Val d'Arno/Lecture 05
LECTURE V.
pax vobiscum.
112. My last lecture ended with a sentence which I thought, myself, rather pretty, and quite fit for a popular newspaper, about the 'lily standard of liberal commerce.' But it might occur, and I hope did occur, to some of you, that it would have been more appropriate if the lily had changed colour the other way, from red to white, (instead of white to red,) as a sign of a pacific constitution and kindly national purpose.
113. I believe otherwise, however; and although the change itself was for the sake of change merely, you may see in it, I think, one of the historical coincidences which contain true instruction for us.
Quite one of the chiefest art-mistakes and stupidities of men has been their tendency to dress soldiers in red clothes, and monks, or pacific persons, in black, white, or grey ones. At least half of that mental bias of young people, which sustains the wickedness of war among us at this day, is owing to the prettiness of uniforms.
Make all Hussars black, all Guards black, all troops of the line black; dress officers and men, alike, as you would public executioners; and the number of candidates for commissions will be greatly diminished. Habitually, on the contrary, you dress these destructive rustics and their officers in scarlet and gold, but give your productive rustics no costume of honour or beauty; you give your peaceful student a costume which he tucks up to his waist, because he is ashamed of it; and dress your pious rectors, and your sisters of charity, in black, as if it were their trade instead of the soldier's to send people to hell, and their own destiny to arrive there.
114. But the investiture of the lily of Florence with scarlet is a symbol,—unintentional, observe, but not the less notable,—of the recovery of human sense and intelligence in this matter. The reign of war was past; this was the sign of it;—the red glow, not now of the Towers of Dis, but of the Carita, "che appena fora dentro al fuoco nota." And a day is coming, be assured, when the kings of Europe will dress their peaceful troops beautifully; will clothe their peasant girls "in scarlet, with other delights," and "put on ornaments of gold upon their apparel"; when the crocus and the lily will not be the only living things dressed daintily in our land, and the glory of the wisest monarchs be indeed, in that their people, like themselves, shall be, at least in some dim likeness, "arrayed like one of these."
115. But as for the immediate behaviour of Florence herself, with her new standard, its colour was quite sufficiently significant in that old Symbolism, when the first restrial bearing was drawn by dying fingers dipped in blood. The Guelphic revolution had put her into definite political opposition with her nearest, and therefore,—according to the custom and Christianity of the time,—her hatefullest, neighbours,—Pistoja, Pisa, Siena, and Volterra. What glory might not be acquired, what kind purposes answered, by making pacific mercantile states also of those benighted towns! Besides, the death of the Emperor had thrown his party everywhere into discouragement; and what was the use of a flag which flew no farther than over the new palazzo?
16. Accordingly, in the next year, the pacific Florentines began by ravaging the territory of Pistoja; then attacked the Pisans at Pontadera, and took 3,000 prisoners; and finished by traversing, and eating up all that could be ate in, the country of Siena; besides beating the Sienese under the castle of Montalcino. Returning in triumph after these benevolent operations, they resolved to strike a new piece of money in memory of them,—the golden Florin!
117. This coin I have placed in your room of study, to be the first of the series of coins which I hope to arrange for you, not chronologically, but for the various interest, whether as regards art or history, which they should possess in your general studies. "The Florin of Florence," (says Sismondi,) "through all the monetary revolutions of all neighbouring countries, and while the bad faith of governments adulterated their coin from one end of Europe to the other, has always remained the same; it is, to-day," (I don't know when, exactly, he wrote this, - but it doesn't matter,) "of the same weight, and bears the same name and the same stamp, which it did when it was struck in 1252." It was gold of the purest title, (24 carats,) weighed the eighth of an ounce, and carried, as you see, on one side the image of St. John Baptist, on the other the Fleur-de-lys. It is the coin which Chaucer takes for the best representation of beautiful money in the Pardoner's Tale: this, in his judgment, is the fairest mask of Death. Villani's relation of its moral and commercial effect at Tunis is worth translating, being in the substance of it, I doubt not, true.
