The Renaissance

BY WILL DURANT

The Story of Philosophy

Transition

The Pleasure of Philosophy

Adventures in Genius

BY WILL AND ARIEL DURANT

THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION

1. Our Oriental Heritage

2. The Life of Greece

3. Caesar and Christ

4. The Age of Faith

5. The Renaissance

6. The Reformation

7. The Age of Reason Begins

8. The Age of Louis XIV

9. The Age of Voltaire

10. Rousseau and Revolution

11. The Age of Napoleon

The Lessons of History

Interpretation of Life

A Dual Autobiography

COPYRIGHT 1953 BY WILL DURANT

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION

IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM

PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER

A DIVISION OF GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION

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eISBN-13: 978-1-45164-762-4

TO MY WIFE

Who has shared in a hundred ways

in writing this book

To the Reader

THIS volume, while complete and independent in itself, forms Part V in a history of civilization written on the “integral method” of uniting in one narrative all phases of human activity. The series began in 1935 with Our Oriental Heritage—a history of Egypt and the Near and Middle East to 323 B.C, and of India, China, and Japan to 1930. Part II, The Life of Greece (1939), recorded Greek history and culture from the beginnings, and the history of the Near and Middle East from 323 B.C., to the Roman Conquest in 146 B.C. Part III, Caesar and Christ (1944), carried the story of white civilization to A.D. 325, centered around the rise and fall of Rome, and the first centuries of Christianity. Part IV, The Age of Faith (1950), continued the narrative to 1300, including Byzantine civilization, Islam, Judaism, and Latin Christendom.

The present work aims to give a rounded picture of all phases of human life in the Italy of the Renaissance—from the birth of Petrarch in 1304 to the death of Titian in 1576. The term “Renaissance” will in this book refer only to Italy. The word does not properly apply to such native maturations, rather than exotic rebirths, as took place in France, Spain, England, and the Lowlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and even in Italy the designation lays undue stress on that revival of classic letters which was of less importance to Italy than the ripening of its economy and culture into their own characteristic forms.

In order to avoid a superficial repetition of the excellent books already in print on this subject, the scale of treatment has been enlarged as compared with the previous volumes in the series. Moreover, as we approach our own epoch our interests are more widely engaged; we still feel in our blood the sap of those effervescent centuries in which modern Europe began; and their ideas, events, and personalities are especially vital to an understanding of our own minds and times.

I have studied at first hand nearly all the works of art mentioned in this book, but I lack the technical training that would give me the right to express any critical judgments. I have ventured, however, to voice my impressions and preferences. Modern art is absorbed in a forgivable reaction against the Renaissance, and is zealously experimenting to find new forms of beauty or significance. Our appreciation of the Renaissance should not deter us from welcoming every sincere and disciplined attempt to imitate not its products but its originality.

If circumstances permit, a sixth volume, probably under the title of The Age of the Reformation, will appear three or four years hence, covering the history of Christian, Islamic, and Judaic civilization outside of Italy from 1300, and in Italy from 1576 to 1648. The enlarged scale of treatment, and the imminence of senility, make it advisable to plan an end of the series with a seventh volume, The Age of Reason, which may carry the tale to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Acknowledgments are due to Mr. Joseph Auslander for permission to quote his fine translation of a sonnet by Petrarch; to the Cambridge University Press for permission to quote a paragraph by Richard Garnett from Volume I of The Cambridge Modern History; to my wife for a hundred illuminating suggestions and conversations; to Dr. C. Edward Hopkin for aid in classifying the material; to Miss Mary Kaufman and Miss Flora Kaufman for varied clerical assistance; to Mrs. Edith Digate for her highly competent typing of a difficult manuscript; and to Wallace Brockway for expert editing and advice.

A tardy acknowledgment is due to my publishers. In my long association with them I have found them ideal. They have given me every consideration, have shared with me the expenses of research, and have never let calculations of profit or loss determine our relations. In 1926 they published my Story of Philosophy hoping only to “break even.” We have been together now for twenty-seven years; and it has been for me a fortunate and happy union.

Notes on the Use of This Book

1. Dates of birth and death are omitted from the text, but will be found in the index.

2. Passages in reduced type are for students and may be safely omitted by the general reader.

3. In locating works of art the name of the city will be used to indicate its leading picture gallery, e.g.:

Bergamo, the Accademia Carrara;

Berlin, the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum;

Brescia, the Pinacoteca Martinengo;

Chicago, the Art Institute;

Cleveland, the Museum of Art;

Detroit, the Institute of Art;

Leningrad, the Hermitage;

London, the National Gallery;

Madrid, the Prado;

Mantua, the Palazzo Ducale;

Milan, the Brera Gallery;

Modena, the Pinacoteca Estense;

Naples, the Museo Nazionale;

New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art;

Parma, the Royal Gallery;

Venice, the Academy;

Washington, the National Gallery; but the great galleries of Florence will be distinguished by their names, Uffizi and Pitti, as will the Borghese in Rome.

WILL DURANT

Los Angeles, December 1, 1952

Table of Contents

BOOK I. PRELUDE: 1300–77

Chapter I: THE AGE OF PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO: 1304–75

I. The Father of the Renaissance

II. Naples and Boccaccio

III. The Poet Laureate

IV. Rienzo’s Revolution

V. The Wandering Scholar

VI. Giotto

VII. The Decameron

VIII. Siena

IX. Milan

X. Venice and Genoa

XI. Twilight of the Trecento

XII. Perspective

Chapter II: THE POPES IN AVIGNON: 1309–77

I. The Babylonian Captivity

II. The Road to Rome

III. The Christian Life

BOOK II: THE FLORENTINE RENAISSANCE: 1378–1534

Chapter III: THE RISE OF THE MEDICI: 1378–1464

I. The Setting

II. The Material Basis

III. Cosimo Pater Patriae

IV. The Humanists

V. Architecture: the Age of Brunellesco

VI. Sculpture

1. Ghiberti

2. Donatello

3. Luca della Robbia

VII. Painting

1. Masaccio

2. Fra Angelico

3. Fra Filippo Lippi

VIII. A Miscellany

Chapter IV: THE GOLDEN AGE: 1464–92

I. Piero il Gottoso

II. The Development of Lorenzo

III. Lorenzo the Magnificent

IV. Literature: the Age of Politian

V. Architecture and Sculpture: The Age of Verrocchio

VI. Painting

1. Ghirlandaio

2. Botticelli

VII. Lorenzo Passes

Chapter V: SAVONAROLA AND THE REPUBLIC: 1492–1534

I. The Prophet

II. The Statesman

III. The Martyr

IV. The Republic and the Medici

V. Art under the Revolution

BOOK III: ITALIAN PAGEANT: 1378–1534

Chapter VI: MILAN

I. Background

II. Piedmont and Liguria

III. Pavia

IV. The Visconti: 1378–1447

V. The Sforzas: 1450–1500

VI. Letters

VII. Arts

Chapter VII: LEONARDO DA VINCI

I. Development: 1452–83

II. In Milan: 1482–99

III. In Florence: 1500–01, 1503–06

IV. In Milan and Rome: 1506–16

V. The Man

VI. The Inventor

VII. The Scientist

VIII. In France: 1516–19

IX. The School of Leonardo

Chapter VIII: TUSCANY AND UMBRIA

I. Piero della Francesca

II. Signorelli

III. Siena and Sodoma

IV. Umbria and the Baglioni

V. Perugino

Chapter IX: MANTUA

I. Vittorino da Feltre

II. Andrea Mantegna

III. The First Lady of the World

Chapter X: FERRARA

I. The House of Este

II. The Arts in Ferrara

III. Letters

IV. Ariosto

V. Aftermath

Chapter XI: VENICE AND HER REALM

I. Padua

II. Venetian Economy

III. Venetian Government

IV. Venetian Life

V. Venetian Art

1. Architecture and Sculpture

2. The Bellini

3. From the Bellini to Giorgione

4. Giorgione

5. Titian: the Formative Years

6. Minor Artists and Arts

VI. Venetian Letters

1. Aldus Manutius

2. Bembo

VII. Verona

Chapter XII: EMILIA AND THE MARCHES

I. Correggio

II. Bologna

III. Along the Emilian Way

IV. Urbino and Castiglione

Chapter XIII: THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES

I. Alfonso the Magnanimous

II. Ferrante

BOOK IV: THE ROMAN RENAISSANCE: 1378–1521

Chapter XIV: THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH: 1378–1447

I. The Papal Schism: 1378–1417

II. The Councils and the Popes

III. The Triumph of the Papacy

Chapter XV: THE RENAISSANCE CAPTURES ROME: 1447–92

I. The Capital of the World

II. Nicholas V: 1447–55

III. Calixtus III: 1455–58

IV. Pius II: 1458–64

V. Paul II: 1464–71

VI. Sixtus IV: 1471–84

VII. Innocent VIII: 1484–92

Chapter XVI: THE BORGIAS

I. Cardinal borgia

II. Alexander VI: 1492–1503

III. The Sinner

IV. Caesar Borgia

V. Lucrezia Borgia

VI. The Collapse of the Borgia Power

Chapter XVII: JULIUS II: 1503–13

I. The Warrior

II. Roman Architecture: 1492–1513

III. The Young Raphael

1. Development: 1483–1508

2. Raphael and Julius II: 1508–13

IV. Michelangelo

1. Youth: 1475–1505

2. Michelangelo and Julius II: 1505–13

Chapter XVIII: LEO X: 1513–21

I. The Boy Cardinal

II. The Happy Pope

III. Scholars

IV. Poets

V. The Recovery of Classic Art

VI. Michelangelo and Leo X: 1513–20

VII. Raphael and Leo X: 1513–20

VIII. Agostino Chigi

IX. Raphael: the Last Phase

X. Leo Politicus

BOOK V: DEBACLE

Chapter XIX: THE INTELLECTUAL REVOLT

I. The Occult

II. Science

III. Medicine

IV. Philosophy

V. Guicciardini

VI. Machiavelli

1. The Diplomat

2. The Author and the Man

3. The Philosopher

4. Considerations

Chapter XX: THE MORAL RELEASE

I. The Founts and Forms of Immorality

II. The Morals of the Clergy

III. Sexual Morality

IV. Renaissance Man

V. Renaissance Woman

VI. The Home

VII. Public Morality

VIII. Manners and Amusements

IX. Drama

X. Music

XI. Perspective

Chapter XXI: THE POLITICAL COLLAPSE: 1494–1534

I. France Discovers Italy: 1494–95

II. The Attack Renewed: 1496–1505

III. The League of Cambrai: 1508–16

IV. Leo and Europe: 1513–21

V. Adrian VI: 1522–23

VI. Clement VII: the First Phase

VII. The Sack of Rome: 1527

VIII. Charles Triumphant: 1527–30

IX. Clement VII and the Arts

X. Michelangelo and Clement VII: 1520–34

XI. The End of an Age: 1528–34

BOOK VI: FINALE: 1534–76

Chapter XXII: SUNSET IN VENICE

I. Venice Reborn

II. Aretino

III. Titian and the Kings

IV. Tintoretto

V. Veronese

VI. Perspective

Chapter XXIII: THE WANING OF THE RENAISSANCE

I. The Decline of Italy

II. Science and Philosophy

III. Literature

IV. Twilight in Florence

V. Benvenuto Cellini

VI. Lesser Lights

VII. Michelangelo: the Last Phase

ENVOI

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

INDEX

List of Illustrations

The page number referred to in the captions is for a discussion of the particular painting or the artist, and sometimes both.

Part I. This section follows page 64

FIG. 1—GIOTTO: The Flight into Egypt

FIG. 2—SIMONE MARTINI: The Annunciation

FIG. 3—LORENZO GHIBERTI: Doors of the Baptistery

FIG. 4—DONATELLO: Crucifixion

FIG. 5—DONATELLO: David

FIG. 6—DONATELLO: Annunciation

FIG. 7—LUCA DELLA ROBBIA: Madonna and Child

FIG. 8—DONATELLO: Gattamelata

FIG. 9—MASACCIO: The Tribute Money

FIG. 10—FRA ANGELICO: The Annunciation

FIG. 11—FRA FILIPPO LIPPI: Virgin Adoring the Child

FIG. 12—ANDREA DEL VERROCHIO: The Baptism of Christ

FIG. 13—DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO: Portrait of Count Sassetti (?) and Grandson

FIG. 14—SANDRO BOTTICELLI: The Birth of Venus

Part II. This section follows page 224

FIG. 15—ANDREA DEL SARTO: Madonna delle Arpie

FIG. 16—CRISTOFORO SOLARI: Tomb Effigies of Lodovico il Moro and Beatrice d’Este

FIG. 17—AMBROGIA DA PREDIS or LEONARDO DA VINCI: Portrait of Bianca Sforza

FIG. 18—LEONARDO DA VINCI: Virgin of the Rocks

FIG. 19—LEONARDO DA VINCI: Self-portrait

FIG. 20—LEONARDO DA VINCI: Mona Lisa

FIG. 21—PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA: Portrait of Duke Federigo da Montefeltro

FIG. 22—LUCA SIGNORELLI: The End of the World

FIG. 23—IACOPO DELLA QUERCIA: The Nativity

FIG. 24—IACOPO DELLA QUERCIA: Noah’s Ark

FIG. 25—PERUGINO: Self-portrait

FIG. 26—PINTURRICCHIO: The Nativity

FIG. 27—ANDREA MANTEGNA: Lodovico Gonzaga and His Family

FIG. 28—ANDREA MANTEGNA: Adoration of the Shepherds

FIG. 29—LEONARDO DA VINCI: Portrait of Isabella d’Este

FIG. 30—TITIAN: Portrait of Isabella d’Este

Part III. This section follows page 384

FIG. 31—GIOVANNI BELLINI: Madonna degli Alberetti

FIG. 32—GIOVANNI BELLINI: Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredano

FIG. 33—GIORGIONE: Sleeping Venus

FIG. 34—GIORGIONE: Concert Champêtre

FIG. 35—TITIAN: Sacred and Profane Love

FIG. 36—TITIAN: Venus and Adonis

FIG. 37—VITTORE CARPACCIO: The Dream of St. Ursula

FIG. 38—TITIAN: Assumption of the Virgin

FIG. 39—CORREGGIO: Sts. John and Augustine

FIG. 40—CORREGGIO: [The Mystic] Marriage of St. Catherine

FIG. 41—PARMIGIANINO: Madonna della Rosa

FIG. 42—Majolica from Faenza

FIG. 43—RAPHAEL: The Pearl Madonna

FIG. 44—RAPHAEL: Portrait of Pope Julius II

FIG. 45—MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: Pietà

FIG. 46—MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: Creation of Adam

Part IV. This section follows page 608

FIG. 47—RAPHAEL and GIULIO ROMANO: The Transfiguration

FIG. 48—MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: Tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici

FIG. 49—TITIAN: Portrait of Aretino

FIG. 50—TITIAN: Portrait of Pope Paul III

FIG. 51—TITIAN: Portrait of Charles V

FIG. 52—TITIAN: Venus of Urbino

FIG. 53—TITIAN: Portrait of a Young Englishman

FIG. 54—TITIAN: Self-portrait

FIG. 55—TINTORETTO: The Miracle of St. Mark

FIG. 56—TINTORETTO: Presentation of the Virgin

FIG. 57—PAOLO VERONESE: Self-portrait

FIG. 58—PAOLO VERONESE: Portrait of Daniele Barbaro

FIG. 59—PAOLO VERONESE: The Rape of Europa

FIG. 60—PAOLO VERONESE: Mars and Venus

FIG. 61—DANIELE DA VOLTERRA: Bust of Michelangelo Buonarroti

BOOK I

PRELUDE

1300–77

CHAPTER I

The Age of Petrarch and Boccaccio

1304–75

I. THE FATHER OF THE RENAISSANCE

IN that same year 1302 in which the aristocratic party of the neri (Blacks), having seized the government of Florence by force, exiled Dante and other middle-class bianchi (Whites), the triumphant oligarchy indicted a White lawyer, Ser (i.e., Messer or Master) Petracco on the charge of having falsified a legal document. Branding the accusation as a device for ending his political career, Petracco refused to stand for trial. He was convicted in absence, and was given the choice of paying a heavy fine or having his right hand cut off. As he still refused to appear before the court, he was banished from Florence, and suffered the confiscation of his property. Taking his young wife with him, he fled to Arezzo. There, two years later, Francesco Petrarca (as he later euphonized his name) burst upon the world.

Predominantly Ghibelline—yielding political allegiance to the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire rather than to the popes—little Arezzo experienced in the fourteenth century all the tribulations of an Italian city. Guelfic Florence—supporting the popes against the emperors in the struggle for political authority in Italy—had overwhelmed Arezzo at Campaldino (1289), where Dante fought; in 1340 all Aretine Ghibellines between thirteen and seventy were exiled; and in 1384 Arezzo fell permanently under Florentine rule. There, in ancient days, Maecenas had been born; there the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would see the birth of Giorgio Vasari, who made the Renaissance famous, and of Pietro Aretino, who for a while made it infamous. Every town in Italy has fathered genius, and banished it.

In 1312 Ser Petracco rushed north to welcome the Emperor Henry VII as one who would save Italy, or at least its Ghibellines. As sanguine as Dante in that year, Petracco moved his family to Pisa, and awaited the destruction of the Florentine Guelfs.

Pisa was still among the splendors of Italy. The shattering of her fleet by the Genoese in 1284 had reduced her possessions and narrowed her commerce; and the strife of Guelf and Ghibelline within her gates left her with scant strength to elude the imperialistic grasp of a mercantile Florence eager to control the Arno to its mouth. But her brave burghers gloried in their majestic marble cathedral, their precarious campanile, and their famous cemetery, that Campo Santo, or Sacred Field, whose central quadrangle had been filled with soil from the Holy Land, and whose walls were soon to receive frescoes by Giotto’s pupils and the Lorenzetti, and whose sculptured tombs gave a moment’s immortality to the heroic or lavish dead. In Pisa’s university, soon after its establishment, the subtle jurist Bartolus of Sassoferrato adapted Roman law to the needs of the age, but phrased his legal science in such esoteric verbiage as brought both Petrarch and Boccaccio down upon his head. Perhaps Bartolus found obscurity prudent, since he justified tyrannicide, and denied the right of governments to take a man’s property except by due process of law.¹

Henry VII died (1313) before he could make up his mind to be or not to be a Roman emperor. The Guelfs of Italy rejoiced; and Ser Petracco, unsafe in Pisa, emigrated with his wife, his daughter, and his two sons to Avignon on the Rhone, where the newly established papal court, and a rapidly expanding population, offered opportunities for a lawyer’s skill. They sailed up the coast to Genoa, and Petrarch never forgot the unfolding splendor of the Italian Riviera—towns like diadems on mountain brows, slipping down to green blue seas; this, said the young poet, “is liker to heaven than to earth.”² They found Avignon so stuffed with dignitaries that they moved some fifteen miles northeast to Carpentras (1315); and there Francesco spent four years of happy carelessness. Bliss ended when he was sent off to Montpellier (1319–23), and then to Bologna (1323–6) to study law.

Bologna should have pleased him. It was a university town, full of the frolic of students, the odor of learning, the excitement of independent thought. Here in this fourteenth century were given the first courses in human anatomy. Here were women professors, some, like Novella d’Andrea (d. 1366), so attractive that tradition, doubtless fanciful, described her as lecturing behind a veil lest the students should be distracted by her beauty. The commune of Bologna had been among the first to throw off the yoke of the Holy Roman Empire and proclaim its autonomy; as far back as 1153 it had chosen its own podesta or city manager; and for two centuries it had maintained a democratic government. But in 1325, while Petrarch was there, it suffered so disastrous a defeat by Modena that it placed itself under the protection of the papacy, and in 1327 accepted a papal vicar as its governor. Thereby would hang many a bitter tale.

Petrarch liked the spirit of Bologna, but he hated the letter of the law. “It went against my bent painfully to acquire an art that I would not practise dishonestly, and could hardly hope to practise otherwise.”^2a All that he cared for in the legal treatises was their “numberless references to Roman antiquity.” Instead of studying law he read all that he could find of Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca. They opened to him a new world, both of philosophy and of literary art. He began to think like them, he longed to write like them. When his parents died (1326) he abandoned law, returned to Avignon, and steeped himself in classic poetry and romantic love.

