The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

We should visit the battle-field to-day, for the walk or drive is one of the pleasantest in the neighbourhood of Siena. About four miles beyond the Porta Pispini we cross the Bozzone, and then, to the left, ascend the long, low hill of Monteropoli. This was the Sienese position before the battle. Opposite is Monteselvoli, and at our feet the Arbia, and between the two long hills the valley. The contadini take an uncanny pleasure in showing us the way, in pointing out and naming the various sites that witnessed the struggle. Away to the left, above the Malena – nearly an hour’s walk from the small railway station of Arbia – is the spot where the battle ended. A steep little hill, the lower part of which is a vineyard, is crowned with olive trees and cypresses, surrounding a pyramid of rough brown stone. The view that it commands is grand and sweeping; the black and barren hills to the south east; Santafiore hid in clouds to the south; and westwards the blood-stained valley of the battle-field, beyond which rises Siena itself with its towers, behind which the sun was already sinking when the Florentines made their last stand.

From the tower of the Marescotti (now of the Palazzo Saracini), Cerreto Ceccolini had watched the whole fight, beating his drum in signal to the people in the streets below, telling them of the course of the struggle, bidding them cry to God and the Madonna while the event hung in doubt, to shout in exultation when the day was won.

The victorious army rested that night on Monteropoli, with their prisoners and booty. They made their solemn entry into Siena the next day by the same gate through which they had passed out to the war, the German nobles and soldiers crowned with garlands of olive, singing songs in their own tongue as they made their way in triumphant procession to the Duomo. Three days of general supplication and thanksgiving followed; to the title Sena vetus was added by solemn decree Civitas Virginis, to the litany an Advocata Senensium. According to Malavolti, not more than 600 Sienese had fallen on the field of battle, but among them were many young men of the noblest families in the city. It is needless to re-tell in this place the familiar story of the triumphant entry of the Count Giordano with the Ghibelline exiles and his German mercenaries into the desolate Florence, and how that short-lived despotism was set up which the people themselves – those strenuous burghers and artisans of the Florentine Guilds – overthrew six years later. Montalcino, the original cause of the war, had surrendered to Siena a few days after the battle, and had been cruelly humiliated. According to the Sienese chroniclers, the people of Montalcino came through the Porta Romana in penitential robes, with halters round their necks, crying misericordia, and were forced to go to the field of battle to bury all the abandoned dead. A similar fate befell Montepulciano, which Manfred granted to the Commune of Siena on November 20th. In the following year Provenzano was made Podestà of Montepulciano, and with him went Don Ugo, the Camarlingo di Biccherna, to arrange for the building of a fortress there.

But this epoch of Ghibelline prepotency in Tuscany was brief. The victory of Charles of Anjou over Manfred at Benevento, in February 1266, was followed by the restoration of the Guelf supremacy in Florence. Siena and Pisa now stood alone.

Siena had not long remained united. There was still a Guelf faction within the walls, headed by the Tolomei, and the nobles were daily growing more estranged from the people. There was fighting in the Piazza Tolomei in 1265, when the people fired the palace; and again, in 1267, when, after the fall of Manfred, the Guelfs commenced to raise their heads anew. It was in these years that Provenzano Salvani became the ruling spirit of the State, and, in Dante’s words, “in his presumption thought to bring all Siena into his own hands.” It was mainly through his influence that Siena joined with Pisa in aiding Corradino, the youthful grandson of the great Frederick, in his designs upon Italy. Corradino came, a victim marked for the slaughter; and in August 1268 he rode into Siena with his army, and was received with the utmost joy as true Caesar. It was during his stay here that his troops, united with the Sienese, gained a slight victory in the Valdarno, and the prisoners brought into the city seemed to the exulting Ghibellines an augury of the complete triumph of the imperial cause. In the utter overthrow of these aspirations on the disastrous field of Tagliacozzo, “where without arms the old Alardo conquered,” a friend of Provenzano’s had fallen into the hands of the Angevin victor, who set a heavy ransom as the price of his life. Then was it that Provenzano appeared in the guise of a supplicant in the Campo, as Dante tells us in the Purgatorio, begging money of all that passed by, till the sum was made up “to deliver his friend from the torment that he was suffering in Charles’ prison.”

