In the spring of 1265, a little boy was born in the center of Ghibelline Florence to proud parents: Alaghiero, a low-profile Guelph who earned a living developing property in Prato (and maybe, to be honest, a little extra on the side making loans), and his wife Bella, who was a distant relative of the Ghibelline Abati family. This is the part in the story where Dante comes in.
Infancy
Florence, like Dante’s own family, was politically divided, but it was the hub of all sorts of economic activity. Technically totally Ghibelline since the battle of Montaperti, Florence’s government suffered a terrible political blow around the time Dante was baptized in San Giovanni. Manfred, the Empire’s last champion, had been cut down in the battle of Benevento and it was only a matter of time before the Popolo and Guelphs eliminated their enemies from the city forever.
Florence, following the advice of Pope Clement IV, gave its government over to the so-called Jovial Friars for one year (1266-67). It was their job to maintain the peace while the Popolo was reestablished. Guelphs eager for revenge were unhindered by the two friars, however, as mobs destroyed several city blocks, including those of the Uberti. Much of what is now Piazza della Signoria was created by knocking down the houses of the ancient Ghibelline families of the Infangati and the Uberti, who lived where the Uffizi stand today.
The city
After Montaperti, the Ghibellines had thrown 1500 Guelphs out of Florence. Under the Friars, about the same number of Ghibellines were exiled. By the end of 1267, Florence’s elite class was made up of the wealthiest slice of the urban middle class and traditional blue-blood Guelphs, such as the Adimari, Buondelmonti, Cavalcanti, Tornaquinci and Bardi (who ran the largest banking corporation).
Charles of Anjou
The Papacy, hoping to defend itself from the Empire, had invited Charles of Anjou into Italy to help him eliminate what was left of the Empire. His success was assured. He defeated the last imperial challenger, Conradin, at the battle of Tagliacozzo in 1268. Even contemporary chroniclers seem sad to confirm that the sixteen-year-old Conradin, beautiful and blond, was betrayed and beheaded by the French king.
As the term of the Jovial Friars was coming to an end, Florence chose to award a ten-year term as podestà to Charles of Anjou, who was represented by lieutenants. Charles immediately quashed the power of the Captain of the Popolo and the Buonomini by replacing them with loyal Guelph elites. Into his inner circle, however, he also admitted the heads of the biggest banking families in town, especially the Bardi. Power was meeting money. Charles’ coat of arms (below) was added to the balustrade of Palazzo Vecchio in recognition of the decade during which he was podestà.
On the banks of the Arno
The new pope, Gregory X, was engaged in an uneasy alliance. Fearful that the Angevins might simply take the place of the Hohenstaufens and ignite more wars, Gregory paradoxically found himself tepidly supporting the Ghibellines in Florence, if only to keep Charles busy.
In 1273, Gregory declares a papal visit to Florence to seal a peace accord between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. This event, held on the banks of the Arno near Piazza de’ Mozzi, proved ultimately to be unsuccessful because Ghibellines knew they’d be killed if they didn’t flee.
Above: Ary Scheffer, Dante Meets Beatrice, 1851
Dante meets Beatrice
If we believe what he writes in the Vita nova, Dante meets Beatrice less than twelve months later, in 1274, the same year in which St. Thomas Aquinas died. Three years later, Charles’ term as podestà comes to its end. The Angevins were at this point well-funded and their territories in Tuscany and Sicily effectively surrounded the Papal States.
Dante’s tender years
The 1270s, the decade of Dante’s most formative years, saw a boom in economic development. Florentine banks loaned money not only to Charles, but to the pope as well. By the time Dante was a strapping young man of 15, Florence’s population had risen to as many as 80,000, five times larger than it was in the days of Cacciaguida, as he tells us in Paradiso. That was a number far too large for the city’s defenses to protect.
In the wake of an economy in the upswing and the exit from Florence of anyone with a guilty Ghibelline conscience (after Pope Gregory X’s visit), the Florentines began planning their next ring of walls. The decision to start a project that could last several decades, combined with the fact that Arnolfo di Cambio and Giotto both contributed to the walls’ early phase, demonstrated a real civic optimism. Dante surely felt great pride being a Florentine. His city was involved in affairs of the greatest importance; indeed, it was the envy of kings and popes.
Dante’s adolescence
In 1280, a solid peace agreement was reached between the Guelphs and what remained of the Ghibellines. Two years later, Florence mercifully agreed to let all the former Ghibelline exiles return, with the notable exception of Farinata’s sons. This profound lack of compassion must have made a strong impression on Dante, even though he felt strongly Guelph from an early age.
The harmony of those first years would soon be upset, however, by the arrival (which so saddened Cacciaguida) of new players, including the Cerchi, Albizi, Peruzzi and Frescobaldi. Meanwhile, several formerly Ghibelline families (Portinari, Strozzi) managed to survive by marrying into the winning side.
Guilds
Florence’s rapid economic growth, which began modestly a hundred years earlier, was fueled by the invention of banking and double-entry bookkeeping. Though still not what we would today call a socially-mobile society, it certainly offered the average man many more ways to make money than feudalism did.
Thanks precisely to the specialization of labor, guilds were growing at a spectacular rate. At the turn of the century, there were seven Arti, as they were called. By 1282, there were 21 and each was highly organized. The main guilds were called the Arti maggiori and the lesser ones the minori. Each of them sought to protect its members by implementing standards and safety measures, and to increase its power by influencing the courts and the government. Some were rather more successful than others.
Priorate of the Guilds
As guilds increased in size, and their membership in number, ever more Florentines found their fortunes tied to that of their corporation. The Priorate of the Guilds, or Priorato della Signoria, was the top administrative structure of the guilds themselves, a sort of council of officials elected from within the city’s main Arti. Before long, it came to represent a large section of the city’s population.