It was on Good Friday of 1327, he tells us, that he saw the woman whose withheld charms made him the most famous poet of his age. He described her in fascinating detail, but kept the secret of her identity so well that even his friends thought her the invention of his muse, and counted all his passion as poetic license. But on the flyleaf of his copy of Virgil, jealously treasured in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, may still be seen the words that he wrote in 1348:

Laura, who was distinguished by her virtues, and widely celebrated by my songs, first appeared to my eyes… in the year of Our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, at the first hour, in the church of Santa Clara at Avignon. In the same city, in the same month, on the same sixth day, at the same first hour, in the year 1348, that light was taken from our day.

Who was this Laura? A will was filed in Avignon on April 3, 1348, by one Laura de Sade, wife of Count Hugues de Sade, to whom she had given twelve children; presumably this was the lady of the poet’s love, and her husband was a distant ancestor of the most famous sadist in history. A miniature attributed to Simone Martini, and now in the Laurentian Library at Florence, is described by tradition as a portrait of Petrarch’s Laura; it shows a face of delicate beauty, fine mouth, straight nose, and lowered eyes suggesting a pensive modesty. We do not know if Laura was married, or already a young mother, when Petrarch first saw her. In any case she received his adoration calmly, kept him at a distance, and gave his passion all the encouragement of denial. The occasional sincerity of his feeling for her is suggested by his later remorse over its sensual elements, and his gratitude for the refining influence of this unrequited love.

Meanwhile he lived in Provence, the land of the troubadours; the echoes of their songs still lingered in Avignon; and Petrarch, like the young Dante a generation before him, became unconsciously a troubadour, wedding his passion to a thousand tricks of verse. The writing of poetry was then a popular pastime; Petrarch complained, in one of his letters, that lawyers and theologians, nay, even his own valet, had taken to rhyming; soon, he feared, “the very cattle would begin to low in verse.”³ From his own country he inherited the sonnet form, and bound it into the difficult rhymepattern that for centuries molded and hampered Italian poetry. Walking along the streams or among the hills, kneeling distracted at Vespers or Mass, groping his way among verbs and adjectives in the silence of his room, he composed during the next twenty-one years 207 sonnets and sundry other poems on the living, breeding Laura. Gathered in manuscript copies as a Canzoniere or Songbook, these compositions caught the fancy of Italian youth, of Italian manhood, of the Italian clergy. No one was disturbed by the fact that the author, seeing no road to advancement except in the Church, had taken the tonsure and minor orders, and was angling for a benefice; but Laura may have blushed—and thrilled—on hearing that her hair and brow and eyes and nose and lips… were sung from the Adriatic to the Rhone. Never before, in the salvaged literature of the world, had the emotion of love been expounded in such diverse fullness, or with such painstaking artifice. Here were all the pretty conceits of versified desire, the fitful flame of love miraculously trimmed to meter and rhyme:

No rock, however cold, but with my theme

Shall henceforth kindle and consume in sighs!

But the Italian people received these bonbons in the most exquisite music that their language had yet heard—subtle and delicate and melodious, gleaming with bright imagery, making even Dante seem at times crude and harsh; now, indeed, that glorious language—the triumph of the vowel over the consonant—reached a height of beauty that even to our day remains unsealed. An alien can translate the thought, but who shall translate the music?

In qual parte del ciel, in quale idea

Era l’essempio, onde Natura tolse

Quel bel viso leggiadro, in ch’ ella volse

Mostrar qua giú quanto lassú potea?

Qual ninfa in fonti, in selve mai qual dea,

Chiome d’oro so fino a l’aura sciolse?

Quando un cor tante in sé vertuti accolse?

Benché la somma è di mia morte rea.

Per divina bellezza indarno mira

Chi gli occhi de costei già mai non vide

Come soavemente ella gli gira;

Non sa come Amor sana, e come ancide,

Chi non sa come dolce ella sospira,

E come dolce parla, e dolce ride.⁴*

His poems, his gay wit, his sensitivity to beauty in woman, nature, conduct, literature, and art, made a place for Petrarch in cultured society; and his condemnation of ecclesiastical morals in Avignon did not deter great churchmen like Bishop Giacomo Colonna, and a brother Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, from offering him hospitality and patronage. Like most of us he enjoyed and condoned before he tired and condemned; between sonnets to Laura he dallied with a mistress, and begot two illegitimate children. He had leisure for travel, and apparently substantial funds; we find him in Paris in 1331, then in Flanders and Germany, then in Rome (1336) as the guest of the Colonnas. He was deeply moved by the ruins of the Forum, revealing an ancient power and grandeur that shamed the poverty and squalor of the abandoned medieval capital. He pled with five successive popes to leave Avignon and return to Rome. He himself, however, left Rome and returned to Avignon.

For seven years, between his travels, he lived in the palace of Cardinal Colonna there, meeting the finest scholars, churchmen, lawyers, and statesmen of Italy, France, and England, and conveying to them some of his enthusiasm for classical literature. But he resented the simoniacal corruption of Avignon, the consuming leisure of ecclesiastical litigation, the confusion of cardinals and courtesans, the conversion of Christianity to the world. In 1337 he bought a small house at Vaucluse—“Closed Valley”—some fifteen miles east of Avignon. Traveling through majestic views to locate that hideaway, one is surprised to find it a tiny cottage built against a cliff, oppressed by massive crags, but caressed by the quiet flow of the undulant Sorgue. Petrarch foreshadowed Rousseau not only in the sentimental involution of his love, but in the pleasure he derived from natural scenery. “Would that you could know,” he wrote to a friend, “with what delight I wander, free and alone, among the mountains, forests, and streams.” Already in 1336 he had set a fashion by climbing Mt. Ventoux (6214 feet high), purely for the exercise, the view, and the vanity of victory. Now at Vaucluse he dressed like a peasant, fished in the brook, puttered in two gardens, and contented himself “with a single dog and only two servants.” His sole regret (for his passion for Laura had spent itself in hunting rhymes) was that he was too far from Italy and too near Avignon.

From that foot of land he moved half the literary world. He loved to write long letters to his friends, to popes and kings, to dead authors, to unborn posterity. He kept copies of this correspondence, and in his declining years he amused his pride by revising it for posthumous publication. These epistles, in vigorous but hardly Ciceronian Latin, are the most vital relics of his pen. Some of them so harshly criticized the Church that Petrarch kept them secret till he was safely dead. While accepting with apparent sincerity the full doctrine of Catholic Christianity, he dwelt in spirit with the ancients; he wrote to Homer, Cicero, Livy as if they were living comrades, and complained that he had not been born in the heroic days of the Roman Republic. He habitually called one of his correspondents Laelius, and another Socrates. He inspired his friends to search for lost manuscripts of Latin or Greek literature, to copy ancient inscriptions, and collect ancient coins, as precious documents of history. He urged the establishment of public libraries. He practised what he preached: on his travels he sought and bought classic texts as “more valuable merchandise than anything offered by the Arabs or the Chinese”;⁶ he transcribed unpurchasable manuscripts with his own hand; and at home he hired copyists to live with him. He gloried in a Homer sent him from Greece, begged the sender for a copy of Euripides, and made his copy of Virgil a vade mecum on whose flyleaf he entered events in the careers of his friends. The Middle Ages had preserved, and some medieval scholars had loved, many pagan classics; but Petrarch knew from references in these works that numberless masterpieces had been forgotten or mislaid; and it became his passion to recover them.

Renan called him “the first modern man,” as having “inaugurated in the Latin West a tender feeling for ancient culture.”⁷ This will not do as a definition of modernity, which did not merely rediscover the classic world, but replaced the supernatural with the natural as the focus of human concern. In this sense too Petrarch may deserve the epithet “modern”; for though moderately pious, and occasionally worried about the afterlife, his revival of interest in antiquity fostered the Renaissance emphasis on man and the earth, on the legitimacy of sensory pleasure, and on mortal glory as a substitute for personal immortality. Petrarch had some sympathy for the medieval view, and in his dialogues De contemptu mundi he let St. Augustine expound it well; but in those imaginary conversations he made himself the defender of secular culture and earthly fame. Though Petrarch was already seventeen when Dante died, an abyss divided their moods. By common consent he was the first humanist, the first writer to express with clarity and force the right of man to concern himself with this life, to enjoy and augment its beauties, and to labor to deserve well of posterity. He was the Father of the Renaissance.

II. NAPLES AND BOCCACCIO

At Vaucluse Petrarch began the poem by which he aspired to rival Virgil —an epic, Africa, on the liberation of Italy through the victory of Scipio Africanus over Hannibal. Like the humanists of a century after him, he chose Latin as his medium, not, like Dante, Italian; he wished to be understood by the whole literate Western world. As the poem progressed he became more and more doubtful of its merit; he never completed it, never published it. While he was absorbed in Latin hexameters his Italian Canzoniere was spreading his fame through Italy, and a translation carried his name through France. In 1340—not without some sly manipulations on his part⁸—two invitations reached him, one from the Roman Senate, the other from the University of Paris, to come and receive at their hands the poet’s laurel crown. He accepted the Senate’s offer, and the suggestion of Robert the Wise that he should stop at Naples on the way.

After the overthrow of Frederick II and the Hohenstaufens by the arms and diplomacy of the popes, his Regno— Italy south of the Papal Stateshad been given to the house of Anjou in the person of Charles, Count of Provence. Charles ruled as King of Naples and Sicily; his son Charles II lost Sicily to the house of Aragon; his grandson Robert, though failing in his war to recapture Sicily, earned his cognomen by competent government, wise diplomacy, and a discriminating patronage of literature and art. The Kingdom was poor in industry, and its agriculture was dominated by myopic landowners who, as now, exploited the peasantry to the edge of revolution; but the commerce of Naples gave the court an income that made the royal Castel Nuovo ring with frequent festivities. The well-to-do imitated the court; marriages became ruinous ceremonies; periodic regattas animated the historic bay; and in the city square young blades jousted in perilous tournaments while their garlanded ladies smiled upon them from bannered balconies. Life was pleasant in Naples, and morals were comfortably loose; women were beautiful and accessible; and poets found in this atmosphere of amorous dalliance many a theme and stimulus for their verse. In Naples Boccaccio was formed.

Giovanni had begun life in Paris as the unpremeditated result of an entente cordiale between his father, a Florentine merchant, and a French lass of doubtful name and morals;⁹ perhaps his bastard birth and half-French origin shared in determining his character and history. He was brought in infancy to Certaldo, near Florence, and suffered an unhappy childhood under a stepmother. At the age of ten (1323) he was sent to Naples, where he was apprenticed to a career of finance and trade. He learned to hate business as Petrarch hated law; he announced his preference for poverty and poetry, lost his soul to Ovid, feasted on the Metamorphoses and the Heroides, and learned by heart most of the Ars amandi, wherein, he wrote, “the greatest of poets shows how the sacred fire of Venus may be made to burn in the coldest” breast.¹⁰ The father, unable to make him love money more than beauty, allowed him to quit business on condition that he study canon law. Boccaccio agreed, but he was ripe for romance.

The gayest lady in Naples was Maria d’Aquino. She was the natural daughter of King Robert the Wise,¹¹ but her mother’s husband accepted her as his own child. She was educated in a convent, and was married at fifteen to the Count of Aquino, but found him inadequate to her needs. She encouraged a succession of lovers to supply his deficiencies, and to spend their substance upon her finery. Boccaccio first saw her at Mass on Holy Saturday (1331) four Easters after Petrarch’s discovery of Laura under similarly sacred auspices. She seemed to him fairer than Aphrodite; the world held nothing lovelier than her blonde hair, nothing more alluring than her roguish eyes. He called her Fiammetta—Little Flame—and longed to singe himself in her fire. He forgot canon law, forgot all the commandments he had ever learned; for months he thought only of how he might be near her. He went to church solely in the hope that she might appear; he paced the street before her window; he went to Baiae on hearing that she was there. For five years he pursued her; she let him wait until other purses were empty; then she allowed him to persuade her. A year of costly assignations dulled the edge of adultery; she complained that he looked at other women; besides, his funds ran out. The Little Flame sought other food, and Boccaccio retired to poetry.

Very probably he had read Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Dante’s Vita Nuova; his first poems were like theirs, sonnets of yearning, burning, churning love. Most of them were addressed to Fiammetta, some celebrated lesser flames. For her he wrote a long and dreary prose version—Filocopo—of a medieval romance, Fleur et Blancfleur. Finer was his Filostrato; here he told in glowing verse how Criseida vowed eternal fidelity to Troilus, was captured by the Greeks, and soon yielded herself to Diomed on the plea that he was so “tall and strong and beautiful,” and at hand. For his medium Boccaccio chose an eight-line stanza—ottava rima— that set a form for Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto. It is a frankly sensual story, whose 5400 lines reach their climax when Criseida, “throwing away her shift, sprang naked into her lover’s arms.”¹² But it is also a remarkable psychological study of one type of woman—lightly false and gayly vain; and it ends with phrases now familiar in opera:

Giovane donna è mobile, e vogliosa

E negli amanti molti, e sua bellezza

Estima più ch’ allo specchio, e pomposa….

Virtù non sente ni conoscimento,

Volubil sempre come foglia al vento.*

Soon afterward, as if to break down resistance with sheer weight, Boccaccio presented to Fiammetta an epic poem, Teseide, precisely as long as the Aeneid. It told of the bloody rivalry of two brothers, Palemon and Arcite, for Emilia; the death of the victor in her loving arms; and her acceptance of the loser after a proper delay. But even heroic love palls after half the 9896 lines; and the English reader may content himself with Chaucer’s judicious abbreviation of the story in The Knight’s Tale.

Early in 1341 Boccaccio abandoned Naples for Florence. Two months later Petrarch arrived at King Robert’s court. He basked awhile in the royal shade, and then went on to seek a crown in Rome.

III. THE POET LAUREATE

It was a pitiful capital of the world. The papacy having moved to Avignon in 1309, no economic means remained of supporting even such moderate splendor as the city had known in the thirteenth century. The wealth that had trickled from a thousand bishoprics into streams from a dozen states no longer flowed into Rome; no foreign embassies kept palaces there; and rare was the cardinal who showed his face amid the ruins of the Empire and the Church. Christian shrines rivaled classic colonnades in dilapidation; shepherds grazed their flocks on the slopes of the seven hills; beggars roamed the streets and highwaymen lurked along the roads; wives were abducted, nuns were raped, pilgrims were robbed; every man carried arms.¹³ The old aristocratic families—Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Annibaldi, Gaetani, Frangipani—contested with violence and intrigue for political mastery in the oligarchic Senate that ruled Rome. The middle classes were small and weak; and the motley masses, mingled of a score of peoples, lived in a poverty too stupefying to generate self-government. The hold of the absent papacy upon the city was reduced to the theoretical authority of a legate, who was ignored.

Amid this chaos and penury the mutilated remains of a proud antiquity nourished the visions of scholars and the dreams of patriots. Some day, the Romans believed, Rome would again be the spiritual and political capital of the world, and the barbarians beyond the Alps would send imperial tribute as well as Peter’s pence. Here and there men could still spare a pittance for art: Pietro Cavallini adorned Santa Maria in Trastevere with remarkable mosaics, and in Santa Cecilia he inaugurated a Roman school of fresco painting almost as important as Duccio’s in Siena or Giotto’s in Florence. Even in Rome’s destitution poets sang, forgetting the present for the past. After Padua and Prato had restored Domitian’s rite of placing a laurel wreath upon the brow of a favorite bard, the Senate thought it befitting the traditional primacy of Rome to crown the man who by universal consent was the leading poet of his nation and his time.

And so, on April 8, 1341, a colorful procession of youths and senators escorted Petrarch—clad in the purple robe that King Robert had given him —to the steps of the Capitol; there a laurel crown was laid upon his head, and the aged Senator Stefano Colonna pronounced a eulogy. From that day Petrarch had new fame and new enemies; rivals plucked at his laurels with their pens, but kings and popes gladly received him at their courts. Soon Boccaccio would rank him with “the illustrious ancients”; and Italy, proud of his renown, proclaimed that Virgil had been born again.

What sort of man was he at this apex of his curve? In his youth he had been handsome, and vain of his looks and clothes; in later years he laughed at his once meticulous ritual of toilette and dress, and curling of the hair, and squeezing of the feet into fancy shoes. In middle age he grew a bit stout and doubled his chin, but his face had still the charm of refinement and animation. He remained vain to the end, merely pluming himself on his achievements instead of his appearance; but this is a fault that only the greatest saints can shun. His letters, so fascinating and brilliant, would have been more so without their sham modesty and honest pride. Like all of us he relished applause; he longed for fame, for literary “immortality”; so early, in this presage of the Renaissance, he struck one of its most sustained notes, the thirst for glory. He was a little jealous of his rivals, and descended to answer their slurs. He fretted some (though he denied it) at Dante’s popularity; he shuddered at Dante’s ferocity as Erasmus would at Luther’s crudity; but he suspected that there was something in the dour Florentine too deep to be fathomed by a facile pen. Himself now half French in spirit, he was too urbane to curse half the world; he lacked the passion that exalted and exhausted Italy.

Equipped with several ecclesiastical benefices, he was affluent enough to despise wealth, and timid enough to like the literary life.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other pleasures fail us, or wound us while they charm; but the pen we take up rejoicing, and lay down with satisfaction; for it has the power to advantage not only its lord and master but many others as well, even though they be not born for thousands of years to come…. As there is none among earthly delights more noble than literature, so there is none more lasting, none gentler or more faithful; none that accompanies its possessor through the vicissitudes of life at so small a cost of effort or anxiety.¹⁴

Yet he speaks of his “varying moods, which were rarely happy and usually despondent.”¹⁵ To be a great writer he had to be sensitive to beauty in form and sound, in nature and woman and man; that is, he had to suffer more than most of us from the noises and deformities of the world. He loved music, and played the lute well. He admired fine painting, and numbered Simone Martini among his friends. Women must have attracted him, for at times he spoke of them with almost anchoritic fear. After forty, he assures us, he never touched a woman carnally. “Great must be the powers of both body and mind,” he wrote, “that may suffice both to literary activity and to a wife.”¹⁶

He offered no novel philosophy. He rejected Scholasticism as vain logicchopping far removed from life. He challenged the infallibility of Aristotle, and dared to prefer Plato. He went back from Aquinas and Duns Scotus to the Scriptures and the Fathers, and relished the melodious piety of Augustine and the Stoic Christianity of Ambrose; however, he quoted Cicero and Seneca as reverently as he cited the saints, and drew his arguments for Christianity most often from pagan texts. He smiled at the discord of philosophers, among whom he found “no more agreement than among clocks.”¹⁷ “Philosophy,” he complained, “aims only at hair-splitting, subtle distinctions, quibbles of words.”¹⁸ Such a discipline could make clever debaters, but hardly wise men. He laughed at the high degree of Master and Doctor with which such studies were crowned, and marveled how a ceremony could make a pundit out of a fool. Almost in modern terms he rejected astrology, alchemy, demoniac possession, prodigies, auguries, dream prophecies, and the miracles of his time.¹⁹ He had the courage to praise Epicurus²⁰ in an age when that name was used as a synonym for atheist. Now and then he spoke like a skeptic, professing Cartesian doubt: “Distrustful of my own faculties… I embrace doubt itself as truth… affirming nothing, and doubting all things except those in which doubt is sacrilege.”²¹

Apparently he made this exception in all sincerity. He expressed no doubt as to any dogma of the Church; he was too genial and comfortable to be a heretic. He composed several devotional works, and wondered had it not been better for him, like his brother, to ease his way into heaven through monastic peace. He had no use for the near-atheism of the Averroists in Bologna and Padua. Christianity seemed to him an indisputable moral advance upon paganism, and he hoped that men would find it possible to be educated without ceasing to be Christians.

The election of a new pope, Clement VI (1342), made it advisable for Petrarch to return to Avignon and present his compliments and expectations. Following the precedent of awarding some benefices—i.e., the income from ecclesiastical properties—for the support of writers and artists, Clement gave the poet a priorate near Pisa, and in 1346 made him a canon of Parma. In 1343 he sent him on a mission to Naples, and there Petrarch met one of the most unruly rulers of the age.

