Critique of Elite Misrule

Nearly all thirteenth - and fourteenth-century Florentine writers on politics and history came from the popolo. Latini, the anonymous chronicler sometimes called pseudo-Brunetto, Compagni, Dante, Giovanni Villani, and later his brother Matteo, and Marchionne di Coppo Stefani were all major guilds-men, but from the non-elite ranks. Several had close ties of marriage or business with the elite. Compagni’s mother was a daughter of Manetto Scali. Giovanni Villani was a business partner of, successively, the Peruzzi, Buonaccorsi, and Bardi. Dante’s mother was from the Ghibelline family of the Abati, and he himself married Gemma Donati, a distant cousin of Corso. As we know from his imaginary encounter with Cacciaguida, Dante liked to think he descended from a family of knights and noble crusaders, but in fact his father was a moneylender with no significant part in political life. Some Alighieri held office in the popular government of 1250-60, but thereafter they make only sporadic appearances in the councils until 1300 when Dante became the first and only member of his family to sit on the priorate. Despite his denunciation of the popolo for excessive political ambition (Purgatorio 6) and his contempt for new wealth (the “subiti guadagni” of Inferno 16) and contado immigrants (Paradiso 16), Dante expressed many of the same criticisms of the elite that we find in other writers, who all excoriated the elite for its factionalism and overweening ambition.

In addition to implying, in the Tesoretto, that Florence’s knightly upper class sorely needed lessons in civility and moderation, in the Tresor (2.114) Brunetto Latini rejected the elite’s claim to nobility and political hegemony. Denying that nobility was dependent on birth, antiquity of lineage, or wealth, he argued that “those who delight in a noble lineage and boast of lofty ancestors, unless they themselves perform virtuous deeds, do not realize that they are disgraced rather than honored by the fame of their forebears. For when Catiline conspired secretly at Rome, he did nothing but evil, and when he spoke before the senators of the uprightness of his father and the nobility of his line and the good it had brought to the city of Rome, he certainly spoke more to his shame than to his honor. . .. But concerning true nobility, Horace says that it is virtue alone.” Elsewhere (2.54) he exhorted would-be “nobles” to “perform always, therefore, acts of virtue.” “A man is called noble on account of his noble and virtuous deeds. . . , not because of his ancestors.” Dante adopted this critique of the elite’s pretensions to nobility when he wrote in the Convivio (4.29) of “those who, because they are of famous and ancient lineage and are descended from excellent fathers, believe that they are noble, but have no nobility in themselves.”31

Davis, Dante’s Italy, pp. 180-6.

The condemnation of factionalism was universal among these writers. Remigio denounced the factions from his pulpit at Santa Maria Novella and in his political tracts. The conflict between Black and White Guelfs seemed to him by far the worst division the city had ever known: “there was never so much disjunction or clash of wills between Ghibellines and Guelfs or between people and nobles as is now seen to exist between Blacks and Whites.”57 He criticized both factions for moral deficiencies and failure to embrace justice and the common good, a concept he identified with the “good of the commune,” thus affirming the priority of the commune’s welfare over that of any individual, family, or group. In the Cronica fiorentina once attributed to Brunetto Latini, the legendary episode that culminates in the Buondelmonti murder functions as a kind of fall from grace that forever dooms the elite families to fratricidal madness. The later violence between the Donati and Cerchi generated “much evil to the shame of the city and its citizens; for all the grandi and popolari of the city took sides, thus reviving the ancient hatreds of the Uberti and the Buondelmonti, whence all Italy has shed blood.”58

Giovanni Villani had a more ambivalent view of the elite families that reflected the shifting political tendencies of the popolo. In times of peace and prosperity, he praised the wisdom of the elite leaders, including his business partners. But when elite factions threw everything into turmoil, he did not hesitate to condemn their failings. In describing the outbreak of the fighting between Black and White Guelfs in 1300, he noted that Florence had never been in a happier or more prosperous state, owing both to the “nobility of its fair knights,” and its “brave popolo” (9.39). But “the sin of ingratitude, aided by the enemy of humankind [the devil], engendered arrogant corruption from such prosperity, on account of which the good and happy times ended for the Florentines.” Against the background of this overarching drama of moral failure, Villani recounts the hatred that developed between Donati and Cerchi because of “envy” and “boorish ingratitude.” Despite their power, wealth, and excellent marriage connections, the Cerchi “were uncivilized and ungrateful, as are those who rise in a short time to prestige and power.” The Donati “were gentlemen and warriors, not especially rich, but were called Malefami”: people of ill repute. When the Guelf party tried to put a stop to the brewing hatred and asked Pope Boniface VIII to persuade Vieri de’ Cerchi to make peace with Corso Donati, Villani reports that Cerchi, “who in other matters was a wise knight, in this one was not very wise and too stubborn and hot tempered,” and that he rejected the pope’s mediation,” thus making another enemy in the pope. The subsequent eruption of violence between armed bands of the two factions was the spark that lit the fuse: “And this was the beginning of the scandal and division of our city of Florence and the Guelf party, whence many evils and dangers soon followed.... And just as the death of messer Buondelmonte was the beginning of the Guelf and Ghibelline parties, so this was the beginning of the great ruin of the Guelf party and of our city.” Villani saw the failures of the elite families as ones of character and judgment, moral lapses produced either by enervating prosperity, by a too recent and too sudden rise to power and wealth that could not wipe away boorishness and irascibility, or as the work of the ever-present “enemy of humankind.” He was too close to the elite to see its violence as structural and systemic.

