John Richard Greene

The one story in the history of the modern world which rivals in concentrated interest the story of Athens is the story of Florence in the years just before and after the opening of the fourteenth century—the few years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in letters, in art. Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a space. Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce. Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's." Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the Florentines worked out patiently and bravely amidst a thousand obstacles the problem of free and popular government. Without, they covered sea and land with their commerce; their agents supplied the Papal treasury, while private firms were already beginning that career of vast foreign loans which at a later time enabled the victor of CrÉcy to equip his armies with Florentine gold.

We can only realize the attitude of Florence at this moment by its contrast with the rest of Europe. It was a time when Germany was sinking down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe le Bel was crushing freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression of its French conquerors. In the North the earlier communal freedom had already made way for the rule of tyrants when it was just springing into life in the city by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the cities of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa had been rivals in commercial activity a hundred years before the merchants of Florence were known out of Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song from the ProvenÇal troubadours half a century before the Florentine singers. Too insignificant to share in the great struggle of the Empire and the Papacy, among the last to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline, Florence emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan or Bologna was already in decay.

The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies in the impression of a distinct personality which is left on us by a simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt rises from the naÏve simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of the gay Canon of LiÈge is exchanged in Dino for a manly patriotism, a love of civic freedom, of justice, of religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist. There is an Herodotean picturesqueness as well as an Herodotean simplicity in such a picture as that of Dante's first battle-field, the Florentine victory of Campaldino:—

"On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced their standards to go into the enemies' land, and passed by Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy found them, they had received no little damage; but such was not the will of God. And they came near to Bibbiena, at a place called Campaldino where was the enemy, and there they halted in array of battle. The captains of war sent the light-armed foot to the front; and each man's shield, with a red lily on a white ground, was stretched out well before him. Then the Bishop, who was short-sighted, asked, 'Those there: what walls be they?' They answered him, 'The shields of the enemy.' Messer Barone de' Mangiadori da San Miniato, a chevalier frank and well skilled in deeds of arms, gathered his men-at-arms together and said to them, 'My masters, in Tuscan wars men were wont to conquer by making a stout onset, and that lasted but a while, and few men died, for it was not in use to kill. Now is the fashion changed, and men conquer by holding their ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye stand firm and let them assault you.' And so they settled to do. The men of Arezzo made their onset with such vigour and so great force that the body of the Florentines fell back not a little. The fight was hard and keen. Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a very great dust. Then the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to creep under the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and disembowelled them, and some of them penetrated so far that in the very midst of the battalion were many dead of either part. Many that were counted of great prowess were shown vile that day, and many of whom none spoke word won honour.... The men of Arezzo were broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity."

"Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino Compagni—pity alike for foe or friend; for the warriors of Arezzo or the starved-out patriots of Pistoja as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity for the victims of her feuds, and even for the men who drove them into exile; pity, most of all, for Florence herself. We read his story indeed at first with a strange sense of disappointment and surprise. To the modern reader the story of Florence in the years which Dino covers is above all the story of Dante. As the 'Chronicle' jots patiently down the hopes and fears, the failures and successes of the wiser citizens in that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his 'Chronicle' says never a word. The name of Dante is mentioned but once and then without a syllable of comment. It is not in Dante that Dino interests himself: his one interest, his one passion is Florence.

And yet as we read page after page a new interest in the story grows on us, the interest that Dino himself felt in the tragedy around him. Our sympathies go with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, men who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and order in a State torn with antipathies of the past, with jealousies and ambitions and feuds of the present. The terrible sadness of the 'Divina Commedia' becomes more intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of those hopes for his country which Dante entertained as well as Dino. And beyond this interest there is the social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth century itself, its strange medley of past and present, the old world of feudalism jostling with the new world of commerce, the trader elbowing the noble and the artisan the trader, an enthusiastic mystical devotion jealous of the new classicalism or the scepticism of men like Guido Cavalcanti, the petty rivalries of great houses alternating with large schemes of public policy, the tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and lust, the art of Giotto with the slow, patient bloodthirst of the vendetta.

What was the cause—the question presses on us through every page of Dino or of Dante—what was the cause of that ruin which waited in Florence as in every Italian city on so short a burst of freedom? What was it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the passionate love of liberty in the people at large? What was it which drove Dante into exile and stung the simple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent despair? The answer—if we set aside the silly talk about "democracy" and look simply at the facts themselves—is a very simple one. The ruin of Florentine liberty, like the ruin of liberty elsewhere throughout Italy, lay wholly with its noblesse. It was equally perilous for an Italian town to leave its nobles without the walls or to force them to reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past their walls. Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in every quarter of the city. Within them lay the noble, a wild beast all the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes, hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his fellow-nobles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a child, shameless, false, unprincipled.

