CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER II.LIFE IN FLORENCE.In1472 certain Venetians addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici and Niccolò Ardinghelli a pamphlet wherein they extolled the advantages of their city and its inhabitants, and abused Florence, her constitution, her policy, her commerce and society, and the house of Medici. The challenge was accepted by Benedetto Dei, a scion of an ancient family, a man of much experience in affairs of state and of commerce, and who had been for many years Florentine ambassador in Constantinople, from whence he went to Damascus on a commission for the Sultan. He defended his native city in a lengthy and rather warm reply; a curious testimony to the deep-seated differences between two states which were often bitter enemies and scarcely ever real friends.[395]‘Florence,’ says the irritated patriot, who seems not to have been acquainted with the brilliant picture of the industry and commerce of Venice drawn in the Great Council in 1420 by the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo,[396]‘is more beautiful and 540 years older than your Venice. We spring from triply noble blood. We are one-third Roman, one-third Frankish, and one-third Fiesolan. Compare with this, I pray you, the elements of which you are composed! First of all you are Slavonians, secondly Paduans of Antenor’s dirty traitor-brood, thirdly fisher-people from Malamocco and Chioggia.We hold by the Gospel of S. John, you by that of S. Mark, in which there is as much difference as between fine French wool and that with which mattresses are stuffed. We have round about us thirty thousand estates, owned by noblemen and merchants, citizens and craftsmen, yielding us yearly bread and meat, wine and oil, vegetables and cheese, hay and wood, to the value of 900,000 ducats in cash, as you Venetians and Genoese, Chians and Rhodians, who come to buy them, know well enough. We have two trades greater than four of yours in Venice put together—wool and silk. Witness the Roman court and that of the king of Naples, the Marches and Sicily, Constantinople and Pera, Broussa and Adrianople, Salonika and Gallipoli, Chios and Rhodes, where to your envy and disgust there are Florentine consuls and merchants, churches and houses, banks and offices, and whither go more Florentine wares of all kinds, especially silken stuffs and gold and silver brocades, than from Venice, Genoa and Lucca put together. Ask your own merchants who visit Marseilles, Avignon, Lyons, and the whole of Provence, Bruges, Antwerp, London, and other cities, where there are great banks and royal warehouses, fine dwellings, and stately churches; ask them who should know, as they go to the fairs every year, whether they have seen the banks of the Medici, the Pazzi, the Capponi, the Buondelmonti, the Corsini, the Falconieri, the Portinari, and the Ghini, the bank of the Medici and their partners at Milan, and a hundred others which I will not name, because to do so I should need at least a ream of paper. You say we are bankrupt since Cosimo’s death. If we have had losses, it is owing to your dishonesty and the wickedness of your Levant merchants, who have made us lose hundreds of thousands—people with well-known names who have filled Constantinople and Pera with failures, whereof our great houses could tell many a tale. But though Cosimo is dead and buried, he did not take his gold florins and the rest of his money and bonds with him into the other world; nor hisbanks and store-houses, nor his woollen and silken cloths, nor his plate and jewellery; but he left them all to his worthy sons and grandsons, who take pains to keep them and to add to them, to the vexation of the Venetians and other envious foes, whose tongues are more malicious and slanderous than if they were Sienese.’ Such was the Florentine’s retort to the attacks of the Venetians, whom he bitterly attacked in his turn, when in 1479 they concluded the disadvantageous treaty by which they ceded Negroponte and other of their Levantine possessions to the Turks.‘Our beautiful Florence,’ says the same chronicler, ‘contains within the city in this present year 1472, 270 shops belonging to the wool-merchants’ guild, from whence their wares are sent to Rome and the Marches, Naples and Sicily, Constantinople and Pera, Adrianople, Broussa and the whole of Turkey. It contains also eighty-three rich and splendid warehouses of the silk-merchants’ guild, and furnishes gold and silver stuffs, velvet, brocade, damask, taffeta, and satin, to Rome and Naples, Catalonia and the whole of Spain, especially Seville, and to Turkey and Barbary. The principal fairs to which these wares go are those of Genoa, the Marches, Ferrara, Mantua, and the whole of Italy; Lyons, Avignon, Montpelier, Antwerp, and London.’ The number of the great banks amounted to thirty-three, that of the cloth-warehouses, which also retailed woollen cloths of all kinds (tagliare), to thirty-two; the shops of the cabinet-makers, whose business was carving and inlaid work (tarsia), to eighty-four, and the workshops of the stone-cutters and marble-workers in the city and its immediate neighbourhood to fifty-four. There were forty-four goldsmiths’ and jewellers’ shops, thirty gold-beaters, silver-wire drawers, and wax-figure makers; the last being in those days a productive branch of industry, as it was the custom to consecrate in the churches and chapels wax-figures of all kinds (voti), chiefly images. ‘Go through all the cities of the world,’ adds the chronicler, ‘nowhere will you find, nor will youever be able to find, artists in wax equal to those we have now in Florence, and to whom the figures in the Nunziata (the Servite Church) can bear witness.’ Another flourishing branch of industry was the making of the light and elegant gold and silver wreaths and garlands which were worn by young maidens of high degree, and gave their name to the artist-family of Ghirlandajo. Sixty-six was the number of the apothecaries’ and grocers’ shops; seventy that of the butchers, besides eight large shops in which were sold fowls of all kinds, as well as game, and also the native wines which were considered best with game, particularly the pungent white wine, called Trebbiano, from San Giovanni in the upper Arno valley; it would wake the dead, adds Dei, in its praise. The Florentine had a right to be proud of his ‘beautiful’ city. From 1422, when Gino Capponi, the conqueror of Pisa, introduced the art of gold-spinning (the gold thread hitherto used having been procured from Cöln and from Cyprus),[397]down to the time of Lorenzo, was the most brilliant period of the silk manufacture which brought great wealth to the city. The Emperor Sigismund’s ill-famed consort, Barbara von Cilly, once sent one of her people with 1,200 gold florins and three bars of gold to buy silken stuffs. In 1422 the first armed galley was equipped for the voyage to Alexandria, and when she was launched there was a solemn procession to implore the protection of Heaven. Thus Florence began to do without the help of Venetian and Genoese vessels; and the two latter states never got over their vexation at this. The Florentines, however, never became famous sailors. Meanwhile the home-produce kept pace with this freer connection with transmarine lands. There seem to have been no silk-worms reared in Florence before 1423; this branch of industry was much older in other parts of Tuscany: in Modigliana, Pistoja, Pescia, Lucca, &c. In Lorenzo’s days the artisans began to emigrate,and transplanted their art to foreign lands. The restrictions of emigration by statute proved at first useless and afterwards injurious. The extent of the intercourse between Florence and other lands is shown by the list of commercial firms established in various countries in 1469; in France there were twenty-four; in the kingdom of Naples thirty-seven; in Turkey no less than fifty, which were under the protection of the consul Mainardo Ubaldini, whose general relations with the Turkish government became so much the better, as those of the Venetians, whose political and commercial interests too often clashed, grew less secure. Long afterwards it was known that the Florentines held in their hands the whole commerce of France; and in 1521, when war broke out between Charles V. and Francis I., and the Florentine merchant-colony at Lyons found itself in danger, a memorial requesting letters of safe-conduct was addressed to the treasurer Robertet, by no less than thirty houses, including the Albizzi, Guadagni, Panciatichi, Salviati, Bartolini, Strozzi, Gondi, Manetti, Antinori, Dei, Ridolfi, Pitti, Tedaldi, and other familiar names.[398]Many of these families married and settled in France.In a city where prosperity was so general, it strikes one as remarkable that the rate of interest on money remained so high. When it is remembered that about 1420 the usurers were forbidden to take more than 20 per cent., and that about ten years later the hitherto excluded Jews were admitted in the hope of thereby finding a protection against the greediness of the Christians, it may be easily perceived how shocking the evil was. The complaints about compulsory loans are quite intelligible with such a high rate of interest. That the intended remedy proved fruitless, and Jews and Christians sucked the blood of their neighbours all alike, may be imagined. More than once there was some idea of a public loan establishment. This was the case in1488, when the popular orator Bernardino da Feltre, of the Minorite order, was preaching in Sta. Croce. He tried to obtain Lorenzo’s support for the erection of a Monte di Pietà, but his efforts proved unsuccessful. It was an universally known fact that the execution of the project was prevented because the Signoria was bribed by a rich Jewish money-changer in Pisa, where this trade had found a special nest.[399]Not till three years after Lorenzo’s death a temporary exclusion of the Jews took place, whose gains in Florence alone were reckoned at 50,000,000 gold florins, and the erection by voluntary contributions of the public loan establishment, which, together with that founded by St. Antonine, and other similar ones, was in the course of years exposed to many vicissitudes.It was natural that the wealth of the merchants should greatly influence their manner of life. The new aristocracy, which had risen in a great measure by trade and commerce, continued, after the pattern of the family at the head of the State, to combine politics with other business, and liked to display a splendour corresponding to their means, not only in buildings, pious foundations, and works of art, but also in the festive occasions of domestic life. Their houses were richly furnished. The numerous cabinet-makers and marble-workers, chiefly engaged on decorative works, were not solely occupied with churches and public buildings; both they, and painters and sculptors of a higher order, vied with each other in the decoration of dwelling-houses. Pictures were interspersed and relieved with marble and terra-cotta busts. At festive banquets fine table-linen, in keeping with the elegance of the plate, was always used. Up to this time there was little exaggerated luxury; the majority were too cautious for that; and if they wanted to honour a distinguished guest or celebrate a wedding, friends lent each other their plate, following the example of the Medici with the Alamanni,Della Stufa, Lanfredini, Nasi, Sassetti, Davanzati, and others.[400]The same thing occurred at a banquet given by Messer Antonio Ridolfi, ex-ambassador at Naples, to the Duke of Calabria, who had stood godfather to his child. On great occasions similar loans, to which all the wealthy citizens contributed, were made to the Signoria. For ordinary occasions people often used, besides silver spoons and forks, gifts of the community or of friends, chiefly brazen table-plate, dishes, cans, salvers, with silver centres and enamelled or niello edges, with the owner’s arms and frequently also those of his wife.[401]Fine crystal was considered necessary for a well-furnished table. Venice provided most of this article, but Tuscany furnished many glass-factories.The festivals, which increased in frequency in the days of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici and the oft-repeated visits of princes, necessarily contributed to the increase of splendour and gaiety. More than once the cost exceeded the amount of supply. If Luca Pitti far outran his means it was, at least, the indulgence of a noble passion—that of building—which tempted him to such extravagance, and a miscalculation in politics which overthrew him. But others were ruined by senseless luxury. A striking example of this is Benedetto Salutati, who, it will be remembered, took part in Lorenzo’s tournament. He was a grandson of the celebrated chancellor; his father had acquired a considerable fortune in business, in which the son succeeded him. Benedetto, we read,[402]had made himself a fine position and was highly esteemed; but he was far from being able to enter the lists with many others as far as the age and nobility of his family were concerned, nor did his fortune put him in a position to maintain a lasting rivalry with them. Nevertheless, he did vie with them. When he rodeto that tournament at five-and-twenty, the housings and trappings of his horse were adorned with 168 pounds of fine silver at sixteen ducats a pound, and the cost of the work was reckoned at 8,000l.That he united love for art with love for spending is proved by the fact that his silver helmet was wrought by Antonio del Pollaiuolo.[403]But the immoderate luxury into which he launched may be learned from the description of the banquet which he and his fellow-merchants gave, February 16, 1476, to the sons of King Ferrante at Naples, where the Salutati, like so many of their fellow-countrymen, had settled, and had intercourse with the royal house through their connection with the above-mentioned Antonio Ridolfi, whose daughter was Benedetto’s wife. It was as if a Florentine merchant had tried to vie with the splendour shown by Cardinal Pietro Riario when Ercole d’Este’s bride was in Rome. The very arrangement of the house gave a foretaste of what was to come. The staircase was hung with tapestry and wreaths of yew; the great hall was decorated with richly-worked carpets; and from the ceiling, covered with cloth of the Aragonese colours ornamented with the Duke of Calabria’s arms, hung two great chandeliers of carved and gilt wood bearing wax candles. Opposite the principal entrance, on a dais covered with carpets, stood the dining-table, spread with the finest lace over a worked cover. One side of the hall was occupied by a large sideboard, on which stood about eighty ornamental pieces of plate—salvers, basins, fruit-baskets, tankards—mostly silver, some gold, besides the silver table-service, consisting of about three hundred plates of various kinds, bowls, beakers, and dishes. Adjoining the hall were two rooms opening into each other, hung with woollen stuff representing foliage, and handsomely carpeted. Here thecompany assembled before and after dinner, and divers musicians contributed to the liveliness of the meal. The guests took their seats amid a flourish of trumpets and fifes. At one end of the table sat the Count of Altavilla, next to him Don Pietro of Aragon, the Duke of Calabria’s younger son, a boy of four years old; then came the four sons of the king—Don Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, Don Federigo, Count of Altamura, Don Giovanni, and Don Arrigo.[404]Next to the latter sat the Count of Belcastro, then came the Count of Ventimiglia and Messer Carlo da Toralto. The Florentine consul, Tommaso Ginori, and Lorenzo Strozzi sat one on each side of Marino Caracciolo; next to them came Francesco Nori (one of the victims of the Pazzi conspiracy) and Andrea Spanocchi of Siena. The seats at the other end of the table were occupied by the Commander de Requesens, Ferrante di Gennaro, and Messer Federigo Carvajal, Commander of Rimini. The outer side of the long table was left for the sewers and cup-bearers, who served the guests and tasted the dishes before presenting them to the princes. Besides these, courtiers stood around the table, partly in attendance partly joining in the conversation. The order of the dinner was as follows: First the introductory course; to each guest was presented a little dish of gilt cakes made of pine-apple kernels, and a little majolica cup containing a beverage made of milk and called Natta (guincata). This was followed by eight silver dishes decorated with coats of arms and mottoes, and containing jelly made from the breast of capons; the dish intended for the duke had, in the middle, a fountain which threw up a shower of orange-flower water. The first part of the meal consisted of twelve courses of different kinds of meat, game, veal, ham, pheasants, partridges, capons, chickens, and blanc-mange; at the end there was placed before the duke a large silver dish, from which, when the cover was taken off, a number of birds flewout. On two large salvers were brought two peacocks, apparently alive, with their tails spread, burning perfumes issuing from their bills, and on their breasts, attached to a silken ribbon, the duke’s arms and the mottoModus et ordo. The second part of the entertainment consisted of nine courses of sweets of various kinds, tarts, light and delicate pastry, with hippocras. The wines, mostly native—Italian or Sicilian—were numerous, and between every two guests was placed a list of the fifteen different kinds, of which the lighter found most favour. At the end of the banquet scented water was offered to everyone in which to dip his hands; then the table-cloth was removed, and on the table was placed a great dish containing a mountain of green boughs with precious essences whose perfume spread through the hall.In the middle of the banquet some mumming[405]was announced. Eight youths entered dressed as huntsmen, with horns, hounds, and slain game; they were musicians of the chapel royal, and took leave after entertaining the company with some pleasing music. After dinner the guests went to the next room, where they entered into lively discourse and listened to music and singing. The duke and the Count of Belcastro conversed with the Florentine merchants and spoke of scarcely anything but Florence and the prince’s stay in Tuscany. After about an hour the sewers brought the dessert; for each person a silver dish of various kinds of sweets, with covers made of wax and sugar; those for the princes and knights adorned with coloured coats of arms and mottoes, those for the merchants with escutcheons and trade-marks. Cup-bearers also brought wine in gold and silver goblets. Towards the fifth hour of the night the guests departed, having stayed about four hours. The whole house was full of the courtiers and servants of the princesand nobles. All praised the excellency of the dishes; never, it was said, had a more splendid banquet been known. Salutati’s love of show, however, brought its own punishment; unless indeed he was ruined by the heavy troubles brought upon his home by these same Neapolitan princes and nobles not long after. Four or five years after this banquet, according to his own declaration to the registrars, he had returned to his native city a penniless man, intending to give up his business altogether, as, under the sad circumstances of the time and the heavy burdens of the community, he was working at a clear loss. About this time he changed his residence to Rome, where he was engaged in banking business in 1491.[406]Such doings as these, however, were exceptional; generally, the mode of life in Florence, as throughout Italy, was simple. In describing the English plenipotentiary who spent some time with Pope Eugene, Vespasiano da Bisticci remarks that he had given up his native custom of sitting four hours at table and adopted the Italian fashion of having but one dish, from which the whole household dined together. Even in the noblest houses there was no extravagance; they had only the produce of the immediate neighbourhood and, in particular, of their own estates. Thus it was that an increase of rural industry was doubly desirable. In later days it was wont to be related of Filippo Strozzi the Elder that he introduced the cultivation of the artichoke and that of a new species of fig, and both Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici carefully followed the progress of agriculture. At parties there was no lack of intellectual enjoyments, such as music and improvisation. Politian gives, in a letter to Pico della Mirandola, an account of a dinner at the house of Paolo Orsini, who was in the service of the Republic; on this occasion Orsini’s son, a boy of eleven, stood up and sang some verses of his own composition.Banquets given for entertainment, as well as for learned discourse, chiefly took place at the villas. The richer and more distinguished Florentines divided their time between the city and the country. It has been seen how the pleasant, healthy, fertile neighbourhood of Florence, especially the hills easily attainable for both pedestrians and horsemen, became covered with villas. These gradually spread further out in all directions, up and down the valley of the Arno, beyond Fiesole and Ponte a Sieve to Mugello, better suited for a real summer residence; along the line of hills towards Prato and the valley of the Bisenzio; on the left bank of the Arno through the valleys of the Ema, the Pesa, and the Elsa, and the rich grape-country of Chianti, to the Sienese border. In proportion to the number and beauty of the city residences the number and richness of the country-houses increased also. Hither came princes, kings, and popes; here they enjoyed hospitality at once grand, cordial, and cheerful. The country-life contributed not a little to arouse and maintain liveliness, freshness, fertility, and elasticity of mind in those who were overwhelmed with grave business of all kinds. The villas, far more than the town-houses, were the places where men met for social intercourse, partly because there they could keep themselves more free from business, partly because they were there not troubled with the want of space which was an inconvenience in the city. The villa-life of theliteratihas been already mentioned. The remarks concerning country-residences and country-life made by Leon Battista Alberti, about the time now under consideration, in his book ‘The Father of the Family,’[407]throw light on an important side of the condition of the citizens, and give a glimpse into the temperament and tastes of the classes who held the direction of the commonwealth. These men did not give themselves up to idle pastimes, but to gaining and keeping a clear survey of personal and civilrelations, and to increasing their own prosperity, and with it that of others, by a wise culture which looked beyond the limits of ordinary domestic economy.There was a darker side to this country-life, and among its shadows was that of the gaming-table. As far back as 1285 a decree had been found necessary forbidding the use of dice and other games of chance,[408]and in the year before the Pazzi conspiracy another similar decree was issued.[409]These prohibitions, however, shared the fate of the sumptuary laws, and no doubt the relations with Naples in the fourteenth century did no good in this respect. Still the Florentines never went such lengths as disgraced the society of cardinals and great lords at Rome in the latter half of the fifteenth century in the days of Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII. Alberti, who in another of his writings[410]describes gaming and its attendant ruin arising from either loss or gain and the bad company inseparable from it, probably witnessed these corruptions more in Rome than in his native land. But while in the city, where they were more exposed to view, men proceeded more cautiously and chess was the game chiefly played, the villas were too often scenes of gambling. That this habit was by no means rooted out in the city is shown by the history of St. Antonine. After the holy archbishop had been preaching one day in the church of Sto. Stefano he passed, with the cross carried before him, through the Borgo Sant’Apostolo. As he was passing the Loggia of the Buondelmonti and saw a company at play, he entered and overthrew the tables; the gamblers, ashamed, threw themselves at his feet and begged for pardon.[411]The games which were also bodily exercises, and lived on in another form, as thegiuoco del pallone, have already been mentioned. They were not without danger; in 1487 a sonof Ugolino Verino lost his life by a blow from a ball while engaged in the game ofMaglio. During the uncommonly sharp winter of 1491 these games took place on the frozen surface of the Arno. Hunting of all kinds had always been a favourite pastime; in many country-houses may be seen places prepared for decoying birds. Hawking stood first of all in the lists of amusements. For graver exercises of the chase there was a better field in the woods of Mugello, the low country round Pisa, the Volterra country, and the bordering Maremma, than in the well-built and thickly-inhabited environs of the city. As for the stage, profane drama, as is shown by the remarks of Poliziano, was just in the dawn of its existence, and in its present antiquated form only suited for the higher circles. This last was also the condition of the Latin dramas, of which a great number had been composed since the beginning of the fourteenth century. Classical comedies were performed by students. May 12, 1488, the ‘Menæchmi’ of Plautus, a favourite and oft-copied piece, was acted under the direction of Messer Paolo Comparini, probably one of the professors at the university. Poliziano wrote the Latin prologue for this performance, at which Lorenzo was present.[412]The sacred plays continued to attract high and low; and, besides the customary representations on feast-days, they never failed to be performed for the edification of foreign princes and potentates who came to the city. The Florentines seem to have been especially skilled in these dramatic representations, for their companies acted in other places outside their own city, for example, at Rome. Famous artists, like Brunelleschi and the engineer Cecca, who met his death in the Faenza campaign of 1488, invented the apparatus for these mystery-plays and also for the processions in the open air, on which occasions mass was said on theringhieraof the palace of the Signoria beforethe people who thronged the square. The most solemn procession of all was that on the eve of St. John; the scene was the precincts of the cathedral and the baptistery, where a gigantic machinery of clouds, with saints and angels, was built up under a lofty canopy of linen.[413]The feasts of the Church were many and splendid; most chiefly that of St. John, which was connected with the history of the city and the State. On the eve of this day and on the day itself the shops of the merchants and artificers made a display of their finest goods; Lorenzo lent his most valuable show-pieces to his friends; and in the Baptistery was exhibited the great silver reredos with its statuettes and reliefs. The splendour was heightened by the participation of the numerous clerical and lay societies, and by the influence of the festivals on the patriotism of the multitude through their connection with glorious events, the memory of which was kept alive among the people by these reciprocal relations. These historical reminiscences went back to the very earliest mythical times of the city. Mystery-plays, shows, and similar festivals were not confined to the churches, companies, and public occasions and places, but also took place in the houses of distinguished citizens, and artists constantly took part in them.[414]When it is considered that at the beginning of the next century the number of the civil companies or brotherhoods for religious exercises amounted to 370,[415]partly for children and partly for adults, it may easily be understood how closely domestic life was intertwined with that of the Church.Some of these societies, called Standard-companies (Compagnie di Stendardo) did not approve of social cheerfulness. But the unions of the lower classes for the purpose of festivities, shows, games, and merrymakings were those called potenze. Their origin is commonly referred to the time of the Duke of Athens; it was probably contemporary with thedevelopment of the democratic element in the commonwealth. These societies, whose festivals and performances strongly resembled a carnaval, were also intended for spiritual exercises. Their number differed greatly at different times; their names are mostly fantastically derived from the occupation or residence of the parties concerned; there was an emperor of the Prato of Ognisanti, a king of the wool-carders of Orsanmichele, and various others with similar titles derived from localities in Camaldoli; monarchs of Sant’Ambrogio and Terrarossa, dukes of the Via Guelfa, of the Arno, of Camporeggi, of the moon, the dove, the owl; princes of the apple and of the standard-carriage, grand signors of the Pitti and of the dyers, lords of the chain, the swallow, the kitchen-range, the sword, the scourge, the elm, and suchlike names. They all bore coats of arms on their banners; thus the emperor of the Prato displayed an eagle; the grand signor of the dyers, a caldron standing on the fire; the duke of the Arno, a pillar of the Rubaconte bridge, with himself majestically seated thereon, surrounded by players. These societies had for their chief object carnaval-amusements, with games and pastimes which degenerated into wild orgies, till in the sixteenth century the license became so great, the waste of time and money and the annoyance to the other citizens so disgraceful, that, after restrictions had been tried in vain, the whole thing was put an end to.[416]Lorenzo has been reproached with having encouraged shows and entertainments in order to keep the people occupied and well-disposed towards himself. He probably acted with this view just as much as the Duke of Athens; and when the Medici came back in 1512 from their long exile, his son Giuliano and his grandson Lorenzo employed these same means, companies and pastimes, chiefly, as a historian of the Medicean party, Filippo de’ Nerli, confesses, in order to keep the citizens and common people in goodhumour with triumphs, festivals, and public shows, and to gather the young nobles around themselves.[417]But the inclinations and habits of the people made the attainment of Lorenzo’s object easy to him. The widespread feeling for art, which gave a special charm to all public displays, contributed not a little thereto.Lorenzo revolutionised and developed the songs of the carnaval. The romance writer Lasca relates[418]the state in which he found the carnaval and what he made of it. Youths and men were wont to walk about the streets in women’s clothes and mimick the girls and women on May-day. The songs they sang were all much the same; the variety introduced into their form and substance by Lorenzo was enhanced by the melodies of Heinrich Isaak. The first masquerade of this kind was that of the glass-blowers and pastrycooks, with a three-part choir. The Triumphs (trionfi) were great mythological or allegorical performances; the Chariots (carri), representations of works, &c. Richly dressed horsemen, to the number of 300, rode beside these chariots, which came out in the afternoon and often enlivened the streets till far into the night, accompanied by men on foot carrying white wax torches. There was also instrumental music and singing in four or eight parts, sometimes even fifteen parts. According to the style and contents of the songs, so the nature of these popular amusements was varied. In several of Lorenzo’s carnaval-songs the license of the day is but too evident; they were downright Roman saturnalia. Later on, when reaction took place against this worldliness, the firstthing attacked was the carnaval. It will be seen hereafter that this opposition had begun long before men’s minds were biassed in a new direction in consequence of a revolution in the political circumstances of Italy and the foreboding of evil to come. The sobering change which followed this license is shown by a satirical dialogue in verse on the carnaval, which was forbidden the houses and streets; a popular production of historical value on this account, that it expresses a foreboding of the many evils which were to befall Rome—Rome, the home of the saturnalia, which threatened to swallow up all life and effort as in a whirlpool:[419]Questo è stato carnascialeC’ha ’l cervel nelle scarpette,Con suo certe gente gretteC’ han giocato il capitale:Hanno avuto certe stretteTu Fiorenza le lor mercíeStazonate brutte e lercíeSì che han perso ogni lor fede.Poi che vai, cammina prestoPer l’Italia tutta quanta,Et a Roma tua ch’è santa,Tu farai questo protesto:Che tempesta a lei vien tanta,Che stupisce il cielo e ’l mondo:Lancie, spade e squadre a tondoChiariran la sua gran fede.Amid the coarse sensual doings of the time there were yet some festivals in which, although accompanied by immoderate display, poetic feeling found room for expression. During one carnaval Lorenzo got up a brilliant procession representing the triumph of Paulus Æmilius; it was on this occasion that the young painter Francesco Granacci gavethe first proofs of his remarkable talent for decoration. In another procession of the same kind the planets were personified and easily recognised by their emblems, and were drawn through the streets in seven chariots amid the sound of music and songs composed for the occasion.[420]Allegorical representations of this sort were common. Twenty or thirty years later Raphael gave them the highest consecration of art in his pictures of the planets, and the multitude was not lacking in a sense of allegory. These gay scenes were rivalled by the carnaval procession got up by Bartolommeo Benci in honour of Marietta Strozzi Giachinotti, a granddaughter of Palla.[421]Eight young men of distinguished families—Pucci, Altoviti, Vespucci, Girolami, and others—took part in it. On the evening of the carnaval they all went together to the house of the Benci, whose name is still borne by a street in the Sta. Croce quarter. They were all dressed in vests of silver and crimson brocade, and mounted on horses with silken housings, each accompanied by eight grooms and thirty torch-bearers. After supper the whole party proceeded to the lady’s house, followed by four men carrying a stage twenty ells high, made of branches of laurel, yew, cypress, and other evergreens, and adorned with a number of allegorical representations of the triumph of love, with the escutcheons of the lady and the author of the festival, surmounted by a bleeding and burning heart from which rockets flew up. Round about were pipers and mounted pages dressed in green. Bartolommeo Benci, with gilt wings fastened to his shoulders, came riding on a handsome and richly caparisoned horse, surrounded by fifteen youths of good family dressed in crimson, and 150 torch-bearers wearing his colours. Amerigo and Francesco Benci and the lady’s brothers Nanni and Strozza Strozzi joined the party. The gentlemen, with gilt spears in their hands,showed off their horses before the windows; then Bartolommeo took the wings from off his shoulders and threw them on the triumphal stage, which at once burst into flames, while a number of rockets flew up from it, some high in the air, some towards the house. When the fireworks were over the party retired, the giver of the entertainment making his horse step backwards till he was out of the square. They then went round to the houses of the lady-loves of all the gentlemen, and finished with an aubade (mattinata) before the house of Marietta, who during the whole scene remained at the window, between four wax torches, ‘with such a stately grace as Lucretia herself would not have needed to be ashamed of.’ The show ended at dawn of day with a breakfast at Bartolommeo’s house. All the Signoria’s servants, who had kept order during the night, received stockings of the Benci colours.The people always preserved their unwearied gaiety, which Ariosto called ‘lo spirito bizarro fiorentino.’ They were always wide awake, ready for a jest, keen in perception, quick at a repartee, disposed to give merit its due, but with the eyes of a lynx for every weakness. The merry meetings with their stories, not inventions of the Decamerone but the links that connected it with the prevailing manners, easily degenerated into buffoonery, as many examples remain to show. As the Florentines went round as jesters to the courts of princes, so they had in the herald or knight of the Signoria a sort of official buffoon who was, however, employed in earnest as well as in jest. The best known jesters belong to the fifteenth century; of these, the barber Burchiello represents the literary type, while the chief example of the ordinary jester with his verbal witticisms is the Piovano Arlotto or Arlotto Mainardi, vicar of a little place in the diocese of Fiesole, who is mentioned in Lorenzo’s ‘Beoni,’ a true mirror of the somewhat coarse-grained wit of these revels. Besides the tales of Francesco Sacchetti, written at its commencement, which are satirical in theirplot as well as in their too often licentious phraseology, the two best known examples of buffoonery overstepping the acknowledged limits of fiction, both in the form of romances, belong to the fifteenth century. The one story is that of the fat cabinet-maker, Manetto Ammanatini, a jest which is said to have driven its victim, a master of artistic cabinet-making and tarsia-work, away to Hungary. It originated with Brunelleschi and his artist-friends, and the actual authorship of the tale has been attributed to him. The other story treats of Bianco Alfani, who was made to believe that he had been chosen Podestà of Norcia, and had to suffer for the delusion.[422]The species of humour which distinguishes these compositions was long preserved in thevilleggiature. Lorenzo was no stranger to it, and Leo X., in the story of Baraballo, gave himself up to it in a manner little becoming his dignity.As regards moral weakness and defects this period was certainly not better than its neighbours; and there can be no hesitation in accusing it of having, by gradually accustoming people to the powers that then were, paved the way for the destruction of the commonwealth in favour of one man, who was not a Lorenzo. The lamentations over the corruption of the times were very frequent. ‘O city of Florence!’ cried the honest Vespasiano da Bisticci in 1480, ‘thou art full of usury and dishonest gain! The one devours the other; greed has made thy people foes one towards the other. Evil-doing has become so habitual that no one is ashamed of it. In these latter days thou hast witnessedsuch unheard-of doings among thy citizens, such disorders and failures, and dost not yet perceive that it is a judgment from God, and thus thou continuest in thy hardness of heart. There is no hope for thee, for thou thinkest of nought but money-making; and yet thou seest how the wealth of thy citizens passeth away like smoke as soon as they have closed their eyes.’ Whatever might be the state of affairs, however, such words as these are not to be taken literally. There was an immense amount of good sterling material left in the people who had outstripped others on the road to intellectual knowledge, civil order, and industrial development. The peculiar relation between the different classes, which, in the ultimate development of democracy, in some measure neutralised its evils, struck root so deeply that it was never completely destroyed by the predominance of Spanish manners which undermined and strove against it for centuries. The Tuscan countryman, raised by the old colony-system, which formed a sort of joint possession, assumed an attitude of freedom towards his lord; the hard and fast lines by which classes were divided in other lands were never known here. The Florentine nobility never forgot that by far the greater part of their number had risen from the ranks of the people in times which were not remote enough to be buried in the night of ages; and in their persons the people felt themselves to a certain extent ennobled. Feudalism never attained its full force here; even when its tendencies prevailed throughout all the rest of Italy except Venice, in Florence it had little more than a formal existence. Down to the extinction of the Medici race, with a few exceptions, they never cast off the traditions of the citizen element. Thus in Florence there were never, as elsewhere, violent conflicts aroused by the sharpness of social contrasts. Conflicts of another kind were avoided by the fact that, since the strengthening of the commonwealths, the higher orders of clergy, notwithstanding their considerable possessions, exercised no real territorial power andalmost always kept on good terms with the commonwealths. In the appointment of bishops, too, the popular element on the whole prevailed, though sometimes, and indeed repeatedly during the fifteenth century, single appointments were made from a purely papal point of view. The reaction which set in so soon after Lorenzo’s death against the laxity of morals which is laid to his charge, and the heroic perseverance with which these Florentines defended their independence for nearly forty years, prove most clearly what wholesome qualities were hidden within the nature of this genuine, pliant, powerful citizen-people.The picture of the Florentines in the last days of the Republic, sketched by an historian of the following century,[423]is equally true of Lorenzo’s time: ‘I do not share the opinion of those who refuse to admit that the Florentines can be noble-minded and consider them low and plebeian because they are merchants. I have often secretly wondered how people who from their childhood have been accustomed to handle bales of wool and silken threads, or to work like slaves all day and part of the night at the loom or the dye-cauldron, often, when needed, display such loftiness of heart and greatness of soul that they speak and act surpassingly well. The air, a medium between the keen atmosphere of Arezzo and the heavy air of Pisa, doubtless has some influence on this peculiarity. Whosoever considers deeply the nature and manners of the Florentines must arrive at the conclusion that they are more fitted to command than to obey. I do not deny that there are among them haughty, covetous, and violent men, such as are to be found elsewhere. Nay, they are even worse here than in other places; for as talent and merit are more brilliant there than elsewhere, so also evil qualities are more conspicuous—so hard is it for them to preserve moderation. Their manner of life is simple and thrifty, but distinguished by cleanliness suchas is not met with elsewhere. It may be said that in this respect artisans and people who live by daily labour are a pattern to the citizens of higher position; for whereas the latter are easily led away to the taverns if they hear that good wine is to be had there, and give themselves a day of pleasure, the former stay at home with the thriftiness of tradespeople who work seeking for their enjoyment in advance, and with the modesty of citizens who understand moderation, rules, and discipline, and will not quit the safe path. Of course there are families which have a great household and a rich table, such as would become noblemen. People call each other by their Christian names, also by their family names, and usually say ‘thou’ unless there is a great difference of rank or age. The knights, doctors, prebendaries, and canons are entitled Messere, the professors Maestro, and the monks Padre.’Leon Battista Alberti and the pious Fra Giovanni Dominici speak in similar terms of the respect for parents and superiors.[424]‘My father,’ Alberti describes his cousin Francesco as saying, ‘never sat down on public occasions when his brother, who had received the honour of knighthood, was present; and he pronounced it as his opinion that one ought not to sit down in the presence of one’s father or the head of the family. Your Romans,’ he added, turning to Leon Battista, ‘who are now ill-conducted in all things (in ogni cosa mal corretti oggi), have likewise fallen into great error in this respect: they honour their parents less than their neighbours, and thus grow up in disorder and vice.’ Fra Giovanni recommends Madonna Bartolommea degli Obizzi to teach her children before all things to reverence their parents, and thus secure earthly happiness. We have before remarked how Lorenzo impressed on his son the duty of showing proper respect for his elders; on this point he was always consistent. The good old habits of strictness werealso kept up by many distinguished women. In Lorenzo’s time there are no such charming portraits as those sketched in his grandfather’s days by the good Vespasiano;[425]but Alessandra de’ Bardi, wife of Lorenzo Strozzi; Francesca Giacomini Tebalducci, wife of Donato Acciaiuolo; Nanna Valori, wife of Giannozzo Pandolfini; Caterina Strozzi Ardinghelli; Saracina Giacomini Acciaiuolo, and others, could not fail to have worthy successors; and the beautiful and dignified female portraits which give such a peculiar charm to Ghirlandajo’s frescoes in Sta. Maria Novella would alone be enough to prove that the generation had not died out. Times had become more settled and peaceful, and since 1478 there had been no sudden overthrow or turn of fortune such as had hitherto rapidly succeeded each other. In the undisturbed peace of their homes good women found ample scope for the practice of the Christian virtues which had distinguished their mothers and grandmothers, often widowed or homeless in early youth, amid the stormy days of trouble.Knighthood has been frequently alluded to in this work. While nobility of birth was attended by civil disadvantages, personal nobility, or knighthood, had a peculiar value of its own. This distinction was a relic of the romantic days of Charles the Great. In imitation of kings and emperors the commonwealth claimed the power of granting it, and in 1288 the first example is said to have occurred in the war against Pisa. Knighthood was a necessary qualification for the office of Podestà, and was conferred on those appointed if they had not previously received it. Knights of this sort were calledCavalieri di popolo. Two cases of strangely conferred knighthood occurred in the fourteenth century. After the rising of the lower classes on July 20, 1378, more than sixty citizens, with Salvestro de’ Medici at their head, were knighted at the request of the multitude. When quietwas in some degree restored these knights of the Ciompi, as they were called, were summoned to declare whether they wished to keep the dignity thus tumultuously conferred on them; in which case they were to be knighted over again by a syndic of the commonwealth who had himself attained that honour. Thirty-one accepted the offer. On October 15 they assembled in the church of the Annunziata and thence proceeded, in knightly attire, to the great square; and there, in presence of the Signoria, the Podestà—a Venetian nobleman—completed the ceremony as syndic of the commonwealth, whereupon they took the oaths of allegiance and received from the Gonfalonier their lances, standards, and shields with the arms of the people.[426]On April 26, 1389, two members of the Panciatichi family, one a child not much more than four years old, were made knights of the people. Great honour was shown them, and like Cola Rienzi in Rome of old, they, with many of their relations and friends, spent the night in the Baptistery, where seven great beds were set up; and the next day a banquet took place in the convent of Sta. Maria Novella[427]at which 250 citizens were present.The knights of the people were divided into two classes-thecavalieri di corredo, knighted for civil services, and thecavalieri di scudofor military ones; the former named from the banquet which they gave after the ceremony, the latter from the shield; like thenoblesse de robeandnoblesse d’épéein France. Both classes bore on their breasts, or on their helmets, shields, &c., the arms of the people, usually with the red lily of the Republic on a round, white escutcheon, sometimes also with the arms of the Guelf party. Besides thesethere were other knights who had received their dignity from Popes or foreign sovereigns, especially the kings of France, on embassies and suchlike occasions; and others who had been knighted on the battle-field by a commander-in-chief, as a reward for their bravery. These last were entitledcavalieri d’arme, to distinguish them from thecavalieri di scudo. The wearing of the golden spurs, afterwards so much abused, was the prerogative of these military knights.Embassies had always been important to the Florentines in a political point of view, as well as a means of obtaining personal distinction. In the first jubilee year, when twelve of them appeared before Pope Boniface VIII. as the representatives of various states, he called them the fifth element. They always preserved their reputation as good diplomatists. Not only did clergy, statesmen, and scholars take an active part in diplomacy, it was a career open even to the Grandi, the real nobility who were excluded from all the offices of state. In the fifteenth century the splendour with which the embassies were conducted corresponded with the importance of the state and the personal rank of the ambassadors. Their posts, however, were not lucrative; for if, as was the case in 1483, each ambassador received about ten gold florins a day, the expenses in excess of those which he could charge for were very heavy. Besides the solemn embassies on special occasions, there were resident envoys at Naples, Rome, Milan, and Venice. The former were numerous and brilliant, and comprised, besides the actual ambassadors, younger men (who, according to a later regulation, were not to be under the age of twenty-four), who went to learn the business of diplomacy and see foreign lands; there was also a chancellor and other officials. Only two examples need be referred to for the high honour in which Florentine embassies were held—Neri Capponi’s famous embassy to Venice during the war of the Visconti, and that to Louis XI. on his accession. ‘Never,’ says Macchiavelli, ‘did that Signoria receive a prince with so much honour asthey did Neri.’ King Louis, with the Duke of Britanny and a suite of about forty horsemen, advanced two leagues from Tours to meet Monsignor Filippo de’ Medici, Piero de’ Pazzi, and Buonaccorso Pitti (Luca’s son), envoys of the Republic, and kept his hat in his hand because the first-named would not be covered.[428]Travelling was slow; the embassy had left Florence on October 27, and reached Tours on December 23. With what splendour Piero de’ Pazzi returned home has been mentioned already.

