Historical Interpretation in Fourteenth-Century Florentine ChroniclesAuthor(s): Louis GreenReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1967), pp. 161-178Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708413 .Accessed: 22/05/2012 10:39

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HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY FLORENTINE CHRONICLES *

BY Louis GREEN

The Florentine chronicle of the XIVth century merits considera- tion for two reasons. First, in common with the more formal ver- nacular literature of the same period, it expresses the outlook of the merchant community out of which, in the following century, the civilization of the Florentine Renaissance was to emerge. Secondly, it supplies valuable indications of how that outlook was modified in a direction away from characteristically medieval to embryonically modern attitudes.

The XIVth century witnessed in Italy and more especially in Florence a cultural efflorescence, astonishingly rich and rapid con- sidering its meager roots, which reproduced with a delay of a century or so the upsurge of commercial activity in the trading cities of the country. Though nourished by an essentially urban and capitalist environment, the manifestations of this efflorescence sought to adapt themselves, rather than supply an alternative, to the prevailing values of the medieval tradition. In Dante's poetry and in Giotto's painting, the dramatic intensity of life conceived in the terms of a fluid, dynamic society was yet compressed into Gothic frames of shape and significance. In the contemporary chronicles, there is the same marriage of two elements, the subsequent separation of which has caused one to be identified as medieval, the other as modern, though at the time they harmonized well enough to appear as com- plementary facets of the one reality. The first was a preoccupation with gain, with power, with position, allied with a compulsion to self-justification and rationalization. The other was a sense of the overriding order within which the struggles and strivings of the world were set and which gave them their meaning and purpose in the wider scheme of things.

There were three types of chronicle written in Florence at this time: the large or universal history, such as Giovanni Villani's; 1

the account of a particular episode, such as Dino Compagni's2 de- scription of the conflict between the White and Black factions of Dante's day; and the domestic chronicle, such as Donato Velluti's3 or Giovanni Morelli's.4 In the best examples of all three the two

*A paper read to Section "E" of the A.N.Z.A.A.S. Conference held in Hobart, Australia, August 1965.

1Giovanni Villani, Cronica (Florence, 1823). 2 Dino Compagni, Cronica, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, IX, part 2 (Citta

di Castello, 1916). Velluti, Cronica domestica 1367-1370 (Florence, 1914). 4 Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi (Florence, 1956).

161

162 LOUIS GREEN

elements can, in varying forms, be clearly distinguished. In the do- mestic chronicle, which recorded the fortunes of a family, a pervasive concern with material wealth was shot through with sanctimonious religiosity. The climax of Giovanni Morelli's recollections, for in- stance, is not, as one might expect from the author's obsessive pre- occupation with money, a hard-headed admonition to his descendants to make bigger profits but an allegorical passage built around a mys- tical experience which lightened his despair when all else seemed to have betrayed him. The mood of the work is not governed by the exuberant pursuit of gain which supposedly characterized the pio- neers of modern capitalism but by a profound weariness at the obli- gation to increase and hand on a burdensome patrimony, a weariness which can only be alleviated by turning from the futility of this life to the certainties of the next.

In Dino Compagni's chronicle there is a similar ambivalence in the exposure of the mechanism of political power. It deals with one of those civic conflicts that scarred the history of Italian city states, one particularly notorious since it was responsible for Dante's exile. It displays an acute political realism; yet what is remarkable about it is not so much this political acuteness and realism as the note of passionate denunciation that runs through it. The events Compagni describes, typical though they are of the factional struggles that dominated the civic politics of the day, are seen as a violation of the proper and natural order of things. The coherence the chronicle achieves is due not only to the skill with which the separate links of the chain of action are drawn together into a connected causal se- quence but also, and even more, to the moral scheme which is im- posed upon them. The chronicle becomes a study in the spread and self-destruction of evil and its lesson is the converse of what it reveals, that there is a justice in life, the transgression of which may bring political power but carries with it its own retribution.

It is a point worth emphasizing, before passing on to a considera- tion of the larger Florentine chronicles with which I shall be mainly concerned, that though the authors of these were essentially practical men, their central preoccupation was not with the realities of wealth and power they so clearly comprehended but with the problem of reconciling activity with order, the flux of change with viable ele- ments of permanence in their world. It is this, I propose to argue, that strangely enough explains why their basic ideas underwent the modi- fications they did during the XIVth century. Had they been merely intent upon understanding what happened, it would have been possi- ble for them, by keeping faith and reason in separate though not necessarily incompatible compartments, to qualify the prevailing view of the world so as to allow for changing circumstances. After all, what is called the medieval outlook was in itself the product of a long series of adjustments and assimilations by which the most spiritually un-

14TH-CENTURY FLORENTINE CHRONICLES 163

compromising of religions was made consonant with the needs of a hierarchical society and composite culture. What made such adap- tation difficult for the XIVth-century Florentine chroniclers was not so much any inherent contradiction between life as they experienced it and the order they believed in as the compulsion to define the re- lationship between them in terms so specific that any variations in one could not but lead to modifications in the other. The linking of a conception of the world with a particular situation in reality meant that its significance subtly, but in my opinion critically, changed with shifts in the base with which it had been linked.

There is, underlying historical interpretation in the chronicles of Giovanni and Matteo Villani, a set of expectations which remain constant even as the means used to satisfy them alter. Three basic assumptions channel events into recurring patterns of significance. The first is the notion of measure: excess brings disaster. The second, which adds to the view of change implicit in the first a sense of direc- tion, is the belief that history is governed by a struggle between right and wrong, that its entire meaning is ultimately a moral meaning. The third is the conviction that there is an exact correspondence be- tween the natural and the supernatural halves of existence, which entails the responsiveness of the phenomenal world to the human world as much as it does the consistency of historical events with the overriding design of Providence.

