The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (3 page)

Over their trunk hose and jacket men still wore the
lucco
, the
scarlet ankle-length gown with long, wide sleeves and a hood attached to the neck; but many young men now preferred more gaily coloured clothes – a pink cape, perhaps, worn with a satin jacket, white stockings shot with silver lace, a velvet cap with a feather in the brim, scented gloves, golden rings and a golden chain, a jewelled dagger and a sword. There were sumptuary laws as there were elsewhere in Europe; but no one paid them much attention. Certainly the women did not. An official, who was ordered to compel women to obey the laws, submitted a characteristic report of his failure:

In obedience to the orders you gave me, I went out to look for forbidden ornaments on the women and was met with arguments such as are not to be found in any book of laws. There was one woman with the edge of her hood fringed out in lace and twined round her head. My assistant said to her, ‘What is your name? You have a hood with lace fringes.’ But the woman removed the laced fringe which was attached to the hood with a pin, and said it was merely a wreath. Further along we met a woman with many buttons in front of her dress; and my assistant said to her, ‘You are not allowed to wear buttons.’ But she replied, ‘These are not buttons. They are studs. Look, they have no loops, and there are no buttonholes.’ Then my assistant, supposing he had caught a culprit at last, went up to another woman and said to her, ‘You are wearing ermine.’ And he took out his book to write down her name. ‘You cannot take down my name,’ the woman protested. ‘This is not ermine. It is the fur of a suckling.’ ‘What do you mean, suckling?’ ‘A kind of animal.’

To the dismay of many an austere churchman, the wives of Florentine merchants were, indeed, renowned for their sumptuous clothes, their elegance, their pale skin and fair hair. If their hair was too dark they dyed it or wore a wig of white or yellow silk; if their skin was too olive they bleached it; if their cheeks were too rosy they powdered them. And they walked the streets in all manner of styles and colours, in dresses of silk and velvet, often adorned with sparkling jewels and silver buttons; in winter they wore damask and fur, showing off prized features of a wardrobe which might well have cost far more than their husband’s house. Unmarried girls of good family were not, of course, allowed such freedom, rarely being seen in the streets at all, except on their way to Mass, and then always
heavily veiled. In some households young and precious daughters were not allowed out at all; they had to read Mass in their own bedrooms and to take exercise in their father’s garden or in the family
loggia
. When it was time for marriage their parents or guardians made all the arrangements, of which the amount of the dowry was the most significant.

Many dowries included foreign slaves whose importation had been officially authorized in 1336 after an outbreak of plague had led to a serious shortage of native servants. These slaves were generally Greeks, Turks or Russians, Circassians or Tartars, the Tartars being preferred by some households because they worked harder, the Circassians by others because they were better looking and better tempered. All were expected to be fully occupied from morning to night, as Fra Bernardino, a travelling preacher from Siena, urged housewives to remember for their own good:

Is there sweeping to be done? Then make your slave sweep. Are there pots to be scoured? Then make her scour them. Are there vegetables to be cleaned or fruit to be peeled? Then set her to them. Laundry? Hand it to her. Make her look after the children and everything else. If you don’t get her used to doing all the work, she will become a lazy little lump of flesh. Don’t give her any lime off, I tell you. As long as you keep her on the go, she won’t waste her time leaning out of the window.

Bought quite cheaply in the markets at Venice and Genoa, the slaves were usually young female children who spent the rest of their lives in bondage. An owner had complete power over them ‘to have, hold, sell, alienate, exchange, enjoy, rent or unrent, dispose of by will, judge soul and body and do with in perpetuity whatsoever may please him and his heirs, and no man may gainsay him’. They were, in fact, considered as chattels, and classed in inventories with domestic animals. Many of them became pregnant by their masters: the correspondence of the time is full of disputes arising from such inconvenience; and the foundling hospitals were continually being presented with little bundles of swarthy or Slavic-looking babies.

