Florence

Italian Firenze, Latin Florentia ("The Flourishing Town"), city, capital of Firenze province and Toscana (Tuscany) region, central Italy. The city, located about 230 km northwest of Rome has been during its long history a republic, a seat of the duchy of Tuscany, and a capital (1865-71) of Italy. Florence was founded as a Roman military colony about the 1st century BC and during the 14th to 16th centuries achieved preeminence in commerce and finance, learning, and, especially, the arts. Florence's splendours reflect the genius of those who flourished there; among the most famous were Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Dante, Machiavelli, Galileo, and the Medici family.

Scholars still marvel that this small city of moneylenders and cloth-makers without much political or military power rose to a position of enormous influence in Italy, Europe, and beyond. The Florentine vernacular became the Italian language; and the local coin, the florin, became a world monetary standard. Florentine artists formulated the laws of perspective; Florentine men of letters, painters, architects, and craftsmen began the period known as the Renaissance; and a Florentine navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, gave his name to two continents.

The inner city of Florence is still structured on the lines of the Roman municipium. The old mercantile centre is now the Piazza della Repubblica, the core of modern public life. Craftwork is sold througout the city, but traditional marketplaces still exist; among these is the Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge), which is a commercial centre for goldsmiths, silversmiths, and jewelers.

The historic religious centre of Florence is the site of the Battistero S. Giovanni (Baptistery of St. John) and the Gothic Duomo. The baptistery, believed to be the oldest surviving building (c. 1000) in Florence, has huge sculptured bronze doors depicting biblical scenes. The city's fresco-lined churches include many fine examples of Renaissance architecture.

The Uffizi gallery, designed by Giorgio Vasari, is the best known of Florence's art museums. Its elegant Mannerist wings house the world's finest collection of Italian Renaissance painting, in addition to notable masterpieces of French, Dutch, Flemish, and German origin. The palaces and parks throughout the city are epitomized by the Palazzo Pitti and its richly landscaped Boboli gardens. The University of Florence and many other institutions of higher learning, including an increasing number of foreign-based universities, are located in and around the city.

In 1338 Giovanni Villani reckoned the population of Florence at 90,000, reflecting the peak of a steady immigration which took advantage of the most flourishing economy in Italy. Recent building projects included the third, expanded circle of walls, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Ponte Vecchio, the cathedral and its campanile, the vast churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, built respectively for the Dominicans and the Franciscans. From the 12th century the independent commune had steadily extended its control over the magnate and clerical landlords of the countryside; now rich merchants were beginning to buy up farms and build villas there themselves. From 1282 the magnate element within the city itself had been politically gelded; only members of the guilds - bankers, merchants, manufacturers and the like - could qualify for civic office. Strengthened by further anti-magnate legislation in 1293 (the Ordinances of Justice), the city's government was run by the creators of its wealth.

Yet, however rational its constitution; so nicely calculated to prevent the formation of parties or the pursuit of individual ambition, the city's society in Villani's day was violent and divided. The landed wealth and militant character of the magnates enabled them to exert considerable indirect power through the clients they cajoled or bullied into supporting them. The law was not theirs but they could intimidate it. Their feuds could make civic life seem more like civil war. Dante was exiled in 1301 for being on the wrong side in a victory of the Black (more hawkish in their support of the Papacy) Guelfs over the more dove-like Whites. And as a Guelf city Florence was exposed to the external crises that arose when Emperors either brought armies into Italy or encouraged their supporters to prey on their Guelf neighbours. Thus in 1315 Florence's army was defeated by Ghibelline Pisa at Montecatini, in 1325 by the Ghibelline Castruccio Castracani at Altopascio. The social antipathies which hamstrung the city's ability to reply to this challenge led to the desperate remedy of temporarily suspending the constitution and granting executive authority to a foreigner, Charles, Duke of Calabria, son of King Robert of Naples. This was the remedy that had led to so many communes' being converted into 'signorie'. And though it was short-lived, the government was forced to the same expedient again in 1342-43.

This time the government's helplessness arose from its inability to deal with an economic crisis worsened by the bankruptcy of the Bardi and Peruzzi companies. So overbearing, however, was the new saviour, Walter of Brienne, Duke of Athens, that within a year he was expelled by a coalition of all social groups. It was in a period marked by a sober determination to keep social tensions from immobilizing government that in 1348 the Black Death struck, killing something under half the population. Economic recovery, though slow, was remarkable, partly because the plague hit the poorest and least productive inhabitants hardest. But it was followed by war with an expansionist Milan, and, in 1375, by an unpopular war, that of the Eight Saints, against the Avignonese agents of the Papacy, thought by the then dominant faction in government to be threatening Florence's trade routes across the Papal State to the Adriatic. War taxation of foodstuffs produced a new mood of desperation among the poor, especially among the in any case badly paid ciompi - the day-workers in the city's largest industry, the fabrication of wool. In 1378 they revolted, forcing the government, but only for a few frightened weeks, to extend representation to them.