The first assumption may be illustrated by two anecdotal episodes in Giovanni Villani's chronicle. One involves two men better known for their appearance in Dante's Divine Comedy: Count Ugolino, who tells in the thirty-third canto of the Inferno the hideous story of death by starvation of himself and his sons; and Marco Lombardo, who discourses on the origin of the world's ills in Purgatory (XVI, 40 ff). In Villani's little story, Count Ugolino is shown at the height of his ill-gotten power and wealth. He proudly displays the magnifi- cence of everything around him to the "wise and valorous courtier," Marco, asking him what he thinks of it. Marco replies, "You are more prone to mischance than any nobleman in Italy." The Count, perturbed, asks why, and receives the answer, "Because you lack nothing but the wrath of God." 5

The other episode concerns Maffeo Visconti who, driven from power in Milan by Guidotto della Torre, was taunted in exile by an envoy from his successor who asked how Maffeo fared and when he expected to return to Milan. Maffeo replied that it seemed to him he fared well since he knew how to adapt himself to the times, and that he expected to return to Milan when the sins of Guidotto, who had supplanted him, exceeded his own.6

Both stories, one culminating in the overthrow and terrible slow end of Count Ugolino and his family in the Torre della Fame in Pisa,

5 Giovanni Villani, Cronica, VII, 21. 6 Ibid, VIII, 61.

164 LOUIS GREEN

the other in the restoration of the Visconti to Milan, recall in their underlying pattern and presumptions the classical ideas of hubris and nemesis. Indeed, the incident concerning Count Ugolino bears a cer- tain resemblance to the story of the ring of Polycrates in Herodotus.7 Giovanni Villani's cautionary tales, however, have an element lacking in the original Greek conception of an equalizing fate. It is not merely a question of a departure from the mean, of excessive good fortune having to be balanced by an appropriate measure of sorrow. There is the additional suggestion of retribution for moral wrong. As Doren8 has shown, the classical idea of fortune acquired, in the Middle Ages, religious overtones which reconciled it with the Chris- tian view of the transitoriness and undependability of all earthly things. Giovanni Villani himself provides evidence of this fusion when he says that "it seems that it happens in the lordships and states of earthly dignitaries, that as they are at their highest peak, so presently does their decline and ruin follow, and not without the providence of divine justice, in order to punish sins and so that no one should place his trust in fallacious good fortune." 9

In his interpretation of the period leading up to his own day, Villani adapted the cyclic rhythm inherent in the concept of fortune to the task of presenting history as a struggle between right and wrong. The identification of Florence with the Guelph, that is, with the pro-Papal, cause in the XIIIth century, made it fairly easy to do this. The great antagonists of the Church and of the victorious Guelph faction in Tuscany had been the emperors of the Hohen- staufen dynasty, notably Frederick II, who suffered a series of dra- matic setbacks after it had seemed that nothing could avert their triumph. The rise and fall of the Hohenstaufen fitted the curve described by the wheel of fortune, and could furthermore be made to teach the lesson that no success could be lasting which violated the will of God. The highest point of Frederick II's achievement co- incided with his excommunication and formal deposition by Inno- cent IV at the Council of Lyons.l0 After this, consistently both with the belief in the inevitable decline of a fortune which had passed its peak and in the eventual discomfiture of the enemies of the Church, he and his descendants went from disaster to disaster to the annihila- tion of their power and the extinction of the family.

The fatal character of this process was underlined by Giovanni Villani's insistence that history takes its necessary course even when all external circumstances would lead one to expect another outcome. This is brought out very clearly in his account of the battle of Bene- vento,l which Villani maintains Manfred, Frederick II's illegitimate

7 Herodotus, Histories III, 41. 8 Alfred Doren, "Fortuna im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance," Bibl. Warburg

Vortrage, II (1923), 71-144. 9 Giovanni Villani, Cronica X, 177. 1o Ibid., VI, 24. 11 Ibid., VII, 7.

14TH-CENTURY FLORENTINE CHRONICLES 165

son and successor, could have won had his destiny not impelled him rashly to leave his impregnable position, to face an adversary whom he could have met on far more favorable terms by waiting until his own forces were strengthened with reinforcements and his enemy was weakened by starvation. Had he acted rationally, Manfred would have avoided destruction and the decline of his house would have been halted; but this he could not do since, as Villani put it, "God deprives of sense him to whom he wishes ill."

The cyclic pattern underlying this moral interpretation of history becomes further evident at the point when the destruction of the Hohenstaufen has brought the pendulum of fate as far as it can go in favor of their enemies, and it begins to swing back. When Conradin, the last survivor of the dynasty, is defeated at Tagliacozzo and, treacherously betrayed to his enemy Charles of Anjou, is executed by him, one moral debt is discharged but another is contracted.12 Charles of Anjou has fulfilled the will of Providence in bringing about the extinction of the doomed family; but he has also killed a mere boy who, though he had to atone for the sins of his fathers, was him- self innocent of them. Charles is therefore culpable. Raised to the summit of power as a natural concomitant of the fall of the Hohen- staufen, he lapses into a sin that brings with it divine disfavor and subsequent adversity. The frustration of his plans to hold a conquered Sicily is seen by Villani as a direct consequence of his failure to show mercy to the unfortunate Conradin.

