The Story of Florence. Gardner Edmund G.
at length capitulated on August 3rd. The Sienese and Count Simone de' Conti Guidi, who had come to mediate, took him over the Ponte Rubaconte, through the Porta San Niccolò and thence into the Casentino, where they made him solemnly ratify his abdication.
"Note," says Giovanni Villani, who was present at most of these things and has given us a most vivid picture of them, "that even as the Duke with fraud and treason took away the liberty of the Republic of Florence on the day of Our Lady in September,12 not regarding the reverence due to her, so, as it were in divine vengeance, God permitted that the free citizens with armed hand should win it back on the day of her mother, Madonna Santa Anna, on the 26th day of July 1343; and for this grace it was ordained by the Commune that the Feast of St. Anne should ever be kept like Easter in Florence, and that there should be celebrated a solemn office and great offerings by the Commune and all the Arts of Florence." St. Anne henceforth became the chief patroness and protectoress of the Republic, as Fra Bartolommeo painted her in his great unfinished picture in the Uffizi; and the solemn office and offerings were duly paid and celebrated in Or San Michele. One of Villani's minor grievances against the Duke is that he introduced frivolous French fashions of dress into the city, instead of the stately old Florentine costume, which the republicans considered to be the authentic garb of ancient Rome. That there was some ground for this complaint will readily be seen, by comparing the figure of a French cavalier in the Allegory of the Church in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella (the figure formerly called Cimabue and now sometimes said to represent Walter de Brienne himself), with the simple grandeur and dignity of the dress worn by the burghers on their tombs in Santa Croce, or by Dante in the Duomo portrait.
Only two months after the expulsion of the Duke of Athens, the great quarrel between the magnates and the people was fought to a finish, in September 1343. On the northern side of the Arno, the magnates made head at the houses of the Adimari near San Giovanni, at the opening of the present Via Calzaioli, where one of their towers still stands, at the houses of the Pazzi and Donati in the Piazza di San Pier Maggiore, and round those of the Cavalcanti in Mercato Nuovo. The people under their great gonfalon and the standards of the companies, led by the Medici and Rondinelli, stormed one position after another, forcing the defenders to surrender. On the other side of the Arno, the magnates and their retainers held the bridges and the narrow streets beyond. The Porta San Giorgio was in their hands, and, through it, reinforcements were hurried up from the country. Repulsed at the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Rubaconte, the forces of the people with their victorious standards at last carried the Ponte alla Carraia, which was held by the Nerli; and next, joined by the populace of the Oltrarno, forced the Rossi and Frescobaldi to yield. The Bardi alone remained; and, in that narrow street which still bears their name, and on the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Rubaconte, they withstood single-handed the onslaught of the whole might of the people, until they were assailed in the rear from the direction of the Via Romana. The infuriated populace sacked their houses, destroyed and burned the greater part of their palaces and towers. The long struggle between grandi and popolani was thus ended at last. "This was the cause," says Machiavelli, "that Florence was stripped not only of all martial skill, but also of all generosity." The government was again reformed, and the minor arts admitted to a larger share; between the popolo grosso and them, between burghers and populace, lay the struggle now, which was to end in the Medicean rule.
But on all these perpetual changes in the form of the government of Florence the last word had, perhaps, been said in Dante's sarcastic outburst a quarter of a century before:–
"Atene e Lacedemone, che fenno
l'antiche leggi, e furon sì civili,
fecero al viver bene un picciol cenno
verso di te, che fai tanto sottili
provvedimenti, che a mezzo novembre
non giunge quel che tu d'ottobre fili.
Quante volte del tempo che rimembre,
legge, moneta, offizio, e costume
hai tu mutato, e rinnovato membre?
E se ben ti ricordi, e vedi lume,
vedrai te simigliante a quella inferma,
che non può trovar posa in su le piume,
ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma."13
The terrible pestilence, known as the Black Death, swept over Europe in 1348. During the five months in which it devastated Florence three-fifths of the population perished, all civic life was suspended, and the gayest and most beautiful of cities seemed for a while to be transformed into the dim valley of disease and sin that lies outstretched at the bottom of Dante's Malebolge. It has been described, in all its horrors, in one of the most famous passages of modern prose–that appalling introduction to Boccaccio's Decameron. From the city in her agony, Boccaccio's three noble youths and seven "honest ladies" fled to the villas of Settignano and Fiesole, where they strove to drown the horror of the time by their music and dancing, their feasting and too often sadly obscene stories. Giovanni Villani was among the victims in Florence, and Petrarch's Laura at Avignon. The first canto of Petrarch's Triumph of Death appears to be, in part, an allegorical representation–written many years later–of this fearful year.
During the third quarter of this fourteenth century–the years which still saw the Popes remaining in their Babylonian exile at Avignon–the Florentines gradually regained their lost supremacy over the cities of Tuscany: Colle di Val d'Elsa, San Gemignano, Prato, Pistoia, Volterra, San Miniato dei Tedeschi. They carried on a war with the formidable tyrant of Milan, the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti, whose growing power was a perpetual menace to the liberties of the Tuscan communes. They made good use of the descent of the feeble emperor, Charles IV., into Italy; waged a new war with their old rival, Pisa; and readily accommodated themselves to the baser conditions of warfare that prevailed, now that Italy was the prey of the companies of mercenaries, ready to be hired by whatever prince or republic could afford the largest pay, or to fall upon whatever city seemed most likely to yield the heaviest ransom. Within the State itself the popolo minuto and the Minor Guilds were advancing in power; Florence was now divided into four quarters (San Giovanni, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, Santo Spirito), instead of the old Sesti; and the Signoria was now composed of the Gonfaloniere and eight Priors, two from each quarter (instead of the former six), of whom two belonged to the Minor Arts. These, of course, still held office for only two months. Next came the twelve Buonuomini, who were the counsellors of the Signoria, and held office for three months; and the sixteen Gonfaloniers of the city companies, four from each quarter, holding office for four months. And there were, as before, the two great Councils of the People and the Commune; and still the three great officers who carried out their decrees, the Podestà, the Captain, the Executor of Justice. The feuds of Ricci and Albizzi kept up the inevitable factions, much as the Buondelmonti and Uberti, Cerchi and Donati had done of old; and an iniquitous system of "admonishing" those who were suspected of Ghibelline descent (the ammoniti being excluded from office under heavy penalties) threw much power into the hands of the captains of the Parte Guelfa, whose oppressive conduct earned them deadly hatred. "To such arrogance," says Machiavelli, "did the captains of the Party mount, that they were feared more than the members of the Signoria, and less reverence was paid to the latter than to the former; the palace of the Party was more esteemed than that of the Signoria, so that no ambassador came to Florence without having commissions to the captains."
Pope Gregory XI preceded his return to Rome by an attempted reconquest of the States of the Church, by means of foreign legates and hireling soldiers, of whom the worst were Bretons and English; although St. Catherine of Siena implored him, in the name of Christ, to come with the Cross in hand, like a meek lamb, and not with armed bands. The horrible atrocities committed in Romagna by these mercenaries, especially at Faenza and Cesena, stained what might have been a noble pontificate. Against Pope Gregory and his legates, the Florentines carried on a long and disastrous war; round the Otto della Guerra, the eight magistrates to whom the management of the war was intrusted, rallied those who hated the Parte Guelfa. The return of Gregory to Rome in 1377 opens a new epoch in Italian history. Echoes of this unnatural struggle between Florence and the Pope reach us in the letters of St Catherine