Lineages

In canto 16 of Paradiso Dante has his ancestor Cacciaguida look back with nostalgia to the great families of the smaller and allegedly more virtuous Florence of the mid-twelfth century. Dante wrote at the height of Florentine economic power and demographic expansion in the early fourteenth century, and in the aftermath of one of the greatest explosions of violence perpetrated by elite factions. His purpose in fashioning the myth of an earlier, simpler, more tranquil Florence was to highlight the corruption and devastation that great wealth and political rivalries had inflicted on the city.1 By contrast, Cacciaguida describes an elite still uncontaminated by either wealth or power. While this picture of early civic and moral purity is largely invented, the families mentioned in Paradiso 16 are not at all fictional. But to a Florentine of Dante’s generation most of them would have seemed echoes of a very distant past. Some were extinct and others, so Cacciaguida himself points out, were shadows of what they once were. Except for a few (Donati, Della Bella, Visdomini, Tosinghi, Lamberti, and Adimari) still politically active at the end of the thirteenth century, Cacciaguida’s families were no longer the elite of Dante’s day, most having fallen into decline by at least the middle of the thirteenth century. The list of once great families highlights the fact that, in little more than a century, economic growth and political turbulence had consigned much of the old elite to oblivion and generated a new one.

The new elite, formed in the middle of the thirteenth century, made Florence the economic giant of Europe and dominated the life of the republic for the next two centuries and more. The thirteenth century was thus a crucial time of consolidation for these emerging families and for the institutions and practices that made them resilient and durable, above all the agnatic lineages, or patrilineal descent groups, that allowed wealthy families to preserve and share material resources and thus encouraged cooperation among kin. Agnatic lineages were communities of kinsmen descended from a common paternal ancestor.2 3 In practice they were also limited to the males of the patriline: the sons, nephews, grandsons, great-grandsons and so on of an ancestor recognized as having established the family’s wealth and status. Members of a lineage did not live together, although they might live near one another, sometimes in contiguous houses. Nor were lineages associations with legal standing or a formal constitution. The most direct manifestation of the concept of family represented by the agnatic lineage was inheritance, normally limited to male heirs in the male line. Cognatic kin (blood relatives on one’s mother’s side) and affinal kin (relatives through marriage) were excluded from inheritance. Women were considered members of their fathers’ lineages and were not legally barred from inheriting; indeed, there are examples of men without sons who bequeathed property to daughters. But most elite Florentines feared that property left to daughters would eventually find its way into the patrimonies of the families into which these daughters married, most obviously through their sons who belonged to their fathers’ lineages. In lieu of a share of inheritance, daughters were instead provided with often quite substantial dowries that were essential to negotiating a prestigious marriage. Although entrusted to a woman’s husband for the lifetime of the marriage, the dowry remained her property and could be reclaimed when her husband died.

A second feature of elite inheritance practices was partible inheritance. Primogeniture was not practiced in Florence, and fathers divided their estates in equal shares among all sons (except those who became professional religious). In the case of the large urban residences (palazzi) and towers that every elite family possessed, and which were crucial to its prestige and political presence (see Map 1), the equally inherited shares also remained undivided joint property, which meant that no one was allowed to alienate his share without a collective decision of the co-owners. These customs reveal the central purpose of the agnatic lineage: to accumulate resources, manage them jointly, and prevent the fragmentation and dispersal of property. Not all inherited wealth was necessarily constituted by fractions of jointly owned property, but for palaces and towers it was a common arrangement meant to enhance the status of kinsmen who otherwise would each have had less power than they all enjoyed as members of the lineage.

Pooling such resources within the lineage made upper-class families more visible to friends, neighbors, and rivals and more conscious of themselves as collectivities of interests, ambitions, and memories, even if not always in perfect harmony. Elite families began to use surnames as a sign of status. Some evolved from the given name of the lineage’s “founder,” others from the localities in the surrounding countryside (the contado) from which families typically emerged. The Abati took their name from an ancestor called Abbas (in Latin) in the late twelfth century, and the Nerli derived theirs from the notary ser Nerlo, also of the twelfth century.3 The family of the Visdomini, who managed the estates of the Florentine bishopric during vacancies, took their surname from the title attached to their role as “vice-lords” (vicedomini)

Map 1 Location of towers and/or palaces of prominent Florentine families in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (some families had more than one tower or palace), and major civic and ecclesiastical buildings (based on the maps in G. Fanelli, Firenze [Rome and Bari, 1980, seventh edn. 2002])

Patronymics denoting a purported lineage founder (e. g., Strozzi, Alberti) or toponyms indicating place of origin (Dell’Antella, Quaratesi). Some lineages became so large after a few generations that their many branches were no longer closely related and the original strategy of accumulating joint property became impracticable across the entire lineage. There were at least 116 adult males sharing the Bardi name in 1342, but the banking company of that name was owned and controlled by a much smaller group of Bardi. Occasionally, branches established new lineages and their own names, but kinsmen sharing a common surname (consorterie) usually maintained a kind of loose and theoretical solidarity for generations and even centuries. While large consorterie sometimes attempted to act in concert, or were feared for the potential power of their numbers, it was clearly impossible for all their members to participate in joint property or business arrangements.