The effect of power to corrupt insures that, in spite of the constant victory of good in history, its motive force, which comes from evil, is never lost. The champions of the Church themselves succumb to the temptations of ambition, lose divine favor and experience the down- ward turn of their fortunes. The Capetian kings of France, traditional allies of the Papacy, lose their inviolate position with Philip the Fair's defiance of Boniface VIII at Anagni and his seizure of the wealth of the dissolved Templars. These misdeeds, coupled with lesser offenses such as the disregard of prohibited degrees of marriage, are regarded by Villani as responsible for the subsequent misfortunes of the House of France: 13 first the death of Philip himself in a hunting accident, then the adultery of the wives of his three sons, and the death in rapid sequence of his heirs, and finally the astonishing French defeats of the early stages of the Hundred Years' War.14

In the middle books of Villani's chronicle, in which he traces the main stream of European history in the XIIIth and early XIVth centuries, this rhythm applies to the succession of temporal ascend- ancies. Success engenders pride, pride sin; and sin brings on decline. There are only two major powers which seem at this stage to be immune from the operation of this rule; and their exclusion is sig- nificant. They are Florence and the Papacy, the identity of whose

12 Ibid., VII, 29. I3 Ibid., IX, 66. 14 Ibid., XII, 67.

166 LOUIS GREEN

interests is the kingpin of Villani's scheme of historical interpreta- tion. Everything in it radiates from this focal point: the discrimina- tion of good and bad forces in history, the equation, stemming from the Guelph partisanship of the Church, of the working of Divine Providence with the eventual victory of those presumed to be its protagonists on earth. Even the belief in the sympathy between the natural and supernatural worlds manifested in portents, miracles and suchlike signs is in a sense dependent on an organization of history in which the point of connection between material reality and spirit- ual design is the Church in its dual role of worldly institution and intermediary between the human and the divine. The association of Florence with the Papacy gives to the viewpoint of the city a cen- trality within the scheme of the medieval universe it could not other- wise have.

The occurrence of omens in his narrative of events demonstrates the close correspondence between the miraculous and the pattern of history. This is most clearly seen in the prophetic utterances by holy men which foreshadow divine retribution; for instance, Clement IV's prediction of the outcome of the battle of Tagliacozzo,15 the Bishop of Sion's vision, on hearing the news of the humiliation of Boniface VIII, of the calamities which are to befall the French royal family as a result of it,'6 and the foretelling by Dionigi of Borgo San Sepolcro of the death of Castruccio Castracane at a time when the Lucchese tyrant seemed on the point of overcoming Florence.17 But the rela- tion of portent to historical tendency is evident not only from these glimpses of the future that, as it were, lift up the curtain of time to reassure the fainthearted that God is after all in his heaven and all will eventually be right with the world even though superficial ap- pearances suggest the opposite. It also shows itself in the symmetry between the omen and the event it foretells.

An incident 18 related by Villani illustrates this. A lion which had been given to the city of Florence by Boniface VIII was attacked and killed by an ass. This, according to Villani, presaged the outrage com- mitted on Boniface shortly afterwards at Anagni, in fulfillment of the sybilline prophecy "when the tamed beast kills the King of Beasts, then the dissolution of the Church will begin." The portent, linked to the Pope through his former ownership of the lion, prefigured symbolically the terrible act it foretold. Like it, it implied an inver- sion of the natural order. Its position in the historical narrative is not accidental, for it defines one of the points of repercussion of a disturbance of equilibrium which is otherwise felt in the prophesy of the Bishop of Sion predicting its consequences, and in those con- sequences themselves when they had time to work themselves out through the process of history.

15 Ibid., VII, 28. 16 Ibid., VIII, 64. 17 Ibid., X, 86. 8 Ibid., VIII, 62.

14TH-CENTURY FLORENTINE CHRONICLES 167

The intrusion of the supernatural into Giovanni Villani's chroni- cle follows the principle that a suspension or distortion of the rules normally governing the world is a response to one of those upsets in the moral order that also release the springs of retribution. One line of impact follows the thread of time and becomes history, the others affect the physical world and become omens or miracles.

Only one class of portents had consistently an independence of moral significance that Villani himself tended to find embarrassing. These were astrological.l9 Believing as he did in a sympathy between the celestial, human, and physical levels of reality, he could not ignore them and, indeed, reported eclipses, the. appearance of comets, and extraordinary conjunctions of planets diligently in his chronicle, attributing to them deaths of kings and popes, political changes, and natural calamities. At one point, he even detected a periodicity in history, illustrated by the recurrence of certain configurations of the stars at twenty-year intervals.20 But his use of astrological indica- tions was always conditional. They defined a tendency, but could not determine events, or could only do so subject to divine consent. "The influence of the stars," he wrote, "does not, of necessity, compel, nor can they oppose the free choice of man's spirit, nor even more the prescience of God which guides, governs, and disposes all things ac- cording to his will." 21

Yet aside from this one not altogether assimilated detail-astrol- ogy-Villani's historical scheme has, as he formulated it in the central books of his work, a remarkable coherence. It reflected the confidence of hindsight and the attainment, around 1300, when he was inspired to write his chronicle, of a historical consciousness that made the past fall neatly into the mold of his interpretation. It was unfortunate for him that, being a chronicler and not a historian, he could not confine himself to the past but had to go on writing into a future out of step with the presuppositions that had given his account of events up to his own day shape and consistency. The growing diver- gence between the interests of Florence and those of the Papacy after the transfer of the Papal See to Avignon and the check to the pre- viously uninterrupted growth of Florentine prosperity in the second quarter of the XIVth century loosened the knots that held together

19 For a full discussion of Giovanni Villani's use of astrology, see E. Mehl, Die Weltanschauung des Giovanni Villani (Leipzig, 1927), 164ff.

