Workers and exiled Ciompi, sometimes with minor guildsmen, were repeatedly accused of attempting to overthrow the regime and restore popular government, and of advancing their cause in the name of the guilds. Former members of the disbanded guilds no doubt continued to agitate for their restoration. In 1383 working-class exiles planned a revolt for July 21, the anniversary of the revolution that brought the Ciompi into government in 1378. Crowds ran through the streets with the flags of their old guilds, crying “Long live the popolo and the guilds.” In October 1393 a minor guildsman was accused of planning an uprising and saying: “It’s necessary to overthrow the present regime, and that can be done by starting a riot, and then we’ll become strong with the guildsmen of this city. To achieve this end, we’ll cry: ‘Long live the guilds! Long live the popolo and the guilds!’ And guildsmen will all come together and we will fight against the rulers of this regime.” For would-be revolutionaries, the connection between guilds and working-class aspirations was rooted in history; for the elite, it was the chief pretext for delegitimating the guilds and removing them from politics. To this end, the ruling group was more than willing to keep alive the perception that linked guilds to working-class conspiracy and rebellion. In 1411 exiled Alberti were accused of fomenting an uprising in which the cry “Long live the popolo and the guilds” would win the support of the lower classes.41 Whether the Alberti actually wrote the old slogan into the script is not clear, but the government was only too happy to accuse them of having done so. By the early fifteenth century, official political discourse made it nearly treasonous to support “the guilds” in any kind of protest against the regime, especially in alliance with workers.
The notion that workers and the poor constituted a permanent danger became commonplace in the generation after 1382 and sustained deep hostility toward the lower classes. In 1390 a new bishop was installed in Florence, according to the anonymous chronicler, “with little good will from the popolo minuto, because it was said that he told those in power: ‘If you want to rule and keep control, keep the popolo hungry for bread.’ And for this reason they hated him.”180 Giovanni Morelli warned against revealing the true extent of one’s possessions: grain should be stored at the farm and not brought to one’s city house, not only to hide it from tax assessors, but because “if a poor man sees that you have grain to sell and that you’re holding on to it to increase its price, he will damn and curse and rob you and burn your house, if he has the power to do so, and he’ll make you hated by the entire lower class, which is a most dangerous thing. May God preserve our city from their rule.”181 Here traditional contempt for the envious poor has become class hatred linked to the memory of 1378. In a 1414 pratica, Gino Capponi expressed a similar horror of being ruled by the Ciompi when, in order to say how unthinkable submission to foreign tyranny would be, he declared that it would be “better to live under the government of the Ciompi than under the tyranny of a king.”182 And fifty years after the popular government of 1378-82 the historian Giovanni Cavalcanti reported an angry diatribe, allegedly delivered by Rinaldo degli Albizzi in 1426 to a meeting of the regime’s leaders, against “guildsmen and citizens of low condition” who resisted the leadership’s policies: the descendants, he said, of those who “for forty accursed months [from July 1378 to January 1382] held this people in servitude,” sent to their deaths so many victims from great families and left as many grieving widows and orphans. Even if Cavalcanti invented or embellished this speech, its inclusion in his chronicle dramatizes the emotional excess of upper-class fears, not only of workers, but now also of “guildsmen,” described as the descendants of “serfs” from the contado and incapable of civil life because of their bestial nature. He has Rinaldo ask if anyone could ever really doubt that people with names like Bardi, Rossi, and Frescobaldi (all magnate families, like the Cavalcanti, deprived of office-holding rights) had a greater right to offices than did people known only by patronymics or by their humble professions.183 Upper-class prejudice against manual laborers and shopkeepers was not new, but it received powerful reinforcement from the consciously manipulated memory of those “forty accursed months.”
