90. The chart of Italian intellect and policy which I have endeavoured
to put into form in the last three lectures, may, I hope, have given you
a clear idea of the subordinate, yet partly antagonistic, position
which the artist, or merchant,--whom in my present lecture I shall class
together,--occupied, with respect to the noble and priest. As an honest
labourer, he was opposed to the violence of pillage, and to the folly
of pride: as an honest thinker, he was likely to discover any
latent absurdity in the stories he had to represent in their nearest
likelihood; and to be himself moved strongly by the true meaning of
events which he was striving to make ocularly manifest. The painter
terrified himself with his own fiends, and reproved or comforted himself
by the lips of his own saints, far more profoundly than any verbal
preacher; and thus, whether as craftsman or inventor, was likely to
be foremost in defending the laws of his city, or directing its
reformation.
91. The contest of the craftsman with the pillaging soldier is typically
represented by the war of the Lombard League with Frederick II.; and
that of the craftsman with the hypocritical priest, by the war of the
Pisans with Gregory IX. (1241). But in the present lecture I wish only
to fix your attention on the revolutions in Florence, which indicated,
thus early, the already established ascendancy of the moral forces which
were to put an end to open robber-soldiership; and at least to compel
the assertion of some higher principle in war, if not, as in some
distant day may be possible, the cessation of war itself.
The most important of these revolutions was virtually that of which I
before spoke to you, taking place in mid-thirteenth century, in the
year l250,--a very memorable one for Christendom, and the very crisis of
vital change in its methods of economy, and conceptions of art.
92. Observe, first, the exact relations at that time of Christian and
Profane Chivalry. St. Louis, in the winter of 1248-9, lay in the isle
of Cyprus, with his crusading army. He had trusted to Providence for
provisions; and his army was starving. The profane German emperor,
Frederick II., was at war with Venice, but gave a safe-conduct to the
Venetian ships, which enabled them to carry food to Cyprus, and to
save St. Louis and his crusaders. Frederick had been for half his life
excommunicate,--and the Pope (Innocent IV.) at deadly spiritual and
temporal war with him;--spiritually, because he had brought Saracens
into Apulia; temporally, because the Pope wanted Apulia for himself.
St. Louis and his mother both wrote to Innocent, praying him to be
reconciled to the kind heretic who had saved the whole crusading army.
But the Pope remained implacably thundrous; and Frederick, weary of
quarrel, stayed quiet in one of his Apulian castles for a year.
The repose of infidelity is seldom cheerful, unless it be criminal.
Frederick had much to repent of, much to regret, nothing to hope,
and nothing to do. At the end of his year's quiet he was attacked by
dysentery, and so made his final peace with the Pope, and heaven,--aged
fifty-six.
93. Meantime St. Louis had gone on into Egypt, had got his army
defeated, his brother killed, and himself carried captive. You may be
interested in seeing, in the leaf of his psalter which I have laid on
the table, the death of that brother set down in golden letters, between
the common letters of ultramarine, on the eighth of February.
94. Providence, defied by Frederick, and trusted in by St. Louis, made
such arrangements for them both; Providence not in anywise regarding the
opinions of either king, but very much regarding the facts, that the one
had no business in Egypt, nor the other in Apulia.
No two kings, in the history of the world, could have been happier, or
more useful, than these two might have been, if they only had had the
sense to stay in their own capitals, and attend to their own affairs.
But they seem only to have been born to show what grievous results,
under the power of discontented imagination, a Christian could achieve
by faith, and a philosopher by reason. [1]
[Footnote 1: It must not be thought that this is said in disregard of
the nobleness of either of these two glorious Kings. Among the many
designs of past years, one of my favorites was to write a life of
Frederick II. But I hope that both his, and that of Henry II. of
England, will soon be written now, by a man who loves them as well as I
do, and knows them far better.]
95. The death of Frederick II. virtually ended the soldier power
in Florence; and the mercantile power assumed the authority it
thenceforward held, until, in the hands of the Medici, it destroyed the
city.
We will now trace the course and effects of the three revolutions which
closed the reign of War, and crowned the power of Peace.
96. In the year 1248, while St. Louis was in Cyprus, I told you
Frederick was at war with Venice. He was so because she stood, if not
as the leader, at least as the most important ally, of the great Lombard
mercantile league against the German military power.