20 Giovanni Villani Cronica XII 41. N. Rubinstein has argued ("Some Ideas on Municipal Progress and Decline in the Italy of the Communes," D. J. Gordon, Fritz Saxi: A Volume of Memorial Essays [London, 1957], 178-183) that the idea of civic decline in the work of the early XIVth-century Paduan humanist and his- torian, Albertino Mussato, was connected with such a conception of astrological periodicity. In Giovanni Villani's Chronicle there does not appear to be any evi- dence that the cyclic rhythm of history owes anything directly to astrology, al- though presumably the notion of fatality itself which is, as I have tried to show, inherent in his view of change, derives ultimately from astrological premises.

21 Giovanni Villani, Cronica, X, 40.

168 LOUIS GREEN

for him the texture of historical meaning. Recording as he did inci- dents in the order of their occurrence without any of the historian's pretensions to a thematic organization of his material, he could not feed back the lessons of a changing present into a reinterpreted past. Nor did his devotion to the justification and glorification of Florence permit him to see in the altered fortunes of his city a repetition of the pattern of decline he had illustrated in the histories of the great dynasties of his age. Instead, he withdrew into apocalyptic pessimism, convinced that the disasters that overwhelmed Florence in the forties of the XIVth century-the plague of 1340, the bankruptcies of the Bardi, the Peruzzi and their associated companies, the tyranny of the Duke of Athens-augured some cataclysm of cosmic dimensions. Himself ruined as a result of the financial failures of this decade and embittered in an old age that had brought the defeat of his hopes for himself, his business interests, the political aspirations of his class and city, he saw everywhere aberrations from the course of nature- famines, plagues, tempests, earthquakes, which were, as he expressed it in the very last chapter of his work, "great signs and judgments of God . . . that Jesus Christ predicted ... should appear at the end of the world." 22

As it happened, his forebodings did not prove entirely groundless. The Black Death, claiming Giovanni Villani himself as one of its victims in 1348, seemed presently to give color to his fears of the impending conclusion of human history. His brother Matteo, who continued his chronicle until he too succumbed to an outbreak of the bubonic plague fifteen years later, wrote under the shadow of this calamity and had to adapt his view of history to the somber mood it inspired. He lived, further, through a time of deepening strains within his own society and in Italy generally. The first threat to the freedom of Florence from the Visconti was to come in the 1350's as a result of the ambitions of the Archbishop of Milan; the first predatory, mercenary companies which were to be the scourge of the country for the next half century began at the same time to exact money from cities under threat of devastating their territories; in Florence itself, the great families reacted against the relatively democratic con- stitution which had been adopted following the expulsion of the Duke of Athens by the device of "admonishing" or depriving of civil rights all those of whom they, or the- dominant group among them, disap- proved. Matteo Villani himself, as Brucker has shown,23 was a victim of this practice. As a result, his outlook was profoundly different from that which had underlain his brother's original conception of history. He did not identify himself as Giovanni had done with the Floren-

22 Ibid., XII, 124. 23 G. A. Brucker, "The Ghibelline Trial of Matteo Villani" in Mediaevalia et

Humanistica, XIII (Boulder, Colo., 1960), 48.

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tine government that, early in the century, had reflected interests with which the Villanis were in sympathy. Nor could he espouse with any enthusiasm the cause of a Papacy which had ceased to be much more than a rival Italian political power frequently hostile to Flor- ence, particularly since the strongest advocates of a papal alliance within the city were precisely the most intransigent numbers of the "parte Guelfa" which was to exclude him from the rights of citizen- ship. The values in which Matteo Villani believed, while still deeply tinctured with religious feeling, did not issue from an exact localiza- tion of right and wrong in the world. Whereas Giovanni Villani had clearly identified historical forces as good and evil on the basis of the part they played in the moral conflict which formed the theme of his chronicle, Matteo in general judged actions according to their tendency to produce or avert human suffering, irrespective of the cause they served. It is significant, for instance, that he condemned the plundering of the Moslem city of Tripoli in North Africa by some Genoese adventurers whose subsequent misfortunes he attributed to divine disapproval of their inhumanity.24

Fear of tyranny and of the depredations of the mercenary com- panies; 25 resentment at the opportunist policies of a corrupt Pa- pacy,26 distrust of both oligarchic and popular tendencies27 in Flor- entine politics which threatened to squeeze out of power the bulk of the solid burgher class that had previously dominated the communal government together led Matteo Villani to abandon the neat moral pigeonholes of a clear-cut interpretation of history for a looser pre- sentation of events, colored by a hatred of all that undermined free- dom and justice, both, as he felt, then severely under challenge. This made for a fragmentation of what had been, in Giovanni Villani's chronicle, a coherent view of the past. It also produced critical shifts of emphasis that stemmed from a need not only to adjust to new con- ditions but also to achieve in them the integration of history within a meaningful world picture.

An interesting passage to which Rubinstein 28 has drawn attention indicates this. Matteo Villani could not, as his brother had done, anchor his belief in civic liberty fundamentally within his world order by seeing its defense against imperial pretensions as part of the contest of the Church's spiritual with the Emperor's temporal power. Yet at the same time he could not dispense with some au- thoritative basis for it. His solution to this problem was ingenious,

24 Matteo Villani, Istorie in L. A. Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, XIV (Milan, 1729), V, 60. 25 Ibid., III, 89; IV, 23.

26 Ibid., I, 70; II, 66, for indications of influence of altered policy of Papacy on Matteo Villani's attitude to the Church. 27 Ibid., II, 2; III, 56; IV, 69.

