The unraveling of elite dominance began with a combination of costly war and economic contraction. After Castruccio Castracani died, Lucca came into the hands of Mastino della Scala, lord of Verona and of an expanding territorial state in northern Italy. Apprehensive about the intrusion of an external power in Tuscany and fearing that Mastino had ambitions beyond Lucca, Florence allied with Venice, which also felt threatened by the Della Scala state to its west. The two republics fought Mastino for three years (1336-8) in an expensive war in which Florence’s government had to borrow heavily and increase indirect taxes. According to Villani (12.50) it also enlisted the cooperation of leading banking companies to bolster communal credit weakened by prior debts. A committee of ten from major companies was empowered to raise money and given control of 250,000 florins of gabelle revenues to guarantee repayment of loans; it assessed loans totaling 100,000 florins, a third of which came from their own companies, and the remainder from other citizens who could choose one of three options. Those willing to lend directly to the commune were promised 15% annual interest. Citizens preferring not to risk lending to the commune were invited to extend loans to one of the companies represented in the committee and receive 8%, while the companies transferred their loans to the commune and received 5%. Those unable to make the loans in either manner could cede their obligations to the companies, which made loans on their behalf and collected interest from both the commune and the citizens whose debts they assumed.125
For perhaps the first time, the companies here became an integral part of the commune’s fiscal apparatus, not only by making their own loans and guaranteeing repayment from gabelle revenues, but also by providing the security that some lenders needed and by assuming the debts of others. Through these channels, the companies helped raise revenue for the commune and began investing more and more of their own assets in government credits from which they earned substantial interest. They were functioning in effect as banks for the commune; through the committee of ten they also controlled the commune’s fiscal policies. While the government increasingly depended on the companies for both direct loans and revenues made possible by securing or assuming other citizens’ loans, the companies likewise became dependent on the government’s ability to pay the interest that they in effect had promised themselves. And that in turn depended on the health of the economy and continued high receipts from the gabelles. But within a few years gabelle receipts began to decline. The gate gabelle, which produced 90,000 florins in 1337-8, yielded only 65,000 in 1342 and 1343. Taxes on wine sold retail went from 60,000 florins in 1337-8 to 36,000 in 1343.126 127 Because of dwindling yields, gabelle purchasers and collectors became more difficult to find.11 The situation worsened when Florence settled with Mastino in 1341 by buying Lucca for 250,000 florins, which provoked Pisa into war against Florence and triggered another wave of heavy borrowing, higher debt, and more pressure on the gabelles in a weakening economy. By the summer of 1341 a major crisis loomed.
The full dimension of the crisis emerges only when the commune’s fiscal difficulties are seen in the context of the companies’ growing problems, which stemmed partly from declining profits in the southern Italian grain trade, and also from the risky decision of the Bardi and Peruzzi to concentrate so much of their assets in England at precisely the moment when war between England and France cut the companies off from the traditionally profitable relationship with France. In return for loans to the crown, the companies sought a monopoly of wool exports from England. In 1337 the Peruzzi alone lent Edward nearly 175,000 florins. In 1338, having consolidated a joint venture in order to pool their assets, the Bardi and Peruzzi promised Edward even more extensive loans, 60% from the Bardi and 40% from the Peruzzi, in return for expanded control of wool exports and the right to collect royal taxes in England. Between 1338 and 1340, their loans amounted to 126,000 pounds sterling, or 840,000 florins. When the 1337 Peruzzi loans are added, the total for the three years (and this does not include whatever loans the Bardi may have made on their own in 1337) exceeds a million florins. Villani’s estimate (12.88) of the sums lent to Edward is higher: 1,365,000 florins (“worth a kingdom,” he added), 57% (780,000 florins) owed to the Bardi and 43% (585,000 florins) to the Peruzzi. But it is close enough to what the surviving documents tell us to make it believable. From the royal treasury the companies received cash payments of 104,000 pounds sterling, just under 700,000 florins, and were no doubt expecting more. During these same two years they exported to Italy 7,365 sacks of English wool, enough to produce 53,000 bolts of cloth. Profitable wool exports, together with tax concessions and other privileges might have made up the 300,000 florin deficit between cash advances and payments received. But it was enormously risky and depended, fatally, as it turned out, on two things: the king’s continued good will toward the companies and ability to repay them in one way or another, and the confidence of the companies’ depositors.128
