Velluti’s comments on his great-grandfather’s physical strength and prowess in combat reflect the prominence of martial valor in the elite’s early self-image: “Very sure of himself in matters of arms, he was a great combattitore.” By the time Velluti was writing, the great families were no longer a warrior aristocracy, and their pride in military deeds became entirely a matter of nostalgia. Even Dante in the early fourteenth century knew that he was invoking a lost past when he fashioned his distant ancestor Cacciaguida as a crusading knight. But thirteenth-century elite families, both the newer lineages and the older ones that traced their prominence back to the twelfth century, actively cultivated the practice and culture of war, and most elite families counted in their ranks many knights. Knighthood was a formal title, originally bestowed by imperial authority (Cacciaguida says that the emperor Conrad “girt me with his knighthood”), although city-state governments also created knights and expected military service from them. Trained in mounted combat and providing their own horses and armor, knights formed the cavalry of the communal army.10 11 In the thirteenth century, knights performed this service themselves instead of hiring replacements, as would happen in the fourteenth century. Because of the considerable cost, most knights came from elite families, and, to judge from their numbers, the military and cultural ethos of knighthood was universal throughout the elite. The chronicler Giovanni Villani estimated that there were 250 knights in Florence in the 1280s. But by the 1330s he could count no more than 65.11
The Florentine elite were never a professional warrior class; they were not full-time fighters and they typically combined the ceremonial and cultural trappings of knighthood, and occasional participation in actual warfare, with more prosaic business careers as merchants or bankers. Even the bellicose Bonaccorso Velluti, according to his great-grandson, “was an expert in business,” in his case the business of importing cloth and having it dyed in Florence. In keeping with Donato’s ideal portrait of him, he is of course described as a pillar of uncompromising rectitude in mercantile dealings. But the part-time quality of the elite’s military activities in no way lessened their dedication to it as the most visible symbol of their status, and as one of the ways in which they made themselves a distinct class and advertised their consciousness of the fact by putting cultural and ritual distance between themselves and the popolo. Elite and popolo were both primarily merchants and in many cases members of the same guilds; thus economic activities alone did not suffice to mark the distinction between the classes. The culture of knighthood served this purpose well, because it carried with it the courtly ethos that linked the elite to the social world of the upper classes in both the Lombard principalities to the north and the Neapolitan kingdom to the south. It is a striking feature of the Florentine elite’s response to the emerging republican polity in their own midst that they turned with greater insistence and ostentation to the emulation of a courtly culture that was imported from elsewhere.
Villani describes a two-month party, or “corte” (8.89), held in 1283 by the elite family of the Rossi and their neighbors in the parish of Santa Felicita in the Oltrarno. The Rossi were a leading elite family and were later included among the politically disenfranchised magnates by the popular government, whose unfavorable view of them may have stemmed from the conviction in 1284 of one of the family’s young men for armed assault against an Oltrarno neighbor from the Ubriachi family, also subsequently relegated to magnate status. The lavish “corte” of the previous year may have been just as offensive to the republican popolo that generally detested such elite ostentation. The festivities opened in June for the celebration of Florence’s patron saint John the Baptist and lasted throughout the summer. Villani says that a “thousand or more men” took part, all dressed in white robes and forming a “company” or “brigade” led by a “lord of Love.” The estimate may be excessive, but even half that number would have been an astonishing gathering spilling out from family palaces and courtyards into the narrow streets and still small public spaces of the thirteenth-century city. Many women also took part, as the brigade engaged in games and amusements and “dances of ladies and knights,” who paraded through the city playing musical instruments and going from one banquet to another. Villani calls it the “most noble and renowned court ever held in Florence or Tuscany,” adding that many noble courtiers and court entertainers from Lombardy and all Italy came to participate. In such festivities the Florentine elite families loudly advertised their emulation of foreign cultural styles, the patronal and proprietary domination they exercised within their parishes and neighborhoods, and the central place of knighthood in their image of themselves as bearers of idealized notions of both love and war.
