Led by the magnates, the elite did all it could to bring down Giano della Bella and the popolo. Dino Compagni, Giano’s loyal supporter and close adviser who shared his hostility to the “grandi,” recounts their campaign to undermine the popular government as the prelude to the ghastly spectacle of open civil war between the reconstituted elite factions in the first decade of the fourteenth century. According to Compagni, the lawyers began to subvert the spirit and intent of the Ordinances. The magnates accused Giano of leading the movement not for justice but to destroy his enemies. They planted rumors about the machinations of this and that group against him, provoking Giano to support punitive measures that only generated real hostility from these groups. They thought about assassination. They brought into Tuscany a French knight, Jean de Chalons, to use intimidation and force to “crush the popolo”; Compagni makes a point of mentioning that Vieri de’ Cerchi, future leader of the White Guelfs, agreed to the plan. A group of elite popolani organized a conspiracy against Giano, as Compagni himself discovered during the meetings of a commission appointed to revise the communal statutes. Giano, “more brave than prudent,” responded with more of his characteristic inflexibility and indignation. Magnates held a meeting in which a Frescobaldi complained that these “dogs of the popolo” had deprived them of honor and offices; he urged that they take up arms and kill Giano and as many of the popolo as they could. But Baldo Della Tosa countered with a plan to “conquer them with cunning” by spreading rumors that the popolo planned to let Ghibellines back into government. Such rumors, he argued, “would sow discord among the popolo, and defame Giano, and detach from his side all the powerful among the popolo” (1.12-15).
The campaign to discredit Giano succeeded in early 1295, when, in another of his endless feuds, Corso Donati sent armed retainers to wound a kinsman and a man was killed. The case came before the podesta’s court, as required by the Ordinances, but a corrupt judge returned an acquittal against all the evidence. Although the podesta had been deceived by his judge, the citizens blamed the podesta and attacked him in his palace. Giano, who was at that moment “with the priors” (a detail that reveals his ongoing influence in government even when not in office), jumped on his horse and rode into the crowd to persuade them not to harm the podesta. But the crowd turned against Giano, pushed him aside, and pursued their assault against the fleeing podesta. Giano’s disgrace was the moment his enemies had been waiting for. They blamed him for the disorders, and some of his supporters advised him to leave the city until things calmed down. Once gone, he was officially banished, on March 5, 1295, and his house ransacked and destroyed. According to Compagni (1.16-17), Giano’s exile seriously weakened the popular government whose policies and reforms now began to be ignored as the elite gradually regained the upper hand against a leaderless popolo. The Ordinances remained in place but were not always enforced, and the guild consuls lost control over the election of the priors. Elite factionalism resurfaced and hostilities soon erupted between the so-called Black and White Guelfs.
The popular party did not disappear in these years and remained strong enough to maintain the exclusion of magnates from the priorate. But the factions began to attract supporters from both the non-magnate elite families that had supported the popolo and from the popolo itself. Compagni denounced with particular anger those of the popolo who sided with a faction. As the elite succeeded in rebuilding vertical ties of patronage with clients from the popolo, the emboldened factions were soon at each other’s throats. Understanding why families joined one or the other of these factions is as difficult as identifying the reasons behind the split between Guelfs and Ghibellines two generations earlier. Indeed, Guelfs and former Ghibellines are found among both Blacks and Whites, and both factions included merchants and bankers. Competition between rival banking families may have played a role, since the Whites were led by prominent bankers, the Cerchi, and among the Blacks the Spini were Pope Boniface VIII’s most important creditors.89 But it is difficult to imagine why the banking families among the Blacks, chiefly Bardi and Spini, would have let a non-mercantile family, the Donati, assume leadership of their faction. And if economic rivalries were really behind the split, it is especially difficult to understand why they would have let hostilities unfold to the extremes of civil war and massive destruction, as in fact happened. Moreover, many families, including some banking families, were divided in their loyalties (Adimari, Della Tosa, and at least ten others, including the Bardi and Fresco-baldi). Such internal splits seem incompatible with the notion of economic rivalries between families.