CHAPTER II.LIFE IN FLORENCE.In1472 certain Venetians addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici and Niccolò Ardinghelli a pamphlet wherein they extolled the advantages of their city and its inhabitants, and abused Florence, her constitution, her policy, her commerce and society, and the house of Medici. The challenge was accepted by Benedetto Dei, a scion of an ancient family, a man of much experience in affairs of state and of commerce, and who had been for many years Florentine ambassador in Constantinople, from whence he went to Damascus on a commission for the Sultan. He defended his native city in a lengthy and rather warm reply; a curious testimony to the deep-seated differences between two states which were often bitter enemies and scarcely ever real friends.[395]‘Florence,’ says the irritated patriot, who seems not to have been acquainted with the brilliant picture of the industry and commerce of Venice drawn in the Great Council in 1420 by the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo,[396]‘is more beautiful and 540 years older than your Venice. We spring from triply noble blood. We are one-third Roman, one-third Frankish, and one-third Fiesolan. Compare with this, I pray you, the elements of which you are composed! First of all you are Slavonians, secondly Paduans of Antenor’s dirty traitor-brood, thirdly fisher-people from Malamocco and Chioggia.We hold by the Gospel of S. John, you by that of S. Mark, in which there is as much difference as between fine French wool and that with which mattresses are stuffed. We have round about us thirty thousand estates, owned by noblemen and merchants, citizens and craftsmen, yielding us yearly bread and meat, wine and oil, vegetables and cheese, hay and wood, to the value of 900,000 ducats in cash, as you Venetians and Genoese, Chians and Rhodians, who come to buy them, know well enough. We have two trades greater than four of yours in Venice put together—wool and silk. Witness the Roman court and that of the king of Naples, the Marches and Sicily, Constantinople and Pera, Broussa and Adrianople, Salonika and Gallipoli, Chios and Rhodes, where to your envy and disgust there are Florentine consuls and merchants, churches and houses, banks and offices, and whither go more Florentine wares of all kinds, especially silken stuffs and gold and silver brocades, than from Venice, Genoa and Lucca put together. Ask your own merchants who visit Marseilles, Avignon, Lyons, and the whole of Provence, Bruges, Antwerp, London, and other cities, where there are great banks and royal warehouses, fine dwellings, and stately churches; ask them who should know, as they go to the fairs every year, whether they have seen the banks of the Medici, the Pazzi, the Capponi, the Buondelmonti, the Corsini, the Falconieri, the Portinari, and the Ghini, the bank of the Medici and their partners at Milan, and a hundred others which I will not name, because to do so I should need at least a ream of paper. You say we are bankrupt since Cosimo’s death. If we have had losses, it is owing to your dishonesty and the wickedness of your Levant merchants, who have made us lose hundreds of thousands—people with well-known names who have filled Constantinople and Pera with failures, whereof our great houses could tell many a tale. But though Cosimo is dead and buried, he did not take his gold florins and the rest of his money and bonds with him into the other world; nor hisbanks and store-houses, nor his woollen and silken cloths, nor his plate and jewellery; but he left them all to his worthy sons and grandsons, who take pains to keep them and to add to them, to the vexation of the Venetians and other envious foes, whose tongues are more malicious and slanderous than if they were Sienese.’ Such was the Florentine’s retort to the attacks of the Venetians, whom he bitterly attacked in his turn, when in 1479 they concluded the disadvantageous treaty by which they ceded Negroponte and other of their Levantine possessions to the Turks.‘Our beautiful Florence,’ says the same chronicler, ‘contains within the city in this present year 1472, 270 shops belonging to the wool-merchants’ guild, from whence their wares are sent to Rome and the Marches, Naples and Sicily, Constantinople and Pera, Adrianople, Broussa and the whole of Turkey. It contains also eighty-three rich and splendid warehouses of the silk-merchants’ guild, and furnishes gold and silver stuffs, velvet, brocade, damask, taffeta, and satin, to Rome and Naples, Catalonia and the whole of Spain, especially Seville, and to Turkey and Barbary. The principal fairs to which these wares go are those of Genoa, the Marches, Ferrara, Mantua, and the whole of Italy; Lyons, Avignon, Montpelier, Antwerp, and London.’ The number of the great banks amounted to thirty-three, that of the cloth-warehouses, which also retailed woollen cloths of all kinds (tagliare), to thirty-two; the shops of the cabinet-makers, whose business was carving and inlaid work (tarsia), to eighty-four, and the workshops of the stone-cutters and marble-workers in the city and its immediate neighbourhood to fifty-four. There were forty-four goldsmiths’ and jewellers’ shops, thirty gold-beaters, silver-wire drawers, and wax-figure makers; the last being in those days a productive branch of industry, as it was the custom to consecrate in the churches and chapels wax-figures of all kinds (voti), chiefly images. ‘Go through all the cities of the world,’ adds the chronicler, ‘nowhere will you find, nor will youever be able to find, artists in wax equal to those we have now in Florence, and to whom the figures in the Nunziata (the Servite Church) can bear witness.’ Another flourishing branch of industry was the making of the light and elegant gold and silver wreaths and garlands which were worn by young maidens of high degree, and gave their name to the artist-family of Ghirlandajo. Sixty-six was the number of the apothecaries’ and grocers’ shops; seventy that of the butchers, besides eight large shops in which were sold fowls of all kinds, as well as game, and also the native wines which were considered best with game, particularly the pungent white wine, called Trebbiano, from San Giovanni in the upper Arno valley; it would wake the dead, adds Dei, in its praise. The Florentine had a right to be proud of his ‘beautiful’ city. From 1422, when Gino Capponi, the conqueror of Pisa, introduced the art of gold-spinning (the gold thread hitherto used having been procured from Cöln and from Cyprus),[397]down to the time of Lorenzo, was the most brilliant period of the silk manufacture which brought great wealth to the city. The Emperor Sigismund’s ill-famed consort, Barbara von Cilly, once sent one of her people with 1,200 gold florins and three bars of gold to buy silken stuffs. In 1422 the first armed galley was equipped for the voyage to Alexandria, and when she was launched there was a solemn procession to implore the protection of Heaven. Thus Florence began to do without the help of Venetian and Genoese vessels; and the two latter states never got over their vexation at this. The Florentines, however, never became famous sailors. Meanwhile the home-produce kept pace with this freer connection with transmarine lands. There seem to have been no silk-worms reared in Florence before 1423; this branch of industry was much older in other parts of Tuscany: in Modigliana, Pistoja, Pescia, Lucca, &c. In Lorenzo’s days the artisans began to emigrate,and transplanted their art to foreign lands. The restrictions of emigration by statute proved at first useless and afterwards injurious. The extent of the intercourse between Florence and other lands is shown by the list of commercial firms established in various countries in 1469; in France there were twenty-four; in the kingdom of Naples thirty-seven; in Turkey no less than fifty, which were under the protection of the consul Mainardo Ubaldini, whose general relations with the Turkish government became so much the better, as those of the Venetians, whose political and commercial interests too often clashed, grew less secure. Long afterwards it was known that the Florentines held in their hands the whole commerce of France; and in 1521, when war broke out between Charles V. and Francis I., and the Florentine merchant-colony at Lyons found itself in danger, a memorial requesting letters of safe-conduct was addressed to the treasurer Robertet, by no less than thirty houses, including the Albizzi, Guadagni, Panciatichi, Salviati, Bartolini, Strozzi, Gondi, Manetti, Antinori, Dei, Ridolfi, Pitti, Tedaldi, and other familiar names.[398]Many of these families married and settled in France.In a city where prosperity was so general, it strikes one as remarkable that the rate of interest on money remained so high. When it is remembered that about 1420 the usurers were forbidden to take more than 20 per cent., and that about ten years later the hitherto excluded Jews were admitted in the hope of thereby finding a protection against the greediness of the Christians, it may be easily perceived how shocking the evil was. The complaints about compulsory loans are quite intelligible with such a high rate of interest. That the intended remedy proved fruitless, and Jews and Christians sucked the blood of their neighbours all alike, may be imagined. More than once there was some idea of a public loan establishment. This was the case in1488, when the popular orator Bernardino da Feltre, of the Minorite order, was preaching in Sta. Croce. He tried to obtain Lorenzo’s support for the erection of a Monte di Pietà, but his efforts proved unsuccessful. It was an universally known fact that the execution of the project was prevented because the Signoria was bribed by a rich Jewish money-changer in Pisa, where this trade had found a special nest.[399]Not till three years after Lorenzo’s death a temporary exclusion of the Jews took place, whose gains in Florence alone were reckoned at 50,000,000 gold florins, and the erection by voluntary contributions of the public loan establishment, which, together with that founded by St. Antonine, and other similar ones, was in the course of years exposed to many vicissitudes.It was natural that the wealth of the merchants should greatly influence their manner of life. The new aristocracy, which had risen in a great measure by trade and commerce, continued, after the pattern of the family at the head of the State, to combine politics with other business, and liked to display a splendour corresponding to their means, not only in buildings, pious foundations, and works of art, but also in the festive occasions of domestic life. Their houses were richly furnished. The numerous cabinet-makers and marble-workers, chiefly engaged on decorative works, were not solely occupied with churches and public buildings; both they, and painters and sculptors of a higher order, vied with each other in the decoration of dwelling-houses. Pictures were interspersed and relieved with marble and terra-cotta busts. At festive banquets fine table-linen, in keeping with the elegance of the plate, was always used. Up to this time there was little exaggerated luxury; the majority were too cautious for that; and if they wanted to honour a distinguished guest or celebrate a wedding, friends lent each other their plate, following the example of the Medici with the Alamanni,Della Stufa, Lanfredini, Nasi, Sassetti, Davanzati, and others.[400]The same thing occurred at a banquet given by Messer Antonio Ridolfi, ex-ambassador at Naples, to the Duke of Calabria, who had stood godfather to his child. On great occasions similar loans, to which all the wealthy citizens contributed, were made to the Signoria. For ordinary occasions people often used, besides silver spoons and forks, gifts of the community or of friends, chiefly brazen table-plate, dishes, cans, salvers, with silver centres and enamelled or niello edges, with the owner’s arms and frequently also those of his wife.[401]Fine crystal was considered necessary for a well-furnished table. Venice provided most of this article, but Tuscany furnished many glass-factories.The festivals, which increased in frequency in the days of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici and the oft-repeated visits of princes, necessarily contributed to the increase of splendour and gaiety. More than once the cost exceeded the amount of supply. If Luca Pitti far outran his means it was, at least, the indulgence of a noble passion—that of building—which tempted him to such extravagance, and a miscalculation in politics which overthrew him. But others were ruined by senseless luxury. A striking example of this is Benedetto Salutati, who, it will be remembered, took part in Lorenzo’s tournament. He was a grandson of the celebrated chancellor; his father had acquired a considerable fortune in business, in which the son succeeded him. Benedetto, we read,[402]had made himself a fine position and was highly esteemed; but he was far from being able to enter the lists with many others as far as the age and nobility of his family were concerned, nor did his fortune put him in a position to maintain a lasting rivalry with them. Nevertheless, he did vie with them. When he rodeto that tournament at five-and-twenty, the housings and trappings of his horse were adorned with 168 pounds of fine silver at sixteen ducats a pound, and the cost of the work was reckoned at 8,000l.That he united love for art with love for spending is proved by the fact that his silver helmet was wrought by Antonio del Pollaiuolo.[403]But the immoderate luxury into which he launched may be learned from the description of the banquet which he and his fellow-merchants gave, February 16, 1476, to the sons of King Ferrante at Naples, where the Salutati, like so many of their fellow-countrymen, had settled, and had intercourse with the royal house through their connection with the above-mentioned Antonio Ridolfi, whose daughter was Benedetto’s wife. It was as if a Florentine merchant had tried to vie with the splendour shown by Cardinal Pietro Riario when Ercole d’Este’s bride was in Rome. The very arrangement of the house gave a foretaste of what was to come. The staircase was hung with tapestry and wreaths of yew; the great hall was decorated with richly-worked carpets; and from the ceiling, covered with cloth of the Aragonese colours ornamented with the Duke of Calabria’s arms, hung two great chandeliers of carved and gilt wood bearing wax candles. Opposite the principal entrance, on a dais covered with carpets, stood the dining-table, spread with the finest lace over a worked cover. One side of the hall was occupied by a large sideboard, on which stood about eighty ornamental pieces of plate—salvers, basins, fruit-baskets, tankards—mostly silver, some gold, besides the silver table-service, consisting of about three hundred plates of various kinds, bowls, beakers, and dishes. Adjoining the hall were two rooms opening into each other, hung with woollen stuff representing foliage, and handsomely carpeted. Here thecompany assembled before and after dinner, and divers musicians contributed to the liveliness of the meal. The guests took their seats amid a flourish of trumpets and fifes. At one end of the table sat the Count of Altavilla, next to him Don Pietro of Aragon, the Duke of Calabria’s younger son, a boy of four years old; then came the four sons of the king—Don Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, Don Federigo, Count of Altamura, Don Giovanni, and Don Arrigo.[404]Next to the latter sat the Count of Belcastro, then came the Count of Ventimiglia and Messer Carlo da Toralto. The Florentine consul, Tommaso Ginori, and Lorenzo Strozzi sat one on each side of Marino Caracciolo; next to them came Francesco Nori (one of the victims of the Pazzi conspiracy) and Andrea Spanocchi of Siena. The seats at the other end of the table were occupied by the Commander de Requesens, Ferrante di Gennaro, and Messer Federigo Carvajal, Commander of Rimini. The outer side of the long table was left for the sewers and cup-bearers, who served the guests and tasted the dishes before presenting them to the princes. Besides these, courtiers stood around the table, partly in attendance partly joining in the conversation. The order of the dinner was as follows: First the introductory course; to each guest was presented a little dish of gilt cakes made of pine-apple kernels, and a little majolica cup containing a beverage made of milk and called Natta (guincata). This was followed by eight silver dishes decorated with coats of arms and mottoes, and containing jelly made from the breast of capons; the dish intended for the duke had, in the middle, a fountain which threw up a shower of orange-flower water. The first part of the meal consisted of twelve courses of different kinds of meat, game, veal, ham, pheasants, partridges, capons, chickens, and blanc-mange; at the end there was placed before the duke a large silver dish, from which, when the cover was taken off, a number of birds flewout. On two large salvers were brought two peacocks, apparently alive, with their tails spread, burning perfumes issuing from their bills, and on their breasts, attached to a silken ribbon, the duke’s arms and the mottoModus et ordo. The second part of the entertainment consisted of nine courses of sweets of various kinds, tarts, light and delicate pastry, with hippocras. The wines, mostly native—Italian or Sicilian—were numerous, and between every two guests was placed a list of the fifteen different kinds, of which the lighter found most favour. At the end of the banquet scented water was offered to everyone in which to dip his hands; then the table-cloth was removed, and on the table was placed a great dish containing a mountain of green boughs with precious essences whose perfume spread through the hall.In the middle of the banquet some mumming[405]was announced. Eight youths entered dressed as huntsmen, with horns, hounds, and slain game; they were musicians of the chapel royal, and took leave after entertaining the company with some pleasing music. After dinner the guests went to the next room, where they entered into lively discourse and listened to music and singing. The duke and the Count of Belcastro conversed with the Florentine merchants and spoke of scarcely anything but Florence and the prince’s stay in Tuscany. After about an hour the sewers brought the dessert; for each person a silver dish of various kinds of sweets, with covers made of wax and sugar; those for the princes and knights adorned with coloured coats of arms and mottoes, those for the merchants with escutcheons and trade-marks. Cup-bearers also brought wine in gold and silver goblets. Towards the fifth hour of the night the guests departed, having stayed about four hours. The whole house was full of the courtiers and servants of the princesand nobles. All praised the excellency of the dishes; never, it was said, had a more splendid banquet been known. Salutati’s love of show, however, brought its own punishment; unless indeed he was ruined by the heavy troubles brought upon his home by these same Neapolitan princes and nobles not long after. Four or five years after this banquet, according to his own declaration to the registrars, he had returned to his native city a penniless man, intending to give up his business altogether, as, under the sad circumstances of the time and the heavy burdens of the community, he was working at a clear loss. About this time he changed his residence to Rome, where he was engaged in banking business in 1491.[406]Such doings as these, however, were exceptional; generally, the mode of life in Florence, as throughout Italy, was simple. In describing the English plenipotentiary who spent some time with Pope Eugene, Vespasiano da Bisticci remarks that he had given up his native custom of sitting four hours at table and adopted the Italian fashion of having but one dish, from which the whole household dined together. Even in the noblest houses there was no extravagance; they had only the produce of the immediate neighbourhood and, in particular, of their own estates. Thus it was that an increase of rural industry was doubly desirable. In later days it was wont to be related of Filippo Strozzi the Elder that he introduced the cultivation of the artichoke and that of a new species of fig, and both Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici carefully followed the progress of agriculture. At parties there was no lack of intellectual enjoyments, such as music and improvisation. Politian gives, in a letter to Pico della Mirandola, an account of a dinner at the house of Paolo Orsini, who was in the service of the Republic; on this occasion Orsini’s son, a boy of eleven, stood up and sang some verses of his own composition.Banquets given for entertainment, as well as for learned discourse, chiefly took place at the villas. The richer and more distinguished Florentines divided their time between the city and the country. It has been seen how the pleasant, healthy, fertile neighbourhood of Florence, especially the hills easily attainable for both pedestrians and horsemen, became covered with villas. These gradually spread further out in all directions, up and down the valley of the Arno, beyond Fiesole and Ponte a Sieve to Mugello, better suited for a real summer residence; along the line of hills towards Prato and the valley of the Bisenzio; on the left bank of the Arno through the valleys of the Ema, the Pesa, and the Elsa, and the rich grape-country of Chianti, to the Sienese border. In proportion to the number and beauty of the city residences the number and richness of the country-houses increased also. Hither came princes, kings, and popes; here they enjoyed hospitality at once grand, cordial, and cheerful. The country-life contributed not a little to arouse and maintain liveliness, freshness, fertility, and elasticity of mind in those who were overwhelmed with grave business of all kinds. The villas, far more than the town-houses, were the places where men met for social intercourse, partly because there they could keep themselves more free from business, partly because they were there not troubled with the want of space which was an inconvenience in the city. The villa-life of theliteratihas been already mentioned. The remarks concerning country-residences and country-life made by Leon Battista Alberti, about the time now under consideration, in his book ‘The Father of the Family,’[407]throw light on an important side of the condition of the citizens, and give a glimpse into the temperament and tastes of the classes who held the direction of the commonwealth. These men did not give themselves up to idle pastimes, but to gaining and keeping a clear survey of personal and civilrelations, and to increasing their own prosperity, and with it that of others, by a wise culture which looked beyond the limits of ordinary domestic economy.There was a darker side to this country-life, and among its shadows was that of the gaming-table. As far back as 1285 a decree had been found necessary forbidding the use of dice and other games of chance,[408]and in the year before the Pazzi conspiracy another similar decree was issued.[409]These prohibitions, however, shared the fate of the sumptuary laws, and no doubt the relations with Naples in the fourteenth century did no good in this respect. Still the Florentines never went such lengths as disgraced the society of cardinals and great lords at Rome in the latter half of the fifteenth century in the days of Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII. Alberti, who in another of his writings[410]describes gaming and its attendant ruin arising from either loss or gain and the bad company inseparable from it, probably witnessed these corruptions more in Rome than in his native land. But while in the city, where they were more exposed to view, men proceeded more cautiously and chess was the game chiefly played, the villas were too often scenes of gambling. That this habit was by no means rooted out in the city is shown by the history of St. Antonine. After the holy archbishop had been preaching one day in the church of Sto. Stefano he passed, with the cross carried before him, through the Borgo Sant’Apostolo. As he was passing the Loggia of the Buondelmonti and saw a company at play, he entered and overthrew the tables; the gamblers, ashamed, threw themselves at his feet and begged for pardon.[411]The games which were also bodily exercises, and lived on in another form, as thegiuoco del pallone, have already been mentioned. They were not without danger; in 1487 a sonof Ugolino Verino lost his life by a blow from a ball while engaged in the game ofMaglio. During the uncommonly sharp winter of 1491 these games took place on the frozen surface of the Arno. Hunting of all kinds had always been a favourite pastime; in many country-houses may be seen places prepared for decoying birds. Hawking stood first of all in the lists of amusements. For graver exercises of the chase there was a better field in the woods of Mugello, the low country round Pisa, the Volterra country, and the bordering Maremma, than in the well-built and thickly-inhabited environs of the city. As for the stage, profane drama, as is shown by the remarks of Poliziano, was just in the dawn of its existence, and in its present antiquated form only suited for the higher circles. This last was also the condition of the Latin dramas, of which a great number had been composed since the beginning of the fourteenth century. Classical comedies were performed by students. May 12, 1488, the ‘Menæchmi’ of Plautus, a favourite and oft-copied piece, was acted under the direction of Messer Paolo Comparini, probably one of the professors at the university. Poliziano wrote the Latin prologue for this performance, at which Lorenzo was present.