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The War of the Eight SaintsMemory and Oblivion
I
Memory forgets, sometimes quite willingly. It is a
process whereby individuals, groups, and entire societies conserve and record,
but also filter, repress, and configure past experience to shape and
accommodate their identities for presentation to self and others. The aims (or
results) may range from explanation to concealment, self-congratulation to
exculpation, self-justification and legitimation to the nurturing
(construction, and elaboration) of grievances against others. Although memories
may be preserved even fortuitously in texts and artifacts, their storage there
can just as well be part of a deliberate and selective process. This is
especially so when the objects concerned are carefully designed works of art,
and the texts artfully composed narrative histories.
The memory of the Quattrocento Florentine Renaissance
has long enjoyed an iconic status in narratives of Western civilization as a
stage upon which its admirers have found enacted much of what they most prized
in European culture and politics. Nor is this wholly accidental. The numerous
vernacular memoirs (ricordi)
of merchants like Giovanni Morelli, as well as the
Latin histories of humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, reveal a
society whose members were deeply self-conscious and historically minded. Much
of the basis for accepting the notion of a Florentine Renaissance derives from
the testimony of contemporaries like Matteo Palmieri and Giorgio Vasari that they were indeed having
one, and on the determination of their fellows to furnish the necessary
historical texts and artworks as proof. The Florentines’ rediscovery of their
ancient Roman ancestors carried in its train a recognition of themselves as an
audience of modern posterity, making their Renaissance dialogue with the past
an essential stimulus also to their own studied self-presentation to future
generations.
Among the most notable examples of the Florentines’
Renaissance are the works of art they commissioned for their churches and the
texts composed by their humanist historians. Architects like Brunelleschi
articulated a classicized Roman vocabulary of harmoniously balanced columns and
rounded arches to solemnize the interior spaces of Florence’s new cathedral and
numerous other churches such as San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito that were rebuilt or remodeled in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries. Painters like Masaccio and sculptors such as Donatello in turn
adorned these churches with images and objects whose classical realism and
naturalism give them heightened spiritual poignancy. Meanwhile, the city’s
humanist chancellors and historians from Coluccio Salutati onward recalled to Florentine citizens the
genealogy of their descent from the Roman Republic, celebrated their republican
institutions and their embrace of civic duty in the defense of their liberty,
and lauded the ambition and unabashed entrepreneurial acquisitiveness that made
possible their civic and charitable benefactions.
But although Florentine artists and humanists alike
deployed classical motifs, the projects in which they engaged were in fact
quite different. Artists employed pre-Christian art forms in the city’s
churches not to subvert religious space but to sacralize the city's urban fabric. The humanists, on the other hand, used classical
rhetoric and historiographical models not only to connect the city’s republican
present to its Roman origins but also to secularize the vision of its history
that informed contemporary political discourse. Underscoring the particularity
of Florentine history did not, to be sure, require detaching it entirely from
Christianity’s universal eschatology. Even Machiavelli, after all, concluded Il
Principe crying out for a new Italian redeemer. But Florentine humanists no
longer recounted events to manifest the providence of God working directly
through human agents. They highlighted instead the causal agency of human
protagonists themselves and inscribed into their actions the civic and
republican values that they aimed to recall to their contemporary and future
readers. Fortuna was not providentia Dei.
The result has been that subsequent historians, taking
their cues from Quattrocento and Cinquecento Florentine historians, long tended
to portray the society as a whole in secular hues. But if we turn back from
these textual sentinels to reconsider the city’s churches not simply as works
of art but as historical artifacts with a documentary significance of their
own, and begin, as historians recently have done, to incorporate the archival
study of religion and the church into Florentine social and political history,
a paradox emerges: while Florentines were secularizing and de-Christianizing
the discursive realm of their civic politics in the early Quattrocento, they
were simultaneously sacralizing and re-Christianizing
their built civic environment. This is not to resurrect long discredited
caricatures of the humanists as pagans, or to reposit a fundamental conflict (not even updated as “culture wars”) between
secularizing humanists and Christian reactionaries. Humanists from Petrarch
onward were deeply Augustinian in their anthropology and attacked ecclesiastics
not for their religion but for their lack of it. Nor is it necessary to pin
religion and classicism on different elements of the social order. Leonardo Bruni wrote his classicizing republican panegyric and
history of Florence to ingratiate himself with the same Florentine rulers who
commissioned Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise; indeed, he helped select the biblical
scenes to be represented.
Taken together, the written and material evidence
furnished by Quattrocento Florentines points to a simultaneous rise of
investment in a built Christian environment, concurrent with a surge of textual
production that wrote secular values into the Florentine social and political
world. The commemoration in Florentine churches of a Christian present
contemporaneous with the textual recollection of a secular past that pointed
directly to it suggests a fascinating instability of values. Societies, of
course, need no more be consistent with themselves than are individuals. The
Florentine case might simply be let stand as an example of mildly schizophrenic
Renaissance self-fashioning. But because memory is the art also of selective
(and collective) forgetting, and silences thus have histories of their own, it
is worth excavating the documentary remains of those lying beneath Florence’s
ecclesiastical commemorations and historical recollections to see whether they
do not converge at some point in the oblivion of a past that Florentines either
chose to forget—or remembered very carefully.
II
In few societies have religion and politics been woven
together so intimately—and conflictually—as they were
in Renaissance Florence. As far back as the eleventh century, Florentine
support under the Countess Matilda had been essential to the survival of the
Gregorian reform movement, and from the formation of the Guelf entente in the
1260s down to the reigns of the Medici popes Leo X (1513-21) and Clement VII
(1523-34) at the outbreak of the Reformation, no community in Europe was more
vital to the economic and political fortunes (and misfortunes) of the papacy
than its Tuscan neighbor, rival, and financier, Florence. Nor, in the two
centuries from Dante’s robust denunciation of the papacy in his Commedia down
to Savonarola’s project to fuse Christian and republican renovatio in a Florentine “New
Jerusalem” that defied Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), was any city so vigorous
in condemning the papacy or so protean in generating new forms of religious thought
and expression in artistic, political, and urban contexts.
The famous twenty-eighth maxim that Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) penned in the early sixteenth
century appears to telescope the ambivalence many Florentines felt toward the
church: “I don't know anyone who dislikes the ambition, the avarice and the
sensuality of priests more than I do”, wrote the papal governor of Modena and
the Romagna. “Nevertheless, the position I have enjoyed with several popes has
forced me to love their greatness for my own self-interest. Were it not for
this consideration, I would have loved Martin Luther as much as I love myself”.
In his ensuing maxim Guicciardini specified the cause
of his dilemma, explaining that the Florentines had “the church as a neighbor, which
is powerful and never dies”. Essential to Guicciardini’s schematization of his Florentine codependence with the church was the manner in
which he identified clergy at all levels with the papacy, both with political
power, and the necessity he therefore felt to partition his religious
convictions from his political interests. Like Machiavelli (1469-1527), Guicciardini wondered whether it was possible “to control
governments and states, if one wants to hold them as they are held today,
according to the precepts of Christian law”, and concluded that it was not.
There was much to justify these sentiments in the wake
of Savonarola’s late-fifteenth-century failure as an “unarmed prophet”, when
Renaissance popes had subverted the earlier efforts of conciliar reformers to
curb their monarchical pretensions and had transformed themselves into
ambitious Italian princes. But because Machiavelli’s and Guicciardini’s texts became the vehicles through which the preceding three centuries of
Florentine history were synthesized and transmitted into the broader stream of
European thought—and memory—historians in turn have read back out of the
history of the Florentine republic the sixteenth-century identification of
church with papacy, and the separation of religion from politics, that they
wrote into it. Nor were these leanings without some foundation in earlier
fifteenth-century humanist historiography. Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370-1444) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), upon whom they relied, embraced classical models that privileged
political, military, and diplomatic narratives to focus their histories on
Florence’s development in its republican dimensions. In the process, they
touched on local ecclesiastical or religious matters only so far as popes and
prelates came on stage as players in Italian politics. The roles that religion
and the local church played in shaping the Quattrocento Florentine cultural
milieu that produced its foundational humanist historians were thus masked and
obscured by the very selectivity and semiotics of the humanists’ own
narratives.
III
This is nowhere more evident than in their treatment
of the cataclysmic War of the Eight Saints that Florence fought against Pope
Gregory XI (1370-78) in 1375-78. Climaxing in the outbreak of the papal schism and
the revolt of Florence's downtrodden Ciompi clothworkers, the war unfolded in two phases and
encompassed two corresponding clusters of issues. It began as a Florentine
effort to check the menacing expansion of the papal state in central Italy that
the Avignon popes had set as a condition for their return to Rome and was
fueled by the antipathy many Florentine citizens felt toward their Guelf
fellows whose personal ties to the Papal Curia threatened to subvert the
commune’s sovereignty. Florence enjoyed a series of early successes, sponsoring
uprisings throughout the papal state that were hailed by the republic’s newly
appointed chancellor Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) as the triumph of Tuscan and Italian libertas over papal despotism.
