Priorate of the Guilds

In 1277 Charles’s ten-year lordship in Florence ended, but he had no intention of relinquishing power. The papacy now saw Angevin ambitions as not so different from those of the Hohenstaufen; by controlling Florence, Charles had similarly surrounded the papal state. Because ongoing tensions between Guelfs and Ghibellines were the surest justification for a prolonged Angevin presence in Tuscany, Pope Gregory X attempted a general reconciliation of Florentine Guelfs and Ghibellines. He was unsuccessful, but when in 1278 Pope Nicholas III announced a similar project in several central Italian cities, the idea was received warmly as both the Guelf government and the Ghibelline party in exile sent requests to the pope for the appointment of a “paciarus,” or peacemaker. Nicholas appointed his nephew, Cardinal Latino Malabranca, whose father had served as podesta in Florence in 1238.82 Because he was temporarily occupied elsewhere, the cardinal appointed as his representative Andrea de’ Mozzi, a Florentine prelate, later the city’s bishop, whose brother Tommaso was among the heads of the powerful Mozzi-Spini banking firm that had financed the Angevin-Guelf victory. When Cardinal Latino arrived in Florence in October 1279 he took up residence in the Mozzi palace on the Oltrarno side of the Rubaconte bridge. Mozzi support for the pope’s policy suggests that other families of new wealth also supported it.

Cardinal Latino negotiated reconciliations between Guelfs and Ghibellines (including the Buondelmonti and Uberti), and between feuding Guelfs, reconciling, for example, the Adimari with the Donati and Della Tosa. In January 1280 he announced the “general peace” and mutual reconciliation of the parties and instituted a new executive magistracy, the Fourteen, with eight Guelfs and six Ghibellines. Many Ghibellines were allowed to return and recover their property, although fifty-five of their most powerful leaders were kept in exile, including the sons of Farinata degli Uberti. On the delicate question of the distribution of seats in communal magistracies, the Peace authorized a committee, equally divided between Guelfs and Ghibellines, to conduct an inquiry into the party affiliations of all citizens between the ages of twenty-one and seventy and prepare three lists of self-declared Guelfs, Ghibellines, and neutrals. Political offices were to be divided according to the results.22 This is a fascinating detail about which we can only wish we knew more, above all whether the survey was actually carried out. Particularly striking is the assumption that each citizen had the right to express a political affiliation and that the distribution of offices should reflect the relative weight of the three groups. It was obviously a sign of the reviving popular movement that citizens would have been free not to declare themselves Guelfs or Ghibellines, but rather as “communes sive indifferentes,” neutral and unaffiliated, and that neutrals would also have their proportional share of seats in government. Even the intention to carry out such a referendum reveals that, a generation after the primo popolo, many Florentines saw themselves as a third force independent of both Guelfs and Ghibellines. Since there is no evidence that the projected political census was actually conducted, it seems likely that, once Cardinal Latino left the city, the elite found a way to scuttle this novel idea that would have reduced its power.

One aspect of the cardinal’s Peace that pointed to the future was the role of the guilds as its guarantors. In February 1280 the Peace was ratified by the Guelf and Ghibelline parties whose differences it sought to compose, and in March eight guilds obligated themselves with formal promises to the observance of the agreement. The eight guilds included five major guilds (Jurists and Notaries, Wool, Por Santa Maria, Doctors and Specialty Importers, and Furriers) and three of the guilds that would soon be classified as middle guilds (Butchers, Smiths, and Shoemakers). Since the Furriers were a major guild in name only, and because the Jurists and Notaries, Por Santa Maria, and the Doctors and Specialty Importers all contained many more non-elite than elite members, this group of guilds was heavily weighted toward the non-elite popolo. For the first time, the power of legally recognized and self-constituted guilds to generate binding collective obligations on behalf of their members was used to buttress a Florentine government. The eight guilds separately appointed representatives (“syndics and procurators”) who appeared before the cardinal “on their own behalf and in the name and on behalf of the aforementioned associations and corporations and their members” and

Salvemini, Magnati e popolani (1899), pp. 320-33 (325).