[412]The sacred plays continued to attract high and low; and, besides the customary representations on feast-days, they never failed to be performed for the edification of foreign princes and potentates who came to the city. The Florentines seem to have been especially skilled in these dramatic representations, for their companies acted in other places outside their own city, for example, at Rome. Famous artists, like Brunelleschi and the engineer Cecca, who met his death in the Faenza campaign of 1488, invented the apparatus for these mystery-plays and also for the processions in the open air, on which occasions mass was said on theringhieraof the palace of the Signoria beforethe people who thronged the square. The most solemn procession of all was that on the eve of St. John; the scene was the precincts of the cathedral and the baptistery, where a gigantic machinery of clouds, with saints and angels, was built up under a lofty canopy of linen.[413]The feasts of the Church were many and splendid; most chiefly that of St. John, which was connected with the history of the city and the State. On the eve of this day and on the day itself the shops of the merchants and artificers made a display of their finest goods; Lorenzo lent his most valuable show-pieces to his friends; and in the Baptistery was exhibited the great silver reredos with its statuettes and reliefs. The splendour was heightened by the participation of the numerous clerical and lay societies, and by the influence of the festivals on the patriotism of the multitude through their connection with glorious events, the memory of which was kept alive among the people by these reciprocal relations. These historical reminiscences went back to the very earliest mythical times of the city. Mystery-plays, shows, and similar festivals were not confined to the churches, companies, and public occasions and places, but also took place in the houses of distinguished citizens, and artists constantly took part in them.[414]When it is considered that at the beginning of the next century the number of the civil companies or brotherhoods for religious exercises amounted to 370,[415]partly for children and partly for adults, it may easily be understood how closely domestic life was intertwined with that of the Church.Some of these societies, called Standard-companies (Compagnie di Stendardo) did not approve of social cheerfulness. But the unions of the lower classes for the purpose of festivities, shows, games, and merrymakings were those called potenze. Their origin is commonly referred to the time of the Duke of Athens; it was probably contemporary with thedevelopment of the democratic element in the commonwealth. These societies, whose festivals and performances strongly resembled a carnaval, were also intended for spiritual exercises. Their number differed greatly at different times; their names are mostly fantastically derived from the occupation or residence of the parties concerned; there was an emperor of the Prato of Ognisanti, a king of the wool-carders of Orsanmichele, and various others with similar titles derived from localities in Camaldoli; monarchs of Sant’Ambrogio and Terrarossa, dukes of the Via Guelfa, of the Arno, of Camporeggi, of the moon, the dove, the owl; princes of the apple and of the standard-carriage, grand signors of the Pitti and of the dyers, lords of the chain, the swallow, the kitchen-range, the sword, the scourge, the elm, and suchlike names. They all bore coats of arms on their banners; thus the emperor of the Prato displayed an eagle; the grand signor of the dyers, a caldron standing on the fire; the duke of the Arno, a pillar of the Rubaconte bridge, with himself majestically seated thereon, surrounded by players. These societies had for their chief object carnaval-amusements, with games and pastimes which degenerated into wild orgies, till in the sixteenth century the license became so great, the waste of time and money and the annoyance to the other citizens so disgraceful, that, after restrictions had been tried in vain, the whole thing was put an end to.[416]Lorenzo has been reproached with having encouraged shows and entertainments in order to keep the people occupied and well-disposed towards himself. He probably acted with this view just as much as the Duke of Athens; and when the Medici came back in 1512 from their long exile, his son Giuliano and his grandson Lorenzo employed these same means, companies and pastimes, chiefly, as a historian of the Medicean party, Filippo de’ Nerli, confesses, in order to keep the citizens and common people in goodhumour with triumphs, festivals, and public shows, and to gather the young nobles around themselves.[417]But the inclinations and habits of the people made the attainment of Lorenzo’s object easy to him. The widespread feeling for art, which gave a special charm to all public displays, contributed not a little thereto.Lorenzo revolutionised and developed the songs of the carnaval. The romance writer Lasca relates[418]the state in which he found the carnaval and what he made of it. Youths and men were wont to walk about the streets in women’s clothes and mimick the girls and women on May-day. The songs they sang were all much the same; the variety introduced into their form and substance by Lorenzo was enhanced by the melodies of Heinrich Isaak. The first masquerade of this kind was that of the glass-blowers and pastrycooks, with a three-part choir. The Triumphs (trionfi) were great mythological or allegorical performances; the Chariots (carri), representations of works, &c. Richly dressed horsemen, to the number of 300, rode beside these chariots, which came out in the afternoon and often enlivened the streets till far into the night, accompanied by men on foot carrying white wax torches. There was also instrumental music and singing in four or eight parts, sometimes even fifteen parts. According to the style and contents of the songs, so the nature of these popular amusements was varied. In several of Lorenzo’s carnaval-songs the license of the day is but too evident; they were downright Roman saturnalia. Later on, when reaction took place against this worldliness, the firstthing attacked was the carnaval. It will be seen hereafter that this opposition had begun long before men’s minds were biassed in a new direction in consequence of a revolution in the political circumstances of Italy and the foreboding of evil to come. The sobering change which followed this license is shown by a satirical dialogue in verse on the carnaval, which was forbidden the houses and streets; a popular production of historical value on this account, that it expresses a foreboding of the many evils which were to befall Rome—Rome, the home of the saturnalia, which threatened to swallow up all life and effort as in a whirlpool:[419]Questo è stato carnascialeC’ha ’l cervel nelle scarpette,Con suo certe gente gretteC’ han giocato il capitale:Hanno avuto certe stretteTu Fiorenza le lor mercíeStazonate brutte e lercíeSì che han perso ogni lor fede.Poi che vai, cammina prestoPer l’Italia tutta quanta,Et a Roma tua ch’è santa,Tu farai questo protesto:Che tempesta a lei vien tanta,Che stupisce il cielo e ’l mondo:Lancie, spade e squadre a tondoChiariran la sua gran fede.Amid the coarse sensual doings of the time there were yet some festivals in which, although accompanied by immoderate display, poetic feeling found room for expression. During one carnaval Lorenzo got up a brilliant procession representing the triumph of Paulus Æmilius; it was on this occasion that the young painter Francesco Granacci gavethe first proofs of his remarkable talent for decoration. In another procession of the same kind the planets were personified and easily recognised by their emblems, and were drawn through the streets in seven chariots amid the sound of music and songs composed for the occasion.[420]Allegorical representations of this sort were common. Twenty or thirty years later Raphael gave them the highest consecration of art in his pictures of the planets, and the multitude was not lacking in a sense of allegory. These gay scenes were rivalled by the carnaval procession got up by Bartolommeo Benci in honour of Marietta Strozzi Giachinotti, a granddaughter of Palla.[421]Eight young men of distinguished families—Pucci, Altoviti, Vespucci, Girolami, and others—took part in it. On the evening of the carnaval they all went together to the house of the Benci, whose name is still borne by a street in the Sta. Croce quarter. They were all dressed in vests of silver and crimson brocade, and mounted on horses with silken housings, each accompanied by eight grooms and thirty torch-bearers. After supper the whole party proceeded to the lady’s house, followed by four men carrying a stage twenty ells high, made of branches of laurel, yew, cypress, and other evergreens, and adorned with a number of allegorical representations of the triumph of love, with the escutcheons of the lady and the author of the festival, surmounted by a bleeding and burning heart from which rockets flew up. Round about were pipers and mounted pages dressed in green. Bartolommeo Benci, with gilt wings fastened to his shoulders, came riding on a handsome and richly caparisoned horse, surrounded by fifteen youths of good family dressed in crimson, and 150 torch-bearers wearing his colours. Amerigo and Francesco Benci and the lady’s brothers Nanni and Strozza Strozzi joined the party. The gentlemen, with gilt spears in their hands,showed off their horses before the windows; then Bartolommeo took the wings from off his shoulders and threw them on the triumphal stage, which at once burst into flames, while a number of rockets flew up from it, some high in the air, some towards the house. When the fireworks were over the party retired, the giver of the entertainment making his horse step backwards till he was out of the square. They then went round to the houses of the lady-loves of all the gentlemen, and finished with an aubade (mattinata) before the house of Marietta, who during the whole scene remained at the window, between four wax torches, ‘with such a stately grace as Lucretia herself would not have needed to be ashamed of.’ The show ended at dawn of day with a breakfast at Bartolommeo’s house. All the Signoria’s servants, who had kept order during the night, received stockings of the Benci colours.The people always preserved their unwearied gaiety, which Ariosto called ‘lo spirito bizarro fiorentino.’ They were always wide awake, ready for a jest, keen in perception, quick at a repartee, disposed to give merit its due, but with the eyes of a lynx for every weakness. The merry meetings with their stories, not inventions of the Decamerone but the links that connected it with the prevailing manners, easily degenerated into buffoonery, as many examples remain to show. As the Florentines went round as jesters to the courts of princes, so they had in the herald or knight of the Signoria a sort of official buffoon who was, however, employed in earnest as well as in jest. The best known jesters belong to the fifteenth century; of these, the barber Burchiello represents the literary type, while the chief example of the ordinary jester with his verbal witticisms is the Piovano Arlotto or Arlotto Mainardi, vicar of a little place in the diocese of Fiesole, who is mentioned in Lorenzo’s ‘Beoni,’ a true mirror of the somewhat coarse-grained wit of these revels. Besides the tales of Francesco Sacchetti, written at its commencement, which are satirical in theirplot as well as in their too often licentious phraseology, the two best known examples of buffoonery overstepping the acknowledged limits of fiction, both in the form of romances, belong to the fifteenth century. The one story is that of the fat cabinet-maker, Manetto Ammanatini, a jest which is said to have driven its victim, a master of artistic cabinet-making and tarsia-work, away to Hungary. It originated with Brunelleschi and his artist-friends, and the actual authorship of the tale has been attributed to him. The other story treats of Bianco Alfani, who was made to believe that he had been chosen Podestà of Norcia, and had to suffer for the delusion.[422]The species of humour which distinguishes these compositions was long preserved in thevilleggiature. Lorenzo was no stranger to it, and Leo X., in the story of Baraballo, gave himself up to it in a manner little becoming his dignity.As regards moral weakness and defects this period was certainly not better than its neighbours; and there can be no hesitation in accusing it of having, by gradually accustoming people to the powers that then were, paved the way for the destruction of the commonwealth in favour of one man, who was not a Lorenzo. The lamentations over the corruption of the times were very frequent. ‘O city of Florence!’ cried the honest Vespasiano da Bisticci in 1480, ‘thou art full of usury and dishonest gain! The one devours the other; greed has made thy people foes one towards the other. Evil-doing has become so habitual that no one is ashamed of it. In these latter days thou hast witnessedsuch unheard-of doings among thy citizens, such disorders and failures, and dost not yet perceive that it is a judgment from God, and thus thou continuest in thy hardness of heart. There is no hope for thee, for thou thinkest of nought but money-making; and yet thou seest how the wealth of thy citizens passeth away like smoke as soon as they have closed their eyes.’ Whatever might be the state of affairs, however, such words as these are not to be taken literally. There was an immense amount of good sterling material left in the people who had outstripped others on the road to intellectual knowledge, civil order, and industrial development. The peculiar relation between the different classes, which, in the ultimate development of democracy, in some measure neutralised its evils, struck root so deeply that it was never completely destroyed by the predominance of Spanish manners which undermined and strove against it for centuries. The Tuscan countryman, raised by the old colony-system, which formed a sort of joint possession, assumed an attitude of freedom towards his lord; the hard and fast lines by which classes were divided in other lands were never known here. The Florentine nobility never forgot that by far the greater part of their number had risen from the ranks of the people in times which were not remote enough to be buried in the night of ages; and in their persons the people felt themselves to a certain extent ennobled. Feudalism never attained its full force here; even when its tendencies prevailed throughout all the rest of Italy except Venice, in Florence it had little more than a formal existence. Down to the extinction of the Medici race, with a few exceptions, they never cast off the traditions of the citizen element. Thus in Florence there were never, as elsewhere, violent conflicts aroused by the sharpness of social contrasts. Conflicts of another kind were avoided by the fact that, since the strengthening of the commonwealths, the higher orders of clergy, notwithstanding their considerable possessions, exercised no real territorial power andalmost always kept on good terms with the commonwealths. In the appointment of bishops, too, the popular element on the whole prevailed, though sometimes, and indeed repeatedly during the fifteenth century, single appointments were made from a purely papal point of view. The reaction which set in so soon after Lorenzo’s death against the laxity of morals which is laid to his charge, and the heroic perseverance with which these Florentines defended their independence for nearly forty years, prove most clearly what wholesome qualities were hidden within the nature of this genuine, pliant, powerful citizen-people.The picture of the Florentines in the last days of the Republic, sketched by an historian of the following century,[423]is equally true of Lorenzo’s time: ‘I do not share the opinion of those who refuse to admit that the Florentines can be noble-minded and consider them low and plebeian because they are merchants. I have often secretly wondered how people who from their childhood have been accustomed to handle bales of wool and silken threads, or to work like slaves all day and part of the night at the loom or the dye-cauldron, often, when needed, display such loftiness of heart and greatness of soul that they speak and act surpassingly well. The air, a medium between the keen atmosphere of Arezzo and the heavy air of Pisa, doubtless has some influence on this peculiarity. Whosoever considers deeply the nature and manners of the Florentines must arrive at the conclusion that they are more fitted to command than to obey. I do not deny that there are among them haughty, covetous, and violent men, such as are to be found elsewhere. Nay, they are even worse here than in other places; for as talent and merit are more brilliant there than elsewhere, so also evil qualities are more conspicuous—so hard is it for them to preserve moderation. Their manner of life is simple and thrifty, but distinguished by cleanliness suchas is not met with elsewhere. It may be said that in this respect artisans and people who live by daily labour are a pattern to the citizens of higher position; for whereas the latter are easily led away to the taverns if they hear that good wine is to be had there, and give themselves a day of pleasure, the former stay at home with the thriftiness of tradespeople who work seeking for their enjoyment in advance, and with the modesty of citizens who understand moderation, rules, and discipline, and will not quit the safe path. Of course there are families which have a great household and a rich table, such as would become noblemen. People call each other by their Christian names, also by their family names, and usually say ‘thou’ unless there is a great difference of rank or age. The knights, doctors, prebendaries, and canons are entitled Messere, the professors Maestro, and the monks Padre.’Leon Battista Alberti and the pious Fra Giovanni Dominici speak in similar terms of the respect for parents and superiors.[424]‘My father,’ Alberti describes his cousin Francesco as saying, ‘never sat down on public occasions when his brother, who had received the honour of knighthood, was present; and he pronounced it as his opinion that one ought not to sit down in the presence of one’s father or the head of the family. Your Romans,’ he added, turning to Leon Battista, ‘who are now ill-conducted in all things (in ogni cosa mal corretti oggi), have likewise fallen into great error in this respect: they honour their parents less than their neighbours, and thus grow up in disorder and vice.’ Fra Giovanni recommends Madonna Bartolommea degli Obizzi to teach her children before all things to reverence their parents, and thus secure earthly happiness. We have before remarked how Lorenzo impressed on his son the duty of showing proper respect for his elders; on this point he was always consistent. The good old habits of strictness werealso kept up by many distinguished women. In Lorenzo’s time there are no such charming portraits as those sketched in his grandfather’s days by the good Vespasiano;[425]but Alessandra de’ Bardi, wife of Lorenzo Strozzi; Francesca Giacomini Tebalducci, wife of Donato Acciaiuolo; Nanna Valori, wife of Giannozzo Pandolfini; Caterina Strozzi Ardinghelli; Saracina Giacomini Acciaiuolo, and others, could not fail to have worthy successors; and the beautiful and dignified female portraits which give such a peculiar charm to Ghirlandajo’s frescoes in Sta. Maria Novella would alone be enough to prove that the generation had not died out. Times had become more settled and peaceful, and since 1478 there had been no sudden overthrow or turn of fortune such as had hitherto rapidly succeeded each other. In the undisturbed peace of their homes good women found ample scope for the practice of the Christian virtues which had distinguished their mothers and grandmothers, often widowed or homeless in early youth, amid the stormy days of trouble.Knighthood has been frequently alluded to in this work. While nobility of birth was attended by civil disadvantages, personal nobility, or knighthood, had a peculiar value of its own. This distinction was a relic of the romantic days of Charles the Great. In imitation of kings and emperors the commonwealth claimed the power of granting it, and in 1288 the first example is said to have occurred in the war against Pisa. Knighthood was a necessary qualification for the office of Podestà, and was conferred on those appointed if they had not previously received it. Knights of this sort were calledCavalieri di popolo. Two cases of strangely conferred knighthood occurred in the fourteenth century. After the rising of the lower classes on July 20, 1378, more than sixty citizens, with Salvestro de’ Medici at their head, were knighted at the request of the multitude. When quietwas in some degree restored these knights of the Ciompi, as they were called, were summoned to declare whether they wished to keep the dignity thus tumultuously conferred on them; in which case they were to be knighted over again by a syndic of the commonwealth who had himself attained that honour. Thirty-one accepted the offer. On October 15 they assembled in the church of the Annunziata and thence proceeded, in knightly attire, to the great square; and there, in presence of the Signoria, the Podestà—a Venetian nobleman—completed the ceremony as syndic of the commonwealth, whereupon they took the oaths of allegiance and received from the Gonfalonier their lances, standards, and shields with the arms of the people.[426]On April 26, 1389, two members of the Panciatichi family, one a child not much more than four years old, were made knights of the people. Great honour was shown them, and like Cola Rienzi in Rome of old, they, with many of their relations and friends, spent the night in the Baptistery, where seven great beds were set up; and the next day a banquet took place in the convent of Sta. Maria Novella[427]at which 250 citizens were present.The knights of the people were divided into two classes-thecavalieri di corredo, knighted for civil services, and thecavalieri di scudofor military ones; the former named from the banquet which they gave after the ceremony, the latter from the shield; like thenoblesse de robeandnoblesse d’épéein France. Both classes bore on their breasts, or on their helmets, shields, &c., the arms of the people, usually with the red lily of the Republic on a round, white escutcheon, sometimes also with the arms of the Guelf party. Besides thesethere were other knights who had received their dignity from Popes or foreign sovereigns, especially the kings of France, on embassies and suchlike occasions; and others who had been knighted on the battle-field by a commander-in-chief, as a reward for their bravery. These last were entitledcavalieri d’arme, to distinguish them from thecavalieri di scudo. The wearing of the golden spurs, afterwards so much abused, was the prerogative of these military knights.Embassies had always been important to the Florentines in a political point of view, as well as a means of obtaining personal distinction. In the first jubilee year, when twelve of them appeared before Pope Boniface VIII. as the representatives of various states, he called them the fifth element. They always preserved their reputation as good diplomatists. Not only did clergy, statesmen, and scholars take an active part in diplomacy, it was a career open even to the Grandi, the real nobility who were excluded from all the offices of state. In the fifteenth century the splendour with which the embassies were conducted corresponded with the importance of the state and the personal rank of the ambassadors. Their posts, however, were not lucrative; for if, as was the case in 1483, each ambassador received about ten gold florins a day, the expenses in excess of those which he could charge for were very heavy. Besides the solemn embassies on special occasions, there were resident envoys at Naples, Rome, Milan, and Venice. The former were numerous and brilliant, and comprised, besides the actual ambassadors, younger men (who, according to a later regulation, were not to be under the age of twenty-four), who went to learn the business of diplomacy and see foreign lands; there was also a chancellor and other officials. Only two examples need be referred to for the high honour in which Florentine embassies were held—Neri Capponi’s famous embassy to Venice during the war of the Visconti, and that to Louis XI. on his accession. ‘Never,’ says Macchiavelli, ‘did that Signoria receive a prince with so much honour asthey did Neri.’ King Louis, with the Duke of Britanny and a suite of about forty horsemen, advanced two leagues from Tours to meet Monsignor Filippo de’ Medici, Piero de’ Pazzi, and Buonaccorso Pitti (Luca’s son), envoys of the Republic, and kept his hat in his hand because the first-named would not be covered.[428]Travelling was slow; the embassy had left Florence on October 27, and reached Tours on December 23. With what splendour Piero de’ Pazzi returned home has been mentioned already.

