Executive authority in the early commune was vested in a committee of (generally twelve, sometimes fewer) consuls, first documented in 1138. Elected annually, and mainly from elite families, the consuls were advised by representatives, also called consuls, of two elite associations: the merchants of Calimala and the association of knights, the societas militum. Two councils, the General Council of 300 and Special Council of 90, were also sometimes consulted. The earliest appearance of the one-man chief executive known as the podesta occurred in 1192-3 when the imperial party was in power.1 The earliest podesta were citizens (the first was from the elite Caponsacchi family), but in the early thirteenth century they were increasingly recruited from other Italian cities and gradually supplanted the consular office. Even so, the pre-1250 commune was dominated by elite families who were still primarily a landowning class with ties to their ancestral homes in the contado and a warrior class whose knights constituted the cavalry of the communal army.62 63
Yet the ground was already being prepared for the challenges to come. On the one hand, economic expansion and specialization resulted in new guilds unwilling to accept the Calimala’s early monopoly of representation of upper-class business and economic categories. As merchants in a particular sector increased and became conscious of their distinct collective interests, they broke away from the Calimala and formed their own guilds, while professional and artisan groups not represented by the Calimala also formed associations. In addition to the new major guilds, a federation formed in 1193 by an unknown number of artisan associations suggests an even earlier history of “minor” guilds. Neighborhood associations coalesced into organized districts that soon demanded, as did the new guilds, representation in the communal councils. In 1224 an unusual session of the General Council of the commune was convened to consider fiscal reform and accusations against the ruling elite concerning mismanagement of communal finances. Two embryonic forms of political representation, territorial and professional, were here juxtaposed: in addition to the Calimala consuls, the General Council included the consuls of the bankers’ and woolen-cloth manufacturers’ guilds, representatives of a confederation of minor guilds, and twenty citizens from each of the six administrative subdivisions (the sesti). A committee with representatives from each sesto was elected to review the work of all fiscal and treasury officials over the previous twenty years.64
Elite factionalism opened the way to greater influence for these newly organized popular associations. While upper-class factional rivalries in the Italian cities went back at least to the twelfth century and everywhere had local origins, these divisions became enmeshed, inevitably if obscurely, in the efforts of successive Holy Roman Emperors to bring under their control the wealthy city-states that lay within the old boundaries of the empire. When one faction aligned with the emperor, its opponents took the anti-imperial side, and when pro - and anti-imperial parties from different cities formed alliances, the dimensions of what may have begun as purely indigenous feuds became much greater. Emperors also found natural allies in the powerful feudatories of the countryside who resisted the growing power of the communes and sought confirmation of their privileges and titles from their formal overlord. At stake for the commune was its campaign to weaken the great rural families and control the surrounding territory.65 Emperor Frederick I (r.1152-90), called Barbarossa and from the Hohenstaufen family of Swabia, waged a thirty-year war from the 1150s to the 1180s against the communes. In 1155 he invaded Tuscany with the support of the counts Guidi and Alberti but could not subdue Florence. After being defeated by the Lombard communes in 1176 at Legnano near Milan, he accepted a treaty (1183) in which the cities of the Lombard League acknowledged imperial sovereignty while securing de facto autonomy. Barbarossa’s son Henry VI (r.1190-7) likewise sought with the support of the feudatories, and with greater albeit brief success, to bring Florence under imperial power. But when he died the Tuscan cities formed a league and swore resistance to further incursions of imperial power.66 When Otto IV (1198-1218) of the Welf family demanded oaths of fidelity from all the communes, Florence was the only one to refuse.67 The second Frederick Hohenstaufen, Otto’s former rival for the imperial throne and the son of Henry VI and the last Norman princess of Sicily, became emperor in 1220 and in the 1230s launched his own war to subdue northern and central Italy.68
It was at this point that the Florentine factions sifted into parties known as Guelf (from the name Welf and signifying Frederick’s enemies) and Ghibelline (an Italianization of Waiblingen, a Hohenstaufen stronghold in Swabia). In the mid 1240s, when the elite was in a state of civil war, the Dominican campaign against Cathar heresy intensified and a new office of “Captain of the People” appeared in 1244, indicating some reaction from the popolo in the face of growing elite violence. Although there was probably no connection between the two events, both were aimed at the Ghibellines. Frederick responded by sending his son, Frederick of Antioch, to preside over the city as podesta and imperial vicar. Fighting between Guelfs anD Ghibellines led to particularly intense clashes in 1248 from which the city’s non-elite population kept its distance; according to Villani, “the popolo and commune of Florence kept itself united for the welfare, honor, and good condition of the republic” (7.3). Help from the emperor tipped the balance toward the Ghibellines, and the leading Guelf families left the city and took refuge in their countryside strongholds. The triumphant Ghibellines sowed the seeds of revenge by destroying many Guelf towers and palazzi. Among the non-elite, sentiment was building for a different kind of political order that might weaken the parties and diminish their ability to engulf the city in war. Nor did the imperial administration enjoy much favor with the majority of Florentines who paid heavy taxes to support a war in which they had little interest. The opportunity for action came in September 1250 when a contingent of Guelf exiles defeated a Ghibelline force at Figline in the upper Arno valley. When the news reached Florence, crowds gathered in the streets calling for government by the popolo.
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