Florence’s victory over (or escape from) Visconti designs in Tuscany, its conquest of Pisa, successful expansion, and emergence as a maritime power imbued the republic with heady optimism and a heightened sense of destiny. Echoes of this buoyant mood resound throughout the period’s political, patriotic, and historical writings, which have received much attention in modern scholarship. In what quickly became, after its publication in 1955, the most influential book of Renaissance and Florentine historiography in the twentieth century, Hans Baron linked the climax of the confrontation with Milan in 1402 to what he saw as a decisive turning point in Renaissance intellectual history. The “crisis,” as he termed it, galvanized Florentine political attitudes into a civic ethos of participatory republicanism and converted many humanists from apolitical classicism to a patriotic defense of republican liberty. Baron argued that, whereas Salutati had been unable to sustain a commitment to the republican ideals to which he occasionally gave expression, after the 1402 crisis Bruni, first as a private scholar and then as chancellor, interpreted the wars against Milan as a conflict of republicanism against monarchical tyranny, in which the Florentines seized the historical and moral imperatives incumbent upon them as heirs of republican Rome. Baron called this cluster of political, historical, and ethical ideas “civic humanism” and located its various manifestations particularly in the two humanist chancellors (Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini), two citizen humanists (Cino Rinuccini and Matteo Palmieri), and the merchant and historian Gregorio Dati, who, although no humanist, shared their view of the Florentine defense of liberty. In addition to a spirited defense of republicanism and participatory citizenship, civic humanists promoted the theory of Florence’s foundation by, and historical links to, the ancient Roman republic, a re-evaluation of Roman history that condemned Caesar and the emperors as “plagues and destroyers” of republican liberty, and the twin convictions that political liberty was indispensable to cultural and literary vitality and that citizens’ active participation in civic life was essential to their moral development. In this generation, Baron believed, Florence’s traditional commitment to civic life merged with humanism’s appeal to the ethical exemplarity of antiquity to proclaim republicanism as a moral ideal.
Central to Baron’s interpretation of the crisis of 1402 was his reconstruction of Bruni’s literary production to show the full emergence of civic attitudes in texts written after the crisis and their absence from those that preceded it. Much of his analysis and the ensuing debates focused on the Panegyric to the City of Florence, whose florid praise of Florence’s liberty and republican constitution Baron saw as reflecting the post-1402 confidence, and on the two Dialogues to Pier Paolo Vergerio, the first of which, he concluded, was written before 1402, the second after, and in a very different mood. In the first, Bruni describes (or invents) a debate between the elderly Salutati, who argues that the modern age rivals antiquity in literary and philosophical accomplishments, and a group of younger classical purists, among whom Bruni includes himself, who, assuming the superiority of antiquity, believe that modern scholars cannot debate philosophical issues until they have reassembled with painstaking exactitude the corpus of classical texts. Expressing this militant classicism in the dialogue is Niccolo Niccoli, a scholar who wrote little and whose dedication to the revival of pure Latinity leads him to contemptuously reject the great fourteenth-century writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, for their non-classical Latin and historical inaccuracies. Niccoli also offers a political criticism of Dante for condemning Caesar’s assassin, Brutus, instead of praising him for attempting to save the Roman republic’s liberty. According to Baron, the disdain in which Niccoli held Florence’s already legendary fourteenth-century poets reflects the attitudes of classical humanists before the 1402 crisis. In the second dialogue, however, Niccoli partially reverses his arguments and admits that the fourteenth-century poets were indeed excellent writers, whose apparent inaccuracies stem from their allegorical appropriation of historical figures. Baron saw this reversal as evidence of at least Bruni’s (if not the historical Niccoli’s) conversion to the civic patriotism that dominated his writings for the next four decades. Debate has swirled around the dating of the texts; many believe that the Dialogues were not composed separately, that Niccoli’s “recantation” is far less complete and less “civic” than it seemed to Baron, and that Bruni’s purposes were to dramatize the tensions between his generation and Salutati, and also within the circle of young humanists, and in any case not to document his or Niccoli’s conversion to a philosophy of civic liberty and the active life.227 On the other hand, the civic, republican, and anti-monarchical sentiments of the Panegyric and of other later Bruni texts, however much bathed in the excesses of imitated classical rhetoric, and the similar if more muted sentiments of the Histories of the Florentine People, can hardly be doubted. Bruni and the texts of the years surrounding 1402 were at the origin of civic humanism’s emergence in modern historiography, but the larger historical problem must be approached from the vantage point of the development of Florentine political discourse, both in other writers, like Palmieri, Dati, and Morelli, and in the daily lexicon of Florentine political life.