LIFE IN FLORENCE.

In1472 certain Venetians addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici and Niccolò Ardinghelli a pamphlet wherein they extolled the advantages of their city and its inhabitants, and abused Florence, her constitution, her policy, her commerce and society, and the house of Medici. The challenge was accepted by Benedetto Dei, a scion of an ancient family, a man of much experience in affairs of state and of commerce, and who had been for many years Florentine ambassador in Constantinople, from whence he went to Damascus on a commission for the Sultan. He defended his native city in a lengthy and rather warm reply; a curious testimony to the deep-seated differences between two states which were often bitter enemies and scarcely ever real friends.[395]‘Florence,’ says the irritated patriot, who seems not to have been acquainted with the brilliant picture of the industry and commerce of Venice drawn in the Great Council in 1420 by the Doge Tommaso Mocenigo,[396]‘is more beautiful and 540 years older than your Venice. We spring from triply noble blood. We are one-third Roman, one-third Frankish, and one-third Fiesolan. Compare with this, I pray you, the elements of which you are composed! First of all you are Slavonians, secondly Paduans of Antenor’s dirty traitor-brood, thirdly fisher-people from Malamocco and Chioggia.We hold by the Gospel of S. John, you by that of S. Mark, in which there is as much difference as between fine French wool and that with which mattresses are stuffed. We have round about us thirty thousand estates, owned by noblemen and merchants, citizens and craftsmen, yielding us yearly bread and meat, wine and oil, vegetables and cheese, hay and wood, to the value of 900,000 ducats in cash, as you Venetians and Genoese, Chians and Rhodians, who come to buy them, know well enough. We have two trades greater than four of yours in Venice put together—wool and silk. Witness the Roman court and that of the king of Naples, the Marches and Sicily, Constantinople and Pera, Broussa and Adrianople, Salonika and Gallipoli, Chios and Rhodes, where to your envy and disgust there are Florentine consuls and merchants, churches and houses, banks and offices, and whither go more Florentine wares of all kinds, especially silken stuffs and gold and silver brocades, than from Venice, Genoa and Lucca put together. Ask your own merchants who visit Marseilles, Avignon, Lyons, and the whole of Provence, Bruges, Antwerp, London, and other cities, where there are great banks and royal warehouses, fine dwellings, and stately churches; ask them who should know, as they go to the fairs every year, whether they have seen the banks of the Medici, the Pazzi, the Capponi, the Buondelmonti, the Corsini, the Falconieri, the Portinari, and the Ghini, the bank of the Medici and their partners at Milan, and a hundred others which I will not name, because to do so I should need at least a ream of paper. You say we are bankrupt since Cosimo’s death. If we have had losses, it is owing to your dishonesty and the wickedness of your Levant merchants, who have made us lose hundreds of thousands—people with well-known names who have filled Constantinople and Pera with failures, whereof our great houses could tell many a tale. But though Cosimo is dead and buried, he did not take his gold florins and the rest of his money and bonds with him into the other world; nor hisbanks and store-houses, nor his woollen and silken cloths, nor his plate and jewellery; but he left them all to his worthy sons and grandsons, who take pains to keep them and to add to them, to the vexation of the Venetians and other envious foes, whose tongues are more malicious and slanderous than if they were Sienese.’ Such was the Florentine’s retort to the attacks of the Venetians, whom he bitterly attacked in his turn, when in 1479 they concluded the disadvantageous treaty by which they ceded Negroponte and other of their Levantine possessions to the Turks.