But as the war bogged down, the Florentines were confronted with rising
military expenses that drove them to a momentous second step. Already under a
papal interdict, the city’s leaders determined in 1376 to finance the war by
selling off local clerical property, and they proceeded to the most extensive
liquidation of an ecclesiastical patrimony attempted anywhere in Europe before
the Reformation. A war against the papacy was thus transformed into a
referendum on the place of religion and the church within the Florentine community
itself—again, one of the most literate and sophisticated in pre-Reformation
Europe. The spoliation of the Florentine church, accompanied by efforts first
to do without clerical ministrations, then, from 1377, to compel clergy to
officiate and laity to attend services, turned the public sharply against the
war. Flagellants took to the streets, the city's political leadership split
bitterly, and Florence was forced to sue for peace. Gregory XI’s timely death
and the outbreak of the schism in the spring of 1378 enabled Florence to
negotiate with the weak Roman pope Urban VI (1378-89). But there immediately
ensued the revolt of the Ciompi. The war had a
devastating impact on the Florentine church that shaped its politics and
internal operations down to the mid-fifteenth century. And it impressed upon
subsequent generations of Florentine rulers the vital importance of the
legitimating power of the sacred in the city’s economy of political interests,
conditioning their policies not only toward papal Rome but, especially, toward
the local Florentine church, even longer.
IV
Guicciardini omitted the war almost entirely from his youthful Storie fiorentine,
beginning immediately afterward with the revolt of the Ciompi.
But he blamed the uprising itself on the Otto di balìa,
a special commission of eight magistrates who had been charged with the war’s
prosecution, for recklessly catering to Florence’s lower classes. He returned
to the war twenty years later in his Cose fiorentine, written in the immediate aftermath of the
Sack of Rome in 1527, on his return to a Florence in the last gasp of
republican and messianic fervor. He prefaced his account with a speech by a
confident Florentine councillor who favored the war “to
preserve the dignity of our patria . . . [and] to maintain our liberty . . .
undertaken not against the Church of God, nor against the vicars of Christ, but
against evil pastors, against wicked governors”. To this he contrasted the
cautious Carlo Strozzi, who wondered how Guelf
Florence could justify a war against the papacy, and predicted that the
inevitable papal interdict would so traumatize the Florentines that “perhaps
the greater part, on account of the damages and injuries of the war, will be
disposed to return to the old faith”. But from these suggestive interpretive
poles Guicciardini proceeded to narrate a tightly
focused account of the political infighting between Florence’s Ricci and Albizzi factions, and of the movements of armies and
embassies, touching only minimally on the broader domestic impact of the
interdict and the expropriation of church property. The veteran statesman’s dry
verdict was that “it is not enough to undertake wars with justice and
generosity, if these are not accompanied by prudence as well”.
Machiavelli touched only glancingly on the war in his Istorie fiorentine.
Nevertheless, he paused to offer an encomium to the Otto for having
administered it “with such virtue and with such universal satisfaction that . .
. they were called Saints even though they had little regard for censures, had
despoiled the churches of their goods, and had compelled the clergy to
celebrate the offices—so much more did those citizens then esteem their
fatherland than their souls”. But though he lauded the Otto for their courage
in placing devotion to the patria above fear of spiritual sanctions,
Machiavelli nevertheless left open the possibility that their actions might
indeed have been damnable. Recounting a meeting held just before the war of
citizens concerned to end factional strife, Machiavelli inserted into the
speech of their spokesman the lament that factionalism and the corruption of
the city had arisen “because religion and fear of God have been eliminated in
all”. While he reveled in the blow dealt the papacy by the Otto, Machiavelli echoed
in his Istorie the view he had set forth in the Discorsi, that “as the observance of divine institutions is
the cause of the greatness of republics, so the disregard of them produces
their ruin”.
Writing a century before Machiavelli and only decades
after the War of the Eight Saints itself, Leonardo Bruni,
the founder of Florentine humanist historiography, was even more reticent. He
could scarcely ignore the rising new Florentine cathedral and the numerous
other ecclesiastical building projects that were visible throughout early
Quattrocento Florence. Thus, in his famous Panegyric (Laudatio) of 1403-4, he commended the Florentines’
piety and paused in his description of the city to offer lavish praise of their
churches: “Indeed”, he wrote, “in all of Florence nothing is more richly
appointed, more ornate in style, more magnificent than these churches. As much
attention has been given to decorating sacred buildings as to secular ones, so
that not only the habitations of the living would be outstanding but the tombs
of the dead as well”. At the same time, Bruni carefully circumscribed the churches' significance by inserting his description
into a portion of the Laudatio devoted not to the city’s history and institutions but to its architecture.
Aiming to celebrate the republic, his parallel juxtapositions of buildings
sacred and profane, of habitations for the living and the dead, effected an
equality between the Florentine church and the republic, while separating the
concerns of this world from those of the next.
Likewise, though Bruni celebrated
the role of Florence’s Parte Guelfa in championing the city’s Roman republican
ideals, he made only the briefest allusion to the Parte’s origin as an alliance
supporting the papacy. While he could trace the many wars that Florentines had
fought against tyrants in defense of their libertas back to the famous Guelf
victory over the Ghibelline leader Manfred at Beneventum in 1266, he made no reference whatsoever to the great war that Florence had
fought immediately prior to its recent victory over Milan’s Giangaleazzo Visconti in 1402—the War of the Eight Saints. The omission was scarcely casual.
Florence's victory over Milan in fact served Bruni,
as it did many other Florentines, not only as an occasion for celebrating the
triumph of Florentine republican ideals but also as a means of canceling the
memory of an earlier war for Florentine libertas—that of the Eight Saints—that had gone terribly
wrong.
Several decades later, when he turned to writing his Historiarum florentini populi libri XII (begun by
1415), Bruni could no longer completely ignore it.
Rather, he focused on the first year of the conflict, which he could easily
frame as a defensive war against papal aggression. Thereafter, throughout its
second, domestic phase, Bruni kept his attention
fixed squarely on the movements of armies and diplomats, turning to Florentine
civic affairs only to note that the renewals of the Otto “provoked great
jealousy among many”. Without ever mentioning Florence’s assault on its local
church and the political turmoil that ensued, he concluded his account by
noting the outbreak of the schism, then partitioned the war from the city’s
internal life, and the Ciompi Revolt, with a chapter
division.
V
The War of the Eight Saints had its ideological roots
in a debate over ecclesiastical wealth and jurisdictions that had been
intensifying throughout Europe for over a century. In sixteenth-century Italy,
Machiavelli and Guicciardini took the temporal power
of church and papacy for granted and distinguished both from true religion. But
in the fourteenth century they were still conceivable as spiritual
institutions, and it was the doctrine of papal plenitudo potestatis, upon which popes based their
expanding claims not only to supreme authority within the church but also to
myriad powers of intervention in temporal affairs, that occupied political
theorists. It had inspired the growth of the radical Spiritual wing of the
Franciscan order, and King Philip IV of France’s challenge to clerical immunities
from royal taxation and the courts, which elicited from Pope Boniface VIII the
intemperate bull Unam sanctam (1302), strongly implying that all temporal rulers derived their authority from
the pope and roundly designating all the faithful as his subjects. Unam sanctam became a rich target for critics that papal apologists like Giles of Rome
actually widened by advancing fulsome claims for papal world dominium
(lordship) that fused the issues of jurisdictions and property rights, thus
effectively inviting opponents of papal authority to take aim at clerical
wealth as well.
Among the sharpest antipapal reactions came from
Italians. Dante articulated in his Monarchia (c. 1310) an ideal Aristotelian vision of a new
Roman Empire, in which all political authority would be concentrated in a
single temporal world ruler: restricting the church to a purely spiritual role
would secure humanity’s common good by ending the destructive conflict between
church and state. As he explained through Marco Lombardo at the center of his
Commedia, all the evils of the world derived from misgovernment caused by a
papacy which “striving to combine two powers in one, fouls self and load and
all”. In his Defensor pacis (1324), Marsilius of Padua added Roman corporation law to Dante’s
amalgam of Aristotelian and Franciscan arguments to propose reducing the church
to purely spiritual powers and subjecting it to the supervision of a sovereign
lay authority, the “faithful human legislator”. Clergy would be subject to the
penalties of the civil law and might, if necessary, be compelled by the state
to perform services and to administer the sacraments. The legislator would
supervise appointments to ecclesiastical offices and any necessary
inquisitions, and would oversee the administration of ecclesiastical property.
Superfluous clerical property would be subject to taxation just like that of
the laity. Dante’s Commedia became,
of course, the cornerstone of Florentine literature, and an Italian translation
(from the French) of the Defensor pacis circulated in Florence from 1363 onward, with numerous marginal arrows pointing
to the passages on tithes and church property.
