Counterrevolution

Like its predecessor of 1343-8, the guild government of 1378-82 saw enemies from both directions: on one side the laborers of the disbanded 24th guild, on the other an elite excluded from power and hurt by fiscal reforms. The rupture between the government and the elite families was beyond repair after December 1379 when Piero degli Albizzi, Donato Barbadori, and five other conspirators were executed, fifty more sentenced to death in absentia and confiscation of property, twenty made magnates, and forty deprived of office-holding rights.175 To these enemies were now added the many lanaiuoli, elite and non-elite, who saw no other solution to their war with the dyers than to overthrow the government that allowed them a guild and thus the ability to negotiate collectively. When the lanaiuoli revolted in January 1382, they took the always ambivalent heart out of the guild coalition. The ensuing counterrevolution gave the elite rather less than it wanted, but it certainly met the demands of the angry manufacturers of woolen cloth.

Fears of plots and conspiracies filled the city with accusations and counteraccusations. When a cloth-shearer with standing in the government was accused of conspiracy, the government’s two chief elite allies, Giorgio Scali and Tommaso Strozzi, went to the palace with 400 men and rescued him from execution by the Capitano. An anonymous eyewitness account, reflecting the mood of the popular government’s enemies on the eve of its overthrow,176 reports without a hint of skepticism the rumor that the convicted cloth-shearer was part of a plot to “kill all the Guelfs and deliver the city to messer Bernabo Visconti, lord of Milan” and that his rescuers were “Ghibellines.” Threatening to resign in protest over the undermining of his authority in order to force the government to allow Scali and Strozzi to be prosecuted, the Capitano got Scali to “confess” that he too was conspiring to surrender Florence to Milan and was “going to ravage the city and rob and kill all of the Guelfs.” Scali was executed “for treason” on January 17, and two more executions on the 20th brought emotions to the boiling point. The “Guelfs” armed themselves and ran through the streets with the banners of the Parte, and “the entire populace marched in processions - the worthy citizens, the soldiers, the people - in an atmosphere of joy and celebration.” The notion that the “whole community” was rising in righteous anger against a few traitors in league with a foreign tyrant foreshadows the political myths of the next two generations: the celebration of civic unity, the consensus of all “worthy” men, and the reduction of political opposition to “treason.” On January 20 the disintegrating government, under pressure from enraged wool merchants, appointed a balia composed largely of existing governmental bodies still evenly divided between the two groups of guilds. But the accent was on unity: the balia insisted that “the needed reforms cannot be lawfully carried out without the full, free, total, and absolute power and authority of the whole Florentine people” and that “this authority cannot be lawfully given except through a parlamento and convocation of the whole Florentine people in a general assembly.”177 Such assemblies of the “whole people” were not in fact common in Florence, and certainly not characteristic of the guild movement with its emphasis on representation and each guild’s right to its own voice. The fiction that the “whole Florentine people” could give its consent or express a single will, especially through a plebiscitary parlamento, was another element of the emerging ideology of the post-1382 years.

That the counterrevolutionaries intended this to be a decisive and even historic turning point emerges from the stated expectation that the balia should bring about nothing less than “a new order of things and a new government [novus status novumque regimen]” and repeal or revise “the badly conceived” innovations of the past. Pressure from the streets dictated the first of the reforms. According to the anonymous chronicler, on the 21st members of the Wool guild, “together with the prominent citizens,” went armed to the Mercato Nuovo and “demanded that the two new guilds be disbanded,” which the balia proceeded to do that same day. Armed bands of lanaiuoli ransacked the guildhalls and destroyed the records of the workers’ guilds, whose members were returned to the jurisdiction of the Lana and Por Santa Maria. The next day frightened members of the fourteen minor guilds marched on the government palace and (so says the chronicler) reported rumors that the “magnates” were planning to ransack the city. As the elite persuaded itself that the popular government was merely a front for traitorous Ghibellines, the minor guilds-men similarly saw everything through the lens of their ancient fear of elite violence. Unable to believe that the minor guildsmen were sincere in such fears, the chronicler surmised that their real motive was “to disguise the fact that they wished to restore the two disbanded guilds, for they feared that they too would be barred from office.” Seeing minor guildsmen descend on the palace in such numbers, the lanaiuoli again took up arms and “marched to the piazza where they attacked the butchers” and killed two of them. The demise of the guild republic was symbolically announced when the priors confiscated the flags of the guilds. On the 23rd, members of the seven major guilds and “the rich and prominent citizens” occupied the Mercato Nuovo and demanded that the minor guilds’ share of offices be reduced. The next day they demanded the cancellation of the scrutiny of August 1378, which the chronicler identifies as the one “the Ciompi conducted.” By Saturday the 25th, the “Guelfs,” confident of their control of the streets, “marched through the city with torches and lanterns, and no one uttered a word in protest.”

