-t date mmped below 
 
 SOUTHERN BRANCH 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF GAUF^RNiA 
 LIBRARY 
 
 L.OS ANGELAS. CALIF.
 
 SIENA
 
 SIENA 
 
 THE STORY OF A MEDIEVAL 
 COMMUNE 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 MDCCCCIX 
 
 7 7 1 o 8 
 
 -. \J >.-/
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1909. BY 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published March, 1909
 
 URL 
 
 35 35 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE persistent interest manifested by the public in the story 
 of the Italian communes will, I hope, make an apology for the 
 present book on Siena unnecessary. The method which I 
 have pursued, however, as well as my general purpose, require 
 
 ^ a brief explanatory statement. 
 
 ^ Though availing myself, to the best of my ability, of the 
 
 v \ work of my many predecessors in this field, I have constantly 
 striven to arrive at an independent view of every circumstance 
 of Sienese history by a personal study of the sources, both 
 printed and unprinted. But while my critical method was as 
 severe as I could make it, during the labors of composition I 
 
 ^ v kept in mind a prospective audience, composed, not of a small 
 group of specialists, but of that larger body of men and women 
 who constitute a spiritual brotherhood by reason of their com- 
 mon interest in the treasure of the past. My book addresses 
 itself frankly to the general reader. A considerable and 
 flourishing group of historical students would have that im- 
 portant, though alas! often mythological, member of the com- 
 monwealth wholly ignored, on the ground of his being as in- 
 capable of raising himself to the level of the high concerns of 
 scholarship as he is unworthy to receive its benefits. I ven- 
 ture to differ with this opinion, and make bold to affirm my 
 belief that scholarship practised as the secret cult of a few 
 initiates, amidst the jealous and watchful exclusion of the 
 public, may indeed succeed in preserving its principles from 
 contamination, but must pay for the immunity obtained with 
 the failure of the social and educational purposes which are 
 its noblest justification.
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 Whoever is not fundamentally hostile to the popularizing 
 function of scholarship which I have just expounded will not 
 quarrel with my system of notes and references. Having the 
 general reader in view, I considered it highly important not 
 to confuse or irritate him with the distracting rumble of a 
 vast accompanying apparatus. I determined on a minimum 
 in this respect a minimum to be determined by two, as I 
 thought, simple and intelligible criteria. In the first place, I 
 was resolved that my references should be complete enough to 
 enable the scholar to possess himself, in a general way, of my 
 equipment and to test the accuracy of my procedure, and 
 further, I wished to supply the general reader, who might 
 desire to enlarge his information on any matter touched upon 
 in the text, with a convenient list of references. The carrying 
 of this plan to its logical conclusion seemed to call for a cata- 
 logue of all the printed works mentioned in the footnotes. 
 This catalogue will be found at the end of the book in the form 
 of an appendix. Of course it lays no claim to being a com- 
 plete bibliography of the subject. 
 
 It remains to say a word as to the plan and contents of my 
 book. I have not written a political history of Siena. To be 
 sure, I have dealt with the political evolution of the commune, 
 but only as one, though an important, phase of the larger 
 problem of its civilization. On this point, on the civilization 
 of Siena, I have concentrated all my efforts. Starting with the 
 simple fact that this town of southern Tuscany, in the period 
 of its freedom, erected for its comfort and delight a diversified, 
 engaging, and wholly distinctive house of life, I determined 
 to illuminate this attractive edifice from as large a number of 
 angles as possible. As soon as my object had thus clearly 
 defined itself, I could not fail to discover that a topical treat- 
 ment of the material was better suited to my ends than a 
 strictly chronological one. The latter system would have re- 
 quired the steady following of a score of paths, coupled with
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 the perpetual retention in my hands of a hundred interwoven 
 threads. I preferred the plan of following through a series of 
 selected threads in the order in which I took them up, and 
 of meeting the requirements of unity by an occasional chapter 
 weaving my constituent elements into a connected whole. By 
 isolating for examination the nobles, the clergy, the merchants, 
 and the other classes of the commonwealth, by following sepa- 
 rately the developments of public and private life, by review- 
 ing the achievements of the various arts, I have, as it were, 
 delivered to my reader the small colored cubes, which of 
 their own accord should fall into suitable relations, achieving 
 the end I had in view as complete a mosaic of Sienese culture 
 as was possible within the compass of a single volume. 
 
 But even should I have attained this purpose, I should not 
 feel that I had reached my ultimate goal, unless I had suc- 
 ceeded in still another matter far more difficult and subtle, 
 and had brought out clearly and convincingly that the achieve- 
 ments of Sienese civilization are nothing but the successive 
 emanations of a town personality, which, though unseen and 
 intangible, was and remains more real than its surviving monu- 
 ments of brick and stone. The Siena of the Middle Age, in 
 spite of its narrow limits, was a nation, and had a distinctive 
 soul as certainly as any nation which plays a role on the 
 political stage of our own day. Shy as a swallow this im- 
 perishable personality still flits over the hills among the silvery 
 olives, or in the purple dusk wanders like a stray wind among 
 the narrow streets. As the one gift utterly worth giving, I 
 would fain hope that I had disclosed to the reader something 
 of the charm and diffused fragrance of this local spirit, in- 
 tegral and indestructible part of the eternal spirit of truth and 
 beauty; failing in this, I have failed in the most essential part 
 of my task, and must consider myself to be making a poor 
 return for the generous hospitality of which, during many years 
 and at various seasons, I have been the grateful recipient. For
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 Siena still has the large heart which, according to an old in- 
 scription on Porta Camellia, swings as wide open to the 
 stranger as the gate whereby he enters: cor magis tibi Sena 
 pandit. Not to have stamped upon a book dealing with the 
 City of the Virgin a likeness, in some degree, at least worthy 
 of its past and present, is to invite the oblivion which is the 
 wage of incapacity.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAOB 
 
 I THE ORIGIN OF MEDIJEVAL SIENA i 
 
 II THE FEUDAL AGE AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE 
 
 FREE COMMUNE 29 
 
 III THE SIENESE CHURCH 72 
 
 IV THE BURGHERS 95 
 
 V THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS . . . .127 
 
 VI THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE .... 149 
 
 VII THE CIVIL STRUGGLE OF THE FOURTEENTH CEN- 
 TURY: THE NINE, THE TWELVE, AND THE 
 REFORMERS 192 
 
 VIII THE SIENESE CONTADO 229 
 
 IX THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT AND SAINT CATHERINE . 25 
 
 ^ X THE Civic SPIRIT AND THE BUILDING OF THE 
 
 CITY 275 
 
 XI THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT AND THE ADORNMENT OF 
 
 THE CITY 309 
 
 XII MANNERS AND PASTIMES; LITERARY AND IN- 
 TELLECTUAL ACTIVITY 337 
 
 XIII SAN GALGANO: THE STORY OF A CISTERCIAN 
 
 ABBEY OF THE SIENESE CONTADO. . . 361 
 
 v XIV THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 387 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 423 
 
 INDEX 427 
 
 ix
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 View of Siena from the Public Gardens . Frontispiece 
 
 PACING PAGE 
 
 The Abbey Church of Sant' Antimo . . . .12 
 
 Interior view. 
 
 Picture of a monk of S. Galgano 24 
 
 From a book-cover in the Archivio di Stato. 
 
 Before the Fortress of Montalcino ..... 42 
 
 La Rocca di Tintinnano or La Rocca d'Orcia . . 48 
 
 The House of Saint Catherine ..... 74 
 
 Fonte Branda 84 
 
 Saint Catherine . 98 
 
 By Andrea Vanni (in the Church of San Domenico). 
 
 The Duomo Nuovo . . . . . . .no 
 
 Interior view of the Cathedral . . . . .124 
 
 General view of the Cathedral ..... 134 
 
 The Palazzo Pubblico 142 
 
 View of the Campo from the Tower of the Cathedral . 152 
 The Palazzo Buonsignori . . . . . .166 
 
 The Palazzo Tolomei . . . . . . .172 
 
 Fonte Ovile . 184 
 
 Jacopo della Quercia's fountain before its removal from 
 the Campo 200 
 
 Porta Romana ........ 212 
 
 The Palazzo Piccolomini ...... 224 
 
 The Ancona 232 
 
 By Duccio (in the Opera del Duomo).
 
 xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 The Majestas ........ 244 
 
 By Simone Martini (in the Palazzo Pubblico). 
 
 Guidoriccio da Fogliano 256 
 
 By Simone Martini (in the Palazzo Pubblico). 
 
 Allegory of Good Government ..... 256 
 
 By Ambrogio Lorenzetti (in the Palazzo Pubblico). 
 
 Detail Guidoriccio da Fogliano ..... 260 
 
 By Simone Martini (in the Palazzo Pubblico). 
 
 Detail from the Allegory of Good Government . . 260 
 
 By Ambrogio Lorenzetti (in the Palazzo Pubblico). 
 
 Madonna and Child ....... 272 
 
 By Ambrogio Lorenzetti (in S. Eugenio Outside Porta S. 
 Marco). 
 
 Madonna, Child, Saints, and Angels .... 284 
 By Matteo di Giovanni (in the Galleria delle Belle Arti). 
 
 Charity .......... 296 
 
 A detail from Jacopo della Quercia's Fountain (in the Loggia 
 of the Palazzo Pubblico). 
 
 Wrought-iron Gate of the Chapel of the Palazzo Pub- 
 blico . . . . . . . . . . 302 
 
 Bronze Banner-holder 334 
 
 By Cozzarelli (attached to the Palazzo del Magnifico). 
 
 The ruined Abbey Church of S. Galgano . . . 362 
 Interior view of San Galgano ..... 384 
 
 San Bernardino Preaching in the Campo . . . 394 
 By Sano di Pietro (in the Sala del Capitolo of the Cathedral. 
 
 Siena During the Siege 414 
 
 From an old print in the Uffizi at Florence. 
 
 MAPS 
 
 Siena and the region between the Arno, the Apennines, 
 and Monte Amiata 38 
 
 The Chianti Boundary between Florence and Siena . 178 
 Battle of Montaperti 178
 
 SIENA
 
 SIENA 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDIAEVAL SIENA 
 
 THE province of central Italy, known as Tuscany 
 in our day, has a broken and richly diversified 
 physical character, due to its position between 
 the mountains and the sea. The Arno is its chief artery. 
 Rising among the bare crags of the upper Apennines, it 
 drops by gradual stages from the mountains to the foot- 
 hills, and, holding a general westerly direction, makes 
 its way through a plain, growing ever broader, greener, 
 and more smiling, to the Mediterranean Sea. In its 
 proud progress it receives, now at its right hand, now 
 at its left, innumerable tributaries. The northern 
 affluents flow, like it, from the Apennines, which sweep 
 seaward at this point, marching with the river and 
 raising a lofty barrier between Tuscany and the Lom- 
 bard plain; the southern streams, on the other hand, 
 come from the Tuscan upland, across which the high 
 central Apennines look out upon the open sea. 
 
 Within this Tuscan upland, defined by the soaring 
 Apennines, the city-bearing Arno, and the blue Mediter- 
 ranean, befell the human circumstances which will 
 engage our attention in this book. Though small in 
 area, it is a region fair to look upon, being a broken
 
 2 SIENA 
 
 plateau of many valleys cut by many streams, which, 
 as a glance at the map will show, run in the main in 
 two directions to the north and to the west. The 
 northward-flowing waters feel their way in thread-like 
 streams, capable, however, of sudden, torrential expan- 
 sion, to the Arno, while the westward rivers cut a difficult 
 and circuitous path through frowning barriers of wood 
 and rock to the sea. Northward the rivers flow and 
 westward, a point of capital importance, for on the 
 irregular central ridge dividing the streams lies the 
 town of Siena, clearly designed by the place it occu- 
 pies to be the ruler of the region. Rising almost under 
 its walls the Elsa River finds its way after a capri- 
 cious journey into the Arno, while a network of small 
 streams, all tributary to the rapid Ombrone, carries the 
 memory of the fair queen of the upland to the Mediter- 
 ranean. 
 
 If beauty of situation determined the importance of 
 a city, Siena would have been second to none in Italy. 
 But, unfortunately, the unrivalled site imposed a num- 
 ber of permanent material drawbacks. One alone of 
 these, the lack of water, constituted no less than a ca- 
 lamity; for at their sources among the hills the Elsa and 
 the Ombrone are mere brooks, not only unsuited to navi- 
 gation but incapable even of yielding a liberal supply 
 of drinking water for man and beast. Was it conceiv- 
 able that Siena should ever overcome this fundamental 
 disability ? Was it at all likely that a town suffering 
 from scarcity of water and deprived of what in early 
 times was always the safest means of communication 
 with the surrounding territory, a generous water-course, 
 should ever become a great directive agent of civiliza-
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDLEVAL SIENA 3 
 
 tion ? No, its action would necessarily be limited, its 
 world would be hardly more than the dependent dis- 
 trict which the citizen, gazing from the ramparts, saw 
 lying at his feet. The story of Siena, set high and dry 
 among the hills, could never be the tale of a world- 
 centre, such as Venice, or Milan, or Florence, bestriding 
 each, like a colossus, one of the great and convenient 
 highways of the Italian peninsula. 
 
 And yet, within its narrow provincial limits the des- 
 tiny and fortunes of Siena might rise to inspiring and 
 memorable heights. Any visitor of the town has still 
 brought vividly home to his attention that, in compen- 
 sation for its lack of navigable streams and its relative 
 remoteness from the crowded lines of trade, it is en- 
 dowed with a lavish sum of minor natural advantages. 
 The fair ridge upon which it lies enjoys an admirable 
 climate, secure from the extremes of heat and cold; the 
 air, washing the middle levels between the sea and the 
 Apennines, is splendidly bracing and salubrious; and 
 although the countryside is broken and uneven, being 
 trenched in all directions by numerous torrential 
 brooks, the soil is generally fertile, bearing all the 
 products of the temperate zone and excellently adapted 
 on the steep hillsides for the cultivation of the vine and 
 olive. Here, then, was from of old a sufficient promise 
 of riches, the necessary foundation for every higher 
 civilization. But the civilization itself would have to 
 be the work of the people, the men and women of Siena. 
 Would Siena ever reap, to match her material oppor- 
 tunities, that nobler harvest, the harvest of the mind, the 
 harvest of the soul ? To this, the human issue, every 
 question in history in the end comes back, wherefore we
 
 4 SIENA 
 
 may assert that as Siena produced a worthy or a negligi- 
 ble race of men, it would be remembered or forgotten 
 among the cities of the world. And because its success 
 in this field, in the mediaeval period at least, was great, 
 because in some respects it was even astonishing, I 
 need offer no apology for calling the attention of a later 
 time to the ruling city of the Tuscan uplands. It is med- 
 iaeval Siena which is our concern in this book, but be- 
 cause this mediaeval city was founded on an earlier past, 
 I may be permitted to glance rapidly, by way of intro- 
 duction to our subject, at some of its antecedent phases. 
 
 ETRUSCAN SIENA 
 
 At the time when we get our first certain information 
 about Tuscany it was called, in the Latin tongue, 
 Etruria, and was inhabited by a people known to their 
 Latin neighbors as Etruscans. The Roman writers, 
 through whom the Etruscans were introduced to 
 history, recount the vigorous resistance which they 
 offered to the encroachments of the ambitious republic 
 in the Tiber valley. We hear of their great cities, 
 perched high on hills, like eagles' nests, and called by 
 names which prove that they were the authentic ances- 
 tors of Volterra, Chiusi, Fiesole, Arezzo, and many 
 other still existing settlements. In the third century 
 before Christ the Romans, after a long struggle, com- 
 pleted the conquest of Etruria (280 B.C.), and the 
 cities, referred to by the Roman writers as centres of 
 opulence, became allies (socii) of Rome and lost their 
 independence. Therewith the process of their Latin- 
 ization set in, but had hardly gone very far when the
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDIEVAL SIENA 5 
 
 towns were ruined and the country turned into a desert 
 by the long civil struggle which preceded the downfall 
 of the republic. Julius Caesar, and, after him, Augustus, 
 the great restorer, gave their best efforts to the recovery 
 of Italy from the awful harrying of the civil wars, and 
 by means of colonies planted throughout the peninsula, 
 in desolated towns, or on new sites, set flowing once 
 more the arrested currents of life. Naturally the 
 Roman colonies produced a Roman civilization. In 
 Etruria such natives as the wars had spared were 
 absorbed by the conquerors, and presently adopted the 
 Roman speech, dress, and manners. Etruria forgot 
 that it had been Etruscan and proudly called itself 
 Latin. To all intents and purposes the transformation 
 was effected in the lifetime of Augustus. 
 
 The Etruscan people, which thus dropped out of 
 history at the moment when the republic assumed the 
 purple and became an empire, has exercised a strong 
 and persistent fascination on the historian, the philolo- 
 gist, and the student of art. Who were they ? whence 
 came they ? with what race or races known to history 
 were they connected by blood and speech ? Some 
 five thousand inscriptions in their tongue, which might 
 clear up the mystery, have been collected in various 
 repositories, but they remain dumb, as no philologist 
 has penetrated the secret of their language. The only 
 thing which may be reasonably deduced from these 
 literary remains is that the Etruscans were not related 
 to the Italic peoples who occupied the country to the 
 south and east of them, nor to the Celts, who, having 
 forced their way across the Alps and seized the valley 
 of the Po, bounded them on the north. Far more
 
 6 SIENA 
 
 responsive to the inquirer than the unread inscriptions 
 of this strange people are their other archaeological 
 remains. No race of men ever gave more loving care 
 to the disposal of its dead, and none, judging by existing 
 fragments of city walls, delighted in such gigantic 
 masonry. Courses of stone still visible at Fiesole, 
 Cortona, Volterra, and elsewhere, fill the mind with 
 amazement at the vanished folk who could build on this 
 colossal scale. Even more suggestive is the revelation 
 afforded by the uncovered burial places. Sometimes 
 in the flanks of hills, sometimes under the shelter of a 
 crumbling citadel, have been found, frequently hol- 
 lowed out of the living rock, underground streets and 
 cities of the dead; and throughout the region humbler 
 vaults with rows of burial urns have been turned up 
 by a chance thrust of the peasant's spade. As the 
 Etruscan custom was to lay with the dead in their last 
 resting-places common objects of daily use, and often, 
 as well, precious utensils and ornaments, such as vases, 
 ear-rings, bracelets, scarabs, and mirrors, the uncovered 
 graves have put us in possession of a body of material 
 attesting a high degree of craftsmanship and a developed 
 sense of the beautiful, and bearing profoundly upon the 
 origin and character of this mysterious people. The 
 derivation of many of their remains from the Hellenic 
 world, whether directly by exchange or indirectly by 
 local imitation, appears at a glance. What, therefore, 
 in view of this association, was the exact share of the 
 native genius in these exquisite evidences of culture ? 
 This and a hundred related questions lie beyond our 
 scope. For our purposes it must suffice definitely to 
 assure ourselves that the Etruscans were a people of
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDIEVAL SIENA 7 
 
 no mean ability, who, even before the period of their 
 contact with the Romans, had reached a notable level 
 of civilization. 
 
 In the days of Etruscan power, when Chiusi and 
 Volterra were defending their independence against the 
 Roman republic to the south, was there an Etruscan 
 settlement at Siena ? The Roman records make no 
 mention of it, and yet we know now by irrefutable 
 evidence that such a settlement existed: no vigorous 
 centre of commerce or of war, but a modest group of 
 habitations around an arx or citadel, whither the farm- 
 ing population of the neighborhood could retire on the 
 approach of danger. The citadel, it must be admitted, 
 is largely an inference based on the analogy of other 
 settlements planted by this people; but the fact of men 
 of Etruscan blood having lived in considerable numbers 
 on the Sienese ridges is established beyond challenge 
 by the discovery of numerous burial places, some within 
 the walls of the present town, others within a radius of 
 a few miles.* Their uniformly small scale is a sug- 
 gestive index of the size of this original Siena. Pro- 
 fessor Rossi, a leading local antiquarian, carefully weigh- 
 ing the evidence, ventures to formulate a number of 
 propositions which constitute a chain of reasonable 
 probabilities. He affirms that an Etruscan town, the 
 name of which in Latin transliteration was Saena, ex- 
 isted; that it was small, perhaps dependent on Volterra, 
 and that its arx was located on the highest point of the 
 present town, still known, after hundreds of years, and 
 
 * The reader wishing to inform himself on the details of these finds may 
 turn to an article by Pietro Rossi in the " Conferenze," published by the 
 Commissione Senese di Storia Patria (1895).
 
 8 SIENA 
 
 possibly in memory of its ancient dignity, as Castel 
 Vecchio, that is, the old citadel. All this does not set a 
 very definite image before the mind, but in establishing 
 the certain fact of the settlement and making probable 
 an arx upon the height, it renders a kindly service to the 
 imagination by associating the present town with the 
 dawn of recorded time, and by spinning a thread, 
 slender but secure, between the twentieth-century 
 chafferers of street and market and the mysterious 
 Etruscans, who, out of their graves, still speak to us of 
 great achievements. 
 
 ROMAN SIENA 
 
 We reach a more solid footing when we pass from 
 Etruscan to Roman times. Professor Rossi,* who again 
 serves as our chief guide, has indicated the probable 
 stages of a growing intimacy between our upland hamlet 
 and the conquering republic of Rome. Putting such 
 conjectures to one side as too intangible, let us fix our 
 attention on the time when Rome adopted the policy of 
 planting colonies throughout Italy. She followed this 
 course, as already mentioned, in consequence of the 
 depopulation and ruin wrought in Etruria and elsewhere 
 by the terrible civil wars which preceded the downfall 
 of the republic. As early as the time of Sulla, Etruria, 
 and possibly Saena, began to receive Roman colonists, 
 
 * In the "Conferenze" of 1897 (Published by the Commissione Senese di 
 Storia Patria). It may seem advisable to explain briefly why I take no ac- 
 count of the many legendary tales touching the origin of Siena. The 
 simple fact is that most of them carry the stamp of a late invention on their 
 face, and have little poetic and less historical value. The reader desiring to 
 inform himself on the subject may consult Rondoni, "Tradizioni popolari 
 e leggende di un Comune medioevale."
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDLEVAL SIENA 9 
 
 but, however that may be, it is certain that Augustus 
 is the real Latin rebuilder of the ruined Etruscan town. 
 Following his victory over Antony, he inaugurated, 
 probably in the year 30 B.C., the Roman period of 
 Sienese history. 
 
 Our shadowy settlement, which we can barely discern 
 against the dusk of time, and which we must imagine 
 smitten with the blight befalling all things Etruscan, 
 now revived as a Roman colony, bearing the name 
 Saena Julia. The evidence on this point, furnished by 
 inscriptions as well as by the ancient writers, is entirely 
 conclusive. In truth the town begins now to become, 
 if not an individuality with sharply marked character- 
 istics, at least an indisputable historic fact. Pliny 
 names it in his Natural History,* so does Ptolemy 
 in his Geography,f and Tacitus J tells an amusing 
 story of how a Roman senator passing through Siena 
 aroused the displeasure of the mob, who, not content 
 with hustling and cuffing him, mortally wounded his 
 dignity by drawing about him in a circle and setting up 
 the customary lamentations over the dead. Inscrip- 
 tions, too, containing references to Siena, and found, 
 some within Sienese territory, some as far away as re- 
 mote Britain, throw a faint light into the prevailing 
 gloom of the period. From these various sources we 
 can gain a reasonably distinct picture of the town, 
 governed, like the other colonies, in imitation of Rome, 
 by magistrates and senate (curia, on/o), and composed 
 of a hierarchy of official classes, resting on the broad 
 
 * Pliny, III. f Ptolemy, III, i. 
 
 t The incident belongs to the time of Vespasian (70 A.D.). "Historiae," 
 IV, 45, 
 
 On Roman inscriptions, see "Bull. Senese," Vol. II, 74 ff.; IV,
 
 10 SIENA 
 
 foundation of the people or plebs. Professor Rossi, 
 guided by a few remaining indications in existing wall 
 or line of street, makes the interesting attempt to draw 
 the axes and fix the gates of the Roman town; but 
 without the help of systematic excavations, which for 
 the present are out of the question, such archaeological 
 inquiries will hardly pass out of the realm of speculation. 
 For the present-day visitor of Siena the suggestion of a 
 Roman past is constantly renewed by the symbol, 
 encountered at every turning, of the she-wolf with the 
 twins. Its use as the heraldic emblem of the town has 
 been proved for the thirteenth century,* but may have 
 been general much earlier, and in any case shows a 
 rooted popular conviction that Siena was sprung from 
 the City of the Seven Hills. Avoiding all debatable 
 ground we may assert that Saena Julia flourished for 
 some centuries; that, a small mirror of Rome, it boasted 
 its forum, its temples, and its baths;f and that having 
 shared, within the scope of a decidedly provincial settle- 
 ment, the greatness of the empire, it began presently 
 to be involved in its decay. 
 
 Before the decay ended in the cataclysm of the 
 Barbarian invasions, which involved Siena in a common 
 ruin with the rest of the peninsula, an event occurred of 
 immense consequence for the coming ages: the Roman 
 world adopted Christianity. The general circumstances 
 under which the twilight of the pagan gods set in and 
 the old temples were deserted for the new altars are 
 well known, but few historical data exist which enable 
 
 * Rossi, " Conf erenze, " p. 22. 
 
 f For additional notices on archaeological remains, see "Bull. Senese," Vol. 
 VI., 103 /., and Bargagli-Petrucri, "Le Fonti di Siena," Vol. I, chap. i.
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDIEVAL SIENA 11 
 
 us to see how the great change was effected in the 
 provinces, and none of an absolutely authoritative 
 character tell us how Christ's kingdom was established 
 in Siena. Fact failing, we have legend. In the Middle 
 Age the story passed from mouth to mouth how, during 
 the persecution of the emperor Diocletian, a noble 
 Roman youth, Ansanus by name, escaping from the 
 capital, sought refuge in Siena, preached, was appre- 
 hended, and, after working a few miracles of it must 
 be confessed a disappointingly unoriginal character, 
 suffered death by the sword. A few miles beyond the 
 eastern gate, on a spur over the river Arbia, and 
 contiguous to the famous battle-field of Montaperti, 
 stands, and has stood for many hundred years, a chapel 
 supposed to mark the spot where the Sienese proto- 
 martyr gave up his life. The spur goes by the name 
 of Dofana. It is not improbable, nay, it is quite 
 credible, that there is some historic foundation to the 
 story of Ansanus, for the memory of so significant an 
 event as the conversion of the city to Christianity was 
 sure to have lived on; and even if the uncontrolled 
 fancy of the people is likely to have embellished the 
 occurrences connected with the coming of the new faith 
 with the usual exuberant detail, we must admit that con- 
 cealed beneath the mass of irrelevancies may lie a kernel 
 of truth. The depth of popular conviction, the spot 
 of martyrdom, definitely designated as early as the 
 seventh century, and, finally, the ancient character of 
 the office of Sant' Ansano read in the Sienese churches,* 
 lend his ghostly personality an almost irrefutable basis 
 
 * The office in its received form dates from the year 1213, and is published 
 in the "Ordo officiorum ecclesiae senensis," Bologna, 1766, p. 273.
 
 12 SIENA 
 
 of fact. Very probably Christianity first filtered in thin 
 streams into Siena as into the rest of Italy through 
 the agency of Greek merchants and travellers, but, in 
 the early fourth century, we may assert with some 
 confidence the new faith was through the preaching 
 of a Roman, Ansanus by name, established for the first 
 time on a popular foundation destined to broaden and 
 deepen and to become in the end the substructure of an 
 entirely new civilization. 
 
 Throughout the fourth century the Barbarians at the 
 boundaries of the empire had been showing increasing 
 signs of restlessness. In the fifth century their pressure 
 on the border posts became irresistible, and the end of 
 the struggle was foreshadowed as early as 410 A.D., 
 when Alaric, chief of the West Goths, seized and plun- 
 dered Rome. The story is told of how for years he had 
 heard an aerial voice which lured him with the whis- 
 pered words, Penetrabis ad urbem, until, in spite of long 
 inner resistance, he was forced to do its bidding. In 
 a letter of St. Jerome we catch the reverberation which 
 this amazing event produced in the Mediterranean 
 world; from afar, in his cell at Bethlehem, where the 
 news reached him and laid him prostrate with grief, 
 he raised the despairing cry, Quid salvum est si 
 Roma peril?* Italy now became the prize of the Teu- 
 tonic invaders, but it is still too often thoughtlessly 
 repeated that a hitherto flourishing country was by this 
 occupation first made acquainted with misery. True, 
 the conquerors poured over the Alps in successive 
 waves; they brought not peace but war, and doubtless, 
 therefore, desolation followed in their path; but, before 
 
 * Hodgkin, "Italy and Her Invaders," Book I, Chs. 16 and 17.
 
 The Abbey Church of Sant' Antimo 
 Interior view
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDIEVAL SIENA 13 
 
 it was possible for them a rude and ill-disciplined 
 savage host to break into the garden of civilization, the 
 inhabitants of that garden must have sunk into all but 
 complete decay. The history of the later empire is the 
 history of a prolonged sick-bed. Wherever the cover 
 is lifted the eye meets the same evidence of incurable 
 disease. A central government hardened into a selfish 
 bureaucracy, its financial agents an organized band of 
 spoliators, the local administration corrupt and in 
 dissolution, the army unpaid and mutinous these are 
 some of the signs which declared with sound of brass 
 that the empire was sick, sick beyond recovery. If 
 the invasions brought the plundering of cities, rich 
 with the accumulated treasure of the ages; if they 
 brought the harrying of fields and the slaughter of their 
 tillers, they did no more than to effect, in swift, dramatic 
 form, a catastrophe which, in the absence of human 
 violence, would have been wrought just as completely 
 by the slow-grinding mills of time. 
 
 The successful raid in the year 410 of Alaric, king of 
 the West Goths, was the prelude to similar expeditions. 
 Plunderers came and went, like a summer storm or a 
 spring flood, leaving no permanent mark on the penin- 
 sula. But with the Herulian Odoacer, and, more 
 emphatically still, with Theodoric, king of the East 
 Goths, the Barbarians adopted a new policy of perma- 
 nent settlement. The East Goths made themselves at 
 home in Italy and held fast to its choicest lands from 
 their coming under their great king to their overthrow 
 by the armies of Justinian, that is, for a period of about 
 half a century (489-553). For a short interval after 
 the fall of the East Goths, Italy was again a part of the
 
 14 SIENA 
 
 empire, an empire, however, no longer Latin, but 
 purely Greek and ruled from Constantinople (554-68). 
 Then came the invasion of a new German folk, the 
 Lombards (568), and the piecemeal conquest of the 
 peninsula from the stubbornly resisting emperor. In 
 the end the Lombards came to dominate the whole 
 north and centre, incorporating these regions in their 
 kingdom of Lombardy. As their destructive rule, 
 while completing the wreckage of the old culture, in- 
 augurated the Italian Middle Age, we must give some 
 little attention to it if we would understand the rise of 
 mediaeval Siena. 
 
 However, before taking up the Lombard conquest in 
 detail, we may pause to raise the epitaph over Saena 
 Julia. What was its history during the long period of 
 inner decay which preceded the coming of the northern 
 tribes ? How did it fare at the hands of West Goths, 
 Vandals, East Goths, Lombards ? No writer has 
 deigned to tell us how the great circumstance of Rome's 
 overthrow affected the provincial town at the head- 
 waters of the Elsa and the Ombrone. The darkness 
 lying over these many centuries of local history is im- 
 penetrable. All that we may say, judging by the 
 consequences, is that Roman Siena perished from the 
 face of the earth. Did it die of that moral dry-rot 
 which ate out the vitals of Rome ? Or was it at some 
 quiet dawn surrounded by the forces of Alaric, Ricimer, 
 or some other plunderer bound for Rome, taken before 
 the watchman could sound the alarm, and left at night- 
 fall a heap of smoking ruins ? The completeness with 
 which the Roman colony vanished, leaving hardly a 
 course of masonry behind which can be definitely
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDIAEVAL SIENA 15 
 
 identified as Roman, proves at least that it was over- 
 taken with disaster. By the time of the coming of the 
 Lombards it could hardly have been more than an 
 aggregation of hovels, an inconsiderable market-place 
 for the ravaged and depopulated uplands. But as 
 with these same Lombards new germs of life appear 
 everywhere throughout Italy, so with them begins a new 
 period of the history of Siena. As early as the eighth 
 century, while the Lombard kingdom was at its height, 
 we get news of her, news which tells us in no uncertain 
 terms, that life is again stirring in the desolate land, and 
 that the third, the Italian Siena, is slowly taking shape. 
 
 ITALIAN OR MEDIAEVAL SIENA 
 
 The quality about the risen Siena of the eighth 
 century, communicating itself immediately and with 
 clearness in the few notices of the time, is, that the 
 milieu of the town is no longer Roman, but mediaeval 
 and Lombard. For this reason we must, if we would 
 understand the beginnings of Siena's third and trium- 
 phant epoch the epoch with which this book is to deal 
 possess ourselves, at least in outline, of the political 
 and administrative history of the Lombard kingdom. 
 
 When, in the spring of the year 568, the Lombards 
 under their king Alboin crossed the Julian Alps, they 
 had no difficulty in effecting a foothold in the valley 
 of the Po. The emperor at Constantinople was repre- 
 sented in his province of Italy by an official called an 
 exarch, whose seat was at Ravenna. The exarch made 
 little resistance, and the Italian natives, calling them- 
 selves, as members of the empire, Romans, though
 
 16 SIENA 
 
 really a mixture of many races, reduced under the long 
 Latin rule to a common type, were too unmanned and 
 broken by the interminable succession of previous 
 invasions and recent pestilence and famine to render 
 their ruler any effective help. Moreover, this latest mul- 
 titude "which the populous North poured from her 
 frozen loins," was, if we are to believe contemporary 
 evidence, the most terrible of all the Barbarian hosts 
 which fate had let loose upon poor Italy. Their fierce 
 manners and savage aspect, unrelieved by any softening 
 influences of civilization, struck a cold fear through the 
 hearts of the effete Romans. Especially did the deli- 
 cate, clean-shaven natives single out for notice and 
 aversion the savage masses of hair and beard adorning 
 their enemies, characteristic features to which this 
 rugged folk owes its name of Langobards, that is, 
 Longbeards. They soon dominated the north with the 
 exception of Venetia, the Ravennese, and Genoa, mari- 
 time districts which were not reducible without a fleet, 
 and presently pushed southward over the Apennines 
 through Tuscany to Spoleto and Benevento. In the 
 south, too, the maritime districts with their strong ports 
 of Bari, Tarento, Otranto, and Naples, withstood the 
 onset of the strangers, who had neither ships nor any 
 knowledge of the sea. Likewise, Rome, energetically 
 defended by its spiritual rulers above all, by the great 
 Pope Gregory maintained its independence. 
 
 The equilibrium thus established between invaders 
 and defenders determined the history of Italy through- 
 out the two centuries of the Lombard dominion. The 
 fragments of the empire north and south, ruled by the 
 exarch at Ravenna and held together to a certain extent
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDIEVAL SIENA 17 
 
 by the spiritual prestige of the pope, resisted with all 
 their might the further progress of the Lombards, who 
 for their part, possessed approximately of two-thirds of 
 the peninsula, were naturally desirous to disembarrass 
 themselves entirely of their struggling enemies and to 
 complete their conquest. In the long run the scales 
 inclined in favor of the Lombards. Every new sover- 
 eign continued to push out his boundaries by making 
 some small acquisition from the emperor and his 
 exarch, until it became plain that the unity of Italy 
 under Lombard auspices was inevitable. Disconsolate 
 over the impending peril, the pope made appeal after 
 appeal to the great folk of the Franks across the Alps 
 to come to his assistance. But we are anticipating. 
 For the present we note with interest that Tuscany 
 was part of the Lombard kingdom almost from the 
 first, having been occupied as early as the year 570, 
 in the days of Alboin. 
 
 The rule of the conquerors, especially in its early 
 stages, was of the most primitive order. Paul, son of 
 Warnefrid, a literary Lombard of the eighth century, 
 has told us almost everything we know about it.* He 
 relates that his forbears, on their first coming into Italy, 
 ruthlessly murdered the great Roman landowners, and 
 made the rest of the inhabitants tributary by exacting 
 a payment of one-third of the produce of the fields. 
 They came for booty and its division must have been 
 their main, if not their only, concern. Inevitably, how- 
 ever, and almost from the first day, the need would make 
 itself felt for some kind of government. Without a 
 trace of reverence for the Roman name the Barbarians 
 
 * In his Historia Langobardorum. Paul died about the year 795.
 
 18 SIENA 
 
 began to organize their administration along lines which 
 appealed to their greed of possession and which were not 
 too remote from their experience. Then it was that the 
 distinctive features of the Roman administration, in so 
 far as any had survived the storms of the last genera- 
 tions, were swept into oblivion. The leading features 
 of that system were, it is generally agreed, the municipal 
 senate or curia, which performed the service of a local 
 government, and the Roman law, which bound all the 
 parts of the wide empire together under a common 
 system of justice. It used to be maintained that Roman 
 curia and Roman law disappeared indeed from sight 
 in the Lombard period, but somehow eked out a hunted 
 and subterranean existence until, after many years, 
 they experienced a glorious rebirth in the Italian com- 
 munes of the twelfth century.* These communes, 
 according to this view, mark not only the happy appear- 
 ance of political liberty in the world after the intolerable 
 anarchy of feudal times, but specifically denote the 
 rebirth of the Roman municipal constitution, which, 
 never destroyed, had merely dropped into a long winter's 
 
 * I touch here upon the famous controversy inaugurated by Savigny, 
 who in his "Geschichte des Romischen Rechts im Mittelalter" urged that 
 the Roman system never perished, and taken up by Hegel, who in his 
 "Stadteverfassung von Italien" expounded the contrary view. A fair 
 recapitulation of the respective arguments will be found in Hodgkin, "Italy 
 and Her Invaders," Vol. VI, chap. 13. I should add that the question of the 
 Roman municipal institutions is now generally separated from the question 
 of the Roman law. The persistence of the latter in the church and, with 
 limited application, among the laity, as personal law, is no longer doubted. 
 Further, the opinion is coming to prevail that certain minor administrative 
 officers of Roman origin, such, for instance, as had to do with the repair of 
 fountains, the maintenance of roads and bridges, survived, at least in many 
 places. What interest could the Lombards have had in sweeping them 
 away? They fastened their grip upon those elements of the administration 
 which ensured them the political control of the country, such as justice, taxes, 
 and the army
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDLEVAL SIENA 19 
 
 sleep. We may now safely declare this opinion chimer- 
 ical. The Lombards were enemies; they were com- 
 plete masters of the situation; they knew no compro- 
 mise. There is no evidence that they suffered any 
 government but that which they authorized, and which 
 they could comprehend and utilize for their selfish 
 purposes. But there is evidence that the awful times 
 were beginning to work their own remedy by means of 
 certain voluntary associations not contemplated in the 
 official Lombard arrangements. 
 
 The growth of voluntary associations, involving the 
 gradual recovery by the down-trodden Italians of self- 
 government, at first, of course, on a very modest basis, 
 may be presented in the following general terms. The 
 monarchy of Alboin did after a while, with the cessation 
 of plunder, bring comparative peace, peace brought new 
 life, and life in its busy, irrepressible fashion led to new 
 forms of social organization. In the Lombard period 
 we may see how men deprived of the fruits of civilization, 
 separated violently from the institutions on which they 
 had leaned, thrust back almost into the state of nature, 
 take their first timid steps toward social regroup- 
 ing along entirely simple and natural lines. In these 
 humble measures, assuming the form of agreements 
 among neighbors for adjusting quarrels, for repairing 
 roads and water conduits, and for other matters of im- 
 mediate interest to a small circle, scholars are now 
 agreed to seek for the germs of the great free communes, 
 which shed their incomparable light over the later 
 Middle Age. An idle quarrel this, the general reader 
 may be tempted to interpose. As long as the cities 
 achieved their freedom and used it for some noble end,
 
 20 SIENA 
 
 what can it matter if they owed it entirely to themselves 
 or received it as a heritage from imperial Rome ? But 
 surely it is not pedantry, it is an instinctive sympathy 
 with youth and force, which gives us pleasure in the 
 knowledge that the Italian liberty of the Middle Age 
 was not a successful copy or revival of extinct Roman 
 forms, but a healthy, spontaneous, and original product, 
 cultivated through silent or almost silent centuries from 
 a seed sown at a time when to outward seeming the end 
 of the world was at hand. I have broached a great 
 question here, though I am not able to follow it further 
 at this point. It is impossible to write about any Italian 
 commune without giving attention to the controversy, 
 as old as the modern science of history, concerning the 
 origin of the town liberties. I have indicated broadly 
 the direction and implication of the most recent studies 
 in the field. In a later chapter, when the specific 
 question of the liberties of Siena is before us, I shall 
 return to this issue, which is possessed, as a long line 
 of brilliant names testifies, of the most persistent 
 fascination. For the present I shall take up the thread 
 of the Lombard administration. 
 
 The power of the Lombard king depended largely 
 on his character and personal equipment. When he was 
 a man of force and daring he made his will felt to the 
 uttermost corners of his realm; when he was weak or a 
 child, the agents who represented him in the provinces 
 became practically independent. These representatives 
 were of two kinds, dukes and gastalds, the dignity of 
 duke being the higher distinction and conferring a semi- 
 independent position. A gastald was more definitely 
 the appointee of the king, sent out on the king's business
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDIEVAL SIENA 21 
 
 and removable at the will of his master. Duke and 
 gastald alike made their homes in the cities, not because 
 they preferred them to the country a thing unlikely in 
 view of the keen passion of the German peoples gener- 
 ally for the open air but because experience would 
 teach that the cities we.re the convenient and necessary 
 centres of administration for a given district. In 
 Tuscany gastalds prevailed, an indication that the 
 king kept his hand more firmly on this province; and 
 indeed rebellion, so constant and distressing a phenome- 
 non of Lombard history, seems to have been relatively 
 infrequent within the boundaries of Tuscany. In the 
 early eighth century Siena had a gastald of the name of 
 Taipert, during whose rule we get our first lively glimpse 
 of the town since the cloud of darkness which descended 
 upon it in the later stages of imperial Rome. No Tuscan 
 city of the time introduces itself to our attention with an 
 incident of equally bold relief. At the hand of authen- 
 tic documents * we can recover the details of a most 
 passionate situation. 
 
 Following the terrible decay and anarchy associated 
 with the migrations, Siena must have begun slowly to 
 feel the effects of the comparative security of Lombard 
 rule, for in the seventh century we get news of her as 
 the seat both of a bishop and of a royal gastald. A 
 bishop, Maurus by name, exercised episcopal authority 
 in Siena about 650 A.D. Perhaps he was the first of 
 the episcopal line, more likely he marked the restoration 
 of a diocese, which, established in the fourth century 
 in the first flush of the Christian triumph, had in the 
 
 * All the documents bearing on the case will be found in Pasqui, "Docu- 
 ment! per la Storia della Citta di Arezzo." Florence, Vieusseux, 1899.
 
 22 SIENA 
 
 following period of confusion suffered shipwreck. At 
 any rate, the territory over which Maurus held spiritual 
 sway was very small and the dioceses of his neighbors 
 pressed upon him most uncomfortably, especially to 
 the east where the bishop of Arezzo held the territory 
 almost up to the city wall. Perplexing as this was in 
 view of the fact that the dominion of the gastald, the 
 bishop's temporal counterpart, embraced all the region 
 immediately about the city, it was rendered positively 
 distressing by the circumstance that the bishop of 
 Arezzo became thereby lord of the tomb where lay the 
 bones of the Sienese apostle, Sant' Ansano. Bishop 
 Maurus tried to extend his authority eastward on the 
 plea that the diocese ought to be coextensive with the 
 civil district ruled by the gastald. All his efforts 
 remained futile. The case, involving the beloved saint, 
 appealed not only to the clergy, but to gastald and 
 people as well. However, the Aretine prelate was in 
 possession and would not retire in spite of the growing 
 resentment of the Sienese. Then suddenly, as might 
 have been foreseen, came an armed clash. In the year 
 711 the bishop of Arezzo, Lupertianus, came, in per- 
 formance of his duties, to the Dofana region where 
 the body of Ansano lay. That was all the provoca- 
 tion which the Sienese needed. Did they suspect that 
 Lupertianus had come to carry away secretly to 
 Arezzo for permanent safe-keeping the precious relics 
 of the saint ? At any rate they poured out of the town, 
 led by the gastald, Taipert, and his judge, Godipert. 
 Their going might mean mischief and the bishop, as a 
 man of peace, wisely stayed at home. We can fancy him 
 restlessly pacing his room, climbing the tower perhaps
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDIAEVAL SIENA 23 
 
 to scan the bare chalk hills to the east, whither the angry 
 crowd had poured to assert the Sienese citizenship of 
 their saint. Let the Aretine chronicler * tell the story 
 as he found it recorded in " vetustissimis thomis." 
 
 "Lupertianus, bishop of Arezzo, was staying with his servants 
 in the church of S. Maria in Pacina, quietly attending to those 
 things which pertain to a bishop in his diocese. At that time the 
 city of Siena was ruled by Aripert, king of the Lombards, and in it 
 dwelt a royal judge, Godipert by name. He, coming with Taipert, 
 the gastald, to the church where Lupertianus, bishop of Arezzo, 
 was, without showing the bishop the least respect, began to hurl 
 injuries at the bishop's men, and to insult them, and to vex them 
 with legal proceedings (per placita fatigare). The which the 
 Aretines attending the bishop supported for some time, until, 
 flaming up, they fell upon and killed Godipert, the Sienese judge. 
 Wherefore the whole people of Siena (universus senensis populus) 
 became enraged against Bishop Lupertianus and put him to 
 flight; and they obliged Adeodatus, bishop of Siena, who was the 
 cousin of the aforesaid Godipert, the judge whom the Aretines had 
 slain, to hold that parish whether he would or no for one year; 
 and there outrageously and against the canons of our church he 
 consecrated three altars and two priests." 
 
 The routed bishop of Arezzo made frantic appeals 
 for justice in all directions, and presently the pope at 
 Rome as well as the Lombard king interposed to quell 
 the disturbance. The case, as submitted to judgment, 
 involved, in addition to the spot of Ansano's martyrdom, 
 all the parishes of the Sienese political territory eight- 
 een, to be exact, with three monasteries which were 
 
 * The chronicler is Gerardus, head of the cathedral chapter of Arezzo. 
 He wrote his narrative about 1056 from ancient records, and his facts, 
 in spite of his being a partisan, have every appearance of veracity. See 
 Pasqui, p. 23, note 2.
 
 24 SIENA 
 
 incorporated with the diocese of Arezzo. The first 
 sentence of the authenticity of which we may be sure 
 was delivered in the court of the major-domo of King 
 Liutprand the successor to Aripert in August, 714, 
 and the verdict was in all respects favorable to the com- 
 plainant. But neither Bishop Adeodatus nor the Sien- 
 ese would rest content. They caused the case to be 
 reopened, a mountain of evidence was collected, and 
 only after a bench of neutral bishops had declared 
 against the Sienese pretensions and King Liutprand 
 had confirmed the finding (October 14, 715) did they 
 at last desist. But even so not for long. Their beloved 
 saint, their pride as a growing commonwealth were at 
 stake, and every time an opportunity offered they re- 
 turned to the attack. The case became one of the 
 famous law-suits of mediaeval history, dragging its 
 interminable convolutions through five hundred years. 
 Not till 1224 did the matter come to a definitive close 
 with a new solemn sentence by the Roman pontiff in 
 favor of Arezzo. 
 
 Although the quarrel has some slight interest on its 
 own account, it merits our attention chiefly by reason of 
 the light which it throws on the reborn city. For Siena 
 was reborn! The issue of the eighteen parishes, in its 
 origin nothing but a technical question between two 
 bishops, took a lively and even warlike turn, for the single 
 reason that the town was aglow with youthful vigor. 
 Siena wanted her saint, a characteristic mediaeval desire; 
 but more than that, she wanted no foreign bishop on 
 her political territory. Nor did she handle the case 
 with polite calm through the official channels of bishop 
 and gastald. It developed into a clash at arms for no
 
 Picture of a Monk of S. Galgano 
 From a Book-cover in the Archivio di Stato
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDLEVAL SIENA 25 
 
 other reason than that the- people insisted on playing 
 a part in the affair. We have the assurance that it was 
 the "universus populus senensis" which encouraged 
 Godipert in his nagging of the bishop's followers, and 
 then, when Godipert was slain, set upon the Aretines 
 and their bishop and drove them home with bruised 
 limbs. This was no longer the inert human mass 
 which once let itself be plundered and slaughtered 
 without resistance by the Barbarian hordes. Indubita- 
 bly life was stirring here, not a thin stream of official 
 life, which is nothing, but broad currents of strong 
 volition filling the whole people and giving evidence that 
 a new race was in the process of formation. And what 
 a stream of light the little riot with its murdered judge 
 and routed bishop throws on the traditional view, still / 
 repeated in many books, that the communal liberty of 
 the Italian towns was born suddenly and without warn- 
 ing about noo A.D., and that its origin was a mystery 
 past finding out! Perhaps historians have in the past 
 confined their investigations too narrowly to evidences 
 of political institutions, forgetful that before liberty can 
 express itself in the laws, its dominion must be estab- 
 lished in the mind and spirit. Centuries were to pass 
 before Siena boasted a free, popular government in 
 full working order, but of this much we may be sure as 
 early as the eighth century Siena and her territory 
 were indeed unfree, being governed in things temporal 
 by a royal gastald, and in things spiritual by a bishop; 
 but the people were no longer a multitude of despic- 
 able Romans, but alive, moved by ambition, capable 
 of action, in short, a factor to be reckoned with. 
 
 Letting our glance travel beyond the hills of Siena we
 
 26 SIENA 
 
 become aware presently that elsewhere in Tuscany, in 
 Lombardy as well, nay, north and south in the peninsula, 
 the signs were increasing of a similar popular resurrec- 
 tion. All Italy was coming back to life. Since Alaric 
 had heard the voice which lured him on to Rome three 
 hundred years had passed. If the successive hordes of 
 conquerors who poured across the Alps repel us with 
 their coarseness, brutality, and greed, viewed as men 
 they rise infinitely above the Roman natives, too abject 
 to raise a finger in their own defence. The invaders, 
 without regular supplies, with rude weapons and poor 
 military discipline, numbered at best a few tens of 
 thousands; the unresisting natives rose into the mil- 
 lions. If moral judgments ever have a place in history, 
 we may assert that the unmanned, cringing Romans 
 deserved their subjection to the plundering Herulians, 
 Goths, and Lombards. But among the numerous 
 Germanic invasions, only the Lombard conquest, as we 
 have seen, led to anything like a successful occupation 
 of the soil. It was in the full elation of triumph that 
 the victors set up their rule over the vanquished. They 
 exploited their victims with cold and calculating indiffer- 
 ence, but they were thrown into daily association with 
 them, and although they had and planned to keep their 
 own courts, customs, dress, and speech, they found 
 themselves presently exposed to the operation of the 
 common physical law that the greater mass draws the 
 smaller into its orbit. The Lombards had not been a 
 hundred years in Italy before they replaced the Arian 
 Christianity, to which they had been converted during 
 their wanderings in the valley of the Danube, with the 
 Catholic faith championed by the pope and practised
 
 THE ORIGIN OF MEDIEVAL SIENA 27 
 
 by their neighbors; by slow degrees they absorbed in- 
 creasing elements of the Roman manners, dress, and 
 language. A superior civilization with its arts and 
 inventions, perhaps even more by means of its comforts 
 and cheap delights, exercises a subtle and far-reaching 
 dominion over the simple minds of a Barbarian people. 
 But the question has another side, for, if the Lombards 
 became involved in a gradual process of Romanization, 
 the natives themselves were, to a certain extent, Ger- 
 manized. To say positively that the Lombards breathed 
 into the exhausted people of the peninsula the spirit of 
 liberty which afterward immortalized itself in the free 
 communes, would be rash, but we can hardly doubt that 
 their successful use of force taught their victims a 
 valuable lesson and brought force once more into repute 
 as the true foundation of society. 
 
 In the days of King Liutprand, before whose throne 
 the bishops of Arezzo and Siena brought their quarrel, 
 the Lombards were still conscious of a racial difference 
 between themselves and the natives, but the assimilation 
 of conquerors and conquered must have made immense 
 strides, as the very incident upon which we have lingered 
 proves. The leading persons in Siena were of Lombard 
 blood. We have, in order to convince ourselves, only 
 to examine the names of the officials mentioned in the 
 old legal documents Taipert, Godipert, Warnefrid, 
 Willerat, and so forth. The Bishop Adeodatus himself 
 with his artificial name of Given-by-God suggests a 
 Lombard origin, which, as was not uncommon, he hid 
 under a Latin pseudonym intended to convey an im- 
 pression of conspicuous Christian zeal. But if the 
 governing class was still largely Lombard, the old hostil-
 
 28 SIENA 
 
 ity between it and the people must have subsided, for 
 in the issue, affecting, through the precious body of 
 Ansano, the welfare of the whole community, rulers and 
 ruled acted as one man. In the spirited conduct of 
 that affair there is not the slightest sign of a division into 
 Lombards and Romans; to all appearances the old 
 enemies have fused to form the new race of modern 
 Italians, which from the eighth century rises into view 
 with all those characteristics destined to bring the 
 peninsula to the front once more as the torch-bearer of 
 civilization.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE AND THE EMERGENCE OF 
 THE FREE COMMUNE 
 
 THE thick veil, which hangs over Siena and is 
 lifted a moment by the documents recounting 
 the conflict between the episcopal sees, presently 
 descends anew. Our glimpse disclosed the picture, not 
 only of a people active and even aggressive in its own 
 interest, but of a cooperation between rulers and ruled, 
 affording a clear indication of the advanced state of the 
 fusion of Lombards and Romans into the new Italian 
 race. This fusion was conducted under the auspices 
 of the Lombard state, which, although still of a rudi- 
 mentary character with the power distributed among 
 dukes, gastalds, and other local agents, was sufficiently 
 centralized to enforce a fair degree of order throughout 
 its dominion. If the Lombards could have completed 
 the conquest of the coast districts, thus uniting Italy 
 under their rule, the peninsula would have met other 
 and happier fortunes than it did. Italian unity, estab- 
 lished as early as the eighth century, would, in the course 
 of a few generations, have become so deeply rooted in 
 popular sentiment that the chances of breaking it by 
 assault from without would have been slight. But it 
 was decreed that Italy was not to enjoy the blessing 
 which a strong Lombard state would have brought, and, 
 as every student knows, the Lombard failure resulted 
 
 29
 
 30 SIENA 
 
 from the existence on the peninsula of a rival state, the 
 papacy. 
 
 The bishop of Rome, already at the time of the com- 
 ing of the Lombards the acknowledged spiritual leader 
 of the West, did not have to be a political genius to 
 divine the great and golden future of his office, if only 
 he could secure freedom of movement for himself and 
 immunity from subjection to a temporal sovereign. 
 This is why he became the centre of resistance to the 
 Lombard conquest, and this, too, explains why, when 
 the Lombard kings, following a natural movement of 
 expansion, were at last on the point of possessing 
 themselves of Rome, he made a passionate appeal for 
 help to the Franks. He would have turned preferably 
 to the Greek emperor at Constantinople, as more distant 
 and therefore less dangerous, but that potentate's 
 decline had, by the eighth century, reached the point 
 where he could hardly maintain himself in his immediate 
 dominions. The powerful kingdom of the Franks was 
 the pope's only visible resource. Pippin, and after him 
 his famous son, Charlemagne, came at the papal bid- 
 ding, and by the year 774 the last Lombard king was a 
 prisoner and his state the prize of a Germanic rival. 
 Charles won a new crown and presently mounted the 
 utmost pinnacle by assuming, on Christmas day of the 
 year 800, the title of Roman emperor. 
 
 I am not here narrating the political history of Italy, 
 except in so far as knowledge of it is indispensable for 
 our understanding of the development of Siena. Now 
 the significant feature stamped upon Italian history 
 by the ruin of the Lombard state is the complete decen- 
 tralization of political power. How did this result come
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 31 
 
 about ? The answer is simple. The empire of the 
 Franks, overwhelmingly powerful under Charles, pres- 
 ently went to pieces. Italy thereupon became the object 
 of fierce contention among its dukes and princes, and 
 the easy victim of any enterprising foreign sovereign 
 who could lead an army across the Alps. These simple 
 facts define the political problem of Italy for the whole 
 mediaeval period and for the modern period as well 
 down to very recent times. What is the significance of 
 their long persistence ? Fancy a state handed over to 
 innumerable local agents who are perfectly free to 
 follow their own bent, except for the more or less 
 theoretic restraint exercised by a usually absent sover- 
 eign. The inevitable consequence will be that the local 
 agents will drop such deep roots, that they will grow 
 so strong and jealous of their independence that their 
 subjection to a national ruler will be rendered well- 
 nigh impossible. Now of all the petty sovereigns of 
 the peninsula there was none to compare in point of 
 energy, resources, and venerability with the pope. 
 What he willed could not be easily resisted, and what he 
 willed with regard to Italy was, that she should not be 
 united because her union would put an end to his 
 temporal sovereignty. One thousand years of papal 
 history show that the pontiff was ever ready to defeat 
 the national hopes, and when, hardly a generation 
 ago, these hopes were at last realized, the consum- 
 mation was effected in the face of the open hostility 
 and secret machinations of the successor of Saint 
 Peter. Even so, now that the union is some forty 
 years old and enjoys the good-will of all the world, 
 the pope alone sulks in his palace, a voluntary prisoner,
 
 32 SIENA 
 
 and declares himself irreconcilably opposed to the 
 national triumph. 
 
 But if the fall of the Lombard state gave life and 
 long life, as it proved to be to the temporal aspirations 
 of the papacy, it had another consequence more im- 
 mediately affecting our town of Siena, in that Italy was 
 now feudalized. Of course the feudal germ was 
 planted in the Lombard state, as well as in every other 
 Germanic conquest of the West, but the reach and 
 vigor of Italian feudalism, a reach and vigor suggesting 
 the riotous luxury of a tropical jungle, would have been 
 impossible without the failure of the central and 
 national authority. 
 
 Following the death of the great Charles, the Lom- 
 bard crown called interchangeably from this time the 
 Italian crown was permanently weakened. Bandied 
 about for a time among the Italian magnates, each un- 
 willing to concede it to the other, it was at last seized 
 by a capable and vigorous foreigner, King Otto I of 
 Germany (961). Henceforth Italy was an adjunct of 
 Germany, but the German king, bearing the title also 
 of emperor after the ceremony of his coronation by the 
 pope, was usually so weak and far away that he could 
 not keep his provincial agents, dukes, counts, gastalds, 
 or whatever their title, from making themselves more 
 and more independent. To counteract their influence 
 he tried to create a rival for them in the bishops, whom 
 he made civil functionaries by the system called immuni- 
 ties. An imperial diploma or charter of immunities 
 gave the bishop certain sovereign rights, such as the 
 exercise of justice on the episcopal domains and the 
 collection thereon of the taxes and services due to the
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 33 
 
 state. In some cases the king went even farther, and 
 raised the bishop to the post of duke or count; that is, 
 he made him his civil representative throughout a 
 province. The less real the royal power was the more 
 readily the sovereign purchased a temporary support 
 by the gratuitous distribution of privileges. The result 
 was only too inevitable. With the king impotent and 
 generally beyond the Alps, Italian history became a 
 wild scramble for place and power among lords, big 
 and little, lay and spiritual. 
 
 For this scramble, characteristic of every society 
 loosely joined and uncontrolled from above, feudalism 
 is the fine and somewhat misleading name. For 
 feudalism in its essence was anarchy. Theoretically 
 the national cohesion was maintained by a system of 
 services due to the king from his dukes and counts, and 
 to them in their turn from their knights; but as these 
 services were rendered only on compulsion, and the 
 compulsion, in Italy at least, was irregular, the practical 
 effect of feudalism was the breaking up of the country 
 into hundreds of larger or smaller lordships, engaged in 
 unscrupulous rivalry and exercising each one an actual 
 power, the measure of which was furnished by the 
 success and failure of each new combination of forces. 
 To this substance of Italian history in the feudal cen- 
 turies no one should be blinded by the superficial 
 prominence of pope and emperor. These sovereigns, 
 as international potentates, occupied an exalted position; 
 they had constantly to be reckoned with, especially 
 when they brought to bear upon their office a clear in- 
 telligence and an enterprising temper; but they were 
 so far from controlling the situation that the only
 
 34 SIENA 
 
 practical course open to them for political purposes was 
 to ally themselves with one or another of the many 
 local factions. In the Middle Age the pope, and more 
 conspicuously still, the emperor, was a partisan. Of 
 course occasional great emperors, like Henry III, or 
 Frederick I, rose above purely factional considerations; 
 but in general the imperial position was weak, false, 
 and precarious. The continued feebleness of the nomi- 
 nal head of the peninsula bears out the assertion that a 
 strong state and a feudal state are irreconcilable terms, 
 and that feudalism itself was an extreme form of decen- 
 tralization. 
 
 Under these conditions with every lord frowning 
 challenge on his fellow from his stronghold among the 
 hills, with the whole country a seething caldron of 
 confusion, the only chance for the cities was to help 
 themselves. Their existence was founded on labor. 
 But in the permanent state of petty war confirmed by 
 feudalism, of what good to any one was labor, with its 
 fruits exposed to instant confiscation by a crew of law- 
 less freebooters ? The cities could help themselves only 
 by withdrawing from the vicious circle of feudalism, and 
 enforcing, by virtue of an independent civic organiza- 
 tion, peace, the peace wherein all men may work. I 
 have said that in the feudal age the substance of Italian 
 history was the scramble for power among the great and 
 small vassals of an impotent, or almost impotent, emperor; 
 but, as the period advanced, the situation was modified 
 in the most significant fashion by the gradual emergence 
 of the cities with their independent aims and programmes. 
 Here, in fact, lies the vital interest in the Middle Age. 
 At the first glance the situation only complicated itself
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 35 
 
 when the cities asked for an independent position in 
 the Italian polity. The struggle was already going on 
 in several planes: pope and emperor towered above the 
 counts, bishops, and other great vassals, who in turn 
 dominated a class of smaller landholders, and now, 
 aspiring to be treated as a separate political element,the 
 cities raised their heads. Among these cities was 
 Siena. Every step taken by her citizens toward a posi- 
 tion of ultimate independence would involve considera- 
 tion : first, of emperor and pope, temporal and spiritual 
 overlords respectively of this and every other Tuscan 
 town; second, of the feudal lords, great and small, 
 possessed of the countryside up to the very walls, 
 engaging in guerilla war as in a sport, and levying way- 
 tolls at every ford and under the shadow of every 
 frowning castle. These general factors must be con- 
 stantly borne in mind as we follow the history of Siena 
 in the feudal age. 
 
 The documentary evidence concerning Siena during 
 the period following the fall of the Lombard state is 
 slight. The feudal darkness descended upon the land, 
 and the few records of the time, which have reached us, 
 speak chiefly of the doings of the great. We hear of 
 lords and princes who harry one another's possessions, 
 of prelates who meet in solemn conclave to consider 
 the welfare of the church, of kings who pass with hosts 
 and banners down the peninsula to be crowned at 
 Rome; laboriously we piece together the starched, 
 official tale of a society, composed apparently merely of 
 an upper class, resting on an undistinguished and 
 negligible mass of common people. As to the life in 
 Siena and in the other Tuscan towns, we are left largely
 
 36 SIENA 
 
 to our fancy, aided by occasional indications, usually of 
 a chance character. Nevertheless, on close scrutiny, 
 the early political fortunes of these towns become, in a 
 general way, discernible. To begin with it is clear that 
 they possess no very definite individuality, correspond in 
 the main to a single type, and experience a common 
 development. Florence and Siena, Pisa and Lucca, 
 so different afterward in their lusty manhood, are 
 alike, if not as pea and pea, at least as children at 
 a christening. For the historian a considerable ad- 
 vantage of these early resemblances is that any bit of 
 information gleaned for one town may be used, with 
 due reserve, to throw light upon the condition of every 
 other. 
 
 We know that in the Carolingian epoch the gastald of 
 Siena, representative of the Lombard king, was replaced 
 by a Frankish count. That was merely a change of 
 title; the count continued to preside in court, maintain 
 order, collect the royal fees and rents, to play, in a word, 
 the part of local government. The territory of his 
 jurisdiction was called the comitatus (contado, county) 
 and comprised the city of his residence and its neighbor- 
 hood. The comitatus originally may have been clearly 
 staked off, but with the growing confusion of the times, 
 the boundary became uncertain and caused grave dis- 
 putes with the representatives of th neighboring 
 counties. A similar uncertainty prevailed occasionally 
 with regard to the exact extent of the dioceses. Comita- 
 tus and episcopatus the dominions respectively of 
 the civil and the spiritual lord commonly corresponded 
 throughout the kingdom of Italy; but, it would not have 
 been the feudal age, if there had been no exceptions to
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 37 
 
 the rule. Siena, for instance, it may be remembered, 
 learned to her sorrow that certain parishes, lying within 
 her comitatus, were none the less outside the diocese of 
 her bishop. Yet here, also, the two administrative 
 units of state and church coincided in a general way. 
 As the Sienese county is an object of great interest to 
 us, we shall be doing well to familiarize ourselves with 
 its boundaries. 
 
 In approximate terms the county of Siena was 
 bounded on the west by the headwaters of the Elsa, on 
 the east by the swamp of the Chiana, and on the south 
 by the courses of the Orcia and the Merse. The 
 Chianti hills, the sunny terraces of which have for 
 centuries grown the rarest wine of Italy, and which 
 draw a close arc around the city to the north, were, to 
 the sorrow of Siena, embraced within the comitatus of 
 Florence. Orcia and Merse themselves, forcing a 
 difficult path through a region of savage cliff and 
 forest before they empty their waters into the Om- 
 brone, were, strictly speaking, beyond the Sienese 
 pale. A small territory, this, and from the economic 
 point of view an average territory without conspic- 
 uous resources, but capable, perhaps, in the hands 
 of energetic men, of calling the world's attention to 
 itself. 
 
 As the count in this primitive society was not only 
 the leader of the armed host, but also the civil and 
 criminal judge, we hear of him most frequently in con- 
 nection with sentences delivered in his court. In the 
 work of justice he was regularly assisted by a number 
 of freemen, chosen by the people on account of their 
 knowledge of the law and called scabini. As the Franks 
 
 77108
 
 38 SIENA 
 
 established in Italy their system of personal law, by 
 which every man according to his nationality had the 
 right to be tried by the Lombard, Frank, or Roman 
 code, the scabini acquired at least a superficial acquaint- 
 ance with all these systems. In measure as society 
 became less barbarous, and the legal threads binding 
 man to man grew more numerous, only men with special 
 training could serve as scabini. Naturally, therefore, 
 the time came when the scabini were transformed into a 
 professional class of notaries and judges. This forma- 
 tive group, the lawyer element, we may note in passing, 
 had afterward long after the Frank period with which 
 we are just now concerned an important share in 
 organizing the free commune, for it was this class that 
 was entrusted with the work of giving the constitutions 
 of the communes a legal shape. By throwing their 
 influence on that occasion on the side of the Roman law, 
 which could not but appeal powerfully to professional 
 men by reason of its evidences of system and culture, 
 the trained lawyers effected the withdrawal of the ruder 
 Germanic practices and penalties in favor of a new 
 local code, which every town worked out for itself 
 on general Roman principles. A little reflection will 
 show that this revival of a defunct system and its 
 complete triumph were inevitable in a country satu- 
 rated, like Italy, with Roman memories, but we 
 should not fail to note that it offers no proof of 
 the uninterrupted domination of the whole Roman 
 administrative system. 
 
 But I have anticipated, led on by the interest attach- 
 ing to the evolution of the system of justice in the 
 Italian towns. I desire now to return to the history of
 
 Livorno 
 
 Viterbo 
 
 I.-N. WWC, UFF10, 
 
 SIENA uiiil the Uccion Between the A K NO. the APENNINES nnil MONTE \MI\T\
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 39 
 
 the count's territory, the comitatus. If, in the days of 
 Charlemagne, the comitatus was the fundamental ad- 
 ministrative unit of the empire, effectively governed by 
 the count, the ninth century had not yet declined to its 
 setting, when we find the comitatus threatened with 
 disaster. The confusion and paralysis which descended 
 on the head of the state naturally spread to all the 
 members. I have already spoken of this confusion 
 under the name of the feudalization of society. Having 
 glanced at the fate of the sovereign under the centrifugal 
 tendencies of feudalism, we have now an opportunity 
 to observe what havoc this movement worked with the 
 constituent elements of the kingdom, the counties. As 
 the ninth century passed into the tenth, certainly one of 
 the most desolate of all the desolate stretches of the 
 journey of our race since the time of Christ, the symp- 
 toms multiplied which indicated that the comitatus 
 would become the prey of selfish interests. This 
 fact becomes intelligible only, if we keep before our 
 mind the picture of the feudal king, weak, beset with 
 enemies, often absent, as often squandering his spurt 
 of energy upon a rival, the puppet of a faction, and 
 perforce ill-informed about the affairs of the counties 
 and incapable of attending to them. Under these cir- 
 cumstances the count could forget his public mission 
 and think chiefly of making as excellent provision as 
 possible for himself and his family. What was to 
 hinder his seizing suitable portions of the public 
 domain in the sure expectation that the hour would 
 come, the hour of need, when his sovereign would 
 pay for a momentary support by legalizing the usurp- 
 ation ?
 
 40 SIENA 
 
 We gather dimly the records are few and indefinite 
 that it was in some such way as this that the Sienese 
 territory passed into the hands of a number of great 
 feudal families. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries 
 we find them encircling the town like a besieging host. 
 Not only do they profess, in sign of their origin, the 
 Lombard, or more frequently still, the Frank law, but 
 they bear the title of counts. In this connection we 
 should remember that in the early Middle Age the 
 title count was never a merely honorary distinction, but 
 always designated an official engaged on the king's 
 business. But if the successive families of counts came 
 to Siena to govern in the name of the king, they stayed 
 to enjoy the domains to which, by some means or other, 
 they managed to secure the enfeoffment. Only in this 
 way can we account for the great family of the Soarzi 
 to the west of the city on the slopes of Monte Maggio 
 and at the headwaters of the Elsa, and for the still 
 greater family of the Scialenghi or Cacciaconti to the 
 east, settled in many branches through the region of the 
 eighteen baptisteries disputed between Arezzo and 
 Siena. In the neighborhood of the Cacciaconti we 
 find also the Forteguerri and the Manenti, the latter 
 descendants, it would seem, of counts of Orvieto, while 
 directly south of the city, almost touching the walls, 
 the Ardengheschi had their castles and estates. Com- 
 pleting the circuit of the town we discover among the 
 inhospitable hills to the south and west, beyond what 
 was strictly Sienese territory, the clans of the Aldo- 
 brandeschi and the Pannochieschi, claiming authority 
 over vast solitudes of wood and marsh. If the measures 
 by which these families secured their great fiefs from the
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 41 
 
 empire are not entirely clear, we are at least sure that 
 they prospered at the expense of the public lands and 
 of the comitatus. To all intents they had succeeded in 
 cutting their holdings out of the Sienese and the neigh- 
 boring counties, in order to rule them as sovereign under 
 the emperor on the basis of a charter of privileges and 
 immunities. 
 
 If we have here one of the chief factors which dimin- 
 ished the imperial prerogatives and disintegrated the 
 imperial administration of Tuscany, we face another 
 when we follow the development of the church. Bishops 
 and monasteries vied with the lay lords in importunate 
 demands upon the emperor for special favors and im- 
 munities. By means of gifts distributed in those pious 
 days with liberal hand, the church was waxing constantly 
 richer, but, left unprotected by the disorganized civil 
 government, it had to suffer its treasures to be seized 
 and its territories to be invaded by a lawless baronage. 
 Under the circumstances the bishops and abbots, the 
 natural guardians of the possessions of the church, 
 were forced to provide for their own defense, and not 
 unnaturally appealed to the emperor to improve their 
 position by the grant of a charter which conferred on 
 them the highest temporal authority in their dominions. 
 Dovetailed, therefore, among the great nobles of the 
 countryside, we find the great prelates, hardly less 
 numerous and powerful than their lay rivals. South of 
 Siena, toward Monte Amiata, lay the monastery of 
 Sant' Antimo; as early as the year 952 its abbot was 
 endowed with the temporalities,* and, in the words of 
 Dante, joined the sword to the shepherd's crook. As 
 
 *" Bull. Sen." IV, 72-74.
 
 42 SIENA 
 
 for the great Benedictine abbey on the slopes of Monte 
 Amiata, San Salvatore, which fills a large page in the 
 history of Siena, each new emperor tried to outdo his 
 predecessor in magnanimous concessions to it.* What 
 a lord abbot successfully demanded could not be 
 reasonably denied to a lord bishop. The Aretine 
 prelate, for example, neighbor and rival of him of 
 Siena, acquired an extensive immunity as early as the 
 year 843,f and similar concessions can be proved 
 for other dioceses of the neighborhood. When we 
 turn to Siena we discover that the episcopal archives | 
 have been neglected by the chapter and dissipated 
 by time, and that the earliest imperial diploma which 
 has been preserved bears the date 1055, but the con- 
 cessions which fairly rained upon all the bishops of 
 the immediate neighborhood, generations and cent- 
 uries before 1055, make it more than probable that 
 the bishop of Siena, too, began at a very early time 
 to acquire a political foothold in his dominions by 
 means of special privileges from the sovereign. In 
 fact, the very phrasing of the document of 1055 makes 
 it probable that it is largely a recapitulation of previous 
 grants. 
 
 This important diploma was issued from the chancel- 
 lery of the Emperor Henry III and, if relatively late, 
 contains at least an enumeration of ample concessions 
 to the beneficiary. It is worth reproducing in part, in 
 order to enable us to see at first hand how the bishop 
 
 * The original documents are preserved in the Archivio di Stato of Siena 
 in the section called Diplomatico. For a brief description of them, see 
 Lisini's Inventario, "Bull. Sen." XIII, 23O/. and 487^. 
 
 f Pasqui, "Document! per la Storia della Cittii di Arezzo," No. 33. 
 
 j On the archives see Lusini, "Bull. Sen." II, 145.
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 43 
 
 became a temporal lord, on a level with the proudest 
 members of the king's baronage. 
 
 "In the name of the Holy and Indivisible Trinity, We, Henry, 
 by the favor of God Roman Emperor . . . concede, give, and 
 confirm to the Sienese church all the possessions which it has 
 legally acquired or shall acquire in the future, that is, Castettum 
 Veins and these lands and manors (a long list follows, some of 
 which can be still identified to the south of the town). All these 
 lands with their appurtenances we concede, granting to the bishop 
 judicial authority over the possessions of the church and the resi- 
 dents thereon, and the right to conduct a wager of battle after the 
 established forms. Further, we desire and command that the 
 bishop shall have a right to the public services resting upon the 
 afore-named possessions of his church (facere munitiones) without 
 interference from any archbishop, bishop, duke, margi ave, count, 
 viscount, or any other person of our realm. ... In witness where- 
 of, etc." * 
 
 It is plain that this document makes the bishop a 
 temporal ruler. However, the question immediately 
 arises, what is the exact meaning of the concession 
 specified as Castellum Vetus ? Under that name was 
 known the highest hill of the city, site of the original 
 Etruscan settlement. Some writers have maintained 
 that the part is here put for the whole, and that the 
 grant to the bishop of Castellum Vetus was tantamount 
 to declaring him ruler of all Siena. To the unbiased 
 reader that must look like a very improbable interpreta- 
 tion. As we know of the bishop that he originally 
 resided on the hill of Castellum Vetus, we may assume 
 that he had landed possessions there; and it is at least 
 entirely reasonable to maintain that the privilege of 
 
 * Pecci, "Storia del Vescovado di Siena," p. 120.
 
 44 SIENA 
 
 Henry III sought primarily to endow him with po- 
 litical rights within and immediately about his private 
 property. In any case that is all the document actu- 
 ally says. If the exact area embraced by so loose a 
 term as Castellum Vetus is not entirely clear, there 
 remains no doubt that the bishop received, in addition, 
 sovereign rights over lands constituting a consider- 
 able territory to the south of the city between the 
 Arbia and the Merse. Over all this region he is de- 
 clared to be temporal lord with the power to collect 
 dues and to pronounce judgment, and he is even au- 
 thorized to conduct a wager of battle, always a sign 
 in those times of high criminal and civil jurisdiction. 
 True, neither this nor any other privilege ever gave 
 the bishop the title and authority of a count of the 
 empire, although an assertion to this effect has often 
 been made,* but it did eliminate the imperial count 
 from a considerable section of the county of Siena, 
 and this fact, taken in connection with his elimina- 
 tion from the estates of the larger monasteries, and 
 from the compact possessions of the Soarzi, Cacciaconti, 
 and other lay lords, gives us a vivid indication of the 
 sorry decline of the once powerful local administrator 
 and of the imperial prerogatives which he represented. 
 As late as the twelfth century, in the time of the 
 Hohenstaufen, we hear of counts of Siena, whom the 
 Emperor Barbarossa, or his son Henry, sent to this re- 
 gion to stand guard over the remnant of the imperial 
 authority, but, hardly finding breathing-space among 
 the powers whose usurpations overspread the land, he 
 
 * For instance, Rondoni, "Sena Vetus," p. 8. No existing document 
 designates the Sienese bishop as count of the territory.
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 45 
 
 lived a pale, unnoticed existence and presently faded 
 away.* 
 
 Among these general conditions were cast the first steps 
 of the free commune of Siena. That they were timid and 
 uncertain needs no explanation when we remember that 
 we are dealing with the period of infancy. I have already 
 said that it is absurd to seek for the exact birthyear of 
 the commune, or to maintain categorica41y that it was 
 born on such and such an occasion, as, for example, 
 when the magistracy of the consuls assumed the political 
 direction of the city. The consuls, to be sure, are the 
 declaration urbi et orbt that the town will henceforth 
 look to itself and manage its own affairs, but long before 
 there were consuls centuries before, in fact the 
 citizens had begun to provide for their most pressing 
 interests by their own efforts. The history of the free 
 commune is really the history of burgher self-help in the 
 midst of the distressing conditions of the feudal age. 
 When to make a journey over land, or rather when to 
 step over your threshold was to take your life into your 
 hands, it would have been strange indeed if men had 
 not learned that the individual, if he would survive, 
 must multiply himself, as it were, by free association 
 with others in the same precarious position. These 
 first beginnings of communal freedom in voluntary 
 groups, formed for the most primitive social ends, long 
 escaped the attention of historians. The pomp of 
 kings, the clash of mailed warriors, the anathemas of 
 
 * As to the evidence concerning the existence of Sienese counts as late as 
 the twelfth century, see Muratori, " Antiquitates Italicae," IV, 577. A 
 list of ten counts, from approximately 1145 to 1200, shows that although the 
 comitatus had been distributed among private interests, a remnant of the 
 imperial administration stubbornly persisted.
 
 46 SIENA 
 
 popes, created a rich and many-colored panorama, 
 through our delight in which we forgot the lowly masses 
 with their unromantic doings in field and shop. But 
 within a generation all this has changed and the earnest 
 effort of many scholars to lift the veil from the lives of 
 those who were not knights and ladies, and rode to hunt, 
 and banqueted in halls, has led us to revise, in good 
 part, our whole view of the Middle Age. Unfortunately 
 our first-hand information of the submerged masses is 
 fragmentary and deficient. The chroniclers of the 
 time, monks, for the most part, of small outlook and 
 encased in class prejudice, had no eyes for what went on 
 among the common people; and the manor and parish 
 records, which might tell us much of the administrative 
 activities of the inhabitants, have reached us only in 
 occasional survivals. In the case of Siena, in particular, 
 the remains are very scanty. However, the history of 
 early voluntary associations has been carefully pieced 
 together for more favored regions, and, as it is becoming 
 constantly more apparent that a primitive sort of self- 
 help was a feature common to all Italy, we are justified 
 in predicating an analogous development for Siena.* 
 
 * The most effective, if not the original, impetus to the investigation of 
 voluntary associations was given by Davidsohn in an article entitled, "Entste- 
 hung des Konsulats" (" Zeitschrift fuer Geschichtswissenschaft," Band VI, 
 1891, p. 22 ff). An Italian translation, "Origine del Consolato," will be 
 found in the "Archivio Stor. It.," Serie V, tomo 9, 1892. To these early 
 investigations Davidsohn has made considerable additions by an article in 
 the "Historische Vierteljahresschrift," 1900, pp. 1-26, and by a remarkable 
 chapter (the eighth) in his " Geschichte von Florenz." His thesis is, that in 
 measure as these voluntary associations familiarized the people once more 
 with self-government, they expanded by a perfectly natural process into the 
 consulate and the free commune. Within the last generation scholars have 
 made special studies of a great number of towns and villages, and in every 
 case their results have confirmed Davidsohn's views. It is out of the question 
 to enumerate all these studies here. Suffice it to name two, separated geo-
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 47 
 
 In order to bring out with all the clearness possible 
 the origin of the self-governing movement, let us take 
 our start from the conditions prevailing in the Lombard 
 and Frank periods, when the gastald, and after him the 
 count, was tht "governor of the city and its territory. 
 Even in this early period, when the royal official was 
 more or less absolute in his district, he neither did nor 
 could attend to all the affairs of the dwellers of town and 
 country. The church, for one thing, charged itself 
 with the spiritual interests of the population. Possessed 
 of a strength and vigor which enabled it to withstand 
 the assaults of the migrations and .mock at the floods 
 which rose and swirled about its foundations, it had 
 come to enjoy a respect which raised it in common eyes 
 far above the state. Secular administrations came and 
 went, but the ecclesiastical administration, with its unit, 
 the parish, braved every storm. While insisting on the 
 special importance of the parish, we should note that the 
 organization of the church in Italy has some additional 
 features, with which it is necessary to become familiar. 
 In the countryside a number of parishes together consti- 
 tuted a larger administrative division, the plebs or pieve, 
 of which the distinguishing feature was the baptistery 
 with its font of holy water, where the whole population, 
 subject to the plebs, partook of the first Christian rite. 
 In the town all the inhabitants enclosed within the walls 
 were regarded as constituting a single plebs and were 
 attached to a single baptismal font. Travelers in Italy 
 
 graphically by almost the whole length of the peninsula. Lothar von Heine- 
 mann, "Zur Entstehung der Stadtverfassung in Italien," 1896, has examined 
 the self-governing activities of the people of Gaeta in the kingdom of Naples, 
 and Sella in the "Arch. St. It.," Serie V, tomo 36, 1905, has done the same 
 for certain districts of Piedmont.
 
 48 SIENA 
 
 will remember that in Florence, Pisa, Siena, and else- 
 where, the baptistery stands to this day as a separate 
 building in the heart of the town, and very likely it has 
 happened that even as they gazed at these wonderful 
 structures, thrilling with their beauty and antiquity, new- 
 born babes were brought in by nurses and god-parents 
 to be received into the Christian fold. // ra/'o bel San 
 Giovanni raised something like a sob in the bosom of 
 the exiled Dante, and surely no one can stand beneath 
 its brave cupola without seeing with his mind's eye an 
 interminable procession of Florentine childhood, reach- 
 ing back and growing fainter, until it loses itself in the 
 dim days of the Lombards. A walled city, then, such 
 as Florence or Siena, constituted, ecclesiastically speak- 
 ing, a plebs, which, to meet the necessities of worship, 
 was divided into parishes, called populi. This swift 
 scrutiny of the organization of the Italian church has, 
 I hope, made clear that its main administrative divisions 
 were diocese, plebs (pieve, baptistery) and parish.* 
 
 Now these divisions, familiar to peasant and cobbler, 
 and rooted in the affections through daily association, 
 imposed themselves, to a certain extent, on the secular 
 administration. There is reason to think that the plebs 
 became an administrative and judicial subdivision of 
 the comitatus, and that a judge, or some other delegate 
 of the count, exercised jurisdiction there. At any rate 
 the inhabitants of a plebs, and more conspicuously still, 
 the small group of neighbors associated in a parish, came 
 to look upon themselves as forming a practical social 
 
 * Siena to-day contains sixteen parishes, or populi, within the walls. 
 Probably that number corresponds to the original number in the days of the 
 republic. See Cappelletti, "Le Chiese d'ltalia," Vol. XVII, p. 531.
 
 cd 
 
 H-l 
 
 <3 
 
 O 
 
 r5 
 
 a 
 
 _z 
 
 _"S 
 H
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 49 
 
 unit. The simple country folk, who loved their parish 
 church as the familiar centre where as infants they had 
 been baptized, where as youths and maidens they had 
 received confirmation, and in whose holy precincts they 
 expected to be buried, would linger after mass or even- 
 song, and, seated under the elm spreading its shade before 
 the door, would discuss their common interests as de- 
 fined by paths, roads, pasture, cattle, and streams. In 
 the case of a town the neighbors of street and parish 
 would find themselves no less absorbed by questions 
 touching cisterns, fountains, public hygiene, and the 
 maintenance and the repair of the church. Trusty 
 men, elected from the parish associates, looked into 
 the various neighborhood issues submitted to them, and 
 presently might even be called upon to act as judges and 
 settle a quarrel between fellow-parishioners involved 
 in a dispute. Everywhere, in hundreds and thousands 
 of small centres, in town and country alike, this modest, 
 almost invisible self-activity sprang into being, accele- 
 rated by the decay of the central power; and because it 
 was sound at heart, and provided for the most immediate 
 and primal needs of society, it was destined not only to 
 survive, but to grow and crowd the dominant system 
 of misrule, called feudalism, from its seat. 
 
 In the course of time the neighborhood assemblies 
 tended to become permanent and regular, and to draw 
 increasingly important subjects within the range of 
 their discussion. Such would be, especially for the 
 villages of the countryside, the regulation of the tie 
 binding them to their feudal lord, perched above them 
 in his castle. By the eleventh century we find elected 
 representatives, called boni homines, signing contracts
 
 50 SIENA 
 
 with feudal landowners, sitting in judgment over their 
 fellows much like a regular court, and meeting with 
 other boni homines to discuss the common business of 
 contiguous parishes and even of larger geographical dis- 
 tricts. In the cities, where men lived more closely 
 together and were pressingly dependent on each other's 
 cooperation, the need for common action was even more 
 urgent than in the country. Proceeding from particular 
 interests to more general ones, the neighbors finally 
 took up the great matter of self-defence. Only as the 
 inhabitants of a town learned from their feudal masters 
 the invaluable lesson of force and took measures to 
 man their walls and gates at the approach of danger, 
 did they give the final and conclusive proof concerning 
 their ability to support the responsibilities of self- 
 government. The attention to questions of defence and 
 war would of necessity involve the whole town, and is, 
 wherever we encounter it, a sure indication that the 
 cooperation among the original groups had reached a 
 relatively advanced stage. 
 