Robert the Wise had just died, and his granddaughter Joanna I had inherited his throne and dominions, including Provence and therefore Avignon. To please her father she had married her cousin Andrew, son of the king of Hungary. Andrew thought he should be king as well as consort; Joanna’s lover, Louis of Taranto, slew him (1345), and married the Queen. Andrew’s brother Louis, succeeding to the throne of Hungary, marched his army into Italy, and took Naples (1348). Joanna fled to Avignon, and sold that city to the papacy for 80,000 florins ($2,000,000?); Clement declared her innocent, sanctioned her marriage, and ordered the invader back to Hungary. King Louis ignored the order, but the Black Death (1348) so withered his army that he was compelled to withdraw. Joanna regained her throne (1352), and ruled in splendor and vice until deposed by Pope Urban VI (1380); a year later she was captured by Charles, Duke of Durazzo, and in 1382 she was put to death.

Petrarch touched this bloody romance only at its source, in the first year of Joanna’s reign. He soon resumed his wandering, staying for a while at Parma, then at Bologna, then (1345) at Verona. There, in a church library, he found a manuscript of Cicero’s lost letters to Atticus, Brutus, and Quintus. In Liége he had already (1333) disentombed Cicero’s speech Pro Archia—a paean to poetry. These were among the most fruitful explorations in the Renaissance discovery of antiquity.

Verona, in Petrarch’s time, might have been classed among the major powers of Italy. Proud of her antiquity and her Roman theater (where one may still, of a summer evening, hear opera under the stars), enriched by the trade that came over the Alps and down the Adige, Verona rose under the Scala family to a height where she threatened the commercial supremacy of Venice. After the death of the terrible Ezzelino (1260) the commune chose Mastino della Scala as podesta; Mastino was assassinated in due course (1277), but his brother and successor Alberto firmly established the rule of the Scaligeri (“ladder bearers,” from the apt emblem of a climbing family), and inaugurated the heyday of Verona’s history. During his reign the Dominicans began to build the lovely church of Sant’ Anastasia; an obscure copyist unearthed the lost poems of Catullus, Verona’s most famous son; and the Guelf family of the Capelletti fought the Ghibelline family of the Montechi, never dreaming that they would become Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues. The strongest and not the least noble of the Scala “despots” was Can Grande della Scala, who made his court an asylum for exiled Ghibellines and a haven for poets and scholars; there Dante for several years indignantly climbed the shaky stairs of patronage. But Can Grande brought Vicenza, Padua, Treviso, Belluno, Feltre, and Cividale under his power; Venice saw herself threatened with a strangling encirclement; when Can Grande was succeeded by the less ardent Mastino II she declared war, brought in Florence and Milan as her allies, and forced Verona to surrender all but one of the conquered towns. Can Grande II built the majestic Scaligero Bridge over the Adige, with an arch whose span of 160 feet was then the largest in the world. He was assassinated by his brother Consignorio, who followed this fratricide with a wise and beneficent rule, and built the most ornate of the famous tombs of the Scaligers. His sons divided the throne and quarreled to the death; and in 1387 Verona and Vicenza were absorbed into the duchy of Milan.

IV. RIENZO’S REVOLUTION

Back in Avignon and Vaucluse (1345–7), Petrarch, still enjoying the friendship of the Colonnas, rejoiced to hear that revolution had flared up in Rome, and that the son of a tavern keeper and a washerwoman²² had deposed the Colonnas and other aristocrats from power, and had restored the glorious republic of the Scipios, the Gracchi, and Arnold of Brescia.

Niccola di Rienzo Gabrini, known by the economy of popular speech as Cola di Rienzo, and by a careless posterity as Rienzi, had met Petrarch in 1343 when, as a young notary of thirty years’ age, he had come to Avignon to acquaint Clement VI with the dire condition of Rome, and to solicit for the Roman people the support of the papacy against the feuding, marauding nobles who dominated the capital. Clement, though skeptical, had sent him back with encouragement and florins, hoping to use the fervent lawyer in the recurrent conflict of the popes with the aristocracy.

Rienzo, like Petrarch, had had his imagination fired by the ruins and classics of Rome. Dressed in the white toga of an ancient senator, and speaking with the ardor of the Gracchi and almost the eloquence of Cicero, he pointed to the remains of the majestic forums and colossal baths, and reminded the Romans of the time when consuls or emperors, from these hills, had given laws and order urbi et orbi, to the city and to the world; and he challenged them to seize the government, to restore the popular assembly, and to elect a tribune strong enough to protect them against the usurping nobility. The poor listened in awe; merchants wondered might this potential tribune make Rome safe for industry and trade; aristocrats laughed, and made Rienzo the butt of their dinner jollity. He promised to hang a selection of them when the revolution came.

To their consternation it came. On May 20, 1347 a concourse of Romans crowded to the Capitol. Rienzo appeared before them escorted by the bishop of Orvieto as vicar of the pope; he proclaimed the restoration of the Republic and a distribution of alms; they elected him dictator, and at a later meeting allowed him to take the old popular title of tribune. The aged Senator Stefano Colonna protested; Cola ordered him and the other nobles to leave the city; furious, but respecting the armed revolutionaries, they withdrew to their country estates. Delirious with success, Rienzo began to speak of himself as the divinely inspired “Illustrious Redeemer of the Holy Roman Republic by the authority of… Jesus Christ.”²³

His administration was excellent. Food prices were regulated to check profiteering; surplus corn was stored in the granaries; work was begun to drain the malarial marshes and put the Campagna under cultivation. New courts dealt out justice with impartial severity; a monk and a baron were beheaded for equal felonies; a former senator was hanged for robbing a merchant vessel; the cutthroats hired by noble factions were arrested; a court of conciliation pacified in a few months 1800 feuds. Aristocrats accustomed to being their own law were shocked to find themselves held responsible for crimes committed on their estates; some paid heavy fines; Pietro Colonna, dripping dignity, was led on foot to jail. Judges guilty of malfeasance were exposed in public pillories. Peasants tilled their fields in unwonted security and peace; merchants and pilgrims en route to Rome kissed the insignia of the resurrected Republic that made the highways safe after half a century of brigandage.²⁴ All Italy marveled at this intrepid transformation, and Petrarch raised to Rienzo a paean of gratitude and praise.

Seizing his opportunity with bold statesmanship, the tribune despatched envoys throughout the peninsula, inviting the cities to send representatives who would form a great parliament to unite and govern “the whole of sacred Italy” in a federation of municipalities, and to make Rome again the capital of the world. To a preliminary council of judges gathered from all Italy he submitted a question: might the Roman Republic, now reconstituted, rightfully reclaim all the privileges and powers that in its decay had been delegated to other authorities? Answered in the affirmative, Rienzo put through the popular assembly a law restoring to the Republic all such grants of power. This grandiose declaration, sweeping away a millennium of donations, abdications, and coronations, threatened alike the Holy Roman Empire, the autonomous cities, and the temporal power of the Church. Twenty-five communes sent representatives to Rienzo’s parliament, but the major city-states—Venice, Florence, Milan—hesitated to submit their sovereignty to a federation. Clement VI was pleased with the tribune’s piety, his formal sharing of his authority with the bishop of Orvieto, the protection he gave to pilgrims, the prospects he held out of a lucrative jubilee in 1350; but—he began to wonder—was not this sanguine republican an impractical idealist who would outreach himself to ruin?

Amazing and pitiful was the collapse of the noble dream. Power, like freedom, is a test that only a sober intelligence can meet. Rienzo was too great an orator to be a realistic statesman; he came to believe his own magnificent phrases, promises, and claims; he was poisoned by his own periods. When the federative assembly met (August, 1347), he had arranged that it should begin by conferring knighthood upon him. That evening he proceeded with his escort to the baptistery of St. John Lateran, and plunged bodily into the great basin wherein, according to legend, Constantine had washed away his paganism and his sins; then, clad in white, he slept through the night on a public couch set up amid the pillars of the church. On the morrow he issued to the assembly and the world a decree declaring all the cities of Italy to be free, endowing them with Roman citizenship, and reserving exclusively to the people of Rome and Italy the authority to elect an emperor. Drawing his sword, he flourished it in three directions, saying, as the representative of Rome, “That belongs to me, that to me, and that.” He began now to indulge in ostentatious extravagance. He rode about on a white horse under a royal banner, preceded by one hundred armed men, and dressed in a white silk robe with fringes of gold.²⁵ When Stefano Colonna twitted him about the gold fringe he announced that the nobles were conspiring against him (which was probably true), ordered the arrest of several, had them led in chains to the Capitol, proposed to the assembly that they should be beheaded, relented, pardoned them, and ended by appointing them to offices of state in the Campagna. They rewarded him by raising a force of mercenaries against the Republic; the city’s militia went out to meet them, and defeated them; and Stefano Colonna and his son died in the battle (November 20, 1347).

Rienzo, exalted by success, more and more ignored and thrust aside the papal representative whom he had associated with himself in office and authority. Cardinals from Italy and from France warned Clement that a unified Italy—and much more an empire ruled from Rome—would make the Italian Church a prisoner of the state. On October 7 Clement commissioned his legate Bertrand de Deux to offer Rienzo a choice between deposition and the restriction of his powers to the secular affairs of the city of Rome. After some resistance Cola yielded; he promised obedience to the Pope, and withdrew the edicts that had annulled imperial and papal privileges. Unmollified, Clement resolved to unseat the incalculable tribune. On December 3 he published a bull stigmatizing Cola as a criminal and a heretic, and called upon the Romans to banish him. The legate suggested that if this should not be done no jubilee would be proclaimed. Meanwhile the nobles had raised another army, which now advanced upon Rome. Rienzo had the tocsin rung to call the people to arms. Only a few came; many resented the taxes he had levied; some preferred the profits of a jubilee to the responsibilities of freedom. As the forces of the aristocracy neared the Capitol Rienzo’s wonted courage waned; he discarded the insignia of his office, said good-by to his friends, broke into tears, and shut himself up in the Castello Sant’ Angelo (December 15, 1347). The triumphant nobles re-entered their city palaces, and the papal legate named two of them as senators to rule Rome.

Unmolested by the nobles but still under the ban of the Church, Rienzo fled to Naples, and then to the mountain forests of the Abruzzi near Sulmona; there he donned the garb of a penitent, and for two years lived as an anchorite. Then, surviving a thousand hardships and tribulations, he made his way, secretly and in disguise, through Italy and the Alps and Austria to the Emperor Charles IV at Prague. He pronounced before him an angry indictment of the popes; to their absence from Rome he attributed the anarchy and poverty of that city, and to their temporal power and policy the abiding division of Italy. Charles rebuked him and defended the popes; but when Clement demanded that Cola be sent as a papal prisoner to Avignon Charles kept him in protective confinement in a fortress on the Elbe. After a year of unbearable inactivity and isolation Cola asked to be sent to the papal court. On his journey to Avignon crowds flocked to see him, and gallant knights offered to guard him with their swords. On August 10, 1352, he reached Avignon in such miserable raiment that all men pitied him. He asked for Petrarch, who was at Vaucluse; the poet responded by issuing to the people of Rome a clarion call to protect the man who had offered them liberty.

To the Roman people… invincible… conquerors of nations!… Your former tribune is now a captive in the power of strangers; and—a sad spectacle indeed!—like a nocturnal thief or a traitor to his country, he pleads his cause in chains. The highest of earthly tribunals refuses him the opportunity of a legitimate defense…. Rome assuredly does not merit such treatment. Her citizens, once inviolable by alien law… are now indiscriminately maltreated; and this is done not only without the guilt that attaches to a crime, but even with the high praise of virtue…. He is accused not of betraying but of defending liberty; he is guilty not of surrendering but of holding the Capitol. The supreme crime with which he is charged, and which merits expiation on the scaffold, is that he dared affirm that the Roman Empire is still at Rome, and in possession of the Roman people. O impious age! O preposterous jealousy, malevolence without precedent! What dost thou, O Christ! ineffable and incorruptible judge of all? Where are thine eyes with which thou art wont to scatter the clouds of human misery?… Why dost thou not, with thy forked lightning, put an end to this unholy trial?²⁶

Clement did not ask for Cola’s death, but ordered him kept in custody in the tower of the papal palace at Avignon. While Rienzo studied Scripture and Livy there, a new tribune, Francesco Baroncelli, seized power in Rome, banished the nobles, flouted the papal legate, and allied himself with the Ghibelline supporters of the emperors against the popes. Clement’s successor, Innocent VI, released Cola, and sent him to Italy as an aide to Cardinal Albornoz, whom he charged with restoring the papal authority in Rome. As the subtle cardinal and the subdued dictator neared the capital a revolt was staged; Baroncelli was deposed and killed, and the Romans turned over the city to Albornoz. The populace welcomed Rienzo with arches of triumph and joyful acclamations in crowded streets. Albornoz appointed him senator, and delegated to him the secular government of Rome (1353).

But years of imprisonment had fattened the body, broken the courage, and dulled the mind of the once brilliant and fearless tribune. His policies cleaved to the papal line, and shunned the grand emprises of his younger reign. The nobility still hated him, and the proletariat, seeing in him now a cautious conservative cured of Utopia, turned against him as disloyal to their cause. When the Colonna declared war upon him, and besieged him in Palestrina, his unpaid troops verged on mutiny; he borrowed money to pay them, raised taxes to redeem the debt, and alienated the middle class. Hardly two months after his return to power a revolutionary mob marched to the Capitol shouting “Long live the people! Death to the traitor Cola di Rienzo!” He came out of his palace in knightly armor, and tried to control the crowd with eloquence. But the rebels drowned his voice with noise, and showered him with missiles; an arrow struck him in the head, and he withdrew into the palace. The mob set fire to the doors, broke through them, and plundered the rooms. Hiding in one of these, Rienzo hastily cut off his beard, donned a porter’s cloak, and piled some bedding upon his head. Emerging, he passed through part of the crowd unrecognized. But his gold bracelet betrayed him, and he was led as a prisoner to the steps of the Capitol, where he himself had condemned men to death. He asked for a hearing, and began to move the people with his speech; but an artisan fearful of eloquence cut him short with a sword thrust in the stomach. A hundred demiheroes plunged their knives into his dead body. The bloody corpse was dragged through the streets, and was hung up like carrion at a butcher’s stall. It remained there two days, a target for public contumely and urchins’ stones.²⁷

V. THE WANDERING SCHOLAR

Rienzo failed to restore ancient Rome, which was dead to all but poetry; Petrarch succeeded in restoring Roman literature, which had never died. He had so openly supported Cola’s revolt that he had forfeited the favor of the Colonna in Avignon. For a time he thought of joining Rienzo in Rome; he was as far on the way as Genoa when he heard that the tribune’s position and conduct were deteriorating. He changed his course to Parma (1347). He was in Italy when the Black Death came, taking many of his friends, and killing Laura in Avignon. In 1348 he accepted the invitation of Iacopo II da Carrara to be his guest in Padua.

The city had a burdensome antiquity; it was already hundreds of years old when Livy was born there in 59 B.C. It became a free commune in 1174, suffered the tyranny of Ezzelino (1237–56), recovered its independence, sang litanies to liberty, and subjected Vicenza to its domination. Attacked and almost overcome by Can Grande della Scala of Verona, it abandoned its freedom and chose as dictator Iacopo I da Carrara (1318), a man as hard as the marble that bore his name. Later members of the family succeeded to his power by inheritance or assassination. Petrarch’s host seized the reins in 1345 by murdering his predecessor, tried to atone by good government, but was stabbed to death after four years of rule. Francesco I da Carrara (1350–89), in a remarkable reign of almost forty years, raised Padua to a passing rivalry with Milan, Florence, and Venice. He made the mistake of joining Genoa against Venice in the bitter war of 1378; Venice won, and subjected Padua to her rule (1404).

Meanwhile the city contributed more than its share to the cultured life of Italy. The majestic church of St. Anthony, known affectionately as II Santo, was completed in 1307. The great Salone, or Sala della Ragione (Hall of Parliament), was repaired in 1306 by the monastic architect Fra Giovanni Eremitano, and still stands. The Reggia, or Royal Palace (1345f), had 400 rooms, many with frescoes that were the pride of the Carraresi; nothing remains of them but a tower whose celebrated clock first chimed in 1364. At the beginning of the century an ambitious merchant, Enrico Scrovegni, bought a palace in the old Roman amphitheater known as the Arena, and summoned Italy’s most famous sculptor, Giovanni Pisano, and her most famous painter, Giotto, to decorate the chapel of his new home (1303–5); as a result the little Arena Chapel is now known throughout the educated world. Here the genial Giotto painted half a hundred murals, roundels, and medallions, telling again the wondrous story of the Virgin and her Son, surrounding the main frescoes with the heads of prophets and saints, and with ample female forms symbolizing the virtues and vices of mankind. Over the inner portal his pupils, with half-hearted seriousness, depicted the Last Judgment in a carnal confusion of gargoylelike grotesques. Mantegna, decorating a chapel in the near-by church of the Eremitani a century and a half later, may have smiled at the simple draftsmanship, the primitive perspective, the monotonous similarity of faces, poses, and figures, the imperfect sense and command of anatomy, the blonde heaviness of nearly all the figures, as if the Lombards of Padua were still Longobards freshly come from well-fed Germany. But the lovely features of the Virgin in the Nativity, the noble head of Jesus in the Raising of Lazarus, the stately high priest in The Wooers, the calm Christ and coarse Judas of The Betrayal, the serene grace, harmonious composition, and developing action of the spacious panorama in color and form, make these paintings—still fresh and clear after six centuries—the first pictorial triumph of the fourteenth century.

Petrarch may have seen the Arena frescoes; certainly he appreciated Giotto, for in his will he left to Francesco da Carrara a Madonna “by that excellent painter, Giotto, a picture whose beauty… surprises the masters of the art.”²⁸ But at the time he was more interested in literature than in art. He must have been stimulated by hearing that Albertino Mussato, a humanist even before Petrarch, had been crowned as Padua’s poet laureate in 1314 for writing a Latin drama, Ecerinis, in the style of Seneca; this, so far as we know, was the first Renaissance play. Surely Petrarch visited the university that was the city’s noble pride. It was at this time the most celebrated school in Italy, rivaling Bologna as a center of legal training, and Paris as a hotbed of philosophy. Petrarch was shocked by the frank “Averroism” of some Paduan professors, who questioned the immortality of the individual soul, and spoke of Christianity as a useful superstition privately discarded by educated men.

In 1348 we find our restless poet at Mantua, then at Ferrara. In 1350 he joined the flow of pilgrims bound for the jubilee in Rome. On the way he visited Florence for the first time, and established a cordial friendship with Boccaccio. Thereafter, said Petrarch, they “shared a single heart.”²⁹ In 1351, on Boccaccio’s urging, the Florentine Signory repealed the edict that had confiscated Ser Petracco’s property, and sent Boccaccio to Padua to offer Petrarch a money recompense and a professorship in the University of Florence. When he rejected the offer Florence repealed the repeal.

VI. GIOTTO

It is difficult to love medieval Florence,* she was so hard and bitter in industry and politics; but it is easy to admire her, for she devoted her wealth to the creation of beauty. There, in the very youth of Petrarch, the Renaissance was in full swing.

It developed in a stimulating atmosphere of business competition, family feuds, and private violence unparalleled in the rest of Italy. The population was divided by class war, and each class itself was split into factions merciless in victory and vengeful in defeat. At any moment the defection of a few families from one parte to another would tip the scales of power. At any moment some discontented element might take to arms and try to oust the government; if successful it exiled the leaders of the beaten party, usually confiscated their property, sometimes burned down their homes. But this economic strife and political agitation were not all of Florentine life. Though more devoted to their party than to their city, the citizens had a proud civic sense, and spent much of their substance for the common good. Rich individuals or guilds would pay for paving a street, constructing sewers, improving the water supply, housing a public market, establishing or improving churches, hospitals, or schools. An esthetic sense as keen as that of the ancient Greeks or the modern French dedicated public and private funds to the embellishment of the city with architecture, sculpture, and painting, and to the interior adornment of homes with these and a dozen minor arts. Florentine pottery led all Europe in this period. Florentine goldsmiths decorated necks, bosoms, hands, wrists, girdles, altars, tables, armor, coins with jewelry or intarsia or engraved or embossed designs unsurpassed in that or any other age.

