Religion

The culture of the popolo was deeply influenced by the turbulent religious currents of the thirteenth century: heresies, the rise of the mendicant orders, and the emergence of the laity as a creative agent in religious life.50 Defense of orthodoxy and the church became characteristic of the popolo’s religion, and rhetoric against heresy a part of its critique of elite politics. For example, in October 1300, just a few months after the government, still under the influence of the popolo, banished leading members of the Black and White factions in an attempt to contain their spreading violence, the councils passed a law reaffirming the commune’s determination to give the papal inquisition full support in its fight against heresy. Responding to the wishes of the cardinal legate Matthew of Acquasparta, who had come to Florence to mediate between the factions and urge a tougher policy against heresy, the government declared that the “city, commune, and popolo of Florence, and especially those persons by whom the Florentine popolo and commune are at present being governed, have always and consistently been devoted with pure hearts to the Guelf party

And to Holy Church, and have not only protected but indeed increased and amplified the liberties of the church whenever necessary, especially for the preservation of the faith and the suppression and extirpation of its enemies, the Patarine heretics and their supporters.”23 In fact, only small segments of the upper class had ever been touched by heretical ideas, but the memory of this threat to Catholic orthodoxy left a sense of urgency about the defense of the faith that the popolo made its own and added to its arsenal of political weapons against the elite.

Fundamental to the religious culture of the popolo was its symbiotic relationship to the mendicants and the creation of confraternal associations whose earliest examples were inspired by the mendicant defense of orthodoxy. By the 1220s the Franciscans and Dominicans were established at opposite ends of the city, respectively at Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, where they later constructed the enormous basilicas that still dominate their neighborhoods. Other mendicant orders became established in the 1250s and 1260s: the Augustinians at Santo Spirito, Servites at Santissima Annunziata, Umiliati at Ognissanti, Friars of the Sack at Sant’Egidio, and Carmelites at Santa Maria del Carmine. Mendicant churches were all located either outside the walls of the 1170s or in the Oltrarno section, the neighborhoods in which immigrants from the contado were settling in large numbers. The friars were popular among immigrants in need of the community and social services that the new orders provided or supported: care for the sick, alms for the poor, lodging for travelers, honorable burials, but also preaching and organized devotion. Some Florentines joined the orders, but many more from all over the city imitated the forms and aims of mendicant piety in lay society: social commitment, expressed through practical attention to the needs and problems of urban society, pastoral work in the world, the sanctification of everyday life, renunciation of ostentatious wealth, and, in all these respects, the imitation of Christ.

Because Florentine families at this time were reluctant to see their daughters renounce marriage, the number of women who joined the second Franciscan order of Clarisses, named for its founder and Francis’s collaborator Clare, was limited. More popular was the non-clerical Order of Penitents, consisting of laypersons, many from the middle orders of society, who wore a religious habit but continued to live at home with their families and to practice their professions. In a sense, the Penitents were the mendicants’ representatives in lay society. They typically accepted the ownership of property forbidden to the friars and administered hospices for travelers and hospitals for the sick and poor, including the Hospital of San Paolo near Santa Maria Novella, which became one of the city’s largest. At the end of the thirteenth century they divided over the question of how much autonomy their association should ASF, Provvisioni, Registri, 10, f. 280.

Have from ecclesiastical authorities, and some moved into the third orders of lay brothers and sisters who were more closely supervised by their respective orders. Tertiaries wore a religious habit and observed an austere mode of life governed by a formal rule but were not required to renounce marriage or lay society. Never particularly numerous in Florence, tertiaries usually came from socially elevated families and often left bequests to support hospitals and hospices for the poor.51

It was above all in confraternities that Florentines, especially of middle social standing, expressed their enthusiasm for religious association modeled on the mendicants.52 Confraternities were formal voluntary associations of laypersons governed by statutes and elected officers, and in this respect they were like guilds. But in Florence, unlike Venice, there was always a clear distinction between guilds, which exercised jurisdiction over professional groups, and confraternities, which did not and in most cases were not organized by profession. Confraternity members met regularly for prayer, penitence, philanthropy, or the singing of vernacular religious songs. From perhaps no more than a handful in the mid-thirteenth century, they multiplied rapidly: at least eighteen were founded before 1300, forty-three by 1348, and sixty-eight by 1400. Many confraternities were located near or in mendicant churches in neighborhoods where contado immigrants concentrated and were founded by, or in some connection with, these new arrivals from the countryside, who seem to have brought with them a vital aspect of the religious culture of the contado, where an astounding 180 confraternities have been counted before 1400.53

