Ghibellines ruled Florence for six years, with the lordly Uberti behind the scenes and a group of mostly old Ghibelline elite dominating the councils (Abati, Amidei, Caponsacchi, Lamberti, Mannelli, and Soldanieri). Merchant families were not lacking in the second tier of politically prominent families of these years, which indicates that the Ghibelline regime was not hostile to the merchant and banking class. On the other hand, the participation of non-elite guildsmen was negligible, even if a few dozen artisans were among those punished by the Guelfs after 1267.77 The fatal weakness of the Ghibelline regime was its inability to control the influence of Florentine merchant capital in and outside the city. The commercial and banking companies whose leading partners were exiled in 1260, such as the Bardi, Mozzi, Rossi, and Scali, temporarily lost their Florentine property but not their far-flung investments and assets, which were beyond the reach of the Ghibellines. Even companies that continued to direct operations from Florence were difficult to control. No one realized the potential significance of this more than the pope elected in August 1261, the Frenchman Urban IV, who turned his pontificate into a crusade to destroy the Hohenstaufen and put an end to their repeated attempts to control the peninsula and encircle and dominate the papacy. Urban needed someone capable of challenging Manfred on the battlefield, and his French connections led him to Charles of Anjou, count of Provence and brother of King Louis IX. Despite grandiose ambitions, Charles had little money and no army. Large sums had to be raised quickly, and the obvious source was Florentine bankers, whom Urban pressured to join the war against the Hohenstaufen by threatening to release their debtors from their obligations, interrupt the importation of Flemish cloth to Florence, and subject them to confiscation of goods and even imprisonment. In secret negotiations papal representatives offered to exempt from these punitive measures merchants willing to enter into formal pacts and to pledge financial support for the Angevin military campaign. Remarkably, over two years these negotiations continued without the Ghibelline governors of Florence knowing of them or at least without being able to stop them. The regime’s financial and economic underpinning was being pulled out, piece by piece, from beneath its feet. At least 181 Florentine bankers and merchants from twenty-one major companies solemnly pledged loyalty to the papacy and the Guelf cause and committed themselves to the destruction of Ghibelline rule in Florence and Hohenstaufen power throughout Italy.78 They included (just to name the most important) the companies of the Scali, Mozzi, Spini, Pulci-Rimbertini, Bardi, Cerchi, Frescobaldi, and Rossi. These pacts were the foundation of a momentous rearrangement of power in Italy, as the already great and still growing wealth of Florentine merchant-bankers turned decisively against the Ghibellines and Manfred, allied with the papacy and Charles of Anjou, and made Florence the financial core of a Guelf entente that linked the city to France and to what was about to become the Angevin south of Italy. The German-Hohenstaufen-imperial orbit in which the commune had emerged and developed was now replaced by a papal-French-Angevin orbit that offered new and greater opportunities for Florentine commercial expansion.
The expanding opportunities for Florentine bankers began with their role in financing Charles’s army. They provided him with interest-bearing loans whose repayment came from ecclesiastical taxes that they collected on behalf of the papacy throughout Europe, and especially in France. The pope declared Manfred a Muslim and a heretic, which officially made the war a crusade and permitted the collection of crusading taxes. In many cases, prelates and ecclesiastical institutions, unable to pay their assessments in cash, borrowed the money from the same Florentine bankers at substantial rates of interest. Florentine firms thus secured a double profit from loans both to Charles and to those asked to repay his debts. But the bankers gained in yet another way that in the long run was the most lucrative of all. To secure continued access to Florentine cash, Charles granted ample commercial, trading, and banking privileges to his creditors in the southern Italian territories that he was about to conquer. Southern Italy was opened to Florentine investment and lending, to the marketing of luxury cloths from the Florentine textile industry, and in general to commercial activities unencumbered by taxes or duties. For the next eighty years, the Angevin South became perhaps the major source of Florentine wealth. While still negotiating his loans, Charles sailed from Marseilles to the Ligurian coast in May 1265; by year’s end his army was ready, and on January 6, 1266, he had himself crowned king of Sicily, in effect a declaration of war against Manfred, whose forces he engaged and defeated on February 26 at Benevento, northeast of Naples. Manfred was wounded and soon died, and, with Hohenstaufen ambitions finally quelled, Ghibellines everywhere were weakened. Charles of Anjou was ruler of the South and the greatest power in Italy.