What is often referred to as Edward’s 1339 “default” specifically excluded the Bardi and Peruzzi from the suspension of payments and was not the cause of their bankruptcies.129 They continued making loans through 1340-1, albeit on a smaller scale. But Edward’s mounting problems were not a good sign and must have frightened depositors. In fact, matters were already disintegrating. In November 1340 a large number of Bardi, but including only one company shareholder, joined the Frescobaldi, Rossi, and some magnate clans of the contado in an uprising, motivated, according to Villani (12.118), by their harsh treatment at the hands of an overly zealous judicial official. The conspiracy may have had nothing to do with the precarious condition of the Bardi company, but among the priors in office at that moment was their influential partner Taldo Valori, who, Villani says, tried to prevent the other priors from sounding the alarm. Whatever the origin of this curious episode, which resulted in the banishment of several conspirators and a quick reaction by the popolo (manifested by a procession of “all the guilds” on November 26, subsequently an annual event observed on All Saints’ day), it cannot have helped those Bardi who were trying to keep the company afloat. In July 1341 the worsening fiscal and military situation prompted the priorate to ask the councils to entrust emergency powers to a committee of Twenty largely composed of representatives of the banking companies, including Pacino Peruzzi, who had taken over the leadership of his firm, and his partner Salvestro Baroncelli; Jacopo di Donato Acciaiuoli and his investing partner Vanni Bandini; and members, associates, or partners of the families and/or companies of the Buonaccorsi, Strozzi, Corsini, Ricci, Albizzi, Medici, Alberti, and Dell’Antella. Of the two members of the Twenty with connections to the Bardi we again find Taldo Valori.130 These were the elite of the elite: the same banking and trading companies that had been borrowing on the commune’s behalf were now given full control of government to salvage the commune’s finances and their own. The Twenty imposed one forced loan after another and, according to Villani (13.3), left the commune a debt of 400,000 florins, not counting the 250,000 florins still owed to Mastino della Scala. In October the Florentines were badly defeated on the battlefield by the Pisans, and ten days later Pope Benedict XII suddenly removed the Florentine companies, including the Bardi and Peruzzi and excepting only the Acciaiuoli, as collectors and transmitters of papal revenues. Like the pope, depositors all around Europe were beginning to doubt the viability of the overextended companies. At the end of 1341 some smaller firms went into default. In June 1342 the Buonaccorsi (one of whose partners was Giovanni Villani) closed its operations in both Naples and Avignon. Depositors began demanding their money, and the chain reaction collapse became an avalanche as depositors of other, still solvent, companies also claimed their investments. The crisis was underway, and the Florentine elite needed quick and drastic help to save its economic empire.
Once again they opted for extensive powers in the hands of a prestigious foreigner and chose Walter of Brienne, Charles of Calabria’s former vicar in 1326-8. Brienne was a known quantity and was well connected in both Naples and Avignon, where the threatened companies faced many angry creditors. The bankers who invited him to assume military and political leadership hoped he would enact the inevitably unpopular policies needed to save their companies. In early 1342 they also gave him command of the communal armies fighting Pisa. But Brienne had ambitions of his own and in September had himself declared signore of Florence for life. As it happened, he remained in office for a mere ten months before being driven out by the same elite families that had brought him in. After his expulsion on July 26, 1343 (which also became a civic holiday), and the gruesome murder of his most hated officials, the Florentines created the legend of the brutal and corrupt despot who tried to deprive them of their liberty. Brienne did enforce communal laws with particular severity, inflicted huge fines and capital punishment on transgressors, and contemptuously disregarded the republic’s officials and councils. But the other side of the story is his serious and substantially successful effort to put the commune’s fiscal affairs in order with reforms that threatened elite interests. Having alienated the elite, he sought to broaden his political support among both minor guildsmen and the textile artisans with measures that further enraged the elite. His brief signoria reawakened latent social tensions that led, after his ouster, to the formation of a new popular government.15
Brienne tried to stop the growing debt from consuming the city’s wealth through indirect taxes. To reduce government spending, he ended the war against Pisa and suspended the assignment of gabelle revenues to debt repayment and interest. He instituted a stricter system for assessing wealth and collecting taxes in the contado and, most important of all, reinstituted the estimo and direct taxation in the city: the same policy attempted by Charles of Calabria and quickly annulled by the elite-dominated government that succeeded him. Both aspects of this new fiscal regime damaged elite interests. Whereas the companies, needing cash to pay worried creditors, expected regular
15
Ibid., 1:148-72.