28 N. Rubinstein, "Florence and the Despots: Some Aspects of Florentine Diplo- macy in the Fourteenth Century," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Ser. V, Vol. II (1952), 31-2.

170 LOUIS GREEN

and illuminating in its bearing on the germination of the one of the key motifs of the Renaissance. He argued that the power of the Em- perors had originally been delegated to them by the Roman people, who included those then inhabiting the Tuscan cities. As a result of the "translatio imperii" it had later, through the good offices of the Church, been transferred to the Germans. Both of these transmissions of imperial authority were, however, provisional since the ultimate source of it lay with the citizens of those Italian Communes which had "maintained the rights and liberties handed down to them from the ancient Roman people" and not with the barbarous and out- landish Germans who were so out of touch with the customs of Italy that they could not effectively rule the country.29

In spite of the quaintness of the reasoning, the implications of such a defense of the inalienable independence of the Italian cities are clear. Since reference can no longer be made to religious authority, the tradition of Antiquity is substituted for it, and is made to fall neatly in its place in a redefined scheme of things by the use of the same technique of identification by association Giovanni Villani had resorted to in linking the cause of Florence with that of the Church.

The difference, of course, between the two ways of justifying what both chroniclers were most devoted to, the freedom of their city, was that one made appeal to an institution immediately present in the world to which recorded events could be directly related, the other to a remote delegation of power which, like the social contract of the XVIIth- and XVIIIth-century philosophers, had no connection in detail with current history. The belief in the survival of ancient freedom could not clarify the confused tangle of incident into the clear lines of a comprehensive design. All it could do was to soften the edges of inherited patterns of interpretation, now cut loose from their parent interconnecting stem.

When Matteo Villani considered tyranny, for instance, he was clearly influenced by the traditional stereotyped view of the self- destructive tendency of evil. He represents the tyrants, as Giovanni Villani had done the enemies of the Church, as contributing in- voluntarily but irresistibly to their own downfall. "Just as the thirst of the miser for money cannot be satisfied by the acquisition of gold," he claimed in a picturesque comparison, "so the tyrant's mania cannot be removed by the gaining of power. To devour, he holds his jaws wide open, and however much he has that he can destroy or take, the more he wants." 30 And so it follows that "as tyrannies are formed, as during their rise they strengthen and grow, so is nourished and hidden within them the cause of their collapse and ruin." 31 At the same time, however, as Matteo Villani reproduced (as he does here) a familiarly shaped interpretation, he altered its quality. It ceased to be part of a pattern which insured that ultimately good would

2 Matteo Villani, Istorie, IV. 77-78. 30 Ibid., IX, 56. 31 Ibid., VI, 1.

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emerge from evil, and became a statement imputing to human nature the impermanence of political power. Its implication for liberty was the opposite of that which, in Giovanni Villani's chronicle, the fall of the Hohenstaufen had for Florentine independence. In the one case freedom had risen from the ashes of despotism; in the other tyranny, while doomed by its very nature to perish, could as an outgrowth of human passion only make way for another expression of itself. Since, as Matteo Villani elsewhere insisted, the effect of tyranny was to debilitate a people in the exercise of freedom,32 liberty could not only be secured by the avoidance of that rise and fall of political powers out of which, in Giovanni Villani's account of history, it had emerged triumphant.

The flux of change became thus no longer a matrix out of which what was destined to come must arise, but an erosive force the rav- ages of which were at all costs to be resisted if what was good in the world was to be preserved. This shift in orientation between the two chronicles is brought out in the use of the term "fortune." For Gio- vanni Villani, "fortune" was the wheel of Fortune,33 inexorable, harsh in its immediate effects, but finally just. To him, it was of the nature of things that no human authority could endure beyond its allotted span; against this law all effort was unavailing. For his brother, however, fortune came to mean something much closer to the modern conception of chance: it was the tendency of situations to get out of hand unless brought under conscious human control. Far from being irresistible, it not only could but ought to be mastered. Thus, in complaining of the incompetence of the Florentine government, he rebuked its leaders for abandoning diligence and solicitude "to the course of fortune." 34 Or again, he quoted with approval such prover- bial expressions as "Good management overcomes bad fortune," 35 or "People rush to where more store is set on fortune than on wisdom" "

in his comments on incidents where prudence had, or could have, pre- vailed over the adversity of circumstance. Even from his considera- tion of tyranny, it appears that he allowed the exception of wisdom to break the rule of the self-destructive nature of the urge to power. He mentioned the interesting case of Giovanni da Oleggio, a Bolo- gnese tyrant, shrewd enough to pull the chestnuts out of the fire be- fore his sins caught up with him: "And having committed so many cruelties, so many extortions and robberies, like an old wolf he knew how to arrange matters so as to leave freely ... with a large quantity of money and jewels. . . . And certainly if he was considered wise, this occasion showed it." 87

The way that Matteo Villani rationalized the fatal cycle of rise, decline, and fall of temporal power into a psychological process left

32 Ibid., I, 63; I, 73; IX, 60. 33 G. Villani, Cronica, XII, 105, as well as X, 177, already quoted above. 34 Matteo Villani, Istorie, IV, 55. 35 Ibid., IV, 34. 86 Ibid., I, 47. 87 Ibid., IX, 76.

172 LOUIS GREEN

open this possibility of escape from it through self-restraint. This, of course, robbed the whole concept of its ethical implications. Ty- rants destroyed themselves not because they did wrong, but because they could not resist being carried away by their desires, something that could be an equal temptation and an equal danger to those who were not tyrants. Conversely political skill, while it might save a tyrant, could also be considered essential for the preservation of what was good and precious in the life of a free state.

