Forged in the Shadow of Mars

Chivalry and Violence in Late Medieval Florence

Peter W. Sposato

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501761904
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe médiévale

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 Mar s, 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.

Chapter 1

Chivalry and Honor Violence

Ché bell’onor s’acquista in far vendetta.

[What beautiful honor one acquires by making vendetta.]

—Dante Alighieri, Rime petrose

On Christmas Day 1301, Simone, the son of the famous Florentine knight Corso Donati, attacked and killed his uncle, Niccola dei Cerchi, who was on his way home after praying in the church of Santa Croce.¹ The incident is described by the fourteenth-century Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, who recounts in his Nuova Cronica how Simone, “driven and encouraged to do evil, … followed on horseback the said Messer Niccola with his companions and other followers; and reaching him at the Ponte ad Africo, … attacked him; … the said Messer Niccola, without fault or cause, nor guarding himself against Simone, his said nephew, was killed and knocked down from his horse.”² Villani’s words betray the author’s disbelief and outrage at Simone’s seemingly unprovoked and unjustified violence. After all Simone had attacked and killed his own uncle without cause on Christmas Day.³ This anger is subsequently tempered by a somewhat surprising lament, for Villani informs his readers that Simone, “wounded through his side by the said Messer Niccola, died that night. So that … it was considered a great loss, because the said Simone was the most accomplished and virtuous young nobleman of Florence, and he would have come to greater honor and state, and he was all the hope of his father, Messer Corso.”⁴

Simone’s act of brutal violence against his uncle surely elicited powerful reactions from contemporary Florentines. Villani’s reaction likely represents that of many popolani who, imbued with ideas about peace and stability in the name of the common good and possessing a healthy dose of fear, would have condemned the senselessness of Simone’s destructive violence that not only resulted in Niccola’s death, but also cost Simone his own life. Contemporary Florentines also would have understood the violence in political and social terms, noting that this incident took place during the height of the feud between the Donati and Cerchi lineages that pitted a lineage of great antiquity but diminished economic prosperity against a lineage of recent origin but significant wealth, in a contest for political power. This may have helped to explain why Simone, the son of the leader of the Donati lineage, would kill Niccola, a member of the Cerchi lineage, who was also his uncle.

And yet, these explanations do not fully account for Simone’s violence. This is because they do not take into consideration Simone’s mentalité and the ideas and values of the cultural community to which he belonged.⁵ Indeed, the powerful connection between honor and violence within chivalric ideology is key to understanding Simone’s behavior.⁶ Chivalry prioritized and valorized the deeply ingrained, almost visceral, need Florentine knights and men-at-arms felt to assert, defend, and vindicate their personal and familial honor (i.e., horizontal honor) through bloody violence. The pervasiveness of this type of violence in Florence during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries suggests that at least in the minds of its practitioners, such an important end more than justified the destructive means. Thus, when seen through this chivalric lens, the motivation behind Simone’s violence comes into focus: the need to assert and defend his personal and familial honor, whatever the cost.

The close connection between violence and honor was a dominant aspect of chivalric culture and identity in late medieval Florence and Tuscany, just as north of the Alps.⁷ Chivalry’s influence in Italy, however, has received comparatively little attention from scholars, who focus instead on political, social, and economic forces.⁸ Moreover, the recent scholarship on elite violence is dominated by a revisionist view that argues violent self-help, specifically the practice of vendetta, was commonplace in Florentine society and not limited to “noble” or traditional lineages. Proponents of this view contend that vendetta and feuding, well regulated by communal laws, were ultimately positive forces in Florentine society, helping to restore balance and end, rather than intensify, conflicts.⁹ In other words, far from being the product of a lifestyle or ethos associated with nobility or membership among a traditional warrior elite, violence related to honor was readily practiced by individuals at all levels of the social hierarchy.¹⁰