Interest payments on their large investment in the debt, they faced instead a suspension of payments and the simultaneous imposition of direct taxes. Brienne was not trying to ruin the companies. In fact, he approved a three-year immunity for the Dell’Antella company against civil actions by creditors, which, subsequently extended to other firms, gave the companies time to build their cash holdings, pressure their debtors, and protect landed property from the bankruptcy commissions through fictitious sales or alienations.131 But, while willing to help them in this way, Brienne’s fiscal reforms could not have come at a worse time for the companies.
So Brienne turned elsewhere to build a political constituency. He released the guild of the Vinattieri from its debts to the commune for the suddenly declining gabelle on the retail sale of wine and reduced the similar obligations of the provisioning guilds. Already precarious social relations were further destabilized by his approval of a petition in November 1342 from the dyers of the textile industry asking for release from subordination to the Wool guild and permission to form their own guild. Lamenting the Lana’s arrogance (“grandigia”) and the “many unjust ordinances” that had nearly reduced them to “poverty,” the dyers outlined with notable precision the circumstances of their mistreatment. They accused the lanaiuoli of deliberately delaying the balancing of their account books and waiting four and five years before paying even a fraction of what they owed them. The dyers had no legal recourse except to the guild’s own consuls, who also unilaterally decreed the piece-rates for their work and imposed a tax on it. The “wickedness and arrogance” of the Wool guild had reached the point where the dyers, “deprived of all rights and honor,” might have to abandon their shops and profession: a not so veiled threat of a strike. They thus begged the duke to liberate “them from the yoke” of the Wool guild and permit them a guild with their own consuls. Brienne accepted the petition and declared the dyers and related categories of artisans to be “one and the same body and universitas” subject to the jurisdiction and regulatory power of no other guild.132 The dyers’ guild lasted only as long as Brienne’s short period of rule, but it signaled the awakening of the political aspirations of Florence’s laboring classes.
Brienne went further. He protected and raised the status of salaried workers in the woolen cloth industry by appointing officials to oversee the various categories of workers and to monitor the jurisdiction and regulatory power traditionally exercised by the Lana. And in a series of holidays in the first half of 1343, culminating in the celebrations on June 24 of the feast day of the Baptist, he made two dramatic changes in the organization of the processions.
He permitted workers to march in brigades of their own, with banners and uniforms that established their status, for the first time, as collective participants in the commune’s ritual life. And he revived an older tradition of organizing processions by guild (abandoned during the period of elite dominance in favor of organization by gonfalone) and allowed the members of each guild to march under its banner in a grand visual and performative display of the republic as the federation of its guilds. The processions of guilds and workers in their separate formations may have occurred peacefully enough on that Baptist’s day of 1343, but the tension was just beneath the surface (and, for the Wool guild, no doubt very much in the open). Brienne’s approval of the dyers’ guild, the first expansion of the guild federation since 1293, and simultaneous organization of workers into associations which, while not guilds, pointed toward that revolutionary possibility, were dramatic signs of expanding social conflicts that would later be played out within the framework of the guild republic.
Brienne may have been a hero to workers, but he had become a lethal danger to the elite and to the Wool guild. Elite families, including magnates, led the conspiracies against him and tried to take political control after his departure. In the vacuum left by Brienne’s expulsion the magnates reached for the political rights they had lost in 1293. Bishop Agnolo Acciaiuoli assembled a committee of fourteen, all from prominent elite families and including magnates, who proceeded to abolish the Ordinances of Justice and the office of Standardbearer of Justice. In electoral reforms that lasted only six weeks, the committee gave the magnates a third of the seats in a twelve-man priorate and half the seats in the advisory colleges and held a general scrutiny in which magnates constituted a third of the nominating and scrutiny committees. (The only action of the six-week “magnate” regime that survived its demise was the administrative reorganization of the city into quarters and of each quarter into four gonfaloni.) Magnate and non-magnate elite families were closing ranks, no doubt in view of what they saw as dangerous stirrings within the guild community. But the guildsmen viewed this magnate resurgence with alarm, as this was the one moment after 1293 when the elite tried to jettison the popolo’s constitution. Political grievances and aspirations were now erupting from all sides. On September 22 guildsmen surrounded the palace and forced the removal of the magnate priors (from the Mannelli, Foraboschi, Spini, and Adimari families). The next day, Andrea Strozzi (quickly repudiated by his family) led an aroused mob of poor workers through the streets denouncing the gabelles and the “popolo grasso.” Magnates, furious over their expulsion from the priorate, barricaded their neighborhoods, and on September 25 fighting broke out between magnates and self-mustered contingents of the popolo. With civil war looming, some non-magnate elite families prudently abandoned their magnate confreres and joined the popolo. A force of 1,000 men from San
Lorenzo led by the Medici and Rondinelli (says Villani, 13.21) quickly overran the enclave of the Cavicciuli (a branch of the Adimari). But the powerful magnate clans of the Oltrarno (Frescobaldi, Rossi, Nerli, Mannelli, and above all the Bardi) put up fierce resistance that was overcome only when the troops of the popolo advanced first over the Ponte alla Carraia to attack Frescobaldi strongholds and then went up the hill of San Giorgio to assail the still defiant Bardi from behind. According to Villani, the “enraged” popolo attacked and destroyed twenty-two Bardi palaces and houses, inflicting damages of over
60,000 florins.