‘Our beautiful Florence,’ says the same chronicler, ‘contains within the city in this present year 1472, 270 shops belonging to the wool-merchants’ guild, from whence their wares are sent to Rome and the Marches, Naples and Sicily, Constantinople and Pera, Adrianople, Broussa and the whole of Turkey. It contains also eighty-three rich and splendid warehouses of the silk-merchants’ guild, and furnishes gold and silver stuffs, velvet, brocade, damask, taffeta, and satin, to Rome and Naples, Catalonia and the whole of Spain, especially Seville, and to Turkey and Barbary. The principal fairs to which these wares go are those of Genoa, the Marches, Ferrara, Mantua, and the whole of Italy; Lyons, Avignon, Montpelier, Antwerp, and London.’ The number of the great banks amounted to thirty-three, that of the cloth-warehouses, which also retailed woollen cloths of all kinds (tagliare), to thirty-two; the shops of the cabinet-makers, whose business was carving and inlaid work (tarsia), to eighty-four, and the workshops of the stone-cutters and marble-workers in the city and its immediate neighbourhood to fifty-four. There were forty-four goldsmiths’ and jewellers’ shops, thirty gold-beaters, silver-wire drawers, and wax-figure makers; the last being in those days a productive branch of industry, as it was the custom to consecrate in the churches and chapels wax-figures of all kinds (voti), chiefly images. ‘Go through all the cities of the world,’ adds the chronicler, ‘nowhere will you find, nor will youever be able to find, artists in wax equal to those we have now in Florence, and to whom the figures in the Nunziata (the Servite Church) can bear witness.’ Another flourishing branch of industry was the making of the light and elegant gold and silver wreaths and garlands which were worn by young maidens of high degree, and gave their name to the artist-family of Ghirlandajo. Sixty-six was the number of the apothecaries’ and grocers’ shops; seventy that of the butchers, besides eight large shops in which were sold fowls of all kinds, as well as game, and also the native wines which were considered best with game, particularly the pungent white wine, called Trebbiano, from San Giovanni in the upper Arno valley; it would wake the dead, adds Dei, in its praise. The Florentine had a right to be proud of his ‘beautiful’ city. From 1422, when Gino Capponi, the conqueror of Pisa, introduced the art of gold-spinning (the gold thread hitherto used having been procured from Cöln and from Cyprus),[397]down to the time of Lorenzo, was the most brilliant period of the silk manufacture which brought great wealth to the city. The Emperor Sigismund’s ill-famed consort, Barbara von Cilly, once sent one of her people with 1,200 gold florins and three bars of gold to buy silken stuffs. In 1422 the first armed galley was equipped for the voyage to Alexandria, and when she was launched there was a solemn procession to implore the protection of Heaven. Thus Florence began to do without the help of Venetian and Genoese vessels; and the two latter states never got over their vexation at this. The Florentines, however, never became famous sailors. Meanwhile the home-produce kept pace with this freer connection with transmarine lands. There seem to have been no silk-worms reared in Florence before 1423; this branch of industry was much older in other parts of Tuscany: in Modigliana, Pistoja, Pescia, Lucca, &c. In Lorenzo’s days the artisans began to emigrate,and transplanted their art to foreign lands. The restrictions of emigration by statute proved at first useless and afterwards injurious. The extent of the intercourse between Florence and other lands is shown by the list of commercial firms established in various countries in 1469; in France there were twenty-four; in the kingdom of Naples thirty-seven; in Turkey no less than fifty, which were under the protection of the consul Mainardo Ubaldini, whose general relations with the Turkish government became so much the better, as those of the Venetians, whose political and commercial interests too often clashed, grew less secure. Long afterwards it was known that the Florentines held in their hands the whole commerce of France; and in 1521, when war broke out between Charles V. and Francis I., and the Florentine merchant-colony at Lyons found itself in danger, a memorial requesting letters of safe-conduct was addressed to the treasurer Robertet, by no less than thirty houses, including the Albizzi, Guadagni, Panciatichi, Salviati, Bartolini, Strozzi, Gondi, Manetti, Antinori, Dei, Ridolfi, Pitti, Tedaldi, and other familiar names.[398]Many of these families married and settled in France.