118. "And these new florins beginning to scatter through the world, some of them got to Tunis, in Barbary; and the King of Tunis, who was a worthy and wise lord, was greatly pleased with them, and had them tested; and finding them of fine gold, he praised them much, and had the legend on them interpreted to him,—to wit, on one side 'St. John Baptist,' on the other 'Florentia.' So seeing they were pieces of Christian money, he sent for the Pisan merchants, who were free of his port, and much before the King (and also the Florentines traded in Tunis through Pisan agents),—[see these hot little Pisans, how they are first everywhere,]—and asked of them what city it was among the Christians which made the said florins. And the Pisans answered in spite and envy, 'They are our land Arabs.' The King answered wisely, 'It does not appear to me Arabs' money; you Pisans, what golden money have you got?' Then they were confused, and knew not what to answer. So he asked if there was any Flon-ntine among them. And there was found a merchant from the other-side-Arno, by name Peter Balducci, discreet and wise. The King asked him of the state and being of Florence, of which the Pisans made their Arabs,—who answered him wisely, showing the power and magnificence of Florence; and how Pisa, in comparison, was not, either in land or people, the half of Florence; and that they had no golden money; and that the gold of which those florins had been made was gained by the Florentines above and beyond them, by many victories. Wherefore the said Pisans were put to shame, and the King, both by reason of the florin, and for the words of our wise citizen, made the Florentines free, and appointed for them their own Fondaco, and church, in Tunis, and gave them privileges like the Pisans. And this we know for a truth from the same Peter, having been in company with him at the office of the Priors."
119. I cannot tell you what the value of the piece was at this time: the sentence with which Sismondi concludes his account of it being only useful as an example of the total ignorance of the laws of currency in which many even of the best educated persons at the present day remain.
"Its value," he says always the same, "answers to eleven francs forty centimes of France."
But all that can be scientifically said of any piece of money is that it contains a given weight of a given metal. Its value in other coins, other metals, or other general produce, varies not only from day to day, but from instant to instant.
120. With this coin of Florence ought in justice to be ranked the Venetian zecchin;[1] but of it I can only thus give you account in another place,—for I must at once go on now to tell you the first use I find recorded, as being made by the Florentines of their new money.
They pursued in the years 1253 and 1254 their energetic promulgation of peace. They ravaged the lands of Pistoja so often, that the Pistojese submitted themselves, on condition of receiving back their Guelph exiles, and admitting a Florentine garrison into Pistoja. Next they attacked Monte Reggione, the March-fortress of the Sienese; and pressed it so vigorously that Siena was fain to make peace too, on condition of ceasing her alliance with the Ghibellines. Next they ravaged the territory of Volterra: the townspeople, confident in the strength of their rock fortress, came out to give battle; the Florentines beat them up the hill, and entered the town gates with the fugitives.
121. And, for note to this sentence, in my long-since-read volume of Sismondi, I find a cross-fleury at the bottom of the page, with the date 1254 underneath it; meaning that I was to remember that year as the beginning of Christian warfare. For little as you may think it, and grotesquely opposed as this ravaging of their neighbours' territories may seem to their pacific mission, this Florentine army is fighting in absolute good faith. Partly self-deceived, indeed, by their own ambition, and by their fiery natures, rejoicing in the excitement of battle, they have nevertheless, in this their "year of victories,"—so they ever afterwards called it,—no occult or malignant purpose. At least, whatever is occult or malignant is also unconscious; not now in cruel, but in kindly jealousy of their neighbours, and in a true desire to communicate and extend to them the privileges of their own new artisan government, the Trades of Florence have taken arms. They are justly proud of themselves; rightly assured of the wisdom of the change they have made; true to each other for the time, and confident in the future. No army ever fought in better cause, or with more united heart. And accordingly they meet with no check, and commit no error; from tower to tower of the field fortresses,—from gate to gate of the great cities,—they march in one continuous and daily more splendid triumph, yet in gentle and perfect discipline; and now, when they have entered Volterra with her fugitives, after stress of battle, not a drop of blood is shed, nor a single house pillaged, nor is any other condition of peace required than the exile of the Ghibelline nobles. You may remember, as a symbol of the influence of Christianity in this result, that the Bishop of Volterra, with his clergy, came out in procession to meet them as they began to run[2] the streets, and obtained this mercy; else the old habits of pillage would have prevailed.
122. And from Volterra, the Florentine army entered on the territory of Pisa; and now with so high prestige, that the Pisans at once sent ambassadors to them with keys in their hands, in token of submission. And the Florentines made peace with them, on condition that the Pisans should let the Florentine merchandise pass in and out without tax;—should use the same weights as Florence,—the same cloth measure,—and the same alloy of money.