The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters. Seeing him pass by Aldruda calls aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by her side. "Whom have you taken to wife?" she says, "This is the wife I kept for you." The damsel pleased the youth, but his troth bound him, and he answered, "I can wed none other, now at any rate!" "Yes," cried Aldruda, "for I will pay the penalty for thee." "Then will I have her," said Buondelmonte. "Cosa fatta capo ha," was the famous comment of the outraged house—"stone dead has no fellow"—and as Dino puts it, in the most ordinary way in the world, "they settled to kill him the day he was to have married the damsel, and so they did." "Kill, kill," echoes everywhere through the story of these Florentine nobles. Assassination is an event of every day. Corso Donati sends murderers to kill an enemy among the Cerchi. Guido Cavalcanti strives to stab Corso in the back as he passes him. Where the dagger fails, they try poison without scruple. The best of them decline a share in a murder much as an Irish peasant may decline a share in an agrarian outrage, with a certain delicacy and readiness to stand by and see it done. When the assassination of the Bishop of Arezzo was decided on, Guglielmo da Pazzi, who was in the counsel, protested "he would have been content had it been done without his knowledge, but were the question put to him he might not be guilty of his blood."

Among such men even Corso Donati towers into a certain grandeur:—

Such was the man who drove Dante into exile:—

He stood not merely at the head of the Florentine nobility, but at the head of the great Guelph organization which extended from city to city throughout Tuscany—a league with its own leaders, its own policy, its own treasure. In the attempt to seize this treasure for the general service of the State the most popular of Florentine leaders, Giano della Bella, had been foiled and driven into exile. An honest attempt to secure the peace of the city by the banishment of Corso and his friends brought about the exile of Dante. It is plain that powerless as they were before the united forces of the whole people the nobles were strong enough by simply biding their time and availing themselves of popular divisions to crush one opponent after another. And yet the struggle against them was one of life and death for the city. No atom of the new civilization, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to have penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls of their city fortresses they remained the mere murderous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. "I counsel, lords, that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto Frescobaldi to his brother nobles in the church of San Jacopo; "let us arm ourselves and run on to the Piazza, and there kill friend and foe alike as many as we find, so that neither we nor our children be ever subject to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the sternness of the laws which pressed upon the nobles forget what wild beasts they were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the 'Inferno.'

From the hopeless task of curbing the various elements of disorder by the single force of each isolated city the wiser and more patriotic among the men of that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which as Dante saw had now lost their old meaning. In the twelfth century the Emperor was at once the foe of religion and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of the towns. In the fourteenth that freedom had either perished by its own excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong enough to defy even an Imperial assailant. Religion found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface VIII., or the church over which he ruled. Whatever might have been its fortune under happier circumstances, the great experiment of democratic self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed, whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its old sanctity was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day. On the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Barbarossa, of the terrible struggle by which the peace of Constance had been won, had grown faint and dim in the course of years. It was long since Italy had seen an Emperor at all.But the old Ghibellinism had recovered new vigour from an unlooked-for quarter. As the revival of the Roman law had given an artificial prestige to the Empire in the twelfth century, so the revival of classical literature threw a new halo around it in the fourteenth. To Dante, penetrated with the greater Latin authors, Henry of Luxemburg is no stranger from over the Alps, but the descendant of the Augustus whom his own Vergil had loved and sung. The same classical feeling tells on Dino. With him Florence is "the daughter of Rome." The pages of Sallust and of Livy have stirred him to undertake her annals. "The remembrance of ancient histories has long spurred my mind to write the events, full of danger yet reaching to no prosperous end, that this noble city, daughter of Rome, has encountered." It was the same sense that united with his own practical appreciation of the necessities of the time in his impatient longing for the intervention of the new Emperor. As Prior, Dino had acted the part of a brave and honest man, striving to conciliate party with party, refusing to break the law, chased at last with the rest of the magistracy from the Palace of the Signory by the violence of Corso Donati and the nobles. If he did not share Dante's exile, he had at any rate acted with Dante in the course of policy which brought that penalty on him. Both were Priors together in 1300; both have the same passionate love of Florence, the same haughty disdain of the factions that tore it to pieces. If the appeal of Dino to his fellows in Santa TrinitÀ is less thrilling than the verse of Dante, it has its own pathetic force:—"My masters, why will ye confound and undo so good a city? Against whom do ye will to fight? Against your brethren? What victory will ye gain?—none other than weeping!" The words fell on deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary waiting came to nothing. Dino leaves us still looking for Henry's coming; Dante tells us of the death that dashed all hope to the ground. Even in the hour of his despair the poet could console himself by setting his "divino Arrigo" in the regions of the blest. What comfort the humble chronicler found whose work we have been studying none can know.