Marsilius was soon joined at Ludwig of Bavaria’s antipapal
court by the brilliant English Franciscan heretic William of Ockham (c. 1285-c.
1347), who, followed by his Oxford countryman John Wycliff (d. 1384) later in the century, articulated political theories that also
curtailed ecclesiastical jurisdictions and property rights, based not, however,
on the church’s presumed character as a spiritual institution but on its now
evident forfeiture of that role. Wycliff wrote his De civili dominio (1378) with an eye on Florence’s War of the
Eight Saints, and the echo of his views in John Hus led to innumerable
condemnations before (and after) the Czech's execution at the Council of
Constance in 1415.
VI
Florence’s rulers had been given a powerful incentive
to acquiesce in the expansion of papal controls over ecclesiastical wealth and
appointments by Pope Martin IV’s confirmation of the Florentine bankers’ right
to collect papal taxes in 1281, and papal actions touching the Florentine
church could in any case easily be mediated privately by Florentines at the
Papal Curia itself. Nevertheless, in (frequent) periods of domestic crisis,
when Florence’s patrician rulers sought to augment their power by admitting
members of the lesser guilds and novi cives to a greater share of political offices, these
new people (gente nuova) tended
to pursue stricter constitutional protections of the commune’s sovereignty,
both against papal meddling from outside and against aristocrats’ use of local
ecclesiastical institutions to augment their power within Florentine politics.
Under the “popular” governments of the Primo Popolo (1250-60) and of Giano della Bella (1293-97), and in response to interventions such as those of the papal
legate Cardinal Latino Malabranca in 1279-80, and of
Pope Boniface VIII in 1301-3, the Florentine councils passed a series of laws
that prohibited the appointment of Florentine “magnates” to the bishoprics of
Florence and Fiesole (which might be used as seigneurial power bases); required that ecclesiastics claiming fiscal and judicial
immunities verify their clerical status; and denied that excommunications of
communal officials could be cited to disqualify their decisions. When, in the
financial crisis of 1343-48 precipitated by the collapse of the Bardi and Acciaiuoli banking
houses, Pope Clement VI (1342-52) used the inquisitor’s office and an interdict
to pressure Florentine bankers to treat ecclesiastical creditors
preferentially, another broadly based government passed additional laws
limiting clerical immunity from communal courts, restricting the inquisitor's
power to investigate usury, and defying the interdict. At the same time, the
Florentines also managed their fiscal crisis to a resolution by creating a
funded public debt, the Monte, backed by papal juridical guarantees.
Thereafter, the decades leading up to the War of the
Eight Saints saw broad Florentine-papal collaboration on matters of finance and
appointments to benefices, as well as light Florentine taxation of the clergy.
But distrust began to grow when Pope Innocent VI (1352-62) dispatched Cardinal Egidio de Albornoz from Avignon
in 1353 to recover control of the papal state in central Italy. Two factions
emerged in Florence: the Albizzi family and their
followers identified the city’s interests with those of the papacy and the
elite Parte Guelfa, while the Ricci and their
supporters were more willing to countenance closer relations with Milan as a
counter to the papacy’s growing power on the peninsula and were more
sympathetic to the gente nuova's mistrust of local ecclesiastical
prerogatives.
VII
Gregory XI came to the pontificate in late 1370 in a
moment of calm and was personally congratulated by members of Florence’s
powerful philo-papal Albizzi, Corsini, Strozzi, and Alberti families. He was determined, however, to complete
the papacy’s consolidation of control over its central Italian Patrimony, and
to subdue its neighbors, in order To bring the Curia back to Rome. Soon he was
dispatching letters and embassies to neighboring Florence and other Tuscan
cities with assurances that his assault on nearby Perugia portended no threat
to their “Tuscan liberties”, while he urged papal loyalists like Lapo da Castiglionchio and other
members of the Parte Guelfa within the city to
discourage any sharp Florentine response. Florentine councillors were deeply skeptical of the pope’s motives. Gregory’s increasingly indignant
appeals for Florentine aid against Perugia, the Este of Ferrara, and Bernabò Visconti of Milan went unheeded or were minimally
honored. But his use of indirect political as well as formal diplomatic
channels to influence Florentine decision making facilitated erratic jumps of
allegiance, such as Uguccione de' Ricci’s spectacular
defection to the Albizzi side in 1373, and fueled a
crescendo of factional strife that overtook the city in the next few years.
The pope also intervened aggressively in local ecclesiastical
affairs and pressed the issue of “ecclesiastical liberties” with Florence. In
1371 he replaced Fra Andrea of the popular Ricci family with his own man, Fra Piero di Ser Lippo of Florence, to head the Florentine inquisition, in a move that could not but
have been perceived in Florence as shoring up the political power of local
Guelf families. In 1373 Gregory deputed his own papal commissioners to reform
the monasteries of the Florentine and Pisan dioceses,
and he intervened aggressively in local ecclesiastical appointments. When
Antonio di Luca Abbati, a member of the minor Tuscan
aristocracy and Gregory’s “serviens armorum atque familiaris”,
was summoned to appear before the communal courts, Gregory stridently protested
this violation of ecclesiastical immunity. Subsequently, the Florentines
uncovered a scheme among members of the Albizzi and Corsini families to secure the appointment of a complicitous abbot to the strategically located monastery
of Vallombrosa in the Apennines to facilitate the advance
of papal troops toward the city. As the chronicler Stefani observed, “This
affair was said to have a very long tail”.
Florence’s councils responded to these provocations by
passing new laws limiting the rights of churches to offer sanctuary to criminals
and by refurbishing older measures that limited clerical judicial immunities
and regulated access to ecclesiastical benefices. The year 1375 revealed only
further papal treachery to the Florentines. The city had been hit by a wave of
plague and severe crop failures in late 1374, but appeals for permission to
import grain from the papal lands around Bologna went unheeded. Rather, while
Florence starved, Gregory ratcheted up his campaign in defense of
ecclesiastical liberties by demanding now that the commune repeal its laws
restricting the powers of inquisitors. For good measure, he fired some
excommunications on this issue over the Florentine bow at the rulers of
neighboring Pistoia. Then, in June, while papal envoys were in Florence seeking
funds for the war against Bernabò Visconti, news
arrived that the pope had secretly arranged a truce with the Milanese ruler.
Papal troops led by the English mercenary John Hawkwood were now released from service and headed toward Florence, demanding a
staggering 130,000 florins to spare the city from pillage. Later that month, a
clerical plot was uncovered in Prato to yield the city to papal troops from
Bologna.
The clerics involved in the Prato plot were brutally
executed, and Florence now organized for war. An executive priorate was drawn for the July-August term that contained an unusually large number of “new
men” sympathetic to the antipapal leanings of the Ricci faction. Already the
city had arranged a nonaggression pact with Hawkwood at a cost of 130,000 florins. Now, without mentioning the clergy directly, the
councils approved the priors' creation of a special commission of eight
citizens, who in fact came to be known as the Otto dei preti,
or Eight Saints, charged to levy a one-year, 130,000-florin forced loan (prestanza) on the
clergy of Florence and Fiesole to pay off Hawkwood.
The old prohibition against Florentine magnates accepting the bishoprics of
Florence or Fiesole was reinvoked, and a law was
passed transferring jurisdiction over last testaments and usury cases from
ecclesiastical courts to the commune’s Monte officials. A month later, the
councils approved the creation of another special commission, the Otto di balìa, empowered to make the military and diplomatic
arrangements necessary to carry on a war against the pope. By late summer they
had worked out an alliance with Florence's and the papacy’s traditional enemy:
Milan.
Both sides had already launched a war of propaganda.
In May, Florence’s ambitious young new chancellor Salutati addressed an “apology” to the pope, meant to be read out in Consistory, that
actually detailed Florentine grievances running back to the arrival of Cardinal Albornoz in 1353. Protesting Florence’s long-standing
devotion to the church, Salutati ostentatiously (but
menacingly) denied the rumor that Florence was preparing to sponsor an uprising
in the Patrimony: the papacy’s “most devoted sons” would never attempt “such a
sacrilege”. Gregory responded with complaints of his own, notably of Florence’s
refusal to aid in the campaign against Bernabò Visconti and of its “tyrannical” violations of ecclesiastical liberties. He
invited Florence’s citizens to put away their pride and return to the “old road”
of humility, threatening that otherwise he would do everything in his power to defend
the church, “against which not even the gates of Hell can prevail”.
VIII
But Florence’s leaders, headed by members of the Ricci
faction but including also many eminent Guelfs, were in no mood for the “old
road”. “Wake up!” Salutati exhorted the Pisans. Moving to frame the anomalous Florentine war
against the papacy in a broad historical context, he reminded them of how the
ancient Greek republics had lost their liberty to the Macedonians by quarreling
among themselves. The dam burst on 11 November, when Città di Castello rose up against its papal governors. “Now
indeed”, crowed Salutati to Bernabò Visconti, “begins the ruin of the church!”. Like dominoes, Viterbo,
Perugia, and dozens of other cities of the Patrimony rebelled as well. They
were joined in the spring by Bologna, the crucial northern anchor of the papal
state. Reports coming into Florence almost daily were read out “in the name of
God and victory” to excited crowds summoned to the Piazza Signoria by the ringing of church bells. Troops of the Tuscan League entered the
liberated cities to cries of “Long live Florence and liberty!” and red banners,
“like those of Rome”, emblazoned with the motto Libertas, were distributed to
Florence’s new confederates.