One point beyond doubt is that the Florentines indeed saw Giangaleazzo Visconti as a mortal threat and the events of 1402 as a crisis in which the republic’s “liberty” was at stake. Buonaccorso Pitti, certainly no humanist and disinclined to see things in ideological terms, was an elite insider and key negotiator in Florence’s search for military help from both France and the emperor. Pitti wrote that the decision in March 1402 to stop funding the emperor “would have cost us our liberty had death not overtaken the Duke of Milan so shortly after his capture of Bologna. ... Had he but beaten us, he would certainly have become the lord of Italy in a short time. He was on the verge of conquering us, since he was already master of Pisa, Siena, Perugia, Chiusi, and all their fortified towns.” While the danger had been grave, according to Pitti, there is no triumphalism in his explanation of Florence’s survival: “Thus it is his death that has saved us and made us grow in power until the present, as one can see, more by luck or the grace of God than by the virtue or wisdom of those who have governed us.” For Pitti, the real danger lay in divisions among Florentines: “It seems to me that we have become puffed up with excessive pride and fallen into such great disorder that if the emperor or some other powerful lord should attack us in this disorder in which we exist (since the leaders of our ruling group are still in such discord as they seem to me to be, neglecting the common good and the honor of our commune for their factional interests and private feuds, and being at fault for admitting into the ruling group two kinds of citizens, new men and the young, who have become bold on account of the divisions they see among the leaders) I think little time would pass before this regime [stato] would be overthrown, unless God sees to it that our leaders make sincere peace among themselves, pull together for the common good, and stop impeding justice for their separate interests as they now do.”31
Giovanni Morelli similarly emphasized the gravity of the military situation in 1402. When news of the Florentine defeat at Casalecchio and the occupation of Bologna by Visconti troops reached Florence, he wrote, “we seemed to be lost beyond hope, because we had no army left, in Florence food supplies
Buonaccorso Pitti, Ricordi, in Mercanti scrittori, ed. Branca, pp. 428-9.
Would not have lasted two months, and the grain harvest was still stacked on the threshing-floors.” Noting the eruption of factional divisions in Pistoia and the uprisings of feudal lords in the Mugello and of “Ghibelline exiles” in Arezzo, Prato, and Volterra, Morelli concluded that “if the duke had attacked us, as he could have, he could certainly have deprived us of the harvest and the whole of the contado; and the city would soon have been his, I believe.” As a non-elite parvenu, Morelli was less inclined than Pitti to criticize the ruling group, but he too attributed the weakness of the Florentine position to internal divisions: “there was much discord within the city because of heavy taxes and recent events among the citizens. . . . The contado was more exhausted and impoverished than the city, and there was no peasant in the contado who would not have come gladly to burn down Florence.” Morelli, as we know, had an exaggerated fear of peasants, but he may not have been wrong in suggesting that the overtaxed contadini would have welcomed the Visconti as liberators quite as much as the subject cities did. A few pages earlier he had recounted the alleged plot that led to the banishment of Donato Acciaiuoli in 1396, the Ricci conspiracy of 1400, and still another conspiracy in which members of the Ricci, Medici, and, of course, Alberti were accused of attempting to assassinate Maso degli Albizzi. Morelli twice says that the instigators of this uprising attempted to get the people behind them with cries of “long live the popolo and the guilds.”228
Pitti and Morelli emphasized the danger of internal divisions accompanying the war (and sometimes generating protests against it) almost as much as they did the menace of Giangaleazzo’s armies. Perhaps for this reason neither turned the Visconti wars into an ideological crusade for the liberty of Italy. By contrast, those who did, chiefly Bruni and Dati, ignored internal political difficulties and represented the Florentines as a community united in defense of liberty against foreign peril. Dati’s History of Florence recounts “the long and great war that occurred in Italy in our time between the tyrant of Lombardy, the Duke of Milan, and the magnificent Commune of Florence.”229 Only occasionally does he hint at the cultural gulf between the ruling class and the rest of the population. For example, in reporting the effect of a hermit’s prophecy that Giangaleazzo would die in 1402, he comments that “although the leading citizens [maggiori cittadini] gave it little credence, the popolo, which gives its ear to such things, found some comfort in it” (5.5.12). Significant here is the changed meaning of “popolo,” which Dati clearly uses to refer to the unsophisticated and uneducated, having evidently lost contact with its traditional usage to refer to his own class, the non-elite guildsmen. But in his account of the war it is “the Florentines” who “become aware of the insatiable appetite of the tyrant,” “the Florentines” who “spread their wings over the whole world and get news and information from every corner” (3.1.1-2), in whose “hands alone the liberty of Italy rested,” and whose spirit is so alien and averse to being defeated or subjected to others that they never had any doubt, and always believed they had many courses of action, like a brave and secure heart that never lacks a way or a remedy. And they always found comfort in the hope, which seemed to put the sense of certainty in their own hands, that the Commune cannot die and that the duke was only one mortal man whose state would die with him” (5.5.10-11). Dati explains the outbreak of the war solely in terms of Giangaleazzo’s ambition to become “lord and king of Italy,” an ambition thwarted by “the Florentines” who “became the hedge that never let him move any farther forward” (5.5.8). They succeeded in blocking him, he says, not because of greater military strength, but because of their superior ability to calculate the duke’s overextension of his resources, which made them certain that his empire would fall apart as soon as the money began to run out and his hired soldiers deserted him. Time and again Dati stresses Florentine “ragione,” which means reason, but also that particular kind of reasoning that has to do with accounts and finances. Here too it was “the Florentines,” with no distinction of class or power, who employed this skill to save the city and the “liberty of Italy.”
The desire to see “the Florentines” as a harmonious whole, a community united in political ideals and generously providing the wherewithal to pay for their defense, was no doubt a romanticized recollection at some years’ distance from the war. But it may also have emerged from the conviction that only by suppressing the memory of internal conflicts would the republic be able to avoid them in the future: if the Florentines believed they had defeated Giangaleazzo because of their unity and dedication to the republic, they might actually develop such unity in facing future threats. Hortatory, as well as the purely celebratory, purposes also inform Bruni’s humanist version of the same themes in the Panegyric. Like Dati, Bruni claims that “all Italy would have fallen under the power of the Duke of Lombardy had not this one city resisted his power with its troops and sound strategy.” He represents the Florentines as a single collective will: “the stout Florentine heart could never know fear, nor could it ever consider surrendering any part of its honor.” Because they knew “that it was a Roman tradition to defend the liberty of Italy against its enemies,” the Florentines were prepared to protect the reputation bequeathed them by their ancestors. “It was with these things in mind that the Florentine people set out for war in great and high spirits.” Bruni displaces the protests over the crushing burden of forced loans into a mythical willingness on the part of the Florentines to spend every soldo to defeat their hated enemy: “They could never place concern for their wealth before their own self-esteem. Indeed they were prepared to lose money and life itself to maintain their freedom. . . . Wealth and money and such things are the rewards of the victors. But those who think that in war they should conserve their wealth, thinking that they make themselves more secure with it, are in fact serving the interests of the enemy more than their own. With such high morale was this city endowed.” Bruni acknowledges that no city, including Florence, “has ever been so well governed and established that it was completely without evil men,” an oblique reference, it seems, to the conspiracies of the late 1390s and 1400. But he insists that the “perversity and evil of a few ought not to deprive an entire nation of being praised for its virtuous deeds.” He thus marginalizes and criminalizes dissent, while insisting that in Florence, if not always elsewhere, there was no conflict between the views of the majority and those of the “best” citizens: “While in other cities the majority often overturns the better part, in Florence it has always happened that the majority view has been identical with [that of] the best citizens.”230 The assumptions that the republic had a better part (“melior pars”) whose ideas found docile agreement within the majority, and that opposition was “perverse and evil,” were deeply embedded in a vision of politics built around consensus; they emerged from the need to find unity in a society that had experienced deep social conflicts and fought a major war with these social and political antagonisms still very much apparent. Asserting the fundamental unity of all Florentines was wishful thinking, but of the kind that can powerfully affect political behavior.