In the very next year a more bitter fate was Provenzano’s own. With Florentine aid, the Guelf exiles were threatening the Sienese frontier, and Provenzano Salvani, with Count Guido Novello, led a mixed force of Tuscan Ghibellines and Spanish and German mercenaries to attack Colle di Val d’Elsa. Here, in June 1269, they were surprised by a smaller force of French cavalry under Guy de Montfort, “routed and rolled back in the bitter paces of flight,” the Florentines and Guelf exiles taking ample vengeance for the slaughter of Montaperti. More than a thousand Sienese fell. Provenzano himself, to whom before the battle it had been foretold that his head should be the highest in the field, was taken prisoner, and murdered in cold blood by Cavolino Tolomei, who rode through the host with his head upon the point of his lance. Among the Guelf exiles in Colle was a noble lady named Sapia – the wife, it is said, of Ghinibaldo Saracini – who waited in agonised suspense in a tower near the field, declaring that she would hurl herself down from the window if her countrymen were victorious. When she saw them routed, and watched the furious Guelf pursuit, she broke out into the paroxysm of delight recorded by Dante, “crying to God, Henceforth I fear thee no more.”8

The battle of Colle di Val d’Elsa closes the period of Ghibelline supremacy in Siena. In the following year Guy de Montfort, as vicar of King Charles, forced the Sienese to take back their Guelf exiles, who soon drove out the Ghibellines. Instead of the Twenty-four, the chief power was now vested in a Thirty-six, who included both nobles and popolani. The long struggle with Florence was over for the present, Siena being forced to join her rival in the Guelf League under the suzerainty of the Angevin king. And as was inevitable when the Guelfs got the upper hand in an Italian state, in 1280 the nobles, or gentiluomini, were excluded from the Government, which was now put into the hands of the “Fifteen Governors and Defenders of the Commune and People of Siena.” A daring, but unsuccessful attempt of the Ghibelline exiles and their adherents within the walls to recapture the city in 1281 only resulted in strengthening the new democratic government. In 1285 the Fifteen were reduced to Nine, the famous magistracy of the Signori Nove, “the Lords Nine, the Defenders of the Commune and People of the city and district of Siena, and of the jurisdiction of the same,” in which no members of noble houses could sit (though still eligible for the other offices of the State, such as those of the Provveditori di Biccherna). Their term of office was two months, during which they lived at the expense of the State in one or other of the palaces of the city, rented for the purpose, until the present Palazzo Pubblico was built. The Nine were chosen from the popolo di mezzo, the rich and enlightened merchant class, that came between the nobles and the plebeians. Throughout the story of Siena we find the word Monte used to denote the faction or order that held sway, and this was the beginning of the Monte dei Nove, whose adherents were afterwards known as the Noveschi. The order that had previously held the supremacy is henceforth known as the Monte de’ Gentiluomini.

The Siena of this epoch of Guelf predominance is that luxurious city of the gente vana, the “vain folk,” that Dante knew, the city whose paths he trod in the early days of his exile. Senseless extravagance reigned side by side with hectic devotion and mystic enthusiasm. Typical, indeed, of this time are two figures of whom we read in the Divina Commedia; the young nobleman, Lano Maconi, who, having squandered all his substance in riotous living, joined in the unsuccessful expedition of the Sienese and Florentines against Arezzo in 1288, and, when the Sienese fell into an ambush at the ford of Pieve del Toppo, instead of saving his life by flight, dashed into the middle of the Aretines and found the death he sought; Pietro Pettignano, Franciscan tertiary and combseller of the Terzo di Camollia, who saved the soul of Monna Sapia by his prayers, saw visions and wrought miracles, and after a life of humility and righteousness died in 1289, and was venerated as a saint.9 Magnificent processions, gorgeous ceremonies of church and state, sumptuous balls and banquets, celebrated the bestowing of the order of knighthood upon the nobles of city and contado – each aristocratic house striving to eclipse the other in lavish hospitality and brilliant display. Amidst it all we hear the voice of that realist of the Trecento – Cecco degli Angiolieri, who “anticipates Villon from afar”10– singing of the three things for which he cares, la donna, la taverna, e’ l dado, celebrating his sordid passion for Becchina, the shoemaker’s daughter, pouring venomous abuse upon his own father, who persisted in living on and thus keeping him out of his heritage, railing against all mankind in half furious, half humorous style, daring to break a lyric lance even with the divine Florentine, Dante Alighieri himself. More characteristic of Siena is Cecco’s contemporary; Folgore da San Gimignano, in his corona of fourteen sonnets addressed to the brigata nobile e cortese, a club of twelve extravagant young Sienese nobles. Month by month through the year he sets forth a round of pleasures of every kind, feasting and hunting, music and jousting (the latter, in spite of a reference to Camelot, of a very harmless, carpet-knight description), dallying in pleasant places with lovely women. Nowhere else shall you find so perfect a picture of the splendid life and delicate living of courtly circles in “soft Siena” —Siena l’amorosa madre di dolcezza, as another poet called her – with her gay young gallants —