123. You see that Mr. Adam Smith was not altogether the originator of the idea of free trade; and six hundred years have passed without bringing Europe generally to the degree of mercantile intelligence, as to weights and currency, which Florence had in her year of victories.
The Pisans broke this peace two years afterwards, to help the Emperor Manfred; whereupon the Florentines attacked them instantly again; defeated them on the Serchio, near Lucca; entered the Pisan territory by the Val di Serchio; and there, cutting down a great pine tree, struck their florins on the stump of it, putting, for memory, under the feet of the St. John, a trefoil "in guise of a little tree." And note here the difference between artistic and mechanical coinage. The Florentines, using pure gold, and thin, can strike their coin anywhere, with only a wooden anvil, and their engraver is ready on the instant to make such change in the stamp as may record any new triumph. Consider the vigour, popularity, pleasantness of an art of coinage thus ductile to events, and easy in manipulation.
124. It is to be observed also that a thin gold coinage like that of the English angel, and these Italian zecchins, is both more convenient and prettier than the massive gold of the Greeks, often so small that it drops through the fingers, and, if of any size, inconveniently large in value.
125. It was in the following year, 1255, that the Florentines made the noblest use of their newly struck florins, so far as I know, ever recorded in any history; and a Florentine citizen made as noble refusal of them. You will find the two stories in Giovanni Villani, Book 6th, chapters 61, 62. One or two important facts are added by Sismondi, but without references. I take his statement as on the whole trustworthy, using Villani's authority wherever it reaches; one or two points I have further to explain to you myself, as I go on.
126. The first tale shows very curiously the mercenary and independent character of warfare, as it was now carried on by the great chiefs, whether Guelph or Ghibelline. The Florentines wanted to send a troop of five hundred horse to assist Orvieto, a Guelph town, isolated on its rock, and at present harassed upon it. They gave command of this troop to the Knight Guido Guerra de' Conti Guido, and he and his riders set out for Orvieto by the Umbrian road, through Arezzo, which was at peace with Florence, though a Ghibelline town. The Guelph party within the town asked help from the passing Florentine battalion; and Guido Guerra, without any authority for such action, used the troop of which he was in command in their favour, and drove out the Ghibellines. Sismondi does not notice what is quite one of the main points in the matter, that this troop of horse must have been mainly composed of Count Guide's own retainers, and not of Florentine citizens, who would not have cared to leave their business on such a far-off quest as this help to Orvieto. However, Arezzo is thus brought over to the Florentine interest; and any other Italian state would have been sure, while it disclaimed the Count's independent action, to keep the advantage of it. Not so Florence. She is entirely resolved, in these years of victory, to do justice to all men, so far as she understands it; and in this case it will give her some trouble to do it, and worse,—cost her some of her fine new florins. For her counter-mandate is quite powerless with Guido Guerra. He has taken Arezzo mainly with his own men, and means to stay there, thinking that the Florentines, if even they do not abet him, will take no practical steps against him. But he does not know this newly risen clan of military merchants, who quite clearly understand what honesty means, and will put themselves out of their way to keep their faith. Florence calls out her trades instantly, and with gules, a dragon vert, and or, a bull sable, they march, themselves, angrily up the Val d'Arno, replace the adverse Ghibellines in Arezzo, and send Master Guido de' Conti Guido about his business. But the prettiest and most curious part of the whole story is their equity even to him, after he had given them all this trouble. They entirely recognize the need he is under of getting meat, somehow, for the mouths of these five hundred riders of his; also they hold him still their friend, though an unmanageable one; and admit with praise what of more or less patriotic and Guelphic principle may be at the root of his disobedience. So when he claims twelve thousand lire,—roughly, some two thousand pounds of money at present value,—from the Guelphs of Arezzo for his service, and the Guelphs, having got no good of it, owing to this Florentine interference, object to paying him, the Florentines themselves lend them the money,—and are never paid a farthing of it back.
127. There is a beautiful "investment of capital" for your modern merchant to study! No interest thought of, and little hope of ever getting back the principal. And yet you will find that there were no mercantile "panics" in Florence in those days, nor failing bankers,[3] nor "clearings out of this establishment—any reasonable offer accepted."
