Middle Ages continued to dispense with a patronymic, and the House of Savoy is without one to the present day. The external aspect of Florence was, in Dante's time, like its social condition, in a transition stage. The little mart of Fiesole had, indeed, expanded vastly since first the fierce mountaineers had begun to descend from their rock-hewn stronghold to barter in the plain; but the tradition of its origin kept the dwellings of its most important citizens clustered round its centres of traffic, and the Merca o Vecchio and the Mercato Nuovo were still the great nuclei of the life of the city. In the latter stood the fortified houses of the Bostichi, infamous for the private application of torture to prisoners within their walls; and near them another formidable group was formed by the dwellings of the Cavalcanti, a warlike clan numbering sixty fighting men. The appearance of this part of the city must have differed considerably from its present aspect, as it was ravaged by the tremendous conflagration of 1304, two years after Dante's exile, in which from twelve hundred to two thousand houses were consumed by an artificial compound of the nature of Greek fire.* As wooden roofs were then much used, even accidental fires were frequent and destructive. Some of these old houses must have been stately mansions, for that of the Tosinghi in Mercato Vecchio, destroyed by the Ghibellines in 1248, at the same time as thirty-five other Guelf strongholds, is described as rising to a height of ninety braccia, surmounted by a lofty tower, and with a façade adorned with marble columns. In the same party triumph was destroyed the great tower, 120 braccia high, which commanded the end of the Corso degli Adimari, and was called "Guardamorto," because it looked towards San Giovanni, the favourite place of interment in the city. But, though party feuds were thus making havoc in Florence, much of what is now familiar in its aspect dates from the same epoch of civil strife. The palace of the podestà or Bargello, begun in 1250, was already occupied as the official residence of the magistracy; and there, where Dante's portrait still adorns the wall, he must have resided during his term of office. The Palazzo Vecchio, with that wonderful tower, whose wall, carried out on brackets, overhangs its base like a projecting cliff of masonry, was only just begun (in 1298), in the midst of an unsightly waste of ruin, where the houses of the Uberti had been destroyed by the triumphant Guelfs. Giotto's campanile was as yet unthought of, but from the stone which the tradition of Florence still points out as the favourite resting-place of Dante he doubtless often watched the workmen busy at the foundations of the new cathedral, and heard the ringing music of the masons' tools, as the first outlines of Santa Maria del Fiore were traced on the site of the older basilica of Santa Reparata. The *"Fuoco lavorato" it is called by the chronicler, who says it left a blue colour on the ground where it fell, work, begun in 1294, was, however, soon suspended amid the civil discords of the city, to be resumed in 1331; after which the marble mass of the Duomo rose rapidly under the patronage of the guild of wool, its cost being met by the danara di Dio, collected in the factories for the great work. Florence had in Dante's time outgrown two sets of walls, and that completed in 1078 was already superseded by the last, which existed until very recently. It may be conjectured that the earlier walls of Florence were not detached ramparts like those of later construction, but rather a defensive system of the compound nature, still exempli fied in the villages which form so striking a feature of the mountain scenery of Italy. These little strongholds, called cistelli, are girt by a mural ring, which forms at the same time the external wall of a continuous circuit of houses, and the bulwark of the town. It is pierced with windows in its upper portion, for the convenience of the inmates, and the gates consist of vaulted passages, generally four in number, passing under the houses like the archway of a porte cochére.* Through such an archway the Borgo Pinto is still reached, from what was in Dante's time the inner circuit of Florence, and it is probably the very postern gate by which Corso Donati forced his way into the city in 1301, finding himself baffled by the main gateway of San Piero Scheraggio close beside it. For we learn from Giovanni Villani's detailed account of this event that the old mural circuit of 1078 was not only standing, but was the chief defence of the city, and that its gates were still fortified and guarded, while the borghi, or streets leading from them to the new walls, were either open or closed by temporary barriers called serragli. These Corso found no difficulty in passing, reaching in succession several of the gates of the ancient circle (cerchie vecchie), all of which he found closed; and it was only with the aid of his friends inside that he was able at last to break down the postern gate of the Borgo Pinto, and forced an entrance in the neighbourhood of his own houses. The new walls, thus easily passed, were probably intended originally for fiscal rather than military purposes, forming a cinta daziara in order to prevent the inhabitants of the borghi, now grown into populous suburbs outside the old gates, from escaping the burden of municipal taxation. It is at any rate certain that at this time they formed no part of the defen sive works of the city, and that the strong gates which still exist must have been of later construction. This forcible re-entry of Corso Donati had important consequences; for, once within, he was able by the connivance of Charles of Valois, then governing Florence, to drive his opponents, the White Guelfs, * Of similar construction must have been, in the days of St. Paul, the walls of Damascus, outside of which he was let down from a win 'ow in a basket," which would have been impossible if they had been detached ramparts. The windows in the walls of the Italian villages are at a great height above the ground, which gen erally slopes precipitously from the rear of the houses. into that long exile in which Petrarch was born, and Alighieri died. The subsequent life of the latter, who was in his story as well as in his character a type of his epoch, gives us a more vivid idea than we should otherwise have had of the fate he shared with a large section of his contemporaries. Not Florence alone, but every Italian city, had then a portion of its principal citizens in banishment, and their return, either by the intervention of a foreign Power, or in virtue of their own warlike prowess, was only the signal for an equal number of the opposite faction to take their turn of exile. The cry of these outcasts comes to us across the centuries in the verse of Dante, who like all poets gave a voice to what thousands mutely suffered; and we realize in his passionate complaint the homeless wandering life, the bitterness and prolonged heart-burning of the nameless and voiceless crowd, who shared his fate without his genius. Six hundred was the number of his