Compagni’s analysis of what he saw as the sometimes personal, sometimes accidental, but never principled motives behind factional loyalties suggests the need for a cultural approach. Essential to the prestige of elite families was competition with other families, not only for economic advantage, but for power and favor among the people, for clients and followers, for control of neighborhoods and churches, for allies in other cities and the support of powerful foreign lords, for reputation, dignity, preeminence, and glory. It was not yet part of the culture and collective imaginary of such families, especially in the aftermath of the popolo’s challenges, to accept non-competitive, peaceful coexistence for their collective benefit. It would take another generation and the chastening experience of ferocious civil war for (some members of) this unruly elite to come to such an understanding of their class interests. By 1300 the elite was thoroughly factionalized. The Cerchi-led Whites counted among their magnate allies the Adimari, Cavalcanti, Gherardini, Frescobaldi, Scali, Mozzi, Nerli, Abati, and some of the Della Tosa, and, among their nonmagnate allies, the Dell’Antella, Canigiani, Falconieri, Girolami, and Rinucci. The Blacks’ magnate contingent included the faction’s undisputed leader Corso Donati and his family, and the Spini, Pazzi, Visdomini, Bardi, Rossi, Brunelleschi, Tornaquinci, Buondelmonti, Franzesi, and the other branch of the Della Tosa. Among the leading Black non-magnate lineages were the Acciaiuoli, Alberti del Giudice, Albizzi, Altoviti, Ardinghelli, Becchenugi, Bordoni, Cerretani, Guadagni, Magalotti, Mancini, Medici, Peruzzi, Strozzi, and Velluti. Whites and Blacks had roughly equal numbers of magnates, but the Blacks had the advantage of much greater strength among non-magnate elite families.
The violence escalated in 1300 between the factions and between elite and popolo. That year’s Mayday celebrations produced a public confrontation between the factions, and in June magnates attacked a procession of the guilds and their consuls shouting, “We are the ones who were responsible for the victory at Campaldino [in 1289], yet you have taken from us the offices and honors of our city” (Compagni, 1.21). To prevent further violence, the priorate sent into exile magnate leaders from both factions: for the Blacks, Corso Donati, Rosso della Tosa, Pazzino de’ Pazzi, and Geri Spini, and, from the Whites, three of the Cerchi (but not their leader Vieri), the poet Guido Cavalcanti, Baschiera della Tosa, and Baldinaccio Adimari. But the attempt at evenhandedness broke down when the Cerchi exiles were allowed to return later that summer. Nor could the government control the efforts of the factions to secure external allies. Corso Donati and the Spini appealed to Pope Boniface, while the Whites sought support within Tuscany, particularly in Pistoia, Arezzo, and Pisa, which earned them the opprobrium of being friends of Ghibellines. As the elite yielded again to its old habit of bringing in foreign powers to defeat internal enemies, the intervention of outsiders made the conflict less amenable to resolution from within.
Boniface requested the intervention on behalf of the Blacks of Charles of Valois, brother of the French King Philip IV, with whom, ironically, Boniface had been locked for years in a struggle for control of the French church. Officially dubbed a “peacemaker” by the pope, Charles approached and entered Tuscany with a force of 500 knights in the summer of 1301. Yet it was no secret that he intended to repatriate the Black exiles and put their faction in power. Fearful of what his army might do, all parties agreed to elect, for the term October-December 1301, a non-partisan priorate, which included Dino Compagni, to deal with the crisis. Increasingly apprehensive, Florentines said of this priorate that it was, as Compagni himself put it, “the last hope,” even as in retrospect it was clear that “we should have been sharpening our swords.” Charles sent envoys demanding that he be welcomed to the city, and Compagni’s priorate responded that, the matter being of such great moment, “they did not want to do anything without the agreement [consentimento] of their citizens.” What happened next shows how deeply engrained the political ideas of the guild republic were in Compagni’s political reflexes. The priors “called a general council of the Guelf party and of the seventy-two guilds, all of which had consuls, and they asked each one to submit a written statement on whether the guild wanted messer Charles of Valois to come to Florence as a peacemaker.” For Compagni and his fellow priors, the “consentimento” of citizens was to be obtained by asking each guild for its autonomous and freely given opinion based on consultations among the members. As to why they requested opinions from seventy-two, rather than twenty-one, guilds, we can only speculate that they appealed either to the many guilds still outside the 1293 federation or to the subdivisions of the twenty-one guilds as if they were autonomous guilds, or both. The intent was evidently to increase the number of guilds whose members, so they hoped, were more likely to be neutral between the factions and critical of their feuds, and thus to augment the chances of a vote against Charles’s entry into the city. In these hopes, the priors of the “final remedy” must have been deeply disappointed, for the guilds “all replied, in speech and in writing, that he should be allowed to come and should be honored like a lord of noble blood - all except the bakers, who said that he should be neither received nor honored, for he was coming to destroy the city” (2.5-7). Compagni lets the bakers’ lonely voice stand as a prophetic warning of what lay ahead.
