Hawkwood by Frances Stonor Saunders

Author:Frances Stonor Saunders [Frances Stonor Saunders]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571266555
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

According to Giovanni Villani, Florence boasted 80 banks and money-changing houses, 600 lawyers, 100 apothecaries, 146 bakers and confectioners, and 30 hospitals providing a total of more than 1,000 beds and employing 60 doctors and surgeons. In 1343 the city chamberlains accounted for revenues of about 314,000 florins. This meant that the state disposed of an income greater than several kings, the Holy Roman Emperor, or even the pope (John XXII, 1316–34, aggressively expanded papal revenues from all parts of Latin Christendom, but his annual income was no more than 228,000 florins).

The corporate enlargement of the city continued, with new squares created by demolishing houses. Quarries of golden-brown sandstone were opened inside the city walls; sand from the Arno, dredged and filtered after every flood, was used in the making of mortar; and gravel was harvested from the riverbed to fill in the walls of the dozens of new buildings that had begun springing up all over the city. The old Roman bridge on the Arno was replaced with a new and sturdier structure, the Ponte Vecchio. A whole new quarter to the north-east was laid out on a rectangular grid. A broad new road, the Via Larga (now Via Cavour), was constructed parallel to the narrow Via San Gallo, designed to make it easier for the carts which brought in the grain from the Mugello to reach the grain market in the centre of the city. Via Larga entered the city at Porta San Gallo, the most important gate because it controlled the road to the north: its four keys weighed nearly five pounds and were made of solid iron.

Such gates were weighty symbols of Florence’s determination to defend not only her commerce, but her freedom. Repeatedly, Florentines praised their commune as the ‘fountain-head of freedom’, ‘the mother of Italian liberty’. Significantly, the Florentine florin, the internationally accepted unit of financial stability, bore no representations of a power – pope or emperor – to which the city owed allegiance. On one side it showed the lily (symbol of Florence), and on the other, Saint John the Baptist (its patron saint). ‘We worship freedom more than anything else, as the end and goal of our commonwealth,’ wrote the great humanist Leonardo Bruni. Despots like the Visconti were referred to as enemies of this republican ideal, as ‘tyrants’ and ‘criminals’ whose ‘actions always fight against and often crush the virtues of the good’. Yet the reality in Florence fell far short of general enfranchisement. The concept of individual freedom was narrow enough, with perhaps only a fifth of its inhabitants enjoying full rights (while in Siena citizenship was strictly hereditary or conferred as a reward for individual merit). But though her practice was usually at variance with it, Florentine theory did still favour democracy above all other forms of government. Her great and growing commercial wealth, while bringing her into conflict with her immediate neighbours, naturally constituted her as leader of those cities which, though discordant about means, still agreed as to the main goal – a society whose leaders were elected by at least some of the people.

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