Forged in the Shadow of Mars: Chivalry and Violence in Late Medieval Florence

By Peter W. Sposato

In Forged in the Shadow of Mars, Peter W. Sposato traces chivalry's powerful influence on the mentalitè and behavior of a sizeable segment of the elite in late medieval Florence. He finds that the strenuous knights and men-at-arms of the Florentine chivalric elite—a cultural community comprised of men from both traditional and newly emerged elite lineages—embraced a chivalric ideology that was fundamentally martial and violent. Chivalry helped to shape a common identity among these men based on the profession of arms and the ready use of violence against both their peers and those they perceived to be their social inferiors. This violence, often transgressive in nature, was not only crucial to asserting and defending personal, familial, and corporate honor, but was also inherently praiseworthy. In this way, Sposato highlights the sharp differences between chivalry and the more familiar civic ideology of the popolo grasso, the Florentine mercantile and banking elite who came to dominate Florence politically and economically during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

As a result, in Forged in the Shadow of Mars, Sposato challenges the traditional scholarly view of chivalry as foreign to the social and cultural landscape of Florence and contests its reputation as a civilizing force. By reexamining the connection between chivalric literature and actual practice and identity formation among historical knights and men-at-arms, he likewise provides an important corrective to assumptions about the nature of elite violence and identity in medieval Italian cities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501761904

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Introduction

Chivalry and the Chivalric Elite in Late Medieval Florence

That noble city in the province of Tuscany, built under the sign of Mars … its citizens bold in arms, proud and combative, and rich with unlawful profits, distrusted and feared for its greatness by the nearby cities, rather than loved.¹ Dino Compagni’s (1264–1324) description of Florence and its leading citizens during his lifetime paints the striking picture of a city riven by violence and engaged in what must have seemed to contemporaries like perpetual warfare. Although Compagni’s emphasis on violence and war may seem, at first glance, incongruent with the popular conception of the great proto-capitalistic Florentine republic, the epicenter of humanism and cradle of the Italian Renaissance, it is actually quite fitting for a city built under the sign of Mars, the Roman god of war. In fact, an ancient temple dedicated to Mars once towered over the city, and an equestrian statue of the god magnificently accoutered in the arms and armor of a medieval knight stood prominently on a pedestal at the north bank of the Ponte Vecchio from at least 1178 to 1333.² Dino Compagni was not alone; well-known contemporaries like Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Giovanni Villani (ca. 1276–1348) also connected Mars to the violence that plagued Florence.³ This association was so powerful in the common imagination of Florentines up through the end of the fourteenth century that the famous humanist Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) found sufficient cause to push back against the idea. Bruni did not deny or minimize the bloody history of elite violence in the city, but rather he sought to explain it through a more pragmatic discussion of social, economic, and political catalysts.⁴

While most modern historians tend to privilege the same forces when seeking to explain the root causes and prevalence of conflict in late medieval Florence, the purpose of this book is to illuminate the central role played by chivalric ideology in strongly encouraging and valorizing violence among a sizable segment of the Florentine elite, and its connection to the violence that loomed so large in that culture.⁵ Chivalry, an ideology infused with violence, was the dominant ethos of the lay elite in late medieval Europe but one that has received little attention from historians who study Florence during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Before discussing chivalric ideology as it manifested in Florence during this period, the concept of ideology requires some explanation. It can be defined as what an individual or group holds to be true and serves as the prism that shapes how one sees and thinks, how one puts thoughts into actions. It is the linkage between theory and practice. In this way ideology is similar to the concept of habitus, a sociological idea articulated by Pierre Bourdieu, that explains how societal forces act on the individual, which has informed the work of historians David Crouch and Sarah R. Blanshei.⁶

Thus, the central argument in this book is twofold: first, that chivalry exercised a powerful influence on a sizable segment of the Florentine elite during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (a time frame necessitated by the evidentiary limitations discussed below); and second, that chivalric ideology shaped the identities these men claimed and the ideas, values, and beliefs that informed their worldview or mentalité. This chivalric mentalité in turn directly impacted their behavior, especially the various forms of violence they committed with striking regularity.⁷ Indeed, we should acknowledge up front that chivalric practitioners in Florence were violent, that they recognized they were violent, and that they embraced an ideology that rendered this violence not only licit and praiseworthy but also purposive. As a result, examining Florentine elite culture through a chivalric lens helps us to make better sense of the penchant for violence, brash lawlessness, and deeply entrenched resistance to the growing public authority of the communal government demonstrated by many individuals and lineages. In other words, if the city of Florence was built under the sign of Mars, Florentine chivalry was forged in Mars’s shadow.