The popolo viewed the elite’s fondness for knighthood and courtly rituals with suspicion and hostility. One indication of this is the role assigned to these cultural factors in the famous story of the murder in 1216 of Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, the event that allegedly divided the elite into warring factions and plunged the city into the chaos of civil war. The earliest extant version of the story is contained in an anonymous chronicle written toward the end of the century.12 If the author was not an actual partisan of the popolo, his account of the already legendary event was certainly heavily influenced by its critique of the elite’s social style. No reader of the chronicle would have failed to notice that all the major protagonists in the story belonged to families that were made magnates. Whatever the actual facts of the episode, this writer embellished them with an anti-aristocratic twist in which the elite’s propensity for violence emerges from its very predilection for the courtly rituals surrounding knighthood. The account functions in a sense as a parable of the original sin that required the popolo’s punishment of the elite.
The setting is a celebration, six miles from Florence in the village of Campi, of the knighthood of Mazzingo Tegrimi dei Mazzinghi, to which “all the best people of Florence” - the city’s knightly aristocracy, all identified by the honorific “messer” accorded to knights - “were invited.” The author calls it a “corte,” complete with the required buffoon or jester, who, no doubt doing what he thought was expected of him (or what someone told him to do), approached the tables where the knights were seated and snatched up the plate of messer Uberto degli Infangati, who became intensely angry. Seeing this, messer Oddo Arrighi dei Fifanti berated Infangati, who called Arrighi a liar. The latter picked up a plate of food and shoved it in Infangati’s face. The chronicler underscores the gap between the pretensions of this self-styled aristocracy and its actual behavior: although introduced as “valorous,” Oddo Arrighi is described as berating Infangati “villanamente” - rudely, roughly, with overtones of boorish rusticity, and thus the opposite of the courtly valor and refinement expected of the “best people” - and escalating the confrontation from words to actions. The entire “corte” was now in an uproar: in the ensuing fight, with tables cleared away and weapons introduced, Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, who had had no part in the original altercation, wounded Oddo Arrighi in the arm with a knife. The chronicler says that he too did this “villanamente,” thus extending his negative judgment to both sides of the conflict and suggesting that they were all a failed would-be courtly aristocracy whose behavior more nearly resembled that of loutish peasants than that of a true court. The wounding of Oddo Arrighi escalated and politicized the conflict. Arrighi “held a meeting of his friends and relatives,” including the Counts of Gangalandi, and the Uberti, Lamberti, and Amidei families. In moments of confrontation and conflict, the account reminds us, elite families appealed to their allies, including families with which they had established marriage alliances. And marriage was also their preferred solution to the conflict at hand. The assembly decided that peace could be ensured through the marriage to Buondelmonte of Arrighi’s niece, the daughter of a sister who had married into the Amidei. The plan was destined to fail, and the anonymous writer mocks the elite’s methods of conflict resolution by using explicitly political language for their attempt at peacemaking: the assembly convened by Arrighi is described as a “council,” and the marriage alliance as a “treaty.” The implication is clearly that great families were as inept at politics as they were at courtly self-discipline.