The twenty-one guilds (the dyers’ guild evidently already abolished) quickly seized the initiative, establishing a new popular government that reissued the Ordinances and again deprived magnates of political eligibility. Although the new government agreed to remove certain families from the magnate ranks (Spini, Scali, Brunelleschi, and some of the Adimari, Rossi, Mannelli, Nerli, and Della Tosa), it turned in the other direction for political allies and gave the minor guilds an unprecedented share of power. Villani says that the government’s first decisions were carried out “with the advice of the consuls of the twenty-one guilds” (13.19) and that “the popolo rose in influence, audacity, and power, especially the middle and lower guildsmen, for at that time the government of the city fell to the consuls of the twenty-one guilds” (13.22). Both Villani’s account and the official documents of the popular government over the next five years repeatedly highlight the influence and authority, not of the twelve guilds that dominated the federation of 1293, but of all twenty-one guilds and their consuls.
In October 1343 the popular government threw out all the electoral pouches and held a new scrutiny that produced an office-holding class radically different from that of the 1330s. Guilds made their own independent nominations, and 3,446 citizens were nominated. The scrutiny council was expanded to 206 members, including representatives of all the guilds, and only 110 votes were needed for approval. For the first and only time in Florentine elections, the names of approved citizens were not written on individual name-tickets, but organized into groups of eight, two from each quarter and all eight on a single ticket, by election officials known as “accoppiatori” (from their function of joining names into groups). The tickets were placed in a pouch, and the eight citizens on the ticket drawn by lot every other month became the priors. In pre-determining the composition of the priorates, the accoppiatori were required to include three minor guildsmen in each priorate, the first time that the fourteen guilds were guaranteed a minimum share of seats. If not enough minor guildsmen had been approved in the scrutiny to meet the quota, the accoppiatori could add the names of persons who had come closest to the 110-vote level. And if, when a ticket was drawn, any of the eight was unable to assume the office, replacements were chosen from those who had received between 90 and 110 votes. Thus, although Villani (13.22) says that only 10% of the nominees were approved in the scrutiny, these provisions resulted in the election of a significant number who had not received 110 votes. Altogether, the various categories of eligible citizens came to about 800. During the almost five years in which the priorates pre-selected in 1343 were drawn and placed in office, exactly one-third of the priors (88 of 265) were minor guildsmen, and the great majority of the two-thirds from the major guilds were non-elite, with only a few priors from elite families. No fewer than 136 families had their first priors in these years, more than three and a half times the number of new families in the fourteen years between 1329 and 1342. It was the combination of the guaranteed minimum three seats for minor guildsmen and the inclusion of so many non-elite major guIldsmen that made this popular government the most popular thus far.18 Villani (13.43) unleashed invective against Florence’s new rulers, calling them “artisans, manual laborers, and simpletons,” and complaining that “the majority of the guild consuls, by whom the commune was then being ruled, were lowly guildsmen just arrived from the countryside, or foreigners, to whom the republic mattered little and who were even less capable of governing it. Willingly do they pass laws with much haste, but with no foundation in reason.” Villani’s bitterness spoke here, perhaps because he had been a partner of both the Peruzzi and the Buonaccorsi. In fact, the new government, far from being incompetent, met the still unresolved dilemmas of the public debt and the looming bankruptcies with innovative policies that succeeded in bringing down the economic powerhouses of the preceding two generations.
World History