“Who as King Priam’s sons might surely stand,Valiant and courteous more than Lancelot,Each one, if need should be, with lance in hand,Would fight in tournament at Camelot.”

It was from these glittering, luxurious scenes that one of Siena’s proudest nobles, Bernardo Tolomei, fled to the desert, in 1313, to found the great convent of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, and to return to the city in 1348 with his white-robed companions, to lay down his life for his fellow-countrymen during the pestilence.

Until the advent of that terrible pestilence of 1348, the epoch of the supremacy of the Nine is the brightest in the history of Siena. “In that time,” wrote Fra Filippo Agazzari, a few years later, “the city of Siena was in such great peace, and in such great abundance of every earthly good, that almost every feast day innumerable weddings of young women were celebrated in the city.”11 It is the epoch in which most of Siena’s noblest buildings were reared, the epoch in which its three supreme painters – Duccio di Buoninsegna, Simone Martini, Ambrogio Lorenzetti – for a brief while raised the school of their native city to an equality with that of Florence. Trade flourished, the university prospered; the Republic remained Guelf, though it retained a certain Ghibelline element within its core that kept it from an aggressive policy, and led the more strenuous Florentines to a proverb touching their neighbour: La lupa puttaneggia, “the she-wolf plays the harlot.” In 1303 the Sienese purchased Talamone – which they fondly hoped to make into a valuable sea-port whereby they might become a great maritime power to rival Genoa or even Venice – from the Abbot of San Salvadore. Henceforth, to their mocking neighbours, they became the “vain folk that hopes in Talamone,” upon which they spent enormous sums of money with no result, owing to the unhealthiness of the situation and the impossibility of keeping the harbour clear. They joined the Italian league against Henry of Luxemburg, sent men and money to the defence of Brescia, and, by their prompt assistance to the Florentines, helped in forcing the Emperor to raise the siege of Florence in 1312, when his army wasted their contado. A little later, when Uguccione della Faggiuola was upholding the imperial cause, 400 Sienese cavalry and 3000 infantry were in the Guelf army that was annihilated at Montecatini in 1315. But in 1326, when Duke Charles of Calabria came to Siena on his way to Florence, and demanded the lordship of the former city as well, they rose in arms against him, barricaded the streets with chains, and forced the proud Guelf prince to accept their terms. The Duke of Athens, in 1343, having made himself tyrant of Florence, attempted to get Siena into his hands, by stirring up the nobles against the Nine; the Nine retaliated by arranging the conspiracy that caused his overthrow and his expulsion from Florence. “For three days,” writes Bindino da Travale, “the balzana floated over the Tower of the Commune of Florence, alone, without any other banner.”

The external wars of this epoch, mainly against Pisa, were unimportant. Within Siena itself the harmony was by no means unintermittent. A passage that we read in the Cronica Senese under the year 1314 is only too typical: “On the sixteenth day of April there was great tumult and battle in Siena, between the Tolomei and the Salimbeni, and all the city was up in arms.” And, in addition to the never ending feud between these two great houses, there were political interests at stake. The Tolomei, with whom were other houses of the magnates, were opposed to the Nine, and adopted the cause of the lower classes of the people, the popolo minuto, who were excluded from the Government by the burgher oligarchy. In 1318 the Tolomei, with certain of the Forteguerri and other nobles, plotted with the notaries and butchers and a number of artisans, to overthrow the Nine; but the attempt was easily repressed. A prolonged vendetta between Salimbeni and Tolomei kept the whole city disturbed between 1320 and 1326, while similar feuds, accompanied by ferocious murders and sanguinary riots, between the Malavolti and Piccolomini, Saracini and Scotti, enlivened the two following decades of the century. In 1346, a section of the Tolomei, allied with the popolo minuto, attempted a rising in the contrada of the Porta Ovile; several of their plebeian adherents were hanged, but the Captain of War was afraid to lay hands upon the nobles. In 1347, the Pope’s legate and the Nine succeeded in reconciling the Piccolomini and the Malavolti.