The connection between chivalry, honor, and violence has been the topic of significant debate among scholars working on northwestern Europe, where chivalry has long been recognized as the animating ideology of the lay elite.⁸ Currently the scholarship on medieval chivalry is dominated by two schools of thought. The first, Richard Kaeuper’s influential work, emphasizes the practical nature of the ideology, with a particular focus on the overt valorization and promotion of violence as a central aspect of chivalric identity.⁹ For Kaeuper, there was little space between chivalric ideals and reality: the violence rampant in works of imaginative literature and celebrated in chivalric biographies, among other types of evidence, echoed the same practice of violence in the historical world. As Kaeuper eloquently argues chivalry was not the broadly protective and altruistic force of romantic dreams.¹⁰ This view sharply contrasts with the second, that of Maurice Keen, who conceives of chivalry as an uplifting and civilizing force, promoting ideas about courtliness and refined manners, and relegating violence to the battlefield, where it was controlled by laws of war.¹¹ For Keen, true knights were moral exemplars, not violent thugs intent on the destruction of society and one another in the pursuit of honor.

At present, only Keen’s chivalric lens has been employed when studying Florence and Tuscany, most notably in the prodigious work of Franco Cardini.¹² Like Keen, Cardini’s chivalry, although neither he nor any other italophone scholar uses the term, is defined predominantly by its ceremonial and courtly aspects. Knights were first and foremost courtly gentlemen who participated in civic-patriotic and spiritual rituals and institutions. Furthermore, chivalry encouraged them to restrict their violence to the battlefield, where they utilized their military skill in the service of the state. In fact, Cardini associates any other form of violent behavior, especially the violence that is central to this present book’s conceptualization of chivalry, with either antiknights or young elite men ( juvenes/donzelli) who had not yet had their violence redirected by participation in brigata or compagnie.¹³ In other words, Cardini believes that knights who engaged in the type of violence Compagni and other Florentines associated with the malevolent influence of Mars are the opposite of chivalric. This understanding of chivalry is largely congruent with contemporary civic or popolani ideas about what noble or knightly (i.e., chivalric) culture should be but not what it actually was. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, the very same works of imaginative literature Cardini draws on to support his view of chivalry are inundated with acts of violence. Rather than being condemned as not chivalric or unbefitting of a knight, however, this violence is valorized and praised as honorable.

Beyond Cardini, scholars working on Italy have spilled comparatively little ink discussing the powerful ideology. This is striking because anglophone scholars ranging from Maurice Keen, John Larner, Philip J. Jones, and Ronald Witt to John Najemy, Carol Lansing, and Sarah Blanshei have all acknowledged chivalry’s presence and influence in Italy, including in cities like Florence, although these references and the few discussions of them remain incidental.¹⁴ Similarly, italophone and francophone scholars working on Florence and other Italian communes, especially Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, Erminia Crimi, Guido Castelnuovo, and Silvia Diacciati, have discussed the existence of a noble or knightly ideology (habitus) and have published important studies of various aspects of the associated culture, but without fully engaging with the general scholarship on chivalry.¹⁵ Still other scholars have sought to trace the influence of a foreign (i.e., French and German) noble culture on the communal Italian elite, leaving little space for a domesticated or even native chivalric culture.¹⁶ Therefore, the history of chivalric practitioners, ideas, and action in communal Italy very much remains to be written.¹⁷ The purpose of this book is to fill this lacuna for late medieval Florence.