The great voice of the early fourteenth-century popolo, more embattled and more bitterly critical of the elite, was Dino Compagni. A merchant and member of the guild of Por Santa Maria, Compagni was for twenty years a leader of the popular movement. His political life came to an end with the victory of the Black Guelfs in 1301-2, and he watched in disgust as even the triumphant Blacks split into new factions and kept the city in a state of semi-permanent violence for another decade. In his dramatic account of the rise and fall of the popular government of the 1290s and the subsequent eruption of the elite’s factional wars, Compagni organized the narrative with a precise selection of details to highlight his conviction that popular government was the only viable obstacle to the violence of the elite, against whose arrogance and abuse of power the chronicle conducts a fierce and sustained polemic. Compagni’s knowledge of history and the rhetorical arts is visible in the work’s literary sophistication, clearly influenced by classical models, particularly Sallust. He addresses his protagonists and introduces speeches in direct discourse, including his own, to dramatic effect. In Compagni we see especially well exemplified the political and cultural elements typical of the popolo: the intensity of his commitment to the popular cause; the devastating critique of the elite; and the assumption that effective political action is grounded in persuasive speech and thus in the rhetorical arts whose best models were found in Roman oratory and history.59

Unlike Villani’s exclusive emphasis on the elite’s moral failings, Compagni adds the perspective of how elite family structures conditioned their political behavior. He too juxtaposes the Buondelmonti murder and the war between Blacks and Whites, but he does so to support a more complex argument. After summarizing the Buondelmonti episode (1.2), Compagni jumps to the 1280s and the movement that produced the popular government whose fall was the beginning of the disastrous slide back toward elite factionalism and violence. A key moment of this regression includes a broken marriage alliance, whose inclusion in the narrative is clearly intended to evoke for the reader the analogous moment in the Buondelmonti story. Compagni reports (1.20) that Corso Donati decided, after the death of his first wife, to remarry and selected a young woman of the Da Gaville family who was her deceased father’s only heir. His attention is on the lineage and inheritance structures of the elite families: “Her relatives did not approve” of the marriage because they “expected this inheritance,” which, if she married Corso and made her Donati children her heirs, would have passed out of the Da Gaville lineage, something that no elite family contemplated with equanimity. It happened that the Cerchi were related to the Da Gaville and supported their effort to block the marriage. But “the girl’s mother, seeing that [Corso Donati] was a very handsome man, agreed to the marriage against the will of the rest of the family.” The Cerchi became angry and tried to prevent the inheritance from falling into Corso’s hands, “but he took it by force.” The intervention of the mother exactly parallels the action of the Donati wife who lured Buondelmonte away from the marriage to which he was pledged in violation of the agreements previously worked out among the feuding families. In fact, Compagni notably embellishes the woman’s role in his version of the Buondelmonti episode, and his point emerges clearly from the parallel: the very structures of marriage, inheritance, and lineage solidarity that defined the elite and made its families powerful were also the fatal weaknesses that led it again and again, in endless repetition of the “original” fall, into quarrels and violence that took the whole city down with them. In such episodes Compagni provides a subtle critique of the “private” origins of the elite’s ultimately very public feuds. The critique is not limited to denunciations of their violence, arrogance, and contempt for law and civility, although such denunciations are of course not lacking. His point is that the damage elite families regularly did to themselves and the city sprang from the very institutions of their family life. Even when they were behaving according to the best standards of their class and protecting the interests and honor of their lineages, they were inexorably sowing the seeds of disputes and divisions. Compagni was implicitly challenging the legitimacy of the elite as a governing class on the grounds that even its well-meaning members were inevitably complicit in the structural flaws of their collective existence. Hence the need, central to the popular movement (and his own role in it), for mechanisms of conflict resolution and forms of public power and authority capable of overriding and controlling the elite’s natural instincts.