Internally, this is a key date: from now until 1494 government took on an increasingly oligarchic tone, with rich mercantile families and magnates (using the loophole permitting them to hold office by joining a guild) cooperating to protect themselves from the plebs, the popolo minuto. Externally it is lost amid a series of new wars against Milan. In 1402 the city was saved at a moment of almost complete encirclement in Visconti conquests by the death of Duke Giangaleazzo. A few years later there were two Neapolitan thrusts to ward off. In 1425 Florence only broke a new threat from Visconti expansion by allying with Italy's new land power, Venice. Yet at the same time, by conquest or purchase, the city's control within Tuscany was expanding: Arezzo (1384), Montepulciano (1390), Cortona (1411), Pisa (1406), Livorno (1421). The momentum of this imperialism carried the republic, once peace had been made with Milan in 1428, into an attempt to conquer the stubbornly independent Lucca. It was expensive, it failed, and it drew odium on the oligarchical group responsible for it, especially on the faction-leader Rinaldo degli Albizzi. His response was to exile the leader of the chief opposition faction, Cosimo de' Medici, in 1433. But his support dwindled. In the next year he himself was exiled and Cosimo invited to return.

As after the crises of 1343 and 1378, there was in 1434 an impulse to close ranks, this time about a figure discreetly equipped with a loyal clientage and representing the values most Florentines with a regard for their lives and fortunes respected, whether old aristocracy or new rich. That Cosimo manipulated the constitution, was a 'father' in the Mafia sense long before he was posthumously voted the , title 'Father of the Patria' in 1464, was accepted. It was done decorously. It had been done before. And it worked. Social rivalries had never been so calm, Florence's external relations never so stable - even when Cosimo linked Florence to the old enemy Milan, now ruled by Francesco Sforza, his client and friend. For his banker's wealth, even when somewhat perilously displayed in the largest palace that had yet been seen in Florence, was a crucial ingredient in his success in ensuring that in most matters his views prevailed. And they were, after all, largely the views of a class. It was therefore agreed by those who had supported or refrained from ostentatiously opposing him that, on his death, his son Piero should take over as helmsman of the still republican ship of state. He lacked his father's authoritative approachability. In 1466 there came a challenge from within the régime. But, as in 1434, the instinct for self-protection prevailed over ideology, and when Piero died in 1469 the succession passed without friction to his 20-year-old son Lorenzo.

But with the third generation of a single family's predominance in civic affairs a natural reaction was to come. It was expressed in its most violent aspect in the plot of the Pazzi to assassinate him in 1478, and in the war which followed, in which Florence's enemies, Pope Sixtus IV and King Ferrante of Naples, both claimed that they were attacking Lorenzo, not the city he illegitimately ruled. In the end it led, 2 years after Lorenzo's death, to the expulsion of his son Piero and to a widely representative form of government supported by Savonarola and designed, once and for all, to prevent the concentration of power in oligarchical, let alone individual, hands.

This 'democratization' of the constitution however, which enfranchised some 3000 citizens, coincided with the opening stages of the Wars of Italy. Inevitably, the delays and indecisiveness that resulted when men without experience held office for short periods led many to yearn for less egalitarian but more effective leadership. A formal step in this direction was taken in 1502 when the gonfalonierate was made a life office, and Piero Soderini was elected to this doge-like position. Informally, key positions came to be held (with the apathetic connivance of the newly enfranchised) by members of the old régime. In 1512, when Pope Julius II was determined to make Florence toe the line of his anti-French policy (which Soderini resisted), there was sufficient pro-Medici feeling to bow to the pressure exerted by the Pope's Spanish army; Soderini fled and the Medici, chiefly represented by Lorenzo's son Cardinal Giovanni, were reinstated as, at first, no more than prominent citizens.

It was Giovanni's promotion to the Papacy in the following year, as Leo X, and the succession, after the pontificate of Adrian VI, of yet another Medici pope, Clement VII, that helped habituate the Florentines to the idea of princely rule, though it was not until after a final veering away in the Last Republic of 1527-30 that this ceased to be exercised through deputies. With the rule of Alessandro de' Medici the city at last joined the ranks of those communes who had, centuries before, accepted signorial rule. Even the opportunity for change offered by the assassination of Alessandro in 1537 was not taken. With Cosimo I a long line of dukes (from 1569 grand dukes) ruled by unchallenged hereditary succession. Not the least tribute to this long-delayed conformity is the reluctance of scholars, until quite recently, to turn their attention to the history of Florence (and to that of an increasingly integrated Tuscany) in the 16th century, instead of in the 14th and 15th century, the republican centuries.

© Web Gallery of Art, created by Emil Krén and Daniel Marx