Guilds

Thirteenth-century Italy witnessed an explosion of self-constituted associations: the spontaneous formation of societies and organizations for purposes that ranged from religious devotion (confraternities) to security (armed neighborhood companies) to resistance against the economic pressure of grasping bishops (rural communes)29 30 to the protection of collective interests by practitioners of the same trade or business (guilds). These were not the exclusive property of the popolo, as elites also joined confraternities and guilds. But armed neighborhood companies, rural communes, and the great majority of guilds emerged from the need to find collective strength in such associations by those who lacked powerful families. Throughout communal Italy the popolo depended chiefly on armed companies and guilds to advance its interests. Both forms of association appeared in Florence no later than the early thirteenth century and provided channels of political representation that brought the popolo into government. In the first popular government of 1250-60 the armed companies were the preferred avenue to power, but by the second half of the century, for reasons to be explored in the next chapter, the guilds became the popolo’s central institutions.

In their guilds, merchants, manufacturers, shopkeepers, artisans, and notaries who did not come from powerful lineages found security, political strength, and cultural identity, much as elite Florentines looked for the same things in their families. In thirteenth-century Florence guilds proliferated, as scores of professional, merchant, trading, and artisan groups formed themselves into legal corporations, each with its own internal governance.31 The creation of guilds did not depend on, and was neither encouraged nor obstructed by, the commune: they emerged from the assumed right of any professional collectivity to give itself legal organization on the basis of the voluntary oaths of its members. In the 1230s each Calimala merchant periodically renewed his promises, sworn on the gospels, to “acknowledge, observe, and implement everything that the consuls of the merchants of Calimala shall require of me within the terms of their office,” never to defraud creditors, to observe and conduct themselves in accordance with the guild’s statutes, and to advise the consuls “as best I know how” whenever requested.32 The first rubric of the oldest surviving complete redaction of statutes of a Florentine guild, the 1296 constitution of the used-cloth dealers (Rigattieri), preserves their oath: “I who am or will be of this guild swear on the holy gospels to hear, give heed to, and observe any and all just and honorable commands and decrees” of the consuls and not to defraud creditors.33

Underlying the foundation of so many guilds was the increasing specialization of economic activities in Florence’s burgeoning economy, a process that led, for example, to separate guilds for different branches of the textile industry, as manufacturers of woolen, silk, and linen cloth, retail cloth dealers, and used-cloth dealers all had their own guilds. The building trades also divided into different guilds, one for builders in wood and stone, a second for woodworkers and carpenters. The chance survival of documents does not permit a chronology of guild creation, only the dates at which their existence is first attested. The elite merchants of Calimala went back to at least the twelfth century; by 1202 the bankers and moneychangers had created a guild, and by 1212 the jurists and notaries and the manufacturers of woolen cloth had done so. By 1300, there is evidence of as many as seventy or eighty such associations in the city, and more beyond the walls. Even the handful of millstone makers in the little village of Montici just outside the city established a guild, complete with the two features that denoted a professional corporation’s legal status: elected consuls and written statutes.34 Economic expansion and specialization explain why so many trades were ready and able to form guilds. But their motivation in doing so was that guilds provided an answer to the dilemma of how trust could be established between parties to commercial transactions in a society that had grown too large to generate it through personal ties alone. Buyers of goods or services, investors, depositors, or parties to any contractual agreement needed guarantees concerning their purchases or the companies or banks in which they invested money. They needed recourse in the event that the person or company at the other end of the sale or deposit or contract produced shoddy goods, acted in bad faith, or failed to honor the terms of the agreement. This was especially necessary when economic transactions occurred across distances that made it impossible for the parties to know each other. In the absence of legal recourse (and sometimes concurrently with it, as a form of added pressure), foreign creditors pressing claims against a Florentine company often asked their own governments to declare reprisals against all Florentine merchants in their territory as a way of forcing either Florence’s government or other Florentine merchants to render justice and compel the offending company to satisfy creditors. Reprisals meant confiscation of goods and possibly arrest, causing serious interruptions of trade and business even for merchants who had nothing to do with the dispute for which they had been declared, and their resolution could drag on in the courts for years.35 To avoid reprisals, merchants and artisans created guilds and voluntarily submitted to their jurisdiction, giving them authority to hear and adjudicate claims from outside parties bringing civil actions against fraudulent or bankrupt members of the guild.

Guilds institutionalized the guarantee that merchants plying the same trade had the will and the means to establish standards for the exercise of

Their profession, to oversee and regulate their members’ activities, and to punish members who violated those standards or defrauded clients, customers, or depositors. The four, six, or eight elected consuls, sometimes assisted by a committee or council, functioned as a tribunal in civil and commercial cases. The consuls of the moneychangers’ guild swore an oath “to govern [regere] the guild and all the moneychangers of the city and its territory who are bound to us by oath, for the common utility of the whole guild, in good faith and without fraud” or favoritisms. They also promised “to gather to render justice [ad ius reddendum] every Monday and Friday and any other days they wish.”36 The guild council, consisting of from a dozen to as many as several dozen members depending on the size of the guild, functioned as a legislative body that wrote the rules governing jurisdiction, the norms regulating the exercise of the profession, and the procedures for the election of consuls and other officers. Each guild had in effect a small-scale republican structure in which the authority exercised by consuls and councils was authorized by the guild’s own membership. Such a self-governing structure was, in the language of medieval jurists, an universitas, a legally recognized association brought into being by the mutual promises and oaths of its members. The commune itself had long been recognized as an universitas, based on similar assumptions and principles. In the 1270s the term began to be used in connection with the guilds, including artisan guilds. As an universitas, a guild was a “fictive person” endowed with legal standing that could, like actual persons, assume obligations, bring and be subject to actions in court, own property, and be represented by one or more persons of its own designation. Just as private persons appointed procurators (or representatives) to act in their name, so an universitas could empower its consuls or any member to act on its behalf and assume obligations that were binding on all the members. Such designated representatives could act on the guild’s behalf without the necessity of securing the approval of the members on each separate matter. Guilds thus embodied an early form of legal representation: the theory and practice by which one or more persons could legitimately act in the name of a larger group that had given those few the authority to do so. Each guild exercised judicial, punitive, executive, and legislative powers over its members and could do so because its consuls and councils were held to represent the will of those who voluntarily created the association. The theoretical and structural similarity of communes and guilds nourished the idea that guilds had a central role to play in communal government.