Defining the Florentine Chivalric Elite

Who were the Florentine chivalric elite? Did they form a group definable in socioeconomic or legal terms? If so, did that definition change over time? It is a relatively straightforward task to identify members of the Florentine chivalric elite in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, as most belonged to the knightly consular aristocracy or to their rural aristocratic counterparts, although the latter group is outside the scope of this study.¹⁸ The lineages of the knightly consular aristocracy proudly distinguished themselves through the dignity of knighthood (identified in Italian by the title messere), membership in the societas militum (1189–1237) that represented their interests, and participation in tower societies (società di torre).¹⁹ They dominated the political and economic hierarchies of the city through their claimed monopoly on violence and their close association with the church.²⁰ They regularly went to war as strenuous knights (in the sense of the Latin term strenuus or active; i.e., miles in armis strenuus) and mounted men-at-arms (gens d’armes), securing in the process wealth and social prestige that translated into political power.²¹ These chivalric lineages, a term used to indicate an extended family identified by a surname, included the Adimari, Buondelmonti, Donati, Fifanti, Tornaquinci, Uberti, and Visdomini, among others.²²

Despite their shared chivalric identity, these lineages were intensely divided by personal, familial, and political interests. The conflict between elite lineages during the years 1177–80 amounted to open warfare, involving serious fighting in the city streets and a fire that burned much of the city center.²³ Forty years later, some of the same lineages were involved when the well-known factional conflict between the Guelfs and Ghibellines began in the city of Florence. According to Compagni, Villani, and others, the conflict originated with the murder of Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti in 1216 by members of the Uberti and Fifanti lineages.²⁴ The conflict was quintessentially medieval with no clear line between private (personal and familial) and public interests and grievances among the Florentine participants. While historians have discussed the political, social, and economic catalysts behind the factionalism, chivalry also played an important role. More specifically, chivalric ideas about honor and violent force contributed to the persistence and virulence of the conflict, encouraging participants to commit egregious acts of violence (see chapter 1).²⁵

Eventually, the Guelf and Ghibelline conflict took on a pan-Italian scope. The Guelfs were associated with the papacy and then the Angevin kings of Naples, while the Ghibellines were tied to the empire.²⁶ Although the dimensions of the conflict shifted during the second half of the thirteenth century as the Ghibelline cause went into decline following the destruction of the Hohenstaufen imperial family in the 1250s and 1260s and the Guelf faction fractured along familial lines in the 1290s into the White and Black Guelfs, it often served throughout this period as a proxy for hostilities within the Florentine chivalric elite.²⁷

In addition to the expanding scope and intensification of the Guelf and Ghibelline conflict, the Florentine chivalric elite also had to negotiate significant changes in Florentine society, politics, and culture in the second half of the thirteenth century. Among the most important catalysts of this change were the arrival of a substantial influx of migrants from the contado and a striking expansion of the urban economy thanks to banking, mercantile, and industrial activities.²⁸ These changes led to the emergence of new elite lineages, the popolo grasso, who owed their meteoric rise to their dominance in those same economic activities.²⁹ Although some members of the popolo grasso were attracted to the chivalric lifestyle (or the vita honorabilis),³⁰ the majority embraced a very different brand of elite identity centered on mercantile and banking enterprises and underpinned by the articulation of a powerful new civic ideology deeply influenced by the revival of Aristotle’s works. This civic ideology was characterized by notions of the common good and service to the commune, and by the promotion of peace and stability in the pursuit of economic profits.³¹ In many ways, the civic ideology of the popolo grasso was fundamentally at odds with chivalry, leading to an ideological contest that lasted from the mid-thirteenth century into the fifteenth century.³² These distinct worldviews and lifestyles led to very different views on the institution of knighthood, with the chivalric elite maintaining the traditional connection between the dignity and the profession of arms and the popolo grasso seeking out the appellation solely for the social and political benefits it conferred.³³

In the second half of the thirteenth century a somewhat cohesive popular movement emerged and succeeded in establishing two broadly supported guild governments, the Primo (1250–60) and Secondo (1293) Popolo. These governments put in place a number of important laws and innovations that ultimately altered the power dynamics within the city. Foremost among them were the creation of a category of politically and legally disadvantaged elite Florentines known as magnates (grandi) and the formation of citizen militias in the city and contado to contest the private armies these magnates brought into the city during times of trouble. The antimagnate laws promulgated in 1286 and 1293, specifically the Ordinances of Justice, were intended primarily to protect the small and the weak from the violence and oppression of the great and the powerful, behaviors that were not only inherent in chivalric ideology but also heavily valorized.³⁴

