Second Popolo and the Ordinances of Justice

On November 24, 1292, an unusually long debate on the election of the next priorate occurred in a special session of the council of the consulates of the twelve major guilds, in which at least nineteen persons, including many who were not consuls of their guilds, expressed a variety of opinions about the election. Among the speakers were members of elite families (Cerchi, Acciaiuoli, Strozzi), jurists, a notary, a woolen cloth manufacturer who was the nephew of Remigio de’ Girolami, a poet, a member of the butchers’ guild, and Dino Compagni. The chief issue was how much electoral influence the guild consuls should have: proposals for giving an equal say in the nomination and/or final approval of candidates to the independently elected consuls of the twelve guilds would bring more new men, recruited more evenly from the twelve guilds, into the priorate; conversely, bypassing the guilds and entrusting the election to a body selected by the outgoing priors would limit access to the priorate to the same elite that dominated the office during the previous decade. Opinions were about evenly divided between these two approaches. The most radical suggestion came from a representative of the butchers’ guild, Dino Pecora, who favored a priorate of twelve members, one from each guild to be selected by the other eleven guilds. This would have given the non-elite guilds (the five middle guilds together with the Vaiai e Pellicciai, and usually also Por Santa Maria and the Medici e Speziali) a majority of votes in selecting priors from the all guilds, including those in which the elite was more heavily represented. Although it was not accepted, this proposal reflected the preference of middle and minor guildsmen that all twelve guilds share equally in the priorate and its election. Equal representation and equal influence in the voting would have relegated the few heavily elite guilds to permanent minority status. Other speakers in the November debate who agreed in principle on a wider distribution of offices within the guild community formulated more moderate versions of the same approach. Compagni recommended that the consuls of each of the twelve guilds nominate six candidates from their own guild, one from each sesto, who would then be voted on, one by one, by all the assembled consuls. The candidate with the highest number of votes in each sesto would be its prior. This allowed each of the twelve guilds to nominate its own candidates and gave the non-elite elements of the guild community the heaviest influence in the voting. But, although he wanted no guild to have more than one prior in any given priorate, Compagni did not insist that the guilds have equal numbers of priors over the long term. Compagni’s proposal was approved with some modifications, but it faced opposition from the lawyers and members of elite families who also argued against all similar plans. The debate was a breakthrough for the popolo and the guild community in establishing the autonomy and equality of each guild in nominating candidates and the equality of all twelve guilds in the final voting.83 For the next century, the autonomy and the equality of the guilds, applied to a variety of changing circumstances, became the hallmarks of guild republicanism. But the movement’s Achilles’ heel was its inability to resolve the question of how many guilds would be allowed to participate in elections or governments based on these principles.

The six priors elected in December 1292 (from six different guilds) sat down with three jurists and wrote the most important political document in Florentine history, the Ordinances of Justice, first promulgated on January 18, 1293.84 Borrowing heavily from the similar legislation of Bologna’s popular government, which had much earlier harnessed the power of both guilds and armed neighborhood societies, the Florentine Ordinances did two overwhelmingly important things: they 1) created a formal federation among the guilds and placed the executive branch of Florentine government in its hands, and 2) codified and expanded existing anti-magnate legislation, subjecting ultimately 140 lineages of the city and contado to tougher applications of the obligation to provide surety and harsher penalties for crimes against non-magnates. In revisions of April 1293, they also barred the seventy-two families of city magnates from the priorate and guild consulates. Appropriating the concept of justice to legitimate both its constitutional reforms and its policy toward the magnates, the Ordinances borrowed the Roman law definition of justice as the “constant and perpetual desire to ensure to each his right [ius]” and declared it the foundation on which the Ordinances themselves “are deservedly called ‘of justice’ ” and promulgated for the “welfare of the res publica.” The first rubric created the formal federation of twenty-one guilds, claiming that “that is judged most perfect which consists of all its parts and is approved by the judgment of them all.” The second part of this sentence is a loud paraphrase of a famous maxim of Roman law, quod omnes tangit debet ab omnibus approbari (that which touches all must be approved by all), which, although not applied to government in its original context, was frequently used by medieval jurists to assert that legitimate rule depended on consent. In this version, the “parts” are the guilds, and the whole that they constitute is in one sense their federation and in a larger sense the “res publica” whose welfare the Ordinances promote. The Ordinances thus affirmed that the legitimacy of Florentine government depended on the consent of the guilds. Each of the twenty-one guilds was required to appoint a legal representative empowered to swear an oath on behalf of his guild to “construct and preserve the good, pure, and loyal society and company of these same guilds,” to honor and defend the communal magistrates, priors, guilds, and the whole Florentine “populus,” and to obey and give aid and counsel to the magistrates, if necessary with arms. They also swore mutual defense among all the guilds and their members to “preserve and defend the justice and right [iustitia and ius] of the guildsmen, so that they are not oppressed or unduly burdened by any person or persons.” If any magnate oppresses or molests a guildsman, the consuls of that guild, and of all the guilds if necessary, must go to the podesta, the Capitano, and the lord priors to expose the offense and ask them to take all necessary measures to terminate it and protect the injured guildsman “in his right and his liberty [in suo iure et libertate servetur].” Thus the Ordinances link the preservation of ius (and hence iustitia) to both the provisions for punishing magnate violence against non-magnates and to the guild federation (“this present society and company, sacrament and universal union among all the guilds”).