Euphoric letters now streamed out of the Florentine
chancery exalting the Italians’ re-embrace of their ancient liberty as they
cast off the tyrannical yoke of servitude so long imposed on them by the
barbarism, greed, and despotism of the papacy’s Gallic prelates and governors. “Remember”, Salutati urged the Orvietans,
“that you are of Italian blood, the nature of which is to rule others, not to
submit to them, and mutually and in turn you should rouse each other for
liberty”. The war was not against the church, he assured Galeazzo Malatesta, but was “with barbarians, with foreigners
who, born of the vilest parents and raised on filth”, had been turned loose by
the church to plunder misera Italia. But as the war developed, Salutati was obliged (and not only by the protests of
Florence’s French and Angevin allies!) to articulate
a fuller and more complex vision of Italian liberty, one that went beyond the dictatores’ older, simple juxtapositions of
liberty and despotism, and that enriched earlier Aristotelian and corporate
views that proposed securing peace, “sufficiency of life”, and the bene comune as the
aims of legitimate government. This was not a war simply for Florentine or
Tuscan liberty but one fought to liberate all of northern Italy. Salutati had not only to address a variety of communities
of differing traditions and political experience but also to enlist the support
of foreign rulers. He was therefore inspired to elaborate a vision of liberty
that went well beyond traditional communal ideals of self-rule and freedom from
foreign domination in two new ways.
First, in soliciting the support of the Romans early
in the war and, later, condemning their readmission of Gregory to the city, he
articulated a new historical genealogy of Italian liberty. Reminding them of
their “hereditary debt” (debito hereditario)
as the “authors and fathers” of popular liberty, he offered the Romans ever
fuller lists of examples of their ancient forbears’ resistance to tyrants (Tarquin) and foreigners (Hannibal), and linked their
history to that of Florence and Italy. By the end of the war, Salutati had developed a view of Roman liberty grounded in
the rule of law. Its foundations had been laid under a dynamic republic, only
to be extinguished subsequently by the Caesars themselves.
At the same time, many of the cities in the Patrimony
lacked such traditions and constituted in effect what Machiavelli would later
describe as the problem of “new states”. In the course of dispensing much
practical advice to cities such as Città di Castello, Bologna, and Orvieto on
how to choose rectors, avoid factional strife, and keep taxes low, Salutati was obliged to reflect on the roles and interests
of nobles and plebs, merchants and artisans in civic affairs, and to develop a
broad anthropology of liberty and its effect on human nature as the magistra virtutum that
could be applied to Italian communities lacking clear republican traditions. In
phrases that go well beyond older visions of the bene comune and that anticipate the
republicanism of Bruni’s Laudatio, Salutati praised liberty to the Bolognese as “[the] one thing alone [which], exalting
cities, multiplies population immensely, enriches families, and adorns the
status and majesty of the citizens with an air of ancient grandeur. . . . This
is the teacher of virtues, since no one hesitates in his own republic which
flourishes with liberty to demonstrate how much and what a virtuous man can do”.
As the propagandist of Florence’s strategy to guarantee its own security by
republicanizing central Italy, Salutati developed an
anthropology of liberty that made its Roman genealogy accessible to all
Italians in an ideology that was, at the same time, new and distinctively
Florentine.
IX
The war was immensely popular among the Florentines,
even among some elements of the clergy. “Woe to those who are under you and
don't rise up!” taunted the satirist Franco Sacchetti in a series of poems by turns sarcastic and enraged that he penned to Gregory
XI, Pope “Guastamondo”. The Augustinian canon and
humanist Luigi Marsili ventilated his own anticlerical
sentiments from Paris to his friend, the lanaiolo Guido Del Palagio, and assured him that excommunications by the likes
of Gregory XI’s “shameless” (sfacciati) Limousin legates meant nothing to Christ: “Christ
sent them [priests] to preach: but I see nothing in the Gospel that says he
sent them to rule”. The Vallombrosan monk Giovanni dalle Celle likewise reassured Del Palagio that “no innocent person can be excommunicated. . . . You only have to beware
not to vote that the pope should be taken or killed, and likewise for all other
clergy and religious”.
“Never”, exulted Salutati in
February, 1376, “has it been so easy to raise money from our citizens!” The
city’s rulers were delighted with the war’s progress. Even such “Archguelfs” as Lapo da Castiglionchio and Filippo Corsini now urged that the Otto “manfully pursue” what they
had begun. It took Gregory until the spring of 1376 to recover from the shock
of his losses in the Patrimony. He then summoned dozens of Florence's leaders
to appear before him at Avignon. The priors took the summons remarkably
seriously and deputed the lawyers Donato Barbadori and Alessandro dell' Antella to present the Florentine case. Salutati now sent
letters to Florence’s Cardinal Piero Corsini and to the College of Cardinals responding to
Gregory’s charge that Florence had deliberately instigated the rebellions in
the Patrimony. Reciting the long history of Florence’s Guelf devotion to the
papacy, he argued that “the damages the church has received . . . are to be
blamed not on us, but on the excesses of its own officials”. The uprisings in
the Patrimony were truly miracles, inspired by God’s spirit, and would
therefore be assessed by “divine judgment, not human counsel”.
X
Gregory, however, conceived the process not as a forum
for debate but as a trial. The defense served up by Barbadori and dell'Antella was a breathtaking display of legal
caviling that cannot have been meant to convince so much as to taunt, ridicule,
and perhaps to generate sympathy for Florence among rulers north of the Alps.
The lawyers began with a plea for postponement, then turned to twenty charges
drawn up by the pope's advocate, Jacopo di Ceva, all
of which they set out to refute. The charges were remarkably detailed, ranging
from Florence’s sponsorship of rebellion in the papal states to the formation
of the commissions of the Otto di balìa and Otto dei preti, its execution of the
Prato conspirators, passage of anti-ecclesiastical legislation, and
unauthorized taxation of the clergy. But in each instance the lawyers argued
provocatively that, lacking exact times, dates, and the names of all persons
involved, the charges were “vague, obscure”, and therefore legally
inadmissible. And they did more than simply quibble. Though they made no
attempt to invoke Florence’s traditional Guelf allegiance to the papacy,
neither did they use this forum as an opportunity to champion the heroic vision
of republican libertas that Salutati had elaborated in support of the war.
Instead, they framed the Florentine defense from
beginning to end with the stunning assertion that Florence was, and always had
been, “subject to the most holy Roman Empire”, and that it therefore could not
recognize the jurisdiction of the Papal Curia. Florence indeed had renewed its
privileges with Emperor Charles IV in 1369 and had been paying the emperor an
annual census of 4,000 florins, a kind of ideological (and political) insurance
policy that the lawyers now cashed in full. Not only, they declared, were the Florentines
innocent of Gregory’s charge that they had violated the terms of their alliance
with the church; the pope lacked competence to judge, both because he could not
be plaintiff and judge alike in his own case and because the Florentine
community and citizens “are laymen, and immediately subject to imperial
authority”. Had they occupied the lands of Volterra,
Pistoia, and other of their neighbors? On the contrary, argued the lawyers,
Florentines served there as vicars of the emperor.
Barbadori and dell'Antella did not,
on the other hand, elaborate this new Florentine Ghibellinism into a bold vision of the prerogatives of the secular state along the lines set
forth by Dante and Marsilius. Rather, they affected
great respect for papal authority and the immunities of the church, while
serving up denials of the papal accusations that were teasingly sophistic and
mendacious. Responding to the charge that Florence had passed laws curtailing
the freedom of the inquisitor and regulating access to ecclesiastical benefices,
they first disputed the laws’ existence, then denied that they had been
enforced, then pointed out that the “clausula derogatoria" attaching to them explicitly prohibited
transgressions of ecclesiastical liberty. Had clerics been tried and condemned
in secular courts? Again they rejected the charge, adding, however, that these
things had been done by Florence’s podestà, a foreign official over whom they
had absolutely no control. Had the clergy been taxed and molested? Again, no:
besides, the pope had failed to specify the sums and clerics involved; anyway,
these were strictly voluntary loans.
And so it went. Not surprisingly, Gregory flicked
aside the Florentine defense as “frivolous and inane”. (Nor would Charles IV
have been amused, having only days earlier ordered the Florentines to desist from
disturbing the Patrimony.) In the interdict that he had ready for promulgation,
Gregory compressed his condemnation of the Florentines into ten major (though
quite detailed) counts, leaving himself ample space to elaborate on the
economic penalties that, along with denial of access to the sacraments and the
cult, were to be inflicted by the clergy and other Christians on these “impious
sons of perdition” and their allies and abettors, the enemies of mother church
and the Christian “respublica”. On hearing the papal
sentence, which was at once a judgment, a polemic, and a curse, Barbadori collapsed to his knees, reciting the Psalms and
calling upon Christ and the apostles as witnesses to Florence’s innocence.
