The Stones of Florence (8 page)

At a later period, the hills were planted over with olive trees, grapes, cypresses, parasol pines; near the cities, handsome villas were built, with gardens, terraces, lemon trees growing in tubs. Yet the peculiar beauty of the Tuscan landscape is in the combination of husbandry with an awesome, elemental majesty and silence; the olives’ silver and the varied greens of the growing crops appear an embroidered veil on a wilderness of bare geology, of cones and cups and solid triangles cut out by a retreating glacier. The knightly era, which turned the landscape of the Veneto into a magic story, with every distant hill topped by a pink castle, was wiped off the map of Tuscany by the wars of the burgher towns. Except for an occasional ruin, the remnants of a grey wall or a tower, rural Tuscany has only convents and abbeys as
ricordi
of the medieval days, for it was a great place for holy persons; hermits and saints flocked here to live in caves or grottoes, preach, see visions, and found monasteries. The Irish and Scottish saints felt a special call to Tuscany; many were buried here and left their names to churches or villages, like San Frediano in Lucca, and San Pellegrino (which means simply ‘pilgrim’) delle Alpi. Saint Bridget’s brother, Blessed Andrew, founded the monastery of San Martino on the river Mensola, just outside Florence, and she herself was flown by an angel from Ireland to Tuscany to join him, in answer to his dying wish. She then built a church, on her own, and retired to live in a cave in the hills.

The nobles of the
contado,
who were unable, in their original savage state, as the documents testify, to write their own names, were also scarcely Christianized, being fond of pillaging convents and monasteries and playing crude jokes on the monks and lay brothers whom they captured in their raids. ‘Pacified’, they brought down into the town of Florence from their feudal mountain lairs the tower-building habit, like animals—moles or beavers—conforming to the instinct of their species. They also brought with them the blood feud and the vendetta. The first towers were built in Florence in the eleventh century; by the twelfth, there were well over a hundred, concentrated in the old quarter around the Mercato Vecchio and what is now the Piazza della Signoria. These rough towers, bearing names like the Lion Tower, the Flea Tower, the Snake Tower, became symbols of insolent prepotency, of that harsh and overbearing character which was forever after attributed to the Florentines by their neighbours:
‘Gent’ è avara, invidiosa, e superba’.
That, Dante said, was the reputation of the Florentines from olden time, and, in another place, he said that the Pisans looked on them as a wild pack of mountaineers.

‘Stingy, envious, and proud,’ the Florentines were possessed by a ferocious independence and rivalry, a determination to be outdone by no one. This, all the old chroniclers agree, was the cause of their civic turmoils: a boundless ambition and its corollary, an overweening envy. Every man wished to be first, and no man could tolerate that anyone should be ahead of him. The towers grew steadily taller as the burghers copied the nobles, and the city became a sort of multiple Babel, with many towers two hundred feet high and some even higher. In 1250, the year of the first democracy (called the
Primo Popolo),
the height of the towers was ordered to be reduced by two thirds, and enough material is supposed to have been left from this to build the city walls beyond the Arno. A democratic tendency, among the poorer artisans, appeared very early in Florence, to match the pride of the nobles and the greed of the burghers. The reduction of the towers to an equal height (none was to exceed ninety-six feet) was a symbol of the levelling process. Today, they are nearly all gone; viewed from across the river, at Piazzale Michelangelo, where a copy of ‘David’, the Giant-Killer, stands, Florence appears a level city, whose uniform low sky line is only broken by the civic tower of Palazzo Vecchio, by the Bargello, by the three great domes of Brunelleschi—the Duomo, San Lorenzo, and Santo Spirito—and by the bell towers of the Duomo, the Badia, and of the two churches of the preaching orders—Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce. From the time of Arnolfo di Cambio, who began work on the Duomo in 1296, just after the fall of the second democracy, a characteristic trait of Florentine building has been the heavy stressing of horizontals.