Although the political provisions of the Ordinances bound the commune more closely to the guild federation, there was still no agreement on how to elect the priors. The relevant rubric specified no procedures, requiring instead that at the end of each two-month term the consuls of the twelve guilds and others appointed by the outgoing priors should debate and decide the matter anew. It did however establish that candidates for the priorate had to be members of one of the twenty-one guilds and also regularly active in the trade or profession of their guilds. The requirement of regular exercise of a profession threatened the eligibility of some members of elite families who, although enrolled in guilds, were not necessarily continuously active in their family firms. But the chief threat to the elite’s political standing was the exclusion of knights, which was the first step toward the ineligibility of all magnates. The Ordinances also created a new office from which magnates were likewise barred: the Standardbearer of Justice, added to the priorate as the seventh member of the executive magistracy and elected by the consuls of the twelve guilds. Although a participant with equal voting rights in the deliberations of the priors, the Standardbearer’s original function was to lead the popolo’s internal security force of 1,000 men selected “from the popolo and the guildsmen” and to destroy the homes and property of magnates who killed or seriously injured non-magnates. To prevent magnate uprisings when the Standardbearer and his troops marched on the home of a guilty magnate, the guildsmen were required to be armed under their banners and ready to obey “viriliter et potenter” the orders of the Capitano. Such displays of force must have been great public spectacles of the vengeance and justice of the popolo. Dino Compagni, the third Standardbearer of Justice in June-August 1293, reports (1.12) that he led the troops to destroy the property of a magnate family whose kinsman had killed a Florentine in France. Something of the mood of this remarkable year emerges from his comment that these early destructions of magnates’ homes “led to a bad practice of the other Standardbearers, because when according to the laws they were supposed to destroy something, the popolo called them cowards if they did not destroy it utterly. And many distorted justice for fear of the popolo.”

The anti-magnate provisions of the Ordinances built on earlier legislation. The first anti-magnate laws followed Cardinal Latino’s Peace. In March 1281 a law required certain members of powerful families to post a monetary bond for good behavior, and in July another strengthened the podesta’s authority to regulate feuds and punish acts of violence, referring to “magnates and powerful men [magnates et potentes] from both parties” as frequent instigators of crimes and public disorders that threatened “to subvert the good and peaceful state” of the city.27 This measure gave the podesta and Capitano of the popolo authority to investigate and punish perpetrators with incarceration, banishment, or the obligation to post bond.

Salvemini, Magnati e popolani (1899), pp. 334-48 (340-1).

Provide surety and threatened the latter with destruction of their property; bound all members of these families to the observance of communal laws; prohibited the carrying of arms by their servants; and, for the first time, instituted a list of specified families all of whose members fell under these regulations as “magnates.” The incumbent priors were authorized to compile the list and include it in the communal statutes. Two criteria, one specific, the other nebulous, determined the selection of magnate families: the presence in a family for at least twenty years of a knight, and a family’s public reputation.85 Collective responsibility of families for the crimes of their members and the designation of entire families as magnates opened the way for the harsher laws of 1293.

In addition to requiring the destruction of property for murder or crippling injury inflicted on non-magnates, the Ordinances imposed much higher than usual monetary penalties for assaults, lesser injuries, and seizure of property. Proof of guilt could be established by witnesses, and exceptions to the obligation to provide surety were eliminated. The Ordinances did not attempt to outlaw vendettas and feuds among magnates themselves; it was violence, intimidation, or oppression against non-magnates and the commune that the Ordinances sought to punish and deter. Yet the real aim may have been to modify the behavior of magnates by weakening and breaking the influence of elite factions over non-elite citizens. An intriguing rubric of the Ordinances prohibited non-magnates from assembling at the home of any magnate during riots, or when the Standardbearer of Justice moved through the streets with his armed force, thus attempting to cut the vertical links of patronage and clientage that drew non-elite into elite factions. Fights between factions that included non-elite followers naturally produced casualties among the latter; thus, prohibitively harsh penalties for the death or injury of non-magnates no doubt deterred magnates from relying on such followers. The aim was to isolate magnates in their own social world, to sever their ties to non-magnates and thus diminish the ability of vertically integrated elite factions to spread violence throughout the city. In the long run the policy was successful, but in the shorter run of the next two decades it was, as we shall see, a spectacular failure.