In Matteo Villani's chronicle, the rhythm which had governed his brother's interpretation of the past subsided into a kind of ground swell on which events bobbed helplessly and pointlessly up and down. The compulsion- to read some moral meaning into history could not be satisfied through these now undirected fluctuations of political power. Instead, it was translated on the one hand into a designation of action as good or bad depending on its results, on the other into the defense of order not through but against the force of circum- stances in an effort to preserve what otherwise seemed on the point of being swept away. Hence, both the practical and the pessimistic character of Matteo Villani's approach to problems in which, of course, like his brother, he also discovered evidence of divine disap- proval of a sinful humanity.

For Matteo Villani did not, in spite of the altered emphasis of his interpretation, abandon the basic postulate underlying the older chronicler's work, that of the interdependence of the spiritual, human, and physical worlds. Indeed, it was the natural calamities and polit- ical setbacks of his age that must ominously have confirmed his own weakening confidence in the favorable outcome of history, and so contributed to his increasing reliance on other less vulnerable sup- ports for his view of things. The distinguishing mark of the portents that Matteo Villani recorded is their adverse, indeed their monstrous nature, the birth of deformed children 38 being one kind of omen to which he gave particular attention. The general impression that the world was out of joint issued as much from his references to natural occurrences as it did from his gloomy picture of human affairs.39 What was absent, however, from his chronicle was any such specific inter- connection between historical events and prodigies in the phenomenal world as formed an integral part of Giovanni Villani's reading of history. Astrological influences and omens were mentioned haphaz- ardly and were linked more often with climatic or other natural ef- fects 40 than with political changes or the deaths of eminent men.

The larger histories written in Florence during the remainder of the XIVth century, namely, that of Marchionne di Coppo Bonaiuti 41

88 Ibid., IV, 60; IX, 25. 39 In particular I, 1. 4o Ibid., II, 44; III, 37; III, 74; III, 104; IV, 24, VI, 12; VII, 47; X, 31; X, 93. 41 Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, Cronaca fiorentina in Rerum Italicarum Scrip-

tores, XXX, part 1 (Citta di Castello, 1927).

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(or Stefani as he is more usually but erroneously called) 42 and the anonymous chronicle once attributed to Piero Minerbetti,43 confirm the movement away from Giovanni Villani's clearly articulated provi- dential view of history which Matteo Villani's work indicates. Mar- chionne, the earlier of the two, still paid lip service to the formulae of the old interpretation-if misfortune befell an evildoer he tended, if only mechanically, to attribute this to divine retribution44-but the anonymous chronicler who wrote between 1385 and 1409, pre- occupied though he was with the prevalence of treachery, brutality, violence, and corruption, seldom drew moral conclusions from it. Both writers occasionally mentioned omens and the position of the stars, but with growing indifference and even scepticism as to their possible bearing on events.45 By comparing each successive chronicle with its predecessor, one can detect a progressive weakening of the sense of structure in history and a correspondingly heightened concern for isolated, immediate practical problems such as, in Marchionne di Coppo Bonaiuti's case, those associated with the tumult of the Ci- ompi, the Florentine lower class revolt of 1378 which forms the climax of his narrative.

The tendency for one style of historical interpretation to fade out was accompanied, as in Matteo Villani's work, by a gradual integra- tion of new areas of interest into different, though as yet only tenta- tively formulated, patterns of significance. In Marchionne di Coppo Bonaiuti's chronicle it is the alternation of political regimes in the internal history of the city between the 1340s and 1380s which pro- vides a suggestion of this. Florentine society is shown as divided into contending classes and factions, at the two extremes the popolo minuto and the great families (with whom, as another "admonished" citizen, Marchionne like Matteo Villani was at odds).46 Each group is represented as striving for its own interests and seeking dominance over the civic government, a dominance which can only be short-lived because it lacks either political experience or popular support. Each new regime overcompensates for the imbalance of the previous one, thus making itself in turn vulnerable to overthrow. Hence the in- stability of Florentine political history at this period, which witnessed in rapid sequence the tyranny of the Duke of Athens, the relatively

42 R. Palmarocchi, Cronisti del Trecento (Milan, 1935) 839. 43 Cronica volgare di anonimo fiorentino dell' an. 1385 al 1409 gia attribuita a

Piero di Giovanni Minerbetti in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, XXVII part 2 (Citta di Castello, 1915).

44 Marchionne di Coppo Stefani Cronaca fiorentina, R. 788 (p. 315) and R. 792 (p. 319).

45 Ibid., R. 615 (pp. 222-3) and R. 996 (p. 442), and Chron. Volg. del anon. fior. 1390, 36 (p. 110).

46 M. Becker, "Un Avvenimento riguardante il cronista Marchionne di Coppo Stefani," Archivio Storico Italiano, 117 (Florence, 1959), 137ff.

174 LOUIS GREEN

democratic constitution that followed it, the predominance of the Albizzi faction, the revolutionary working-class regime of the Ciompi and, on its collapse, the reversion to oligarchical rule by a tight knot of great families.