XI
In his history of Florence, Leonardo Bruni made Gregory’s trial and condemnation of the
Florentines the centerpiece of his account of the war, inserting lengthy
speeches into the mouths of Barbadori and Gregory to
set out the Florentine and papal positions. But what was a good Florentine
republican, or even a Guelf, to make of Barbadori’s and dell'Antella’s defense, framed as it was within
an imperial jurisprudence that not only ignored, understandably, Florence's
Guelf traditions but also neglected to articulate the ideal of libertas that Salutati had made the centerpiece of the Florentine cause,
and that offered instead a defense which, in the age after civil lawyers like Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14-57), was anachronistically servile even by Ghibelline standards in its
complete forfeiture of Florentine sovereignty?
Bruni rewrote the speech entirely, expunging every
reference to Florence’s submission to imperial authority, as well as virtually
every charge leveled by the pope against the Florentines for their abuse of the
church. This was no homage to the ancient historiographical tradition of
rhetorical summation but a deliberate excision from the historical record
undertaken to purify and sanctify Florentine public memory. In Gregory’s
speech, Bruni allowed the pope to express indignation
only at Florence’s provocation of the uprisings in the Patrimony. Then, drawing
on the charges advanced against the church by Salutati in his letters, Bruni moved Barbadori to the offensive, blaming the war squarely on the tyranny and abuses of the
papacy’s Gallic legates: “If your governors, your holiness, or let us say
legates, had bothered to establish a benevolent government, rather than a
tyranny frightful to all men, neither would you have reason to accuse us at
present, nor we to defend ourselves”.
But having recounted the legates’ abuses at length,
and following Salutati closely, Bruni then diverged from the course suggested by the chancellor’s own letters. For
rather than have Barbadori advance from traditional
Aristotelian denunciations of the despotism of the papal legates to an
articulation of Salutati’s affirmative new vision of
the ideal of libertas,
as the chancellor himself had frequently done, Bruni next inserted into Barbadori’s speech a history of
Florence's Guelf loyalty to the papacy that went back not simply to the time of
Manfred but, indeed, to that of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. Why, if Bruni was using Barbadori as a
mouthpiece for the Florentine position, did he not exploit this rhetorical
opportunity to highlight one of Salutati’s greatest
achievements? In part, he was simply following the line of argument that Salutati himself had directed to audiences like the College
of Cardinals, rather than that which he had developed to encourage Florence's
allies. But Bruni was now writing a history meant to
illustrate the theme of Florence's devotion to the cause of liberty that he had
set forth in his Laudatio.
It was one for which Salutati’s many letters provided
evidence in abundance. Surely Bruni had no intention
of suppressing his mentor's achievement in order to appropriate it
himself—though neither here, nor anywhere else in his history, did he ever
mention his predecessor.
Going through the chancellor’s letters, Bruni will have found that Salutati’s most frequent correspondent was Bernabò Visconti
(1323-1385), the uncle of Florence’s mortal enemy Giangaleazzo (1351-1402). And he will have discovered Salutati greeting him “not just as a friend, but as a brother”, with whom he felt united
“not just in a single will, but in a single body”. Bruni,
of course, had written his Laudatio to celebrate the
victory of Florentine libertas over Milanese despotism in the war of 1390-1402. Nowhere in his account of the
War of the Eight Saints did he acknowledge Florence’s crucial alliance with
Milan. To have demonstrated that Guelf Florence had fought a war for libertas against
a French pope was perhaps not terribly awkward. But to admit that the
Florentines had actually justified that war, at the moment of truth, in
Ghibelline terms, was impossible. To acknowledge, further, that his mentor and
fellow Florentines had attained full historical awareness of their mission to
champion the cause of libertas,
not simply in a war fought against the papacy but as comrades-in-arms with
Milan, was utterly unthinkable—indeed, not to be remembered. Barbadori’s original speech to Gregory XI was consigned to
the archives and erased altogether from Bruni'’
textual repository of Florentine civic memory.
Writing in the mid-fifteenth century, when Florentine
relations with Milan were warming up as a result of the demise of the Visconti
line of dukes (1447) and the rise of Francesco Sforza, Bruni’s successor as chancellor and historian, Poggio Bracciolini, acknowledged in his account of the war that
Florence indeed had allied with Bernabò Visconti. It
had been a difficult but necessary choice forced on the Florentines by the need
to defend their liberty against papal tyranny. And Poggio wholeheartedly framed the war as a Florentine struggle for liberty, praising
the city’s citizens in a manner that echoes Salutati and anticipates Machiavelli for “judging that the fear of religion is to be set
aside when liberty is at stake, and that the censures of unfaithful men are not
to be feared”. At the same time he did so in a way that, like Bruni, entirely submerged Barbadori’s original Ghibelline defense of the Florentine position. He may not even have
known of it. And, again like Bruni, Poggio then narrated the subsequent course of the war as a
purely military and diplomatic contest between Florence and Gregory. But there
was also, in this second phase, a domestic history of the war that neither
historian chose to touch upon.
XII
After some hand-wringing, Florence's leaders
proclaimed on 11 May 1376 that as a sign of Christian devotion the city would
observe Gregory’s interdict. The laity would be denied all sacraments save
baptism, confirmation, and penance; priests were to withdraw from public
religious processions, and to withhold the consecrated host from the sight of
Florentines. The citizens’ initial response was one of proud defiance: “But we
see it in our hearts”, declared an anonymous chronicler, “and God well knows
that we are neither Saracens nor pagans; on the contrary, we are and will
remain true Christians, elected by God, Amen”. Florentine spirits were buoyed
by the auspicious rebellion of Bologna, which the city marked with a feast
devoted to Saint Benedict, and further festivities were sponsored in honor of
the Otto di guerra. Salutati spent the spring sending letters around to the rulers of Europe thanking them
for their support and cautioning them of what Gregory’s ambitions portended for
their own kingdoms. Although Florentine merchants were subject to harassment
everywhere, Gregory exempted many leading families from the penalties of the
interdict (provided they refused to pay Florentine taxes), and in Italy only
Naples and Florence’s doughty little enemy Lucca, beyond the peninsula only
Castile, officially enforced the interdict.
But as the summer wore on, so did the war. Bologna,
Perugia, and other recently liberated cities in the Patrimony began to totter.
When the Romans admitted Gregory to their city in October, Salutati bitterly chided them: “What are you doing, my good men. . . . Still expecting
the messiah who will save Israel?” In Florence, voices had been raised since
the spring in the deliberations (pratiche) of Florence’s priors and their advisers, urging
the Otto dei preti to tax
the clergy more heavily “so that they contribute just as do other citizens”,
and “so that laymen are not taxed on account of clerics”. In September a failed
peace embassy produced rage and frustration in the councils. Salvestro de' Medici now advanced a radical proposal. “The
bishops of Florence and Fiesole”, he declared to the priors, “and all the
prelates of the city of Florence, should be sent to the pope to get him to quit
the war and make peace. And if not, all the goods of the clergy should be taken
by the commune, and the war fought at their expense”.
On 25 September the councils brought this neo-Marsilian vision to life by creating yet a third commission
of eight, the Otto livellariorum (or Otto dei livelli or livellari, the Eight of Rents), charged to survey the
ecclesiastical patrimony and to expropriate clerical estates for sale to
Florentine citizens. For the “defense of liberty and of the state”, they
promised that money could thus be raised “without inconvenience to anyone, and
to the advantage of many”. But the public response was hostile. Within a few
weeks, the councils were obliged to pass additional measures reassuring
citizens that the expropriations would touch only “superfluous” ecclesiastical
wealth and promising that the clergy would “infallibly” be inscribed “as
creditors of the commune” for reimbursement of their lost revenues at an annual
rate of 5 percent on the assessed monetary value of their property. But they
also empowered the Otto to compel citizens to purchase the estates “willingly
or unwillingly”.
XIII
The Otto livellariorum proceeded to the most extensive
liquidation of an ecclesiastical patrimony carried out anywhere in Europe
before the Reformation. Hundreds of churches, monasteries, and hospitals
suffered expropriations, and thousands of Florentines were forced to purchase
ecclesiastical lands, many against their will. The hardest hit were the secular
clergy and the older male religious orders. Fully 18,326 florins worth of
episcopal estates, 87 percent of the bishopric's later 1427 catasto tax assessment, were sold to 585 purchasers, and virtually all of the cathedral
chapter's property, 8,046 florins worth, was disbursed among 191 purchasers.
