The political background
By 1088, Matilda of Canossa knew she needed more allies in order not to be gobbled up by Henry IV. The next year, at age 43, she married Welf V (or II), Duke of Bavaria, who was around 17. It was a childless marriage suggested to her by Pope Urban. Matilda fortified her territory with new troops and the Welf family improved its position in a struggle for investitures. (It was this family, and its ties to the papacy, that eventually led to their supporters being called Guelphs.)
In 1105, Henry IV passed the imperial crown to his son, Henry V, who ruled the Roman Empire for the first 25 years of the century. Oddly, the new emperor showed a simply utilitarian interest in Italy, the “garden of the empire” (as Dante calls it in Purgatorio 6.105). Both eager for a truce, Henry V and Matilda met in a castle in the Apennines in 1111. When the meeting was over, she had gained the new moniker of “Imperial Vicar and Vice Queen of Italy” and he regained title to lands his father had claimed. Matilda died a widow just four years later, leaving Florence to become a de facto republic.
Who’s emperor?
Henry V, last of the Salian line, died in 1125 without a male heir but had a daughter called Agnes of Waiblingen. He couldn’t pass the crown to her directly, so he gave it and all his fiefs to her son, Duke Frederick II (the One-Eyed) of Swabia. Of course, the royal succession, being irregular, was contested by Adalbert, archbishop of Mainz and longtime enemy of Henry.
Adalbert thought that the monarchy was growing too strong and convinced the nobles to elect Lothar II to the throne because he was much weaker. In fact, he was so weak that, by the middle of the century, Frederick’s younger brother Conrad III had retrieved the imperial crown for the Hohenstaufen, whose coat of arms is shown below.
Conrad
While Emperor Conrad was on the throne, a young Florentine man named Cacciaguida degli Elisei (ca. 1098 - ca. 1148) joined the imperial army. Though he was not initially noble, Conrad promoted him to the nobility for his military valor. Cacciaguida took part in several battles in the emperor’s conflicts, perhaps even including those related to the rebellion of Lothar’s descendants, which are traditionally considered the initial rift that led to the Guelph-Ghibelline split.
In 1147, Cacciaguida followed the emperor on the ill-fated Second Crusade to the Holy Land, traveling with a group of 20,000 men under Conrad’s command. Their plan was to march overland to Antioch, and there meet up with Louis VII’s French reinforcements before attacking. Galvanized by the thought of conquering infidels, Conrad recklessly led his men into Turkish territory shortly after leaving Constantinople. The Christians were harassed and outfoxed by Mesud I’s more agile army. By the time the nobles decided to turn back, it was too late. The Battle of Dorylaeum had begun; a clash that left Conrad wounded and, most probably, Cacciaguida dead.
The old warrior
Cacciaguida, of course, was Dante’s great-great grandfather. Over the course of three central cantos in Paradiso, the old warrior speaks with his descendant about the values of ancient Florence, and wistfully compares them to the corruption of Dante’s times. See Doré’s depiction above.
Cacciaguida talks about the changes that inevitably accompany the passage of time, and he uses Florentine families as examples. This tight focus on the city and its geography is one of the reasons why over half of the Dante plaques in the city reproduce verses from that chat.
The good ol’ days
The 1100s, according to Dante’s Florentine mythology, were a time of peace and prosperity when good and bad were easily distinguished from each other, when men were brave and steadfastly loyal, and women were dutifully spinning and caring for loving children.
Of course, there never has been a golden age like that. Still, Dante was right about one thing: the twelfth century was special. It was a time of head-spinning innovation and change.
Change
The social fabric, dissolved in earlier centuries by invasion and war, was being reconstructed by new institutions residing, not at the feudal or regional level as in the past, but at the local level. Trade began to flourish, and Florence invented its own system of weights and measures. Business was booming in the new Republic.
In fact, there were over 130 castles in the countryside around Florence at the beginning of the century, and the number was rising. But these were not the grim defensive outposts of feudal vassals, as in the time of the Lombards (although they did often belong to noble families). Instead, each castle was supported by nearby farmers who also served when necessary in its militia. Bit by bit, little towns like Florence, or Pisa or Lucca, gained all the necessary components to defend themselves and even to transform themselves into what would later become a fully-fledged city-state.
Government
Municipal organizations blossomed in several different colors, and some of them would coalesce around mutual concerns, becoming in the process what one could loosely call governing bodies. The first year for which we can definitively identify a civic government in extant documents is 1138.
Inspired by memories of Roman history, Florentines created the office of consul and accepted two from each of the city’s six districts or sestieri. Generally speaking, these twelve consuls served together for one year as the city’s highest governing council. At the end of their term they were replaced. The map below shows how the sestieri were set up. The blue line represents the walls of 1258. The six districts are: 1. Porta del Duomo; 2. San Pancrazio (or Brancazio); 3. San Piero Maggiore; 4. Borgo, a.k.a. Santa Trinita; 5. San Pier Scheraggio; 6. Oltrarno.
Information about how they were elected is very slim, but it is safe to say that the consular system was run by a group of the oldest, wealthiest and most powerful families. There was still no town hall or other official meeting place, though, so the consuls organized their assemblies in churches or palazzi on an ad hoc basis.
Safety
What we may call the middle class was still too tiny and immature to claim any influence in governing. Indeed, in a time when there was still no police force, safety and security were provided by a family’s ties to larger groups or what were called consorterie, clans of two or more families united by business, and often by marriage too, just in case. Violence or grave insults suffered by the member of one family were commonly resolved by vendetta, like-for-like injury.