In Florence the repercussions were slow to unfold. The restoration of exiled Guelfs did not occur until over a year later, in April 1267, when Angevin troops finally arrived in Tuscany. In the intervening year the popolo re-emerged, displaced the Ghibellines, and then attempted to prevent the imposition of a Guelf regime. In the aftermath of Benevento, the suddenly precarious Ghibelline regime opened negotiations with Pope Urban’s successor, Clement IV, who demanded that Florence’s Ghibellines offer reconciliation to the Guelfs. As the frightened Ghibellines temporized, Clement pressured them to appoint two Bolognese noblemen, a Guelf and a Ghibelline, as joint holders of the office of podesta. They instituted a committee of thirty-six Guelfs and Ghibellines, both “popolani and grandi” (writes Villani, 8.13). The thirty-six assumed the reins of government from their meeting place in the guildhall of the Calimala, and among their “many good decisions” was to recognize the federation and military organization of the seven “major” guilds, which were permitted to arm themselves, hire military captains, and assemble their members in designated meeting places, so that (says Villani) “if anyone attempted an uprising by force of arms, the guilds would come to the defense of the popolo and the commune under their banners.” From this alliance of the seven guilds also came a committee of their representatives, called the “priorate of the guilds,” in the second half of 1266. For the first time, the security and political aspirations of the popolo were entrusted to the guilds, establishing a precedent for the more successful role they assumed in 1282 and 1293.
Realizing that the Ghibellines were losing control of the situation, Guido Novello called for cavalry contingents from the Ghibelline cities of Tuscany and assembled a force of 1,500 knights. When, in November, the thirty-six refused to approve a tax to pay for these troops, Ghibelline families, led by the Lamberti, rioted and assaulted the thirty-six at the Calimala guildhall, crying “Where are these thirty-six thieves? We’ll cut them to pieces” (Villani, 8.14). Rival contingents of popolo and Ghibellines squared off for battle, but on November 11 Guido Novello made the incomprehensible mistake of taking his formidable force out of the city, intending to return and engage the popolo from a safer direction. When his knights reassembled the next day, they found the gates closed and a defiant popolo determined to keep them out. The Ghibelline government promptly collapsed; only six years after its great triumph, Ghibellinism was finished in Florence.
In a gesture meant to revive the primo popolo’s policy of neutrality between Guelfs and Ghibellines, the thirty-six readmitted some exiled Guelfs and arranged marriage alliances between the parties. But most Guelfs wanted revenge for the years of exile and the confiscations and destruction of property. As the thirty-six apparently split over whether to readmit the intransigent Guelfs, who included the party leaders, the offices of the Anziani and the Capitano del popolo suddenly reappeared and declared the commune’s neutrality between the parties. But all the other players in this drama, including the bankers who had financed the war, the pope, and of course Charles of Anjou, wanted the elimination of the Ghibellines from Florence’s government. Clement invited Charles to send troops into Tuscany, and the popolo prudently submitted to papal authority even before the Angevin army arrived in April 1267. The Guelfs got their revenge, exiling Ghibellines and confiscating their property, which was sold and divided among the Guelf party, the commune, and households that had suffered damages at the hands of the Ghibellines.79 With the exile and economic dismemberment of the Ghibelline lineages, the thirty-year war between the elite parties finally ended.
Charles of Anjou was made podesta and given rule over the city for ten years, during which he was represented by a series of lieutenants. He imposed a government dominated by the Guelf party, which, no more kindly disposed to popular institutions than the Ghibellines, abolished the Anziani, the Capitano del popolo, and the priorate of the guilds, but not the guilds themselves. Surprisingly, it was not the merchant-bankers allied with the papacy and the Angevins that assumed power.80 Of the families whose companies made big loans to Charles (chiefly the Frescobaldi, Bardi, Scali, and Cerchi, nine of whom received knighthoods from him in 126781), only the Bardi were regularly present in the Guelf councils of 1267-80. Despite their decisive role in the Guelf victory, it may have been the very fact of excessively close ties to Charles that kept these families from power, as many began to fear Angevin domination of Tuscany. But economic realities worked inexorably to redefine the ruling class. The old Guelf elite, although victorious in 1267, began to lose ground as many families slipped into political oblivion in this last generation of their glory and the merchant and trading giants became the core of a newly configured elite. This was by no means the triumph of a “bourgeoisie” over an “aristocracy.” It was rather a process of evolution within the elite itself, a replacement at the center of power of elite families that did not adapt to the age’s booming capitalism by equally elite, if somewhat more recent, families that did. However, simultaneously and as a consequence of economic expansion at the local level, in particular the boom in the textile trades, the non-elite popolo of the guilds also gained strength and prepared to challenge the entire elite, both its old and new components. These two developments are sometimes confused and even conflated. Although they overlapped, they were distinct: on the one hand, a transformation of the elite from a predominantly (but never exclusively) warrior class characterized by its knighthoods, city enclaves, and countryside strongholds into a class increasingly (although still not entirely) defined by far-flung mercantile activities across Europe and the Mediterranean; and, on the other hand, the rise to unprecedented political strength through their guilds of a coalition of local merchants, manufacturers, shopkeepers, artisans, and notaries. Both processes come into full view arounD 1280.
World History