Earliest among Florentine confraternities were the laudesi companies whose chief purpose was the singing of hymns to the Virgin. The centrality of Marian devotions in their activities signals their link to the campaign conducted by the Dominicans, and slightly later by the Franciscans as well, against the Cathars, who denied that Mary had given birth to a divine being. Among the confraternities founded in the 1240s during the high tide of mendicant anti-Catharism were those of the Vergine Maria delle Laude at Santa Croce and San Pier Martire e Laude della Vergine Maria at Santa Maria Novella; they were followed by laudesi confraternities at the Carmine in 1249, San

Marco in 1250, Santissima Annunziata in 1263, San Felice in Piazza in 1277, Sant’Egidio in 1278, the cathedral of Santa Reparata in 1281, Santa Trinita in 1300, and Ognissanti in 1336. So important was hymn-singing that at least two of them established schools for lay singers. Over several generations hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Florentines must have received at least a rudimentary education in the fundamentals of vocal music. Something of the social significance of these confraternities emerges from the memorable character Boccaccio created in Decameron 7.1, Gianni Lotteringhi, a member of a laudesi company with ties so close to the Dominicans that he was “appointed frequently to the post of captain of the laudesi of Santa Maria Novella, with the task of supervising the school [of lay singers] and performing other little duties” in the confraternity. Gianni is easily duped by his wife because devotion to his confraternal duties caused him to stay away from home and not pay enough attention to her. Boccaccio was satirizing the conventional religiosity of ordinary Florentines, but it is precisely in its conventionality that the portrait rings true. Gianni is a fictional representation of the new men who made some money but came from undistinguished families: he was a stamaiuolo, an independent agent in the textile industry who bought combed wool and hired women spinners to whom he paid low piece-rates for turning the wool into yarn that he then sold to the producers of woolen cloths. He was wealthy enough to buy a summerhouse in the country, where his wife regularly met her lover, while he was occupied in town with his business and his confraternity in which his role “made him feel much more important.” In return for frequent donations and gifts, the friars “taught him a few good prayers,” and “other bits of silliness, which he held dear and stored away most diligently for the salvation of his soul.” In Boccaccio’s character we see the combination of social and spiritual motives that led Florentines to join confraternities in large numbers, especially those elements of the popolo in search of communities that could give them a sense of self-esteem and a social prominence they otherwise lacked.

Confraternities provided community, solidarity, and social services for artisans and women. The dyers of the quarter of Santa Croce founded a confraternity in 1280, Sant’Onofrio dei Tintori, which began building a hospital in 1339. Another religious company of artisans, San Giovanni Decollato dei Portatori di Norcia, was founded in 1297 and ran a hospice for travelers, and perhaps immigrants, near the northern gate of the city in via San Gallo. The fact that the two earliest known artisan confraternities (and it is likely that there were more) both administered social services suggests that such associations typically attended to the practical needs of both members and non-members as they cemented their own sense of social solidarity through common prayer and worship. The Wool guild always feared the possibility that confraternities of artisans within the industry might result in organized challenges to the domination of the merchant-entrepreneurs, and in 1317 it excluded artisans from one such confraternity at San Marco. Less threatening was the Compagnia di San Luca formed by the painters in 1339. The existence of a religious company of women at San Lorenzo in 1303 and another founded in 1365 at Santa Maria Novella suggests that there may have been others that provided women with religious and social community. Flagellant confraternities, which emphasized penitence and the imitation of the suffering Christ, did not become popular in Florence until the mid-fourteenth century. Only three have been discovered before the 1330s, when three more were founded in quick succession. Following the great plague of 1348, and perhaps in part because of its terrors, flagellant confraternities became more numerous: eight more by 1390, and in 1399 alone, the year of the outbreak of religious enthusiasm associated with processions of penitents dressed in white and hence called the Bianchi, no fewer than seven flagellant companies were founded in Florence.

Still other confraternities specialized in charitable activities; some assisted their members with occasional financial help and burials, while others distributed alms to the poor, supported and administered hospitals and schools, and provided assistance to widows, foundlings, and prostitutes. Among the most prominent of the early charitable confraternities were the Bigallo, founded no later than the 1240s, which ran a number of small hospitals in the contado; the Misericordia, which administered bequests to the poor; and Orsanmichele, founded in 1291 as a laudesi company and soon a magnet for pious bequests owing to the popularity of the cult that grew up around an allegedly miracleworking image of the Virgin on an internal pillar of the loggia of the communal grain market. At first the grain merchants and purchasers supported the cult, but it became so popular that the confraternity was soon making a great deal of money from the sale of candles to worshippers, and, as the membership grew (estimated at between two and three thousand), from their dues and contributions as well. Orsanmichele attracted the devotions of Florentines of all classes and the charitable inclinations of both elite and popolo (Dino Compagni was a member). Its expanding wealth made Orsanmichele the principal vehicle in the fourteenth century for the distribution of alms to Florence’s poor. By the 1330s the company’s annual income was in excess of 10,000 lire, and in 1329 the commune entrusted Orsanmichele with the distribution of the 2,000 lire that the government gave each year to the poor. Orsanmichele eventually became in effect an agency of government, especially after the huge bequests that came to it in the aftermath of the 1348 plague, but originally it was one of many private associations created largely by the popolo for a combination of social and religious purposes.