That league consisted essentially of Venice, Milan, Bologna, and Genoa,
in alliance with the Pope; the Imperial or Ghibelline towns were, Padua
and Verona under Ezzelin; Mantua, Pisa, and Siena. I do not name the
minor towns of north Italy which associated themselves with each party:
get only the main localities of the contest well into your minds. It
was all concentrated in the furious hostility of Genoa and Pisa; Genoa
fighting really very piously for the Pope, as well as for herself; Pisa
for her own hand, and for the Emperor as much as suited her. The mad
little sea falcon never caught sight of another water-bird on the wing,
but she must hawk at it; and as an ally of the Emperor, balanced Venice
and Genoa with her single strength. And so it came to pass that the
victory of either the Guelph or Ghibelline party depended on the final
action of Florence.
97. Florence meanwhile was fighting with herself, for her own amusement.
She was nominally at the head of the Guelphic League in Tuscany; but
this only meant that she hated Siena and Pisa, her southern and western
neighbours. She had never declared openly against the Emperor. On the
contrary, she always recognized his authority, in an imaginative manner,
as representing that of the Caesars. She spent her own energy chiefly in
street-fighting,--the death of Buondelmonti in 1215 having been the root
of a series of quarrels among her nobles which gradually took the form
of contests of honour; and were a kind of accidental tournaments, fought
to the death, because they could not be exciting or dignified enough on
any other condition. And thus the manner of life came to be customary,
which you have accurately, with its consequences, pictured by
Shakspeare. Samson bites his thumb at Abraham, and presently the streets
are impassable in battle. The quarrel in the Canongate between the
Leslies and Seytons, in Scott's 'Abbot,' represents the same temper; and
marks also, what Shakspeare did not so distinctly, because it would have
interfered with the domestic character of his play, the connection of
these private quarrels with political divisions which paralyzed the
entire body of the State.--Yet these political schisms, in the earlier
days of Italy, never reached the bitterness of Scottish feud, [1]
because they were never so sincere. Protestant and Catholic Scotsmen
faithfully believed each other to be servants of the devil; but the
Guelph and Ghibelline of Florence each respected, in the other, the
fidelity to the Emperor, or piety towards the Pope, which he found it
convenient, for the time, to dispense with in his own person. The street
fighting was therefore more general, more chivalric, more good-humoured;
a word of offence set all the noblesse of the town on fire; every one
rallied to his post; fighting began at once in half a dozen places of
recognized convenience, but ended in the evening; and, on the following
day, the leaders determined in contended truce who had fought best,
buried their dead triumphantly, and better fortified any weak points,
which the events of the previous day had exposed at their palace
corners. Florentine dispute was apt to centre itself about the gate of
St. Peter, [2] the tower of the cathedral, or the fortress-palace of the
Uberti, (the family of Dante's Bellincion Berti and of Farinata), which
occupied the site of the present Palazzo Vecchio. But the streets of
Siena seem to have afforded better barricade practice. They are as steep
as they are narrow--extremely both; and the projecting stones on their
palace fronts, which were left, in building, to sustain, on occasion,
the barricade beams across the streets, are to this day important
features in their architecture.
[Footnote 1: Distinguish always the personal from the religious feud;
personal feud is more treacherous and violent in Italy than in Scotland;
but not the political or religious feud, unless involved with vast
material interests.]
[Footnote 2: Sismondi, vol. ii., chap. ii.; G. Villani, vi., 33.]
98. Such being the general state of matters in Florence, in this year
1248, Frederick writes to the Uberti, who headed the Ghibellines,
to engage them in serious effort to bring the city distinctly to
the Imperial side. He was besieging Parma; and sent his natural son,
Frederick, king of Antioch, with sixteen hundred German knights, to give
the Ghibellines assured preponderance in the next quarrel.
The Uberti took arms before their arrival; rallied all their Ghibelline
friends into a united body, and so attacked and carried the Guelph
barricades, one by one, till their antagonists, driven together by local
defeat, stood in consistency as complete as their own, by the gate
of St. Peter, 'Scheraggio.' Young Frederick, with his German riders,
arrived at this crisis; the Ghibellines opening the gates to him; the
Guelphs, nevertheless, fought at their outmost barricade for four days
more; but at last, tired, withdrew from the city, in a body, on the
night of Candlemas, 2nd February, 1248; leaving the Ghibellines and
their German friends to work their pleasure,--who immediately
set themselves to throw down the Guelph palaces, and destroyed
six-and-thirty of them, towers and all, with the good help of Niccola
Pisano,--for this is the occasion of that beautiful piece of new
engineering of his.
