In the mid-to-late 1340s, the popular government faced mounting hostility from both workers burdened by higher indirect taxes and elite families that found a new locus of unity in a revived Guelf Party and launched a campaign to discredit the new men by accusing them of being “foreign” immigrants and Ghibellines. In 1346 the Parte Guelfa promoted a law requiring the guilds to identify among their members recent contado immigrants unable to prove that they, their fathers, and grandfathers had been born in the city: 426 persons were deprived of office-holding rights, including sixty notaries, thirty members of Por Santa Maria, forty in the Medici, Speziali, e Merciai, and most of the rest from the minor guilds.140 The law’s prologue gives a glimpse of the nascent political rhetoric that would soon take hold within the elite: offices, it insisted, should be entrusted only to persons “in whom is borne, implanted from birth, the devotion of true sons to the city, people, and commune of Florence as to their true mother.” Here the civic community is imagined as a family in which loyalty could only come from the affective bonds of blood and filial love. In accusing new men of Ghibelline sympathies, the elite similarly wrapped itself in emotional appeals to civic loyalty. In 1347 the Parte supported a law prohibiting Ghibellines convicted as rebels against the commune, or any of their descendants, from holding office. Ghibellinism was a dead issue by the middle of the fourteenth century, but the term carried powerful if inevitably vague overtones of generic disloyalty to commune and church that could tarnish reputations. Here too the elite embraced a rhetoric of blood and family: persons of dubious loyalty were endeavoring “to separate devoted and faithful children from their venerated mother, the Holy Roman Church, mother of her Guelf children.”141
The catastrophe of the Black Death in 1348 gave the elite the opportunity to undo the results of the 1343 scrutiny and intensify its political attack on the guilds. All government activity came to a halt in April as the plague devastated the city and killed half or more of the population in a few months. When the horror subsided in August, it was evident that the huge mortality made the electoral lists unusable. An ad hoc committee, or balia, dominated by members of elite families removed the names of the deceased and of “foreigners” and held a new scrutiny whose results were added to the pouches, but with each name on its own ticket. It also cut the minor guilds’ share in the priorate to two seats, but its boldest decision was to combine different minor guilds and reduce their number from fourteen to seven. The traditional number of twenty-one guilds was restored two years later, but the balia’s action certainly reflected elite anger over the policies of the guild-dominated popular government. The traditional numerical superiority of the minor guilds made any government based on the participation of all twenty-one guilds inimical to elite interests.
For the next two decades a tense compromise prevailed in which neither elite nor popolo had things exactly to its liking. An electoral reform of 1352 reflected the compromise. Nominations now came from the guilds as well as the Parte Guelfa and the college of the Sixteen, but guild representation on the scrutiny council was limited and controlled by the priors and colleges, who appointed 70% of the council. Scrutinies were scheduled at three-year intervals, with separate sets of pouches resulting from each. Sortition always began from the oldest set of pouches still containing any tickets and proceeded chronologically through the others until a priorate was constituted; indeed, a scrutiny’s pouches might not come into use until years after that scrutiny. Any given priorate typically included members drawn from the pouches of from two to five scrutinies, making it impossible to attribute a particular priorate’s composition to any one scrutiny and thus enhancing the stability and legitimacy of the procedures. Compromise was also reflected in the results. There was a steady arrival of new men, mostly non-elite major guildsmen: between 1352 and 1377, 48% of the seats went to members of 313 families whose first prior came after 1343, including 222 with a first prior after 1352. But many fewer new families reached the priorate than during the popular government of the 1340s: an annual average of 8.5 in 1352-77 as against 28 per year in 1343-8. On the other hand, older families regained a significant share of the electoral spoils: 181 pre-1343 families had 52% of the seats in these 26 years. Of 45 families with 7 or more priors, only 6 had their first prior after 1343; the other 39 were mostly from the elite, led by the Strozzi (with 14 priors), and including the Medici, Rucellai, Altoviti, Rondinelli, Alberti, Salviati, Covoni, Ridolfi, Peruzzi, Capponi, Baroncelli, and the two leading political families of this generation, the Ricci and Albizzi.142
New factions emerged around these two families and originated in a competition for control of the San Giovanni quarter where both lived.143 The Ricci were bankers and had allies among the Alberti, Medici, Rondinelli, Ridolfi, Covoni, and within the popolo. The Albizzi, producers of woolen cloth who counted supporters among the Strozzi, Corsini, Altoviti, Soderini, Rucellai, and Baroncelli, gravitated toward the Guelf Party and espoused its anti-Ghibelline, pro-papal, and elite views. For example, the Albizzi favored relaxation of the divieti that prohibited members of the same lineage from succeeding one another in office except after designated intervals, and which thus reduced the presence of large elite families in the priorate; they even argued for the admission of magnates to certain offices. Although equally dominated by elite families, the Ricci faction was more sympathetic to the new men and generally supported the guild community in opposing these ideas. Dividing the factions above all were the Parte Guelfa’s attempts to purge the office-holding class of so-called Ghibellines. In 1358 the Parte revived the