128. But the second story, of a private Florentine citizen, is better still.
In that campaign against Pisa in which the florins were struck on the root of pine, the conditions of peace had been ratified by the surrender to Florence of the Pisan fortress of Mutrona, which commanded a tract of seaboard below Pisa, of great importance for the Tuscan trade. The Florentines had stipulated for the right not only of holding, but of destroying it, if they chose; and in their Council of Ancients, after long debate, it was determined to raze it, the cost of its garrison being troublesome, and the freedom of seaboard all that the city wanted. But the Pisans, feeling the power that the fortress had against them in case of future war, and doubtful of the issue of council at Florence, sent a private negotiator to the member of the Council of Ancients who was known to have most influence, though one of the poorest of them, Aldobrandino Ottobuoni; and offered him four thousand golden florins if he would get the vote passed to raze Mutrona. The vote had passed the evening before. Aldobrandino dismissed the Pisan ambassador in silence, returned instantly into the council, and without saying anything of the offer that had been made to him, got them to reconsider their vote, and showed them such reason for keeping Mutrona in its strength, that the vote for its destruction was rescinded. "And note thou, O reader," says Villani, "the virtue of such a citizen, who, not being rich in substance, had yet such continence and loyalty for his state."
129. You might, perhaps, once, have thought me detaining you needlessly with these historical details, little bearing, it is commonly supposed, on the subject of Art. But you are, I trust, now in some degree persuaded that no art, Florentine or any other, can be understood without knowing these sculptures and mouldings of the national soul. You remember I first began this large digression when it became a question with us why some of Giovanni Pisano's sepulchral work had been destroyed at Perugia. And now we shall get our first gleam of light on the matter, finding similar operations carried on in Florence. For a little while after this speech in the Council of Ancients, Aldobrandino died, and the people, at public cost, built him a tomb of marble, "higher than any other" in the church of Santa Reparata, engraving on it these verses, which I leave you to construe, for I cannot:—
"Fons est supremus Aldobrandino amoenus.
Ottoboni natus, a bono civita datus."
Only I suppose the pretty word 'amoenus' may be taken as marking the delightfulness and sweetness of character which had won all men's love, more, even, than their gratitude.
130. It failed of its effect, however, on the Tuscan aristocratic mind. For when, after the battle of the Arbia, the Ghibellines had again their own way in Florence, though Ottobuoni had been then dead three years, they beat down his tomb, pulled the dead body out of it, dragged it—by such tenure as it might still possess—through the city, and threw the fragments of it into ditches. It is a memorable parallel to the treatment of the body of Cromwell by our own Cavaliers; and indeed it seems to me one of the highest forms of laudatory epitaph upon a man, that his body should be thus torn from its rest. For he can hardly have spent his life better than in drawing on himself the kind of enmity which can so be gratified; and for the most loving of lawgivers, as of princes, the most enviable and honourable epitaph has always been
"όιδἑ πολῑται αὐτὸυ ἐμίσουν αὐτὸν."
131. Not but that pacific Florence, in her pride of victory, was beginning to show unamiableness of temper also, on her so equitable side. It is perhaps worth noticing, for the sake of the name of Correggio, that in 1257, when Matthew Correggio, of Parma, was the Podesta of Florence, the Florentines determined to destroy the castle and walls of Poggibonzi, suspected of Ghibelline tendency, though the Poggibonzi people came with "coregge in collo," leathern straps round their necks, to ask that their cattle might be spared. And the heart-burnings between the two parties went on, smouldering hotter and hotter, till July 1258, when the people having discovered secret dealings between the Uberti and the Emperor Manfred, and the Uberti refusing to obey citation to the popular tribunals, the trades ran to arms, attacked the Uberti palace, killed a number of their people, took prisoner Uberto of the Uberti, Hubert of the Huberts, or Bright-mind of the Bright-minds, with 'Mangia degl'Infangati,' ('Gobbler[4] of the dirty ones' this knight's name sounds like,)—and after they had confessed their guilt, beheaded them in St. Michael's corn-market; and all the rest of the Uberti and Ghibelline families were driven out of Florence, and their palaces pulled down, and the walls towards Siena built with the stones of them; and two months afterwards, the people suspecting the Abbot of Vallombrosa of treating with the Ghibellines, took him, and tortured him; and he confessing under torture, "at the cry of the people, they beheaded him in the square of St. Apollinare." For which unexpected piece of clangorous impiety the Florentines were excommunicated, besides drawing upon themselves the steady enmity of Pavia, the Abbot's native town; "and indeed people say the Abbot was innocent, though he belonged to a great Ghibelline house. And for this sin, and for many others done by the wicked people, many wise persons say that God, for Divine judgment, permitted upon the said people the revenge and slaughter of Monteaperti."