The criteria for determining whether an individual or lineage was listed among the magnates, codified for the first time in the Ordinances, are, in many ways, essentially the characteristics and behaviors valorized and promoted by chivalry: knighthood, arrogance, discord, abuse of power, and violence, especially against the small and weak (popolani minuti).³⁵ Thus, prima facie the criteria for determining magnate status seems to be ideally suited for identifying members of the chivalric elite during this period, and not surprisingly many chivalric lineages appear in the lists of magnates issued in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Unfortunately, the designation cannot always be taken at face value, because some elite individuals and lineages were labelled magnates based solely upon political motivations, allowing others who actually met the criteria to avoid the designation because of their cooperation with the Florentine government or personal alliances with the lineages of the ruling popolo grasso.³⁶

Thus, by the end of the thirteenth century neither traditional social appellations like knight or noble (miles, nobilis) nor newer legal designations like magnate (grande, magnate) represented definitive markers of chivalric identity among the Florentine elite.³⁷ These obstacles require the construction of a new heuristic device, that of a cultural community, to trace chivalry’s continued vitality among a broad group of elite Florentines well into the fifteenth century. The concept of a cultural community derives from Barbara Rosenwein’s emotional community, that is, groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value (or devalue) the same or related emotions.³⁸ A cultural community is, like Rosenwein’s emotional community, by its very nature not a well-defined social group or legally defined class with rigid boundaries, but rather has a fluid membership whose contours are difficult to precisely define at any given time. This allows for a membership that transcends social groups and legally defined classes to encompass all members of the Florentine elite who subscribed to chivalric ideas and embraced a chivalric lifestyle.³⁹

This lifestyle was centered on the close link between prowess (prodezza) and honor (onore), what Richard Kaeuper has eloquently described as the most potent bond at the heart of chivalry, as well as a fierce sense of autonomy (or proud self-assertive dominance) and the profession of arms.⁴⁰ Members of the Florentine chivalric elite considered warfare to be an ennobling and praiseworthy enterprise, and violence in the defense of personal and familial honor not only licit but also necessary. In other words, what unified these men was the adoption of a set of values and behaviors, regardless of the antiquity of their lineage or how they acquired their wealth and power.

If members of the knightly consular aristocracy and their counterparts from the contado formed the core of the chivalric cultural community in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, they were joined in the second half of the thirteenth century by certain elite males from the lineages of the popolo grasso. These two groups combined to form what Silvia Diacciati has called the milizia, a group defined by its martial function and knightly lifestyle but not necessarily by the dignity of knighthood itself.⁴¹ The chapters that follow will demonstrate that many members of the lineages of the milizia were enthusiastic members of the chivalric elite. This group included the Bardi, Bordoni, Brunelleschi, Cerchi, Frescobaldi, Pulci, Scali, and Spini, among many others. The majority of these lineages appear in the list of magnates issued in 1293 and 1295, with Diacciati highlighting a number of them as possessing definitive knightly traditions.⁴² These lineages formed the core of the chivalric cultural community during this period, thus suggesting that while the Florentine chivalric elite of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were not completely synonymous with the magnates, there was a great deal of congruence between the two groups.

In the first half of the fourteenth century new individuals and lineages primarily from the popolo grasso continued to join the ranks of the chivalric elite despite, or perhaps in response to, the deep structural transformations at work within the elite and its relationship to the popolo during this period.⁴³ Some members of newer lineages like the Medici and the Acciaiuoli, for example the famous knight and seneschal of the Angevin regno Niccolò Acciaiuoli (d. 1365), appear among the ranks of the chivalric elite during this period.⁴⁴ This was not an all-or-nothing proposition, however, as the members of these new lineages were often divided in the elite identities they claimed. In contrast, traditional chivalric lineages—especially those originating in the knightly consular aristocracy—showed remarkable continuity during this period, with members of the Adimari, Bardi, Buondelmonti, Cavalcanti, Donati, Frescobaldi, Gherardini, Nerli, Pazzi, Tornaquinci, and Visdomini still engaging in the behaviors commonly associated with the chivalric lifestyle, such as the practice of various forms of violence and the cultivation of the profession of arms.⁴⁵

