A committee of “good men,” as Villani calls them, looking for a safe place to meet in the face of hostility from both the imperial administration and the Ghibellines, particularly the Uberti who hounded them from one location to another until they were welcomed into the fortified houses of the Anchioni family in San Lorenzo, discussed political reform for several weeks. On October 20, 1250, they announced the new face of Florentine government. The first and most basic of their innovations was the reorganization of urban space. They instituted twenty armed neighborhood companies, each led by a standardbearer and four rectors elected within the company for a year.
The companies enrolled all males between the ages of fifteen and seventy, excluding knights. Each company had a distinctive standard (gonfalone) that served as a symbol of neighborhood identity and solidarity, some featuring dragons and lions rampant. So powerful was the symbolic value of the standards (Villani describes all twenty) that the administrative zones they represented came to be known, metonymically, as gonfaloni. The Capitano del popolo, a non-Florentine appointed for one year with the responsibility of sounding the bell and summoning the neighborhood militias whenever necessary, replaced the podesta as the commune’s chief military and judicial official. Even more impressive in some respects was the organization of the contado, where ninety-six parishes each became the home of a militia company, also with standardbearers and rectors, and organized into regional leagues. The main function of the militias was to ensure peace and security against elite factions that had often barricaded and besieged entire neighborhoods.
The new chief magistracy was the office of twelve Anziani, or Elders, two from each sesto, elected twice a year, probably by leaders of the military companies and the guilds. The Anziani ran day-to-day affairs of government and had broad judicial, financial, and administrative powers and the exclusive right to initiate legislation (as did the later priors). To become law their proposals had to gain the approval of the legislative councils, both the older ones and the new Credentia, with six representatives from each sesto, and the Council of the Capitano del popolo, whose twenty-four regular members were frequently joined by the 100 standardbearers and rectors of the militia companies and the consuls of the guilds.69
How “popular” was the primo popolo? Its most popular feature was the wide base of support indicated by the participation of the militia representatives and the guild consuls, all elected within their associations, in the Council of the Capitano, and their consultation by the Anziani on matters including war and taxes. Names of more than one hundred Anziani from 1250 to 1260 reveal the exclusion of knights and the presence of only six from families of the old consular ruling group and another dozen from other pre-1250 families. The primo popolo clearly attempted to remove the families associated with the elite parties and to replace the old governing class with new men. On the other hand, most of the Anziani came from families associated with the major guilds and were involved in banking, trade, and the legal profession. Among those whose professions have been identified were many Calimala merchants, some bankers or moneylenders, a dozen from Por Santa Maria, twenty jurists or notaries, and five from the Wool guild. No representatives of the minor, or artisan, guilds have been identified among these officeholders.70
The situation in the legislative councils shows the same effort to limit the participation of the old ruling group. Knights were excluded from the new councils of the popolo, and, although they still sat in the two older councils, of 661 members of the various councils in 1255-6, only fourteen were knights.71 72 Here too the overwhelming majority came from the major guilds, but the presence of a few minor guildsmen suggests that the primo popolo felt it necessary to make some gesture toward them. Indeed, on one occasion in 1251, among twenty-eight council members whose professions can be identified were five minor guildsmen or artisans, nine lawyers, twelve notaries, and two doctors. A council of 1256 included a tailor and two shoemakers in addition to five lawyers, eight notaries, and two doctors.11 Although minor guildsmen were clearly a small minority, the numerous notaries, although major guildsmen, came from decidedly non-elite (and in many cases contado) families, adding significantly to the popular presence in the councils.