From the combined philanthropy of religious orders and confraternities and the charitable initiatives of private individuals, early fourteenth-century Florence could boast an extensive network of social services. Villani counted no fewer than thirty hospitals and hospices with a total of a thousand beds for “the poor and the infirm,” including Santa Maria Nuova, founded in 1288 by Folco Portinari, father of Dante’s Beatrice. But most hospitals emerged from the collective efforts and donations of thousands of Florentines who joined confraternities or para-ecclesiastical groups like the Order of Penitents. The religion of the popolo had its doctrinal side in the fight against heresy, and its devotional side in the singing of laude and in cults like that of the Orsanmichele Madonna. But for the popolo these purposes flowed naturally and obviously into the provision of social services and aid to the poor. It was here that the popolo’s religious life most revealed the impact of the mendicants who promoted the notion that holiness and religious merit could be acquired by laypersons, married or not, in all walks of life, and in any professional status, through actions that responded to the earthly needs of one’s fellows citizens and thus through the virtue of “caritas.” One did not need to be a monk removed from society or shrouded in contemplation in order to obtain God’s favor.

In their preaching as in their religious associations and social services, the mendicants displayed the same symbiotic relationship with the popolo.27 Franciscans and Dominicans attracted large crowds from all social levels to their public sermons. Preachers from both orders regularly addressed the concerns and dilemmas of an urban laity wrestling with the moral implications of rapidly and unevenly accumulating wealth, of changing economic practices and attitudes, and of social mobility and political tensions. But it would be one-sided to imagine this only as the influence of preachers on the laity. In many respects, above all in the choice of themes, preachers felt the influence of the laity, who, like most audiences, voted with their feet. Had they not found the real and pressing issues of their lives addressed in these sermons, they would not have attended in such numbers. And in this sense the mendicants (in Florence and elsewhere) received the imprint of the popolo as much as the popolo did that of the orders. This can be seen especially in the writings and sermons of Remigio de’ Girolami, whose two treatises on civic peace, De bono communi and De bono pacis, probably emerged from sermons he gave to the Florentines on the evils of factionalism and the necessity of suppressing individual ambition in favor of the common good. Remigio constantly urged the Florentines to compose their differences and embrace peace. Despite his intellectual training in the Aristotelianism that dominated Dominican education at Paris, Remigio pointed to the heroes of ancient Rome as models of virtuous and selfless citizenship, quoting and praising Cicero as a patriotic citizen who exemplified the true nobility that is attained through virtue, not

27

Dameron, Florence and Its Church, pp. 207-11.

By birth. In one of his sermons he told the Florentines that God had given them seven special gifts: “abundance of money, a noble coinage, abundance of population, a civilized way of life, the wool industry, skill in the production of armaments, and a vigorous building activity in the contado.”54 This perception of Florentine achievements is entirely from the discourse of the popolo: the production, rather than the conspicuous consumption, of wealth; the gold florin, first minted in 1252 by the first popular government; population growth, mainly through immigration from the countryside; and the productivity of the woolen cloth industry in which the popolo was much involved. But nowhere more than in his praise for the “civilized way of life” (civilitas vivendi) does Remigio reflect the ideology of the popolo and its attempts to domesticate the elite and make it conform to civic and civilized norms of collective existence. He also underscores the dangers of misuse or abuse of these gifts, suggesting that the proper exercise of worldly and secular activities, including the production and accumulation of wealth, will meet with God’s favor. It amounted in effect to a benediction of urban society as defined by the popolo.55

No Franciscan sermons have survived from this time, but from the writings of those who taught at Santa Croce it is clear that the Franciscan impact on the Florentine popolo was inseparable from the great dispute within the order over the literal observance of the prohibition against owning property. The Spirituals insisted on strict poverty and rejected the legal arrangements by which the so-called Conventuals used property without owning it. Two of the most influential intellectual leaders of the Spirituals, Pierre Jean Olivi and Ubertino da Casale, were lectors at Santa Croce in the 1280s, and their teaching (and possibly preaching) on the question of poverty conveyed to many Florentines, perhaps Dante among them,56 their sustained and harsh critique of the church’s wealth and worldliness and of the openly political ambitions of its popes. Whether or not directly influenced by the Spirituals, the Florentine popolo maintained a consistent opposition to papal interference in the affairs of the city, as the anti-ecclesiastical legislation of later popular governments makes clear. In the meantime, the Spirituals found much sympathy in Florence and Tuscany. Even after being declared heretics by Pope John XXII in the 1320s and driven underground by the Inquisition, they survived and re-emerged in the years of the papal-Florentine war of 1375-8.