In a time of simmering class tensions and growing exploitation of the poor, Salvestro de’ Medici turns against his conservative comrades and declares he’s on the side of the downtrodden. On his political agenda? Backing an all-out war against the Pope.
Transcript
As you probably expect from living in the 21st century, all those wages spiking up and workers getting the power to seek employment with different employers didn’t sit well with the rich. So, in the years following the original outbreak of the Black Death, there was a conservative retrenchment.
Like I touched on last time, by this time the old Guelf nobility and the wealthiest members of the major guilds coalesced into one conservative faction, led by people like the rich Albizzi and Strozzi families. Essentially, they sought to restore at least some of the nobility’s control over the government and share that power with the major guilds. Also the conservatives were deeply hostile to the so-called “new men”, migrants from around Tuscany and the rest of Italy who came in to take advantage of the economic opportunities created by the Black Death and managed to prosper while some of the established elite families of the city found themselves struggling. The conservatives were hell-bent on keeping the “new men” from having any representation in the government. I’m skipping ahead a little, but this early fifteenth century speech from Rinaldo degli Albizzi, quoted from Dale Kent’s book The Rise of the Medici, really just captures the conservative attitude toward the new men:
“They are naturally ignoble and mean-spirited. One has come from Empoli, another from the Mugello, some came here as our servants, and now we find them our partners in the government of the Republic. Now they take us for the servants, and themselves for the lords. Like all newcomers, they don’t really know their business, unless it be to overthrow you. The ignorant mob should stick to their petty skills and concentrate on earning enough to care for their families, and be kept out of the government of the Republic entirely, like the scandalmongers and creators of discord that they are.”
On the other side, there were the populists. Mostly the populists were supported by city laborers, the lower middle class, and the new men, but some of the elites backed them too, like the Medici for the most part and the Ricci family. At the very least, they supported preserving the Ordinances of Justice wholly intact, increasing the representation of members of the minor guilds in government, and give help to the populo minuto, the lower-class shopkeepers, artisans, and laborers who didn’t qualify for guild membership, but admittedly very few advocated for giving them equal political rights. Just keep in mind these weren’t really terms that the people themselves used, and these definitely weren’t political parties in the modern sense, and people moved between the two sides or staked out moderate positions between the two sides constantly, as we’ll see in a bit.
Although the conservatives didn’t dare completely overturn the Ordinances of Justice that originally established guild dominance of the republic, they broke much of the power of the minor guilds by reducing the number of offices members could hold and by even combining some of the minor guilds. Salvestro de’ Medici himself supported a law that eased the Ordinances of Justice, allowing nobles to hold political offices outside the Signoria itself again. The conservatives also found a new way to stifle their opposition. See, even though some of the nobility still liked to call themselves Guelf, Guelf and Ghibelline were practically meaningless terms since the Holy Roman Emperors had more or less given up on northern Italy. But the conservative government passed a law allowing them to ban any Ghibelline from holding political office. Who, exactly, was a Ghibelline? Well, anyone the government said was a Ghibelline, of course. Also they passed laws designed to keep the “new men”, even ones who had joined the guilds, from being able to hold most political offices. Nor did the conservatives show mercy to the laborers. Like the governments of France and England, the Signoria reacted to the growing prosperity of workers in the wake of the Black Death by stomping down with a boot, making workers contracturally bound to their employers for the first time and forcing wages to stay low. And, just like in France and England, this was a recipe for a nasty revolt, but let’s put a pin in that.
In the meantime, Salvestro de’ Medici, the very man who had introduced the law to let nobles back into many political offices, switched sides. In March of 1367, he gave a speech where he called conservatives “evil men who want to control the government of Florence and to crush the less powerful citizens.” Because of how little evidence there is, we don’t know exactly what caused Salvestro’s change of heart. Perhaps it was pure political opportunism. Personally, I don’t think the fact that he switched teams after the Black Death is a coincidence. I would even suggest he saw the changes happening around him and to the people of Florence and responded accordingly, and perhaps was even disgusted by the way his conservative colleagues in government cracked down on dissenters and stifled the pay of workers. As we’ll see, though, if he was sincere, it didn’t mean that he couldn’t be clever and manipulative.