Though poorer parishes in the city went largely untouched, the city’s dozen
collegiate churches, such as San Lorenzo and Santa Maria Maggiore, were
stripped nearly bare. In the countryside, poorer parishes in the Apennines were
also spared, but all the large baptismal parishes (pievi) close to the city and
south of the Arno were heavily imposed upon. Among religious, the ancient
Florentine Badia lost over half its estates, and even
deeper expropriations were made from dozens of other Benedictine, Camaldoli, and Vallombrosan monasteries. Mendicant houses and nunneries, on the other hand, suffered only
token expropriations. Among hospitals, the city’s flagship institution, Santa
Maria Nuova, though more heavily endowed than the
bishopric itself, escaped untouched. But from one-third to one-half of the
estates of the Bigallo, the Misericordia,
and San Paolo were taken, and even orphanages like San Gallo and La Scala suffered comparable expropriations.
Some Florentines exulted in the fleecing of the
clergy. Jacopo Sacchetti urged the Otto livellariorum to squeeze them “down to the dregs”, and the expropriations continued even
after the death of Gregory XI in March 1378, beyond the election of Pope Urban
VI in April, and down to the official proclamation of peace in July 1378. Nevertheless,
more than Gregory XI’s imposition of the interdict itself, it was the decision
by the Florentine government—now clearly in the grip of its radical elements—to
proceed with the spoliation of their local church that turned much of the
Florentine populace against the war. It split the republic’s leadership as
well, alienating many of those Guelfs who had originally been willing to
countenance the war only to check Gregory’s territorial ambitions. Additional
measures had to be passed compelling communal accountants to carry out their
tasks and forcing citizens to accept assignment to the magistracy of the Otto livellariorum.
This was scarcely the first time that a temporal power
had gone to war with the papacy, and Florence had been interdicted over half a
dozen times before. But this interdict now gripped with exceptional force. Its
impact cannot be credited simply to the financial and spiritual penalties
inflicted on the Florentines, much less to the stature of the pope who imposed
them. Temporal rulers since the time of Emperor Henry IV (1056-1106) in the
investiture conflict and, more recently, King Philip IV the Fair of France
(1285-1314) in his confrontations with Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) had found
natural allies against the papacy among their own clergies, who resented the
encroachments of centralizing papal administration on their own local
prerogatives. The Florentine government’s financial punishment of the
Florentine clergy for the pope’s offenses proved a colossal political blunder
that forfeited the possibility of local clerical support. And turning a war
against the papal state into an assault on local ecclesiastical institutions
shifted public attention from Gregory XI’s aims to the pretensions of Florence’s
own rulers. It required extending the state’s coercive power not only over
ecclesiastics but also over citizens. Florentines were now forced to comply
with the profanation of a sacred ecclesiastical patrimony that they had endowed
themselves, carried out in violation of what even the most cynical regarded as
fundamental property rights. They had been assured that an interdict and denial
of the cult by a manifestly evil pope and prelates meant nothing to Christ: but
what if they were truly guilty of assaulting his shepherds?
XIV
No sooner had the expropriations begun than the priors
were forced to confront a surge of public penitential processions. The
chronicler Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, who himself served in these months as a member of the Otto dei preti, observed that
throughout the city and the contado “it seemed that a compunction overcame all the
citizens, and every night, in almost every church, lauds were sung”. Every day
there were processions of upwards of twenty thousand people, with relics and
songs, “and all the people following behind”. Lay confraternities now formed
groups of flagellants, recruiting members down to the age of ten, and in all
five thousand. Wealthy young nobles were among their most enthusiastic
recruits, and they took to dispensing alms, fasting, preaching by day, and
sleeping out unsheltered by night. Stefani noted the paradox that “it seemed
indeed that they wanted to defeat and humiliate the pope, and that they wanted to
be obedient to the church”. The city's leaders directed the Dieci di libertà, a political police force, to
investigate the meetings of the flagellants, while urging the Otto livellariorum to push on with the expropriations. An atrocious massacre of civilians by
Gregory'’ Breton mercenaries at the town of Cesena in early 1377 gave
Chancellor Salutati a rich source of antipapal
propaganda to broadcast to the rest of Europe, but it provoked only an increase
of penitential processions in Florence itself.
Gregory now had the upper hand in the war and was
demanding over a million florins for a settlement. “He doesn't want to make
peace”, protested Salutati to Louis of Hungary, “he
wants to sell it!” That summer Bologna capitulated to papal forces, and that
autumn Gregory raised the stakes further by condemning Florence’s rulers for
heresy. They responded with a further act of defiance, accompanied by measures
demanding complicity of all citizens. In October 1377, “in order that by
attending masses and the clergy's other divine offices and orations, devotion
and orthodoxy may grow”, the councils passed a law requiring Florentines now to
violate the interdict. Not only would the priors attend mass daily in their private
chapel: the podestà and Captain of the People were to compel clergy to
officiate throughout the city, and laity to attend mass at least on Sundays and
feast days.
But Bishop Ricasoli and
other Florentine prelates had already fled the city. Andrea Capponi,
speaking for the government’s Standard Bearer of Justice (Gonfaloniere di giustizia), denounced them as “rebels
of the republic, and public enemies”. The mystical ascetic and church reformer
Catherine of Siena, instead, who before the war had chided Florence’s Bishop Ricasoli to “wake up from the sleep of negligence”, now
praised him for his “virile” resistance, while she condemned collaborative
clerics for their “servile fear of men”. Gregory deputed her on a peace mission
to Florence in the winter of 1377, believing, as he told her Dominican
confessor and biographer Raymond of Capua, that “they would not molest her; she
is a woman, and besides they hold her personally in high esteem”. At meetings
of the Parte Guelfa,
Catherine encouraged the politically divisive purges from public office (ammonizione) of
accused Ghibelline sympathizers that the Parte was now promoting as a means of overturning the radical government and
unblocking the path to peace. But according to Raymond, she was shocked by the
political vendetta that in turn swept the city in the spring of 1378. Stefani
reported more dryly that “on that account she was regarded almost as a
prophetess by those of the Parte, and
by others as a hypocrite and evil woman”. That summer Catherine was among those
obliged to flee the city by the July tumult of the Ciompi.
XV
Civic conflict, military reverses, and popular
resentment of the war forced the government to sue for peace in March 1378.
Gregory’s sudden death on 27 March enabled the city to negotiate terms with the
weak Roman pope Urban VI (el. 7 April), who, with the outbreak of the schism,
was soon seeking Florentine support against his rival Clement VII (20 July
1378-1394) of Avignon. At the end of July, Florence agreed to pay Urban an
indemnity of 250,000 florins (it had agreed to pay Gregory 800,000), to restore
all church property confiscated since October 1375, and, after some hesitation,
to repeal its laws touching the inquisition. But the treaty was not formally signed
in Rome until 28 August, and Salutati spent September
and October pleading with Florence’s Roman ambassadors to secure an official
bull of absolution to calm the religious crisis that had helped precipitate the Ciompi Revolt and upended the city’s politics.
The delay was caused by haggling over the first
installment of Urban’s indemnities. The broadly based
guild regime (1378-82) that recovered control of Florence from the Ciompi promptly complied with the treaty by formally
repealing the city’s anti-ecclesiastical legislation in September. But the
councils explicitly excepted all ordinances touching the Monte and thus
preserved the republic’s important fiscal claims against ecclesiastical courts
in matters of contract and usury. And Urban, though he counted heavily on the
indemnities, never received much more than 30,000 florins. Only the Florentine
populace’s hatred of the “butcher of Cesena”, Robert of Geneva, now Pope
Clement VII, prevented the post-1382 Albizzi regime
from accepting his offer to cancel them entirely, and from following Florence’s
Cardinal Piero Corsini into
the lucrative Avignon camp. But the Roman pope Gregory XII’s (1406-15) revival
of the claims was one of the reasons Florence withdrew allegiance from him on
the eve of the Council of Pisa in 1408. Among the first demands the city made
of the newly elected Pisan pope Alexander V (1409-10)
was the abrogation of the treaty, which he prudently granted.
Restoring the clergy’s confiscated property proved a
longer and more complex process that for decades left ecclesiastics dependent
on the (often inadequate) interest payments of their Monte shares and forced
many lay people to choose between restoring at a financial loss the property
they had been compelled to purchase or retaining it against their religious
consciences. Not until the civil disturbances had subsided in 1380 did the
councils, under pressure from ecclesiastics and “many officials and wise
citizens, merchants, and artisans”, pass into law a quintessentially Florentine
scheme for making restitution. Clergy would be issued 5 percent
interest-bearing shares in the Monte for sums equal to the purchase price of
the property they had lost. Restitution itself would be made in accordance with
drawings held twice annually. Citizens whose names were extracted would be
repaid the price of the property they had purchased, which would then be
restored to its original clerical owners. The clergy, in turn, were forbidden
henceforth to deny laity who had not yet made restitution the last rites and
ecclesiastical burial.