And now the artist, reflecting the new emphasis on personal ability or virtù, stood out from the guild or the group, and identified his product with his name. Niccolò Pisano had already freed sculpture from limitation to ecclesiastical motives, and subservience to architectural lines, by uniting a sturdy naturalism with the physical idealism of the Greeks. His pupil Andrea Pisano cast for the Florentine Baptistery (1300–6) two bronze halfdoors depicting in twenty-eight reliefs the development of the arts and sciences since Adam delved and Eve span; and these fourteenth-century works survive comparison with Ghiberti’s fifteenth-century “doors to Paradise” on the same building. In 1334 the Florentine Signory approved the designs of Giotto for a tower to bear the weight and scatter the chimes of the cathedral bells, and a decree was passed, in the spirit of the age, that “the campanile should be built so as to exceed in magnificence, height, and excellence of workmanship everything of the kind achieved of old by the Greeks and Romans when at the zenith of their greatness.”³⁰ The loveliness of the tower lies not in its square and undistinguished form (which Giotto had wished to top with a spire), but in the Gothic traceried windows, and the reliefs, in colored marble, carved on the lower panels by Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and Luca della Robbia. After Giotto’s death the work was carried on by Pisano, Donatello, and Francesco Talenti, to whom the tower owes the culminating beauty of its highest arcade (1359).

Giotto di Bondone dominated the painting of the fourteenth century as Petrarch dominated its poetry; and the artist rivaled the poet in ubiquity. Painter, sculptor, architect, capitalist, man of the world, equally ready with artistic conceptions, practical devices, and humorous repartee, Giotto moved through life with the confidence of a Rubens, and spawned masterpieces in Florence, Rome, Assisi, Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, Faenza, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo, Padua, Verona, Naples, Urbino, Milan. He seems never to have worried about obtaining commissions; and when he went to Naples it was as the palace guest of the king. He married and had ugly children, but this did not disturb the placid grace of his compositions, or the cheerful tenor of his life. He leased looms to artisans at twice the ordinary rental;³¹ however, he told the story of St. Francis, the apostle of poverty, in one of the outstanding works of the Renaissance.

He was still a youth when Cardinal Stefaneschi called him to Rome to design a mosaic—the celebrated Navicella, or Little Ship, showing Christ saving Peter from the waves; it survives, considerably altered, in the vestibule of St. Peter’s, inconspicuous above and behind the portico colonnade. It was probably the same Cardinal who commissioned the polyptych preserved in the Vatican. These products show an immature Giotto, vigorous in conception, weak in execution. Possibly a study of Pietro Cavallini’s mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere, and his fresco in Santa Cecilia, helped to form Giotto in those Roman years; while the naturalistic sculpture of Niccolò Pisano may have moved him to turn his eyes from the works of his predecessors to the actual features and feelings of living women and men. “Giotto appeared,” said Leonardo da Vinci, “and drew what he saw,”³² and the Byzantine petrifaction faded from Italian art.

Moving to Padua, Giotto painted in three years the famous frescoes of the Arena Chapel. Perhaps at Padua he met Dante; he may have known him in Florence; Vasari, always interesting and sometimes accurate, calls Dante the “close companion and friend” of Giotto,³³ and ascribes to Giotto a portrait of Dante that formed part of a fresco in the Florentine Bargello or Palace of the Podesta. The poet, with exceptional amiability, celebrates the painter in The Divine Comedy.³⁴

In 1318 two banking families, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, engaged Giotto to tell in frescoes the stories of St. Francis, St. John the Baptist, and St. John the Evangelist, in the chapels that they were dedicating in the church of Santa Croce in Florence. These paintings were whitewashed in later years; they were uncovered in 1853 and were repainted, so that only the drawing and the composition are Giotto’s. A like fate befell the celebrated frescoes in the double church of St. Francis at Assisi. That hilltop shrine is one of the major goals of pilgrimage in Italy, and those visitors who come to view the paintings attributed to Cimabue and Giotto seem as numerous as those who come to honor or solicit the saint. It was probably Giotto who planned the subjects and drew the outlines for the lower frescoes of the Upper Church; for the rest he seems to have confined himself to supervising the work of his pupils. These frescoes of the Upper Church narrate in detail the life of St. Francis; Christ Himself had rarely received so extensive a painted biography. They are masterly in their conception and composition, pleasant in their gentle mood and flowing harmony; they end once and for all the hieratic stiffness of Byzantine forms; but they lack depth and force and individuality, they are graceful tableaux without the color of passion or the blood of life. The frescoes in the Lower Church, less mangled by time, mark an advance in Giotto’s power. He seems to have been directly responsible for the pictures in the Magdalen Chapel, while his aides painted the allegories illustrating the Franciscan vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. In this duplex church the legend of Francis gave a mighty stimulus, almost a new birth, to Italian painting, and generated a tradition ideally completed in the work of the Dominican Fra Angelico.

All in all, Giotto’s work was a revolution. We feel his faults because we know of the painting skills that were developed by the movement that he began. His drawing, modeling, perspective, and anatomy are painfully inadequate; art, like the medical science of Giotto’s time, was just beginning to dissect the human body, to learn the place, structure, and function of each muscle, bone, tendon, nerve; men like Mantegna and Masaccio would master these elements, and Michelangelo would perfect them, almost make a fetish of them; but in Giotto’s day it was still unusual to study, scandalous to represent, the nude. What is it, then, that makes the work of Giotto in Padua and Assisi a landmark in the history of art? It is the rhythmic composition, drawing the eye from every angle to the center of interest; the dignity of quiet motion, the soft and luminous coloring, the majestic flow of the narrative, the restraint of expression even in deep feeling, the grandeur of the calm that bathes these troubled scenes; and, now and then, the naturalistic portraiture of men, women, and children not as studied in past art but as seen and felt in the movement of life. These were the components of Giotto’s triumph over Byzantine rigidity and gloom, these were the secrets of his enduring influence. For a century after him Florentine art lived on his example and his inspiration.

In his wake came two generations of Giotteschi, who imitated his themes and style, but rarely touched his excellence. His godson and pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, almost inherited art; Taddeo’s father, and three of Taddeo’s five sons, were painters; the Italian Renaissance, like German music, tended to run in families, and prospered there through the transmission and accumulation of techniques in homes, studios, and schools. Taddeo began as an apprentice to Giotto; by 1347 he was at the head of Florentine painters; even then, however, he signed himself devotedly “Discepol di Giotto il buon maestro.”³⁵ He became so rich through his industry as painter and architect that his descendants could afford to be patrons of art.

An impressive work long attributed to him but now ascribed to Andrea da Firenze shows how, in this first century of the Renaissance, Italy was still medieval. In the Capella degli Spagnuoli, or Chapel of the Spaniards, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican friars set up about 1370 a pictorial apotheosis of their famous philosopher. St. Thomas Aquinas, comfortably substantial but too devoted to be proud, stands in triumph, with the heretics Arius, Sabellius, and Averroes groveling at his feet; around him Moses, Paul, John the Evangelist, and other saints seem but accessories; below them fourteen figures symbolize seven sacred and seven profane sciences—Donatus grammar, Cicero rhetoric, Justinian law, Euclid geometry, and so on. The thought is still completely medieval; only the art, in design and color, shows the emergence of a new age from the old. The transition was so gradual that not for a century yet would men feel themselves to be in a different world.

The advance in technique is clearer in Orcagna, who stands second only to Giotto among the Italian artists of the fourteenth century. Named originally Andrea di Cione, he was called Arcagnolo—Archangel—by his admiring contemporaries, and lazy tongues shortened the appellation to Orcagna. Though often listed among Giotto’s followers, he was rather a pupil of the sculptor Andrea Pisano. Like the greatest geniuses of the Renaissance he was a master of many arts. As a painter he made a colorful altarpiece of Christ Enthroned for the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, while his elder brother Nardo executed on the walls vivid frescoes of heaven and hell (1354–7). As an architect he designed the Certosa or Carthusian monastery near Florence, famous for its graceful cloisters and its Acciaiuoli tombs. As architects and sculptors he and his brother executed the ornate tabernacle in the Or(atory) San Michele in Florence. A picture of the Virgin there was believed to work miracles; after the Black Death of 1348 the votive offerings of survivors enriched the fraternity that managed the building, and it was decided to house the picture in a sumptuous shrine of marble and gold. The Cioni designed it as a miniature Gothic cathedral, with columns, pinnacles, statues, reliefs, precious metal, and costly stone; it is a jewel of trecento decoration.* Andrea, acclaimed for it, was appointed capomaestro at Orvieto, and shared in designing the façade of the cathedral. In 1362 he returned to Florence, and worked there on the great duomo till his death.

The immense fame of Santa Maria del Fiore—the largest church that had as yet been built in Italy—had been begun by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296. A succession of masters—Giotto, Andrea Pisano, Francesco Talenti, and many others—labored on it till our time; its present façade dates from 1887; even now the cathedral is incomplete, and must in good measure be rebuilt by every century. Architecture was the least successful of the arts in Renaissance Italy; it took half-heartedly from the north some elements of Gothic like the pointed arch, combined them with classic columns, and sometimes, as in Florence, topped the whole with a Byzantine dome. The mixture was incongruous and—barring some small churches by Bramante—lacked unity and grace. The façade of Orvieto and Siena were superb displays of sculpture and mosaic rather than honest architecture; and the accentuation of horizontal lines by the alternating strata of black and white marble in the walls depresses eye and soul, when the very meaning of the church should have been a prayer or paean rising to the skies. Santa Maria del Fiore—as the Florentine cathedral was called after 1412 from the lily in the heraldic emblem of the city—is hardly a flower; it is, but for Brunellesco’s illustrious dome, a cavern, whose dark vacuity might be the mouth of Dante’s Inferno instead of a vestibule to God.

It was the inexhaustible Arnolfo di Cambio who in 1294 began the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, or the Holy Cross, and in 1298 the loveliest structure in Florence, the Palazzo della Signoria, known to later generations as the Palazzo Vecchio. The church was finished in 1442 except for the façade (1863); the Palace of the Signory, or Old Palace, was completed in its main features by 1314. Those were the years that saw the banishment of Dante and Petrarch’s father; factional strife was in its heyday; so Arnolfo built for the Signory a fortress rather than a palace, and designed its roof with machicolated battlements; while the unique campanile, by the diverse ringing of its bell, served to call the citizens to parliament or to arms. Here the city fathers (priori, signori) not only governed but lived; and the temper of the time appears in the law that during their two months of office they were not to leave the building on any pretext whatever. In 1345 Neri di Fioravante spanned the Arno with one of the world’s famous bridges, the Ponte Vecchio, now cracked with age and many wars, but still precariously bearing impatient traffic and twenty-two shops. Around these proud achievements of the Florentine civic spirit, in the narrow streets that led from the cathedral and Signoria squares, rose the as yet modest mansions of the worried rich, the noble churches that transmuted merchants’ gold into art, the noisy shops of traders and artisans, and the crowded tenements of an industrious, rebellious, excitable, intelligent populace. In that frenzy of egos the Renaissance was born.

VII. “THE DECAMERON”

It was in Florence that Italian literature achieved its first and greatest triumphs. There Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, in the late thirteenth century, gave the sonnet its finished form; not there, but longing for it, Dante the Florentine struck the first and last true note of Italian epic poetry; there Boccaccio composed the supreme work of Italian prose, and Giovanni Villani wrote the most modern of medieval chronicles. Visiting Rome for the jubilee of 1300, and moved like Gibbon by the ruins of a mighty past, Villani thought for a while of recording its history; then, judging that Rome had been sufficiently commemorated, he turned back to his native haunts, and resolved “to bring into this volume… all the events of the city of Florence… and give in full the deeds of the Florentines, and briefly the notable affairs of the rest of the world.”³⁶

He began with the Tower of Babel and ended on the verge of the Black Death, in which he died; his brother Matteo and his nephew Filippo continued the story to 1365. Giovanni was well prepared; he came of a prosperous mercantile family, commanded a pure Tuscan speech, traveled in Italy, Flanders, and France, served thrice as prior and once as master of the mint. He had for those times an uncommon sense of the economic bases and influences of history; and he was the first to salt his narrative with statistics of social conditions. The first three books of his Croniche Fiorentine are mostly legend; but in later books we learn that in 1338 Florence and its hinterland had 105,000 inhabitants, of whom seventeen thousand were beggars and four thousand were on public relief; that there were six primary schools, teaching ten thousand boys and girls, and four high schools, in which six hundred boys and a few girls studied “grammar” (literature) and “logic” (philosophy). Unlike most historians Villani included notices of new books, paintings, buildings; seldom has a city been so directly described in all the departments of its life. Had Villani brought all these phases and details into one united narrative of causes, phenomena, personalities, and effects he would have transformed his chronicle into history.

Settling down in Florence in 1340, Boccaccio continued to pursue woman in life and verse and prose. The Amorosa Visione was dedicated to Fiammetta, and recalled in 4400 lines of terza rima the happier days of their liaison. In a psychological novel, Fiammetta, the bastard princess is made to tell the story of her deviation with Boccaccio; she analyzes the emotions of love, the torments of desire and jealousy and desertion, in Richardsonian detail; and when her conscience rebukes her infidelity she imagines Aphrodite chiding her for cowardice: “Make not thyself so timorous in saying, ‘I have a husband, and holy laws and promised faith forbid me these things.’ These are but vain conceits and frivolous objections against the power of Eros. For like a strong and mighty prince he plants his eternal laws; not caring for other laws of lower state, he accounts them base and servile rules.”³⁷ Boccaccio, abusing the power of the pen, ends the book by having Fiammetta proclaim, to his glory, that it was he who deserted her, not she who deserted him. Returning to poetry, he sang in the Ninfale Fiesolano the love of a shepherd for a priestess of Diana; his triumph is described in fond detail, with some enthusiasm spared for natural scenery. This is almost the working formula of The Decameron.

It was shortly after the plague of 1348 that Boccaccio began to write this renowned concatenation of seductive tales. He was now thirty-five; the temperature of desire had fallen from poetry to prose; he could begin to see the humor of the mad pursuit. Fiammetta herself seems to have died in the plague, and Boccaccio was calm enough to use the name that he had given her for one of the least finicky raconteuses of his book. Though the whole was not published till 1353, some of it must have been issued in installments, for in the introduction to the Fourth Day the author replies to the criticism that had reproved the earlier narratives. As we have the book now it is a “century” of stories—a full hundred; they were not meant to be read in any great number at one time; published seriatim, they must have provided topics for many a Florentine evening.

The prelude describes the effects, in Florence, of the Black Death that struck all Europe in 1348 and afterward. Born apparently of the fertility and filth of Asiatic populations impoverished by war and weakened by famine, the infection crossed Arabia into Egypt, and the Black Sea into Russia and Byzantium. From Constantinople, Alexandria, and other ports of the Near East the merchants and vessels of Venice, Syracuse, Pisa, Genoa, and Marseille, aided by fleas and rats, brought it to Italy and France.³⁸ A succession of famine years in western Europe—1333–4, 1337–42, 1345–7—probably sapped the resistance of the poor, who then communicated the disease to all classes.³⁹ It took two forms: pulmonary, with high fever and spitting of blood, bringing death in three days; or bubonic, with fever, abscesses, and carbuncles, leading to death in five days. Half the population of Italy was carried off in the successive visitations of the plague from 1348 to 1365.⁴⁰ A Sienese chronicler wrote, about 1354:

Neither relatives nor friends nor priests nor friars accompanied the corpses to the grave, nor was the office of the dead recited…. In many places of the city trenches were dug, very broad and deep, and into these the bodies were thrown, and covered with a little earth; and thus layer after layer until the trench was full; and then another trench was begun. And I, Agniolo di Tura… with my own hands buried five of my children in a single trench; and many others did the like. And many dead were so ill covered that the dogs dug them up and ate them, dispersing their limbs throughout the city. And no bells rang, and nobody wept no matter what his loss, because almost everyone expected death…. And people said and believed, “This is the end of the world.”⁴¹

In Florence, according to Matteo Villani, three out of five of the population died between April and September of 1348. Boccaccio estimated the Florentine dead at 100,000, Machiavelli at 96,000;⁴² these are transparent exaggerations, since the total population hardly exceeded 100,000. Boccaccio opens The Decameron with a frightful description of the plague:

Not only did converse and consorting with the sick give the infection to the sound, but the mere touching of the clothes, or of whatsoever had been touched or used by the sick, appeared of itself to communicate the malady…. A thing which had belonged to a man sick or dead of the sickness, being touched by an animal… in a brief time killed it… of this mine own eyes had experience. This tribulation struck such terror to the hearts of all… that brother forsook brother, uncle nephew… oftentimes wife husband; nay (what is yet more extraordinary and well nigh incredible), some fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children, as though they had not been theirs…. The common people, being altogether untended and unsuccored, sickened by the thousand daily, and died well nigh without recourse. Many breathed their last in the open street, whilst other many, for all they died in their houses, made it known to the neighbors that they were dead rather by the stench of their rotting bodies than otherwise; and of these and others who died the whole city was full. The neighbors, moved more by fear lest the corruption of the dead bodies should imperil themselves than by any charity for the departed… brought the bodies forth from the houses and laid them before the doors, where, especially in the morning, those who went about might see corpses without number. Then they fetched biers, and some, in default thereof, they laid upon a board; nor was it only one bier that carried two or three corpses, nor did this happen but once; nay, many might have been counted which contained husband and wife, two or three brothers, father and son, and the like…. The thing was come to such a pass that folk reckoned no more of men that died than nowadays they would of goats.⁴³

Out of this scene of desolation Boccaccio pictures his Decameron as taking form. The plan for the pagan outing is made in “the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella” by “seven young ladies, all knit one to another by friendship or neighborhood or kinship,” who had just heard Mass. They ranged between eighteen and twenty-eight years of age. “Each was discreet and of noble blood, fair of favor and well-mannered, and full of honest sprightliness.” One proposes that they should lessen their chances of infection by retiring to their country houses, not separately but together, with their servants, moving from one villa to another, “taking such pleasance and diversion as the season may afford…. There may we hear the small birds sing, there may we see the hills and plains clad in green and the fields full of corn wave even as doth the sea; there may we see trees, a thousand sorts; and there is the face of heaven more open to the view, the which, angered against us though it be, denieth not unto us its eternal beauties.”⁴⁴ The suggestion is accepted, but Filomena improves upon it: since “we women are fickle, willful, suspicious, and timorous,” it might be well to have some men in the party. Providentially at that moment “there entered the church three young men… in whom neither the perversity of the time, nor loss of friends and kinsfolk… had availed to cool… the fire of love…. All were agreeable, well-bred, and they went seeking their supreme solace… to see their mistresses, who, as it chanced, were all three among the seven ladies aforesaid.” Pampinia recommends that the young gentlemen be invited to join the outing. Neifile fears that this will lead to scandal. Filomena answers: “So but I live honestly, and conscience prick me not of aught, let who will speak to the contrary.”

So, on the Wednesday following, they set out, preceded by servants and victuals, to a villa two miles from Florence, “with a goodly and great courtyard in its midst, and galleries and saloons and bedchambers, each in itself most fair, and adorned with jocund paintings; with lawns and grassplots round about, and wondrous-goodly gardens, and wells of very cold water, and cellars full of wines of price.”⁴⁵ The ladies and gentlemen sleep late, breakfast leisurely, walk in the gardens, dine at length, and amuse themselves by matching stories. It is agreed that each of the ten shall tell a story on each day of the outing. They stay in the country ten days (whence the title of the book, from the Greek deka hemerai, ten days); and the result is that Boccaccio’s commedia umana counters each of Dante’s gloomy cantos with a merry tale. Meanwhile a rule forbids any member of the group to “bring in from without any news other than joyous.”