In a city where prosperity was so general, it strikes one as remarkable that the rate of interest on money remained so high. When it is remembered that about 1420 the usurers were forbidden to take more than 20 per cent., and that about ten years later the hitherto excluded Jews were admitted in the hope of thereby finding a protection against the greediness of the Christians, it may be easily perceived how shocking the evil was. The complaints about compulsory loans are quite intelligible with such a high rate of interest. That the intended remedy proved fruitless, and Jews and Christians sucked the blood of their neighbours all alike, may be imagined. More than once there was some idea of a public loan establishment. This was the case in1488, when the popular orator Bernardino da Feltre, of the Minorite order, was preaching in Sta. Croce. He tried to obtain Lorenzo’s support for the erection of a Monte di Pietà, but his efforts proved unsuccessful. It was an universally known fact that the execution of the project was prevented because the Signoria was bribed by a rich Jewish money-changer in Pisa, where this trade had found a special nest.[399]Not till three years after Lorenzo’s death a temporary exclusion of the Jews took place, whose gains in Florence alone were reckoned at 50,000,000 gold florins, and the erection by voluntary contributions of the public loan establishment, which, together with that founded by St. Antonine, and other similar ones, was in the course of years exposed to many vicissitudes.

It was natural that the wealth of the merchants should greatly influence their manner of life. The new aristocracy, which had risen in a great measure by trade and commerce, continued, after the pattern of the family at the head of the State, to combine politics with other business, and liked to display a splendour corresponding to their means, not only in buildings, pious foundations, and works of art, but also in the festive occasions of domestic life. Their houses were richly furnished. The numerous cabinet-makers and marble-workers, chiefly engaged on decorative works, were not solely occupied with churches and public buildings; both they, and painters and sculptors of a higher order, vied with each other in the decoration of dwelling-houses. Pictures were interspersed and relieved with marble and terra-cotta busts. At festive banquets fine table-linen, in keeping with the elegance of the plate, was always used. Up to this time there was little exaggerated luxury; the majority were too cautious for that; and if they wanted to honour a distinguished guest or celebrate a wedding, friends lent each other their plate, following the example of the Medici with the Alamanni,Della Stufa, Lanfredini, Nasi, Sassetti, Davanzati, and others.[400]The same thing occurred at a banquet given by Messer Antonio Ridolfi, ex-ambassador at Naples, to the Duke of Calabria, who had stood godfather to his child. On great occasions similar loans, to which all the wealthy citizens contributed, were made to the Signoria. For ordinary occasions people often used, besides silver spoons and forks, gifts of the community or of friends, chiefly brazen table-plate, dishes, cans, salvers, with silver centres and enamelled or niello edges, with the owner’s arms and frequently also those of his wife.[401]Fine crystal was considered necessary for a well-furnished table. Venice provided most of this article, but Tuscany furnished many glass-factories.

