Sometime before the dawn of the fourteenth century, a family named the Medici moved from a small village in the Mugello Valley in the Apennines to the bustling city of Florence. Eventually, they became successful bankers and one member was elected to the republic’s top office. They also jumped right into the city’s latest violent class and factional civil war.
Transcript
Once upon a time, there was a courageous knight named Averardo. He fought well for Emperor Charlemagne, freeing Italy from the tyranny of the Lombards. While traveling through the Mugello Valley, he caught word of a giant who was terrorizing the people who lived there. Averardo challenged this Goliath to one-on-one combat. The giant tried to brain Averardo with his mace, but he lifted his golden shield at the pivotal moment, holding the shield so strongly that the mace shattered against it. However, it left the shield dented with the iron balls off the mace. Even with his shield damaged, however, Averardo was able to overpower and kill the cruel giant. Impressed by his feats, Charlemagne himself granted Averardo the right to use the dented shield, iron balls and all, as his family insignia. With that, Averardo graciously accepted the invitation of the people he liberated to settle in the valley. There, his descendants became known as the Medici family.
Is this story fact or fiction?
I mean, to be fair, the Medici actually did come from a village named Cafaggiolo in the Mugello Valley, in the Apennines not far north of Florence. We can’t say much more than that, even how they got the name Medici. Since Medici seems to come from the Latin word for doctor, medicus, it is possible that at least one member of the family if not a line of descendants worked in medicine. Surnames were relatively rare outside the nobility by around the thirteenth century, when the Medici first appear, and commoner surnames were often based on a family profession. Still, we can’t know that for certain. In fact, one historian of the Medici, James Cleugh, suggested that the Medici just got the name because they signed up with the guild of physicians when they first arrived in Florence. I haven’t seen another source second that, though, so take that theory with a grain of salt.
What historians do tend to agree on is that the idea that the Medici’s family crest, showing red balls over a field of gold or yellow, was probably never meant to refer to this hypothetical heritage as doctors. The red balls could not be pills because round pills weren’t a common feature of medicine at the time the Medici’s insignia first appears. Nor are they the fragments off a giant’s mace. Instead the balls are probably actually coins, with the entire insignia resembling the signs medieval money-changers used to hang outside their stalls and shops.
We have no idea why and exactly when the Medici migrated from their humble mountain village to the bustling metropolis of Florence down south. We just know they kept ties with Cafaggiolo, and a Medici villa in the valley still exists as a historic landmark. Likely enough, the Medici, like thousands of others, were drawn by the economic boom in the cities during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. I’ll talk more about this in a future episode, but Florence’s trading and banking networks became so pervasive and rich that the city’s standard coin, the florin, became the standard international currency for Europe.
Florence was in the middle of a massive population boom as well. By 1250, the city’s population reached 65,000. Between the mid-twelfth and mid-thirteenth centuries Florence’s population increased to 50,000 and reached 65,000 in 1250, making it the fifth largest city in Europe, in no small part because of immigrants like the Medici. Naturally, this meant the Florentines weren’t reluctant to throw their weight around. In 1300, during the celebration of the Papal Jubilee, Pope Boniface VIII was surprised and maybe a little disconcerted to find himself greeting twelve Florentines who appeared acting as diplomats for the sovereigns of Bohemia, Russia, the Golden Horde, Naples, Sicily, Muscovy, England, and France and Verona and Pisa. Boniface referred to the Florentines, who were by then everywhere in Europe as bankers and merchants, as the “fifth element”, as present as air, fire, and water.
The first time a Medici appears in the Florentine records is in 1216, when a Bonagiunta de’ Medici is listed as a member of a city council. All we can say about him is that he was the son of Giambuono de’ Medici and that he owned houses in the city’s commercial city, the Mercato Vecchio or the Old Market. There’s also a document that reveals that Bonagiunta and his brother Chiarissimo must have been bankers since it records that they leant money to a monastery. Other documents suggest Bonagiunta’s sons Galgano and Ugo took up their father’s line of work.
And…well, that’s it for most of the thirteenth century. Then, suddenly, Bonagiunta’s great-grandson, Ardingo de’ Medici, appears as a prior who was part of the pivotal Signoria that passed the Ordinances of Justice. Whatever happened during those missing decades, fortune had been extremely kind to the Medici. Not only was Bonagiunta sitting pretty on the republic’s executive council, in 1296 he would become gonfaloniere for the first time and he was married to Gemma de’ Bardi, a noblewoman from one of Florence’s top aristocratic families.
