Economic grievances drew artisans and wage laborers into politics from at least the mid-fourteenth century, when the working classes began to exhibit an impressive awareness of the factors determining their employment and living conditions and a consistent political agenda centered on the right of association. When the dyers petitioned Walter of Brienne for a guild in 1342, they may have been seeking to recover rights they once had in the Wool guild. Shortly thereafter, unskilled laborers who had never had such rights attempted to organize, although we know of their efforts in the 1340s only from the prohibitions and punishments they provoked. To put the dyers’ guild beyond legality and forestall other workers’ associations, the 1344 revisers of the communal statutes prohibited any “corpus” or “collegium” of workers involved in manufacturing woolen cloth, specifically mentioning the dyers. That same year the established guilds, which had long denied “their” workers the right of association and even simple gatherings, petitioned the government for legislation that subjected to their authority all persons, even if not guild members, who bought or sold items “pertaining” to these guilds. But in reissuing the Ordinances of Justice the popular government of 1343 anchored its own legitimacy in the right of association; thus, without intending to do so, they may have encouraged workers to pursue the same right for themselves. Ironically, a government controlled by guilds forcefully denied workers and artisans rights of association and strengthened guild prerogatives over them.
Workers took to the streets frequently in 1343-5, beginning with the crowd led by Andrea Strozzi in September 1343. In March 1344 three men were fined for leading a band against the Rucellai family (exactly why is not clear), crying “Long live the guilds and the popolo and death to the Rucellai and the popolani grassi!” A serious attempt to organize workers was thwarted in 1345 when the Capitano del popolo’s police arrested the worker Ciuto Brandini and accused him of forming a large association of carders, combers, and other workers in the textile industry that met regularly and even collected dues. To modern eyes it seems a primitive trade union, but in fourteenth-century terms they created a guild, complete with consuls. A government presenting itself as an emanation of the city’s guilds (“the Florentine republic,” according to several legislative acts of these years, being “ruled and governed by the guilds and guildsmen of this city and their consuls”) could not simply convict Ciuto of forming a guild. So the Capitano ruled that, “led by a diabolical spirit,” he had “seduced” as many workers as possible into a “wicked association [iniqua societate]” in order to provoke “noxious disorders, to the harm, opprobrium, danger, and destruction of the citizens of Florence, their persons and property, and the stable government of the city.” From their “illegal plots,” the court intoned, “tumult, sedition, and disorder would have arisen.”1 Appeals from Ciuto’s associates to the priorate for his release, and threats of a strike and an uprising (“motivated,” says an anonymous chronicler, by the desire “to be better paid”), were to no avail, and he was quickly convicted and executed.154 155
Unrest among workers in the 1340s reflected their deteriorating economic circumstances: a combination of low wages and increases in gabelle rates that made it their worst decade of the century. After the 1348 plague, while indirect taxes continued to rise, the population catastrophe drove wages suddenly higher. For masons, builders, and their apprentices, daily wages tripled after the plague and stayed at the same high level for the next two decades; in other industries they at least doubled. Prices also rose, but not as much as wages, and conditions were never better for fourteenth-century workers than in the decades 1350-70. Prosperity within individual households depended of course on the balance of incomes and mouths to feed and on whether employment was regular or sporadic. Unmarried masons with no dependents who found steady work generally earned twice what they needed for basic living costs even before the plague, and three and four times their living costs over the next twenty years. Before the 1340s, masons’ households consisting of two adults and two children with a single income managed to make ends meet. In the 1340s they earned only 70% of living costs, but 150-180% in the succeeding decades. Unskilled laborers in the building industry earned about half as much as skilled masons, but unmarried ones still earned more than the cost of basic necessities before the plague and much more after it. But families with two adults and two children and only the single income of an unskilled apprentice or journeyman never earned enough to cover costs, either before or after the plague, despite the doubling of wages. Sporadic employment only made matters worse. Unskilled wage laborers were the most vulnerable workers, and for them survival depended on charity or reducing costs, for example, by sharing living quarters with relatives.156