In January 1293, thirty-eight elite city families were declared magnates. But the next priorate of February-April, which included Giano della Bella, identified by all the sources as the leader and inspiration of the popular government, nearly doubled the city magnates to seventy-two families, further toughened the penalties for magnate crimes, enlarged the security force to 2,000 men, and barred magnates from the guild consulates and most of the communal councils. About two-thirds of the seventy-two families belonged to the old elite: the legendary leaders of both the defunct Ghibelline cause (Uberti, Lamberti, Amidei, Soldanieri) and the victorious Guelfs (Donati, Buondelmonti, Adimari, Cavalcanti). Almost certainly by design, the roster contains about as many Guelf as (former) Ghibelline families. Some older magnate families were still politically prominent (Della Tosa, Cavalcanti, Donati) or active in commerce (Abati, Rossi), but most were already in decline, and it cost the popular government little to affirm the magnate status of no longer powerful families that had probably been declared magnates in 1286. Much more significant, and the real challenge to the elite, was the inclusion of more than two dozen families from the merchant elite, new and old, including some from each sesto: Rossi, Frescobaldi, Mannelli, Bardi and Mozzi in Oltrarno; Cosi and Manieri in San Pancrazio; Scali and Spini in Borgo; Abati, Cerchi, and Pazzi in Porta San Piero; Cavalcanti, Pulci, Bagnesi, and Franzesi in San Pier Scheraggio; Agli, and Amieri in Porta Duomo.86 If one purpose behind the expansion of the magnate rolls was to deter and discourage factions, it was crucial to do so in all neighborhoods.

The presence among the magnates of so much of the economic elite makes it impossible to argue, as many have, that the Ordinances mark the rise to power of the capitalist elite that had been pushing older “feudal” families from the centers of power. Behind the popular government of 1293-5 were the non-elite guildsmen who viewed with suspicion the entire elite (old and new, Guelf and Ghibelline, bankers and landowners). To have attempted to relegate the entire elite to magnate status would of course have provoked an upper-class revolt. What the popolo did instead (and this had to have been planned) was to split the elite between magnates and non-magnates. Punishing certain families served as a warning to others and probably earned the popular government a degree of grudging cooperation from those not made magnates. An interesting example is that of the Peruzzi, bankers nearly as rich and powerful but not as old as the Bardi. Why were they not made magnates? Perhaps because their first appearance in political life came after the creation of the priorate, but also because Pacino Peruzzi, a leading investor in the family company, regularly argued in the debates on electoral procedures throughout 1293 in favor of giving the consuls of the twelve guilds greater influence in electing the priors, as he did, for example, on February 14. Can it be a coincidence that his kinsman Giotto Peruzzi, the head of the company, was elected on that day and thus sat on the same priorate of February-April 1293 with Giano della Bella that expanded the list of magnate families? The Peruzzi may have been spared because they cooperated with the popolo.

That the government established in 1293 did not represent the interests of the merchant-banking elite emerges clearly from the composition of the twelve priorates over the next two years. Of eighty-four priors and Standardbearers of Justice, thirty-seven (44%) were their families’ first priors.87 Most elite families, obviously the magnates but also many non-magnates, were shut out: the Acciaiuoli, for example, who had nine priors in the previous decade, had none in these two years; also without priors were the Canigiani, Pitti, Capponi, Baroncelli, Corsini, Medici, Salviati, Ricci, Guicciardini, Rucellai, Covoni, and many others. The Altoviti, Peruzzi, Becchenugi, Guadagni, and Girolami (if they rank as elite) all had two priors, and another fifteen to twenty elite families each had one. But the great majority were from the middling ranks of the major guilds, and many reached the office for the first time. In the five years from 1293 through 1297 (during which the guild consuls had a major role in elections), seventy-three families had their first prior, whereas in the preceding five years forty-six did so (despite the fact that the priorate had only been created in 1282).

Just as the primo popolo gave monumental architectural expression to its challenge to the elite families by lopping off their towers and building a fortresslike seat of government for itself (today’s Bargello), the second popolo likewise began planning a new palace of the priors (now Palazzo Vecchio) in 1294 at the peak of its power (see Plate 1). But building got underway only in 1298, when, according to Villani (9.26), increasing tensions “between the popolo and the grandi” over elections of the priorate and the recrudescence of elite factions made it “no longer safe” for the priors to meet, as they had, in houses rented from the Cerchi. Construction was far enough advanced in just a few years for the priors to take up residence. Originally designed to face north and thus to overlook the area where the houses and neighborhood enclave of the proud Ghibelline Uberti once stood, its builders changed course and had the imposing structure face west. Even so, the new palace and its piazza, which was systematically and carefully enlarged over many decades, symbolically buried the greatest of Florence’s elite families. With its fortress-like rustication, echoes of Roman architecture, and huge tower, the palace of the popolo loudly announced resolute defiance of the elite.88

Plate 1 Palace of the priors (Palazzo Vecchio), begun c.1298 as the political center of the “second popolo,” possibly designed by Arnolfo di Cambio (Scala/Art Resource, NY)