A new set of political attitudes gradually took hold as an ideology of consensus and paternalistic leadership replaced the republicanism of separate interests. “Consensus” (not to be confused with consent) here stands for a cluster of assumptions about unity, absence of social conflict, the inadmissibility of dissent, and the dutiful acquiescence of good citizens in the natural and benevolent leadership of the elite. For the first time the elite’s claim to lead rested on the assent of non-elite major guildsmen in return for a wide sharing of offices. The two aspects of this transformation have sometimes seemed paradoxical, and an exclusive focus on one or the other obscures their functional relationship: on the one hand, the emergence of an inner core of elite families as a largely uncontested ruling class; on the other, the expansion of the ranks of officeholders, but without a share of actual power. Motivated by their fear of the working classes, non-elite major guildsmen accepted their inclusion among eligible officeholders, and an occasional office, as the reward for cooperation with the elite and a mark of recognition of their worth as good citizens. Expanding the political class widened the elite’s base of support and enhanced its power and legitimacy.
Electoral policies were thus central to the new political configuration.57 In 1385 the nomination of candidates for the priorate was freed of all restrictions deriving from proscriptions of alleged Ghibellines; in 1387 the old requirement of active exercise of a trade was similarly abrogated; and even guild membership was no longer a test of eligibility. The result was a notable increase in nominations: from approximately 5,350 in 1382 to 6,310 for the scrutiny of 1391, including 4,584 major guildsmen. They declined in the next scrutiny (of 1411) for which complete lists have survived to 5,265 (3,910 major guildsmen and 1,355 minor guildsmen), perhaps because of the sharp decline in population following several outbreaks of plague. But in 1433, nominations climbed back to 6,354. To put this in perspective: in a population less than half that before the 1348 plague, nominations doubled by comparison with even the popular scrutiny of 1343. Whereas in 1343 one in seven adult males was nominated, by 1391 one in two was nominated, and in 1433 (with a total population of no more than 40,000), two of every three. Although of course a minority of nominees was approved, the secret of the scrutiny allowed many to nurture the hope that they had been successful and to wait patiently for years to find out. Approved candidates initially declined, from roughly 875 in 1382, to 677 in 1391, and 619 in 1393. But by 1411 they jumped to 1,069 and in 1433 to the remarkable total of 2,084. Most of the
For what follows, see my Corporatism, pp. 263-300.
Approved candidates were major guildsmen, 884 in 1411 and 1,757 in 1433. Expanding numbers of both nominations and successful candidates contributed to the perception that political participation had never been broader. But the social base from which the political class was recruited was narrowing. Minor guild representation in the priorate was reduced from four to three to two seats, and the composition of the scrutiny committees conformed to the same ratios. An expanding political class was increasingly limited to major guildsmen.
Precisely because so many major guildsmen were being approved and admitted to high office, the elite needed to ensure that real power remained in its hands. The solution, first implemented in 1387, was to allow the officials in charge of placing name-tickets in the pouches (who were still called accoppiatori) to select from candidates successful in the scrutinies a small preferential pool for whom a certain number of seats on the priorate was reserved. At first two, and by 1393 three, of the eight seats were reserved for this handpicked elite whose names went into the so-called small pouch, or borsellino. And because the Standardbearers of Justice were also selected by the accoppiatori, four of the nine seats were henceforth filled from the borsellino, while the hundreds and eventually thousands of other approved citizens competed against much greater odds for the remaining five seats. A contemporary chronicler described the reaction among non-elite citizens: those selected by “the powerful” for the borsellino, he claimed, “were very loyal to their regime [molto confidenti allo stato loro].” Everyone was eager to know which priors came from which pouches: “And when the new priors were drawn, citizens said: Which priors are the ones from the borsellino? And it was much criticized by the good citizens, because it did not seem a good thing to them to make such a distinction among citizens.”194 Even as the identities of those selected for the borsellino were never officially revealed, it institutionalized (and consolidated the popular perception of) the distinction between an inner circle of real power and the rest of the officeholders.