 For many generations of that submerged epoch of the 
 mediaeval period to wKicn we refer currently as the 
 Dark^ Age, there was, therefore., jsome limited form of 
 self-government, of which the boni homines, entrusted 
 with the business oF the, parish, or of some limited social 
 or agricultural group, are the symbol. They have 
 hardly begun to represent the interests of trie larger unit, 
 the town, when we find them adopting a name indicative 
 of their new honor they call themselves consuls. 
 The appearance of the name is a certain sign of an 
 enlarged and improved organization, but it does not 
 mean, as used to be maintained, that the citizens now
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 51 
 
 first experimented in self-government. On the con- 
 trary, we should now be amply convinced that extensive 
 self-governing activities characterized all the Italian 
 towns long before we hear of consuls. And just as the 
 consular officials are by no means synchronous with the 
 beginnings of democracy, so a town provided with such 
 dignitaries has not necessarily renounced allegiance to 
 the emperor and his agents, and entered into all the 
 rights of sovereignty and independence. J^\\ through 
 the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when we know 
 defimteJ^hj^he_T^scan communes were governed by 
 consuls or some other elected authority?, when, further- 
 more^ they showed everj^ ^^_ of a vigorous self- 
 consciousness, theY-did-JLOtConceive themselves as 
 entirely emancipated from the authority of the empire. 
 Self-government an? independence these were indeed 
 the twin objects of every town beginning to disentangle 
 itself from the feudal net; but we must accustom our- 
 selves to think of both of them as reached by very 
 devious paths, and after a process like the annual 
 coming of the spring, which for long weeks advances 
 and recedes and again advances, until the young season, 
 bringing fresh and ever fresh battalions to the front, 
 drives old winter into hopeless flight. 
 
 The first reference to a governing body of consuls in the 
 city oTISiena tieloTTgirtS'tK^yeaF 1 125.* In the previous 
 year (1124) we have a reference to boni homines who, 
 in representation of their city, accompanied the bishop 
 of Siena, Gualfredo, to Rome, in order to help plead 
 
 * Pasqui, "Document!," etc., p. 573. The reference occurs in a deposition 
 made by witnesses summoned in 1177 in the course of the interminable 
 Siena-Arezzo conflict.
 
 52 SIENA 
 
 the cause of their diocese when that zealous prelate 
 reopened the interminable feud with Arezzo over the 
 eighteen baptisteries. These two notices suggest the 
 connection, amounting almost to identity, between boni 
 homines and consuls. Very probably the boni homines 
 of the city parishes or other minor groups, with the 
 growth of common interests, had been for some time 
 meeting together to take advice, and very probably the 
 full assembly of boni homines had been found too 
 cumbersome for the satisfactory dispatch of business. 
 On the election of an executive committee of boni 
 homines, involving for the first time the representation 
 of the whole town, the higher dignity of the new body 
 was recognized by dhejidoptiorTbt the title, about which 
 still hung the glamor of the Roman republic the title 
 qTconsuta Everywhere in Tuscany the consuls came 
 forward about the same time. For Pisa and Lucca 
 they can be proved shortly after 1080;* in the case of 
 Florence the first reference to the new magistracy 
 belongsTo" tHe~year H38;t and as regards Siena, we^ 
 first hear of consuls, as already stated, in 1125. But 
 where there are consuls there is a commune, for when 
 the constituent groups came together to give themselves 
 a common set of officials they recognized also that they 
 had created a new practical unity. And let the reader 
 note that this new unity, the commune, is not identical 
 with the town or city. Town and city are geograph- 
 ical expressions, but the commune denotes a political 
 entity, to the privileges of which the citizen body 
 
 * See Henry's Privileges of 1081, Muratori, "Antiq. It.," IV, 20, and 
 Ficker, "Forschungen," IV, no. 81. 
 f Davidsohn, " Geschichte," I, 345.
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 53 
 
 taken as a whole need not be, and very generally was 
 not, admitted. 
 
 The general appearance of the consulship among 
 the Tuscan towns about the year uoo would tend to 
 show that, in spite of an infinite variation in detail 
 among them, they all presented an essential identity in 
 social structure and political experience. In attempt- 
 ing now to take a closer view of the new office, let us 
 keep before our minds the unfamiliarity of the age 
 with political thought and action. Must it not fill a 
 modern man with surprise that no town exhibited a 
 sense of having done anything meritorious in providing 
 itself with an elected magistracy, and that none showed 
 the least tendency to magnify its courage with a ringing 
 Declaration of Rights ? Such ideas and methods 
 characterize a struggle for freedom conducted by a 
 people who have achieved political consciousness. In 
 the Middle Age self-government was never evoked, as 
 has been frequently the case in our own day, by political 
 theory, but was a groping, practical growth, nursed 
 among small groups and made necessary by the bar- 
 barous incompetence of the official government. On 
 this account the consuls did not for a long time pass out 
 of the realm of experiment. One year they were elected 
 to represent the commune, another not the single 
 groups being evidently content on occasion to fall back 
 on the older, though less manageable, institution of the 
 boni homines. Everywhere it was the same, but every- 
 where, too, experience would teach the advantage for 
 the town of an uninterrupted central direction of affairs 
 secured by the permanent establishment of the new 
 magistracy. Under these circumstances, toward the
 
 54 SIENA 
 
 middle of the twelfth century, the consulship began to 
 function more regularly,* and about the same time, 
 also, the elaboration of the new government in the 
 direction of political effectiveness had made considerable 
 progress. With the consuls came to be associated a 
 council, representing more or less numerous groups of 
 citizens and acting as an advisory body the nucleus, 
 it will be seen, of a future legislature; and, further, with 
 a view to protecting the citizens against possible illegal- 
 ities on the part of the chief magistracy, there was 
 drawn up, at first in rude and summary form, a docu- 
 ment defining its functions. This received the name 
 of breve consulum, and on it the consuls, on assuming 
 their duties, took the oath of office. Growing from 
 year to year as the result of accumulated political ex- 
 perience, it became the celebrated communal constitu- 
 tion of the Age of the Republics. In the early days we 
 hear very generally, too, of the meeting of the whole 
 people, the parlamentum, called for the purpose of 
 laying important matters of state before the general 
 body of citizens, but it does not appear that the parla- 
 mentum anywhere became an effective instrument of 
 control or acquired other than a theoretical claim to 
 power and sovereignty. To the development of these 
 and similar institutions which gradually took shape to 
 serve the needs of the new republic of Siena I shall 
 later devote a separate chapter. At present it behooves 
 us to attend the consuls in their first efforts to direct 
 the destiny of the city. 
 
 * In Siena, as late as 1151, we encounter instead of consuls or boni homines, 
 a single executive, one Scudacollus. The fact is a further support of the 
 theory of the elastic nature of the early republican institutions. For Scuda- 
 collus see Ficker, "Forschungen," IV, no. 120.
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 55 
 
 The chief concern of the new magistracy was to 
 live. Strictly speaking it was a rebel magistracy, for 
 it represented the self-governing attempt of a com- 
 munity which legally was governed by the emperor 
 and his delegate, the count. The count of Siena, as 
 we have seen T had long since. byTeason or the emperor's 
 weakness, the feudal usurpations, and the ecclesiastical 
 immunities, become a negligible factor, but, as it hap- 
 penedT^bout the middle of the same century which 
 saw the rise of the consuls, a really great emperor, 
 Frederick I of the H Q u s , e , _oJHohenstaufen, called 
 Barbarossa, came to the throne in Germany, and 
 undertook to^ revive all the obsolete imperial rights m 
 his fair Dominion beyond the Alps. To general 
 mediaeval history belong Frederick's heroic attempt and 
 failure to turn back the wheel of time and bring the 
 cities underthe old subjection. In Lombardy, especially, 
 where, owing to geographical conditions, urban life 
 was more developed than in Tuscany, they met heroism 
 with heroism, and after a great victory at Legnano 
 (176) forced The emperor to confirm their right to 
 elect tHeir own officialjfahd to conduct their own affairs. 
 TKcTpeace document, a notable milestone in the histgrv 
 of democracy, was signed at Constance in southern 
 Germany, in the year 1183. The Tuscan cities played 
 only a secondary part in the struggle, and did not receive 
 the benefits of the peace, but they had with character- 
 istic agility used the embarrassment of the emperor to 
 strengthen their position. When Frederick, therefore, 
 toward the end of his reign, and being now an old man, 
 whose red beard had long since turned white, paid a 
 visit to Tuscany, he found the cities not only governing
 
 56 SIENA 
 
 themselves by the consular regime, but possessed by 
 conquest each one of its comitatus or a large part of it. 
 The fiery emperor did not hesitate to show his dis- 
 pleasure at this situation, took measures which raised 
 the spectre of a Tuscan war, counterpart of the late 
 struggle in Lombardy, and then, satisfied with the 
 vigorous affirmation of his rights, relented, offering a 
 compromise. A picture of his fortunes in Tuscany at 
 this critical junction is furnished by a review of his 
 relations to Siena. Let us examine them as briefly as 
 possible. 
 
 In the year 1179 the emperor's Italian legate, the 
 Archbishop Christian of Mainz, had been captured by 
 some private enemies and imprisoned at Montefiascone, 
 pending the payment of an immense ransom. In 
 return for a contribution to this end the Sienese received 
 from the prisoner a charter,* recognizing not only the 
 consuls but their rule over such districts in the comitatus 
 as they had already annexed by the defeat of the feudal 
 barons. As usual the concession did not hinder the 
 application of the law of might, as soon as the tables 
 were turned. When, in 1185, Frederick paid the visit 
 to Tuscany already referred to, he attempted as before in 
 Lombardy, to save the feudal system with its hierarchy 
 of nobles, by destroying the usurped power of the cities. 
 Siena resisted this diminution of her authority, yielding 
 only after a siege conducted by the emperor's son, 
 King Henry. In a reconciliation, so-called, of June, 
 1 1 86, the Sienese threw themselves abjectly at their 
 sovereign's feet.f Pleased with the effect produced, 
 the young king gave back to the town some of its cus- 
 
 * Muratori, "Antiq. It.," IV, 575. f MM., IV, 467.
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 57 
 
 ternary rights, solemnly confirming them in a parchment 
 over his signature.* 
 
 "In the name of the Holy and Indivisible Trinity, We, Henry 
 VI., by divine favor, king of the Romans . . . make known to 
 all the faithful of the empire, present as well as future, that in 
 view of the merits of our trusty subjects, the citizens of Siena, we 
 grant them (universitati ipsorum) the free election of their consuls. 
 However, the consuls shall receive the investiture annually from 
 our hand or that of our most glorious father, Frederick, emperor 
 of the Romans, or that of our successors, without any charge or 
 exaction. ... In addition we grant them full jurisdiction in the 
 city of Siena, and outside the city, hi the comitatus, over the men 
 belonging to the bishop of Siena or to any Sienese resident at the 
 time this document is drawn up, saving the right of appeal in 
 cases amounting to more than twenty pounds. Also, we grant to 
 the Sienese people the fodrum f of these same men ... All 
 nobles outside the city and all other men throughout the Sienese 
 comitatus, except those noted above, with all jurisdiction over 
 them, their fodrum and services in general, we retain in our 
 power. Also, we concede to the Sienese the privilege of coining 
 money hi the city of Siena. ... In witness whereof" [Follows 
 a long list of witnesses, the seal of King Henry, and the date, 
 October, 1186]. 
 
 The full importance of this document will appear 
 in the light of a rapid recapitulation. The consular 
 regime had now been in existence for many years, being 
 proved for 1125, and reaching back, with high probabil- 
 ity, to an earlier date. Moreover, long before the ap- 
 pearance of consuls, there had been self-government of 
 one sort or another, beginning with simple parish 
 
 * Ibid., IV, 469. 
 
 f The fodrum was an important service, consisting usually of provisions 
 paid by the barons to the emperor when he was on a journey.
 
 58 SIENA 
 
 matters and increasing steadily in scope. Although the 
 providing for local interests of a purely administrative 
 nature was sanctioned by a long and uninterrupted usage, 
 and was tolerated, if not expressly endorsed, by the cen- 
 tral feudal power, the seizure of the political direction by 
 the citizens, or any group of citizens, as indicated by 
 the election of consuls, was indisputably a usurpation. 
 Luckily for Siena similar usurpations were universal 
 in Italy, and fell, furthermore, at the auspicious moment 
 when the empire was engaged in a struggle for its very 
 life with the church. The result of multiform embar- 
 rassments was that the successive emperors, however 
 deeply they may have resented the illegal procedure of 
 the cities, had to move cautiously. Pisa 1 withou^ whose 
 money and _ ships the imperial action in southern and 
 central Itaj^jgguld_have been paralyzed, as early as 
 1081 won a privilege from Henry IV, by which it 
 Eecarfie "practically '"an independent republic.* In the 
 same yeaTT^ucca received a patent conferring extensive 
 prerogatives.! A hundred years later, in consequence 
 of their victory at Legnano (1176), the Lombard com- 
 munes acquired a sweeping sanction of the liberties 
 which they had long ago seized as a natural and inde- 
 feasible right. Siena, generally on the side of the em- 
 peror against the church, had coaxed favors from 
 several sovereigns in payment for her loyalty, but, as 
 far as appears from surviving records, had never 
 enforced the legalization of the consulship. However, 
 the emperors and their agents had not refused to deal 
 with the elected representatives of the city, thereby 
 
 *Muratori, "Antiq. It.," IV, 19. 
 
 f Picker, "Forschungen," IV, no. 81.
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 59 
 
 accepting and honoring them in fact, if not in law.* 
 Under the circumstances the status of Siena was both 
 ambiguous and uncomfortable. The emperors, how- 
 ever grateful to the town for its services against the pope 
 and other enemies, conceded to it as little as possible in 
 the hope that the time might come when they would 
 be strong enough to reintegrate the feudal rule; and 
 the citizens, for their part, although anxious to legalize 
 a revolutionary magistracy, found a limited satisfaction 
 in not being hindered in the exercise of self-government. 
 In the year 1186 the contradictory position of emperor 
 and townsmen led to a war in which the victory re- 
 mained, as we have seen, with the feudal lord. King 
 Henry could, therefore, dictate a settlement. His 
 initial measure was to declare null and void the "sub- 
 missions," by which the lusty city authorities had 
 forced their yoke upon the nobles of the country. 
 These nobles he took under his protection, declaring 
 them subject only to himself. But, although he thus 
 set back the development of the city, he made up for his 
 action, in part at least, by a charter recognizing the 
 consular rule within the walls and, beyond their circuit, 
 over the territory of the bishop and of other Sienese 
 residents. The consuls were to be freely elected accord- 
 ing to local custom, but were to be fitted into the frame- 
 work of feudalism a framework which Henry's posi- 
 tion as a feudal chief obliged him to maintain by 
 being enfeoffed with the city by their suzerain. How- 
 ever much the citizens may have mourned the many 
 
 * For the dealings with Siena of Rainald of Koln, Frederick's plenipoten- 
 tiary in Italy in the period 1164-67, see Davidsohn, "Geschichte von 
 Florenz," p. 498. Rainald's favors look very much like an express recogni- 
 'tion of the republican regime.
 
 60 SIENA 
 
 reductions of authority stated or implied in the charter 
 of 1186, they had good reason to rejoice that their self- 
 government now had a firm footing in law. In the 
 shelter of the imperial privilege the free institutions of 
 the town, still in a rudimentary form, could be elaborated 
 with greater dispatch and security. 
 
 It is perfectly plain that the fundamental considera- 
 tion with Henry, in issuing his diploma, was to preserve 
 the country nobility in its immediate dependence on the 
 empire. For this purpose he made a concession to the 
 city in the matter of self-government, but at the same 
 time he declared firmly that from the nobles and 
 imperial fiefs in general the townsmen must keep their 
 grasping tentacles. From his point of view his policy 
 is perfectly intelligible. If things went on in the future 
 as they had been going on in the past, each city would 
 presently be paramount in its contado, the feudal 
 nobility would be reduced at best to a class of citizen- 
 landholders, and the emperor would find the services 
 due to him usurped by the towns, his income gone, 
 and himself in effect crowded out of his kingdom 
 of Italy. The citizens, on the other -hand, were as 
 imperatively driven to persist in their course, for, 
 with the comitatus and its highways in the hands 
 of the nobility, what assurance did they have that 
 they could pursue the trade by which they pros- 
 pered ? They might bend a humble knee before 
 their suzerain coming at the head of an irresistible 
 army, but, as they held life dear, they would have 
 to strive openly and secretly to bind the countryside 
 to their interests with hoops of steel. This terri- 
 torial struggle was, therefore, the necessary concom-
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 61 
 
 itant of the struggle for political recognition which 
 we have just followed. 
 
 As a matter of fact all the towns had no sooner taken 
 their first steps on the road to self-government than 
 they began to realize their parallel aim of controlling 
 the neighborhood. The whole twelfth century of 
 Sienese history is filled with wars conducted for this 
 end, and about the same time we first hear of consuls, 
 we hear also of the first "submissions" made to the city. 
 In 1137 the Soarzi surrendered a fourth part of Monte- 
 castelli and other dominions to Siena;* in 1138 Count 
 Manente ceded to the bishop and people one-sixth of 
 the castle of Radicofani, on the border toward Rome;f 
 in 1145 the abbot of San Salvatore on Monte Amiata 
 followed the example of Count Manente and yielded 
 certain rights of his own in Radicofani ;J in July, 1151, 
 Count Paltonerius of the Forteguerra family gave up San 
 Giovanni d'Asso, a fortified place to the east; in 1157 
 the Ardengheschi sold the hill of Orgia, just beyond the 
 southern gate, after the Sienese had taken and burned 
 the castle there; || and in 1168 Count Ildebrandino 
 Cacciaguerra lost the important little town of Asciano.fl 
 These are a few items selected at random from an almost 
 interminable record of triumphs, of which the Sienese 
 archive preserves the moving memory. In spite of 
 varying terms of submission all the treaties affirm alike 
 the purpose of drawing the baronage within the radius 
 of the city's influence. As this was the feudal age, the 
 
 * Archivio di Stato, "Caleffo vecchio," c. 4*. 
 
 f Ibid., "Caleffo vecchio," c. 2it. 
 
 j Muratori, "Antiq. It.," IV, 567. 
 
 Archivio di Stato, "Caleffo vecchio," c. 21. 
 
 II Ibid., c. 17. 1f Ibid., c. jt, 8
 
 62 SIENA 
 
 conquered nobles had imposed upon them also a 
 ceremony of submission, some of the details of which 
 we may learn from the legal documents. From the parch- 
 ment of 1 157, for instance, we learn that the Counts Ar- 
 dengheschi were obliged to appear in person before the 
 people of Siena assembled in parliament in front of the 
 episcopal church, and to confirm their renunciation of 
 Orgia with an oath. The notary invited to give the 
 surrender the necessary legal form, affirmed the ap- 
 pearance of the- counts in language devoid of every 
 human touch, but our imagination readily revives the 
 stirring scene. The present wonderful cathedral with 
 its facade gay as a parti-colored carpet did not yet 
 exist; in its place stood a smaller and a ruder church, 
 dedicated, like its successor, to the Virgin and ap- 
 proached by a flight of steps from the open square in 
 front. On this square, on that February day duly 
 noted in the document, are crowded the citizens of high 
 and low degree, gesticulating, chattering, exulting in 
 the fall of their enemies. At last the counts appear 
 upon the stone terrace before the church to take the 
 oath. Silence falls upon the close-pressed throng until 
 the decisive word is spoken, and then, a shout! The 
 accumulated hate of generations finds vent in that 
 spontaneous cry.* 
 
 * As it may interest the reader to note the kind of terms on which defeated 
 noblemen usually surrendered their sovereignty and became citizens, I add 
 the document by which four counts of the Cacciaconti family acknowledged 
 their subjection to Siena: 
 
 "In the name of the Lord, Amen. We, Cacciacomes, Cacciaguerra, 
 Guido, son of Cacciacomes, and Rainaldus, son of Ildebrandinus, swear on 
 the Holy Gospels, that henceforth and forever we shall be Sienese citizens, 
 and shall preserve and protect every person of the city of Siena and of its 
 suburbs and their goods. . . . And we, Cacciacomes, Cacciaguerra, and Rai- 
 naldus promise to reside within the walls of Siena for three continuous
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 63 
 
 In all the earlier documents preserved in the Sienese 
 archive the submission, on the part of the conquered 
 nobleman, is made not only to the people but also to the 
 bishop, and sometimes to the bishop alone. This was 
 an empty formula, which should mislead no one into 
 the belief that the bishop was the ruler of the city, or 
 even in the slightest way the special beneficiary of the 
 victories of the citizens. The bishop had indeed long 
 been a great lay lord, as is amply proved by the diploma 
 of 1055, but with the rise of the commune he found him- 
 self in much the same position as the other lords, and 
 by degrees which escape our attention yielded his 
 temporal sovereignty to the vigorous commonwealth. 
 Signs that his yielding was not altogether graceful are 
 not lacking, for we hear of one bishop, Ranieri by name, 
 who in the struggle between Barbarossa and Pope 
 Alexander leaned too openly toward the church and was 
 driven out of the city by a popular uprising. He died 
 in exile (1170) "expulsus a scismaticis" a not un- 
 common fate in those days of political and ecclesiastical 
 revolution.* But if the Sienese were thus occasionally 
 in conflict with their bishop as a power commanding a 
 considerable political influence, they had no serious 
 
 months in time of peace as well as in time of war. (Guido, son of Caccia- 
 comes, makes the same promise for two months.) And we swear we will give 
 ear and attend to the commands of the Sienese consuls as well as to the com- 
 mands of the court officials (consules placiti) who will summon us in matters 
 of justice. And we shall retain the privileges enumerated in various chapters 
 of the breve constilum (i. e. the Sienese constitution). . . . And we shall offer 
 every year to the cathedral church of Siena, on the festival of Our Lady of 
 August, one candle of six pounds (for our possession of) Monte Santa Maria, 
 and one of eight pounds for Chiusure (and so forth for six other places 
 specified). Done at Siena. . . . February, 1197." Muratori, "Antiq. It.," 
 IV, 583- 
 
 * For the narrative of Bishop Ranieri's conflict with Siena see an article by 
 Davidsohn, "Bull. Sen.," V, 63 /.
 
 64 SIENA 
 
 quarrel with him as spiritual head of the state. On 
 the contrary they looked upon the great prelate with 
 sincere veneration, and when they ordered the notaries 
 to formulate the surrender of towns and castles as made 
 to him, they did so in the prudent calculation that their 
 conquests, essentially illegal, might seem less offensive 
 by being draped with the authority of the church.* In 
 consequence the imperial power, which the illusory 
 phrasing planned to conciliate, had no sooner begun 
 to wane than the citizens dispensed with their stalking- 
 horse. By 1186 the position of the townsmen had 
 become so firmly established that not only was the 
 fiction of the bishop's supremacy entirely dropped in 
 the documents of submission, but in the imperial char- 
 ter of that year the sovereignty of Siena over the episcopal 
 territories was expressly recognized. It certainly de- 
 serves to be noted as a sign of the advancing organiza- 
 tion of the state, that by the year 1186 the church of 
 Siena was, as regards its landed possessions, already 
 subordinated to the civil power. 
 
 The breakdown of the empire in Tuscany,jfelajed 
 as far as^humjnTp^^ 
 
 Barbarossa, came with suddenness^^nd^completeness 
 .in i the jf ear 1197. jnjjiajryear Henry VI ? the energetic 
 and^unscrupulous successor of Frederick, died in Sicily, 
 leaving __asTKTs heir a boy in swaddling-clothes. No 
 sooner did this news reacr^the north than_lhe Tuscan 
 cities rose in rpvn|t. They met at San Genesio, beneath 
 that lofty San Miniato, which ~was'~trTe'~centre of Jthe 
 imperial a^rrnmsjTation for the Tuscan prpvinrp, ?mj 
 
 * The Florentines, among others, followed a similar practice. See for 
 their procedure Santini, "Contado e Politica Esteriore del secolo XII," p. 44.
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 65 
 
 formed a league planned to secure them against any 
 fufufe'tyranny of the^emgire^ Now the best security 
 of a free condition was the subjection of the neighboring 
 lords, mainstays of the imperial power, who would have 
 been reduced to obedience long ago and definitely, but 
 for the frequent interposition in their favor of the em- 
 peror. With Henry's death came the great opportunity : 
 the cities formed their spontaneous union, and proceeded 
 straightway to realize its main object, to wit, that each 
 city should put itself in possession of its contado. 
 During the following years while the empire was almost 
 annihilated through the convulsions attending a dis- 
 puted succession, the Sienese reduced, either to direct 
 submission or to dependence through the less humiliat- 
 ing form of an alliance, all the great families which still 
 defied their authority. In the year 1197 the sharp 
 sword of the townsmen once more smote the Caccia- 
 conti, who now definitely became Sienese citizens;* in 
 the year 1202 the Counts Ardengheschi agreed to pay 
 an annual hearth-tax of twenty-six denari for each fam- 
 ily resident in their many lands ;f in the same year the 
 Counts of Sarteano signed an offensive alliance directed 
 against Montepulciano;J finally, in the year 1203, the 
 Aldobrandeschi, the greatest of all the feudal families 
 and destined to loom terrible on the horizon for another 
 century and a half, signed a treaty of friendship, the 
 first, if inconsiderable, step in the long process of their 
 subjection. 
 
 As minor towns in the neighborhood were not less 
 
 * See foot-note, p. 62. 
 
 t Malavolti, p. 41, della Prima Parte. J Ibid. 
 
 $ Archivio di Stato, Section Diplomatico. Date Jan. 4, 1202 (old style).
 
 66 SIENA 
 
 offensive to the pride and ambition of Siena than the 
 great lords, this same occasion, when the empire was in 
 abeyance and the Tuscan towns were bound together 
 by a general convention, was used to bring into sub- 
 jection all neighboring places which might become the 
 basis of military or commercial action against the re- 
 gional metropolis. In pursuit of this policy, Montalcino, 
 crowning a magnificent conical hill to the south, fell, 
 not without stubborn resistance, into Sienese hands 
 (1202).* Thereupon the townsmen girded their loins 
 for a still more hardy enterprise, the capture and sub- 
 jection of Montepulciano, which lifted its towers and 
 battlements not far to the east of Montalcino. But now 
 appeared prominently a new difficulty, which had long 
 cast its shadow before. The attempt to seize Monte- 
 pulciano was furiously resented by the Florentines, even 
 though they were in formal alliance with the Sienese. 
 Not content with enjoying their own comitatus, the 
 ambitious dwellers of the Arno valley were already 
 aspiring to control a vaster region, if not to dominate 
 all Tuscany. They resolved at all hazards to check the 
 expansion of Siena, and determined by guile, and when 
 guile failed by war, to keep the Sienese out of that hill- 
 town to their east, dominating the Chiana valley and 
 opening a gate to all central Italy. Thus the two cities 
 lately allied for a common end against the emperor, at 
 the beginning of the new century turned upon each 
 other with unexampled bitterness. The whole thir- 
 teenth century resounds with this struggle, in which 
 each seeks aid wherever it can, from Tuscan city neigh- 
 bors, from feudal nobles, from pope and emperor. 
 
 * Malavolti, p. 41, della Prima Parte.
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 67 
 
 Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo, Pistoia, all figure in the conflict; 
 its object, the supremacy in Tuscany. 
 
 The century which we have been considering, the 
 century of the great Hohenstaufen emperors Fred- 
 erick I and Henry VI, did not close without a significant 
 change in the chief magistracy of Siena. The other towns 
 went through a similar evolution, approximately at the 
 same time. Did the consuls, whose number varied from 
 three to six, prove, as a plural executive, incapable 
 of that quick decision demanded by the needs of the 
 hour ? Very likely with the increasing complication of 
 society, with friction among the urban classes, and with 
 foreign war, a certain cumbersomeness would appear 
 in this magistracy, and would create a preference for a 
 single head. Single executives, I have already said, 
 were from time to time intercalated in the succession of 
 consuls almost from the first. The idea made headway, 
 and with the advent of the thirteenth century, almost 
 all the cities replaced their consuls with a single ruler, 
 called potesta. The first potesta * of Siena came from 
 Lucca in the year 1199; in the next year a native, 
 Filippo d'Orlando Malavolti, filled the office. But the 
 young republic looked with marked distrust upon a 
 native ruler, fearful lest he use his position to push the 
 material interests of his family, or, still worse, to 
 perpetuate his power with the help of some faction 
 and crown himself the city's tyrant. In consequence, 
 and as security against this dire eventuality, a decision 
 was made after a period of fluctuation in favor of a 
 foreign potesta on the ground that he would be un- 
 
 * See for a full list of the Sienese potesta "Miscellanea Storica Sanese," 
 IV, i86/.
 
 68 SIENA 
 
 acquainted with the factions of the city and presumably 
 willing to maintain an independent position among 
 them. His term of office in the beginning lasted 
 usually one year and he was handsomely housed and 
 remunerated. 
 
 It is impossible to see the replacement of the consuls 
 by the potesta in any other light than that of an advance 
 in political organization. However, it was a change 
 merely at the top. The foundations upon which the 
 government rested did not suffer change, and these 
 foundations, although they comprised, in a broad sense, 
 the whole people of Siena, were, closely considered, 
 essentially aristocratic. Let us see what that means: 
 The consular constitution was undoubtedly due to the 
 democratic impulse of the new centres of life, the towns, 
 but the free associations, the union of which gave birth to 
 the commune, were composed of, or at least were directed 
 and controlled by, a relatively small class of wealthy 
 members. These alone enjoyed full citizen rights in 
 the commune. This needs to be said expressly in 
 rectification of the common tendency to overstate the 
 case of the young democracy of Italy. And yet that 
 that democracy would be limited in its early stages must 
 appear the moment we reflect that the upper class alone 
 possessed the material resources and commanded the 
 experience of life required to make the best of the new 
 opportunities which offered with the revival of com- 
 mercial intercourse among the nations. And that brings 
 us to the question as to what elements of society com- 
 posed the ruling class in the first phase of the free com- 
 mune. The answer varies, within certain limits, for 
 the different towns of Tuscany; but for Siena, which is
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 
 
 our immediate concern, we may affirm that the upper 
 class of the consular era consisted of a group of lesser 
 feudal lords, who, possessed of fiefs near the city, dwelt 
 within the walls and were therefore citizens, and that 
 allied and practically identical with them was a group 
 of burghers who had prospered in trade, notably in the 
 lucrative business of money barter. This upper group 
 of the well-to-do was variously designated as nobles, 
 magnates, and grandi. No effort was made to distin- 
 guish socially between those rich by virtue of land and 
 those rich by commerce, or to place one kind of riches 
 above another. In fact such a distinction would have 
 been impossible owing to the circumstance that the 
 Sienese gentry engaged in commerce without a touch of 
 the usual aristocratic contempt for trade, and that the 
 successful bankers preferably invested their funds in 
 agricultural property. From the ranks exclusively of 
 these leading citizens were chosen the consuls in the 
 early days of self-government, with the result that to 
 the prestige which the dominant class enjoyed by reason 
 of its wealth was added the further prestige associated 
 with political prerogative. 
 
 As soon as the development of industry and com- 
 merce succeeded in awakening new strata of the citizen 
 body to mental and economic activity, it became im- 
 probable that the favored political position of the 
 oligarchy could be maintained. Then with the blood 
 running red in their arteries the masses would be 
 certain to make an effort to break down the monopoly 
 of the upper class. The thirteenth century had hardly 
 begun when the people opened the combat. In the 
 year 1212 a Sienese chronicle reports a struggle (the
 
 70 SIENA 
 
 first of which we have definite information) between 
 giandi andj!>oo/o. It is the inauguraaon^pf^the .chamer 
 of domestic revolution, a long and dreary story, and 
 destined noTlo be closed until Siena herself ended her 
 life as an independent state. The chronicler reports 
 under the year 1212: "St. Francis of Assisi of the 
 Order of the Brothers Minor came to Siena; and there 
 was great enmity between people and nobles, and he 
 made peace and union among them."* No more 
 than that: a class struggle, which St. Francis, the good 
 brown brother, exercising his inspired ministry of peace 
 on earth, composed. Slight though the information 
 be, it is pleasant to have the assurance that that kindli- 
 est of spirits once entered in very flesh the gate, paced 
 the narrow streets, and laid his inexorable benediction 
 on the turbulent factions. Did he favor the claims of 
 the people against the grandi ? We cannot tell, but this 
 we know the brief entry is precise that with the 
 thirteenth century began a struggle for a wider partici- 
 pation of the people in the government of the city. 
 
 The year 1200 marks a convenient mile-stone in the 
 historyjpf jjena where we may pause a moment to look 
 backward and forward. The empire, moving plainly 
 to its setting, was no longer able to count greatly in 
 Tuscany either for good or for ill; the bishop, once a 
 ruler of great sway, had been reduced, as far as his 
 territories~wefe~concerned, to citizenship; the feudal 
 nobles, if not annihilated, had all felt the rod of the 
 burghepn their backs. These triumphs of the twelfth 
 century declare*! that Siena had broken her feucTal 
 
 * Muratori, "Scriptores," XV, Cronica Senese, ad annum, note 4. See 
 for confirmation of St. Francis's visit to Siena, the "Fioretti," chap. XI.
 
 THE FEUDAL AGE 71 
 
 shackles and had embarked upon a career of independ- 
 ence. _^But a^jthe^jold difficulties vanished from the 
 path of the republic, fresh ones rose to take their place. 
 In the new century Siena would have to faceJFlorence 
 to decide the question of supremacy in Tuscany; she 
 would have to solve_the domestic struggle between oli- 
 garchs and democrats. And greater than either of 
 these issues, if we consider well, she would have to meet 
 the problem, sole measure of every community's true 
 worth, the problem of building a noble mansion for 
 herself upon her hills and finding a human mind and 
 soul to house therein.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 
 
 WHAT we have heard so far of the bishop, head 
 of the Sienese church, does not differentiate 
 him particularly from any other feudal lord: 
 he quarrels with his neighbor of Arezzo for five hundred 
 years, renewing ever and again, and in a spirit gro- 
 tesquely unchristian, the attempt to possess himself of 
 the eighteen baptisteries, and he goes on accumulating 
 immunities until, by the diploma of Henry III (1055), 
 he acquires, in addition to the usual jurisdiction over 
 the clergy in his diocese, the political dominion over 
 territories constituting a considerable section of the 
 city and county of Siena. To be sure, in the twelfth 
 century, his temporal authority waned, being gradually 
 absorbed by the rising commune, but did he for that 
 reason become an unimportant figure in the state ? 
 Not in the least, for we must not fail to see that if the 
 bishop, being the child of his time, was infected with the 
 feudal spirit and tried to secure as wide a secular 
 dominion as possible, his authority with his diocesans 
 and his good name in the world did not depend on 
 his military and financial resources, but rested, in the 
 final analysis, on immaterial claims: his authority was 
 spiritual. Thus it had been at the beginning when the 
 church was the bride of poverty, and thus and not 
 otherwise it still was in the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
 
 72
 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 73 
 
 turies, after a stream of pious donations, both long and 
 deep, and the grant of the tithe by the state together 
 with freedom from taxation, had transformed it into the 
 wealthiest corporation of the age. But even had its 
 riches disappeared, or had they been appropriated by 
 some such act of force as that by which Siena and the 
 other rising communes deprived their respective bishops 
 of political jurisdiction, the life of the church, its real 
 life, would hardly have been threatened. For the 
 church was an idea, the most powerful and universally 
 distributed idea of the Middle Age, and as long as that 
 idea retained its vigor, any catastrophe, if we can con- 
 ceive of such, which at some dusk should have obliter- 
 ated its material existence, its shrines, its houses, its 
 rents, would have been followed the next morning by a 
 rain of donations reestablishing it in its integrity 
 undiminished by a jot or tittle. We call the mediaeval 
 period currently the Age of Faith. There is much 
 mistaken information disseminated in books and ser- 
 mons about the quality of this faith and the loveliness 
 of its works and of these misconceptions we shall hear 
 anon but the mediaeval period is the Age of Faith 
 unmistakably in the sense that all men accepted the 
 church as the divinely appointed instrument of salva- 
 tion, and believed that the seven sacraments, adminis- 
 tered by bishop and clergy, were the seven converging 
 roads to heaven. With such faith abroad, burning in 
 every heart, the church was indeed founded upon a rock. 
 To the awe and reverence inspired by the church on 
 the score of its service in saving souls, other elements, 
 almost from the first, contributed. When society went 
 to pieces under the hammer-blows of the Barbarians, the
 
 74 SIENA 
 
 church alone of Roman institutions resisted dissolu- 
 tion and became a rallying-point of the cowed and 
 broken population; and when, in the course of time, 
 men began again to take heart and interest themselves 
 in the conduct of their own affairs, we have seen that 
 it was the parish church, the familiar symbol of the 
 bond of neighborhood, which served as the focus for 
 all the community interests, religious, social, and polit- 
 ical. As it was possible to assert that the free commune 
 with its consuls, its governing boards, and its parla- 
 mentum, represented the evolution of the parish meet- 
 ing, so we may with the same assurance affirm that the 
 palazzo pubblico or city hall was the direct descendant 
 of the parish church. And since the new city-state 
 leaned in its infancy so largely on the older and firmer 
 ecclesiastical organization, we ought not to be surprised 
 to discover that this early dependence left its mark in 
 the form of an enduring intimacy between the old 
 associates. Here is the feature of the mediaeval period 
 that more than any other remains incomprehensible 
 to the modern mind. Church and state, far from hold- 
 ing aloof from each other and drawing a definite 
 trench between their activities, were fused to such an 
 extent that the state concerned itself without contradic- 
 tion with certain affairs of the church, and the church 
 without contradiction with certain affairs of the state. 
 In fact it never occurred to any one that the functions 
 of church and state cojuld be entirely separated, since 
 the cooperation of both was necessary for the preserva- 
 tion of society. Nevertheless, as the democratiV prinrj-, 
 pies gathered vigor and the views of men concerning the 
 function of the civil power were enlarged and c|arjfip^, wq
 
 The House of Saint Catherine
 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 75 
 
 may notice a tendency to reHi^f thp sharp of the 
 
 in the business of society, and to emphasize the suprem- 
 
 acy of the" state over all the affairs of its members. 
 
 These views of a modified clerical domination were 
 reflectedlrT all the cppstitutions of the yoijng Italian 
 republics, and with no little force in the earliest draft 
 of the Sienese constitution which has come down to us, 
 belonging to the year 1262. _ As this document affords 
 a very clear picture of the relations of church and state 
 within the frame of the commune, we cannot do better 
 than to take our stand upon the information which it 
 supplies. If some reader is tempted to object that the 
 year 1262 is a relatively advanced period in the evolution 
 of the commune, he may rest assured that the condition 
 of the church in that year was not substantially different 
 from what it had been during the previous century, for 
 since 1186 at the latest the year when Henry VI 
 issued his charter of liberties the territories of the 
 church had been a part of the political dominion of the 
 city and the church itself reduced to some kind of 
 dependence on the young commonwealth. The Sienese 
 constitution devotes innumerable articles to the affairs 
 of the church and the clergy, plainly indicating thereby 
 the large place which religion filled in the public life of 
 the time.* Among these articles is a solemn declaration 
 to the effect that Catholicism is the sole religion of the 
 state and that its injunctions must be satisfied by every 
 citizen of high or low degree under penalties which, 
 according to our present code, are not only severe but 
 even atrocious. The articles further declare that the 
 
 *"I1 Constitute di Siena dell' anno 1262." Edited by Zdekauer. See 
 Distinctio I, "De Fide Catholica."
 
 76 SIENA 
 
 state will protect all the possessions of the church and 
 suppport its enterprises, as, for instance, its building 
 operations, with generous contributions; but, in ex- 
 change for these benefits, the document affirms in reso- 
 nant tones that the state expects obedience from the 
 church and its members in all matters recognized to be 
 
 o 
 
 strictly temporal. Of course with the long established 
 independence of the church in matters spiritual the 
 state did not pretend to interfere. Reducing the varied 
 information afforded by the Sienese constitution to 
 general terms, we may assert that, in spite of certain 
 losses which the church sustained by being detached 
 from the imperial system and assimilated to the com- 
 mune, it remained under the new regime a powerful, 
 self-directive polity. 
 
 Throughout the history of Siena as a free commune 
 there obtained, therefore, the idea of a partnership 
 between two coordinated governments, the one supreme 
 in matters temporal, the other in matters spiritual. A 
 Sienese citizen as possessed of membership in both 
 gladly paid equal allegiance to them, and rejoiced in the 
 success and greatness of the church no less than in the 
 success and greatness of the state. His patriotism took 
 this double direction without any sense of contradiction, 
 and, happily for him, without occasion for feeling any 
 contradiction as long as the world rested content in a 
 single absorbing and satisfying faith. It is this patriotic 
 feeling toward the church that explains why, when the 
 bishop of Siena raised a technical issue with his neighbor 
 of Arezzo, the citizens of Siena took a hand in the 
 quarrel and in that dim scuffle of the year 711 drove the 
 Aretines into flight; and again it is the patriotism of the
 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 77 
 
 Sienese which accounts for the fact that their bishop 
 would not be silenced by an endless succession of royal, 
 imperial, and papal sentences, but, prompted by the 
 pride and ambition of his spiritual subjects, constantly 
 renewed his suit. 
 
 If we have become convinced that the love of the 
 church among the mediaeval communes was T to a large 
 extent^ a manifestation of local patriotism, we are 
 prepared to understand the peculiarly intimate relation 
 which bound the residents of Siena to the saints of their 
 home. The saints dwelt indeed in heaven, garmented 
 in light and intoning songs of praise around the throne, 
 but also in a mysterious way they were present in Siena 
 and took brotherly cognizance of the ills of those who 
 brought them gifts and called upon them from their 
 hearts. This nearness to the divine powers stirred the 
 soul to its depths and produced all those exquisite 
 manifestations of religious fervor in which mediaeval 
 Siena abounded. Above all it produced the inspiring 
 ceremonies, national in the truest sense of the word, 
 associated with the worship of the Virgin Mary. To 
 her was dedicated the cathedral, seat of the bishop; and 
 just as the cathedral bound all the shrines and churches 
 of the Sienese dominion into a concordant whole, so, 
 regardless of parish obligations to other saints, the 
 Virgin laid her mild injunction on every heart. Her 
 annual festival was a day of joy and thanksgiving, 
 officially proclaimed by the state and celebrated spon- 
 taneously by the whole population. It fell on the 
 1 5th of August, the day of her assumption to the side of 
 her Son. To evoke that wonderful festival is not only 
 to set before our eyes in material form the strange fusion
 
 78 SIENA 
 
 achieved by the mediaeval mind of the life terrestrial and 
 the life spiritual, but also to realize one of those gay and 
 colored spectacles for which the modern world has no 
 equivalent, and which are like the moving page of some 
 blithe and exquisite romance. 
 
 A general animation became apparent in the city as 
 the middle of August drew near. The town crier, 
 sounding his trumpet before him, passed through the 
 streets announcing the programme for the festival; 
 at the same time he made proclamation concerning the 
 great fair of three days,* which, with characteristic 
 prudence and in keeping with the homely character of the 
 celebration, the government did not hesitate to associate 
 with the season of thanksgiving. On the eve of the 
 looked-for day fell the opening public act. All the 
 citizens from the age of eighteen to seventy, forming in 
 procession according to parishes and under the leader- 
 ship of the parish priests, marched to the cathedral. 
 For the greater glory of Our Lady each celebrant carried 
 in his hand a lighted taper, and before the citizens went 
 the magistracy, attended by the carroccio or car of state, 
 upon which were conspicuous the official offering of 
 candle and banner. Thus before sundown of August 
 1 4th, Siena had renewed its vows to the goddess of its 
 choice and love. But the next day came a procession 
 of another kind, one which swelled the hearts of the old 
 burghers with patriotic felicity. The castles, villages, 
 towns, and monasteries, conquered outright or subdued 
 under the euphemistic name of an alliance, knocked, 
 as it were, at the gate of the city, and in the person of 
 the proprietors or of elected delegates proceeded in 
 
 *"I1 Constitute di Siena dell' anno 1262," I, 195.
 
 79 
 
 solemn state to the duomo to repeat the oath of alle- 
 giance to the victorious commune. A scene more 
 splendid and, at the same time, more feudal cannot be 
 imagined. The free town was a perpetual protest 
 against the feudal system, but when the problem pre- 
 sented itself as to how the shattered elements of feudal- 
 ism were to be organized under the new sovereignty, 
 the city leaders chose a solution which proved that they 
 could not emancipate themselves from the domination 
 of current legal forms. They simply assumed toward 
 the nobles and corporations of the county the familiar 
 position of suzerain. The morning of the fifteenth, 
 therefore, saw the procession of Sienese vassals march 
 to perform an annual act of homage. In that procession 
 were the proud descendants of the ancient counts of 
 the city, mitred abbots or their mandataries, the repre- 
 sentatives of villages and towns; and in their hands 
 they bore, in honor of the Virgin, each one a lighted 
 candle. Through dense and exultant crowds they made 
 their way up the marble steps of the cathedral until they 
 stood within the portal, before the desk of a secretary 
 of the commune. To the humble scrivener, seated 
 before a solemn ledger, they consigned their offerings, 
 all destined for the service of the Supreme Lady and 
 consisting of candle-wax, or banners of brocade, or 
 money, according to the articles of submission.* 
 
 Meanwhile the fair had begun in the great central 
 square called the Campo, at first merely an ordinary, 
 undistinguished, provincial piazza, but gradually trans- 
 
 * See for the official order of the day, "II Constitute di Siena dell" anno 
 1262," Distinctio V, 36, 37. Also, Toti, "Atti di votazione della cittk di 
 Siena," pp. 10-16.
 
 80 SIENA 
 
 formed by the erection of public and private buildings 
 into one of the most beautiful and most unique squares 
 of Italy. Wooden booths in rows filled the wide space and 
 their displays of delicates, oriental spices, armor, and 
 goods of all kinds were intended to attract not only the 
 peasants of the neighborhood but also foreign traders 
 from Arezzo, Florence, and more distant parts. Mimes, 
 acrobats, and musicians, the whole tribe of bohemians 
 embraced under the more or less opprobrious epithet 
 of homines curtis, flooded the city, reciting ballads, 
 turning somersaults, and engaging in merry-making, 
 each after his kind. To satisfy a very prevalent taste 
 the government even authorized the erection of a gam- 
 bling booth, around which, according to abundant 
 evidence, always pressed an eager throng. At the same 
 time the bells rang to worship, and into the open churches 
 poured great crowds, drawn as much by the desire to 
 see the flaming candles and decorations of the altar as 
 to make offer to heaven of a contrite heart. Through- 
 out the day the Virgin and the host of saints were 
 conceived to hover close at hand, almost within reach 
 of ear and eye, pleased with all the ways of their people. 
 Thus on the I5th of August Siena mixed heaven and 
 earth, achieving a national holiday that had all the 
 elements of joy, sincerity, and poetry. 
 
 This festival, repeated year after year and rousing 
 with each return the emotions of an excitable people 
 to a state of religious exaltation, led at last to one of the 
 most moving and picturesque episodes of the Italian 
 Middle Age. It was the year 1260. The Florentines, 
 supported by almost all the other towns of Tuscany, had 
 acquired the upper hand in the province, and now led
 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 81 
 
 an army against Siena, wounded and at bay, to deliver 
 the death blow. We shall have much to say of that 
 memorable campaign when we take up the many wars 
 between the two neighboring cities. Here I wish merely 
 to detach from the struggle a wonderful, culminating 
 episode in the worship of Mary. We have seen how 
 that worship lay imbedded in the mystic longings, as 
 well as in the daily thoughts and cares of the whole 
 population. It sank roots which drank at the well of 
 tears. Love of home, yearning for heaven, right living 
 and forgiveness the name of Mary signified all that. 
 And now the Florentines were at the gate and the day 
 of doom seemed at hand. Is it wonderful that this 
 people, thoroughly convinced of the power of their 
 patroness to save as well as to destroy, should have given 
 themselves into her hands utterly and without reserve ? 
 An old chronicle * records the story in words of which 
 no translation, be it regretfully confessed, can render the 
 subtle flavor. After telling us how in their black hour 
 the city council made one of their number, the excellent 
 Buonaguida Lucari, head or syndic, it proceeds: 
 
 "And whilst this election was in progress, our spiritual father, 
 my lord the bishop, caused the bell to ring to summon his clergy. 
 And he made to come together all the clergy of Siena, priests, and 
 canons, and friars, and all the religious, to the duomo, and being 
 
 * This famous chronicle exists in several MSS. of the first half of the fif- 
 teenth century. It is generally held that they are all transcriptions or 
 versions of a much earlier original. The Sienese antiquary, Porri, has earned 
 our gratitude by publishing one of the manuscripts in his "Miscellanea 
 Storica Senese," 1844, under the title, "La Sconfitta di Montaperti, secondo 
 il MS. di Niccolo di Giovanni di Francesco Ventura." The above vigorous 
 and skilful translation is from the "History of Siena" of Langton Douglas, 
 p. 84 ff. Mr. Douglas, in addition to Porri, has made use of an unpublished 
 MS. in the Ambrosian Library of Milan.
 
 82 SIENA 
 
 assembled there he made a short sermon to them, admonishing 
 them and comforting them, and bidding them pray to God and His 
 Most Holy Mother, the Virgin Mary, and to all the saints ... for 
 the people of the city; . . . that as he had spared the city of 
 Nineveh because of its fasting and repentance, so it would please 
 Him to free Siena from the fury and pride of these knaves of Floren- 
 tines. And so he ordained that every one should make bare his 
 feet, and should go devoutly in procession through the duomo, 
 singing with a loud voice and invoking ceaselessly the pity of God. 
 
 "And whilst my lord the bishop with all the religious and clergy 
 were thus going in procession singing their litanies and prayers, 
 God did put it into the mind of the syndic, that is to say of Buona- 
 guida Lucari, to rise, and say in a voice so loud that he was heard 
 by the citizens who were outside the church in the piazza of S. 
 Cristofano: !My lords of Siena, and my dear fellow citizens, we 
 have already commended ourselves to King Manfred, now it 
 appears to me, that we ought in all sincerity to give ourselves, our 
 goods and our persons, the city and the contado, to the Queen of 
 life eternal, that is to say, to our Lady Mother, the Virgin Mary. 
 To make this offering, let it be your pleasure to bear me company.' 
 
 "And no sooner had he said these words than this Buonaguida 
 stripped himself to his shirt. And, being barefooted and bare- 
 headed, he took his leathern girdle and fastened it round his neck 
 with a slip-knot. And in this guise, at the head of the procession 
 of the citizens, he set out towards the duomo. And behind him 
 went all the people; and whomsoever they met by the way went 
 with them, each man being shoeless and without cloak or hat. . . . 
 And as they went they ceased not to cry 'Mary Virgin, succor us 
 in our great need, and deliver us out of the claws of these lions, 
 and from these haughty men who seek to devour us.' And all 
 the people prayed, 'Oh, Madonna, most holy Queen of Heaven, 
 we miserable sinners entreat your mercy.' 
 
 "And upon their arrival at the duomo, my lord the bishop was 
 going in procession through the church, and was at that moment 
 at the high altar, before our gracious Lady, the Virgin Mary. 
 And he began to sing the ' Te Deum Laudamus ' in a loud voice. 
 
 "It was just then that the people reached the door of the church,
 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 83 
 
 and commenced to cryout'Misericordia, Misericordia!' with many 
 tears. At that plaint so dolorous and piteous, my lord the bishop 
 and all the clergy turned round, and went to meet Buonaguida. 
 And when they were come together, all kneeled down, and Buona- 
 guida prostrated himself to the earth. Whereupon my lord the 
 bishop raised him up and gave him the kiss of peace. And then 
 all the citizens went one to another and kissed one another on 
 the mouth. And this was done at the entering to the choir of 
 the duomo. 
 
 "And taking one another by the hand, my lord the bishop and 
 Buonaguida went up to the altar of our Mother, the Virgin Mary, 
 and there they kneeled down with great lamentation and bitter 
 tears. And this venerable citizen, Buonaguida, lay all prostrate 
 on the ground, and so did all the people, with much weeping and 
 many sighs. And so they remained for a quarter of an hour. 
 Then Buonaguida raised himself to his feet in front of our Mother, 
 the Virgin Mary, and uttered many wise and prudent words. 
 And amongst others he spake these following: 'Oh, Virgin, 
 glorious Queen of Heaven, Mother of sinners! I, a wretched 
 sinner, give, grant, and yield to thee, this city and contado of 
 Siena, and I pray thee, sweetest Mother, that it may please thee 
 to accept it, notwithstanding our great frailty and our many sins. 
 Regard not our offences, but guard, defend, and deliver us, I be- 
 seech thee, from the hands of these perfidious dogs of Florentines, 
 and from whomsoever may wish to oppress, to harass, or to ruin us.' 
 
 "These words having been said, my lord the bishop went up 
 into the pulpit and preached a very beautiful sermon, admonishing 
 the people with good examples, and praying and commanding them 
 to embrace one another, and to forgive one another all trespasses, 
 to confess and to communicate. . . . And he charged them that 
 they should go with him and with all the clergy and religious in 
 procession. 
 
 "And in this procession before all the rest went that carved 
 crucifix which is in the duomo, and immediately after it followed 
 many clergy. Then came a red standard, behind which walked 
 my lord the bishop. He was barefoot, and by his side was 
 Buonaguida in his shirt, with his girdle around his neck. Then
 
 84 SIENA 
 
 followed all the canons of the cathedral, all without shoes and 
 bareheaded, and as they went they sang psalms and hymns very 
 devoutly. After them passed along all the women, shoeless and 
 bareheaded, and a part of them with hair dishevelled, ever com- 
 mending themselves to God and to the most holy Mother, the 
 Virgin Mary. And so they went in procession to S. Cristofano, 
 and into the Campo, and returned to the duomo. And they 
 commenced to make peace one with another. And he that had 
 received the greatest injury went to seek out his brother to make 
 peace with him, and to pardon him, and to kiss him. And soon 
 concord was made. ..." 
 
 Which befell on the zd of September, 1260; and the 
 next day the Sienese marched out of the city with un- 
 furled banners and in the furious battle of Montaperti 
 swept the Florentines off the field like chaff. Seeing 
 that their exaltation gave them irresistible strength 
 they were not far wrong in ascribing their victory to 
 the Virgin. More than ever Siena was henceforth her 
 city, the Sienese her sons. That presentation of the 
 keys in the duomo was an act unconsciously moulded 
 by the prevailing feudal ideas. By virtue of it Queen 
 Mary became sovereign and liege, ruling amcena Sena 
 as her earthly fief. The very coins henceforth recounted 
 the new glory, for from the time of the dedication they 
 appeared, bearing in addition to the ancient legend, 
 Sena Vetus, the proud words, Civitas Virginis. 
 
 The gate out of which the Sienese marched to strike 
 the enemy opened upon the country to the east, and was 
 and is still called Porta Santo Viene (The Saint Comes). 
 And thereby hangs the tale of another procession which 
 deserves a word in this record of the cordial relation of a 
 mediaeval people and its saints. Older than Monta- 
 perti by one hundred and fifty years, the story introduces
 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 85 
 
 us once more to the Sienese protomartyr, Sant' Ansano, 
 and to the church at Dofana, which possessed his body 
 and had from the early eighth century been the occasion 
 of furious litigation between the bishops of Arezzo and 
 Siena. In the year 1108 the body of the saint, a price- 
 less relic, which had lain undisturbed for eight hundred 
 years, was exhumed. The bishop of Arezzo and his 
 followers, full of distrust against their neighbors, were 
 for carrying it away with them, but yielding either to 
 reason or to force, agreed to a division.* Accordingly 
 the head was apportioned to Arezzo, the trunk to Siena. 
 On February 6, 1108, occurred a remarkable scene.f 
 The Sienese clergy accompanied by many people went 
 to Dofana to bring back the martyred saint, now a heap 
 of dust without a skull, to the city which he had given 
 his life to save. As the procession, moving to the 
 accompaniment of solemn chants, drew near the gate 
 the waiting people rushed forth unable to restrain their 
 jubilation. Cries of "// santo viene! II santo viene!' 
 rent the air, and from that day the gate by which 
 Ansano had gone forth to death and had returned 
 triumphant, after biding his time for eight centuries, 
 has been called from the auspicious event.J 
 
 * A spirited account, contemporary or almost contemporary, and curiously 
 distorted by Sienese bias, may be found in Pecci, "Storia del Vescovado di 
 Siena," p. 145 /. 
 
 t Date and fact supplied by "Annales Senenses," Monumenta Ger. Hist., 
 Scriptores, XIX. 
 
 J The Porta Santo Viene is now interchangably called Porta dei Pispini from 
 the name of a neighboring fountain. In connection with the older name I 
 may note that doubt has recently been thrown, not on the above procession, 
 which is an indisputable fact, nor on the name of the gate, which is no less 
 certain, but on the origin of that name. It has been pointed out that Santo 
 Viene may be a popular corruption of Sant' Eugenio, a monastery close by, 
 from which the gate in remote days may conceivably have been named. 
 See Bargagli-Petrucci, "Le Fonti di Siena," I, p. 31.0.
 
 86 SIENA 
 
 But to return to the proffer of the city, to the Virgin 
 on that dark September day when the army of the 
 Florentines lay outside the city. The reader will 
 recall that the procession of citizens, chanting and crying 
 mercy, wound from the duomo to S. Cristofano and 
 back again. The duomo was on the southern hill of 
 the city, while the church of San Cristofano lay to the 
 north on the way to Porta Camellia. Note these two 
 terminals, for they are an affirmation of the dependence 
 of the young state upon the church, a dependence 
 which must have been great indeed, since Siena, al- 
 though by the year 1260 a commonwealth of consider- 
 able importance and long past the period of apprentice- 
 ship, did not yet have a separate edifice to house her 
 civil government. True, the first steps looking to the 
 creation of permanent municipal offices had been taken, 
 for we hear of a mint and a general salt-store existing 
 on the Campo, but the potesta still had his private 
 residence in some house which he rented from a citizen, 
 and conducted court in the church -of San Pellegrino. 
 In San Pellegrino, too, were installed the administrative 
 offices of the commune, known as La Biccherna, while 
 the city council, called the Council of the Bell, came 
 together in the church of San Cristofano. In 1260 this 
 
 O 
 
 last edifice fulfilled in some sort the functions of a city 
 hall. That is the reason why the penitential procession, 
 making the round of the city, swung between it and the 
 cathedral. The great palazzo pubblico, which in our 
 own days dominates the central piazza and constitutes 
 the chief monument of Sienese civic pride, was not begun 
 till the end of the thirteenth century. So long did it 
 take for the mediaeval mind to learn to differentiate
 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 87 
 
 between civil and ecclesiastical functions and to recog- 
 nize the necessity of an entirely separate physical 
 organism for the state ! Again I may point out that we 
 must always keep present before us the essential 
 crudity of the society of this early republican period and 
 its total unfamiliarity with that political theory and 
 practice which give our proceedings so much more 
 precision and firmness. Nothing is so certain as that 
 the town government, in process of slow formation for 
 hundreds of years, took each forward step only under 
 the pressure of the new practical necessities attending 
 the commercial expansion of the city. Therefore the 
 churches, being the only spacious edifices which a 
 mediaeval city boasted, were quite good enough for 
 secular matters until the accumulation of business and 
 the more elaborate organization of the government 
 demanded offices of special construction. 
 
 The Sienese church, such as we have found it, was 
 undoubtedly alert and vigorous with red blood coursing 
 in its veins. In spite of abuses which cropped up from 
 time to time, it maintained an effective organization of 
 parishes and baptisteries, by which its spiritual comfort 
 was made accessible to the poorest beggar of the town 
 and to the lowliest charcoal burner of the mountains. 
 But it could not, even when served by a devoted priest- 
 hood, satisfy the extraordinary religious fervor of the 
 Middle Age. Everywhere in Europe the passion for 
 sanctity gave birth to a special institution, by means of 
 which men, withdrawing from the world and its lusts, 
 could surrender themselves to a life of prayer and 
 meditation. As early as the Apostolic Age an element 
 ofOriental asceticism appeared in the Christian religion,
 
 88 SIENA 
 
 and in the course of time this element created a suitable 
 expression of its ideal in the monastery. 
 
 Naturally the monastic fervor did not fail to reach 
 Siena, over whose territory it deposited its monuments 
 with a lavish hand. Leaning from the rampart outside 
 the gate of San Marco a large red mass rises into view. 
 It is the monastery of Sant' Eugenio, called by the 
 Sienese with a pleasant familiarity // Monistero, as if 
 it were the only one of its kind. It was secularized in 
 the eighteenth century when, after a thousand years of 
 not unhonorable service, the ample cloisters and 
 dormitories were turned without objectionable altera- 
 tions into a country residence. II Monistero is the first 
 monastic foundation of this neighborhood, owing its 
 existence to a pious gift made in the year 730 by a 
 Lombard gastald Magnificus Warnefnd Gastaldius 
 Civitatis Senensis.* The monks under their abbot 
 governed themselves by the Benedictine rule, the usual 
 constitution adopted by all early monasteries. South 
 of II Monistero, some twenty miles as the crow flies, and 
 not far from Montalcino, may still be seen the fine ruin 
 of a church marking the site of another Benedictine 
 foundation, the abbey of Sant' Antimo. Its origin, too, 
 falls probably in the eighth century, for, by the ninth, 
 it was well-to-do and had acquired ample immunities 
 from the emperors. Still it was overshadowed in 
 importance by the great Benedictine house of San Salva- 
 tore, which stood on the slopes of Monte Amiata, and 
 which constituted one of the greatest feudal patrimonies 
 of all Italy. San Salvatore, likewise, dates from that 
 
 * The interesting deed was published by Pecci, "Storia del Vescovado di 
 Siena," p. 44.
 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 
 
 age of monastic fervor, the eighth century, received 
 gifts from many noblemen, coaxed immunities from 
 emperors and popes, quarrelled constantly with its 
 greedy and powerful neighbors, the family of the Aldo- 
 brandeschi, declined, was plundered, and rose again 
 what a story if our day had leisure to write and read 
 such tales! Such are some of the oldest monastic 
 foundations of the neighborhood of Siena. That they 
 have been permitted to decay or been quietly surren- 
 dered to unhallowed uses sufficiently defines the attitude 
 of our time to the ascetic ideal of the Middle Age, but 
 should not hinder us from doing justice to the period 
 when their abbots owned rich estates and enjoyed equal 
 consideration in the land with the great barons. 
 
 The foundations I have named are of a very venerable 
 antiquity, owing their rise to the first great wave of 
 monastic enthusiasm which passed over Europe. No 
 sooner had the force of the first wave spent itself than 
 it was followed by another and still another; in fact, 
 monastic revivals were a common phenomenon of a 
 period which conceived them to be the highest expres- 
 sion of its faith. Numerous were the foundations by 
 which Siena marked its participation in all these move- 
 ments. At the height of her power scores of greater and 
 smaller homes dotted her territory within and without 
 her walls.* I can do no more here than add to the 
 list of original settlements the names of some of the more 
 famous and enduring establishments of the later periods. 
 In the valley of the Merse may still be seen the wonder- 
 
 * For a partial list of such places, mostly vanished and forgotten, see the 
 " Constituto dell' anno 1262," Distinctio I. Falletti-Fossati in his "Costumi 
 Senesi," p. 115, reckons that in 1310 there were twenty-eight convents within 
 the city alone, with over six hundred inmates.
 
 90 SIENA 
 
 ful ruin of the abbey of San Galgano, founded in the 
 twelfth century in the days of the Cistercian reform. 
 Outside the gate of Fonte Branda, in the deep solitude 
 of one of the few magnificent forests which still adorn 
 modern Italy, lies the Augustinian monastery of Lec- 
 ceto; and at the opposite point of the compass, to the 
 east of the town, lies, not buried in an enchanted wood, 
 but high on a summit, commanding a wide view over 
 rolling hills and valleys, the Certosa of Pontignano. In 
 the naves and cloisters of San Galgano, Lecceto, and 
 Pontignano the footsteps of the monks have long since 
 ceased to sound, but, though fallen from their estate, they 
 still speak with the compelling power of beauty of a time 
 which entertained other hopes than ours and dreamed 
 other dreams. 
 
 Within the city proper the monastic wave of the thir- 
 teenth century, which was the most fervid of all and 
 which directed its energy particularly upon the towns, 
 could not but have a large effect. I am speaking of the 
 movement named of the begging friars and associated 
 with the two towering figures of St. Francis and St. 
 Dominic. Missionaries and brothers of these two 
 orders got a foothold very early in Siena and, favored 
 by the piety of the citizens, began the creation of those 
 two edifices which, not without additions and changes 
 imposed by the succeeding generations, still dominate 
 respectively the east and west hills of the town. 
 
 But Siena boasts a nobler product of the Christian 
 spirit than its many monasteries of the city and contado, 
 nobler because sprung from a more unselfish desire to 
 render service to mankind. I am referring to the fa- 
 mous hospital, which, erected opposite the cathedral
 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 91 
 
 steps and called from that circumstance Santa Maria 
 della Scala, still flourishes, accumulating new vigor with 
 each century and multiplying its benefactions to the 
 poor and heavy laden. Such an institution, keeping 
 pace with advancing time, reaffirms our faith in the 
 enduring power of the Christian ideal. 
 
 Santa Maria della Scala, recognized in the days of 
 the Italian republics as the greatest hospital of Tuscany, 
 grew from a small seed, being in its origin nothing 
 but a house of rest for pilgrims. Its founders were the 
 canons of the cathedral church, whose bounties enabled 
 it to take shape, probably in the eleventh century, for 
 the first documentary reference to it is of the year 
 1090.* Its scope was soon extended, till it embraced 
 many forms of charity, and constituted, besides satis- 
 fying its original function, a hospital in our modern sense, 
 a home for foundlings, an orphan asylum, and a poor 
 house.f The service of the institution was performed 
 by a company of volunteers, men and women, who took 
 no religious vows, but wore a special garment with the 
 insignia of the hospital and regarded themselves as a lay 
 brotherhood under rules framed and voted by them- 
 selves. These rules, enforcing a very rigorous discipline 
 inspired by the monastic ideal, have been luckily pre- 
 served for us in several redactions. J Besides giving the 
 
 * See Banchi, "Statuti Senesi," Vol. Ill, Introduzione, p. 7. 
 
 f Of the scale on which the hospital was established in all its services, the 
 following inscription, touching the waifs of the year 1298 and still legible on 
 the wall toward the piazza del duomo, gives a graphic impression: Hec 
 domus facta est pro gittatellis in anno domini M.CC.LXXXXVIII in quo 
 tempore sunt in numero CCC. gitetelli et plus. 
 
 t The earliest redaction, of the year 1305, has been published by L. Banchi, 
 "Statuti Volgari de lo Spedale di S. Maria Vergine di Siena scritti 1'anno 
 MCCCV."
 
 92 SIENA 
 
 conditions under which the brothers and sisters were 
 received, and precisely regulating such matters as 
 prayer, food, and drink, they inform us that the com- 
 pany was governed by a rector, elected in a general 
 session. This privilege of naming their own ruler the 
 brothers had not obtained without a struggle. In fact, 
 almost from the first they were involved in a severe 
 quarrel over the control of the institution with their 
 patrons, the canons of the cathedral. Laymen though 
 they were, and, therefore, in that age an inferior social 
 order, they had seen the property of the hospital grow 
 by the free gifts of themselves and their fellow-citizens, 
 and chafed at the leading-strings of their superiors. 
 The conflict was at last carried to the highest ecclesias- 
 tical tribunal, to the pope at Rome, and by sentence of 
 the year 1194,* the brothers were practically freed from 
 canonical interference. Henceforth the great hospital 
 of Santa Maria della Scala was in all respects a lay 
 institution, operated by the brothers and enjoying the 
 official support of the state, an expressive witness of the 
 successful and inevitable emancipation of society from 
 the church.f 
 
 The Catholic church, which in the Dark Age, fol- 
 lowing the invasions, held disorganized society together 
 by means of its parish organization, which served as a 
 
 *Muratori, "Antiq It.," IV., 585. 
 
 f To the above brief historical account there is a curious legendary corol- 
 lary. We are told that legends have a valuable historical kernel; that may 
 be true in general, but the story recounted admirably by Banchi ("Statuti 
 Senesi," Vol. Ill, Introduzione, 17-28) of how the brothers of the hospital, 
 needing a saint and founder, discovered, or rather literally manufactured one, 
 proves that some legends, at least, are cut out of whole cloth. The hospital 
 was founded, as we have seen, by the canons. The brothers, hostile to the 
 canons, would have preferred a lay origin. A wish warmly entertained is 
 readily converted into a fact. The brothers spread the news not till the
 
 THE SIENESE CHURCH 93 
 
 staff to the young republics in the days of their youth, 
 which fostered the spirit revealed in the monasteries 
 of city and country and in such institutions of charity 
 as the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, was in the 
 main a vast power for good. And yet it was constantly 
 threatened with the sloth and corruption attending 
 success. The inheritor of wealth and a secured position 
 is always in danger of falling asleep, like the giant 
 Fafner, over his treasure, to grumble like him when 
 forcibly aroused: "ich lieg' und besitze; lass mich 
 schlafen." Out of this indolence the church had to 
 be shaken at frequent intervals by the elemental force 
 of a popular revival. I have spoken of the many 
 monastic movements, each of which earnestly tried to 
 bring to the front the ascetic aspect of the Christian 
 ideal. Much wilder agitations than these, originating 
 generally in a protest against the hollowness of official 
 forms of worship and ending in religious ecstasy, at- 
 tended the evolution of society throughout the Middle 
 Age. Every student of religion has heard of the flagel- 
 lants, bands of whom, stripped to the skin and lashing 
 their macerated bodies, passed again and again up and 
 down the highways of the peninsula, chanting songs 
 strange and terrible as the howling of eastern dervishes. 
 If the church was inclined to resent all demands for 
 
 fourteenth century of a pious cobbler, who began the hospital enterprise 
 from his own means hundreds of years before; presently they named him 
 Sutore or Sorore (Latin sutor cobbler); in the course of another generation 
 they found his body, miraculously preserved dinanzi I'altare de'Pizzicaioli 
 (A. D. 1492); and, finally, the whole amusing fabrication had an official 
 stamp set on it by one of those lying lives of the saints put forth with bare- 
 faced impudence in that unloveliest period of Italian history, the Counter- 
 Reformation. Since then for the good popolano of Siena the fame of the 
 cobbler, Sorore, rests upon a foundation of stone.
 
 94 SIENA 
 
 change raised by unofficial bodies, as constituting an 
 interference with its authority and a threat against its 
 peace, it generally took the wise course toward all these 
 movements of letting them alone. The hysterical ones 
 would soon spend their force and perish; the more 
 durable might, with a little manipulation, be adopted 
 and dominated. To the adopted class belong the move- 
 ments associated with the Cistercians, Dominicans, 
 Franciscans, and many other monastic societies. All 
 these organizations, springing from religious enthusiasm 
 and fed in part, at least, by the popular indignation 
 against the vices and human insufficiencies of the clergy, 
 were thus comfortably fitted into Rome's elastic system. 
 All this can leave no room for doubt that, by the side 
 of the established service of the Lord and His saints, 
 solemnly conducted by the church and supplemented 
 by the monasteries, there existed in the Middle Age an 
 intense personal search for the fruits of the spirit, the 
 continuation of the original evangelical passion. Some 
 of the most exquisite as well as some of the most fero- 
 cious phenomena of the religious activity of the period 
 are the outflow of this individual attitude toward the 
 problems of the life eternal. Among all the republics 
 of Italy none was more rich in representatives of 
 personal sanctity than Siena. Pier Pettignano, Saint 
 Catherine, San Bernardino these are only the more 
 prominent names in the list of her impassioned vision- 
 aries. To the variety of religious experience for which 
 they stand I shall give attention in another place, con- 
 vinced that no other study will bring us nearer to the 
 heart of this fascinating people.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE BURGHERS 
 
 THE past contains the record of many cities whose 
 mere name suffices to set our imagination on 
 fire. Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence all these 
 gave birth to a wonderful civilization, which survived 
 their political power, long since crumbled to dust, and 
 of which the succeeding generations of men have been 
 the often unmindful beneficiaries. With regard to one 
 and all of these cities it is hardly necessary to recall to 
 the reader that their immortal achievements in the arts 
 rested upon a solid material basis, created by the fruitful 
 and closely interwoven activities of a busy population of 
 peasants, artisans, and merchants. Whoever, there- 
 fore, would penetrate to the sources of the culture of the 
 Athenians, the Romans, the Venetians, and the Floren- 
 tines must seek to inform himself in each case about such 
 fundamental problems as the productivity of the soil, 
 the forms of urban labor, the opportunities of com- 
 merce; in a word, he must master the conditions sur- 
 rounding the homely, ineluctable, ever-renewed struggle 
 for bread and those many things of which bread is the 
 universal symbol. And if such an economic review 
 opens an avenue to the understanding of the lordly 
 cities of the past, it must be of equal service in inter- 
 preting the cultural significance of that secondary 
 group of towns, of which Siena is a conspicuous mem- 
 
 95
 
 96 SIENA 
 
 her. As an approach to my chief end in this book, the 
 Sienese civilization, I purpose in this chapter to examine 
 the economic basis upon which the City of the Virgin 
 reared the remarkable edifice of her political power and 
 artistic achievement. 
 
 The Italian cities of the Middle Age owed the first 
 
 . ~- _ _ _ a .__ , ^ 
 
 flush jof their material prosperity to the stirring of jhe 
 stagnantpools of life effectedjby that world movement 
 cjlledth^cTusaHesT ^The quickened pulse-beat of the 
 great city-centres presently produced an' accelerated 
 political development, of which we have the proof in 
 the courageous republicanism of the twelfth century, 
 sigrraTTzedr^ylhe universal emergence of the consulshi p 
 and the heroic resistance to Frederick Barbarossa. So 
 closely related are all the fields of human endeavor that 
 an expansive movement in one of them is certain to 
 affect advantageously all the others. Thus the more 
 compact political organization in its turn reacted 
 favorably on trade and industry, with the result that an 
 international commerce sprang into being, which spun 
 ever-increasing threads of intercourse around the coun- 
 tries of the Mediterranean and Atlantic. In this com- 
 mercial renascence Siena participated according to the 
 measure of her opportunities and resources. 
 
 When in the twelfth and, with gathering momentum, 
 in the thirteenth century, commerce revived in western 
 Europe, it employed as its most convenient instrument, 
 the fair, and preferably, for the purposes of general or 
 international exchange, the fairs of Champagne in 
 eastern France. These French fairs were world-marts, 
 and presented themselves to view in all the color and 
 picturesqueness of the Middle Age. In the period of
 
 THE BURGHERS 97 
 
 their prosperity the long process, by which the diverse 
 peoples of Europe have been more or less reduced to a 
 common type, had hardly begun. In dialect and dress, 
 in food and drink, in the forms of social intercourse, 
 every man reflected the peculiarities of the immediate 
 small group into which he was born. A Florentine 
 knew a Genoese at a glance by the cut of his beard or 
 cloak; that fur cap signified a Pole; that greasy curl a 
 Jew from York or Bruges. A score of tongues, a 
 hundred dialects, resounded along the streets of tempo- 
 rary booths erected to serve the convenience of ex- 
 change. The county of Champagne saw annually no 
 less than six of these international gatherings. While 
 they owed their popularity in the first instance to the 
 central position of Champagne in Europe, they further 
 recommended themselves to the traders by the circum- 
 stance that they succeeded one another in such a way 
 as to extend practically throughout the year. They thus 
 assumed the character of a permanent international money 
 market and produce exchange, and became the most 
 convenient instrument at hand for regulating the supply 
 and demand of many necessities. Each of the six fairs 
 lasted from one and a half to two and a half months. 
 When Lagny fair, with which the year began, was over, 
 the town of Bar-sur-Aube set up its booths, with Provins 
 and Troyes following in the summer and autumn, nay, 
 following with two fairs apiece to complete the full round 
 of six. 
 
 The procedure in connection with any one of these 
 fairs did not differ greatly from the order of exercises 
 usual in all the others. Each gathering was, in accord- 
 ance with mediaeval sentiment, inaugurated on or near
 
 98 SIENA 
 
 one of the great holidays of the church, the occasion 
 being emphasized by a formal act of worship, such as in 
 the Middle Age was inseparable alike from the business 
 and pleasure of the people. The first week passed 
 amidst the noise and confusion attending the erection of 
 the wooden booths and the installation of the merchants 
 from far and near, to be followed presently by an ani- 
 mated barter in all known varieties of merchandise, 
 among which figured, as leading articles, the cloth of 
 Flanders, the leather of Spain, and the pepper and 
 spices of the Orient. When the sale and purchase of 
 the goods had been effected, the work of the bankers and 
 money-changers began, a work the risks and worry of 
 which will not fail to appeal to us if we recall the many 
 coinage systems in use and the as yet helpless infancy 
 cf capital and credit. Such, briefly, were the fairs of 
 Champagne.* 
 
 In these merchant gatherings, Italians, usually 
 designated as Lombards, or with scant international 
 courtesy, on account of their sharp bargains, as Lom- 
 bard dogs, occupied a conspicuous place. Especially 
 toward the end of each fair, when, as we have seen, the 
 banking began, did they step forward with the air of 
 polite and accommodating middlemen; and among 
 them, from the beginning of the thirteenth century, f 
 were prominent many adventurous citizens of Siena. 
 For the second half of that same century we have orig- 
 
 * On the fairs of Champagne and the general commercial activity of the 
 Sienese in the thirteenth century, see the following: Paoli, "Siena alle 
 FierediSciampagna"; Paoli and Piccolomini, "Lettere Volgari"; Zdekauer, 
 "Document! Senesi riguardanti le Fiere di Champagne" ("Studi Senesi nel 
 circolo Giuridico," XII, 337); "II Monte dei Paschi," Vol. I; Patetta, 
 "Caorsini Senesi in Inghilterra," "Bull. Sen.," IV, 311 ff. 
 
 fSee Paoli, "Fiere di Sciampagna," p. 69. The earliest date is 1216.
 
 Saint Catherine 
 By Andrea Vanni (in the Church of San Domenico)
 
 THE BURGHERS 99 
 
 inal material of a unique kind, being a number of 
 letters of Sienese merchants in the Tuscan idiom, record- 
 ing the transactions of Champagne with accuracy and 
 fulness.* Although these documents, owing to their 
 antiquity, constitute an important contribution to the 
 general history of mediaeval commerce, the student of 
 Siena is interested in them chiefly because they furnish 
 a clear, direct, and wholly intelligible picture of the 
 activity on which the early prosperity of the town was 
 founded. 
 
 What economic facts do those letters communicate? 
 To begin with, we make out that it was customary, 
 toward the middle of the thirteenth century, for a num- 
 ber of enterprising Sienese citizens to form a partnership 
 and dispatch one or more of their number to Champagne 
 to turn the subscribed capital to account. As almost 
 all the great Sienese families with whom we shall be 
 dealing, the Salimbeni, the Tolomei, the Buonsignori, 
 the Malavolti, the Cacciaconti, and many more, figure 
 in this correspondence, we may affirm that the great 
 fortunes of Siena were made in trade and were fed from 
 the French tap-root. While the chief activity of one and 
 all of the companies was the traffic in money, the chief 
 aim, in the frank language of one of the letters, was 
 guadagniernne grosamente, that is to say, big profits.f 
 And the opportunities must be acknowedged to have 
 been golden. Armed with great purses of thick leather 
 the Sienese volunteered their deft services in effecting 
 an exchange between the different moneys that flowed 
 together at the fair, or in extending a loan, on good 
 
 "The "Lettere Volgari" referred to above. 
 fPaoli, "Lettere," p. 75.
 
 100 SIENA 
 
 security, to some unlucky fellow-mortal hard pressed 
 for cash. Engaged thus in exchange and loans they 
 did the business of an ambulatory bank. Their interest 
 charge on loans was rarely less than twenty per cent, 
 per annum, and might be sixty per cent, and more. 
 The monstrous height of this rate is less a sign of Italian 
 greed than of the scarcity of metal in the Middle Age. 
 It stands to reason that persons in need of money would 
 not have paid such a preposterous interest if coin had 
 been plentiful and the lending companies numerous. 
 The inevitable consequence of the growing interna- 
 tional relations of trade and finance was the gradual 
 appearance of improved banking devices, and in this 
 connection it is noteworthy that the ruler who, in the 
 ^_ thirteenth century, supplied the main impetus toward 
 j- this development was the pope. A universal power, 
 > he had financial relations with all theTworld, due to the 
 ^ general offering .^alled_. Peter's Pence, to the impost 
 ^ which he was empowered to lay on ecclesiastical prop- 
 
 ** ~ ' *-- - - - J^ 
 
 ^5 erty in connection_with Lja_cjrusade, and to the payments 
 V* whicK he required of jnewjv appointeid bishnp&urijeturn 
 
 ^ *~ - -~ _ * _ - * "^ 
 
 or the_^apal-x^eftfifmatien. From Jill thejcorners of 
 Europe flowed toward Rome sums of money, the collec- 
 tion and transmission of which gradually trained a 
 capable and enterprising school of financiers. With this 
 administrative service the pope naturally entrusted his 
 own countrymen, the Italians, and preferably the 
 Italian merchants, because of their familiarity with 
 foreign moneys and markets. The experience thus 
 gained in the pope's business, added to the knowledge 
 acquired in the pursuit of their personal affairs, largely 
 explains why these Mediterranean traders took the lead
 
 THE BURGHERS 101 
 
 in banking and kept it against the whole world for many 
 generations. 
 
 However, the Italian merchants, enjoying not only 
 the rich harvest of their own enterprise in Champagne 
 and elsewhere, but also the vast financial advantages re- 
 sulting from collecting and accumulating the pope's 
 moneys, were by no means an object of general affection. 
 From the beginning of the world the dealer in money, 
 the capitalist, has excited envy and hatred; and for 
 reasons, sometimes paltry, sometimes grave and con- 
 vincing, the Italian agents of the pope brought down 
 upon their heads the aversion of the various peoples 
 among whom they operated. A lively echo of the Eng- 
 lish feeling toward them comes to us from the chronicle 
 of that vigorous enemy of the Roman curia, Matthew 
 Paris.* In the reign of Henry III (1216-65) the pope 
 often enough with the consent of the king, who stipulated 
 for a share in the profits wrested huge sums from the 
 fat English prelates, making use, of course, in his hateful 
 and often tyrannical game, of his Italian servants. The 
 indignant Matthew abominates them as the pest of his 
 country, designating them sometimes as Lombards 
 canes, sometimes as Caorsini. This latter term, literally 
 meaning men of Cahors in France, was opprobriously 
 applied in the Middle Age to money-lenders and usurers 
 in general. Now it is a fact certain to stir our interest 
 that, among "the Lombard dogs" and Caorsini so 
 cordially detested by the patriotic Matthew, were also 
 merchants from Siena. In the capacity of papal col- 
 lectors they overran the land, and if we give credence 
 to Matthew, covered both themselves and their master 
 
 * Mon. Germ. Hist., Scriptores, Vol. XXVIII.
 
 102 SIENA 
 
 with dishonor. The unchristian greed of the papal 
 curia may be admitted without further argument, but 
 the hard practices of the merchants deserve a brief 
 elucidation. As the bishops and abbots, whom the 
 Italians fleeced on the pope's orders, had no ready cash, 
 they were obliged to borrow from the collectors them- 
 selves and at an offensive and usurious rate of interest. 
 In this way the foreign agents, without any doubt what- 
 ever, ruined many men and committed many iniquities, 
 but in partial excuse of them it may be urged that the 
 whole business world was as yet inchoate and disor- 
 ganized, and that there were few or no acknowledged 
 rules of commercial conduct and honor. Nothing 
 illustrates this state of affairs so well as the ludicrous 
 mediaeval attitude toward usury. 
 
 Usury in the Middle Age was interest interest high 
 or low, fair or unfair, and was strictly forbidden by the 
 church.* Councils and fathers had taken the matter 
 up and had never hesitated to declare all money lending 
 for profit as contrary to the gospels and, therefore, 
 monstrous. In the year 1179 the Lateran Council 
 held under the presidency of Pope Alexander III, re- 
 issued a number of earlier prescriptions against usury 
 in a more definite form, and Alexander's declarations 
 were afterward often republished by his successors. 
 Owing to the ascendancy of the church in all the affairs 
 of life an echo of the papal fulminations may be found 
 in the legislation of almost all the states and cities of 
 Europe. Wherever in the Middle Age we encounter 
 
 * Among the numerous books on the subject of usury I refer the reader 
 to W. J. Ashley, "Introduction to English Economic History and Theory," 
 I, chapter III.
 
 THE BURGHERS 103 
 
 an expression of principle, usury, broadly defined as 
 interest, was tabooed and forbidden. 
 
