Beyond the city lay the contado, the surrounding hinterland that originally embraced the dioceses of Florence and Fiesole and then expanded as Florence brought more territory under its control. By 1300 it extended roughly twenty - 92 five miles north (to Barberino and Borgo San Lorenzo in the Mugello valley and beyond to Scarperia), a similar distance northeast (to Dicomano), fifteen miles east (beyond Pontassieve to the northern end of the Casentino), thirty miles southeast (including the upper Arno valley to Montevarchi), twenty-five miles southwest (to Castelfiorentino, Certaldo, and Poggibonsi in the Valdelsa), twenty miles down the lower Arno valley (to Empoli), but only some ten miles west by northwest (just beyond Signa and Campi). In the 1320s Florence pushed farther in this direction and took control of the Monte Albano, but not until 1350 was even nearby Prato incorporated into the dominion. Later, when larger cities like Arezzo and Pisa came under Florentine rule, they were referred to as the district93 (see Map 3, page 472).
Because of low urban birth rates and high infant mortality, Florence, like most pre-modern cities, did not generate its own population growth, which depended on immigration from the heavily populated contado. Estimates for the pre-plague contado derive from Villani’s figures of 70,000 men able to bear arms in 1300 and 80,000 in 1338 (an increase due to the expanding area under Florentine control), which indicate an overall contado population between 280,000 and 320,000. This dense rural population had been increasing steadily for two centuries and by the late thirteenth century was growing beyond the contado’s ability to supply sufficient work. Hence, large numbers of rural families left their overpopulated towns and villages and migrated to the metropolis. By 1300 the combined population of city and contado was over 400,000, but rural population was already stagnating and in some areas declining, owing partly to emigration and partly to a decreasing birth rate. The great epidemics that began in the 1340s, especially the devastating Black Death of 1348, reduced contado population by one-half to two-thirds, and recurrences of the epidemic kept it low for a long time: between 100,000 and 140,000 in the second half of the fourteenth century, 125,000 in 1427, and 110,000 in 1470. Not until the sixteenth century did the contado begin to recover, reaching 220,000 by mid-century. It approached its medieval peak only in the eighteenth century, with 282,000 in 1745, which underscores just how densely populated the contado was in the century before the Black Death.
Late twelfth - and thirteenth-century Florence was protected by walls built in the 1170s. In the thirteenth century’s rapid growth, new neighborhoods spilled over and surrounded these walls. Between 1200 and 1300 the city’s population tripled, or even quadrupled, to an estimated 120,000, a huge metropolis by medieval standards. The arrival of wave after wave of immigrants from the countryside throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries deeply
Map 2 Florence’s three circuits of walls with major churches, hospitals, and civic buildings, and family palaces built in the fifteenth century (based on the maps in G. Fanelli, Firenze [Rome and Bari, 1980; seventh edn. 2002])
Affected the character of the city, physically and culturally. Immigrants flooded into new neighborhoods in the Oltrarno, necessitating the construction of three new bridges between 1220 and 1252 and an extension of the walls in 1258. In the last quarter of the century, immigration peaked and new settlements extended ever farther from the old walls in every direction. In 1284 the government began constructing a much larger set of walls, completed only in 1334, which enclosed an area almost eight times that of the earlier walls and included the neighborhoods in which the mendicant orders were building their great basilicas of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce and where they and their lay followers built the hospitals that served the needs of immigrants newly arrived from their ancestral villages (see Map 2). The social and cultural imprint of a century and more of constant immigration from the contado provides the background to the complaint voiced by Dante’s Cacciaguida in Paradiso 16 when he says that the “mixing of people [la confusion delle persone]” was the origin of the troubles of a city that would have done better to keep its boundaries “at Trespiano and Galluzzo,” just a few miles, respectively, to the north and south. It was the lament of a social conservative who would have traded the economic growth that was both cause and effect of immigration for the imagined ideal of a smaller, self-contained community without the cultural and political upheavals that Dante associated with the newcomers. That so many people came to the city is evidence not only of an overpopulated contado but also of the capacity of an urban economy in a long phase of steady expansion to absorb an ever larger labor force. Thousands of notaries and skilled artisans brought with them professional skills, and still more former agricultural workers came in search of employment in either the textile or building trades.
According to Matteo Villani, who continued his brother Giovanni’s chronicle after his death in 1348, the city lost 60 percent of its people in that one awful summer. Tax rolls from 1352 record 9,955 households in the city, which indicates a population between 40,000 and 45,000. Some recovery occurred over the next generation. A 1380 tax census lists 13,074 households and an exactly counted population of 54,747 (4.19 persons per household). But the plagues kept returning: in 1400 (when 12,000 people died) and again in 1417 and 1424. By 1427, according to the Catasto, Florence had 37,225 inhabi-tants distributed in 10,171 households (only 3.65 persons per household). For the city, too, recovery came only with the general increase of the European population in the sixteenth century. A 1552 census counted 60,000 inhabitants, but in only 9,956 households (6.03 per hearth), which means that the birth rate was finally, and significantly, increasing. But, in the city as in the contado, only in the eighteenth century did the population equal and exceed its medieval high. Florence and its contado in 1300 were more densely populated than they would be for the next four centuries, a fact of crucial importance for understanding the city’s economy before the Black Death.94
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