Even tighter electoral controls were instituted by the inner elite in October 1393, when Maso degli Albizzi, nephew of the Piero executed in 1379, was Standardbearer of Justice. After announcing that it had foiled a conspiracy involving the rival Alberti, thus creating a perception of emergency, the government asked a parlamento to authorize a balia the majority of whose members consisted of the incumbent priors and colleges and one hundred citizens appointed by them and was a veritable who’s who of the ruling group of the next few decades. The families represented, in addition to the Albizzi, included the Da Uzzano, Soderini, Ridolfi, Vettori, Capponi, Pitti, Corsini, and
Guicciardini from Santo Spirito; Magalotti, Salviati, Baroncelli, Mancini, Dell’Antella, and Castellani from Santa Croce; Acciaiuoli, Strozzi, Spini, Rucellai, Ardinghelli, Altoviti, Davanzati, and Minerbetti from Santa Maria Novella; and the Medici (both Vieri di Cambio and Giovanni di Bicci, father of Cosimo), Ricci, Alessandri, and Valori from San Giovanni. Once the Alberti “conspirators” had been dispatched, the balia turned its attention to electoral reforms: it annulled the pouches of a 1385 scrutiny for the priorate and all existing pouches for dominion offices, the Mercanzia, and guild consulates; it scheduled new scrutinies and in the meantime handpicked the guild consuls, Mercanzia councilors, and even the next priorate, thus ensuring the presence in office of trusted allies during the scrutinies (five of the eight handpicked priors for November-December 1393 came from the balia itself and included Niccolo da Uzzano as Standardbearer of Justice); and it increased to three the seats on the priorate to be filled from the borsellino. But its most audacious action was the appointment of nine accoppiatori to revise the existing borsellini by adding or deleting names as they saw fit, including those of citizens approved in the new scrutiny, thus making them eligible for extraction much sooner. The power given the accoppiatori of 1393 was unprecedented: with complete control over the borsellini, they revised at will the ranks of eligible citizens for nearly half the seats on the priorate and determined the composition of this privileged inner circle for years to come. Appointed by, and from within the ranks of, the balia, the accoppiatori included Maso degli Albizzi, the most powerful leader of his faction and subsequently Standardbearer of Justice two more times; Andrea Vettori, a Calimala merchant who became Standardbearer in 1395; Giovanni Bucelli, a three-time Standardbearer whose son Francesco was among the next generation’s inner circle; Davanzato Davanzati, a banker elected twice as prior and twice as Standardbearer; Bartolomeo Valori, a woolen-cloth manufacturer, three times Standardbearer and one of the most frequent speakers in the pratiche, whose son Niccolo also subsequently belonged to the inner elite; Andrea Minerbetti, a cloth manufacturer, twice Standardbearer, and the father of yet another member of the next generation’s ruling group; and three others, including, as required, two minor guildsmen. These nine men determined the shape and size of the Florentine office-holding class for the next generation.
It did not take long for the effects of their work to emerge. After 1393 the number of families reaching the priorate for the first time quickly declined. Whereas each year between 1382 and 1393 from thirteen to twenty-two families had their first prior (and many more than that during the popular government), new families were fewer in the next decade and between 1403 and 1433 averaged under three per year. Families with several priors were mainly older ones: thirty-four of forty-three families with four or more priors between 1382 and 1399 had their first prior before 1343, twenty-four of them before 1300. By comparison with the twenty years before the mid-1390s, the Florentine office-holding class gradually closed the door to newcomers after 1393. This Florentine “serrata” (or closing) was never as tight as that of Venice. Some new families (Morelli, Serristori, and Pucci) went on to hold office with impressive frequency, but they were exceptions whose political success depended on the favor of those at the pinnacle of power. Paradoxically, while it became more difficult for new families to rise into the political class, offices were more widely distributed than ever before. In 1382-99, 977 available seats on the priorate were held by 898 citizens. In 1410-19, 480 posts (excluding the Standardbearers of Justice) were shared by 433 individuals.195 Between 1382 and 1407, only twenty citizens reached the priorate three or more times (compared to 134 in the twenty-five years before 1378).196 Nonetheless, the inner elite carefully controlled the limited pool of those who had access to half the seats.