Giovanni Morelli’s reaction to domestic turmoil in the midst of war provides a glimpse of how the politics of consensus, from which civic humanism’s assumptions about political participation sprang, functioned among non-elite guildsmen who were relinquishing their historic role as antagonists to the elite. Morelli came from a non-elite family of woolen cloth merchants whose first prior was his cousin Bernardo in 1387. Giovanni and his brother followed their father Paolo into the Wool guild in 1396.231 Like other non-elites climbing the social ladder, Giovanni married into an elite family with a handicap: in this case no less than the Alberti.232 But he underestimated the risks of marrying Caterina Alberti in 1395, especially since the 1393 balia had already exiled Caterina’s great-uncle Cipriano. Morelli later lamented “that this marriage alliance deprived me of much honor I might have had from my commune.” Aware of their lack of success in the scrutinies, in 1404 he and his brother moved to a different gonfalone to improve their chances and openly sought the favor of influential citizens. Without knowing whether these efforts had helped him, and before obtaining his first office (on the Sixteen) in 1409, he anxiously noted that the 1404 scrutiny displeased some elements of the ruling group “because of suspicions they had of many popolani whom they did not consider their friends.”233 Morelli’s was the dilemma of the non-elite major guildsman trying to navigate among elite factions, insecure without a political base of his own, and dependent on favors for a small place in the political sun. His problematic marriage and slow-starting political career no doubt reinforced already cautious instincts to stay in the good graces of all. He noted that after each of the recent conspiracies the “stato” (the ruling group) consolidated itself by eliminating those suspect to it and increasing police forces to guard the “stato and the good citizens.” “I have recalled these conspiracies for several reasons, and especially so that our [Morelli] descendants may take these as instructive examples and never work in any way against any istato or reggimento, being content to follow and support the wishes of the Signoria, and especially to place themselves in the hands of great men from old Guelf families; for you see the harm and shame that come to those who try to oppose them.” He underscores the necessity of winning the good graces of the “better citizens,” whether through marriage alliances or friendship, and of “leaning on someone in the ruling group, some powerful Guelf who is well thought of and free of suspicion. . . . Make him your friend by speaking well of him, helping him wherever you can, by going up to meet him and offering your services.” One should cultivate such powerful men by asking their advice and inviting them to one’s home. “Beyond this, always stand by those who hold and possess the palace and the rule of our city, and obey and follow their wishes and commands. Keep yourself from denouncing or speaking evil of their undertakings and actions, even if they are harmful. Stay silent, and depart from your silence only to praise them.” Even listening to anything spoken “against those who rule” is imprudent; it is best to avoid the company of “malcontents,” but one must report to the authorities immediately, and without second thoughts, anything one hears spoken against them.
Loyal support for the leadership of the “buoni uomini antichi” was accompanied in Morelli by a frank dislike of “parvenus, guildsmen, and people of modest stature” to whom he wished “prosperity, peace, and happy concord,” but whose “reggimento” he did not like (an allusion to the popular government of 1378-82), “although having them to a certain degree mixed in is good for restraining excessively ambitious spirits.” He lamented the pointlessness of the doubts the inner elite had about the scrutiny of 1404, because the only reason for disliking those who rule is if one is excluded: “I don’t mean one who takes the office for his own evil purposes, but one who has conducted and continues to conduct himself well. Such a person should not be held in contempt or deprived of his honor. [But] if you do these things to him, he will have every reason to hate you.” Morelli was making the case for the passively dutiful citizen who merits a share, if only a small one, of offices and “honors.” To gain political honors, he needed to seek the favors of “those who rule” by showing them deference and “conducting himself well,” to be a virtuous citizen in a political system in which virtue meant conduct acceptable to “those who rule.” Morelli was reluctant to see his exclusion from office before 1409 as a function of broader political or social divisions. He could not imagine himself as representing interests or ideas opposed to those of the oligarchy and saw his misfortune as personal, as the result of a marriage that deprived him of what he considered his due in light of the virtuous conduct that in the end finally proved his worth and rewarded him with offices. The conclusion he drew from this experience was not about the social abyss that separated him from the regime’s power brokers. It was rather about the importance of being a team player and the small victories that the acceptance of such a role made possible. He wanted to see only the harmonious whole; his “good conduct,” political quiescence, and willingness to pay honor to the very oligarchs who had kept him on the sidelines proved to him that virtue would in the end merit honor. “I have recalled this in order to inform you of the methods one should employ to acquire the honor that the commune accords its citizens: doing good, obeying the laws, paying honor to the officials of the commune, to particularly respected citizens, to men of ancient families, and to persons of worth.”234