The festivals, which increased in frequency in the days of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici and the oft-repeated visits of princes, necessarily contributed to the increase of splendour and gaiety. More than once the cost exceeded the amount of supply. If Luca Pitti far outran his means it was, at least, the indulgence of a noble passion—that of building—which tempted him to such extravagance, and a miscalculation in politics which overthrew him. But others were ruined by senseless luxury. A striking example of this is Benedetto Salutati, who, it will be remembered, took part in Lorenzo’s tournament. He was a grandson of the celebrated chancellor; his father had acquired a considerable fortune in business, in which the son succeeded him. Benedetto, we read,[402]had made himself a fine position and was highly esteemed; but he was far from being able to enter the lists with many others as far as the age and nobility of his family were concerned, nor did his fortune put him in a position to maintain a lasting rivalry with them. Nevertheless, he did vie with them. When he rodeto that tournament at five-and-twenty, the housings and trappings of his horse were adorned with 168 pounds of fine silver at sixteen ducats a pound, and the cost of the work was reckoned at 8,000l.That he united love for art with love for spending is proved by the fact that his silver helmet was wrought by Antonio del Pollaiuolo.[403]But the immoderate luxury into which he launched may be learned from the description of the banquet which he and his fellow-merchants gave, February 16, 1476, to the sons of King Ferrante at Naples, where the Salutati, like so many of their fellow-countrymen, had settled, and had intercourse with the royal house through their connection with the above-mentioned Antonio Ridolfi, whose daughter was Benedetto’s wife. It was as if a Florentine merchant had tried to vie with the splendour shown by Cardinal Pietro Riario when Ercole d’Este’s bride was in Rome. The very arrangement of the house gave a foretaste of what was to come. The staircase was hung with tapestry and wreaths of yew; the great hall was decorated with richly-worked carpets; and from the ceiling, covered with cloth of the Aragonese colours ornamented with the Duke of Calabria’s arms, hung two great chandeliers of carved and gilt wood bearing wax candles. Opposite the principal entrance, on a dais covered with carpets, stood the dining-table, spread with the finest lace over a worked cover. One side of the hall was occupied by a large sideboard, on which stood about eighty ornamental pieces of plate—salvers, basins, fruit-baskets, tankards—mostly silver, some gold, besides the silver table-service, consisting of about three hundred plates of various kinds, bowls, beakers, and dishes. Adjoining the hall were two rooms opening into each other, hung with woollen stuff representing foliage, and handsomely carpeted. Here thecompany assembled before and after dinner, and divers musicians contributed to the liveliness of the meal. The guests took their seats amid a flourish of trumpets and fifes. At one end of the table sat the Count of Altavilla, next to him Don Pietro of Aragon, the Duke of Calabria’s younger son, a boy of four years old; then came the four sons of the king—Don Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, Don Federigo, Count of Altamura, Don Giovanni, and Don Arrigo.[404]Next to the latter sat the Count of Belcastro, then came the Count of Ventimiglia and Messer Carlo da Toralto. The Florentine consul, Tommaso Ginori, and Lorenzo Strozzi sat one on each side of Marino Caracciolo; next to them came Francesco Nori (one of the victims of the Pazzi conspiracy) and Andrea Spanocchi of Siena. The seats at the other end of the table were occupied by the Commander de Requesens, Ferrante di Gennaro, and Messer Federigo Carvajal, Commander of Rimini. The outer side of the long table was left for the sewers and cup-bearers, who served the guests and tasted the dishes before presenting them to the princes. Besides these, courtiers stood around the table, partly in attendance partly joining in the conversation. The order of the dinner was as follows: First the introductory course; to each guest was presented a little dish of gilt cakes made of pine-apple kernels, and a little majolica cup containing a beverage made of milk and called Natta (guincata). This was followed by eight silver dishes decorated with coats of arms and mottoes, and containing jelly made from the breast of capons; the dish intended for the duke had, in the middle, a fountain which threw up a shower of orange-flower water. The first part of the meal consisted of twelve courses of different kinds of meat, game, veal, ham, pheasants, partridges, capons, chickens, and blanc-mange; at the end there was placed before the duke a large silver dish, from which, when the cover was taken off, a number of birds flewout. On two large salvers were brought two peacocks, apparently alive, with their tails spread, burning perfumes issuing from their bills, and on their breasts, attached to a silken ribbon, the duke’s arms and the mottoModus et ordo. The second part of the entertainment consisted of nine courses of sweets of various kinds, tarts, light and delicate pastry, with hippocras. The wines, mostly native—Italian or Sicilian—were numerous, and between every two guests was placed a list of the fifteen different kinds, of which the lighter found most favour. At the end of the banquet scented water was offered to everyone in which to dip his hands; then the table-cloth was removed, and on the table was placed a great dish containing a mountain of green boughs with precious essences whose perfume spread through the hall.

In the middle of the banquet some mumming[405]was announced. Eight youths entered dressed as huntsmen, with horns, hounds, and slain game; they were musicians of the chapel royal, and took leave after entertaining the company with some pleasing music. After dinner the guests went to the next room, where they entered into lively discourse and listened to music and singing. The duke and the Count of Belcastro conversed with the Florentine merchants and spoke of scarcely anything but Florence and the prince’s stay in Tuscany. After about an hour the sewers brought the dessert; for each person a silver dish of various kinds of sweets, with covers made of wax and sugar; those for the princes and knights adorned with coloured coats of arms and mottoes, those for the merchants with escutcheons and trade-marks. Cup-bearers also brought wine in gold and silver goblets. Towards the fifth hour of the night the guests departed, having stayed about four hours. The whole house was full of the courtiers and servants of the princesand nobles. All praised the excellency of the dishes; never, it was said, had a more splendid banquet been known. Salutati’s love of show, however, brought its own punishment; unless indeed he was ruined by the heavy troubles brought upon his home by these same Neapolitan princes and nobles not long after. Four or five years after this banquet, according to his own declaration to the registrars, he had returned to his native city a penniless man, intending to give up his business altogether, as, under the sad circumstances of the time and the heavy burdens of the community, he was working at a clear loss. About this time he changed his residence to Rome, where he was engaged in banking business in 1491.[406]

Such doings as these, however, were exceptional; generally, the mode of life in Florence, as throughout Italy, was simple. In describing the English plenipotentiary who spent some time with Pope Eugene, Vespasiano da Bisticci remarks that he had given up his native custom of sitting four hours at table and adopted the Italian fashion of having but one dish, from which the whole household dined together. Even in the noblest houses there was no extravagance; they had only the produce of the immediate neighbourhood and, in particular, of their own estates. Thus it was that an increase of rural industry was doubly desirable. In later days it was wont to be related of Filippo Strozzi the Elder that he introduced the cultivation of the artichoke and that of a new species of fig, and both Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici carefully followed the progress of agriculture. At parties there was no lack of intellectual enjoyments, such as music and improvisation. Politian gives, in a letter to Pico della Mirandola, an account of a dinner at the house of Paolo Orsini, who was in the service of the Republic; on this occasion Orsini’s son, a boy of eleven, stood up and sang some verses of his own composition.Banquets given for entertainment, as well as for learned discourse, chiefly took place at the villas. The richer and more distinguished Florentines divided their time between the city and the country. It has been seen how the pleasant, healthy, fertile neighbourhood of Florence, especially the hills easily attainable for both pedestrians and horsemen, became covered with villas. These gradually spread further out in all directions, up and down the valley of the Arno, beyond Fiesole and Ponte a Sieve to Mugello, better suited for a real summer residence; along the line of hills towards Prato and the valley of the Bisenzio; on the left bank of the Arno through the valleys of the Ema, the Pesa, and the Elsa, and the rich grape-country of Chianti, to the Sienese border. In proportion to the number and beauty of the city residences the number and richness of the country-houses increased also. Hither came princes, kings, and popes; here they enjoyed hospitality at once grand, cordial, and cheerful. The country-life contributed not a little to arouse and maintain liveliness, freshness, fertility, and elasticity of mind in those who were overwhelmed with grave business of all kinds. The villas, far more than the town-houses, were the places where men met for social intercourse, partly because there they could keep themselves more free from business, partly because they were there not troubled with the want of space which was an inconvenience in the city. The villa-life of theliteratihas been already mentioned. The remarks concerning country-residences and country-life made by Leon Battista Alberti, about the time now under consideration, in his book ‘The Father of the Family,’[407]throw light on an important side of the condition of the citizens, and give a glimpse into the temperament and tastes of the classes who held the direction of the commonwealth. These men did not give themselves up to idle pastimes, but to gaining and keeping a clear survey of personal and civilrelations, and to increasing their own prosperity, and with it that of others, by a wise culture which looked beyond the limits of ordinary domestic economy.

There was a darker side to this country-life, and among its shadows was that of the gaming-table. As far back as 1285 a decree had been found necessary forbidding the use of dice and other games of chance,[408]and in the year before the Pazzi conspiracy another similar decree was issued.[409]These prohibitions, however, shared the fate of the sumptuary laws, and no doubt the relations with Naples in the fourteenth century did no good in this respect. Still the Florentines never went such lengths as disgraced the society of cardinals and great lords at Rome in the latter half of the fifteenth century in the days of Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII. Alberti, who in another of his writings[410]describes gaming and its attendant ruin arising from either loss or gain and the bad company inseparable from it, probably witnessed these corruptions more in Rome than in his native land. But while in the city, where they were more exposed to view, men proceeded more cautiously and chess was the game chiefly played, the villas were too often scenes of gambling. That this habit was by no means rooted out in the city is shown by the history of St. Antonine. After the holy archbishop had been preaching one day in the church of Sto. Stefano he passed, with the cross carried before him, through the Borgo Sant’Apostolo. As he was passing the Loggia of the Buondelmonti and saw a company at play, he entered and overthrew the tables; the gamblers, ashamed, threw themselves at his feet and begged for pardon.[411]

The games which were also bodily exercises, and lived on in another form, as thegiuoco del pallone, have already been mentioned. They were not without danger; in 1487 a sonof Ugolino Verino lost his life by a blow from a ball while engaged in the game ofMaglio. During the uncommonly sharp winter of 1491 these games took place on the frozen surface of the Arno. Hunting of all kinds had always been a favourite pastime; in many country-houses may be seen places prepared for decoying birds. Hawking stood first of all in the lists of amusements. For graver exercises of the chase there was a better field in the woods of Mugello, the low country round Pisa, the Volterra country, and the bordering Maremma, than in the well-built and thickly-inhabited environs of the city. As for the stage, profane drama, as is shown by the remarks of Poliziano, was just in the dawn of its existence, and in its present antiquated form only suited for the higher circles. This last was also the condition of the Latin dramas, of which a great number had been composed since the beginning of the fourteenth century. Classical comedies were performed by students. May 12, 1488, the ‘Menæchmi’ of Plautus, a favourite and oft-copied piece, was acted under the direction of Messer Paolo Comparini, probably one of the professors at the university. Poliziano wrote the Latin prologue for this performance, at which Lorenzo was present.[412]The sacred plays continued to attract high and low; and, besides the customary representations on feast-days, they never failed to be performed for the edification of foreign princes and potentates who came to the city. The Florentines seem to have been especially skilled in these dramatic representations, for their companies acted in other places outside their own city, for example, at Rome. Famous artists, like Brunelleschi and the engineer Cecca, who met his death in the Faenza campaign of 1488, invented the apparatus for these mystery-plays and also for the processions in the open air, on which occasions mass was said on theringhieraof the palace of the Signoria beforethe people who thronged the square. The most solemn procession of all was that on the eve of St. John; the scene was the precincts of the cathedral and the baptistery, where a gigantic machinery of clouds, with saints and angels, was built up under a lofty canopy of linen.[413]The feasts of the Church were many and splendid; most chiefly that of St. John, which was connected with the history of the city and the State. On the eve of this day and on the day itself the shops of the merchants and artificers made a display of their finest goods; Lorenzo lent his most valuable show-pieces to his friends; and in the Baptistery was exhibited the great silver reredos with its statuettes and reliefs. The splendour was heightened by the participation of the numerous clerical and lay societies, and by the influence of the festivals on the patriotism of the multitude through their connection with glorious events, the memory of which was kept alive among the people by these reciprocal relations. These historical reminiscences went back to the very earliest mythical times of the city. Mystery-plays, shows, and similar festivals were not confined to the churches, companies, and public occasions and places, but also took place in the houses of distinguished citizens, and artists constantly took part in them.[414]When it is considered that at the beginning of the next century the number of the civil companies or brotherhoods for religious exercises amounted to 370,[415]partly for children and partly for adults, it may easily be understood how closely domestic life was intertwined with that of the Church.

Some of these societies, called Standard-companies (Compagnie di Stendardo) did not approve of social cheerfulness. But the unions of the lower classes for the purpose of festivities, shows, games, and merrymakings were those called potenze. Their origin is commonly referred to the time of the Duke of Athens; it was probably contemporary with thedevelopment of the democratic element in the commonwealth. These societies, whose festivals and performances strongly resembled a carnaval, were also intended for spiritual exercises. Their number differed greatly at different times; their names are mostly fantastically derived from the occupation or residence of the parties concerned; there was an emperor of the Prato of Ognisanti, a king of the wool-carders of Orsanmichele, and various others with similar titles derived from localities in Camaldoli; monarchs of Sant’Ambrogio and Terrarossa, dukes of the Via Guelfa, of the Arno, of Camporeggi, of the moon, the dove, the owl; princes of the apple and of the standard-carriage, grand signors of the Pitti and of the dyers, lords of the chain, the swallow, the kitchen-range, the sword, the scourge, the elm, and suchlike names. They all bore coats of arms on their banners; thus the emperor of the Prato displayed an eagle; the grand signor of the dyers, a caldron standing on the fire; the duke of the Arno, a pillar of the Rubaconte bridge, with himself majestically seated thereon, surrounded by players. These societies had for their chief object carnaval-amusements, with games and pastimes which degenerated into wild orgies, till in the sixteenth century the license became so great, the waste of time and money and the annoyance to the other citizens so disgraceful, that, after restrictions had been tried in vain, the whole thing was put an end to.[416]Lorenzo has been reproached with having encouraged shows and entertainments in order to keep the people occupied and well-disposed towards himself. He probably acted with this view just as much as the Duke of Athens; and when the Medici came back in 1512 from their long exile, his son Giuliano and his grandson Lorenzo employed these same means, companies and pastimes, chiefly, as a historian of the Medicean party, Filippo de’ Nerli, confesses, in order to keep the citizens and common people in goodhumour with triumphs, festivals, and public shows, and to gather the young nobles around themselves.[417]But the inclinations and habits of the people made the attainment of Lorenzo’s object easy to him. The widespread feeling for art, which gave a special charm to all public displays, contributed not a little thereto.