At least the slave, hard as she was worked, could generally be sure of eating well, for although she had few legal rights and was often
dismissed in documents as a creature of little importance, she was regarded as one of the family and treated as such. In hard times she was certainly better off than the very poor native Florentines who were sometimes reduced to a diet of dried figs or bread made with oak bark. If she belonged to a moderately prosperous family she could look forward to sharing their evening meal of garlic-flavoured
pasta, ravioli
in broth, liver sausage or black pudding, goat’s milk cheese, fruit and wine, with an occasional pigeon or a piece of meat, usually lamb, on a Sunday. For the richer merchants, of course, there was more exotic fare. Excessive indulgence was forbidden by sumptuary laws; but, as with clothes, the laws were flagrantly disregarded and the most was made of every loophole. If the main course was to consist of no more than ‘roast with pie’, well, then, everything that could possibly be desired was tossed into the pie, from pork and ham to eggs, dates and almonds. An honoured guest of a well-to-do citizen might be offered first of all a melon, then
ravioli, tortellini
or
lasagne
, then a
berlingozzo
, a cake made of flour, eggs and sugar, then a few slices of boiled capon, roast chicken and guinea fowl, followed by spiced veal, or pork jelly, thrushes, tench, pike, eel or trout, boiled kid, pigeon, partridge, turtle-dove or peacock. For vegetables there was usually a choice of broad beans, onions, spinach, carrots, leeks, peas and beetroot. Finally there might be rice cooked in milk of almonds and served with sugar and honey, or
pinocchiato
, a pudding made out of pine kernels, or little jellies made of almond-milk, coloured with saffron and modelled in the shape of animals or human figures. Everything was strongly flavoured. A chicken
minestra
would be spiced with ginger and pounded almonds, as well as cinnamon and cloves, and sprinkled with cheese or even sugar. Into a fish pie would go olive oil, orange and lemon juice, pepper, salt, cloves, parsley, nutmegs, saffron, dates, raisins, powdered bay leaves and marjoram. The red sauce known as
savore sanguino
contained not only meat, wine, raisins, cinnamon and sandal, but also sumac which is now used only for tanning. In summer the main meal of the day in the families of most well-to-do merchants would be served just before dusk at a trestle table near to the open garden door, the guests sitting on straight-backed chairs or,
more likely, on benches or the lids of chests, while musicians played softly in a far corner of the room.

From such households as these came the men who ruled Florence. Theoretically every member of the city’s several guilds, the
arti
, had a say in its government; but this was far from being the case in practice. There were twenty-one guilds in all, seven major ones and fourteen minor. Of the seven major guilds that of the lawyers, the
Arte dei Giudici e Notai
, enjoyed the highest prestige; next in importance were the guilds of the wool, silk and cloth merchants, the
Arte della Lana
, the
Arte di Por Santa Maria
and the
Arte di Calimala
which took its name from the streets where the cloth warehouses were to be found.
⁵
Emerging as a rival to these in riches and consequence was the
Arte del Cambio
, the bankers’ guild, though bankers still suffered from the condemnation of the Church as usurers and felt obliged to adopt certain customs and euphemisms in an attempt to disguise the true nature of their transactions. The
Arte dei Medici, Speziali e Merciai
was the guild of the doctors, the apothecaries and the shopkeepers, of merchants who sold spices, dyes and medicines, and of certain artists and craftsmen, like painters who, buying their colours from members of the guild, were themselves admitted to it. The seventh major guild, the
Arte dei Vaccai e Pellicciai
, looked after the interests of both dealers and craftsmen in animal skins and fur.