Consensus was also a prevailing myth within the elite. Despite its collective predominance, no one family or group of families clearly led the rest in appearances in the priorate. The families with the most priors in 1382-99 were the Altoviti (9), Salviati (8), Acciaiuoli, Albizzi, Biliotti, Rucellai, and Strozzi (7 each). Until 1434, the inner leadership consisted of some fifty or sixty men who held key offices frequently but whose families did not monopolize them, who sat on electoral committees and balie, dominated the Mercanzia (and through it the guilds), served as ambassadors and ran foreign policy, and spoke regularly in the pratiche. Attempts to identify the inner elite in the first third of the fifteenth century have focused on frequency of participation in the pratiche as the mark of real influence. Because the regime relied on these advisory sessions to generate consensus around its policies, the frequent participants were those particularly authoritative, influential, and respected citizens who had the best chance of carrying others toward their views. Between 1403 and 1414, fifty-seven men, the overwhelming majority from elite families, spoke in at least twenty pratiche: five spoke more than one hundred times (Filippo Corsini, Piero Baroncelli, Cristofano Spini, Maso degli Albizzi, and Rinaldo Gianfigliazzi), and another fourteen more than fifty times (including Gino Capponi, Lorenzo Ridolfi, and Niccolo da Uzzano).197 If power was now increasingly a function of the ability to persuade and build consensus, this generation witnessed yet another transformation in the character of the Florentine elite: its emergence as a civic aristocracy skilled in the rhetorical techniques of eloquence and public argument.
Patronage and money remained, however, the foundations of power. Every great family needed wealth with which to build and keep its network of neighbors, friends, and relatives who provided indispensable support in difficult situations. But it was a basic principle of the regime’s stability that no family should exceed the others in office-holding or in the reach of its patronage network. Even the Albizzi, despite the prestige of Maso and Rinaldo, did not have the wealth or patronage resources with which to dominate the rest of the elite. Behind the two major political conflicts within the elite at either end of the half-century between 1382 and 1434 - the exile of the Alberti and the struggle with the Medici - lay an unwritten rule that no family of the inner circle should exercise obviously greater power than the others. At the end of the fourteenth century, the Alberti, who acquired vast wealth from papal banking, were the one family capable of upsetting the consensus. Benedetto Alberti had courted the favor of the popular government, was knighted by the Ciompi in July 1378 and appointed one of four civilian chiefs of the armed security force in 1379 (Stefani 795, 830). And Cipriano Alberti defended the guilds in 1382. The enemies they made took advantage of two political mistakes by the Alberti a few years later to destroy the family as a force in Florentine politics. In civic celebrations of 1386, the Alberti dressed their brigade of knights, all in white and gold and “adorned with every ornament,” in the family’s own coat of arms, instead of the communal insignia, and were forced out of the festivities for excessively glorifying the family. In April 1387, when his son-in-law was drawn as Standardbearer of Justice but was discovered not to be of the required age, Benedetto engaged in what the anonymous chronicler describes as heavy-handed pressure to have him seated in office: “people didn’t like Benedetto’s tactics, because it seemed to them that he wanted to be signore of Florence.”62 Immediately following this episode, the government created the balia of May 1387, which (in addition to instituting the borsellino) banished Benedetto and Cipriano for two years. In 1393 five Alberti, including Cipriano, were exiled and others barred from office. Accusations of conspiracy and treason continued to rain down on the family and exile was inflicted on more and more of them until, by the early fifteenth century, all Alberti men were banished.
What made the Alberti dangerous to the regime was the combination of great wealth and popular appeal. If any family at this time had the means and will to rise above the others and make one of its own “signore” of Florence (as had happened in most cities in northern Italy), it was the Alberti. In the dialogues On the Family written in the 1430s after the exile was rescinded, Benedetto’s illegitimate grandson Leon Battista has one of the speakers recall that “in those times” (before the exile) the Alberti contributed no less than
Alle bocche della piazza, pp. 62, 65.
One of every thirty-two florins spent by the government.198 There is no way of verifying the accuracy of this astonishing claim, but a list of voluntary lenders to the commune in 1395 reveals that, of 501 households that made loans, just 52 were assessed 49% of the total and that the fiscal household of the four sons of Niccolaio Alberti lent 130,000 florins, equivalent to 23% of the total contributed by these wealthiest 52 households and 11% of the overall sum. No other household was even close: the next highest assessment was less than a fifth of that of the Alberti brothers. This was the kind of wealth that could threaten the carefully constructed equilibrium among elite families, and it may have been the deeper reason why the ruling group felt it necessary to manufacture pretexts to banish the Alberti. When, a generation later, the enormous wealth of the Medici presented the oligarchy with a similar threat, the ruling group once again tried to banish the giant in its midst. This time they failed, for reasons to be considered later and which once again changed the course of Florentine history. But before that happened, a confident ruling elite utterly transformed not only government and politics, but also political attitudes, foreign policy, Florentine territorial dominion in Tuscany, and the relationship of government to families and citizens.
World History