In 1282, a revolution broke out in Sicily that turned Charles’ attention away from Tuscany. At that same time, the pope and others were distracted by lingering hopes of the Ghibelline cause in Tuscany and in the person of Guido da Montefeltro (entrapped in flame in Inferno 27). During this brief moment of autonomy, the Priorate decided that the time had come to take back the city.
The change in power wasn’t so much a coup d’état, however, as it was the emergence of another experiment in democracy. The Priorate had become so self-sufficient and powerful that its lawyers and notaries were able to write themselves into the city-state’s constitution. The ‘revolution’ came simply in the fact that all these guildsmen put their representatives at the top of the organizational chart.
Before the change, the government was run by the foreigner podestà, the Buonomini (12 elected officials, two from each of the city’s sestieri) and the Capitano del Popolo (a kind of ‘police chief’ with ‘officers’ in each of the 20 districts). Afterwards, the Priorate of the Guilds stood at the top of the food chain, even above the podestà.
Below: the coat of arms of the Priorate (in use by 1458), which is also visible on Palazzo Vecchio’s balustrade
The idea was simple: the new Priorate was made up of six men who left their families and moved into Chestnut Tower to live and work together for a six-month term. They attended to the city’s business and, at the end of that period, elected the successive group of six and so on. Beatrice’s dad, Folco Portinari, was one of those six in 1282 (just as Dante will be in 1300).
Lovestruck
In 1283, a series of unprecedented events took place, beginning around the time of the festival of Florence’s patron St. John the Baptist on the 24th of June. Several of the rich elite families threw ostentatious parties one after the other, and each could last for days or more. At the first, held in piazza Santa Felicita in the Oltrarno, the Rossi family welcomed hundreds of guests, all dressed in white, who gathered around one man costumed as the God of Love. Musicians, dancers and jesters entertained knights and ladies of high station as well as men and women of the working classes. The Court of Love, as they called it, lasted for more than two months.
It’s likely that Dante, who turned 18 just before that crazy ‘summer of love,’ saw Beatrice for the second time at one of these many feasts and afterwards began the Vita nova. We know for sure that these were the weeks during which he wrote that work’s famous opening poem: A ciascun’alma presa, which describes his attraction to Beatrice. Curiously, he then sent the sonnet by courier to a few close acquaintances: Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia and Dante da Maiano. In response, Guido says it’s love; Dante da Maiano says it’s a sign that he needs to take a cold shower. Either way, Dante marries Gemma Donati within 24 months.
Florence at the top of its game
The Dominicans, having laid the foundations for their new monastery in 1279, began work on its church, Santa Maria Novella, in 1283. The next year, the Badia was completely renovated and, not long afterwards, the first four gates were finished of the new ring of walls. A functional roof was put over the grain market of Orsanmichele in 1284 and immediately thereafter people began to attribute miraculous events to the Madonna painted on the wall inside.
Charles meanwhile was suffering a string of setbacks in Sicily. After he died in 1285, the island reverted to its status as an independent kingdom and Florence breathed a sigh of relief. At last able to go again on the offensive, the Florentines set their sights on Pisa and Arezzo, cities that were still firmly in the Ghibellines’ grip. In 1287, when the Aretines’ Ghibelline government expelled their Guelph enemies from the city, the city of the red lily saw an opening. They transformed the discontentment into a desire for war.
Campaldino
In 1288, Beatrice’s father, Folco Portinari, completed his dream project, the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Unfortunately, he died the next year. Dante laments Folco’s passing in the Vita nova and uses his funeral as a plot element to make Beatrice seem even more angelic.
By June of the next year, however, the clamor for Guelph supremacy finally brought soldiers to the battlefield. The Florentines readied the carroccio, the martinella and their men. Included in the ranks was Dante himself. After crossing the Arno, the troops traveled down what is now Via di Ripoli on their way toward Arezzo, where there is still a marker and plot of land owned by the city of Arezzo.
Below: the monument that commemorates the battle site
Victory
Since Dante fought in the victory of the Florentine Guelphs over the Aretine Ghibellines at the battle of Campaldino in 1289, many of its characters are familiar to us from the Comedy. Corso Donati, future leader of the Black Guelphs, was reckless but successful in leading the cavalry to victory over the soldiers of Bonconte da Montefeltro. Vieri de’ Cerchi, who would become the leader of the White Guelphs, was also there, though literally battling with an injury. Presumably not far from Dante was Cecco Angiolieri, the poet.
In that same year, the Florentines administratively cleaned up their guild system and abolished serfdom throughout their domain. Villani would later remember those times as the real beginning of Florence’s democratic republic. Sadly, Beatrice died one year later.
The knights
As commerce grew in this otherwise happy period, Florence’s proto-capitalistic system moved wealth sometimes to unexpected families (as Dante explains in Inferno 7). As some previously aristocratic clans dropped out of the elite, they were readily replaced by others of humbler origins. Intelligence and luck, rather than noble birth, determined who had money and power.
For members of the ancient nobility, this was a great loss of prestige and privilege. Corso Donati, like many others, demanded special recognition based on the fact that knights (and, thus, all the cavalry) had been essential in the victory at Campaldino. Attitudes like this were quite common, and the list of abuses perpetrated by nobles on the common man was growing longer.
Giano della Bella
While many nobles were causing widespread irritation to the government, one of them was decidedly different. He was Giano della Bella, and Cacciaguida probably thought of him as a traitor. Though he came from an old family and was a member of the Calimala guild, Giano was determined to put an end to the very class from which he came. Before all else, he helped to bring back into the system the nine most important guilds that had been left out of governing, raising their total number to twenty-one and expanding his political base substantially.