What really destabilized the relative calm of the preceding decades was the war against the papacy, which, together with the political revolution it precipitated, was a veritable watershed in Florence’s history.148 For more than a century, since the Guelf alliance of the 1260s, the republic had maintained close ties with the papacy. Florentines had almost always been the most important among the popes’ bankers (as they would again be after this crisis), and Florence had fought, either with or in sympathy with the papacy, against Ghibellines from the Hohenstaufen to Henry VII to the lords of Pisa (Uguccione della Faggiuola), Lucca (Castruccio Castracani), and Verona (Mastino della Scala). Guelfism and loyalty to the church were at the center of Florence’s selfimage; hence the dramatic significance of the decision to go to war against the church and the traumatic internal divisions it generated.
During the early years in Avignon, the papacy lost control of its territories in central Italy, which wrapped around the Florentine dominion from Rome to Umbria and north to the Romagna and Bologna. They even lost control of Rome itself, sometimes to the always turbulent Roman nobility, other times to popular governments. In 1353 Innocent VI appointed the Spanish cardinal Egidio Albornoz as legate to undertake the reconstitution of papal authority in central Italy. Albornoz’s patient work over the next decade in bringing many cities back under papal rule inevitably produced border disputes and controversies with Florence. By 1370 some Florentines began to see the papacy’s reviving presence as a threat to Florentine security and hegemony in Tuscany itself, as rumors abounded that the church sought to subvert Florence’s rule over its own subject cities. In the spring of 1375 Pope Gregory XI ended a war against Visconti Milan, and many feared that his chief military commander, the English mercenary John Hawkwood, would bring his army into Tuscany and against Florence. To prevent this, Florence bought off Hawkwood, paying him the immense sum of 130,000 florins, and then appointed a committee of eight, later dubbed the “Eight Saints,” to pay for Hawkwood’s bribe with a forced loan on the local clergy: the bishop, abbots, monasteries, and all the landed wealth controlled by ecclesiastical institutions. At the end of July the government crossed its Rubicon by allying with (traditionally Ghibelline) Milan, a decision widely seen as being aimed at the pope. War commenced, and its prosecution was entrusted to another committee of eight with extensive powers to conduct military policy and raise and spend monies as they saw fit. Stefani said of them that “they did the greatest things ever done until then” (752). The Otto di balia who ran the war included four from elite families (Alessandro de’ Bardi, Giovanni Magalotti, Andrea Salviati, and Tommaso Strozzi), two non-elite major guildsmen (the spice dealer Giovanni Dini and the woolen-cloth manufacturer Guccio Gucci), and two minor guildsmen (the wine retailer Marco di Federigo Soldi and the grain dealer Tommaso di Mone).
First among the “great things” they did was to systematically undermine Albornoz’s two decades of work by dispatching Florentine agents to foment rebellion in forty cities of the papal states, including Bologna, Perugia, Orvieto, and Viterbo. They also used ideology as a weapon, asking their recently appointed humanist chancellor Coluccio Salutati to write eloquent public letters urging the papal cities to throw off the “tyranny” of a corrupt papacy in favor of the “liberty” of free cities. In letters to the people of Bologna and Perugia, Salutati linked the liberty that Florence enjoyed, and that he encouraged them to embrace, to the republicanism of ancient Rome. Without mincing words, he denied the legitimacy of papal rule because monarchy could never reflect the will of the people and could only be imposed on those deprived of liberty. Salutati also grounded Florentine liberty in the historic traditions of the popolo. He proclaimed the good fortune of cities ruled by “merchants and guildsmen, who naturally love liberty and are more gravely oppressed by the pain of subjection,” who “desire peace in which to practice their artes, love equality among citizens, and do not glory in the nobility of family or blood.”149 He thus tied the cause of independence from external tyrants (like the pope) to the ideology of the guild republic.