Workers and artisans were also associated with heresy. In December 1382 the government banned the Fraticelli from Florentine territory, claiming that for several years members of the outlawed sect had gone about infecting “simple and ignorant laypersons” with heretical ideas. Franciscan inquisitors resumed their activity, despite some resistance. When the Inquisition arrested a layman on suspicion of heresy in 1383, his son and neighbors rescued him by stoning its officials.184 In 1384, the inquisitor condemned an alleged heretic and handed him over to the podesta to be burned. According to the anonymous chronicler, “there was a great deal of talk about this all over the city, because it had been a long time since any inquisitor had done this sort of thing in Florence.” Even the bishop, the local clergy, and many experts in canon law were against this execution.185 In both episodes the accused were middle - or lower-class laypersons. The most famous condemnation for heresy in this generation was the 1389 burning of a fraticello, Fra Michele di Berto from Calci in the territory of Pisa (not yet part of the Florentine dominion), who was accused of preaching his heretical opinions to “many men and women” in Florence. An eyewitness account of his sentencing and procession to the place of execution before a huge throng following him at every stage shows that public opinion was divided: “the majority said he was wrong and that no one should speak such evil of the priests. And some said, ‘He is a martyr,’ and others said, ‘He is a saint,’ and still others denied it. And there was a greater tumult and disturbance in Florence than there had ever been.”186 These awed expressions of admiration for Brother Michele no doubt confirmed the perception that he and the Fraticelli were indeed dangerous and that heresy had somehow fed the political turmoil of the 1370s. Even if Franciscan heresies were not behind the political activism of the working classes, the repression of alleged heterodoxy in the 1380s certainly reinforced in retrospect the notion that religious and political dissent went hand in hand within the working classes.
Criminal prosecution in the communal courts also contributed to the perception of danger from the lower classes. Ever less interested in crimes committed among and against workers, the courts of the podesta and Capitano concentrated instead on working-class crime against the upper class.187 Punishments decreed by the Wool guild’s court for workers convicted of theft of cloth or tools often included ritual humiliation, with the guilty being paraded through the industry’s neighborhoods wearing either a “crown of perpetual shame” or the stolen objects around their necks.188 Both the communal courts
And those of the Florentine governors of the outlying territories undertook more systematic prosecution of moral and sexual transgressions, including private and consensual acts of adultery and seduction, whose alleged perpetrators were disproportionately from the working classes and rural village communities.189 Such strategies of social discipline and criminal prosecution nourished the perception of workers and the poor as particularly predisposed to both violent crime against the upper classes and violations of moral and sexual norms of which the upper class now made itself the stern guardian. Similarly reinforcing such ideas were petitions approved by the priors and legislative councils from persons convicted of sexual crimes and seeking pardons or reductions of their penalties. Read aloud to hundreds of council members, they reproduced the texts of the original convictions in often quite salacious detail, thus advertising the excesses of lower-class behavior. In a sampling of some thirty such petitions, only one involved someone with a surname.190 In all these ways, government and courts fashioned images of the working classes and the poor, men and women alike, as by nature given to anti-social behavior that regularly turned violent and thus had to be contained.
Fear of the lower classes became politically potent because it lodged deep in the psyches of non-elite major guildsmen as well as in the elite. Particularly revealing in this regard are Stefani’s denunciations of workers and the guild regime in which he himself served. Far from being some reactionary elite Guelf, Stefani came from a modest non-elite family. His father Coppo had been an occasional consul of Por Santa Maria. Stefani’s social status and guild affiliation were identical to those of Dino Compagni, and his political career, like Compagni’s, was largely defined by the popular movement. He held his first major office in 1372 on the newly created Ten of Liberty, served as the commune’s envoy to Bologna during the war against the papacy, and held his other offices in 1378-82.191 In his one term as prior, in November-December 1379, he and his colleagues made the momentous decision to execute Piero degli Albizzi and Donato Barbadori for treason, an action about which he expressed doubts, but not criticism, in the chronicle. His removal from the Sixteen in 1382 shows that he was no friend of the Guelf elite; indeed he was often severely critical of what he called their arrogance and overbearing ambition. Yet, in his account (written under the impact of the events of 1378-82)
Of Walter of Brienne’s signoria, Stefani denounced the woolworkers in a vitriolic passage (567) as the latter-day equivalent of Christ-killers: “it was rumored that the duke wished to ally himself with the popolo and that he often referred to them saying ‘our good people.’ He forgot that it was they who crucified Christ, crying ‘Die! Die!’ And well he should have remembered that they would treat him no better than they had treated Christ, who was a just lord” (as Brienne evidently was not, in Stefani’s view). He regarded the lower classes as incapable of rational political action, for they live “con niun ordine [without any organization or order] and, being too numerous to assemble or to reach understanding of things,” are easily seduced by demagogues (553).