The narratives, averaging six pages in length, were seldom original with Boccaccio; they were collected from classical sources, Oriental writers, medieval gesta, French contes and fabliaux, or the folklore of Italy itself. The last and most famous story in the book is that of the patient Griselda, which Chaucer adopted for one of the best and most absurd of The Canterbury Tales. The finest of Boccaccio’s novelle is the ninth of the fifth day—of Federigo, his falcon, and his love, almost as self-sacrificing as Griselda’s. The most philosophical is the legend of the three rings (I, 3). Saladin, “Soldan of Babylon,” needing money, invites the rich Jew Melchisedek to dinner, and asks him which of the three religions is the best—the Jewish, the Christian, or the Mohammedan. The wise old moneylender, fearing to speak his mind directly, answers with a parable:

There was once a great man and a rich, who, among other very precious jewels in his treasury, had a goodly and costly ring…. Wishing to leave it in perpetuity to his descendants, he declared that whichever of his sons should, at his death, be found in possession thereof, by his bequest unto him, should be recognized as his heir, and be held by all the others in honor and reverence as chief and head. He to whom the ring was left held a like course with his own descendants, and did even as his father had done. In brief, the ring passed from hand to hand, through many generations, and came at last into the possession of a man who had three goodly and virtuous sons all very obedient to their father, whereof he loved all three alike. The young men knowing the usance of the ring, each desiring to be the most honored among his folk… besought his father, who was now an old man, to leave him the ring…. The worthy man, who knew not himself how to choose to which he had liefer leave the ring, bethought himself… to satisfy all three, and privily let make by a good craftsman other two rings which were so like unto the first that he himself scarce knew which was the true. When he came to die he secretly gave each one of his sons his ring, wherefore each of them, seeking, after their father’s death, to occupy the inheritance and the honor and denying it to the others, produced his ring in witness of his right, and the three rings being found so like one another that the true might not be known, the question which was the father’s very heir abode pending and yet pendeth. And so I say to you, my lord: of the three Laws given by God the Father to the three peoples, each people deemeth itself to have His inheritance, His true Law and His commandments; but of which in very deed hath them, even as of the rings, the question yet pendeth.

Such a story suggests that in his thirty-seventh year Boccaccio was not a dogmatic Christian. Contrast his tolerance with the bitter bigotry of Dante, who condemns Mohammed to perpetually repeated vivisections in hell.⁴⁶ In the second story of The Decameron the Jew Jehannat is converted to Christianity by the argument (adapted by Voltaire) that Christianity must be divine, since it has survived so much clerical immorality and simony. Boccaccio makes fun of asceticism, purity, the confessional, relics, priests, monks, friars, nuns, even the canonization of saints. He thinks most monks are hypocrites, and laughs at the “simpletons” who give them alms (VI, 10). One of his most hilarious stories tells how the friar Cipolla, to raise a good collection, promised his audience to display “a very holy relic, one of the angel Gabriel’s feathers, which remained in the Virgin Mary’s chamber after the Annunciation” (VI, 10). The most obscene of the stories tells how the virile youth Masetto satisfied an entire nunnery (III, ). In another tale Friar Rinaldo cuckolds a husband; whereupon the narrator asks, “What monks are there that do not do thus?” (VII, 3)

The ladies in The Decameron blush a bit at such stories, but enjoy the Rabelaisian-Chaucerian humor; Filomena, a girl of especially nice manners, tells the tale of Rinaldo; and sometimes, says Boccaccio’s least happy image, “the ladies kept up such a laughing that you might have drawn all their teeth.”⁴⁷ Boccaccio had been reared in the loose gaiety of Naples, and most often thought of love in sensual terms; he smiled at chivalric romance, and played Sancho Panza to Dante’s Don Quixote. Though twice married he seems to have believed in free love.⁴⁸ After recounting a score of stories that would today be unfit for a male gathering, he makes one of the men say to the ladies: “I have noted no act, no word, in fine nothing blameworthy, either on your part or on that of us men.” In concluding his book the author acknowledges some criticism of the license he has used, and especially because “I have in sundry places written the truth about the friars.” At the same time he congratulates himself on his “long labor, thoroughly accomplished with the aid of the Divine favor.”

The Decameron remains one of the masterpieces of world literature. Its fame may be due more to its morals than to its art, but even if immaculate it would have merited preservation. It is perfectly constructed—superior in this respect to The Canterbury Tales. Its prose set a standard that Italian literature has never surpassed, a prose sometimes involved or flowery, but for the most part eloquent and vigorous, pungent and vivacious, and clear as a mountain stream. It is a book of the love of life. In the greatest disaster that had befallen Italy in a thousand years Boccaccio could find in his vitals the courage to see beauty, humor, goodness, and joy still walking the earth. At times he was cynical, as in his unmanly satire on women in the Corbaccio; but in The Decameron he was a hearty Rabelais, relishing the give and take, the rough and tumble, of life and love. Despite caricature and exaggeration the world recognized itself in the book; every European language translated it; Hans Sachs and Lessing, Molière and La Fontaine, Chaucer and Shakespeare, took leaves from it admiringly. It will be enjoyed when all of Petrarch’s poetry has entered the twilight realm of the praised unread.

VIII. SIENA

Siena would have challenged the claim of Florence to have begotten the Renaissance. There too the violence of faction raised the temperature of thought, and communal pride nourished art The woolen industry, the export of Sienese products to the Levant, and the trade of the Via Flaminia between Florence and Rome gave the city a moderate affluence; by 1400 the squares and principal streets were paved with brick or stone; and the poor were rich enough to stage a revolution. In 1371 the woolworkers besieged the Palazzo Pubblico, broke down its doors, expelled the businessmen’s government, and set up the rule of the riformatori. A few days later an army of two thousand men, fully equipped by the mercantile interests, made its way into the city, invaded the quarters of the proletariat, and slew men, women, and children without discrimination or mercy, spitting some on the lance, hacking others with the sword. The nobility and the lower middle class came to the rescue of the commons, the counterrevolution was defeated, and the reform government gave Siena the most honest administration that the citizens could recall. In 1385 the rich merchants rose again, overthrew the riformatori, and expelled four thousand rebel workmen from the city. From that date industry and art declined in Siena.*

It was in this turbulent fourteenth century that Siena reached the zenith of her art. On the west side of the spacious Campo—the main square of the city—rose the Palazzo Pubblico (1288–1309); the adjoining campanile, the Torre de Mangia, rearing its slender height to 334 feet, is the most beautiful tower in Italy. In 1310 the Sienese architect and sculptor Lorenzo Maitani went to Orvieto and designed the lordly façade of the cathedral there; he and other Sienese artists, and Andrea Pisano, engaged in a frenzy of decoration on the portals, pilasters, and pediments, and produced a miracle in marble to commemorate the miracle of Bolsena. In 1377 the great duomo of Siena received a similar façade from designs left by Giovanni Pisano, perhaps too ornate, but still one of the wonders of inexhaustible Italy.

Meanwhile a brilliant band of Sienese painters had carried on where Duccio di Buoninsegna had left off. In 1315 Simone Martini was commissioned to decorate the Hall of the Great Council in the Palazzo Pubblico with a maestà, i.e., a Coronation of the Virgin; for Mary was, in law as well as in theology, the crowned queen of the city, and might properly preside at meetings of the municipal government. The picture dared comparison with the maestà that Duccio had painted for the cathedral five years before; it was not so large, nor so overlaid with gold; like that “majesty” it betrayed the Byzantine derivation of Sienese painting by the immobile features and lifeless pose of its crowded characters; perhaps it made some advance in color and design. But in 1326 Simone went to Assisi; there he studied the frescoes of Giotto; and when he was invited to picture in a chapel of the Lower Church the life of St. Martin he escaped from the stereotyped faces of his earlier work, and achieved a memorable individualization of the great Bishop of Tours. At Avignon he met Petrarch, painted portraits of the poet and Laura, and won an appreciative mention in the Canzoniere. These brief lines, said Vasari, “have given more fame to Simone than all his own works have done… for a day will come when his paintings will be no more, whereas the writings of such a man as Petrarch endure for all time”; no geologist would be so optimistic. Benedict XII made Simone official painter to the papal court (1339); and in that capacity he illustrated the life of the Baptist in the papal chapel, and of the Virgin and the Saviour in the portico of the cathedral. He died at Avignon in 1344.

That secularization of art which Simone had essayed in his lay portraits was extended by Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Perhaps after studying in Florence, Pietro abandoned the sentimental traditions of Sienese painting, and produced a series of altar pictures of unprecedented power, sometimes of savage realism. In the Hall of the Nine (Councilors) in the Palazzo Pubblico Ambrogio painted four famous frescoes (1337–43): Evil Government, The Consequences of Evil Government, Good Government, and The Consequences of Good Government. Here the medieval habit of symbolism, superseded by Giotto, is retained; majestic figures represent Siena, Justice, Wisdom, Concord, the Seven Virtues, and Peace—the last reclining gracefully like a Pheidian deity. In Evil Government Tyranny is enthroned, and Terror is his vizier; merchants are plundered on the road; faction and violence incarnadine the town. Against the same architectural background Good Government shows a population happily busy with handicrafts, amusements, and trade; farmers and merchants lead into the city mules laden with food and goods; children play, maidens dance, viols make silent music; and over the scene a winged spirit flies, figuring Security. Perhaps it was these energetic brothers—or Orcagna, or Francesco Traini —who painted the immense fresco, The Triumph of Death, in the Campo Santo at Pisa. A hunting party of lords and ladies richly attired comes upon three open coffins in which royal corpses lie festering; one hunter holds his nose at their smell; above the scene hovers the Angel of Death, wielding an enormous scythe; in the air ministers of grace escort saved souls to paradise, while winged demons drag most of the dead into hell; serpents and black vultures entwine and consume the naked bodies of women and men; and below, kings, queens, princes, bishops, cardinals writhe in the pit of the damned. On a neighboring wall the same authors, in another immense fresco, painted on the left a Last Judgment, and on the right a second vision of hell. All the terrors of medieval theology here take physical form; it is Dante’s Inferno visualized without mercy and without stint.

Siena never emerged from the Middle Ages; there, as in Gubbio, San Gimignano, and Sicily, they survived the Renaissance. They never die, but patiently, subtly bide their time to come again.

IX. MILAN

In 1351 Petrarch returned to Avignon. Probably at Vaucluse he wrote a pretty essay, De vita solitaria, lauding the solitude that he could bear as a healing medicine but not as a sustaining food. It was shortly after this return to Avignon that he brought the medical fraternity down upon his head by exhorting Pope Clement VI, who was in failing health, to beware of doctors’ prescriptions. “I have always begged my friends, and ordered my servants, never to let any of these doctors’ tricks to be tried on my body, but always to do the exact contrary of what they advise.”⁴⁹ In 1355, exasperated by some therapeutic fiasco, he composed an intemperate Invective Against a Physician. He was not much better disposed toward lawyers, “who spend their entire time in disputations…. over trival questions. Hear my verdict upon the whole pack of them. Their fame will die with their flesh, and a single grave will suffice for their names and their bones.”⁵⁰ To make Avignon completely distasteful to him Pope Innocent VI proposed to excommunicate Petrarch as a necromancer, on the ground that the poet was a student of Virgil. Cardinal Talleyrand came to Petrarch’s rescue, but the air of saintly ignorance that now perfumed Avignon sickened the laureate. He visited his monk brother Gherardo, wrote a wistful treatise De otio reliogiosorum (On the Leisure of Monks), and toyed with the idea of entering a monastery. But when an invitation came to him to be the palace guest of the dictator of Milan (1353), he accepted with a readiness that shocked his republican friends.

The ruling family in Milan bore the name Visconti from having often filled the post of vicecomites, or archiepiscopal judges. In 1311 the Emperor Henry VII appointed Matteo Visconti his vicar in Milan, which, like most cities in northern Italy, loosely acknowledged itself as part of the Holy Roman Empire. Though Matteo made serious blunders he governed so ably that his descendants held power in Milan till 1447. They were seldom scrupulous, often cruel, sometimes extravagant, never stupid. They taxed the people heavily for the numerous campaigns that brought most of northwestern Italy under their rule, but their skill in finding competent administrators and generals brought victory to their arms and prosperity to Milan. To the woolen manufactures of the city they added a silk industry; they multiplied the canals that extended the city’s trade; they gave to life and property a security that made their subjects forgetful of liberty. Under their tyranny Milan became one of the richest cities of Europe; its palaces, faced with marble, lined avenues paved with stone. With Giovanni Visconti, handsome, indefatigable, ruthless or generous at need or whim, Milan reached its zenith; Lodi, Parma, Crema, Piacenza, Brescia, Bergamo, Novara, Como, Vercelli, Alessandria, Tortona, Pontremoli, Asti, Bologna acknowledged his rule; and when the Avignon popes contested his claim to Bologna, and visited him with excommunication, he fought Clement VI with courage and bribery, and with 200,000 florins won Bologna, absolution, and peace (1352). He paid for his crimes with gout, and adorned his despotism with the patronage of poetry, learning, and art. When Petrarch, arriving at his court, asked what duties would be expected of him, Giovanni replied handsomely: “Only your presence, which will grace both myself and my reign.”⁵¹

Petrarch remained eight years at the Visconti court in Pavia or Milan. During this comfortable subjection he composed in Italian terza rima a series of poems that he called Trionfi: the triumph of desire over man, of chastity over desire, of death over chastity, of fame over death, of time over fame, of eternity over time. Here he sang his final word of Laura; he asked pardon for the sensuality of his love, conversed with her chaste ghost, and dreamed of being united with her in paradise—her husband having apparently gone elsewhere. These poems, challenging comparison with Dante, represent the triumph of vanity over art.

Giovanni Visconti, dying in 1354, bequeathed his state to three nephews. Matteo II was a sensual incompetent, and was fraternally assassinated for the honor of the house (1355). Bernabò governed part of the duchy from Milan, Galeazzo II the remainder from Pavia. Galeazzo II was a capable ruler who wore his golden hair in curls and wedded his children to royalty. When his daughter Violante married the Duke of Clarence, son of King Edward III of England, Galeazzo dowered the bride with 200,000 gold florins ($5,000,000), and gave the two hundred English attendants of the groom such presents as outshone the generosity of the wealthiest contemporary kings; the leavings of the wedding banquet, we are assured, could have fed ten thousand men. So rich was trecento Italy, at a time when England was bankrupting herself, and France was bleeding herself white, in the Hundred Years’ War.

X. VENICE AND GENOA

In 1354 Duke Giovanni Visconti sent Petrarch to Venice to negotiate peace between Venice and Genoa.

“You see in Genoa,” the poet had written, “a city in the act of ruling, seated on rough hillsides, superb in walls and men.”⁵² The merchant’s itch for gain, pitting the sailor’s pluck against the sea, had plowed lanes of Genoese commerce through the Mediterranean to Tunis, Rhodes, Acre, and Tyre, to Samos, Lesbos, and Constantinople, through the Black Sea to the Crimea and Trebizond, through Gibraltar and the Atlantic to Rouen and Bruges. These enterprising businessmen developed double-entry bookkeeping by 1340, and marine insurance by 1370;⁵³ they borrowed money from private investors at seven to ten per cent, while in most Italian cities the rate ranged from twelve to thirty. For a long time the fruits of trade were divided, never amicably, among a few rich families—the Doria, the Spinola, the Grimaldi, the Fieschi. In 1339 Simone Boccanera led the sailors and other workers in a successful revolution, and became the first of a line of doges that ruled Genoa till 1797; Verdi commemorated him in an opera. The victors in their turn divided into hostile family groups, and disordered the city with costly strife, while Genoa’s great rival, Venice, thrived on order and unity.

Next to Milan, Venice was the richest and strongest state in Italy, and without exception the most ably governed. Its craftsmen were famous for the elegance of their products, mostly made for the luxury trade. Its great arsenal employed 16,000 men; 36,000 seamen manned its 3300 vessels of war or trade; and in the galleys freemen, not slaves as in the sixteenth century, plied the oars. Venetian merchants invaded every market from Jerusalem to Antwerp; they traded impartially with Christians and Mohammedans, and papal excommunications fell upon them with all the force of dew upon the earth. Petrarch, who had ranged from Naples to Flanders in his “love and zeal for seeing many things,” marveled at the shipping he saw in the Venetian lagoons:

I see vessels… as big as my mansion, their masts taller than its towers. They are as mountains floating on the waters. They go to face incalculable dangers in every portion of the globe. They bear wine to England, honey to Russia, saffron, oil, and linen to Assyria, Armenia, Persia, and Araby, wood to Egypt and Greece. They return heavily laden with products of all kinds, which are sent hence to every part of the world.⁵⁴

This lusty trade was financed by private funds collected and invested by moneylenders who began in the fourteenth century to take the name of bankers, bancherii, from the banco or bench on which they sat before their tables of exchange. The chief monetary units were the lira (a shortening of libra, pound) and the ducat (from duca, duke, doge), a gold coin of 3560 grams. This and the Florentine florin were the most stable and most widely honored currencies in Christendom.*

Life here was almost as gay as in the Naples of Boccaccio’s youth. The Venetians celebrated their holidays and victories with majestic ceremonies, carved and colored their pleasure vessels and their men-o’-war, draped their flesh in Oriental silks, brightened their tables with Venetian glass, and made much music on their waters and in their homes. In 1365 the Doge Lorenzo Celsi, accompanied by Petrarch, presided over a competition among the best musicians in Italy; poems were chanted to various accompaniments, great choruses sang, and the first prize was awarded to Francesco Landino of Florence, a blind composer of ballads and madrigals. Lorenzo Veneziano and others were making the transition from medieval severity to Renaissance grace in frescoes and polyptychs already presaging the colorfulness of Venetian painting. Houses, palaces, and churches rose like corals out of the sea. There were no castles in Venice, no fortified dwellings, no massive forbidding walls, for here private feud soon submitted to public law, and, besides, almost every mansion had a natural moat. Architectural design was still Gothic, but light and graceful as northern Gothic dared not be. In this period the majestic church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari was built; St. Mark’s continued, every now and then, to lift its aging face with youthful decorations of sculpture, mosaic, and arabesques, and superimposed Gothic ogives upon some round arches of the old Byzantine form. Though the Piazza San Marco had not yet received its full encirclement of architecture, Petrarch doubted “if it has an equal within the bounds of the world.”⁵⁵

All this beauty, quivering in the reflection of the Grand Canal, all this monolithic structure of economy and government, ruling an Adriatic and Aegean empire from an Archimedean fragment of the earth, met a mortal challenge in 1378, when the old strife with Genoa reached its peak. Luciano Doria led a Genoese armada up to Pola, found the main Venetian fleet weakened by an epidemic among the sailors, and in an overwhelming victory captured fifteen galleys and nearly two thousand men. Luciano lost his life in the battle, but his brother Ambrogio, succeeding him as admiral, took the town of Chioggia—on a narrow promontory some fifteen miles south of Venice—formed an alliance with Padua, blocked all Venetian shipping, and prepared, with Genoese seamen and Paduan mercenaries, to invade Venice itself. The proud city, apparently defenseless, asked for terms; these were so insolent and severe that the Great Council resolved to fight for every foot of water in the lagoons. The rich poured their hidden wealth into the coffers of the state; the people labored day and night to build another fleet; floating fortresses were raised around the islands, and were equipped with cannon, now for the first time appearing in Italy (1379). But the Genoese and Paduans, having already blockaded Venice from the sea, stretched a cordon of troops across its land approaches, and shut off the city’s food supply. While some of the population starved, Vittore Pisani trained recruits for the new navy. In December, 1379, Pisani and the Doge Andrea Contarini led the reconstituted fleet—thirty-four galleys, sixty large craft, four hundred small boats—to besiege the Genoese and their ships at Chioggia. The Genoese fleet was too small to face the new Venetian navy; Venetian cannon shot into, the Genoese vessels, fortresses, and barracks stones weighing 150 pounds, killing, among many, the Genoese admiral Pietro Doria. The Genoese, starving, asked leave to evacuate the women and children from Chioggia; the Venetians consented; but when the Genoese offered to yield if their fleet should be allowed to depart, it was the turn of Venice to demand unconditional surrender. For six months the siege of Chioggia continued; at last, reduced by disease and death, the Genoese gave up; and Venice treated them humanely. When Amadeus VI, Count of Savoy, offered mediation the exhausted rivals agreed; they made mutual concessions, exchanged prisoners, and resigned themselves to peace (1381).