Gregory’s military response produced few results in Tuscany. Hawkwood honored his agreement not to make war on Florence, confined his activity to the papal territories, and in 1377 abandoned Gregory and joined the antipapal league. Gregory’s other captains ironically limited their depredations to the papal Romagna, including a horrendous sack of Cesena in February 1377. Most effective among the pope’s responses to Florentine subversion of papal rule was the imposition, on March 31, 1376, of an interdict prohibiting all religious services in Florence and its territory and declaring Florentines subject to arrest and confiscation of their goods throughout Europe. Suspension of the Mass (except on specified holy days), denial of communion to the laity, the absence of processions, public prayers, extreme unction, burial services, and a host of other rites fundamental to the cultural and devotional identity of Christian society confronted Florentines of all social ranks with dilemmas of conscience and loyalty that were not easily resolved, even in the midst of strong anti-clerical and anti-papal sentiment. Debates raged in the pratiche over whether to observe the interdict, and, while some counseled defiance, the Eight of War decided to obey it. Without priestly services and sacraments, Florentines created their own forms of devotion and prayer in processions and confraternities. Stefani says that a “compunction seemed to seize the citizens” (757), as men and women filled all the churches every evening singing lauds and spending large sums on candles and books. Processions of the “whole people” with relics and music were held daily; more than 5,000 flagellants, including children, beat themselves as 20,000 people followed in procession; young men from elite families dedicated themselves to prayer, fasting, begging, and the conversion of prostitutes. While Stefani may have exaggerated the numbers, the city clearly responded to the interdict with heightened levels of religious enthusiasm and emotion, almost as if to show that they could be better and more devout Christians than the pope who had imposed this unjust sentence. Another chronicler commented that citizens, deprived of the sight of the host, believed that “we see it in our hearts, and God well knows that we are neither Saracens nor pagans; on the contrary, we are and will remain true Christians, chosen by God.”150
Religious enthusiasm spilled over into heterodoxy and even heresy. Remnants of the dissident Spiritual branch of the Franciscans, the Fraticelli, whose insistence on the literal observance of the vow of poverty and critique of the church’s material wealth had led to their attempted secession from the order in the late thirteenth century and subsequent condemnation by Pope John XXII, emerged from hiding in these years and found protectors and followers in a city angry with the pope and hungry for religion. Their denunciation of the papacy and church hierarchy for their corrupting wealth and power found sympathetic audiences in a city at war with a “tyrant” pope. Even the prophetic streak of Joachite origin that had nourished the Spirituals’ sense of historical destiny reappeared in force: the conviction that their persecution at the hands of a false church was the necessary prelude to a millenarian transformation of church and society. The spread of improvised devotions, heterodox ideas, and prophetic fantasies, in the absence of the clerical discipline that normally guided the religious impulses of the laity, produced violations of the interdict. Influential citizens urged the resumption of religious services, and in October 1377 the government reversed itself and decided to defy the interdict by ordering the clergy to begin saying Mass again. Forced resumption of religious services split both the laity, uncertain about defying a papal order, and the local clergy. Parish priests were for the most part willing to obey the government, but the upper echelons, more beholden to papal authority, sought ways to avoid the dilemma. When, under papal pressure, the bishops of Florence (Angelo Ricasoli) and Fiesole (Neri Corsini) left Florentine territory, the commune responded by requiring prelates to remain at their posts under penalty of heavy fines and confiscations. For the most part the local clergy, with whatever qualms of conscience, stayed put.151
Gregory’s interdict also launched an economic war by ordering governments throughout Europe not to do business with Florentine merchants and bankers, threatening to prosecute them, and urging other rulers to do likewise. Florentine business interests were damaged, but not broken. Hundreds of Florentine merchants left Avignon, and bankers, chiefly the Alberti, obviously lost their lucrative positions there. Elsewhere there were occasional expulsions and confiscations, but most governments ignored the papal order, notably the king of France, who actually protected Florentines. The merchant diaspora found ways to protect its assets and wait out the storm, and recovery, even in Avignon, quickly followed the end of the war.152 In the meantime, Florentines had economic cards of their own to play. At the end of 1376 the government began confiscating and selling local church property to finance what was becoming a costly war. Ironically, the most outspoken proponent of seizing church property and using it to fight the papacy was a Medici, from a different branch of the family whose later economic and political fortunes were so closely tied to the papacy. In September 1376, Salvestro de’ Medici advised the government in a pratica that “the bishops of Florence and Fiesole and all prelates of the city of Florence, should be sent to the pope to procure his withdrawal from the war and induce him to make peace. If he does not, then let all ecclesiastical property come into the commune, and let the war be fought at the clergy’s expense.”153 A committee was appointed to compile a census of ecclesiastical property and commence selling it, even as some were reluctant to purchase property that they feared might have to be returned to the church in an eventual settlement. It was the largest and most systematic disendowment of any territorial church before the Reformation.
In the spring of 1377 papal mercenaries recaptured Bologna and deprived Florence of a crucial ally. Later that year talks broke down when Gregory announced that his price for peace would be an indemnity of 1,000,000 florins, an astronomical sum that was more a provocation than serious negotiation. He also tried to split the war leaders from the people by declaring them heretics; the commune responded with another huge tax on the local church and more confiscations of church property. As the stalemate dragged on, the pro-papal and anti-war Parte Guelfa stepped up its campaign to discredit the government with more “warnings” against war leaders and supporters who were chiefly from the popolo. Gregory’s death in March 1378 rescued Florence from a war whose repercussions in the economic sphere and on the consciences and divided loyalties of its citizens were far more serious than any military threat. Under his successor Urban VI peace negotiations resumed, a truce was declared in May, and a final settlement in July. The commune agreed to an indemnity of 250,000 florins and to the eventual restitution of the massive amounts of confiscated church property. In the meantime it agreed to pay 5% annual interest on the value of the property, which in effect turned local churchmen into communal creditors. The large indemnity and property settlement might suggest that the papacy won the war. But exactly how much of the indemnity was ever paid is unclear. Thirty years later the papacy claimed that 88% was still unpaid, and the restitution of clerical property went on for decades and was probably never completed. Moreover, Urban’s election split the cardinals, a faction of whom elected a second pope and thus inaugurated an almost 40-year schism with two competing lines of popes in Rome and Avignon. With both papacies offering concessions to secular governments in return for recognition and support, Florence was able to have some of the debts cancelled and to tighten control over the local church, its courts, and finances. Through much of the fifteenth century, the commune controlled its ecclesiastical establishment more closely than ever before, and from this perspective it may have been the Florentines who won the war of the Eight Saints. None of this was apparent in the short term, however, as the tensions generated by the war between the Guelf elite and the guild community immediately erupted into revolution.
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