 However, what, in contrast to doctrine and law, were 
 the facts ? We have already had a hint of them in con- 
 nection with our exposition of the development of 
 Mediterranean commerce, and must have assured our- 
 selves that money-lending flourished as a necessary 
 adjunct to trade. We may go further back than the 
 Middle Age and easily convince ourselves that money- 
 lending has existed in the world since the remote day 
 when one man, by saving, laid up a store of value which 
 another desired to put to use. In view of so ancient and 
 immemorial a practice how did the mediaeval period 
 come to develop its peculiar position ? The answer 
 is found in the special religious and economic conditions 
 of the era. With the fall of the Roman Empire civil- 
 ization went to pieces, and capital and business enter- 
 prise alike disappeared from society. In the petty 
 world of the Barbarian kingdoms theviews of the church 
 on trade and interest acquired an indisputable ascen- 
 dancy, enforced by the circumstance that they sprang 
 from a high-minded, though ascetic, interpretation of 
 Christ's message. As a result the little borrowing and 
 lending, for which there was occasion in a primitive 
 society, was gladly left, with its stigma of corruption and 
 illegality, to the outcast race of the Jews. But when the 
 West again summoned its energies, and trade, stimu- 
 lated by the crusades, expanded in volume, it was 
 unlikely that the Christians would permit the profitable 
 banking field to be monopolized by the dingy folk of the 
 ghetto. Laws or no laws, they could not resist the 
 temptation of gain, and in the period of the fairs of
 
 104 SIENA 
 
 Champagne we have seen that Christian money lenders, 
 and, above all, Italians, leaped to the front. To 
 Italians, accordingly, it was given to organize in the 
 course of the following generations the traffic in money 
 as a serviceable and necessary adjunct of business; 
 Italians, too, gradually succeeded in giving the despised 
 calling a respectable standing in society. For a long time, 
 however, church and state combined to maintain their 
 theoretical prohibitions, and, under cover of them, 
 frequently pounced on money-lenders, subjecting them 
 to outrageous extortions. In all Europe there was 
 hardly a prince, lay or spiritual, who did not periodically 
 arrest Jews, and if possible, Italians, on the ground 
 of an illicit trade, to set them free again in return for a 
 surrender of their money-bags or such a percentage 
 thereof as sufficed to establish a presumption of inno- 
 cence in a mind open to financial persuasions. A 
 moral justification for this bare procedure might seem 
 to have been furnished by the hatred with which the 
 mass of the people looked upon the usurious, blood- 
 sucking practices of the capitalists. But these prac- 
 tices, if common sense had prevailed, might have been 
 regulated by drawing a sharp line, after our modern 
 fashion, between usury and interest, and permitting 
 one while prohibiting the other. Only this the church, 
 sworn to its ideals, would never consent to do, and the 
 civil governments, with singular shortsightedness, long 
 delayed taking the initiative. It was the grave risk, 
 associated with the money traffic under a system alter- 
 nating between sufferance and confiscation, which 
 partially explains the appalling interest charge usual in 
 that age. Safety, secured by the legalization, under
 
 THE BURGHERS 105 
 
 proper restrictions, of the operations of finance, would 
 have been attended by a large decline in the interest 
 rate. Thus the vacuous idealism of the church 
 vacuous and even cynical, for the pope and the prelacy 
 were among the leading figures of the money market 
 both as clients and as silent partners of the merchant 
 companies long delayed the cure of a most crying evil. 
 It is not without pleasure that the historian of Siena 
 observes the little hill-town to have been among the 
 earliest cities to enter a protest against the intransigent 
 position of the church. As early as the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, as is proved by the Constitution of the year 1262, 
 the government of the republic, though clamorously 
 professing obedience to the church in all things, author- 
 ized usury, provided the usurer be not in other respects 
 a man of ill repute and suspicious religious opinions.* 
 Probably such legislation as this put banking operations 
 on a sounder basis in Siena than was usual in Italy, and 
 especially north of the Alps. Nevertheless, while the 
 church stood her ground some peril dogged the steps 
 of the usurers, as is proved by a curious denunciation 
 which has come down to us from the records of a papal 
 inquisitor, sent to ferret out heresies in Tuscany. To 
 this inquisitor it was reported that a Sienese notary, 
 Ser Pietro by name, not only practised usury, but 
 "stubbornly asserted that to lend money to people was 
 not a sin, and that the brothers and religious who said 
 otherwise nesciunt quid loquantur:" they do not know 
 what they are talking about! f We thank Ser Pietro for 
 
 * "II Constitute di Siena dell 'anno 1262." Dist. II, 151; with comment 
 thereon by Sanesi, " Bull. Sen.," VI, p. 507. 
 
 t Ser Pietro lived during the first half of the fourteenth century. See 
 Sanesi, "Bull. Sen.," VI, 497 /.
 
 106 SIENA 
 
 sending us out of his tomb a breath of common sense on 
 a matter distastefully redolent of unctuous and insincere 
 professions. At the same time we are pleased to gather 
 from the document that the bold heretic, being at the 
 time of the denunciation against him already dead, was 
 as safe as a grave could make him from the clutches of 
 the all-powerful tribunal. Conceivably the Sienese 
 state, in view of its partial authorization of money- 
 lending, would have interfered to protect its subject 
 against the ecclesiastical police, but we can hardly 
 flatter ourselves that it would have prevailed in the 
 struggle. At any rate, with or without the approval of 
 the church, the state remained true to its convictions 
 about the legitimacy of financial operations, and in the 
 year 1339 gave the final sanction to its views by authoriz- 
 ing every one to engage in money-lending who registered 
 in a special ledger, nel libra detto usuraio di Biccherna, 
 an act of entry equivalent to the purchase of a license.* 
 Returning once more to the fairs of Champagne, we 
 find, on looking into the procedure at these international 
 gatherings in connection with the sale and purchase of 
 goods, that drafts, letters of credit, and other similar 
 devices of a perfected capitalistic regime had only just 
 made a beginning, and that settlements were preferably 
 effected directly between traders and with actual coin. 
 Not until toward the year 1300 did the draft become a 
 universal instrument of business. During the preceding 
 one hundred years experiments looking forward to its 
 perfection were frequent, and undoubtedly our Sienese 
 bankers, and even more certainly their Florentine rivals, 
 counted for something in giving this admirable device 
 
 * Muratori, XV. "Cronica Sanese." Ad annum 1339.
 
 THE BURGHERS 107 
 
 for universalizing trade its final form.* Still, with 
 or without the draft, minted money, as the most con- 
 venient means of hoarding wealth, would be an im- 
 portant staple of commerce, and it is curious to see how 
 the Tuscans by their superior adaptability, as well as by 
 their superior cunning, drove a thriving business in this 
 article. The standard coin of the Champagne fair was 
 the provisinOy a small silver penny (denarius or denier) 
 from the mint of the local magnate, the count of Cham- 
 pagne and Provins; 12 pennies made a shilling (solidus), 
 and 240 pennies constituted a pound or libra. The 
 Tuscans, and prominently among them alas! our 
 Sienese, learned that by coining a provisino of their own, 
 part silver and part copper, they could enter the Cham- 
 pagne market, capture from the unsuspecting traders 
 the native money with its greater intrinsic value, and by 
 sending it home for recoinage, clear a handsome profit.f 
 Undoubtedly one of the ambiguous features of the early 
 money traffic, and sure in the long run to be its own 
 undoing! Experience declares that the debasing of the 
 currency once begun knows no end, while the confusion 
 of prices caused by a fluctuating standard of value puts 
 an insufferable burden on commerce. Presently only 
 the cheaper or Tuscan kind of provisino held the mar- 
 ket, with a still cheaper preparing to drive out the hybrid 
 rival. The king of France, not to be outdone, followed 
 the insidious example set by the Transalpine merchants, 
 and shamefully debased the standard royal coin, the 
 silver penny or denier from the mint of Tours. The 
 wily Italians had killed the goose that laid the golden 
 
 * Schaube, "Anfange der Tratte." Zeitschrift fur Handelsrecht, XLIII, 
 pp. 1-51. t "H Monti dei Paschi," Vol. I, p. 20 ff.
 
 108 SIENA 
 
 eggs! With no reliable standard in circulation the 
 whole business world was subjected to great annoyance 
 and loss. In this crisis an ingenious people stepped for- 
 ward, a people whom Pope Boniface VIII. once declared 
 to have been added by a special act of divine grace as a 
 fifth element to a world effectively complete with four. 
 In the year 1252 the Florentines* abandoned the silver 
 basis, rendered unreliable by a flood of debased silver 
 coins, and, first of mediaeval nations, went over to the 
 gold standard : they issued the gold florin, very carefully 
 coined and almost 100 per cent. fine. Commerce 
 welcomed the new standard as a godsend, and soon 
 the florin had made its way into every market of the 
 world. The establishment of an honest currency was 
 an act of enlightened self-interest, designating more 
 plainly than words the supreme seat of Tuscan intelli- 
 gence. Most certainly we are justified in holding that 
 the financial wisdom symbolized by the florin con- 
 tributed in no small measure toward securing the 
 ultimate primacy in Tuscany to the city of the Red 
 Lily.f 
 
 If in sketching the activity of the Sienese in Cham- 
 pagne I have dwelt chiefly on its sordid and disorganized 
 
 * For description of the florin see Villani, "Croniche," Book VI, chap .53. 
 For its value (fine) as well as that of other current coins, see Schneider, 
 "Die finanziellen Beziehungen der florentinischen Bankiers zur Kirche," 
 p. 74. 
 
 t The stages of Florentine financial ascendency may be briefly given as 
 follows: In the early Middle Age the silver penny was the standard coin, 
 and of silver pennies there were many varieties (of Tours, of Pisa, of Siena, 
 etc.). In 1234 the Florentines took the step of issuing a much more valuable 
 coin, a silver solidus (i solidus =12 pennies). The popularity of this coin 
 induced them to adopt (1252) the still bolder measure of issuing a gold 
 florin, which contained in small volume the value of 20 silver solidi and 240 
 silver pennies. See Davidsohn, "Geschichte VOH Florenz," II 1 , pp. 213, 411.
 
 THE BURGHERS 109 
 
 phases, I would not convey the impression that this 
 French trade did not have a very romantic side. The 
 truth is that, if it had not touched the love of life and 
 challenged the spirit of adventure lurking in the human 
 breast, it would never have been followed with persist- 
 ence. Prizes beckoned, supreme prizes as the world 
 counts, but they were to be had only at the risk of a 
 journey down a long lane of perils. The Sienese com- 
 panies of the Salimbeni, the Tolomei, and the rest were 
 the thirteenth century prototypes of the gentlemen- 
 adventurers of Elizabeth's day; and the fairs of Cham- 
 pagne were the Gold Coasts and Golcondas which they 
 sought with high hearts and faces lifted to the dawn. 
 A distinguished scholar has drawn a vivacious picture 
 of the dangers besetting in those anarchic days the 
 journey across Apennines and Alps, which we children 
 of these piping times of peace can see only in the happy 
 light of a vacation outing. 
 
 "When all was ready and the rolls and bales were loaded on 
 the pack-asses, the company proceeded in long caravans and by 
 short stages across valleys and mountains over perilous paths and 
 ways, where from time to time thieves, and lords and castle-owners 
 worse than thieves, burst forth to steal, or to impose exactions; 
 and with one and the other it was necessary now to use the sword 
 and now to compound with dues and presents, as seemed best. 
 Then came the journey from fair to fair through distant and 
 often inhospitable countries, always in the midst of the greatest 
 risks and dangers. The dues, imposts, and exactions of every 
 sort to be paid on passing through villages and cities are not to be 
 enumerated. If the barons of France agreed to let the companies 
 of Italian merchants impoverish their subjects with commercial 
 bargains and even more with money-lending, it was certainly not 
 for nothing; for they did not fail to draw profit from the situation
 
 110 SIENA 
 
 in their turn. The agents of the companies were obliged, in order 
 to curry favor, to keep their purses open, since without a discreet 
 liberality neither life nor substance was secure."* 
 
 What a tale of oppressions almost inconceivable to 
 us of another and a milder period ! But the hard school 
 of life had at least the advantage of developing supple- 
 ness and decision, and of giving the manhood of these 
 trading adventurers something of the fine temper of 
 steel. Without this training, we may boldly assert, there 
 could never have been an Italian Renaissance, which, 
 with its arts and letters, is nothing but a later and a 
 nobler phase of the same passion of adventure which 
 drove the merchants to seek new opportunities across 
 inhospitable lands and seas. 
 
 I have already spoken of the association of the Sienese 
 merchant companies with the Roman curia in the capac- 
 ity of collectors of papal taxes, and I have made it plain 
 that this was one of the main sources of Sienese pros- 
 perity. In fact, toward the middle of the thirteenth 
 century a large percentage of the papal moneys flowed 
 through Sienese hands. In the narrow via del re may 
 still be found an interesting reminiscence of this early 
 fiscal bond between Siena and the capital of Christen- 
 dom. On an ancient house front can be read an 
 inscription informing the passer-by that Angelieri 
 Solafica, campsor Domini Papa Gregorii IX, built this 
 residence A. D. 1234-! This Angelieri, who is memo- 
 rable as the grandfather of the famous poet, Cecco 
 Angelieri, was in all probability one of the very Caorsini 
 who bled England in the days of Henry III and excited 
 
 * Signer Menzozzi in "II Monti dei Paschi," Vol. I, 54. 
 
 t For fac-simile of this inscription see "II Monte dei Paschi," I, 14.
 
 THE BURGHERS 111 
 
 the savage protest of Matthew Paris. But if Matthew 
 was displeased, Gregory declared himself well served, 
 as Angelieri's fine house sufficiently shows, and Greg- 
 ory's successors continued for some time to employ the 
 Sienese companies in their affairs. But the honor was 
 invested with perils. For one thing, rival cities, like 
 Florence, never ceased playing upon the pope's sus- 
 picions, and, further, the complicated politics of Italy^ 
 required powers of quick resolution and deep deception 
 which the Sienese did not command. An inevitable 
 crisis resulted when v toward the middle of the thirteenth 
 century, the struggle which the papacy had long; been^ 
 waging with the Empire came_to_a_head. Obeying theji 
 impetuous temper, the Sienese plnpgpH h 
 
 conflict on the imperial or Ghibelline side. Cool-headed 
 Florence upheTcT the Guelph or papal cause with Iniij 
 deeds and still louder protestations. As a reward, more 
 and more of the Roman banking business was turned 
 toward the Arno city. Worse followed. In November, 
 1260,* on the heels of the great victory of Montaperti, 
 which for a brief moment delivered all Tuscany into the 
 hands of the Sienese and their Ghibelline allies, the pope 
 smote them with his interdict. Throughout the Middle 
 Age ambitious pontiffs used this weapon, and the even 
 sharper one of excommunication, most unscrupulously 
 for political ends. The confusion produced among the 
 Sienese merchants abroad by the papal enmity was 
 immense. Andrea Tolomei, writing from Troyes in 
 1262 to his associates, is full of lamentations on the 
 
 * Paoli, "Fiere di Sciampagna," p. 84. The interdict was not removed 
 till 1266. Consult with regard to the effects of the papal displeasure David- 
 sohn, "Geschichte von Florenz," II 1 , p. 532.
 
 112 SIENA 
 
 subject; many debtors refuse to pay "per lo fato de lo 
 schumunichamento," and the abbess of the Mount of 
 Provins alleges as a further reason that "maiestro 
 Mille" apparently the papal nuncio "forbade her to 
 pay." In fact, the good Andrea is on the point of losing 
 faith in human nature: "if the pope should dispatch the 
 order that all the Sienese were to be seized in person and 
 goods, as it is rumored he plans to do, I believe that his 
 order would be obeyed, for there are many wicked peo- 
 ple here, who take pleasure in robbing their neighbor; 
 and they will rob him if they can, and urge the pope as a 
 pretext."* Many of the banking companies, among 
 them the very house of the Tolomei, which, according to 
 the above letter, found itself in a painful situation, soon 
 made peace with the papacy, privately, of course, and 
 behind the back of the municipality. By and by, too, 
 the interdict and its attending excommunications were 
 withdrawn. Although it is true that the pope never 
 ceased to employ certain of his Sienese servants, even 
 while their city was under the ban, the fact remains 
 that the Florentines, with their reputation of tried 
 Guelph fidelity, steadily improved their hold on the 
 papal finances at the expense of their neighbors. 
 
 Certainly the pope did not cease his relations with the 
 greatest of all the Sienese merchant houses, the Buon- 
 signori. The history of this house is a mirror of the 
 commercial fortunes of Siena in the thirteenth century. 
 Founded in the year 1209, it rose to be the foremost 
 company of Europe under the name of the Magna 
 Tavola. La grande table was a name to conjure with 
 at the French fairs. As the century advanced the 
 
 * " Lettere Volgari," pp. 45-47.
 
 THE BURGHERS 113 
 
 society established agents in all parts of the world, en- 
 gaging in banking on a scale which suggests a great 
 international credit institution of our own days. In 
 the year 1289, on the occasion of a reorganization, its 
 capital amounted to the sum, huge for those days, of 
 35,000 gold florins, while among its clients we find popes, 
 emperors, kings, barons, merchants, and cities.* It 
 weathered many storms, which broke over it in the form 
 of royal confiscations and papal anathemas, until in 
 1298, when seemingly at its zenith, it was overtaken by 
 disaster. There was a panic, accompanied by a run of 
 the depositors, and the proud institution went to the wall 
 an accident, the patriotic historian Tommasi f would 
 have us believe, due to a quarrel among the partners 
 and the envy of rivals, but if an accident, it was omin- 
 ously coincident with the decline of Sienese and the 
 rise of Florentine banking prestige. 
 
 We have seen that the Sienese merchant companies 
 were financial institutions doing business in exchange 
 and loans. But they also dealt, though in a subsidiary 
 way, in general merchandise. That valuable literary 
 jetsam, the Lettere Volgari already referred to, reveals 
 that the companies sold wax, pepper, and spices at the 
 French fairs, and carried back Flemish cloth to Siena. 
 Many articles besides,! such as shoes, stockings, belts, 
 ploughs, cuirasses and helmets, found their way to the 
 markets of the town, showing clearly a certain back- 
 wardness in its industrial development. Truth to tell, 
 Siena was not and never became a great manufacturing 
 
 * "II Monte dei Paschi," I, p. 41. 
 
 t "Dell' Historic di Siena," Lib. VII, p. 141. 
 
 t Zdckaucr, "La Vita Privata nel Dugento," p. 46.
 
 114 SIENA 
 
 centre. But this much the thirteenth century with its 
 world-wide stimulation of urban life accomplished: it 
 brought the desire for industrial activity and organiza- 
 tion and with it that characteristic institution of the 
 Middle Age, the guild. Naturally the merchants, 
 whose rise preceded the coming of industries to Siena, 
 led the way in the formation of a general society planned 
 to protect their common interests. We hear of a Sienese 
 merchant guild as early as the year 1192. But the 
 crafts were not slow to follow suit, and presently the 
 masons, carpenters, inn-keepers, barbers, butchers, 
 millers, and the other classes of workmen and artisans 
 were organized as arti, with the usual apparatus of 
 constitution, officers, regulations, prohibitions, and 
 fines.* Under these conditions the general social and 
 economic aspect of Sienese life was much like that of 
 any other mediaeval town. 
 
 While the presence in Siena of merchant and craft 
 guilds implies life and organized power, it does not 
 prove the existence of great industrial establishments. 
 The manufacture which in those days was the greatest 
 source of prosperity in Europe was woolen cloth. It 
 conferred the same sort of preeminence as coal and iron 
 give to-day. Cloth created the wealth of Flanders; her 
 flocks of sheep were the riches of England; Florence, 
 just girding her loins for her victorious race, owed her 
 material greatness to the excellence of her cloth. The 
 Sienese, too, made an effort to acclimate the cloth in- 
 dustry, but their wool guild never really throve because 
 
 * "II Monte dei Paschi," Vol. I, 15, note. Very likely such characteristic 
 expressions of the mediaeval spirit of association as the guilds go far back 
 of the twelfth century; no Sienese document, however, recording the fact, 
 has come down to us.
 
 THE BURGHERS 115 
 
 of the great number of adverse conditions with which it 
 had to battle. For one thing, the wool crop of the out- 
 lying district was never large or of high grade, and most 
 important, in fact decisive, was the grievous dearth of 
 water. Never have men since cities have a history 
 struggled so hard against a decree of nature, or so per- 
 sistently hoped against hope, pinning their faith in the 
 last resort to a miracle. With admirable patience the 
 burghers brought water from afar by means of cunning, 
 subterranean conduits which still exist, arousing the 
 admiration of modern engineers.* Nevertheless the 
 supply obtained was insufficient. When that pictu- 
 resque upland region, where Siena has her seat, failed to 
 reveal, even to close scrutiny, any further spring capable 
 of being tapped for city uses, the townsmen encouraged 
 one another to believe in a hidden river underneath their 
 feet. They even knew its name, the Diana; borings 
 were invited at public expense, and sensitive ears in the 
 still hours of the night plainly heard the rush of its 
 waters. Readers of the Divine Poet have laughed 
 merrily over his contemptuous fling at the gente vana 
 who hugged such illusions to their breast, f but for the 
 lover of this people the curious aberration has the deep 
 pathos inseparable from the spectacle of hopes heroi- 
 cally pursued in the face of the unchangeable decrees of 
 nature. 
 
 No, the arte della lana, though it took root, never 
 acquired commanding proportions; in fact, the indus- 
 trial guilds, taken as a whole, did not prosper compared 
 with neighboring Florence. Doubtless the absence of 
 
 * On the water supply see the meritorious work by F. Bargagli-Petrucci, 
 "Le Fonti di Siena." t Dante, " Purgatorio," XIII, 153.
 
 116 SIENA 
 
 water, and the relative poverty of the neighborhood in 
 such raw products of industry as wool, copper, and iron, 
 are a sufficient explanation of the situation, but the mis- 
 taken zeal of the municipality and the rigorous statutes 
 of the guilds themselves count for something in the 
 result. Among many excellent regulations which con- 
 cerned themselves with obtaining for the consumer a 
 full measure and an honest product, were to be found 
 others which, by paralyzing the free activities of the 
 workers, must have caused grave harm. Thus the 
 statutes of the wool guild required * that only one piece 
 of cloth be woven at a time, that it be neither longer nor 
 shorter than a certain standard, and that only native 
 wool be put on the looms; and all guilds alike pursued 
 a selfishly exclusive policy, imposing a heavy tax on all 
 candidates for admission, and positively forbidding the 
 exercise of their respective occupations to all but guild 
 members in good standing. Add minute regulations 
 regarding the hours and quantity of labor and the ob- 
 servation of so many church festivals that about one 
 hundred and thirty days of the calendar year were 
 devoted to an enforced rest,f and we get some idea of 
 the mischievousness of that spirit of over-regulation 
 which characterized both the guilds and the govern- 
 ment. However, we can hardly pretend that Siena 
 
 * "Statuti Senesi," II, p. XXI. Banchi, the editor, writes indeed of the 
 wool guild of the Radicondoli, but what he says holds of the wool guild of 
 Siena as well, as may be seen by consulting the " Statute dell' arte della Lana " 
 in Vol. I of the same publication. 
 
 t "Statuti Senesi," I, p. 311, gives the list: "queste sono le feste che pare 
 al Comune dell' Arte de la Lana che sieno da guardare," seventy-eight in all, 
 which, with fifty-two Sundays, brings the total to one hundred and thirty. 
 It is, however, not likely that the suspension of work on all these feast-days 
 was complete.
 
 THE BURGHERS 117 
 
 suffered more in this respect than her neighbors, for 
 the guild system was universal and the petty and chaotic 
 economic views, upon which it rested, enjoyed a general 
 currency in the Middle Age. 
 
 The final and conclusive proof of the industrial weak- 
 ness of Siena_Js furnishecTBy theHFact that the craft 
 guilds never played a political role of any importance. 
 The city becarneTiirf due time a democracy, much more 
 of a delnnocracy7 mdee37~tnlin Florence, where the arti 
 simply and without ceremony took possession of the 
 goyernment^and admitted to citizenship only through 
 the door of their organizations. In Siena the guilds 
 were not strong enough to seize the power, and when 
 popular rule came, the political franchise was distributed 
 without any regard to the guild connection. The 
 closer we examine the situation the more firmly we 
 become convinced that the only really powerful guild 
 was that of the merchants, and the only occupation, 
 largely remunerative, that of trade. The merchants, 
 therefore, not only had a political role assured to them,* 
 but they alone, through their companies, were responsible 
 for lifting Siena above the plane of a provincial market, 
 and for bringing her into contact with the general 
 political and economic forces of Italy. For this reason 
 I return once more to her commercial fortunes. Here 
 is the root of her vitality, and here, too, the key to the 
 most stirring phase of her political destiny. 
 
 What I have said of the unenlightened views which 
 were entertained in the Middle Age with regard to 
 industry, and which, while turning every occupation into 
 
 * The political power exercised by the merchants will be treated in chapter 
 VII.
 
 118 SIENA 
 
 a monopoly, almost buried it under a mountain of 
 regulations, should prepare our minds for a wealth of 
 unfavorable conditions weighing also upon commerce. 
 Many of these had their origin in the undeveloped state 
 of society and in the relative infrequency of intercourse 
 even among neighbors. The crusades, we are aware, 
 greatly stirred and accelerated the sluggish stream of 
 mediaeval trade, but, even after the crusades, a Tuscan 
 town, steeped in the current feudal concepts, long con- 
 tinued to see in a neighbor merely an enemy, to be put 
 down if possible, in any case to be hated while breath 
 came and went. The foreign trader who entered the 
 gates of Siena was watched with suspicion, and, in ac- 
 cordance with the prevailing legal theory, was looked 
 upon as gathered into a single personality with the city 
 of his origin. He was a Florentine or Pisan as the case 
 might be, with the rights of a Florentine or Pisan, which 
 in the rude, formative days would mean none at all. 
 Only treaties, for which the time ripened but slowly, 
 could give him a standing in the eyes of the Sienese law. 
 In case, therefore, a visiting trader delayed payment of a 
 debt, or defaulted, the courts gave the native creditor 
 the right to indemnify himself by the seizure of the goods 
 of any of the debtor's fellow citizens who happened to 
 be at hand. In the view of the rhadamanthine judge, 
 the individual merchant's fault implicated the whole 
 foreign society to which the individual belonged. 
 This barbarous practice with regard to international 
 trade was known as the system of rappresaglie or 
 reprisals. The havoc which it wrought may be left to 
 the imagination. No sooner did the courts render a 
 verdict than all the countrymen of the defaulting
 
 THE BURGHERS 119 
 
 merchant, taking what they could gather in their arms, 
 fled precipitately, leaving the bulk of their goods as loot 
 in the hands of the creditor. The rival city, insulted in 
 the person of its routed merchants, hardly awaited their 
 return before it visited a similar fate on the traders of 
 the offending party. Here was commercial war, which 
 might at any moment be transferred to the grim decision 
 of the field. Men would have to see the patent folly of 
 such action and learn to look upon one another with 
 more fraternal eyes before their intercourse could be put 
 upon a higher plane. From the beginning of the 
 thirteenth century doubtless a timid commencement 
 was made before that time the documents permit us 
 to see how the Tuscan cities strove to replace the institu- 
 tion of reprisals, worthy of Mohawks and Hurons, with 
 commercial treaties, planned to eliminate violence and 
 to give international trade that security without which 
 it could not live. During the century lying between 
 1 200 and 1300 tentative agreements gradually crystal- 
 lized into durable instruments of peace.* The judicial 
 action with regard to a debtor was limited to the guilty 
 person, and one man's fault or misfortune did not apply 
 the shears to every thread which trade and civilization 
 had spun between two communes. Treaties in the place 
 of violence and rude self-help such is the road that 
 has been travelled by men in Italy and throughout the 
 world in order to secure the fruits of civilization. The 
 
 * See on reprisals Del Vecchio and Casanova, "Le Rappresaglie nei 
 Comuni medioevali"; also Arias, "I Trattati Commercial! della Republica 
 Fiorentina." Parte seconda takes up the rappresaglie and their gradual 
 amelioration. See especially "Documenti," p. 371 ff. As early as 1213 a 
 Bolognese document puts forth the principle a cui data, a colui richieslo, 
 which principle, the result probably of the revival of Roman law, gradually 
 crept into all trade agreements.
 
 120 SIENA 
 
 effect of treaty arrangements among the Tuscan com- 
 munes was to replace cruelty, injustice, and brute force 
 with a peaceful procedure advantageous and honorable 
 for everybody concerned. Not that trade in Tuscany 
 became entirely free and unrestricted, since for financial 
 reasons, if there had been no others, the cities were 
 obliged to levy customs duties at the gates; but if trade 
 did not become free as the air, it liberated itself from 
 the most barbarous disabilities and became as secure as 
 cities in a divided nation without a central head could 
 make it. Thus commerce will be seen to have been a 
 potent agent of civilization; but as civilization means 
 peace, and as peace stimulates the exchange of goods, 
 trade steadily produced more trade until commercial 
 considerations became the leading preoccupation of 
 Siena and all her Italian sisters. 
 
 From what we have seen of the association of Siena, 
 with the papacy on the one hand, and with the fairs of 
 Champagne on the other, we are prepared to assert 
 that the all-important highway which Sienese trade 
 would struggle to keep open and make sure was the road 
 from Rome over Siena into France. That was the 
 famous via francigena or via francesa. On the north- 
 bound journey from Siena it debouched from the Elsa 
 into the Arno valley not far beyond Poggibonsi, and on the 
 southbound journey the last town in Sienese territory 
 which it touched was San Quirico, flanked on right and 
 left by the far-seen hill-towns of Montalcino and Monte- 
 pulciano. We have learned in an earlier chapter how 
 a natural patriotism impelled the young republic to 
 possess itself of its county or contado, though it had to 
 ride roughshod over a thousand difficulties; we may
 
 THE BURGHERS 121 
 
 now learn how that patriotism was steadily blown upon 
 by the merchant class, whose self-interest was com- 
 pletely identical with the political passions of the 
 multitude. But to hold the via francesa, or rather that 
 small part of it which passed through strictly Sienese 
 territory was not easy, for the Florentines claimed 
 Poggibonsi and guarded it as the apple of their eye, 
 while in the region of San Quirico, Siena met the com- 
 bined opposition of the city of Orvieto, of the great 
 feudal clan of the Aldobrandeschi, and of course, of 
 Florence, only too ready to support her rival's enemies 
 any and everywhere. In consequence, we may note 
 that if we have seen trade grow more humane by reason 
 of the gradual abandonment of reprisals, the political 
 relations between Florence and Siena did not therefore 
 in the least improve, because with the quantitative growth 
 of trade the points of friction between the two towns 
 became more numerous. It is a melancholy fact that 
 trade, which I have just celebrated, and with undoubted 
 justice, as the mother of civilization, is at the same time 
 the most fruitful source, known to history, of envy, war, 
 and every form of mischief. Florence and Siena were 
 impelled by reasons of trade, each to bring the other 
 under its law, and as Florence was the stronger and 
 more aggressive power, she was sure to carry the conflict 
 straight to the via francesa, because only in this way 
 could she attend effectively to the clipping of her 
 neighbor's wings. 
 
 It is therefore clear that, to follow the directions of 
 Sienese trade under the natural law of expansion, is to 
 touch the regions where the commune encountered the 
 greatest resistance and engaged in its most critical bat-
 
 122 SIENA 
 
 ties. The via francesa, effecting an approach to the 
 markets north and south of Siena, was all-important, 
 but this one avenue was not likely to exhaust the desire 
 of ambitious merchants. Having crossed the Alps and 
 acquired a world-wide outlook in England and the 
 Champagne, they would not fail to be impressed with 
 the importance of the sea as a universal highway. The 
 whole history of Florence, whose merchants were pos- 
 sessed of a conspicuous intelligence, is a struggle to get 
 to the Mediterranean, and Siena, although the approach 
 was difficult, was moved by the same desire. Westward 
 across scarped hills, following the general direction of 
 the unnavigable Ombrone, lay the town of Grosseto, 
 before which coiled, like some vast, torpid monster of 
 the sea, the sullen and fever-ridden swamps of the 
 Maremma. On the sea-edge of this deadly bog hung 
 a few fever-wasted settlements, such as Orbetello, 
 Port' Ecole, and Talamone, and one or the other 
 of these, preferably Talamone, it was the patriotic 
 dream of the Sienese to turn into a seaport, thus 
 opening an unimpeded communication with the outer 
 world. The plan involved as a preliminary step the 
 seizure of Grosseto. 
 
 The story of that acquisition is a typical chapter in 
 the expansion of the town which boasted the favor of 
 the Virgin. Grosseto was a dependency of the feudal 
 house, so often referred to, the Aldobrandeschi; in 
 measure as its fortunes waxed, chiefly by reason of the 
 salt stores of the neighborhood, it aspired to emulate the 
 consular movement common to all Italy and win political 
 independence from its feudal lords. Siena, therefore, 
 on casting a covetous eye in that direction, would have
 
 THE BURGHERS 123 
 
 to deal with both the Aldobrandeschi and the growing 
 commune, impertinently looking forward to a career of 
 sovereignty. With the patience of a beast of the thicket 
 the city, whose emblem was the wolf, lay in wait for its 
 prey. By various means the Aldobrandeschi were 
 eliminated from the situation; at the same time, through 
 apparently harmless commercial treaties,* Grosseto was 
 gradually drawn into the Sienese orbit; and, finally, in 
 the ripeness of time, the grim wolf leaped upon its 
 victim. The capture occurred in the year 1224, and 
 is inscribed in red letters in the calendar of the 
 republic.f 
 
 Thus, gradually, was Grosseto won, but like Montal- 
 cino, Montepulciano, and the other places of the con- 
 tado, which had to bend the neck to receive the Sienese 
 yoke, it proved a restive captive. The annals of the next 
 one hundred years are full of revolts and attempted 
 
 * The first treaty is of the year 1151. See Repetti, " Dizionario Geograf- 
 ico," under Grosseto. 
 
 f A patriotic son has left an engaging description of the triumphant expedi- 
 tion of his fellow-citizens against Grosseto: 
 
 " No one ever saw a more beautiful army. The shields, the cuirasses, and 
 the tents lent a lustre to all the country round about so that it seemed another 
 paradise. Arrived near the walls of the hostile city the potesta, full of anxiety 
 for the safety of his people, ordered fortifications to be built; before they were 
 ready an accidental skirmish took place. Unable to recall his men, and seeing 
 them assaulted by the defenders from the walls with an incessant shower of 
 arrows, stones, beams, and every kind of weapon, he put himself spiritedly at 
 their head and fought with death-defying courage for the honor of his city. 
 In such manner, with the aid of God, he won a wonderful victory, entering the 
 city with his host and carrying away captive all the men whom he found, to 
 the eternal glory of Siena and to the increase of her strength and power, 
 which henceforth extended as far as the sea." And another chronicler adds: 
 "Grosseto was stormed on the day of Saint Mary of September (the eighth). 
 And the host which went there numbered 3,100 men between foot and horse. 
 And on their return, for joy of the victory gained, there was a great festival 
 with a bonfire, and all the shops around the Campo were shut up." Banchi, 
 "II Memoriale delle offese fatte," etc. "Arch. Stor. It.," Serie terza, XXII, 
 pp. 226-27.
 
 124 SIENA 
 
 revolts, but regardless of cost and effort Siena held fast 
 to her prize in the conviction that Grosseto was a neces- 
 sary stage in the march to the Mediterranean, which 
 spread its blue waters not six miles distant from the 
 walls of the recalcitrant little town. However, Gros- 
 seto, though it dominated a part of the Tuscan littoral, 
 was not itself a port. Hence the seaward ambition of 
 Siena found its natural culmination in the acquisition, 
 in the year 1303, of the small haven of Talamone, also 
 originally a possession of the great Maremma counts. 
 From the Aldobrandeschi it had passed into the hands 
 of the abbot of San Salvatore of Monte Amiata, and 
 from him, a man of peace, often in need of ready money, 
 the prudent republic obtained its cession for a round 
 sum. The purchase was much remarked in the Italian 
 world and aroused the ever ready envy of Florence. 
 The greatest of all Florentines, however, took a purely 
 ironical view of the incident. In a biting passage * 
 Dante treats the idea of Siena becoming vicariously, 
 through Talamone, a seaport, as on a level with that 
 other fancy of the light-headed, self-deluded subjects of 
 the Virgin, touching the hidden river, called Diana. 
 Time, the incorruptible judge of our dreams as well as 
 of our deeds, has confirmed the correctness of the poet's 
 view. Talamone, sand-choked and fever-ridden, came 
 to nothing, and Grosseto itself accordingly lost some- 
 thing of its early hopeful look of being a great bargain; 
 but as long as the Sienese entertained the ambition of 
 becoming an Italian power and transcending the obsta- 
 cles of nature, they naturally linked Grosseto and Tala- 
 mone in a common prayer. 
 
 *"Purgatorio," XIII, 152.
 
 Interior view of the Cathedral
 
 THE BURGHERS 125 
 
 Such is the material story of the doughty burghers 
 who made mediaeval Siena a story revealing at every 
 stage the exercise of moral qualities which in their sum 
 compose the picture of an impressive manhood. Our 
 backward view of the prolonged struggle of the citizens 
 closes on the sad reflection that all their efforts did not 
 suffice to produce the hoped-for result of commercial and 
 political greatness. For a moment in the thirteenth 
 century, from the heights of Montaperti, Siena had a 
 glimpse of the Promised Land, but the vision faded away 
 and the town was thrust back behind provincial bars. 
 Durable victories are not won upon the battlefield. 
 The gifts of the Sienese of one kind and another, espe- 
 cially their artistic gifts, were as great as could be found 
 anywhere in Tuscany; their failure, if we weigh the 
 facts judicially, was due to shortcomings neither of 
 mind nor heart, but must be laid, primarily at least, to 
 the door of certain physical conditions, such as the town's 
 situation high among the hills, the dearth of water, the 
 difficult communications, and the poverty of the neigh- 
 borhood in such articles as might serve as the basis of 
 a great industry. Without native manufactures with 
 which to trade on the world's markets, Sienese com- 
 merce, though it began so promisingly, was doomed to 
 failure in the long run. On the other hand, none of the 
 drawbacks of Siena obtained in the rich and noble Arno 
 valley, from the heart of which the towers of Florence 
 rose. Therefore a sketch of the struggle and failure of 
 Siena in the field of production and exchange becomes 
 an involuntary apostrophe to the greatness of the city 
 of the Lily. Invisible hands point to her as the predes- 
 tined economic capital of Tuscany. How with un-
 
 126 SIENA 
 
 wavering persistence and with steady flame of passion 
 she used her natural and economic advantages to cap 
 them with a political triumph, it shall be the object of a 
 later chapter to make clear.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 
 
 IN speaking, in a previous chapter, of the rise of the 
 commune, I tried to bring out the fact that many gen- 
 erations before it arrived at its splendid young man- 
 hood in the age of the consuls, it had been engaged in 
 silent, groping, and uncertain development among the 
 older and overshadowing feudal institutions. Then 
 when it rose into view sufficiently to permit a closer 
 examination, we noticed that it had indeed an apparent 
 democratic basis, in so far as it rested upon the meeting 
 of the townsmen in the public square, the so-called 
 parlamentum, but at the same time we became assured 
 that the practical political power was in the hands of a 
 body of consuls, appointed from a small group of noble 
 families. I now purpose to examine more at leisure 
 what the consular government was and what it became. 
 We are agreed that the consular era marked the happy 
 revival of self-government in the midst of feudal brutal- 
 ity, but we should not fail to see that all the details of 
 self-government, such as a suitable executive, a legislative 
 assembly in touch with the people, and an effective ad- 
 ministrative service, remained to be worked out with 
 infinite trouble amidst the usual perils of revolutionary 
 explosions. As we take up the story of laborious 
 internal organization, let us remember that such work 
 
 127
 
 128 SIENA 
 
 furnishes a conspicuous test of the character and temper 
 of a people. 
 
 Throughout the twelfth century the work went bravely 
 on, a movement out of chaos and darkness into 
 cosmos and light. In order to measure its full signifi- 
 cance we must start with a clear perception of the loose 
 and accidental character of the earliest institutions of 
 the commune. To illustrate what I have in mind by 
 means of the consuls, I note again that we hear of 
 consuls of Siena for the first time in the year 1125, 
 though it is very likely that they were in existence before 
 that date. Now the consuls of the early twelfth century 
 were not a settled magistracy, the forms of which were 
 precisely defined by a series of statutes, but, in accord- 
 ance with the haphazard character of the first measures 
 of the young commune, they bore rather the aspect of a 
 temporary committee, appointed to perform a particu- 
 lar public service. Such occasional committees dis- 
 charged every variety of public business in the early days, 
 and were called, in Sienese usage, balie. When the 
 particular affair for which a balia was appointed, had 
 been attended to, the balia was again dismissed. But 
 much business, as soon as men give themselves a govern- 
 ment, being constant or at least recurrent, the balia 
 tended to establish itself, that is, the temporary committee 
 showed an inclination to be converted into a permanent 
 magistracy. This movement was hardly well under 
 way when the advantage appeared of defining as pre- 
 cisely as possible the functions of the new officials in a 
 document which might serve as a guide to their conduct, 
 and upon which they might be required to take the oath 
 of office. This document received the name of breve.
 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 129 
 
 Such is the genesis of the consulship: originally only a 
 temporary committee or balia, it developed a breve, 
 which grew, by additions, into a formal body of statutes 
 regulating the city executive. And on this order was 
 the genesis of every other communal institution. Of 
 course the new commonwealth required a department 
 of justice to further peace and order among the citizens. 
 The earliest town courts were tentative creations, that 
 is, balie. .Hence they were dissolved and again estab- 
 lished until, under the pressure of social necessity, they 
 became fixed and permanent. At the same time, be- 
 ginning with a few regulations laid down in a breve, 
 they gradually came to rest upon an elaborate corpus 
 of statutes and enactments. Administrative com- 
 mittees, appointed to look after the revenues, the walls, 
 the fountains, and other public services, were not lacking 
 from very early times, and though clothed at first, like 
 the consuls and the courts, with a provisional character, 
 they would tend, like them, to become permanent magis- 
 tracies, carefully regulated by means of brevi. 
 
 Presently among so many and diverse beginnings the 
 need made itself felt of adjustment and unification. 
 There were now many offices of more or less accidental 
 origin, and each office had in its breve an effective con- 
 stitution, but there was no general constitution of the 
 commune. By throwing the brevi together and carry- 
 ing through a dovetailing of their articles and powers 
 that desideratum could be attained without great effort. 
 It is by such contributions from many streams that 
 Siena acquired a constitution, a composite instrument 
 of which we hear for the first time in the year 1179.* 
 
 *Zdekauer, "II Constitute . . . dell' anno 1262," Introduction, p. XIV.
 
 130 SIENA 
 
 Doubtless it is older than that, just as it is highly proba- 
 ble that there were consuls before 1125. The date of 
 the constitution is of little importance compared with the 
 understanding of the process by which it came to be. 
 Just as the stable magistracy developed by logical stages 
 from the ephemeral balia, so the constitution has its 
 roots in the several brevi defining the various offices. 
 
 The fashioning of a written constitution marks the 
 passage from political unconsciousness to consciousness, 
 from unsettled youth to disciplined manhood. What 
 the constitution of Siena was, and, more particularly, 
 what the institutions were with which it adorned the 
 state, we shall examine presently at the hand of the 
 remarkable copy of the year 1262, which is preserved in 
 the Sienese archive and has been edited in exemplary 
 fashion by Professor Zdekauer.* However, before I 
 take it up, I wish to examine the local class and party 
 struggle, without which we can not possibly put our- 
 selves in touch with the true spirit of Sienese public 
 life nor catch the individual profile of each municipal 
 office. 
 
 (A) THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 
 
 With the birth of the commune the theoretical sover- 
 eignty'oTtfieTtaTian cities is, by most writers, declared 
 to~Tiave been_transrerred to the people assembled in 
 public meeting, that is, to the institution called parla- 
 
 * "II Constitute del Comune di Siena dell' anno 1262." This work is an 
 inexhaustible storehouse of fact, bearing upon every phase of thirteenth-cent- 
 ury life. Two broad avenues of approach to it have been driven by the 
 editor in two studies, the first offered as an Introduction to the Constitution, 
 the second, a published lecture to be found among the "Conferenze" issued 
 by the Commissione Senese di Storia Patria for 1897. The present chapter 
 is greatly indebted to these lucid studies.
 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 131 
 
 mentum. Without quarreling with the theory we may 
 rest_assured that the practical authority, in Siena at 
 leajjtj rested elsewhere The people, assembled in the 
 square before the cathedral at the bidding of the magis- 
 trates, participated in a general way in politics by having 
 treaties communicated to them and by receiving the sub- 
 missions of conquered noblemen, but they did not 
 govern. That privilege was exercised exclusively by a 
 small circle of ancient and welUto-cIo families, from 
 ajnong whom the consuls were regularly elected. The 
 consular regime was therefore essentially an oligarchy. 
 Such a system was possible because the upper class had 
 mainly created and defended the commune, and be- 
 cause, possessed of wealth, vigor, and superior intelli- 
 gence, it found no difficulty in dominating the noisy and 
 disorganized parliament. The consuls presently sur- 
 rounded themselves with a council, called the Council 
 of the Bell, which, being of more practicable size than 
 the parliament, handled the business of the city with 
 dispatch and made the general assembly of the citizens 
 more superfluous than ever. Naturally the Council 
 of the Bell marched under the same aristocratic banner 
 as the consuls. The rule of the people would be carried 
 from theory into the realm of reality only when the 
 masses had acquired sufficient economic independence 
 and political ambition to organize as a popular party 
 for the express purpose of capturing the offices. I 
 pointed out in another place* that in the year 1212 there 
 was, according to the chronicler, "great enmity between 
 people and nobles," an unmistakable revolutionary dis- 
 turbance; in the next year (1213) we have our first refer- 
 
 * Chapter II, p. 70.
 
 132 SIENA 
 
 ence to the existence of a popular party, a societas 
 populi senensis.* This body was probably the common 
 
 army of Siena organized for political purposes. In this 
 p connection it is important to recollect that, ^all through 
 
 * the twelfth century, the army, composed of the whole 
 
 a ./.... ... j_ j: - ....... 
 
 t citizen body, was in existence, that it was mobilizedfor 
 
 ^ ' "!' !.* HMI ilt* ^[miniin >* ^^, ^-.T-^^f-. r-n,.-.. i , . n -. ' f > . ' n>.^.^... i HHM i tf*. 
 
 a a particular end, usually the overthrow of a neighboring 
 castle, and that, the campaign over r it was a^ain dis- 
 ""^ solvej^. While_the upper class constituted the knights 
 or milites^ who rode on horseback, the citizen mass 
 -* made up the pedites or foot-soldiers. Together they 
 marched out of the gates when the war banner was un- 
 furled, but just as the milites in that display outshone 
 the pedites, so they towered above their humble neigh- 
 bors in political influence. Nevertheless, though docile 
 at first, the people would soon feel the power which was 
 theirs by reason of their numbers, and would strive to 
 turn it to advantage. Slowly the common longing of 
 dumb thousands would create a leader, and from his 
 efforts would result an organization, which we may 
 designate as the political counterpart of the ancient 
 military union of the people. 
 
 By some such process the societas populi senensis of 
 1213 must have come into being, but since, in the ab- 
 sence of documents, we are not justified in pressing the 
 matter of origin, let us content ourselves in fixing the 
 significance of the accomplished fact. Undeniably the 
 phenomenon means that byttie ^^ beginning of the thir- 
 teenth century_the masses had reached a conscious 
 pplitical purposeand had organized into a party aiming 
 at control^ Therefore a struggle followed r a struggle 
 
 *Zdekauer, "II Constitute," etc. Introduction, p. XLIII.
 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 133 
 
 between the new elements calling themselves the people 
 ^/VjWjWo) and the upper class in possession, referred to 
 variously as magnati, grandi, and cives majores. My 
 task is to show how, moving onward inch by inch under 
 an irresistible momentum, the people gradually dis- 
 placed the oligarchs from every post of influence, until 
 atlast, by a general decree, characteristic of a resentful 
 and exultant victory, they excluded the former rulers 
 from all participation in public life.. 
 
 In the conflict between oligarchs and masses, thus 
 inaugurated with the thirteenth century, the replace- 
 ment of the consuls as chief executive by the potesta is 
 of little consequence. It is prudent to dispose of this 
 incident before plunging deeper into the social struggle. 
 In the year 1199, for the usual multiple executive was 
 substituted a single man, plainly a step in the direction 
 of greater concentration of power. For some years after 
 1199 there was an uncertain practice in Siena with 
 regard to the chief executive, until, beginning with the 
 year 1211, we have regularly the potestas foretaneu s, the 
 foreign potesta, installed for one year. The men of the 
 Council who called him belonged to or sympathized 
 with the dominant caste; they gravitated naturally 
 toward a person of their own social level, preferably 
 from Bologna, Modena, or some other town as far 
 removed as possible from the interests and passions of 
 Siena; and, after he came, they constituted themselves 
 his advisers, or rather, from more than one point of 
 view, his lords and keepers. His entrance upon the 
 scene marked no immediate displacement of political 
 power, although it is clear that the crowding of the local 
 nobles out of the highest dignity in the town must have
 
 134 SIENA 
 
 made room for a freer unfolding of popular energy. 
 The fact that our earliest evidence of political unrest 
 among the people belongs to the period just subsequent 
 to the coming of the potesta may be taken as a sign that 
 the monopoly of the oligarchs was looked upon as 
 weakened. 
 
 For several decades after our first proof of the exist- 
 ence of a popular party we lose sight of it again. Very 
 likely it did not succeed immediately in making itself 
 felt in the public life of the town. It had powerful 
 opponents; it lacked experience; and it had still to 
 perfect its organization. If practical advantages were 
 to be obtained this last point was particularly important, 
 and, as a matter of fact, it received unremitting attention 
 until, toward the middle of the thirteenth century, the 
 organizing work was crowned by the people giving 
 themselves a single head under the title of captain.* 
 As with the captain of the people was associated a 
 council of the people, it became plain that the societas 
 populi senensis was shaping its institutions according to 
 the model furnished by the commune with its potesta 
 and Council of the Bell. However, even before the 
 society reached its final and effective form, it won an 
 immensely significant victory, for in the year 1240 the 
 potesta, though retained as a sort of honorary sovereign 
 with important representative functions, was deprived 
 of the political direction of the city; this responsibility 
 was put into the hands of twenty-four citizens (/ 
 Pentiquattro), and, what is particularly worthy of 
 remark, one-half of the Twenty-four were required to 
 
 * We get our first news of a captain of the people in 1253. Muratori, XV, 
 "Cronica Sanese," ad annum.
 
 2 
 o 
 
 .c 
 
 u
 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 135 
 
 be of the party of the people.* The revolution of tfye, 
 year 1240, therefore, established a political partnership 
 between nobility and commoners. Indications are not 
 wanting which point to the conclusion that the con- 
 servatives in power did not yield gracefully to the new 
 order of things, and that it required long and loud 
 clamor at the gates before the people's party was ad- 
 mitted into the citadel. But, the first success won, that 
 party proceeded with the remorseless tenacity which 
 has always characterized a pushing democracy, to fol- 
 low up its initial victory. Wedging its way into one 
 communal dignity after another, it had by the year 1262 
 succeeded in carrying a measure to the effect that one- 
 half of the holders of all offices must be popolam.^ 
 When we observe by a perusal of the great constitution 
 of this same year that the captain of the people, symbol 
 and gauge of popular influence, ranked with the potesta 
 as a political factor, remaining inferior to him only in the 
 subtle matter of prestige, we can form some idea of the 
 extent of the popular triumph. The people had built 
 up a party of commoners to effect the capture of the com- 
 mune, and, after a struggle of half a century, the move- 
 ment had advanced so far that the ruling class had been 
 everywhere obliged to let the upstart representatives 
 of the people make themselves comfortable at its side. 
 
 The rule of the Twenty-four, representing a compro- 
 mise between the nobility and the people, lasted for a 
 period of just thirty years, from 1240 to 1270. This 
 period is not only coincident with what is perhaps the 
 
 *Salvemini ("Archivio Stor. It.," Serie V, Vol. XXI, 571 /.) defends an 
 interesting, but not conclusive, proposition to the effect that the Twenty-four 
 were wholly of the party of the people. 
 
 t "II Constitute," etc., I, 518.
 
 136 SIENA 
 
 climax of the whole Italian Middle Age, but it also con- 
 ducted Siena to the summit of her political destiny, 
 disclosing to her for a moment an outlook as wide and 
 intoxicating as was ever scanned by Venice or Florence. 
 The life of the Twenty-four covers the last act in the 
 tragedy of the Hohenstaufen. By taking the Ghibelline 
 sid with conviction and enthusiasm, the Twenty-four 
 shared the victories won by Frederick II and his de- 
 scendants, Manfred_ and Conradin, and inevitably^ 
 when Jatejfaially declared against the imperial charn- 
 pions, went down with them in a common defeat. The 
 fact that the Twenty-four, who mark a temporary union 
 of oligarchs and commoners, followed this policy, proves 
 that the unanimous sentiment of the citizens supported 
 the Ghibelline cause. This momentary domestic har- 
 mony makes the rule of this particular government one 
 of the happy incidents of Sienese history, and accounts 
 in part for the great victory won at Montaperti (1260) 
 against Florence and the Guelphs. For a tremulous 
 moment after her sweeping triumph Siena held Tuscany 
 in her hand. If, as sages and poets have told us, it 
 behooves men to fill the cup of life to the brim and empty 
 it to the lees, the fever and triumph, associated with 
 Frederick and Manfred and Montaperti, were worth 
 while even at the price of the awful fall which followed. 
 Disaster, after several vain threats, closed definitely 
 about the city, when the boy Conradin, last of his line, 
 was defeated in the year 1268, and on the great market- 
 place of Naples, in the sight of the court of the French 
 usurper and the massed multitude of commoners, had 
 his head severed from his body by the executioner's axe. 
 From that moment the Ghibelline doom was sealed and
 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 137 
 
 Siena's brief dream of empire vanished in air. The 
 Twenty-four, sponsors of a Ghibelline policy, did not 
 quail before the storm which now broke over them. 
 They met the Guelph onslaught at Colle (1269), where 
 the sentence of Montaperti was reversed. Siena had to 
 become Guelph or be obliterated. The first step in the 
 city's recantation was the snuffing out of the Twenty-four. 
 
 To Manfred and Montaperti, as well as to Colle and 
 the Guelph triumph, I shall return in the next chapter. 
 I have introduced them here to explain the greatness and 
 fall of the Twenty-four and to render intelligible the 
 inner changes that signalized the passage of Siena from 
 the Ghibelline to the Guelph side. This was a gradual 
 process, much delayed by plots and disturbances, until 
 the trading elements of Siena made up their mind 
 firmly that there was no salvation for the material 
 interests outside the alliance with the victorious church. 
 Then the merchants resolutely took control. In carry- 
 ing through their Guelph programme they discovered 
 no need for greatly altering the institutions; their prin- 
 cipal measure was to give the political direction into the 
 hands of a group of partisans, business men and 
 Guelphs. The number of members constituting this 
 committee fluctuated for a time we hear on one occa- 
 sion of Thirty-six, on another of Fifteen until it was 
 finally fixed at Nine. The new governing committee 
 Li Signori Nove Governatori e Difenditori del Comune e 
 del Popolo di Siena exercised much the same sort of 
 power as the defunct Twenty-four, and, becoming a 
 fixture in the year 1292, ruled the city for more than 
 sixty years. 
 
 The Nine sound a perfectly definite note in the history
 
 138 SIENA 
 
 of Siena. They mark the adoption by the city of a 
 Guelph foreign policy, in sober recognition of the fact 
 that henceforth there was security only in the camp of 
 the church. But that is not all: they signify also the 
 final stage in the conquest of the commune by the 
 people. During the recent passionate struggle the no- 
 bility and commoners had been united by a general 
 Ghibelline sentiment. The domestic harmony was 
 consecrated by the Twenty-four, made up in equal pro- 
 portion of representatives of the two groups. But class 
 rivalry continued under the surface, and the catastrophe 
 of Conradin had no sooner drawn the ground from 
 under the Twenty-four than the local disturbances 
 flared up more intolerably than ever. Thereupon the 
 merchants, resolved on peace at all costs, seized the 
 power, their victory finally crystallizing in the govern- 
 ment of the Nine. As the merchants represented the 
 old societas populi senensis, not content with declaring 
 prudently for the church, they now resolved to crown the 
 ambition of their party and complete the capture of the 
 commune. Accordingly they declared the nobility 
 ineligible to office, reserving all positions of influence to 
 themselves. It was a violent measure, which, though of 
 doubtful wisdom, was yet not without a grim sort of 
 political logic. Since the beginning of the thirteenth 
 century the people had demanded participation in the 
 government only to be thwarted at every point by the 
 selfish oligarchs. None the less by the middle of the 
 century they had made important progress, and, under 
 the Twenty-four, weighed as much in the scales as the 
 old rulers. But as commerce and industry were giving 
 an increasing significance to the productive workers with
 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 139 
 
 each new year, it was likely that they would demand 
 increasing recognition, nay, press their claims to the 
 point of an absolute triumph. This uncompromising 
 j>olic the merchants carried through, thus coupling with 
 the Guelph alliance in the foreign field a local demo- 
 cratic victory.* 
 
 It was in the year 1277 that Siena adopted the measure 
 which turned the tables upon the nobility. On the 28th 
 of May a motion was passed in the General Council to 
 the effect that the grandi should be henceforth and for- 
 ever excluded from the supreme magistracy of the re- 
 public.f Agreed that the measure was intelligible 
 enough in view of the passions developed by the long 
 domestic struggle, it was none the less in the highest 
 degree regrettable by reason of its breeding in the nobil- 
 ity a justifiable and rancorous aversion against the 
 democratic regime. The magnates of Siena were 
 indeed a difficult urban element, but they were not 
 entirely feudal, for they had gone into trade, and the 
 great commercial companies, named for such families as 
 the Salimbeni, the Tolomei, the Malavolti, and the 
 Piccolomini, were one of the main sources of the city's 
 