There is a hint here of something like the classic cycle which Aristotle and Polybius detected in politics; but it is no more than a hint, being suggested by the general pattern of events and incidental comments on them rather than brought out in explicit inference. A much more conscious reorganization of material of a realistic, political character into a coherent interpretation is evident in a later work, Goro Dati's Istoria di Firenze.4 This chronicle, to which Hans Baron 48 has rightly attached importance, dates from the end of the first decade of the XVth century and differs in form from its prede- cessors: it does not follow the traditional arrangement of text into short, chronological chapters, but is set out as a dialogue. It is also, in spite of its title, less comprehensive in scope than the earlier, loose, universal chronicles, confining itself in fact to the conflict between Florence and the Milanese tyrant, Gian-Galeazzo Visconti, and to such historical incidents as had some relation to it. In spite of these "modern" characteristics, however, it still expresses in its tone and outlook the values of the XIVth-century Florentine merchant-class. There are also, as I shall attempt to show, close affinities between its style of historical interpretation and that of earlier, more conven- tional chronicles that entitle it to be considered as a final point in the line of development which they define.

Goro Dati's main aim in this work was to explain the defeat of Gian-Galeazzo Visconti and the victory of Florence. He started, therefore, like Giovanni Villani but unlike the intervening chroniclers, with a clear sense of historical and moral direction. Writing after the conclusion of the conflict, he was able to simplify and generalize, en- countering no difficulties in assigning to the two sides the traditional roles of villain and hero. In this, there was nothing novel. Indeed, it might seem to imply, after the more flexible Florentine historiography of the late XIVth century, a relapse into archaically rigid categories of interpretation. There were, however, important senses in which Dati's Istoria represented a step forward: at least superficially his explanation of events was naturalistic and, in development and pre- sentation, it had a logical consistency which marked it off from the piecemeal exposition of the patchwork histories of his predecessors. Gian-Galeazzo's designs against Florence were clearly related to the single plan of isolating and encircling the city and so sapping its capac- ity to resist that it would ultimately fall an easy prey to him. His failure was attributed neither to accident nor miracle, but to an over-

47 Gregorio Dati, L'Istoria di Firenze dal 1380 al 1405 (Norcia, 1902). 48 H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1955), I,

140ff.

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extension of his resources made unavoidable by the very nature of his aims.49

Outwardly, Goro Dati's analysis of the situation was rational and realistic. But an examination of the form of his explanation cannot but awaken the suspicion that beneath its apparently scientific objectivity it concealed more traditional and primitive patterns of thought. Gian-Galeazzo's ambition was given a compulsive character which impelled him irresistibly towards his doom in a way that recalls strikingly the self-destructive tendency of evil in Giovanni Villani's religious interpretation of history. There was, furthermore, a fatality in the whole cycle of his rise and fall, as described by Goro Dati, which provides a clue to the extent to which Dati's reasoned exposition of causes masked assumptions as to the final necessity of Gian-Galeazzo's failure. This appears most plainly in the use of the term "fortune" in the sense of an inexorable force, as in Giovanni Villani's chronicle, but with the added connotation of something not blind, but purpose- ful. Had Gian-Galeazzo "gone step by step," Dati remarked at one point, "he would have advanced more securely; but fortune always wants to keep for itself some opening through which it can intervene beyond the capacity of the human mind to resist." 50 Or again, in speaking of the kindling of Gian-Galeazzo's ambition, Dati personified fortune as a temptress: "Already waxing fortune, showing itself his friend, blew with favorable winds on the ships of his desires and his mind strained to the utmost height the hoisted spars; such dominions as either his forebears or any other tyrant of Lombardy had had did not suffice him, and it seemed to him that he had nothing unless he had everything." 61

Throughout his account of the war between Milan and Florence, Dati shaped his explanation to follow the turn of fortune's wheel. If Gian-Galeazzo had successes to begin with, it was because he had to reach the summit of achievement before he could be brought down. "But fortune," Dati commented, excusing an early Florentine defeat, "had not yet decided to make an end of it; it wanted to keep him waiting yet a little longer, wanted to make him rise still higher to make his fall all the greater." 2 If Gian-Galeazzo could not, like Matteo Villani's Giovanni da Oleggio, remain satisfied with his initial gains and give his ambition pause at the first sign of his changing fortunes, it was because he was caught up by the ungovernable passion for conquest. At this stage in Dati's interpretation the idea of fate is translated into psychological compulsion. The transition is made, as in Matteo Villani, right down to the accompanying evocative simile. "Just as agony and fear make a woman in labor conceive such a hatred for carnal intercourse with a man that pain disposes her never

49Gregorio Dati, L'Istoria di Firenze, 90 (p. 71). 50Ibid., 56 (p. 51). 51 Ibid., 18 (p. 24). 52 Ibid., 38 (p. 39).

176 LOUIS GREEN

to engage in it again and once the affliction has passed it seems to her a thousand years before she can return to the accustomed embraces ... so it happened to the Conte di Virtui that as soon as he thought himself out of danger . .. the poison worked within him and revived his customary desires." 53

Like Matteo Villani's tyrant, the Conte di Virtu, namely Gian- Galeazzo Visconti, is in the power of an irresistible natural impulse. While his inability to overcome Florence is finally due, according to Dati, to the inadequacy of his financial resources, the cause of his downfall lies deeper, in the urge which prompted him to undertake and then would not let him abandon an enterprise beyond his capacity. The reasons for his defeat may be spelt out in terms of natural causes, but underlying the whole description of his career there is the impli- cation of a necessary and irreversible process, the nature of which was determined by the character of the man himself and the reaction of fortune, here acting as a substitute for what to Giovanni Villani would have been divine providence. The element of the supernatural is not explicit, but it survives not only in the morphology of the explanation but also in vestigial traces which at key points betray its underlying presence. For instance, the death of Gian-Galeazzo Visconti, the denouement of the whole drama, is foretold by a holy hermit in the district of Arezzo.54 Dati disclaims the importance of this, saying that "though little reliance was placed upon this by the greater citizens, all the same it reassured the people who have an ear for such things." Nevertheless, it is significant that he should bring it in at the exact point where it would have occurred in Giovanni Villani's account of just such an incident. It is equally interesting that Dati, again in the tradition of Giovanni Villani, has the death of Gian-Galeazzo echoed by a terrible storm in which the ground shook "so that it seemed the world should be destroyed," 55 and that he could see in the occurrence of riots in Milan on the feast of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence, a portent of the coming victory of the latter city over the Duke of Milan.56