Until the recommendation for peace through marriage, the story has exclusively male protagonists, even as the marriage “treaty” implies the ready cooperation of the women whose lives it affected. Elite honor depended on docile women willing to be married off for political reasons. Here too the chronicler points to the gap between the elite’s pretensions and the chaotic reality of its behavior. As soon as the marriage was agreed to, Madonna Gualdrada, wife of messer Forese Donati, secretly sent for Buondelmonte and talked him out of the engagement. Once again the conflict escalates with the introduction of another great family name. The Donati would have been familiar to contemporary readers as a leading family in the factional wars around 1300, one whose only apparent connection to the other families of the story is an implied familiarity with the Buondelmonti. In fact, it is not actually the Donati who enter the story - no Donati men play any role - but rather one of their wives. Families that counted upon the passivity of women, so the episode implies, in fact put women in precarious and liminal situations in which their loyalties and ambitions might be neither predictable nor controllable. The intervention of Madonna Gualdrada destabilized the dubious peace constructed by the men. Her seduction by proxy of Buondelmonte played on his sense of insecurity as a proud young man being pushed around by his elders. Addressing him as a “shamed knight,” she underscores both his claim to honor as a knight and the denial to him of the full measure of that honor by the overriding needs and interests of the family as defined by its collective fathers. Yet again the author points to an inherent contradiction in elite family structure. Lineages presupposed a convergence of interests and outlooks among men, especially between fathers and sons. Yet they constantly produced cohorts of young men who had to wait too long for their share of family honor and who were as much under the thumb of patriarchy as were the women. It is no accident that the author invents, or dramatizes, a secret entente between a married woman and a young unmarried man as the cause of the unraveling of the plan worked out by the male elders. Madonna Gualdrada taunts Buondelmonte by telling him he has brought shame on himself in agreeing to marry Arrighi’s niece out of fear of the Fifanti and the Uberti, and she urges him to renounce the agreement and marry instead one of the Donati women, perhaps her own daughter. If he does so, she assures him, “you will always be a knight of honor.” Buondelmonte quickly agreed, the narrator says, “without any counsel,” and without having taken the matter, as he ought to have, to his elders. He thus broke the cardinal rule of elite lineages by acting on his own, as a free agent, without getting advice and support from his family’s leaders and allies.
By breaking this rule Buondelmonte sealed his own fate. The next day, with crowds gathered from both groups of families for the wedding, he failed to appear and went instead to pledge his engagement to the Donati woman. The insult to the Amidei and their allies might as well have been a declaration of war. An incensed Oddo Arrighi called another “council,” this time “of all his friends and relatives,” who met in a church, presumably because of their increased numbers. He lamented the dishonor done to him by Buondelmonte, and from the assembled elders came a variety of recommendations: some said that Buondelmonte should be beaten and others that he should be wounded in the face. But Mosca dei Lamberti warned that anyone resorting to such half measures would be inviting even worse retaliation and that, this being a case in which “a thing done cannot be undone,” Buondelmonte would have to be killed. This advice, made famous by Dante in Inferno 28 (in which he placed Mosca), assumed that, whereas humiliation or injury would surely entail further acts of revenge, murder would not. The most likely explanation for such an apparently odd argument is that Buondelmonte had angered and alienated his own family by acting unilaterally. If he remained alive, his family could not have avoided the obligation to avenge him; but once he was killed, so Mosca seems to have reasoned, his exasperated friends and relatives would not have retaliated. A month and a half later on Easter morning, at the very spot where the planned engagement was to have taken place in front of the Amidei palace, the “vendetta” was carried out. Buondelmonte, accompanied by his new Donati bride on his wedding day, was knocked from his horse by messer Schiatta degli Uberti (the first action in the story by anyone from this powerful family) and killed by Oddo Arrighi himself.