During the fourteenth century, the political and ideological conflicts between the chivalric elite and the popolo grasso were more often than not decided in favor of the latter and its civic ideology. As a result, members of the Florentine chivalric elite in the middle decades of the fourteenth century increasingly found themselves at the margins of society or in exile, with more than one contemporary and near-contemporary chronicler and moralist observing that the chivalric mentalité and lifestyle were not well suited to civic society. This did not lead to the complete collapse of chivalric culture during this period, but rather forced the chivalric elite to decide between three paths: first, completely abandon the chivalric lifestyle and adopt the civic ideology of the popolani; second, modify certain aspects of the chivalric lifestyle that were deemed a particular threat by the Florentine government—like committing egregious acts of violence against social inferiors—while also doubling down on other aspects, like the profession of arms; or third, continue to fully embrace the chivalric lifestyle and operate as marginalized figures. The first two options allowed an individual or lineage to return to civic society, a process studied in detail by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber.⁴⁶ The life of Buonaccorso Pitti, examined in the epilogue below, provides an excellent example of a chivalric practitioner who chose the second option and succeeded in moving between the chivalric and civic worlds during his lifetime.

Those who made the third choice often remain hidden from our view, appearing only when they broke the law or when they warranted the attention of a contemporary chronicler because they chose to take a particularly dramatic course of action, like armed rebellion. Occasionally we can gain sustained glimpses of these men, but usually only the most successful and intrepid of their number, like Niccolò Acciaiuoli and Esaù Buondelmonti (d. 1400), who established themselves as prominent figures at royal and noble courts in Italy and further abroad where their violent lifestyle was mainstream.⁴⁷ In fact, a recent study of the Buondelmonti has identified multiple members of the lineage who enjoyed a fully realized chivalric lifestyle abroad.⁴⁸ While these men were certainly exceptional in the level of success they attained, it is important to keep in mind that they are representative of a larger group of men who will likely forever evade our direct study.

The Social Complexities of the Florentine Chivalric Cultural Community

Although the ideological conflict between the chivalric cultural community and the popolo grasso was at its core that of a violent, warrior elite versus a plutocratic, economic elite, the dominant role played by commerce, industry, and banking in Florence meant that both groups engaged extensively with this world from the second half of the thirteenth century. The flexibility of chivalric identity in Florence, and quite possibly in communal Italy in general, meant that it could survive alongside professions like banking, commerce, and international trade. Indeed, the mercantile or banking origin of a lineage’s wealth did not ipso facto render all of its members immune to chivalry’s influence or ineligible to join the chivalric cultural community. In fact, members of the same lineage might belong to different cultural communities and thus be animated by different ideologies (i.e., civic or chivalric).⁴⁹ Florentine chivalric lineages often, but not always, included a few merchants, bankers, and/or international traders alongside strenuous warriors.

Some members of the chivalric elite, like Vieri dei Cerchi (d. 1313), wore more than one hat during their lifetimes, embracing chivalry for part of their lives before retiring to take up politics and business. In this way, elite men moved between the chivalric and civic cultural communities in late medieval Florence. Even more common was the practice of using income generated by investment or other activities in the world of business and banking to support less lucrative but more formative chivalric activities, like the profession of arms.⁵⁰ For example, Diacciati notes that Corso Donati, a paragon of the Florentine chivalric elite, likely supplemented his military career through the lending of money at interest, mercantile activities, and the ownership of factories involved in the wool industry, although these connections to the world of business and trade played no role in shaping the chivalric identity he claimed and lifestyle he exemplified.⁵¹ Diacciati observes that such efforts to obfuscate participation in commercial activities occurred even among less illustrious members of the chivalric elite, like the magnate Neri degli Strinati (d. after 1312), who makes little mention of these sources of income in his cronichetta.⁵² This was also almost certainly common practice among many members of chivalric lineages of greater repute, like the Bardi, Frescobaldi, and Pazzi, whose business interests and companies played such a prominent role in the Florentine economy.