These were good times for Florence and the Medici. But they weren’t exactly quiet times, what with the new ongoing feud between the White and the Black factions that replaced the old Guelph and Ghibelline war. While the Ghibelline and Guelph conflict started with a prank, this one was sparked by real estate. A family of wealthy merchants, the Cerchi, purchased a mansion in a posh, traditionally aristocratic neighborhood, which made them the neighbors of two of Florence’s oldest noble families, the Donati and the Pazzi. These two families also had much smaller checking accounts than the Cerchi. Dino Compagni, who was not only alive for these events but was a member of the White faction, explains what happened next, starting in the year 1300:
“Seeing the Cerchi rising to eminence (they had built and added to the palace, and kept great state), the Donati began to feel a deep hatred towards them. This increased greatly, because Corso Donati, an ambitious knight, whose wife had died, became betrothed to another, the daughter of the late Accirrito of Gaville, an heiress. But when her kinsmen would not consent to this, because they were expecting the inheritance, the maiden’s mother, seeing he was a very handsome man, concluded the match, contrary to the wishes of the rest. The Cerchi, kinsmen of Neri of Gaville, became angry, and tried to prevent Corso from getting the inheritance. However, he took it by force; and hence arose much mischief and danger to the city and to individuals.”
Some men from the Cerchi family were allegedly poisoned by Corso, although the courts dismissed the charges because there was no proof. The Cerchi then went straight to the court of public opinion and riled up the artisan and laborer classes, the popolani. The Donati were already on the popolani’s bad side because the Donati played a key role in the plot to get our champion of democracy Giano della Bella exiled and blacklisted by the Pope himself, so they didn’t require much persuasion. However, the descendants of the old Ghibelline nobles also took up the cause of the Cerchi, largely out of old generational rivalries with the Guelf families who slighted them decades ago when the war between the Guelfs and Ghibellines was still old. Out of this motley crew came what would become known as the White faction. Meanwhile, even though the Donati had been champions of the campaign to stop the Ordinances of Justice and prevent the guilds from taking the reins of the Republic, the upper middle class tended to side with the Donati and their noble allies. Why? Well, I don’t think you need to be a Marxist to guess it was because they wanted to side with anyone the majority of the popolani were against. And this formed the nucleus of what would be the Black faction.
Look, I know, just don’t try to think about late medieval Italian factional politics too much or you’ll end up like an H.P. Lovecraft protagonist.
What’s important is that the middle classes of Florence proved to be just as ready to pursue old-fashioned bloody vendettas as the nobility. Starting with a fight that broke out at the funeral of a noblewoman, the Whites and the Blacks engaged in street fights, riots, and assassinations. Dino explicitly mentions the Medici among the middle-class and noble families that participated in the violence or were victims of it, with one unnamed member of the family getting murdered in the chaos. Compagni claims the violence reached a point where men were being tied up and tortured in public and in broad daylight. In another incident, a few Blacks lit a fire to destroy a White barricade, but the fire grew out of anyone’s control and ended up destroying the city center and over 2,000 buildings.
No wonder Compagni went on a tangent in his history to write this bitterly satirical speech, which he attributes to the blacks:
“Arise, O wicked citizens, full of discord, take sword and fire in your hands, and spread abroad your evil doings. Disclose your iniquitous desires and abominable purposes; delay no longer; go and lay waste the beauties of your city. Shed your brother’s blood, strip yourselves of faith and love, deny one another help and service. Delay not, ye miserable men, for more is destroyed in one day’s war than is gained through long years of peace; and small is that spark which brings a great kingdom to destruction.”
It’s still a little unclear exactly whose side the Medici were on, even though Compagni describes them as being popolani themselves. However, he also claims that they attacked a well-liked member of the popolani, Orlanduccio Orlandi, and left him for enough. Likely enough, the family was divided, like other sprawling clans were, and the loyalties of even individuals shifted.
In any case, the fighting would, naturally, prove to have tremendous political consequences beyond a little property damage and human death here and there. Boniface VIII sent a papal envoy to try to negotiate a peace between the Blacks and the Whites. Compagni claims, though, that the real purpose of the mission was to dot the I’s on a secret agreement between the Pope and the leaders of the Blacks that would allow the Papal States to annex Florence in exchange for military support against the Whites. Given that Compagni himself was a White, it’s safe to doubt this particular claim of his. That said, though, there’s no doubt at least in Compagni’s account that the Pope’s sympathies were with the Blacks, who had managed to tie up their own cause with that of papal supremacy over all of Italy.