The balia promptly annulled the “Ciompi scrutiny” and held a new one based on lists compiled by the standardbearers of the gonfaloni, who cast their net widely nominating approximately 5,350 citizens, 50% more than were nominated in the 1350s and only 10-15% fewer than in 1378. But over 70% of the nominees (approximately 3,800) were major guildsmen, nearly the entire population of the seven guilds and an early sign that the new regime intended to promote upper-class consensus and overcome the historic split between elite and non-elite major guildsmen. The balia decided it would itself serve as the scrutiny committee, together with fifty-four citizens it selected, including powerful figures who became the core of the elite’s leadership over the next few decades: Maso degli Albizzi, Niccolo da Uzzano, Filippo Corsini, Piero Baroncelli, and Vieri de’ Medici. Two weeks of voting resulted in the approval of about 575 of 3,800 major guildsmen and 300 of approximately 1,550 minor guildsmen. Although the results were, as always, an official secret, it was predictable, given their representation in the scrutiny council, that minor guildsmen would constitute a substantial percentage of approved citizens (one-third, in fact). This prompted a group of elite leaders to attempt either to circumvent the balia or hijack it to their own purposes. Stefani (913) says that the “families” and the “grandi” met on February 15, four days after the scrutiny’s conclusion, and designated forty-three spokesmen to present their demands to the government: that the forty-three be added to the balia, which should also be purged of anyone who had been “warned” by the Parte in the 1370s; that those exiled by the popular government be readmitted and compensated for confiscated or destroyed property; that the minor guilds’ share of seats in the priorate be reduced to three; that sixty magnates be restored to popolano status and not required to wait the customary twenty years to regain office-holding rights; and that no one be prosecuted for assaults or murders committed between January 13 and midnight on February 15, a demand Stefani called “diabolical” since it meant that they openly intended to settle scores with violence before the day was out. Two further demands support Stefani’s contention that these Guelf leaders had formed the most improbable of political alliances - with the Ciompi: a five-month extension for the payment of forced loans, and reduced assessments for anyone taxed two florins or less. In fact, the forty-three included nine or ten persons either without family names or with indications of artisan or working-class status, but only one, a cloth stretcher, can be identified as a ciompo. The rest were overwhelmingly from elite families, magnate (Bardi, Rossi, Buondelmonti, Cavalcanti, Gherardini, and others), and nonmagnate (including Tommaso Soderini, Filippo Corsini, Piero Pitti, Tommaso Brancacci, Carlo Strozzi, Cristofano degli Spini, Vieri de’ Medici, Biagio Guasconi, Francesco da Filicaia, Andrea degli Albizzi, and members of the Canigiani, Peruzzi, and Rucellai).

Both Stefani and the anonymous chronicler describe the actions of the forty-three as an illegal attempt to force acceptance of their demands without approval from the priors, councils, or balia. They marched toward the palace under the banner of the Parte, carried by Vanni di Michele Castellani, occupied and closed off the piazza, and demanded that the priors sound the bell for a parlamento. According to the anonymous chronicler, Chancellor Salutati came out onto the platform and “read and ratified” the document, which gave the forty-three balia powers to carry out whatever reforms they liked. But the Wool guild and consuls of the other guilds sent a delegation to demand the expulsion of the forty-three, who first answered that “they had no intention of leaving the palace because the people had put them there, and that they would leave only when the people wanted them to.”

Cooler heads among the forty-three prevailed, as Francesco da Filicaia advised the others on behalf of the Wool guild (of which he was a member) that all the guilds agreed that the forty-three should resign and go home. The next day the twenty-one guilds swore an oath to remain united, “unto death,” against anyone attempting to “overthrow the stato of the guilds and the Parte Guelfa.”178 Stefani (914) tells a slightly different story in which the leaders of the gang of forty-three pressured Salutati and the notary of the legislative councils to draft documents that would have turned their demands into law, but that both men refused on the grounds that this had not been approved by the priors. The next day the “good men and the merchants and guildsmen immediately agreed, and the [other] guilds appealed to the Wool guild, whose members went openly into the palace and announced that the 43 should get out immediately and that the [existing] balia was sufficient to do what needed to be done.” Thwarted on this occasion, a month later dissatisfied elite leaders were back again, and a similar scenario unfolded, with another list of demands. This time they succeeded in removing seven of the sixteen standardbearers of the gonfaloni, among them Stefani,179 who says only that “the flags [of the gonfaloni] were taken away from some good men.” (919). But the legislative councils resisted most of the elite demands, and for the rest of the year a tense standoff prevailed between the Guelf leaders and the rest of the major guildsmen.

A good example of this tension, but also of changing political winds, came in August when, as Stefani reports (935), the pouches yielded a priorate of “common men,” except for its Standardbearer of Justice, Cipriano degli Alberti whose family had been sympathetic to the popular government. Guelf hardliners wanted to use force to prevent them from taking office, but Cipriano went to the palace with an armed escort insisting that he and the priors-elect be allowed to assume their rightful posts. Stefani speculated that if Cipriano “had followed the wishes of the guildsmen, he could have turned the city in whatever direction he wanted.” The guilds demanded punishment for those who tried to reject the incoming priorate, and the question was submitted to a pratica in which the advisory colleges made it clear that the practice of consulting the guilds and hearing their views would no longer be welcomed. A spokesman for the Sixteen went so far as to advise that “the guilds should not be allowed to assemble for the purpose of presenting their opinions” to the government. The Twelve, although they thought “no guild should be prevented from addressing” the government, “doubted that any good can come from it.” Delegitimizing the guilds and removing them from constitutional functions became prime objectives of the post-1382 regime. Government gradually came more firmly under the control of elite leaders determined to sever the historic link between republic and guilds and convinced that their counterrevolution should not be limited to undoing the policies and institutions of 1378-82, but indeed that the time had come for a new kind of elite regime, grounded in a rhetoric of unity and consensus, in which hierarchical social relations and paternalistic leadership would seem the natural order of things. But first guild government had to be discredited, and this was done by associating guilds with subversion and working-class rebellion. In relegating the guilds to political oblivion, the elite now had the acquiescence of non-elite major guildsmen whose fear of working-class insurrection finally overcame their old mistrust of the elite. Without their support, guild republicanism steadily receded from the arena of acceptable politicaL discourse.