Seeing one Tuscan city after another side with Giangaleazzo to escape Florentine domination convinced the ruling group that more coordinated control of the region was necessary to prevent a repetition of that experience, especially because territorial expansion had now become a prime objective of all major Italian states. Florence’s territorial acquisitions before the 1380s had pushed sporadically beyond the old contado, mostly to the west, including Pistoia and the Monte Albano (1328-31), Pescia (1339), Prato and again Pistoia (1350-1), San Gimignano (1353), Volterra (1361), San Miniato al Tedesco (1370), and several smaller towns, all within a traditional Florentine sphere of influence. After the acquisition of Arezzo in 1384, a broader expansion of Florence’s power brought Montepulciano (in 1390 and definitively in 1404), Pisa (1406), Cortona (1411), and Livorno (1421) under the rule of the republic, which thus became the capital of a regional empire.213 The turning point in the development of the territorial state, the moment when hegemony in Tuscany emerged as a central objective of foreign policy, was the conquest of Pisa in 1406.
Partly because traditionally Ghibelline Pisa controlled the access to the sea that Florentine merchants coveted, these ancient rivals had fought a series of wars stretching back to the thirteenth century (1280s, 1315-16, 1340-2, and 1362-4). Seeking protection from Florence in the 1390s, Pisa too had allied with Giangaleazzo and was still in Visconti hands after 1402 when Gabriele Maria Visconti assumed rule.16 At first, Florence avoided confrontation over Pisa and took the offensive against Visconti positions elsewhere in alliance with the Roman papacy. But when Pope Boniface IX’s legate Baldassare Cossa recovered Bologna for the papacy and made a separate peace with Milan, the purpose of continuing the war in Lombardy evaporated. Now the Florentines turned to Pisa and made several unsuccessful offers to buy it. A first attempt to take the city by force in January 1404 also failed. Public opinion turned against the prospect of another war, and in June the councils terminated the semi-permanent war balia of eighty-one created in 1393. Gabriele Maria accepted a French protectorate over Pisa administered by Marshall Boucicaut, governor of Genoa, who, however, willingly listened to offers of a deal that would have ceded Pisa to Florence for 200,000 florins. But when in July 1405 the Pisans learned of a meeting between Maso degli Albizzi and Gabriele Maria, correctly interpreting it as evidence that they were about to be betrayed into the hands of their ancient enemies, they took up arms with cries of “Viva il popolo e liberta,” chased Visconti into the citadel (although he was quickly released), and proclaimed their independence. Although taking Pisa was now going to be much more difficult than they had anticipated, the regime’s elite leaders, Rinaldo Gianfigliazzi, Filippo Corsini, and, after some hesitation, Maso degli Albizzi, favored going ahead with the purchase, and in August Pisa and its contado were sold to Florence for 206,000 florins (80,000 for Gabriele Maria and 126,000 for Boucicaut), but as a fief under French sovereignty. In the meantime Florence began hiring troops, despite opposition in the councils where nearly a third was opposed to rearming. An emergency council of 120 appointed a war balia, which included Lorenzo Ridolfi, Niccolo da Uzzano, Filippo Magalotti, Rinaldo Gianfigliazzi, Cristofano Spini, and Bartolomeo Valori. Boucicaut handed over the citadel at Pisa on August 30, but on September 6 the Pisans attacked, overran the Florentine garrison, and occupied the citadel. A resolution by force was now inevitable; public opinion demanded an aggressive response and the angry priors ordered an investigation to determine culpability. In January 1406 a new balia took office: Bartolomeo Corbinelli, Gino Capponi, Lotto Castellani, Lapo Niccolini, Niccolaio
16
For what follows: Brucker, Civic World, pp. 187-208.