Two factors in particular made workers’ economic status precarious even in good times: debt and taxes. Workers’ indebtedness was widespread. Data are lacking for before 1378, but each year in the 1380s an estimated 300 workers received court orders to repay creditors (hence possibly 3,000 over the decade), and each year eighty had their goods confiscated for failure to do so. In 1427, 81% of 357 households of textile workers in the Santo Spirito quarter reported debts in their Catasto declarations, on average equivalent to 55% of assets,157 and debts exceeded assets in 30% of the city’s households.158 It is difficult to imagine that the situation was much different in the 1370s. Wool guild records are filled with reports of confiscations for unpaid debts, requested by creditors and carried out by guild officials who carted off furniture, beds, mattresses, tools, and equipment, including the looms of poor weavers, making it impossible for them to work.159 Some spent months in debtors’ prison. Creditors could be shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, or landlords, but mostly employers. Lanaiuoli frequently extended loans to their workers either for the purchase of looms or other tools or to cover living costs during times of unemployment. Debts carried interest, which reduced real income, as did indirect taxes, which increased dramatically between 1340 and 1360, creating real misery in the 1340s and cutting deeply into the higher wages of the 1350s-1360s.160
Although nominal wages in the 1370s remained much higher than before the plague, they declined somewhat from the preceding decades, as did real incomes (adjusted for prices and taxes). Workers were still better off than they had been before 1348, as evidenced by their increasing (but still limited) presence among households with sufficient assets to be assessed forced loans, although having enough wealth to pay prestanze eventually hurt the minority of well-off workers when assessments rose and collections became more frequent. During the papal war, only 20% of residents assessed in the quarter of Santa Maria Novella paid the full amount and collected interest; 80% of all households and 90% of textile artisans either paid one-third of their assessments or paid others (again, often their employers) as much as a fifth to assume their obligations, losing the interest in either case. In 1375-7, paying their own prestanza assessments cost workers 9-10% of income,161 whereas paying employers to pay their taxes took an estimated 6%.162 Prestanze became more onerous during the papal war, and it was on these taxes, not the gabelles, that the revolutionaries focused in 1378. But indignation over heavy taxes and their effects on the working poor is already apparent in the emotional appeal submitted to the priors in 1369 predicting an “uprising if these forced loans and special levies are not reduced, for there is great privation here. People are living in misery since they earn little and prices have been so high for thirteen months and more. Just think about those who have three or four or five children, and who are assessed two or three florins, and who have to live from the labor of their hands and those of their wives. How can they stay here and live?”163 164 Although fully employed skilled workers (especially those with small households) did well between the plague and 1378, debt, taxes, irregular employment, and large families kept many in poverty.
Workers never lived in large numbers in the city center, dominated early on by elite families,11 and working-class neighborhoods were mainly beyond the perimeter of the twelfth-century walls. Significant social and economic differences distinguished the two main clusters of workers. Unskilled wage laborers in the textile industries predominated in the western and southern sections of the Oltrarno, including the gonfalone Drago Verde (particularly the parish of San Frediano between the Carmine and the river, and the neighborhood called Camaldoli just to the south) and gonfalone Ferza (especially the parish of San Piero Gattolino). These were politically the most radical workers and the chief promoters of the August revolt of the Ciompi. The largest working-class neighborhood north of the river, called Belletri, was centered in the outer reaches of the sprawling gonfalone Lion d’oro north of San Lorenzo and the modern Mercato Centrale. Here lived a more heterogeneous assemblage of wage laborers, skilled artisans, and minor guildsmen that was the principal force behind the July revolution. Two other working-class neighborhoods were in the parishes of Santa Lucia Ognissanti in Santa Maria Novella and Sant’Ambrogio in gonfalone Chiavi in San Giovanni. But the poor (many of them widows and elderly) were present in large numbers everywhere: in 1355, in all sixteen gonfaloni, “miserabiles” (defined as having no property, possessions worth less than 100 lire, and no trade or profession) accounted for at least 22% of households; between 30 and 40% in three gonfaloni; 40-50% in four; and over 50% in two (Lion d’oro in San Giovanni, and Unicorno in Santa Maria Novella, which included Santa Lucia Ognissanti).165
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