Unfortunately, the government could afford to budget
only 25,000 florins annually for the restitutions. The drawings did not get
well under way until 1383, and soon, from the late 1380s through the war
against Milan to its climax in 1402, the government was frequently obliged to
suspend the drawings, and later even the interest payments on the clergy’s Monte shares, to free up funds to meet
new war expenses “for the defense of Florentine liberty”. Only in the 1420s,
with the reunification of the papacy under Martin V (1417-31), did the
government press to complete the process, making possible in turn the
compilation of Florence's new tax inventory of lay and clerical wealth, the catasto, begun in
1427.
The restitutions not only were protracted over half a
century but also created in the meantime tremendous inequities among the clergy
and friction with the laity. As late as 1420, a quarter of the episcopal estates
remained in lay hands. Though all of the city’s smaller parishes had received
their goods by 1407, most of the larger collegiate churches had to wait until
1427. Small institutions, whose possessions had been distributed among only a
few purchasers, might receive all of them back within a few drawings—or be left
waiting for decades. Among hospitals, the Misericordia and San Paolo had recovered all of their property by 1405 and 1408: the Bigallo waited until 1426, as did most monasteries, whose
estates had been apportioned among numerous purchasers. Nor were the
restitutions always neat and straightforward: there was frequently an afterlife
of litigation. Some properties had been improved by their lay owners, others
allowed to deteriorate; some had been passed on whole in testaments, others
sold or divided up among several new owners. There were myriad disputes over
bookkeeping and interest payments. Hundreds came before the Monte officials;
dozens were appealed to the councils and the priors themselves. The last case
was not resolved until 1454.
XVI
The war fundamentally transformed the financial relations
between Florence, the papacy, and the Florentine clergy. Beforehand, Florence
had needed the papacy to serve as the judicial guarantor of the Monte. Now the
relationship of dependence was reversed. Popes from Urban VI (1378-89) to
Gregory XII (1406-15) relied on (meager) Florentine indemnity payments to keep
their finances afloat, and after the schism Popes Martin V (1417-31) and
Eugenius IV (1431-47) both sought to bolster papal finances by investing
heavily in the Monte. Through their Monte shares, the financial interests of the local Florentine clergy also became tied
to those of the Florentine state. During the process of restitution, clergy
depended on Monte interest for their
livelihood. Afterward, though occasional calls in the pratiche for new expropriations
of clerical property went unheeded, offers of Monte shares were used to secure
approval and prompt payment of further clerical taxes down to the mid-fifteenth
century, while threats to withhold interest payments if cooperation was not
forthcoming were made good against Pope Eugenius IV in 1446 and the Florentine
clergy in 1452. The detailed inventories of ecclesiastical wealth generated by
the Monte officials and, from 1427, the catasto tax
officials were used not only to carry out direct levies on the clergy but also
to monitor the movement of benefactions from laity to ecclesiastical
institutions, and even to appropriate the revenues of non-officiating (absentee) clergy. The Monte and the catasto thus became the basic bureaucratic instruments whereby
Florence circumscribed, supervised, and manipulated the financial operations of
the church within its expanding territorial state. The republic was still using
Monte shares and interest as levers on the clergy when Pius II (1458-1464)
assumed the pontificate.
Further, the financial devastation wrought by the war
did to church government in Florence what the schism did to the papacy: it
precipitated a constitutional struggle that lasted beyond the schism to the
mid-fifteenth century, in which the traditional principle of episcopal
hierarchical authority was challenged by clerical experiments with corporate
self-government. After decades of weak episcopal leadership, in the aftermath
of the Council of Constance (1414-1418) that ended the schism, the secular
clergy of the diocese took matters into their own hands by fusing conciliar and
republican principles to form a self-governing corporation that challenged the
hierarchical authority of Bishop Amerigo Corsini (1411-35; after 1419, archbishop) in order to
defend themselves against Florentine and papal tax officials. Only at
midcentury was the reforming Dominican archbishop Antoninus (1446-59) able to intervene between Florence and the papacy to defend the
clergy within the Florentine territory. Providing them with long-sought
financial relief, he was able in turn to reimpose his
own episcopal hierarchical authority over them.
XVII
Looking back, few Florentines doubted the justice of
their city's war against Pope Gregory XI. In the view of the contemporary
Stefani, the Otto di balìa “performed the greatest deeds that had ever been carried out down to that day”.
Two decades later the pious, prosperous, but politically emarginated dyer
Giovanni Morelli praised them in the Ricordi he wrote
for his son as “the most famous, sagacious and valiant men ever seen in
Florence”. Filippo Rinuccini,
whose uncle Francesco had been forced to purchase estates from the monastery of Vallombrosa, likewise believed they had “conducted
themselves valiantly” (portoronsi valentmente),
and his son Alamanno referred in his 1479 dialogue “On
Liberty” to Florence’s “greatest and most expensive war, the one against the
terrible governors of the Papal States”.
But the humble Morelli also
recalled another side of the war. “Our Lord God desired that his pastors be
chastised”, he explained, “but because that was not properly our task, since we
are sinners ourselves as well, God chastised us in turn”. Even before the
interdict was lifted, the Ciompi had risen in July
1378. The purges (ammonizioni)
of suspected Ghibellines had opened up a power struggle among Florence’s ruling
orders between resurgent partisans of the Parte Guelfa and supporters of the Otto, while the
government’s assault on local ecclesiastical institutions had had the broad
effect of destabilizing all public authority, lay as well as clerical, opening
the way for the popolo minuto now to
make a bid for political power. In July, half a dozen strategically located
churches were used as centers of Ciompi operations:
their leaders in fact styled themselves the”Eight Saints of the Balìa of the People of God”. Though
their demands were more strictly political and economic than religious,
Florence’s traditional rulers viewed the Ciompi with
horror and interpreted the uprising as a direct result of the war and, more
specifically, of the city’s assault on the local church. “For the sin committed
against the holy church of God”, noted the Florentine prior Alamanno Acciaiuoli in his chronicle of 1378, “having been led
by evil Florentine citizens to make an assault [impresa] upon it, and to provoke
so many cities and castles to rebel . . . and then, subsequently, for having
sold the possessions and goods of ecclesiastics, carrying away so much money;
and for the opprobrium, vituperation, and offenses that were inflicted daily on
ecclesiastical persons, God promised to impose this punishment [disciplina] on this our city”. Chancellor Salutati explained to Prior Ubaldino Buonamici of the church of Santo Stefano that God had
visited the schism on the papacy for its assault on Florentine libertas (and for the massacre at Cesena), the rebellion of
the Ciompi on Florence for its liquidation of the
clerical patrimony.
XVIII
Salutati spoke for the members of the Guelf reggimento that returned to power
in 1382 and found its political center in the Albizzi family. Thus, while they developed the use of institutions such as the Monte
and the catasto to control the church in their
expanding territory, they also articulated a variety of strategies aimed at
pacifying society, and legitimizing their regime, not simply by reviving old
papal Guelfism but by appropriating the legitimizing
power of local religious life and ecclesiastical institutions. Embracing and
shaping key (and acceptable) strains of public devotion, they made themselves
stewards of a project to resacralize a city that had
recently profaned itself.
The religious trauma of the war, followed by the
outbreak of the schism, had stimulated a rise in the activities of fraticelli heretics and prophets; but it also generated a surge in confraternal
foundations, new hospitals, ecclesiastical building projects, and lay
benefactions to ecclesiastics. The regime turned first to coercion, and set
boundaries, by passing a law in 1382 that condemned the fraticelli and required
Florentine officials to carry out the orders of the inquisitor. Aimed at
disciplining flagellants, prophets, and aristocrats of radical bents who had
surfaced over the last few years, the measure also put an ideological brand on
the upstart popolo minuto and
distanced the regime from the Marsilian policies of
the government of the Otto that had preceded it. But executions in 1384 and
1389 provoked worrying public revulsion. More persistently, therefore, the
government sought to shape and identify with, rather than repress, public
expressions of religious sentiment. In the century down to 1450, sixty new
confraternities were created in the city, the bulk of them penitential
societies of disciplinati.
Though the government kept a wary eye on them, confraternities provided an
important release of social tension. The Albizzi regime actively encouraged the musical development of the laudesi and incorporated
confraternities and sacre rappresentazioni into a ritual calendar of public religious holidays and dozens of new civic
oblations to key religious institutions that it expanded dramatically over the
next several decades. When, in 1399, the great movement of Bianchi penitents
reached the city gates, Florence's priors, unlike their counterparts in Milan
and Venice, welcomed them into the city and organized additional processions
throughout the surrounding countryside.