By the time he wrote the Divine Comedy Dante was no friend of the popolo. But he was no friend of anything about Florentine politics, and he pulled no punches in excoriating the elite families for their misdeeds. The encounter with Farinata degli Uberti (Inferno 10) begins in relative civility when the Ghibelline captain hears the pilgrim’s Tuscan speech and inquires about his visitor. But when he asks the deceptively simple, but in fact dangerous, question, “Who were your ancestors?” and Dante reveals his Guelf origins, they immediately trade taunts about which party threw the other out more often and more effectively. Apparently forgetting the “noble fatherland” for which he had expressed concern upon first seeing Dante, Farinata encapsulates his own loyalties as entirely focused on family and faction when he snarls that his Guelf enemies were “fiercely adverse to me, my ancestors, and my party.” And when he asks the pilgrim why the Florentine “popolo” had become so hostile to him and his kindred and needs to be reminded that it was the result of the slaughter inflicted on the Florentines at the battle of Montaperti by the Ghibelline army in 1260, Dante underscores the blindness of elite families that regularly lost sight of the horrors they inflicted on the city through partisan conflicts. In fact, Dante’s Hell contains many of the legendary leaders of both the Guelf and Ghibelline parties in the mid-thirteenth century.

In Paradiso 15-17, every virtue of Cacciaguida’s twelfth-century city points to some flaw in the bloated metropolis of 1300. In those days, Florence “within her ancient circle... abode in peace, sober and chaste,” still free of the massive immigration from the contado in the next century that, according to Dante, changed its character: the “intermingling” of people from the countryside only brought troubles and corruption. But the examples Cacciaguida gives of the kind of people that would have been kept away if the old boundary between city and contado had been respected are not those of peasants or artisans, but the great families at the center of the elite’s violent history. The Cerchi “would [still] be in the parish of Acone,” and the Buondelmonti still in their ancestral home in the Valdigreve. Thus, the imaginary Florence of Dante’s good old time kept the unruliest elements of the elite in a state of rural isolation. Moreover, Cacciaguida claims, the elite families already in the city were very different from those of Dante’s day, still uncontaminated by conspicuous displays of wealth, lacking the necklaces, coronals, and embroidered gowns that now are “more to be looked at than the person,” and the excessive dowries that now “cause fear to the father of every girl.” In those days, men went “girt with leather and bone” and did not desert their women “for France,” because they were not yet international merchants and bankers. “With unpainted faces,” virtuous women then worked at home at their spinning wheels and watched over their children, telling them the legends of Florence’s origins, the tales of “the Trojans, and Fiesole, and Rome.” Cacciaguida’s city was a community of loyal citizenry “pure down to the humblest artisan.” Dante’s language directly echoes the popolo here: the old Florence of his imagination was a city of artisans, or guildsmen, exercising their arti. The eminent families whose names Cacciaguida intones were not yet “undone by their pride” or ruinous factionalism and were still committed to an ethic of good citizenship and civic duty: “With these families, and with others with them, I saw Florence in such repose that she had no cause for wailing. With these families I saw her people so glorious and so just, that the lily was never set reversed upon the staff, nor made vermilion by division” - an allusion to the changing flags of factions alternating in power. Dante’s ideal city is a utopia defined by the ideals of the popolo and its polemic against elite misrule. He himself suffered exile when the Blacks achieved their violent victory and expelled both their upper-class enemies and the last remnants of the popular government. With good reason to be angry at the factions, his denunciation of them emerges from many of the same perceptions that animated the popolo’s critique of elite misrule.60

A generation later Boccaccio included in the Decameron a story (6.6) that gives a glimpse of how average Florentines, in taverns and streets, may have joked about the pretensions and arrogance of elite families. The story is about an entertaining storyteller named Michele Scalza, who finds himself in an argument “about which Florentine family is the most ancient and noble.” His friends suggest the Uberti and Lamberti, both very old lineages, but Scalza disagrees and declares the Baronci to be the oldest and most noble family. But the Baronci were a relatively new family, and Scalza’s friends challenge his choice. Undeterred, he explains: “As you know, the more ancient a family is, the nobler it is.” His proof that the Baronci were the most ancient is as follows: “the Good Lord made the Baronci when He was [still] learning to paint, but made everyone else after He had learned. . . . All the others, as you must have noticed, have well made, suitably proportioned features, but take a look at the Baronci faces: some have long thin ones, others have impossibly fat ones; some have long noses, others stubby ones; some have chins that jut out to meet their noses, some have jaws the size of donkey jaws; you’ll find some with one eye bigger than the other, just like the faces children make when they’re first learning to draw. Therefore, as I say, it’s obvious that the Good Lord made them when He was learning to paint, which makes them more ancient than any other, and consequently more noble.”61 His listeners so liked Scalza’s explanation that they applauded his judgment: the ugly Baronci were indeed Florence’s, and the world’s, noblest family.