The capital of Tuscany--according to its most respectable and veracious
chroniclers--is the oldest city extant. Its history is traced with great
accuracy up to the Deluge, which is as much as could be reasonably
expected. The egg of Florence is Fiesole. This city, according to the
conscientious and exhaustive Villani, [Footnote: Cronica. Lib. I. c. vii.]
was built by a grandson of Noah, Attalus by name, who came into Italy in
order "to avoid the confusion occasioned by the building of the Tower of
Babel." [Footnote: "per evitare la confusione creata per la edificazione
della torre di Babel," etc.] Noah and his wife had, however, already made
a visit to Tuscany, soon after the Deluge; so that it is not remarkable
that "King Attalus" should have felt inclined to visit the estates of his
ancestor. At the same time, it is obvious that the Noahs had not been
satisfied with the locality, and had reëmigrated; for Attalus, upon his
arrival, found Italy entirely without inhabitants. He, therefore, with
great propriety claimed jurisdiction over the whole country, elected
himself king, and his wife Electra queen; built himself a palace, with a
city attached to it; and in short, made himself, generally, at home. We
are also fortunate in having some genealogical particulars as to his wife's
antecedents; and it is to be regretted that modern historians, of the
skeptical, the irreverent, and the startling schools, could not imitate
the gravity, the good faith, and the respect for things established, by
which the elder chroniclers were inspired. The apothecaries of the Middle
Ages never dealt so unkindly with the Pharaohs of Egypt, as the historical
excavators of more recent times have done with the embalmed, crowned, and
consecrated mummies which they have been pleased to denounce as delusions.
Your Potiphars or your Mizraims, even when converted into balsam, or
employed as a styptic, were at least not denuded of their historical
identity by the druggists who reduced their time-honored remains to
a powder. Their dust was made merchandise, but their characters were
respected. Moreover, there was an object and a motive, even if mistaken
ones, on the part of the mediæval charlatans. But what ointment, what
soothing syrup, what panacea has been the result of all this pulverizing of
Semiramis and Sardanapalus, Mucius Scævola and Junius Brutus? Are all the
characters graven so deeply by the stylus of Clio upon so many monumental
tablets, and almost as indelibly and quite as painfully upon school-boy
memory, to be sponged out at a blow, like chalk from a blackboard? We, at
least, cling fondly to our Tarquins; we shudder when the abyss of historic
incredulity swallows up the familiar form of Mettus Curtius; we refuse to
be weaned from the she-wolf of Romulus. Your unbelieving Guy Faux, who
approaches the stately superstructures of history, not to gaze upon them
with the eye of faith and veneration, but only that he may descend to the
vaults, with his lantern and his keg of critical gunpowder, in order to
blow the whole fabric sky-high,--such an ill-conditioned trouble-tomb
should be burned in effigy once a year.
Electra, then, wife of Attalus, founder and king of Fiesole, was of very
brilliant origin, being no less than one of the Pleiades, and the only one
of the sisters who seems to have married into a patriarchal family. "The
reason why the seven stars are seven is a pretty reason"; but it is not
"because they are not eight," as Lear suggests, but, as we now discover
by patient investigation, because one of them had married and settled in
Tuscany. We are not informed whether the lost Pleiad, thus found on the
Arno, was happy or not, after her removal from that more elevated sphere
which she had just begun to move in. But if respectability of connection
and a pleasant locality be likely to insure contentment to a fallen star,
we have reason to believe that she found herself more comfortable than
Lucifer was after his emigration.
Great care must be taken not to confound Attalus with Tantalus,--a blunder
which, as Villani observes, [Footnote: Cron. Lib. I. c. vii.] is often
committed by ignorant chroniclers. But Tantalus, as we all very well know,
was the son of Jupiter, and grandson of Saturn. Now we are quite sure
that Noah never married a daughter of Saturn, because that voracious
heathen ate up all his children except Jupiter. This simple fact precludes
all possibility of a connection with Saturn by the mother's side, and
illustrates the advantage of patient historical investigation, when founded
upon a reverence for traditional authority. Had it not been for such an
honest chronicler as Giovanni Villani, our historic thirst might have been
tantalized for seven centuries longer with this delusion. Certainly, to
confound Tantalus, ancestor of all the Trojans, with Attalus, ancestor of
all the Tuscans, would be worse than that "confusion of Babel" which the
quiet-loving potentate came to Florence to avoid.
Attalus brought with him from Babel an eminent astrologer and civil
engineer, who assured him, after careful experiments, that, of all places
in Europe, the mount of Fiesole was the healthiest and the best. He was
therefore ordered to build the city there at once. When finished, it was
called _Fia sola_, because of its solitariness; Attalus, in consequence
of his participation in the Babel confusion, having become familiar with
Tuscan several thousand years before that language was invented. The city,
thus auspiciously established, flourished forty or fifty centuries, more
or less, without the occurrence of any event worth recording, down to the
time of Catiline. The Fiesolans, unfortunately, aided and comforted that
conspirator in his designs against Rome, and were well punished for their
crime by Julius Cæsar, who battered their whole town about their ears, in
consequence, and then ploughed up their territory, and sowed it with salt.
