The end of the papal war was the beginning of the series of revolutions that made 1378 the most memorable year in Florentine history, though not one usually remembered with fondness. It began, in June, with a determined response to the Parte Guelfa’s excesses from the full guild community, which was quickly overtaken, in July, by a revolutionary movement of workers and artisans who created first one and then three new guilds that joined the guild federation and claimed their share of offices. In August, unskilled textile workers, the Ciompi, created a revolutionary authority of their own, which was immediately crushed by the rest of the expanded guild federation. After dismantling the guild of the Ciompi, the remaining twenty-three guilds established the last and most radical of Florence’s guild governments, which ruled from September 1378 to January 1382 until its overthrow by the elite and the beginning of a gradual realignment of class relations that transformed Florentine political culture. Although the convulsions of 1378 and the radicalism of the guild republic of 1378-82 had roots in the long conflict between elite and popolo, the revolutions of artisans and workers frightened both elite and popolo into resolving their historically unstable relationship. After the revolutionary years, the elite realized it needed to anchor its power in a different political style and ideology, while the chastened non-elite major guildsmen definitively abandoned the temptations of guild republicanism and permanently linked their fortunes to the elite. As the catalyst for this metamorphosis of Florentine society and politics, the brief but traumatic insurrection of workers stands as the central event in the republic’s history, the continental divide between two different political universes.
World History
