Val d'Arno/Lecture 04
LECTURE IV.
parted per pale.
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 ascendency 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 1250,—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]
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 Cæsars. 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. Sampson 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,[2] 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 dozen places of recognized convenience, but ended in the evening; and, on the following day, the leaders determined in contented 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,[3] 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.
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[4] 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.
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 tor 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 to-day,") 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[5] and standard; and elected a council of twelve ancients, constituting a seniory or signoria, to deliberate on and direct public affairs.
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 Lucca; 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:—
105. A. Sesto, (sixth part of the city,) of the other side of Arno.
| Gonfalon | 1. Gules; a ladder, argent. | |
| 2. Argent; a scourge, sable. | ||
| 3. Azure; (una piazza bianca con nicchi vermigli). | ||
| 4. Gules; a dragon, vert. | ||
| B. Sesto of St. Peter Scheraggio. | ||
| 1. Azure; a chariot, or. | ||
| 2. Or; a bull, sable. | ||
| 3. Argent; a lion rampant, sable. | ||
| 4. (A lively piece, "pezza gagliarda") Barry of (how many? ) pieces, argent and sable. | ||
You may as well note at once of this kind of bearing, called 'gagliarda' by Villani, that these groups of piles, pales, bends, and bars, were called in English heraldry 'Restrial bearings,' "in respect of their strength and solid substance, which is able to abide the stresse and force of any triall they shall be put unto."[6] And also that, the number of bars being uncertain, I assume the bearing to be 'barry,' that is, having an even number of bars; had it been odd, as of seven bars, it should have been blazoned, argent; three bars, sable; or, if so divided, sable, three bars argent.
| This lively bearing was St. Pulinari's. | |||
| C. Sesto of Borgo. | |||
| 1. Or; a viper, vert. | |||
| 2. Argent; a needle, (?) (aguglia) sable. | |||
| 3. Vert; a horse unbridled; draped, argent, a cross, gules. | |||
| D. Sesto of St. Brancazio. | |||
| 1. Vert; a lion rampant, proper. | |||
| 2. Argent; a lion rampant, gules. | |||
| 3. Azure; a lion rampant, argent. | |||
| E. Sesto of the Cathedral gates. | |||
| 1. Azure; a lion (passant?) or. | |||
| 2. Or; a dragon, vert. | |||
| 3. Argent; a lion rampant, azure, crowned, or. | |||
| F. Sesto of St. Peter's gates. | |||
| 1. Or; two keys, gules. | |||
| 2. An Italian (or more definitely a Greek and Etruscan bearing; I do not know how to blazon it;) concentric bands, argent and sable. This is one of the remains of the Greek expressions of storm; hail, or the Trinacrian limbs, being put on the giant's shields also. It is connected besides with the Cretan labyrinth, and the circles of the Inferno. | |||
| 3. Parted per fesse, gules and vai (I don't know if vai means grey—not a proper heraldic colour—or vaire). | |||
106. Of course Hubert of Lucca did not determine these bearings, but took them as he found them, and appointed them for standards;[7] he did the same for all the country parishes, and ordered them to come into the city at need. "And in this manner the old people of Florence ordered itself; and for more strength of the people, they ordered and began to build the palace which is behind the Badia,—that is to say, the one which is of dressed stone, with the tower; for before there was no palace of the commune in Florence, but the signory abode sometimes in one part of the town, sometimes in another.
107. "And as the people had now taken state and signory on themselves, they ordered, for greater strength of the people, that all the towers of Florence—and there were many 180 feet high[8]—should be cut down to 75 feet, and no more; and so it was done, and with the stones of them they walled the city on the other side Arno."
108. That last sentence is a significant one. Here is the central expression of the true burgess or townsman temper,—resolute maintenance of fortified peace. These are the walls which modern republicanism throws down, to make boulevards over their ruins.
109. Such new order being taken, Florence remained quiet for— full two months. On the 13th of December, in the same year, died the Emperor Frederick II.; news of his death did not reach Florence till the 7th January, 1251. It had chanced, according to Villani, that on the actual day of his death, his Florentine vicegerent, Rinieri of Montemerlo, was killed by a piece of the vaulting[9] of his room falling on him as he slept. And when the people heard of the Emperor's death, "which was most useful and needful for Holy Church, and for our commune," they took the fall of the roof on his lieutenant as an omen of the extinction of Imperial authority, and resolved to bring home all their Guelphic exiles, and that the Ghibellines should be forced to make peace with them. Which was done, and the peace really lasted for full six months; when, a quarrel chancing with Ghibelline Pistoja, the Florentines, under a Milanese podesta, fought their first properly communal and commercial battle, with great slaughter of Pistojese. Naturally enough, but very unwisely, the Florentine Ghibellines declined to take part in this battle; whereupon the people, returning flushed with victory, drove them all out, and established pure Guelph government in Florence, changing at the same time the flag of the city from gules, a lily argent, to argent, a lily gules; but the most ancient bearing of all, simply parted per pale, argent and gules, remained always on their carroccio of battle,—"Non si muto mai."
110. "Non si muto mai." Villani did not know how true his words were. That old shield of Florence, parted per pale, argent and gules, (or our own Saxon Oswald's, parted per pale, or and purpure,) are heraldry changeless in sign; declaring the necessary balance, in rulingmen, of the Rational and Imaginative powers; pure Alp, and glowing cloud.
Church and State—Pope and Emperor—Clergy and Laity,—all these are partial, accidental—too often, criminal—oppositions; but the bodily and spiritual elements, seemingly adverse, remain in everlasting harmony.
Not less the new bearing of the shield, the red fleur-de-lys, has another meaning. It is red, not as ecclesiastical, but as free. Not of Guelph against Ghibelline, but of Labourer against Knight. No more his serf, but his minister.
His duty no more 'servitium,' but 'ministerium,' 'mestier.' We learn the power of word after word, as of sign after sign, as we follow the traces of this nascent art. I have sketched for you this lily from the base of the tower of Giotto. You may judge by the subjects of the sculpture beside it that it was built just in this fit of commercial triumph; for all the outer bas-reliefs are of trades.
111. Draw that red lily then, and fix it in your minds as the sign of the great change in the temper of Florence, and in her laws, in mid-thirteenth century; and remember also, when you go to Florence and see that mighty tower of the Palazzo Vecchio (noble still, in spite of the calamitous and accursed restorations which have smoothed its rugged outline, and effaced with modern vulgarisms its lovely sculpture)—terminating the shadowy perspectives of the Uffizii, or dominant over the city seen from Fesole or Bellosguardo,—that, as the tower of Giotto is the notablest monument in the world of the Religion of Europe, so, on this tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, first shook itself to the winds the Lily standard of her liberal,—because honest,—commerce.
- ↑ 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 favourites 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.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Sismondi, vol. ii., chap. ii.; G. Villani, vi., 33.
- ↑ Lynx.
- ↑ 'Corporal,' literally.
- ↑ Guillim, sect. ii., chap. 3.
- ↑ We will examine afterwards the heraldry of the trades, chap, xi., Villani.
- ↑ 120 braccia.
- ↑ "Una volta ch'era sopra la camera."