 * Lack of space makes it necessary to treat the struggle which preceded 
 the overthrow Of the" "magnates in the above summary fashion. I must, 
 however, not fail to observe that the victory of the popolo was much 
 
 ~~~~ * - - - I I I _ L .. _ _ II ' ' 1, Pi l ' jy"l f" 
 
 helped ir^ Siena as elsewhere by the division of the nobility into the two 
 groups of (juelphs' and Ghibellihes. As early as 1262 the Guelph nobles. 
 though a mmonty L engaged in street riots, which ended' in the first ^reat 
 eaDdus~7rom~tn"e city. The exodus was a common weapon of party 
 warfare. On the (juelDh~GJubeIline conflict of 1262 see Muratori, "Croqjca 
 Sariese," XV, 33, and Davidsohn's comment, "Geschichte von Florenz," II 1 , 
 p. 538. The incident serves admirably to explain the various reasons why 
 the nobilfty could not be trusted with the government of a democratic 
 community. 
 
 t Archivio di Stato. " Consiglio Generale della Campana." Deliberazoni 
 ad annum.
 
 140 SIENA 
 
 prosperity. It is perhaps an erroneous opinion that, by 
 the adoption of a more generous policy, this class would, 
 in the course of time, have been fused with the people 
 into a truly democratic society; it admits of no dispute 
 that the policy of exclusion was the worst that could 
 possibly have been adopted, since by feeding the auda- 
 cious self-will of the nobles with a genuine grievance, 
 it created a condition of latent revolt and threw Siena 
 upon an interminable sick-bed. 
 
 (B) THE INSTITUTIONS 
 
 I have already said that the victory of the people, 
 won toward the end of the thirteenth century, did not 
 greatly alter the city's institutions. Originally the 
 offices had been filled by the nobles; then they were 
 shared between nobles and people; and, after the exclu- 
 sion act of 1277, they were appropriated, if not by the 
 people, at least by the upper stratum of the people, 
 the trading bourgeoisie. But, whoever possessed the 
 offices, their form remained essentially unchanged. 
 The fact was that the institutions of Siena were to all 
 intents complete before the people carried their victory 
 to its uncompromising conclusion. Exactly what these 
 institutions were is disclosed by the Sienese constitution, 
 the genesis of which I have attempted to explain. With 
 the copy of the year 1262, the earliest version preserved 
 by the chances of time, before us, we are enabled to 
 reconstruct the whole machinery of Sienese public life. 
 Eschewing so ambitious a project, I shall content myself 
 with isolating for observation and remark some of the 
 more important features of the local political system.
 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 141 
 
 As already stated, some students hold the view that 
 no sooner did the young republic of Siena usurp the 
 functions of government than the theoretical sovereignty 
 passed from the empire and emperor to the body of 
 citizens assembled in parlamentum. The parliament, 
 however, in no sense governed, wherefore the practical 
 sovereignty soon centred in the Council of the Bell. 
 There are traces in the constitution that the parliament, 
 though obsolescent by the year 1262, was still looked 
 upon as a potential factor in the life of the city, but, as 
 the Council of the Bell did not wish to imperil its own 
 supremacy, it took care to bury the general assembly in 
 oblivion by never calling it together. Whoever peruses 
 the constitution will readily convince himself that the 
 Council of the Bell is the real core of the Sienese state. 
 He will learn that it was composed usually of about 
 three hundred members, distributed equally among the 
 three terzi or sections of the city, that the potesta was its 
 presiding official, and that its session was legal only if a 
 general summons had been made by the ringing of a 
 bell. When the campana del consiglio raised its metallic 
 voice, audible far beyond the circumference of the walls, 
 three hundred men abandoned ledger, shop, and fire- 
 side to wend their way to the church of San Cristofano, 
 which in 1262, and for some years after, still did service 
 as a city hall. Not only such matters as the voting of 
 moneys, the making of laws, and the decision over peace 
 and war, but also the election of the potesta and all 
 officials whatsoever lay in the hands of the Council. 
 Such powers indicate unquestioned sovereignty. 
 
 Of the many committees of the Council of the Bell 
 I shall speak only of one, very characteristic of this
 
 142 SIENA 
 
 formative period, the so-called Thirteen Guardians of 
 the Constitution (/ Tredici Emendatori). They had 
 special charge of the body of statutes, with the duty not 
 only of incorporating with them the new laws passed 
 by the Council, but also of proposing such changes in the 
 machinery of the state as appeared to them desirable. 
 For the purpose of giving their undivided attention to 
 the subject, they went every year, for a period of not 
 more than eight days, into a kind of religious retreat. 
 The ripe fruit of their deliberations was presented to the 
 Council in the form of constitutional amendments to 
 accept or reject as that body saw fit.* 
 
 In the year 1262 the chief official of the state, clothed 
 by the Council of the Bell with full executive authority, 
 was still the potesta, though his authority was by no 
 means what it had been when the office was first insti- 
 tuted half a century earlier. In his first period the 
 potesta not only influenced legislation by sitting with the 
 Thirteen Guardians of the Constitution, but was per- 
 mitted of his own authority to fix the height of the fines 
 by which the citizens compounded certain transgressions 
 of the law. By the middle of the century (1250) he had 
 been deprived of all such powers of personal initiative 
 and been reduced strictly to the terms of an executive 
 official. Other circumstances, already touched upon, 
 contributed to the diminution of his importance. The 
 steady rise of the people's party had brought their leader, 
 called the captain of the people, forward, with the result 
 that the constitution of 1262 names him as the potesta's 
 alternate in leading the armed host, and puts him on a 
 level with the potesta in many other respects. Further, 
 
 * See what amounts to their breve in "II Constitute," etc., I, 137-148.
 
 The Palazzo Pubblico
 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 143 
 
 the fact that the political direction of the government 
 had passed, by the revolution of the year 1240, to a com- 
 mittee of citizens called the Twenty-four, effectively 
 reduced the stature of the chief official. The constitu- 
 tion of 1262 still does full honor to him as head of the 
 commune and successor of the consuls: he is endowed 
 with the insignia of sovereignty; he moves with elabo- 
 rate state through the city; he presides over the highest 
 municipal court; he may, provided the Council does 
 not prefer the captain of the people, lead the local army 
 in war; nevertheless he is a waning and not a growing 
 power in the commune. 
 
 Though the constitution of 1262 undeniably declares 
 that the potesta's decline has begun, this process was 
 greatly accelerated in the generation immediately fol- 
 lowing. Before the end of the century, not only was he 
 entirely relieved of any connection and responsibility 
 toward the army, but the Nine, heirs and successors of 
 the Twenty-four, dropped all concealment and stepped 
 forth openly into the light of day as the real governors 
 of the city. Therewith the potesta vanished from the 
 purely political story of Siena, though in the chapters 
 dealing with justice and administration he still loomed 
 large for some generations by reason of the fact that he 
 continued to be appointed to preside over the leading 
 communal court and, at the same time, acted as the 
 court's executive official. 
 
 Having touched upon the evolution of the potesta we 
 are prepared to attend to the characteristic features of 
 his office, as it was exercised through the greater part of 
 the thirteenth century. The first section of the consti- 
 tution of 1262 (Distinctio I) is devoted largely to him
 
 144 SIENA 
 
 and his duties. We there learn that he was elected by a 
 very complicated process in the Council of the Bell; 
 that he was to be preferably, though not necessarily, a 
 foreigner; that his term of office lasted for one year; 
 that he had to be in Siena on the first of November, in 
 order to familiarize himself with his duties, which began 
 on January first. As the commune had only just made 
 a beginning toward providing itself with buildings for 
 its functionaries, the potesta was obliged to occupy a 
 private house, being authorized to pay a rental for it of 
 XL. librce et non plus.* Among many additional de- 
 tails none are so curious as those which minutely regu- 
 late his private conduct. He was indeed surrounded 
 with ceremony and rewarded with an ample stipend, but, 
 in return, he could bring only a certain number of care- 
 fully specified persons with him in his suite and had to 
 submit to petty, not to say ludicrous, rules, prescribing 
 his guests at table and the very hour of his retirement 
 at night. The fact was the stout burghers, who gave 
 themselves the foreign potesta as ruler, were devoured 
 with the suspicion that he might transform his elective 
 dignity into a tyranny, and controlled his every move- 
 ment as a guarantee against conspiracies and as a 
 necessary safeguard of their newly won and precious 
 liberties. 
 
 No less important than the executive provisions are 
 the administrative arrangements of Siena as revealed 
 by the constitution of 1262. The document informs us 
 that the business of the city was largely concentrated in 
 the hands of four men, called Proweditori. Like the 
 potesta, they were elected by the Council of the Bell, to 
 
 * "II Constitute," etc., I, 158.
 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 145 
 
 which, too, they were responsible for the conduct of 
 their office. They comprised essentially a department 
 of the treasury in charge of the revenues and expendi- 
 tures of the state, exercising, in addition, a general con- 
 trol over many minor administrative services.* Their 
 account books, beginning with the year 1226, are extant, 
 constituting a source of invaluable information touching 
 dress, customs, commerce, and an endless variety of facts 
 illustrating the state of Sienese civilization. f A house 
 attached to the church of San Pellegrino and used for 
 their official residence bore, for an unexplained reason, 
 the name Biccherna, and la Biccherna became in popu- 
 lar usage the term of reference to the office of the Four. 
 Their secretary was called camarlingo, and in the early 
 period of the republic was frequently, because of the 
 reputation of honesty attaching to his cloth, a Cistercian 
 monk from the great abbey of San Galgano in the Merse 
 valley. A charming memorial of this secretary and his 
 four superiors is preserved in the Piccolomini palace, 
 the splendid structure of Pope Pius II, which serves at 
 present as the home of the Sienese archives. To appreci- 
 ate this memorial we must acquaint ourselves with the 
 custom of the Biccherna to file away its accounts within 
 a pair of stout wooden covers, which, moved by the love 
 of art characteristic of the time, it commissioned some 
 local painter to grace with a design in color. Many of 
 these covers have been preserved, all more or less signifi- 
 cant, and affording in their sum a rarely intimate and 
 
 * The duties of the Proweditori are described in "II Constitute," etc., I, 
 381. On their origin see Introduction, p. xxi ff. 
 
 t The Commissione Senese di Storia Patria has begun the publication of 
 these account books under the name Libri dell' Entrata e dell" Uscita della 
 Repubblica di Siena. Thus far (1908) two volumes have appeared.
 
 146 SIENA 
 
 immediate view of a vanished world. A visit to them, 
 where they hang in a rarely trodden corridor of the great 
 papal palace, builds the road to yesterday with audible 
 whispers of the by-gone years. We see the coats of 
 arms of former Provveditori, which are often splendid 
 designs in mediaeval heraldry, the Virgin in the very act 
 of protecting her city in some grave crisis of war or 
 pestilence, and, often, the figure of a white-clad, shrewd- 
 faced monk, bending over a book of figures our 
 camarlingo.* 
 
 Many special studies, based on the constitution of 
 1262 and utilizing a large amount of other material, have 
 reconstructed the Sienese system of justice as it existed 
 in the thirteenth century. This large subject, which, in 
 order to reach broad and satisfactory conclusions, ought 
 to be considered in connection with the whole ques- 
 tion of justice in the mediaeval communes, I can no more 
 than hurriedly touch in passing. When the feudal 
 courts broke down, or when they failed to meet the 
 wants of the population, new courts took shape, insti- 
 tuted by the great corporations which came to dominate 
 society. In Siena, as everywhere, there was in conse- 
 quence a variety of justice: justice of the church, justice 
 of the guilds, justice of the commune. In this situation 
 it was not always easy to say which court had compe- 
 tence in a particular case. The movement toward the 
 unification of these various systems was, in the year 
 
 * For an attractive account of these covers see Hey wood, "A Pictorial 
 Chronicle of Siena." The whole series of covers has been issued in photo- 
 graphic fac-simile, accompanied by a scholarly Introduction, by Lisini, "Le 
 Tavolette Dipinte di Biccherna e di Gabella." In this connection it should 
 be explained that the Gabella was a minor section of the general financial 
 administration, and that its officials, like those of the Biccherna, had the 
 habit of filing away their records between painted wooden covers.
 
 THE LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS 147 
 
 1262, still so backward, that an able critic has declared 
 the judicial department the weakest point in the organ- 
 ization of the state.* Each of the diverse courts within 
 the walls being independent of the other developed its 
 own procedure, and each rested upon a body of law, con- 
 taining customary, statutory, Germanic, and Roman ele- 
 ments in varying proportion. Here was abundant 
 occasion fo confusion, which, however, a movement 
 already noted tended to reduce. I refer to the revival in 
 the twelfth century of the study of Roman law in the 
 university of Bologna, which influenced tremendously 
 the legal systems of all the communes of Italy, and 
 led to their absorption of Roman principles in constantly 
 increasing measure. 
 
 On every department of public life, on which a stu- 
 dent may desire information, the constitution offers full 
 particulars. Of the army I shall speak in another 
 place, f That Siena minted her own money, one of the 
 usual attributes of sovereignty, we know from the 
 charter of Henry VI, J but only through the constitution 
 of 1262 are we aware that she took deep pride in her 
 coinage, declaring that none but the best workmen shall 
 be employed in order that the money of the city be both 
 reliable and beautiful. However, of all the varieties 
 of information vouchsafed by this document, none would 
 prove more fruitful, especially on the social side, than 
 a study of the municipal taxes. Owing to its great 
 
 * Zdekauer, "II Constitute," etc. Introduction, p. lix. For an important 
 contribution to our knowledge of early communal justice, see the same 
 editor's "II Constitute dei Consoli del Placito del Comune di Siena"; 
 also, Caggese, "Un Comune Libero alle Porte di Firenze," p. 34 ff. 
 
 t Chapter VI, p. 164 ff. t See chapter II, p. 57. 
 
 $ For the breve of the lords of the mint the mint itself was called II 
 Bulgano see "II Constitute," etc., I, 418, 444.
 
 148 SIENA 
 
 necessities, the commune early in its career put on the 
 tax screws, levying all the direct and indirect taxes 
 known to a modern secretary of the treasury, but perhaps 
 the most significant observation in connection with the 
 revenues is that they show a growing tendency on the 
 part of the authorities to proportion the burden to the 
 wealth of the individual citizen plainly an affirmation 
 of democratic ideals.* 
 
 This rapid sketch of the institutions of Siena covers 
 the period of the Twenty-four, reaching down to the 
 exclusion of the nobility (1277) and to the assumption of 
 political power by the people. Before I carry the 
 domestic evolution further, I must follow the genesis 
 and culmination of the greatest national issue which 
 Siena in all her career was obliged to face, the struggle 
 with Florence for the supremacy in Tuscany. By an 
 interesting coincidence the conflict was at its height at 
 the very period when the constitution of 1262 came into 
 being. At that time, however, the rivalry was already 
 a century and a half old, and by having eaten into the 
 blood and fibre of every Sienese man, woman, and child, 
 ignited, at the slightest provocation, a flame of passion 
 that was fed from every enthusiasm and every rancor of 
 the human breast. 
 
 * The direct tax, affirming itself more and more in the Sienese system, was 
 a tax on total wealth and was called lira. It was levied for the first time in 
 an experimental way in 1202, but from that time was gradually broadened 
 and regulated in its application by being based on careful registers. On 
 the lira see "II Constitute," etc., Introduction, p. Ixviii; also " Conf erenze " 
 (1897), p.
 
 N 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE^ 
 
 Ojme can follow the story o the long and bloody 
 wars between Siena and Florence without keen 
 distress. Such savage hatred, such din and 
 onset of armed hosts, such wanton butchery of wounded 
 men, such cold torture Q prjggnprs^ such harrying of 
 fields at the very moment when the bending corn was 
 nejiingjto_the_sicklg se non piangi di che pianger 
 su oli ? That they, Tuscan cities of the same blood, 
 should ^^ Jhay^w^rr^d u^oji_oneanother at all, has, at 
 first blush, something unreasonable to the modern mincf^ 
 though when we recall that the society of which they 
 were a part systematically cultivated a martial frame 
 of mind, that their territories were contiguous and their 
 boundaries uncertain, and that mutual animosity was 
 constantly stimulated by commercial rivalry, we cannot 
 fail to recognize that here were conditions and motives 
 which still operate in our own day to produce armed 
 conflicts. But if the underlying causes of the wars 
 between Siena and Florence are unhappily familiar to 
 our thought and experience, there remains, separated 
 from our modern practice by a gulf of seven centuries, 
 the manner in which these wars were carried on. In 
 this respect Time has wrought an immense improve- 
 ment, of which we must take exact account if we would 
 seize the peculiar atmosphere enveloping a mediaeval 
 
 149
 
 150 SIENA 
 
 campaign. Apart from our medical service, which as 
 a very recent achievement of science affords no basis for 
 comparisons, we have an elaborate international war- 
 code, under which non-combatants are safeguarded, 
 prisoners treated with humanity, and every care taken 
 to eliminate merely wanton cruelty. Many of the baser 
 passions had to be tamed, a process involving a radical 
 reform of conduct, before mankind could make this 
 general advance. In the campaigns, not only of Siena 
 and Florence, but of all the Italian cities, the absence 
 sometimes of even the most rudimentary humanitarian 
 impulses forces itself on our attention, and the brutality, 
 the uncontrolled fury, the total surrender to the pulses 
 of hate, burn us as with fire. Hear, for example, the 
 words of a poor Franciscan, Brother Salimbene of 
 Parma. Listening from his quiet retreat in the Emilia 
 to the noisy march of the world, he entered in his 
 chronicle with the pardonable garrulity of old age all 
 that he could learn about the great sea-fight of the year 
 1284 between the Genoese and the Pisans. The slaugh- 
 ter was terrible, and when the victorious Genoese had 
 sailed away with those whom they had spared as 
 prisoners in their hands, the women of Pisa went on 
 foot to seek out their husbands, sons, and brothers. 
 
 "And when the aforesaid women sought out their captives, the 
 jailers would answer them: 'Yesterday thirty died and to-day 
 forty. We cast them into the sea, and thus we do daily with the 
 Pisans.' So when those ladies heard such news of their dear ones 
 and could not find them, they fell down amazed with excess of 
 grief, and could scarce breathe for utter anguish and pain of heart. 
 . . . For the Pisans died in prison of hunger and famine and 
 misery and anguish and sadness." And he closes a heart-rending
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 151 
 
 passage with this significant statement: "Note, moreover, that 
 as there is a natural loathing between men and serpents, dogs and 
 wolves, horses and gryphons, so is there between the Pisans and 
 Genoese, Pisans and men of Lucca, Pisans and Florentines."* 
 
 Horses and gryphons! An amusing mythological 
 intrusion, but incapable of weakening the vibrant force 
 of the old man's statement. Like his spiritual father, 
 St. Francis, like the best men of the church for ages past, 
 he bewailed this unmitigated manner of carrying on 
 war; but many generations were to come and go before 
 the voice of humanity made itself heard above the 
 tumult of violence. 
 
 Let us give ear to one more and the weightiest witness 
 touching the moral background of the age before we 
 take up the detailed struggle of Florence and Siena. 
 Dante Alighieri was a younger contemporary of 
 Brother Salimbene. What was to him the summum 
 bonuniy the supreme hope and desire of mankind ? 
 Listen to this solemn sentence from the De Monarchia 
 (Book I, chap. 4): "And hence to the shepherds 
 sounded from on high the message not of riches, nor 
 pleasures, nor honors, nor length of life, nor health, nor 
 beauty, but the message of peace." The greatest thing 
 is the thing we miss most, and Dante neither had peace 
 in his own life nor did he see it anywhere about him in 
 the world. Even more moving than his own words is 
 the glimpse of the great exile which we get in a con- 
 temporary letter.f The writer was an inmate in a 
 
 * Coulton, "From St. Francis to Dante: A translation of all that is of 
 Primary Interest in the Chronicle of Salimbene," p. 218. 
 
 f The letter of Ira Ilario retains a certain biographical value even if it is, 
 as some contend, apocryphal. On its authenticity see Bartoli, " Delia Vita 
 di Dante," chapter 12.
 
 152 SIENA 
 
 monastery high in the mountains above Luni. One 
 day a wanderer with the sad eyes of Ahasuerus entered 
 the gate. " Hither he came moved either by the religion 
 of the place or by some other feeling. And seeing him 
 ... I asked him what he wished and sought. He 
 moved not, but stood silently contemplating the columns 
 and arches of the cloister. Again I asked him what he 
 wished. . . . Then slowly turning his head, and looking 
 at the friars and me, he answered 'Peace." The 
 stranger was the great Florentine. 
 
 Peace, the peace which in his poem he said he sought 
 from world to world,* was the aspiration of his deepest 
 mood. But here we come upon an anomaly, painful 
 in such a man, but intensely human. Though he 
 craved a better day, and dreamt of peace and love, he 
 was buffeted by all the passions of his age. That was 
 the price he paid, and probably paid gladly, for being 
 alive. Does he not share every hatred by which his 
 fellow-citizens, ranging from the humble wool-carder to 
 the proud merchant of the Calimala, were fused into a 
 nation animated by a common patriotism ? In his 
 verse rival Pisa becomes the vitupero delle genti, neigh- 
 boring Pistoia is urged to make an ash-heap of itself for 
 its sins, and the upland Sienese are sneered at as fickle- 
 hearted children, a genie vana. His attitude is equally 
 uncompromising toward his fellow-citizens, or rather 
 toward that presumptuous section of his fellow-citizens 
 who conducted his beloved Florence along a different 
 political path from that which he would have wished 
 her to travel; he has nailed their reputations, while 
 the world lasts and poetry is power, to the gallows. 
 
 *"Purg.," V, 61.
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 153 
 
 No, Dante might cry peace, peace, but, while he himself 
 travailed with hate, showing us in the vast panorama 
 of his poem his whole generation stirred in every fibre 
 with the like passion, there could be no peace. 
 
 Returning to the rivalry of Florence and Siena, I 
 repeat that it TVad its origin iri~a territorial issue, re- 
 enforced and embittered by unrestrained commercial 
 competincm7 The reader will recall that, as soon as the 
 twjo_towns became independent commonwealths, they 
 entered upon a struggle to control each one its own 
 comitatus or county. In the early Middle Age, during 
 the Germanic domination, the comitatus or count's 
 territory was the civil counterpart of the diocese or 
 bishop's territory, and, in a general way, the boundaries 
 of the two administrative units of church and state 
 coincided. But there were regions of divergence. The 
 failure of the Sienese diocesan boundary to include 
 eighteen baptisteries, lying to the east and included 
 within the political boundary of Siena, was at the bottom 
 of the long lawsuit, of which we have heard, between 
 the bishops of Arezzo and Siena. Northward, in the 
 direction toward Florence, there was even graver trouble, 
 to understand which we must familiarize ourselves with 
 certain important facts in the Florentine political 
 development. Owing to some confusion of the ninth 
 century which escapes our knowledge, the county of 
 Fiesole had been united with that of Florence, giving 
 Florence a civil territory larger than that of any other 
 Tuscan town. How far the boundary of the combined 
 county of Florence-Fiesole extended southward was 
 uncertain, but the Florentines raised the claim that it 
 reached beyond the Chianti hills, nay, even to a succes-
 
 154 SIENA 
 
 sion of points, the nearest of which was not above seven 
 or eight miles from the Sienese walls. 
 
 Apart from the doubt which, in view of the prevail- 
 ing mediaeval confusion in the matter of boundaries, the 
 Sienese might reasonably entertain concerning the jus- 
 tice of the Florentine claim, they were urged by the most 
 elementary considerations of safety to keep a neighbor 
 of the metal of Florence at a more comfortable distance 
 from the gates. At this point the reader is requested to 
 examine the accompanying map * and to take note how 
 close to Siena the probable southern boundary line 
 of the combined county of Florence-Fiesole extended. 
 Even so the Florentines raised objections and claimed 
 a still further extension southward. Agreement prov- 
 ing impossible in the face of such insolence, the de- 
 cision had to be referred to the field, and since, as we 
 shall presently see, Florence was victorious, her view 
 naturally triumphed. As early as 1203 an arbiter, the 
 potesta of Poggibonsi, rendered a decision favorable in 
 all respects to Florence, with the result that down to 
 the last days of the independent existence of the two 
 republics, the boundary between them practically re- 
 mained as traced by Florence and confirmed by the 
 so-called "lodo" of 1203. 
 
 During the early jnediaeval centuries this boundary 
 dispute between_Siena and Florence slumberedTassum- 
 ing importance Qnly with fbfijwellth^century^ for not 
 till then didjhe two cities Jbegin to extend their domin- 
 ions beyond their_g2J]s, In this movement of expan- 
 sion they had no sooner clashed with the great nobles 
 of their respective contados than they began to quarrel 
 
 *See p. 177.
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 155 
 
 with one another. If Siena was hemmed in by the So- 
 arzi, the Cacciaconti, the Aldobrandeschi and other 
 clans, Florence was hardly less hampered by the two 
 great houses of the Guidi and the Alberti, who held 
 scores of castles all around the city. Under the stimu- 
 lus of an unscrupulous rivalry, Florence secretly en- 
 courageaand often lent open aid to the Sienese nobles, 
 while Siena followed the same policy towqrd the F|QJ- 
 entine magnates. When we recollect that each of the 
 two towns was territorially and commercially in contact 
 with other towns, Florence especially with Arezzo, 
 Pistoia, and Pisa, Siena more particularly with Arezzo 
 and Orvieto, we are prepared to understand that they 
 never faced each other like two duellists, each of whom 
 relies upon himself alone, but that their city neighbors 
 were inevitably drawn into the conflict. Nor does that 
 exhaust the political and military factors of which we 
 must take account in this keen rivalry. As pope and 
 emperor enjoyed considerable, if varying, power, towns 
 so savagely hostile as Siena and Florence would not 
 hesitate to enlist the support of one or the other for 
 their side^ When Florence became Guelph, holding 
 with remarkable steadiness to the alliance with Rome, 
 Siena had really no choice left but to become Ghibelline 
 jmd seek her salvation in a union with the emperor. 
 Thus the nobles of the respective contados, the neigh- 
 boring free communes of Tuscany, the emperor and 
 pope all play parts in the long feud between Florence 
 and Siena, but while the presence of these numerous 
 agents often obscures the issue and complicates the 
 situation, we are certainly not wrong in affirming that 
 no matter with what helpers and under what battle-
 
 156 SIENA 
 
 cries the two towns clashed in field and council- 
 chamber, in the mind and heart of each was ever 
 uppermost its own security and greatness. 
 
 The first armed conflict of Florence and Siena 
 bringing the_territorial issue between them into sharp 
 relief occurred in the year 1129 at Vignale, a castle 
 situated in the disputed Chianti territory.* The Sienese 
 had seized an opportunity to enter and fortify it, when 
 the Florentines hurried up and drove them out again. 
 In 1141, we are informed, the Florentines pushed an 
 incursion into Sienese territory as far as the Porta 
 Camellia, the north gate of the town, and in the year 
 1145 we hear of a great Florentine victory on the slopes 
 of Monte Maggio, that wooded mountain intercepting 
 the gaze of whosoever standing on the Sienese ramparts 
 looks toward the setting sun. In the battle of Monte 
 Maggio the Guidi, the leading feudal family of the Arno 
 valley, fought on the side of Siena, and though defeated, 
 or rather because defeated, continued to nurse a rancor- 
 ous hatred for the Florentine commonwealth. In 
 company with their ally, Siena, they now planned a 
 stroke which was to check the further progress south- 
 ward of the Arno city. 
 
 The via francigena, of such importance to Siena, fol- 
 lowed, as we know, the Elsa valley until it reached the 
 Arno, crossed the river by the bridge at Fucecchio, and 
 
 *The Annales Senenses ("Monumenta Germ.," XIX) report, without 
 explaining, an earlier clash than the above, a clash of 1114. The wars of 
 Florence and Siena in the twelfth century are a difficult subject, upon which 
 many scholars have exercised their ingenuity. In addition to Davidsohn 
 ("Geschichte von Florenz") and Santini ("Contado e Politica Esteriore del 
 Sec., XII"), much valuable material has been contributed by Villari ("I 
 Primi Due Secoli della Storia di Firenze") and Hartwig ("Quellen und 
 Forschungen zur Geschichte von Florenz").
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 157 
 
 then turned sharply west to Lucca. Half-way down 
 the Elsa valley lay the hamlet of Poggibonsi, so favor- 
 ably situated on a hill that whoever controlled it might 
 hope to hold the key to the whole region. Poggibonsi 
 was a possession of the Guidi, but lay, so the Arno 
 burghers clamorously affirmed, in Florentine territory. 
 Toward the middle of the twelfth century little Poggi- 
 bonsi on the Elsa became the center of a web of in- 
 trigues which almost defies unravelling. Suffice it that 
 the Guidi, filled with wrath at the presumptuous 
 Florentines, deftly spun their threads to play Poggibonsi 
 into the hands of Siena. In the year 1155 the cabal, in 
 which even the pope was induced to take a hand, scored 
 a complete success. The Florentines, hurrying up with 
 an army to protest with force against the diminution of 
 their authority, were defeated, and Poggibonsi for the 
 present remained in the hands of Siena, a welcome 
 guarantee to that town against further Florentine en- 
 croachment on the Elsa side, f 
 
 If one thing more than another distinguished the Arno 
 burghers it was that they could bide their time with the 
 patience of a hunter in the woods. Desirous of trapping 
 Poggibonsi, they waited for their opportunity nineteen 
 years. Then they intrigued with the Cacciaconti, lords 
 of Asciano and neighboring points and ancient enemies 
 of Siena, and acquired a foothold in the important 
 Asciano itself. When the Sienese arrived on the scene, 
 prepared to undertake the siege of the little town, the 
 Florentines advanced upon them to the cry of San 
 
 t Poggibonsi in the twelfth century is a story by itself and a fascinating 
 one for the student of Tuscany. For a coherent account see Davidsohn, p. 
 457^-f an d passim; also, Santini, "Contado e Politica Esteriore", pp. 57, 
 81-83, 100-106.
 
 158 SIENA 
 
 Giovanni, their patron saint, and defeated them roundly 
 (1174). In spite of spirited efforts the sons of the 
 Virgin could not recover from this calamity, and in the 
 year 1176 were obliged to accept peace at the dictation 
 of their enemies. The conditions of the victors were 
 hard : they acquired one-half of the Sienese interest in 
 Poggibonsi and forced from Siena a recognition of the 
 Chianti boundary line as drawn by themselves. 
 
 The next crisis in the affairs of the two rivals occurred 
 injthe year 1 197, when the suddenjeath of the Emperor 
 Henry VI broke the tyrannical yoke which his masterful 
 will had imposed on the Tuscan cities. We have ob- 
 served how, by the charter of the year 1 186, Henry had 
 in effect limited the authority of the Sienese consuls to 
 the city itself. The like or a similar policy he had pur- 
 sued with reference to the other towns, with the result 
 that they had lost their hold on their respective contados, 
 ambition and prize of many decades of combat. In 
 1197, therefore, the towns, relieved of the imperial 
 incubus, made a general Tuscan alliance with the main 
 object of permitting each one to repossess itself of its de- 
 pendent territory. We have taken note of the " submis- 
 sions," which Siena now successfully enforced from 
 Cacciaconti, Ardengeschi, and others of her feudal foes. 
 But the contado issue, revived by the Tuscan league, 
 naturally brought the old Chianti boundary dispute 
 once more to the front. Siena was very desirous to 
 improve her position against her grasping neighbor, but 
 as Florence would not yield one inch of her historical 
 claim, the upland city, in order to avoid war, agreed 
 to have the Chianti matter settled once for all by the 
 decision of an umpire. The potesta of Poggibonsi was
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 159 
 
 accepted for this office, and in the year 1203 pronounced 
 the "lodo" already mentioned, favorable in every respect 
 to the Florentine claims. A little later, in the year 1208, 
 Siena resigned all her remaining rights to Poggibonsi. 
 Thus, after a struggle of almost one hundred years, the 
 defeat of Siena, with regard to the various questions 
 touching her northern boundary, was indisputable and 
 complete. With the new century the conflict between 
 the now thoroughly embittered towns continued, but 
 Siena, persuaded of her inability to break through the 
 Florentine line to the north, with shifty resolution turned 
 her chief attention in another direction.* 
 
 To understand fully the change which now occurred 
 in the Sienese policy of conquest we must return to the 
 Tuscan league of 1 197. From that union of cities Siena 
 received authority to possess herself of her contado. 
 Accordingly, as soon as the nobles had been reduced to 
 obedience, she laid siege to the hill-town of Montalcino, 
 and in the year 1201 raised her banner over its walls. 
 Then, moving step by step, she undertook to subjugate 
 Montepulciano, even more important than Montalcino, 
 for Montepulciano reared its threatening towers not only 
 near the via francigena, but also directly over the road 
 which penetrated eastward to the Chiana valley and 
 to central Italy. On the basis of an express agreement 
 
 * Of course Poggibonsi and the northern boundary were not eliminated 
 from the subsequent struggles, for Florence did not enter into permanent 
 possession of the little town in 1208. The interference of the emperor 
 presently effected the liberation of Poggibonsi, without, however, in the least 
 discouraging the ambition of the Arno burghers. Throughout the thirteenth 
 century Poggibonsi, when free as well as when unfree, remained a centre of 
 dark intrigue directed against Florence. For the astonishing vicissitudes of 
 the little town in the thirteenth century see Davidsohn, " Geschichte von F.," 
 especially II 1 , pp. 219, 428, 513; and II", p. 64.
 
 160 SIENA 
 
 the Florentines had supported the Sienese in their 
 campaign against Montalcino, but now when the latter 
 moved on Montepulciano the Arno burghers took alarm. 
 A strong Siena was not to their taste, and although 
 Montepulciano was proved before commissioners of the 
 Tuscan league to lie, beyond the peradventure of a 
 doubt, in Sienese territory,* and, therefore, to be lawful 
 Sienese prey, the Florentines were ready to resort to 
 any and every device before they sanctioned Sienese 
 rule at that commanding point. The result was war, in 
 fact a whole succession of wars, spun out through the 
 greater part of the thirteenth century, with Montepul- 
 ciano as the storm-centre, and a number of other Sienese 
 towns, such as Montalcino and Grosseto, involved 
 whenever Florence could induce them to rise in revolt. 
 Between the new wars and those of the previous century 
 over Poggibonsi and the Chianti boundary existed as a 
 bond the inalterable resolution of Florence to thwart 
 the expansion of Siena. 
 
 In order to bring the new phase of the struggle before 
 us as succinctly as possible, I shall set down the wars in 
 their chronological order. There was war between 
 Florence and Siena from 1207 to i2o8Vagainfrom 1229 
 to 1235, another war from 1251 to 1254, and a final 
 struggle with interruptions- from 1258 to 1270. Even 
 the intervals of peace witnessed some disturbances, 
 because Tuscany, with its many other cities, provided 
 each with its own set of quarrels, was almost always in a 
 state of confusion, which inevitably reacted upon the 
 delicate relations of our two rivals. I do not purpose 
 
 * The evidence, taken down by the commissioners and entirely conclusive 
 on the point at issue, may be found in Muratori, "Antiq. It.," IV, 576 ff.
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 161 
 
 to follow these wars with any detail until we get to 
 Montaperti and the dazzling prospect, brief as summer 
 lightning, which it opened to the Sienese. The military 
 art of that century was a pitiable thing, and the capri- 
 cious course of assaults, sieges, and retreats must exas- 
 perate every modern reader. To Mr. Maurice Hewlett, 
 considering the ways of the Tuscan cities,* their cam- 
 paigns reach unimagined heights of futility. Siena, 
 Pisa, Arezzo, Florence and the rest are to his amused 
 view very like a pack of ill-tempered village curs, who 
 bark and snarl at one another until with a sudden rush 
 they roll over in the dust, biting right and left, and then, 
 yapping rage and victory, make for home. With due 
 allowance for the exaggerations of the romantic tempera- 
 ment, it remains none the less true that there is little 
 profit to be had of the ordinary Tuscan war. Its back- 
 ground of mediaeval manners alone is perenially inter- 
 esting, and as that can be recovered best out of the mouth 
 of contemporaries, or from writers who were sufficiently 
 close to contemporaries to share their sentiments, I shall 
 content myself with following the events at the hand of 
 expressive selections from the chroniclers. f 
 
 The war of 1207 began with a siege by the Sienese of 
 Montepulciano. To make a diversion the Florentines 
 with their allies the Aretines and Count Guido, who, 
 following the wavering practice of his kind, was now on 
 the Florentine side attacked the castle of Montalto, 
 not far from Asciano. On the 29th of June the Sienese 
 
 * In his " Road in Tuscany." 
 
 f Readers interested in the political combinations and military incidents of 
 these wars are referred to the second volume of Davidsohn's "Geschichte 
 von Florenz." They will find there a brilliant, detailed reconstruction of 
 the complicated affairs of Tuscany in the thirteenth century.
 
 162 SIENA 
 
 came up to the relief of Montalto, and a great battle 
 ensued, of which a Florentine eye-witness has left a 
 curious account. 
 
 "The Florentines, investing the aforesaid castle, assaulted 
 it with many mangonels, and in order that the garrison might not 
 effect a retreat . . . guards were set round about. On a certain 
 day, however, when the sun shot down hot rays, and the guards 
 wearied by work were resting in the shade . . . behold the 
 Sienese, come to snatch the castle garrison from danger by a sudden 
 stroke. . . . But the Florentines, seizing their arms, rushed upon 
 them and drove them into flight, pursuing them for four miles, not 
 over ways suited for war, but through woods and thickets difficult 
 even for wild beasts. . . . And the tents and the whole equipment 
 of the army was seized, and of knights and foot-soldiers twelve 
 hundred or thereabouts were captured, and very many on both 
 sides were killed. . . . However, I desire not to omit what, 
 though I did not see, by virtue of my being of that expedition I 
 heard, to wit, that the women, coming from afar, with tears, 
 sought the bodies of their husbands, and each in order to find one 
 had to turn many corpses over seeking for her own. They cried 
 aloud, weeping together, and owing to the altered features scarce 
 one recognized her husband. . . . " * 
 
 That signal defeat obliged the Sienese to desist from 
 attacking Montepulciano and to make peace. They 
 would have to await their opportunity, and the oppor- 
 tunity in the changing circumstances of Tuscany always 
 came. Hear the version of the next encounter as given 
 by the great Florentine chronicler, Villani: 
 
 "In the year 1229 the Sienese broke the peace with the Floren- 
 tines, because against the articles of peace they laid siege to Monte- 
 pulciano in the month of June of the said year. On which ac- 
 
 * "Sanzanomis Gesta Florentinorum." Hartwig, "Quellen und Forschun- 
 gen," I, p. 15.
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 163 
 
 count in the following September, Messer Giovanni Bottacci being 
 potesta of Florence, the Florentines -led an army against the 
 Sienese and harried the countryside to Pieve Asciata and dis- 
 mantled Montelisciai, one of their castles not three miles from 
 Siena. And the next year, Otto da Mandello of Milan being 
 potesta of Florence, the Florentines led an army against the 
 Sienese on the 3ist of May, and they brought the carroccio with them 
 and, passing by the city of Siena, went to San Quirico a Rosenna 
 and dismantled the baths of Vignone. . . . And returning they 
 laid siege to Siena." * 
 
 In the matter of the siege itself it occurred in the 
 year 1230 we will give ear to another Florentine, who 
 offers us a fuller account than the grave Villani. The 
 Florentine army lay encamped before the north gate, 
 called Porta Camellia. 
 
 "And the Sienese making a sally to defend themselves a great 
 battle followed; when the Florentines drove them back, even the 
 women came out to fight, but to no avail, for Count Alberto di 
 Mangona succeeded hi hanging up his shield on the gate" in 
 token of victory! "The slaughter was great and the city was 
 almost completely captured; and if the Florentines had not been 
 moved by compassion they might have destroyed the whole of it 
 with fire and sword. They brought one thousand three hundred 
 and thirty-five prisoners to Florence and, in addition, many 
 beautiful women of Siena, and them they obliged to become the 
 concubines of those who had captured them." f 
 
 The "compassion" of the Florentines is good, espe- 
 cially in the light of the succeeding item about the 
 captured Sienese women. But to proceed with the war. 
 In 1232 the Sienese at last had their heart's wish; they 
 took Montepulciano and levelled its walls with the 
 
 * Villani, "Cronica," Libro VI, chap. 6. 
 
 t "Die sogenannte Chronik des Brunette Latini," Hartwig, II, p. 237.
 
 164 SIENA 
 
 ground. This success was mitigated by a new harrying 
 of the poor countryside by the Florentines, and in the 
 next year (1233) came another siege, which was unsuc- 
 cessful but must have been a sore trial to the Sienese in 
 more ways than one, for the besiegers "threw many 
 stones into the city from many engines of war, and to do 
 despite and bring shame to the besieged hurled asses 
 over the walls e altra bruttura"* amidst the Homeric 
 laughter of the embattled warriors from Arno, sadly 
 addicted, as we may still learn by a perusal of the gay 
 tales of their countryman, Boccaccio, to beffe and prac- 
 tical jokes. When the Florentines came yet another 
 year in the season of the crops and laid waste the fields 
 and destroyed more than forty castles and settlements, 
 the Sienese at last cried enough. One of their own 
 chroniclers reports the terms of the peace. Of course 
 Montepulciano had to be set free. "And the Sienese 
 rebuilt the walls of Montepulciano which cost them 
 8,000 florins :"f the walls which they themselves had 
 cast down a bitter morsel for the stiff-necked burghers 
 of the upland town! Montalcino, too, the other apple 
 of discord in the southern district of Siena, had to be 
 given its independence at the bidding of the victorious 
 Florentines. 
 
 At this juncture we may pause a moment to look into 
 the composition of the forces which engaged in these 
 furious expeditions. We have already heard that the 
 popular army, according to the old Germanic concept of 
 das Folk in Wafjen, was an expressive feature of all the 
 free communes of Tuscany, but we have not attempted 
 
 * Villani, "Cronica," Libro VI, chap. 10. 
 
 f Muratori, "Cronica Sanese," ad annum 1235.
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 165 
 
 to develop a detailed picture of such a communal host. 
 On the safe assumption that the army of one city was 
 much like that of another, we are justified in drawing 
 upon a remarkable, I may say a unique, military docu- 
 ment, preserved in the Florentine archives. This is the 
 so-called Libro di Montaperti, being nothing less than 
 the administrative records of the Florentine host of 1260, 
 which, on their capture by the Sienese in the terrible 
 rout of that year, were jealously guarded as an invaluable 
 prize through many generations, only to be returned to 
 the Arno city in the sixteenth century, in visible sign of 
 the definite supremacy of the Medicean commonwealth.* 
 With the help of this source, supplemented by the Sien- 
 
 _,_,,, i - ~ - - . A .L. ^ ,__,_ J . , ,.- 
 
 ese constitution of 1262,! we can get a very graphic con- 
 cetion of a Florentine, as well as of a Sienese. army 
 of the thirteenth century. 
 
 To begin with, the communal army was indeed demp- 
 cratic in the fullest sense of the word, for, when war was 
 Declared, all the male inhabitants, from the age of fifteen 
 to the age of seventy, in the city as well as in the county, 
 were obliged to report for service under threat of heavy 
 penalties. Apart from certain inconsiderable bands, 
 detailed for garrison duty, the conscripts formed one 
 large field army, composed, in the case of Siena, of 
 three main divisions corresponding to the three regions 
 or terzi of the town Citta on the south hill, San Martino 
 on the east hill, and Camollia on the north hill. The 
 Florentine host, according to the division of the Arno 
 town into six regions, and not into three as at Siena, 
 was made up of six distinct bodies. Thus every inhab- 
 
 * "II Libra di Montaperti," Pubblicato per cura di Cesare Paoli, Florence, 
 1889. f See, for guidance, Introduction, xxxxiv and Ixxxviii.
 
 166 SIENA 
 
 itant within the walls of our City of the Virgin marched 
 with the men of the terzo in which he dwelt, but as the 
 terzo system was, for the sake of convenience, extended 
 also to the county, which we may conceive as composed 
 of three sectors adjoining the three hills of the town, 
 every county dweller was carried on the army lists 
 either of Citta, of San Martino, or of Camellia. 
 
 When we have understood that the military forces 
 of San Martino would be normally made up of the city 
 dwellers of the terzo, increased by the inhabitants of 
 that section of the county contiguous to San Martino, 
 and so with Citta and Camellia, we may pass on to the 
 composition of each of the three great fighting corps. 
 Each was divided into milites and pedites, that is, into 
 cavalry and infantry, the enrolment in one or the other 
 of the two services being determined exclusively by 
 wealth. The individual whose lira or property tax 
 reached a certain sum had to keep a horse for the com- 
 mune, and present himself for service with lance, shield, 
 and other accoutrements exactly prescribed, while he 
 whose lira fell below a certain sum served on foot and 
 armed himself according to a humbler requirement. 
 The arms, it will be observed, were in each case fur- 
 nished by the citizen and not by the commune. How- 
 ever, milites and pedites did not exhaust the military 
 categories, for the development of war had favored the 
 formation of certain special troops, composed of picked 
 men drafted from the terzi. Thus we hear of a body of 
 pavesai or shield-bearers, carrying immense bucklers 
 which were tied together for attack and afforded the 
 appearance of a moving wall, of a body of arcadon or 
 long bowmen, and of a company of balestrieri, armed
 
 The Palazzo Huonsignori
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 167 
 
 with balestre or cross-bows. Among the special arms 
 the cross-bows held the most prominent place, for, when 
 built on a large scale, according to a great variety of 
 patterns, they formed a primitive artillery for hurling 
 stones and arrows, and proved themselves particularly 
 effective in the conduct of a siege. If we add a baggage 
 service of pack-asses, destined to carry the tents and the 
 provisions, we can see that the army, on passing out of 
 the gates, each division under a leader and following a 
 gonfalon or pennon gayly fluttering in the wind, was 
 already far beyond the stage of primitive organization.* 
 But of all the curious and attractive features of a 
 mediaeval host upon the march none would have 
 exercised such fascination upon a spectator of our time 
 as the carroccio. We heard from Villani, the Florentine 
 chronicler, that his countrymen carried the carroccio 
 with them in the campaign of 1230, and it is a fact that 
 no city of mediaeval Italy undertook any action on a 
 large scale without this strange instrument of war. 
 The Florentine historian, although writing in the four- 
 teenth century, when the cafroccio had already fallen 
 into disuse, was sufficiently stirred by antiquarian 
 interest to devote a page of loving description to it. 
 He writes of Florence, but we may safely assume that 
 the Sienese and Pisan and Milanese and every other 
 war-chariot had much the same appearance. 
 
 "And observe that the carroccio, which the commune and 
 people of Florence took along with them, was a platform on four 
 wheels, painted crimson all over, and it carried two great crimson 
 
 * For an excellent article on the mobilization of a mediaeval army see 
 Hartwig, "Quellen und Forschungen," II, p. 297 ff. This may be supple- 
 mented by comparison with Davidsohn, "Geschichte v. F.," II ', p. 413 ff.
 
 168 SIENA 
 
 masts from which waved the great standard of the commune, con- 
 sisting of one white and one crimson bar and yet to be seen in 
 San Giovanni. And the carroccio was drawn by a magnificent 
 pair of oxen, covered with crimson hangings and reserved expressly 
 for this service . . . and their driver enjoyed freedom of taxation 
 in the city. And when an expedition was proclaimed the nobles 
 and knights of the neighborhood drew forth the car of state from 
 the Opera of San Giovanni and brought it to the New Market. 
 . . . And the best and strongest and worthiest foot-soldiers were 
 appointed as its special guard and the whole people were wont to 
 collect about it." * 
 
 As far as the carroccio had a practical purpose, it 
 served, as Villani's statement indicates, as a rallying- 
 point for the infantry, but rather than a factor of military 
 usefulness it was an agent of pomp and patriotism, and 
 as such became the object of an almost religious venera- 
 tion on the part of the citizens. For this reason to lose 
 the carroccio was an intolerable disgrace, and for this 
 reason the Florentines at Montaperti, as we shall pres- 
 ently see, died around it in the same devoted spirit in 
 which crusaders perished fighting for the Holy Sepulchre. 
 
 As we approach the middle of the thirteenth century 
 we observe that the local issue between Florence and 
 Siena becomes bound up more inextricably than ever 
 with the ancient quarrel between papacy and empire. 
 Toward the end of thej-gign of Frederick IJ, that ex- 
 
 lj^was_a_prophecy of 
 
 __ 
 the modern world, the relations of this sovereign with the 
 
 * Villani, "Cronica," Libro VI, chap. 76. Interesting additions and cor- 
 rections of Villani's description in Davidsohn, pp. 691-92. Siena preserves an 
 interesting relic of its carroccio in the two tall, age-browned poles to be seen 
 in the cathedral, clamped against the piers of the cupola. These poles once 
 served as the masts which crowned the Sienese carroccio, and from them 
 waved proudly the standards of the city.
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 169 
 
 pope became embittered to the point of irreconcilability, 
 witrTtrVe consequence that the quarrel of the two heads 
 of society wasT reflected in every Italian town in fresh 
 and ever more ferocious broils between Guelphs and 
 Ghibellines. In Florence, in the year 1248, the Ghibel- 
 lines, encourage3^Kv^rederickTiirnseTf7^rove out tfce 
 Guelphs, but in 1251, after the death of Frederick, the 
 Guelphs acquiFed the ascendency and drove out the 
 GhiEellines. As soon as these (jhibelllne exiles allied 
 themselves with Ghibelline Siena, which they straight- 
 way proceeded to do, the occasion was supplied for 
 another war. It broke out in 1251, led to fresh Floren- 
 tine victories, and ended (1254) ignominiously for Siena 
 by a renewed recognition of the independence of the 
 coveted Montepulciano and Montalcino. Owing to the 
 temporary elimination of the empire from the affairs of 
 Italy, Siena felt so completely crushed that she presently 
 (1255) joined with Florence in what in the grotesque 
 jargon of the jurists was called "an eternal league of 
 love." In addition to the pledge to support one another 
 in the case of war, each city agreed neither to receive 
 within its walls nor to shelter in its district tlnefuorusciti, 
 that is, the rebels of the other. 
 
 Here was what, on the surface at least, looked like 
 unexampled harmony between the ancient rivals, but it 
 was rendered vain by the fact that it was not the result 
 of free choice but of victory and defeat. The test of the 
 genuineness of the new friendship came soon enough. 
 In the year 1258 the Florentine Ghibellines who, as 
 happened often enough, had been temporarily recon- 
 ciled to their Guelph opponents, grew restive. They 
 entertained hopes associated with a Hohenstaufen
 
 170 SIENA 
 
 revival, of which we shall presently hear, plotted unsuc- 
 cessfully against their city, and, finally, in order to save 
 their lives, decided on a general exodus. At the head of 
 the Florentine Ghibellines was the Uberti family, of 
 which the leading member was Manente, known as 
 Farinata. He, together with many relatives and 
 friends, made his way to Siena, and, contrary to solemn 
 treaty obligations, was eagerly made welcome. There- 
 with another casus belli was at hand. The Farinata 
 degli Uberti, who in clanking armor rode into Siena 
 with indignation against his native city smouldering 
 like a live coal in his heart, was the same person whom 
 Dante, meeting in Hell, has limned for us with his un- 
 erring stroke: he rose from his pit of flame, says the 
 admiring poet, with an action "come avesse lo inferno 
 in gran dis petto" What a man to know more of, if 
 only the documents were not silent or almost silent con- 
 cerning him! The new war led to Montaperti and its 
 glories. Hitherto for a period of one hundred and 
 fifty years the Sienese had been almost uninterruptedly 
 beaten. It was with them as with the Celts of whom 
 a countryman once tragically said: "they went forth 
 to war, but they always fell." And now Time brought 
 its revenge. 
 
 Before taking up the story of Montaperti * we must 
 cast a glance at the general politics of Italy as they had 
 developed after the deatk, in the year 1250, of Emperor 
 Frederick II. With the withdrawal of his hand from 
 the helm, the fortunes of the empire had sunk very low, 
 
 * On the campaign culminating in Montaperti consult Paoli, "La Bat- 
 taglia di Montaperti"; Langton Douglas, "A History of Siena," chap. VII; 
 and Davidsohn, "Geschichte von F.," II ', p. 460 ff.
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 171 
 
 and the church party might reasonably flatter itself that 
 its cause had triumphed. However, the dynasty of 
 the Hohenstaufen still survived, its main representative 
 being Frederick's acknowledged heir, Conrad, whom 
 the sovereign, even in his lifetime, had established in 
 Germany to rule that country in his name. Shortly 
 after the death of his father Conrad came across the Alps 
 to assume his Italian heritage of Sicily, but had hardly 
 received the crown when he died (1254). Even this 
 premature death did not dispose of the family, for 
 Conrad, on leaving Germany, had left behind a son and 
 heir, known to fame as Conradin. For the present 
 certainly, this lad, being still confined to the nursery, 
 was eliminated from the situation, and victorous Rome 
 was the undisputed mistress of the peninsula. So at 
 least thought the pope, making his reckoning without 
 another son of the great Frederick, Manfred, who was 
 treated as a negligible branch of the imperial tree, 
 because he had been born to the emperor out of wedlock. 
 On the death of Conrad, Manfred, his younger half- 
 brother, full of the pride of race, seized the Sicilian 
 crown for himself, drove the papal agents, who had come 
 to claim the prize, from his dominion, and by his bril- 
 liant successes against the forces of the pope, stimulated 
 the depressed Ghibellines throughout Italy to new life. 
 Without Manfred's unexpected triumphs it is not likely 
 that the Florentine Ghibellines would have plotted 
 against their city, or that Siena would have affronted 
 Florence by receiving, contrary to treaty, Farinata and 
 the other exiles within her walls. That act declared as 
 plain as words that the City of the Virgin, rising from 
 its disgrace, again assumed the championship of
 
 172 SIENA 
 
 Ghibellinism in Tuscany, and, putting its reliance in 
 Manfred and his mounting fortunes, was ready once 
 more to try conclusions with its Arno rival. To so bold 
 a provocation Florence could respond only with war. 
 
 The year 1230, was largely spent in preparations. 
 The earlier wars, as we have seen, had rarely been 
 re^trictedl^^ejialaDxLJikar^ncey^a^ many neighbors 
 wj^pr_without_th_eir iconsent, had heeri^sudcedinto^the 
 maelstrom. The present war, more than any ofits pred- 
 ecessors, affected all Tuscany, for the papacy and the 
 empire were involved, and with them every petty 
 
 -i i .I _______ ,- ------ ------ ^ i i ^^^ 
 
 Guelph and Ghibelline partisan. Florence could declare 
 
 tl\at she was fighting nnf nply for kerself^hiit 
 
 i L r Q- - -*9 ~ y 
 
 i L r 
 
 great cause of the church. By such an appeal she suc- 
 ceeded in cementing a league of Tuscan Guelphs, which 
 included the chief cities of the province, for Tuscany at 
 this time, owing to the continued success of the church, 
 had almost entirely gone over to the victorious side. 
 Even Pisa, traditionally attached to the empire, seems 
 to Jiave^ remained neutral on this occasion, owing to a 
 cloud of distrust which had arisen between it and 
 Manfred.^ Thus Siena stood, to all intents, alone. 
 Triumphant Florence, not satisfied with the preponder- 
 ance secured by her many Guelph alliances, did not fail 
 to make her usual appeal to the insidious agent, treason. 
 She incited Montalcino and Montepulciano to make 
 common cause with her, and successfully encouraged 
 Grosseto and the whole Maremma region to rise in 
 rebellion. Caught between the army of the Guelphs 
 and the disturbances in her own house, Siena's doom 
 seemed at hand. 
 
 In these straits she turned eagerly to King Manfred.
 
 The Palazzo Tolomei
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 173 
 
 Was she not fighting his battle and that of the Ghibelline 
 cause ? Would he permit the one strong pillar of his 
 throne in central Italy to be broken ? In May, 1259, 
 King Manfred and Siena entered into a league, by which 
 the young sovereign, in return for the oath of fealty and 
 obedience, took Siena under his protection. In sign of 
 good faith he sent northward, with a small troop of 
 German men-at-arms, his near relative, an experienced 
 warrior and a man of parts, Giordano, Count of San 
 Severino. In December Giordano rode through the 
 gate of Siena amidst the cheers of the citizens. Elated 
 by this evidence of the king's good will, the Sienese im- 
 mediately ordered an expedition against rebellious 
 Grosseto, and in February, 1260, after a short siege, 
 once more took the troublesome coast town in posses- 
 sion. They had followed up this success by laying 
 siege to Montemassi, another rebel town of the Marem- 
 ma, when they received the news that the Guelph army 
 had set out from Florence. The campaign had opened 
 in earnest. 
 
 On April 19, the Florentines with the carroccio in their 
 midst, and attended by allies who swelled the total 
 number of the army to thirty thousand men, marched 
 by the Elsa valley to meet the enemy. Two courses 
 were open to them : either to proceed to the Maremma 
 to support the rebellion there, or to strike straight at 
 Siena herself. Unable to make up their minds swiftly, 
 they let the favorable moment pass and turned against 
 Siena when it was too late to take the city by surprise. 
 On May 17, they appeared before the Porta Camollia 
 only to find the gate barred and the Sienese ready to 
 receive them. The very next day a small company of
 
 174 SIENA 
 
 Giordano's Germans made a sudden sortie, carrying 
 all before them until they came upon the bulk of the 
 Florentine army, which succeeded in repulsing them and 
 in capturing one of their banners. The jubilant Floren- 
 tines gave vent to their animosity by dragging the royal 
 standard through the mud of the highway. Still the 
 valor of the enemy must have made a deep impression 
 on them, for they immediately withdrew to a safe dis- 
 tance, raised the siege, if siege it may be called, and 
 before the end of May were once more safe at home. 
 Their triumphal entrance into Florence with Manfred's 
 captured banner flattered the love of "pompa e gran- 
 digia" characteristic of the age, but hardly concealed 
 the fact of the substantial failure of the expedition. The 
 first engagement of the year was over. 
 
 If the Sienese had won no decisive success in the 
 recent campaign they had at least gained time. And 
 time, in view of the double task upon their hands of 
 foreign war and local insurrections, was everything. 
 At this auspicious moment, spreading encouragement 
 and arousing an immense enthusiasm, additional 
 German men-at-arms arrived in the city, sent by Man- 
 fred and conducted to Tuscany by that valiant Sienese, 
 Provenzano Salvani, whose energy and courage made 
 him the natural leader of his countrymen in the hour of 
 peril. Accordingly the people resolved to improve the 
 lull in the war with Florence by renewed measures 
 against the rebels of the contado. Great in those 
 summer months was the Sienese activity, and great, too, 
 the Sienese success. Not only did the citizens once 
 more reduce the Maremma to obedience, but they 
 subjected the fields about Montepulciano to an awful
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 175 
 
 harrying by means of an expedition, equipped, we hear, 
 with one thousand new sickles to be tried upon the 
 standing corn, and their energy spread such terror that 
 they actually broke, in the month of July, the resistance 
 of the town. To this long chain of triumphs it remained 
 only to add the capture of the passionately desired and 
 passionately hated Montalcino. In the course of the 
 summer the hill-town was subjected to a vigorous siege. 
 
 It was the news that this stronghold was about to 
 fall* that stirred the Florentines to take the field once 
 more. Toward the end of August they left their city, 
 resolved to relieve and reprovision threatened Montal- 
 cino. As their way would take them past Siena, some 
 of the more sanguine leaders doubtless hoped to 
 frighten the enemy into submission by a show of 
 numbers, for well-equipped contingents from Prato, 
 Lucca, Volterra, Arezzo, Colle, San Gimignano, and 
 even distant Bologna, swelled the army of the Floren- 
 tines, as it poured out of the gates, while troops from 
 Orvieto and Perugia joined it on the march. A second 
 time within five months all Tuscany, ranked and in- 
 vincible, a host composed of probably no less than 
 seventy thousand fighting men, came sweeping down 
 upon Siena. 
 
 This time the Florentines took the shorter route, not 
 marching by the Elsa valley as in the spring, but follow- 
 ing the Val di Pesa across the Chianti range, and on 
 September 2 were at Pieve Asciata with many- 
 towered Siena full in sight on its high ridge, covered 
 with green vineyards interspersed with rows of silvery 
 
 * Hartwig, "Quellen und Forschungen," II, p. 309, is very convincing on 
 this point.
 
 176 SIENA 
 
 olives. Their exultation was immense, the victory in 
 their eyes as good as won. Only this profound assur- 
 ance can explain the course which they now followed, 
 for they dispatched two ambassadors to Siena to demand 
 in insolent terms the immediate surrender of the town, 
 and then moving leisurely across the Arbia, they pitched 
 camp on a plain called le Cortine, and awaited the re- 
 turn of their messengers. The plain was at the foot of 
 a barren range of chalk hills, which bore the name of 
 Monteselvoli and looked across the valley of the Arbia 
 to Siena. There we will leave them while we follow 
 their ambassadors into the city. 
 
 On arriving in the town the Florentine spokesmen 
 were led before the Twenty-four, the governors of the 
 city, and haughtily presented their message. In the 
 name of their countrymen they commanded that the 
 walls be torn down in several places, in order that the 
 Florentines might enter the city wherever they pleased, 
 and, further, they continued, "we desire to put a com- 
 mission in every terzo of Siena and to erect a fortress 
 in Camporeggi . . . ; and with regard to these mat- 
 ters we desire an answer, which not being satisfac- 
 tory, our army shall fall upon you with the greatest 
 cruelty."* Having dismissed the insolent envoys with 
 a dignified response, the Sienese governors began feverish 
 preparations of defense, encouraged at every step by the 
 splendid spirit shown by Giordano, King Manfred's 
 
 * My quotations on Montaperti are from two Sienese chronicles published 
 by Porri in his "Miscellanea Storica Sanese," in 1844. The first goes under 
 the name of Domenico Aldobrandini ; the second under that of Niccolo 
 Ventura. They are both of the fifteenth century and are patently elabora- 
 tions of an earlier lost original, probably contemporary or almost contempo- 
 rary with Montaperti
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 177 
 
 vicar, and his tried corps of eight hundred German 
 men-at-arms. A pressing need was money. But the 
 call for a loan had hardly gone forth when up rose in 
 the Council Salimbene Salimbeni and made offer of the 
 whole sum wanted 118,000 gold florins. Salimbene 
 was at the head of one of the greatest of the Sienese 
 merchant companies, which thus demonstrated in his 
 person that money had not destroyed their patriotism 
 nor undermined their courage. "And immediately the 
 said Salimbene went to his palace for the money and 
 put it in a cart covered with crimson cloth and decked 
 with branches of olive, and so brought the money to San 
 Cristofano,"* where the Twenty-four were in session. 
 Financial provision thus made and the Germans heart- 
 ened with double pay, the rulers appointed Buonaguida 
 Lucari as syndic with full powers. And he, seized 
 with a sudden inspiration, addressed himself to the vast 
 concourse which had gathered in the piazza before the 
 church, inviting his fellow-citizens to attend him in a 
 procession to the duomo, in order to deliver the city, 
 in its hour of need, into the keeping of the Virgin Mary. 
 How Buonaguida stripped himself to his shirt and with 
 his girdle round his neck, like a halter, and, followed by 
 the whole town crying misericordia, misericordia, made 
 his way to the cathedral, and how the bishop and clergy 
 received him at the high altar, and how the act of dedi- 
 cation was effected, we have followed in another con- 
 nection. "And they made peace with one another, and 
 he who had been most offended sought out his enemy to 
 make peace with him."f And thus passed Thursday 
 the second of September. 
 
 * "Ventura," p. 39. t "Ventura," p. 45.
 
 178 SIENA 
 
 Early the next morning the Twenty-four sent three 
 heralds, one to each terzo, who ordered the army of 
 citizens straight to make ready. Then every man 
 joined his company, and the companies gathered ac- 
 cording to terzi, as was the custom, and presently the 
 host marched out of the gate of Santo Viene, first the 
 terzo of San Martino under its banner, then the terzo 
 of Citta under its banner, and finally, the terzo of 
 Camellia under its ancient standard of pure white; 
 and this, says the chronicler, "gave much comfort, for it 
 seemed like the mantle of the Virgin Mary." Thus 
 passed the general muster of the Sienese strengthened 
 by a few allies, such as King Manfred's Germans, Count 
 Aldobrandino of the powerful Maremma family, who at 
 Giordano's solicitation had joined the ranks of the 
 Ghibellines, and Farinata with the Florentine exiles. 
 As no city of any importance had sided with Siena, the 
 Ghibelline host could hardly have exceeded twenty 
 thousand horse and foot, leaving it numerically in con- 
 siderable inferiority to the army of the Guelphs. The 
 leader of the citizen forces was probably, according to 
 the terms of the constitution, the potesta, one Francesco 
 Troghisio, who owed his appointment to King Manfred, 
 although, curiously enough, the chronicles agree in 
 committing the chief command of the Sienese to Count 
 Aldobrandino, hardly to be styled a consistent friend of 
 the commune.* As commander-in-chief of the whole 
 host of Ghibellines figured, of course, King Manfred's 
 vicar in Tuscany, the valiant Count Giordano. 
 
 * According to a theory, defended by Hartwig, II, p. 310, the potesta was 
 not in command at Montaperti, because with another section of the Sienese 
 army he was conducting the <yege of Montalcino.
 
 Conio o 
 
 ' Vagliali 
 
 Probable southern boundarj' of the combined County of Florence- 
 Hiesole 
 
 The boundary between Florence and Siena as claimed by Florence 
 and drawn by the treaty (lodo) of 1203 
 
 The CHIANTI BOUNDARY between FLORENCE and SIENA 
 
 Battle of MONTAPERTI
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 179 
 
 As the day was already far advanced the army pro- 
 ceeded only a short distance beyond Siena to the low 
 range of Monteropoli. There it pitched camp, with 
 the enemy at the foot of Monteselvoli in full sight and 
 separated from him only by the shallow stream of the 
 Arbia and its valley. The next morning the Ghibelline 
 leaders were resolved to launch their attack. That night 
 while the Florentine camp was kept in constant alarm 
 by the sudden swoop of small bands of horsemen, the 
 Sienese rested quietly. Then it was that a white mist 
 was seen to float over the host. Many anxious people, 
 sisters and wives, peering into the darkness from the 
 ramparts of Siena wondered at this phenomenon, "and 
 some said that it is the smoke of the great fires lit by the 
 Sienese folk. Others said: 'Not so, for smoke would 
 drift, and this rests fast as you see; surely it is other 
 than smoke.' Still others said : ' It is the mantle of our 
 mother, the Virgin Mary.'" * So passed the night of 
 the third of September. 
 
 When the next day dawned the Sienese commanders 
 made ready for battle. Behind the camp of the Floren- 
 tines the sun had not yet risen and the barren chalk 
 hills beyond the Arbia, at the foot of which the tents of 
 the enemy were spread, looked bleak as a desert in the 
 cold light of morning. Three corps, with a fourth to 
 act as reserve, were rapidly formed. The first, led by 
 Count Arras, Giordano's seneschal, was ordered to 
 make a wide detour and lie quietly in ambush behind 
 the hills under the Florentine left until the favorable 
 moment came. This was an unusual piece of tactics 
 for those simple, forthright days of the military art, and 
 
 * "Aldobrandini," p. 10.
 
 180 SIENA 
 
 probably decided the issue. The second troop was led 
 by Count Giordano, the third by Count Aldobrandino, 
 and the reserve by Messer Niccolo da Bigozzi, a worthy 
 Sienese. Then before the order to attack was given, the 
 wise quartermasters provided a copious breakfast of 
 various kinds of roast meat and "perfectly matured" 
 wines and the finest bread. " And the Germans danced a 
 beautiful dance to the accompaniment of a song which 
 in our language began : soon shall we see what hap may 
 fall.*** Thus encouraged with feast and music the 
 Ghibellines were no longer to be restrained, but pres- 
 ently poured across the Arbia, and in passionate haste 
 but excellent order began to mount the slopes of Monte- 
 selvoli, rushing straight upon the Florentines. These, 
 ranged by their leaders along the crest, awaited the 
 attack from their point of vantage. 
 
 Just as Giordano's cavalry, which held the van, was 
 about to open battle, behold my lord Harry of Asten- 
 berg make his way to the side of his captain and "with 
 deep bow pronounce these words: 'All our house of 
 Astenberg is privileged by the Holy Empire to strike 
 the first blow in every battle, and this favor, I pray, you 
 grant unto me.' And it was granted. Whereupon my 
 lord Walter, nephew of the aforesaid lord Harry, dropped 
 from his horse to earth, and on his knees spoke thus to 
 his uncle: 'Whoever receives favors should be disposed 
 to grant them. Be pleased that I, in your stead, be the 
 first to lower lance.' Which my lord Harry conceded, 
 and kissed and blessed him. And my lord Walter 
 leaped on his horse, and thanked his uncle for the honor, 
 and put his helmet on his head, and was off at the in- 
 
 * "Ventura," p. 61.
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 181 
 
 stant";* and after him rushed lord Harry with Count 
 Giordano and his Germans, and after them came 
 Count Aldobrandino with his troop, and finally all the 
 people of Siena on foot shouting amain alia morte, 
 alia morte. Thus, the sun looking on from the east, 
 the battle was engaged on Saturday, September the 
 fourth. 
 
 Battles in those days were usually decided by sheer 
 push of men on horse and foot. What happened on the 
 slopes of Monteselvoli during the long hours while the 
 sun rose to the zenith and sank westward toward Siena 
 may be left to the imagination. Deeds of blood were 
 done, deeds of savage courage which fill many pages of 
 glowing description in the old chroniclers. Suffice it for 
 us that the day was probably decided by the turning 
 movement of Count Arras. After an interval, when the 
 two swaying lines of battle had had time to grow ex- 
 hausted, he rose from his ambush and suddenly fell 
 upon the rear of the Florentines. An immediate con- 
 fusion ensued. The Guelph horse was overwhelmed, 
 and presently the great standard, carried by Messer 
 Jacopo de'Pazzi, fell to earth; down it went by act of 
 foulest treason, says the Florentine, Villani, unwilling 
 to believe that his people could ever be beaten in fair 
 fight by mere provincial Sienese, and convinced and 
 ready to convince others with copious detail that Pazzi 
 had his hand hewn off by a false friend at his back. 
 And Dante, another patriotic Florentine, holding the 
 same belief, met the traitor, one Bocca degli Abbati, 
 frozen in the ice of deepest hell, and struck his foot into 
 his face.f Treason or no treason, the attack of the 
 
 * "Aldobrandini," p. 19. f "Inferno," XXXII, 76 /.
 
 182 SIENA 
 
 Ghibelline cavalry drove the Florentine men-at-arms 
 from the field. Discouraged, seized with panic, they 
 dug their spurs into their horses, leaving the Florentine 
 foot to save themselves as best they could. With 
 splendid courage the Arno commoners gathered 
 around their carroccio, blindly resolved to save the 
 honor of the day. But the Sienese, rejuvenated by 
 ,the consciousness of victory, swarmed about them 
 from all sides. In the gulches of the Malena, a 
 small stream which empties into the Arbia, a slaughter 
 ensued which colored the water red and piled the 
 corpses in pyramids. "And how many died God 
 knows, for they were not heard when they shouted : I 
 surrender. . . . Nor did it avail to call for aid upon 
 San Zenobio and Santa Reparata" home saints of the 
 Florentines, plainly poor stuff compared with Siena's 
 Virgin "for the Sienese slaughtered them as butchers 
 slaughter their cattle on Holy Friday."* At last the 
 Ghibelline leaders took compassion, and gave orders 
 that the butchery cease, and that who would, be taken 
 captive. Whereupon the Florentines in their joy bound 
 one another in order to save their lives. And to supply 
 the touch of comedy which is certain to intrude upon 
 the gravest moments of the human drama, Usiglia, 
 the ancient vivandiere, took and bound with her head- 
 band (benda) thirty-six prisoners and led them off to 
 camp like a string of geese. Ten thousand enemies 
 or thereabouts lay stretched upon the field, while 
 twenty thousand prisoners and untold quantities of 
 arms, tents, and provisions fell into the hands of the 
 victors. 
 
 * "Ventura," p. 68.
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 183 
 
 On the other side of the Malena, across which a 
 handful of Guelphs had made their escape, took place 
 the closing episode. There on a hill, crowned with a 
 castle known as Montaperti, the weary fugitives made 
 a last stand, but before night fell they accepted the offer 
 of the victors and surrendered at discretion. The 
 inconspicuous mound, at the foot of which the battle 
 expired, has given its name to the historic conflict. 
 
 All that day an immense suspense hung over Siena 
 deserted by the male half of its inhabitants. The 
 bishop, surrounded by the clergy and the women, prayed 
 or moved in solemn procession from church to church. 
 The less contemplative chiefly old men and children 
 gathered at the foot of the tower of the Marescotti, from 
 the top of which Cerreto Ceccolini, the drummer, spying 
 eastward, gave out the news. The battle was waged 
 only three miles away as the crow flies, and Cerreto's 
 expert vision detected every capital movement among 
 the barren, sun-lit hills. Beating the drum at each 
 announcement he shouted: "They mount the slopes of 
 Monteselvoli; our line gives way, no, it is theirs"; and, 
 finally, "their banners fall, they are broken, they are 
 broken ! " A day, we can fancy, far more terrible to those 
 left behind than to them who stood in the heat of the 
 fray. 
 
 That night the victorious host rested in its old camp 
 on Monteropoli, but the next day, Sunday, the fifth, 
 rising early, it wound back to Siena to make a triumphal 
 entry by the ancient gate of Santo Viene. By this gate, 
 one hundred and fifty years before, the bones of Sant' 
 Ansano had been brought from their resting-place, 
 hardly a bow's shot from the bloody battle-field, back
 
 184 SIENA 
 
 to the city he had loved. Pious songs of gladness had 
 greeted his home-coming; the victors, returning from 
 Montaperti, where they had staked their wives and 
 children on a throw of the dice, brought and loosed an 
 ecstasy of joy. At the head of the line came one of the 
 Florentine ambassadors who had made the haughty 
 demand for immediate submission. He sat bound, 
 face about, on an ass, from the tail of which dangled, 
 bespattered with the mud of the highway, the great 
 standard of the commune of Florence. Then came 
 Giordano and his Germans, crowned with olive and 
 singing clear songs in their own tongue; close behind 
 followed the victorious carroccio, after which trailed in 
 huddled groups thousands of anguished prisoners; and, 
 finally, amidst wild jubilation, marched past the citizen- 
 soldiers of Siena, the fathers, sons, and brothers of the 
 intoxicated multitude. The host went first to the 
 cathedral to return thanks to the Virgin for the protec- 
 tion she had afforded her people, and then for three days 
 the victory was celebrated with prayers and games and 
 every form of joy and gratitude. 
 
 It remained to reap the harvest of the unparalleled 
 success. On September 8 Montalcino surrendered. 
 A deputation of citizens to the number of four hundred 
 presented themselves in the Campo of Siena and with 
 abject mien asked for mercy. Montepulciano had 
 already yielded in July, some months before Montaperti, 
 but, exasperated by the hardness of the victors, it rose 
 once more in revolt. The action, hopeless under the cir- 
 cumstances, led to a new siege and a new surrender. 
 On July 5, 1261, an instrument was signed, by which 
 the town agreed to offer annually, on the occasion of
 
 o 
 
 w
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 185 
 
 the August festival, a candle of fifty pounds, and to 
 permit the Sienese to build a fortress within the walls. 
 Long before the final collapse of Montepulciano a cruel 
 fate had overtaken Florence. Twelve days after 
 Montaperti Count Giordano entered the Arno city and 
 turned its government over to the Ghibelline exiles who 
 rode in his train Count Guido Novello, Farinata degli 
 Uberti, and their associates. There was no resistance; 
 the remaining Guelph leaders, who by flight had saved 
 themselves from the ruin of Montaperti, had, on Gior- 
 dano's approach, abandoned the city without a struggle. 
 The Florentine Ghibellines, raised once more to power, 
 had, of course, to show themselves thankful to their 
 protectors, the commune of Siena. On November 25 
 they signed a treaty renouncing almost all the advanced 
 positions which Florence had gained during the last 
 hundred years, and by which she threatened to strangle 
 her south-Tuscan rival. The treaty not only cancelled 
 all Florentine claims in Montalcino and Montepulciano, 
 which thus at last were delivered over to Siena, but it 
 gave Siena new guarantees along her northern border 
 by obliging Florence to withdraw her hand from Men- 
 sano, Casole, Staggia, and Poggibonsi a line of points 
 which controlled the upper valley of the Elsa. The 
 document, to put its results in a word, realized the long 
 standing ambition of Siena to govern its own county 
 without challenge from a rival. When we consider that 
 it marks no effort to partition the territory of Florence 
 in order permanently to reduce the Arno city from its 
 high rank, we may even find the terms of the peace de- 
 cidedly moderate. A group of uncompromising Ghibel- 
 lines indeed, led by Count Giordano, were for levelling
 
 186 SIENA 
 
 Florence, the secular enemy of the empire, with the 
 earth, but Farinata degli Uberti rose in the council of the 
 Ghibellines at this suggestion and, with his hand laid 
 ominously on his sword, declared that he would defend 
 his native city from such a fate with his last breath. 
 Thus Florence survived, without being even notably 
 diminished in its territory, but for the time being the 
 proud town was unquestionably subordinated to Siena, 
 since Siena enjoyed an undisputed primacy in Tuscany. 
 
 The sweeping victory of Montaperti soon put an end 
 to Guelph resistance thrgu^ouF^central Italy. Town 
 after town, following the_Florejritine_ example7~purged 
 itself of its Guelph faction, declared for^ Manfred and 
 Ghibeflin7sh% and "Joined the league headed by King 
 Manfred's vtcar"arrd^th"e"Sienese. Lucca was the last 
 to yield, Fut~'wTTen"th"ltR'e~yieair r "l264 the Lucchese 
 Guelphs, despairing of ~f urtheT~Fesistance,~ Y63e~sa3Iy 
 across the Apennines to seek sheTterTn friendly Bologna, 
 all Tuscany was gathered^ under the twin banner of 
 Manfred and Siena. 
 
 AsjtTie rise was sudden, so was the overthrow. Three 
 blows, falling in swTFt succession, sH;attered~trie young 
 paramountcy of the city of the Virgin, and shattered it 
 forever. The Urst was the Fall oF~MaTiirecf. The 
 implacable pope, unable to support tHe 
 
 ber of the hated race of the Hohenstaufen almost under 
 the walls of Rome, presently invited Charles of Anjou, 
 brother of the French king, to cross the Alps and seize 
 the Sicilian crQwji_ibxJiimseJ In 1265 Charles fol- 
 lowed the summons, was invested by Pope Clement IV 
 with the southern kingdom, and as a soldier of the 
 church, with the cross upon his shoulder, set out to
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 187 
 
 destroy "the viper's brood." In the battle of Bene- 
 ventum, fought on February 26, 1266, fortune declared 
 for Anjou, and Manfred himself died a death not un- 
 worthy of his race. For two days the victor searched 
 the battlefield for the body of his enemy. At last it 
 was discovered under a heap of the dead, naked and 
 hacked almost past recognition. To effect its identifi- 
 cation it was laid out before the victorious Charles 
 seated among his courtiers, while a number of captive 
 barons were dragged from prison into the usurper's 
 presence. Among them was the great-hearted Giordano, 
 Manfred's cousin and his some-time vicar in Tuscany. 
 Six years had passed since his star stood over Monta- 
 perti; six years of good and evil fortune had brought him 
 here to the bier of his liege. The other barons on being 
 interrogated maintained a timorous attitude, but when, 
 says Villani, the turn of Giordano came, his face dropped 
 into his hands and he sobbed aloud, ome, ome, signor 
 mio * a cry of the wounded heart that almost strips 
 that scene of horror of all unloveliness! 
 
 Beneventum ended the predominance of the Ghibel- 
 line league of Tuscany. The Guelphs returned to 
 Florence, the Ghibellines were driven out, and Siena, 
 head of the Ghibellines, found her path beset with 
 enemies. Nevertheless she maintained her faith in the 
 imperial cause. When the last offspring of the Suabian 
 house, Conradin, a lad of fifteen, appeared in the year 
 1267 in Italy, she received him with loyal rejoicing and 
 sped him with many a prayer upon his southward 
 enterprise. With Ghibelline supporters collected from 
 all parts of the peninsula, he tried the hard feat of dis- 
 
 * Villani, " Cronica," Libra VII, chap. 9.
 
 188 SIENA 
 
 lodging the stout Charles of Anjou from the Sicilian 
 kingdom, and met a fate worse than the worst fears 
 which haunted his despairing mother on his setting out. 
 On August 23, 1268, he was defeated by Anjou near 
 Tagliacozzo, escaped from that bloody field only to be 
 sold to the victor by a traitor, and a few months later, 
 on the present market square of Naples, paid for his 
 daring with his head. 
 
 Tagliacozzo was the second blow which staggered 
 Siena and the Ghibellines. The third and last fell in 
 less than a year's time: its name is Colle. 
 
 Even the disaster of Tagliacozzo did not turn Siena 
 from her Ghibelline convictions. The leader of the 
 Twenty-four, the guiding spirit of Siena ever since the 
 rise of Manfred, had been Provenzano of the noble 
 house of the Salvani. In the summer of 1260 we saw 
 him lead, amidst rejoicing, a troop of Manfred's horse 
 into the city. He had succeeded in popularizing 
 Ghibellinism in Siena and, with Ghibellinism, himself. 
 His name looms large in the public records of the day, 
 but, as usual, Dante with a line comes nearer to making 
 him live before our eyes, than repeated entries in official 
 documents. He tells us * colui . . . Toscana sonb 
 tutta, all Tuscany rang with his name, and after this 
 introduction to the blare of trumpets, sketches that 
 imperishable picture of the proud nobleman stooping to 
 collect alms upon the Campo from every passer-by, in 
 order to achieve the ransom of a friend languishing in 
 the prisons of Anjou. While Provenzano dominated 
 the government of Siena, the town was not likely to sur- 
 render its convictions, in spite of the fact that the Guelph 
 
 * "Purg," XI, p.
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 189 
 
 tide was steadily mounting. Tuscany had already for 
 the most part subjected itself to the pope and to his 
 representative, King Charles of Anjou, but Pisa and 
 Siena, with the courage of despair, continued to pin 
 their faith to the lost imperial cause. Naturally the 
 exultant Guelph faction believed that the time had come 
 to bring every Ghibelline stronghold to the ground. 
 From Colle on the Elsa, which was held by the Guelphs 
 for King Charles, and where some of the Guelph 
 fuorusciti of Siena had taken residence, they harried 
 the country around Siena and undertook incursions 
 which brought them to the very walls of the town. 
 It goes, of course, without saying that Ghibelline Siena 
 had a Guelph faction among her nobility, just as Guelph 
 Florence had a Ghibelline one. In June, 1269, the 
 government, bent on punishing the repeated Guelph im- 
 pertinences, dispatched Provenzano with an army against 
 Colle. At the news the Florentines, supported by some 
 French men-at-arms, hurried up, and in the ensuing 
 encounter (June 17, 1269) the Guelphs wiped out the 
 disgrace of Montaperti. Provenzano himself was slain, 
 and his head, set on a pike, was carried in triumph 
 through the streets of Colle.* 
 
 Colle destroyed the Sienese fighting force almost as 
 effectively as Montaperti had destroyed that of Florence. 
 
 * It is difficult to refrain from repeating in this connection a story of 
 Provenzano told by the incomparable Villani. The chronicler believed, as a 
 good Florentine, that Provenzano was in league with the devil and tells 
 (Libro VII, chap. 31) how Satan enticed him into the Colle expedition with 
 an ambiguous prophecy. Of course Provenzano insisted exclusively on the 
 favorable reading, and was promptly caught on the other horn of the Delphic 
 prognostication. Having recounted all which the historian adds gravely 
 by way of warning to his readers: "Wherefore it is folly to put your faith 
 in the words of the devil."
 
 190 SIENA 
 
 For some months Siena continued to offer a despairing 
 resistance, until in the summer of 1270 the French 
 vicar who represented King Charles in Tuscany com- 
 pelled the city to take back its Guelph exiles. Presently 
 the Ghibelline nobles were driven from the town, the 
 government of the Twenty-four, identified with Ghibel- 
 linism, dissolved itself, and Siena, without great violence, 
 under the steady pressure of ineluctable fate, joined the 
 Guelph league. It remained for a Florentine to raise 
 the epitaph over the fallen foe. With calm impudence 
 Villani rendered the significance of Colle in the following 
 words: "The Florentines drove the Ghibellines from 
 Siena and pacified the two communes. They have 
 remained friends and companions in arms ever since. 
 And thus ended the war between Florence and Siena 
 which had lasted so long a time." 
 
 In this manner Siena turned Guelph, and as long as 
 she remained Guelph was doomed to rest in dependence 
 on Florence, as Florence during the brief ascendency 
 of Ghibellinism had been dependent on Siena. His- 
 torians have been inclined to lament the conversion of 
 Siena to a political programme which put her in an 
 inferior position. As if it could have been avoided! 
 Siena yielded to 77 avd\Ki], the great god Necessity. It 
 takes no profound insight to recognize that the success 
 ojf^Florence was due to something more than to a victory 
 in the field, tojomething more even than to the triumph 
 
 of the rhiirrlv, j-hpjally r>f plnrpnrp, oypr the empire. 
 
 Siena's ally. The success of Florence was secured 
 
 -.1 .. .I L . f^^ -.r-i-f .--. in--- - ... -..!-..,-.-. .-..- m _-. -_-- - __ _-. .- -_.._. ! 
 
 primarily by her economic advantages, buttressed and 
 affirmed by~the haH, inflexible, and yet adventurous 
 temper of her citizens. Siena went down under a decree
 
 THE RIVALRY WITH FLORENCE 191 
 
 of fate, but she went down heroically in company with 
 the_empire ancTtKe~Rohenstaiifen, in whose compelling 
 tragedy her name shines out with the immortal candor 
 attaching to fidelity and sacrifice.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE OF THE FOURTEENTH 
 
 CENTURY: THE NINE, THE TWELVE, 
 
 AND THE REFORMERS 
 
 WE have seen that the fall of the great Ghibelline 
 'family, the Hohenstaufen, brought_wjtli.it 
 the ovefthrow^or~Ghihel1inism jtselT Colle, 
 the special blow levelled at Tuscan Ghibellinism, was 
 the inevitable consequence of Beneventum and Taglia- 
 cozzo. After the defeat of 1269 Siena was obliged to 
 become Guelph if she would continue to exist, but the 
 transition was an uneasy and bitter experience. The 
 most numerous faction of her nobility, by virtue of long 
 association and feudal prejudices, held Ghibelline con- 
 victions, and the common people, too, inclined to the 
 imperial side, from sentiments deriving from such war- 
 like memories as Montaperti, but chiefly from the ancient 
 and ineradicable hatred of Guelph Florence. For these 
 reasons Siena was a long time settling down to a steady 
 Guelph policy. The Ghibelline and Guelph factions 
 among the nobility vented their spite on one another in 
 murders attended by the usual confiscations and banish- 
 ments until the city and contado were reduced to a state 
 of chronic disorder. This confused situation at last 
 obliged the mezza gente, the trading middle class, to 
 assert itself. Having reached the conclusion that the 
 
 192
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 193 
 
 conditions necessary for the successful prosecution of 
 business could be secured only by a sincere adhesion 
 to the Guelph party, these people had adopted Guelph 
 views. They waited with some patience for the nobility 
 to adjust itself to the new situation, but when the feuds 
 of the great families imperilled the whole social structure 
 they undertook to act without further delay. In the 
 year 1277, as we noted in a previous chapter, they de- 
 clared the grandi ineligible to office, reserving all the 
 state dignities to themselves. By concentrating the 
 power in their own hands they hoped to be able to over- 
 awe the nobility and secure peace. For a time there 
 was a fluctuation in the number of men on the committee 
 entrusted by the victors with the executive power, but 
 the choice settled at last upon nine. Although the 
 mezza gente was really in control from the time 
 when the exclusion bill against the nobility went into 
 force, the regular and continuous rule of I Nove 
 Governatori e Difenditorl del Comune e del Popolo di 
 Siena dates from the year 1292. Before following 
 the incidents connected with their long reign we 
 must scrutinize more closely the foundation of their 
 power. 
 
 We know that the main political struggle of the thir- 
 teenth century, the century which closed with the tri- 
 umph of the Nine, had Iain between the nobility, origin- 
 ally in possession of the power, and a party of the people^ 
 organized expressly for the conquest of the commune; 
 and we know further that with each decade the nobility 
 had been shut within more and more narrow limits, 
 while the influence of the people had grown in propor- 
 tion as their enemies had declined. The exclusion of
 
 194 SIENA 
 
 the nobility, therefore, in 1277 from political honors, 
 bore to a certain extent the character of a logical evolu- 
 tion, and logical, too, we are ready to declare, would 
 have been a democratic regime conducted by the whole 
 people. However, the facts do not accord with this 
 last deduction, for with the fall of the grandi not the 
 people, but only a section of the people, harvested the 
 fruits of victory. The reason is not far to seek. The 
 people's party societas populi which challenged the 
 nobility, beginning approximately with the year 1213, 
 was a union of the local military companies, each of 
 which corresponded in the main to a ward or contrada 
 of the city. Thus the people's party was in effect the 
 Sienese army of pedites or foot-soldiers, but though in 
 many respects a vigorous body, it was, in those days of 
 great material poverty and small political experience, 
 inevitably manipulated by its leading citizens, the well- 
 to-do members of the guilds. In the turbulent times 
 following the Ghibelline disaster at Colle the rich popo- 
 lani stepped forward, and favored by the party which 
 had been behind them for half a century, seized the 
 reins of power. Then, enthroned on high, they forgot 
 the ladder by which they had mounted. An act of re- 
 volting ingratitude if you will, but not without a parallel 
 in the history of other nations, ancient and modern, and 
 particularly characteristic of the young Italian republics. 
 The mediaeval city was, as we have seen, an agglomera- 
 tion of diverse groups, which had formed a commune 
 or state in the correct recognition of growing common 
 interests. They had formed this commune hesitatingly, 
 moving cautiously among a host of long-standing 
 rivalries and new-born jealousies, but, the commune
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 195 
 
 once formed, each constituent group strove to acquire 
 as large a share in the new creation as possible. The 
 nobles, a social group determined by wealth and birth, 
 appropriated the commune first, until dispossessed by 
 the gradual encroachment of the people. But the peo- 
 ple themselves, far from being homogeneous in the sense 
 of a modern citizen body, were composed of diverse 
 grousand factions, each older than the commune and 
 commanding a ready and profound allegiance: such 
 groups were, with respect~to~the church, the parishes: 
 witTf respect to the army ,~ the military companies; and 
 wjth_jresrjecrito^mdustry ancl commefce, the arti or 
 guilds. These last, the guilds, were of all the various 
 groups among the people the most powerful and most 
 enterprising, and of their number the great merchant 
 guild, together with the one industrial union of any 
 consequence, the wool guild, held an easy preemi- 
 nence. These men, merchants and manufacturers, 
 the mezza gente as they called themselves, deliber- 
 ately seized the government under the circumstances 
 which we have traced, and with the exclusive spirit 
 of the age, converted the offices into a private monop- 
 oly. Not only the nobles but the professional classes 
 of lawyers and doctors, as well as such petty guilds- 
 men as butchers, bakers, barbers, and carpenters, 
 and, of course, the proletariat of the day-laborers, 
 were declared ineligible to rule Siena. The men 
 with money to lend and notes to discount, constituting 
 the capitalist class, calmly affirmed that the com- 
 mune, the eternal object of contending ambitions, was 
 theirs. 
 
 Listen to what the victors have to say on this matter
 
 196 SIENA 
 
 of eligibility in the new constitution * which they im- 
 posed on the state. Under the heading, Of Them Who 
 May Be Of The Nine, we read: "Also, that the Signori 
 Nove . . . should and must belong to the merchants 
 of the city of Siena, that is, to the middle class. "f And 
 to define this middle class we read in the next article: 
 "Also, it is decreed and ordered that no nobleman of 
 the city of Siena, nor any knight, nor any judge, nor any 
 notary, nor any physician of the city or district may be 
 of the number of the Signori Nove."J And still another 
 article declared that all Ghibellines shall be excluded 
 from the supreme magistracy. In view of which 
 statutory provisions a profound student arrives at the 
 following summary conclusion: "The leaders of the 
 wool-guild, a few rich members of the other guilds: 
 such in all probability were the collaborators of the 
 powerful merchants, who suffered no other guild to be 
 represented in the government."^ 
 
 In their uncontrolled greed of power the merchants 
 did not hesitate to discard the whole theoretical basis of 
 the early commune. We have seen that the sovereignty, 
 which originally rested, at least in theory, with the people 
 
 * The Constitution of 1309-10, a document which rivals in importance the 
 Constitution of 1262, has been published by the Archivio di Stato in Siena 
 (" II Costituto del Comune di Siena." Volgarizzato nel MCCCIX-MCCCX, 
 Siena, 1903). Just as the Constitution of 1262 unfolds the picture of the 
 state under the Twenty-four, that of 1309-10 conveys a full knowledge of the 
 political, social, and judicial conditions under the Nine. A part of this con- 
 stitution, accompanied with sound observations, has also been published by 
 Luchaire under the name, "Le statut des neuf gouverneurs et defenseurs 
 de la commune de Sienne; Extrait des Melanges d'Archeologie et d'His- 
 toire publics par PEcole fran9aise de Rome," T. xxi. Consult also the same 