According to this and other accounts, the Buondelmonti murder was the spark that ignited the war of Guelfs and Ghibellines, the great conflict that dominated Florentine and Italian history for most of the thirteenth century. The explanations for the rivalries and antagonisms that divided Florentine elite families over many decades are certainly more complex than this tradition allows. But the story’s importance lies in what it reveals of the family structures, social conventions, and collective self-image of the elite, and also of the popolo’s critique of the elite. If the account is in part parody and exaggeration, it parodies and exaggerates attitudes and institutions central to the life of these families: the expectation of family solidarity and the leadership of the elders; the networks of “friends and relatives” mobilized in times of crisis; the marginal position of women between their natal and marital families; the control of neighborhoods and churches by families or clusters of families; coalitions of family groups in political factions with their “councils”; the role of marriage in consolidating factions; knighthood and the emulation of the courts; and the easy and frequent recourse to violence and vendetta. The point of the story is surely the close and even causal connection between these structural features of elite family life and the constant episodes of violence and revenge that they inflicted on the city. At every stage of the story, the elite’s preferred methods of containing violence and resolving conflicts only led to more and more violent conflicts. The story portrays the elite, with its pretensions to being a ruling class, as a disastrous failure that could not even control its women and young men. Such implications were no doubt polemical and tendentious, but not entirely unfounded. The elite’s propensity for violence and vendetta was always the popolo’s first article of indictment in its list of grievances against these overmighty families. Most of the thirteenth-century descriptions of this behavior come from chroniclers sympathetic to the popolo or from legislation passed by popular governments seeking to curb it, but fourteenth-century court records and elite memoirs confirm the picture of the elite families as a generally unruly lot, given to frequent acts of aggression against their fellow citizens. Most contemporaries accepted as axiomatic that the greatest threat to public order came, not from the poor or the working classes, but from the powerful and prestigious families that dominated the center of the city with their fortress-like palaces and towers. The story of the Buondelmonti murder encapsulates that conviction. Dante’s Cacciaguida likewise laments the violence of the great families when he refers to the Amidei as the “house of which was born [Florence’s] weeping, by reason of its just resentment which has slain you and put an end to your glad living.” He also damns the victim of that resentment: “O Buondelmonte, how ill for you that you did fly from its nuptials at the promptings of another. Many would be happy who now are sad if God had committed you to the [river] Ema the first time you came to the city.”
Elite vendettas were usually directed at families or factions of the same class. Vendetta may be thought of as codified private justice: a system for handling and sometimes resolving disputes without the intervention of law or courts. The thirteenth-century elite’s preference for private justice has generally been explained in terms of codes of honor and structurally ingrained patterns of behavior that demanded retribution for insults or injuries. One theory, which focuses on the ritual dimension of feuding, hypothesizes that feuds were a way of containing conflict within certain limits and rules that made them a mechanism for limiting chaos, for channeling hostilities into actions and reactions that contemporaries recognized as governed by custom and therefore manageable.13 But it is important to distinguish the intra-class violence perpetrated by elite families against each other from the inter-class violence that particularly provoked the anger of the popolo. Violence against persons outside the elite emerged from class rather than purely factional tensions. Behind much elite violence was the growing antagonism between the elite, which wanted above all to remain master of its own house, and the popolo, which had already begun creating laws, institutions, and forms of public coercion whose first purpose was to rein in the turbulent elite. Although popular governments applied tough sanctions against elite violence in the late thirteenth century, elite vendettas were at least as common at this time as in any previous generation. Much elite violence, whatever the specific origin in this or that quarrel, can thus be seen as collective acts of defiance against the constraints imposed by the popolo: loud statements that the elite wanted no meddling from self-declared governments of guildsmen in what it considered its own internal affairs. From this perspective, the pursuit of vendetta was a politically motivated rejection of the popolo’s emerging norms of the supremacy of law and the internalized discipline of the good citizen.
In fact, even thirteenth-century vendettas did not occur without some intervention of law and government. The most revealing description from the elite itself of an early vendetta is Velluti’s reconstruction of his family’s feud with the Ghibelline Mannelli family. It began in 1267, the year the Guelf faction regained control of the city and settled old scores against the Ghibellines, when Ghino Velluti, the son of a brother of Velluti’s great-grandfather, was killed by the Mannelli, who were angry over Ghino’s part in securing the cancellation of a decree of banishment against an enemy of theirs. A late thirteenth-century chronicler reports that the first hostile action against the Ghibellines by the returning Guelfs was an assault on Mannello Mannelli’s father by a member of the Rossi family.14 If this was the event that sparked the retaliation, Mannello presumably killed Ghino to avenge the insult to his father’s honor in the exoneration of the latter’s assailant. Mannello was exiled by the Guelf regime, but this did not satisfy the Velluti, who waited twenty-eight years to exact their revenge. When they finally did so, it was in another politically charged moment, the feast day of the Baptist (June 24, which was both a civic and religious holiday) in 1295, a year in which the elite was trying to weaken the popular movement that had inflicted magnate status on so many of them. Two brothers of the murdered Ghino, together with Donato’s father Lamberto, attacked and killed Lippo di Simone de’ Mannelli during the celebrations. That they carried out the vendetta on a civic holiday of a year in which the elite was trying to bring down the popular government suggests that it was also an open challenge to the popolo’s efforts to tame elite violence.