The well-known contemporary distinction between the Cerchi and Donati lineages, posited most famously by Dino Compagni and Giovanni Villani, highlights the need to reexamine the complexities of Florentine elite society during this period through a chivalric lens. These two lineages were held up as illustrative of the differences between a new lineage, greatly enriched by a booming urban economy (the Cerchi), and an ancient lineage of warriors, proud but increasingly impoverished (the Donati). Compagni described the Cerchi as men of low estate, but good merchants and very rich; they dressed well, kept many servants and horses, and made a brave show, and the Donati as of more ancient lineage but not as rich and much more brazen than the Cerchi, and they feared nothing.⁵³ Giovanni Villani, likewise, described the Donati as a house of gentlemen and warriors.⁵⁴

In reality, however, the Cerchi and Donati actually complicate rather than prove these simple distinctions. The Cerchi lineage included a whole host of bankers and merchants alongside men like the aforementioned Vieri dei Cerchi and his kinsman Ricoverino. The former famously fought at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289 alongside his son, Giano, as captain of the feditori—the mounted warriors who comprised the vanguard of a Florentine army—before retiring to a life of banking and politics. Ricoverino, meanwhile, was a prominent young Florentine man-at-arms who seems to have fully embraced the chivalric lifestyle without ever, as far as we can tell, engaging in mercantile activities.⁵⁵ While historians know little else about Ricoverino, Villani’s Nuova Cronica includes a remarkable story about a skirmish in the piazza of Santa Trinità during which Ricoverino famously lost his nose to a sword stroke. Rather than retreating Ricoverino charged into the fray with his sword held high in pursuit of vengeance.⁵⁶ The Donati, in contrast, were a decidedly chivalric lineage, with many members vigorously cultivating the profession of arms and perpetrating destructive violence throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And yet, the lineage also included less well-known men like Aldebrandino di Buoncambio, Apardo Nigromonte, Banduccio, Giacomo, Pietro di Forese, and Tolosano, who were all merchants or bankers.

These two lineages are not unique in this regard. The Frescobaldi, like the Cerchi, were heavily involved in the world of banking. Alongside this profitable economic activity, however, members of the Frescobaldi lineage practiced various forms of chivalric violence (see chapters 1 and 2) and cultivated the practice of arms (see chapter 4). For example, an extensive but not exhaustive investigation of the sources for the present book revealed at least twenty-five Frescobaldi men who cultivated military careers during the period 1260–1391. After the decline of the Frescobaldi bank in the early fourteenth century, many members of the lineage seem to have doubled down on these chivalric behaviors, especially committing acts of violence against popolani. This intensification of chivalric violence in the wake of economic misfortune seems to have been a recurring theme in the fourteenth century, punctuated by a dramatic shift in 1343, when a large number of chivalric lineages, especially those bearing the designation magnate, withdrew from these economic activities.⁵⁷

These developments almost certainly exacerbated extant divisions within chivalric lineages, motivating many individuals to distinguish themselves from their kin by stressing their popolani bona fides. Ippolito Frescobaldi’s testimony in 1373 is illuminating in this regard, as he went to great lengths to convince the Florentine government that "although he belongs to the house of Frescobaldi, nevertheless he was and is considered, through the maternal line, to be weak and impotent, and has always tried to live in peace and tranquility, abstaining from inflicting injury upon anyone, and embracing the life and customs of the popolani of this city."⁵⁸

The complexities of the sociocultural terrain of late medieval Florence were not lost on contemporary Florentines, especially members of the chivalric elite, who were forced to come to terms with the omnipresence of mercantile and banking enterprises. This did not mean that they recognized these enterprises as ennobling, but rather that they lived in a rapidly changing world. As long as they did not adopt the popolani attitudes of the civic elite, such activities neither threatened their membership in the chivalric cultural community nor defined their lifestyle or identity.⁵⁹ In other words, chivalry offered the Florentine chivalric elite a flexible and practical alternative set of elite values and ideals to the civic-mercantile ideas of the popolo grasso, which are commonly treated by historians. The chivalric identity they claimed, with its associated mentalité and lifestyle, not only connected them with their counterparts elsewhere in Italy and north of the Alps, but also helped distinguish them from the popolo grasso. Indeed, chivalry was in many ways antithetical to the civic ideology of the popolo, creating a stark contrast that can be detected through careful social analysis. This type of social analysis, however, requires us to look at a broad range of different types of contemporary sources in order to identify and study the attitudes and actions of Florentine knights and men-at-arms. These in turn allow us to determine whether or not certain men subscribed to chivalric ideas and embraced the chivalric lifestyle.