 author's "Documenti per la Storia dei Rivolgimenti Politici del Comune di 
 Siena dal 1354 al 1369." 
 
 f'Distinctio," VI, 5. J "Dist.," VI, 6. "Dist.," VI, 7. 
 
 U Luchaire, "Documenti," etc., p. XXI.
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 197 
 
 assembled in parliament, was with the advance of the 
 consular regime centred in the General Council, called 
 the Council of the Bell. The Council of the Bell not 
 only made the laws, but elected the officials of the state, 
 and subjected them to its control. Such powers in a 
 numerous body and, because of its numbers, difficult to 
 control, were far from suiting the merchants: they 
 vested the sovereignty in the Nine, another way, of 
 course, of vesting it in themselves. To preserve equal- 
 ity among their number and keep the authority in circu- 
 lation they limited the term of service of the Nine to two 
 months. Examine carefully these prerogatives which 
 appear from a perusal of the constitution: the Nine 
 named their own successors; they appointed all the 
 leading officials of the state; their resolutions were law; 
 the potesta and captain were obliged to carry out their 
 orders; they elected the members of the General 
 Council, suffering naturally only partisans; and, finally, 
 they appointed the officers (sworn Guelphs and clients!) 
 of the military companies. Was it possible to carry the 
 principle of political exclusiveness further ? And do not 
 the enumerated privileges create a magistracy of prac- 
 tically absolute power ? The only possible conclusion, 
 in the face of such functions as the above, is that 
 the Nine constituted what we may call a distributed 
 tyranny. In spite of the delusive drapery of certain 
 persisting popular forms, as, for example, the Council 
 of the Bell, we recognize in this constitution that prin- 
 ciple of government which, in the more concise and 
 evolved form of the power of a single man, under- 
 mined the democracy of all the free communes of 
 Italy and established its throne on their ruin: a
 
 198 SIENA 
 
 deeply regrettable development, as Sismondi and 
 other generous hearts have declared in moving 
 tones; but, what is more to the point, in an objective 
 analysis of Italian society, an inevitable development 
 under the group system of the Middle Age. As long as 
 an association or a league of associations aimed at a 
 monopoly of the state to the exclusion of all others, 
 there was bound to be war to the knife, and of this 
 social war with its tyranny of fluctuating groups the only 
 possible solution was the military tyranny of One. 
 
 The merchants reaped j^s t hey had sown. They were 
 strongly intrenched in power, they were watchful as 
 Argus, but they could not escape the common lot of 
 oligarchs. Conspiracy followed conspiracy, chiefly 
 among the nobles and the more enterprising of the ex- 
 cluded guilds. However, though repression became one 
 of the constant preoccupations of the merchants, they 
 did not fail to engage in constructive activities also. 
 They constituted, when all is said, the wealthiest and 
 most progressive element in the city, and tirelessly 
 busied themselves, and with notable success, in prob- 
 lems of public improvement. To these and other 
 factors, which piece together the historical picture of 
 the period of the Nine, I shall now give attention, draw- 
 ing as far as possible, for purposes of illustration, upon 
 the pages of the Sienese chronicles and, especially, upon 
 that fascinating narrative, ascribed to Andrea Dei and 
 Agnolo di Tura.* 
 
 First of all, I shall take up the relations entertained 
 by the Nine with the empire, and, more particularly, 
 with their neighbors of Tuscany and with Florence. 
 
 * Muratori, "Scriptores," XV. "Cronica Sanese."
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 199 
 
 Almost everything in this connection is said when I 
 repeat ^hf^the^ Nine were Guelphs, and that the 
 Guelph faith was a fundamental feature of their policy. 
 Therefore, under their_rule jiena was ofrlcialiy a link 
 which, with other linksjike Florence, Lucca, Colle anJ 
 the rest, made a chain binding Tuscany to the church. 
 This polite view of the character of the Guelph League 
 as an organization founded to support religion and the 
 pope, while saving the susceptibilities of the members, 
 did not alter the fact that the alliance was really a crea- 
 tion of Florence, and as such served specific Florentine 
 ends. About the same time that the Nine assumed the 
 power of Siena, the mezza gente or great merchants had 
 taken possession of the offices in Florence, thus proving 
 a certain general resemblance in the social conditions 
 of the two towns. But this partial identity did not keep 
 differences from announcing themselves which sprang 
 largely from opportunity and national temper. As if it 
 were not enough that the conditions of mediaeval trade 
 gave the Arno valley a natural and assured preeminence 
 in central Italy, the Sienese grew timid at the very 
 moment when the Florentines unfolded a splendid 
 audacity. Above all, the sons of the Red Lily followed 
 tenaciously the immemorial policy of commercial cap- 
 tains: their sleeping and their waking thoughts were 
 concerned with the conquest of new markets. Pos- 
 sessed of this spirit it is small wonder that they manipu- 
 lated the Guelph League for their own purposes, 
 practically dictating the Sienese foreign policy and dis^ 
 posing of the Sienese military forces as if they were their 
 owrL It this was a tnHe humiliating, the Nine might 
 consider that they received compensation in the form
 
 200 SIENA 
 
 of political security, for, while Siena was united with 
 Florence, the merchants of the Arno city would not only 
 cease annoying Siena in her contado, but would lend a 
 helping hand to keep such invaluable allies as the Nine 
 in the seat of power against the attack of nobles and 
 every other kind of domestic conspirator. 
 
 The rule of the Nine gives at every point the impression 
 of a government satisfied with a strictly circumscribed 
 and local independence, purchased at the price of the 
 surrender of its foreign policy into the hands of a 
 powerful protector. Let us follow, to bring this atti- 
 tude home, the conduct of the Nine when, after more 
 than fifty years, an emperor once more appeared in Italy. 
 In 1310 Henry VII descended the Alps, hailed as a 
 Messiah by the poor remnant of the Ghibellines, dis- 
 persed, like the race of the Jews, by defeat and misfor- 
 tune. His John the Baptist, who went before him, was, 
 as everybody knows, the great Dante Alighieri. Here 
 was an opportunity, a perilous one, of course, but such as 
 individuals and nations of mettle have run to meet. 
 The Twenty-four who ruled Siena back in the days of 
 Monaperti took a much graver risk when they made 
 alliance with King Manfred. The Nine by seizing 
 Henry's proffered hand would have immediately become 
 the pivot of Tuscany, and Siena the head of a league, 
 the main object of which must inevitably have been the 
 overthrow of Florence. Instead, the rulers chose the 
 safe course. When Henry, in the year 1312, laid siege 
 to Florence, they dispatched military aid to their Guelph 
 friend, and, if we are to believe the chronicler, saved 
 Florence from the emperor's clutches.* The next year 
 
 * Muratori, XV, 48, A.
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 201 
 
 (1313) Henry passed by Siena on the way south, but the 
 Sienese locked their gates and manned their walls. 
 Matters standing thus, death took a hand in the game. 
 At Buonconvento, sixteen miles from Siena, the em- 
 peror, after a short illness, departed this life to enter, as 
 all good Ghibellines believed, straightway and without 
 the need of purgatorial penance, into the joys of 
 paradise. The simple-minded chronicler, exhibiting as 
 usual no sign of emotion, gives a succinct account of the 
 emperor's coming. If the government was Guelph, 
 none the less, in this old Ghibelline stronghold, throb- 
 bing with Ghibelline memories, there must have been 
 a great deal of imperial sentiment abroad. Why else 
 did the Nine, just as Henry was expected, "begin to 
 get the chains ready," as the chronicler dryly notes ? 
 This military device, aimed at the domestic enemy, 
 consisted of iron chains, which could on short notice be 
 swung across the main thoroughfares, thus hindering 
 the concentration of forces and, above all, the charge 
 of horsemen. The rivets to which the chains were at- 
 tached can still be seen at many places through the city.* 
 As Henry swept by, the agitated inhabitants crowded 
 towers, walls, and points of vantage, and surely in that 
 throng many hearts shaped silent prayers for his success. 
 
 "He left Pisa on the eighth of August with a large and excellent 
 cavalry . . . and on the fourteenth approached Siena on the 
 side of Porta Santo Viene. And his people burnt many houses 
 and did much damage. . . . On the twenty-second of August, 
 being Wednesday, the emperor fell ill. He left Stigliano while he 
 was still ill and moved to Buonconvento; and on Friday, August 
 
 * For some interesting notices about these chains, see "Miscellanea Stor, 
 San.," IV, p. io&
 
 202 SIENA 
 
 twenty-fourth, on St. Bartholomew's day, in the church of Buon- 
 convento, the emperor died; and on Saturday his army broke 
 camp and returned to Pisa with the body of the emperor, and 
 there he was buried with great honor." * 
 
 Following Henry's failure and tragic end the empire 
 counted for less than ever in the affairs of Tuscany, but 
 the troubles of the harassed province did not on that 
 account cease. New conflicts constantly made their 
 appearance, caused largely by the Florentine ambition 
 to rule and the inevitable resistances which that ambi- 
 tion aroused. Daring leaders, Uguccione della Faggi- 
 uola, lord of Pisa, Castruccio Castracane, tyrant of 
 Lucca, administered stinging defeats to the purse- 
 proud burghers of the city of the Lily, but no amount 
 of encouragement could induce the government of the 
 Nine to abandon their political reserve or to be drawn 
 from their allegiance to their city's dearest foe. In 
 every expedition which Florence organized, naturally 
 after loud beating of the Guelph drums, a Sienese troop 
 took part and was duly butchered pour les beaux yeux 
 of her Arno neighbor. Of course some small returns 
 the Nine could reasonably ask for such exemplary devo- 
 tion, and some, too, they received not only in the form 
 of the support of the Guelph League against internal 
 foes, but also in the privilege, certainly not inconsider- 
 able, of consolidating and even extending their power 
 in the Sienese contado. 
 
 The rule of the Nine in the contado has many points 
 of interest. However, as I shall unfold the fortunes of 
 the contado in the following chapter, it must suffice me 
 here to point out some of the more obvious difficulties 
 
 * Muratori, XV, 48.
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 203 
 
 which the government encountered in the country-side. 
 Although Florence, allied with the Nine, no longer 
 intrigued with the subject towns to persuade them to 
 rise in rebellion, the situation around Siena was any- 
 thing but tranquil. The spirit of independence died 
 hard, and Grosseto, Montepulciano, and Montemassi 
 to name only some of the more important points re- 
 volted many times and had as often to be put down. 
 Besides, with Tuscany in disturbance from such wars as 
 those associated with the names of Uguccione and 
 Castruccio, Siena could not hope to be entirely spared 
 from provincial broils, and was frequently alarmed and 
 harried by incursions into her territory. Then there 
 were the city-nobles, sworn enemies of the merchants 
 who had reduced them to political nullity; on slight 
 provocation, and, often on no provocation at all, they 
 raised the flag of insurrection on one or another of their 
 moated castles, and before they could be brought to terms 
 many troops had been mobilized and much money 
 spent. On the other hand, the original feudal nobility 
 made, with one exception, little trouble, for the progress 
 of time had practically wiped this class out of existence. 
 In the southern districts, in the region of Monte Amiata, 
 the Aldobrandeschi still held their own, but in a number 
 of wars waged against them by the Nine, they were 
 signally defeated and obliged to renew all the old treaties 
 of dependence while offering, in addition, the outright 
 cession of numerous lands and castles.* Plainly the 
 proud house was in unarrested decay. It would seem 
 
 * Not counting the minor conflicts, in the nature of border raids, there were 
 two real wars waged between Siena and the Aldobrandeschi in the time of 
 the Nine, the first in 1299-1300, the second in 1331. See Muratori, XV, 
 ad annum.
 
 204 SIENA 
 
 that this truth was not hidden from some of the members 
 of the family itself, for of Count Jacomo of Santa Fiora, 
 who died in 1346, we hear that he left the commune of 
 Siena heir of all his goods. Is not such a testament the 
 sign of a complete discouragement ? And is not this 
 view confirmed by what the chronicler adds in explana- 
 tion of Jacomo's unusual act ? "And this he did," we 
 read, "because he said that what he had, or the greater 
 part thereof, he had seized and stolen in the contado of 
 Siena." * A baron of ancient lineage regretting a little 
 violence and eager to restore ill-gotten goods ! Beyond 
 the peradventure of a doubt, the feudal character was 
 passing with the feudal system. 
 
 Overshadowing every other question and interest 
 attaching to the rule of the Nine, is the story of their 
 relations to their political enemies within the city. 
 When we recall that the merchants established an 
 
 ruled at the expense of the nobiity 
 and _the common people, we can form an immediate 
 conception^ of their difficulties. The elements with a 
 grievance would tend to coalesce, and in those violent 
 days would balk at nothing in order to discrown their 
 tyrants. It was well for the Nine that they kept their 
 hand on the local militia by reserving to themselves the 
 appointment of the officers. Their continued uneasi- 
 ness, in spite of this prudent measure, is proved by their 
 employment of a special palace guard which, from 1320 
 on, was under a foreign commander, the capitano di 
 provided with extraordinary powers for the 
 
 *Muratori, XV, 114, C. 
 
 f On this official, who betrays the system of force built up by the Nine, see 
 Luchaire, "Documenti," p. L.
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 205 
 
 detection and punishment of political crimes. A 
 special palace guard! This touch was needed to es- 
 tablish an unmistakable analogy between this re- 
 publican magistracy and such avowed tyrants as the 
 Visconti and the Scala, who at this very time had 
 succeeded in enthroning themselves, with the aid of 
 hireling soldiers, on the buried liberties of Milan and 
 Verona. 
 
 In addition to minor tumults, more or less dangerous 
 to the government, the chronicles report three serious 
 conspiracies aimed against the Nine, each one of which 
 composes an admirably clear picture of the local situa- 
 tion. We have seen that things could not have been 
 entirely satisfactory in the year 1313, when the nearness 
 of Henry VII moved the Nine to serve warning to pro- 
 spective rioters by closing the streets with chains. The 
 open outbreak of 1318 could not have been, there- 
 fore, wholly unexpected. The chronicle of Andrea Dei 
 gives the following account of it : 
 
 "At this time some of the Tolomei and other grandi of Siena 
 . . . made a league and conspiracy with the notaries and butchers 
 and other guildsmen to break and overthrow the office of the Sig- 
 nori Nove and to seize the signiory themselves. 
 
 "And on the night of Thursday, October 25th, being the eve of 
 Saints Simon and Jude, they gathered on the Campo at the mouth 
 of the Casato" (the aristocratic street, where many nobles dwelt), 
 "accompanied by a small number of foot-soldiers, and raised the 
 cry: Death to the Nine. And among them were certain notaries 
 and butchers and other common people (popolari minuti) of 
 Siena, and they engaged in battle with the forces of the Nine, 
 drawn up before their palace to the number of one hundred foot- 
 soldiers. . . . And the notaries and butchers and other conspira- 
 tors expected that the Tolomei and the other nobles, who were
 
 206 SIENA 
 
 parties to the said conspiracy, would come to the Campo with their 
 retainers, but they came not. ... On account of which those 
 who had engaged in this enterprise were broken by the guard of 
 the commune and driven from the Campo." * 
 
 The failure was followed by numerous confiscations, 
 executions, and that most puerile measure of political 
 revenge, unhappily practised by all of the Italian cities, 
 the destruction of the houses of the defeated opponents. 
 All which severity did not put an end to resistance. In 
 1324 there was an attempt which, in its leading features, 
 presents a close parallel to the conspiracy just described. 
 The Nine were too strong and too watchful; they killed 
 the movement in the bud, with the result that they did 
 not have to face another grave local peril till the year 
 1346. Of this outbreak we read as follows in the 
 chronicle: f 
 
 "On Sunday, August i3th, a rumor went through Siena of a 
 league made by certain common people (popolari minuti) who 
 elected as their captain Spinelloccio, son of Misser Jacomo di 
 Misser Meo Tavena de' Tolomei" (always a Tolomei in these 
 enterprises !).... 
 
 "And certain of the said conspirators raised a clamor and pro- 
 ceded to the house of Berto di Lotto, who was giving a feast for 
 some strangers and citizens, among the latter, Giovanni di Ghezzo 
 Foscherani. And while Giovanni was washing his hands, some 
 of the conspirators, among whom was a certain Simone of Volterra, 
 attacked him with knives, and Simone struck Giovanni several 
 blows and ran away, raising the cry through the quarter of Ovile " 
 (the poorest quarter of the town and the most crowded) : '"Long 
 live the people and death to those who are starving us (e muoia 
 chi ci a/ama)'; for in that year there was a great famine of 
 grain. 
 
 *Muratori, XV, 60, D. f Muratori, XV, 115.
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 207 
 
 "At this juncture a son of the above Giovanni, whose name was 
 Meo, seeing his father wounded, hurried home, and, seizing his 
 sword, ran like a madman after Simone with intent to avenge the 
 outrage. On him, too, Simone threw himself with his knife and 
 wounded him in several places; and finally he killed Meo, son of 
 Giovanni de' Foscherani. Whereupon the said Simone escaped 
 without let or hindrance . . . and fleeing and shouting ever: 
 'Long live the people and the guilds, and death to them who are 
 starving us,' without the least interference, passed through the gate 
 and vanished into safety. 
 
 "For which reason the city was filled with suspicion. And the 
 Nine sent into many directions for aid, and from Florence, Pistoia, 
 San Gimignano, Colle, Montepulciano, Montalcino, and our 
 contado a great quantity of horse and foot poured into Siena and 
 guarded the city many days. ..." 
 
 Observe how the brothers of the Guelph League 
 stood shoulder to shoulder, and how Florence was pre- 
 pared to be at some trouble to keep so useful an ally 
 as the Nine in power. Simone murdering oligarchs in 
 the streets, with everybody apparently standing by with 
 folded arms, was a phenomenon calculated to. arouse 
 reflection. The fact was, the position of the Nine, after 
 two generations of ascendency, was no longer what 
 it had been. But of this anon. Before considering 
 their inevitable downfall I wish to refer to a few 
 events, which pieced together with such scenes as 
 the above, perform the service of making the life 
 in the winding streets among the palaces and ware- 
 houses, as actual as if we beheld it with our living 
 eyes. 
 
 The laconic chronicler upon whom I am drawing 
 never indulges in lavish description. Facts are what 
 he is after with his simple grasp of life, facts that are as
 
 208 SIENA 
 
 tangible and solid as a floor beam or a paving block. 
 He takes note of a tower blown down by the wind, 
 crushing a hundred persons, of an earthquake, a drouth, 
 a fire, letting no crude, nerve-shaking disaster escape 
 his attention, but his mind is not yet alive to the subtle 
 occurrences in the realm of the spirit, and the particular 
 traits of even those broad events which he describes are 
 a blank to him. However, the Renaissance was in the 
 wind and the Renaissance, among other things, meant 
 awakened senses, quickened mental processes, and a 
 more personal relation to society. Here and there in the 
 dispassionate record we have quite modern touches in 
 the shape of descriptive detail, for instance, in connec- 
 tion with the family feuds among the nobles, and par- 
 ticularly in the story of the grande mortalita of 1348, the 
 Black Death of European fame. 
 
 In the daily budget of news exchanged by the gossips 
 congregated in church or on the Campo, the latest inci- 
 dent in one of the many family feuds must have held a 
 prominent place. The reader's attention need only be 
 directed to Shakespeare's Montagues and Capulets in 
 order to lead him to recall that every Italian city was 
 stirred with these savage vendettas, survivals of the 
 feudal preference for the decision of the sword over the 
 sentence of the law. In Siena the two most powerful 
 families were the Tolomei and the Salimbeni. They 
 pursued one another in the spirit of the Old Testament 
 demand of a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. Over 
 and over again their murders and riots filled the whole 
 city with alarm. To stir further the troubled waters of 
 civic life, similar feuds sprang up between the families 
 of the Malavolti and the Piccolomini, the Scotti and the
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 209 
 
 Saraceni. An event like the following is possible only 
 within the frame of the Italian Middle Age: 
 
 "On April i6th (1315) a great conflict and battle occurred be- 
 tween the Tolomei and the Salimbeni, and the whole city armed 
 itself. And the next day the rumor spread that the Aretines, at the 
 bidding of the Tolomei, were coming in their aid, and the whole 
 city armed itself and rushed to the gates and the Campo, but 
 found nothing." * 
 
 Not only do the citizens of high birth pursue their 
 ancient and honorable pastimes on the public streets, 
 but they are suspected, and probably not without some 
 ground, of treason ! The Florentines, always solicitous 
 for the good of Siena under the pliable Nine, interfered 
 on this and other occasions to compose the feud between 
 the Tolomei and the Salimbeni; neighboring bishops 
 and even the pope may be found at one time or another 
 engaged in the same service; but the peace was hardly 
 sworn when some new excess put everything in jeopardy 
 again. The combat described above still retains some- 
 
 o 
 
 thing of the air of a knightly tournament, but some of 
 the incidents associated with these vendettas are, viewed 
 in the light of our modern standards, nothing but naked 
 assassinations. Consider this act in the Malavolti- 
 Piccolomini blood-feud : 
 
 "On February ipth (1334), just after sunset, four youths of 
 the Piccolomini, to wit, Giovachino d' Andrea di Misser Salamone, 
 Amerigo di Turino, Neroccio di Misser Naddo, and Riccio di 
 Benuccio" (what a sonorous roll-call of brigands! almost capable 
 of reconciling one to being murdered) "with some retainers left 
 their house, and coming to the house of the Malavolti entered the 
 court-yard. There they came upon Niccolo di Misser Cione 
 
 * Muratori, XV, 54, C.
 
 210 SIENA 
 
 Malavolti playing chess; and Giovachino drove a knife into his 
 throat killing him instantly. And then they returned to their 
 house without further incident." * 
 
 Another characteristic feature of life in Siena and 
 other mediaeval towns were the recurrent famines, usu- 
 ally accompanied with disease and pestilence. The 
 failure from one cause or another of the crops of a par- 
 ticular district always produced a crisis in the Middle 
 Age, owing to the poor facilities for moving grain beyond 
 a certain distance, as well as to the absurd protective 
 views generally current, which caused every state to put 
 the exportation of food-stuffs under a severe embargo. 
 The result may be seen in such a record as this for Siena : 
 1302 famine; 1328 famine followed by a terrible mor- 
 tality; 1339 famine and disease; 1346 partial famine. 
 Though the above record establishes an indubitable 
 concatenation between the phenomena of hunger and 
 disease, the Black Death of 1347-48, that scourge 
 unparalleled in the history of Europe, had nothing to 
 do with the Sienese famine of the preceding year. The 
 Black Death related, it would seem, to the Bubonic 
 Plague, which still decimates the populations of the 
 crowded East was carried into Europe by Italian 
 merchants. From such seaports as Genoa and Pisa 
 it spread inland with incredible rapidity, leaped the 
 Alps, and presently devastated the whole West. ... In 
 the spring of 1348 it appeared at Siena: 
 
 "In this time began the Great Mortality, the greatest, and 
 most obscure, and most horrible imaginable; and it lasted till 
 October, 1348. It was of such a secret character that men and 
 
 *Muratori, XV, QI, D.
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 211 
 
 women died almost without warning. A swelling appeared in the 
 groin or the arm-pit, and while they were talking they fell dead. 
 The father would not attend to his son; one brother fled from the 
 other; the wife abandoned her husband; for it was said that to 
 catch the disease it sufficed to look upon a victim or to feel his 
 breath. And it must have been so indeed, since so many perished 
 in the months of May, June, July, and August, that it was impossi- 
 ble to find any one to bury the dead. Neither relatives nor friends 
 nor priests nor friars accompanied them to the grave, nor was the 
 office of the dead recited. He who lost a relative or house-mate, 
 as soon as the breath had left the body, took him by night or day, 
 and with two or three to lend a hand, carried him to the church, and 
 with his helpers buried the corpse as best he could, covering it 
 with just enough earth to save it from the dogs. And in many 
 places of the city trenches were dug, very broad and deep, and into 
 them the bodies were thrown and covered with a little earth; and 
 thus layer after layer until the trench was full; and then another 
 trench was commenced. And I, Agniolo di Tura, called Grasso, 
 with my own hands buried five of my children in a single trench; 
 and many others did the like. And many dead there were so ill- 
 covered that the dogs dug them up and ate them, dispersing their 
 limbs through the city. And no bells rang, and nobody wept no 
 matter what his loss, because almost every one expected death. 
 . . . And people believed and said: This is the end of the world."* 
 
 But the Black Angel thus reaping up and down the 
 city spared the good Agniolo, called Grasso, and before 
 he died of some other disease, less terrible but just as 
 effective, he wrote the above description, which by reason 
 of a certain rusticity and homeliness has a far greater 
 poignancy than the more literary treatment of the same 
 theme by the famous novellist Boccaccio.f 
 
 * Muratori, XV, 123. Agniolo puts the dead at Siena at 80,000; Boc- 
 caccio in his Introduction to the Decameron gives the figures for Florence at 
 100,000 "dentro alle mura." 
 
 t Introduction to " II Decamerone."
 
 212 SIENA 
 
 With this quotation I shall have to close my illustra- 
 tions of the life in Siena under the Nine, as depicted in 
 the pages of the chroniclers. Fairness, however, de- 
 mands that before relating the fall of this government I 
 again insist that against its many faults and deficiencies 
 are set some notable achievements. If it is not easy to 
 sympathize with the foreign programme of the mer- 
 chants, which imposed a close dependence on Florence, 
 if their home policy was dictated by the selfishness of 
 class interest, they were, nevertheless, in their way, 
 patriotic and enlightened citizens, and beautified their 
 town with that keen pleasure with which a lover adorns 
 his mistress. Since peace was their lode-star, a com- 
 mercial peace which would enable every man to go 
 about his daily business, it was at least consistent that the 
 merchants should give their attention to civic improve- 
 ments by constructing aqueducts and fountains, by paving 
 the streets, by erecting public buildings,and generally by 
 patronizing the arts. The noble outward show, as 
 noble as may be found anywhere up and down the fair 
 peninsula, which Siena in this twentieth century still 
 presents to the eye, is due primarily to the creative 
 activity of the Nine. The Campo, where they built their, 
 palace, was the particular object of their munificence, 
 and whoever has seen this unique piazza will agree that 
 the chronicler was not misled by local pride when, in 
 1346, in a burst of feeling extraordinary for him, he 
 wrote. "On December 3<Dth the paving of the Campo 
 was completed. And with the beauty of the fountains 
 and of the buildings round about, it is held to be one of 
 the fairest squares in Italy, and even in Christendom."* 
 
 * Muratori, XV, 117, D.
 
 Porta Romana
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 213 
 
 The rule of the merchants for good and for ill was 
 drawing to a_close. In the year 1354 an emperor once^ 
 again descended_into Italy Charles IV was an un- 
 imaginative, matter-of-fact politician, who accepted the 
 verdict of history, recognized that Ghibellinism was a 
 dead issue and Italy a lost province, and was content, 
 like a good peddler, to get the best prices he could for 
 his damaged imperial wares. These consisted of 
 privileges and confirmations, to which there still attached 
 a certain value in the eyes of the local governments, for 
 the emperor was, in spite of all that had happened, the 
 theoretical source of all political power; and in any 
 case the imperial diploma with its pendent seal of gold 
 would be a handsome archivial decoration. Naturally 
 at the prospect of so attractive a possession the com- 
 munes presented themselves before Charles in great 
 number. In view of his conciliatory bearing the Nine, 
 though Guelph, opined that they had nothing to fear 
 from him, and after some hesitation, dispatched an 
 embassy to him at Pisa to offer their homage. To 
 return the courtesy, on his way to Rome, whither he 
 went to be crowned, he came to Siena, entering the city 
 amidst loud acclaim on~the evening of March 23, 1355. 
 Considering the strictly commercial interpretation which 
 he put upon his Italian mission, it is not likely thaFKe 
 entertained any plan of overthrowing the Sienese govern- 
 ment. From this charge he may be exonerated; never- 
 theless, he could not hinder hispresence in Siena being 
 utilized by the opposition for its own ends. Again and 
 again thelToBTeslTnd the common people hid conspired 
 to overthrow tfieiF tyrants, and now no sooner had 
 Chanes~ehtere3^the gate than a new conspiracy sprang
 
 214 SIENA 
 
 into existence. _ The nobles circulated among the 
 crowd, whispering sedition, and with the first vivas for 
 the emperor mingIed^alsQ-JJiLjQinijQOus cry: Muoiali 
 NoveJ We may fairly believe that Charles was helpless 
 in the midst of the following explosion, the causes of 
 which, as a foreigner, he could not possibly have fath- 
 omed. The more closely we examine the course of 
 events, the more certain it becomes that on this, as well 
 as on later occasions, he was hardly more than a cloak 
 for the ambitions of others, constituting, in spite of 
 whatever good-will with which we may credit him, 
 merely an additional element of confusion in an 
 already complicated situation. 
 
 The frightened Nine offered no resistance to the new 
 conspiracy. All through the next day (March 24.th) 
 
 poured in a surging m.assjnto^ the Campo and prepared 
 tQ^torrn_the.4]!jalae. The emperor was within, consult- 
 ing with the agitated governors. In order to end the 
 confusion he announced to the populace that the rule 
 of the Nine was over and that a committee would con- 
 sider the bases of a new constitution. The victors 
 relieved their patriotic enthusiasm in the usual form by 
 the pillage of the houses of the merchants and of all 
 those public buildings which the forces of the emperor 
 did not protect. Abused, cuffed, hunted like wild 
 beasts, the deposed oligarchs fled from the city. 
 
 The work of the committee, which was composed of 
 twelve popolani and eight nobles, that is, of representa- 
 tives of the two groups which had triumphed in the 
 revolution, ended with the establishment of the govern- 
 ment of the Dodici, twelve rulers in place of nine, all
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 215 
 
 of the victorious people. The merchants paid the price 
 of defeat by being excluded from the offices. The 
 nobles, represented, as we have seen, on the constituent 
 committee, were at first treated with distinction and a 
 council of twelve of their number was appointed to act 
 as a consultative body with the governing Twelve. 
 However, this council was presently discontinued as con- 
 ferring too much influence, and the grandi were asked 
 to content themselves with some purely administrative 
 posts. In consequence, cheated of their hopes, they 
 took to lawlessness, while the old Salimbeni-Tolomei 
 feud, which had rested for a time, flared up again, care- 
 fully nourished by the new rulers in the hope of weaken- 
 ing their enemies. The next few years once more proved 
 the inability of the people to assimilate the noble ele- 
 ment, and amply illustrated the countless woes inflicted 
 on the commonwealth by the persistent social schism. 
 Immediately after the March revolution the emperor 
 had left the city for Rome and did not return till some 
 weeks after, when the work of the commission, appointed 
 by himself, was done. In his presence and with his 
 sanction the new constitution was, on May 1st, put in 
 force, and the first Twelve took up their residence in the 
 Palazzo Pubblico. Their term of office was to last, as 
 with the Nine, two months, and all the citizens, except 
 the nobles and the merchants, that is, the earlier govern- 
 ing classes, were to be eligible to the palace. Again at 
 this point we touch the radical flaw in the political edifice 
 of Siena and of every other commune in Italy: the com- 
 mune having its origin in a union of groups, never suc- 
 ceeded in fusing them into a whole, composed of elements 
 equal among themselves and equally subordinated to
 
 216 SIENA 
 
 the government. Out of the conflict of social classes, 
 military companies, guilds, interests of all kinds, that 
 longed-for product, the modern state did not emerge. 
 The inevitable result was the perpetuation of the group. 
 The nobles, divorced from power by a renewed exclu- 
 sion, hardened more and more into a political party, 
 called in the political jargon of the period, il monte dei 
 Gentiluomini. The merchants, branded and disgraced, 
 formed another party, il monte dei Noveschi or of the 
 Nine, while the victorious people, identified with the 
 Twelve, were called il monte dei Dodicini. A monte 
 was a thing like an oriental caste, into which a man 
 found himself born and from which there was no 
 escape except by death. With attachment to the monte 
 superseding every other loyalty, the party in power felt 
 no scruples about securing by open violence or by the 
 most disingenuous sleight of hand the possession of the 
 honors and emoluments.* 
 
 The new government, though a party affair, had at 
 ' least the advantage of resting apparently on a broader 
 foundation than its predecessors. The common people 
 had won the victory, and the earliest enactments of the 
 new government not only employed a very democratic 
 language, but apparently pursued the plan of organizing 
 the state according to a truly democratic ideal. Twelve 
 reorganized guilds the shattered merchant guild was, 
 of course, not among them received official recognition, 
 and every citizen was invited to register in one of them. 
 The total guild membership constituted the body of 
 eligible or governing citizens. So far the new theory; 
 
 * On this matter of parties see Paoli, "I Monti nella Repubblica di Siena." 
 Nuova Antologia, Serie terza, 1891.
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 217 
 
 the practice was entirely different. The 
 
 just below the great merchants, shop-keepers and 
 notanes for the most part, found itself 1 m power on 
 themorrow of the March revolution, and was resolved 
 to hold fast to what it had secured. No manstands 
 socially so low that he cannot find somebody still 
 lower whom lie may Tfeelydesipise. If the social group 
 just defined was envious of its superiors, it had no 
 love for the common people beneath it, and apart from 
 a liberal alms of democratic phrases, had no mind to rub 
 elbows with workingmen. Through various kinds of 
 manipulation, which are common to the professional 
 politicians of all ages, the Twelve were presently chosen 
 from as limited a circle as ever the Nine had been, and 
 Siena awakened from its revolutionary dream to discover 
 that it was the victim of a shrewd band, which in dignity, 
 prestige, and experience of life stood far below the former 
 nlters.~" 
 
 Such a government asjhis,jguilty of monstrous deceit, 
 issuing democratic ^ j?romises while concerned only witK 
 distributing politicaljfavors ^among a small circle of 
 initiates, did not deserve to live. In truth, its difficulties 
 were, from the first day, enormous. On the news of the 
 revolution in Siena many places in the contado, such as 
 Grosseto, Montalcino, and Montepulciano,* revolted on 
 the convenient pretext that they had sworn loyalty to 
 the Nine; the discontented nobles spread a constant 
 feeling of uneasiness; that dreadful scourge of mediaeval 
 Italy, the companies of adventure, put in an appearance 
 and had to be bought off by a timorous government with 
 
 * Montepulciano submitted to Perugia and caused the Perugian war of 
 1357-58. On this conflict see Heywood in "Bull. Sen.," XIV, p. 425 ff.
 
 218 SIENA 
 
 huge sums of florins admitting that here were troubles 
 inseparable from rule in those days, the fact remains 
 that never did a government prove more weak, irresolute, 
 and incompetent. The wonder is that it lived for thir- 
 teen years, especially as divisions soon appeared in its 
 own ranks. The one creditable act of that whole period 
 was performed in its despite by the general of the 
 Republic, a Roman noble of the Orsini family, who diso- 
 beying, in an access of manly indignation, the orders of 
 his pusillanimous masters, attacked the plundering 
 mercenaries, known as the Company of the Hat, and put 
 them to rout (1363). For which uncommanded victory 
 he had reason to be thankful not to have been made to 
 pay with his head! What the state of public opinion 
 was within the walls, with Gentiluomini, Noveschi, and 
 the cheated people muttering wrath, is well brought out 
 by the chronicler in a strikingly picturesque passage: 
 "And the Signori Dodici entered into great fear of the 
 air (grande paura dell' aria!} and appointed police 
 captains in every terzo of the city with many soldiers 
 under them; and to these officials they gave ample 
 authority to behead whosoever should cough against 
 them (chiunque tossisse contra /oro), and they issued 
 many and strict orders against whosoever should bring 
 to remembrance the emperor,"* ever the extreme hope 
 of the lovers of change. Is another touch needed 
 to complete the picture of a tyranny, which, shut up 
 in its palace, trembles at every chance noise in the 
 streets ? 
 
 The mere news that Charles IV had come a second 
 time to Italy evidently his exchequer needed to be 
 
 *Muratori, XV, 192, E.
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 219 
 
 replenished sufficed to overthrow the Twelve. Again 
 a critical examination of events will establish that if the 
 emperor's power was small, his prestige was still con- 
 siderable. Men of influence and ambition and there was 
 no dearth of them in Italy could always create serious 
 trouble in alliance with the sovereign. Pushed to the 
 front by skilful politicians, this high personage might 
 deceive himself into thinking that he was playing an 
 imperial role, while he was really no more than a puppet 
 in the hands of clever manipulators. Charles came to 
 Italy a second time, and in the year 1368 appeared again 
 in Siena, but except as a centre of intrigue and confusion 
 we can eliminatejhimjrom the extraordinary succession 
 of disturbances which accompanied his arrival. The 
 autumn of 1368 established a record, which it would be 
 hard to match even among the turbulent Italian cities 
 four revolutions in less than four months! 
 
 Revolution I. On September 2d, the nobles, tem- 
 porarily composing all their difficulties, above all, patch- 
 ing up the ancient Salimbeni-Tolomei feud, proceeded 
 to the Palazzo Pubblico, and "senza colpo di spada" 
 put the Twelve out. A fall, worthy of this ignominious 
 company. Then the nobles set up a government of 
 their own, a strictly nobiliary government such as Siena 
 had not seen since the days of the consuls, more than a 
 century and a half ago. Of course this anachronism 
 had no chance to live. As soon as the emperor's vicar, 
 Malatesta, commanding an armed force, arrived within 
 bow-shot of the city, new plots took shape. Joined 
 with the Salimbeni, who at this juncture deserted their 
 noble brethren, Malatesta encouraged a rising of the 
 people.
 
 220 SIENA 
 
 Revolution 2. On September 23d Malatesta, the 
 Salimbeni, and the people engaged the nobles, and after 
 a bloody fight drove them from the palace and the city. 
 Accordingly, the victory being in the main a popular one, 
 a government of twelve popolani was set up, wherein all 
 the various parties of the people were represented. The 
 Noveschi secured three members, the Dodicini four, and 
 /'/ popolo minuto, the hitherto excluded lowest ranks of 
 the people, five. The Salimbeni, in reward of their 
 powerful aid, received a number of special concessions, 
 among others, six castles in the contado. Of course 
 these fine folk had not played the traitor to their class 
 for nothing. The upshot of the successful revolution 
 was that the people were again in control, three groups 
 thereof, but naturally no one group felt contented with 
 the share secured by itself. 
 
 Revolution 3. On December nth the popolo minuto 
 stormed the palace and put the Noveschi and the Dodi- 
 cini out. That left five of their own kind in office, to 
 which number they added ten, making a chief executive 
 of fifteen, all of a single political affiliation. As the coun- 
 cil, in cooperation with which the new executive carried 
 on the government, was called the Council of the 
 Riformatori (Reformers), the new party took the name 
 of il monte dei Riformatori. That meant the creation 
 of a fourth monte, the earlier three being the Genti- 
 luomini, the Noveschi, and the Dodicini. Each one of 
 them, let us remember, had no political programme 
 other than is expressed by the simple predatory formula: 
 to the victors belong the spoils. 
 
 Revolution 4. On December i6th (apparently on 
 the 1 6th, for the records of these days are inextricably
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 221 
 
 jumbled) the Council of the Riformatori resolved, 
 probably on account of risings of the Noveschi and the 
 Dodicini, to readmit these parties to office, but not in the 
 original proportion. The governing committee was 
 still to be fifteen, of whom eight must be Riformatori, 
 while four seats were conceded to the Dodicini, and 
 three to the Noveschi. Though it must strike us as 
 something of an innovation for a victorious party not 
 only to agree that rival parties had a right to live, but to 
 make a place for them at its side, let us not fail to note 
 that the Riformatori were careful to secure a clear pre- 
 ponderance to themselves. The exclusion of the nobil- 
 ity was of course maintained. 
 
 When after three months of perpetual disturbances 
 the new government, called the Fifteen, or, more usually, 
 the Riformatori, was installed in the palace, Charles IV 
 arrived in Siena. He entered the city on December 22, 
 1368. He had always kept up a special intimacy with 
 the Salimbeni, and the Salimbeni, at outs with their 
 own class, and in need, in the dangerous local game, of 
 allies, usually cooperated with the Dodicini. Charles's 
 friendly relation with the Salimbeni, at whose palace 
 he took up his residence, led to his undoing. He agreed 
 to help in an attempt to overthrow the Riformatori, and 
 on January 18, 1369, the plot came to a head. Then 
 the people showed some of their ancient quality. In a 
 fierce battle for the possession of the Campo, Charles's 
 knights were beaten back and broken by the almost 
 unanimous forces of the citizens, who hurriedly patched 
 up their local differences in the face of an attack on their 
 independence by a foreign usurper. At nightfall the 
 emperor found himself shut up as a prisoner in the
 
 222 SIENA 
 
 houses of the Salimbeni. On being visited by the victo- 
 rious rulers he showed the stuff he was made of. He 
 sobbed, wept, threw his arms about every one who came 
 within reach, protesting as was probably true that he 
 was the victim of the misrepresentations of the Salimbeni 
 and the Dodicini. He was ready for any concession. 
 The Riformatori had his notary draw up an imperial 
 privilege, nominating them vicars of the empire, and not 
 without scorn, we may believe, permitted him to with- 
 draw from the city. Charles's terror, great as it was, 
 did not so get the better of his greed as to induce him to 
 forget to ask for the usual compensation accompanying 
 a diploma which emanated from his chancellery. 
 
 This event, particularly interesting in showing that 
 the civic spirit had not yet been entirely killed by the 
 frenzy of party, made only a passing impression on the 
 life of the city. The Riformatori hopefully tried to take 
 advantage of the momentary outburst of patriotism in 
 order to heal the local schisms. They commanded 
 (January 31, 1369) a solemn mass of peace (messa della 
 pace} in the cathedral to be attended by Noveschi, 
 Dodicini, and Riformatori, that is, all the popular parties, 
 on the conclusion of which they should make peace with 
 one another and promise to be loyal to the existing 
 government. The Fifteen had already attempted to 
 replace the odious party designations with new and more 
 honorable terms, which recognized the tie of civic 
 brotherhood : the Noveschi were to be called popolo del 
 piccolo numero (People of the small following), the 
 Dodicini, popolo del numero media (People of the moder- 
 ate following), and the Riformatori, popolo del maggior 
 numero (People of the largest following) all to no
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 223 
 
 effect. True, the Riformatori showed a greater liber- 
 ality than their predecessors by admitting Noveschi and 
 Dodicini to office along with themselves, but by setting 
 up a machinery which planned to secure their perma- 
 nent control of power, they showed that they were de- 
 voted to an undemocratic principle which could not 
 possibly serve as the seed of the modern state. 
 
 The Riformatori held the helm for seventeen years 
 (from ^b^-JaZZ^E^m-the midst of a situation which 
 grew not better, but seemed daily to grow worse. The 
 c^rfrpanjes_ofadventure continued to molest the country- 
 side. Famine and famine prices were added to the now 
 permanent industrial depression. In 1371 the starving 
 woolen workers of the quarter of Ovile rose and par- 
 tially overthrew the government; thereupon the Salim- 
 beni and the Dodicini, falling on them at an unexpected 
 moment, took revenge by a terrible massacre of these 
 poor wretches. Crimes were of daily occurrence, and 
 men grew brutalized by the chronic disorder to the point 
 of taking delight in intolerable cruelties. What are we 
 to think of a civilization which suffered its criminals to 
 be torn to pieces with red-hot pincers while bound upon 
 a cart moving along the street at a walking pace ?* 
 Small wonder that the good chronicler waxes despond- 
 ent. He can account for the wickedness of the time 
 only by the operation of occult influences :f 
 
 "At this time there reigned in the world a planet which had 
 these effects: The brothers of S. Augustine fell upon their provin- 
 
 * Muratori, XV, 250 B (1377). However, this punishment was not 
 peculiar to Siena, but common to the criminal justice of the Middle Age. 
 See Molmenti, "Venice," Part II, Vol. I, 39. 
 
 t Muratori, XV, 238 B (1373).
 
 224 SIENA 
 
 cial with knives and killed him. ... At Assisi the Brothers Minor 
 fell to quarreling and butchered some fourteen of their number. 
 Everywhere in the world apparently there were dissensions and 
 bloody encounters innumerable, which I mention not for very 
 shame. In Siena no man understood or kept faith : the Gentiluo- 
 mini kept it neither among themselves nor with others; the Nove- 
 schi neither among themselves nor with others; the Dodicini 
 neither among themselves nor with others; and the Riformatori, 
 to wit, those that ruled, neither with one another nor with others 
 in any perfect wise. And so the world is all one darkness." 
 
 And so the world is all one darkness! The cry, we 
 may note in passing, of some chronicler at almost every 
 period of the Middle Age. 
 
 In the year 1385 the Riformatori were overthrown 
 and another government formed which, excluding them, 
 was composed of Noveschi, Dodicini, and another party 
 organized from a social stratum still lower than the 
 Riformatori, and called for short // Popolo. Naturally 
 this group formed a new monte, il monte del Popolo, 
 the fifth, and we are relieved to find, the last in the 
 distraught political history of Siena. There is no profit 
 in following the tale further. Henceforth no one 
 monte dreamt of being able to exclude all the others, 
 but each plotted to get improved terms for itself, entering 
 into alliances which shifted as the interest of the moment 
 dictated. Never in old Hellas was there a more self- 
 ensnarled city than Siena, and as in Hellas, the only 
 remedy for a state which could not compose its quarrels 
 became the tyrant. Men being men, which is to say, 
 when their passions are aroused, not far above beasts of 
 the forest, the tyrant was the only conceivable door 
 through which mediaeval society could pass to the realiz-
 
 The Palazzo Piccolomini
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 225 
 
 ation of democratic justice and equality. With matters 
 at this pass the chief regret must be that the tyrant so 
 long delayed his arrival. 
 
 This hurried review of the political movements of 
 the fourteenth century has omitted or blurred the 
 numberless details which enter into each particular situa- 
 tion. To some factors I have not given sufficient prom- 
 inence, others I have passed over with silence. I ven- 
 ture to hope that I have at least made clear why the 
 Sienese people, though haunted by democratic longings, 
 never succeeded in establishing an effective democracy. 
 But the disheartening evolution, which we have followed 
 to a kind of political stale-mate, cannot be explained 
 entirely by the furious party spirit, or by the fickleness, 
 the excitability, and the other defects of the Sienese 
 temper. There is another cause which must at least 
 be mentioned in this connection. I have already pointed 
 out the intimate relations which necessarily existed 
 from the first between the political movements in the 
 city and its economic development. Now, economically, 
 Siena fell into a sad decline in the fourteenth century. 
 If, during the first decades of that century, at the height 
 of the power of the merchants, industry and commerce 
 continued, in the main, to grow, they certainly did not 
 advance at anything like the pace maintained by 
 neighboring Florence. As a money centre, in which 
 capacity we found Siena enjoying preeminence and 
 harvesting wealth about the year 1250, the town had 
 fallen into the background. The popes from the period 
 of Montaperti gave preference to the Florentine bankers, 
 until in 1309 they dropped suddenly and entirely out of 
 the Italian financial world by deserting Rome and es-
 
 226 SIENA 
 
 tablishing their residence across the Alps in far-away 
 Avignon. However, this withdrawal of the papal moneys 
 from Sienese hands was not in itself an irreparable blow, 
 for truth to tell the pontiffs were already completely 
 superseded as a factor in the financial world by the 
 great merchants. These had captained the vast 
 movement of commercial expansion, which showed a 
 splendid energy especially early in the fourteenth cen- 
 tury, and which more than the revival of learning, the 
 religious unrest, and all other causes whatsoever, im- 
 pressed the modern stamp upon the European world. 
 Of the new system of capitalistic production, created by 
 the quickened pace of industry and commerce, Florence 
 became the undisputed head. Absolutely, the resources 
 of Siena continued to grow, but, relatively, the increase 
 was insignificant, compared with that of Florence, 
 Genoa, Venice, and a dozen other centres, more favora- 
 bly planted along the great international highways. 
 The town, regarded from the economic point of view, 
 did not perish, but it was left behind in the race. 
 
 Hand in hand with the decline in banking and com- 
 merce went the decline in industry. In spite of the 
 difficulties experienced by the wool-guild, difficulties, 
 it may be remembered, springing largely from the lack 
 of water, the manufacture of woolens continued in the 
 fourteenth century to be a considerable source of wealth 
 and to give employment to many workers. The prole- 
 tariat of this industry, concentrated largely in the 
 quarter of Ovile, numbered several thousands. In the 
 recurrent periods of industrial depression or in time 
 of high bread prices, their condition must have been 
 terrible. That they organized in 1371 and sought
 
 THE CIVIL STRUGGLE 227 
 
 redress by violence proves that they were growing 
 desperate; decimated for their pains by a cowardly 
 massacre conducted by the Salimbeni and the Dodicini, 
 they and other workingmen of a too independent leaning 
 were, on the fall of the Riformatori (1385), expelled, to 
 the number of four thousand, from the city.* This 
 almost ludicrous act of party fury may be taken to mark 
 the end in Siena of capitalistic production on a large 
 scale. To be sure, almost every known craft continued 
 to be represented on the roster of the city's activities, 
 but they were all conducted, in prevailing degree at 
 least, under the system of private or individual produc- 
 tion, characteristic of a backward industrial community. 
 In the decline of Siena the fortunes of the contado had 
 a considerable share, for an uninterrupted chain of 
 wars, risings, and deeds of petty lawlessness gravely 
 affected agricultural production. A leading source of 
 trouble in the countryside was ever the nobility. Siena 
 had to pay a terrible price for being able neither to 
 destroy nor to assimilate this class. From the hills, 
 where their castles were situated, they could always 
 harry the burghers at will, and though beaten again and 
 again, were not, till considerably after the period which 
 we are glancing at, definitely reduced to order. If Siena 
 had become really industrialized, the organized power of 
 the citizens would have irresistibly swept the nobles from 
 their points of vantage; that is what came to pass in 
 happier Florence. Add to the difficulties associated 
 
 * Even the chronicler cannot refrain from crying out upon this folly : 
 " E io scrittore, che non so' di' Riformatori, giudicai essere mal fatto, perche 
 si guasto e disfece la citta di Siena, che in piu volte furno cacciate piu di 
 quattro mila buoni artigiani Cittadini della citta, che non ne torno mai el 
 sesto." Muratori, XV, 294.
 
 228 SIENA 
 
 with the nobles the raids of the companies of adventure 
 which, throughout the second half of the fourteenth 
 century, killed peasants, burned farmsteads, drove off 
 the herds of sheep, goats, and cattle, and we shall under- 
 stand that the troubles of agriculture were no less grave 
 than those of manufacture, and that their interaction 
 must have affected disastrously the material welfare 
 of every man, woman, and child of the town's jurisdic- 
 tion. So much for the affairs of the contado at this 
 point; in the following chapter I shall attempt to develop 
 a connected picture of them. 
 
 In view of facts such as these, the opinion is untenable 
 that Siena owed her decline to her political ills. She 
 owed it to these ills in association with a score of economic 
 factors, glanced at in the above analysis.* In any 
 case she declined, not absolutely, let me remark again, 
 but relatively, and steered her course to that haven of 
 provincialism, where happily or regrettably, according 
 to the reader's point of view, she has ridden at anchor 
 to this day. 
 
 * A programme of reforms, drawn up in 1382 by a special commission, 
 unfolds a most cheerless picture of the city's finances. A government's 
 finances are, let us remember, an excellent indication of its general state of 
 health. The monthly expenses surpassed by 4,000 florins the monthly 
 revenues and the city was heavily in debt. The report is a cry of despair. 
 It has been published by Lisini, "Prowedimenti Economici della Repubblica 
 di Siena nel 1382."
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 
 
 THE intimate relation subsisting between Siena and 
 its contado makes it desirable to give special 
 attention to some of the problems and conditions 
 of the wide region around the walls. We have seen how 
 the rising commune reached out to control the great 
 highways, and how its action not only led to a clash with 
 the feudal lords established along their course, but was 
 also at the bottom of the rivalry with Florence and other 
 city neighbors, moved by a similar ambition. While I 
 have traced the general march of affairs, showing the 
 gradual subjugation of the Soarzi, Cacciaconti, Arden- 
 gheschi, and other noble houses to the young commune, 
 and while I have followed the wars with Florence over 
 Poggibonsi, Montepulciano and other provincial points 
 of vantage, I have not examined the country for its own 
 sake. I purpose to do that now, starting with the period 
 of the potesta, when the feudal lords, although still 
 powerful, were beginning to show the effects of the long 
 battering to which they had been exposed in the era 
 of the consuls. 
 
 In the course of the thirteenth century the great 
 families of the contado were broken up, and, with few 
 exceptions, vanished from the scene. A handful had 
 the good fortune or rather the intellectual elasticity to 
 adjust themselves to the new conditions. Thus one line 
 
 229
 
 230 SIENA 
 
 of the many-branched Cacciaconti moved to Siena, took 
 up a mercantile career, and conducted successful 
 financial operations on the fairs of Champagne. After 
 a generation it was probably indistinguishable from the 
 city nobility, which, of course, readily admitted wealthy 
 newcomers of approved station into its ranks. How- 
 ever, in general, the feudal lords, perplexed by the urban 
 movement and hindered by it in the exercise of their 
 accustomed liberties, hated it with all the vigor of a 
 whole-hearted prejudice. Over such obdurate noble- 
 men time passed pitilessly with its iron car. When 
 they were not sought out on their hill-tops by the 
 burgher host, which piled their ruined castles over them 
 for a monument, they fell victims to the new civilization 
 in a more insidious manner. In some cases they would 
 enter into an engagement with the city with regard to 
 one or another of their castles, and when they failed to 
 observe the terms of the treaty, the municipal authorities 
 would seize the forfeited property. Or, fond of display, 
 and persuaded that their station obliged them to parade 
 a new war horse or a suit of sables, they would make a 
 light-hearted loan of a prosperous banker, who presently 
 placed a bailiff in the court-yard. One authentic 
 example, showing how poverty waited upon grandeur, 
 may serve in place of further explanation. In the year 
 1296 we find a curious entry in the city account books: 
 " item, three lire for a cloak given to Nicholas, count of 
 Rocca di Tintinnano, causa paupertatis" by reason of 
 his poverty! * And two years later the gift is repeated, 
 and with a fine regard for a gentleman's necessities, a 
 pair of boots thrown in. The Rocca di Tintinnano, 
 
 * Archivio di Stato. I Libri della Biccherna, 1296. Uscite c. 233.
 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 231 
 
 rising high over the via francigena at the point where 
 the great road crossed the river Orcia, was a position of 
 inestimable advantage. Toward the middle of the 
 thirteenth century the counts, harassed by debts, sold 
 it to Siena,* and before the century had drawn to a close, 
 a decayed but authentic descendant, the above Nicholas, 
 scraped his thanks to the Signori Nove for the gift of a 
 cloak. A pathetic evolution this, probably not untypical 
 of the fortunes of the landed gentry after the grinding 
 process, to which the old order was subjected by the rise 
 of new classes, had continued for a few generations. 
 
 If, in the course of the thirteenth century, the original 
 feudal masters of the contado almost disappeared, a 
 partial exception to this general decline is to be noted 
 in the case of the most powerful of all the great families, 
 the Aldobrandeschi. Their distance from Siena and the 
 vastness of their territory, as well as its wild, inaccessible 
 character, explain why they were able to maintain 
 themselves somewhat longer than others of their kind. 
 When, as has been recounted, Siena in the year 1224 
 seized the town of Grosseto, she got a foothold at a 
 point of vantage, from which she could gradually work 
 her way toward the baronial strongholds in the scarped 
 and wooded Monte Amiata region. As late, however, as 
 the time of the Nine, the great Maremma counts, who 
 had meanwhile split into the two branches of Santa 
 Fiora and Pitigliano, continued to make occasional 
 trouble for Siena,f but treaties of alliance, shrewdly 
 transformed by the grasping burghers into treaties of 
 subjection, ended by absorbing the Aldobrandeschi 
 estates into the dominion of the Republic. When, in 
 
 * Bull. Sen, III, p. 327. t See chap. 7, p. 203.
 
 232 SIENA 
 
 the early fifteenth century, the last male of the family 
 died, the fortunes of the house had sunk so low that 
 the event hardly attracted the notice of contemporaries. 
 For the student of Italian feudalism, above all on its 
 social side, it would be difficult to find a more en- 
 gaging field of inquiry than the rise and decline of 
 the great clan of the Aldobrandeschi.* 
 
 While the burghers inhabiting such great common- 
 wealths as Florence and Siena are chiefly responsible for 
 the overthrow of the feudal nobility in Tuscany, another 
 social element, to which I desire now to call attention, 
 contributed in no mean manner to the passing of the 
 order. I am referring to the peasantry, who, though 
 poor and down-trodden, were none the less deeply af- 
 fected by the passion for civil liberty marking the twelfth 
 century and culminating in the establishment of self- 
 governing consuls in all the Italian towns. The simple 
 fact is that the breath of freedom wafted abroad waked 
 even the most remote agricultural districts to new life. 
 It may prove interesting to inquire a little more particu- 
 larly just what changes this liberating movement brought 
 about, first, in the relation of the lords to their peasants, 
 and, second, in the general level of comfort and dignity 
 maintained by the humble tillers of the soil. 
 
 Originally, wherever feudalism held sway, the 
 country folk were largely serfs who cultivated their 
 lands under a system of tenure, obliging them to pay 
 
 * Such a social-political study as I have in mind has never been under- 
 taken, though much material dealing with the Aldobrandeschi fortunes has 
 been diligently collected. See Berlinghieri, " Notizie degli Aldobrandeschi "; 
 Milanesi, " Periodico di Numismatica," Vol. I (1868), p. no ff.\ Repetti, 
 " Dizionario geografico," Appendice, chap. 12; Davidsohh, " Forschungen 
 zur Geschichte von Florenz," Vol. I, p. 94; and numerous notices (passim) 
 in "Bull. Sen." and "Mis. Stor. Sen."
 
 I!
 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 233 
 
 certain customary dues, in the form of personal services, 
 farm products, or money to their lords. It lay in the 
 haphazard nature of the feudal bond to dignify it with 
 the name of the feudal system is an act of excessive 
 courtesy that these dues varied greatly from province 
 to province, often from neighbor to neighbor. The 
 lord dwelt in a fortified castle, wherein, however, his 
 dependents were not without rights, for they stored their 
 grain and wine within its walls. Davidsohn, writing 
 of the Arno valley,* has shown how this common 
 interest in a central stronghold gradually led to definite 
 agreements between the lords and the agricultural 
 population, and how these agreements exhibit a steady 
 improvement in the social and economic status of the 
 peasantry. It is with distinct surprise that the student, 
 accustomed to think of the feudal age as one of unlimited 
 petty tyrany, will learn that by the twelfth century the 
 peasants, usually grouped together in a village at the 
 foot of a castle, had generally acquired an appreciable 
 measure of self-government. For the Sienese contado 
 the proofs of this advance are numerous. We have 
 heard of the Rocca di Tintinnano whose impoverished 
 count, shortly before the year 1300, had become a 
 pensioner of Siena. In 1207, when the needy Nicholas's 
 ancestors still breathed the free air of the Orcia valley, 
 they conceded hardly of their own will, we may opine 
 a carta libertatis f to the villagers. This instrument 
 recognized a consul of the community of peasants, who 
 exercised certain functions of government and received 
 
 * Geschichte von Florenz, chap. 8. 
 
 t Published, with valuable comment, by Zdekauer, "Bull, Sen.," Ill, ft.
 
 234 SIENA 
 
 a certain share of the dues, while a second consul, 
 representing the lords, received the remaining and more 
 considerable part of the imposts. Although the con- 
 tinued exploitation of the peasants appears unquestion- 
 ably from this document, the weighty fact remains that 
 the counts came to terms with their dependents, and 
 that the conceded charter was, if not a guarantee of 
 absolute justice, at least a check upon unlimited abuse. 
 And what happened at Rocca was duplicated at about 
 the same time in the hundreds of castelli and borghi 
 which, like giants in ambush, lay hidden among the 
 woods and hills of the Sienese contado.* Must we 
 infer that humanitarian principles were beginning to 
 make their way among the landholders, possibly through 
 the teaching of the church ? Certainly not. The 
 growth of the cities in the twelfth century reacted 
 favorably on the country, higher food prices prevailed, 
 and the peasants necessarily benefited from the general 
 prosperity. When to the economic advance was joined 
 the spirit of liberty emanating from the great communes, 
 the peasants irresistibly forced a reduction of the feudal 
 services and their admission to a part-control of what- 
 ever was common to themselves and their masters. 
 By the middle of the thirteenth century the grip of 
 feudalism upon the lives of its agricultural dependents 
 was visibly relaxing. 
 
 At the very time when the lords were confronted with 
 
 * See on this point Zdekauer "Sugli Statuti del Monte Amiata (1212- 
 1451)," published in Studi Guiridici Dedicati a F. Schupfer, Torino, 1898. 
 In this article Zdekauer, examining a half dozen little communities subject 
 to the abbot of S. Salvatore of Monte Amiata shows (i) their political restless- 
 ness, and (2) their steady wrenching of self-governing rights from an un- 
 willing master.
 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 235 
 
 the danger of a peasant agitation, they were obliged to 
 meet, as we know, an attack from another side from the 
 side of the commune of Siena determined to extend its 
 political territory. In this struggle the burghers were 
 successful, adopting in general toward the defeated 
 barons the following procedure: At first they were 
 content with a rather vague "submission" of the feudal 
 owners of the soil, taking the form of a tribute to the 
 Virgin on the occasion of her Mid-August festival; but, 
 presently, discovering that such a relation did not suffi- 
 ciently bind the unruly lords to the city, they tried, either 
 by purchase or conquest, to detach the ancient masters 
 entirely from their possessions. To refer again, for 
 purposes of illustration, to the now familiar Rocca di 
 Tintinnano, we find that Siena, after experimenting 
 with the loyalty of the owners, bought them out fully 
 and completely in the year 1250, and obliged them to 
 remove from their hereditary seat. The step involved 
 the extension of the municipal administration to the 
 appropriated district. Accordingly, the city placed a 
 paid official, called castellano, in the Rocca, and of 
 course followed the same plan with regard to other 
 strongholds seized under similar conditions. A castel- 
 lano, while exercising, in the name of the commune, 
 all the rights of his feudal predecessor, might be sup- 
 posed to foster and strengthen the self-governing insti- 
 tutions developed by the peasants who dwelt at the 
 castle's foot. The evolution thus effected from feudal 
 to burgher rule promised the villages a fair share in the 
 golden future of Siena. 
 
 Unfortunately, however, this promising development 
 was choked while it was yet in the bud. Siena was
 
 236 . . SIENA 
 
 playing, in the thirteenth century, a big political game 
 of the kind we "now designate as world-politics. The 
 prime requirement for world-politics then as now is 
 money. The fiscal needs of the city in the prolonged 
 Tuscan turmoil were very great, and brought with them 
 not only increasing taxes, but also loans at usurious and 
 often ruinous rates. The loan money was supplied by 
 the great merchant houses, the Tolomei, the Salimbeni, 
 the Buonsignori and the rest, who, beginning with the 
 practice of taking in pledge the communal property, 
 and more particularly the conquered feudal castles of 
 the contado, ended by assuming full rights in the mort- 
 gaged possessions. What was the result ? Toward the 
 year 1300 the original country nobility had been largely 
 replaced in its ancient strongholds by the newer city no- 
 bility, who, after the manner of upstarts, insisted jealously 
 on all the rights that went with their titles, and who, in 
 their capacity of absentee landlords, were less cordially 
 united with the peasantry than the vanished masters. 
 Thus the Rocca di Tintinnano, repeatedly referred to, 
 received a charter of liberty from its feudal masters in 
 1207, and saw them take their definitive departure in 
 1250, when Siena acquired all their rights for a round 
 sum; a generation later, in 1274, the Rocca was in the 
 hands of the Salimbeni, probably as payment for finan- 
 cial help extended during the recent war with Florence. 
 Innumerable are the examples showing that this devolu- 
 tion from baron to banker denoted a typical process 
 throughout the country. I cite only one more case, that 
 of San Giovanni d'Asso, an important castle to the 
 east, not far from Asciano.* Its feudal masters were the 
 
 * "Misc. Stor. Sen.," II, p. 90.
 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 237 
 
 great counts Forteguerri, who as early as 1151 mort- 
 gaged it to Siena the usual financial preliminary to 
 political disaster. Accordingly, in 1208, we find the 
 Forteguerri out and Siena in; but not for long, for in 
 1256 we learn that San Giovanni d'Asso has passed into 
 the hands of the Buonsignori, there to remain till that 
 famous banking house went into liquidation; finally, in 
 1303, the Salimbeni, presumably owing to a forced sale, 
 took possession. Can we want a better example of 
 how the state made over its assets to the money-lenders 
 who financed its political ambitions, thereby thought- 
 lessly creating a second country nobility on the ruins of 
 the older baronage destroyed by the sword ? 
 
 Thus did the city, after holding out to the peasant 
 communities for one radiant moment the delusive hope 
 of liberty, yield to its cruel needs and thrust the vil- 
 lages back into their old dependence. World-politics, 
 I say, with their inevitable bill for military glory. 
 To this feature of the hard lot of the struggling 
 peasantry should be added as a factor of at least equal 
 importance, the economic selfishness which has always 
 characterized city-states in their treatment of subject 
 populations. In distributing the taxes urban rulers 
 have rarely scrupled to lighten their own burdens at the 
 expense of their agricultural clients. At Siena the great 
 preoccupation of the various governments the Twenty- 
 four, the Nine, the Twelve and so forth was cheap 
 food for the dwellers within the walls, no matter what 
 violence had to be done to achieve the result. Cheap 
 food would help keep the urban masses quiet, besides 
 making it possible for the manufacturing interests, with 
 which the life of the city was bound up, to pay low
 
 238 SIENA 
 
 wages. Therefore mediaeval Siena always followed a 
 policy of most arbitrary interference with the laws of 
 exchange. To send breadstufFs across the boundary to 
 Florence or other centres was rigorously forbidden. 
 Producers had to market their harvests in Siena in the 
 hope that a continued abundance would depress prices; 
 and if the prices did rise, as they would in years of poor 
 crops, the city governors made sure that the growers 
 received no benefit from the circumstance by fixing a 
 maximum price for all leading articles. To hinder 
 monopolization really a very constant peril in an 
 artificially limited market an elaborate legislation was 
 formulated with the object of eliminating the middleman 
 and transferring the necessities of life directly from the 
 producer to the consumer. All such manipulation of 
 the natural processes of exchange must strike us as the 
 height of folly as well as of injustice, unless we keep 
 before our minds that in the Middle Age we are dealing 
 not with the vast national agglomerations of to-day but 
 with small urban units, and that the victorious burgher, 
 devoted passionately to his particular commune, made 
 everything else subservient to its interests as these 
 defined themselves to his understanding.* 
 
 Nor does this complete the tale of the oppression 
 
 * The policy of the artificial control of the food market, imposed by the 
 bourgeoisie, grew more rigorous in measure as the people drove the nobility 
 from power. At first, therefore, the divieto or prohibition to export agri- 
 cultural products was exceptional. By the time of the Constitution of the 
 year 1262 the divieto had already become more or less permanent (Dist., I, 
 24), but full and comprehensive legislation on the subject was reserved to 
 the Nine (Statuto del Divieto del 1300 in the Arch, di Stato). See on this 
 question Salvemini, Magnati e Popolari in Firenze, pp. 47-5, and Caggese, 
 Siena e il suo Contado, Bull, Sen., XIII. See further on the whole economic 
 issue, Mengozzi, La charta Bannorum etc., Bull. Sen., XIII, 381^"., and 
 Lisini, Prowedimenti Economici della R. di Siena nel 1382.
 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 239 
 
 practised by the city against the country population. 
 In addition to the above burdens resting on the free 
 exchange of farm products and constituting a series 
 of indirect imposts, a direct sum was assessed annually 
 on every country community, while a tariff on all manu- 
 factures imported into Sienese territory increased the 
 price within the district of shoes, clothing, and agricul- 
 tural implements. In the face of such a policy, there 
 can be left room in no one's mind for doubt touching 
 the reckless exploitation of the country folk whom fate 
 had delivered into the city's hands. The sad truth is 
 that in the fourteenth century the village communities, 
 which in the previous century had been visibly prosper- 
 ing, were slowly sapped of their vitality and the villagers 
 themselves reduced to desperation. A recent student * 
 is right when he describes the town as a tree fed by roots 
 which radiated over the contado, and as flourishing by 
 relentlessly consuming the soil. The patent inference 
 is that although the tree might thrive apparently by 
 systematically exhausting the ground which nourished 
 it, in the long run it only prepared its own de- 
 struction. 
 
 As if this economic policy, built on false assumptions 
 and inspired by the sole consideration of urban neces- 
 sities, were not enough to reduce the country to a condi- 
 tion of profound prostration, a veritable rain of addi- 
 tional afflictions fell upon the poor peasantry. We are 
 familiar with the insecurity of life and property pre- 
 vailing in the feudal age, but this insecurity was not 
 removed by the victory of the commune. If anything, 
 the fourteenth century makes a more chaotic impression 
 
 * Caggese, Bull. Sen., XIII, p. 73.
 
 240 SIENA 
 
 than its predecessor, for to feudal violence, become a 
 confirmed habit, was added the terrible curse of the 
 companies of adventure. 
 
 If we would form an adequate idea of the disturbances 
 to which country life was exposed during the Middle 
 Age, we must not limit our view to the private feuds 
 among the nobility or to the wars between the nobility 
 and the towns. As a matter of fact the feudal habit of 
 putting even the most trifling differences to the decision 
 of the sword possessed all classes of society alike, and 
 would continue to possess them until the state had 
 acquired sufficient strength to enforce respect for the 
 slow processes of law. The familiar form of rural 
 disturbance was indeed associated with the nobility, 
 who carried on vendettas in their own ranks, or plotted 
 against the ambitious commune, or, falling on some 
 defenceless abbot, appropriated his lands; but other 
 social classes or political entities, as, for instance, the 
 village communities, occasionally contributed to the 
 confusion. To present a case in point, the little borgo of 
 Castiglione, in that lively storm centre, the Val d'Orcia, 
 looked with unconcealed hatred upon the monastery of 
 Vivo because of a dispute about the use of certain 
 meadows. In 1328 the Castiglionesi to the number of 
 two hundred suddenly fell on the monastery, raised their 
 banner over its campanile, pricked* with their swords 
 and lances, evidently in the spirit of rude horse-play, 
 Frate Ranieri,who was celebrating the Mass, robbed the 
 furniture and cattle, devastated the fields, in short, 
 
 * Ponteggiaverunt is the excellent word of the original declaration. See 
 Bull. Sen., X, p. 44. Article by Bandi, I Castelli della Val d'Orcia. This 
 article, together with those by the same author in Vol. IX, gives a good idea 
 of the troublous life in the Sienese wilds.
 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 241 
 
 conducted themselves in a manner entirely worthy of 
 their aristocratic exemplars. 
 
 Public opinion rather approved than condemned 
 such actions, provided they were carried through 
 with boldness and success. Grown-up men, much like 
 school-boys of our own time romantically excited by 
 tales of frontier heroism, even entertained an open 
 admiration for a courageous highwayman. A civil 
 spirit, like Dante, might condemn these gentry, "che 
 fecero alle strade tanta guerra,"* and might consign 
 them to nameless horrors in hell, but the average man, 
 used to violence, practising it himself, made light of 
 their crimes. One of the worst of this pestiferous tribe, 
 operating, in the period of the Nine, in the Monte 
 Amiata region, was Ghino di Tacco. What Dante 
 with his inflexible standards of right and wrong thought 
 of Ghino and his likes I have stated, but I suspect that 
 not Dante but Benvenuto da Imola, one of the poet's 
 earliest commentators, reflects the true contemporary 
 sentiment about Ghino when, at the mention of his 
 name, he bursts into nothing less than lyric encomium, 
 calling him "vir mirabilis, magnus, membrutus, . . . 
 fortissimus . . . prudens et largus."t Although Ghino, 
 as is amusingly confirmed by a story of Boccacio,J may 
 have been a gentlemanly robber, he hardly deserves 
 an epitaph which would honor the shade of a Miltiades 
 or a George Washington. 
 
 l Nevertheless the exploits of the Castiglionesi and the 
 violences of Ghino di Tacco represent minor troubles of 
 the contado which would not have persisted long, if they 
 
 * Inf., XII, p. 138. t Bull. Sen., X, p. 37 (note), 
 
 t II Decamerone, Giornata Decima, II.
 
 242 SIENA 
 
 had not flourished under the shelter of the turbulent 
 conditions created by the perennial wars of the nobles 
 among themselves and with Siena. Of these wars I 
 have already said enough to make it unnecessary to add, 
 at this point, more than a few details. We have seen 
 by what degrees, and owing to what policy on the part 
 of the commune, the city nobility came, at least in large 
 part, into possession of the castles of the original feuda- 
 tories. With the transfer of their interests from the 
 town to the country the Tolomei and their compeers, 
 although they did not immediately drop their mercantile 
 connections, began to assume more and more the habits 
 of the class which they succeeded. The unfortunate 
 fact that, from the year 1277 on > tnev were tne victims 
 of manifest injustice by being excluded from the govern- 
 ment of their native city, made them more prone than 
 ever to plots and violence. Their exclusion, it may be 
 remembered, was the consequence of the Guelph- 
 Ghibelline feuds among them, which they insisted on 
 fighting out in the streets, regardless of the security of 
 the common people tranquilly going about their busi- 
 ness. But these givers and takers of hard blows clashed 
 not only in the city but also in the country; preferably, 
 indeed, in the country because there they were much 
 less likely to be interfered with. The signal victory of 
 the Guelph party in Siena, as well as in all Tuscany, 
 should logically have put an end to the Guelph-Ghibel- 
 line animosities. But such was the bitterness of faction 
 and the devotion to the spirit of vendetta that the local 
 noble feuds continued to shake the city long after the em- 
 peror's power was broken. Among the family quarrels 
 of Siena the vicious warfare between the Tolomei and
 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 243 
 
 the Salimbeni easily overshadowed all the rest. The 
 quarrel of these great houses continued, interrupted by 
 frequent spectacular reconciliations emphasized with 
 false oaths before the altar, throughout the period of the 
 Nine, to be replaced in its turn by one of the strangest 
 wars recorded in the annals of a free community. 
 
 In narrating the overthrow of the Nine (1355) I 
 showed that the Salimbeni once more came to the front 
 politically, owing, in part, to their influence with the 
 emperor, Charles IV, and, in part, to their alliance with 
 the party group or monte, known as the Dodicini. 
 During the disturbed period that followed, they suc- 
 ceeded by clever, unscrupulous tactics, in manoeuvring 
 themselves into a position from which they dominated 
 the state almost at will. They had long, in return for 
 money lent to the state, enjoyed the possession of many 
 castles among them La Ripa, Vignone, and the invalu- 
 able Rocca di Tintinnano and in the year 1368, for 
 services rendered to the cause of the people during that 
 year, received in reward Castiglione d'Orcia, Mont* 
 Orsaio, and other places, which, added to their earlier 
 acquisitions, made them unquestioned masters in the 
 Val d'Orcia and throughout the southern section of the 
 contado. Encouraged to defy their native city which 
 thus thoughtlessly elevated a single family at its own ex- 
 pense, they presently entertained the ambition of raising 
 their possessions into an independent kingdom, in the ul- 
 terior hope, it was openly whispered, of acquiring the 
 hereditary lordship of Siena itself. Such a project the 
 republic had, of course, to repulse with vigor. A war 
 ensued between Siena and its leading family, which, 
 punctuated with truces and dishonest agreements,
 
 244 SIENA 
 
 lasted half a century. Although the city was torn with 
 the feuds of the monti, and the military position of the 
 rebellious Salimbeni along the steep banks of the 
 Orcia was almost impregnable, once alive to the issue, 
 Siena had still sufficient resolution left to fight for its 
 life, and, in the end, came out victorious. Its culminat- 
 ing triumph, the capture in 1418 of the Rocca di 
 Tintinnano was accomplished by treason,* but as that 
 was a weapon of warfare familiar to both sides, we have 
 no occasion to feel that the city by the use of such 
 means defiled its honor. With the Salimbeni decimated 
 by the long struggle and their castles once more in the 
 hands of the government, the inordinately extended 
 reign of feudalism in the wooded Val d'Orcia was, after 
 a struggle of three centuries, at last definitely broken. 
 
 To the reader, now sufficiently familiar with the 
 excesses of mediaeval warfare, there is no need of ex- 
 plaining how the long Salimbeni conflict devastated the 
 Contemplating "this calamity in con- 
 
 nection with all the other miseries with which the coun- 
 try was regularly visited, one marvels that the whole 
 region was not depopulated by a unanimous migration. 
 Verily, man is strong to endure, and the love of home 
 passes understanding. For even now I am not at the 
 end of my narrative of the afflictions of the contado. 
 Worse in its sudden fury than any of the ills yet enume- 
 rated, though not so steadily recurrent as some of them, 
 was the curse of the predatory companies. Throughout 
 the second half of the Jourteenth century this evil befell 
 notonly Siena and Tuscany, but alTItaiy. That a ban d 
 of assassins, calliiigjthemselves soldiers, could, under an 
 
 * Malavolti, Historia di Siena, ad annum 1418.
 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 245 
 
 audacious leader, march up and dowr^jhe peninsula, 
 
 rnntrJKim-i rmrm 
 
 is an eloquent comment on the helplessness of the Italian 
 governments. "Perpetual rivalries among neighbors 
 added _tojthe^ eternal domestic strife had so paralyzed 
 the national will that it proved incapable of destroying 
 a thieving pack oFwolves, the enemies of everybody. 
 
 The origin of the companies of adventure is to be 
 found in the ^vil custom of the Italian_jtates of the 
 fourteenth century of doing tEeir fightingjipt_with_the 
 JocaF militias but with mercenarjes., usually from beyond 
 the_ Alps Germans, Frenchmen, Hunganans,-_amf 
 Einglish*, The n^[nnl_aTrny_nf .Siena, create^ in thg 
 consular ej^a^jtilL pyisted and was prrasinnally ralk^ 
 out for service^but, as a sort of parliament of the people, 
 it was distrusted by the ruling clique, and, furthermore, 
 inlKe matter of efficiency could not match itself with a 
 corps of trained, professional soldiers. That these mer- 
 cenaries, on being dismissed at the termination of a 
 war for which they had been engaged, should have 
 bethought themselves to take advantage of the impotent 
 but wealthy governments of Italy, is not strange.* 
 The initial act of audacity, as far as Siena is concerned, 
 was committed by a German leader, Werner von 
 Urslingen, when, in 1342, the republic of Pisa cancelled 
 his engagement. He avowed with the frankness and 
 emphatic rhetoric characteristic of his craft, his free- 
 booter's point of view by the inscription on his breast- 
 plate: Enemy of God, of Pity, and of Mercy. Such 
 men can be tamed only with cold steel. Siena it was 
 the time of the Nine offered him money, some twenty- 
 
 * Professione, Siena e le Compagnie di Ventura.
 
 246 SIENA 
 
 five hundred florins, with the request to go away and 
 cease from further troubling honest folk.* Equally 
 successful throughout Tuscany, Werner made his way 
 northward and crossed the Alps, trailing behind him 
 an immense booty. 
 
 Such success was sure to create imitators. Hardly 
 ten years had passed, when the company of a Provencal, 
 called Fra Moriale, descended on the Sienese and 
 plundered at will, pending the agreement concerning their 
 gratuity (1354). The Nine bought poison no less, we 
 hear, than one hundred and thirty-five pounds of it! to 
 mix in the enemy's food, which ingenious substitute for 
 fighting failing in its effect, they weakly paid their tor- 
 mentors a large sum of gold florins.f Money again, 
 food also everything except forged iron, the only coin 
 of courage! And now the gates were open, and the 
 floods devastated Tuscany with .unchecked fury. We 
 hear of the company of Count Lando, of that of Anichi- 
 no, of the White Company, the Company of the Hat, 
 the Company of the Star, of a succession of mercenary 
 hosts with each one of which is associated a monotonous 
 tale of murder, rapine, and conflagration. For more 
 than a generation this pest afflicted the Sienese state, 
 sometimes raging once every few years, occasionally 
 several times in one year. And the Sienese, cringing 
 behind their impregnable walls, always paid, always, 
 with one exception, due to the fact that the leader it 
 was the captain of the Breton Company of the Hat 
 did not want money but territory. At the end of his 
 patience and against the express orders of the Signori 
 
 * Muratori, XV, " Cronica Sanese," 105, E. 
 t Muratori, XV, "Cronica Sanese," 141, D.
 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 247 
 
 Dodici, the Sienese general, one of the Roman Orsini, 
 fell upon the Bretons and signally defeated them (1363). 
 It was an isolated act of manhood without further effect; 
 for, eight months later, behold, in place of the Company 
 of the Hat, the Company of the Star, which made itself 
 at home in the country until persuaded to depart with 
 a bribe of over fifty thousand fiorini d'oro.* But even 
 that huge sum was small compared with the money paid 
 out to the famous commander, John Hawkwood, an 
 Englishman, reputed to have laid his long fingers during 
 his career on several hundred thousand florins of the 
 Sienese exchequer. What wonder that Siena was 
 reduced to terrible financial straits, made reckless loans, 
 and put the tax screws on the subject population! 
 Selfish as the burghers were, and cowardly as their 
 behavior toward the blackguard scum of Europe looks 
 to our eyes, they were neither without pity for the cruel 
 harrying suffered by the undefended peasants, nor with- 
 out the desire to save them from excessive taxes. But 
 what could they do, themselves the victims of hard 
 necessity ? 
 
 Marshalling all these facts concerning the contado we 
 are obliged to agree that Siena did not always deal 
 righteously with her dependent territory nor prove her- 
 self the mother of bounty and felicity. It would almost 
 seem that the town set itself a larger task than it could 
 master. That task, historically stated, was to uproot 
 
 * The impression of pusillanimity made by the Dodici is completed when 
 we read : " And the Sienese sent " in addition, be it observed, to the money 
 "to Misser Anechino, Captain of the said Company, beautiful and rich 
 presents, to wit, a magnificent horse with hangings, and much wax and 
 sweets" of which the Middle Age was very fond "and well-aged wine, 
 and corn and other things." Chronicle of Neri di Donate, Muratori, 
 XV, 183, E.
 
 248 SIENA 
 
 feudalism and to extend to the country all the benefits 
 of the new civilization which the free communes had 
 evolved. Some towns, like Florence, succeeded in this 
 mission with comparative ease. Siena, because it com- 
 manded fewer resources than Florence, and because its 
 feudal adversaries were more numerous, more powerful, 
 and better protected by natural defenses than those of 
 the Arno city, did not bring the struggle to a close till the 
 fifteenth century. As an additional circumstance, 
 retarding the overthrow of the feudal agents, must not 
 be forgotten the necessity, under which Siena was, of 
 dividing her forces by defending herself against ambi- 
 tious and encroaching city neighbors. If Siena had 
 been an island unthreatened by a foreign foe, we can 
 hardly doubt that feudalism would not have remained 
 ensconced for long in the fastnesses of the hills, however 
 inaccessible they may have been. But in spite of all 
 difficulties, in spite of the grinding of the peasants under 
 excessive taxes, in spite of the rise of a second giant 
 brood of feudalism after the first had been laid low, in 
 spite of the harrying of the fields by the companies of 
 adventure, early in the fifteenth century the city's purpose 
 was, in the main, attained and the country fused with 
 it under a government which, however imperfectly 
 democratic, was none the less an immense advance over 
 the political and social system designated by the name 
 of feudalism. 
 
 For this reason we may call the period from the first 
 vernal budding of communal freedom to the completed 
 conquest of the countryside the heroic period of Siena, 
 and single it out of the long life of the town for special 
 study. Compared with it, the periods which followed
 
 THE SIENESE CONTADO 249 
 
 were, as far as their political history is concerned, un- 
 steady, bewildering, and even meaningless. Certainly 
 they do not sound the clear, high note which we detect 
 wherever life is hopeful and society adorns itself daily 
 with some new work of civilization. The organizing 
 and constructive activity of Siena, taken at least in any 
 large sense, came to an end with the beginning of the 
 fifteenth century. Henceforth we look in vain for any 
 essentially new germs. As soon as the communes of 
 Tuscany had conquered their respective contados, the 
 next step in the political evolution plainly was the 
 fusion of the communes into a provincial unity; 
 Tuscany, Lombardy, Umbria and the rest, once 
 unified, might then have proceeded to constitute the 
 larger unity of the Italian nation. But this indispensa- 
 ble work the communes proved themselves incapable of 
 carrying to a successful issue. We have heard some- 
 thing of their rivalries and hatreds and have received 
 a lively impression of the persistence of the stupid 
 prejudices which divided them. The upshot of fruitless 
 quarrelling was that the communes were driven into a 
 blind alley and like every man or society without a clear 
 purpose, presently began, in varying degree, to stagnate; 
 which process, long resisted by the splendid vigor and 
 elasticity of the Italian mind, engaged just then in 
 culling the fruits of the Renaissance, gradually but 
 ineluctably paralyzed the multifold energies of the 
 peninsula. Italy, cursed with political impotence, was 
 a doomed land. A chapter of that doom, to which I 
 shall return, is entitled the Twilight of Siena.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT AND SAINT CATHERINE 
 
 IN an earlier chapter I took occasion to show that 
 the official church, though an intensely popular 
 and a by no means inelastic institution, was not 
 always able to satisfy the extraordinary religious passion 
 of the Middle Age. Whenever this passion inflamed 
 large groups of men and women to devote themselves 
 to the quiet contemplation of the goodness of God or 
 to the active service of the sick and outcast, the church 
 had no great difficulty in retaining the allegiance of her 
 over-zealous subjects by organizing them in monastic 
 societies. As outlets provided to relieve the periodically 
 mounting floods of fervor, the companies of monks, 
 nuns, and friars rendered an incalculable service to 
 established religion. But time and again the waters 
 burst all bounds, and the church, a majestic edifice with 
 far-flung buttresses of stone, suddenly found itself 
 enveloped by a raging stream, while the agitated occu- 
 pants sustained their spirits with the knowledge that 
 such violent crises had occurred before, without further 
 consequences than the deposit of a heap of unsightly 
 wreckage along the track of the torrent. A common 
 enough spectacle throughout the whole Middle Age it 
 was to see bands of excited seekers of salvation infest 
 the highways of the land, lacerating their flesh with 
 brandished thongs, singing lauds or chanting dirges, 
 
 250
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 251 
 
 according to their mood, and summoning the world to 
 repentance. Let him who has any curiosity on this 
 subject turn to that most direct and communicative of 
 all mediaeval documents, the chronicle of Brother Salim- 
 bene. What a record of processions, extravagances, 
 miracles, and pious frauds, constituting, in the eyes of 
 the average modern reader, a chapter of unmixed mid- 
 summer madness! Salimbene was a boy of twelve, 
 residing in his native Parma, when a revival struck 
 northern Italy with the vehemence of an earthquake. 
 Peasants left their ploughs to listen to song and sermon, 
 burghers folded their ledgers and proclaimed a truce to 
 party fury, nobles, divided by inherited feuds, embraced 
 amidst tears; for, says Salimbene, "no wrath was left 
 among them, no trouble or hatred; they had drunk of 
 the wine of the sweetness of God's spirit, whereof if a 
 man drink, flesh hath no more savor for him."* Men 
 called this revival, conducted apparently on an unprece- 
 dented scale, the Alleluia, and during the few weeks 
 of the year 1233, while it lasted, it made our sordid earth 
 seem a thing radiant and immaterial in the eyes of 
 hundreds of thousands of human beings. 
 
 Such elemental movements can only be explained on 
 the ground that the mediaeval period conceded to religion 
 a larger share in life than our time is inclined to do. 
 On account of this unchecked indulgence in religious 
 emotion we frequently designate the departed centuries 
 as the Age of Faith, and a group of romanticists among 
 us never ceases to regret that our scientific pursuits have 
 provided us with a set of inhibitions which lay a crushing 
 burden on enthusiasm. These fond dreamers very 
 
 * Coulton, "From Saint Francis to Dante," p. 21.
 
 252 SIENA 
 
 generally owe their views to a deliberate concentration 
 of attention upon a single aspect of mediaeval Christian- 
 ity. They see the sublime self-oblivion, induced by a 
 surrender of the individual to the will of God, but they 
 do not see, or, having seen, wilfully ignore those many 
 sinister phenomena which, though by no means an 
 essential part of Christianity, are none the less associated 
 with the mediaeval practice of religion and with its ready 
 exaltation of passion over reason. The revolting 
 cruelty of the time, for instance where is its ultimate 
 root to be found but in the habit of yielding to every 
 impulse, noble or ignoble ? Leaving entirely out of con- 
 sideration the horrors practised under the name of war- 
 fare, we are aware that monstrous excesses, closely 
 resembling those of the battlefield, were common occur- 
 rences in the domestic life of every Italian community. 
 Let the reader recall such an act as that of the year 1371, 
 when the Dodicini and their friends, the Salimbeni, 
 wantonly exterminated the poor wool-carders of the 
 Compagnia del Bruco.* Or let him weigh the signifi- 
 cance of such a cold item as the following in an inventory 
 of public property taken in the fifteenth century: "a 
 knife for quartering men at the window of the Martin- 
 ella" that is, at a window of the Palazzo Pubblico 
 where all the town could participate in the awful 
 mutilation perpetrated under the name of justice; and 
 further, " two pairs of pincers for tearing the flesh from 
 men at the said window "~\ It would not be difficult to 
 collect evidence on this point filling many volumes. 
 The nameless sufferings of Dante's Inferno, far from 
 
 * Chapter 7, p. 223. 
 
 t Paoli, " Libro di Montaperti," p. XLIIII, (note).
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 253 
 
 being a pure invention of the poet, were only too often 
 the truthful transcript of an experienced horror which 
 had seared itself upon his memory. Is there anything 
 even in Dante more blood-curdling than the following 
 trait reported of Ezzelino, lord of Treviso: "On a 
 certain day he caused 11,000 men of Padua to be burnt 
 in the field of St. George in the city of Verona; and 
 when fire was set to the place in which they were con- 
 fined, he jousted around them with his knights as if in 
 sport."* Dante belonged to the next generation after 
 Ezzelino, but often in his youth must have heard old 
 men recount this and a score of similar tales about the 
 unbridled despot. 
 
 But let us guard against too strong an emphasis of 
 this aspect of the time a proceeding which would be 
 quite as reprehensible as the practice of the romanticists 
 of viewing the past exclusively in the rosy light shed 
 by some unreflecting act of love and sacrifice. Let us 
 rather be content to observe that the sharp contrasts 
 existed everywhere acts of burning devotion flourish- 
 ing by the side of senseless deeds of violence and that 
 these contrasts are not only a memorable characteristic 
 of the age but an inevitable consequence of its peculiar 
 evaluation of the elements of conduct. The mediaeval 
 period consistently magnified the emotions at the ex- 
 pense of reason which it belittled and decried. The 
 Nothing Too Much of ancient philosophy, extolling a 
 perfect equilibrium of all the human faculties, was an 
 
 * Coulton, "From St. Francis to Dante," p. 115. Many authorities report 
 the eating of human flesh by enraged adversaries. See Villani, " Cronica," 
 XII, 17. "Ed ebbonvi de' si crudeli, e con furia si bestiale . . . che 
 mangiarono delle loro carni crude." The author is speaking of the uprising 