Whatever the envoy’s purposes, it ended in catastrophe. A popolani mob, armed with crossbows, stormed the papal envoy’s quarters and threatened him. The Pope reacted by putting all of Florence under a papal interdict. The government, which at the time included Compagni himself and the poet Dante, tried to appease the Pope by banishing the most radical members of both factions. However, Boniface VIII had decided to take matters into his own hands and resolve the crisis – ostensibly for the sake of peace, but really for the Blacks. As the popes had learned, if you had a problem with some other Italian state, find yourself a French prince, aim him at the problem, and let him go. This time, the Pope appealed to Charles de Valois, the second son of King Philip III of France, promising to support him in becoming Holy Roman Emperor if he just helped him bring Florence to heel. In 1302, he marched with an army to Florence. Outmatched, the signoria had the city gates opened to Charles, following his envoys’ promise that he was just there to negotiate a lasting peace between the Whites and the Blacks. Unfortunately, he was lying. He released all Blacks who had been imprisoned. Also six hundred citizens who associated with the White party were banished and a new government was installed, stacked with members of the Black faction. One of the Whites who were exiled just happened to be the poet Dante. He just so happened to be in Siena at the time. The government condemned him to be burned alive if he set foot past the city limits ever again. And, in fact, Dante would never see his beloved Florence again.
Many of the Whites formed a kind of government in exile in the nearby town of Pastoia. By 1306, Ardingo de’ Medici was serving as prior again. Still, though, we’re not exactly sure if he identified with either faction or may have been under his watch. Still, it was during his time as a prior that the greatest atrocity of the war between the Blacks and the Whites took place. The town was put under siege, and to try to prevent a famine the women, children, old men, and the disabled of the town were sent out of the town. Rather than showing them mercy or taking them captive, the Florentines either slaughtered them or forced them back into the town to suffer starvation. The town had no choice but to surrender on the Blacks’ own terms:
I have to quote Compagni again:
“Sodom and Gomorrah, and the other cities which were overwhelmed in a moment and their inhabitants slain, had a far better fate than the Pistoians dying in such bitter sufferings. How did the wrath of God assailt them! How many, and what sins could have committed to merit such sudden judgement?”
By this time, however, there was a new pope, Clement V, who you might know from such hits as relocating the papacy to the city of Avignon outside Italy and helping arrange the executions of the Knights Templar on trumped up charges. Somewhat less partisan over this whole White and Black thing than his predecessor, Clement V demanded that Florence end the ongoing conflict. When the Florentines refused, the pope declared war on Florence in 1307. Ardingo himself helped rally the resistance, which managed to repel papal forces from Tuscany.
In fact, Ardingo seems to have been a successful and beloved politician. A vivid description of him comes from a scholar writing much later in the sixteenth century, although there may be a ring of truth to it:
“It was alleged that his extraordinary mode of life, the great number of bullies and ruffians that he kept around him, his house ever open to all sorts of people, his immoderate munificence, his friendships with many Italian princes, and, in short, as is always the case when malicious rumors get about, his presence, his style of speech, his stately bearing, his walk and indeed his every gesture, word and movement savored of sovereignty.”
Whatever Ardingo’s successes, however, the republic remained on a knife’s edge. After long decades of the Holy Roman Empire being split between multiple candidates, a new emperor was elected, Henry VII, who decided to once again try to subdue northern Italy. Florence refused to submit. How this would have shaken out we will never know. While in Italy, Henry VII got dragged into a war between the Papal States and the kingdom of Naples, and then died from a sudden illness in 1313.
Unfortunately, there was another threat much closer to home. By this point, Florence’s major rival when it came to trade and banking was the fellow Tuscan city of Pisa. Pisa was ruled by its own signore, Castruccio Castracani, who was an exceptionally talented general. The signoria was so intimidated by Castracani and the Pisans, in fact, that they actually voted to invite King Robert of Naples, the grandson of Charles of Anjou, to become signore of the city for five years in exchange for military aid. Even with a king in their corner, Florence lost a pivotal battle to Pisa in 1316, and then again about ten years later.
Obviously, at least Florence was defying the trend of its neighbors by not making one of its own citizens signoria. Still, given that European royals tend to be an ambitious lot, especially heirs to spare who likely will see an older brother inherit the throne, it was a risky strategy for the long-term health of the republic. Still, though, the signoria later offered the office of signore to King Robert’s son and heir, Charles of Calabria, for a ten-year term. Not only was Charles granted the role of commander in chief of Florence’s army, but also the right to appoint the Podesta and the priors of the signoria. Yet again, though, the grim reaper stepped in to lend the republic a hand. The city’s demonic archenemy Castruccio died in 1328 and his regime almost immediately collapsed. A couple of months later, Charles of Calabria also died.
However, Florence was not quite done with offering power to foreigners, and next time, a couple of timely deaths won’t save the republic from tyranny. Next time, the Medici will step once again onto the stage of history to save Florence from the regime of the man I already like to call, King Walt.
The Medici Podcast 