Issue by promoting a controversial law that reconfirmed the bans against Ghibellines in office, permitted secret accusations of suspected Ghibellines, and gave the Parte itself a freer hand in investigating and prosecuting suspects. Some twenty persons were tried and convicted in the first few months. A simpler method of discrediting its enemies was a “warning” (ammonizione) not to accept political office or face prosecution. These warnings intimidated political opponents and generated much fear, as well as anger and resentment, over the next two decades. Viewing such tactics as a cynical attempt to drive new men from office, the Ricci and the guild community tried to curtail the “anti-Ghibelline” campaign. Although the Parte issued fewer warnings in the early 1360s (about thirty in five years), it occasionally outraged public opinion by targeting respected citizens with spotlessly Guelf family backgrounds, provoking storms of protest and calls for reining in the Parte. In 1362 it even accused and put on trial the chronicler Matteo Villani, brother of Giovanni, possibly in retaliation for his criticism of the Parte in the chronicle, especially his view that the 1358 law was “iniquitous” and “evil.”144 By the early 1370s the Parte’s intensifying campaign against its enemies unleashed a backlash that was the origin of another popular government.
Although sometimes bitter and deep, factional divisions in the 1350s and 1360s never approached the chaos of earlier times. As always, elite patronage networks sought to attract clients from the popolo and thus weaken horizontal ties of class solidarity with vertical links of patronage, but they no longer gave birth to private armies. Elite political action increasingly entered the civic spaces created by the popolo, in particular at this time the consultative assemblies (called pratiche), convened by the priors to hear the views of influential citizens. Unlike the legislative councils, in which only voting and little or no debate occurred,145 a pratica was a forum for the expression of opinions but not for voting. These advisory sessions, in which, beginning in the late 1340s, groups of citizens were periodically invited to offer advice to the priors on important matters, became and remained a central feature of Florentine political culture until the end of the republic. Some citizens were invited because of their personal prestige or that of their families, while others represented bodies like the Parte Guelfa, the Mercanzia, the Twelve, the Sixteen, and occasionally the guild consuls. Pratiche made no decisions, and the priors were not bound to follow the views expressed in them. Their purpose was rather to air opinions and forge consensus around government policy. Florentines paid close attention to who was invited to these sessions, who spoke, and in agreement with whom (or not), and with what effect on policy. Predictably, the elite preferred small gatherings recruited from their class, while guildsmen wanted larger, more representative meetings. The emergence of the pratica as a stage for political debate and for demonstrations of the influence of powerful citizens was another important step in the civilizing of the Florentine elite.
Between 1350 and 1370 the popolo made no attempt to resurrect the popular constitution of the 1340s, while the elite accepted, sometimes grudgingly, the presence of new men in office and the limits placed by divieti on officeholding by large families. That neither faction was able to dominate the other also reassured the popolo. But after 1370 two developments destabilized this compromise and prepared the way for the next popular government: intensifying conflicts between elite and non-elite major guildsmen, especially in the Wool guild; and a sudden rapprochement between the factions that galvanized the popolo into action. Controversies in the Wool guild were the first sign of the breakdown of consensus.146 In the 1350s and 1360s the guild was governed by small committees (balie), appointed by the consuls and composed largely of members from elite families, which were not obligated to seek approval of their actions from the guild council or, apparently, even to report to it. For example, in November 1369 a consulate including members of the Albizzi, Rucellai, Rondinelli, Capponi, and Ridolfi selected a balia committee of eight with members from the Albizzi, Rucellai, Rondinelli, Del Palagio, and Salviati. Not only were three of the guild’s elite families represented on both the consulate and the balia; the Lana’s leading families also came from both sides of the Albizzi-Ricci factional divide. But a movement of opposition to this concentration of power in a few elite families surfaced in January 1370, when the guild council suddenly prohibited the consuls from tampering with the established schedule for guild elections (as they had in the past), insisted that elections of the guild’s notary be restored to the council (on the grounds that “that which touches all must be approved by all”), and established tighter control by the council over the appointment of balie. Four years later, the guild council strengthened its role, requiring that henceforth petitions and proposals before the council be read aloud separately and in the vernacular rather than Latin, “so that they may be more clearly and openly understood by the council members,” and mandating council meetings at least twice in each consular term of four months, “whether or not there is pressing business,” because “when the assembled members of the guild regularly consult and talk with one another in such meetings, many issues are raised and brought to the attention of the consuls that redound to the honor, utility, and benefit of the guild and its members.” Reasserting the council’s prerogatives and opening guild government to broader participation were the responses of the non-elite majority to the elite’s earlier monopoly of power.