fellow-citizens actually banished with him, no inconsiderable proportion of a population, estimated, some thirty years later, as containing twenty-five thousand men capable of bearing arms-namely, between fifteen and seventy years of age of whom a thousand five hundred and six ranked as nobles. The conditions of exile were not alike for all, but varied according to the circumstances of those condemned. The more powerful were generally confinati-that is, restricted to a given place of residence, where they might be least dangerous to the hostile government, and most remote from their territorial possessions and rural adherents. If they broke bounds (rompere il confine, as it was called), they became outlaws, condemned in person and property (nell'avere e nell a persona) that is to say, their goods were confiscated, and they themselves, if taken, were liable to capital punishment. Their property, indeed, would seem to have been at all times administered by the Government, as we sometimes find an allowance per day made to them for their expenses, and the trusteeship of Ghibelline possessions, as . well as the exclusion of the proscribed party from office, was one of the functions of the vigilance committee instituted by Charles of Valois, with the title of magistrato di parte guelfa. On the mass of the less formidable exiles a simple sentence of banishment was pronounced, as in the case of Dante, who was free to wander where he chose, save within the territory of Florence. In some cases the city chosen as a refuge by these outcasts would peremptorily expel them, at a few days' notice, in consequence of some change in its policy. Thus, Dante's fellow-exiles were driven from Arezzo by Uguccione della Faggiuola, in the hope of recommending himself to the favour of the Pope. And Lucca, being defeated by the Florentines in 1263, was driven to make peace at the expense of the Guelf refugees; who, expelled from her territory at three days' notice, had to cross the Apennines in haste and misery, to seek shelter at Bologna. At other times the banished party was strong enough to wage war against the one in power, devastating the territory, and sacking the castles and villages of their adversaries. Before Dante's time, between 1248 and 1267, Florence had seen four of these party revolutions, and alternate proscriptions of Guelfs and Ghibellines. The former were finally restored after the defeat of Manfred at the battle of Benevento, in 1266, only however to quarrel among themselves, and split into the famous Black and White factions, represented respectively by the Donati and Cerchi. The even tual triumph of the Black party was due to the pusillanimity of the Cerchi, which threw the game into their adversaries' hands; and the overbearing Corso Donati, Dante's enemy and brother-in-law, was able to carry all before him, and avenge on his opponents by every form of violence and oppression, the exile from which he had re turned, a triumphant rebel. In this haughty and unscrupulous noble we see a premature specimen of the Renaissance tyrant, only arrested in his career of development by the unsettled conditions of a society unripe as yet for the continuance of any permanent form, even of violence. He was wanting in the conciliatory arts, which win submission to usurped authority by masking instead of parading it, and found himself gradually superseded in power by those of his party who had the superior craft to ally themselves with the popular side. Reared in the traditions of a ruling caste, his haughty spirit could not brook even the semblance of subjection; as we learn from the arguments with which he habit ually addressed himself to the prejudices of the more violent and fac tious spirits he gathered round him. These men appropriate all the honours, while we, who are by birth gentlemen and grandees, are reduced to live like strangers in our native city. They are followed by trains of armed retainers, they have on their side the false popular leaders, and divide amongst them the public treasure, of which we, as their betters, ought to be masters. 66 The last cry of a dominant race, whose epoch of power was passing away, could not have found clearer or more emphatic utterance. The era of the tyranny of force in which Corso had graduated was gone by, while that of the tyranny of fraud had not yet begun, and the law which he had so often defied crushed him in the end. Baffled and fugitive, after seeing his palace carried by assault, he was himself overtaken and slain by the officers of the Republic, a mile outside the city. The monks of San Salvi buried him near the spot where he fell, and Florence was all the more tranquil for the extinction of his restless spirit. The old order of things was indeed passing away, and Corso Donati was its last representative. The balance of power had shifted, and the democratic element was rapidly gaining the ascendant, to become in its turn an instrument of personal aggrandisement. It was thus used by a man who had all Corso's ambition, combined with a subtle genius far more dangerous than his frank insubordination, for it enabled the " Father of his country" to be at any rate the father of its rulers. Tyranny in the future must have the law as its accomplice-the masses as its associates; and princes, taking a lesson from their own flatterers, must learn to court the many in order to oppress the few. The undisguised class-tyranny of the nobles was gone forever their position as a ruling caste uudermined-and they were gradually amalgamated with their fellow citizens, among whom they thenceforward lived as equals. Their influence as an element of the race was more abiding, and to it Florence owes all that is inost glorious in her annals. The barbarians crossed the Alps not only to destroy but to renovate, and the in tellectual revival of Italy was due as much to the fresh graft of Northern vigour on the subtle intelligence of the Latin race, as to the resuscitated traditions of classical culture. The illustrious Tuscans, who have made their little country the choicest shrine of genius in Europe, belonged with scarcely an exception to the old patrician race, and stamped on all time its impress of energetic vitality. The turbulent aristocracy, whose feuds long distracted Florence, gave her also the pacific heroes whose fame is her best inheritance; and the names of Dante and Boccaccio, of Cimabue, Brunelleschi, Alberti, Da Vinci, and Buonarroti,* of Pulci, Machiavelli, and Galielo, show the value to Italy and the world of the legacy of the Lombards. E. M. CLERKE, in Dublin Review. FIRST AND LAST. THEY told me Love would only bring me woe, To heed a prophecy I hated so, Determined for myself to learn and know. Love knocking at my door, I let him in : A shining angel he, who entered singing. He deigned to eat, I standing humbly by, And vowed a hundred vows, and swore an oath * Buonarroti is probably an incorrect translation of the same Teutonic compound more accurately rendered in the name Buonconsiglio, the German Rath (counsel) being confounded, as the meaning of the language became lost, with Rad (wheel). and accordingly translated ruoto." |