The restitution of ecclesiastical property was
accompanied by a surge of lay benefactions to ecclesiastical institutions that
continued through the fifteenth century. The completion of the cathedral, the
decoration of Orsanmichele, and the rebuilding of
such churches as Santa Trinita, San Lorenzo, and
Santa Croce were but the most notable of numerous projects that conjoined art
and power in a display of wealth and piety, carried out by opere that linked the city’s
priors, guildsmen (or, increasingly, leading parishioners), and ecclesiastics
to rebuild, repair, or redecorate the city’s churches and monasteries. The
government’s strategy of apportioning new ritual oblations to favored
ecclesiastical institutions was replicated in the distribution of gabelle exemptions, fiscal subventions, and communal assistance in the judicial pursuit
of testamental revenues to churches, monasteries, and
especially hospitals. As Poggio's De avaritia attests, the aftermath of the war saw the birth in Florence of modern
charitable philanthropy. A comparable process unfolded in the sphere of
Florentine sumptuary legislation. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries, the Florentine government superseded the episcopal court in the
regulation of such life-cycle sacraments as baptisms, marriages, and funerals,
as well as in enforcing laws regulating women's dress, gambling, and sexual
conduct (including the supervision of nunneries). Even hosting the Council of
Pisa in 1409 was embraced as an opportunity not only to legitimize one of
Florence's most recent territorial acquisitions but also to connect the
sanctification of the republic to the broader effort to reunite a universal
church whose own sanctity, and legitimacy, had been located by conciliar
theorists in the community of the faithful. "Nothing," declared
Antonio di Alessandro degli Alessandri to the priors, “would bring our republic greater merit before God, and fame
among men”.
XIX
Bruni thus articulated his secularizing vision of
Florentine republican history not only in the aftermath of the city's triumph
over Milan in 1402, nor simply against a broad cultural backdrop of waning or merely
persisting medieval religious sentiment. Florence in the early Quattrocento was
a deeply penitential society, engaged in a process of civic re-sacralization in atonement for the profanation it had
inflicted on its church during the War of the Eight Saints. The evidence of
heightened Florentine religious sensibility abounds, as Bruni noted in his Laudatio,
in the city’s built environment. Bruni aimed not to
contest but to complement this lavish display of Florentine piety. Though he
has been lauded for his modern, critical approach to sources and documents,
more lay behind his narrative selections (and omissions) than critical method,
classical historiography, and rhetorical schematization.
Bruni would have been writing his account of the War of the
Eight Saints in book 8 roughly in the years 1434-36. He had begun the Historiarum florentini populi libri XII upon his
return to Florence in 1415 after a decade’s service in the Papal Curia, and by
the time he completed the first six books (to 1343) in 1429, his assumption of
the chancellorate in 1427 had given them official
status. Hostilities with Milan had resumed under Giangaleazzo Visconti’s son Filippo Maria (1392-1447) in 1423, and
in 1436 Pier Candido Decembrio challenged republican Florence—and Bruni—by issuing
his own imperial panegyric of Milan. In the biography of Dante that he wrote
that year, Bruni disparaged the poet’s Ghibelline Monarchia and, as
we have seen, he omitted entirely from his history of the Eight Saints the
Florentines’ Ghibelline defense of their policies before Pope Gregory XI in
1376. At a time when many Florentines still wondered whether the destruction of
papal power in central Italy had not in fact opened the door to Milanese
aggression, and when Florence had just joined Pope Eugenius IV in engaging the
condottiere Francesco Sforza against Milan (1434), Bruni likewise deemed it inopportune to highlight the birth of Salutati’s new historical vision of libertas in the war Florence had fought alongside Milan against the papacy. Rather, the
triumph of Florentine republican libertas remained attached, in Bruni’s historical narrative, to the Florentine victory over Milan in a manner that
canceled the failures of its earlier conflict with the church.
Nor was this the moment to open up the domestic
history of the war. In 1434 Pope Eugenius IV was forced to flee from Rome to
Florence, where he found shelter for nearly a decade. But it was scarcely to
appease this weak pope that Bruni suppressed from his
account of the war every reference to the city’s spoliation of its
ecclesiastical patrimony. Rather, it was the religious sensibilities,
anxieties, and memories of the Florentine public that he sought to assuage. Two
years after Eugenius’s arrival in the city—again in
1436—at great Florentine expense and with lavish ceremony, the pope consecrated
the newly completed Florentine cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, which had
been erected on the site of the old Santa Reparata,
demolished in 1375. This was the capstone of that entire process of religious
commemoration and civic re-sacralization that had
been under way since the end of the War of the Eight Saints, one which the Albizzi regime had embraced and overseen, and which
Florence's new Medici rulers aimed to inherit. Two years later they underwrote
the Council of Florence (1438-39), again to connect the resanctified republic to a broader project to unify Christendom. Bruni chose not, in his history, to point back to the spoliation of its
ecclesiastical patrimony that Florence had carried out during the war, and to
the subsequent decades of restitution, that had necessitated this project. If
the memories now being inscribed into the city's sacred urban fabric were to be
piously conveyed to posterity, the legitimizing narrative of the Florentine
republic would have to be detached from much of the history of its own church.
The artistic commemoration of a Florentine respublica christiana entailed the construction of
a purified, expurgated—and thus, secularized—narrative of the respublica florentina.
The sacralization of Florentine space—and
memory—required the textual secularization of Florentine history, and time.
The Florentine response to the War of the Eight Saints
offers a remarkable study in the calculated disjunctures between historical events, historical writing, and public memory. Without the
archival documents, it would be impossible to hear the silences in Bruni’s and his successors’ humanist texts. Those silences,
in turn, echo the trauma of events willingly forgotten. Bruni was buried with a copy of his history: in his eulogy, Poggio praised it as a work “through which the fame and name of Florence will
certainly come down to posterity and even into eternity”, and an anonymous
panegyric noted that Bruni “embellished a history in
twelve books by which he kept alive the memory of many things done by Florence
which were already being forgotten”. The reverse was also true. Bruni’s authoritative history successfully reconfigured
Florentine memory by attaching the theme of republican libertas to the war against
Milan, while consigning the moment of Florentine Ghibellinism and sacrilege—and much of Florence's religious history since the Eight
Saints—to oblivion.
XX
But the clergy remembered, and it fell to Archbishop Antoninus, who at midcentury supervised the last stage of
the restitutions and reordered the clergy’s finances and government, to recount
the domestic history of the War of the Eight Saints and the city’s assault on
its church. In his universal Cronica, less widely circulated than his Summa theologica,
and much less so than Bruni’s history, Antoninus willingly acknowledged his debt to the humanist’s
work. But Antoninus well knew the history of the
Florentine church and was unwilling to accommodate the construction of a civic
self-image that silently wrote it out of republican memory and into pious
oblivion. Thus, where Bruni turned in his narrative
to the movements of troops and diplomats, the archbishop instead brought the
penitents and prophets back into the city’s streets.
He offered a full account of the Florentines’ expropriation of clerical
property, “so that all the while with the goods of the clergy they could fight
against the church”, explained in detail the restitution process, and noted
that “nevertheless, many of [these goods] were lost, either through negligence,
or in the oblivion and passage of time”. And, unlike Bruni and Poggio, Antoninus revived the views of Acciaiuoli and Salutati by connecting the war and the expropriations
directly to the revolt of the Ciompi—and to God's
chastising judgment on the city. The Florentines had spent “infinite” sums of
money and had been interdicted and excommunicated while their enemies grew
stronger. Then had come civic strife, the struggles between citizens and the popolo minuto, and
finally the domination of the vilissima plebs,
the Ciompi. Thus, reminded the strict archbishop, “the
Florentines did not walk away unpunished”.
Antoninus’s episcopal reforms enabled him to reassert
ecclesiastical control of the sacred in Florentine life and gave him political
capital that he spent defending the republic. Like their Albizzi predecessors, the Medici pursued a policy of cultivating religious legitimation
that was a legacy of the “Eight Saints”. But when they moved to consolidate
their power in 1458 by pushing for the abolition of secret balloting in the
city’s councils, Antoninus threatened their partisans
with excommunication. They were obliged to abandon quiet subversion and to
resort instead to an open coup (parlamento), at the same time choosing political power over
the trappings of legitimacy. Thereafter, although Lorenzo de' Medici lavishly
underwrote public religious festivals and married members of his family into
families of the Papal Curia, the widening gap between private religious
sensibility and ostentatious public display became a staple of late-fifteenth-century
Florentine discussion.
At the end of the fifteenth century, Savonarola,
reaching deep into the city’s civic memory, cited Antoninus as a precedent for his own efforts to revive Florence’s republican and
religious traditions. But given the historiographical tradition they had
inherited from Bruni, it was natural that neither
Machiavelli nor Guicciardini should regard the
prophet as other than an anomaly, or even notice his ties to the reforming Antoninus. In the wake of Savonarola’s execution in 1498,
with the Medici restored to Florence by their kinsmen Popes Leo X and Clement
VII in the early sixteenth century, Machiavelli turned to ruminate on the
possibility of exercising political power in a state without credible
"divine institutions”. Guicciardini, in turn,
arranged his personal life and writings around that historical partition
between politics and religion that he had inherited from his Quattrocento
humanist predecessors. It has remained a staple of the European memory of the
Renaissance virtually to this day.
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