The normative values of guild association combined a broadly social dimension with more specifically political aspects. In both areas guilds represented

Answers to problems of social organization, discipline, civility, and later political and constitutional issues: answers that differed starkly in both principle and practice from those promoted by the elite. In the Tuscan vernacular guilds were “arti,” and the word itself denoted norms and standards of professional discipline. “Arte” meant a skill that could be taught and learned, a collective discipline, enshrined in both custom and written rules, governing professional ethics. Guild statutes underscored the sanctity of contract and what were held to be the ancient “customs,” or “usages of merchants,” the consuetudo or usus mercatorum, which included resolution of disputes through law and impartial adjudication of rights. Guilds were not of course a paradise of mutuality and brotherhood; fissures and antagonisms, both personal and collective, were frequent. But in guilds the means employed for the resolution of conflicts were strikingly different from those used by the elite where the collective discipline of a lineage or faction depended on the patriarchal authority of strong and charismatic leaders and on hierarchical ties of patronage and obligation. A guild’s authority to discipline was subscribed by the members themselves, codified in written statutes, and administered by the members as many of them took turns in the consular office. The political dimension of guild culture began with the elective and shared nature of executive-judicial authority that rotated among the members. Guildsmen elected their consuls and councils for terms of usually four or six months and were accustomed to the notion that positions of power were held briefly and that officeholders were accountable for their conduct. Consuls were obligated to the observance of statutes that could only be modified with the consent of the guild’s legislative council. Thus their powers were delegated to them by the membership. Consent, representation, delegation, accountability, and the supremacy of written statutes were the fundamental political assumptions embedded in guilds. They made of the guild community a very different kind of political culture from that of the elite families.

The twenty-one officially recognized guilds included in the 1293 federation had a combined membership of about 8,000 members, or 28-30% of the city’s adult males in an estimated population of 100,000. The seven major guilds had some 3,200 members (40% of the membership of the twenty-one guilds), several hundred of whom belonged to elite families. The large majority of major guildsmen and the approximately 4,800 artisans and shopkeepers of the other fourteen guilds constituted the popolo. In this period Florentines distinguished the five so-called “middle guilds” (butchers, shoemakers, smiths, builders and wallers, and used-cloth dealers), with a total membership of perhaps 3,000, from the nine “minor” guilds (retail sellers of wine; innkeepers; sellers of salt, oil and cheese; tanners and leather craftsmen; armorers; locksmiths, makers of iron tools, and coppersmiths; harness-makers; woodworkers and lumber merchants; and bakers) with a combined membership of about 1,800. This uneven distribution of population among the three subdivisions of the guild federation reveals the relative weakness of the nine minor guilds. The popolo’s chief strength rested with the non-elite members of the major guilds together with the large middle guilds. Indeed, the popular movement of the 1280s was initially limited to these twelve guilds (often called the “twelve major guilds”), to which the other nine guilds were added in a secondary role in 1293. Although the popolo within the top twelve guilds needed the support of the nine minor guilds, it was the former who led. From the beginning of its political ascendancy, the popolo was beset by a split between its upper ranks of merchants and textile manufacturers and the weaker constituency of artisans and shopkeepers. And beyond these were the various categories of workers, skilled and unskilled, who sought, mostly in vain, either membership in the established guilds or guilds of their own.

Many guilds were themselves alliances or federations of two or more distinct professional groups. This happened because the popolo decided to limit the number of guilds admitted to a political role to twelve in the 1280s and twenty-one in 1293. Excluded trades and professional groups looked for alliances with the established guilds. Some groups, like the shopkeepers (merciai) who sought entrance into the guild (Medici, Speziali, e Merciai) that had belonged to the doctors and importers of spices and specialty goods, or the silk merchants who allied with the retail cloth dealers in Por Santa Maria, achieved equal status with their guilds’ other components. In other cases, they could achieve no more than subordinate status, subject to the guild’s jurisdiction, but without equal access to the consulate or council. The circumstances of these subordinate categories varied from that of the painters in the guild of the Medici, Speziali, e Merciai, who had their own statutes and thus a position of modest independence under the umbrella of the guild’s jurisdiction, to that of the dyers in the woolen cloth industry who gradually lost whatever collective rights they had as a recognized subdivision within the guild and became subject to its harsh regulatory and police powers without any representation in its political structure. Throughout the guild community these “minor branches,” as they were called, existed in a great variety of political and legal relationships to the guilds’ dominant professional groups, and such issues were regularly foci of contention and dispute. The Florentine guilds must not be seen through the lens of any romanticized view of medieval guilds as associations that blunted competition and conflict in peaceful brotherhood and affective mutuality. Conflicts of interest and power occurred within guilds, just as struggles among groups of guilds took place within both the federation and the commune. When challenging the elite in times of crisis, the guild community used the rhetoric and ideals of solidarity and equality, but within the guilds divisions and disputes regularly occurred among categories with divergent interests.