Promised “to follow and obey the cardinal in all things pertaining to the observance of his Peace and the implementation of the recently promulgated judgment against any association or person acting against the Peace.” In addition, “they conceded to the cardinal full and free power to punish at his discretion” the guilds and their members “if they neglected to carry out” the terms of the agreement to which they had pledged themselves. And to this end, they obligated themselves, the guilds they represented, and the assets of the corporations and their members.23 This arrangement is testimony to the quiet success achieved by the guilds during the preceding decades in becoming repositories of legitimacy that derived from the voluntary, and hence secure, nature of the promises that guilds, as universitates, were able to make. Their role in supporting the Peace and its reforms thus appropriated the solution they themselves embodied to the problem of how to create legitimate authority. The link was still indirect, because these guarantees were offered to the cardinal as mediator and peacemaker, not directly to the magistracy of the Fourteen that he created. But the legitimacy of this government rested, albeit at one remove, on the coercive power voluntarily conceded to the cardinal by the guilds. Within the short space of two years representatives of the most powerful guilds replaced the Fourteen as the commune’s chief executive committee.

In March 1282, Sicily exploded in rebellion against its Angevin rulers, causing Charles to abandon Tuscany and defend his suddenly endangered southern kingdom. For the first time in half a century, neither Guelfs nor Ghibellines had powerful foreign supporters, and the division of seats in the Fourteen became meaningless, as power quickly shifted away from both parties. From at least 1281 the Fourteen had regularly consulted the consuls of the seven major guilds, and in 1282 the five middle guilds were formally recognized and given the right to send representatives to the councils. Even the elections of the Fourteen were increasingly carried out by the consuls of the seven, and on one occasion the twelve, guilds. And in June of 1282, the transfer of power to the guilds culminated with the institution of the “priorate of the guilds.” Compagni (1.4) recalls that he was one of a group of six “popolani citizens” who, worried about Guelf infringements of the Peace of 1280 and the possibility of renewed partisan fighting, “went about persuading the citizens” and succeeded in winning support for the election of three “priors of the guilds, to aid the merchants and guildsmen whenever necessary.” He describes the mood surrounding the establishment of the new office: “The popolani became so emboldened when they saw that these three met with no opposition, and [the priors] were so aroused by the candid words of the citizens who spoke of their liberty and the injuries they had suffered, that they dared to make ordinances and laws which would have been hard to evade. They did not accomplish

23

ASF, Capitoli, 29, ff. 345-6; Ottokar, Il comune, pp. 10-11.

Much else, but considering their weak beginning this was a great deal.... They were called the Priors of the Guilds; and they stayed secluded in the tower of the Castagna near the Badia so that they did not have to fear the threats of the powerful.” Within a year the priorate displaced the Fourteen.

As Compagni reveals, at its inception the priorate was the voice (and ears) of those who saw themselves as victims of the “powerful.” During those heady months of the reviving popular movement, the idea that the guilds and their representatives could and should protect the interests and security of “merchants and guildsmen” against the “threats of the powerful,” and that “the small and weak should not be oppressed by the great and powerful,” acquired much emotional force. The first priorate had three members, and, while they were not elected as representatives of their guilds, they did in fact come one each from the Calimala (Bartolo di messer Jacopo de’ Bardi), Cambio (Rosso Bacherelli), and Lana (Salvi di Chiaro Girolami). The succeeding priorate expanded to six members, one for each sesto. But, as Villani explains, this also meant an expansion of the number of guilds from which the priors were elected: “to these three greater guilds they added the guild of the Medici e Speziali, the guild of Por Santa Maria, and that of the Vaiai e Pellicciai. And gradually there came to be added all the others up to the twelve guilds” (8.79). Somewhere in these months, as we have seen, the five middle guilds were admitted to the ranks of the guilds with political standing, and Villani reports that the consuls of all twelve guilds participated in the bi-monthly election of new priors. Looming behind the early expansion of the number of guilds represented in the priorate was the question of how many guilds would ultimately have or demand access to the new office, a question of potentially enormous consequence given the existence of dozens of guilds. An early indication of the dilemma came in August 1282, when in deliberations concerning the election of the Fourteen (who still held office side-by-side with the newly created priorate), one speaker proposed that they be elected by the consuls of “thirty-two guilds.” Which guilds he had in mind is impossible to say, but the very notion that so many guilds might participate in the election of communal magistrates no doubt reflected the pressure coming from many artisan guilds for a political role.