XI. TWILIGHT OF THE “TRECENTO”

Petrarch, sampling every city and every host, took up his residence in Venice in 1361, and lived there for seven years. He brought his library with him, containing almost all the Latin classics except Lucretius. In an eloquent letter he deeded the precious collection to Venice, but reserved its use to himself till his death. As a gesture of appreciation the Venetian government assigned to him the Palazzo Molina, furnished for his comfort. However, Petrarch took his books with him on his later wanderings; at his death they fell into the hands of his last host, Francesco I da Carrara, an enemy of Venice; some were kept at Padua, most were sold or otherwise dispersed.

It was probably at Venice that he wrote an essay De officio et virtutibus imperatoris (On the Duty and Virtues of an Emperor), and a long concatenation of dialogues De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies for Both [Good and Bad] Fortune). He counsels modesty in prosperity and courage in adversity; warns against hitching one’s happiness to earthly victories or goods; teaches how to bear with toothache, obesity, the loss of a wife, the fluctuations of fame. It is all good advice, but it is all in Seneca. About this time, too, he composed his greatest prose work, De viris illustribus, thirty-one biographies of Roman celebrities from Romulus to Caesar; the 350 octavo pages devoted to Caesar constituted the most thorough life of that statesman till the nineteenth century.

Petrarch left Venice in 1368 for Pavia, hoping to negotiate a peace there between Galeazzo II Visconti and Pope Urban V, only to learn that eloquence without guns finds no ears among diplomats. In 1370 he accepted the invitation of Francesco I da Carrara to live for the second time as a royal guest in Padua. But his aging nerves resented the city’s bustle, and he soon retired to a modest villa at Arqua, in the Euganean hills, twelve miles southwest of Padua. There he passed the remaining four years of his life. He gathered and edited his letters for posthumous publication, and wrote a charming miniature autobiography, Epistola ad posteros (1371). Again he yielded to the philosopher’s ancient failing—to tell statesmen how to manage states. In De republica optime administranda (1372) he advised the lord of Padua to “be not the master but the father of thy subjects, and to love them as thy children”; to drain marshes, ensure a food supply, maintain churches, support the sick and helpless, and give protection and patronage to men of letters—on whose pens all fame depends. Then he took up The Decameron, and translated the story of Griselda into Latin to win for it a European audience.

Boccaccio was now in a mood to regret that he had ever written The Decameron or the sensual poems of his youth. In 1361 a dying monk had sent him a message reproaching him with his evil life and merry tales, and prophesying for him, in case he deferred reform, a speedy death and everlasting agonies in hell. Boccaccio had never been an assiduous thinker; he accepted the delusions of his time in regard to casting horoscopes and telling the future through dreams; he believed in a multitude of demons, and thought that Aeneas had veritably visited Hades.⁵⁶ He turned now to orthodoxy, and thought of selling his books and becoming a monk. Petrarch, advised of this, besought him to take a middle course: to turn from the writing of amorous Italian poems and novelle to the earnest study of the Latin and Greek classics. Boccaccio accepted the counsel of his “venerable master,” and became the first Greek humanist in Western Europe.

Urged on by Petrarch, he collected classical manuscripts; rescued books XI-XVI of the Annals, and books I-V of the Histories, of Tacitus from their oblivion in the neglected library of Monte Cassino; restored the texts of Martial and Ausonius, and contrived to give Homer to the Western world. Some scholars in the Age of Faith had carried on a knowledge of Greek, but in Boccaccio’s day Greek had almost totally disappeared from the ken of the West except in half-Greek Southern Italy. In 1342 Petrarch began to study Greek with the Calabrian monk Barlaam. When a bishopric in Calabria fell vacant Petrarch successfully recommended Barlaam for it; the monk departed, and Petrarch dropped Greek for lack of a teacher, a grammar, or a lexicon; no such books were then available in Latin or Italian. In 1359 Boccaccio met at Milan one of Barlaam’s pupils, Leon Pilatus. He invited him to Florence, and persuaded the university—which had been founded eleven years before—to establish a chair of Greek for Pilatus. Petrarch helped to pay his salary, sent copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey to Boccaccio, and commissioned Pilatus to translate them into Latin. The work was frequently delayed, and involved Petrarch in a troublesome correspondence; he complained that the letters of Pilatus were even longer and dirtier than his beard;⁵⁷ only through Boccaccio’s exhortations and cooperation was Pilatus prodded to complete the task. This inaccurate and prosaic version was the only Latin translation of Homer known to Europe in the fourteenth century.

Meanwhile Pilatus had taught Boccaccio enough Greek to read the Greek classics haltingly. Boccaccio confessed that he understood the texts only partly, but described what he did understand as surpassingly beautiful. Inspired by these books and Petrarch, he devoted almost all his remaining literary work to the purpose of promoting in Latin Europe a knowledge of Greek literature, mythology, and history. In a series of brief biographies De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Vicissitudes of Famous Men) he ranged from Adam to King John of France; in De claris mulieribus he told the stories of famous women from Eve to Queen Joanna I of Naples; in De montibus, silvis, fontibus, etc., he described in alphabetical order the mountains, forests, springs, rivers, and lakes named in Greek literature; and in De genealogiis deorum he composed a handbook of classical mythology. So deeply did he become absorbed in his subject that he spoke of the Christian God as Jove, of Satan as Pluto, of Venus and Mars as if they were as real as Mary and Christ. These books seem now intolerably dull, written in bad Latin and with middling scholarship; but in their time they were precious manuals for students of Greece, and played an important role in implementing the Renaissance.

So Boccaccio moved from the escapades of youth to the dignity of old age. Florence used him now and then as a diplomat, sending him on missions to Forlì, Avignon, Ravenna, and Venice. At sixty he was physically weak, suffering from dry scab and “more maladies than I know how to enumerate.”⁵⁸ He lived in suburban Certaldo in bitter poverty. Perhaps it was to aid him financially that some friends in 1373 persuaded the Florentine Signory to create a cathedra Dantesca, or chair of Dante, and to pay Boccaccio a hundred florins ($2500) to give a course of lectures on Dante in the Badia. His health broke down before the course was complete, and he turned to Certaldo reconciled to death.

Petrarch had written, “I desire that death find me ready and writing, or, if it please Christ, praying and in tears.”⁵⁹ On his seventieth birthday, July 20, 1374, he was found leaning over a book, apparently sleeping, actually dead. In his will he left fifty florins to buy a mantle for Boccaccio as protection against the cold during the long winter nights. On December 21, 1375, Boccaccio too died, aged sixty-one. For fifty years now Italy would lie fallow, till the seeds that these men had planted would come to flower.

XII. PERSPECTIVE

We have followed Petrarch and Boccaccio through Italy. But politically there was no Italy; there were only city-states, fragments free to consume themselves in hate and war. Pisa destroyed its commercial rival Amalfi; Milan destroyed Piacenza; Genoa and Florence destroyed Pisa; Venice destroyed Genoa; and half of Europe would join most of Italy to destroy Venice. The collapse of central government in the barbarian invasions, the “Gothic War” of the sixth century, the Lombard-Byzantine dichotomy of the peninsula, the decay of the Roman roads, the contest of Lombards and popes, the conflict of papacy and Empire, the papal fear that one secular power sovereign from the Alps to Sicily would make the pope a prisoner, subjecting the spiritual head of Europe to the political leader of a state: all these had wrought the disunity of Italy. Partisans of the popes and partisans of the emperors not only divided Italy, they split almost every city into Guelf and Ghibelline; and even when that strife subsided the old labels were used by new rivalries, and the lava of hate flowed into all the avenues of life. If Ghibellines wore feathers on one side of their caps, Guelfs wore them on the other; if Ghibellines cut fruit crosswise, Guelfs cut it straight down; if Ghibellines wore white roses, Guelfs wore red. In Crema the Ghibellines of Milan tore a statue of Christ from a church altar and burned it becaused its face was turned in what was considered a Guelf direction; in Ghibelline Bergamo some Calabrians were murdered by their hosts, who discovered from their way of eating garlic that they were Guelfs.⁶⁰ The timid weakness of individuals, the insecurity of groups, and the delusion of superiority generated perpetual fear, suspicion, dislike, and contempt of the different, the alien, and the strange.

Out of these impediments to unity rose the Italian city-state. Men thought in terms of their city, and only a few philosophers like Machiavelli, or a poet like Petrarch, could think of Italy as a whole; even in the sixteenth century Cellini would refer to Florentines as “men of our nation,” and to Florence as “my fatherland.” Petrarch, freed by foreign residence from a merely local patriotism, mourned the petty wars and divisions of his native country, and in an eloquent ode—Italia Mia!— besought the princes of Italy to give her unity and peace.

O my own Italy!—though words are vain

The mortal wounds to close

Innumerable that thy bosom stain—

Yet may it soothe my pain

To sing of Tiber’s woes

And Arno’s wrongs, as on Po’s saddened shore

Mournful I wander, and my numbers pour….

Oh, is this not the soil my foot first pressed?

And here, in cradled rest

Was I not softly hushed and fondly reared?

Oh, is not this my country—so endeared

By every filial tie—

In whose earth shrouded both my parents lie?

Oh, by this tender thought

Your hard hearts to some pity wrought,

Look on the people’s grief,

Who, under God, of you expect relief,

And, if ye but relent,

Virtue shall rouse her in embattled might,

Against blind fury bent,

Nor long shall doubtful hang the unequal fight.

No, no! The ancient flame

Is not extinguished yet, that raised the Italian name!

Petrarch had dreamed that Rienzo might make Italy one; when that bubble burst he turned like Dante to the head of the Holy Roman Empire, theoretically the secular heir to all the temporal powers of the pagan Roman Empire in the West. Soon after Rienzo’s retirement (1347) Petrarch addressed a stirring message to Charles IV, King of Bohemia and, as “King of the Romans,” heir apparent to the Imperial throne. Let the King come down to Rome and be crowned emperor, the poet pleaded; let him make Rome, not Prague, his capital; let him restore unity, order, and peace to “the garden of the Empire”—Italy.⁶¹ When Charles crossed the Alps in 1354 he invited Petrarch to meet him at Mantua, and listened courteously to appeals echoing the impassioned pleas of Dante to Charles’s grandfather Henry VII. But Charles, having no force adequate to conquer all the despots of Lombardy and all the citizens of Florence and Venice, hurried to Rome, got himself crowned by a papal prefect for lack of a pope, and then hastened back to Bohemia, sedulously selling Imperial vicariates on the way. Two years later Petrarch went to him in Prague as Milanese ambassador, but with no significant results for Italy.

Perhaps there would have been no Renaissance if Petrarch had had his way. The fragmentation of Italy favored the Renaissance. Large states promote order and power rather than liberty or art. The commercial rivalry of the Italian cities inaugurated and completed the work of the Crusades in developing the economy and wealth of Italy. The variety of political centers multiplied interurban strife, but these modest conflicts never totaled the death and destruction caused in France by the Hundred Years’ War. Local independence weakened the capacity of Italy to defend herself against foreign invasion, but it generated a noble rivalry of the cities and princes in cultural patronage, in the zeal to excel in architecture, sculpture, painting, education, scholarship, poetry. Renaissance Italy, like Goethe’s Germany, had many Parises.

We need not exaggerate, to appreciate, the degree in which Petrarch and Boccaccio prepared the Renaissance. Both were still mortgaged to medieval ideas. The great storyteller, in his lusty youth, laughed at clerical immorality and relicmongering, but so had millions of medieval men and women; and he became more orthodox and medieval in those very years in which he studied Greek. Petrarch properly and prophetically described himself as standing between two eras.⁶² He accepted the dogmas of the Church even while he flayed the morals of Avignon; he loved the classics with a troubled conscience at the close of the Age of Faith as Jerome had loved them at its opening; he wrote excellent medieval essays on contempt of the secular world and on the holy peace of the religious life. Nevertheless, he was more faithful to the classics than to Laura; he sought and cherished ancient manuscripts, and inspired others to do the same; he overleaped nearly all medieval authors except Augustine to regain continuity with Latin literature; he formed his manner and style on Virgil and Cicero; and he thought more of the fame of his name than of the immortality of his soul. His poems fostered a century of artificial sonneteering in Italy, but they helped to mold the sonnets of Shakespeare. His eager spirit passed down to Pico, his polished form to Politian; his letters and essays threw a bridge of classical urbanity and grace between Seneca and Montaigne; his reconciliation of antiquity and Christianity matured in Popes Nicholas V and Leo X. He was truly, in these ways, the Father of the Renaissance.

But again it would be an error to overrate the contributions of antiquity to this Italian apogee. It was a fullfillment rather than a revolution, and the medieval maturation played a far greater role than the recovery of classic manuscripts and art. Many medieval scholars had known and loved the pagan classics; it was the monks who had preserved them; it was clerics who in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had translated or edited them. The great universities had since 1100 passed down to the youth of Europe some measure of the mental and moral heritage of the race. The growth of a critical philosophy in Erigena and Abelard, the introduction of Aristotle and Averroes into university curriculums, the brave proposal of Aquinas to prove nearly all Christian dogmas by reason, so soon followed by Duns Scotus’ confession that most of these doctrines were beyond reason, had reared and shattered the intellectual edifice of Scholasticism, and had left the educated Christian free to attempt a new synthesis of pagan philosophy and medieval theology with the experience of life. The liberation of the towns from feudal hindrances, the widening of commerce, the spread of a money economy—all these had preceded Petrarch’s birth. Roger of Sicily and Frederick II, not to speak of Moslem caliphs and sultans, had taught rulers to give glamour to power by patronizing art and poetry, science and philosophy. Medieval men and women, despite an otherworldly minority, had kept, unabashed, the natural human relish for the simple and sensual pleasures of life. The men who conceived, built, and carved the cathedrals had their own sense of beauty, and a sublimity of thought and form never surpassed.

Therefore all the bases of the Renaissance had been established by the time of Petrarch’s death. The amazing growth and zest of Italian trade and industry had gathered the wealth that financed the movement, and the passage from rural peace and stagnation to urban vitality and stimulus had begotten the mood that nourished it. The political basis had been prepared in the freedom and rivalry of the cities, in the overthrow of an idle aristocracy, in the rise of educated princes and a virile bourgeoisie. The literary basis had been prepared in the improvement of the vernacular languages, and in the zeal for recovering and studying the classics of Greece and Rome. The ethical bases had been laid: increasing wealth was breaking down old moral restraints; contact with Islam in commerce and Crusades had encouraged a new tolerance for doctrinal and moral deviations from traditional beliefs and ways; the rediscovery of a pagan world relatively free in thought and conduct shared in undermining medieval dogmas and morality; interest in a future life gave ground before secular, human, earthly concerns. Esthetic development proceeded; the medieval hymns, the cycles of romance, the songs of the troubadours, the sonnets of Dante and his Italian predecessors, the sculptured harmony and form of The Divine Comedy, had left a heritage of literary art; the classic models transmitted a refinement of taste and thought, a polish and politeness of speech and style, to Petrarch, who would bequeath it to an international dynasty of urbane genius from Erasmus to Anatole France. And a revolution in art had begun when Giotto abandoned the mystic rigor of Byzantine mosaics to study men and women in the actual flow and natural grace of their lives.

In Italy all roads were leading to the Renaissance.

CHAPTER II

The Popes in Avignon

1309–77

I. THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY

IN 1309 Pope Clement V removed the papacy from Rome to Avignon. He was a Frenchman, the former bishop of Bordeaux; he owed his elevation to Philip IV of France, who had startled all Christendom by not only defeating Pope Boniface VIII but arresting him, humiliating him, and almost starving him to death. Clement’s life would be unsafe in a Rome that reserved to itself the right to maltreat a pope, and resented the insolent irreverence of the King; moreover, the French cardinals formed now a large majority in the Sacred College, and refused to entrust themselves to Italy. So Clement stayed awhile at Lyons and Poitiers; then, hoping to be less subject to Philip in a territory owned by the king of Naples as count of Provence, he took up his residence in Avignon, just across the Rhone from fourteenth-century France.

The immense effort of the papacy from Gregory VII (1073–85) to Boniface VIII (1294–1303) to form a European world state by subordinating the kings to the popes had failed; nationalism had triumphed over a theocratic federalism; even in Italy the republics of Florence and Venice, the city-states of Lombardy, and the Kingdom of Naples rejected ecclesiastical control; a republic twice raised its head in Rome; and in the other Papal States* military adventurers or feudal magnates—Baglioni, Bentivogli, Malatestas, Manfredi, Sforzas—were replacing the vicars of the Church with their own swashbuckling authority. The papacy in Rome had wielded the prestige of centuries, and the nations had learned to do it homage and send it fees; but a papacy of continuously French pontiffs (1305–78), almost imprisoned by the kings of France, and lending them great sums to carryon their wars, seemed to Germany, Bohemia, Italy, and England a hostile power, the psychological weapon of the French monarchy. Increasingly those nations ignored its excommunications and interdicts, and only with rising reluctance yielded it a declining reverence.

Against these difficulties Clement V labored with patience, if not with fortitude. He bowed as little as he could to Philip IV, who held over Clement’s head the threat of a scandalous post-mortem inquest into the private conduct and beliefs of Boniface VIII. Harassed for funds, the Pope sold ecclesiastical benefices to the highest bidder; but he lent tacit approval to the merciless reports that the mayor of Angers and the bishop of Mende presented on the subject of clerical morals and Church reform to the Council of Vienne (1311).¹ He himself led a clean and frugal life, and practised an undemonstrative piety. He protected the great physician and critic of the Church, Arnold of Villanova, from persecution for heresy; he reorganized medical studies at Montpellier on Greek and Arabic texts, and tried—though he failed—to establish chairs of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic in the universities. To all his troubles was added a painful disease—lupulus, probably a fistula—which compelled him to shun society, and killed him in 1314. In a better environment he would have been an ornament to the Church.

The chaotic interregnum that followed revealed the temper of the times. Dante wrote to the Italian cardinals urging them to hold out for an Italian pope and a return to Rome; but only six of the twenty-three cardinals were Italian; and when the conclave met in a locked room* at Carpentras, near Avignon, it was surrounded by a Gascon populace that shouted: “Death to the Italian cardinals!” The houses of these prelates were attacked and destroyed; the crowd set fire to the building that housed the conclave; the cardinals broke a passage through the rear wall, and fled from the fire and the mob. For two years no further attempt was made to choose a pope. Finally at Lyons, under the protection of French soldiery, the cardinals raised to the papacy a man already seventy-two years of age, who might reasonably be expected to die soon, but who was destined to rule the Church for eighteen years with rugged zeal, insatiable avidity, and imperial will. John XXII had been born at Cahors in southern France, the son of a cobbler; it was the second time that a cobbler’s son had risen, by the remarkable democracy of an authoritarian Church, to the highest place in Christendom; Urban IV (1261–4) had shown the way. Employed as a teacher for the children of the French king of Naples, John studied civil and canon law with such aptitude that the king took him into favor. On the king’s recommendation Boniface VIII made him bishop of Fréjus, and Clement V raised him to the see of Avignon. At Carpentras the gold of Robert of Naples silenced the patriotism of the Italian cardinals, and the cobbler’s son became one of the strongest of the popes.

He displayed abilities rarely combined: scholarly studies and administrative skill. Under his leadership the Avignon papacy developed a competent, if corrupt, bureaucratic organization, and a fiscal staff that shocked the envious chancelleries of Europe with its capacity for gathering revenues. John undertook a dozen major conflicts that called for funds; like his predecessor he sold benefices, but without a blush; by sundry devices this scion of the banking town of Cahors so fattened the papal treasury that at his death it held 18,000,000 gold florins ($450,000,000), and 7,000,000 in plate and jewelry.² He explained that the papal Curia had lost much of its income from Italy, and had to build its offices, staff, and services anew. John seems to have felt that he could serve God best by winning Mammon to his side. His personal habits tended to an abstemious simplicity.³

Meanwhile he patronized learning, shared in establishing medical schools at Perugia and Cahors, helped universities, founded a Latin college in Armenia, fostered the study of Oriental languages, fought alchemy and magic, spent days and nights in scholastic studies, and ended as a theologian suspected of heresy. Perhaps to check the spread of a mysticism that claimed direct contact with God, John ventured to teach that no one—not even the Mother of God—can attain to the Beatific Vision until the Last Judgment. A storm of protest arose among the eschatological experts; the University of Paris denounced the Pope’s view, a church synod at Vincennes condemned it as heresy, and Philip VI of France ordered him to reform his theology.⁴ The crafty nonagenarian eluded them all by dying (1334).