This chapter does not seek to reassert the now thoroughly disproven contention that violent responses to matters of honor were the exclusive preserve of nobles, the traditional elite, and other members of the chivalric cultural community. It is clear that Florentines at every level of the social hierarchy considered violence to be an option during conflicts, although the risks and costs associated with this course of action no doubt led many to choose force only after carefully considering other alternatives, especially the law courts and private peace pacts negotiated and recorded by notaries.¹¹ This violence also tended to be characterized by proportionality.¹² Less convincing, however, is the related argument that the explicit link between excessive violence and “noble” identity made by a number of prominent contemporary chroniclers was simply popolani propaganda intended to demonize certain members of the elite who refused to peacefully integrate into civic society. It seems much more likely that chroniclers were making this connection precisely because the honor-related violence of these men was different in a number of significant ways, not least in terms of its intensity and its deleterious impact on the city.¹³

These differences can be explained by a number of factors stemming from chivalric ideology. First, chivalry not only encouraged and valorized violence perpetrated in order to assert or defend honor, it created a clear expectation that challenges to honor would be met with force.¹⁴ As Thomas Kuehn has observed for fifteenth-century Florence, “honor was both an individual and group possession.”¹⁵ This was certainly the case in our period, when all male members of a lineage had to defend the group’s honor and ensure its dominance and interests. Any dishonor suffered, even by a single individual, impacted the entire lineage, requiring members to respond. To do otherwise risked suffering dishonor or shame.

Second, the cultural forces of honor and shame were arguably more precious to the chivalric elite than to the average Florentine. While this is impossible to precisely measure given the nature of the sources, surviving contemporary voices suggest that honor was worth more than life itself. Sometimes this sentiment was made explicit, as when Guittone d’Arezzo, a famous Tuscan poet who wrote for an aristocratic audience in thirteenth-century Tuscany, wrote that dishonor or shame “is more to be feared than death.”¹⁶ Giovanni Villani’s account of a likely apocryphal conversation between Messer Farinata degli Uberti and other Florentine Ghibelline exiles in 1260 suggests that Guittone’s point was a reality for historical chivalric practitioners. In this conversation Messer Farinata exhorts his fellow Ghibellines to fight, concluding that “for us death and defeat would be better than to crawl around the world any longer.”¹⁷

Given the high stakes, the failure to avenge slights to one’s honor through violence compounded an individual’s dishonor and challenged his chivalric identity. This potent combination of chivalry, honor-shame, and superior resources resulted in a level of violence among these knights and men-at-arms that was different enough in degree to be different in kind from the violence perpetrated by other members of Florentine society.¹⁸ A tell-tale characteristic of chivalric honor violence seems, in fact, to have been its transgressive nature that perpetuated and intensified conflicts rather than restoring parity and providing the conditions for peace.¹⁹ Not surprisingly given their desire to prevail rather than restore parity through proportional responses, the traditional (i.e., chivalric) elite seem to have rarely made use of alternative methods of dealing with conflict, especially notarial peace pacts.²⁰

Limitations of the Sources

As noted in the introduction, the study of chivalry in late medieval Florence is made more difficult by the limitations of chronicle and archival evidence. This is particularly true for the historical practice of chivalric honor violence. Most contemporary chronicles were composed by popolani authors who were either unsympathetic or outright hostile toward the chivalric lifestyle and its justifications of violence.²¹ From their point of view, chivalric violence presented a serious threat to life in an orderly and prosperous civic society. As a result, they rarely offer the chivalric perspective or much insight into the mentality of the perpetrators of honor violence, instead usually offering only criticism and condemnation. Even authors who interacted closely with the chivalric cultural community, like the anonymous chronicler known as Pseudo-Brunetto Latini, often fail to satisfy the historian’s desire to know motivation and context.²² For example, when this anonymous author writes about a striking incident occurring in January 1296 that saw the podestà of Florence condemn the famous Florentine knight Corso Donati for wounding his cousin and fellow knight, Simone Galastrone ...