In early times, however, the towers had a function which was not one of mere ostentation or the vaunting of family greatness. They were used to withstand a siege, just as they had been in the mountain passes, but now within the city, in the feuds that began to break out, between one family or clan and another, or between one family and the rest of the
comune.
Each family or group of families had a tower adjoining the house of its chief, with a little bridge connecting the tower to the house’s upper storey. The more powerful families had a whole series of towers, clustered together, or dispersed throughout the city. After some deed of vengeance had been committed, the clan would take refuge in its tower or towers, hurling stones and burning pitch down into the street at its opponents. The houses adjoining a belligerent tower, when not burned to the ground, were often destroyed by the heavy scaling engines used in the attack. Barricades were thrown up in the streets, and it was unsafe for an ordinary citizen to go out during a feud. Men sent to repair Ponte Vecchio after one of the great floods appeared in chain mail, with axes, and the unfurled banner of their parish, to protect them while they worked against the fighting magnates. This happened in 1178, on one of the occasions when the statue of Mars had been swept into the river; the year before, the first civil war had been started in Florence, by the Uberti, ancestors of Farinata. The war, between the Uberti and the ruling oligarchy, lasted two years and burned down half the old city. During this time, says Davidsohn, citing a fourteenth-century tradition, the tormented citizens, meeting together, debated leaving Florence and starting a new city somewhere else.

Earlier, in the eleventh century, a passionate and illiterate young noble, on his way up to San Miniato one Good Friday, met the man who had killed his brother; on an impulse, perhaps because it was Good Friday and the man threw out his hands to him for mercy, in the gesture of Christ on the cross, he spared his life and, coming into the church, knelt down to pray before a painted Crucifix, which gravely bowed its head to him, commending his restraint. This was Saint Giovanni Gualberto, the founder of the Vallombrosan order, an extraordinary figure whose fight against simony was of crucial importance for the eleventh-century religious revival but who is remembered in story less as a pioneer church reformer than as the man who renounced a blood feud. In fact, he was a typical Florentine extremist who kept the city in uproar for the next forty years with his brawling monks and their partisans, causing great scandal and embarrassing the pope, himself a religious reformer and firebrand—Urban II. Giovanni made Florence the headquarters of the reform movement, carrying the fight into the piazza, where monks of his party appeared armed with swords to meet the bishop’s faction. Blood shed by the truculent monks was sopped up, on one occasion, by pious women, with cloths, which were then preserved in reliquary vessels. The saint, meanwhile, remained in his convent in the Vallombrosan forest, directing operations, struggling against sins of the flesh, to which his manly nature was prone, and learning to write his name.

Religious sects of various kinds flourished in medieval Florence, which oscillated between an extreme fanaticism and an equable, enlightened tolerance. On the one hand, it was a centre of Epicureanism, as it was then understood (Farinata degli Uberti was supposed to have been an Epicurean, that is, a pagan sceptic and materialist given over to bodily pleasure); on the other, it was a hotbed of puritan theory and practice. The Patarene heresy, which resembled the Albigensian, made thousands of converts here during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Florence, in fact, was the seat of a Patarene ‘diocese’, the most powerful in Italy, with its own bishops and clergy. This puritan sect believed that this world was wholly ruled by the devil; they were vegetarians and pacifists who refused to marry or take oaths; they did not believe in baptism or the Eucharist or in prayers and alms for the dead or in the veneration of relics, pictures, or images, and they thought that all the popes from Saint Sylvester on (he was responsible for the so-called ‘Donation of Constantine’, that is, for the temporal power of the Church) were condemned to eternal damnation. Such uncompromising doctrines had a profound attraction for the Florentines, who thirsted periodically for religious reform as they thirsted for an ideal state. In Saint Giovanni Gualberto and the early Tuscan hermits can be seen the precursors, like so many shaggy Baptists, of the great Franciscan religious revivalist movement and, finally, of Savonarola. This strain of zealotry in the Florentine temperament is no doubt the reason the Florentine churches today strike the eye as ‘protestant’ or ‘reformed’, in comparison with the churches of Lucca, Siena, Venice, Rome. The Florentines have, in both senses, an iconoclastic, image-breaking nature. If Savonarola had prevailed, Luther would not have been needed.