Sources and Methods

This book makes use of a variety of approaches and sources when studying chivalric ideology and its practitioners in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Florence. These sources include both historical works like chronicles, ricordanza (personal or familial journals), and the records of the Florentine government now found in the State Archive (Archivio di Stato), as well as works of imaginative chivalric literature, especially romances and epics. The need to cast a wide net into the evidentiary waters is all the more urgent in the Florentine context because of the inherent limitations of the traditional historical sources for understanding chivalry. Rosenwein’s observation that some emotional communities are hidden from the historian’s view because of the nature of the available sources certainly holds true for the Florentine chivalric cultural community.⁶⁰

Most contemporary chronicles were composed by popolani authors who were not only largely ignorant of the intricacies of Florentine chivalry, but as intellectual representatives and proponents of a broadly supported Florentine government underpinned by the nascent civic ideology discussed earlier in the introduction, they were also unsympathetic or outright hostile toward the chivalric lifestyle and its justifications of violence.⁶¹ The only exception was violence performed in the heroic defense of the city against external enemies.⁶² From their point of view, any other form of chivalric violence represented a serious threat to the vita civile, a belief proven to be true on numerous occasions, and thus deserving of only criticism and condemnation.⁶³ Therefore, while they recount many historical acts of chivalric violence, they rarely offer the chivalric perspective or much insight into the mentalité of the perpetrators of this violence. Even authors who were familiar with the chivalric cultural community, as Paula Clarke suggests was the case with Giovanni Villani, often fail to satisfy the historian’s desire to know motivation and context.⁶⁴

In addition, it seems likely that contemporary chroniclers wrote mostly about major incidents of chivalric violence, leaving historians in the dark about the more mundane conflicts that undoubtedly occurred. The various document sets in the Florentine archives, especially those of the judicial archive, serve as the natural complement to chronicles. Unfortunately, most of the records for the years before 1343 no longer exist, a casualty of a fire set during the uprising that drove Walter of Brienne, the Duke of Athens and erstwhile lord of Florence, from the city in the summer of that year.⁶⁵ To make matters more difficult, the archival evidence that does survive often fails to offer insight into motivation or sometimes even context. The violence is readily apparent, but the records offer little information about the mentality of the aggressors.

The limitations of traditional historical sources in the Florentine context require scholars to rely more heavily on the suggestive body of evidence provided by a number of romances and epics composed and/or consumed in Tuscany during this period.⁶⁶ These works focused predominantly on Arthurian material (the Matter of Britain), but also stories related to the court of Charlemagne (the Matter of France) and the Greek and Roman past (the Matter of Rome).⁶⁷ The appearance in Tuscany of first names like Turpin, Orlando, Rolando, and Olivero suggests that the Roland story, one of the core works of the Matter of France, was well known in the region by the late twelfth century. Olaf Brattö’s study of the names listed in the Libro di Montaperti, a collection of records about the Florentine army that was defeated at Montaperti in 1260, identified sixty-nine Rolandos.⁶⁸ Likewise, Carol Lansing observes that a Florentine tenzone dating from the 1260s includes an Orlanduccio Orafo, who congratulated himself on his heroic name.⁶⁹ This evidence confirms the circulation of the Roland story in Florence by the mid-thirteenth century as well.

Alongside Orlanduccio Orafo in the mid-thirteenth-century Florentine tenzone is another heroically named character, Pallamidesse di Bellindote, whose given name (Palamedes) stems from the Arthurian works of the Matter of Britain. Ronald Witt, drawing upon the work of Robert Davidsohn and David Herlihy, has argued that the Arthurian cycle likely circulated in Tuscany from the first half of the twelfth century, noting the appearance of names drawn from these works in Pistoian documents dating to that period.⁷⁰ Arthurian romances circulated the region in both French and the vernacular during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries