Chapter IV (3)

Putting aside the immense commercial and industrial advantages that this organisation of the guilds afforded to the Republic during the thirteenth century, we shall see that they were equally useful from the political point of view. All these merchants, constituting a large majority of the citizens, were continually engaged in directing great undertakings, settling commercial disputes, discussing statutes and laws; they maintained relations with all parts of the known world, and travelled to all parts on special missions in defence of their common interests. We see that they all took a continuous and eager share in political life, inasmuch as every guild was an independent, self-ruling institution, with separate magistrates, laws, statutes, and councils, and that it became a centre of industrial, intellectual, and political activity. Thanks to this freedom of circulation, the pulse of the Florentine people was quickened to redoubled strength, and every faculty of the human mind, all moral and political energy of which man is capable, suddenly rose to a prodigious height in Florence. Choosing any one of these merchants almost at random, one might be sure to find him capable of governing the Republic; a man to be trusted with the most delicate of diplomatic missions, and honourably acquit himself of it; one able to command a respectful hearing from Pope, king, or emperor, without allowing himself to be duped, yet without failing to conform to the requirements of court ceremonial. Thus the Florentines rose to great fame throughout Europe for their shrewdness and subtlety, and as in the midst of all this extraordinary commercial and political activity Italian art and literature also developed, the small mercantile Republic soon shed its lustre over the whole world.

The greater guilds also achieved another good result in Florence. At a time when the State organisation divided the city in two halves, as it were; at a time when the strife of factions was about to be fiercely renewed, when party leaders excited men's passions by nourishing the flame of discord, and the continual change of the supreme Council of Twelve transferred the direction of the government to citizens of all tempers, and all devoted to their respective parties, then the decentralisation of the government in a large number of small associations was indeed an inestimable benefit. If nobles or people rebelled against their rulers in order to change the Twelve, or the Podestà, the Captain, or even the statutes, the suspension of public business that inevitably ensued produced much less real than apparent confusion. Being split up into so many small associations, the Republic could exist without a government even for several months; since the armed, disciplined, and strongly constituted guilds, were now even better prepared than in past times to seize the reins, and prevent the troubles which would have certainly befallen the city had it been left without guidance. Thus the constitution of the guilds, as established in 1266, likewise serves to explain how it was that poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture were enabled to flourish among a people of traders; even as it explains why so much progress was possible amid such, apparently, enormous confusion, and how democracy succeeded in destroying every relic of feudalism in Florence, and in achieving absolute equality together with the highest degree of freedom known to the Middle Ages. The Florentine Commune was the centre of so much culture because it was also the seat of the largest freedom compatible with the times. Of this culture the best and loveliest fruits are owed to the democracy; for we find in Arnolfo's towers and churches, in the paintings of Cimabue and Giotto, as also in Dante's verse, the special stamp and characteristic of the Florentine people. During the Middle Ages in Provence, France, Germany, and England, many nobles rose to literary fame, and indeed nearly all the poets of those lands were of patrician birth. But Florentine art and letters, constituting the most fertile seeds of art and letters in Italy, were essentially republican; many writers, and most of the artists, of Florence were the offspring of traders or labouring men.