Davanzati, Bernardo Cavalcanti, and Maso degli Albizzi were the high command that conducted the war.214
Under the command of a Genoese captain, Florentine forces destroyed the Pisan countryside, blockaded and laid siege to the city, cut off supplies, and waited for surrender. Starvation was the main weapon, and the Florentines used it without mercy. A Florentine chronicler dwelt on “the many things done by the [war balia], very cruel things, in order to have the city of Pisa.” He recounted the painful details of women and children forced out of the city by the Pisans as “not useful persons,” only to be driven back toward the walls by Florentine troops, refused re-entry by the Pisans, and forced to remain in the scorched area between the walls and the Florentine camp “eating grass like animals and dying of starvation.” The Florentines executed anyone trying to bring grain into the city. Cruelties were committed inside the walls as well, as factions took contrasting views on whether to yield or fight to the death.215 It took thirteen months for the Pisans to surrender. On October 9, 1406, Gino Capponi and Bartolomeo Corbinelli, representing the Dieci, rode into the city, took command, and distributed bread to the famished survivors. Although it consolidated Florentine domination of Tuscany, the conquest came at the cost of human suffering that the Pisans never forgot or forgave, as they made clear in 1494 when they again declared independence and defended it for fifteen years.
Florentine reactions to the conquest of Pisa were ambivalent. Obligatory celebrations, jousting, and processions with the sacred image of the Madonna of Impruneta, brought to the city only on the most solemn occasions, marked the victory. But behind the triumphalism some were aghast at the cruelty and gave signs of troubled conscience over what the republic had done. Acknowledging that hundreds died of starvation and that in a few more days they would all have been dead, Giovanni Morelli commented that Pisa could easily have been taken in an assault, with many lives spared, and expressed doubt about whether it was all worth it: “we didn’t know and didn’t want to know what honor or profit came of it.”216 Gregorio Dati wrote in his History of Florence (8.17.5-6) that the Florentines did what they did “because they were in the right according to the laws of the world and wanted what belonged to them, which they had bought from its lawful owner [Gabriele Maria].” But he also admired the Pisans for the obstinacy with which they defended their freedom: “Never was there a city in the world that held out until death in order not to be overcome as much as the Pisans did, or that knew how to resist with so much determination and intelligence as they did.” While believing that “might accompanied by right must always win,” Dati did not ignore the sufferings endured by the Pisans: once the bread was gone, “they ate grass, cooked leaves, ground straw, and finally every terrible thing, including dogs, cats, other animals, and the excrement of horses. Nor were they spared the ultimate misery of eating human flesh, even worse than what happened in Jerusalem at the time of the emperors Titus and Vespasian. Adults and children fell dead from hunger every day, and the entire city was filled with grief. Speaking of it fills my heart with horror, because never from [the time of the Roman assault against Jerusalem] has there been such a siege” (8.8-9). The clear echoes here of Josephus’ account of the siege of Jerusalem point to the uglier side of the Roman model. “Out of love for the Florentines,” Dati added (8.22.9), “I pray God that He will give them the ability to know how to restrain themselves, and not spend money or engage in undertakings against others that would displease God.”217 His warning was about more than foolish spending: it was an admonition that, even with right and might, it was possible to go too far.