The harvest of that agricultural operation was reaped by Florence; for the
conqueror immediately afterwards, by command of the Roman Senate, converted
a little suburb at the bottom of the hill into a city. Into this the
Fiesolans removed at once, and found themselves very comfortable there;
being saved the trouble of going up and down a mountain every time they
came out and went home again. Florence took its name from one Fiorino,
marshal of the camp, in the Roman army, who was killed in the battle of
Fiesole. As he was the flower of chivalry, his name was thought of good
augury; the more so, as roses and lilies sprang forth plenteously from the
spot where he fell. Hence the fragrant and poetical name which the City of
Flowers has retained until our days; and hence the cognizance of the three
flowers-de-luce which it has borne upon its shield. Julius Cæsar, whose
sword had severed the infant city from its dead mother in so Cæsarean a
fashion, had set his heart upon calling the town after himself, and took
the contrary decree of the Roman Senate very much in dudgeon. He therefore
left the country in a huff, and revenged himself by annihilating vast
numbers of unfortunate Gauls, Britons, Germans, and other barbarians, who
happened to come in his way.
The first public edifice of any importance erected in the city was a temple
to Mars, with a colossal statue of that divinity in the midst of it. This
is the present baptistery, formerly cathedral, of Saint John; for the
temple never was destroyed, and never can be destroyed, until the day of
judgment. This we know on the authority of more than one eminent historian.
It is also proved by an inscription to that effect in the mosaic pavement,
which any one may inspect who chooses to do so. [Footnote: Villani, Cron.
Lib. I. c. xlii.]
The town was utterly destroyed A.D. 450, by Totila, _Flagellum Dei_,
who, with great want of originality, immediately rebuilt Fiesole; thus
repeating, but reversing, the achievement of the Romans five hundred years
before. So Fiesole and Florence seem to have alternately filled and emptied
themselves, like two buckets in a well, down to the time of Charlemagne.
That emperor rebuilt Florence, but experienced some difficulty in doing
so, by reason of the statue of Mars, which had been thrown into the Arno.
The temple, converted to Christian purposes, had been the only building to
escape the wrath of Totila; but owing to the pagan incantations practised
when the town was originally consecrated to the god of war, the statue of
that divinity would not consent to lie quietly and ignominiously in the bed
of the Arno, while his temple and town were appropriated to other purposes.
The river was dragged. The statue was found and set upon a column near the
edge of the river, on a spot which is now the head of the Ponte Vecchio.
True to its pugnacious character, it brought nothing but turbulence and
bloodshed upon the town. The long and memorable feuds between the Guelphs
and Ghibellines began by the slaying of Buondelmonte in his wedding dress,
at the base of the statue. (A.D. 1215.)
There could be no better foundation for romance or drama than the famous
Buondelmonte marriage, before which, sings Dante, Florence had never cause
to shed a tear, and after which the white lily of her escutcheon was dyed
red in her heart's blood. There were four noble families in Florence, of
surpassing importance,--the Buondelmonti, the Uberti, the Donati, and the
Amidei. A match-making widow of the Donati has a daughter of extraordinary
beauty, whom she intends to bestow in marriage upon the young chief of the
Buondelmonti. Before she has time to complete her arrangements, however,
Buondelmonte betroths himself to a daughter of the house of Amidei. Signora
Donati waylays him, as he passes the door, and suddenly displays to him the
fatal beauty of her daughter. "She should have been your bride," said the
widow, "had you not been so hasty." The gentleman, dazzled by the beauty
of the girl, and satisfied by the prudent mother as to the dowry, marries
Signorina Donati upon the spot. Next day, riding across the Ponte Vecchio
upon a white horse, he is beset by a party of friends and relatives of
the deserted damsel, and killed close by the statue of Mars. All the
nobles of Florence take part in the question; upon one side the Nerli, the
Frescobaldi, the ----; but "courage, gentle reader," as Tristram Shandy
observes, in his famous historical chapter upon Calais; "I scorn it; 'tis
enough to have thee in my power; but to make use of the advantage which the
fortune of the pen has now gained over thee would be too much."
Thirty years long, then, the town gates were all fastened, and the streets
all chained, so as to make many little compact inclosures for slaughtering
purposes; while the whites and blacks, Guelphs and Ghibellines, red caps
and brown, all buffeted each other pell-mell. To the exhaustion thus
produced of noble blood is often ascribed the establishment of a popular
government at the close of the thirteenth century. The causes lay really
much deeper, however,--in the great revolutions consequent upon the
extinction of the Suabian dynasty, and in the wonderful progress in culture
made by the Florentine democracy.
O Buondelmonte, quanto mal fuggisti
Le nozze sue per gli altrui conforti!
Molti sarebber lieti, che son tristi,
Se Dio t' avesse conceduto ad Ema
La prima volta ch' a città venisti.
Ma conveniasi a quella pietra scema
Che guarda il ponte, che Fiorenza fesse
Vittima nella sua pace postrema.
Con queste genti, e con altre con esse,
Vid' io Fiorenza in sì fatto riposo,
Che non avea cagione onde piangesse.
Con queste genti vid' io glorioso
E giusto il popol suo tanto, che 'l giglio
Non era ad asta mai posto a ritroso,
Nè per division fatto vermiglio.
_Paradiso_, XVI. 140-154.