 of 1343-
 
 254 SIENA 
 
 abomination to a society which set above all else the 
 primal satisfaction of the quickened pulse-beat, whether 
 of love or hate. In this passion for excess, crystallized 
 into a code of conduct, most of the social phenomena 
 which fill our sober minds with amazement at the 
 vanished past have their philosophic explanation. 
 
 If such a revival as the Alleluia of the year 1233 
 attracts our attention by reason of its magnitude and 
 universality, other movements of lesser scope, avoiding 
 the mobilization of great masses and aiming at some 
 definite reform of society and the individual, achieved 
 far more permanent results. Of these local actions, 
 associated usually with the name of some visionary, not 
 a town of Tuscany is so poor as not to boast a long 
 succession; and of all the Tuscan towns none might 
 venture to compare itself, in respect of prophets and 
 religious leaders, with Siena. Doubtless the imagina- 
 tive temper of the Sienese, coupled with their half- 
 pagan sense of the perpetual nearness of celestial 
 agents, rendered them peculiarly responsive to the influ- 
 ence of Roman Christianity. How else account for the 
 long list of native sons and daughters who, to the admira- 
 tion of a greater or lesser following, stirred the potent 
 sentiments associated in the mediaeval mind with God's 
 wrath and man's depravity ? In the days of Dante we 
 hear of a certain Peter who traded in combs (pettini} 
 and therefore went by the name of Pier Pettignano. 
 His fame for holiness had gone abroad, for the Floren- 
 tine poet declares that Peter's intercession saved from 
 worse punishment the blinded Sapia who spoke the 
 awful blasphemy.* The pious comb-seller was deeply 
 
 * Dante, "Purgatorio," XIII, 106 /.
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 255 
 
 venerated by his countrymen, and when, in the year 
 1289, he died, almost a hundred years old, the republic 
 declared him holy, and supported its conviction by 
 voting him a monument at public expense unum 
 sepulcrum nobile.* Scant as this material is, we know 
 even less of the Dominican friar, Ambrogio, who seems 
 to have been a member of the noble house of the 
 Sansedoni. He was a contemporary of Pier Pettignano, 
 and, not long after he died in the year 1287, was 
 canonized by the church. From the circumstance that 
 he long continued to be worshipped at many Sienese 
 altars, we must conclude that he made a considerable 
 impression in his day.f 
 
 With the coming of the fourteenth century the veil 
 lifts, giving us a much clearer view of the holy men and 
 women of Siena as they went about their chosen work 
 of salvation. The Blessed Bernardo Tolomei (b. 1272) 
 of the noble family of that name wonderfully com- 
 bined the two Christian ideals of contemplation and 
 service. A strain of asceticism drove him into the bare 
 chalk hills to the east of Siena, where with steady labor 
 he made a little garden-spot, and called it Monte 
 Oliveto. He lived to found an order the Olivetans 
 organized under the rule of Saint Benedict; but for 
 all his joy in his pleasant retirement Bernardo did not 
 refuse to help his countrymen in a great crisis. When 
 the plague of 1348 devastated Siena, he left his quiet 
 hills and met his death heroically while attending the 
 poor victims of that awful visitation. | Another founder 
 
 * "Misc. Stor. Sen.," IV, p. 42. f "Misc. Stor. Sen.," IV, p. 164. 
 
 t On the Blessed Bernardo Tolomei see a series of articles by P. Lugano, 
 'Bull. Sen.," IX-X.
 
 256 SIENA 
 
 of an order was the Blessed Giovanni Colombini 
 (1304?- 1 367) with whom originated the Poveri Gesuati. 
 Of him it is reported that he was a merchant of great 
 means, when, as he was verging on old age, illumination 
 descended on him like a dove from heaven. Straight- 
 way he divested himself of his wealth chiefly, like a 
 good Sienese, in favor of the hospital of the Scala 
 espoused the Lady Poverty, and wandered through the 
 streets and lanes perpetually praising God. Some of 
 the lauds which he and his followers sang have come 
 down to us under the name of rime spiritual! and are, 
 if monotonous in matter, still tremulous with the joy 
 of the convert.* But more celebrated than any of the 
 aforementioned, second only among Italian saints to 
 Saint Francis, are Saint Catherine and San Bernardino. 
 Of the latter, as belonging to a relatively late period, 
 I shall speak briefly in another placejf before taking 
 up the life of her, who marks the culmination of Chris- 
 tianity within the bounds of Sienese influence, I may 
 be permitted to call attention to the reverse of the medal 
 and to speak of the occasional appearance in the city 
 of heretical views and sects. 
 
 Though Siena was profoundly religious and affirmed 
 her fidelity to the church by adding numerous names 
 to the roster of saints, no less than every other city of 
 Tuscany, she was guilty of certain irregularities of 
 thought and practice defined as heretical. In this 
 connection it is well to recall that our precise modern 
 idea, that heresy consists in formulating and defending 
 an unorthodox theological opinion, must be revised for 
 
 * "Bull. Sen.," II, iff, discusses his life, and on p. 47 gives one of his 
 lauds. t Chapter 14.
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 257 
 
 mediaeval times in view of the custom of throwing 
 alchemists, epicureans, astrologers, and wizards into 
 a common class with the religious innovators. Such 
 summary procedure saved thought on the part of the 
 authorities, and, further, may have recommended itself 
 as an easy way of periodically purging society of its 
 restless and dangerous elements under the pretense of 
 defending the imperilled church. True, belief in love 
 draughts, in the influence of the stars, of the possibility 
 of transmuting baser metals into gold, was general,* 
 for the age was one of extraordinary superstition, but a 
 revulsion, due to religious fear, was certain to follow 
 sooner or later, and then the thaumaturgists, represent- 
 ing a strange mixture of charlatanism and honest zeal 
 for knowledge, paid for their brief popularity with their 
 lives. A typical case is that of Capocchio of Siena, 
 who aroused the suspicion of the authorities in conse- 
 quence of his devotion to the primitive science of the 
 thirteenth century, and perished at the stake, f 
 
 But much more interesting than the misled and mis- 
 named scientists who might from time to time fall 
 under the imputation of heresy are the representa- 
 tives of movements consciously religious in character 
 and openly or secretly directed against the church. 
 The student of the Middle Age, who knows that 
 great concerted agitations repeatedly threatened the 
 ascendency of Rome, will not be surprised to 
 
 * On this subject of superstition see "Misc. Stor. Sen.," I, 124. The 
 government officially employed wizards, prophets, and exercisers. On the 
 opening of a campaign with Florence it was a common practice to hire a 
 magician for the purpose of having him concoct a powder to scatter among 
 the enemy! 
 
 t Dante met Capocchio in hell, "Inferno," XXIX, 133 /.
 
 258 SIENA 
 
 hear that almost all of them could claim a follow- 
 ing in Siena. The Manicheans, and after them the 
 Paterini, who bore a certain inner resemblance to 
 the Manicheans, had a strong following in southern 
 Tuscany throughout the early Middle Age,* while in 
 the thirteenth century we hear of Sienese supporters of 
 the thrice cursed Albigensian heresy, and in the four- 
 teenth of a group of Franciscan rebels against Rome 
 called Fraticelli.f These various sects did not by any 
 means occupy the same theological ground, but they 
 were all agreed in their opposition to the dominant 
 church. Therefore the bishop of Siena, supported 
 from the thirteenth century on by the new and famous 
 institution of the Inquisition, was obliged to exercise 
 constant vigilance. The Inquisition differed from the 
 old episcopal supervision in matters of faith in that it 
 was centrally operated from Rome, chiefly through 
 the agency of the Dominican order, and that it pro- 
 ceeded in accordance with much more rigid principles. 
 Bishop and Inquisition alike enjoyed, though with 
 varying fervor, the cooperation of the Sienese state, 
 and from the earliest constitution which has reached us, 
 the Constitution of 1262, we may learn that the state, 
 anxious to avoid the censure of the church, legislated 
 with the utmost severity against heretici et pactareni.% 
 Catherine Benincasa, the most fragrant and ex- 
 quisite representative of Sienese Christianity during the 
 
 * Davidsohn, "Geschichte von Florenz," I, 721 ff., II], pp. 302-4, 
 presents a careful review of the Paterini in Florence and Tuscany. 
 
 t For the edict against them see Cappelletti, "Storia delle Chiese d'ltalia," 
 XVII, p. 484. On the general subject of heresy consult Tocco, "L'Eresia nel 
 Medio Evo," Florence, 1884. 
 
 J Zdekauer, "II Constituto di 1262," I, 118. The legislation on heresy 
 tended to become more and more rigorous, as may be seen by consult-
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 259 
 
 whole Middle Age, was born on March 25, 1347. Her 
 father, Jacopo Benincasa, a dyer by profession, con- 
 ducted his business on the steep slopes of the street 
 which led down to one of the famous fountains of the 
 city, the Fonte Branda. Jacopo and his wife Lapa 
 were honest working people, poor in everything except 
 in offspring, for Catherine not the smallest marvel in a 
 marvellous career was, according to her biographer, 
 Fra Raimondo, the next to the last in a succession of 
 twenty-five children, who singly or in pairs came to 
 make their home under the dyer's roof. The Benincasa 
 house still stands, provided in the sixteenth century 
 with a beautiful loggia both in the front and in the rear, 
 and otherwise altered to meet the requirements of a 
 sacred museum, but the essential changes are slight, 
 and the immediate environment bears to this day much 
 the same aspect which marked it in the time of the 
 saint's youth. Here the working people continue to 
 make their home; the street, too precipitous for even 
 the lightest vehicles, swarms with riotous children, 
 swarthy with the wind and sun; and the air is full of 
 the pungent, not unpleasant odor rising from the vats, 
 around which the tanners ply their immemorial trade. 
 Over the dusty flags the baby Catherine must have 
 rolled, watched by the busy Lapa out of the corner of her 
 eye; like the urchins of our day, she must have toddled 
 down to Fonte Branda, where the press of men and 
 
 ing "II Constitute di 1309-10 with regard to its heretical provisions." The 
 ecclesiastical ideal in the matter of persecution was represented by the 
 hideous laws promulgated in the years 1232 and 1238 by Frederick II, in 
 order to curry favor with the church. Monumenta Ger., Leges II, p. 286, 
 p. 326. Whenever Siena or another commune wished to stand well with the 
 pope, it made a show of incorporating these laws in its statutes.
 
 260 SIENA 
 
 women, come to draw water for the house and shop, 
 provided a never-failing spectacle; and perhaps her 
 first adventure was to scramble up the steep hill flanking 
 the ancient fountain, in order to have a peep into the 
 cool interior of the great church of San Domenico, 
 which reared its transept almost vertically above her 
 father's roof.* 
 
 The church of Sari Domenico, perpetually in view on 
 its high eminence, was destined to play a directing role 
 in Catherine's career. The good brothers of the 
 monastery, who came sometimes to visit her parents, 
 were struck with the self-contained manner of the 
 child, and gladly undertook her spiritual guidance. 
 Without believing to the letter all the miraculous things 
 reported of the youthful Catherine, we may rest assured 
 that she had a strong religious bent from her birth, 
 which, being carefully nursed by her Dominican friends, 
 presently took the form of an overpowering enthusiasm 
 for the life of a Christian ascetic. In spite of the 
 remonstrances of her family, in the year 1362, when she 
 was only fifteen years old, she joined the Order of 
 
 * The literature on Saint Catherine is rapidly assuming vast proportions. 
 For a good review of the sources see the Bibliography appended to Gardner, 
 "Saint Catherine of Siena." The original life, called the Legend, which has 
 principally supplied later writers with their facts, was written in Latin by 
 Catherine's confessor, Fra Raimondo of Capua. Far and away the most 
 important source for an intimate knowledge of the saint are her Letters. 
 If all the material furnished by the hagiographers were lost and these unique 
 epistles spared, her historical portrait would not suffer the loss of a single 
 significant trait. Of the several editions, I have used the edition of Gigli, 
 reprinted in 1842 at Milan. Her complete works, including the "Dialogo" 
 and Fra Raimondo's "Life "(in Italian), were published by her devoted ad- 
 mirer, Girolamo Gigli, early in the eighteenth century. Of recent works, the 
 most important are Drane, "The History of St. Catherine"; Capecelatro, 
 "Storia di S. Caterina da Siena"; Scudder, "Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen 
 in Her Letters"; and Gardner, "Saint Catherine of Siena."
 
 Detail Guidoricc o da Fogliano. By Simone Martini (in the Palazzo Pubblico) 
 
 Detail from the Allegory of Good Government. 
 By Ambrogio Lorenzctti (in the Palazzo Pubblico)
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 261 
 
 Penance of Saint Dominic, the saint of her particular 
 devotion, and became what the Sienese called a Mantel- 
 lata. The Order of Penance was a lay order, embracing 
 both sexes and planned to supplement the work of the 
 Dominican friars, but its members wore religious dress 
 and dedicated themselves, as far as their secular condi- 
 tion permitted, to the duties of their faith. On assum- 
 ing the mantle Catherine continued to dwell at home, 
 where she converted her room into a cell, and gave her- 
 self wholly to the contemplation of the mysteries of 
 Christianity. For years she led a life of strictest 
 confinement, abandoning her solitary retreat only to 
 attend mass and receive the eucharist in the church of 
 her order, which had come to stand in her exalted mind 
 for the promise and glory of the cross. 
 
 A pure and simple-minded girl, burning out her 
 life like a taper before the tabernacle of the Lord that 
 is all there might have been to the uneventful history 
 of the maid Catherine, if, in addition to her love of God 
 and yearning for heaven, she had not also felt the pas- 
 sion to serve mankind. This is a fundamental trait 
 of her character, giving her life a human zest generally 
 lacking in the pallid ranks of the brotherhood of 
 mediaeval saints. For a brief period in her zealous 
 youth she may indeed have sealed her senses to the 
 sights and sounds of the world, but she was too utterly 
 human to persist long in so narrow a course. The fact 
 is, the world rang like a trumpet in her ears and gave 
 her no rest. The miseries of her age invaded her cell, 
 but, instead of driving her into deeper solitude, they 
 aroused her will to wrestle with them to the end of 
 making the earth she lived in a more godly habitation.
 
 262 SIENA 
 
 And what a desolating picture it was which society 
 spread before her eyes! While the pope was an exile 
 in Avignon, apparently content never to return to his 
 hereditary seat at Rome, the emperor, sunk even to 
 baser depths than his spiritual rival, looked upon his 
 office as a mere device for raising revenue. In 1355 
 Catherine with her own eyes may have seen an emperor, 
 after an interval of a century, ride through the streets of 
 Siena, and possibly she shared for a brief hour the 
 dream that his coming meant an end of domestic 
 confusion. But instead of peace Charles IV brought 
 new civil wars and the government of the Twelve. At 
 her father's table this event must have given rise to 
 brisk and gleeful comment, for the clan of the Benincasa 
 belonged to the new monte of the Dodicini, and for a 
 short space (1355-68) took rank with the rulers of the 
 city. But the Twelve, as we know, were a wretched 
 magistracy under whom the state enjoyed hardly a 
 moment of peace. The city rang with the lawless 
 deeds of the Tolomei and the Salimbeni, and no sooner 
 was the din raised by these cantankerous noblemen 
 somewhat quieted, than there sounded across the 
 contado the wail of the poor peasants, plundered and 
 put to torture by the prowling bands of Hawkwood and 
 similar adventurers. Violence, blasphemy, greed, and 
 oppression met the young girl at every turn until her 
 heart swelled with all the sorrows of the race. Had 
 thirteen hundred years of Christianity been all in 
 vain? "I die and I cannot die," was the agonized 
 cry she raised again and again.* But in spite of her 
 anguish she sought the burden of the world, courag- 
 
 *See, for instance, "Lettera 90," III, 28.
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 263 
 
 eously resolved to do her part to realize a nobler 
 brotherhood of man. 
 
 The work done by Catherine in the service of her 
 fellows is generally regarded as the most memorable 
 chapter of her life. That view, however, is not shared 
 by all her admirers. Fervent Catholics, in particular, 
 love to linger on the many temptations which she 
 victoriously overcame, or to contemplate the glowing 
 trances during which the heavens opened and she gazed 
 upon the serene features of the Virgin and her Beloved 
 Son. The ecstasies of Catherine constitute a chain of 
 fascinating incidents, in which a modern psychologist 
 should find a rich treasure of evidence bearing upon the 
 tenuous character of what in common phrase we call 
 reality. How Saint Catherine in a vision was wedded 
 to Christ, how she exchanged hearts with her heavenly 
 Lover, how, finally, she had seared upon her flesh the 
 Five Wounds these and similar holy experiences 
 narrated by her particularly impressed her age, as 
 chapel walls and panels, glorified by the great 
 masters of painting, still eloquently testify throughout 
 the length and breadth of Italy. All her communica- 
 tions with the divine powers occurred in the state of 
 trance, during which, according to an eye-witness, " she 
 appeared like a statue which retains nothing but the 
 human form."* She passed into this condition most 
 readily after having partaken of the sacrament, when, 
 being upon her knees, her head would fall forward on 
 the altar rail, and she would lose all consciousness of 
 time and place. Once, as she lay thus abstracted from 
 the world, a shameless woman, we are told, moved by 
 
 * Evidence of Caffarini. See Drane, p. 71.
 
 264 SIENA 
 
 scepticism or curiosity, drove a needle into her foot. 
 She gave no sound of pain, but an hour later, when she 
 awakened from her trance, she complained of suffering 
 and walked with a limp. No student of human nature 
 will be inclined to minimize this side of her career the 
 side by which she takes rank with Saint Theresa and the 
 great visionaries but no one, responsive to the allge- 
 mein Menschliche by which she is related to our com- 
 mon human lot, will protest against devoting particular 
 attention to her public acts and private charities, the 
 moving record not of her dreams but of her earthly 
 destiny. 
 
 Catherine had borne the robe of penance for hardly 
 three years when she began to give up her life of close 
 confinement, irresistibly drawn to the world by the 
 passion of service. Love henceforth became the 
 substance of her days, the love which flows from God 
 like a radiance and is the one sure bond uniting His 
 creatures. To rich and poor, to rulers and ruled, to 
 oppressors and oppressed she preached the same doc- 
 trine, convinced that there were no ills which would not 
 yield to the divine cure. All the sins of the world, she 
 says somewhere in her passionate and picturesque way, 
 are but a drop of vinegar in the boundless ocean of 
 God's love. This is the enveloping element, not God's 
 wrath, as the doctors of theology, her predecessors and 
 contemporaries, had been sternly telling a credulous 
 and frightened people. With this old-new message she 
 moved like an angel of light along the streets of her 
 native town, recalling a blasphemous youth to the 
 thought of God, giving food to the needy, speaking a 
 word of good cheer to the sick and dying. Among the
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 265 
 
 relics which Siena still possesses of her and the relics 
 are not all of this acceptable human sort is the iron 
 lamp she lighted when called out suddenly at night upon 
 an errand of mercy. How often may she have lighted 
 it in the grim years when pestilence swept over the hills 
 like a poisonous mist from the sea, and her word of 
 comfort was wanted at all hours in every quarter of the 
 city! But the healthy, too, had need of her ministra- 
 tions, the physically healthy, whose souls were eaten 
 with canker. For the fierce party and family feuds 
 which tore the entrails of her native town she never 
 ceased recommending her panacea of regenerating 
 love. The conversion of the young patrician, Stefano 
 Maconi,* from his sworn vendetta, forms one of her 
 noblest conquests, but yields in interest to the well- 
 known incident connected with the name of Niccolo 
 Tuldo, of whose change of heart she herself has left a 
 moving record. f 
 
 Niccolo Tuldo was a Perugian youth who, during a 
 visit to neighboring Siena, called attention to himself 
 by offensive criticism of the government. $ He was 
 seized, and immediately, according to the inhuman 
 justice of the day, condemned to death. The sentence, 
 falling on him like a bolt from the blue, almost drove 
 him out of his mind. He raged, cursed, and refused 
 all religious consolation, until Catherine, prompted by 
 her quick sympathies, came to knock at his prison cell. 
 With sweet compulsion she recalled him to himself, and 
 in a few visits converted the young worldling into a 
 
 * Gardner, p. i6Sff. The episode probably belongs to the year 1376. 
 t"Letter a 97,"III, p. 58 /. 
 
 J If the party in power was the Riformatori, as is probable, the incident 
 would belong to some year after 1368; Gardner assumes the year 1377.
 
 266 SIENA 
 
 soldier of the cross, for whom death lost every aspect 
 of terror. Having promised to be with him at the hour 
 of trial, she awaited him at the foot of the scaffold, 
 around which crowded the usual multitude of eager 
 spectators. 
 
 "He arrived like a gentle lamb, and seeing me, 
 began to laugh, and desired that I make him the sign 
 of the cross; and when he had received the sign, I said 
 'down; down to the espousals, my sweet brother, 
 which will bring you quickly to everlasting life.' He 
 sank down with great humility, and I laid his head upon 
 the block, and knelt at his side, and recalled to him the 
 blood of the Lamb. His lips kept repeating the words 
 Jesus and Catherine, and he was still speaking when I 
 received his head in my hands. ..." 
 
 Then Catherine kneeling and pressing the head to 
 her bosom passed into an ecstasy in which she saw the 
 soul of Niccolo mount upward to where Christ waited, 
 clothed in the radiance of the sun. And a remarkable 
 feature of this ecstasy was that it took place amidst a 
 perfect riot of the overwrought senses. With hands 
 and dress bathed in the blood of the victim, which 
 somehow in her mystic joy she associated with the 
 blood spilt by the Redeemer, she wrote these intoxicated 
 words: "And the fragrance of the blood brought me 
 such peace and quiet that I could not bear to wash it 
 away." 
 
 The great reputation won by Catherine among the 
 people of Siena soon spread to neighboring parts and 
 created a general demand for her beneficent presence. 
 Montepulciano sent for her to make peace between two 
 hostile families; Pisa and Lucca desired her fertile
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 267 
 
 counsel;* and presently Florence sent a messenger to 
 invite her visit. The Florentine business was concerned 
 with the papacy_andj>roduced that incident in her 
 public career by m^jins__Qf_which she assumes a place 
 in the political- story-jofLItaly. 
 
 In the year 1375 Florence, the old Guelph centre, 
 had fallen out with its natural ally, the papacy, over 
 a number of matters, the most Immediately pressing of 
 which was the economic policy of the States of the 
 
 Church ^across tEe...Apnniries J Owing to a scarcity 
 
 of provisions threatening a dire famine, the Arno city 
 attempted to import food-stuffs from Bologna, but the 
 papal legate at that post defeated the plan by a general 
 prohibition. Perhaps the papal legate, as the Floren- 
 tines averred, was plotting to overthrow the democratic 
 government in their city; perhaps the Florentines were 
 jealous of the consolidation and increase of the papal 
 states which had lately been effected by the famous Car- 
 dinal Albornoz. At any rate, popular excesses against 
 ecclesiastics were followed by preparations for war, 
 which were still going forward, when, in December. 
 1375, the Florentines achieved the great success of in- 
 ducing the lords Imd cities of the papal territory to rise 
 m revolt against their master. At the same time all 
 Tuscany declared its adhesion to the Arno city. By the 
 spring of 1376 the pope in distant Avignon faced a situa- 
 tion whichmust have filled him with consternation, jbr 
 not only hadhe lost most of his Italian patrimony^Jnu 
 as longas he wasjnvolved with ail his resources in a war. 
 with Florence, he could hardly hope totake effective 
 
 * The Montepulciano incident belongs to 1374; the visits to Pisa and Lucca 
 to 1375-
 
 268 SIENA 
 
 sterjsfor the recovery of his territory. He showed his 
 resentment by F^d^jfiirfo J^gsumptilgu^ 
 interdict. NotEmg daunted, the Florentines, or rather 
 {fie ^^arty^amongjhe_Florentines, maintained their 
 J3oiicy> though a c^jiservatiye^group, shocked at the 
 rupture of the ancient bonds between Florence and the 
 church, applied itself strenuously to the reestablishment 
 of peace.^ It was this party which in the month of May 
 sent for Catherine, in order to request her to act as 
 mediator at Avignon. 
 
 Although gladly complying with the wishes of her 
 Florentine friends, Catherine did not fail to see that 
 her journey would enable her to promote an enterprise 
 even nearer to her heart than the cessation of hostilities 
 in central Italy. She was indeed a Christian mystic, 
 but she was also a devoted Catholic, firmly convinced 
 that the salvation of mankind could be wrought only 
 through the agency of the church. Two things, there- 
 fore, grieved her spirit above all others: first, that the 
 ministers of the church, especially the highest prelates, 
 were so often corrupt and worldly, and second, that the 
 chief pastor chose wilfully to absent himself from his 
 appointed capital. With her usual candor she wrote 
 of these grievances to the pope in letters which an- 
 nounced her approaching visit, and on June 18, 1376, 
 attended by a group of faithful followers, entered the 
 gates of the transalpine town. The reigning pope was 
 Gregory XI, a slight, pale-visaged Frenchman, who 
 listened to her impassioned communications with wistful 
 longing. He was ready to make peace, and peace 
 would have promptly followed if the Florentines had 
 really desired it; more than that, he was ready to go to
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 269 
 
 Rome, and in support of his declaration could point to 
 a circular letter to the princes of Christendom of over 
 a year ago, wherein he had registered a promise to that 
 effect. But there were difficulties. The cardinals, 
 Frenchmen in their vast majority, were unwilling to 
 exchange the luxurious palaces of Avignon for the 
 squalid ruins of Rome, and belabored him ceaselessly 
 in the hope of undermining his resolution. Knowing 
 his timorous disposition, they even sent him a letter, 
 purporting to come from some eminent authority across 
 the Alps and hinting at the perils of Italian poison. At 
 this ruse Catherine's indignation brimmed over. 
 
 "In the name of Christ Crucified," she wrote him, 
 "I beg you to be not a fearful child but a man; open 
 your mouth and swallow the little drop of bitter medi- 
 cine. ... By the infinite and inestimable goodness of 
 God I hope that you will prove yourself firm and stable, 
 and will not be disturbed by reason of any wind or 
 trick of demons" (messers, the cardinals, to wit!) "but 
 will follow the will of God, and your own pure desire, 
 and the counsel of the servants of Christ Crucified."* 
 
 Many such words pronounced without fear or favor, 
 words which scorched as with fire the lordly prelates 
 anxious for their ease and comfort, the holy maid spoke 
 at Avignon, where the cooks were more exquisite, the 
 tailors more expensive, and the minstrels and courtesans 
 more numerous than anywhere else in Europe. It is to 
 be regretted that no contemporary writer exhibits her 
 in the midst of these splendors. Catherine, before the 
 wealth and color and laughter of the leading court of 
 Europe, makes one of those striking contrasts in which 
 
 * "Lettera 10," I, p. 59.
 
 270 SIENA 
 
 her age, an age of transition, abounded. Half con- 
 cealed from view in her black mantle, with her eyes 
 turned inward, she doubtless walked the streets of the 
 fair town, spread beneath the blue sky of southern 
 France, without noting overmuch those signs and 
 trappings which she would call mere phases of corrup- 
 tion, but from her letters we gather that she saw enough 
 and more than enough to confirm her in her worst 
 suspicions of the state of the church. 
 
 Fortified by Catherine's indomitable spirit^ Gregory 
 at last found the needed courage, and setting out from 
 Avignon, on January 17, I372> arrrve3 at Rome amidst 
 frenzied popular rejoicings. Thus ended the long 
 Babylonish captivity, not without -the important partici- 
 pation of the Sienese virgin. The great benefits, how- 
 ever, which she anticipated from the transfer of the 
 papal capital were slow in appearing. The Florentine 
 war party maintained the upper hand in the Arno city, 
 and throughout the pope's first year in the peninsula 
 the conflict between himself and the stubborn democ- 
 racy continued unabated. Catherine bled and ago- 
 nized over the miserable issue. In the early spring of 
 the year 1378 she came to Florence in the pope's name 
 to arrange an honorable peace, and, in spite of diffi- 
 culties and even riots, in one of which she almost lost 
 her life,* at last brought the troublesome matter to a 
 successful termination. But Gregory was not destined 
 to be cheered by the good news. Long broken in 
 health _he_had died in the month of March, and with 
 hjs death the latent Franco-Italian quarrel in the 
 college_of_cardinals stood revealed before the world. 
 
 * Her own account, mystically transmuted, in "Lettera 96," III, 52 jf.
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 271 
 
 The election which ensued of the Italian prelate, 
 UrEan VT7 ~is~one uf the must LTinTIinV incidents of 
 church history.* but Urban was hardly elected when 
 the French faction, repucTTating him, chose one ot their 
 own number under the title pmiement Vll, and thus 
 precipitated the famous crisis called the Great Schism. 
 How this new calamity hung with a pall the ardent 
 mind of Catherine, who had freely predicted some such 
 trouble as this unless the poisonous plants were weeded 
 from the garden of the church, may be left to the imagin- 
 ation. The unity of the church, as represented by the 
 person of the pope, was to her a sacred thing, and now 
 she was called upon to be a spectator while the cardinals 
 tore the seamless coat of Christ. She was not a moment 
 in deciding where she stood, for, once assured that her 
 Italian compatriot was canonically elected, she had 
 really no liberty of choice. Her letters to Urban, 
 rising almost to shrillness in their tender solicitude, are 
 assertions of his inalienable right, and mingle ringing 
 encouragements with constantly renewed appeals to 
 effect at last the cure of the church's evils. But beyond 
 instilling her own high courage into the pope, she could 
 in this vast crisis do little but pray. Therefore her 
 political career ceased with this new phase of Italian 
 history. In November, 1378, she went, at the pope's 
 request, to Rome in order to lend him the benefit of her 
 wise counsel, and although her presence was felt by the 
 pontiff as a strengthening draught, and although she 
 wrote letters in his behalf to kings and princes, and 
 pleaded affectionately with the sulky Romans, always 
 on the point of insurrection, she was never again lifted 
 
 * Gregorovius, "Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter," VI, 481 ff.
 
 272 SIENA 
 
 high into the sight of all by a public mission. During 
 these her last months on earth she was racked with 
 many pangs of the body admirably borne, the result of 
 her persistent disregard of the laws of nature. For 
 years she had starved herself so that her stomach 
 could no longer support more than the merest mouthful 
 of food. It was even currently believed that she sus- 
 tained life without other nourishment than the bread 
 received in communion. This could be disproved, if 
 one were not satisfied with the verdict of common- 
 sense, out of the records left by her disciples, but in any 
 case it is sure that she carried the mortification of the 
 flesh to such a point that she was frequently heard to 
 say that the mere thought of a meal was like going to 
 execution. Bodily disease, added to her mental agony 
 over the condition of the church, was more than she 
 could bear; she failed steadily through long weeks, and 
 on the aQth of April, 1380, died, lovingly attended to 
 the last by her sorrowing disciples. Her mortal re- 
 mains were interred at Rome in the Dominican church, 
 called the Minerva. 
 
 After her death the fame of Catherine grew rather 
 than diminished, in consequence of which fact many 
 worshiped her as a saint without awaiting the formal 
 authorization of the church. At last, in June, 1461, 
 the Sienese pope, Pius II, besides gratifying his own 
 love for his native city, met a very general demand by 
 publishing a bull which raised her to the honor of the 
 altars. 
 
 So far has the story of the daughter of Jacopo Benin- 
 casa travelled that to many people in the remoter out- 
 posts of Christianity Siena is merely the town of Saint
 
 Madonna and Child 
 By Ambrogio Lorenzetti (in S. Eugcnio Outside Porta S. Marco)
 
 THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 273 
 
 Catherine. But if the holy maid has carried the fame 
 of the city abroad, Siena has repaid the service by 
 lovingly cherishing her memory. Whoever visits the 
 Tuscan town will find at almost every turning 
 some token which brings her to the mind, but most 
 especially will her memory attend him along the steep 
 street where she was born, and on the hill above it 
 which bears the venerable church of San Domenico. 
 For the house of her father and the temple where she 
 worshiped not only are hallowed by her spirit, but also 
 cherish some authentic relics of her life on earth, 
 preserved in a setting upon which a number of eminent 
 artists have expended their best effort. To San 
 Domenico, in particular, no admirer of the maiden will 
 fail to make a pious pilgrimage. If he is not greatly 
 drawn to the relics of her bodily life, for the church 
 boasts the possession of her head and one of her fingers,* 
 he will at least take curious and vivacious notice of 
 what art has done with the wonderful material of her 
 life. In a chapel built in her honor after her death, 
 the Lombard Sodoma has portrayed her in a series of 
 much-praised frescoes. Sodoma lived in the sixteenth 
 century when painting had already divorced itself from 
 religious feeling. It need cause no surprise, therefore, 
 that, though his work in Saint Catherine's chapel is not 
 without a certain sensuous charm, it should be marred 
 by an almost total lack of sympathetic insight. Much 
 more true to the honest spirit of the saint is the 
 unadorned portrait of her by her contemporary and 
 
 * These were sent to Siena shortly after her death by her confessor and 
 biographer, Fra Raimondo, and are exposed on her annual festival, the 3Oth 
 of April
 
 274 SIENA 
 
 disciple, Andrea Vanni. It hangs over the altar in the 
 actual chapel the capella delle volte where she prayed 
 and was rapt away to some of her most resplendent 
 visions. Standing in this consecrated enclosure before 
 her sweet and solemn countenance, we realize that one 
 of the highest functions of art is to preserve the memory 
 of the noble dead, for, gazing, we are drawn close as 
 never before to her gracious being, and in a revealing 
 flash see her as she was, the maid, who 
 
 . . . "mixed herself with heaven and died; 
 And now on the sheer city-side 
 Smiles like a bride."
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT AND THE BUILDING OF 
 THE CITY 
 
 ON September 2, 1260, Siena, by unanimous im- 
 pulse of her citizens, dedicated herself to the 
 Virgin, and two days later touched the zenith 
 of her political fortunes in the great victory of Monta- 
 perti. The hundred years following Montaperti con- 
 stitute the period in the evolution of Siena during which 
 she participated most vitally in the life of Italy, and 
 won such a place as she holds among the communes of 
 the peninsula. Although this statement has already 
 been illustrated to a certain extent in the previous 
 chapters, a very suggestive line of evidence remains yet 
 to be adduced : in the foremost century of her existence 
 Siena raised her cathedral and her Palazzo Pubblico, 
 adorned herself with fountains, girdled herself with 
 walls and gates, in a word, assumed the characteristic 
 garment which she was to wear for all the following ages. 
 Who makes the acquaintance of the Siena of to-day 
 finds spread before him substantially a fourteenth cen- 
 tury town. And because the subsequent centuries, 
 effecting innovations and changes almost everywhere 
 else in Italy, hardly turned a stone in this upland town, 
 no other city throughout the length and breadth of the 
 peninsula strikes so resonantly and significantly the 
 
 275
 
 276 SIENA 
 
 mediaeval note. Her monuments of brick and stone 
 affirm gracefully and ponderously by turn, but never 
 doubtfully, a distinctive personality, and as we are 
 seeking better acquaintance with this personality, as it 
 constitutes in fact the real object of this book, I must 
 consider myself well employed in following the leading 
 phases by which the town became materially what it is. 
 
 The original nucleus of Siena was that highest point 
 in the southern section of the town, still called Castello 
 Vecchio or the Old Castle. The ridge of Castello 
 Vecchio drops gently till it encounters two other ridges 
 from the north and east respectively at a place of 
 meeting known by the name of Croce di Travaglio.* 
 Immediately below the Croce di Travaglio, in the pocket 
 between the ridges from the south and east, lies the 
 great public square or Campo, which antiquarians 
 incline to identify with the forum of Roman times. In 
 the avenues of communication following the three 
 ridges, in the Croce di Travaglio, and in the Campo, we 
 have the main features which determined the physical 
 aspect of Siena. 
 
 Owing to the fact that Siena was built upon three 
 ridges, the town appears from remote times as divided 
 into three sections called terzi. The terzo lying to the 
 south and embracing Castello Vecchio and its ridge was 
 called, in deference to its age, Citta, that is the city; 
 the terzo to the east was named San Martino ; and the 
 
 * This mysterious term may refer to some cross (croce) which once 
 rose here to mark the intersection of the three Sienese spurs, or, quite as 
 possibly, to the cruciform shape of the place itself, with arms running off in 
 different directions. According to the best opinion the word travaglio is an 
 Italian corruption of the Latin trium vallium. See Heywood, "Guide to 
 Siena," p. 81 (note).
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 277 
 
 northward terzo bore the designation Camollia. The 
 houses, massed at the point of junction and running out 
 along the narrow ridges, give Siena, when seen from one 
 of its high towers, the appearance of the claw of some 
 huge bird of prey. The division into three parts, com- 
 manded by nature itself, was of the kind to become 
 deeply imbedded in the consciousness of the Middle 
 Age, which we have come to know as the period of home 
 feeling and neighborly associations. In fact, as soon as 
 we hear of a commune of Siena, we are informed that at 
 its head stood three consuls or some multiple of three: 
 the terzi evidently insisted that in the formation of a 
 common government they should be all equally repre- 
 sented. When the consuls were superseded by a 
 potesta, who came from foreign parts, he was obliged 
 to choose his residence in a different terzo from his two 
 immediate predecessors, in order that each terzo might 
 in turn harbor the chief dignitary. When a party 
 government replaced the potesta in the political direc- 
 tion of the town we may discover in such magistracies 
 as the Twenty-four, the Nine, the Twelve, the Fifteen- 
 all multiples of three the persistence of the terzo 
 jealousy. No less vigorously than in politics the ancient 
 sentiment expressed itself in common social relations, 
 as may be vividly seen, to mention only a single instance, 
 in the game of pugna, really hardly more than a general 
 street-fight by three bands, representative of the three 
 sections; these three hosts met from time to time in the 
 Campo and a curious detail of their battle of fists and 
 stones was that Camollia and San Martino regularly 
 united apainst Citta, thereby clearly betraying a long- 
 standing resentment against the original settlement and
 
 278 SIENA 
 
 against certain airs of superiority by which its inhab- 
 itants may have given offence. 
 
 But the physical separation of Siena into terzi is only 
 the beginning of the long tale of her local divisions. 
 In the days of the consuls the grandi formed, by reason 
 of their wealth and habits of life, a class sharply marked 
 off from the rest of the people. Their superiority 
 showed itself in their very houses, which, built of stone 
 and brick, occupied the ridges, while the common 
 people, housed wretchedly in wooden huts and in those 
 caves and cellars, specimens of which still abound and 
 which are made possible by the soft clayey character of 
 the soil, spread in careless disorder along the slopes of 
 the hills. The original houses of the grandi were really 
 rude castles, consisting of buildings clustered without 
 any effort at beauty or order around an open court, and 
 inhabited, in addition to the family or clan, by retainers 
 and petty craftsmen, huddled in dark shops on the 
 street level. An excellent example of such a composite 
 dwelling, called castellare, may still be seen opposite the 
 church of San Vigilio. It is the most complete monu- 
 ment the remote Middle Age has left in Siena.* But 
 sombre as it is, and impressive in spite of its being a 
 mere formless heap of masonry, time has deprived it of 
 the most conspicuous feature of a feudal residence 
 the tower. In the early days every castellare had a 
 tower, built to exceed in height, if possible, the tower 
 of the neighboring castellare. For not only was the 
 tower the best possible security against an enemy, but, 
 
 * Heywood (The "Ensamples" of Fra Filippo, p. 34 ff.) draws a vivid 
 picture of the appearance of the streets and houses of thirteenth century 
 Siena.
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 279 
 
 by letting it soar high over the roofs, the owner pro- 
 claimed, with the ingenuous boastfulness of a primitive 
 race, his greatness to his fellow-citizens. As late as the 
 sixteenth century a sufficiently large number of these 
 towers was left standing to make Siena look at a dis- 
 tance, we are told, like a canebrake,* and even after 
 the wholesale destruction ordered by the Emperor 
 Charles V to supply the material for the fortress with 
 which he planned to tame the turbulent town, so many 
 towers continued to scale the sky that a northern gentle- 
 man on his grand tour might readily imagine that he 
 had dropped among a strange race of cliff-dwellers. 
 Only a comparatively recent period has effected their 
 complete removal, when, in consequence of the ap- 
 pearance of rifts in their walls, they threatened the 
 safety of the citizens. 
 
 Such was Siena in the consular period: a mass of 
 castellari along the heights and over-soared by towers; 
 with the congested quarters of the poor, largely of 
 wood, clustering round and spreading down the steep 
 declivities. The main thoroughfares along the ridges, 
 traced in Roman, and possibly Etruscan, times were 
 reasonably broad and straight, but on the slopes there 
 was an inextricable maze of dark by-ways, due to 
 personal caprice unchecked by anything resembling an 
 effective social control. In sign of this confusion 
 Siena, although never a town of great extension, pos- 
 sessed in 1301 as many as thirty-six gates,f whereas 
 
 * Ugurgieri, "Le Pompe Sanesi," II, 307. "Erano tante torri in Siena 
 che la Citta pareva un canneto." See the old print of Siena in chap. 14. 
 
 t Bargagli-Petrucci, "Le Fonti di Siena," I, 256, note i. The author 
 finds an additional reason for the large number of gates in the successive 
 circles of walls.
 
 280 SIENA 
 
 some generations later, when useless walls had been 
 leveled and the side streets rectified in accordance with 
 the more rational plan imposed by a central government, 
 one-third that number was found to be ample.* If, 
 to complete the picture of feudal independence, we 
 recall that the nobles in addition to dominating the city 
 from their castellari were leagued together in consorterie 
 or associations, the members of which were pledged to 
 help one another and to take justice from the hands 
 of their officers, we shall have formed a conception of 
 the difficulty of reducing a class, inoculated with ideas 
 of might and grandeur, to a system of civil order. 
 
 The clergy, which, owing to the dissipation and ex- 
 haustion of the authority of the state in the period of 
 the Germanic conquest, had practically succeeded in 
 separating itself from lay society, represented another 
 difficulty of the early commune. Its independence, at 
 first an affair of custom, had been confirmed by solemn 
 compacts, the slightest encroachment on which was 
 sure to excite a fiery fulmination from the Holy Father 
 at Rome. But the numerous body of citizens of clerical 
 degree was by no means one and undivided. At their 
 head stood indeed the bishop, but within the imposing 
 organization what a profusion of elements, all more or 
 less self-governing! Immediately under the bishop 
 were the cathedral canons with their own palace, their 
 own property, and their own policy, and throughout the 
 city were convents, male and female, large and small, 
 some strictly local, and others affiliated with such uni- 
 versal orders as the Benedictines, the Cistercians, the 
 Dominicans, and the Franciscans. Among the laity, 
 
 * Nine is the number of gates Siena has to-day.
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 281 
 
 hardly less penetrated with the spirit of religious 
 association than the clergy itself, we encounter not only 
 voluntary societies, whose members wore a clerical- 
 looking gown and devoted themselves to deeds of char- 
 ity, but also more formal corporations called confra- 
 ternities, not unlike our secret and mutual aid societies, 
 and pledged to render service to their bretheren in mis- 
 fortune, sickness, and death. Bishop and parish 
 priests, canons, the innumerable convents, confrater- 
 nities, and lay charitable unions give some idea of the 
 varied and picturesque aspect of mediaeval religious life. 
 
 So much for the nobility and clergy; below them was 
 the body of the common people who lived by the sweat 
 of their brows and whose numbers grew constantly 
 greater with the development of civil society. One of 
 the first signs they gave of a renewed energy was by 
 the formation of military companies. Apparently one 
 such company sprang up in each parish, while the union 
 of all of them constituted itself as the armed host of 
 the republic. Another assurance of growing vigor 
 was furnished by the industrial organization of the 
 commoners, effected by means of the guilds or arti. 
 The arti, in measure as they accumulated wealth and 
 influence, yielded to the corporative bias and exercised 
 an increasing sway over their members through a 
 mechanism of officers, police, revenues, and justice. 
 Small wonder, in view of this ubiquitous group activity, 
 that a distinguished student of the Italian Middle Age 
 has expressed the opinion that the mediaeval town was 
 a very miracle of internal divisions. 
 
 And now we are in a position to appreciate the hercu- 
 lean labor undertaken by the new political entity, the
 
 282 SIENA 
 
 commune. Not only were the clergy, nobles, merchants, 
 and artisans, used to independence and exercising it 
 daily, to be fused into a body of citizens subjected to a 
 common law and recognizing a common duty, but out of 
 the various loyalties, bound up with geographical, 
 military, and professional associations and communi- 
 cated to the blood and marrow through ancient habit, 
 was to be created a higher loyalty attaching to the 
 new-born commune of Siena. Only as that loyalty, 
 called patriotism in our day, should grow and flourish, 
 could the town generate the civic spirit, upon the 
 health and vigor of which depended its greatness. 
 And, in spite of difficulties, jealousies, clashes, the 
 civic spirit was born and stood forth in the light. 
 Without it there would have been no history of Siena 
 capable of holding our attention for even a moment. 
 The achievements of that spirit in the constitutional, 
 administrative, and political fields we have already 
 examined; we shall now proceed to examine the 
 remembrance it has left of itself in monuments of public 
 utility and beauty. 
 
 It is characteristic of all the Italian communes that 
 their earliest municipal enthusiasm gravitated toward 
 the church. Not only were mediaeval men wrapped up 
 in religious practices much more than it is easy for us 
 to understand, not only was the church the object of a 
 veneration deep as the springs of life, but the cathedral 
 of the bishop, not waiting to be created like the com- 
 mune, but existent and tangible, though often of small 
 dimensions, was the natural focus of that sentiment, the 
 most ineradicable experienced by the human heart, 
 the love of home. No sooner had this feeling been
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 283 
 
 roused from passivity to action with the stir of new life 
 in the towns, than the people of each exhibited discon- 
 tent with the petty proportions of their central house of 
 worship. Its abolition to make room for a more 
 magnificent structure became the universally chosen 
 means of declaring that the town was reborn. Every 
 visitor of Venice grows instinctively aware how all the 
 struggles and triumphs of the young republic are 
 entered in that wonderful volume which bears the name 
 of the basilica of St. Mark. Whoever has stood before 
 the cathedrals of Pisa, Florence, and Lucca has been 
 able to read upon their walls, as if written with illu- 
 minated letters, the story of the communes to which they 
 bear perpetual witness. Just so is Siena bound up with 
 her cathedral, which we may rightly name the first 
 labor of her civic spirit. 
 
 It was in the second quarter of the thirteenth century 
 when, under the guidance of the Twenty-four, the town 
 was mounting to its meridian, that the citizens of Siena 
 resolved to tear down the old cathedral, named for the 
 Virgin, and to build a new one which, dedicated to the 
 same supreme Lady, should be commensurate with the 
 growing wealth and political importance of their com- 
 mune.* The historian Malavolti assigns the beginning 
 of the work to the year 1245; not improbably it was 
 initiated a few years earlier. The original architect 
 has not been discovered, and no operaio or head of the 
 works is named in the documents till we get down to 
 
 * The literature on the cathedral is extensive. I refer the reader to: 
 Milanesi, "Document! per la Storia dell' Arte Senese"; Borghesiand Banchi, 
 "Nuovi Documenti per la Storia dell' Arte Senese"; Richter, "Siena"; 
 Langton Douglas, "History of Siena," p. 265 ff.; Canestrelli, "Bull. Sen.," 
 XI, p. J2/.; C. E. Norton, " Church-Building in the Middle Ages."
 
 284 SIENA 
 
 1257, when we find a Cistercian monk from San Gal- 
 gano, Fra Vernaccio, in charge. This circumstance 
 has misled some scholars, inclined to give more weight 
 to literary arguments than to the evidence of the senses, 
 into the belief that the style of the cathedral was bor- 
 rowed from the wonderful abbey of San Galgano, 
 which had just risen on the banks of the Merse, some 
 fifteen miles to the south. Nothing could be more 
 erroneous. San Galgano is, as we shall see hereafter, 
 a remarkably pure production of French Gothic 
 inspiration, while the cathedral is an Italian structure 
 of prevailingly Romanesque character. Fra Vernaccio 
 was succeeded presently by Fra Melano, also a Cis- 
 tercian from San Galgano, and during his incumbency 
 occurred, on September 2, 1260, the stirring dedication 
 of Siena to the Virgin under the direction of Buonaguida 
 Lucari and the bishop, and with the passionate partici- 
 pation of the whole citizen body. At the time of this 
 event the distinctive feature of the structure, the great 
 cupola over the crossing, was practically finished, 
 together with the towering campanile, a part of the 
 transept, and all the west end as far as it was then 
 planned to be carried, which was, however, two bays 
 short of the present length. Thus it will be seen that 
 the cathedral in which Siena prepared her spirit for the 
 great trial of Montaperti, and to which she carried her 
 thank-offerings after her victory, was hardly more than 
 half the size of the final edifice. 
 
 Fra Melano continued in charge for more than a 
 decade, during which time he extended both the right 
 and left transepts by a bay, and called Niccolo Pisano 
 the summons occurred in 1266 to erect the famous
 
 Madonna, Child, Saints, and Angels 
 By Matteo di Giovanni (in the Galleria dclle Belle Arti)
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 285 
 
 pulpit, which still constitutes one of the main decora- 
 tions of the interior. Before the downfall of the 
 Twenty-four, occasioned by the overthrow of Tuscan 
 Ghibellinism at the diastrous battle of Colle (1269), 
 the cathedral was done as originally planned except 
 for the facade. As Giovanni Pisano, the equally 
 famous son of Niccolo, was operaio from 1284 to 1298, 
 it has been surmised that he was employed for the 
 precise purpose of giving the building its missing front; 
 however, as the first facade was torn down at a later 
 time to make room for an extension of the nave, the 
 Pisan artist's authorship of this section is no more than a 
 reasonable conjecture. In no case can he have had 
 anything to do with the existing facade, though a current 
 tradition persistently refers to him as its author. Thus 
 the eager activity of hardly more than a single genera- 
 tion of men had given the Virgin a new home and 
 endowed the Sienese with a treasure of beauty in which 
 rich and poor had an equal share. 
 
 However, after some decades, following the common 
 fashion of fickle man, the citizens began to exhibit dis- 
 content with the house of their Protectress. Florence 
 and Orvieto, neighbors to the north and south, were 
 engaged upon more spacious cathedrals, and Siena had 
 no desire to be thrown into the shade. The Nine, that 
 capable though partisan government, representative of 
 the merchant class and borne just then on the mounting 
 tide of prosperity, shared fully the popular sentiment, 
 and in the year 1315 undertook an enlargement, inaugu- 
 rating thereby a second period of construction in the 
 history of the cathedral. The plan adopted was to 
 build a choir eastward behind the cupola, and, as the
 
 286 SIENA 
 
 ground in this region descended precipitously, it was 
 resolved to lead out the choir like a viaduct over power- 
 ful piers, which would offer the additional advantage of 
 affording room, among their masonry, for a new bap- 
 tistery. It may have weighed with the architects that at 
 Assisi a magnificent effect had been produced by throw- 
 ing out vast buttresses over the brow of a hill for the 
 support of the great central church of the order of 
 Saint Francis. By the new plan the cathedral would 
 be enlarged at least one-third, while a worthier structure 
 would be obtained to take the place of the old baptistery, 
 which lay to the right of the cathedral and had fallen into 
 contempt as the relic of a barbarous time. The new 
 work was advancing slowly, owing to the difficulties 
 of the site, when a commission of experts, called together 
 in 1322 and having among them the famous Sienese, 
 Lorenzo di Maitano, architect at Orvieto, declared the 
 recent construction unsafe, and recommended the build- 
 ing of an entirely new church. As this advice was too 
 startling and audacious, it was rejected by the govern- 
 ment and the old plan adhered to for another seventeen 
 years. At the end of that time, while the choir and 
 baptistery were still struggling with apparently unsolv- 
 able difficulties, the idea of a new church had made so 
 many proselytes that the sentiment in its favor carried 
 the day. On August 23, 1339, the momentous decision 
 was made; Lando di Pietro, a Sienese in the employ 
 of the king of Naples, was called from the south to take 
 charge; and in the following February the first stone 
 of the new structure was set in place. The proposal 
 was to erect the duomo nuovo at right angles to the 
 existing edifice, thus preserving the latter but reducing
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 287 
 
 it to serve as transept for a new and magnificent nave 
 with aisles. If the project had been carried out a 
 provincial town of southern Tuscany would have 
 boasted the most splendid temple of Italy. The very 
 thought explains the doom which overtook the structure. 
 Siena had overreached herself; although she was still 
 animated with hope and overflowing with life, such a 
 central church decidedly overstated her importance 
 among the Tuscan communes. The gente vana, whom 
 even the stern Dante reproved more in sorrow than in 
 anger, had with the impulsiveness of children under- 
 taken an enterprise beyond their strength, and presently, 
 when difficulties accumulated in their path, impulsively 
 gave it up. The difficulties, however, it must be 
 granted, were enormous. First came the plague of 
 1348, bringing manifold ruin to the city, and presently, 
 cracks appeared in the new parts, telling an ominous 
 tale of faulty construction. This discouraging circum- 
 stance, by the way, had attended the building of the 
 cathedral from the first, and justifies the assertion, sup- 
 ported by copious evidence from other towns of the 
 peninsula, that the Italian architects were as deficient 
 in technical knowledge as they were abundantly pos- 
 sessed of audacity, imagination, and aesthetic percep- 
 tion. While the work came to a standstill and experts 
 insisted on the necessity of taking down the injured 
 vaults to prevent a catastrophe, the Nine, patrons of the 
 new dome, were themselves overtaken with ruin (1355). 
 They were followed by the Twelve, mean folk of reduced 
 vistas, who, after ordering, in the year 1357, that the 
 unsafe portions be removed, let the whole plan quietly 
 lapse into oblivion.
 
 288 SIENA 
 
 The visitor to Siena never fails to be arrested by the 
 few arches which still stand of the famous dome of 
 Lando di Pietro. The slender piers support a succession 
 of round arches as bold and graceful as any to be found 
 in the peninsula, where boldness and grace are the 
 recurrent expression of the national genius. But even 
 the chance traveller can see that these exquisite piers 
 would be unable to support the vaults of the colossal 
 nave which defied completion, and that the colossal 
 nave itself was the dream of a people, splendidly cour- 
 ageous indeed but lacking in that self-command and 
 just measure which are the spiritual groundwork of 
 every enduring success. 
 
 The abandonment of the impossible carried the mind 
 back once more to the possible, with the result that the 
 old project of an extended choir led out over the brow 
 of the hill on massive foundations was again taken up. 
 If Siena would have to be content with the cathedral 
 she possessed, she could at least add to the size and the 
 beauty of the existing structure. This clear resolution 
 must be put at the side of the disastrous inconsequence 
 connected with the new dome, if we would do justice to 
 the moral reserves of a race, which, often as it yielded 
 to its reckless instincts, never failed to disclose, when the 
 need was greatest, a sufficient fund of manly persistence. 
 By the year 1370 the choir end had been completed, 
 and, immediately after, steps were taken to enlarge the 
 opposite or west end. The old facade,* possibly the 
 work of Giovanni Pisano, was removed, and, after the 
 
 * Some notion of the appearance of this first facade can be gained from 
 an old book-cover of the Biccherna, preserved in the archives and reproduced 
 by Richter, "Siena," p. 46. A modest performance, this, in pleasing contrast 
 with the pretentious front which replaced it.
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 289 
 
 nave had been lengthened by two bays, a new facade, 
 conceived as the fitting crown of the enterprise, was 
 taken in hand. The work was begun in the year 1377, 
 and advanced so rapidly that by 1382 the Board of 
 Works could again transfer its attention to the east end 
 and to the problem of a suitable frontispiece for the 
 recently completed choir and baptistery. On a sketch 
 furnished by the painter, Jacopo di Mino di Neri del 
 Pellicciaio, and still to be seen in the museum of the 
 Opera, the east facade was carried to the present height 
 and never finished. The difficulties, which even the 
 untrained eye can appreciate, were too great for the 
 science of the Italian architects.* 
 
 A thing highly remarkable, in view of the capricious 
 history which I have traced, is that to step within the 
 cathedral of Siena is to receive a perfectly consistent 
 artistic impression. This impression arises from the 
 character stamped upon the structure by the earliest 
 operaii and maintained, in spite of slight deviations of 
 taste, by all the subsequent builders. The cathedral 
 is a thoroughly Italian edifice, employing the construc- 
 tive forms of the Romanesque style as developed in 
 Lombardy, and fusing them with certain elements, 
 chiefly decorative, which derive from the Tuscan school 
 of Pisa. The Lombard vaulted architecture, containing 
 the germ of Gothic but utterly lacking in Gothic eleva- 
 tion and flight, produced a low, massive, and ill-lighted 
 
 * To render complete this long story of construction, I add that a hundred 
 years later the interior was adorned with two features which are the object 
 of much admiration: The small and delicate Baptistery in the northwest 
 angle of the left transept was built in the year 1482, and the Piccolomini 
 Library, containing the celebrated frescoes of Pintoricchio, in 1495. Both of 
 these additions employ the forms of the early Renaissance, but, lost in the 
 vast edifice, do not modify the general mediaeval effect.
 
 290 SIENA 
 
 structure, pervaded by a startling effect of brooding 
 sombreness. Sant' Amb-rogio, that ponderous though 
 hardly beautiful church of Milan, is an excellent 
 example of what the unadulterated Lombard principles 
 aesthetically signify. The cathedral of Siena makes a 
 similar appeal, considerably modified, however, by the 
 presence of certain Pisan features. The Pisan school, 
 as may be seen by the unique and overwhelming group 
 of cathedral, baptistery, and campanile in that solitary, 
 grass-grown square of the Arno town, cultivated, by 
 means of beautiful arcades and a subtle use of different 
 colored marbles, a style which associates itself with the 
 free and sunny traditions of classical Italy. The earliest 
 architects at Siena, whoever they were, were imbued 
 with Lombard ideas, but, owing to an acquaintance with 
 Pisan results, wished to graft the charm and elegance 
 of the neighboring school on the Lombard stock. If 
 the thought in itself was good, the execution is subject 
 to some heavy strictures, for the slight arcade around the 
 cupola hardly suffices to produce an effect of elegance, 
 and the alternate bands of black and white marble, 
 representing the Sienese version of the Pisan brilliancy 
 of surface, instead of supplying a note of gaiety, only 
 deepen the natural gloom of the edifice. That the 
 Board of Works was itself not delighted with the 
 misapplied Pisan effect is proved by the circumstance 
 that, when the choir was reached, the amount of black 
 marble used in piers and walls was considerably reduced, 
 to the immense brightening of that section. A similar 
 tendency to excess, the usual fault of youth and inex- 
 perience, may also be observed in the extraordinary 
 cornice, which, composed of the heads of the long sue-
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 291 
 
 cession of the popes, circles the whole nave and choir. 
 These and other features, over which experts doubtfully 
 shake their heads, and which tend to puzzle the visiting 
 dilettante, do not, however, succeed in keeping the 
 cathedral from making that triumphant impression, 
 which, however achieved, we know to be a thing rising 
 above details and defying intellectual analysis. Espe- 
 cially when the evening light sifts through the clerestory, 
 softening the harsh dispute between the banded black 
 and white, and spreading a warm gloom among the tall 
 piers, stretching in solemn rows through nave and 
 transept, the spacious beauty of this interior will unfold 
 itself to every one whose approach to the world of art 
 is unvexed by thought, and who rates a genial and naive 
 simplicity above the correctness of an unerring taste. 
 
 When I said that the cathedral strikes unhesitatingly 
 the Romanesque note I did not mean to imply that it is 
 entirely free from minor Gothic traits and adornments. 
 Gothic forms succeeded in obtaining so universal an 
 ascendency in the course of the thirteenth century that 
 they were certain to insinuate themselves even into a 
 building deriving from an earlier inspiration. In the 
 Sienese cathedral they meet the eye at every turn, in the 
 forms of the windows, in the capitals, in the profiles 
 of the ribs, but wherever they occur they are absorbed 
 into a perfect harmony with the prevailing style. 
 
 When we step from the nave into the open air to 
 receive the impression which the exterior view makes 
 upon the mind, we are likely to surrender ourselves, 
 first of all, to the happy sense of release attending our 
 passing from a place of solemn gloom into the clear, 
 boundless light of an Italian day. This long edifice,
 
 292 SIENA 
 
 enveloped in shining marble and crowned by cupola 
 and soaring campanile, has under the blue sky an air of 
 frank communication which is in the sharpest possible 
 contrast with the ghostly suggestion and whispered 
 messages of the interior. How imposingly and with 
 what a sense of ease it spreads its huge mass over the 
 hill! What a crown to shine forever, white and pure 
 above the clustered houses of the city browned with 
 age and, at the hour of sunset, glowing dull red as in 
 memory of the spilt blood of civil feuds! If, in the 
 lonely piazza of Pisa may be seen greater charm and 
 grace, elements of charm and grace are here also, in the 
 smooth garment of marble and in the cupola with its 
 delicate arcade. If, as close by as San Galgano, we 
 may see nobler Gothic, these windows of aisle and clere- 
 story have at least an undoubted distinction and finish. 
 So runs our impression till, slowly swinging round the 
 square, we stand face to face with the facade. Except 
 as a curiosity, a tour de force, it is incredible that any 
 one should have patience with this celebrated feature 
 of the exterior, and support the shock with which it falls 
 upon the sensibilities. It was planned as an adaptation 
 of the facade of the cathedral of Orvieto which, though 
 it, too, has little organic connection with its interior 
 and is made to play the part of a mere screen, achieves 
 a beauty all its own, due to a fusion in admirably chosen 
 proportions of architecture, sculpture, and mosaic. 
 Of this merit, a merit of harmony, there is nothing in the 
 Sienese counterfeit; in its place we meet that barbarous 
 spirit of excess, of which we have found other traces 
 in the building, and in which we are obliged to recognize 
 a national trait. The superabundance of sculpture,
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 293 
 
 not in subdued relief as at Orvieto, but in the round 
 and of all sizes, has, quite apart from the wilful blurring 
 of the great structural lines, practically obliterated the 
 architecture. The facade exists for the sculpture only, 
 which circumstance, in view of the necessarily ancillary 
 function of sculpture, removes every doubt concerning 
 the fitness of this terminal production. It is the Christ- 
 mas dream of a fanciful but undisciplined child, not 
 only disorganized and bewildering but, owing to a recent 
 restoration, deprived of that saving grace of many a 
 mediocre handiwork of man, the ivory tint of age. In 
 sharp contrast' to the west front, the baptistery end was 
 planned in a modest, attractive, and wholly Sienese 
 adaptation of Gothic principles, and, although un- 
 finished, may boldly be called the most satisfactory 
 feature of the whole exterior. In west and east end 
 respectively we may see two significant and contrasting 
 phases of the Sienese temper. 
 
 Again I submit, that for all the strictures and problems 
 cast up by the detailed examination of this cathedral, 
 there is a simple remedy which blots them out of exist- 
 ence. We have only to withdraw our attention from 
 youthful violences and unassimilated experiments push- 
 ing themselves into notice here and there, in order to 
 take in with a creative sweep the marvellous image of the 
 whole, and we must fall under the spell of the splendor 
 and majesty of this monument, to which many genera- 
 tions gave their love and labor, and where we may read, 
 expressed in stone and marble, the passions, the faults, 
 and the destiny of a nation. 
 
 A similar atmosphere lends a romantic charm to that 
 other great emanation of the civic spirit, the Palazzo
 
 294 SIENA 
 
 Pubblico.* We have seen that in the early days of the 
 commune the new government followed the practice 
 of putting the churches to public use, and of renting 
 private residences in order to house its officials. The 
 Constitution of 1262 showed us the Council of the Bell in 
 session in the church of San Cristofano, while the potesta 
 held court in San Pellegrino and dwelt with his suite in 
 a mansion rented from a citizen. These arrangements, 
 unexceptionable in the nursery days of the commune 
 when its business was inconsiderable, would be found 
 unsatisfactory in the period of manhood; and, in fact, 
 as early as 1193, we encounter a measure proving that 
 the republic had awakened to the new necessities of its 
 position. In that year the consuls acquired land on 
 the lower edge of the Campo, and after filling in the 
 ground and building a retaining wall a measure 
 necessitated by the sharp declivity at this point erected 
 a modest edifice of probably no more than a single 
 story on the higher or Campo side. This was the 
 nucleus of the great palace of later days, and in it were 
 housed the dogana del sale e dell' olio and the public 
 mint, called il bolgano. Thus matters rested for about 
 one hundred years, when the inconvenience and lack 
 of dignity attaching to the haphazard installation of the 
 potesta and Council of the Bell led to a succession of 
 improvements. In this connection it must again im- 
 press the modern mind that there was nothing suggest- 
 ing dispatch or precipitation in the founding of a 
 mediaeval commonwealth. Every step was taken after 
 
 * Scattered contributions on the history of this structure, together with 
 abundant archivial material, have been utilized in the valuable study of 
 Donati, "Bull. Sen.," XI, p. 311 ff. As my story of the construction of the 
 palazzo is based upon Donati, I refer to him, once and for all, at this point.
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 295 
 
 ripe consideration and under pressure of ineluctable 
 necessity. The necessity, in the case of the Council of 
 the Bell, was that ever since the year 1271 it was without 
 a home, and reduced to a very disconcerting and no- 
 madic existence, because San Cristofano had to be 
 abandoned by reason of injuries received in connection 
 with the spiteful destruction of the houses of the famous 
 Provenzano Salvani which abutted thereon. For more 
 than a decade the Council was obliged to meet in private 
 houses, rented from great nobles, until the humiliating 
 situation was ended (1284) by the construction, within 
 the Dogana, of an appropriate council chamber. In 
 the same year the potesta was permanently assigned to 
 a rented house to the right of the Dogana, and the Nine, 
 whose period of power had just dawned, shortly after 
 leased and moved into a house on the left of the com- 
 munal structure. The main branches of the public 
 service were now at least concentrated at one point. 
 
 With the question of the communal offices clearly 
 put, the movement had inevitably to continue until the 
 republic had provided itself with a specially constructed 
 palace commensurate with its position in the Italian 
 world. In 1288 a resolution was passed conformable 
 to this idea, and was shortly followed by the purchase 
 of the rented houses on either side of the Dogana. Not 
 till ten years later, however, was actual work begun on 
 the famous municipal residence which still stands 
 work which, from the nature of the case, was not entirely 
 new construction according to a general plan, but 
 which consisted in considerable part of a remodelling of 
 existing buildings. In a comparatively short time the 
 central section or torrione had taken the shape we now
 
 296 SIENA 
 
 see; as early as 1299, we are informed, it was completed 
 to the very battlements. And now any further delay 
 which occurred was due solely to the lack of funds. 
 Early in the fourteenth century we hear that the potesta's 
 wing to the right of the torrione was under way, and in 
 1310 the left wing, or wing of the Nine, was ready for 
 occupation. The palazzo thus completed in a period 
 of hardly more than ten years is substantially the 
 palazzo of to-day except that it was a story lower in 
 each of the wings. Within were two open courts, one, 
 which may still be admired, in the section of the potesta, 
 the other, enclosed in modern times and encumbered 
 with a broad stairway, in the wing called of the Nine or, 
 as frequently, of the Signoria.* 
 
 In the subsequent years followed many additions and 
 improvements. We learn that the treasury office or 
 Biccherna, which had found a home in the central 
 secion, received a stone vault, and that the walls of 
 various rooms were made beautiful with paintings, but 
 we perceive that no further important work in construc- 
 tion took place on the Campo till the government 
 resolved to build itself a tower for its bells. The town 
 bells, which summoned the members of the Council to 
 their deliberations; which announced the dawn of 
 another day of work,f and at night tolled the curfew, 
 
 * This suppression of one of the interior courts was effected, in order to 
 meet some fancied needs, in the year 1680. In the same year another even 
 more important change was made, for the wings on either side of the torrione 
 received their second story. Clear evidence of the original height of these 
 wings is furnished by the rows of arches which are still visible under the 
 second story windows, and which supported the original battlements. The 
 wonder is that the seventeenth century should have effected a remodelling 
 of the front in so chaste a spirit. 
 
 fThe Constitution of 1262 declared (I, 304) that every dawn the bell 
 must be rung per magnam horam, a full hour!
 
 Charity. A detail from Jacopo della Quercia's Fountain 
 In the Loggia of the Palazzo Pubblico
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 297 
 
 clearing the streets and squares of chatter and business; 
 which, in the absence of clocks, were relied upon to give 
 notice of the passing hours the town bells, I say, had 
 a share in mediaeval life which made them an object of 
 almost superstitious veneration. Following the general 
 custom, they had been hung originally in rented towers, 
 until the resolution was taken to build a worthy struc- 
 ture for them at public expense to the right of the palaz- 
 zo. On October 12, 1325, the corner-stone was laid 
 with the usual religious ceremony, after which, accord- 
 ing to an ancient chronicle, messer Ugo de* Fabbri, 
 who had the work in charge, "put into the foundation 
 of the said tower some pieces of money . . . and set in 
 each corner a stone with bits of writing in Hebrew, 
 Greek, and Latin letters to make it safe against injury 
 from thunder, lightning, and tempest."* Thus did 
 messer Ugo de' Fabbri, convinced, like every good 
 mediaeval Christian, of the powers of necromancy, 
 make shrewd double provision for the security and long 
 life of his enterprise. In connection with the tower the 
 whole wing of the palace adjoining it underwent changes 
 both of adjustment and enlargement. This had be- 
 come pressingly necessary because the quarters of the 
 potesta had been found too small for him and his numer- 
 ous suite. For some reason the progress was slow, 
 for we find that the potesta did not take possession ot 
 his improved residence till the year 1330, and that in 
 1338 the tower had not yet risen above the walls of the 
 palace. Only then the work began in earnest on what 
 
 * The original is delightful: ". . . e fuwi messa in ogni canto una pietra 
 co' lettare ebraiche greche e latine, perche non fosse percossa ne da tuono, nfe 
 da sastta, ne da tempesta." Chronicle in Biblioteca Comunale, Cod. A., 
 Ill, 26, c. 83.
 
 298 SIENA 
 
 the almost unanimous voice of the lovers of art proclaims 
 to be the most beautiful tower of Italy. Signor Lisini 
 has discovered that its architects were two Perugians, 
 Minuccio di Rinaldo and Francesco, his brother, who 
 were, however, superseded before the completion of 
 their work. The noble ornament of gray stone, which 
 crowns the slender shaft of brick, or rather issues from 
 it as naturally and gracefully as the lily bursts from its 
 sheaf, was completed after a plan furnished by the 
 painter, Lippo Memmi. In the year 1344 the tower 
 was put into service and the citizens let their work rest 
 for a moment to listen joyfully as the first bell sent its 
 clamorous summons from a height of almost three 
 hundred feet.* During the next years the final touches 
 were added and some changes introduced, of which I 
 note only one because it furnished the tower with its 
 curious name. A mechanism, built in imitation of a 
 man, was installed aloft to strike the hours, and to this 
 man of wood, replaced afterward by a more splendid 
 one of brass, the people humorously gave the name of 
 the live bell-ringer whom the too inventive spirit of the 
 age had deprived of his occupation. The supplanted 
 bell-ringer seems to have been something of a butt 
 among the loungers that gathered in the wine-shops, 
 and went among them by the amusing name of Mangia- 
 guadagni or spendthrift. The designation of Man- 
 giaguadagni, or Mangia for short, was presently 
 transferred to the automaton, and, in the course of 
 time, attached itself to the whole tower, known there- 
 fore to this day as la torre del Mangia.^ 
 
 * To be exact the tower measures 86$ meters. 
 
 t This luminous explanation of the name Mangia originated with Lisini, 
 "Misc. Stor. Sen.," I, 26.
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 299 
 
 And still the work of supplying the growing public 
 needs with buildings specially constructed for the 
 purpose continued. The prisoners of the town, who 
 had been miserably housed in narrow rented quarters 
 that, apart from the memories clinging to them of name- 
 less horrors, were veritable breeding places of pestilence, 
 were in the year 1330 transferred to the first municipally 
 owned prison, erected behind the palace of the potesta; 
 and, shortly after 1342, a new and vast hall for the 
 General Council was raised over the gloomy rows of 
 cells. Such an association, amounting almost to physi- 
 cal contact between the rulers of society and its 
 broken victims, would be intolerable to our feeling, 
 but seems to have aroused no comment among a gen- 
 eration of men endowed with enviable nerves of 
 iron. The great sola del consiglio was in the bureau- 
 cratic sixteenth century, which had neither under- 
 standing nor reverence for the relics of a free society, 
 reduced to a theatre, and gradually put through such 
 changes as to oblite r ate every feature of its original 
 style. 
 
 To render complete the history of the palazzo, I must 
 add a word touching the outer chapel at the foot of the 
 Mangia tower, the capella di piazza. This chapel owes 
 its origin to a vow addressed to the Virgin during the 
 grande mortalita of 1348, but its construction was not 
 begun till four years later. Owing to muddling, both 
 official and professional, it long defied completion, and 
 was at length, in an access of despair, covered with a 
 temporary roof at the height of the capitals. Not till a 
 century later, in the period of the Renaissance, was the 
 work again taken in hand, and being entrusted to the
 
 300 SIENA 
 
 capable Federighi, was soon vaulted over and finished 
 with pleasing decorations, chief among them an effective 
 frieze of gryphons (1468-70). 
 
 At last I have arrived at the end of this long-spun 
 and complicated story of a municipal structure which 
 took one hundred and fifty and more years to bring to 
 completion. This deliberate procedure, while corre- 
 sponding to the slow economic expansion of the medi- 
 aeval commune, also gives the measure of the very 
 gradual manner in which the consciousness of a new 
 society and its needs dawned upon those blindly groping 
 generations. The rich experience of the many subse- 
 quent centuries, laid down in an effective science of 
 government and in a knowledge of mechanics which 
 laughs at difficulties, has changed completely our man- 
 ner of approach to the problem of providing a fit home 
 for our ruling bodies. A modern architect would under- 
 take to erect and finish a building of much greater bulk 
 than the Sienese palazzo in less than a year. But would 
 he, so infinitely superior in the means at his command, 
 venture to promise that it will endure as long, and be an 
 object of beauty and a source of joy six centuries after 
 the laying of its corner-stone ? 
 
 The palace of Siena, composed of a central mass and 
 wings and flanked by the tower which soars upward 
 like an arrow released from the bow, ranks with the 
 great municipal residences of the Middle Age. The 
 forms which it employs the pointed arches of the ground 
 floor, the ample three-light windows, the square battle- 
 ments speak the common language of the Gothic 
 period, but they are so combined and modified by local 
 sentiment as to result in a highly idiomatic creation.
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 301 
 
 The union of stone in the lower story with brick in the 
 superstructure has produced a delightful variation of 
 surface, which is a subtle source of pleasure to the eye. 
 The final grace, however, is conferred upon the palace 
 by its position on the Campo. This remarkable square, 
 which, as already observed, may owe its shape to a 
 preexisting Roman forum, is neither quite an oval nor 
 quite a semicircle. Its capricious refusal to be classi- 
 fied under any known geometric form is one of its charms, 
 to which must be added the natural tilt of the ground 
 toward the Palazzo Pubblico. As the entrance to the 
 Campo is from the elevated ridges which meet in the 
 Croce di Travaglio, the communal palace with its 
 battlemented sky-line, its gloriously patinated surface, 
 and its slender tower is placed at just the point where 
 it presents itself to view with the greatest possible 
 effectiveness. Strange to say the houses fronting on the 
 Campo, though they have for the most part gone 
 through modernizations, especially as regards the 
 windows, hardly attenuate, by reason of their wise 
 subordination to the palace, the consistent mediaeval 
 impression of this square. In the days of the republic 
 when, owing to a formal ordinance, Gothic windows a 
 colonelli prevailed around the whole enclosure,* the 
 effect must have been magnificent. 
 
 The ordinance just referred to, enforcing the style 
 of the municipal residence upon the houses of the 
 Campo, may account for the fact that this building 
 served as the model for the private palaces throughout 
 the city. In such edifices, raised shortly after the 
 
 * The ordinance in question was passed in 1297. Borghesi and Bane hi, 
 "Nuovi Documenti," etc.
 
 302 SIENA 
 
 Palazzo Pubblico, in the period of the Nine, Siena is 
 peculiarly rich. To pass them in review the tall, 
 inscrutable Palazzo Tolomei, the rude and yet distin- 
 guished Palazzo Saracini, the Palazzo Sansedoni, set 
 in the high fellowship of the Campo and washed with 
 soft pink as from a perpetual dawn, the Palazzo 
 Grottanelli, splendid with the coats of arms of its 
 former residents, the Captains of War, the Palazzo 
 Salimbeni with its air of feudal insolence, the Palazzo 
 Buonsignori crowned with beautiful battlements is to 
 receive an overwhelming impression of the fourteenth 
 century greatness of this city. These buildings, one 
 and all, rest architecturally upon the communal palace: 
 they employ the same materials of construction with a 
 frank preference for brick; they exhibit the same Gothic 
 ornaments; but each one is so entirely free in its use of 
 what it borrows that the result never fails to be artistic 
 and original. Concerning the Tolomei palace, and 
 concerning it alone, a doubt may reasonably be enter- 
 tained touching the asserted derivation from the Palazzo 
 Pubblico. The residence of the Tolomei, perhaps 
 the most wonderful of all by reason of the union of great 
 simplicity with fine proportions, is declared by an ancient 
 chronicler to have been begun in the year 1208, that 
 is, several generations before the palace on the Campo.* 
 The same chronicler speaks, too, of subsequent injuries 
 suffered through fire and political malice. The evi- 
 dence still supplied to the eye would seem to show that 
 there was an early Romanesque palace from which the 
 present structure derives its general frame of stone, 
 
 * Muratori, XV, "Cronaca Sanese," ad annum. "Fecesi el Palagio de' 
 Talomei."
 
 Wrought-iron Gate of the Chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 30,3 
 
 especially the tall first story and the fine lions of the 
 lintels, but that it underwent important changes in the 
 fourteenth century, when it received its Gothic im- 
 print, noticeable, above all, in the windows with their 
 graceful tracery. 
 
 A body of courageous citizens, who had built through 
 generations and with many sacrifices a cathedral and a 
 municipal residence, were sure to address themselves 
 with proportionate energy to all minor public works. 
 Chief among them in a city situated like Siena were the 
 fountains. They had received the care of the parishes 
 and neighborhood associations long before there was 
 a commune, and, naturally, with the rise of the com- 
 mune, their improvement became one of the chief 
 objects of the new government. In fact, among the 
 earliest notices we possess of Siena is a reference to 
 Fonte Branda. An inscription, still imbedded in the 
 wall of this fountain, informs us that one Bellaminus 
 built it in the year 1193, while a second inscription of 
 1246 makes mention of additional labors of construc- 
 tion, a reference presumably to the heavy stone vault 
 which encloses the work.* Fonte Branda was an 
 exceptionally handsome fountain in its day, with a 
 copious flow constantly enriched by the extension of the 
 subterranean aqueducts upon which it depends for its 
 supply of water. In modern times it has lost its battle- 
 ments and has acquired a squat and inelegant appear- 
 ance through the burying of its piers to over half their 
 length by the gradual filling in of the soil, but Dante 
 
 * For the history of Fonte Branda and of every other fountain of Siena, 
 the reader may turn to the scholarly work of Bargagli-Petrucci, "Le Fonti di 
 Siena"; for Fonte Branda in particular, see Vol. I,
 
 304 SIENA 
 
 gives ample evidence that its fame in the days of its 
 splendor had gone over Italy.* 
 
 Other fountains, similarly enclosed in walls and 
 heavily vaulted, lend picturesque touches to various 
 quarters of the town. Around the great open basins 
 may be seen at all hours of the day the women of the 
 neighborhood, gay with colored kerchiefs and chattering 
 merrily as they bend over the household washing. 
 Such fountains are Fonte Nuova in Vallerozzi, Fonte 
 d'Ovile outside the gate of that name, and Fonte 
 Follonica, left in a romantic abandonment amidst the 
 kitchen gardens behind Santo Spirito. A fountain of a 
 different kind, not meant so much to serve the needs of 
 the citizens as to give expression to their love of home 
 and their passion for beauty, was the celebrated foun- 
 tain of the Campo. That it should have occurred to 
 an artistic people to add to a square, which was their 
 pride, the charm of running water is not strange. The 
 difficulty was to find the requisite supply. In the year 
 1334 work was begun to collect water by means of 
 subterranean channels outside Porta Camollia, and 
 after a heavy expenditure of money and labor, a thin 
 stream at last issued forth upon the Campo (1343)- 
 It was enough to loose a bedlam of joy. For fifteen 
 days, we are told, the citizens held carnival, instituting 
 games and dancing in companies amidst music and 
 laughter through the streets.f They were a light- 
 
 * The man in hell, agonized by thirst, would rather see his enemies at his 
 side suffering his pain than have all the waters of Fonte Branda: per Fonte 
 Branda non darei la vista. "Inf.," XXX, 76-78. Petrucci seems to prove 
 successfully that the reference is to the Sienese fountain and not to one of the 
 same name in the Casentino. 
 
 t Muratori, XV, "Cronaca Sanese," 106. ". . . e per la delta cagione 
 si fece tanta allegrezza in Siena e tanti balli . . . che sarabbe incredibile a
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 305 
 
 hearted folk, the mediaeval Sienese, and never let an 
 occasion for merry-making escape. After this there 
 could be but one name for the new fountain: it was 
 called Fonte Gaia. A drop of wormwood in the full 
 goblet was the meagre flow, which the signoria set 
 itself to remedy by an ever renewed search for springs 
 along the northern ridge. Early in the fifteenth century 
 the government resolved to transform the receptacle in 
 the central square into a magnificent structure of 
 marble. By a fortunate coincidence the right man for 
 the work was close at hand, Jacopo della Quercia, 
 a Sienese citizen and one of the greatest names of 
 Italian art. After a labor often years, often interrupted 
 by the need of his restless genius to engage in a variety 
 of enterprises, Jacopo completed, in the year 1419, such 
 a monument as was boasted in the Middle Age neither 
 by imperial Rome, ever echoing with the murmur of 
 water, nor by Venice, maid of the sea. However, in 
 the course of the ages Jacopo's fountain suffered such 
 serious injury that to avoid total destruction it had, in 
 the nineteenth century, to be removed from the Campo. 
 Its remnants may now be seen in an environment that 
 could not have been better chosen, the upper loggia of 
 the Palazzo Pubblico. The broken pieces, like a Greek 
 torso recovered after centuries from a temple ruin, are 
 touched with imperishable beauty. 
 
 An appreciable factor in the mediaeval impression 
 still conveyed by Siena are her walls and gates. Natu- 
 rally they were an early and a constant preoccupation 
 
 dire e a credere chi non 1' avesse veduto; che quasi ciascuna Arte otto dl 
 prima e otto di poi per se fece una brigata . . . ballando e danzando e 
 cantando per la citta insino alia notte."
 
 306 SIENA 
 
 of a republic surrounded by enemies. This is not the 
 place to discuss the difficult question of the successive 
 extensions due to the growth of the city. Malavolti,* 
 beginning with the Etruscan castle, speaks of six 
 circles of walls, which, of course, is not to be taken 
 literally but to be interpretated as referring to six 
 distinct periods of enlargement.f In any case, when 
 we reach the days of her power under the Nine, Siena 
 had substantially the walls and gates of to-day. Minor 
 portals have been closed, the principal ones have under- 
 gone repairs and alterations, but the fourteenth century 
 is still forcefully impressed on the defences behind 
 which she defied her foes. The Porta Romana, the 
 Porta de' Pispini, and the Antiporta of Camollia, a 
 single round arch of magnificent sweep, have that pre- 
 cious quality called character, which, if not identical 
 with beauty, bears a close kinship to it. To receive the 
 message which Siena conveys it is necessary to have 
 looked at her gates with reverence, as it is also necessary 
 to have walked around her walls, especially the pictu- 
 resque stretch from Ovile to Pispini. Whoever has 
 followed in an afternoon's excursion their sudden 
 plunge and ascent along their broken path, and soothed 
 his senses with their perfect tone of pink and gray, will 
 have mastered one of the secrets of the spell exercised 
 by the ancient city. 
 
 In the fifteenth century the vital force of Siena, which 
 had been visibly failing for some time, still showed itself 
 
 * Malavolti, Prima parte, 13, 15, 21, etc. 
 
 t Bargagli-Petrucci, " Le Fonti di Siena," has a map at the end of Volume I 
 in which he gives with admirable clearness his version of the six circles. He 
 also traces a seventh and last circle, resulting from the construction in the 
 sixteenth century of the fortezza di S. Barbara.
 
 THE CIVIC SPIRIT 307 
 
 in occasional creative outbursts. Such a one is asso- 
 ciated with Jacopo della Quercia's fountain; at the 
 same time, but with different artistic result, was built 
 the Loggia della Mercanzia (1416), fronting the Croce 
 di Travaglio, and hardly to be found other than heavy 
 and ill-proportioned by the side of the great Florentine 
 loggia with which it naturally invites comparison. For 
 some years now conspicuous enterprises ceased till, 
 shortly after the middle of the fifteenth century had been 
 passed, there was a brief stir of architectural activity due 
 to the impulse of a single man, the famous Sienese pope 
 of the Piccolomini family, Pius II. Then were built 
 the charming Piccolomini Loggia, the Palazzo Picco- 
 lomini, the Palazzo Nerucci, and the Palazzo Spannoc- 
 chi, all planned either by Florentine architects or by 
 architects under Florentine influence. These splendid 
 structures give the Renaissance touch to Siena which 
 no one would care to miss; nevertheless, they not only 
 represent an artistic importation, but are impotent to 
 drown the mediaeval note so formidably struck by the 
 city's ensemble.* 
 
 Thus through continued efforts, chiefly of the thir- 
 teenth and fourteenth centuries, was Siena endowed 
 with the various monuments which are the expression 
 in durable material of her character and history. Add 
 the humble but never unsightly houses of brick and 
 
 * It must strike the reader's attention how little the churches, apart always 
 from the cathedral, count in this ensemble. That is due to a variety of 
 reasons. In the first place the two great houses of the begging orders, S. 
 Francesco and S. Domenico, are architecturally of little or no interest, being 
 nothing more than huge barns; and, further, the very ancient parish churches, 
 such as S. Vigilio, S. Cristofano, and S. Martino, which, if small and rude, 
 must have possessed a definite mediaeval character, were in the Renaissance 
 centuries done over in the prevailing style.
 
 308 SIENA 
 
 stone along the sharp slopes and winding streets by 
 which the poorer classes gradually replaced the wooden 
 dwellings of an earlier time, and we have before us the 
 picture of the commune at the height of its destiny. 
 If our hearts are moved by this age-browned city, lying 
 high upon its hill and lifting up its white cathedral like 
 a shrine of pearl, it is not merely because our imagina- 
 tion readily makes a romance of the past, but because 
 we perceive in its strong and ordered masonry the ad- 
 mirable effects of a creative civic spirit.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT AND THE ADORNMENT 
 OF THE CITY 
 
 OWING to the cosmopolitanism of our time, with 
 its growing tendency to obliterate mental 
 boundaries and create a uniform civilization, 
 the purely national element in a work of art is not as 
 prominent as it once was. While an artistic production 
 is received by us primarily in the light of a personal 
 statement about life, in the Italian Middle Age it 
 represented far more truly the version current among 
 a particular school or group, with the passions and 
 prejudices of which the individual artist was content 
 to be fully identified. The neighbors of shop and 
 street, enclosed by the same wall, constituted the 
 people of his choice and love, distinct not only 
 politically from the rival peoples established in the 
 surrounding towns, but differentiated from, them 
 morally and mentally, as well as by innumerable peculiar- 
 ities of dress, habit, and sentiment. The work of the 
 mediaeval artist possesses therefore in the highest degree 
 the flavor of the immediate soil from which it sprang. 
 This idiomatic result, due to the stubborn self- 
 sufficiency of the early commonwealths, was confirmed 
 and fortified by still another circumstance. As the 
 communes acquired strength and vigor they set them- 
 
 309
 
 310 SIENA 
 
 selves as one of their chief tasks the upbuilding of a 
 home, worthy, noble, and beautiful. I have already 
 spoken of this common mediaeval passion, showing how 
 in Siena it produced the cathedral, the Palazzo Pubblico, 
 and the whole town as it still stands. But as the 
 national enthusiasm did not rest here, as the walls 
 raised by the architects were susceptible to the manifold 
 adornment which are the special province of sculpture, 
 painting, and the minor arts, these arts no less than 
 architecture, and certainly to an extent utterly unknown 
 in our day, were informed with the civic spirit and 
 moulded to its uses and ideals. In view of these cir- 
 cumstances, which bring home to us the picture of a 
 long continued isolation, coupled with a fiery local 
 passion, it is not strange that all work issuing from the 
 botteghe of the Sienese artists should have a distinctive 
 quality, in which we may, without falling into exag- 
 geration, recognize the special genius of the Sienese 
 commonwealth. 
 
 The identification of the mediaeval artist with the 
 group claiming him by birth is fully illustrated by the 
 great work which inaugurates the history of the Sienese 
 school of painting.* I am speaking of Duccio di 
 Buoninsegna's famous Ancona, painted for the duomo 
 and enthroned on the High Altar, directly under the 
 
 * The literature on Sienese painting is immense. For an analysis of the 
 aesthetic elements of the school nothing exists to compare with the essay of 
 Berenson, "The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance." On the 
 history and the production of the school see Milanesi, "Documenti per la 
 Storia d'Arte Senese"; Borghesi and Banchi, "Nuovi Documenti," etc.; 
 Vasari, " Le Vite de' piu eccellenti Pittori," etc., edited by Milanesi; Langton 
 Douglas, "A History of Siena," chap. 18; Heywood and Olcott, "Guide 
 to Siena," Part II; Burckhardt, "Der Cicerone," 9* e Auflage; E. H. and E. 
 W. Blashfield, "Italian Cities." Vol. L
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 311 
 
 cupola, in the year 1311. There was painting in Siena 
 before Duccio's day, enough to have led to the forma- 
 tion of a very active guild of the practitioners of the art, 
 but, judging by its best known work, the madonna by 
 one Guido da Siena, hanging in the Palazzo Pubblico, 
 it was without any special significance. Duccio first 
 blew Guide's poor embers into flame and is the true 
 founder of Sienese painting. Guido, his predecessor, 
 and the long line of earlier craftsmen in whose tracks 
 Guido followed, were the degenerate heirs who ad- 
 ministered with laughable ineptitude the great pat- 
 rimony of the Byzantine Greeks. Ages before, in the 
 fifth and sixth centuries, this people, spanning the 
 Bosphorus at the meeting-point of East and West, had 
 developed out of Asiatic and Hellenic elements a new 
 decorative system which for richness and solemnity of 
 effect has rarely been surpassed. At Ravenna, hailed 
 as bride of the Adriatic until displaced by mounting 
 Venice, the eastern artists worked for several genera- 
 tions and to such good effect that we may still, by a visit 
 to that marsh-encircled town, assure ourselves that a 
 Greek mosaic of the early Christian era, set together of 
 little cubes of colored glass, has not only a permanency 
 itself no mean merit in a work of art but a glow 
 and majesty which takes possession of our delighted 