The last two big pieces of the territorial mosaic also came as purchases, but without the horrors inflicted on Pisa. In 1411, Cortona was bought for 60,000 florins in the midst of a war (1409-14) with King Ladislaus of Naples.218 And because Pisa alone was not sufficient for access to the sea, in May 1421 nearby Livorno and Porto Pisano were bought from Genoa for 100,000 florins.219 If the conquest of Pisa entailed a major reconfiguration of territorial power in Tuscany, the acquisition of Livorno had equally significant consequences of a different sort, as Florence now became a maritime power. Within the year, the government instituted the office of the Sea Consuls to oversee the construction and voyages of a merchant galley fleet, owned by the government and available to merchants who paid to have their goods transported. The first galleys sailed in the summer of 1422 for Alexandria, and within a few years the fleet grew to eleven great galleys and fifteen long galleys that made regular voyages to Italy’s Tyrrhenian ports, the Levant, the Aegean, North Africa, southern France, Catalonia, and through the straits of Gibraltar to Southampton and Flanders.220
To justify this expanding regional hegemony, the same writers who extolled Florentine liberty also promoted an image of the republic as the bearer of imperial destiny,221 a combination that might seem contradictory if it weren’t so characteristic of expansionist republics, ancient and modern. Rome was the model, admired by humanists both as a free republic and as the greatest of imperial powers. For many Florentines of this generation, humanists and others, liberty and territorial dominion were linked as cause and effect: because liberty can only survive in a compatible environment, they reasoned, freedom-loving peoples who fight for their own liberty must also protect that of their neighbors. In 1377, during the papal war, Salutati had asserted that it was the ancient Roman republic’s “desire for liberty alone that brought forth the empire, the glory, and all the dignity of the Roman people.”222 In 1400, responding to the accusation of the Milanese humanist Antonio Loschi that Florence’s systematic suppression of its neighbors’ liberties made its rhetoric of liberty hypocritical, Salutati argued that Florence was actually defending them from Milanese tyranny: “so that they would not be throttled by tyranny or despoiled of their ancient dignity, our city has snatched or rescued them from the hands of tyrants and constituted and established them subjects of the Florentines. Thus these peoples have either been born with us in liberty or brought by us to the sweetness of freedom from the bitter constraints of slavery. . . . You believe that the part of the Florentine citizenry which resides in the towns and fields outside the walls of the city, who enjoy freedoms you could never imagine, desires, instead of being subjects of our city, lives of slavery under your master. Such an attitude now is and, I hope, will always be considered the height of folly and madness for those whose greatest glory is to be called Florentines - because they are our people by birth, by right, and by the gift of fate.”223 Leonardo Bruni, in the Panegyric to the City of Florence, proclaimed that “to you, men of Florence, belongs by hereditary right dominion over the entire world and possession of your parental legacy. From this it follows that all wars waged by the Florentine people are most just,” not only because, given its inheritance of world-wide dominion, Florence “necessarily wages war for the defense or recovery of its own territory,” but also because the Florentines had committed themselves to a “struggle against tyranny” that began “a long time ago when certain evil men undertook the worst crime of all - the destruction of the liberty, honor, and dignity of the Roman people. At that time, fired by a desire for freedom, the Florentines adopted their penchant for fighting and their zeal for the republican side.”224 Hence their wars were of necessity fought for the defense of liberty.
A much later but telling example of the effect on political discourse of the imperial dimension of fifteenth-century Florence’s self-image was the decision of a Medici balia in January 1459 to make a symbolic change in the name of the priorate, until then still the “priors of the guilds.” The change was necessary because “it does not seem appropriate to the dignity, power, and prestige of the city of Florence and the status of its government and regimen” for its chief executive body to have “the title ‘priors of the guilds’, implying that they preside over humble and abject persons and base matters. When Florentine ambassadors and citizens are in the company of princes and lords, [this name] causes them to be held in lower esteem and to be less honored.” According to the balia, the old title had been instituted “when the city was small and had little or no territorial dominion [imperium] and the wealth of the citizens was meager.” But “now that everything has changed and grown in such great measure, the title should be modified and elevated to the dignity and nobility of the office.” Thus, “since the city of Florence has been established in a state of true and perfect liberty and is inferior to no other city or republic in its zeal, care, diligence, and passion for the cultivation, protection, and preservation of this liberty, as earlier times have clearly shown in so many and such great wars waged with such fortitude against those who have endeavored to oppress it, it would be not unworthy, indeed entirely consonant with reason, [for the priors] to take their name from that liberty,” and henceforth be known as the “priors of liberty.”225 Although the city now had only a third of the population of the commune that created the “priors of the guilds,” its territorial dominion was indeed much greater. Here again is the combination of “liberty” and “imperium” and the argument that Florentine devotion to liberty is proved by the “many and great wars waged with such fortitude” against its enemies. With the memory of the Pisan disaster dimmed by time (for the Florentines), the notion that empire served liberty could be invoked without guilt to bolster Florentine sovereignty. And, although the term had been used earlier, fifteenth-century Florentines now increasingly referred to the office of the priors and Standardbearer as the “Signoria,” meaning lordship, and to the priors as “Signori,” or lords.
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