John’s successor was a man of gentler mold. Benedict XII, the son of a baker, tried to be a Christian as well as a pope; he resisted the temptation to distribute offices among his relatives; he earned an honorable hostility by bestowing benefices for merits, not for fees; he repressed bribery and corruption in all branches of Church administration; he alienated the mendicant orders by commanding them to reform; he was never known to be cruel or to shed blood in war. All the forces of corruption rejoiced at his early death (1342).

Clement VI, born of a noble house in Limousin, was accustomed to luxury, gaiety, and art, and could not understand why a pope should be austere when the papal treasury was full. Almost all who came to him for appointments secured them; no one, he said, should depart from him unsatisfied. He announced that any poor clergyman who should come to him within the next two months would partake of his bounty; an eyewitness reckoned that 100,000 came.⁵ He gave rich gifts to artists and poets; maintained a stud of horses equal to any in Christendom; admitted women freely to his court, enjoyed their charms, and mingled with them in Gallic gallantry. The countess of Turenne was so close to him that she sold ecclesiastical preferments with careless publicity.⁶ Hearing of Clement’s good nature, the Romans sent an embassy inviting him to reside in Rome. He did not relish the prospect, but he appeased them by declaring that the jubilee, which Boniface VIII had established in 1300 for every hundred years, should be celebrated every half century. Rome rejoiced at the news, deposed Rienzo, and renewed its political submission to the popes.

Under Clement VI Avignon became the capital not only of the religion but of the politics, culture, pleasure, and corruption of the Latin world. Now the administrative machinery of the Church took its definitive form: an Apostolic Chamber (camera apostolica) in charge of finances, and headed by a papal chamberlain (camerarius) who was second in dignity to the pope alone; a Papal Chancery (cancelleria) whose seven agencies, directed by a cardinal vice-chancellor, handled the complex correspondence of the See; a Papal Judiciary composed of prelates and laymen learned in canon law, and including the Consistory—the pope and his cardinals acting as a court of appeals; and an Apostolic Penitentiary—a college of clergy who dealt with marital dispensations, excommunication and interdict, and heard the confessions of those seeking papal absolution.

To house the pope and his aides, these ministries and agencies, their staffs and servants, Benedict XII began, and Urban V completed, the immense Palace of the Popes, a congeries of Gothic buildings—living chambers, council halls, chapels, and offices—enclosing two courts, and themselves enclosed by mighty ramparts whose height and breadth and massive towers suggest that the popes, if besieged, would rely on no miracle for their defense. Benedict XII invited Giotto to come and decorate the palace and the adjoining cathedral; Giotto planned to come, but died; and in 1338 Benedict summoned from Siena Simone Martini, whose frescoes, now obliterated, marked the zenith of painting in Avignon. Around this palace, in lesser palaces, mansions, tenements, and hovels, gathered a great population of prelates, envoys, lawyers, merchants, artists, poets, servants, soldiers, beggars, and prostitutes of every grade from cultured courtesans to tavern tarts. Here, for the most part, dwelt those bishops in partibus infidelium who were appointed to sees that had fallen into the hands of non-Christians.

We, who are inured to colossal figures, can imagine the amount of money required to support this complex administrative establishment and its entourage. Several sources of income were nearly dried up: Italy, deserted by the papacy, sent hardly anything; Germany, at odds with John XXII, sent half its usual tribute; France, holding the Church almost at its mercy, appropriated for secular purposes a large part of French ecclesiastical revenues, and borrowed heavily from the papacy to finance the Hundred Years’ War; England severely restricted the flow of money to a Church that was in effect an ally of France. To meet this situation the Avignon popes were driven to develop every trickle of revenue. Each bishop or abbot, whether appointed by pope or secular prince, transmitted to the Curia, as an inaugural fee, one third of his prospective income for a year, and paid exasperating gratuities to the numerous intermediaries who had supported his nomination. If he became an archbishop he had to pay a substantial fee for the archiepiscopal pallium—a circular band of white wool, worn over the chasuble as the insignia of his office. When a new pontiff was elected, every ecclesiastical benefice or office sent him its full revenue for one year (annates), and thereafter a tenth of its revenue in each year; additional voluntary contributions were expected from time to time. On the death of any cardinal, archbishop, bishop, or abbot, his personal possessions and effects belonged to the papacy. In the interim between such death and the installation of a new appointee the popes received the revenues, and paid the expenses, of the benefice; and they were accused of deliberately extending this interval. Every ecclesiastical appointee was held responsible for dues unpaid by his predecessors. As bishops and abbots were in many cases feudal proprietors of estates received in fief from the king, they had to pay him tribute and provide him with soldiery, so that many were hard pressed to meet their combined ecclesiastical and secular obligations; and as the papal exactions were more severe than the state’s, we find the hierarchy sometimes supporting the king against the pope. The Avignon pontiffs almost completely ignored the ancient rights of cathedral chapters or monastic councils to choose bishops or abbots; and these by-passed collators joined in the accumulating resentment. Cases tried in the Papal Judiciary usually required the expensive help of lawyers, who had to pay an annual fee for license to plead in the papal courts. Every judgment or favor received from the Curia expected a gift in acknowledgment; even permission to be ordained had to be bought. The secular governments of Europe looked with awe and fury upon the fiscal machinery of the popes.⁷

Protests arose from every quarter, and not least vigorously from churchmen themselves. The Spanish prelate Alvaro Pelayo, though thoroughly loyal to the papacy, wrote On the Lamentation of the Church, in which he mourned that “Whenever I entered the chambers of the ecclesiastics of the papal court, I found brokers and clergy engaged in weighing and reckoning the money that lay in heaps before them…. Wolves are in control of the Church, and feed on the blood” of the Christian flock.⁸ Cardinal Napoleone Orsini was disturbed to find that nearly all the bishoprics of Italy were the object of barter or family intrigue under Clement V. Edward III of England, himself adept in taxation, reminded Clement VI that “the successor of the Apostles was commissioned to lead the Lord’s sheep to the pasture, not to fleece them,”⁹ and the English parliament passed several statutes to check the taxing power of the popes in Britain. In Germany papal collectors were hunted down, imprisoned, mutilated, in some cases strangled. In 1372 the clergy of Cologne, Bonn, Xanten, and Mainz bound themselves by oath not to pay the tithe demanded by Gregory XI. In France many benefices were ruined by a tragic combination of war, the Black Death, pillage by brigands, and the exactions of papal collectors; many pastors abandoned their parishes.

To such complaints the popes replied that ecclesiastical administration required all these funds, that incorruptible agents were hard to find, and that they themselves were in a sea of troubles. Probably under duress, Clement VI lent Philip VI of France 592,000 gold florins ($14,800,000), and 3,517,000 more ($87,925,000) to King John II.¹⁰ Great outlays were required to reconquer the lost papal states in Italy. Despite all taxes the popes suffered dire deficits. John XXII rescued the papal treasury by paying into it 440,000 florins from his personal funds; Innocent VI sold his silver plate, his jewelry and works of art; Urban V had to borrow 30,000 florins from his cardinals; Gregory XI owed 120,000 francs when he died.

Critics retorted that deficits were caused not by legitimate outlays but by the worldly luxury of the papal court and its hangers-on. Clement VI was surrounded by male and female relatives attired in precious stuffs and furs; by knights, squires, sergeants at arms, chaplains, ushers, chamberlains, musicians, poets, artists, doctors, scientists, tailors, philosophers, and chefs who were the envy of kings—all in all, some four hundred persons, all fed, clothed, lodged, and salaried by a lovably lavish Pope who had never known the cost of money. Clement thought of himself as a ruler who had to awe his subjects and impress ambassadors by “conspicuous consumption” after the custom of kings. The cardinals too, as the royal council of a state as well as the princes of the Church, had to maintain establishments befitting their dignity and power; their retinues, equipages, banquets were the talk of the town. Perhaps Cardinal Bernard of Garves overdid it, who hired fifty-one dwellings to house his retainers; and Cardinal Peter of Banhac, five of whose ten stables sheltered thirty-nine horses in comfort and style. Even bishops fell in line, and, despite remonstrances from provincial synods, kept rich establishments with jesters, falcons, and dogs.

Avignon now assumed the morals, as well as the manners, of royal courts. Venality there was notorious. Guillaume Durand, Bishop of Mende, reported to the Council of Vienne:

The whole Church might be reformed if the Church of Rome would begin by removing evil examples from itself… by which men are scandalized, and the whole people, as it were, infected…. For in all lands… the holy Church of God, and especially the most holy Church of Rome, is in evil repute; and all cry and publish it abroad that within her bosom all men, from the greatest unto even the least, have set their hearts upon covetousness…. That the whole Christian folk take from the clergy pernicious examples of gluttony is clear and notorious, since the said clergy feast more luxuriously and splendidly, and with more dishes, than princes and kings.¹¹

And Petrarch, a master of words, exhausted his vocabulary of vituperation to brand Avignon as

the impious Babylon, the hell on earth, the sink of vice, the sewer of the world. There is in it neither faith nor charity nor religion nor the fear of God…. All the filth and wickedness of the world have run together here…. Old men plunge hot and headlong into the arms of Venus; forgetting their age, dignity, and powers, they rush into every shame, as if all their glory consisted not in the cross of Christ but in feasting, drunkenness, and unchastity…. Fornication, incest, rape, adultery are the lascivious delights of the pontifical games.¹²

Such testimony, from an eyewitness who never veered from orthodoxy, cannot be entirely disregarded, but it has the ring of exaggeration and personal resentment. Some discount must be made from it as the cry of a man who hated Avignon for snatching the papacy from Italy; who begged for benefices from the Avignon popes, received many, and asked for more; who consented to live with the murderous and antipapal Visconti, and had two bastards of his own. Morals in Rome, to which Petrarch importuned the popes to return, were then no better than in Avignon, except as poverty is an aid to chastity. St. Catherine of Siena was not as vivid as the poet in describing Avignon, but she told Gregory XI that at the papal court “her nostrils were assailed by the odors of hell.”¹³

Amid the moral decay there were many prelates who were worthy of their calling, and preferred the morals of Christ to those of their time. When we reflect that of the seven Avignon popes only one lived a life of worldly pleasure, and another, John XXII, however rapacious and severe, disciplined himself to ascetic austerity, and another, Gregory XI, though merciless in war was in peace a man of exemplary morals and piety, and three—Benedict XII, Innocent VI, and Urban V—were men of almost saintly life, we cannot hold the popes responsible for all the vice that gathered in papal Avignon. The cause was wealth, which has had like results in other times—in the Rome of Nero, the Rome of Leo X, the Paris of Louis XIV, the New York and Chicago of today. And as in these last cities we perceive that the vast majority of men and women lead decent lives, or practise their vices modestly, so we may presume that even in Avignon the lecher and the courtesan, the glutton and the thief, the crooked lawyer and the dishonest judge, the worldly cardinal and the faithless priest, were exceptions standing out more vividly than elsewhere because surveyed, and sometimes condoned, by the Apostolic See.

The scandal was real enough to share with the flight from Rome in undermining the prestige and authority of the Church. As if to confirm the suspicion that they were no longer a world power but merely the tools of France, the Avignon popes named 113 Frenchmen to the college of cardinals in a total of 134 nominations.¹⁴ Hence the connivance of the English government at Wyclif’s uncompromising attacks upon the papacy. The German electors repudiated any further interference of the popes in the election of their kings and emperors. In 1372 the abbots of the archdiocese of Cologne, in refusing the tithe to Pope Gregory XI, publicly proclaimed that “the Apostolic See has fallen into such contempt that the Catholic faith in these parts seems to be seriously imperiled. The laity speak slightingly of the Church because, departing from the custom of former days, she hardly ever sends forth preachers or reformers, but rather ostentatious men, cunning, selfish, and greedy. Things have come to such a pass that few are Christians in more than name.”¹⁵

It was the Babylonian Captivity of the popes in Avignon, and the ensuing Papal Schism, that prepared the Reformation; and it was their return to Italy that restored their prestige and deferred catastrophe for a century.

II. THE ROAD TO ROME

The status of the Church was lowest in Italy. In 1342 Benedict XII, to weaken the rebellious Louis of Bavaria, confirmed to all the despots of the Lombard cities the authority they had assumed in defiance of Imperial claims; Louis, in revenge, gave the Imperial sanction to the despots who had seized the Papal States.¹⁶ Milan openly flouted the popes. When Urban V sent two legates to Milan (1362), bearing bulls of excommunication to the Visconti, Bernabò compelled them to eat the bulls—parchment, silken cords, and leaden seals.¹⁷ Sicily, ever since its “Vespers” (1282), had remained in open enmity to the popes.

Clement VI engaged an army to recapture the Papal States, but it was his successor, Innocent VI, who for a time restored them to obedience. Innocent was almost a model pope. After indulging a few relatives with appointments, he determined to stop the current of nepotism and corruption. He put an end to the epicurean splendor and wasteful outlay of the papal court, dismissed the horde of servants that had ministered to Clement VI, scattered the swarm of place seekers, ordered every priest to reside in his benefice, and himself led a life of integrity and modesty. He saw that the authority of the Church could be restored only by liberating her from the power of France and returning the papacy to Italy. But a Church alienated from France could hardly maintain herself without the revenues that had formerly come to her from the Papal States. Innocent, a man of peace, decided that these could be reclaimed only by war.

He entrusted the task to a man with the fervent faith of a Spaniard, the energy of a Dominic, and the chivalry of a Castilian grandee. Gil Alvarez Carrillo de Albornoz had been a soldier under Alfonso XI of Castile, and had not abandoned war on becoming archbishop of Toledo; now, as Cardinal Egidio d’Albornoz, he became a brilliant general. He persuaded the republic of Florence—which feared the despots and brigands that surrounded her—to advance him the funds to organize an army. By clever and yet honorable negotiation, rather than by force, he deposed one after another of the petty tyrants that had seized the Papal States. He gave to these states the “Egidian Constitutions” (1357) that remained their basic law till the nineteenth century, and that provided a workable compromise between self-government and allegiance to the papacy. He outwitted the famous English adventurer John Hawkwood, took him prisoner, and threw the fear if not of God at least of the papal legate into the condottieri. He recovered Bologna from a rebellious archbishop, and persuaded the Visconti of Milan to make their peace with the Church. The way was now open for the popes to return to Italy.

Urban V continued the austerity and reforms of Innocent VI. He labored to restore discipline and honesty in the clergy and at the papal court, discountenanced luxury among the cardinals, checked the chicanery of the lawyers and the extortions of the moneylenders, punished simony, and won to his service men of excellence in character and mind. He maintained at his own expense a thousand students in the universities, founded a new college at Montpellier, and supported many savants. To crown his pontificate he resolved to restore the papacy to Rome. The cardinals were horrified at the prospect; most of them had their roots and affections in France, and were hated in Italy. They begged him not to heed the pleas of St. Catherine or the eloquence of Petrarch. Urban pointed out to them the chaotic condition of France—its king a prisoner in England, its armies shattered, the English conquering the southern provinces and coming ever nearer to Avignon; what would a victorious England do to a papacy that had served and financed France?

So on April 30, 1367, he sailed from Marseille, joyously escorted by Italian galleys. On October 16 he entered Rome amid the wild acclaim of the populace, the clergy, and the aristocracy; Italian princes held the bridle of the white mule on which he rode; and Petrarch poured out his gratitude to the French Pope who dared to live in Italy. It was a desolate though happy Rome: impoverished by its long separation from the papacy, half of its churches deserted and decayed, St. Paul’s in ruins, St. Peter’s threatening at any minute to collapse, the Lateran palace but recently destroyed by fire, palaces rivaling the tenements in dilapidation, swamps where there had been dwellings, rubbish lying ungathered in the squares and streets.¹⁸ Urban gave orders and allotted funds for rebuilding the papal palace; unable to bear the sight of Rome, he went to live at Montefiascone; but even there his memories of luxurious Avignon and beloved France made him miserable. Petrarch heard of his hesitations, and urged him to persevere; St. Bridget of Sweden predicted that he would die soon if he left Italy. The Emperor Charles IV sought to strengthen him, gave the Imperial sanction to the papal recovery of central Italy, came humbly to Rome (1368) to lead the Pope’s horse from Sant’ Angelo to St. Peter’s, served him at Mass, and was crowned by him in a ceremony that seemed happily to heal the old strife of Empire and papacy. Then, on September 5, 1370, perhaps yielding to his French cardinals, and saying that he wished to make peace between England and France, Urban embarked for Marseille. On September 27 he reached Avignon, and there, on December 19, he died, clothed in the habit of a Benedictine monk, lying on a miserable couch, and having ordered that all who cared to enter should be admitted, so that all might see how vain and brief is the splendor of the most exalted man.¹⁹

Gregory XI had been made a cardinal at eighteen by his genial uncle Clement VI; on December 29, 1370, he was ordained a priest, and on December 30, aged thirty-nine, he was elected pope. He was a man of learning, in love with Cicero; fate made him a man of war, and consumed his pontificate in violent revolt. Urban V, fearing that a French pope could not yet trust Italians, had named too many Frenchmen as legates to govern the Papal States. Finding themselves in a hostile environment, these prelates had built fortresses against the people, had imported numerous French aides, had taxed exorbitantly, and had preferred tyranny to tact. At Perugia a nephew of the legate pursued a married lady so voraciously that in trying to escape him she fell from a window and was killed. When a deputation demanded punishment for the nephew, the legate replied, “Why all this fuss? Do you mistake a Frenchman for a eunuch?”²⁰ By a variety of means the legates earned such hatred that in 1375 many of the states rose against them in successive revolutions. St. Catherine made herself the voice of Italy, and urged Gregory to remove these “evil pastors who poison and devastate the garden of the Church.”²¹ Florence, usually an ally of the papacy, took the lead of the movement, and unfurled a red flag bearing in golden letters the word Libertas. At the beginning of 1375 sixty-four cities had acknowledged the pope as their civic as well as their spiritual head; in 1376 only one remained loyal to him. It seemed that all the work of Albornoz was undone, and that central Italy was again lost to the papacy.

Gregory, prodded by the French cardinals, charged the Florentines with being the head of the revolt, and ordered them to submit to the papal legates. When they refused he excommunicated them, forbade religious services in their city, and declared all Florentines to be outlaws, whose goods might be seized, and whose persons might be enslaved, by any man anywhere. The whole structure of Florentine commerce and finance was threatened with collapse. England and France at once laid hands upon the Florentines and their property there. Florence responded by confiscating all Church property in its territory, tearing down the buildings of the Inquisition, closing the ecclesiastical courts, jailing—in some cases hanging—obstinate priests, and sending an appeal to the people of Rome to join the revolution, and end all temporal power of the Church in Italy. While Rome hesitated, Gregory despatched to its leaders a solemn promise that if the city remained loyal to him he would return the papacy to Rome. The Romans accepted the pledge, and kept the peace.

Meanwhile the Pope had sent to Italy a force of “wild Breton mercenaries” under the command of “the fierce Cardinal Legate Robert of Geneva.”²² Robert waged the war with incredible barbarity. Having taken Cesena with the promise of an amnesty, he put every man, woman, and child there to the sword.²³ John Hawkwood, leading his mercenaries in the service of the Church, slew 4000 in Faenza on suspicion that the town intended to join the revolt. St. Catherine of Siena was shocked by these brutalities, by the mutual confiscations, by the cessation of religious services in so much of Italy. She wrote to Gregory:

You are indeed bound to win back the territory which has been lost to the Church; but you are even more bound to win back all the lambs which are the Church’s real treasure, and whose loss will truly impoverish her…. You must strike men with the weapons of goodness, love, and peace, and you will gain more than by the weapons of war. When I inquire of God what is best for your salvation, for the restoration of the Church, and for the whole world, there is no other answer but the word Peace! Peace! For the love of the Crucified Saviour, Peace!²⁴

Florence invited her to be one of its envoys to Gregory; she went, and took the occasion to condemn the morals of Avignon; she was so outspoken that many called for her arrest, but Gregory protected her. The mission had no immediate result. But when word reached him that unless he came soon Rome would join the revolt, Gregory—perhaps moved also by Catherine’s pleas—set out from Marseille, and reached Rome on January 17, 1377. He was not unanimously welcomed; the appeal of Florence had stirred old republican memories in the degenerate city, and Gregory was warned that his life was unsafe in the ancient capital of Christendom. In May he retired to Anagni.