Yet the chief sense in which the government of 1250-60 was “popular” rests in the exclusion of much of the ruling class of the preceding period and the limited role of known Guelfs and Ghibellines. Less than a quarter of the Anziani and only 17 percent of council members were affiliated with either party and were vastly outnumbered by persons with no known connection to the parties. Moreover, the numbers of Guelfs and Ghibellines were roughly equal: slightly more Guelfs than Ghibellines among the Anziani, the reverse in the councils. The significance of this obviously carefully monitored policy is clear: the popolo tried to steer a middle course between the parties and to present itself as a dominant third force capable of limiting their influence. At the beginning of the decade, the primo popolo was essentially neutral between Guelfs and Ghibellines. It recalled the exiled Guelfs of 1248, but banished no Ghibellines and tried to avoid antagonizing either party. Outside pressures ultimately forced the primo popolo to become embroiled in the very party struggles it tried to suppress and caused it to draw closer to the Guelfs and alienate the Ghibellines. Until then, however, the policy of neutrality between the parties was a major achievement of this first attempt at an alternative to elite dominance. The primo popolo was not a social revolution; it emerged from a split within the elite, between those committed to the factions and those who saw such alliances as damaging to the economic interests of their class and city. Although knights may have been barred from the Anziani, there is no evidence of families designated as magnates or of punitive legislation against them. The largely successful effort to remove the parties from the center of the political stage was made possible in part by the support of the guilds and the military companies in exchange for some representation in government. The primo popolo thus foreshadows the analogous policies of later popular governments that reached even farther from the elite for support to mount more radical challenges.
To reduce the elite’s ability to conduct urban warfare, the primo popolo significantly reconfigured the physical city. Its most dramatic policy was the systematic reduction of the towers that elite families used as defensive strongholds and impregnable bastions from which to rain down rocks and missiles against their enemies. Before 1250 Florence was a veritable forest of family towers (see Map 1), some as high as 120 braccia (70 meters, 230 feet) and thus more than two-thirds the height of Brunelleschi’s fifteenth-century dome atop the cathedral. The primo popolo ordered them all reduced to a maximum of 50 braccia (29 meters, 96 feet), insisting that no private tower rise higher than that of the new palazzo del popolo (the Bargello) built in this decade. Cutting down family towers symbolically asserted public over private power and simultaneously limited the towers’ effectiveness in street warfare. The government used the stones from the destroyed upper portions to expand the city walls on the south side of the river. Another dimension of the popolo’s urban policy was the construction of wide, straight streets that led into the center and facilitated the quick movement of security forces. The best example is via Maggio (originally Maggiore) in the Oltrarno district and the connecting Santa Trinita bridge, which afforded quick access from the southern gate into the inner city where the elite had its enclaves.73
With Frederick Il’s death in December 1250, the Ghibellines were in disarray throughout Italy, and Florence under the primo popolo asserted its power in Tuscany as never before. After bringing the contado under control, the government eliminated any potential support for the Hohenstaufen in Tuscany. When Frederick’s son Conrad readied an expedition to southern Italy, the primo popolo, worried that the Ghibelline city of Pistoia might become a rallying point for his Tuscan supporters, sent an army in 1251 to overturn the Pistoian regime. Although successful, this action compromised the popolo’s declared neutrality between Guelfs and Ghibellines. Florentine Ghibellines began to fear that the new government was inevitably more a friend of the Guelfs than of theirs, and some decided to leave the city and join their allies elsewhere in Tuscany. Even more ominous was the formation of an anti-Florentine league of Ghibelline cities, including Pisa and Siena. But for the next several years, the primo popolo met all challenges, defeated Siena, took Pistoia a second time, pushed back a Pisan attack on their ally Lucca, cleaned the Ghibellines out of Figline and the Sienese out of Montalcino, occupied Poggibonsi and Volterra, imposing on the latter a constitution modeled on their own, and frightened the Pisans into conceding to Florentine merchants privileges and exemptions from taxes and customs duties. The Florentines, Villani wrote (7.58), called 1254 the “victorious year,” as the primo popolo became the undisputed power in Tuscany. An inscription placed in the west wall of the new palazzo del popolo exalted the city’s wealth, victories, fortune, and power, claiming for Florence the right to rule the sea, the land, and the entire world, and predicting eternal triumph, in the manner of Rome, over subjects to be ruled with justice and law. Exaggerated as they are, these boasts reflect the growing appeal of ancient Rome to the popolo, and it has been plausibly argued that Brunetto Latini, chancellor and notary of the Anziani, may have composed these famous lines.74 A second way in which the primo popolo advertised, and increased, Florentine power was the minting of the gold florin, with the lily on one face and the image of the city’s patron saint, John the Baptist, on the other. Since Carolingian times no state in the West had minted gold coins until Frederick II imitated the coins of the ancient Roman emperors, but no city had ever done so until Genoa and Florence minted florins almost simultaneously in 1252. It was a proclamation of sovereignty, another politically charged imitation of ancient Rome, and a symbol of Florence’s expanding wealth.