Stefani’s anger was not limited to the workers he called the “popolazzo.” It was also directed at the guilds and their government for having created the political framework in which workers and dyers could defend their interests: “So great was the power of the guildsmen that in every matter under deliberation they achieved their aims in the councils. . . . Thus whoever has more power gets what he wants, with little concern however for whether it is good or useful for the city; everyone seeks his own advantage as best he thinks he can: neither laws nor statutes count for much in such matters” (877). His reaction to the independent guild of dyers negotiating piece-rates with their former masters in the Wool guild was especially irate. He denounced the “domineering attitude [soperchio homore] that predominated among guilds-men” and the “insolence” and “arrogance” of the dyers who “had no concern for who they were” or for the fact that they “used to be governed by and subject to the cloth manufacturers from whom they had their laws and to whose statutes they were subject.” Their requests were “so alien to the cloth manufacturers and so abominable to the citizens that it was beyond all measure” (887).54 He used similar language to condemn Walter of Brienne’s organization of the 1343 San Giovanni processions by guilds instead of gonfaloni: “with each guild separate and independent from the rest,” he wrote, the “citizens, seeing the exaltation of the gente minuta, became highly indignant, because this was beyond all human and divine reason” (575). These outbursts are especially significant because they come from a non-elite guildsman and thus from the class that had risen to power and challenged the elite through its guilds. The old ambivalence of his class, caught between enemies “above” and “below” and alternately fearing one more than the other, here finds resolution: Stefani’s is the first clear voice among non-elite major guildsmen to reject, explicitly and loudly, guild republicanism. As we shall see, he was also the first from the popolo to contribute to the refashioning of the image of the elite (despite his often harsh criticism of it).
Elite prejudice against the lower classes was no less deeply engrained. Whereas for two centuries the calls for order and discipline came from the popolo as it sought to contain the violence of the great families and their private armies, now, remarkably in the space of a single generation, roles were reversed as the elite appropriated the popolo’s discourse of civic discipline and turned it against the lower classes. The reversal is neatly encapsulated in Francesco di Tommaso Giovanni’s account of the intervention in 1458 of the police magistracy of the Otto di Guardia (of which he was then a member), which captured and executed a convicted thief who had escaped from their custody in the midst of a riot started by friends and neighbors who tried to rescue him: “we disabused the people of their bad habits,” he said about the man’s decapitation in front of a huge crowd.192 For him this action was more than merely deserved punishment for a crime; the public display of the state’s severity was required to repress that built-in predisposition toward crime that had become central to upper-class perceptions of workers and the poor.
In his Histories of the Florentine People, begun around 1415, the humanist Leonardo Bruni demonstrated just how crucial the memory of the Ciompi and the fear of social revolution had become to the political assumptions of the ruling class. His account of the events of 1378 contains a memorable passage that evokes the vivid fear of workers while denying legitimacy to their political aims: “Every day new movements were born, because some people were eager to plunder the possessions of the rich, others to gain revenge against their enemies, and still others to make themselves powerful. This may stand as a lesson for all time [perpetuum documentum] to the distinguished men of the city: never to let political initiative or arms into the hands of the multitude, for once they have had a bite, they cannot be restrained and they think they can do as they please because there are so many of them.” Well-meaning but misguided attempts at reform had resulted in “making poor guildsmen and men of base condition the rulers of the city” and put “noble and distinguished” families at the mercy of the “stupidity of the aroused multitude. For there was no end or order to the unleashed appetites of the poor and criminals, who, once armed, lusted after the possessions of rich and honorable men and thought of nothing except robbing, killing, and exiling citizens.”193 In this most authoritative of the city’s histories, given official status and a government-sponsored translation into Tuscan, “poor” and “criminals” became two ways of referring to a single social category.
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