And now, as if at last yielding to Catherine, he turned from war to diplomacy. His agents encouraged the populace of the cities, who longed for peace with the Church, to overthrow their rebel governments; and to all towns that returned to his allegiance he promised self-government under a papal vicar of their own choice. City after city accepted these terms. In 1377 Florence agreed with Gregory to let Bernabò Visconti arbitrate their dispute. Bernabò, having persuaded the Pope to give him half of any penalty he might lay upon Florence, bade the city pay an indemnity of 800,000 florins ($20,000,000) to the Holy See. Deserted by her allies, Florence angrily submitted; but Pope Urban VI reduced the penalty to 250,000 florins.

Gregory had not lived to see his victory. On November 7, 1377, he returned to Rome. He had been an invalid even in Avignon, and had not borne well his winter in central Italy. He felt the approach of death, and feared that the conflict between France and Italy for possession of the papacy would tear the Church to pieces. On March 19, 1378, he made arrangements for the speedy election of his successor. Eight days later he died, longing for le beau pays de France.²⁵

III. THE CHRISTIAN LIFE: 1300–1424

Deferring to a later chapter a consideration of the faith of the people and the morals of the clergy, let us note two contrasting features of Christian life in fourteenth-century Italy: the Inquisition and the saints. Fairness requires us to remember that the great majority of Christians then believed that the Church had been instituted, and that her basic doctrines had been laid down, by the Son of God; hence—whatever might be the faults of her human personnel—any active movement to overthrow her was rebellion against divine authority as well as treason against the secular state of which the Church was the upholding moral arm. Only with this thought in mind can we understand the ferocity with which Church and laity joined in suppressing the heresy preached (c. 1303) by Dolcino of Novara and his comely sister Margherita.

Like Joachim of Flora, Dolcino divided history into periods, of which the third, from Pope Sylvester I (314–35) to 1280, saw the gradual corruption of the Church through worldly wealth; since Sylvester (said Dolcino) all the popes except Celestine V had been unfaithful to Christ; Benedict, Francis, and Dominic had nobly tried to win the Church back from Mammon to God, but had failed; and the papacy had now, under Boniface VIII and Clement V, become the harlot of the Apocalypse. Dolcino made himself the head of a new fraternity, the “Apostolic Brethren of Parma,” who rejected the authority of the popes, and inherited a medley of doctrines from the Patarines, the Waldenses, and the Spiritual Franciscans. They professed absolute chastity, but each man among them lived with a woman whom he called his sister. Clement V ordered the Inquisition to examine them; they refused to appear before the tribunal; instead they armed themselves, and took up positions at the foot of the Piedmontese Alps. The inquisitors led an army against them; bloody battles were fought; the Brethren retreated into mountain passes, where they were blockaded and starved; they ate rats, dogs, hares, grass; at last their mountain stronghold was stormed, a thousand fell fighting, thousands were burned to death (1304). When Margherita was led to the stake she was still so beautiful, despite emaciation, that men of rank offered her marriage if she would abjure her heresies; she refused, and was slowly consumed. Dolcino and an associate, Longino, were reserved for special treatment. They were mounted on a cart and were paraded through Vercelli; during this procession their flesh was torn from them bit by bit with hot pincers; their limbs and genitals were wrenched from their bodies; finally they were allowed to die.²⁶

It is pleasant to turn from such barbarism to the continuing efficacy of Christianity in inspiring men and women to saintliness. The same century that saw the tribulations and corruptions of Avignon produced missionaries like Giovanni da Monte Corvino and Oderic of Pordenone, who tried to convert the Hindus and Chinese; but the Chinese, says a Franciscan chronicler, clung to the “error that any man could be saved in his own sect.”²⁷ Unwittingly these missionaries contributed less to religion than to the science of geography.

St. Catherine of Siena was born, lived, and died in a modest room still shown to visitors. From that foot of earth she helped to move the papacy, and to revive in the people of Italy a piety that has survived Rinascita and Risorgimento alike. At fifteen she joined the Order of Penance of St. Dominic; this was a “tertiary” organization, composed not of monks or nuns, but of men and women living a secular life, yet dedicating themselves as much as possible to works of religion and charity. Catherine dwelt with her parents, but she made her room almost an anchoritic cell. lost herself in prayer and mystical contemplation, and hardly left her home except to go to church. Her parents were disturbed by her preoccupation with religion, and feared for her health. They laid upon her the heaviest drudgery of the household, which she performed without complaint. “I make a little corner apart in my heart for Jesus,” she said,²⁸ and maintained a childlike serenity. All the joy, doubt, and ecstasy that other girls might derive from “profane” love Catherine sought and found in devotion to Christ. In the growing intensity of these solitary meditations she thought and spoke of Christ as her heavenly lover, she exchanged hearts with Him, saw herself, in vision, married to Him; and like St. Francis she thought so long about the five wounds of the Crucified that it seemed to her that she felt them in her own hands and feet and side. All temptations of the flesh she rejected as the wiles of Satan to withdraw her from her one engrossing love.

After three years of almost solitary piety she felt that she could safely venture into the life of the city. As she had devoted her womanhood to Christ, so she devoted her maternal tenderness to the sick and needy of Siena; she stayed to the last moment with the victims of plague, and stood in spiritual consolation beside condemned criminals until the hour of their execution.²⁹ When her parents died and left her a modest patrimony, she distributed it among the poor. Though she was disfigured by smallpox, her face was a blessing to all who saw her. Young men at her word abandoned their wonted blasphemies, and older men heard with melting skepticism her simple and trusting philosophy. All the evils of human life, she thought, were the result of human wickedness; but all the sins of mankind would be swallowed up and lost in the ocean of God’s love; and all the ills of the world would be cured if men could be persuaded to practise Christian love. Many believed her; Montepulciano sent for her to come and reconcile its feuding families; Pisa and Lucca sought her counsel; Florence invited her to join an embassy to Avignon. Gradually she was drawn into the world.

She was horrified by what she saw in Italy and France: Rome filthy and desolate; Italy divorcing itself from a Church that had deserted to France; a clergy whose worldly living had forfeited the respect of the laity; a France already half ruined with war. Confident in her divine mission, she denounced prelates and pontiffs to their faces, and told them that only a return to Rome and to decency could save the Church. Herself unable to write, she, a girl of twenty-six, dictated stern but loving letters, in her simple and melodious Italian, to popes, princes, and statesmen; and on almost every page appeared the prophetic word Riformazione.³⁰ She failed with the statesmen, but she succeeded with the people. She rejoiced when Urban V came to Rome, mourned when he left, lived again when Gregory XI came; she gave good advice to Urban VI, but was shocked by his brutality; and when the Papal Schism tore Christendom in two she was among the first casualties of that incredible conflict. She had reduced her meals to a mere mouthful of food; she carried asceticism so far, said legend, that the consecrated wafer received by her in communion was her only nourishment. She lost all power to resist disease; the Schism broke her will to live; and two years after its outbreak she passed away, aged thirty-three (1380). To this day she is a force for good in the Italy that she loved only next to Christ and the Church.

In the year (1380) and city of her death St. Bernardino was born. The tradition of Catherine molded him; in the plague of 1400 he gave his days and nights to caring for the sick. Having joined the Franciscans, he set the example of obeying the strict rule of the Order. Many monks followed him; with these he founded (1405) the Observantine Franciscans, or Brethren of the Strict Observance; and before he died three hundred monastic communities had accepted his rule. The purity and nobility of his life gave an irresistible eloquence to his preaching. Even in Rome, whose population was more lawless than that of any other city in Europe, he drew criminals to confession, sinners to repentance, and habitual feudists to peace. Seventy years before Savonarola’s Burning of the Vanities in Florence, Bernardino persuaded Roman men and women to throw their playing cards, dice, lottery tickets, false hair, indecent pictures and books, even their musical instruments, into a giant funeral pyre on the Capitol (1424). Three days later a young woman accused of witchcraft was burned on the same square, and all Rome crowded to the spectacle.³¹ Saint Bernardino himself was “a most conscientious persecutor of heretics.”³²

So the good and the evil, the beautiful and the horrible, mingled in the flux and chaos of the Christian life. The simple folk of Italy remained contentedly medieval, while the middle and upper classes, half drunk with the long-cellared wine of classic culture, moved forward with a noble ardor to create the Renaissance, and modern man.

Fig. 1—GIOTTO: Flight into Egypt; Arena Chapel, Padua PAGE 22

Fig. 2—SIMONE MARTINI: The Annunciation; Uffizi Gallery, Florence PAGE 35

Fig. 3—LORENZO GHIBERTI Doors of the Baptistery; Florence PAGE 91

Fig. 4—DONATELLO: Crucifixion, wood; Santa Croce, Florence PAGE 95

Fig. 5—DONATELLO: David, bronze; Bargello, Florence PAGE 93

Fig. 6—DONATELLO: Annunciation, sandstone; Santa Croce, Florence PAGE 95

Fig. 7—LUCA DELLA ROBBIA: Madonna and Child, terra cotta; relief over a portal of the Badia, Florence PAGE 97

Fig. 8—DONATELLO: Gattcmielata; Padua PAGE 94

Fig. 9—MASACCIO: The Tribute Money; Brancacci Chapel, Florence PAGE 100

Fig. 10—FRA ANGELICO: The Annunciation; San Marco, Florence PAGE 102

Fig. 11—FRA FILIPPO LIPPI: Virgin Adoring the Child; Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin PAGE 105

Fig. 12—ANDREA DEL VERROCHIO: The Baptism of Christ; Uffizi Gallery, Florence PAGE 131

Fig. 13—DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO: Portrait of Count Sassetti(?) and Grandson; Louvre, Paris PAGE 130

Fig. 14—SANDRO BOTTICELLI: The Birth of Venus; Uffizi Gallery, Florence PAGE 137

BOOK II

THE FLORENTINE RENAISSANCE

1378–1534

CHAPTER III

The Rise of the Medici

1378–1464

I. THE SETTING

THE Italians called this coming of age la Rinascita, Rebirth, because to them it seemed a triumphant resurrection of the classic spirit after a barbarous interruption of a thousand years.* The classic world, the Italians felt, had died in the German and Hun invasions of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries; the heavy hand of the Goth had crushed the fading but still fair flower of Roman art and life; “Gothic” art had repeated the invasion with an architecture precariously unstable and decoratively bizarre, and a sculpture coarse, crude, and gloomy with dour prophets and emaciated saints. Now, by the grace of time, those bearded Goths and those “long-beard” Lombards had been absorbed into the dominant Italian blood; by the grace of Vitruvius and the instructive ruins of the Roman Forum the classic column and architrave would again build shrines and palaces of sober dignity; by the grace of Petrarch and a hundred Italian scholars the rediscovered classics would restore the literature of Italy to the pure idiom and precision of Cicero’s prose, and the mellow music of Virgil’s verse. The sunshine of the Italian spirit would break through the northern mists; men and women would escape from the prison of medieval fear; they would worship beauty in all its forms, and fill the air with the joy of resurrection. Italy would be young again.

The men who spoke so were too near the event to see the “Rebirth” in historical perspective, or in the confusing diversity of its constituents. But it took more than a revival of antiquity to make the Renaissance. And first of all it took money—smelly bourgeois money: the profits of skillful managers and underpaid labor; of hazardous voyages to the East, and laborious crossings of the Alps, to buy goods cheap and sell them dear; of careful calculations, investments, and loans; of interest and dividends accumulated until enough surplus could be spared from the pleasures of the flesh, from the purchase of senates, signories, and mistresses, to pay a Michelangelo or a Titian to transmute wealth into beauty, and perfume a fortune with the breath of art. Money is the root of all civilization. The funds of merchants, bankers, and the Church paid for the manuscripts that revived antiquity. Nor was it those manuscripts which freed the mind and senses of the Renaissance; it was the secularism that came from the rise of the middle classes; it was the growth of the universities, of knowledge and philosophy, the realistic sharpening of minds by the study of law, the broadening of minds by wider acquaintance with the world. Doubting the dogmas of the Church, no longer frightened by the fear of hell, and seeing the clergy as epicurean as the laity, the educated Italian shook himself loose from intellectual and ethical restraints; his liberated senses took unabashed delight in all embodiments of beauty in woman, man, and art; and his new freedom made him creative for an amazing century (1434–1534) before it destroyed him with moral chaos, disintegrative individualism, and national slavery. The interlude between two disciplines was the Renaissance.

Why was northern Italy the first to experience this spring awakening? There the old Roman world had never been quite destroyed; the towns had kept their ancient structure and memories, and now renewed their Roman law. Classic art survived in Rome, Verona, Mantua, Padua; Agrippa’s Pantheon still functioned as a place of worship, though it was fourteen hundred years old; and in the Forum one could almost hear Cicero and Caesar debating the fate of Catiline. The Latin language was still a living tongue, of which Italian was merely a melodious variant. Pagan deities, myths, and rites lingered in popular memory, or under Christian forms. Italy stood athwart the Mediterranean, commanding that basin of classic civilization and trade. Northern Italy was more urban and industrial than any other region of Europe except Flanders. It had never suffered a full feudalism, but had subjected its nobles to its cities and its merchant class. It was the avenue of trade between the rest of Italy and transalpine Europe, and between Western Europe and the Levant; its commerce and industry made it the richest region in Christendom. Its adventurous traders were everywhere, from the fairs of France to the farthest ports of the Black Sea. Accustomed to dealing with Greeks, Arabs, Jews, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, and Chinese, they lost the edge of their dogmas, and brought into the literate classes of Italy that same indifference to creeds which in nineteenth-century Europe came from widening contacts with alien faiths. Mercantile wisdom, however, conspired with national traditions, temperament, and pride to keep Italy Catholic even while she became pagan. Papal fees trickled to Rome along a thousand rivulets from a score of Christian lands, and the wealth of the Curia overflowed throughout Italy. The Church rewarded Italian loyalty with a generous lenience to the sins of the flesh, and a genial tolerance (before the Council of Trent, 1545) of heretical philosophers who refrained from undermining the piety of the people. So Italy advanced, in wealth and art and thought, a century ahead of the rest of Europe; and it was only in the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance faded in Italy, that it blossomed in France, Germany, Holland, England, and Spain. The Renaissance was not a period in time but a mode of life and thought moving from Italy through Europe with the course of commerce, war, and ideas.

It made its first home in Florence for much the same reasons that gave it birth in northern Italy. Through the organization of her industry, the extension of her commerce, and the operations of her financiers, Fiorenza—the City of Flowers—was in the fourteenth century the richest town in the peninsula, excepting Venice. But while the Venetians in that age gave their energies almost entirely to the pursuit of pleasure and wealth, the Florentines, possibly through the stimulus of a turbulent semidemocracy, developed a keenness of mind and wit, and a skill in every art, that made their city by common consent the cultural capital of Italy. The quarrels of the factions raised the temperature of life and thought, and rival families contended in the patronage of art as well as in the pursuit of power. The final—not the first—stimulus was given when Cosimo de’ Medici offered the resources of his own and other fortunes and palaces to house and entertain the delegates to the Council of Florence (1439). The Greek prelates and scholars who came to that assembly to discuss the reunion of Eastern and Western Christianity had a far better knowledge of Greek literature than any Florentine could then possess; some of them lectured in Florence, and the elite of the city crowded to hear them. When Constantinople fell to the Turks many Greeks left it to make their home in the city where they had found such hospitality fourteen years before. Several of them brought manuscripts of ancient texts; some of them lectured on the Greek language or on Greek poetry and philosophy. So, by the concourse of many streams of influence, the Renaissance took form in Florence, and made it the Athens of Italy.

II. THE MATERIAL BASIS

Florence, in the fifteenth century, was a city-state ruling not only Florence but (with interruptions) Prato, Pistoia, Pisa, Volterra, Cortona, Arezzo, and their agricultural hinterland. The peasants were not serfs but partly small proprietors, mostly tenant farmers, who lived in houses of crude cemented stone much as today, and chose their own village officials to govern them in local affairs. Machiavelli did not disdain to chat and play with these hardy knights of the field, the orchard, or the vine. But the magistrates of the cities regulated sales, and, to appease a troublesome proletariat, kept food prices too low for peasant happiness; so the ancient strife of country and city added its somber obbligato to the songs of hate that rose from embattled classes within the city walls.

According to Villani the city of Florence proper had in 1343 a population of some 91,500 souls; we have no equally reliable estimate for later Renaissance years, but we may presume that the population grew as commerce expanded and industry thrived. About a fourth of the city dwellers were industrial workers; the textile lines alone, in the thirteenth century, employed 30,000 men and women in two hundred factories.¹ In 1300 Federigo Oricellarii earned his surname by bringing from the East the secret of extracting from lichens a violet pigment (orchella, archil). This technique revolutionized the dye industry, and made some woolen manufacturers into what today would be millionaires. In textiles Florence had already reached by 1300 the capitalistic stage of large investment, central provision of materials and machinery, systematic division of labor, and control of production by the suppliers of capital. In 1407 a woolen garment passed through thirty processes, each performed by a worker specializing in that operation.²

To sell its products Florence encouraged its merchants to maintain trade with all ports of the Mediterranean, and along the Atlantic as far as Bruges. Consuls were stationed in Italy, the Baleares, Flanders, Egypt, Cyprus, Constantinople, Persia, India, and China to protect and promote Florentine trade. Pisa was conquered as an indispensable outlet of Florentine goods to the sea, and Genoese merchant vessels were hired to carry them. Foreign products competitive with Florentine manufactures were excluded from the markets of Florence through protective tariffs set by a government of merchants and financiers.

To finance this industry and commerce, and much else, the eighty banking houses of Florence—chiefly the Bardi, Peruzzi, Strozzi, Pitti, and Medici—invested the savings of their depositors. They cashed checks (polizze),³ issued letters of credit (lettere di pagamenti),⁴ exchanged merchandise as well as credit,⁵ and supplied governments with funds for peace or war. Some Florentine firms lent 1,365,000 florins ($34,125,000?) to Edward III of England,⁶ and were ruined by his default (1345). Despite such catastrophes Florence became the financial capital of Europe from the thirteenth through the fifteenth century; it was there that rates of exchange were fixed for the currencies of Europe.⁷ As early as 1300 a system of insurance protected the cargoes of Italy on their voyages—a precaution not adopted in England till 1543.⁸ Double-entry bookkeeping appears in a Florentine account book of 1382; probably it was already a century old in Florence, Venice, and Genoa.⁹ In 1345 the Florentine government issued negotiable gold-redeemable bonds bearing the low interest rate of five per cent—a proof of the city’s reputation for commercial prosperity and integrity. The revenue of the government in 1400 was greater than that of England in the heyday of Elizabeth.

The bankers, merchants, manufacturers, professional men, and skilled workers of Europe were organized in guilds. In Florence seven guilds (arti, arts, trades) were known as arti maggiori or greater guilds: clothing manufacturers, wool manufacturers, silk goods manufacturers, fur merchants, financiers, physicians and druggists, and a mixed guild of merchants, judges, and notaries. The remaining fourteen guilds of Florence were the arti minori or minor trades: clothiers, hosiers, butchers, bakers, vintners, cobblers, saddlers, armorers, blacksmiths, locksmiths, carpenters, innkeepers, masons and stonecutters, and a motley conglomeration of oil sellers, pork butchers, and ropemakers. Every voter had to be a member of one or another of these guilds; and the nobles who had been disfranchised in 1282 by a bourgeois revolution joined the guilds to regain the vote. Below the twenty-one guilds were seventy-two unions of voteless workingmen; below these, thousands of day laborers forbidden to organize, and living in impotent poverty; below these—or above them as better cared for by their masters—were a few slaves. The members of the greater guilds constituted in politics the popolo grasso, the fat or well-fed people; the rest of the population composed the popolo minuto or little people. The political history of Florence, like that of modern states, was first the victory of the business class over the old landowning aristocracy (1293), and then the struggle of the “working class” to acquire political power.