Whatever brought about Salvestro’s political realignment, it was total. When the Signoria received a request from the Pope for military aid, it seemed natural and inevitable that they would agree. After all, the conservatives still prided themselves on Florence’s Guelph past and that the city always sided with the popes against the Holy Roman emperors. But then, Salvestro argued against the proposal and got enough votes to tell the pope no.
The request from the pope didn’t even come from Rome, but from Avignon, a city in what is now southeastern France. Pope Clement V, who started out life as a child of minor French nobility and was a personal friend of King Philippe IV of France, relocated the entire papal court there by 1309. It was justified by the fact that the nobles of Rome had gotten too rowdy for the Pope’s safety, and that wasn’t…incorrect. But, in reality, it was because the French had gotten their clutches on the papacy, something proven when King Philippe wielded Pope Clement V like a weapon to take down the entire order of Knights Templar on trumped-up charges and split their wealth between himself and his buddy the Pope. Not only that, but nearly all the cardinals Pope Clement appointed just happened to be French.
The poet Petrarch famously called this with Old Testament flair the “Babylonian captivity” of the church. But it wasn’t just because the popes had obviously become the puppets of the French monarchy, although that was certainly bad enough. It was that, at a time when the Black Death had shaken up people’s faith in the Church, the papal court in Avignon was living it up on ill-begotten Templar wealth. Now, to be fair, many of the worst reports of the Avignon papacy come from Italians like Petrarch who were rightfully furious that the French stole the entire papacy from Italy. However, there are some tangible hints here and there that the Avignon popes weren’t too worried that Jesus would hold them to that whole “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter heaven” thing. For one thing, Clement’s successor, Pope John XXII, condemned the entire Franciscan order as heretics because they argued Jesus and the apostles didn’t own property. During his pontificate, John built a palace just outside Avignon with a pleasure garden and had another chateau built in the Rhone valley. Also here’s his shopping list for one banquet he hosted:
“4,012 loaves of bread, 9 oxen, 55 sheep, 8 pigs, 4 wild boars, large quantities of fish, 200 capons, 690 chickens, 3,000 eggs, 580 partridges, 270 rabbits, 40 plovers, 37 ducks, 59 pigeons, 4 cranes, 2 pheasants, 2 peacocks, 292 small birds, 3 hundred weight of cheese, 2,000 apples and other fruit, and 11 barrels of wine.”
It is true that Florentine bankers and merchants followed the pope to Avignon, and helped turn Avignon from a small poor city to a major metropolis. But between the rather worldly lifestyles of the rich and holy in Avignon and the pope staying away from Italian soil and doing the bidding of the French, Florentine loyalty to the papacy was at an all-time low outside the conservative elite. So when the popes realized that it was a problem that the people of Rome and the Papal States were resenting their absence and not sending their taxes to Avignon and needed to pay for an army to bring their subjects back into line, as well as keep the ambitious Duke of Milan who was eyeing the vulnerable Papal States at bay, it’s no surprise many Florentines were swayed by Salvestro’s argument to stay out of it.
But unfortunately it turned out Florence couldn’t stay out of it. The old fear that the Pope had secret designs on Tuscany that nearly got a papal envoy to Tuscany killed and sparked a war was still alive and well. That’s when John Hawkwood, a military commander from England who also happened to be one of the most notorious mercenary leaders or condotierri in Italian history, steps into the scene. He had fought for the papacy against Milan, but he was rather upset that the Pope had dismissed him and cheated him and his men of pay. (Seriously, what is it with people in this period and short-changing mercenaries?). Deciding someone had to pay, Hawkwood decided to pillage and extort protection money from the locals in Tuscany.
Since rumors were already flying that the Pope was again plotting to annex Tuscany to the Papal States, and a notorious mercenary that was last anyone heard working for the Pope was marching on Tuscany…well, you can imagine what the leaders of Florence thought. You might not even be surprised at what they did: declare war on the Pope. Further, they offered Hawkwood an unheard-of sum of 130,000 florins to help them fight his recent employer, money they raised through forced loans on clergy and monastic houses. Given that Hawkwood had no rules except he would never fight against the king of England, he gladly accepted. In the meantime, although Salvestro had opposed an allegiance with the Pope, he gladly supported the current war and snipping away Florence’s last political ties to the papacy. It became known as the War of Eight Saints, so named because the Signoria appointed an eight-man commission to oversee the war effort.