Clearly then, the framework which Dati imposed on history, for all its new look, was no more than a refurbished version of a tradi- tional stereotype. This is not, however, to say that his interpretation breaks no new ground, or is unimportant as an indication of change in historical outlook. Its significance derives from the success with which new elements have been assimilated into an old scheme, thus satisfying the need for meaning and compatibility with moral standards while at the same time reducing causation in appearance at least to a single-streamed natural process. The idea that history operates subject to law rather than in immediate response to divine

53 Ibid., 46 (p. 44). 54 Ibid., 97 (p. 74). 55 Ibid., 100 (p. 76). 56 Ibid., 110 (p. 82).

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judgment, which is implicit even in Dati's conception of a directing, purposeful fortune, marks an important step forward in the evolution of a speculative historical method.

Moreover, if Goro Dati's Istoria represented a return to the same sense of historical order as had inspired Giovanni Villani's chronicle, it did so on new terms which reflected the more humanistic values that had developed in the latter half of the XIVth century. In this work, liberty and tyranny replaced the Church and its enemies as the two central contending forces in history. This produced crucial realign- ments of sympathies: freedom was of necessity idealized and the Roman Republic, considered the exemplar of democratic institutions in Italy, was wherever possible regarded as the model of everything distinctively Florentine. Analogies were brought out between the strategy employed by Roman generals in the Punic Wars and those used by the Florentines against Milan.57 The virtues that raised the Romans to greatness were traced back to Etruscan influence and a long-standing link was thus established between Roman and Tuscan justice, probity, and piety.58 The alleged Roman descent of the Florentines (Florence was supposed to have been founded as a Roman colony) was made the explanation of their inherited aversion to tyranny.69 Even the religion of the Romans, which no degree of ingenuity could represent as Christian, was made to foreshadow that of their Florentine successors in the sincerity of the devotion it implied. "Because they thought they were making sacrifices to and honoring the one true God," Dati suggested somewhat ingenuously in their defense, "the true God allowed them to acquire the merit for them on earth that they sought ...." 6 Thus, not even difference of religion was allowed to stand as a distinction between the two peoples which might weaken the claim of the Florentines to be the heirs of Rome.

Goro Dati's sense of identity with the Roman tradition stemmed, as had Matteo Villani's more tentative allusion to the Roman heritage, from the need to give the backing of a sanctioned authority to the civic freedom when the exigencies of historical interpretation induced both to make of civic freedom a rallying point as compelling in its appeal as the religious allegiance it had replaced. If Dati was stronger and more explicit in his definition of the connection between Rome and Florence, it was because he worked within a coherent scheme of explanation to which the affinity could be integrally related. Paradoxically, it was the regressive strain in his presentation of history that framed with its reinforcing structure new elements which, with-

57 Ibid., 35 (p. 37) and 55 (p. 50). 58Ibid., 149 (pp. 108-9). (In his assertion that the Romans sent their sons to

study in ancient Etnlria, Dati may well be indebted to Livy, IX, 39.) 59Ibid., 158 (pp. 120-1). 60Ibid., 149 (p. 110).

178 LOUIS GREEN

out its support, could not have become an adequate substitute for those they supplanted. The reestablishment of a balance, which gave rise to a rudimentary expression of the outlook of the early Renaissance, was in this case the product of a fusion between a pattern of interpretation of medieval origin and ideas which had emerged, under the stress of circumstance, in answer to a continued demand for compatibility between the immediate reality of life and its final meaning.

That this was the manner of development of a view of history that has many affinities with that of the early Humanists throws a revealing light, perhaps not on the causes of the Renaissance which must be sought in a wider context than this, but certainly on the process by which one set of values began to be transformed into another. The transition, if this evidence is anything to go by, represented not so much a break as a redeployment, entailing a substitution of some elements for others to preserve in the new system of interpretation the balance and consistency of the old. The initial condition of change can probably be put down to the com- pulsion of the Florentine chroniclers to justify naturally an order which those more at ease in the medieval world had taken for granted. This insistence on proof, perhaps a sign of bad conscience, perhaps an involuntary carry-over from the mental habits of a vigorous, inquiring community, undoubtedly explains the flexibility with which ideas were adapted to altering conditions. But to account for the actual form of what emerged one needs to go beyond this, and see in the resort to the authority of Rome and the reliance on natural virtues rather than on religious orthodoxy a response to a more widespread situation. The degree of definition achieved in medieval thought in the XIIIth century itself acted as a restriction to further adaptability. The involvement of a particular conception of society with a given system of values carried with it the danger that any unfamiliar challenge would compel recourse to another tradition, and the classical was, within the medieval cultural heritage, the most readily available. If it was in Italy that it had the most immediate appeal, it was here that it answered to the aspirations for freedom and dignity which allegiance to the Church had transiently seemed to provide but which ultimately could only be satisfied by reliance on something sufficiently remote to be beyond the caprice of circumstance. The Florentine Humanists and chroniclers of the XIVth century moved independently in the same direction because the mental predispositions of the society to which both belonged formed the best bridge between a culture which had lost its capacity to respond creatively to change and its most viable alternative.

University of Tasmania