The terrible pestilence, known as the Black Death, that swept over Europe in 1348, devastated Siena for nearly six months. Even when we remember Boccaccio’s pages, we still read the account in the Cronica Senese with a fresh thrill of horror.12 It raged from May to October. Men and women felt the fatal swelling, “and suddenly, crying out, they died. The father hardly stayed to see his son; one brother fled the other; the wife abandoned her husband; for it was said that this disease was caught by looking, and in the breath.” So great was the mortality that none could be hired to bury the dead. No sooner was a man’s breath out of his body, than his friends took him to the church and buried him, without any funeral service, as best they could. Huge trenches were dug in different parts of the city, and the dead thrown in, indiscriminately, in great heaps. “And I, Agnolo di Tura called Grasso, buried five of my sons in one trench with my own hands; and many others did the like. And also there were some that were so badly covered up that the dogs dragged them out, and ate many bodies in the city. No bells tolled, and no one wept at any misfortune that befel, for almost every person expected death; and the thing went in such wise that folk thought that no one would remain on live, and many men believed and said: This is the end of the world. Here no physician availed, nor medicine, nor any defence; rather it seemed that the more precaution a man took, the sooner he died.” About three quarters of the inhabitants of city and contado perished, though the “more than 80,000 persons” of Agnolo di Tura must be an exaggeration. While the pestilence raged most fiercely, Bernardo Tolomei and his white robed Olivetani came down from their cloistered retreat to tend the stricken people of their native city, and almost all, including Bernardo, died with them. In the following year the Sienese who survived gave themselves up to feasting and riotous living. They all behaved for a while like brothers and relations, says the chronicler; each one felt as though he had won back the world, and no one could settle down to doing anything. And for a long while Siena seemed uninhabited, per Siena non pareva che fusse persona.

The order of the Nine fell in 1355, and thirteen years of tumultuous, perpetual change followed. The Emperor elect, Charles IV. – “di Lusimburgo ignominioso Carlo,” as Fazio degli Uberti calls him – was on his way from Pisa to be crowned at Rome; the Sienese ambassadors, headed by Guccio Tolomei and Giovanni di Agnolino Salimbeni, had sworn fidelity to him at Pisa on behalf of the Nine, and he had sworn in return to preserve the liberties of Siena, and to make the Nine his vicars. With a thousand knights and barons, the Emperor and Empress entered Siena on March 25th, each under a baldacchino gorgeous with gold, with music playing and banners flying, and were greeted with enthusiasm. No sooner had the Caesar dismounted at the palace of the Salimbeni, than a cry arose throughout the city: “Long live the Emperor and death to the Nine!” The Piccolomini with the consent of the other magnates (excepting only Giovanni di Agnolino Salimbeni) began the rising, and the popolo minuto on the following day rose in arms at their call. When night fell, on the 26th, the chains of the city were cut, and the keys brought to the Emperor; the Nine, helpless and terrified, lurked in the Palace of the Commune, while the people sacked and burned their houses. The next day all Siena was in arms. The Emperor rode through vast acclaiming throngs in the Campo to confer with the Nine in the Palace, while louder and louder rose the deafening roar, “Long live the Emperor and death to the Nine!” – the nobles instigating the populace to further efforts. In the Palace the Caesar received the abdication of the Nine, forced them to renounce all the privileges he had granted them, to annul the oath he had sworn to their ambassadors – while the younger nobles, shouting and cheering, led the populace to sack the palaces of the Provveditori di Biccherna and Consoli di Mercanzia, and the houses of the wool merchants, to release the prisoners, to hunt out the luckless Podestà and War-Captain. The books of condemnation, the papers of the Nine, were burnt before the Emperor’s eyes in the piazza, and their official chest was dragged through the city at the tail of an ass. Though Charles had sufficient decency to refuse to surrender the persons of the Nine to the fury of the mob outside, he let the nobles and populace avenge themselves on their houses and property, and it was not until the evening had come that he sent his soldiers to guard the Dogana del Sale, and to order every one to lay down their arms. But such was the general alarm that no one would receive any of the adherents of the luckless Nine; their servants deserted them, the very priests and religious shrank from them as though they had the plague. The Emperor caused a certain number of citizens to be elected – twelve nobles and eighteen of the popolo minuto to “reform the government,” and went on his way leaving his vicar, the Patriarch of Aquileia, in charge. A supreme magistracy of twelve popolani was elected, henceforth known as the Signori Dodici, four from each terzo of the city, holding office for two months, one of them to serve as Captain of the People; there was further to be a kind of subsidiary council of six gentiluomini, who were not to reside with the Signoria in the Palazzo, but without whom the Twelve could undertake nothing of importance nor open letters that concerned the state. When the Emperor returned from Rome at the beginning of May and passed through Siena again, he was received with great honours and renewed acclamations, as the Deliverer of the People, and made about sixty knights, nobles of Siena and plebeians alike – many of the latter carried bodily to him on the shoulders of the populace and knighted, amidst the wildest clamour and confusion, against their own will and to the great disgust of the imperial barons.