 senses like orchestral music. No artists have ever 
 achieved more with pure color than these Christian 
 Greeks; their designs, on the other hand, while fulfilling, 
 at least in the earlier examples, the minor part reserved 
 for them in the general effect, tended to become, as the 
 years rolled on, more and more conventionalized, and 
 the human figures in them increasingly stiff, lifeless,
 
 312 SIENA 
 
 and hieratic. In the mosaics of Ravenna, Rome, and 
 many scattered places we may recognize the models as 
 well as the starting-point of Italian painting. However, 
 under the disintegrating influences of the Germanic 
 conquest and settlement, the young art failed to take 
 firm root, and, though imitating the eastern productions, 
 soon lost all sense of the Byzantine graces of form and 
 color, and ended in producing those palsied and revolt- 
 ing Christs-upon-the-cross, examples of which are to be 
 found in the early rooms of every Italian museum. 
 Although Guido da Siena's madonna, which bears an 
 inscription with the date 1221 a date, by the way, 
 which most authorities look upon as impossible, pre- 
 fering to substitute for it 1284 * enjoys the distinction 
 of marking a reaction from the prolonged and intolerable 
 degradation of the graphic arts, the painter's improve- 
 ment is not sufficient to carry him forward into a land 
 of promise. That step was reserved to Duccio.f Did 
 Duccio in his youth have under his eyes by any chance 
 the old mosaics of Ravenna and Rome, or did he go 
 further and travel to distant Constantinople to appren- 
 tice himself to some Greek master in whose shop the 
 majestic traditions of his craft were still current ? 
 These questions, imposed by the character of the young 
 innovator's work, have been frequently put, but belong 
 to the realm of conjecture. What is certain and beyond 
 conjecture is that Duccio somehow and somewhere quick- 
 ened his spirit and steadied his hand by contact with the 
 genius of Byzantium. To be sure he did not work in 
 
 * On this controversy see Langton Douglas, "Siena," 481 ff. 
 
 f Duccio was active in Siena a's early as 1278, and probably died shortly 
 after 1313. See for a few certain facts, extracted from the public records, 
 the article by Lisini, "Bull. Sen.," V, 20 ff.
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 313 
 
 mosaic, but in the slighter and more fluid medium of 
 paint, which had succeeded to the favor once enjoyed 
 by the colored cubes. But his painting is for all the 
 world like a mosaic which, in the course of its transfer 
 from an ancient wall or apse, has, not without some 
 paling of its glorious surface, acquired a greater freedom 
 of line and a closer relationship to the actual forms of life. 
 While Duccio renewed the art of painting and became 
 the father of a school, down in the Arno valley, at Flor- 
 ence, a similar mission was fulfilled by Giotto, son of 
 Bondone. Because Giotto, giver of life to the school 
 of Florence, was somewhat younger than Duccio, it has 
 been urged by occasional partisans that the school of 
 Siena enjoys a clear priority over its Florentine rival 
 and must stand at the head of every history of Italian 
 painting. That was not the view of Messer Giorgio 
 Vasari, the first great historian of the arts, who, though 
 an Aretine by birth, became a passionate partisan of 
 the greatness of Florence, his city by adoption. On the 
 strength of the reputation of a certain Cimabue, named 
 by Dante as the forerunner of Giotto and older by a 
 generation than Sienese Duccio, he imperiously as- 
 signed all the credit for reviving what he called "the 
 noble art of design" to his fellow-citizens of Florence. 
 He would have it that painting is specifically a Floren- 
 tine invention, and the school of Siena no more than 
 the seedling of a famous stock. But unhappily Cima- 
 bue, in spite of Vasari's generously inventing a life for 
 him and of supplementing the act by a liberal catalogue 
 of works, has, under the searchlight of modern criti- 
 cism, shrunk to such an extent that not a single authori- 
 tative painting remains to make him credible and
 
 314 SIENA 
 
 real.* With Cimabue eliminated from the argument, at 
 least until new facts come to light, the wordy war between 
 the champions of Florence and Siena, touching the age of 
 their respective schools, would appear to settle itself, if 
 that were anything gained. For the student, however, 
 whose mind turns instinctively to essentials, the question 
 of priority a question of dates is of little importance. 
 He will gladly dismiss every mere querelle allemande to 
 fix his attention upon such simple and indubitable facts 
 as these, to wit, that Duccio and Giotto are the 
 acknowledged originators of two splendid schools of 
 painting, that they are to all intents contemporaries, 
 and that they are independent and largely self-inspired 
 workers. Independent, I say, for Giotto, though 
 somewhat younger than Duccio, did not fall under the 
 influence and was not the plagiarist the Sienese master, 
 but strove to give expression to the forms of his imagina- 
 tion by following the light of his own soul. In the 
 course of his long self-education he did not turn back 
 to the Byzantine world; something imposed itself on 
 him more imperatively than the work of the Greeks, 
 and that was nature herself. He dipped into the 
 fulness of life and by so doing opened a book 
 from which his countrymen, hailing him as their 
 leader, drew their chief joy and profit for many genera- 
 tions to come. Duccio, thrilling to the wonders of 
 Byzantium, became a decorator with only a languid 
 interest in the natural world, and his followers of Siena, 
 receiving their inspiration from him, remained for the 
 two hundred years the school flourished, decorators 
 
 * For the case against Cimabue see an article by Langton Douglas in the 
 "Nineteenth Century" of March, 1903.
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 315 
 
 also, who only now and then, and always with something 
 akin to distaste, turned to refresh their splendid though 
 formalized art by contact with the shapes and move- 
 ments of animate life. 
 
 Duccio's altar-piece owes its origin to the commune, 
 which, ever solicitous for the great cathedral erected by 
 its efforts, wished to make that structure as beautiful 
 in all details as lay in the power of the age to accomplish. 
 As the cathedral was dedicated to the Virgin, it was 
 highly proper that her image should adorn her temple. 
 The task was assigned to Duccio by a sort of referendum 
 of his countrymen who, weary of the tortured and 
 meaningless figures of the old art, found themselves 
 carried away by the novelty and charm imparted to his 
 panels by the new master in their midst. However, 
 though enjoying the fame of a bold innovator, not till 
 he undertook the Ancona of the Virgin did Duccio reach 
 the full expression of his talent. It was the national 
 undertaking, performed with all Siena looking on, that 
 gave him his inspiration and made him the founder of a 
 school. The work, which the solid and thrifty rulers, 
 with fine disregard of cost in such an enterprise, urged 
 him to make as splendid as lay in his power, was 
 assigned to him in 1308 and was completed in less than 
 three years. Then, the long labor done, the artist 
 added, by way of signature, an inscription which has the 
 faint, delicate fragrance of that loveliest product of 
 monastic Christianity, the Fioretti of St. Francis. 
 "Holy Mother of God," it reads, "give Siena peace and 
 Duccio life because he painted Thee thus."* On the 
 
 * "Mater Sancta Dei Sis Causa Senis Requiei Sis Duccio Vita Te Quia 
 Pinxit Ita."
 
 316 SIENA 
 
 appointed day the great altar-piece was carried to the 
 house of the Virgin; and, a contemporary chronicler 
 recounts, "the bishop ordered a great and devout 
 company of priests and friars to attend in solemn pro- 
 cession the Signori Nove and all the officials of the 
 commune and all the people; and all the greatest 
 citizens in turn with lighted candles in their hands 
 escorted the said picture, and behind them followed the 
 women and children with much devotion. And they ac- 
 companied the said picture all the way to the duomo,"* 
 amidst the ringing of bells and the blare of silver 
 trumpets. With such general delight did the Sienese 
 receive into their keeping the monumental work of 
 their fellow-citizen, and with favor and reverence they 
 continued to look upon it for many generations. But at 
 last a new taste came to prevail, and in the sixteenth 
 century the picture was removed from its place of 
 honor to suffer various translocations and indignities 
 until in our time it has found a resting-place, incompar- 
 ably better than the ordinary gallery, in the quiet 
 opera del duomo. There it may be visited with that 
 peace of mind which is indispensable to its under- 
 standing. 
 
 The Ancona, placed on the High Altar under the 
 cupola where it could be seen from the front and from 
 the rear, was painted, in order to meet this situation, on 
 both sides: on the nave side with the Virgin among the 
 hosts of heaven, and on the choir side with more than a 
 score of episodes from the life and death of the Saviour. 
 In addition, there were the usual predella and several 
 other panels with Biblical scenes, inserted at various 
 
 *"Cronaca d'Anonimo." Quoted by Lisini, "Bull. Sen.," V, 22.
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 317 
 
 openings in the elaborate Gothic frame, for what Duccio 
 presented to his native city was not only a painting but 
 also a small masterpiece of wood-carving and of archi- 
 tecture. In the course of the wanderings, imposed by 
 the intolerant taste of the Renaissance, the beautiful 
 frame was destroyed, and the Ancona itself broken into 
 convenient sections, with the result that the picture now 
 offered to view, though in a not unsatisfactory state of 
 preservation, is merely the disjecta membra of the 
 elaborate composition mounted by the artist. 
 
 The body of the altar-piece represents the Virgin 
 amidst the companies of heaven. She is seated on her 
 throne with the divine Child before her, attended by a 
 court of saints and angels in solemn, ordered rows. 
 In the foreground on their knees are four members of 
 the blessed troop particularly dear to Siena our old 
 friend, Sant* Ansano, of course, among them begging 
 her favor for the town which in the stormy period pre- 
 ceding Montaperti had proclaimed her liege and sover- 
 eign. Though it is immediately apparent that Duccio 
 exhibited in this picture a knowledge of his craft which 
 was nothing short of revolutionary, though the panel is 
 touched with such rich splendor as to make it a sensuous 
 delight, our deepest satisfaction in its presence springs 
 not from these sources, but from the sincere and unmis- 
 takable revelation which it affords of the religious 
 sentiment of the Middle Age. We are often told by 
 critics of a scientific bent that he falls into egregious 
 error who extracts other than aesthetic emotion from a 
 work of art, and does not soberly confine his attention to 
 such elements of technical skill as tone, color, line, and 
 composition. Without embarking on a theoretical dis-
 
 318 SIENA 
 
 cussion which can have no place here, it may be catagor- 
 ically affirmed that followers of this unbending creed 
 will never establish a simple and cordial relation with 
 Duccio and his school. For, though a thing so subtle 
 as to defy analysis, the fact remains that the rarest 
 charm and most lasting distinction of Sienese painting 
 is the serene atmosphere of Christian sentiment in which 
 it is steeped. But let no one dream that Duccio's 
 merit is exhausted with this praise. His unreflecting 
 and instinctive relation to the gods of his home estab^ 
 lishes chiefly his quality as a man; as an artist he com- 
 mands a host of specifically artistic merits. What these 
 are can any one doubt who will surrender himself to the 
 impression of the great Ancona ? Gazing with open 
 senses, can he fail to respond to the rich glow of color, 
 to the delicate details, and to the stately proportions of 
 the composition ? Gold, a liquid gold, soft as evening 
 waters, fills the eye, for it lies upon the halos, the robes, 
 the background, touching everything with splendor; 
 the charming patterns, worked with the passion of the 
 miniaturist into mantles, throne, and shield-like aureoles 
 enforce the note of gaiety; and any loss of power and 
 simplicity threatened by the meticulous elaboration is 
 entirely overcome by the large, rhythmical swing of the 
 composition. 
 
 When we turn from Duccio's great panel of the en- 
 throned Virgin to the scenes from the Passion of Christ 
 originally the reredos of the great Madonna we 
 perceive at a glance that his powers were not suited to 
 this particular task. No doubt these panels, too, pos- 
 sess the charm of surface which Duccio's brush gave to 
 everything it touched; nevertheless, they do not to use
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 319 
 
 a term familiar to artists carry. The painter who 
 could give us a vision of the Virgin and her company as 
 moving as a song, on turning to the dramatic episodes 
 recounted in the gospels, immediately lost his bear- 
 ings: he accumulates facts, he wanders among ac- 
 cessories, he babbles like a thought-free child. The 
 swift, clear seizure of all that was essential in a given 
 occurrence, in the kiss of Judas, in the scourging of 
 Christ, in everyone of the familiar and always marvellous 
 scenes of the Passion, was denied him. So conspicuous 
 a failure in so sure a hand must plunge us into puzzled 
 reflection. Giotto, working at Florence, not forty miles 
 away, had, in a degree perhaps never matched in the 
 history of art, this very power of grasping with absolute 
 precision the significance of a human event and render- 
 ing it with the minimum of effort. Why Giotto's suc- 
 cess and Duccio's failure ? Without pretending to 
 solve unfathomable mysteries, we may point out that 
 the respective achievements of the two masters accurately 
 reflect their different inspiration and original proclivi- 
 ties. Duccio, looking back to the Byzantine mosaicists, 
 became a sumptuous decorator with no more than a 
 child's feeling for the sweet and terrible drama of exist- 
 ence, while Giotto, the naturalist, who moved familiarly 
 among men and steeped himself in all their grave con- 
 cerns, achieved a gift of swift and simple statement 
 summoning our attention like a tocsin. 
 
 During the time Duccio was painting his altar-piece 
 for the cathedral the civil residence of the commune 
 was completed and the rulers, animated with the public 
 spirit with which we are now familiar, took up the mat- 
 ter of its ornamentation. The ideals of mediaeval life
 
 320 SIENA 
 
 emanated so largely from the church that the pictorial 
 imagery of a public hall no less than that of a house 
 expressly built for worship would be determined by 
 religion. When to Simone Martini, therefore, was 
 committed a wall of the new chamber where the Great 
 Council of the citizens was wont to meet, nothing was 
 more natural than his presenting there, just as Duccio 
 had done in the duomo, the liege Lady of Siena with her 
 heavenly attendants. The Majestas, as the work is 
 nobly called, done in fresco in the year 1315,* still sur- 
 vives, though considerably impaired by the ravages of 
 time. Nevertheless, neither time nor the more wilful 
 injuries of man have robbed it of its charm, a charm so 
 delicate and imponderable that to express it in words 
 seems like a vain beating of the air. Simone, it is plain, 
 learned his art from Duccio, but by the force of genius 
 was enabled to go far beyond his master. All that 
 makes Duccio's cathedral panel memorable is here, too, 
 but in every instance carried to a fuller, richer expres- 
 sion. Instead of Duccio's splendor, achieved by a 
 profusion of gold-leaf, Simone gives us a harmony, 
 different in kind but as effective as that of those masters 
 of sensuous charm, the Venetians. For with the younger 
 artist gold a rich but barbaric medium, when all is 
 said is abandoned for color, which washes the draper- 
 ies, throne, and faces with gay and delicate tints, 
 mounting to a note of welcome austerity in the flat 
 background, blue and cool and deep as an Italian night. 
 In the composition, too, Duccio's rigorous symmetry has 
 been replaced by a more flowing and resourceful treat- 
 
 * Owing to damage done by the humidity exuding from the neighboring 
 government salt-stores, the fresco was in part renewed by Simone in 1321.
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 321 
 
 ment, revealed in a less mathematical grouping of the 
 saints and soldiery of heaven, and in such an expressive 
 detail as the long vertical lines of the poles which support 
 the canopy of the throne and endow the picture with its 
 agreeable effect of height. But, elaborate as the com- 
 position is, it is dominated at every point by the Ma- 
 donna herself. To her, hieratic and remote, as tradition 
 would have her, but touched for the first time in Sienese 
 art with something of human grace, the eye returns 
 from every excursion as to its home and haven. In 
 Simone we meet the art of the innovator Duccio carried 
 to its perfection. 
 
 And what the opposite wall of the same room dis- 
 closes will only confirm that impression. There, some 
 years later (1328), Simone painted the equestrian 
 portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano, a professional 
 soldier frequently employed by the republic to command 
 its army in time of war. Such a portrait signified a 
 departure from the tradition which favored the exclusive 
 presentation of religious themes, but which would 
 inevitably be subjected to change in measure as art 
 absorbed new elements of life. Simone, though prac- 
 tising painting with characteristic Sienese reverence for 
 the past, was great enough to be afraid neither of new 
 ideas nor of new methods. He shows us Guidoriccio 
 as he rides abroad before Montemassi, a Maremma 
 castle which had risen in revolt and which the Sienese 
 army had been sent to subdue. The slight landscape, 
 showing the battlemented stronghold as well as the 
 camp of the Sienese, is treated as a pure accessory, and 
 all the emphasis is concentrated on the rider. The rich 
 trappings, swathing both man and horse, display
 
 322 SIENA 
 
 Simone's fine sense of pattern, while the flowing move- 
 ment of the wind-blown drapery lends, by that contrast 
 which only the greatest artists can employ successfully, 
 a wonderful impressiveness to the vertical rigidity of the 
 warrior.* 
 
 Adjoining the spacious hall of the Great Council was 
 the smaller and more intimate chamber of the Nine. 
 In the year 1337, nine years after Simone had limned the 
 portrait of Guidoriccio, its decoration was entrusted 
 to a man who had lately begun to attract attention, 
 Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Ambrogio had an older brother, 
 Pietro, and the two, toward the middle of the fourteenth 
 century, and especially after Simone betook himself to 
 Avignon as painter to the pope, threw all their Sienese 
 rivals into the shade. Although Ambrogio could boast 
 a much greater native endowment than Pietro, the two 
 brothers are logically associated together, owing to their 
 common departure from the artistic traditions of their 
 countrymen. Of course both are profoundly Sienese, 
 but both none the less fell under the spell of Giotto's 
 naturalism. This larger range, coupled with their excel- 
 lent color and grave types, may account for the wide 
 popularity they enjoyed throughout central Italy. On 
 being entrusted with the chamber of the Nine, Ambro- 
 gio proceeded to prove his sympathy with the enlarged 
 ideals of painting by composing an allegory, called Good 
 and Bad Government. It would be rash to say that he 
 
 * Simone worked much abroad; at Assisi he has left frescoes in the chapel 
 of Saint Martin, which for pure loveliness have rarely, if ever, been surpassed; 
 at Avignon, where he died in 1344, his work has been destroyed. At Avignon 
 he met a happy accident the poet Petrarch, painted a portrait of Laura, 
 and was paid in poet's coin with two delicate sonnets (49 and 50 of II Can- 
 zoniere).
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 323 
 
 achieved a great triumph. Allegory, with its tendency 
 to impart information and inculcate a lesson, is always 
 in danger of tiring its public, unless the artist sternly 
 checks his garrulity by the exercise of dramatic brevity 
 and self-restraint. These were not merits of Ambrogio 
 or of his Sienese compatriots in general. Ambrogio, like 
 Duccio in the case of the scenes from the Passion of 
 Christ, found there was much to say and tried ramblingly 
 to say it all. The result is that he came very near 
 saying nothing. On the wall opposite the single window 
 of the rectangular room in which he worked he pre- 
 sented his idea of the moral and political agents, Justice, 
 Concord, Fortitude and so forth, which are the pillars 
 of Good Government. On the neighboring wall he 
 exhibited the images of Tyranny, Pride, Cruelty, and 
 all the evils which in their sum signify Bad Government. 
 Adjoining Good and Bad Government respectively are 
 two further frescos which bring before our eyes the actual 
 effects in a city and its district of the two systems. Two 
 pictures of the four are, therefore, strictly speaking, 
 allegorical, two are more particularly illustrative. The 
 illustrative ones, as well as the allegory of Bad Govern- 
 ment are almost ruined. What little can be still made 
 out justifies us in saying that Bad Government, with a 
 profusion of devils, monsters, and the like juvenile 
 shapes of terror, is simple to the point of childishness, 
 and that the expansive illustrations of the effects of 
 Good and Bad Government are redundant to the point 
 of weariness. Of course there are some exquisite details, 
 especially, in the city blessed with a good government, a 
 knight riding out to hunt and a group of girls executing 
 the popular ridda or round dance. If Ambrogio had
 
 324 SIENA 
 
 arrested his brush at this point he would have given us 
 enough, but he chose to crush these modest flowers of 
 his art under an overwhelming and meaningless ma- 
 chine. 
 
 There remains to be considered the allegory of Good 
 Government, which, though injured, is far from a state 
 of ruin and which represents the artist's highest achieve- 
 ment in the chamber of the Nine. Again the instructive 
 element is too omnipresent to permit our spirit to take 
 its ease, as it should in the presence of a work of art, 
 but, our first distaste at this disproportion overcome, 
 we encounter such an abundance of high, artistic charm, 
 that it is impossible to resist the impression that Am- 
 brogio, in spite of his scholastic aberrations, was a 
 delicate and powerful genius. Good Government, con- 
 ceived as a sovereign of grave and noble aspect, sits 
 surrounded by a court of six ladies representing as 
 inscriptions inform us Prudence, Fortitude, Peace, 
 Magnanimity, Temperance, and Justice; at his feet, to 
 his left, are his armed ministers who have brought in a 
 group of evil-doers, bound and chained, while from his 
 right, come to do him honor, approaches a company of 
 citizens, all holding, in sign of civic union, by a cord 
 committed to them by two women, seated apart and 
 placarded, to help our understanding, as Concord and 
 Justice. Nothing could be more effective than the 
 ruler, looking out with level glance and planted, with 
 his sceptre on his knee, firm as any tower; and nowhere 
 can we hope to find so much grace, joined with so much 
 dignity, as in the virtues seated at his side. Peace, 
 robed in white, with a crown of olives in her hair, has 
 always been singled out for praise. Prudence and
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 325 
 
 Magnanimity, to the sovereign's right and left, are 
 hardly inferior to her. A very decorative touch, char- 
 acteristically Sienese, is supplied by the long, massed 
 lances of the armed men; in fact, wherever the eye falls, 
 it encounters some feature of delight. The color is a 
 chapter by itself; applied with the greatest delicacy, it 
 acquires against a quiet background of deep blue a glow 
 and fusion worthy of Simone. 
 
 The brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, car- 
 ried off their feet by the example of Giotto, and trying, 
 with questionable success,* their hand at allegory and 
 dramatic narrative, were unsurpassed in their day 
 when they undertook altar-pieces in the meditative 
 spirit and of the decorative quality traditional in their 
 city. Pietro's triptych in the Opera del Duomo, repre- 
 senting the Birth of the Virgin, and the much suppler 
 and gayer Ambrogio's many small madonnas one at 
 Sant' Eugenio outside Porta San Marco, another at San 
 Francesco, a third in the Galleria, this last particularly 
 fine with a bower of angels and four kneeling bishops 
 are wonderfully intimate revelations of fourteenth cen- 
 tury feeling. A touch of naturalism, caught from 
 Florence, gives these panels an unusual vivacity without 
 impairing the charm of the hereditary and truly Sienese 
 qualities of line and color.f 
 
 After the Lorenzetti came a period of stagnation. 
 We have seen that Siena itself toward the middle of the 
 century was touched with languor, and that its civic 
 
 * Look, for confirmation, at Pietro's work at Assisi. His scenes from the 
 Passion are without a feature capable of communicating pleasure; they are 
 chaos. 
 
 f Pietro and Ambrogio are lost track of toward the middle of the century; 
 it has been surmised that they died in the great plague of the year 1348.
 
 326 SIENA 
 
 energy fell into decline. Such a state of affairs was sure 
 to affect unfavorably the practice of painting, especially 
 as it coincided with a dearth of men on a level with the 
 creative geniuses of the last half century. Even in the 
 Middle Age, though the nation influenced the produc- 
 tion of the studios in a degree unknown to our time, 
 the arts had their ultimate root in the individual. In 
 Florence, in the second half of the fourteenth century, 
 may be noticed an artistic decay as indisputable as the 
 contemporary failure of Siena, and in the case of 
 Florence, it is impossible to explain the phenomenon as 
 due to an enfeebled moral and economic condition. If 
 painting in the Arno town declined, if it fell immediately 
 after its first brave flight to even a lower level than that 
 reached at Siena, the only satisfactory explanation is 
 that no individual appeared who was capable of turning 
 to account the magnificent inheritance of Giotto. In 
 the upland city such men as Andrea Vanni (d. 1414) 
 and Taddeo Bartoli (d. 1422), though hardly more than 
 honest journeymen, showed at least that the spark 
 struck by Duccio was not extinguished. To throw 
 a glance at Andrea's polytych in Santo Stefano, or at 
 Taddeo's scenes from the life of the Virgin in the 
 chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico, is to recognize the per- 
 sistent vitality of a great tradition. Florence has no 
 contemporary work of the same fibre, but Florence 
 presently achieved what was denied her rival a second 
 period of creation more triumphant even than the first. 
 Were her slumbering energies revived because all 
 Florence Florence considered as a people and a 
 nation responded to the sharp stimulus of the Renais- 
 sance and expanded gratefully under the new influence,
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 327 
 
 or did her artistic energies owe their quickening rather 
 to leaders and geniuses like Masaccio and Donatello, 
 who freed the plodders in the botteghe from the chains 
 of old conventions and endowed them with new eyes 
 and a new understanding ? Be the reason what it may, 
 Florentine art celebrated a glorious revival, expressive 
 of the young hopes which shed their light over mankind, 
 while in Siena, although there as elsewhere the Renais- 
 sance piped its alluring song, the painters contentedly 
 travelled the accustomed way, reproducing the forms and 
 sentiments with which they were familiar. We may 
 doubt whether even a succession of great leaders, had 
 they been granted to Siena instead of to Florence, could 
 have secured the victory of the Renaissance code of 
 life and art without the support of popular favor. 
 Indeed an earlier and a no less eloquent prophet of 
 the new time than Masaccio, Jacopo della Quercia, 
 was, by a strange caprice of nature, a son of pro- 
 vincial Siena, and during a score of years preached 
 the new gospel in his native city practically to deaf 
 ears. 
 
 In any case the fifteenth century broke over Siena 
 and produced, at least as far as painting is concerned, 
 no art specifically of the Renaissance. To be sure this 
 century witnessed the labors of a most fascinating group 
 of artists, who signify a second blossoming of the 
 Sienese genius; but the striking fact remains that they 
 hardly deign to take notice of the new movement of 
 civilization, and, except for the absorption of a few new 
 elements of skill, exhibit a devoted loyalty to the medi- 
 aeval traditions of their home. Although the new 
 period decidedly merits a close and sympathetic study,
 
 328 SIENA 
 
 the scope of this sketch does not permit me to do more 
 than to present its leading representatives under the 
 form of a general characterization. The dominant 
 figures of Sienese painting during its second period of 
 bloom were Stefano di Giovanni, called Sassetta (1392- 
 1447), Sano di Pietro (1406-81), Benvenuto di Giovanni 
 (1436-1518 ?), Matteo di Giovanni (1435 P-I495), Fran- 
 cesco di Giorgio (1439-1502), and Neroccio di Landi 
 (1447-1500). One and all of these men exhibit, of 
 course in varying combinations, the familiar Sienese 
 tendencies and qualities. They seek a sumptuous 
 effect, retaining for the purpose the use of gold long 
 after it was abandoned elsewhere; they cling to a 
 delicate and elaborate detail;- they love the old general- 
 ized types better than the differentiated humanity of the 
 new realism; they refuse to be betrayed by perspective, 
 and light, and the other conquests of science into a 
 surrender of their simple decorative principles; and, 
 finally, they admirably produce the impression which 
 is appropriate to their means and their intention. In 
 this last feature lies the real test of all their qualities; 
 by sending forth into the world, a whole century after 
 the death of the Lorenzetti, and when secular influences 
 were asserting their ascendency throughout Italy, 
 religious pieces sincerely conceived and unerring in 
 their effect, they establish their rank as true artists. 
 However, let no one expect to encounter among their 
 panels either the radiant, care-free figures of Simone's 
 art, suggesting a distant world of blithe romance, or the 
 robust saints of Ambrogio who seem to have stepped out 
 of a meeting of dignified burghesses. In their passage 
 through the minds of a weaker generation, the old types,
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 329 
 
 though still recognizable, have undoubtedly lost some- 
 thing of their nobler nature and been brought nearer 
 to our common human state of wistfulness and frailty. 
 These fifteenth century masters, shut off from the fresh 
 currents of thought and taking their pleasure in end- 
 lessly refining upon the old methods and the old senti- 
 ments, had necessarily to pay for their self-satisfaction 
 with the loss of virility. They constitute an Indian 
 summer, shedding a faint fragrance which, if sweet, 
 suggests decay and a near end. 
 
 All these belated medievalists, and more particu- 
 larly Matteo di Giovanni and Neroccio, were endowed 
 with great natural gifts and did not adopt their conserva- 
 tive creed purely from pride or indolence. They knew 
 perfectly well what was going on at Florence and in the 
 world around; they were acquainted with the work of 
 Donatello, and admired Botticelli and his friends, going 
 so far as to import occasionally a trait of one or another 
 Florentine into their work; but from every excursion 
 beyond the circle of their town they returned with spon- 
 taneous resolution to the tradition of their predecessors 
 because these painters, and these alone, stirred the Sienese 
 heart. There is something in such tenacious loyalty 
 to home ideals which forces our respect, but the honor 
 we gladly pay the Sienese quattrocentists should not lead 
 us to overlook the fact that their attitude is the proof 
 of a confirmed provincialism. Duccio and his followers, 
 marching onward with the breath of the morning upon 
 them, carried Siena into the van of Tuscan civilization; 
 Sano, Neroccio, and Matteo were content to have her 
 sit remote among her hills, spinning reminiscences like 
 an ancient pensioner. Thus painting adds its bit of
 
 330 SIENA 
 
 evidence touching the rapid exhaustion, under the con- 
 ditions of the new age, of the once lusty commune. 
 
 The profusion with which pictorial decoration once 
 colored the walls of municipal buildings and of churches 
 is brought home with astonishment to any one who 
 strolls through the rooms of the Palazzo Pubblico or 
 along the choir of S. Francesco and the Servi. What 
 is left, crumbling and growing fainter every day, con- 
 stitutes a considerable production, but is a small fraction 
 of the art which once made these places attractive and 
 memorable. In the fourteenth century, not only every 
 wall which in any sense belonged to the public glowed, 
 like the rich page of a missal, with fair borders and 
 grave saints, but the passion for decoration spread to 
 personal and household articles as well, and painters, not 
 excluding the greatest, gladly made a trial of their skill 
 upon shields, coats-of-arms, banners, book-covers, and 
 marriage chests. Only this general diffusion of the 
 decorative taste can account for the immense number 
 of painters who found employment in Siena in the 
 fourteenth century.* 
 
 Everything affirms that the Sienese were a people 
 who, among all the arts, felt most immediately drawn 
 to the moving charm commanded by the art of painting. 
 But, possessed with the desire to magnify life in every 
 manner given to man, they gratefully accepted also such 
 services as lay in the gift of sculpture and the artistic 
 crafts. As early as the year 1266, while Duccio was 
 still a boy, the operaio of the cathedral ordered the 
 pulpit of Niccolo Pisano, which still stands in the shadow 
 
 * A list of them more than two hundred names in "Misc. Stor. Sen.," 
 IV, p. 133-
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 331 
 
 of the cupola. If the beauty of this monument is not 
 generally convincing, there can be no dispute as to its 
 historical importance. The Gothic sculpture of all 
 Tuscany may be properly said to have its roots in it. 
 The sculptors of Siena, who, before the arrival of the 
 Pisan master, are more correctly qualified as stone- 
 cutters, now had a work set before them far beyond 
 their scope. And to the inspiration of the pulpit was 
 presently added the highly finished figure-work of 
 Giovanni, Niccolo's son, technically as gifted as his 
 father and endowed with much finer artistic perceptions. 
 Giovanni, who, as we know, acted for many years as 
 operaio of the cathedral, probably not only erected the 
 first facade of that edifice the facade which was 
 afterward destroyed but adorned its niches and taber- 
 nacles with many statues. Although very few remains 
 of Giovanni's work can be still identified in Siena, there 
 is no doubt that he exercised a wide influence and 
 became the real founder of the Sienese Gothic school. 
 This school found occupation chiefly in connection with 
 the stonework of the cathedral, where we can judge of 
 its taste and skill in the capitals of nave and choir, and 
 in the foliage and figure-work profusely scattered 
 everywhere. The sculptors of the Sienese trecento also 
 fashioned stone altars and tabernacles, and raised those 
 curious sepulchral monuments which consist of sar- 
 cophagi imbedded in the walls of churches, and which 
 are still to be found in frequent examples throughout 
 Tuscany. All things considered, the amount of their 
 work which has come down to us is not great, and such 
 as it is, stamped with the mark of the shop and never 
 of the individual, gives us no reason to regret that its
 
 332 SIENA 
 
 bulk is small. With the temperamental bent of the 
 Sienese toward color, we need hardly wonder that 
 sculpture did not acquire the magic touch of contempo- 
 rary painting and never rose above the level of an honest 
 mediocrity. A far more favorable opinion of the local 
 school would be forced upon us if it could be proved 
 that Sienese sculptors moulded the reliefs upon the 
 facade of the cathedral of Orvieto. These, the most 
 delicate creations in stone of the Gothic period to be 
 found in Central Italy, immediately communicate by 
 their delicate forms and expressive movements that 
 feeling of intensified existence which is the best return 
 man has from art. Very probably these reliefs were 
 executed by Sienese masters under the general direction 
 of the architect of the facade, Lorenzo di Maitano, who, 
 it is certain, was a native of Siena; but even if the Or- 
 vieto work is Sienese, the fact remains that to the city 
 of the Virgin accrued no recognizable benefit from the 
 skill of its sons. 
 
 Just as sculpture was falling into a languor that prom- 
 ised a complete demise, it received a new impulse from 
 one of the forerunners of the Renaissance, Jacopo della 
 Quercia (1374-1428). Although Jacopo's mind and 
 hand never entirely ceased to declare his mediaeval 
 origin, he turned with bold initiative from the exhausted 
 conventions of the past in order to refresh his art by 
 direct study of the forms of nature. He was the first 
 and almost the only Sienese realist, but his realism, in 
 distinction from that of his Florentine contemporaries, 
 was held in restraint by a sense of form so purely classical 
 that we do not encounter its like again till the days of 
 Michael Angelo. His main work in Siena is the Fonte
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 333 
 
 Gaia, of which I have already spoken in another place, 
 but his name is also connected with the beautiful font 
 of the Baptistery, for which he drew the general plan 
 and contributed the bronze relief representing the 
 expulsion of Zaccharias. However, though his country- 
 men admired, they did not comprehend. Jacopo's 
 work was in effect an attempt to throw open the doors 
 and windows of the Sienese mind to new light and 
 understanding; but, smiling pleasantly, without a sign 
 of rancor, the people of the hill-city rejected the prof- 
 fered salvation. The realist creed did in the course of 
 time make headway in the Elsa valley and, wedded to 
 the decorative taste native to this region, produced a 
 local school of Renaissance sculpture, the work of which 
 we may sincerely admire in delicately ornate doors, in 
 shapely friezes, and in occasional statuary. Federighi 
 (d. 1490), if not the most capable, was certainly the 
 most active of this group, and in work where he could 
 legitimately indulge his love for smoothness and finish, 
 as, for example, in the frieze of the chapel of the Campo 
 or in that of the Palazzo dei Diavoli outside Porta 
 Camellia, proved that the old Sienese refinement still 
 survived. But energy and force, the virtues of the con- 
 queror, neither he nor his contemporaries possessed, 
 wherefore their work fades to a shadow when confronted 
 with the impetuous creations of such fifteenth century 
 Florentines as Pollaiuolo and Verocchio.* 
 The Age of the Communes, which saw the revival of 
 
 * I may be permitted to remind the reader who observes my failure even 
 to mention artists like Vecchietta and Marrina, that I am as little engaged in 
 writing a history of sculpture as of painting. My sole object is to convey by 
 the method of an historical review a general idea of the quality of Sienese 
 work in stone and color.
 
 334 SIENA 
 
 the democratic spirit of republican Rome and, rooted 
 in the general awakening of man's slumbering energies, 
 a new bloom of the Fine Arts, naturally witnessed also 
 !an interesting development of the artistic crafts. We 
 have found that the men who painted the pictures and 
 carved the images of stone and marble received their 
 commission from the great corporations of the church 
 and commune. As soon as their products involved any 
 considerable outlay of money, the humbler workers in 
 wood and metal were obliged to resort to the same power- 
 ful patrons. The truth is that wealth, far from being in 
 any considerable quantity in private hands, was a corpor- 
 ate possession and was employed to serve the purpose and 
 flatter the taste of the ruling bodies of church and state. 
 The metal and wood workers of Siena, therefore, chiefly 
 produced in their shops, as the highest expression of their 
 skill, crucifixes, reliquaries, chalices, choir-stalls, and 
 other articles, serving to decorate the places of worship 
 and to ennoble the service of the Mass. Among the 
 various classes of craftsmen traceable in the Siena of 
 the trecento, the goldsmiths more particularly seem to 
 have enjoyed a great reputation, and one of them, 
 Lando di Pietro, who, after the manner of his time, was 
 also an architect and in this capacity drew the bold 
 plan for the uncompleted "duomo nuovo," was chosen to 
 fashion the crown used for the coronation of Dante's 
 hero, Henry VII. This crown, as well as Lando's 
 other works, are lost or, what is more likely, were, by an 
 age devoted to another style in jewel ornaments, re- 
 turned to the crucible, unless it be that the exquisitely 
 worked reliquary of San Galgano, preserved by the nuns 
 of the Santuccio near Porta Romana, is of his hand.
 
 Bronze Banner-holder 
 By Cozzarelli (attached to the Palazzo del Magnifico)
 
 THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT 335 
 
 However, as this work has been also claimed for 
 Ugolino di Vieri, we must, waiving the question of attri- 
 bution, be content to receive it as an earnest of fourteenth 
 century skill and taste. The mediaeval records prove 
 that republican Siena harbored within her walls, in 
 addition to goldsmiths, numerous workers in wood, 
 iron, and stained glass, but when we search for the sur- 
 viving evidence of their handiwork, we find that it 
 reduces itself to a few scattered articles. True, after 
 time and man have for centuries done their worst to 
 disperse the artistic treasures of Siena, the town is still 
 remarkably rich in the product of the crafts, but an 
 examination will show that this product belongs, in its 
 bulk, either to the period of transition or to the full 
 Renaissance. As characteristic examples of this work, 
 conceived in the forms popularized by the new civiliza- 
 tion, I may refer to the delicately ornate iron screen 
 of the inner chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico, to the 
 admirable bronze banner-holders of Cozzarelli on the 
 facade of the palace of Pandolfo Petrucci, and to the 
 exquisite wood pilasters carved for the same patron 
 by Barili. All these creations of the wood and metal 
 crafts breathe that quality of aristocratic refinement 
 which is met in all things Sienese in the last period of 
 life of the republic. 
 
 Therewith I have again reached the Renaissance and 
 the utmost chronological boundary of this book. 
 Casting our eye backward over the path we have 
 travelled, we are made aware that the art by which the 
 Sienese, in the period of their fullest development, 
 most significantly expressed their character and ideals 
 is the art of painting. In this field, in the course of
 
 336 SIENA 
 
 the trecento when youth and hope made their dwelling 
 in the city, the people of the Virgin created radiant 
 works, the effects of which were felt far beyond the nar- 
 row pale of home. Duccio and the Lorenzetti, but, 
 above all, the magician Simone, showed, in their feeling 
 for line and color and in the beauty of their decorative 
 effects, a subtle refinement which, since the nation 
 realized its noblest possibilities in these great sons, we 
 may receive as the special message of this people; but 
 thus delicately endowed, instead of shrinking from the 
 world, Simone and his peers confronted it with the enter- 
 prise of fresh and elastic personalities. A hundred 
 years after, in the Indian summer of Sienese art marked 
 by such names as Neroccio and Matteo, the enterprise 
 had vanished, but the refinement, coupled with the 
 old sincerity of feeling, still remained. We are aware 
 that in the period of these quattrocentists the whole 
 public life of Siena began to exhibit ominous signs of 
 collapse. The coincidence leads us back to the reflec- 
 tion which I set down at the head of this chapter: 
 though in our day the arts, having, to a certain extent 
 at least, become denationalized, do not always serve as 
 a secure index of the life of a given people, in mediaeval 
 Siena the artists afford us without any doubt the most 
 precious information which we have touching the civiliza- 
 tion of the city of their birth. Happy in their communal 
 setting and saturated with its special quality, these men 
 unconsciously gave expression to the mute hopes and 
 longings of their fellow-citizens. That is the reason why 
 the art of Siena, as much as any art of any period of 
 history, possesses a national and democratic character.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES; LITERARY AND 
 INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY 
 
 BY the struggle of the young commune against the 
 feudal system, by its gradual political organiza- 
 tion, by its wars with its neighbors, by the arts 
 which it cultivated by such broad avenues as these 
 the historian is most likely to arrive at what is significant 
 in Sienese civilization; nevertheless an immense amount 
 of curious information, occasionally adding an effective 
 stroke to the picture, is afforded by investigating the 
 more secret and unfamiliar paths which introduce us to 
 the amusements of the people, to the forms of inter- 
 course, and to the many homely aspects of daily living. 
 In order that, for a moment at least in our long journey, 
 we may feel upon us the breath of common day, I now 
 plan to pass in review some of the more ephemeral 
 aspects of street and square, although the pressure of 
 space obliges me to be satisfied with an ideal sadly short 
 of completeness. At the same time I shall define 
 briefly the attitude of the Sienese toward the things of 
 the mind by reviewing their relation to literature and 
 science. 
 
 No lover of sport will neglect to inquire into the games 
 of a nation which has engaged his notice, and games, it 
 may be asserted without fear of contradiction, are a not 
 
 337
 
 338 SIENA 
 
 unimportant index of civilization. That the Greeks 
 celebrated their Olympic games with a healthy and 
 cheerful competition among men and horses, while the 
 Romans sought an outlet for their animal spirits in the 
 brutal spectacle of a gladiatorial show do not these 
 contrasting scenes present effectively the whole startling 
 difference between Hellenic and Latin culture ? And 
 letting our glance travel to the age which followed the 
 fall of Rome, is there anything which reveals the char- 
 acter of feudal society more successfully than the 
 jousts of steel-clad warriors, varied with the gentler 
 though still vigorous pursuits of hunting and hawking ? 
 In examining the earliest games of which there is record 
 among the mediaeval Sienese, we observe that our town, 
 or at least the dominant class of our town, was devoted 
 to the same amusements as those which enjoyed the 
 favor of the baronial element throughout Europe. In 
 the year 1222, to give a relatively late example, we hear 
 that una bella e nobile giostra was held in the meadow 
 outside Porta Camellia, and, further, that the first prize, 
 consisting "of an exceeding swift horse with housings 
 of silk together with a fine suit of armor," was awarded 
 to a certain Buonsignore of Arezzo.* Although the 
 dugento brought the political defeat of the nobility, the 
 great families, in part at least, survived, and with them 
 continued to flourish for some generations to come a 
 preference for the rude exercise of the lists. Even in 
 the trecento, therefore, when a group of purse-proud 
 merchants governed the city, tournaments were no 
 infrequent feature of Sienese life; nay, they must have 
 been looked upon with favor, for we find that they were 
 
 * Muratori, Vol. XV, "Cronica Sanese." Note under year 1222.
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 339 
 
 permitted in the Campo itself, in spite of the interrup- 
 tion of business occasioned thereby. The fact was 
 that the city was keenly interested to possess among its 
 citizens men capable of employing arms, and, in sign of 
 being favorably disposed to martial exercises, even went 
 so far as to extend its protection to that characteristic 
 product of feudal society, the institution of knighthood. 
 A mediaeval knight, it is well known, was not born 
 but made. A necessary condition, indeed, especially 
 in the north of Europe, where the institution had a 
 much more exclusive character than among the city- 
 democracies of Italy, was that the candidate for knight- 
 hood be of good family, but good and even noble birth 
 alone did not suffice to secure the chivalric honors. Be- 
 fore a young gentleman might aspire to such a distinc- 
 tion he was required to give proof of his readiness and 
 ability to do a warrior's service in some noble and unself- 
 fish cause. Then he was struck knight by the emperor or 
 some great prince, and with significant ceremonies was 
 received into the brotherhood of chivalry. It was a 
 sign of the healthy self-esteem developed by the Italian 
 republics that they soon assumed in this matter the 
 prerogatives of feudal sovereignty, and freely created 
 knights among those of their citizens who served in the 
 communal army in the capacity of milites. In Siena 
 candidates for the coveted honor were by formal 
 statute permitted to erect a pavilion in the central 
 square, and there, with all the world looking on, for the 
 space of some two weeks, they feasted friends, gave and 
 received presents, and offered proof of their prowess.* 
 That jousting was slow to lose its popularity is proved 
 
 * Falletti-Fossati, "Costumi Senesi," pp. 219-21.
 
 340 SIENA 
 
 by one of the most picturesque of the sonnets addressed 
 by Folgore da San Gimignano "unto the blithe and 
 lordly Fellowship" of Sienese nobles, the famous 
 brigata spendereccla. Let the reader imagine as scene 
 of the events described the great Campo with its Palazzo 
 Pubblico and girdle of Gothic palaces, and unless in 
 reading Folgore's poem he realize with intensity one 
 phase of mediaeval sport and pageantry, rhyme may be 
 declared to have no power over him : 
 
 I give you horses for your games in May, 
 And all of them well-train'd unto the course 
 Each docile, swift, erect, a goodly horse; 
 With armor on their chests, and bells at play 
 Between their brows, and pennons fair and gay; 
 Fine nets, and housings meet for warriors, 
 Emblazoned with the shields ye claim for yours, 
 Gules, argent, or, all dizzy at noonday. 
 And spears shall split, and fruit go flying up 
 In merry counterchange for wreaths that drop 
 
 From balconies and casements far above; 
 And tender damsels with young men and youths 
 Shall kiss together on the cheeks and mouths; 
 And every day be glad with joyful love.* 
 
 Meanwhile the popular forces triumphed throughout 
 Tuscany, and feudalism with its honors, feasts, and 
 games sloped to its setting.f As jousting owed its 
 
 * Translated by D. G. Rossetti in his "Early Italian Poets." Nothing is 
 known of Folgore. From evidence supplied by his poems we are made 
 aware that he was a contemporary of Dante, and that the above sonnet 
 describes or idealizes a Sienese scene of the early fourteenth century. 
 
 f By the end of the fourteenth century tournaments, looked on as hopelessly 
 out of date, had become a subject of mockery. Their revival under the 
 Renaissance tyrannies was strictly artificial, and served no other end but that 
 of pomp.
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 341 
 
 existence to the need felt by the cavaliers for constant 
 practice in their chosen arms, so an exercise was certain 
 to be evolved which would enable the bulk of the com- 
 munal army, composed of foot-soldiers, to prepare 
 itself in time of peace for the stern discipline of war. 
 Such pedestrian exercises, in distinction from the splen- 
 did and ceremonial combats of the upper class, would 
 naturally have a rude and democratic character. In 
 some form or other, under the generic name of battaglie, 
 they may be encountered in every city of Tuscany. In 
 these mimic battles bands of city youths would meet 
 from time to time in some open square, and using 
 stones or staves as weapons, would attempt to gain a 
 victory over one another. The oldest form of battaglia 
 known to Sienese annals, was, from the helmets 
 worn by the players, called elmora. Mr. Heywood, who 
 has treated of Tuscan sports in his usual penetrat- 
 ing fashion, informs us that besides the helmet for 
 which a protection of basket-work might be substituted 
 the player wore a breastplate, cuisses, and greaves. 
 A wooden staff and shield for thrust and ward completed 
 his regular equipment, but stone-throwing, resorted to in 
 the heat of the encounter, was a common feature of the 
 combat.* Under these circumstances elmora was not 
 likely to prove very different from a real battle, and in- 
 deed so numerous were the casualties usually associated 
 with it that efforts were made at a relatively early period 
 to effect a reform. Beginning in 1263 with the abolition 
 of stone-throwing, the whole game was presently put 
 under the ban.f But in spite of solemn ordinances the 
 
 * Heywood, "Palio and Ponte," pp. 179-80. 
 
 t "II Constitute di Siena di 1262," Dist. V, 33 and 194.
 
 342 SIENA 
 
 sport continued to be followed until a peculiarly savage 
 contest, which almost set the city topsy-turvy, rang its 
 passing-bell. The chronicler describes the event, which 
 befell in the year 1291, in the following terms: 
 
 " In Siena there was a great battle of elmora after this manner, 
 that the terzo of San Martino and the terzo of Camollia fought 
 with the terzo of Citta on such wise that the terzo of Citta was 
 driven back even to the chiasso delle Mora. And there did they 
 receive succor from the casato, and from the piazza Manetti, and 
 from the Scotti and the Forteguerri. Then began they to cast 
 stones, and afterward they fought hand to hand with great assault 
 of battle. And thither came well-nigh all Siena, either to join in 
 the fray or to interpose to separate the combatants. But so great 
 was the confusion and shouting that no man might hear himself 
 speak; neither were they able to stop the battle. Whereby it bef el 
 that there were slain ten gentlemen besides many of the baser 
 sort; and many were wounded until at last the terzo of Citta was 
 victorious, and drove back the terzo of San Martino and that of 
 Camollia, thrusting them forth from the Campo. And in good 
 sooth, if Messer Pino, the potesta, had not forced his way into the 
 metee with his folk and compelled those men to lay down their 
 arms, there would have been even greater slaughter. And by 
 reason of this battle it was ordained that thenceforth the game 
 should not be played with staves and stones, but that they who 
 joined therein should use their fists alone."* 
 
 This prohibition of the use of staves and stones no 
 more than reenacted an old law, which from this 
 time on, however, seems to have been fairly well 
 respected. To salve the feeling of the citizens, the edict, 
 while abolishing elmora, expressly authorized a combat 
 of another kind, the battaglia of fists, called pugna. 
 
 *Muratori, Vol. XV, "Cronica Sanese," 42. I have used the translation 
 of Heywood, "Palio and Ponte," p. 181.
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 343 
 
 i 
 Some writers maintain that now only did pugna come 
 
 into existence, but Mr. Heywood adduces plentiful 
 proof that as a relatively innocent variant of elmora it 
 had enjoyed the favor of the Sienese throughout the 
 dugento. When played, according to the rules, with 
 fists alone, pugna, though still strenuous, was hardly 
 likely to lead to serious accidents; in the heat of passion, 
 however, the temptation would arise to seize other 
 weapons, thus effecting a more or less complete resur- 
 rection of the proscribed elmora. Of this circumstance 
 a pugna of 1324, when the Nine were in. their glory, 
 gives ample proof. 
 
 " On the Sunday before carnival, the same being the third day of 
 February, a game of pugna was played in Siena. Those of the 
 terzo of San Martino with those of the terzo of Camellia numbered 
 six hundred each; and there came against them the terzo of Citta. 
 Whereby it befel that there was in the piazza of Siena much folk 
 stripped to their doublets, with caps of cloth upon their heads fur- 
 nished with cheek-pieces for the protection of the face and head. 
 Also they wrapped handkerchiefs around their hands according to 
 custom. And playing at the pugna on this wise, the two terzi cast 
 out the terzo of Citta from the Campo. And they commenced to 
 throw stones, and certain persons took staves; and so they fought 
 on. Thereafter they armed themselves with shields and helmets 
 and with lances, swords, and spears; and so great was the uproar 
 in the Campo that all the world seemed upside down for the 
 multitude of folk that was therein. And all the soldiers of the 
 commune came armed into the Campo, and likewise the potesta 
 with his attendants. And the Signori Nove made proclamation 
 that the battle should cease. . . . And ever there came more 
 people into the Campo by all the ways that led thereto, with cross- 
 bows and with axes and with bills. And the battle ever increased, 
 and neither the Signori nor any others that were there were able 
 to remedy so great ruin. Wherefore the bishop of Siena, with the
 
 344 SIENA 
 
 priests and friars of all the orders, came into the Campo in pro- 
 cession, bearing the cross before them. And they commenced 
 to pass through the battle . . . until at last they who fought were 
 separated by reason of the prayers of the said bishop and of all 
 the priests and friars. . . . Now, therefore, when the tumult was 
 over, the Signori Nove took counsel concerning the said battle and 
 slaughter and arson . . . and it was resolved that henceforth 
 they should play no more at the pugna."* 
 
 A courageous resolution, but without other than 
 temporary effect! These hand-to-hand struggles not 
 only suited the vigorous temper of the time, but were 
 favored and perpetuated by the strong sectional feeling 
 among the city wards or terzi. Hence pugna remained 
 a national diversion far into the Renaissance, and when 
 during the siege of 1555 the citizens wished to honor 
 the representative whom the French king had sent 
 among them to strengthen them in their resistance, 
 they introduced the magnanimous Sieur de Monluc to 
 an exhibition of their ancient pastime.f 
 
 Elmora and pugna do not complete the tale of Sienese 
 national games. Because of the relative infrequency 
 with which it was played I pass over pallone, one of the 
 many variants of mediaeval foot-ball, in order to fix my 
 attention on horse-racing, a sport deeply rooted in 
 popular devotion. Throughout Italy horse-races were 
 commonly designated as palii from the rectangular piece 
 of silk, brocade, or other material (palio) which was 
 given to the winner as a prize. Of the existence of a 
 Sienese palio there is record as early as the year 1238, 
 and characteristically enough the first known palio was 
 
 * The above translation is from Heywood, " Palio and Ponte," p 186. The 
 original is in "Misc. Stor. Sen.," V, 174. 
 
 f Sozzini, "Diario Delle Cose Avvenute," p. 354.
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 345 
 
 run in connection with the festival of August, held in 
 honor of the Virgin Mary.* This latter circumstance 
 should be noticed, for it brings to our attention that the 
 palio was never merely a horse-race a secular sporting 
 fixture but a feature in a great religious celebration 
 as well. In the course of the trecento not only did the 
 August race become annual, but, owing to the growing 
 popularity of this form of sport with all classes of the 
 population, additional palii were gradually instituted 
 by the commune. In the later period of the republic 
 as many as four palii, all like their prototype of Mid- 
 August religio-secular events, were run annually under 
 the auspices of the government, f 
 
 These races, open to all comers, were run by the best 
 horses and jockeys which Italy commanded. For this 
 reason they were run alia lunga, that is, on a straight- 
 away course as far as the circumstances permitted. 
 In the early period the highway outside the Porta 
 Camellia seems to have enjoyed a preference, but, later 
 on, probably owing to the desire to let as large a number 
 of people as possible share in the spectacle, a city course 
 was mapped out, extending from Porta Romana to the 
 cathedral square and marked by not a few dangerous 
 slopes and turns. In the days of their splendor the 
 palii were held in such high honor that the greatest 
 lords of Italy were proud to compete in them, and sur- 
 viving records apprise us that such men as Pietro 
 
 * Heywood, "Palio and Ponte," p. 62. 
 
 t The four palii of the last phase of the republic were: The palio of the 
 Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni on the 3oth of March; the palio of Saint Mary 
 Magdalene on the 22nd of July; the palio of Our Lady of Mid-August; and 
 the palio of San Pietro Alessandrino on the 26th of November. Heywood, 
 " Palio and Ponte," p. 89.
 
 346 SIENA 
 
 Gambacorti of Pisa, Lorenzo de' Medici, and Caesar 
 Borgia sent the best blood of their stables to capture the 
 coveted banner. Thus matters stood till the fall of the 
 republic (1555), when with the decay of the national 
 spirit the palii fell into gradual disuse and were aban- 
 doned, all except the original palio, the palio of Mid- 
 August. Owing to its connection with the annual 
 ceremonies conducted in honor of the liege-lady of the 
 town, it managed to survive, dragging on an increasingly 
 unnoticed existence till far into the nineteenth century 
 when by general consent it was quietly suppressed.* 
 
 "The palio of Mid-August suppressed ?" I hear an 
 exasperated reader remarking who may have seen it 
 with his own eyes no later than last summer. It is even 
 as I say: the palio alia lunga, dating back tc the thir- 
 teenth century and run with high-bred horses in order to 
 test their speed and endurance, is now no more. There 
 is indeed still a palio of Mid-August, one of the brightest 
 spectacles withal the summer sun looks down upon in 
 its circuit of the glad earth, but except for a few points 
 of external resemblance, it is not related to the palio of 
 the Middle Age. The modern race, run on August 
 1 6th, the day after the Feast of the Assumption, was 
 instituted not earlier than the seventeenth century by 
 the ward or district societies of Siena called contrade.^ 
 Of these societies there are seventeen, and for over two 
 hundred years they have, with very few interruptions, 
 
 * Heywood, "Palio and Ponte," pp. 89-90. 
 
 fThe attempt has been made to identify the contrade with the ancient 
 military companies of the dugento. Signor Lisini has successfully exploded 
 this view ("Misc. Stor. Sen.," I, 26; IV, 67-69). The contrade are societies 
 formed in the fifteenth century they are first mentioned in 1482 for the 
 purpose of sharing in and increasing the splendor of public festivals.
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 347 
 
 conducted this contest of August i6th, as well as a simi- 
 lar one on July 2nd, the day of the Visitation of the 
 Blessed Virgin. The two modern palii, as not concerned 
 with the matter of this book, I shall not undertake to 
 describe further than to point out how they differ from 
 the similarly named events of an earlier period. To 
 begin with they are not primarily horse-races at all. 
 Horses indeed contest in them and for the prize of a 
 banner but every ancient cab-horse tottering on the 
 verge of the boneyard is considered good enough for the 
 event, and blooded stock is on no account brought to the 
 starting-post. The fact that the race is run not alia 
 lunga, but alia tonda, that is, around the irregular and 
 sloping course of the ancient Campo, should suffice to 
 prove that the promoting contrade are not aiming at a 
 horse-race of the type of those which flourish at Epsom 
 or Latonia. What the contrade had in mind from the 
 moment of the inception of the modern palio was a 
 pageant, which was to be made as splendid as possible 
 with music, banners, floats, and richly costumed com- 
 panies; and with this spectacle they planned should be 
 associated, as an additional touch of vivacity, a com- 
 petitive struggle among the seventeen rival societies. 
 It is this latter circumstance, which, by having become 
 through long established habit part of the blood and 
 marrow of every born Sienese, contributes the real 
 flavor to the events of July and and August i6th; it 
 and it alone explains why the modern palii continue to 
 thrive lustily in a time inwardly hostile to the ceremonial 
 inheritance of the past.* 
 
 * I am the more ready to deny myself the pleasure of entering upon the 
 story and description of the modern palio as this theme has inspired the pens
 
 348 SIENA 
 
 Thus we see that while tournaments were often cele- 
 brated on the Campo, the original horse-races were run 
 elsewhere. Still the life of the mediaeval town was to an 
 extraordinary extent concentrated in the ample square. 
 Every week of the year market was held there, market 
 for vegetables, fish, and for a long time even for cattle, 
 while a good part of the space was permanently leased 
 out at a stipulated sum per square yard (a misura di 
 braccia) to bakers, cobblers, coopers, and other shop- 
 keepers and artisans.* Considering the unsatisfactory 
 sanitary conditions of the average mediaeval town, we 
 shall doubtless be disposed to hold that whatever 
 picturesqueness was gained by this crowding of business 
 at a central point was heavily paid for with the accumu- 
 lation of every variety of filth. In fact, on the side of 
 cleanliness, the piazza for a long time left much to be 
 desired, as we may convincingly gather from a docu- 
 ment of 1296, which makes clear that the work of re- 
 moving the market-waste was chiefly performed by a 
 troop of roaming hogs.f None the less, higher stan- 
 dards of municipal decency began to impose themselves, 
 with the result that before the fourteenth century had 
 run its course, all the squares and streets of the city were 
 paved with brick or stone, and were kept tolerably 
 clean by ordinances which laid the obligation of remov- 
 ing the dust and dirt before each house upon the owner. 
 
 A citizen of the twentieth century, however, if he 
 
 of two of the most attractive writers on matters Sienese. No visitor of Siena 
 should fail to read Signer Riccardo Brogi's amusing "II Palio di Siena" and 
 Mr. Heywood's "Our Lady of August and the Palio of Siena," revised and 
 reprinted as a section of a more recent book, "Palio and Ponte." 
 
 * Zdekauer, "La Vita Pubblica nel Dugento," p, 113 (Conferenza di 1897). 
 
 t The document mentions unam troiam et quattuor porcellos. See 
 Appendice VI of Zdekauer's Conferenza of 1897.
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 349 
 
 could have visited the Campo of the trecento, would 
 have had his curiosity aroused by nothing so much as 
 by a sort of stockade roofed over with canvas, which 
 any native would have told him was the baratteria the 
 public gambling den. A gambling establishment con- 
 ceded for a stipulated sum to a group of promoters 
 may come with the shock of surprise to those of us who 
 habitually see the Middle Age adorned with a halo of 
 righteousness. And yet, though modern opinion would 
 not hesitate to declare the improvised structure of the 
 Campo a house of evil manners, historical investigation 
 has established that the licensed baratteria represents 
 a distinct improvement over the rough and ready 
 practices of earlier times. 
 
 The morality of the Middle Age was not opposed to 
 gambling. Saint Thomas Aquinas, the highest theolog- 
 ical authority of the age, expressly declared that games 
 of chance were not in themselves bad, but that they were 
 made so through certain circumstances (accid entice) 
 attending them, such as fraud and blasphemy.* Ac- 
 cordingly the earliest Sienese statutes which have 
 reached us authorize gambling, provided it takes place 
 at daytime and in the city streets (in viis publicis et 
 palani).-\ Under conditions of publicity, it was prob- 
 ably imagined that fraud and blasphemy, the really 
 objectionable features, would be eliminated, or at least 
 reduced to a minimum. These tolerant views enabled 
 gamblers in Siena and elsewhere to organize as a regular 
 
 * Zdekauer, "II Giuoco in Italia nei secoli XIII e XIV." Arch, Stor. It. 
 Tomo, XVIII. Anno 1886, pp. 21, 49. This effective article has established 
 our knowledge of mediaeval gambling on new and solid foundations. 
 
 t Ibid., p. 23. Another paragraph inveighs against playing nocturno 
 tempo.
 
 350 SIENA 
 
 guild or corporation, which, in view of the vile riff-raff 
 composing it, was naturally held in general contempt. 
 Such was the status in Siena of games of chance until 
 we reach the end of the thirteenth century. Owing to 
 the gradual enlightenment of public opinion, the 
 restrictions upon gambling had been growing more and 
 more numerous until in 1295, in an access of virtue, the 
 practice was entirely forbidden by a sweeping municipal 
 ordinance. When this action was promptly rescinded, 
 because it was found to do no more than to drive the 
 games and those who lived upon them underground, the 
 commune reauthorized the current vice, but, in the hope 
 of better regulation, concentrated it, as far as possible, 
 at a single point. Out of these circumstances and 
 considerations arose that curious institution, the barat- 
 teria of Siena, which, if we will imagine ourselves to be 
 strolling around the Campo of the fourteenth century 
 with the holiday crowd come to attend the August fair, 
 we should come upon, conspicuous with awning and 
 banner and surrounded by an excited multitude, not far 
 from the central position occupied by Fonte Gaia. 
 
 Much matter which the student of manners is likely to 
 find highly entertaining has recently been collected on 
 mediaeval games of chance. Suffice it to say here that 
 such games fall into two main groups, the first played 
 with dice alone, the second with figures or men* In a 
 period when, as we have just seen, there was no 
 objection in principle to dicing, and when, further, 
 young and old habitually gave vent to their emo- 
 tions with a fervor which no exercise of reason 
 checked, the crush and excitement around the Sienese 
 
 *Zdekauer, "II Ginoco" etc. p. 7.
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 351 
 
 gambling booth must have been constant and con- 
 siderable. At Grosseto, Magliano, Montalcino, and 
 a dozen other places of the contado, similar scenes took 
 place, for each dependent town had a baratteria on the 
 Sienese model conducted by some lessee who bought 
 the privilege from the republic. Add that at Florence, 
 Lucca, Pistoia, and other centres of Tuscany, the same 
 gambling frenzy had led to the same arrangements, and 
 we can appreciate to how common an experience Dante 
 appealed when he described the press of the shades in 
 purgatory around himself by casting up a marvellously 
 vivid picture of // giuoco della zara* Zara, a game of 
 dice, the key to which we no longer possess, f seems to 
 have wrought immense havoc among the young and 
 spendthrift, and in the period when restrictions began, 
 was put under special disabilities in favor of games with 
 some intellectual content, such as chess and back- 
 gammon. But although games with men were en- 
 couraged by the government and were, indeed, extremely 
 popular, the wild passion for dice persisted even among 
 the upper classes, as is plentifully attested by fourteenth 
 century literature. $ 
 
 It is interesting to speculate whether the official 
 gambling booth in the Campo was permitted to drive 
 its unpleasant trade all the year round, spreading its lure 
 
 * "Purgatorio," VI, p. i. 
 
 t For some account of Zara see Zdekauer, pp. 7-8. The game has given us 
 our word hazard. 
 
 % To let one instance serve for many, see the gay picture of the Mercato 
 Vecchio developed by the Florentine poet, Pucci (died about 1373). He 
 sings of the beauty of the old piazza on an autumn day: 
 
 "Quando de' tordi son, sempre n'e piena 
 La bella piazza, e molti gentilotli 
 Co' dodi in man, fan desinare e <-p,na."
 
 352 SIENA 
 
 even during the sacre rap presentation^ which, in Easter 
 week or on other Christian holidays, were occasionally 
 given in the piazza. There is nothing in mediaeval 
 morals which would have caused any one to be particu- 
 larly shocked by such an association. At any rate, 
 whether to the accompaniment of the rattle of dice or 
 not, following a very prevalent custom of the age, re- 
 ligous plays were given from time to time on a temporary 
 stage erected on the Campo. At first these representa- 
 tions took the form of simple scenes, such as Christ's 
 Birth or Resurrection, selected with reference to the 
 season of the year; later, whole miracle plays were 
 produced, enriched with song and dialogue, and repre- 
 senting a dramatic version of some impressive Bible 
 story.* But nowhere in Italy, and certainly not in 
 Siena, did these enjoy the favor and exhibit the vitality 
 which in northern Europe enabled them to serve as 
 the nucleus of one of the most wonderful forms of 
 modern artistic expression, the drama. The feebleness 
 of the Italian drama during the Renaissance, a feeble- 
 ness which is the more astonishing in the light of the 
 brilliant contribution made by the people of the pe- 
 ninsula to every other department of art, is explained 
 by the failure of the nation to develop the opportunity 
 extended by the miracles and moralities of the ecclesi- 
 astical stage. 
 
 For some unfathomable reason the sacre rappresenta- 
 zioni of the trecento did not appeal to the Sienese 
 imagination, and tended to become less and less fre- 
 quent.f In consequence Siena produced no drama 
 
 * Falletti-Fossati, "Costumi Senesi," p. ig$ff. 
 
 f Lisini shows ("Misc. Stor. Sen.," V, 23) that miracle plays continued
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 353 
 
 worth mentioning an accident, we might be inclined 
 to argue, if we did not have to acknowledge that, in 
 spite of its many gifts, this people was never strongly 
 drawn to any form of literature whatsoever, and that it 
 failed to produce a single poet or writer rising above the 
 common stature. A review of Sienese literature, there- 
 fore, is neither a heavy nor a very inspiring task. In 
 connection with certain aspects of Sienese knighthood, 
 I mentioned Dante's contemporary, the poet Folgore 
 from San Gimignano. He will be found of exceeding 
 interest in affording glimpses of Sienese life, but in view 
 of his origin he can not fairly be assigned a place among 
 purely Sienese authors. This is not the case with 
 Cecco Angiolieri (died 1312?), another contemporary 
 of the great Florentine. Cecco was a Sienese born and 
 bred, and contributed in his sole person a considerable 
 section of what there is to the literature of his native 
 town. In sharp contrast with Folgore, who dwelt among 
 the lofty concepts of chivalry and composed his sonnets 
 under the spell of the troubadours and trouveres and 
 their Italian imitators, Cecco sounded the realistic 
 note of the rising middle classes, curiously modified by 
 an element of individual lawlessness and literary bohe- 
 mianism. Rossetti, for whom he is "the scamp of 
 Dante's circle," speaks, not without admiration, of 
 "his natural bent to ruin." In fact it is the utterly 
 frank disclosure of his wild passions which recommends 
 him to us of a later time as the singer of certain true, 
 though by no means admirable, emotions of the human 
 
 to be given in the quattrocento, but in a closed room and before a small 
 audience. All this proves that they failed to take root in popular favor the 
 capital difference between them and the same variety of amusement among 
 the transalpine nations.
 
 354 SIENA 
 
 breast. To read him in company with his contempora- 
 ries is to grow aware that he is, within the small and 
 sinister circle of his thoughts, more direct and vivid 
 than any poet of his age with the notable exception, of 
 course, of the incomparable Florentine. In the spirit 
 of the boastful tavern brawler Cecco ventured to 
 resent a real or fancied slur addressed to him by Dante, 
 and did not scruple to revenge himself upon the great 
 Ghibelline with some impertinent verses. He sang with 
 frank indelicacy the material charms of the pretty 
 Becchina; he gambled, got drunk and was arrested; 
 he venomously defamed his father and mother; he 
 showed his fangs to Dante such was Cecco Angiolieri, 
 decidedly something of a jail-bird, but also, by reason of 
 his strict avoidance of the romantic make-believe which 
 was the stock-in-trade of so many contemporary poet- 
 asters, an authentic son of the muse.* 
 
 In Cecco's generation, a generation which has the 
 
 * In order that the reader may have a taste of Cecco's peculiar quality, 
 made up in about equal proportions of swagger, cynicism, and genuine humor, 
 I quote one of his sonnets in Rossetti's exquisitely delicate translation: 
 
 "If I were fire, I'd burn the world away; 
 
 If I were wind, I'd turn my storms thereon; 
 If I were water, I'd soon let it drown; 
 If I were God, I'd sink it from the day; 
 If I were Pope, I'd never feel quite gay 
 
 Until there was no peace beneath the sun; 
 If I were Emperor, what would I have done? 
 I'd lop men's heads all round in my own way. 
 If I were Death, I'd look my father up; 
 
 If I were Life, I'd run away from him; 
 And treat my mother to like calls and runs. 
 If I were Cecco (and that's all my hope), 
 
 I'd pick the nicest girls to suit my whim, 
 And other folk should get the ugly ones." 
 
 The best edition to consult is I Sonetti di Cecco Angiolieri . . . per cura 
 di A. F. Massera. Rossetti has translated twenty-one sonnets, of which it is 
 not too much to say that they do not fall below the original.
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 355 
 
 distinction not only of having produced some of the 
 greatest poetry of all time, but also of having given the 
 Italian language its literary form, other poets, as, for 
 instance, Bindo Bonichi (d. 1337), flourished in Siena, 
 but little from their hand has come down to us. Unde- 
 niably the share of Siena in Italian verse is small. 
 Presently Italian prose began its career, and in this 
 department the Sienese contribution, if not widely signif- 
 icant, is at least not without a considerable local interest. 
 Starting with private letters and tongue-tied chronicles 
 from many of these belonging to a later period of re- 
 latively high expressiveness I have had occasion to 
 quote Sienese prose reached its culmination, as far as 
 the Middle Age is concerned, in the Letters of Saint 
 Catherine (1347-80),* the "Assempri" of Era Filippo 
 Agazzari (1339-1422)^ and the sermons of San Ber- 
 nardino Albizzeschi (1380-1444)4 All of these have 
 an immense philological importance as testi di lingua; 
 all of them are invaluable to the student of manners by 
 reason of the lifelike glimpses they afford of a fascinat- 
 ing period; but they have not, with the possible excep- 
 tion of Saint Catherine's Letters, a place in that realm 
 of pure literature which lives for its own sake and 
 embraces the best of what has been thought and written 
 in all ages. This subtraction made, the fact remains 
 that the investigator, engaged in establishing the ways 
 in which men lived in the trecento and early quattro- 
 
 * On Saint Catherine see chap. 9. 
 
 fThe "Assempri" are popular sermons, composed largely of tales and 
 anecdotes pointing a lesson. They were published in 1864 by C. F. Carpel- 
 lini. Some of them have been translated and ably commented by Heywood 
 in his The "Ensamples" of Fra Filippo. 
 
 J On him and his sermons see chap. 14.
 
 356 SIENA 
 
 cento, can not do better than to give the closest possible 
 study to the works of the above-named religious ex- 
 horters and critics.* 
 
 Meanwhile Boccaccio, down at Florence, which in 
 matters literary set the tone for all Italy, had popular- 
 ized the novella. As this form of expression rapidly 
 took possession of the general fancy, it was only natural 
 that an occasional Sienese should try his skill at the 
 production of short tales. About the year 1425 Gentile 
 Sermini composed his forty stories,f while to the same 
 general period belongs ./Eneas Silvius Piccolomini's 
 (Pope Pius II) Storia di due amanti.% If these works, 
 as regards their moral tone, are not precisely edifying, 
 they are decency itself compared with the productions 
 of such later novellieri as Giustiniano Nelli and Pietro 
 Fortini, who illustrate the unbridled license, as well as 
 the essential hollowness, of the full Renaissance. In 
 this field, quite as much as in the field of the Christian 
 moralists, the productions which have reached us furnish 
 an interesting comment on Sienese life, but it would be 
 absurd to judge them as worthy, on the literary and 
 aesthetic side, of being classed with the Decameron. 
 
 * Whoever desires to know what place these writers hold in the literary 
 history of Italy may consult Bartoli, "Storia della Letteratura Italiana," or 
 Gaspary, "Geschichte der Ital. Literatur." 
 
 t "Le Novelle di Gentile Sermini ora per la prima volta," etc., Livorno, 
 1874. 
 
 J Written originally in Latin. ^Eneas, the humanist, held Italian to be an 
 inferior literary medium. 
 
 Following literature, a people usually develops scholarship a thing like 
 literature and yet distinct from it. But the history of Sienese scholarship 
 would lead me too far. Suffice it to say that the Renaissance produced the 
 first serious students of history in Sigismondo Tizio (d. 1528), Orlando 
 Malavolti (1515-96), and Giugurta Tommasi (d. 1620). Each of these men 
 produced a history of Siena of a high order of thoroughness, if not of literary 
 skill.
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 357 
 
 Perhaps one reason for the relatively low level main- 
 tained by Sienese literature is that this lively and sensu- 
 ous people had neither the patience nor the inclination 
 for that mental discipline which can be acquired only 
 by means of hard, desperate, and persistent labor. 
 This opinion of the small enthusiasm of the Sienese 
 for matters intellectual would appear to be borne out 
 by the story of the local university, lo studio di Siena. 
 Before the year 1250 we have notice of masters employed 
 by the republic to give instruction in grammar (Latin), 
 medicine, and law, and from that early period the state 
 was at some pains to develop a seat of learning in its 
 midst which should rival the universities of Bologna 
 and Padua. But though by no means despicable the 
 studio never exercised much influence beyond the 
 circuit of the walls, and, even within this narrow range, 
 it served frankly the primary end of supplying the town 
 with lawyers and doctors.* When, in the fifteenth cen- 
 tury, the new learning began to flourish, the Sienese 
 teaching was necessarily influenced by it, but the chief 
 effect from the presence in the town of an occasional 
 humanist like Filelfo would appear to have been an in- 
 creased laxity of morals. At any rate the designation 
 "Soft Siena" (molles Sena) owes both its currency and 
 justification to this time. The learned Sienese, Pope 
 Pius II, acquired his really admirable culture more by 
 reason of travel than by his steady attendance upon the 
 lectures at the university of his native town, but it is 
 perhaps no more than fair to admit that he may have re- 
 
 * On the studio see Zdekauer, "Sulle Origini dello Studio di Siena" and 
 "Lo Studio di Siena nel Rinascimento"; also, Sanesi, "Documenti per la 
 storia della R. Universita di Siena." Arch.. Stor. It. Tomo. XXVII, 1901.
 
 358 SIENA 
 
 ceived his first scholarly impulses from the local masters. 
 Making all possible allowances, we can not but find the 
 story of the studio decidedly meagre. Admitting that 
 it satisfied the narrow purpose of turning out a body of 
 reasonably trained professional men, the fact remains 
 that it did not in any notable way advance the intel- 
 lectual life of contemporary Italy. 
 
 Consideration of such matters as these will always 
 bring us back to a previous reflection : the gifts of the 
 Sienese were not eminently intellectual. As soon as 
 Siena fell behind in the economic and political race 
 among the Italian states, her mental fibre was exposed 
 to decay from lack of hardy exercise. Perhaps this is 
 the chief reason for the slow pulse-beat of Sienese 
 thought. With the inclination to inertia once estab- 
 lished, a dozen other influences, above all, the highly 
 conservative influence of the church, came to the sup- 
 port of the original tendency. We noticed in treating 
 of Sienese art that a curious self-satisfaction on the part 
 of the artists induced them to adopt an unfriendly atti- 
 tude toward the new ideals of the Renaissance, and that 
 by virtue of their quattrocento contributions to the 
 realm of painting the Sienese proclaimed themselves 
 essentially a provincial folk. Nothing brings this fact 
 out more clearly than a story which is related by the 
 Florentine Ghiberti and which, as a most delightfully 
 apposite characterization of the mercurial temper and 
 mental philistinism of the Sienese, I set down here as 
 my final word on the subject. 
 
 Lorenzo Ghiberti, the Florentine sculptor of the fa- 
 mous bronze gates of his native Baptistery, wrote before 
 his death some very interesting Commentaries upon art,
 
 MANNERS AND PASTIMES 359 
 
 in the course of which he narrates that, once on a visit 
 to Siena, he was shown a beautiful drawing from the 
 hand of Ambrogio Lorenzetti of a Greek statue existent 
 in Ambrogio's day and afterward destroyed. His infor- 
 mant told him that the statue had been accidentally dug 
 up in Siena a hundred years before, and had aroused 
 tremendous enthusiasm, not only among the painters 
 and goldsmiths of the town, but also among the com- 
 mon people. Amidst universal rejoicing it had been es- 
 corted to the Campo, and there set up over the new 
 fountain, the Fonte Gaia, which had just been inaugu- 
 rated and which lacked as yet the monumental setting 
 created by Jacopo della Quercia. On the strength of 
 the drawing put into his hands, Ghiberti assigned the 
 original to Lysippus, one of the most distinguished names 
 of Greek art, and from the description which he adds 
 we are led to surmise that the statue represented the 
 goddess Aphrodite rising from the sea. For some years 
 the recovered wonder of antiquity continued to crown 
 the Fonte Gaia, smilingly prophesying to those who 
 could understand its mysterious language the coming of 
 a new age, when a succession of misfortunes, bringing 
 famine and pestilence in their wake, roused to life the 
 ever latent forces of mediaeval superstition. In a 
 session of the council a citizen arose and spoke I use 
 Ghiberti's own words as follows: "'Gentlemen. Con- 
 sidering that ever since we have set up this statue we 
 have encountered nothing but ill-luck, and, considering 
 further, that idolatry is totally forbidden by our religion, 
 we are obliged to believe that our adversities have been 
 sent us by God in punishment for our sins. As a matter 
 of plain fact no one will deny that ever since we have
 
 360 SIENA 
 
 done honor to the said statue, matters have steadily 
 gone with us from bad to worse. MY fixed opinion is 
 that as long as we keep it on our soil misfortunes will 
 continue to befall us. Wherefore I move that it be 
 taken down and broken and the remnants carried away 
 to be buried in the territory of the Florentines." And 
 Ghiberti concludes his tale by dryly adding that "the 
 council unanimously supported the motion, which was 
 accordingly put into execution by burying the statue in 
 our territory.'* 
 
 Very possibly the last amusing touch about the final 
 disposal of the idolatrous statue is an invention of 
 Ghiberti's Florentine malice, but the incident itself is a 
 certain fact of history, having befallen, as the documents 
 prove, in the year 1357.* 
 
 Thus perished what was apparently a priceless monu- 
 ment of ancient art, sacrificed to the fickle temper of a 
 people, splendidly capable of occasional bursts of 
 creative enthusiasm, but not given to apply itself with 
 steady intensity to a moral and intellectual task which 
 nothing short of the continued devotion of many genera- 
 tions of men can carry to a triumphant maturity. The 
 noble statue of Lysippus, emotionally received and just 
 as emotionally rejected, is more than an incident: it is a 
 symbol a symbol which speaks eloquently to us both 
 of the qualities and the defects of the lovable but undis- 
 ciplined sons and daughters of the Virgin. 
 
 * On the whole incident of the statue see "Misc. Stor. Sen.," V, 175.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 SAN GALGANO: THE STORY OF A CISTERCIAN 
 ABBEY OF THE SIENESE CONTADO 
 
 IN speaking in an earlier chapter of the Sienese 
 church, I took account of the important share 
 which the monasteries had in the official organiza- 
 tion of religion. I referred the monastic movement to 
 its origin in the ascetic spirit of Christianity, and spoke 
 of the successive waves in which the movement would 
 rise from time to time to a climax, and leave its mark on 
 all the countries of Europe in the shape of a new series 
 of splendid edifices devoted to the service of God. 
 Because the story of a monastery affords a peculiarly 
 significant glimpse of the Middle Age, I purpose now to 
 follow such an institution in detail; and further, because 
 no monastery of the Sienese territory maintained more 
 intimate relations with the city of Siena than the abbey 
 of San Galgano, and since no other surpasses it in fair- 
 ness of site or can compare with it in beauty of archi- 
 tecture, from the long list of Sienese foundations, which 
 includes such famous names as San Salvatore on Monte 
 Amiata, Sant* Antimo near Montalcino, Lecceto, lying 
 a short journey outside the gate of Fonte Branda, and 
 Monte Oliveto near Buonconvento, I shall select San 
 Galgano in order to show by a specific example how a 
 monastery came into being, how it grew in usefulness 
 
 361
 
 362 SIENA 
 
 and honors, and how with the sapping of its spirit in the 
 period of the Renaissance, it settled into irretrievable 
 decline. 
 
 For the student of monasticism no order of the twelfth 
 century can vie in importance with that of the Cister- 
 cians. Founded at Citeaux in Burgundy as a reformed 
 offshoot of the Benedictines, they immediately achieved 
 great honor through one of their early leaders, Saint 
 Bernard, who not only personally called into being the 
 great abbey of Clairvaux, but who, by reason of his 
 wide reputation for wisdom and holiness, popularized 
 the order throughout Europe. Monks from Citeaux, 
 Clairvaux, and other French foundations penetrated 
 into the neighboring countries, and were received with 
 such favor that before the new movement celebrated its 
 centenary it could boast a roster of eight hundred rich 
 and flourishing abbeys. In Italy successful houses 
 already existed at Fossanova, Casamari, and other 
 places, when a peculiarly inviting set of circumstances 
 secured to the brothers a foothold in Southern Tuscany. 
 
 In the wooded upland country, in which the Merse 
 river begins its winding course, lies the little town of 
 Chiusdino, crowning a hill, which is remarkable, like 
 almost all the dwelling-places of mediaeval men, by 
 reason of its wide survey and splendid inaccessibility. 
 In the twelfth century, when our story begins, Chiusdino 
 with the neighboring hills and valleys belonged to the 
 diocese of the bishop of Volterra, who, under the added 
 title of count of the empire, exercised also civil authority 
 in this region. Here, shortly after the year 1 180, tidings 
 of strange and miraculous import began to pass from 
 mouth to mouth. The simple peasant folk told one
 
 bO 
 
 13 
 
 O 
 
 U 
 
 -o
 
 SAN GALGANO 363 
 
 another as they sat before their doors at eventide or 
 paced the road together to the neighboring market, that 
 a knight, Galgano by name and a citizen of Chiusdino, 
 forswearing the delights of the flesh, had abandoned 
 family and friends, that he had gone to dwell as an 
 anchorite in the forest solitudes around his home, and 
 that when, after a year of unexampled hardships, he 
 had died and been buried, immediately, in sign of the 
 favor which he enjoyed with the Lord, wonderful 
 cures began to be effected at his tomb. Presently, a 
 pious stream of pilgrimage began to flow toward Monte 
 Siepi, as the wooded hill was called which was the 
 scene of the good man's rigorous self-discipline, as well 
 as the place of his burial.* This spontaneous venera- 
 tion, which has numerous counterparts throughout 
 Europe and brings home to us the passionate attach- 
 ment of mediaeval folk to all the material manifestations 
 of holiness, not only met with no opposition on the part 
 of the church, but presently received the highest possible 
 endorsement through an act of the pope probably of the 
 year 1 185 elevating the Chiusdino knight and hermit to 
 the ranks of the saints. Naturally the reputation of the 
 newly canonized Galgano was sedulously nursed by the 
 leading dignitary of the region, the bishop of Volterra, 
 who, beginning with the erection of a simple shrine over 
 the grave of his late subject, gradually formed the ambi- 
 tious plan of making the new cult serve as the basis for a 
 great monastic foundation. He communicated with the 
 Cistercian brothers, always eager to extend the influence 
 of their order, with the result that a few monks, appar- 
 
 * On the story of San Galgano, see Rondoni, "Tradizioni popolari e leg- 
 gende di un Comune medioevale," p. noff.
 
 364 SIENA 
 
 ently Frenchmen hailing from Clairvaux itself, settled 
 in the unpeopled solitudes of Monte Siepi. Thus the 
 first step was taken in the creation of the abbey of San 
 Galgano. 
 
 A cartularium, preserved in the archives of Florence 
 and containing the privileges conceded to the new foun- 
 dation by temporal and spiritual rulers, supplemented 
 by abundant material to be found in the Archivio di 
 Stato of Siena, makes it possible to develop an accurate 
 picture of the growth of the settlement on Monte 
 Siepi.* The oldest existing document is of the year 
 1191; it was issued from the chancellery of Emperor 
 Henry VI, and declared that the sovereign, probably 
 at the instigation of Hildebrand, bishop of Volterra, 
 who signed as a witness, took the monks of San Galgano 
 hailing from Clairvaux under his high protection. He 
 added the gift of a field juxta Abbatiam and solemnly 
 warned all neighbors not to "violate our munificence 
 with temerarious audacity, "f The imperial shelter, 
 good so far as it went, needed to be supplemented by the 
 more valuable, because more constant, protection of the 
 local lord. That was the bishop of Volterra, who, as 
 inaugurator of the settlement, was not likely to withhold 
 a liberal support. Accordingly, in the year 1201, 
 Bishop Hildebrand, recapitulating, we are led to sur- 
 mise, a number of earlier grants, issued a comprehensive 
 privilege, in which, after enumerating a long list of 
 fields and forests made over by him to a certain Bono 
 
 * The Sienese material is in three large folio volumes, called caleffi, and 
 consists of about 2,250 documents. This material, together with the cartula- 
 rium at Florence, has been consulted and, in part, published by Canestrelli in 
 his excellent "L'Abbazia di San Galgano," to which I am deeply indebted. 
 
 t Canestrelli, "Documento V."
 
 SAN GALGANO 365 
 
 and a band of monks, he not only took the brothers under 
 his protection, but promised them complete liberty in 
 their internal affairs together with freedom from taxa- 
 tion.* Evidently the foundation, favored and enriched 
 by the bishop, assured of a friendly interest by the em- 
 peror, was advancing rapidly. To complete its legal 
 safeguarding nothing was lacking, according to medi- 
 aeval ideas, except the word of the pope. It was not till 
 the year 1206, fifteen years after the emperor had spoken 
 in the matter and five after the deed of Bishop Hilde- 
 brand, that Pope Innocent III issued a bull, declaring 
 his good -will toward the enterprise in the remote hills 
 of the upper Merse. Innocent III, it may be remem- 
 bered, was the pontiff of fiery, uncompromising temper, 
 under whom the pretensions of the papacy to universal 
 rule were stretched to the utmost. The increase of 
 monasteries, representing each one the lighting of a new 
 hearth of religious and, more particularly, of papal 
 influence, must have been deeply to his liking. When 
 he spoke, therefore, though he spoke tardily, he poured 
 out for the monks of San Galgano a veritable cornucopia 
 of bounties. In the first place, the head of the monas- 
 tery apparently Bono, the earliest leader of the 
 Cistercian enterprise of whom there is record, had by 
 this time passed away was no longer designated as 
 priest or prior or by some other title indicative of small 
 beginnings, but as abbot, the dignity reserved for the 
 chief official of a perfected and influential organization. 
 Proceeding, Innocent confirmed all the possessions of 
 the monks; reiterated their freedom from taxation and 
 immunity from sentences, pronounced in the courts of a 
 
 * Canestrelli, "Documento II."
 
 366 SIENA 
 
 bishop or any lay lord whatsoever; and proclaimed their 
 right to elect their own abbot and to govern themselves, 
 practically as a sovereign body.* The new monastic 
 venture, dedicated to the high task of spreading civiliza- 
 tion through the sparsely settled wilds of the upper 
 Merse, was now as secure as the formal authorities of 
 feudal society could make it. 
 
 However, no amount of official sanction could contrib- 
 ute greatly to the development of a monastery, if the 
 institution did not perform effective service in the 
 society in which it was situated, or if it failed to enlist the 
 sympathies and support of all classes of the population. 
 Only if these conditions were satisfied could San Gal- 
 gano hope to arouse the pride and become identified 
 with the patriotism of the neighborhood, thus winning 
 recruits for its ranks and stimulating the stream of 
 private contributions necessary for the realization of its 
 Christian programme. Following the Cistercian ideal 
 this programme consisted not only in the creation of a 
 retreat for holy men, but also in genuine pioneer labors, 
 such as the clearing of forests and the bringing of un- 
 broken land under the plough. In all these respects 
 the success of our monastery in the first flush of its 
 hopeful youth was conspicuous. The sons of the neigh- 
 borhood came in such numbers to knock for admission 
 at the portals of the house of peace that whatever slight 
 French character the personnel of the first group of 
 monks may have had was presently lost to make room 
 for a genuine Tuscan foundation. Admitted within the 
 walls, the fugitives from a world of empty honors were, 
 after due probation, apportioned to one of two classes: 
 
 * Canestrelli, "Documento XII."
 
 SAN GALGANO 367 
 
 either they became spiritual brothers who, as priests, 
 served the mass and attended to the duties pertaining to 
 religion, or they joined the conversi or lay brothers, who 
 tilled the fields and performed the various kinds of 
 manual labor required in connection with the operation 
 of a busy farmstead, 
 
 In a society where men gladly give their lives to a 
 cause conceived as worthy, they hesitate even less in 
 offering of their plenty. Gifts of land, bounties of all 
 kinds, of which the record still exists, were showered 
 upon the abbey. While these benefactions testify to 
 the profound conviction of the Middle Age regarding 
 the usefulness of an institution which no longer awakens 
 our enthusiasm, their form betrays the peculiar and, to 
 our taste, somewhat unctuous piety of the period. 
 According to mediaeval theology, a gift to the church 
 was a good work, especially remarked by God and sure 
 to be taken into account on the day of reckoning. For 
 this reason the clergy could, with perfectly good con- 
 science moreover, stimulate the charitable instincts of 
 the laity. Something of this desire to acquire credit 
 with the Lord, palliated by a child-like candor, reaches 
 us from the old deeds of hand. In the year 1196, for 
 instance, Matilda, described as daughter of the departed 
 Ugolihus and derelict of Guidaldonius, and the first 
 private donor of whom there is record, presents the 
 monks with a farmland, because "whoever shall con- 
 tribute to sacred and venerable places shall receive a 
 hundredfold and have eternal life"; on which exordium 
 she adds, with simple-hearted readiness to lay bare every 
 fold of her heart, that she hopes by means of her gift to 
 save her soul and that of her relatives, doubtless the
 
 368 SIENA 
 
 departed Ugolinus and Guidaldonius aforesaid.* Many 
 bequests came to the brothers from neighboring Siena 
 and her prosperous merchants. We hear of one com- 
 mercial citizen, a certain Andrea di Giacomo, who left 
 as much as a thousand lire (libra*), a very considerable 
 sum, for the purchase of a farm with the direction that 
 the product thereof be distributed among the poor. 
 If this is charity at all times and the world over, Andrea 