Florence the conqueror
Like other communes of northern Italy in the 1100s, Florence began military planning to ensure that no other nearby area could threaten her or her immediate interests. The upper class, mainly the nobles and a very few rich merchants, could afford to go into battle well-equipped with armor and a steed. The poor, who shared the same civic obligation to defend the patria, were transformed into a mass of infantry with bad weapons, if any, and very little training, if any.
Whenever they took a city or town, the Florentines would oblige the nobles of that area to live, at least for a period of several months, within Florence’s city walls. Upon their arrival, they were made citizens and included under the umbrella of the city’s protection. These moves were intended to ensure their future loyalty and to reinforce a feeling of interdependence. Meanwhile, the borders of the city-state continued to expand. On their third attempt (1125), the Florentines finally managed to conquer Fiesole, which they destroyed almost completely.
Urbanization
Because the great landowning families of the time (such as the Alberti or the Guidi counts) were mostly descendants of Germanic nobles who came or were sent to Tuscany over the centuries to supervise fiefdoms, the young Republic now presented its expansion into the contado as the liberation of everyone who lived there. The villagers, in other words, were supposed to feel emancipated from the Empire and the local nobles, all of whom had long been reaping the benefit of their labor.
As more nobles moved into the cities, so too did others of modest means. The former had enough wealth to buy and develop properties and towers that gave them a certain measure of independence. Whenever possible, they chose areas adjacent to their relatives that then grew into centers of political and commercial power. On the contrary, the humble worker or tradesman who made his way to town didn’t have the same connections.
Gente nova
People of this new demographic influx were disparaged by Dante and nobles who looked down their noses at people from the countryside and those engaged in trade. Though progressively making themselves indispensable to Florence’s economic and military ambitions, these upwardly mobile citizens were nonetheless often thought of as gente nova, or nouveaux riches:
“La gente nova e ’ subiti guadagni / orgoglio a dismisura han generata, / Fiorenza, in te, sì che tu già ten piagni.” (“The newcomers and their quick cash / have made such pride grow in you, / Florence, that you’re already suffering for it,” Inferno 16.73-75.)
Dante believed that the city’s idyllic environment had been disrupted by the influx of families from the countryside since the 1100s, and it was Cacciaguida who told us so. Borgo, the area just north of Ponte Vecchio but then still outside the old walls, was singled out as a neighborhood that went to ruin upon the arrival of the Buondelmonti family, for example, but there were others as well.
Guilds
It wasn’t long before the political dominance of the wealthy and their organizations could only be challenged by other entities of similar influence. The solution was found in the invention of societates mercatorum (forerunners of the arti, or guilds) that were formed along professional lines by the embryonic middle classes seeking safety in numbers.
The first of these was the Arte di Calimala (Guild of Cloth Finishers and Dealers), which was established around 1150. By the end of the century, there were six more similar professional guilds, also called corporazioni, each dedicated to its own trade. Together they made up a counterweight to the immense influence of the nobility.
The Empire strikes back
While Conrad III hadn’t taken much notice of Florence while it remained contained within the margraviate of Tuscany, which the Welfs still officially governed, cities farther north were finding it difficult to maintain their status as semi-independent city-states.
In 1154, the new emperor Frederick I (known colloquially as Barbarossa or Red Beard) crossed the Alps and headed toward Rome for his coronation. On the way, he turned his attention to repossessing all the autonomous communes in northern Italy, which seemed to him to be in open rebellion. Three years later, he added with word ‘holy’ to Holy Roman Empire.
The Papacy strikes back too
As Barbarossa beat them into submission and gathered them back under imperial control, the pope realized that his survival depended upon stopping the Empire from reestablishing a power base south of the Alps.
The pope at that time was Alexander III. His strategy for resisting Barbarossa’s expansion depended upon the Lombard city-states sticking together, all along the Po river, and forming a sort of defensive barrier known as the Lombard League. Between them and the Papal States was Tuscany, where Florence was steadily growing in wealth and size.
The leagues
The cities of Tuscany and the Po valley found themselves stuck between two enormous powers: the Empire to the north and the Papacy to the south. Matilda managed to protect Tuscany in a similar situation, but her territories - and resources - were very large compared to those of a nascent city-state.
Once Florence joined this Lombard League, and then the Tuscan League, it had to coordinate its actions with those of its neighbors. However, the leaders and founders of the League made the mistake of agreeing to autonomy among its members. Each city-state, breathing the air of independence, began acting according to its own best interests.
The chaos
This economic and military free-for-all pit village against village, and town against town. Every area fought to increase of its territory. Tuscany was entirely militarized and divided among its main cities: Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia, Florence, Arezzo, Siena.
While these cities were attempting to wrest power from one another, they also had to deal with revolt from within. In 1177, for instance, the Uberti started a bloody three-year battle to take control of Florence with the help of other supporters of the Empire.
Generally speaking, Florence and Lucca leaned more traditionally toward the Papacy, while Pisa and Siena were usually supporters of the Hohenstaufen family and its Empire.
The podestà
During this time, Florentines decided that their system of twelve consuls was not an ideal way to govern themselves after all. Instead, they replaced it with the podestà, one man who held all the power for twelve months. The curious word came from the Latin potestas, which was the official title given by Emperor Barbarossa to the chief administrative officer of towns. The new experiment was already in action by 1193, a year in which we know that a single man held all the power.
For some, not unexpected, reason, the Florentines decided that it was too risky to lend absolute power to someone with vested interests. So, rather than having one of their own serve as podestà, they brought in a respectable person from another town who swore to govern with complete impartiality.