The Reformation was anticipated in Florence in the eleventh century. The fight against simony or the trafficking in religious offices was the same, essentially, as the fight against indulgences. But it is characteristic, also, of the city, so changeable in its passions, so black and white, so either-or, that something like the Counter Reformation took place here in the thirteenth century, when the Inquisition, under Saint Peter Martyr, organized two lay groups, the Crocesegnati and the Compagnia della Fede, to exterminate the Patarene movement. And this battle, too, was fought in the streets and the piazzas. Peter, wearing his Dominican habit and grasping a red-cross banner, led his sodalities, which were really military bands, into action. Near Santa Maria Novella, where he used to fulminate from the pulpit, occurred the horrible massacre of the Patarenes; the spot is marked by a cross called the Croce al Trebbio and a peculiar lone column. Another column, near the church of Santa Felicita, on the other side of the Arno, not far from Ponte Vecchio, marks the site of another holy massacre. In the Spanish Chapel in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella, the Inquisitor-Saint is shown, in his black-and-white Dominican habit, accompanied by a pack of black-and-white dogs (the Hounds of the Inquisition), who are helping him snuffle out heresy. This saint was subsequently stabbed to death
(i.e.,
‘martyred’) by a heretic on his way from Como to Milan. In north Italian painting, he is usually represented with a knife through his head; the Florentines sometimes showed him with his finger to his lips, which is thought to be a symbol of the Inquisition. The Spanish Chapel is called that because the Spanish suite of Eleanor of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I, were accustomed to hear mass here; the
trecento
frescoes on the walls, depicting the triumph of orthodoxy over heresy, which seem to us today somewhat quaint in their subject matter, must have formed for them, early in the Counter Reformation, a congenial picture of the world—only the rack and the faggots were lacking. Meanwhile, Peter Martyr’s armed columns, having disposed of the Patarenes, devoted themselves to good works, founding hospitals and tending the sick. Their brotherhood, which was now known as the Brotherhood of Mercy and had its centre in the Bigallo, opposite the Duomo, became the original Red Cross. These brethren, masked, in their black hoods (their identities are officially kept secret for humility’s sake), can still be seen sometimes alighting from an automobile with a stretcher late in the afternoon outside a tenement in one of the poorer quarters—Santo Spirito, Santa Croce, or San Frediano—to take a sick person to the hospital.

Such shifts in public attitude were as characteristic of Florentine medieval politics as they were of Florentine medieval religion, and in politics, too, they were attended by terrible outbreaks of cruelty. An alternating current, reversing itself at very short intervals, seemed to run through this people like a dangerous electrical fluid. No one could hold public office with safety, and charges of heresy mingled with charges of treason. The Guelphs were called
‘traditori’,
and the Ghibellines were called Patarenes. ‘In ancient and modern times,’ wrote the chronicler Giovanni Villani, ‘it has always happened in Florence that anyone who made himself head of the people has always been humbled by that same people, who are never inclined to give due praise or acknowledge merit.’ He was speaking of the fall of Giano della Bella, his contemporary, a puritan in politics, the first tragic figure, after Brutus, in political history. A completely disinterested man, an aristocrat who made himself a commoner out of love of justice, he was accepted by the people as their leader in the fight for ‘full democracy’ late in the thirteenth century, which meant widening the base of the electorate by increasing the number of the minor ‘Arts’ or guilds to include small merchants and craftsmen—oil merchants, innkeepers, cutlers, woodworkers, bakers, and so on.

In his zeal against the lawless nobles of his own class and the greedy ‘special interests’ of the great wool and banking guilds (represented at this period by the Guelph party), Giano inspired the fearful ‘Ordinances of Justice’ (1292–94), which were a genuine instrument of terror and which gave the political informer, for the first time in democratic history, a regular status in society. Under the Ordinances of Justice, the greatest injustices were perpetrated: offenders (
i.e.
, anti-democrats or non-democrats) could be convicted on rumour and public opinion only, without the presentation of evidence; the nobles were excluded from every honour and office, and every individual was made liable for the crimes committed by his relations. Boxes called
‘Tamburi’
were set up outside the Podestà’s palace (the Bargello) and the house of the captain of the people to receive secret denunciations. Seventy-three families were deprived of their civic rights, and families at this time were veritable tribes; one man, for example, had thirty cousins and nephews under arms. It was during this period, of the
Secondo Popolo,
that many aristocratic families changed their names and became plebeians to blend with the environment as the Jews in Spain and Portugal used to have themselves baptized during the Inquisition: the Tornaquinci turned into the Tornabuoni, the Calvacanti into the Clampoli, and the Marabottini into the Malatesti.