132. The sentence which I have last read introduces, as you must at once have felt, a new condition of things. Generally, I have spoken of the Ghibellines as infidel, or impious; and for the most part they represent, indeed, the resistance of kingly to priestly power. But, in this action of Florence, we have the rise of another force against the Church, in the end to be much more fatal to it, that of popular intelligence and popular passion. I must for the present, however, return to our immediate business; and ask you to take note of the effect, on actually existing Florentine architecture, of the political movements of the ten years we have been studying.
133. In the revolution of Candlemas, 1248, the successful Ghibellines throw down thirtysix of the Guelph palaces.
And in the revolution of July, 1258, the successful Guelphs throw down all the Ghibelline palaces.
Meantime the trades, as against the Knights Castellans, have thrown down the tops of all the towers above seventy-five feet high.
And we shall presently have a proposal, after the battle of the Arbia, to throw down Florence altogether.
134. You think at first that this is remarkably like the course of republican reformations in the present day? But there is a wide difference. In the first place, the palaces and towers are not thrown down in mere spite or desire of ruin, but after quite definite experience of their danger to the State, and positive dejection of boiling lead and wooden logs from their machicolations upon the heads below. In the second place, nothing is thrown down without complete certainty on the part of the overthrowers that they are able, and willing, to build as good or better things instead; which, if any like conviction exist in the minds of modern republicans, is a wofully ill-founded one: and lastly, these abolitions of private wealth were coincident with a widely spreading disposition to undertake, as I have above noticed, works of public utility, from which no dividends were to be received by any of the shareholders; and for the execution of which the builders received no commission on the cost, but payment at the rate of so much a day, carefully adjusted to the exertion of real power and intelligence.
135. We must not, therefore, without qualification blame, though we may profoundly regret, the destructive passions of the thirteenth century. The architecture of the palaces thus destroyed in Florence contained examples of the most beautiful round-arched work that had been developed by the Norman schools; and was in some cases adorned with a barbaric splendour, and fitted into a majesty of strength which, so far as I can conjecture the effect of it from the few now existing traces, must have presented some of the most impressive aspects of street edifice ever existent among civil societies.
136. It may be a temporary relief for you from the confusion of following the giddy successions of Florentine temper, if I interrupt, in this place, my history of the city by some inquiry into technical points relating to the architecture of these destroyed palaces. Their style is familiar to us, indeed, in a building of which it is difficult to believe the early date,—the leaning tower of Pisa. The lower stories of it are of the twelfth century, and the open arcades of the cathedrals of Pisa and Lucca, as well as the lighter construction of the spire of St. Niccol, at Pisa, (though this was built in continuation of the older style by Niccola himself,) all represent to you, though in enriched condition, the general manner of building in palaces of the Norman period in Val d'Arno. That of the Tosinghi, above the old market in Florence, is especially mentioned by Villani, as more than a hundred feet in height, entirely built with little pillars, (colonnelli,) of marble. On their splendid masonry was founded the exquisiteness of that which immediately succeeded them, of which the date is fixed by definite examples both in Verona and Florence, and which still exists in noble masses in the retired streets and courts of either city; too soon superseded, in the great thoroughfares, by the effeminate and monotonous luxury of Venetian renaissance, or by the heaps of quarried stone which rise into the ruggedness of their native cliffs, in the Pitti and Strozzi palaces.
- ↑ In connection with the Pisans' insulting intention by their term of Arabs, remember that the Venetian 'zecca,' (mint) came from the Arabic 'sehk,' the steel die used in coinage.
- ↑ "Corsona la citta senza contesto niuno."—Villani.
- ↑ Some account of the state of modern British business in this kind will be given, I hope, in some number of "Fors Clavigera" for this year, 1874.
- ↑ At least, the compound 'Mangia-pane,' 'munch-bread,' stands still for a good-for-nothing fellow.