99. It is the first interference of the Germans in Florentine affairs
which belongs to the real cycle of modern history. Six hundred years
later, a troop of German riders entered Florence again, to restore its
Grand Duke; and our warmhearted and loving English poetess, looking on
from Casa Guidi windows, gives the said Germans many hard words, and
thinks her darling Florentines entirely innocent in the matter. But if
she had had clear eyes, (yeux de lin [1] the Romance of the Rose calls
them,) she would have seen that white-coated cavalry with its heavy guns
to be nothing more than the rear-guard of young Frederick of Antioch;
and that Florence's own Ghibellines had opened her gates to them.
Destiny little regards cost of time; she does her justice at that
telescopic distance just as easily and accurately as close at hand.
[Footnote 1: Lynx.]
100. "Frederick of _Antioch_." Note the titular coincidence. The
disciples were called Christians first in Antioch; here we have our
lieutenant of Antichrist also named from that town. The anti-Christian
Germans got into Florence upon Sunday morning; the Guelphs fought on
till Wednesday, which was Candlemas;--the Tower of the Death-watch was
thrown down next day. It was so called because it stood on the Piazza of
St John; and all dying people in Florence called on St. John for help;
and looked, if it might be, to the top of this highest and best-built of
towers. The wicked anti-Christian Ghibellines, Nicholas of Pisa helping,
cut the side of it "so that the tower might fall on the Baptistery. But
as it pleased God, for better reverencing of the blessed St. John, the
tower, which was a hundred and eighty feet high, as it was coming down,
plainly appeared to eschew the holy church, and turned aside, and fell
right across the square; at which all the Florentines marvelled, (pious
or impious,) and the _people_ (anti-Ghibelline) were greatly delighted."
101. I have no doubt that this story is apocryphal, not only in its
attribution of these religious scruples to the falling tower; but in
its accusation of the Ghibellines as having definitely intended the
destruction of the Baptistery. It is only modern reformers who feel the
absolute need of enforcing their religious opinions in so practical a
manner. Such a piece of sacrilege would have been revolting to Farinata;
how much more to the group of Florentines whose temper is centrally
represented by Dante's, to all of whom their "bel San Giovanni" was
dear, at least for its beauty, if not for its sanctity. And Niccola
himself was too good a workman to become the instrument of the
destruction of so noble a work,--not to insist on the extreme
probability that he was also too good an engineer to have had his
purpose, if once fixed, thwarted by any tenderness in the conscience of
the collapsing tower. The tradition itself probably arose after the
rage of the exiled Ghibellines had half consented to the destruction,
on political grounds, of Florence itself; but the form it took is of
extreme historical value, indicating thus early at least the suspected
existence of passions like those of the Cromwellian or Garibaldian
soldiery in the Florentine noble; and the distinct character of the
Ghibelline party as not only anti-Papal, but profane.
102. Upon the castles, and the persons of their antagonists, however,
the pride, or fear, of the Ghibellines had little mercy; and in their
day of triumph they provoked against themselves nearly every rational as
well as religious person in the commonwealth. They despised too much the
force of the newly-risen popular power, founded on economy, sobriety,
and common sense; and, alike by impertinence and pillage, increased the
irritation of the civil body; until, as aforesaid, on the 20th October,
1250, all the rich burgesses of Florence took arms; met in the square
before the church of Santa Croce, ("where," says Sismondi, "the republic
of the dead is still assembled today,") thence traversed the city to the
palace of the Ghibelline podesta; forced him to resign; named Uberto of
Lucca in his place, under the title of Captain of the People; divided
themselves into twenty companies, each, in its own district of the city,
having its captain [1] and standard; and elected a council of twelve
ancients, constituting a seniory or signoria, to deliberate on and
direct public affairs.
[Footnote 1: 'Corporal,' literally'.]
103. What a perfectly beautiful republican movement! thinks Sismondi,
seeing, in all this, nothing but the energy of a multitude; and entirely
ignoring the peculiar capacity of this Florentine mob,--capacity of two
virtues, much forgotten by modern republicanism,--order, namely; and
obedience; together with the peculiar instinct of this Florentine
multitude, which not only felt itself to need captains, but knew where
to find them.
104. Hubert of Lucca--How came they, think you, to choose _him _out of
a stranger city, and that a poorer one than their own? Was there no
Florentine then, of all this rich and eager crowd, who was fit to govern
Florence?
I cannot find any account of this Hubert, Bright mind, of Ducca; Villani
says simply of him, "Fu il primo capitano di Firenze."
They hung a bell for him in the Campanile of the Lion, and gave him
the flag of Florence to bear; and before the day was over, that 20th
of October, he had given every one of the twenty companies their flags
also. And the bearings of the said gonfalons were these. I will give you
this heraldry as far as I can make it out from Villani; it will be very
useful to us afterwards; I leave the Italian when I cannot translate
it:--