurists sitting higher up and others lower down. The Donati and Cerchi sat as distinct groups directly facing one another across a small open space. This obviously planned seating arrangement clearly spelled trouble, which soon arrived. When someone on one side rose to his feet (Compagni does not even trouble to say which side), “either to straighten his clothes or for some other reason,” the other side, thinking this might be a prearranged signal for action, also stood up and put their hands on their swords. The others responded likewise and the fight was on. On this particular occasion, says the chronicler, wiser heads prevented a melee, but not before a large number of Cerchi supporters ran to the family’s palaces to receive orders to attack the Donati. The confrontation thus generated a public display of Cerchi strength that served as a warning to the Donati and a demonstration to the city at large of the speed with which loyal Cerchi followers could gather in support of their leaders. The event seems almost choreographed, a ritual confrontation in which everyone knew the parts they were expected to play.
Another example, also from Compagni (1.22), is the fight that occurred during the Mayday festivities of 1300 when open hostilities again erupted between the Donati and Cerchi. Each year elite families celebrated the advent of spring on the first of May with dinners and dances in the semi-enclosed “courts” of their inner-city enclaves. Bands, or brigate, of young men, organized by faction, went from court to court to dance, and separate brigate of women danced within their neighborhoods. According to Compagni, the Donati brigata, which included members of the Bardi and Spini families and “other companions and followers,” actually went looking for a confrontation with the Cerchi brigata, and in the ensuing fight a Cerchi had his nose sliced off. The accusations and recriminations divided the entire city: “the great, middling, and little men and even the clergy could not help but give themselves wholeheartedly to these factions, this man to one and that man to the other.” Here too the confrontation served to clarify loyalties, to strengthen the sense of obligation among “companions and followers,” and thus to sharpen the boundaries between the factions. In the ensuing consolidation of factional loyalties, the polarizing momentum made it difficult for anyone not to line up on one side or the other. Compagni’s analysis of the Cerchi faction highlights their elite allies, but also underscores their non-elite following: with them were “all the Ghibellines,” because they thought they had less to fear from them; the former supporters of the popular leader Giano della Bella, because it seemed to them that the Cerchi had mourned his expulsion; Guido Cavalcanti (the poet and friend of Dante) who hated Corso Donati; Naldo Gherardini, because he was an enemy of the Manieri, who were related by marriage to Corso Donati; messer Manetto Scali and his kinsmen, because they were related by marriage to the Cerchi; messer Lapo Saltarelli, also related to the
Cerchi by marriage; messer Berto Frescobaldi, because he had received loans from the Cerchi; messer Goccia Adimari, because he quarreled with his own kinsmen (who supported the Donati); Bernardo di messer Manfredi Adimari, because he was a partner in the Cerchi trading company; three members of the Della Tosa family, because they were angry with their kinsman, messer Rosso, who had deprived them of honors and privileges; the Mozzi; the major branch of the Cavalcanti; and many non-magnate families and members of the popolo. Compagni’s analysis of the Donati faction is less detailed: “long familiarity and friendship” motivated the loyalty of their leading allies, the Della Tosa and Adimari, and, presumably, that of the other major families he lists (Pazzi, Rossi, Bardi, Bordoni, and Cerretani). But the Donati too had followers in the ranks oF the popolo.
One purpose of elite efforts to enlist clients and followers was to control the popolo. Paradoxically, fighting amongst themselves helped elite families neutralize the popolo politically by recruiting as many of them as possible into their factions. Great families thus competed for followers, and the competition frequently led to hostilities that provided ideal occasions for displaying the strength and solidarity of a family’s following. A brawl, even the threat of one, would get out the “troops” and allow a family’s street power to be seen and measured. Quarrels between factions were thus a necessary part of the process by which great families demonstrated their greatness. Success in this competition meant greater prestige and security, more influence in the councils of government, and greater physical control of neighborhoods and the inner city. But the essence of such conflicts was the competition for loyalties and support among the middle and non-elite classes. Factions began as alliances of elite families whose strength was increased by the combination of their formerly separate contingents of non-elite clients. When these alliances and the competitions between them spilled out of their neighborhoods to other parts of the city, the potential for urban civil war became very real. And when, finally, external conflicts demanded that powerful families declare for one side or the other, these divisions coalesced into two large groupings. This happened in the 1230s and 1240s when the Guelf and Ghibelline parties took shape, and it happened again, with the split in the Guelf party, around 1300. Whatever the precise circumstances of such divisions, the history of elite factionalism in Florence is inseparable from the still larger and deeper conflict between elite and popolo.
World History