Lorenzo revolutionised and developed the songs of the carnaval. The romance writer Lasca relates[418]the state in which he found the carnaval and what he made of it. Youths and men were wont to walk about the streets in women’s clothes and mimick the girls and women on May-day. The songs they sang were all much the same; the variety introduced into their form and substance by Lorenzo was enhanced by the melodies of Heinrich Isaak. The first masquerade of this kind was that of the glass-blowers and pastrycooks, with a three-part choir. The Triumphs (trionfi) were great mythological or allegorical performances; the Chariots (carri), representations of works, &c. Richly dressed horsemen, to the number of 300, rode beside these chariots, which came out in the afternoon and often enlivened the streets till far into the night, accompanied by men on foot carrying white wax torches. There was also instrumental music and singing in four or eight parts, sometimes even fifteen parts. According to the style and contents of the songs, so the nature of these popular amusements was varied. In several of Lorenzo’s carnaval-songs the license of the day is but too evident; they were downright Roman saturnalia. Later on, when reaction took place against this worldliness, the firstthing attacked was the carnaval. It will be seen hereafter that this opposition had begun long before men’s minds were biassed in a new direction in consequence of a revolution in the political circumstances of Italy and the foreboding of evil to come. The sobering change which followed this license is shown by a satirical dialogue in verse on the carnaval, which was forbidden the houses and streets; a popular production of historical value on this account, that it expresses a foreboding of the many evils which were to befall Rome—Rome, the home of the saturnalia, which threatened to swallow up all life and effort as in a whirlpool:[419]

Questo è stato carnascialeC’ha ’l cervel nelle scarpette,Con suo certe gente gretteC’ han giocato il capitale:Hanno avuto certe stretteTu Fiorenza le lor mercíeStazonate brutte e lercíeSì che han perso ogni lor fede.Poi che vai, cammina prestoPer l’Italia tutta quanta,Et a Roma tua ch’è santa,Tu farai questo protesto:Che tempesta a lei vien tanta,Che stupisce il cielo e ’l mondo:Lancie, spade e squadre a tondoChiariran la sua gran fede.

Amid the coarse sensual doings of the time there were yet some festivals in which, although accompanied by immoderate display, poetic feeling found room for expression. During one carnaval Lorenzo got up a brilliant procession representing the triumph of Paulus Æmilius; it was on this occasion that the young painter Francesco Granacci gavethe first proofs of his remarkable talent for decoration. In another procession of the same kind the planets were personified and easily recognised by their emblems, and were drawn through the streets in seven chariots amid the sound of music and songs composed for the occasion.[420]Allegorical representations of this sort were common. Twenty or thirty years later Raphael gave them the highest consecration of art in his pictures of the planets, and the multitude was not lacking in a sense of allegory. These gay scenes were rivalled by the carnaval procession got up by Bartolommeo Benci in honour of Marietta Strozzi Giachinotti, a granddaughter of Palla.[421]Eight young men of distinguished families—Pucci, Altoviti, Vespucci, Girolami, and others—took part in it. On the evening of the carnaval they all went together to the house of the Benci, whose name is still borne by a street in the Sta. Croce quarter. They were all dressed in vests of silver and crimson brocade, and mounted on horses with silken housings, each accompanied by eight grooms and thirty torch-bearers. After supper the whole party proceeded to the lady’s house, followed by four men carrying a stage twenty ells high, made of branches of laurel, yew, cypress, and other evergreens, and adorned with a number of allegorical representations of the triumph of love, with the escutcheons of the lady and the author of the festival, surmounted by a bleeding and burning heart from which rockets flew up. Round about were pipers and mounted pages dressed in green. Bartolommeo Benci, with gilt wings fastened to his shoulders, came riding on a handsome and richly caparisoned horse, surrounded by fifteen youths of good family dressed in crimson, and 150 torch-bearers wearing his colours. Amerigo and Francesco Benci and the lady’s brothers Nanni and Strozza Strozzi joined the party. The gentlemen, with gilt spears in their hands,showed off their horses before the windows; then Bartolommeo took the wings from off his shoulders and threw them on the triumphal stage, which at once burst into flames, while a number of rockets flew up from it, some high in the air, some towards the house. When the fireworks were over the party retired, the giver of the entertainment making his horse step backwards till he was out of the square. They then went round to the houses of the lady-loves of all the gentlemen, and finished with an aubade (mattinata) before the house of Marietta, who during the whole scene remained at the window, between four wax torches, ‘with such a stately grace as Lucretia herself would not have needed to be ashamed of.’ The show ended at dawn of day with a breakfast at Bartolommeo’s house. All the Signoria’s servants, who had kept order during the night, received stockings of the Benci colours.

The people always preserved their unwearied gaiety, which Ariosto called ‘lo spirito bizarro fiorentino.’ They were always wide awake, ready for a jest, keen in perception, quick at a repartee, disposed to give merit its due, but with the eyes of a lynx for every weakness. The merry meetings with their stories, not inventions of the Decamerone but the links that connected it with the prevailing manners, easily degenerated into buffoonery, as many examples remain to show. As the Florentines went round as jesters to the courts of princes, so they had in the herald or knight of the Signoria a sort of official buffoon who was, however, employed in earnest as well as in jest. The best known jesters belong to the fifteenth century; of these, the barber Burchiello represents the literary type, while the chief example of the ordinary jester with his verbal witticisms is the Piovano Arlotto or Arlotto Mainardi, vicar of a little place in the diocese of Fiesole, who is mentioned in Lorenzo’s ‘Beoni,’ a true mirror of the somewhat coarse-grained wit of these revels. Besides the tales of Francesco Sacchetti, written at its commencement, which are satirical in theirplot as well as in their too often licentious phraseology, the two best known examples of buffoonery overstepping the acknowledged limits of fiction, both in the form of romances, belong to the fifteenth century. The one story is that of the fat cabinet-maker, Manetto Ammanatini, a jest which is said to have driven its victim, a master of artistic cabinet-making and tarsia-work, away to Hungary. It originated with Brunelleschi and his artist-friends, and the actual authorship of the tale has been attributed to him. The other story treats of Bianco Alfani, who was made to believe that he had been chosen Podestà of Norcia, and had to suffer for the delusion.[422]The species of humour which distinguishes these compositions was long preserved in thevilleggiature. Lorenzo was no stranger to it, and Leo X., in the story of Baraballo, gave himself up to it in a manner little becoming his dignity.

As regards moral weakness and defects this period was certainly not better than its neighbours; and there can be no hesitation in accusing it of having, by gradually accustoming people to the powers that then were, paved the way for the destruction of the commonwealth in favour of one man, who was not a Lorenzo. The lamentations over the corruption of the times were very frequent. ‘O city of Florence!’ cried the honest Vespasiano da Bisticci in 1480, ‘thou art full of usury and dishonest gain! The one devours the other; greed has made thy people foes one towards the other. Evil-doing has become so habitual that no one is ashamed of it. In these latter days thou hast witnessedsuch unheard-of doings among thy citizens, such disorders and failures, and dost not yet perceive that it is a judgment from God, and thus thou continuest in thy hardness of heart. There is no hope for thee, for thou thinkest of nought but money-making; and yet thou seest how the wealth of thy citizens passeth away like smoke as soon as they have closed their eyes.’ Whatever might be the state of affairs, however, such words as these are not to be taken literally. There was an immense amount of good sterling material left in the people who had outstripped others on the road to intellectual knowledge, civil order, and industrial development. The peculiar relation between the different classes, which, in the ultimate development of democracy, in some measure neutralised its evils, struck root so deeply that it was never completely destroyed by the predominance of Spanish manners which undermined and strove against it for centuries. The Tuscan countryman, raised by the old colony-system, which formed a sort of joint possession, assumed an attitude of freedom towards his lord; the hard and fast lines by which classes were divided in other lands were never known here. The Florentine nobility never forgot that by far the greater part of their number had risen from the ranks of the people in times which were not remote enough to be buried in the night of ages; and in their persons the people felt themselves to a certain extent ennobled. Feudalism never attained its full force here; even when its tendencies prevailed throughout all the rest of Italy except Venice, in Florence it had little more than a formal existence. Down to the extinction of the Medici race, with a few exceptions, they never cast off the traditions of the citizen element. Thus in Florence there were never, as elsewhere, violent conflicts aroused by the sharpness of social contrasts. Conflicts of another kind were avoided by the fact that, since the strengthening of the commonwealths, the higher orders of clergy, notwithstanding their considerable possessions, exercised no real territorial power andalmost always kept on good terms with the commonwealths. In the appointment of bishops, too, the popular element on the whole prevailed, though sometimes, and indeed repeatedly during the fifteenth century, single appointments were made from a purely papal point of view. The reaction which set in so soon after Lorenzo’s death against the laxity of morals which is laid to his charge, and the heroic perseverance with which these Florentines defended their independence for nearly forty years, prove most clearly what wholesome qualities were hidden within the nature of this genuine, pliant, powerful citizen-people.

The picture of the Florentines in the last days of the Republic, sketched by an historian of the following century,[423]is equally true of Lorenzo’s time: ‘I do not share the opinion of those who refuse to admit that the Florentines can be noble-minded and consider them low and plebeian because they are merchants. I have often secretly wondered how people who from their childhood have been accustomed to handle bales of wool and silken threads, or to work like slaves all day and part of the night at the loom or the dye-cauldron, often, when needed, display such loftiness of heart and greatness of soul that they speak and act surpassingly well. The air, a medium between the keen atmosphere of Arezzo and the heavy air of Pisa, doubtless has some influence on this peculiarity. Whosoever considers deeply the nature and manners of the Florentines must arrive at the conclusion that they are more fitted to command than to obey. I do not deny that there are among them haughty, covetous, and violent men, such as are to be found elsewhere. Nay, they are even worse here than in other places; for as talent and merit are more brilliant there than elsewhere, so also evil qualities are more conspicuous—so hard is it for them to preserve moderation. Their manner of life is simple and thrifty, but distinguished by cleanliness suchas is not met with elsewhere. It may be said that in this respect artisans and people who live by daily labour are a pattern to the citizens of higher position; for whereas the latter are easily led away to the taverns if they hear that good wine is to be had there, and give themselves a day of pleasure, the former stay at home with the thriftiness of tradespeople who work seeking for their enjoyment in advance, and with the modesty of citizens who understand moderation, rules, and discipline, and will not quit the safe path. Of course there are families which have a great household and a rich table, such as would become noblemen. People call each other by their Christian names, also by their family names, and usually say ‘thou’ unless there is a great difference of rank or age. The knights, doctors, prebendaries, and canons are entitled Messere, the professors Maestro, and the monks Padre.’

Leon Battista Alberti and the pious Fra Giovanni Dominici speak in similar terms of the respect for parents and superiors.[424]‘My father,’ Alberti describes his cousin Francesco as saying, ‘never sat down on public occasions when his brother, who had received the honour of knighthood, was present; and he pronounced it as his opinion that one ought not to sit down in the presence of one’s father or the head of the family. Your Romans,’ he added, turning to Leon Battista, ‘who are now ill-conducted in all things (in ogni cosa mal corretti oggi), have likewise fallen into great error in this respect: they honour their parents less than their neighbours, and thus grow up in disorder and vice.’ Fra Giovanni recommends Madonna Bartolommea degli Obizzi to teach her children before all things to reverence their parents, and thus secure earthly happiness. We have before remarked how Lorenzo impressed on his son the duty of showing proper respect for his elders; on this point he was always consistent. The good old habits of strictness werealso kept up by many distinguished women. In Lorenzo’s time there are no such charming portraits as those sketched in his grandfather’s days by the good Vespasiano;[425]but Alessandra de’ Bardi, wife of Lorenzo Strozzi; Francesca Giacomini Tebalducci, wife of Donato Acciaiuolo; Nanna Valori, wife of Giannozzo Pandolfini; Caterina Strozzi Ardinghelli; Saracina Giacomini Acciaiuolo, and others, could not fail to have worthy successors; and the beautiful and dignified female portraits which give such a peculiar charm to Ghirlandajo’s frescoes in Sta. Maria Novella would alone be enough to prove that the generation had not died out. Times had become more settled and peaceful, and since 1478 there had been no sudden overthrow or turn of fortune such as had hitherto rapidly succeeded each other. In the undisturbed peace of their homes good women found ample scope for the practice of the Christian virtues which had distinguished their mothers and grandmothers, often widowed or homeless in early youth, amid the stormy days of trouble.

Knighthood has been frequently alluded to in this work. While nobility of birth was attended by civil disadvantages, personal nobility, or knighthood, had a peculiar value of its own. This distinction was a relic of the romantic days of Charles the Great. In imitation of kings and emperors the commonwealth claimed the power of granting it, and in 1288 the first example is said to have occurred in the war against Pisa. Knighthood was a necessary qualification for the office of Podestà, and was conferred on those appointed if they had not previously received it. Knights of this sort were calledCavalieri di popolo. Two cases of strangely conferred knighthood occurred in the fourteenth century. After the rising of the lower classes on July 20, 1378, more than sixty citizens, with Salvestro de’ Medici at their head, were knighted at the request of the multitude. When quietwas in some degree restored these knights of the Ciompi, as they were called, were summoned to declare whether they wished to keep the dignity thus tumultuously conferred on them; in which case they were to be knighted over again by a syndic of the commonwealth who had himself attained that honour. Thirty-one accepted the offer. On October 15 they assembled in the church of the Annunziata and thence proceeded, in knightly attire, to the great square; and there, in presence of the Signoria, the Podestà—a Venetian nobleman—completed the ceremony as syndic of the commonwealth, whereupon they took the oaths of allegiance and received from the Gonfalonier their lances, standards, and shields with the arms of the people.[426]On April 26, 1389, two members of the Panciatichi family, one a child not much more than four years old, were made knights of the people. Great honour was shown them, and like Cola Rienzi in Rome of old, they, with many of their relations and friends, spent the night in the Baptistery, where seven great beds were set up; and the next day a banquet took place in the convent of Sta. Maria Novella[427]at which 250 citizens were present.

The knights of the people were divided into two classes-thecavalieri di corredo, knighted for civil services, and thecavalieri di scudofor military ones; the former named from the banquet which they gave after the ceremony, the latter from the shield; like thenoblesse de robeandnoblesse d’épéein France. Both classes bore on their breasts, or on their helmets, shields, &c., the arms of the people, usually with the red lily of the Republic on a round, white escutcheon, sometimes also with the arms of the Guelf party. Besides thesethere were other knights who had received their dignity from Popes or foreign sovereigns, especially the kings of France, on embassies and suchlike occasions; and others who had been knighted on the battle-field by a commander-in-chief, as a reward for their bravery. These last were entitledcavalieri d’arme, to distinguish them from thecavalieri di scudo. The wearing of the golden spurs, afterwards so much abused, was the prerogative of these military knights.

Embassies had always been important to the Florentines in a political point of view, as well as a means of obtaining personal distinction. In the first jubilee year, when twelve of them appeared before Pope Boniface VIII. as the representatives of various states, he called them the fifth element. They always preserved their reputation as good diplomatists. Not only did clergy, statesmen, and scholars take an active part in diplomacy, it was a career open even to the Grandi, the real nobility who were excluded from all the offices of state. In the fifteenth century the splendour with which the embassies were conducted corresponded with the importance of the state and the personal rank of the ambassadors. Their posts, however, were not lucrative; for if, as was the case in 1483, each ambassador received about ten gold florins a day, the expenses in excess of those which he could charge for were very heavy. Besides the solemn embassies on special occasions, there were resident envoys at Naples, Rome, Milan, and Venice. The former were numerous and brilliant, and comprised, besides the actual ambassadors, younger men (who, according to a later regulation, were not to be under the age of twenty-four), who went to learn the business of diplomacy and see foreign lands; there was also a chancellor and other officials. Only two examples need be referred to for the high honour in which Florentine embassies were held—Neri Capponi’s famous embassy to Venice during the war of the Visconti, and that to Louis XI. on his accession. ‘Never,’ says Macchiavelli, ‘did that Signoria receive a prince with so much honour asthey did Neri.’ King Louis, with the Duke of Britanny and a suite of about forty horsemen, advanced two leagues from Tours to meet Monsignor Filippo de’ Medici, Piero de’ Pazzi, and Buonaccorso Pitti (Luca’s son), envoys of the Republic, and kept his hat in his hand because the first-named would not be covered.[428]Travelling was slow; the embassy had left Florence on October 27, and reached Tours on December 23. With what splendour Piero de’ Pazzi returned home has been mentioned already.

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