Behind these political struggles lay economic issues and disputes over production levels and labor costs. In the late 1360s, the industry underwent significant expansion, mostly in the high-quality export sector controlled by elite families like the Albizzi, Pitti, and Del Bene. Increased production also drove up wages, in both the luxury-cloth sector and the manufacture of cloths for the local and regional markets. Rising labor costs were a threat to the viability of the smaller firms of non-elite producers of cheaper cloths. This is the picture of their difficulties presented in two enactments of the guild council in 1372, which complained that some producers were luring workers away from other firms with promises of higher wages and loans to pay off debts incurred to former employers. Their remedy was a more rigorous enforcement of existing limits on the number of cloths each firm was allowed to produce in a year. Production quotas began in 1349, just after the plague, probably in an effort to support the price of cloth in the face of plummeting demand. No member of the guild was allowed to produce more than 220 bolts per year, and no more than 50 in the first year. In the expansion of the 1360s, many members petitioned the guild for exemptions from the 220-bolt limit, while others circumvented the regulation by having separate quotas approved for two or more partners that cumulatively exceeded the limit. Those seeking to halt this expansion and contain rising wages persuaded the guild council to restore production ceilings for all firms, however many partners they had, and to require workers who had borrowed from employers during periods of unemployment to remain bound to those employers until they paid off their debts, thus depressing wages to subsistence levels and limiting the freedom of workers to seek higher wages elsewhere. Conflicts of economic interest pitted elite producers of high quality cloths, who needed laborers and were willing to pay them more, against producers of cheaper cloths, who reacted to their predicament by seizing political control of the guild and using this power to impose the restrictions on production and workers’ mobility that they hoped would solve the problem of rising wages. By one measure at least they were successful: after 1372 no producer was allowed a quota in excess of 220 bolts. But their success came directly at the expense of the industry’s workers, who were now threatened by both shrinking employment and stagnant or declining wages. For the guild’s non-elite majority these temporary victories were a reaffirmation of traditional principles of guild government. Similar challenges occurred in other major guilds. In Por Santa Maria the practice (first instituted in 1346) of giving each of its three major subdivisions (membra) an equal number of seats in the consulate and council was restored in 1371 and the role of the council subsequently expanded. And in the Medici, Speziali, e Merciai a similar effort revived the prerogatives of the council and guaranteed the guild’s membra equal and autonomous roles in electing council members.
In 1371, perhaps reflecting the conflicts within the major guilds and in part generating them, came the popolo’s furious reaction to the reconciliation between Uguccione de’ Ricci and Piero degli Albizzi and Ricci’s apparent conversion to the Parte’s anti-Ghibelline campaign. The event alarmed the guildsmen, who saw the protection afforded until then by Ricci opposition to the Parte suddenly evaporate. Amid protests and accusations against the specter of a united elite centered in the Parte, in April 1372 the priors convened an unusually large pratica, in which Filippo Bastari, a respected citizen independent of the factions, and from a family on the border between elite and popolo, spoke at length of the dangers of factionalism, calling for unity and attacking the usurpation of public authority by powerful private individuals: “whoever wants something from the commune should not have recourse to private citizens but to the priors and colleges. In order to curtail ambition, lest anyone show himself to be above the commune, the priors should favor those citizens who want the commune to be above all citizens. The lord priors and their colleges should be the heads of this city, and not certain private citizens.”147 Bastari’s protest against the illegitimate power of “privati cives” through their patronage networks was echoed in the subsequent creation of a balia with a mandate “to remove sects and divisions and repress and restrain the power and audacity” of overmighty citizens. The balia entrusted military and foreign policy to a new council that included two representatives from each guild and ninety-six citizens drawn by lot, six from each gonfalone; it created the office of the Ten of Liberty to investigate factions; suspended the office-holding rights of three Albizzi (including their leader Piero) and three Ricci (including Uguccione); gave the consuls of the twenty-one guilds, together with the priors and colleges, authority to review petitions requesting that members of elite families accused of certain crimes be declared magnates; and expanded the governing committee of the Mercanzia to seven with two representatives of the minor guilds. Restoring the guild consuls to crucial functions in government, including the enforcement of new punitive measures against elite misbehavior, signaled the revival of the popolo. In the next few years members of the Ridolfi, Albizzi, Strozzi, Brancacci, and Benelli families were made magnates with the votes of the guild consuls, and in 1373 the legislative councils extended the exclusion of the Albizzi and the Ricci from communal offices to ten years. The balia of 1372 initiated the last resurrection of guild republicanism.
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