The revival of party antagonisms eventually drew the primo popolo into a major war that destroyed it. Villani gives a good example (7.61) of the danger the popolo faced, not only from Ghibellines, but also from elite Guelfs. In 1255 the government sent 500 knights, under the command of the Guelf captain Guido Guerra of the Counts Guidi, to help an ally against its Ghibelline enemies. When the count reached Arezzo, then at peace with Florence, he stormed in and, “against the wishes and without any mandate from the commune of Florence,” expelled the Aretine Ghibellines. The popolo was “furious with the count” and sent an army to take Arezzo and readmit the Ghibellines. Here was a case of an overmighty Guelf, from a noble family accustomed to exercising jurisdiction in territories under its control, making his own foreign policy and pursuing objectives defined more by loyalty to the Guelf party than by the government whose cavalry he commanded. By 1258 tensions between Guelfs and Ghibellines were increasing, as Frederick Il’s son Manfred, now king of Sicily, began a military campaign to revive Hohenstaufen hegemony throughout Italy. The Tuscan Ghibellines saw in Manfred their chance for revenge against the Guelfs and for the destruction of the primo popolo. In July 1258 the government uncovered a plot, led by the Uberti and supported by Manfred, to overthrow the popolo. When the Uberti ignored a summons, a crowd attacked their palaces and killed one of them and several of their followers. Two others confessed and were executed. The Uberti left Florence and went to Ghibelline Siena, and with them went all or part of seventeen other Ghibelline families, including the Fifanti, Guidi, Amidei, Lamberti, Abati, and Soldanieri. Over the next year Manfred won one victory after another and seemed unstoppable. To the dismay of the Florentine Ghibellines, however, he tried to win the Florentine popolo to his side, but negotiations broke down when the Florentines refused to receive a royal governor who intended to reform their statutes. By 1260 it was clear that the Ghibelline-Hohenstaufen-Sienese were preparing for war, and the Florentine popolo had no choice but to close ranks with the Guelfs.
The communal army, distinct from the militias set up in 1250 for internal security, consisted of six units corresponding to the sesti, each a combination of infantry and cavalry. Cavalry service was provided by men from wealthy families or substitutes hired by them. The infantry was divided by categories of service under separate commanders. Partly recruited from the city and partly from the contado districts that were an extension of the sesti, the total force of the Florentine army in the war of 1260 was approximately 16,000: 1,400 city cavalrymen; 8,000 contado infantry; 4,000 city infantry; 2,000 crossbowmen and archers; 300 shield-men from the city; and only 200 foreign mercenaries, all cavalrymen.75 Villani (7.78) says that even this huge Florentine contingent was only part of the Guelf army whose infantry he estimated at 30,000. Although smaller, the Ghibelline-Sienese army routed the Florentines at Montaperti on September 4, 1260, a day forever remembered with grief by the Guelfs and the popolo, and commemorated by Dante, as his pilgrim reminds Farinata degli Uberti, as the battle “that made the river Arbia run red with blood” (Inferno 10) and later prompted the harsh laws against Ghibellines. Farinata justifies his part in the war saying that he was not alone, or without cause, but that he was indeed the only one who prevented Florence from being utterly destroyed. Here Dante alludes to the legend according to which Manfred ordered the city razed to the ground and its population resettled elsewhere, an order that the other Ghibelline captains were prepared to execute, except Farinata who announced that he had not fought all these years to see his city obliterated, but to return and live there.
Montaperti was the end of the primo popolo and the beginning of six years of exile for leading Guelfs, who left the city within days of the catastrophe. The Ghibellines, recalling the punishments inflicted on them in 1258, destroyed, according to the Book of Damages, 103 palaces, 580 smaller houses, 85 towers, and a large number of shops and warehouses. The property itself was not sold but rented, which made its recovery possible some years later. Also punished were the leaders of the primo popolo. About a third of the exiled families, and half the merchant families among them, had had one or more members among either the Anziani or the councils of the primo popolo,76 some of whose non-elite leaders were also exiled, most notably Brunetto Latini. The Ghibellines dispatched the entire constitutional structure created in 1250 and installed a government essentially of the Ghibelline party under the podesta Guido Novello of the Counts Guidi (ironically a cousin of the Guelf Guido Guerra) who governed in the name of Manfred Hohenstaufen.
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