From the moment of Charles’s arrival in early November 1301, Compagni’s account has about it an air of ineluctable tragedy. Accompanying Charles were Corso Donati and the Blacks, who insisted on the immediate removal and replacement of the priors (against which Compagni protested with the by now touchingly naive argument that this would violate the Ordinances of Justice). On November 8 the Blacks installed priors of their own choosing. Despite promises to respect the safety of citizens and property, six days of chaotic violence ensued during which old scores were settled, enemies eliminated, property confiscated and destroyed. Some months later, decrees of exile were handed down against the Cerchi, Della Tosa, Adimari, Mozzi, Scali, and many other Whites: 559 men were exiled and 108 assessed fines.90 Among them was Dante, then communal envoy at the papal court, who stood accused of fraud, extortion, and obstructing the peacemaking efforts of Charles and Boniface. Cited to appear before the podesta’s court, Dante did not return, was declared a rebel in March 1302, and spent the rest of his life in exile.91 Also exiled was the notary ser Petracco, who went to live in Arezzo, where Francesco was born. Although his conviction was rescinded six years later, he preferred to accept a post at the papal court of Clement V in Avignon. Exiled Whites eventually joined forces with old Florentine Ghibelline exiles and other Tuscan Ghibellines and spent years planning a revenge and a return that never happened.
Florence was now in the hands of Corso Donati and his chief magnate lieutenants, Rosso della Tosa, Pazzino de’ Pazzi, Geri Spini, and Betto Brunelleschi, with the support of the magnate and non-magnate houses of his faction. Compagni bitterly remarked that “none of them can deny that he was a destroyer of the city. Nor can they say that any need constrained them, other than pride and competition for offices” (2.26). Although an oversimplification of what was at stake in 1300-2, it describes well enough the actions of the Black leaders over the next decade, as they turned on one another and indulged yet again in the elite’s historic weakness of factional splintering. New rivalries and ruptures now pitted Corso Donati against Rosso della Tosa, and each took with him a contingent of Blacks. Donati played on the resentments of magnates and persuaded thirty-two of them, mostly from older families but including the Bardi, to swear an oath to overturn their continued exclusion from political offices. Rosso della Tosa had more of the magnate merchants on his side (Pazzi, Frescobaldi, and Spini) and many non-magnate elite. In 1304, with the danger of a new civil war looming, Pope Benedict XI sent Cardinal Nicholas of Prato to negotiate a reconciliation of the rival factions of Black Guelfs and an agreement with the White exiles. In April the cardinal organized a public ritual of reconciliation in piazza Santa Maria Novella. Another result of his mediation was the re-establishment of the neighborhood military companies first created by the primo popolo in 1250. Evidently, the popolo was still strong enough to demand something for itself. Peace among elite factions may still have depended, as it did in 1280, on the popolo’s support. The standardbearers of the military companies also received a new role as advisers to the priors, thus becoming the first of the priorate’s two advisory colleges. Nicholas then turned his attention to the exiles and invited fourteen of them, including an Uberti and a Cerchi, to come to the city for negotiations. Compagni noted the warm welcome they received from “many old Ghibelline men and women [who] kissed the Uberti arms.” Even the fiercely antagonistic branches of the Della Tosa made peace, and “the popolo took great hope from this” (3.7).
But the promising events of early 1304 ended in disaster. Compagni believed the Blacks had no real wish for peace with the exiles, whose representatives began to sense both the futility and danger of their presence in the city. They left on June 8, and the cardinal followed them out of town the next day. Violence immediately exploded, according to Villani (9.71), between the supporters of Cardinal Nicholas’s mediation and the Black Guelf leadership. Compagni reports that it was the Medici and Della Tosa who started the street fighting on June 10 that led to the great disaster. The Cavalcanti seemed on the verge of bringing the city center under their control when a fire, set by Black leaders to dislodge the Cavalcanti, spread quickly and, with the help of a strong wind, destroyed the center of Florence. Villani says that 1,700 palaces, towers, and houses were consumed; Compagni thought it closer to 1,900 (3.9). The people, he says, were “stunned” by the devastation but did not dare complain about those responsible for it, because they “ruled the city tyrannically.” Villani enumerated the destroyed areas: the loggia of Orsanmichele; the palaces and houses of the Abati, Macci, Amieri, Toschi, Cipriani, Lamberti, Cavalcanti, Gherardini, Pulci, and Amidei; the whole of via Calimala with its many shops;
Everything around the Mercato Nuovo and the church of Santa Cecilia; via Por Santa Maria all the way to the Ponte Vecchio, into via Vacchereccia (toward the new palace of the popolo), behind the church of San Pier Scheraggio, and all the adjacent neighborhoods down to the Arno. He summed it up by saying that on that day the “marrow and core” of the city went up in flames. The great fire of 1304 was the lowest point to which the elite families had ever brought their city.
