Definitions

Side-by-side with the elite was the class that sometimes cooperated with it, sometimes challenged it, and which, in Florence as elsewhere, was called the “popolo.” The word was (and is) used in different senses that require clarification. It sometimes meant all Florentines, or all those eligible to participate in political life. But it more often referred to non-elite citizens, sometimes including the laboring classes of artisans and salaried workers (usually called the “popolo minuto”), but most often signifying the non-elite middle classes, thus evoking the “populus” of the ancient Roman republic. When Florentines spoke of the popolo in specifically political contexts, they usually understood it as synonymous with the large majority of guildsmen who did not belong to elite families. The guild community was in continuous evolution during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and thus even in this more specific usage the meaning of “popolo” depended on the number of guilds and the professions and economic categories they embraced at any given moment.

What separated elite and popolo was never a straightforward distinction between “major” and “minor” guilds. Even the categories of major and minor guilds were fluid. Minor guildsmen were indeed an important component of the popolo, but the center of the popolo’s political strength was among the non-elite members of the same major guilds in which merchants and bankers from elite families were enrolled. The distinction between elite and popolo cut through the memberships of the major guilds, making the internal politics of these guilds a key ground of conflict between the classes. Only in the oldest and most aristocratic of the guilds, the international merchants, bankers, and

Large-scale commodity traders of the Calimala, was the elite always the majority. In the guild of the Giudici e Notai the jurists were a small minority and came mostly from elite families, whereas the many notaries were socially of the popolo. The guild of bankers and moneychangers (Cambio) included powerful international merchant companies of the elite (like the Peruzzi) but also many non-elite moneychangers closer to the social status of the popolo. Among the manufacturers of woolen cloth (Lana), the split between elite and popolo was anchored to the difference between the mostly elite producers of high-quality cloths for the foreign luxury market and the non-elite producers of coarser and cheaper cloths for local and regional markets. The Lana was the most contentious site of conflict between elite and popolo in the major guilds. By contrast, in the guild of Por Santa Maria, which combined the manufacturers of silk cloth and retail cloth merchants, and which eventually included goldsmiths, shirtmakers, and a host of artisan groups, the popolo was the large majority, as it was also in the complex composite guild that combined the doctors and the importers of specialty goods and spices, and later admitted as an equal third subdivision the shopkeepers who sold a wide variety of household goods and items of personal apparel (Medici, Speziali, e Merciai). The same was true of the guild of the manufacturers of furs and fur-lined coats (Vaiai e Pellicciai), which, although officially a major guild, was closer in social composition and political influence to the minor guilds. In these last three major guilds the names of elite families were scarce compared to those known only by patronymics.

Thousands of regional and local merchants, moneychangers, small-scale textile manufacturers, retail cloth traders, and shopkeepers rubbed elbows with the elite in the same guilds and engaged in a two-century struggle with them for control, not only of these guilds, but of the guild community and, through it, the commune. Among the chief causes of the turbulence of Florentine political life until about 1400 was the fluctuating and ambivalent position of these non-elite major guildsmen, who sometimes, generally in periods of economic prosperity, accepted the political leadership of the elite and shared power with it in regimes from which the rest of the guild community was excluded, thus producing periods of what is usually thought of as oligarchic government but which always depended on the cooperation of the non-elite major guildsmen. At other times, under the impact of economic and/or military and fiscal crises, the non-elite major guildsmen broke with the elite and looked to the minor guilds for allies in attempts to diminish elite power. Alliances between these two major components of the popolo gave birth to a series of popular governments that challenged elite hegemony over a century and a half, changing the character of the elite and the shape and structure of communal government. The most politically charged meaning of “popolo” referred to the popular governments produced by these alliances of non-elite major guildsmen and minor guildsmen - for example, when Giovanni Villani wrote about a 1289 agreement between the seven major guilds and five minor guilds that it was “almost the beginning of a popolo [quasi uno cominciamento di popolo] from which the popolo that began in 1292 took shape” (8.132).

Besides the seven guilds ultimately known as the major guilds, scores of other guilds came into being throughout the thirteenth century with no limit or control. Not until 1293 did the Ordinances of Justice give formal political recognition to twenty-one guilds, including the seven and fourteen others later known as the minor guilds. Before 1293, the existence of dozens of smaller and autonomously constituted guilds represented the potential for a guild-based popolo extending far down the social and economic hierarchy. This was no doubt one of the chief reasons why even the popular government of the mid-1290s decided to limit the number of politically recognized guilds. In fact, the middle-class popolo never sought the inclusion in the guild federation, and thus in government, of the myriad categories of artisans that were all forming their own guilds. Popular government was thus beset by a fundamental contradiction from the outset. Even as it aimed to expand the role of guilds and the power of the guild community in government and needed the support of the most prominent minor guilds to do so, it simultaneously sought to limit this expansion and prevent many categories of artisans and all laborers from organizing into guilds, thus denying them the very right of association that was the basis of the popolo’s own claim to control of government.