Even with Hawkwood’s considerable talents, though, the war effort against the papacy stalled. The reigning pope, Gregory XI, who was another son of French nobility, was determined to get his revenge against the enemies he called the “sons of damnation.” Pope Gregory XI even unleashed the nuclear weapon in a pope’s arsenal, an interdict. Like a super-charged version of excommunication, the interdict forbade the clergy in Florence from performing any rites except the baptism of children and last rites and any Masses or religious processions except on certain holy days. Even worse, the interdict also gave Christian authorities carte blanche to exile or seize the possessions of any Florentines abroad.
It did deal a blow to Florence’s economy as all the Florentines who made a good living setting up shop in Avignon or being the Pope’s bankers had to leave the city. But that was a double-edged sword as Avignon lost the majority of its merchants, importers, shopkeepers, and bankers. And while a few Florentines across western and central Europe were expelled and harassed, most authorities simply ignored the Pope’s orders. The king of France even explicitly protected Florentines from harassment in his domains. Not only that, but the Signoria of Florence, with Salvestro’s encouragement, confiscated much church property. Nor did the interdict cause the people of Florence to fear for their souls and clamor for peace. On the contrary, the citizens of Florence began running their own religious processions and church services. There was even a new outburst of religious devotion. Groups of flagelants walked the streets whipping themselves bloody and young men and women from upper-class families dedicated themselves to trying to help beggars and convert prostitutes to a more respectable way of life.
The modern historian John Najemy in his History of Florence writes: “The city clearly responded to the interdict with heightened levels of religious enthusiasm and emotion, almost as if to show that they could be better and more devout Christians than the pope who had imposed this unjust sentence.”
So it’s safe to say that popular opinion was not on the side of the Pope or the conservative faction.
Still, though, the war was going badly, especially after the city of Bologna, a key ally of Florence, was captured by papal forces. In 1377, though, Salvestro had problems closer to home. Yet another brother of Salvestro, Africhello, had gotten into trouble with the law. Africhello had gotten into a property dispute with an elderly widow over an estate in the Medici home turf of the Mugello. Africhello then broke into the widow’s home and murdered her. Again, Salvestro had to step in to keep a brother of his from getting the death penalty, although even he couldn’t save Africhello from losing his political rights.
It certainly didn’t help that the Pope was acting like a spiteful child, making exorbitant demands during the peace talks.
(Insert Austin Powers reference)
I know, an old and obvious reference that doesn’t entirely fit my context, but indulge me, please. But yes, he asked for 1,000,000 florins. A peace treaty was only made when Pope Gregory dropped dead in Rome in March of 1378 and the leading families of Rome forced the cardinals to elect as the new Pope a humble Italian bishop from Naples, who took the name Urban VI. The new pope agreed to a much smaller indemnity of 250,000. The Florentines also promised to gradually return most of the confiscated church property. However, the Florentines dragged their feet on restoring church property, so it’s safe to say it was never completed. Plus, thirty years later, the papacy would angrily grumble that 88% of the indemnity was still unpaid. So while the War of the Eight Saints ended with a victory for the papacy, it wasn’t much of a victory.
In any case, the war was a huge financial burden that led to more taxes imposed on even average laborers, and it further widened the split between the conservatives and populists. It was also a victory for Salvestro de’ Medici, whose anti-papal stance had been more than vindicated by the Pope’s ruthless behavior toward the papacy’s former ally. Plus his political career doesn’t seem to have been weighed down by the scandalous and occasionally homicidal behavior of his brothers.
Just a couple of months after the War of Eight Saints was over, on May 1, 1378, Salvestro was selected to serve as Gonfalioniere. The conservatives were horrified and actually tried to get the appointment overturned. They failed, but four of the eight priors that would serve with Salvestro were conservatives, leading to a mostly deadlocked government. Salvestro reportedly declared he was there to represent “the ordinary people, the merchants and craftsmen of Florence, and also the poor and those without power so that they can live peacefully on the fruits of their labor and possessions.”
In fact, even with the deadlocked government, his turn in office would plant the seeds for a proletarian revolution.
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