Hardly had the Emperor left the city than the six nobles – with the consent of their leader, Giovanni di Agnolino Salimbeni, who appears prominently during these years as a powerful influence in the Republic on the side of peace and moderation – were forced to lay down their office. The whole government now remained in the hands of the Twelve, who were mostly petty tradesmen and notaries, and whose rule was corrupt and incapable. A number of the subject towns refused to acknowledge them; Montepulciano gave itself to Perugia, and the Sienese, in revenge, persuaded the governor of Cortona to revolt against the Perugians. A fierce war between Siena and Perugia followed. The Sienese gained a creditable victory outside the walls of Cortona. The light armed cavalry of Perugia harried the Sienese contado, and even approached the gates of the city itself, and the Sienese retaliated by taking the mercenaries of Conrad of Landau into their pay – who were, however, intercepted and severely cut up by the Florentine mountaineers of the Val di Lamone – and ravaged the Perugian territories up to the walls of Perugia. Peace was made at the end of 1358, much to the advantage of Siena, who kept Cortona, while the Perugians had to set Montepulciano free at the end of five years. At the beginning of 1365 the latter town made Messer Giovanni di Agnolino their Podestà, and returned to the obedience of Siena.

During these years of the rule of the Twelve, the contado was perpetually threatened by wandering bands of mercenaries – the Compagnia Bianca, mainly Englishmen, but led by German captains; the Compagnia della Stella; the Compagnia del Cappello of Italians, under Niccolò da Montefeltro; the Compagnia di San Giorgio, which is associated with the great name of John Hawkwood. These had to be compounded with, to be guarded against by enrolling other mercenaries, to be played off against each other. In October 1363, the Sienese, led by their Conservatore or War-Captain, Ceccolo di Giordano Orsini, and stiffened by a strong force of Germans and Hungarians, overtook the Compagnia del Cappello, which was devastating the contado, in the Valdichiana, and gained a complete victory, taking its captain and other leaders prisoners. But when, in March 1367, they tried to play the same game with John Hawkwood and his company of Englishmen, near Montalcinello, there was a very different tale to tell; the Sienese were driven back to Siena in headlong rout, their Conservatore was taken prisoner, and peace had to be purchased at a goodly rate of golden florins. Within the city there was restless plotting against the Twelve, followed by banishments and executions – for this government was by no means so reluctant to lay hands upon the nobles as the Nine had been. Realising that the feeling of the city was turning against them, the Twelve sent a splendid embassy to receive Pope Urban V. when he landed at the Port of Talamone (on his way to Rome in that ineffectual, because premature, attempt to heal the leprosy of Avignon), entered into league with him, sent horsemen under Sozzo Bandinelli and Piero Piccolomini to support the cause of the Church at Viterbo and Bologna. This was good so far as it went, but it did not avert the storm that burst upon Siena in 1368.