The fourteen other guilds given official standing by the popular government included the largest and most important of the city’s artisan trades (they are listed in the next section). Most of the other guilds not included in the federation of 1293 either merged with one or another of the recognized guilds or disappeared within a generation. But the potential they once represented was not forgotten. At two points in the fourteenth century, in the 1340s and again in the 1370s, Florence’s hitherto unincorporated artisans and workers demanded guilds of their own and admission into the guild federation, thus expanding the popolo. Here was the second major source of political turbulence in the early Florentine republic: the pressure to extend the right of guild association to the masses of politically aware but disenfranchised workers and artisans. The social complexity of Florentine politics emerged from this triangular struggle: the guild-based popolo, itself crisscrossed by divergent interests and social identities, saw on one side an elite whose arrogance and power it sought to curtail and on the other an array of artisans and workers it was determined to keep at bay. Only in the aftermath of 1378, when the most radical of the popular governments created three new guilds of textile workers and artisans, did the frightened non-elite major guildsmen abandon any further attempts to create popular governments in alliance with the minor guildsmen, thus definitively aligning themselves with the elite.

Two further sources of potential confusion concerning the popolo need to be addressed. The first is that not all elite families were declared magnates, and those that escaped (like the Peruzzi, Alberti, Rucellai, Medici and Strozzi, to name only a few) were, and are, often referred to as popolani. Magnates were a large and visible part of the elite class, not a class by themselves. But this should not be confused with the social distinction between elite and popolo: the only sense in which non-magnate elite families were popolani is that they were not magnates and could hold office. The conflict at the center of Florentine politics in the thirteenth century was not between magnates and the upper-class non-magnate popolano families; it was rather between the entire elite (magnate and non-magnate) and the popolo. A second source of confusion derives from the fact that the distinction between elite and popolo was never defined in law and was often a grey area. Florence had no legally designated nobility: no institutional boundary between elite and popolo, no noble titles to distinguish the former from the latter. The popolo included major guildsmen who were close to the elite in many respects and often formed business partnerships with members of elite families. The line between elite and non-elite was a matter of perception, which sometimes made it difficult (and still does) to say whether certain individuals or families belonged to the elite or the popolo. During periods of cooperation between elite and popolo, many middle-rank families sought acceptance into the elite ranks through marriage alliances, business partnerships, and patronage relationships. Families regularly rose, in the perception of their fellow Florentines, from popolo to elite. The chief differences between elite and non-elite families, at least in the eyes of the elite (differences that even great wealth could not obliterate), were family size, a lineage’s antiquity, and, in the thirteenth century, the cultural trappings of knighthood. Everyone recognized that the Bardi (magnates) and the Alberti (non-magnates) were both great elite families, and no one thought that Dino Compagni, even though he was a wealthy merchant, belonged to that class. But at any given moment there were families that hovered on the invisible boundary between the classes. The Girolami are a good example: a politically successful but relatively small family of woolen cloth manufacturers that first appeared in the late 1270s and early 1280s and sided with the popolo over the next two decades but went on to achieve a place among the second tier of Florence’s notable families. Were they part of the lesser elite or the upper ranks of the popolo?

Because of the steady movement of families from the periphery of the elite into the circle of established families, some historians conclude that the popolo was not a class or even a movement representing the interests of definable segments of Florentine society. Some have gone so far as to see in the popolo only factions or splinter groups of the elite itself and thus to assert that politics in a city-state like Florence was limited to infighting for positions of supremacy within a defined circle of more or less established families. This is the view first systematically advanced by Nicola Ottokar in 1926 in an influential prosopographical study of the composition of the ruling class at the end of the thirteenth century, in which he criticized the class-conflict explanation of these same years advanced by Gaetano Salvemini in 1899, who had seen “magnates” and “popolani” as distinct classes with divergent economic interests: the magnates as a feudal class whose wealth was predominantly in land and the “popolani” as a commercial bourgeoisie.1 But both historians used “popolani” to refer to upper-class non-magnate families. By this definition Ottokar was correct in arguing that the magnates were not a class and that their economic activities and interests were in many cases identical to those of leading “popolani.” He and the many historians who followed his approach went on from there to deny any and all class conflicts, a view that reduces Florentine politics to mere quarrels within the upper class. Between an aristocratic ruling class on the one hand and the occasional eruption of the masses in the form of raw street power on the other, this approach to Florentine history sees nothing in between. What such approaches miss is precisely the popolo and the entire alternative political culture that it represented and promoted. At the center of this popular political culture were the ideas and assumptions associated with guild association and the kind of political community to which they gave rise.