But even when lineages ceased to function principally as consortia for the joint ownership of property, the social and emotional dimension of belonging to such a family was of enormous importance to elite Florentines, who took great pride in having names like Uberti, Donati, Adimari, Bardi, and several dozen others. Because of the prestige they conferred, surnames spread quickly among wealthy elite families, and from there to the popolo, but they were never as common outside the elite as within. Among slightly over 2,000 citizens listed as government creditors in 1345 in the quarter of Santo Spirito south of the Arno, only 258 (13%) had family names. The list contains fifty-

Two different surnames, but just four (Bardi, Frescobaldi, Nerli, and Rossi) account for 60% of the 258. In 1427, by contrast, 37% of all household heads in the tax rolls had surnames, and in 1480 almost half. By the fifteenth century there were some 1,200 family names in Florence.5 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, surnames were among the signs distinguishing elite from non-elite. Pride in the name and the need to preserve an exact record of ancestors generated the idea that families had histories; genealogical reconstructions produced narratives linking the generations. An early example of the genre is the Cronichetta of Neri Strinati, written in 1312, and based, so he says, in large part on the memory of family events recounted to him over many years by various elders, especially Madonna Ciaberonta, who, having died in 1267 at the astonishing age of 115, was presumably able to provide details going back to the last third of the twelfth century. For every male in the family, Neri was interested in recording, above all, sons and property.6 The genre of the family chronicle evolved quickly in the fourteenth century, eventually producing in large numbers the ricordi and ricordanze that became perhaps the most characteristic expression of the elite’s sense of social place.7

An illuminating example of the elite’s concern for family origins and history is the chronicle of Donato Velluti.8 Born in 1313 and writing in the late 1360s, Velluti reveals both the typical upper-class thirst for information about origins and ancestors and the acute consciousness of how little even solidly established families of the time actually knew about themselves before the mid-thirteenth century. “Because men desire to know of their birth [di sua nazione] and ancestors, and how marriage alliances with other families have occurred, and how wealth has been acquired,” Velluti begins, “I have thought to make a record and memorial [ricordanza e memoria] of what I have heard about such things from my father and from family members older than myself, and of what I have seen in legal documents, account books, or other writings, few as they may be, and of what I myself have seen or experienced.” Because the written sources were few and mostly recent, Velluti, like Neri Strinati, relied in great part on the memory of family elders. He could not confirm the family legend that the Velluti had migrated to Florence from Semifonte in the Valdelsa. The earliest documents he found concerned business dealings of his greatgrandfather Bonaccorso and his three brothers in 1244. Of Bonaccorso’s father Piero and grandfather Berto he knew only their names. But about Bonaccorso and his brothers Velluti knew that they lived together in the Oltrarno, that they had a small tower whose location he specified, and that they were engaged in business with a shop in Borgo San Jacopo. Three of the brothers had children, and Donato reports their names and those of all their descendants. Although Velluti could not find the name of his greatgrandfather’s wife, he did not ignore either the Velluti women or those who married into the family, regularly naming the daughters and mothers of Velluti men. It was thus not for lack of interest or effort that he was unable to name his paternal great-grandmother, which presumably means that Donato’s father could not name his grandmother. Family memory was precious, no doubt aLl the more because it was fleeting. Part of the problem was that, despite the desire to appear old and established, many lineages, the Velluti included, were of fairly recent origin. Another problem for the preservation of memory was the length of generations in the male line. Velluti’s father Lamberto, born in 1268, was forty-five years old when Donato was born. Donato never knew his paternal grandfather Filippo and was unsure of the year of his death. And the portrait he gives of his great-grandfather Bonaccorso has about it an aura of inflated legend: that he lived to the age of 120, was a bold and strong warrior who fought heretics and whose body was all “stitched together” from the many wounds he suffered in battles and skirmishes, and who, after losing his sight at the age of one hundred, kept himself vigorous by walking three to four miles every day on his balcony for another twenty years.9 All of this could have been true, but it could also have emerged from the need for a heroic and virile founder of the family’s fortunes.