Republic of Florence

“ Opposite to us, to the north, rises the hill upon which stands Etruscan Fiesole, from which the people of Florence originally came: "that ungrateful and malignant people," Dante once called them, "who of old came down from Fiesole." Behind us stand the fortifications which mark the death of the Republic, thrown up or at least strengthened by Michelangelo in the city's last agony, when she barred her gates and defied the united power of Pope and Emperor to take the State that had once chosen Christ for her king. ”

“ The sun had indeed set of the most noble Republic in all history.
Alessandro dei Medici, the reputed son of Lorenzo by a mulatto woman, was now made hereditary ruler of Florence by the Emperor, whose illegitimate daughter he married, and by the Pope. For a time, the Duke behaved with some decency; but after the death of Clement in 1534, he showed himself in his true light as a most abominable tyrant, and would even have murdered Michelangelo, who had been working upon the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo. ”

“ Equally vain was the attempt to keep the peace by separating the leaders of the disturbances. They were banished by a kind of ostracism; they departed in ostentatious meekness, Corso Donato to plot at Rome, Vieri de' Cerchi to return immediately to Florence. Anarchy had got too fast a hold on the city, and it required a stronger hand than that of the pope, or the signory of the republic, to keep it down.
Yet Florence prospered. Every year it grew richer, more intellectual, more refined, more beautiful, more gay. ”

“ When Florence, however, by achieving the long-desired conquest of Pisa, at last became mistress of the sea, and witnessed the rapid increase of her commerce, she discovered that the annexation of a great and powerful republic, full of life and strength and possessed of so large a trade, brought her none of the advantages which might have ensued from a union of a freer kind with an equal distribution of political rights. ”

“ His personality, combined with the widely ramifying banking relations of the Medici, gave him an almost European influence. His popularity among the mountaineers and in the country districts, from which armed soldiery were ever ready to pour down into the city in his defence, made him the fitting man for the ever increasing external sway of Florence. The forms of the Republic were preserved, but he consolidated his power by a general levelling and disintegration, by severing the nerves of the State and breaking the power of the Guilds. ”

“ These mercantile aristocrats ruled the Republic with so much energy and zeal, precisely because the aggrandisement of Florence conduced at the same time to the increase of their own wealth and commerce. Thus a city whose population was seldom more than 100,000, and often shrank far below that number, and whose narrow territory was surrounded by so many enemies, was enabled to become a State feared by the rest of Italy, and respected throughout Europe. ”

“ The Guelf party of Florence, though it was the life and soul of the republic, and irresistible in its disposal of the influence and arms of Florence, and though it embraced a large number of the most powerful families, is always spoken of as something distinct from, and external to, the governing powers, and the whole body of the people. ”

“ Their palaces and towers were destroyed, while the Uberti and their allies with the Emperor's German troops held the city. This lasted not two years. In 1250, on the death of Frederick II., the Republic threw off the yoke, and the first democratic constitution of Florence was established, the Primo Popolo, in which the People were for the first time regularly organised both for peace and for war under a new officer, the Captain of the People, whose appointment was intended to outweigh the Podestà, the head of the Commune and the leader of the nobles. ”

“ Florence was now a thoroughly democratic and commercial republic, and its whole policy was mainly dominated by commercial considerations: its rivalry with Pisa was due to an ambition to gain secure access to the sea; its strong Guelphism was the outcome of its determination to secure the bank-business of the papacy; and its desire to extend its territory in Tuscany to the necessity for keeping open the land trade routes. ”

“ Dante has branded these two warrior monks as hypocrites, but, as Capponi says, from this Bottega issued at once and almost spontaneously the Republic of Florence. Their great achievement was the thorough organisation of the seven greater Guilds, of which more presently, to each of which were given consuls and rectors, and a gonfalon or ensign of its own, around which its followers might assemble in arms in defence of People and Commune. To counteract this, Guido Novello brought in more troops from the Ghibelline cities of Tuscany, and increased the taxes to pay his Germans ”

“ Florence was the centre of the Humanism of the Renaissance, the revival of Grecian culture, the blending of Christianity and Paganism, the aping of antiquity in theory and in practice. In the pages of Vespasiano we are given a series of lifelike portraits of the scholars of this epoch, who thronged to Florence, served the State as Secretary of the Republic or occupied chairs in her newly reorganised university, or basked in the sun of Strozzian or Medicean patronage. Niccolò Niccoli, who died in 1437, is one of the most typical of these scholars ”

“ The art of stirring division among their foes, of supporting the weaker party against overbearing neighbours, of constantly contriving to rouse half Italy against every potentate risen to sufficient strength to be a terror to their own Republic, was the invariable means by which Florence maintained her independence in the midst of States who were losing their liberty, and in the midst of the numerous and formidable foes pressing about her on all sides. And345 this successful policy was the work of the greater guilds, or rather of the prosperous trading class (popolani grassi) . ”

“ Whenever a new city was conquered and subjected to the Republic, it was governed more or less harshly; allowed to retain more or fewer local privileges; sometimes even permitted to retain a republican form of government, subject to the authority of a Podestà, captain, or commissary, and paying the taxes imposed by them; but its inhabitants never enjoyed the freedom of the City, nor were their representatives by any chance admitted to the councils or political offices of Florence. ”

“ The learned have yet to arrange, examine, and illustrate the endless series of provisions, statutes, consulte, pratiche, ambassadorial reports, and, in short, of all the State papers of the Republic, many of which are still unsought and undiscovered. Nevertheless, we believe that, without attempting for the present any complete history of Florence, some rather useful work may be performed. ”