In 1308 Corso Donati tried one last time to rid himself of inconvenient allies and assert uncontested leadership. It is possible that Donati, aware of the emergence at the conclusion of protracted factional struggles of single ruling families in many northern Italian communes (such as the Visconti in Milan and Este in Ferrara), may have aspired to a similar position in Florence for himself and his family. If, as Compagni reports, Rosso della Tosa harbored the ambition “to exercise lordship in the manner of the lords of Lombardy” (3.2), it is easy to imagine that Donati did as well. Perhaps provoked by the reinforcement of the Ordinances of Justice in 1306 and the institution of the Executor of the Ordinances, Donati assembled another faction of disgruntled magnates (Compagni calls it a conspiracy) that included the Bardi, Rossi, Frescobaldi, Tornaquinci, Buondelmonti, and the non-magnate Medici and Bordoni and planned an armed assault on the palace to demand a new government. The attempted coup may have been the closest medieval Florence came to getting its own version of one of those “lords of Lombardy.” But rivals from within his now splintered faction thwarted whatever ambition Donati harbored. Rosso della Tosa and other leading Blacks got wind of his plans and had Corso and his associates accused and sentenced. Donati barricaded himself in the family enclave near San Pier Maggiore, and, as the newly restored military companies of the popolo, led by the podesta, Capitano, and Executor, attacked the stronghold, he waited for help from friends, who, however, seeing the forces arrayed against him, prudently deserted him. Although Corso escaped and took refuge in a monastery outside the walls, he was hunted down and killed.
Compagni considered Corso Donati the greatest of the popolo’s enemies and yet wrote with a kind of awe about the unforgettable “barone.” In addition to his famous comparison (2.20) to “Catiline the Roman, but more cruel,” in which Compagni mixes praise for Corso’s physical presence, speech, good breeding, and intellect with the devastatingly straightforward judgment that “his mind was always set on evildoing,” he said of Donati’s “bad death” (3.21) that he “lived dangerously and died reprehensibly. He was a knight of great spirit and renown, noble in blood and behavior, and very handsome in appearance even in his old age, of fine form with delicate features and white skin. He was a charming, wise, and elegant speaker, and always undertook great things. He was accustomed to dealing familiarly with great lords and noble men, and had many friends, and was famous throughout all Italy. He was the enemy of the popolo and of popolani, and was loved by his soldiers; he was full of malicious thoughts, cruel and astute. . . . Everyone commonly said that the ones who ordered his death were messer Rosso della Tosa and messer Pazzino de’ Pazzi; and some people blessed them, while others did the opposite.”
Although it was difficult to discern at the moment, Corso Donati’s death heralded the end of an era. Within four years, Rosso della Tosa, Betto Brunelleschi, and Pazzino de’ Pazzi were all dead, the last two murdered in acts of revenge by the Donati and Cavalcanti. Occasionally serious conflicts and conspiracies within the ruling group continued, but never again would the city be engulfed in open civil war pitting private elite armies against one another. Nor, for the next century, would any Florentine dominate the political stage as thoroughly as did Corso Donati: not until Cosimo de’ Medici did so with very different means in a transformed political world. The disappearance of violent fissures within the elite and of larger-than-life figures like Corso Donati and Farinata degli Uberti, whose fame, power, and charisma were the product of the dramatic divisions of their class, reflect deep structural transformations at work within the elite and its relationship to the popolo. The circumstances of Corso Donati’s downfall likewise signal these changes. His enemies, even among the magnates, appealed to the government to have him condemned, and the assault on his stronghold was carried out by the popolo’s military companies, led by three communal officials, two of whom had been instituted by the popolo. The popolo was not yet ready to launch another political challenge (which came only several decades later), but the manner in which Donati was brought down with the cooperation of members of his own class and faction means that the elite, even some magnates, were now, at least sometimes, willing to work through the popolo’s institutions to deal with what everyone recognized as the embarrassing spectacle of an overmighty citizen who refused to adapt. Through the violence of the century’s first decade and all the angry attempts to “break the popolo,” the Ordinances were not abrogated, the priorate of the guilds remained the chief communal magistracy, magnates were still barred from sitting on it, and Florence did not succumb to a “lord.” However reluctantly, the elite was gradually acquiescing in an order of things it had long resisted.
World History