Gregorio (or Goro) Dati was a silk merchant active in international trade and a non-elite member of Por Santa Maria in which, like his father Stagio, he served frequently as consul. Stagio was never selected for the priorate, despite a business partnership with the elite Castellani and several terms as his guild’s representative on the Mercanzia’s governing committee. Goro’s uncle Manetto, a retail wine-seller and minor guildsman, made the family’s first appearance in the priorate in 1380. When, in 1412 at age fifty, Goro gained his first major office (the Sixteen), he commented in his diary that until then he did not know whether he was among those approved for the highest offices. Recalling that his father’s name had been drawn only after his death in 1374, Dati suggested in effect that the wait had lasted almost two lifetimes. He recognized and accepted his subordinate position in political life: now that he knew he was eligible for major offices, he felt he had “received a great favor” and would have been willing to trade the possibility of additional offices for the opportunity to sit just once on a major executive committee. It was, in other words, more important to him to know that he was considered worthy of office by those who made such decisions than to have an active role with real influence in government. Ironically, he manifests his worthiness by relinquishing all desire for such a role: “In order not to appear ungrateful, and not wishing to stimulate an insatiable ambition which, whatever it achieves, only wants still more, I have decided and resolved that from now on I must never implore favors from anyone” in order to be approved in the scrutinies, “and will instead leave such matters to those who oversee them and let happen to me whatever may please God. Henceforth, whenever my name is drawn for any communal or guild office, I promise to obey and not to refuse the burden and to do as well as I can and know how. In this way I will ward off the vice of ambition and presumption and will live as a free man and not as a slave for favors.” Despite this firm resolve to steer clear of the temptation to seek patrons and favors, Dati revealingly specifies the penalties he will impose on himself “in the event I should do otherwise,” as presumably he did, since he was subsequently elected prior in 1425 and Standardbearer of Justice in 1429.
Dati understood the citizen’s duty and the honor of office in remarkably passive and deferential terms. Contrary to the homogeneity of “the Florentines” in the Istoria, in his private diary he explicitly accepts the gulf in politics between “those who oversee” things and make the decisions, and from whom favors are sought and received, and those, like himself, who only had to decide whether to play the game of political mendicancy by imploring favors and patiently waiting for an occasional office. He exhibits the paradox of the non-elite “good citizen” who embraces the ethic of the active political life while recognizing that it turns him into a “servant” of upper-class political bosses. The historian who sang the heroic deeds of the Florentines in the Visconti wars and lauded his city’s defense of liberty represented his own political career as essentially devoid of any purposes or ideas. About his term on the Ten of Liberty in 1405, for example, he said that “I pleased everyone and acted as rightly as I was able.” His term on the Twelve in 1421 elicited the comment that “no greater unanimity could be found than that which reigned amongst us.” He accepted to serve as podesta of two towns in the dominion in 1424 in order to leave the city during a recurrence of plague and remembered the experience as one in which, “by God’s grace, none of us got sick” and during which “I acquired little wealth. . . but was highly esteemed by the inhabitants.” And about his term as Standardbearer of Justice in 1429, he commented that “we worked harmoniously together and accomplished a number of good things,” of which he mentions only the decision to move a column from the Mercato Vecchio to Piazza San Felice. The only office for which he even hints at a policy he supported was his appointment to the Five Defenders of the contado and the district in 1422: “an onerous office, in which. . . we did a great deal to improve the lot of the unfortunate peas-ants.”40 Dati’s overriding concern was for harmony and cooperation on the committees on which he served, to “please everyone,” and to be seen as having “acted rightly.” He advocated no policies, represented no interests, expressed no grievances, and proposed no reforms. The vita activa civilis of civic humanism was supported by hundreds of men like Goro Dati who saw their role in politics in these passive terms.
Loyalty, deference, personal worthiness, acquiescence in the leadership of those born to it: these are likewise the civic virtues heralded by Bruni. In 1428, shortly after becoming chancellor, he wrote a funeral oration for Nanni Strozzi, a professional soldier from the Ferrara branch of the Strozzi who was killed leading Ferrarese troops in alliance with Florence against Milan. Here too Bruni lauded Florence’s constitution, describing it as “popular” because it secured “liberty and equality” for all citizens (a liberty “limited only by the laws and free of fear”) and because “the hope of attaining office and raising oneself up is the same for all.” Expanded numbers of eligible citizens and officeholders may have given this claim a degree of verisimilitude, but the “hope of attaining office” was not of course the same for all, even for all those approved in the scrutinies. Bruni omits any mention of the borsellino and the two-tiered system of eligibility it institutionalized. Yet the examples of Morelli and Dati show that the hope they nourished for so long of someday obtaining an important office strongly conditioned their political behavior and attitudes.