The Mannelli immediately accused not only the four attackers, but also Donato’s grandfather Filippo of having ordered the murder. Filippo appeared in court to confront his accusers, who produced no fewer than twenty-four witnesses, men and women, to testify against him. “May God be praised,” comments Donato, the witnesses proved nothing and he was acquitted. The silence of the witnesses (he adds that one of them “in effect said little or nothing”) may have been the result of either fear or complicity in the cover-up. In either case, such cooperation was the very stuff of elite power. The actual perpetrators did not appear before the court, presumably because their participation in the murder could not be denied. The court found them guilty in absentia and assessed heavy fines that were paid on their behalf by the same Velluti banking and trading company that had been founded by Bonaccorso Velluti and his brother’s sons, including Ghino, who was murdered in 1267, and the two brothers who carried out the vendetta in 1295. Donato matter-of-factly refers his family readers to the relevant page of the company ledger for the payment of the fines and court costs in what was treated in effect as a business expense. The obligations of vendetta and honor here overlapped with
Family business partnerships. Donato remarks that “thus we carried out the vendetta of our relatives [consorti] and we paid our share.” However, because the company was beginning to experience difficulties as a result of loans extended to “the lords and barons of France and England,” they had to borrow the money from neighbors and allies. Moreover, the commune agreed to reduce the fines by almost half if the Velluti and their friends cancelled credits in the communal debt by the same amount. In effect, the Velluti avoided much of the penalty assessed against them by getting a group of friends to forgive the commune sizeable shares in the public debt. Donato openly admits that this agreement was made possible by the influence the Velluti enjoyed in the government at the time. The vendetta was thus absorbed into broader forms of fiscal and political cooperation among the elite families whose objective was to thwart the strict application of the laws against upper-class violence. Circumventing the courts and the criminal justice system must have been at least as satisfying, and as central to the preservation of elite honor, as the vendetta itself against the Mannelli.
The commune also intervened to mediate and ratify formal acts of peace between warring families. Although the Mannelli signed a peace with the Velluti through a legal representative, they still treated them with rancor and hostility. The commune forced them to declare another peace on July 17, 1295, in the presence of communal officials. Three Mannelli, acting on behalf of over twenty other men of the family, and seven Velluti, acting on behalf of three of their relatives, met to swear promises of peace and exchange the traditional kiss on the mouth. The Velluti represented at this peacemaking came from all three of the extant patrilines descended from Donato’s greatgrandfather. Both families were required to provide guarantors (mallevadori, or fideiussores in legal Latin), who put up a sum of money to be forfeited to the commune if any of the parties violated the peace. Both the Velluti and the Mannelli recruited mallevadori from both magnate families (four for each side, with one represented on both sides) and non-magnate elite houses. Among the Velluti’s magnate guarantors were two Frescobaldi, an Abati, a Pulci, and two Rossi; their non-magnate guarantors included members of the Guicciardini, Soderini, Del Bene, Machiavelli, and a larger number of less well known names. The Mannelli’s magnate guarantors were two Gherardini, two Rossi, two Bardi, and a Mozzi, with a smaller number of non-magnates.15
Rituals of peacemaking thus involved not only the commune but also the wider community of the elite. To the extent that such rituals legitimated and reinforced the very family and class solidarities that undergirded codes of honor and the vendettas that sustained those codes, formal reconciliations also legitimated the vendetta itself. The entire process, from murder to punishment to peacemaking, provided the elite families with occasions to affirm their Velluti, Cronica domestica, pp. 10-18.
Independence from, and contempt for, the popolo’s attempts to rein them in and make their behavior conform to standards of civil moderation. The elite insisted on being a law unto itself even when it needed to do so through the institutions of communal government.
World History