“ He recalled the remembrance of the injuries done to the republic by the governor of Lucca; his malevolent disposition toward them; and their embarrassing situation with regard to him, if the pope or the duke were to make war upon them; and concluded that no enterprise was ever undertaken by the people of Florence with such perfect facility, more positive advantage, or greater justice in its favor. ”

“ But the Florentine Republic was to have a more glorious sunset. In 1527, while the imperial troops sacked Rome, the Florentines for the third time expelled the Medici and re-established the Republic, with first Niccolò Capponi and then Francesco Carducci as Gonfaloniere. In this sunset Machiavelli died; Andrea del Sarto painted the last great Florentine fresco; Michelangelo returned to serve the State in her hour of need. The voices of the Piagnoni were heard again from San Marco, and Niccolò Capponi in the Greater Council carried a [143] resolution electing Jesus Christ king of Florence. ”

“ Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, who hoped to make himself King of Italy by violence as he had made himself Duke of Milan by treachery, and intended to be crowned in Florence. Pisa was finally and cruelly conquered in 1406; Cortona was obtained as the result of a prolonged war with King Ladislaus of Naples in 1414, in which the Republic had seemed once more in danger of falling into the hands of a foreign tyrant; and in 1421 Leghorn was sold to the Florentines by the Genoese, thus opening the sea to their merchandise. ”

“ A revulsion in public sympathy was only natural. Ordinary citizens had from the first resented the application of torture to the best blood of Florence. The well-known figure of the bright young Tornabuoni was soon missed; men remembered the brilliant marriage-feast, when he had led home the pride of Florence, the beautiful Giovanna d' Albizzi. The loss of territory and trade, the famine, the faction, the ferocity of the new republic were contrasted with what men began to call the joyous times before 1494. The responsibility for the judicial crime was fixed upon Valori ”

“ 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. ”

“ The most elevated political thought and the most varied forms of human development are found united in the history of Florence, which in this sense deserves the name of the first modern State in the world. ”

“ The old King Ferrante of Naples died, and his successor Alfonso prepared to meet the torrent of French arms which Ludovico Sforza, the usurping Duke of Milan, had invited into Italy.
In art and in letters, as well as in life and general conduct, this epoch of the Quattrocento is one of the most marvellous chapters in the history of human thought; the Renaissance as a wave broke over Italy, and from Italy surged on to the bounds of Europe. And of this "discovery by man of himself and of the world," Florence was the centre ”

“ From the close of 1260, the year of the battle of Montaperti, down to 1266, when the rule of Count Guido and King Manfred came to an end, the history of Florence records no remarkable event. The city's freedom is crushed, its wars reduced to petty and inglorious party strife, and its new institutions, if worthy to be so called, have no effect on the historical development of the Florentine constitution. ”

“ France, with the fierce Swiss infantry, the light Gascon skirmishers, the gigantic Scottish bowmen–uomini bestiali as the Florentines called them–in all about 12,000 men. The procession swept through the gaily decked streets over the Ponte Vecchio, wound round the Piazza della Signoria, and then round the Duomo, amidst deafening cries of Viva Francia from the enthusiastic people. ”

“ Thus, in accumulating riches and power, Florence was only multiplying the causes of her approaching and unavoidable decline. The Commune seemed increasingly incapable of giving birth to the modern State, and accordingly, when its chief support, commerce, began to decay, the strength of the burghers was sapped, and the oppressed multitude, now a formidable majority, speedily looked to monarchical rule for their relief. Thus the Medici were enabled to attain supremacy in the name of freedom, and with the support of people and populace. ”

“ We see that they all took a continuous and eager share in political life, inasmuch as every guild was an independent, self-ruling institution, with separate magistrates, laws, statutes, and councils, and that it became a centre of industrial, intellectual, and political activity. Thanks to this freedom of circulation, the pulse of the Florentine people was quickened to redoubled strength, and every faculty of the human mind, all moral and political energy of which man is capable, suddenly rose to a prodigious height in Florence. ”

“ For it was the day fixed for the entry of the King of France into Florence, and though he came under the pretence of peace and an invitation to a treaty, he came stained with Italian blood and in the guise of a conqueror. And the Conte della Mirandola had been among the brightest in the bright rule of the resplendent Medici. Giovanni Pico had been at the death-bed of the great Lorenzo, who had spoken almost his last words to the gentle youth who had heard the Friar he had brought to Florence, Frà Girolamo, refuse the haughty ruler absolution unless he gave Florence her liberty. ”

“ The citizens assembled in the church of Santa Reparata, to form the new government, and appointed fourteen citizens, half from the nobility and half from the people, who, with the archbishop, were invested with full authority to remodel the state of Florence. ”

“ These buildings were completed in a few years; nor did our city ever enjoy a greater state of prosperity than in those times: filled with men of great wealth and reputation; possessing within her walls 30,000 men capable of bearing arms, and in the country 70,000, while the whole of Tuscany, either as subjects or friends, owed obedience to Florence. And although there might be some indignation and jealousy between the nobility and the people, they did not produce any evil effect, but all lived together in unity and peace. ”

“ The hero of this Magna Charta of Florence is a certain Giano della Bella, a noble who had fought at Campaldino and had now joined the people; a man of untractable temper, who knew not how to make concessions; somewhat anti-clerical and obnoxious to the Pope, but consumed by an intense and savage thirst for justice, upon which the craftier politicians of both sides played. ”