Over the next decade, the elite managed to control the elections and produce priorates cumulatively dominated by members of five major guilds. From 1282 to 1292, Calimala and Cambio jointly had 46% of the posts, Giudici e Notai 19%, Lana and Por Santa Maria each 10%. The rest were scattered among the other guilds or held by persons whose guild affiliation is unknown.24 Fourteen of the 156 families appearing in the priorate in these years had five or more seats, cumulatively holding ninety-eight (26%) of the posts, and fifteen

24

Ottokar, Il comune, pp. 18-19.

Families had four priors each. These twenty-nine families accounted for 41% of the priors in the decade. But they were not the ruling Guelf elite of 126780. With some exceptions, the politically successful families were now from the banking and commercial class. The Girolami, a family that supported the popolo, led with twelve appearances and were followed by the Altoviti (10), Bardi (10), Acciaiuoli (9), Becchenugi (7), Canigiani (7), Cerretani (6), Falconieri (6), and Ristori (6). Not one was an old Guelf family from the early part of the century. Among families appearing four or more times, only the Tornaquinci and Visdomini belonged to the old elite: a meager representation of the traditional Guelf aristocracy that dominated communal politics as late as the 1270s. The institution of the priorate thus promoted the rise to leadership within the elite of merchant-banking families and the gradual slide into obscurity of older families.

But the expectations that the priorate would produce a non-partisan government protective of the “small and the weak” were disappointed, and the popolo had to wait until the 1290s to try again. Compagni acknowledges (1.5) that the early priorate failed to reduce elite power and arrogance. Although they had been appointed to “watch over the wealth of the commune,” to “deal justly with all,” and to ensure “that the small and weak should not be oppressed by the great and powerful,” he wrote, “things soon changed, since the citizens who held that office dedicated themselves not to keeping the laws, but rather to corrupting them.” They protected friends who ran afoul of the law, plundered the communal treasury, and instead of protecting the weak let them be “attacked by the grandi [magnates] and by the rich popolani who held office and were related by marriage to the grandi. . . . For these reasons the good popolani citizens were unhappy, and they blamed the office of the Priors, because the grandi Guelfi had become lords.” In this revealing passage, Compagni laments the control of the new institution by “grandi” who were just as objectionable in his eyes as the old elite: a lordly and haughty ruling group that he saw as a combination of magnates and wealthy non-magnates linked to them by marriage. In his eyes the class that had to be reined in was not limited to the magnates; it was the entire elite, magnate and non-magnate, against which his “good popolani” of the nonelite guild community needed to marshal their forces.

In the late 1280s the ruling elite took the city into a war against Ghibelline Pisa and Arezzo. Despite a notable victory at Campaldino in 1289 (in which Dante is said to have fought), the war dragged on inconclusively for several years. Both Villani and Compagni emphasize that many knights from magnate families played a leading role at Campaldino, in particular Corso Donati and Vieri de’ Cerchi, who emerged a decade later as leaders, respectively, of the Black and White Guelfs. Villani reports that the “popolani became suspicious that the grandi out of pride in their victory might oppress them even more than usual; and for this reason the seven major guilds banded together with the next five guilds, and they made arrangements for arms and shields and banners” (8.132). It was about this alliance that he remarked that it was “almost the beginning of a popular government.” Since a political alliance between the seven and the five guilds had already occurred in 1282, the “banding together” of 1289 may have extended it to military cooperation. Somewhere in these years, most likely in either 1287 or 1289, nine more guilds received formal recognition and the right to carry arms and assemble their members under official banners. These were the nine “minor” guilds, several of which were combinations of related professions that until then probably had their own guilds. For the moment, these guilds had no political role and were not invited to send their consuls to the communal councils. But the recognition of their right to bear arms could only have occurred with the approval and support of the twelve established guilds, which evidently felt the need to augment the guild community’s street strength in the event of hostilities. These nine guilds would subsequently be included in the guild federation of 1293.