Bruni may have been echoing an illusion, but it was an illusion that mattered. He understood that the hope to which he pointed engendered a commitment to dutiful citizenship grounded in personal worth: it demanded that citizens “show diligence, skill, and a serious and morally acceptable way of life, for our city requires in its citizens virtue and uprightness of character. Anyone who has these things is considered of sufficient birth to govern the republic.”236 This is the same link that Morelli and Dati made between personal and civic virtue. And the sign of that virtue was cooperation with and deference to the leadership. That Bruni was arguing for the superiority of republicanism and the active life is only one (and perhaps not the most original) of his contributions to Florentine political discourse. He was also legitimating a new oligarchic republicanism in which good citizens (of the popolo) respected their “betters” (within the elite).
Bruni’s most celebrated model of virtuous citizenship is the largely fictional Dante of the little “biography” written in 1436, circulated in many manuscripts, and later widely printed. Choosing Dante to illustrate the humanist ideal of citizenship was tricky, because the historical Dante was an angry exile who hurled one invective after another at the city that banished him and derided Florentine claims to political sovereignty. For Dante, republican autonomy constituted criminal rejection by an arrogant city in rebellion against divinely instituted imperial authority. But Dante was also the author of the greatest poem in the Florentine language, a work that did as much as the republican tradition to fashion the city’s cultural identity.237 Humanists who accepted the legitimacy of imperial authority, like Salutati in the De Tyranno, had no difficulty praising Dante for both his political views and his poetry. But what was a republican civic humanist like Bruni to make of the tensions of Dante’s legacy? Bruni turns Dante’s life into a cautionary tale in the deceptively simple biography. Rejecting Boccaccio’s representation of Dante’s life and poetry as the products of turbulent emotions of love, Bruni depicts Dante - before the exile - as a virtuous citizen who fought in the commune’s army and held political offices, and as a family man who married and raised children. Civic duties and family responsibilities reinforce each other in this idealized portrait, because, as Bruni paraphrases Aristotle’s notion of the city as a family writ large, “man is a social animal,” and “his first joining, from the multiplication of which is born the city, is husband and wife, and nothing can be perfect where this is lacking.”
Bruni acknowledges that Dante’s banishment was imposed by “a perverse and iniquitous law.” But he portrays Dante in exile as abandoning the restraint inculcated by citizenship and marriage: at first “he tried with good works and good behavior to regain the favor that would allow him to return to Florence” (an echo of Morelli’s advice about winning the favor of the powerful), but he fatally lost patience when Emperor Henry VII came to Italy. Dante “could not maintain his resolve to wait for favor, but rose up in his proud spirit and began to speak ill of those who were ruling the land, calling them villainous and evil and menacing them with their due punishment through the power of the emperor.” When Henry died, “Dante entirely lost all hope, since he himself had closed the way of a change of favor by having spoken and written against the citizens who were governing the repuBlic,” thus making himself responsible for turning an unjust sentence into a justly permanent exile. For Bruni, even innocent exiles owed obedience, respect, and deference to the republic and to those who “ruled the land.” Dante’s failure to honor this obligation left the city’s rulers with no choice but to banish him for life. Good citizens controlled the passions and exercised self-discipline. Domestication of the passions was also central to the kind of poet Bruni wanted to believe Dante was. “One may become a poet,” he says, in two ways: either through “incitement and motion of personal genius by some inner and hidden force, which is called ‘furor’ and having one’s mind possessed,” or “through knowledge and study, through learning and art and prudence.” Even as he admitted that the first is the way to “the highest and most perfect kind of poetry,” Bruni concluded that Dante was a poet of “the second sort,” for “he acquired the knowledge which he was to adorn and exemplify in his verses through attentive and laborious study of philosophy, theology, astrology, arithmetic, through the reading of history and through the turning over of many different books.”43 What might seem an odd judgment of Dante as a poet was in fact integral to Bruni’s purposes. In both politics and poetry he wanted citizens whose attitudes and behavior were shaped by the consensus, sociability, and discipline of a civic world that sought to banish dissent with a new politics of personal virtue.
World History