The minor guilds were those of such relatively humble tradesmen as butchers, tanners, leatherworkers, smiths, cooks, stonemasons, joiners, vintners and innkeepers, tailors, armourers and bakers. But while a member of the
Arte della Lana
would look down upon the
Arte dei Fabbri
, the smiths, in their turn, could feel superior to tens of thousands of those ordinary workers in the wool and silk trades, the weavers, spinners and dyers, the combers and beaters who, like carters and boatmen, labourers, pedlars and all those who had no permanent workshop, did not belong to a guild at all and – though they constituted more than three-quarters of the population of the city – were not allowed to form one. Such deprivation had in the past caused bitterness and occasional outbursts of violence. In the summer of 1378, the lowest class of woollen workers, known as the
ciompi
– because of the clogs they wore in the wash-houses – rose in revolt,
protesting that their wages were scarcely sufficient to keep their families from starvation. Shouting, ‘Down with the traitors who allow us to starve!’ they sacked the houses of those merchants whom they condemned as their oppressors, forced them and their elected officials to flee for their lives, and demanded the right to form three new guilds of their own. The right could not in the circumstances be denied them; but they did not enjoy it for long. The jealousy of their fellow workers in other trades, combined with the power and money of their employers, soon destroyed the
ciompi
’s short-lived guilds. By 1382 the twenty-one original guilds were once more in undisputed control of the city; and by the re-enactment of the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, which had defined the constitution of Florence as an independent republic, these guilds resumed their manipulation of the government.

The government was formed in this way: the names of all those members of the guilds aged thirty or over who were eligible for election to office were placed in eight leather bags known as
horse
. Every two months these bags were taken from the sacristy of the church of Santa Croce where they were kept;
⁶
and, in a short ceremony to which any citizen who cared to watch it was admitted, names were drawn out at random. Men known to be in debt were declared ineligible for office; so were those who had served a recent term or were related to men whose names had already been drawn. The citizens eventually selected were known for the next two months as
Priori
; and the government which they constituted was known as the
Signoria
. There were never more than nine men in the
Signoria
, six of them representing the major guilds, two of them the minor guilds. The ninth became
Gonfaloniere
, temporary standard-bearer of the Republic and custodian of the city’s banner – a red lily on a white field. Immediately upon their election all the
Priori
were required to leave their homes and move into the Palazzo della Signoria where they were obliged to remain for their two-month term of office; they were paid a modest salary to cover their expenses and enjoyed the services of a large staff of green-liveried servants as well as a
Buffone
who told them funny stories and sang for them when they were having their excellent meals. They wore splendid crimson coats lined
with ermine and with ermine collars and cuffs, the
Gonfaloniere’s
coat being distinguished from the others by its embroidery of golden stars.

In enacting legislation and formulating foreign policy, the
Signoria
were required to consult two other elected councils known as
Collegi
, one the
Dodici Buonomini
, consisting of twelve citizens, the other, the
Sedici Gonfalonieri
, comprising sixteen. Other councils, such as the Ten of War, the Eight of Security and the Six of Commerce, were elected from time to time as the circumstances of the Republic demanded. There were in addition various permanent officials, notably the Chancellor, who was customarily a distinguished man of letters; the
Notaio delle Riformagioni
, who promulgated the decrees of the
Signoria;
and the
Podestà
, a kind of Lord Chief Justice, a foreigner usually of noble birth who lived at the palace, which was also a prison, later known as the Bargello.
⁷

In times of trouble the great bell of the
Signoria
would be tolled in the campanile of their Palazzo. Because of its deep, mooing tone it was known as the
Vacca;
and as its penetrating boom sounded throughout Florence all male citizens over the age of fourteen were expected to gather in their respective wards and then to march behind their banners to the Piazza della Signoria to form a
Portamento
. Usually on such occasions the citizens, having affirmed that two-thirds of their number were present, were asked to approve the establishment of an emergency committee, a
Balìa
, which was granted full powers to deal with the crisis.

The Florentines were inordinately proud of this system which, upheld by them as a guarantee of their much vaunted freedom, they were ever ready to compare favourably with the forms of government to be found in other less fortunate Italian states. Venice, admittedly, was also a republic, but it was a republic in which, so its detractors soon pointed out, various noble families played a part in government which would have been impossible for such families under the constitution of Florence. Florence’s great rival, Milan, was under the firm rule of a tyrannical duke, Filippo Maria Visconti. The Papal States, a disorderly array of petty tyrannies which sprawled across the peninsula from Rome to the Adriatic, were in a condition approaching anarchy; while the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily was being
torn apart by the rival factions of the Houses of Anjou and Aragon.