 clearly sounds the note of his age when he adds a be- 
 quest of eight hundred lire for the purchase of a second 
 farm to be given to the monks on the condition that they 
 daily recite a mass for the repose of his soul.f Let one 
 more example suffice to depict both the gifts and the 
 givers. In the year 1287, a citizen of Massa, after 
 leaving twelve hundred lire to San Galgano, adds a gift 
 of four hundred lire "for the construction of an altar 
 in the said church in honor of the blessed Virgin Mary 
 and the saints James, Christopher, and Nicholas, near 
 which altar let my name be written in patentibus licteris 
 (in large letters!), in order that all the priests who cele- 
 brate mass at that altar may be reminded to pray for my 
 soul and to make mention of my name in the service."! 
 Although a charity, associated with such intense spiritual 
 profit-seeking, may kindle an amused smile upon our lips, 
 it furnishes no occasion to treat it with contempt. When 
 all is said the fact remains that the habit of giving of one's 
 substance for an unselfish end was widespread, and that 
 it testifies to the success with which the church infused 
 the spirit of idealism into a dull and brutalized society. 
 
 * Canestrelli, "Documento I." 
 
 t Canestrelli, p. 72. The bequest is of the year 1274. 
 
 t Canestrelli, p, 73.
 
 SAN GALGANO 369 
 
 We have seen that Bono and his small Cistercian 
 band made their home near the grave of San Galgano 
 on Monte Siepi. They built there the circular chapel 
 which still stands, and added a. dormitory and other 
 quarters, parts of which survive in the two wings leaning 
 upon the chapel like awkward buttresses. Presently 
 the donations of which we have taken note began to 
 pour in, and the brothers saw an opportunity for en- 
 larging the circle of their activity. Dissatisfied with 
 their narrow and primitive quarters on Monte Siepi, 
 they resolved to descend from their wooded spur to the 
 broad meadow immediately at its foot, and to commence 
 a second structure on a scale which more adequately 
 represented the accumulated means and golden prospects 
 of the monastery. The information on this removal 
 afforded by the documents is unfortunately slight, but 
 by piecing together various items we arrive at the con- 
 clusion that the new edifices were begun about the year 
 1224,* while still existing walls and lines of masonry 
 enable us to affirm that they included, besides the great 
 abbey church, a dormitory, a cloister, a refectory, barns, 
 stables, and all the various offices of a corporation which, 
 if primarily a religious retreat, had also something of the 
 character of a library, a school, and a great agricultural 
 establishment. By accidents and changes, to which I 
 shall return in due time, most of the accessory structures 
 have been swept away, but the great abbey church still 
 stands, desolate and in ruins, it is true, but touched 
 with such enduring beauty that it may be called without 
 hesitation one of the most exquisite churches of Tuscany 
 and even of all Italy. Built in slow stages, as suited the 
 
 * Canestrelli, pp. 69-75.
 
 370 SIENA 
 
 gradually accumulating means of the brothers, it was 
 probably not finished till the end of the century which 
 saw the laying of the corner-stone. In the place of 
 ascertained facts, enabling us to compose a secure narra- 
 tive of the construction of the famous church, we must 
 content ourselves with conjecture, and conjecture, too, 
 supplies the only answer to our eager question concern- 
 ing the names of the great artists who drew the plans 
 for it. Without doubt they were Cistercian monks, 
 for the Cistercians, apart from their jealous desire to 
 keep their buildings in their own hands, were recognized 
 as the architectural leaders and innovators of their day. 
 However, when we appeal to the documents for the 
 names of the individual monks who distinguished 
 themselves in this great enterprise, we are denied an 
 answer, and must content ourselves with the general 
 conclusion that the order built the abbey church of San 
 Galgano. Considering the nature of the order, and 
 remembering that men entered it to lose their person- 
 ality in the hope of finding it again in the Lord, we can 
 hardly quarrel with the accident which produced a 
 result so fully in accord with the profound spirit of the 
 institution.* 
 
 On one very fascinating matter, included in the dark 
 chapter of construction and involving the much-mooted 
 question of the style of the great abbey church, it is 
 possible to speak with precision, for the building being 
 still in existence, at least as regards its structural lines, 
 furnishes all the material necessary for an intelligent 
 opinion. No student of art standing before these re- 
 
 * Canestrelli, pp. 77-78, names some of the builders (operai), who not 
 improbably figured also in the capacity of architects.
 
 SAN GALGANO 371 
 
 mains will fail to be struck by the fact that here is an 
 edifice of such pure northern Gothic as is not to be 
 found again in all Tuscany. Indeed these lithe and 
 graceful forms would not be held to be out of place if 
 one came upon them suddenly on a tour through north- 
 ern France. Were the architects, whom we have agreed 
 to be Cistercians, also Frenchmen, imported when the 
 resolution was first taken to begin the edifice ? The 
 general plan, as well as the grouped piers and the 
 ribbed vaults, point to that conclusion, although Canes- 
 trelli, patriotically eager to vindicate the monument for 
 his own people, affirms with some show of proof that 
 Italian architects were quite capable of this quality of 
 work. That Italian influences are perceptible here and 
 there is undeniable, but the structural skeleton with its 
 harmonious system of concentrated strains and balanced 
 thrusts is so emphatically French that we are forced to 
 conclude that, if men of French blood did not build 
 this church, the Italian monks, entrusted with the 
 work, must have received their architectural training 
 in France, if not directly by residence in the Burgundian 
 houses of their order, at least indirectly through the 
 agency of the traditions accumulated in the earlier 
 Cistercian foundations in Italy, such as Fossanova and 
 Casamari. 
 
 During the thirteenth century, while the monks were 
 engaged upon the reconstruction of the abbey on a 
 monumental scale, they remained a vigorous and grow- 
 ing organization. It is an old observation that an ideal, 
 devotedly pursued, almost magically creates the energies 
 necessary for its fulfilment. The thirteenth century, 
 therefore, constitutes the abbey's heyday, marked not
 
 372 SIENA 
 
 only by the loud and steady ring of hammer and chisel, 
 which came across the meadow of the Merse and 
 sounded through the encircling woods, but also by the 
 quality of the converts attracted by the cloistered life. 
 Nothing is more erroneous than the common notion 
 that it was the broken and unfit, the sad company of 
 life's derelict, who were drawn to the mediaeval monas- 
 teries. Undeniably this defeated section of society 
 might be found in large numbers in a given institution 
 in the period of decay, but in the flourishing time, 
 which was, of course, the time of youth, the monastic 
 programme, universal enough to reach the operative as 
 well as the reflective temperament, laid a spell upon the 
 best minds of the day. Turn as one may there is no 
 way of accounting for the part played by the monasteries 
 in mediaeval civilization, save on the ground that their 
 ranks constituted a representative expression of the 
 intelligence and energy of society. San Galgano bears 
 out this assertion at every point. We have already seen 
 that when the monks undertook to build themselves an 
 abbey, which still, though in ruins, communicates the 
 most delicate spirit of beauty, they did not have to go 
 for help outside their own cowled brotherhood. By the 
 side of the architects, and wearing like them the yoke 
 of monastic obedience were to be found trained lawyers 
 and notaries. With its varied business the monastery 
 could turn them to good use and was at pains to as- 
 semble for their behoof a considerable law library.* 
 Physicians and surgeons, who in their youth had trudged 
 on foot to the schools of Salerno and Montpellier, paced 
 the quiet garden walks with ordained priests, expert in 
 
 * Canestrelli, "Documento XVIII."
 
 SAN GALGANO 373 
 
 the lore of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Schoolmen. 
 With such elements represented in the remote com- 
 munity, we can hardly go wrong in assuming that its 
 intellectual level rose far above that of contemporary lay 
 society. How else shall we account for the fact that 
 the neighboring city of Siena frequently requested the 
 aid of the monastery in purely civic affairs ? With the 
 commune's growth the office of treasurer acquired an 
 increasing importance, and when the citizens wanted a 
 thoroughly capable and reliable man to put in charge 
 of their moneys, whither did they turn but to the abbot 
 of San Galgano ? They asked for the loan of one of his 
 monks, for the first time, it would seem, in the year 
 1257, and were so satisfied with the service they received 
 that they kept up the practice for almost a hundred 
 years.* Then they resorted to a layman, indicating in 
 plain terms that it was not until the democratic govern- 
 ment had been established for some generations that 
 the average citizen acquired those moral and mental 
 qualities which put him on a level with the monks. 
 I pointed out in a former chapter that a quaint memorial 
 of these comptroller-monks, called camarlinghi di Bic- 
 cherna, is carefully preserved in the archives of Siena. 
 On certain of the painted covers of the account books 
 which they kept in their time will be found the solemn 
 countenance of a cowled brother, who thus still seems 
 to guard from his grave the treasure entrusted to his care 
 while living. Nor was the treasurership the only tribute 
 which Siena paid to the high character of the Galgano 
 fraternity. In the thirteenth century the chief public 
 
 * Canestrelli, "Documento XX," gives a list of the camarlinghi from S. 
 Galgano.
 
 374 SIENA 
 
 enterprise in which she was engaged was her cathedral, 
 for great buildings, both for civil and ecclesiastical uses, 
 were one of the passions of the age. Encouraged prob- 
 ably by the splendid success with which the monks were 
 raising their own abbey, the municipality entrusted the 
 erection of the duomo to their tried and skilful hands. 
 Through the second half of the thirteenth century Fra 
 Vernaccio, Fra Melano, Fra Villa and other brothers 
 empty, featureless names furnished by the stolid records 
 were at the head of the works, and during their in- 
 cumbency the magnificent pile was, in all essential 
 respects, given the form which still meets the eye.* 
 
 Such services rendered by San Galgano to the com- 
 mune of Siena indicate that the shuttle was flying back 
 and forth, weaving a mutually profitable intimacy be- 
 tween the abbey and the city. In view of the general 
 political situation of Tuscany in the thirteenth century 
 this development was inevitable. The monks were 
 men of peace; their object in the world, the works of 
 peace. We have seen that in settling on the upper 
 Merse they needed and had sought the protection of the 
 established powers, the pope, the emperor, and the 
 bishop of Volterra. But with the death, in the year 
 1250, of Frederick II, the last great Hohenstaufen, the 
 empire, long threatened with decay, was definitely re- 
 duced to impotence, and though the pope tried to seize 
 his rival's heritage, he failed, in Tuscany at least, be- 
 cause the cities of that province were resolute to appro- 
 priate for themselves whatever benefits resulted from 
 the decay of the federal power. The bishop of Volterra, 
 
 * Canestrelli, "Documento XXI," gives the full list of monks who served as 
 operai.
 
 SAN GALGANO 375 
 
 indeed, continued to play the part of a local sovereign, 
 theoretically of considerable sway, but his glory waned 
 as soon as he ceased to draw light and power from his 
 feudal master. Thus Siena came to dominate in South- 
 ern Tuscany over a region which included the Merse 
 valley and therewith the abbey of San Galgano. Abbey 
 and city did not fail to see the mutual advantage of a 
 close political alliance. Siena, and Siena alone, could 
 in the changed political circumstances of Italy offer to 
 the abbey an adequate guarantee against violence and 
 spoliation, and the abbey would give to the city an 
 increased security on its southern frontier, in addition 
 to conferring on it the honor which in a religious age 
 attached to the patronage of a great ecclesiastical estab- 
 lishment. 
 
 Thus, under the pressure of time and change, San 
 Galgano replaced the patronage of its earliest protectors 
 for that of the neighboring commune, That great treas- 
 ury of fact, the Constitution of 1262, upon which I have 
 so often levied, proclaims the relation in terms indica- 
 tive of the large confidence of the young commonwealth. 
 On entering upon his office the potesta of Siena was 
 obliged to swear that he would diligently watch over the 
 monastery of San Galgano and all its possessions, and, 
 continuing, he was made to say that " at the demand of 
 my lord abbot I shall give notice by messenger and letter 
 to the lords and people of the region, near which the 
 possessions of the abbey are situated, that the said abbey 
 and its goods are under the protection of the commune 
 of Siena; and I shall extend the affectionate request to 
 them that they inflict no injury upon it or any of its 
 goods, seeing that we of Siena are held to aid the monks
 
 376 SIENA 
 
 and to defend them from wrong as if they were our 
 fellow-citizens."* And this promise of protection was 
 anything but hollow. The lords of the neighborhood, 
 as well as such small but often violent communities as 
 Chiusdino and Grosseto, wisely kept their hands off 
 the abbot's possessions, and the abbey continued to 
 flourish till the arrival of its evil day. 
 
 The thirteenth century, I have already said, was the 
 prosperous period of the Cistercian order in Italy, and, 
 particularly, of its offspring near the grave of San 
 Galgano. Then gradually signs of decay appeared. 
 The phenomenon has its parallel in the story of every 
 spiritual institution evolved by the children of men. 
 The monks raised by wealth above the necessity of 
 effort, became estranged from their own ideals and gave 
 themselves to idleness and vice. Just as the Cistercians 
 themselves originated in a protest against the decay of 
 the older Benedictines, so a passionate revolt was certain 
 to direct itself against Cistercian self-satisfaction, and to 
 gather the most promising and candid spirits of the age 
 in new affiliations. This is the meaning of the rise of 
 the begging friars. The noble orders founded by Saint 
 Francis and Saint Dominic did not at once affect San 
 Galgano, owing to the great and merited prestige which 
 it enjoyed in its immediate neighborhood. But slowly, 
 if imperceptibly, they exercised a disturbing influence 
 on what we may call the recruiting market of our monas- 
 tery, for, in entering the field to bid against the older 
 institutions, they appealed with irresistible force 
 to all the more strenuous spirits by virtue of their 
 youthfulness and fire. Early in the fourteenth century, 
 
 * "II Constitute di Siena dell' anno di 1262," I, 103.
 
 SAN GALGANO 377 
 
 about the time the new abbey in the meadow under 
 Monte Siepi celebrated its first centenary, one catches 
 signs suggesting that its moral tone has suffered. For 
 one thing Siena ceased to look to it for architects and 
 camarlinghi. That may have been, as I have already 
 hinted, because lay society had at last advanced to the 
 point where it could trust itself for these services, but, 
 on the other hand, the suspicion cannot be dismissed 
 that the services could no longer be rendered. In any 
 case the usefulness of the institution decreased, and 
 with the usefulness the efficiency of the residents. An 
 ominous silence gathered around San Galgano, the 
 silence descending upon a society which has outlived 
 its time, and when it is broken by confused sounds of 
 war and panic, drawing our attention once more to 
 the upper Merse, we are brought face to face with 
 disaster. 
 
 In the second half of the fourteenth century Italy was 
 visited by one of thTlriost~a^o1mlh^ble"sociaTpIagues 
 with which the much tormented peninsula was vexed 
 during the long agony of feudalism. It consisted in the 
 so-called Companies of Adventure. Since the central 
 authority, still nominally represented by the emperor 
 across the Alps, was destroyed, and ambitious local 
 powers, lords and cities, quarrelled fiercely for dominion, 
 a chaotic condition was created, T Tnafketf "by "atfhftst 
 uninterrupted petty warfare and furnishing lucrative 
 employmentTTor large bands of "mercenary soldiers. 
 TheTeaders ot these bands were not slow to see that with" 
 tfie" decay of the various city militias, a decay which was 
 in full swing by the middle ot the fourteenth century. 
 they really held Italian society at their mercy. I spoke
 
 378 SIENA 
 
 in another place * of this cruel phenomenon, showing 
 how the lawless freebooters, representing the dregs of 
 all Europe, ravaged the Sienese country Ground the 
 walls and squeezed incalculable sums out of the fright- 
 ened burghers. Of course the rich abbey lands of San 
 TjaTgano~TeH a helpless prey to the adventurers, who 
 again and again spread over them in insolent ease, not 
 unlike a devastating cloud of locusts. The chroniclers 
 assure us that the worst of the plunderers of the beau- 
 tiful Cistercian settlement was the Englishman, Sir 
 John Hawkwood, nothing more than a successful 
 brigand according to our mild standards, but rewarded 
 with royal honors in an age when he and his like com- 
 manded the most powerful armed forces of society. 
 Hawkwood, employed by Florence to do the righting, 
 for which the burghers, with their attention concentrated 
 on trade and profits, had lost the taste, was cheered as 
 if he were the shepherd David by the Florentine popu- 
 lace, and when he died received the extraordinary honor 
 of being painted on horseback over the inner portal of 
 the Florentine cathedral. There he still rides exalted 
 over the worshippers, clamorously preaching in the im- 
 pressive silence of Christ's temple the world-old doctrine 
 of the mailed fist. Hawkwood, under engagement to 
 Florence, was of course free to harry the territory of 
 Siena. His practice, as well as that of other condottieri 
 who visited the Merse valley, was to establish himself 
 with head-quarters at San Galgano, and then burn, rob, 
 and devastate within a radius of many miles.f The 
 scenes which occurred everywhere in the Middle Age 
 
 * Chapter 8. 
 
 t Muratori, Vol. XV, "Cronica Sanese," pp. 187, 189.
 
 SAN GALGANO 379 
 
 when a lawless horde burst upon a defenceless popula- 
 tion, put a tax upon the imagination of a humanitarian 
 age like ours. Hawkwood's first visit to San Galgano 
 befell in the year 1363, and many visits by him and 
 others of his kind followed in the succeeding generation. 
 When the pest of the adventurous companies was at last 
 eradicated and better times dawned, the monastery 
 was in a state of complete disorganization. In 1397 
 the then abbot, one Lodovico di Tano, was constrained 
 to sell a piece of land in order to pay a papal imposition. 
 He found a purchaser, but could not meet the legal re- 
 quirements for perfecting the bargain, because the 
 monks, whose consent was indispensable, were all dis- 
 persed. The abbot dwelt alone in the deserted halls of 
 the great monastery.* 
 
 With the return of tranquillity in the fifteenth century 
 San Galgano experienced a revival. Enough monks 
 returned to form a new nucleus, the offices were chanted 
 as of old, and the damage done by the Companies of 
 Adventure was gradually repaired. But the former 
 splendor never returned. The melancholy story of the 
 decline to the point of abandonment and ruin that now 
 meets the eye is written legibly enough in the records, 
 but can only be briefly indicated here. Before the new 
 and vital interests, which the Renaissance, now mount- 
 ing to its meridian, popularized throughout Italy, the 
 monastic idea began to pale. San Galgano, buried 
 among thick woods in a remote valley, did not bulk so 
 large as in a simpler age. Its revenues were still con- 
 siderable, but its ranks represented a descending curve 
 of efficiency and were no longer crowded with cheerful 
 
 * Canestrelli, p. 21.
 
 380 SIENA 
 
 and self-sacrificing volunteers. The abbey worried 
 along, however, as vested interests will, until presently 
 it fell a victim to one of the growing diseases of the 
 Roman system, the canker of prelacy. With the pas- 
 sion for a princely scale of living, which the Renaissance 
 fastened upon the Roman pontiffs, went the need of a 
 court, of gorgeous palaces, and of a numerous retinue 
 of sycophants to shine as minor lights around the central 
 sun. To meet the multifarious demands upon their 
 budget the popes were driven to tap such questionable 
 sources of income as the sale of indulgences, while 
 to satisfy the covetous and luxurious prelates they were 
 constrained to assign to them the revenues of fat 
 bishoprics and abbacies. Every one will remember how 
 powerfully this reckless exploitation contributed to the 
 reform movement which swept over northern Europe in 
 the sixteenth century. San Galgano, a rich benefice 
 close at hand, was not likely to escape the general fate. 
 In the year 1503 Pope Julius II, one of the most im- 
 posing personalities of the whole line of popes, but, as 
 ill-luck would have it, always desperately in need of 
 cash, gave the abbey in commendam to one of his cardi- 
 nals. On the surface the transaction signified no more 
 than that the abbey was "commended" to the cardinal's 
 paternal care; in reality it appropriated the entire 
 revenue to his personal use. The keeping up of the 
 abbey depended henceforth on the distant commenda- 
 tary's charity, supplemented by the begging talents 
 of the monks. Some monks of an adventurous tem- 
 per might still be inclined to take their chances 
 with the institution under the nefarious absentee sys- 
 tem, but they had no legal claim to anything. Their
 
 SAN GALGANO 381 
 
 money flowed to Rome, and once at Rome was past 
 reclaiming. 
 
 There is no reason for following closely the miserable 
 tale of decay under the successive commendataries, 
 though the story is not without its element of pathos. 
 In the year 1576 a papal inspector, sent on a tour through 
 Tuscany, found a single monk acting as caretaker of 
 the vast establishment, reflecting in his rags the crying 
 destitution of the monastery.* The inspector reported 
 to Rome that the refectory was without a roof, that many 
 chapels were in decay, that of the four bells three could 
 not be rung, and that through the broken windows the 
 birds entered and made their nests in the church. In 
 the year 1632 the pope, himself scandalized at the results 
 of a prolonged exploitation but incapable of devising 
 an effective policy of reform, reduced the dishonored 
 monastery from its dignity of abbey, and, twenty years 
 after, secularized it by organizing it as a simple benefice. 
 The benefice, however, embracing the many estates 
 which San Galgano had accumulated through the ages, 
 produced an undiminished revenue, and this revenue 
 continued to flow into the hands of a commendatary, 
 who, in return for an unmerited bounty, assumed the 
 meagre obligation of maintaining Christian worship in the 
 abbey church and of making a few repairs at his discre- 
 tion. The Cistercian order now definitely left the place 
 which was associated with a not inglorious chapter of 
 its past. The commendatary, looking for cheap labor, 
 sent first some Vallombrosans, and later, occasional 
 Franciscans to act as custodians of the edifice, but these 
 uninterested guardians, drawing an infinitesimal wage, 
 
 * Canestrelli, "Documento XXVIII."
 
 382 SIENA 
 
 were glad if they could eke out a living without giving a 
 thought to the maintenance of the splendid monument, 
 in whose ample enclosure they must have rattled around 
 like peas in a bushel. 
 
 And so we arrive through the long and painful stages 
 of neglect at the last phase, the chapter of total abandon- 
 ment. On the 22nd of January, 1786, a congregation 
 of perhaps fifty peasants was gathered in the sacristy 
 before the only altar which seems to have been kept in 
 sufficient repair for the celebration of the mass. The 
 rest of the edifice, we are informed, had become fright- 
 fully damp and unwholesome, owing to the fact that 
 whenever it rained the water poured through the roof 
 like a sieve. Suddenly on that January day, "all' atto 
 della consecrazione,"* at the moment when the Fran- 
 ciscan caretaker and priest consecrated the bread, 
 there came a tremendous roar, followed by a shock 
 which threw the terrified worshippers upon their knees. 
 The bell tower, which rose just behind the sacristy and, 
 as was usual in Italy, stood free of the church, had given 
 way and crashed to the ground. It must have seemed 
 to the witnesses like a divine intervention that, instead 
 of burying them under its ruins in the sacristy, it had 
 measured its length upon the open field behind the 
 choir. After this catastrophe neither peasants nor 
 caretaker would trust themselves in the dilapidated 
 edifice. They got leave to transfer the worship, main- 
 tained in the crumbling abbey for the convenience of the 
 scattered peasants of the neighborhood, to Monte 
 Siepi; and the venerable though neglected round chapel 
 which marked the grave of San Galgano and had served 
 
 * Canestrelli, p. 61.
 
 SAN GALGANO 383 
 
 as the original settlement of the Cistercians, was once 
 more supplied with an altar and rang with the solemn 
 music of the liturgy. To this day, on Sundays and other 
 Christian festivals, it is visited by a thin congregation of 
 silent, stoical-looking peasants, attended by their wives 
 and children. With the withdrawal of the priest and 
 his flock a formal deconsecration was required by the 
 regulations of the Catholic church, in sign that the great 
 abbey was left to perish in peace. The Bishop of Vol- 
 terra, in whose diocese the abbey lay, in due time 
 published the necessary decree, and on August 10, 1789, 
 the pertinent ceremony was gone through with by two 
 commissioners, accompanied by a notary to make the 
 necessary legal attestation. It is interesting to observe 
 that just six days before, some hundreds of miles away 
 across the snow-capped barrier of the Alps, a body of 
 Frenchmen, calling themselves the National Assembly, 
 had swept the remnants of feudalism out of existence 
 and inaugurated for Europe a new age, founded upon 
 the bold belief, no less than blasphemous to the medi- 
 aeval mind, of the ability of reason to effect the salvation 
 of the human race. The chronological coincidence, 
 linking the far-sounding pronouncement made on the 
 Parisian stage with the abandonment unwept, unsung, 
 of a monument which had its root in the warm heart of 
 the Middle Age, touches the imagination. Sunt lachry- 
 m(e rerum. 
 
 Neglected since the days of the Renaissance by greedy 
 and conscienceless commendataries, the doomed abbey 
 was from the moment of deconsecration left unguarded 
 and untenanted, a prey to the conquering elements. 
 Not long before the tower came down in the manner
 
 384 SIENA 
 
 we have seen, a cardinal commend atary, Feroni by 
 name, had managed to persuade the pope to transfer the 
 whole property of San Galgano as a private estate to his 
 family, with the sole obligation of contributing to the 
 maintenance of religious worship in the abbey. When 
 the tower fell, the family, in return for fitting up the 
 chapel on Monte Siepi, got the maintenance clause 
 abolished. The disavowal of the edifice was now com- 
 plete; as far as the law was concerned, the owners were 
 free to look upon the ancient monument as a useless 
 encumbrance amidst their pleasant fields and meadows, 
 and nothing hindered them from destroying it at pleas- 
 ure. While balking at this extreme step, they freely re- 
 sorted to it as a quarry, and the peasants, following the 
 example of their enlightened masters, plundered it at 
 will for such building material as their need required. 
 Whenever a vault fell in, bullock carts rolled lumberingly 
 to the scene to appropriate the fine blocks of travertine 
 which littered the ground, and a heap of indistinguish- 
 able rubbish might be the only evidence of the existence 
 of the abbey at this day, if the Italian government, 
 sluggishly responding to the indignant appeal of a 
 devoted lover of his country's history and art, had not, 
 in the year 1894, stayed further demolition by declaring 
 the ruin a national monument and by making meagre 
 provision for its preservation. 
 
 Hardly a building, testifying to the character and 
 splendor of the Italian past, is more worthy of a visit 
 than the ruined abbey of San Galgano. Unvisited by 
 the casual tourist by reason of its remoteness from the 
 common highways of travel, utterly untouched by the 
 many vulgar influences of modern life, it has gathered
 
 O 
 
 ei 
 X
 
 SAN GALGANO 385 
 
 about itself the atmosphere of silence which settles upon 
 all noble works. On an afternoon in June, abandoning 
 the hot and dusty highway which I had followed for 
 some hours, I mounted a grassy bank, and across a 
 sun-lit meadow saw it lying, white and glittering like 
 the gates of pearl. Around the level field, from whose 
 thick clover came the riotous song of summer mounting 
 to its acme, stood the wooded hills, grave and watchful. 
 To the west, its defiant outline almost obliterated by the 
 strong light, rose the clifF of Chiusdino. Fronting the 
 lofty citadel and close at hand, lay gently-sloping Monte 
 Siepi with the purple roof of the old round chapel just 
 visible above the tree-tops. Here at last in the silence 
 of the white summer afternoon, broken only by the 
 voices in the grass and the faint, clear call of the cuckoo, 
 the long story of the monastery became perfectly intel- 
 ligible by being lifted out of the conditions of material 
 fact into the realm of beauty. To the wakeful inner 
 vision will always come a moment when things, born 
 in time, assume the aspect of eternity. From that 
 westward rock, its sharp lines dissolving in the sun, had 
 the knight Galgano ridden forth upon his quest of God, 
 his golden hair, of which the legend tells, waving in the 
 wind; in these peaceful hills had he wandered, carrying 
 his heart in his hands like a sacrifice; and here, on 
 brooding Monte Siepi, earth had gathered the ex- 
 hausted body like a leaf of the dead year. Presently 
 over the grave had risen the round chapel of the Cister- 
 cian brotherhood, and, in the due course of time, built 
 of the prayers of men, the abbey yonder, lifting a pure 
 front above the meadow. Even so. The crickets re- 
 hearse the tale to the cicadas shrilling in the hedges, the
 
 386 SIENA 
 
 thrush and cuckoo inform the hills, which, when evening 
 falls, will hold silent conference with the marching 
 stars. 
 
 Just before sunset I entered the portal and stood in 
 the deserted nave. The vaults had fallen in, disclosing 
 the blue sky covered with a web of delicate rose vapor. 
 A few blocks of weathered travertine, which had lately 
 given way, littered the grassy floor. At the entrance to 
 the transept a brilliant patch of yellow marked a bed 
 of buttercups, graciously planted by some wandering 
 wind. At either hand the eye followed the rows of 
 piers till it rested upon the marred choir wall with its 
 ghostly apertures. Finer clustered columns one may 
 not hope to find, each one composed of perfectly articu- 
 lated members, simple, serviceable, and beautiful. 
 Equally simple, with an added grace of subtle rhythm, 
 are the triforium and clerestory. If this was Italian 
 workmanship it was at least directed by the delicate 
 Gothic spirit which emanated from the Isle de France. 
 In the days when the ribbed vault terminated the nave 
 and aisles, the church must have produced an effect as 
 rounded and complete as a sonata by some great 
 master. But if completeness has been lost, its absence 
 is not noticed by reason of a quality much more moving 
 to us in our character of men, a quality which Words- 
 worth has called "the unimaginable touch of time." 
 Daily as the light fails from the sky and dusk gathers 
 within the spacious enclosure, time, and its kindred 
 spirit, beauty, circle like great birds above the deserted 
 home of men.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 
 
 WE are nearing the end of our journey. The 
 mediaeval commune, the history of which I 
 set out to trace, perished with the spread of 
 the new civilization bearing the name of the Renais- 
 sance. In a formal sense, indeed, the republic of Siena 
 lived far into the new period, but it led a maimed 
 existence, at the mercy of circumstances, and without 
 that splendid vigor which distinguished it in those 
 strictly mediaeval centuries, called by the Italians the 
 dugento and trecento. It was precisely because the 
 town in its creative period exhibited an irrepressible 
 activity and developed an attractive and original 
 civilization that we of another age are content to follow 
 its fortunes and to linger over its works. For the same 
 reason the Age of the Renaissance, a period of unar- 
 rested decline, has but a weak claim upon our interest. 
 Still, whoever has followed with sympathy the rise and 
 culmination of this original and perplexing people will 
 not rest until he has given himself the melancholy 
 satisfaction of viewing also the end. 
 
 We dropped the thread of Sienese political develop- 
 ment at the close of the fourteenth century, when the 
 town stood face to face with a score of difficulties which 
 seemed on the point of overwhelming and destroying it. 
 
 387
 
 388 SIENA 
 
 We noted the domestic turmoil of the monti, the in- 
 dustrial and financial depression, the prowling Com- 
 panies of Adventure, the rebellious nobility surely a 
 formidable array of evils. But these troubles were not 
 all, for at the moment of this domestic crisis the whole 
 Italian peninsula was swept by a political revolution, the 
 effects of which Siena, remote and provincial though 
 she was, could not hope to escape. 
 
 In thejxmrse of the fourteenth century a movement 
 of concentration had affirmedTtself^lyyTeason of which 
 the numerous republics and lordships of the peninsula 
 kegan to disappear in order to make room for more 
 
 ample and powerful political aggregations. Five states_ 
 
 had pushed their way to the front Venice and Milan 
 injthe north, Florence between the Apennines and the 
 sea, the States of the Church embracing the central 
 Apennines, and Naples to the south. Milan was held 
 by theJVisconti, who had raised their tyrannical regime 
 on the rums of the democratic commune; Venice wajm 
 oligarchy of rich merchants; Naples was a feudal king- 
 dom; inTact each of the rive states had a political organ- 
 izajion peculiar to itself Widely differing in constitu- 
 tional forms, they resembled one another, however, in 
 that they all alike strove ceaselessly, by means fair or 
 foul, to enlarge their boundaries by absorbing their 
 weaker neighbors. Out of this general greed grew ever 
 fresh wars which, by the side of the radiant and cloud- 
 capped Italy of the Renaissance evoked by the human- 
 ists and artists, set a material Italy which was a very 
 lazar-house of sorrow and disease. 
 
 In these Italian wars Siena had no other interest than 
 that of self-preservation. She was perpetually between
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 389 
 
 hammer and anvil and obliged to take desperate chances 
 to escape from each new predicament. Florence was as 
 always the chief source of alarm. In the face of this situa- 
 tion the natural policy of the smaller city was to secure 
 itself against subjection to the Arno town by avoiding 
 scrupulously to give offence, and Florence for her part 
 was magnanimously content to be friendly, pending the 
 arrival of the favorable moment when she could safely 
 show her fangs and seize her prey. Patriotic historians 
 of Siena speak indignantly of the Florentine policy of 
 this period, charging it, as in the past, with faithlessness 
 and violence. These offensive traits, indeed, undeniably 
 characterize the conduct of the Arno merchants, but 
 beneath such baser qualities, it is only fair to Florence 
 to insist, stirred an entirely healthy desire of expansion, 
 fed by the dim but unerring perception that a more 
 effective organization of Italy was inevitable in an age 
 which was pushing its galleys into unknown seas beyond 
 the Mediterranean, and girding its loins for the conquest 
 of new continents. 
 
 A single glance at the geographical position of Flor- 
 ence will convince us that her most immediate ambition 
 was the control of the Arno valley. It was therefore a 
 signal satisfaction to the republic when in the year 1384 
 she raised her banner over Arezzo. This success, 
 carrying Florentine influence far inland, must have 
 encouraged the government to think that the time had 
 come for a renewed grappling with Siena. Ever since 
 the Montaperti period, when Siena had become Guelph, 
 that is, for more than a hundred years, the relations of 
 the two neighbors had been fairly satisfactory, but now 
 plainly Florence felt strong enough to resume offensive
 
 390 SIENA 
 
 operations. In pursuit of this policy she conducted a secret 
 intrigue with the Sienese dependency of Montepulciano 
 till that town revolted and put itself under her protection. 
 This breach of a long established amity occurred in 
 the year 1387. The Sienese sent an embassy to Flor- 
 ence to lodge a complaint; pursued patient negotiations, 
 marked, on the part of the Arno city, by deceit and 
 subterfuge; and presently, in alarm lest worse follow, 
 sought the alliance of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, lord of 
 Milan. Gian Galeazzo is a highly remarkable example 
 of that new order of political being, the tyrant, brought 
 forth by the wild confusion of the peninsula. Too 
 much has been written about the personal aspect of the 
 tyrant, about his ambition, his violence, his disregard 
 of the laws of God and man, and too little about the 
 political purposes which he served. Gian Galeazzo 
 had a clearer understanding of the necessity of uniting 
 Italy than any statesman the peninsula produced 
 down to the time of Macchiavelli. An illuminating 
 glimpse of his policy is afforded by a declaration which 
 he once launched to the effect "that Tuscany and 
 Lombardy must become one and inseparable."* What 
 a statesmanlike vision that simple utterance proves him 
 to have possessed, but what a storm of protest it was 
 sure to raise in an age of small and infinitesimal corpora- 
 tions, profoundly persuaded that they existed by reason 
 of a divine mandate! 
 
 By the force of genius Gian Galeazzo had already 
 imposed his authority on the valley of the Po, when he 
 received the proffer of an alliance from the Sienese 
 
 * " Quod Tuscia cum Lumbardia fiet unum et idem." Quoted by Profes- 
 sione "Siena e le Compagnie di Ventura," p. 160.
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 391 
 
 which would secure him a welcome foothold in Tuscany. 
 The treaty was signed in the year 1389 and was to last 
 ten years. Even before its arrangements were perfected 
 war with Florence over Montepulciano had broken out, 
 the usual ferocious war waged with mercenaries, and 
 marked by the harrying of the open country, by plunder 
 and arson. If Siena, soon reduced to pitiful straits, at 
 least preserved her independence, she owed that boon 
 to the political support of the Milanese duke. Occa- 
 sional efforts to bring about peace proved vain. Not 
 only did Florence refuse to give up Montepulciano, but 
 her stubborn rancor even made the Sienese tremble for 
 the safety of their own city. Rather than fall into the 
 hands of their archenemies, in the year 1399, at the 
 expiration of the ten years' treaty, they offered the sov- 
 ereignty of their city to Gian Galeazzo. The step won 
 them a respite, and the Milanese duke, by scrupulously 
 avoiding interference in local affairs, proved that his 
 supremacy was perfectly consistent with the essentials 
 of self-government.* Victory after victory had carried 
 the duke by this time far toward the realization of his 
 plans. The year before the acquisition of Siena, he had 
 raised his banner, bearing the famous writhing viper 
 of the Visconti, over Pisa. Perugia, Assisi, and proud 
 Bologna were presently added to his dominions. It was 
 whispered that he was on the point of making a frank 
 avowal of his hopes by crowning himself king of Italy, 
 when he was taken with fever and died (1402). Im- 
 mediately his dominions melted away, and Siena, find- 
 
 * See the admirable regulations by which he circumscribed the powers of 
 his personal representative in the city. Malavolti, "Storia di Siena," terza 
 parte, p. 189.
 
 392 SIENA 
 
 ing no security in a continued submission to a weak 
 successor, reasserted her independence (1404). The 
 Visconti episode was closed, but it brought into clear 
 relief two things: first, that Siena had little good to 
 expect from Florence, and, second, that she could meet 
 a persistent onslaught from the Arno city only with the 
 aid of a protector. 
 
 I do not plan to follow the fortunes of Siena in tfoe 
 new centurywith any detail. Although the disturb- 
 ances oif Italy continued, the agitated peninsula being 
 unable to find peace in her system of small states^ Siena 
 for a long time_enjgyed a relative quiet, as Florence^ 
 temporarily turned her er| pr gy in ntVi^r Directions. In 
 the year 1406 she acquired Pisa, and therewith free 
 access to the open sea; and in 1430 she tried to throw 
 herjQgt about LuccaT This rapid development alarmed 
 Siena, and in the latter case led to her taking up arms 
 in behalf of the threatened city on the Serchio, but 
 apart from flurries of this nature, no notable event, de- 
 fining the relation of Siena to her neighbors, took place 
 until we reach the pontificate of Pius II, inaugurated 
 in the year 1458. Pius II, whose family name was 
 ./Eneas Silvius Piccolomini, was an offspring of one of 
 the oldest houses of Siena, and was a famous scholar and 
 traveller. As he was attached with passionate intensity 
 to his home, Siena during his rule (1458-1464) was as 
 effectually under the protection of the papacy as she 
 had once been under that of Milan. Accordingly, 
 neither Florence nor any other power threatened her 
 territory, which happy circumstance Pius, during fre- 
 quent prolonged stays in Siena, tried with noble inspira- 
 tion to turn to account by effecting a permanent cure
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 393 
 
 of the secular divisions of his fellow-townsmen. The 
 local situation, therefore, as it presented itself to the 
 eyes of Pius, and as it developed under his personal 
 pressure, invites our attention. 
 
 The system of the monti, hereditary parties which 
 struggled for the possession of the power and honors, 
 was a device apparently invented for the express pur- 
 pose ofperpetuatmg domestic disorder? We are already 
 aware that to this political system was largely attribu- 
 table the steady decline of the town. We have followed 
 
 the story of the monti tcrthe revolution of 1385 when the 
 RiformatorTwere overthrown and the monte del Popolo, 
 the^fifth and the last of these cantankerous castes, came 
 into beingjl The victory of that year gave the sovereign- 
 ty to the Noveschi, the Dodicini, and the Popolari (as 
 the members of the monte del Popolo were called), the 
 now time-honored exclusion of the nobles or Gentilu- 
 omini from the signiory being, of course, maintained. 
 Presently, in a most unusual access of magnanimity, a 
 concession* was made to the Riformatori with the result 
 that the four peoples' parties seemed to have been 
 reduced to an apparent harmony. But the old rancor 
 glowed beneath the ashes. In 1403 the Dodicini, 
 whom we know from of old as tireless sowers of dissen- 
 sion, entered into a conspiracy with some of the nobles 
 to overthrow the government, and on being discovered 
 were ammoniti in perpetuo excluded forever from the 
 signiory. The government thus devolved on the three 
 monti of the Noveschi, the Riformatori, and the Popo- 
 lari, and remained with them without any substantial 
 change till the time of Pius II, that is, for half a century. 
 
 * In 1387 and again in 1398.
 
 394 SIENA 
 
 This long period of inner quiet was made possible 
 by an unusual understanding among the three ruling 
 groups, aided by their sharp repression of every hostile 
 demonstration on the part of the excluded orders of the 
 Gentiluomini and the Dodicini. To keep these domes- 
 tic enemies in the proper degree of submission their 
 leaders were from time to time, without even the sem- 
 blance of legal procedure, packed out of the town and 
 banished. San Bernardino (1380-1444), saint and 
 orator, who acquired an added authority among his 
 countrymen from being a Sienese born and bred, pleaded 
 in public addresses, attended by vast crowds of male 
 and female auditors, for a civil peace founded on 
 justice for all, but his eloquence entered the ears and 
 did not penetrate the hearts.* The city fathers were 
 satisfied that they had done their whole duty when they 
 yielded so far to the saint's persuasions as to fix the 
 monogram of Christ, surrounded, in sign of universal 
 love, by the rays of the sun, to the front of the palazzo. 
 Upon this monogram, San Bernardino, so to speak, 
 founded his ministry. Carrying it with him whenever 
 he mounted the pulpit, he urged upon his hearers that 
 they adopt it in place of the worldly devices and coats- 
 of-arms which their provocative zeal led them to attach 
 to the house-fronts. Like the magistracy, the citizens 
 generally, as Sienese walls still testify, complied with 
 the saint's demand. Professions but no deeds, lip- 
 worship but no conversion! Long habit inclined the 
 citizens to turn periodically to the excitement of street 
 
 * The addresses, gratefully free from the bombast of the humanists and 
 delivered in the honest dialect of shop and market, afford admirable glimpses 
 of the time. The series delivered in 1427 has been luckily preserved for us. 
 Banchi, "Le Prediche Volgari di S. Bernardino."
 
 San Bernardino Preaching in the Campo 
 By Sano di Pietro (in the Sala del Capitolo of the Cathedral)
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 395 
 
 brawls as drunkards do to the bottle. How else are we 
 to interpret the remarkable notice reported by the 
 historian Malavolti for the year 1439 - ? The young men 
 of the town, we hear, made restless by the otto continue, 
 the long years of domestic peace, formed themselves into 
 two bands under the names of Chiassa and Graffio 
 (Noise and Scratch!), and engaged in street-fighting 
 which would have set the town topsy-turvy if the govern- 
 ment had not ended the mischief with rigorous penalties. 
 As Chiassa and Graffio had nothing to do with politics, 
 nor stood even remotely for any programme of govern- 
 mental action, we may accept them as the naive ex- 
 pression of an inborn and ineradicable contentiousness. 
 I have tried to be just to the great and impersonal 
 forces which determined the course of Sienese history, 
 but let us not forget that the national temper counts for 
 something, nay, counts for much in the general result. 
 Whoever wants further proof need but give attention 
 to the reception extended by the Sienese to the reform 
 plans of Pope Pius II. 
 
 The family of Pius, the Piccolomini, belonged to the 
 grandi, who, at the time of Pius's accession to the chair 
 of Saint Peter, had been excluded from the signiory 
 for almost two hundred years. To curry favor with 
 the new pope, the male members of his family re- 
 siding in Siena were made eligible to all honors as 
 soon as the news of Pius's election was reported at home. 
 The pope was a man of too elevated a character to be 
 caught with such small bait. He asked for the re- 
 habilitation of all the nobles, and did not hesitate to 
 come in person to Siena to plead with the magistrates 
 to bury the past and inaugurate an era of concord.
 
 396 SIENA 
 
 Tardily, and with every sign of discontent, the govern- 
 ment yielded; but when Pius now demanded the same 
 favor for the Dodicini, in order that the whole citizen 
 body might be at last embraced in a single union of 
 hearts, he met with obdurate resistance. It was the 
 last and the best chance the Sienese ever had of putting 
 their government on a foundation of true democratic 
 justice. Their rejection of Pius's proposals, made with 
 the love of a citizen and the authority of a pontiff, showed 
 an attachment to their hereditary rancors which had 
 become an element of the blood. They were en- 
 amored of their differences and did not want to be 
 cured of them ! Pius was no sooner cold in his grave 
 than, with a meanness which is as ludicrous as it is 
 melancholy, they even withdrew the rights that they 
 had granted to the nobility. 
 
 As we approach the end of the fifteenth century a 
 new f act or, _gassing almost unnoticed at first, made 
 itselfjelt in the politics of Ttaly. Foreign powers, and, 
 more particularly, France and Spain, began to throw 
 covetous glances in the direction of the peninsula. If 
 there had been a grain of true statesmanship among the 
 princes, or a spark of patriotism among the people, the 
 peril to the national liberties resulting from the incursion 
 of overwhelmingly powerful foreign states, would have 
 made all discord cease. Instead, the Italian govern- 
 ments, without a thought or a scruple, continued to 
 pursue each other s destruction : now it was Venice 
 -k- a .gy?_4 with the_pope against Milan, now Naples with 
 Milan against Florence, and again some other combina- 
 tion of partners, as if politics were a drawing-room 
 amusement on the level of a quadrille. Siena counted
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 397 
 
 for little or nothing in these combinations and would 
 have preferred to observe a strict neutrality. However, 
 that was not always possible. In the year 1477 the pope 
 and the king of Naples planned a war against Florence, 
 Milan, and Venice, and as they could most conveniently 
 reach their northern enemies, and more particularly, 
 Florence, through the territory of Siena, they obliged 
 that government to enter into alliance with them. In 
 the struggle that followed Florence suffered some heavy 
 losses,* resulting in an ephemeral occupation of some 
 of her territory by the elated Sienese. This short-lived 
 triumph almost cost the sons of the Virgin their po- 
 litical existence, for the leader of the victorious allies, 
 the Duke of Calabria, on being admitted into Siena with 
 an armed host, showed a strong disposition to remain. 
 As soon as the war with Florence was terminated with 
 a general peace (1480), he engaged in intrigues with a 
 group of local supporters chiefly of the Noveschi to 
 play the town into his hands. Success was as good as 
 assured when an accident intervened. The Turks dis- 
 embarked on the Neapolitan coast, and the Duke of 
 Calabria was hurriedly recalled to protect his own state 
 and people. The incident deserves a place in this rapid 
 story of Siena's fall, first, because it proved that the 
 government of the town could be disturbed by any 
 adventurer who came on horseback at the head of an 
 armed force, and second, because the treason of the 
 Noveschi precipitated an era of disturbances which 
 grew into a political bedlam beyond anything recorded 
 
 * Above all, a signal defeat at Poggio Imperiale (1479) in the Elsa Valley. 
 The Sienese signiory ordered a pictorial representation of the victory to be 
 made for the palazzo. The poor fresco may still be seen adjoining the 
 splendid Madonna of Simone Martini.
 
 398 SIENA 
 
 in the annals even of Italy, and which lasted till the end 
 of the republic. 
 
 Into the story of this last mad chapter of Sienese 
 political history it is entirely unprofitable to enter except 
 to rescue from oblivion two important episodes, the one 
 connected with the name of Pandolfo Petrucci, the other 
 with Siena's siege and heroic end. 
 
 I have already spoken in general terms of that inter- 
 esting phenomenon of Italian history, the tyrant. He 
 is the strong man who, when the confusion in the city 
 republics became intolerable, seized the government and 
 reorganized it around himself as master. That Siena 
 with its plots, street-fights, and banishments was 
 sedulously preparing the way for such an end of its 
 liberties must be clear as day to whomsoever has atten- 
 tively followed the vicissitudes of the town. Here lies 
 the significance of Pandolfo Petrucci,* the story of 
 whose rise bears a striking resemblance to that of Cosi- 
 mo, founder of the Medicean fortunes in neighboring 
 Florence. 
 
 Pandolfo and his family belonged to the Noveschi, 
 who, we have just seen, were involved in the intrigues 
 woven around the person of the Duke of Calabria. 
 When the intrigues came to naught the intriguers found 
 themselves hoist by their own petard. In consequence 
 of popular commotions many leading Noveschi, among 
 them the Petrucci family, were banished, and the whole 
 monte was presently declared excluded forever from the 
 
 * For Petrucci consult Pecci, "Memorie Storico-critiche della Citta di 
 Siena," Vol. I. To correct Pecci, the panegyrist, read Mondolfo, "Pan- 
 dolfo Petrucci, Signore di Siena." The political duel between Petrucci and 
 Caesar Borgia is treated by Lisini, "Bull. Sen.," VI a splendid episode 
 worthy of close study on the part of every critic of the Renaissance.
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 399 
 
 government (1483). The decree had been in force four 
 years when the Noveschi, who were rich merchants with 
 powerful connections, overthrew their adversaries. In 
 the early morning hours of July 22, 1487, Pandolfo and 
 his friends scaled the wall at Fonte Branda, took pos- 
 session of the Campo, drove the rulers from the palace, 
 and reformed that was the euphonious expression 
 hallowed by usage the government. The changes 
 which followed during the next years need not engross 
 our attention further than to take note that the influ- 
 ence of the Noveschi kept constantly growing, and that 
 part passu increased the family power of the Petrucci, 
 represented by Pandolfo and his brother Jacopo. 
 When Jacopo he, too, a clever politician died in 
 1497, Pandolfo added his brother's authority to his own. 
 In the same year the Consiglio Generate practically 
 resigned the responsibilities of government for a term 
 of five years into the hands of a committee or Balia,* in 
 which the partisans of Pandolfo had a clear preponder- 
 ance. Such a step, concentrating the authority in a 
 few hands, was an open avowal that the old democratic 
 
 * For the evolution of the magistracy of the Balia see Paoli's monograph, 
 "Del Magistrate della Balia nella Repubblica di Siena," published in the 
 "Atti e Memorie della Accademia dei Rozzi (1879)." I called attention in 
 chap. 5 to the early habit of appointing Balie or special committees, and 
 showed how some of them became permanent magistracies. All through the 
 period of the republic such Balie continued to be appointed to wrestle with 
 difficulties arising in connection with finance, administration, and so forth. 
 Beginning with 1455 we note a change. Owing to the need, in a grave crisis 
 of that year, of secrecy and dispatch which could not be secured by the 
 ordinary channels of government, the Consiglio Generale gave full powers to 
 a special Balia "qui congregentur de per se et habeant eandem auctoritatem 
 quam nunc habent Magnifici Domini, Capitaneus Populi, etc." This Balia 
 was manifestly a kind of dictatorship for a limited period. The growing 
 difficulties favored a more and more frequent resort to it, until, in the time 
 of Pandolfo, it quietly made itself permanent.
 
 400 SIENA 
 
 constitution was no longer practicable. Whenever the 
 Balia approached the end of its term, its authority was 
 renewed, and thus the same group continued in power, 
 serving as the convenient mantle beneath which a 
 private citizen concealed his autocratic rule. Cosimo 
 de' Medici, a half hundred years before, had estab- 
 lished the same kind of latent tyranny in Florence, 
 maintaining it by means of a ring of political friends 
 who shared the offices and honors. InJFlorence and 
 Siena, which did not keep standing armies, but onTy 
 engaged foreign soldiery as the need arose, a prospective 
 master was obliged to have recourse not to force, 
 frankly and openly asserted, but to the prudential com- 
 binations and subterranean methods of the professional 
 politician.^ 
 
 "T'andolfo had to present a bold front in two directions, 
 first, against the domestic enemies, ambitious men of 
 his own temper who enjoyed the advantage of being able 
 to rally the people by the cry of liberty, and, second, 
 against Siena's foreign foes, chief of whom was, now as 
 always, Florence. The local enemies he got rid of by 
 the means, usual among the Italian city tyrants, 
 of banishment and assassination. Some sixty men, 
 it has been calculated, paid for their opposition to 
 his supremacy with their lives, among them some 
 of his earliest friends and nearest relatives. In that 
 famous manual for despots, "The Prince" of Mac- 
 chiavelli, we can read in words which have a glint 
 like steel, how a man new to power must never let his 
 hand be stayed by weakness or pity. When Pandolfo's 
 own father-in-law, Niccolo Borghesi, persisted in cross- 
 ing his plans, the tyrant plotted his destruction. On
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 401 
 
 June 19, 1500, as Niccolo was returning home from the 
 duomo, he was struck down by hired assassins. Apart 
 from such domestic incidents, we must recognize, if we 
 wish to be fair to the general character of Pandolfo's 
 rule, that Siena was tranquil under him as hardly ever 
 in her history, that trade flourished, and that the un- 
 scrupulous tyrant enjoyed great popularity not only 
 among the men of his own monte, but among the people 
 in general. Macchiavelli, the all-observing Florentine, 
 has expressed the opinion * that Pandolfo's power had 
 its root in the little armed force of three hundred men 
 which the city took into its employ to maintain order, 
 and of which he had the captaincy. Of course 
 Pandolfo was only too ready to confirm his position 
 with the aid of soldiers, if necessary, but the fact 
 remains, reflecting considerable credit on the deftness 
 and effectiveness of his system, that he maintained 
 himself among so restless a people as the Sienese 
 largely by the sole weight of his masterful personality. 
 In Pandolfo's day occurred the successive invasions 
 of Italy by France and Spain which prepared the en- 
 slavement of the peninsula. In the presence of the two 
 western giants even Milan, Florence, and their peers 
 counted for little, and a state of the slender resources of 
 Siena became, of course, almost negligible. Critics of 
 Pandolfo's foreign policy fluently charge him with timid- 
 ity, coupled with a flagrant lack of creative leadership. 
 As if Siena would have made herself other than ridicu- 
 lous by a swash-buckler attitude! The best thing a 
 small state in love with life could hope, in the terrible 
 trial through which the peninsula was passing, was to 
 
 * "Discorsi sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio," C. VI, del 1. 3.
 
 402 SIENA 
 
 keep from under the wheels of the Juggernaut. That is 
 what Siena accomplished under Pandolfo's leadership; 
 not much, if you will, but the utmost possible under the 
 circumstances. Neighboring Florence, it is true, went 
 through a crisis which offered a rare opportunity for 
 aggression and seemed to superficial observers to herald 
 the demise of the merchant city. Pisa revolted, while 
 Montepulciano and Arezzo soon followed the bold 
 example. Many Tuscans thought and declared that 
 with a little determination the Red Lily might be hum- 
 bled in the dust. But Pandolfo knew better. Taking 
 cool inventory of the resources of the Florentines and 
 the value of their tried alliance with the King of France, 
 he moved among the pitfalls of contending factions with 
 extreme caution. Of course he hated Florence as a 
 good Sienese must, and in his heart wished all enemies 
 of the Arno city well, not scrupling to lend them secret 
 help whenever he could in the form of money and sup- 
 plies, but, when asked to join openly and without 
 reserve the movement against Florence, he always drew 
 back. Some modern scholars have declared their horror 
 of this system of lying professions of friendship for 
 Florence, coupled with secret machinations with all her 
 enemies; they have declared Pandolfo a person of mean 
 stature without talent and sincerity.* Sincerity in the 
 age of Caesar Borgia! A person so afflicted would have 
 done well to get himself a suit of motley at once. I say 
 again that Pandolfo's diplomacy was anything but edify- 
 ing; that its note was prudence, a prudence imposed 
 upon it by the feebleness of the Sienese state; and, 
 
 * This is the view of Burckhardt, " Cultur der Renaissance," I, chap. 4. 
 Even Mondolfo in his careful sketch of Pandolfo's policy inclines to this view.
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 403 
 
 finally, I assert that as its aim was and could be nothing 
 higher than the conservation of the independence of 
 Siena, we can not refuse some credit to Pandolfo for 
 having weathered a storm which wrought the ruin of 
 Milan and Naples, not to mention a half-score of lesser 
 Italian states. 
 
 A close examination of Pandolfo's career will disclose 
 that he did not differ essentially from the other tyrants 
 of his day. His secretary, Antonio da Venafro, was 
 once asked by Pope Alexander VI how his master kept 
 the turbulent Sienese under control. "By lies, Your 
 Holiness," was Antonio's prompt reply colle bugle! 
 That was the system of every tyrant of Italy, to which 
 the more desperate sort, like the Baglioni of Perugia 
 and the Bentivogli of Bologna, added indiscriminate 
 slaughter, and an occasional genius, like Caesar Borgia, 
 military skill and an unlimited enterprise. The active 
 will, at least in the form of that colossal daring which 
 we encounter in the adventures of Caesar, was not among 
 the qualities with which nature had endowed Pandolfo 
 for better and worse. A single glance at his portrait,* 
 showing a lean man with high philosophical forehead 
 and watchful eyes beneath, will confirm the impression 
 conveyed by his acts, that we are face to face with the 
 manipulator of men, the sleepless planner, the politician. 
 A heavy and protruding underlip is a blot in a counte- 
 nance not without distinction and suggests periods of 
 misanthropic gloom and sudden lapses into vulgarity. 
 And of episodes illustrating the latter tendency his life 
 was certainly not free. He was already an invalid on 
 
 * An engraving from a portrait said to be by Peruzzi will be found as 
 frontispiece to Pecci, " Memorie," etc.
 
 404 SIENA 
 
 the verge of the grave when he became enamored of a 
 woman of the people, Caterina from the Salicotto region, 
 a filthy quarter where the poor were herded. The 
 Sienese smiled maliciously at their lord's infatuation for 
 the smith's daughter and saddler's wife, whose height 
 and general bulk had won for her the amusing sobriquet 
 of the Two-handed Sword. But Caterina's buxom 
 charms did not restore Pandolfo to gaiety and health. 
 In the spring of the year 1512 he tried the baths of San 
 Filippo, whence, finding no relief, he started back for 
 Siena. But death was in pursuit and overtook him on 
 the way. On May 21, at the little town of San Quirico, 
 he breathed his last. 
 
 While Pandolfo' s career offers a resemblance in many 
 points to that of Cosimo de' Medici, the fortunes of 
 their respective descendants differ widely. Cosimo, by 
 the lucky circumstance of a capable family succession, 
 founded a dynasty, whereas Pandolfo's heirs, as vicious 
 as they were incompetent, frittered away, in a surpris- 
 ingly short time, the hard-won prestige of their father. 
 Four years after Pandolfo's death, his son and suc- 
 cessor, Borghese Petrucci, had to flee from Siena for 
 his life. For a number of years (1516-22) Borghese's 
 cousin, Raffaele, who enjoyed the powerful support of 
 the Medicean pope, Leo X, held sway, and on his death, 
 Fabio, a younger son of Pandolfo's, was called to the su- 
 preme position in the state. When Fabio, a thought- 
 free youth, more occupied with love than with affairs 
 of state, was banished in 1524, the Petrucci chapter of 
 Sienese history came to an abrupt close. 
 
 Having rid themselves of a threatening dynasty the 
 Sienese were again masters of their own fortunes. The
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 405 
 
 Noveschi, the mpnte from which Pandolfo issued and 
 upon which he chiefly leaned, hoped to assume his 
 inheritance, but a rising of the people under the leader- 
 ship of the Libertini, the friends of liberty, overthrew 
 them, and punished them with the usual measures of 
 exclusion from the honors and banishment from the 
 city. The news was highly distasteful to Pope Clement 
 VII, with whom the Noveschi maintained a strict 
 alliance. Clement resolved to interfere, animated, it 
 would seem, by the secret reflection, natural enough in 
 a born Florentine and a Medici, of making the oppor- 
 tunity serve to crush Siena once and for all, and to 
 subject it to his house. He sent a papal army against 
 Siena, supported by a considerable Florentine force. 
 Then occurred wonders in the city which for over a 
 century had exhibited so many ominous signs of decrep- 
 itude. Then was seen that one thing and only one 
 could heal the bitter divisions of the townsmen: the 
 fear and hatred of Florence. The approach of Clement's 
 army lit a patriotic fire in every heart, and with spirits 
 consecrated as in the days of Montaperti by a renewed 
 offering of the city to Madonna, the Sienese prepared 
 to meet the foe. On July 25, 1526, the citizen levies 
 fell unexpectedly on the hostile forces camped outside of 
 Porta Camellia, and drove them from the field. In the 
 sheer explosive energy of a consuming passion the victory 
 of Camollia may fairly be coupled with the stroke which 
 gave the Arbia a place in the immortal verse of Dante. 
 The angered Clement became involved at this juncture 
 in a war with Emperor Charles V and saw ruin descend 
 on himself and Rome in the form of Bourbon's army. 
 In place of plundering &iena, thepope's own sacred seat
 
 406 SIENA 
 
 was put to a terrible_sack (1527^. Siena, rescued from 
 danger, ^ughtlhealliance of the mighty Charles, whose 
 protection se^rtedto promise amplemimunity against 
 the further ill-will of the pope. 
 
 But the protector, once admitted within the gates, 
 himself began to play the part of master. Charles, it 
 must be acknowledged, had some justification for his 
 encroachments. He began by condescending to play, 
 from his lofty eminence, the part of friend and modera- 
 tor. Again and again he counselled the Sienese to end 
 their local quarrels, readmit their proscribed citizens, 
 and live in peace. In the year 1536 he came in person 
 and gravely repeated his advice. Not only, in spite of 
 these exhortations, did murder and violence continue 
 to reign within the walls, but, owing to the weakness of 
 the government, law and order ceased also to be enforced 
 in the countryside. By virtue of a treaty of the year 
 1 5^p t jCharles, in order the better to protect Siena, had 
 put. a Spanish garrisonjn^ the town. Imperceptibly his 
 representative increased the scope of his powers, until 
 h. e g a .Y-? a^dkice_to_die_maMstrates on all affairs of im- 
 portance, assumed the pojicing of the territory, and 
 made hlmseirvirtual governor of the state. Finally, in 
 the year 1547, he took a step in which the Sienese unani- 
 mously recognized the end of those liberties which, 
 though they consistently abused, they nevertheless 
 loved instinctively and deeply. He began the construc- 
 tion of a fortress on the hill of San Prospero, the public 
 garden of the present day, from which he could easily 
 dominate the city with his artillery. Repeatedly the 
 Sienese sent ambassadors to Charles to beseech him to 
 respect the independence of the republic; again, as in
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 407 
 
 other grave crises of the state, they went in solemn 
 procession to the cathedral to invoke the protection of 
 the Virgin.* By the side of these peaceful measures, 
 however, they did fail to take more practical steps by 
 opening secret negotiations with the agents of the 
 French king, in the assurance that that sovereign was 
 always eagerly ready to encourage any opposition which 
 might manifest itself against his rival of Spain. In 
 accordance with carefully laid plans the Sienese rebel- 
 in the summer of the year 1552. The 
 
 Spaniards, taken by surprise, were obliged, after a brief 
 resistance, to abandon both the city and the fortress. 
 A treaty secured them an unmolested retreat (August 
 5th). As they filed out of the fortress between dense 
 masses of exultant citizens, some Sienese youths ad- 
 dressed a polite greeting to the commander, Don 
 Franzese, whose gracious manners had secured him the 
 personal attachment of a large circle. "I thank you 
 for your good-will," answered that gentleman; then 
 bowing a dignified farewell to the company he added 
 significantly: "You Sienese have done a handsome 
 stroke, but bear yourselves discreetly in the future, for 
 you have offended too great a man."f 
 The revolt of Siena from Emperor Charles V was one 
 
 * It may be noted at this point that Siena dedicated itself five times to the 
 Virgin, in 1260, in 1483, iff 1526, in 1550, and in 1555. A brief record of the 
 special circumstances connected with each case will be found in Heywood 
 "Palioand Ponte," p. 40 ff. 
 
 t Sozzini, p. 88. I refer to his "Diario delle Cose Avenute in Siena da 20 
 Luglio 1550 al 28 Giugno 1555," published in "Arch. Stor. It.," II (1842). 
 For the siege consult the above vivid book of Sozzini, an eye-witness; also 
 Montalvo, "Relazione della Guerra di Siena" (ed. by Ricomanni and Grot- 
 tanelli, 1863), Monluc, " Commentaires et lettres" (ed. by Alphonse de 
 Ruble, 1864). Very important, as a means of controlling Monluc, is Cour- 
 teault, "Blaise de Monluc Historien," Paris, 1908.
 
 408 SIENA 
 
 of a series of actions in Italy and Germany which 
 inaugurated a new general war between that sovereign 
 and_h:is_rival of France^ In the world-game played by 
 the two rulers in the sixteenth century Siena had, by the 
 accident of geographical position, become a point pos- 
 sessed of a certain strategical advantage, and each 
 would attempt to hold it against the other. To such 
 a pass had the new political organization of Europe 
 brought the ancient commune. She could maintain 
 herself only by leaning on one or the other: Spanish 
 yesterday, she might be French to-day and Spanish 
 again to-morrow, but she could never more belong to 
 herself alone. Strange to say neither the people noi 
 their leaders saw this simple fact, which, to our per- 
 ception, looms as palpable as a mountain. They 
 actually believed they were defending their liberties 
 a term on which the history of the town throws a lurid 
 light and hugged to their breasts the ignorant hope of 
 being able to treat as equals with France and Spain. 
 If this was an illusion, it is at least to be said for the 
 Sienese that they gave themselves to it with such sincer- 
 ity that they reached in this, the final chapter of their 
 history as a free republic, a level of heroism rarely at- 
 tained by any people, great or small, ancient or modern; 
 for heroism is independent of reason and success, and 
 often puts forth its fairest flower in the niggard soil 
 of lost hopes and desperate causes. 
 
 In January, 1553, Charles made his first attempt to 
 recover the town. His army, moving northward from 
 Naples, presently spread through the Val di Chiana, 
 with the end in view of establishing a military base in 
 Sienese territory. The Spanish commander had not
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 409 
 
 yet completed this action, the necessary preliminary to 
 the contemplated siege, when he was recalled by the 
 necessity of defending Naples against the Turkish fleet, 
 sent westward by the sultan in aid of his ally, the 
 French king. Siena celebrated the withdrawal in the 
 usual way with a religious procession, followed by 
 bonfires and brazen fanfares from the battlements, but 
 the relief was only temporary. In January, 1554, the 
 Spaniards returned, in close alliance this time with 
 Cosimo, Duke of Florence a most ominous circum- 
 stance in the eyes of every thinking Sienese. The 
 great Charles alone was an enemy of weight, but Charles 
 in alliance with the hereditary foe of Siena might well 
 fill the mind with evil prognostications. The com- 
 mander-in-chief of the Imperialist forces was the Mar- 
 quis of Marignano, who began hostilities by boldly 
 pitching his camp before the Porta Camollia along the 
 northern or Florentine road. 
 
 Henry II, King of France, was prepared to be at con- 
 siderable pains to preserve a town in his obedience which 
 afforded his army its only foothold in central Italy. In 
 the very month, therefore, in which Marignano reopened 
 the hostilities, he sent one of his marshals, Piero Strozzi, to 
 act as his vicar-general for Italy, and, more particularly, 
 to conduct a vigorous defence of Siena against the 
 Spaniards. Strozzi, the head of an ancient Florentine 
 family which had gone into exile rather than suffer the 
 tyranny of Duke Cosimo, could be counted on to carry 
 a fiery and venomous zeal into the struggle. His 
 military talents, too, were of no mean order. Com- 
 manding a small French troop, which he hoped to 
 enlarge presently by well-equipped reinforcements from
 
 410 SIENA 
 
 the north, and supported by the ardent citizen levies of 
 Siena, he faced with confidence the problem of defending 
 the town. It is indicative of the regeneration of the 
 inhabitants effected by the inspiring occasion, that 
 though they had long ago permitted their ancient mili- 
 tary organization to fall into complete decay, they now 
 gladly presented themselves to serve with spade, panier, 
 pike, arquebus, or whatever arm the defence of their 
 beloved country seemed to require. 
 
 Both Marignano and Strozzi were hampered for a 
 time in the execution of their plans by the insufficient 
 number of their troops. Any offensive action, on the 
 part of Strozzi, was out of the question till the arrival 
 of succor, while Marignano with his thin line of be- 
 siegers could not effectually blockade the city. In 
 April, however, the Imperialists scored a notable suc- 
 cess by seizing the lofty villa, Belcaro, and the ancient 
 Munistero, both crowning hills outside Porta San 
 Marco and commanding the important Maremma road. 
 Summer was on hand before Strozzi got assurance of the 
 dispatch from the north of the longed-for reinforce- 
 ments. At the word he undertook the execution of a 
 plan which was surely not lacking in imaginative daring. 
 
 The French were to come in two divisions by routes 
 carefully kept secret, one force, composed of Swiss, 
 across the Apennines to Lucca, the other, made up of 
 Gascons and Germans, by sea from the ports of France 
 to Viareggio. On June n, 1554, with the fall of night, 
 Strozzi slipped out of Siena, leaving a garrison sufficient 
 to man the walls; made his way westward by a cir- 
 cuitous route; crossed the Arno at Pontedera; and 
 successfully established a junction with the Swiss at
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 411 
 
 the appointed place of meeting. As soon as the fleet 
 had disembarked the other auxilliaries, with an army 
 which, for the moment, would completely outnumber 
 that of Marignano, he intended to swoop down on 
 undefended Florence. It was a plan worthy of his 
 hatred of the Medicean tyrant of his native city, but 
 dependent on the cooperation of too many individ- 
 ual wills. The French admiral failed to put in a prompt 
 appearance in resentment, it was said, of the royal 
 order which subordinated him to Strozzi's command 
 and Strozzi, after a few days of waiting near Lucca, had 
 to give up his enterprise. He recrossed the Arno in 
 order to be within reach of Siena, and at last received 
 the news that the French fleet had appeared off the coast 
 of the Maremma, several weeks behind the appointed 
 time. Recovering from his profound disappointment, 
 he met the new arrivals, and then led his united troops 
 back to Siena, quickly prepared, after the fashion of 
 sanguine men, to work out another plan. 
 
 On July 15, the French army entered the city which 
 it had come to save with all the pomp and circumstance 
 of war. Alessandro Sozzini, one of the cheering citi- 
 zens, tells us how the parti-colored raiment of the Ger- 
 man arquebusiers and the gallant bearing of the French 
 pikemen delighted a people who fed greedily on every 
 spectacle.* Of greater moment, however, to us of a 
 later age is that among the new arrivals was a man who 
 could wield a pen. I refer to Monsieur Blaise de 
 Monluc, appointed by Henry II at Strozzi's own request 
 to serve as governor of the town. A poor Gascon 
 gentleman by birth, who had entered the royal service 
 
 * Sozzini, p. 264.
 
 412 SIENA 
 
 as soon as he could swing a sword, he had been ad- 
 vanced in honor for the sole reason of merit until he 
 ranked with the best soldiers of his day. Loyal to his 
 king with every drop of his blood and full of frank 
 admiration for brave men, fair women, good wine, and 
 all similar bounties of a generous earth, he was just the 
 man to appreciate the exalted mood of the Sienese. 
 Late in life, during a period of leisure forced upon him 
 by a bullet wound, he sat down to write his autobiog- 
 raphy an amazing book, which Henry IV called the 
 "Soldier's Bible," and which treats of the Sienese siege 
 with a vividness obliterating all the intervening years. 
 
 Strozzi's new plan, the second string to his bow, was 
 as follows : Departing from Siena with the bulk of his 
 troops, he would establish a base in the rich Chiana 
 valley to the east, whence he could provision Siena at 
 pleasure in case Marignano continued the siege. If 
 Marignano, on the other hand, abandoning Siena, 
 fastened upon his heels, he would, under favoring cir- 
 cumstances, put everything upon the arbitrament of a 
 battle. The second eventuality came to pass. Strozzi 
 had hardly left Siena (July 17) when the Imperialists 
 made ready to follow. Some days of manoeuvring in 
 the Chiana region followed, reaching a fitting climax in 
 a great shock of arms on August 2, 1554, at the castle of 
 Marciano. Through a series of mishaps, among which, 
 according to Sienese tradition, treason had a part, 
 Strozzi was not only defeated but overwhelmed. Some 
 of his men, casting away their armor and weapons, 
 made their way back to Siena; Strozzi himself with the 
 remnant of his horse escaped to friendly Montalcino. 
 
 Siena, breathless for news of the host manoeuvring to
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 413 
 
 the east, heard only too soon of the events of that 
 August day of fierce sunshine. Toward evening the 
 first stragglers appeared, bleeding, covered with dust 
 and sweat, and dropping from sheer exhaustion in the 
 streets. "Never did spectacle so claim compassion as 
 this of the poor wounded, and especially the plight of 
 the French and Germans, who uttered sobbing cries 
 and held out their hands, asking for water and a bit of 
 salt for their wounds; so that men and women brought 
 them salt, bread, and wine, and aided them as best they 
 could. And I swear that I saw more than a hundred 
 men lean against a wall, unable to restrain their tears 
 for pity of these poor soldiers reduced to the last 
 extremity."* 
 
 The destruction of Strozzi's field army sounded the 
 doom of Siena. The victorious Imperialists could now 
 return, complete the blockade without hindrance, and 
 starve the town into surrender. Cold reason might 
 urge the citizens to end the struggle, but patriotism had 
 been fanned to a consuming flame, and patriotism 
 whispered to die rather than yield. This resolution, 
 taken by the rulers, was in harmony with the set de- 
 termination of the citizen body; needless to say it had 
 the enthusiastic approval of the buoyant and grandilo- 
 quent commander, Blaise de Monluc. 
 
 Shortly after the battle of August 2, the blockade of 
 Siena, maintained in a loose way since January, became 
 close and complete. And immediately prices rose and 
 a shortage announced itself in all articles of food. 
 Loyal peasants who tried to drive cattle or carry vege- 
 tables to market were seized by the Spaniards, plun- 
 
 * Sozzini, p. 272.
 
 414 SIENA 
 
 dered^of their goods, and hanged up by the roadside as 
 a warning to their fellows. All around the city the oaks 
 bore among the acorns of that autumn this horrible 
 human fruit. Strozzi, off at Montalcino, transmitted 
 hopeful messages of stores upon the way, to be followed 
 by a new French army sent to his good Sienese by their 
 beneficent protector, Henry II, but apart from a few 
 pack-asses who occasionally broke through the Spanish 
 lines under cover of night, nothing happened to lighten 
 the growing burden of starvation. With Strozzi indeed 
 rests no blame. He did what he could by sending stirring 
 appeals to the French court, but was unable to rouse the 
 distant government from the apathy which had over- 
 taken it with regard to all things Italian. 
 
 The siege in this final phase lasted eight terrible 
 months. On Christmas eve, Marignano, stirred by an 
 impatient message from Duke Cosimo at Florence, re- 
 solved to bring matters to a conclusion by a general 
 assault. His preparations were carefully made, but 
 were not kept so secret as to escape detection. Two 
 hours past midnight the great bell of the Mangia tower 
 boomed forth the news to the sleeping city; the citizens 
 and soldiers, springing from their beds, ran to their ap- 
 pointed posts; and the attack was victoriously repelled. 
 Thenceforth Marignano contented himself with the 
 slower methods of starvation. The soldiers taunted 
 one another from behind trench or bulwark; occasionally 
 cavalry bands, supported by arquebusiers on foot, skir- 
 mished in the valley below Porta San Marco; or again 
 Marignano enlivened the tedium of camp life by drop- 
 ping a few canon balls into the town such incidents as 
 these afforded food for daily gossip but did not incline
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 415 
 
 the balance one way or another. The real work of the 
 siege was done by hunger and disease. Cattle soon 
 ceased to be brought to market, and asses, dogs, cats, 
 and rats were greedily devoured.* If a peasant got 
 through the lines with a basket of figs or nuts, he was 
 surrounded in a moment by a shouting and gesticulating 
 crowd, wildly outbidding one another for his dainties. 
 The poor picked the weeds from the crevices of damp 
 walls and made them into a soup. The magistracy, 
 which, for the purpose of a better control, had con- 
 fiscated all grain and flour within the walls, saw with 
 anxiety the shrinkage of supplies, and repeatedly cut 
 down the weight of the daily loaf allotted to each 
 soldier and citizen. Finally, desperately resolved to 
 leave no stone unturned, the defenders decided to get 
 rid of the bocce disutili the useless mouths which 
 had to be fed, but did not strengthen the resistance. 
 The wonderfully expressive phrase illustrates the view- 
 point of a grim and patriotic people brought face to face 
 with disaster. As early as September the expulsions 
 began, involving sometimes the peasants who had fled 
 from their homes before the harrying Spaniards, some- 
 times the serving classes who waited upon the well-to- 
 do, and at last, the very orphans of the hospital. Oc- 
 casional bands of these expelled wretches the Imperial- 
 ists charitably let pass their lines; others they sternly 
 thrust back toward the walls and trenches, where, equally 
 rejected by both sides, they were left to wander, like 
 the wailing souls of Limbo, till death brought relief. 
 
 * Monluc, II, p. 89. "Les chatz se vendoinct trois et quatre escuz, et 
 le rat ung escu" at least those are the figures Monluc remembered fifteen 
 years after the event.
 
 416 SIENA 
 
 It was on October 5 that two hundred and fifty chil- 
 dren from the famous hospital of the Scala, ranging from 
 six to ten years of age, were led to the gate of Fonte 
 Branda. Accompanied by a group of men and women 
 who desired to improve the opportunity to effect their 
 own escape, they set out with the fall of night, carrying 
 their slender effects in bundles or thrown across the 
 backs of asses. They had not proceeded far upon their 
 way before they were challenged by a Spanish guard- 
 whereupon in the dark ensued a terrible scene of wanton 
 wickedness, and when the morning dawned the survivors 
 of that hapless caravan, sobbing, bleeding, robbed of 
 everything, were back at Fonte Branda gate. "The 
 spectacle would have made a Nero weep," says an eye- 
 witness, who adds that, unable to shake off the horrible 
 impression, he could neither eat nor drink for three 
 days.* 
 
 But let it not be imagined that the long and tragic 
 struggle spread an atmosphere of unbroken gloom over 
 the city. The natural gaiety and mercurial disposition 
 of the Sienese did not desert them in these days of trial, 
 and often filled the streets with laughter and amusement. 
 Monluc, who shared the faith that men were no worse 
 fighters for a little cheerfulness, saw many a sight which 
 stirred his pulse and filled him with admiration. f On 
 January 13, for instance, some youths improvised a 
 dance, un hallo tondo, in the Campo. Then with 
 
 * Sozzini, p. 307. 
 
 f His admiration for the women of Siena, who, from the lowest to the 
 highest classes, presented themselves to work with the men at the trenches 
 and bastions, led him to compose one of the most charming passages of his 
 book. "II ne sera jamais, dames siennoises, que je n'immortalize vostre 
 nom, tant que le livre de Monluc vivra: car, a la verite, vous estes dignes 
 d'immortelle louange si jamais f emmes le f eurent." Then he relates how at the
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 417 
 
 mounting zest they played at pallone * with half the 
 city looking on amidst applause; and finally, at a 
 trumpet signal, they divided as of old into three bands 
 according to terzi, and played with unabated passion at 
 the rude and vigorous game of pugna. The French 
 commander, surrounded by a group of his transalpine 
 officers, looked on at the wild frolic, and was so amazed 
 at the unquenchable vivacity which could shake off the 
 sadness of the time, that a wave of emotion passed over 
 him and filled his eyes with tears. Hardly was the 
 game ended when the cry arose from all sides: alle 
 guardie, alle guardie. "And in a flash they rushed from 
 the piazza to get their weapons and present themselves 
 at their appointed posts. "f 
 
 At last when spring came and no French army was 
 on the way for their relief, the famished burghers saw 
 that they had no alternative but to surrender. They 
 opened reluctant^ negotiations with Charles his^aljy. 
 Duke^ Cosimo, playing the part of mediator and after 
 longjliscussions, on April 17, 1555, a treaty was drawn 
 up which,_isaving appearances for the besieged, none 
 fheless^ signified snhje^ti^rf "f The French garrison 
 was to march out with the honors of war, but Sienaliad 
 to accept the protection ^)f the emperor, who received 
 the__right to change the government and to occupy the 
 
 beginning of the siege the noble and well-to-do ladies divided themselves into 
 three companies with leaders, banners, and appropriate and beautiful cos- 
 tumes, and how, company-wise, they marched each day to their work, singing 
 a song in honor of France as they fared along. And, says the emphatic 
 soldier, "I would give my best horse if I could remember that song to quote 
 it here." Monluc, II, pp. 55-56. 
 
 * A variety of foot-ball. 
 
 t Sozzini, p. 354. 
 
 J The treaty will be found in Pecci, "Memorie," etc., IV, aiS/.
 
 418 SIENA 
 
 town with his troops. Under the circumstances an 
 additional article, declaring that the republic retained 
 its liberties, was, of course, meaningless. And that 
 was the view of a group of patriots who in literal truth 
 preferred exile and death to living in subjection. When, 
 therefore, on April 21, the gates were thrown open and 
 Monluc, preceded by his arquebusiers and pikemen, 
 marched out with drums and banners like a conqueror, 
 there went with him a company of eight hundred 
 Sienese, who turned their steps toward Montalcino, 
 resolved to live out their days on earth in the little 
 mountain town as freemen wearing no lord's livery. 
 Monluc has left a moving picture of these heroic 
 victims on the march, showing us the old women and 
 infants seated on sumpter mules amidst the wreck of 
 their belongings, while the rest plodded along on foot, 
 many an old man leading his wife by one hand and his 
 daughter by the other.* Arrived at Montalcino, which, 
 with some of the neighboring points of Southern Tus- 
 cany, was still occupied by the French and not in- 
 cluded in the capitulation, they set up what in a spirit 
 of stubborn pride they called "The Sienese Republic 
 in Montalcino." The republic, according to their view, 
 was to be found wherever there were unconquered 
 Sienese. 
 
 A few hundred feet from the Roman gate, by which 
 he issued forth, Monluc was met by his opponent, 
 Marignano, who had won the reputation during the 
 siege of being both an efficient and a courteous com- 
 mander. Leaning from their horses they embraced 
 effusively, and fared along together for a space, discuss- 
 
 * Monluc, II, p. 102.
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 419 
 
 ing with the easy comradery of men-at-arms the inci- 
 dents of the late campaign. The occasion was of the 
 sort to draw out all of the Gascon's native talent for 
 dramatic display. He tells us that he condescended to 
 point out to Marignano some of the mistakes which that 
 general had made in the conduct of the siege. "Un' 
 altra volta saro piu savio," quietly responded the well- 
 bred Italian, showing thereby that he could use his 
 tongue quite as effectively as his sword.* On taking 
 leave of one another, Marignano rode back to lead his 
 Spaniards into the conquered town, and presently the 
 ringing of bells and the roar of artillery declared that 
 Siena had again passed under the dominion of the 
 emperor. 
 
 The aging Charles did not enjoy the recovery of 
 Siena long. In the very year of the surrender, broken 
 by the burden of life, he began to relinquish his honors 
 and possessions to his son Philip, and Philip, hard- 
 pressed like his father by the &mg ot France, soon dis- 
 covered that his position in Italy required close and 
 unrelaxing vigilance. In order to keep the valuable 
 friendship of Duke Cosimo of Florence, he was presently 
 obliged to cede to that sovereign Siena and all her terri- 
 tory (July 3> I 557)- it is only too plain that Cosimo, 
 wHp was one of the subtlest of diplomats, had been 
 workinj^steadily toward this end ever since he offered 
 to help Charles subdue the recalcitrant city. Naturally 
 he was not minded to let Montalcino and the southern 
 rim of the Sienese contado escape his grasp. Following 
 his custom, he watchfully bided his time, and when, in 
 tEe year 1559, in the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis. Henry 
 
 * Monluc, II, p. 104.
 
 420 SIENA 
 
 II agreed to hand over the last French outpost in Tus- 
 cany to Philip,, Cosimo was on hand to remind his 
 Spanish friend that Montalcino was indubitably implied 
 in the cession of 1557. Thus "the Sienese Republic in 
 Montalcino," after four years of undaunted struggle 
 against the fates, came to an end, and over the undivided 
 territory of Siena reigned the House of Medici.* The 
 state was not fused with the Florentine state, for it 
 maintained a separate administrative existence, but 
 henceforth it snared with Florence a common sovereign 
 and a comrnon^3estin^._ In this limited sense Siena 
 had, after a stubborn resistance prolonged through four 
 centuries, been at last subjected to the rule of the rival 
 commonwealth. Perhaps it would correspond more 
 nearly with the facTs to declare that both citieshad 
 ims *"> frh<* nile_and vigor of the Medi- 
 
 The reader who has followed with sympathy the long 
 story of the commonwealth of Siena will not refuse to 
 share the grief of the citizens over its end. And yet, if 
 he listens to the voice of reason, he will be forced to 
 acknowledge that the end was prepared by ineluctable 
 necessity, and came in the fulness of time. To every 
 thing under the heavens there is a season. Thus for 
 the free communes there was a season which opened 
 to them an escape out of the prison of feudalism, and 
 which endowed man with a new conception of his 
 powers and purposes. The communes have the im- 
 mense merit of having created a new civilization, a 
 
 * For these last events and arrangements consult Pecci, "Memorie," 
 etc., IV.
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF SIENA 421 
 
 civilization, in fact, with the elaboration of which the 
 world has been occupied down to our own day. In the 
 glory of the city republics of Italy, in the immortal 
 achievements of Venice, Milan, Florence, and the rest, 
 Siena has a small but assured share. But time revolved 
 and the season came for political organizations of an 
 ampler sort. Then it was that Siena began to show 
 signs of gathering perplexity and insufficiency. She 
 could not solve the problem of a stable government; she 
 could not protect from robbery and violence the country 
 population committed to her care; she could not main- 
 tain her independence except by binding herself, at the 
 sacrifice of dignity, to a protector. It was as right as 
 it was inevitable that she should terminate her career by 
 being gathered under a government representing all 
 Tuscany, regrettable though it was that Tuscany in its 
 turn was not gathered under a government which em- 
 bodied the unity of the Italian people. Against that 
 natural consummation of the impressive development 
 which had given the inhabitants of the peninsula a 
 common speech, common interests, and a common 
 culture, fate had, for the present at least, set its face. 
 None the less, if Italian unity was delayed, its coming 
 was certain, and, as a measure of preparation, the disap- 
 pearance of the Sienese republic imposed itself by the 
 logic inherent in events. 
 
 Thus, coolly, the historian, occupied with the objec- 
 tive study of man in society, records a political catas- 
 trophe, but even as he writes he is reminded by his 
 quickened pulses that the heart has a share in human 
 events which is beyond the control of reason. No 
 argument of science can rob death of its sting, and
 
 422 SIENA 
 
 no overthrow of a heroic people will fail to stir our 
 regret; for, says the poet, contemplating the end of 
 the last of the Italian communes the end of Venice, 
 
 "Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade 
 Of that which once was great has passed away."
 
 COMPLETE LIST OF PRINTED WORKS 
 
 REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT 
 
 AND FOOTNOTES 
 
 "Archivio Storico Italiano" (since 1842). Vieusseux. Firenze. 
 
 Arias, G. "Itrattati commerciali della repubblica fiorentina." Le Mon- 
 
 nier. Firenze, 1901. 
 Ashley, W. J. "Introduction to English Economic History and Theory." 
 
 2 vols. New York, 1892. 
 "Atti e Memorie . . . della R. Accademia dei Rozzi." 3 vols. Siena, 
 
 1870-88. 
 
 Banchi, L. "Le prediche volgari di S. Bernardino. 3 vols. Siena, 1880. 
 Banchi, L. "Statuti volgari de lo spedale di Santa Maria Vergine di Siena, 
 
 scritti 1'anno MCCCV." Siena, 1864. 
 Banchi, L. "I Posti della Maremma durante la Repubblica." Firenze, 
 
 1871. 
 
 Bargagli-Petrucci, F. "Le Fonti di Siena." 2 vols. Olschki, 1906. 
 Bartoli, A. "Storia della letteratura italiana." 8 vols. Sansoni. Fi- 
 renze, 1878. 
 Bartoli, A. "Della Vita di Dante" (section of same author's "Storia della 
 
 letteratura italiana). 
 Berenson, B. " The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance." Putnam. 
 
 New York, 1897. 
 
 Berlinghieri, R. "Notizie degli Aldobrandeschi." Porri. Siena, 1842. 
 Bernardino, San. "Le prediche volgari," etc. Edited by Banchi. 3 vols. 
 
 Siena, 1880. 
 Blashfield, E. H. and E. W. "Italian Cities." 2 vols. Scribner. New 
 
 York, 1901. 
 
 Boccaccio. "II Decamerone." 
 
 Bonichi, Bindo. "Rime." Romagnoli. Bologne, 1867. 
 Borghesi and Banchi. "Nuovi documenti per la storia dell' arte senese." 
 
 Torrini. Siena, 1808. 
 
 Brogi, R. "II Palio di Siena." Torrini. Siena, 1894. 
 "Bulletino Senese di storia patria." (Since 1894.) Sordomuti di L. Lazzeri. 
 
 Siena. 
 Burckhardt, J. "Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien." 2 vols. See- 
 
 mann. Leipzig, 1885. 
 
 Burckhardt, J. " Der Cicerone." gteAuflage. Seemann. Leipzig, 1904. 
 Caggese, R. "Un comune libero alle porte di Firenze nel secolo XIII." 
 
 Seeber. Firenze, 1905. 
 
 Canestrelli, A. " L'abbazia di San Galgano." Alinari. Firenze, 1896. 
 Capecelatro, A. "Storia di Santa Caterina da Siena e del papato del suo 
 
 tempo. Siena, 1878. 
 
 Cappelletti. "Le chiese d' Italia." 30 vols. Venezia, 1862 +. 
 Carpellini, D. C. F. " Gli Assempri di Fra Filippo." Gati. Siena, 1864. 
 Catherine, Saint. "Opere." Published bv G. Gigli. 4 vols. Siena and 
 
 Lucca, 1707 +. 
 
 423
 
 424 PRINTED WORKS REFERRED TO 
 
 Catherine, Saint. "Epistole della serafica Vergine S. Caterina da Siena." 
 
 With notes by P. F. Burlamacchi. 4 vols. Milan, 1842. 
 " Conferenze." Published by the Commissione Senese di Storia Patria. 3 
 
 vols. Siena, 1895-97. Nuova serie (2 vols. 1900-1). 
 " Constitute (il) del comune di Siena dell' anno 1262." Edited by L. 
 
 Zdekauer. Hoepli. Milan, 1897. 
 " Constituto (il) del comune di Siena, volgarizzato nel MCCCCIX-MCCCX." 
 
 Siena, 1903. 
 Coulton, G. G. "From St. Francis to Dante: A Translation of all that is of 
 
 Primary Interest in the Chronicle of Salimbene." David Nutt. Lon- 
 don, 1906. 
 
 Courteault. " Blaise de Monluc, Historien." Paris, 1908. 
 Dante Alighieri. "La Divina Commedia." 
 Davidsohn, R. "Geschichte von Florenz." 2 vols (to 1908). Mittler. 
 
 Berlin, 1896, 1908. 
 Davidsohn. " Forschungen zur Geschichte von Florenz." 3 vols. Mittler. 
 
 Berlin, 1896-1901. 
 
 Douglas, Langton. "A History of Siena." Murray. London, 1902. 
 Drane, A. T. " The History of Saint Catherine of Siena." 2 vols. Long- 
 mans. London, 1899. 
 
 Falletti-Fossati, C. "Costumi senesi," etc. Siena, 1882. 
 Ficker, J. "Forschungen zur Reichs und Rechtsgeschichte Italiens." 4 
 
 vols. Wagner. Innsbruck, 1874. 
 Fioretti di S. Francesco d'Assisi. "Per cura di Mons." Leopoldo Arnoni. 
 
 Roma, 1889. 
 
 Folgore da S. Gimignano. "Rime." Romagnoli. Bologna, 1880. 
 Gardner, E. G. "Saint Catherine of Siena." London (Dent) and New 
 
 York (Dutton), 1907. 
 Gaspary, A. "Geschichte der Italienischen Literatur." 2 vols. Berlin, 
 
 1885. 
 
 Gigli, G. "Diario Sanese." 2 vols. Siena, 1854. 
 Gregorovius, F. "Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter." 7 vols. 
 
 4 te Auflage. Cotta. Stuttgart, 1889 +. 
 Hartwig, O. " Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der Stadt Florenz." 
 
 Elwert. Marburg, 1875. 
 Hegel, Karl. "Geschichte der Stadteverfassung von Italien." Leipzig, 
 
 1847. 
 Heinemann, Lothar von. "Zur Entstehung der Stodtverfassung in Italien." 
 
 Leipzig, 1896. 
 Hewlett, M. "The Road in Tuscany." 2 vols. Macmillan. London 
 
 and New York, 1904. 
 Heywood, W. "Our Lady of August and the Palio of Siena." Torrini. 
 
 Siena, 1899. 
 
 Heywood, W. "The 'Ensamples' of Fra Filippo." Torrini. Siena, 1901. 
 Heywood, W. "A Pictorial Chronicle of Siena." Torrini. Siena, 1902. 
 Heywood, W. "Palio and Ponte." An Account of the Sports of Central 
 
 Italy from the Age of Dante to the 2oth Century. Methuen. London, 
 
 1904. 
 
 Heywood, W., and Olcott, L. "Guide to Siena." Torrini. Siena, 1903. 
 Hodgkin, T. "Italy and Her Invaders." 8 vols. Clarendon Press. Ox- 
 ford, 1885 +. 
 "Libri dell' entrata e dell' uscita della repubblica di Siena." Published by 
 
 the Commissione Senese di Storia Patria. 2 + vols. Siena, 1903 +. 
 Lisini, A. " Provvedimenti economic! della repubblica di Siena nel 1382." 
 
 Torrini. Siena, 1885.
 
 PRINTED WORKS REFERRED TO 425 
 
 Lisini, A. "Le tavolette dipinte di Biccherna e di Gabella." Olschki. 
 
 Firenze, 1902. 
 
 Luchaire, G. "Le statut des Neuf Gouverneurs et Defenseurs de la com- 
 mune de Sienne." Extrait des Melanges d' Archeologie et d'Histoire 
 
 public's par 1'Ecole francaise de Rome. Tome XXI. Rome, 1901. 
 Luchaire, G. "Documenti per la storia dei rivolgimenti politici del comune 
 
 di Siena dal 1354 al 1369." Lyon and Paris, 1906. 
 Malavolti, O. "Historia de' batti e guerre de' Senesi." Venezia, 1599. 
 Marenduzzo, A. " Gli Assempri di Fra Filippo da Siena." Nava. Siena, 
 
 1899. 
 Massera, A. F. "I Sonnetti di Cecco Angiolieri." Zanichelli. Bologna, 
 
 1906. 
 Mengozzi, N. "II Monte dei Paschi di Siena e le aziende in esso riunite." 
 
 6 vols. Lazzeri. Siena, 1891 -f-. 
 
 Milanesi, G. " Documenti per la storia dell' art esenese." Porri, Siena, 1856. 
 "Miscellanea Storica Sanese." Edited by O. Porri. 1844. 
 "Miscellanea Storica Senese." Published at Siena. 5 vols (1893-99). 
 Molmenti, P. "Venice: Its Individual Growth," etc. Translated by 
 
 Horatio Brown. 6 vols. McClurg. Chicago, 1906 -f-. 
 Mondolfo, U. G. "Pandolfo Petrucci, Signore di Siena." Siena, 1899. 
 Monluc, Blaise de. " Commentaires et lettres." Edited by Alphonse de 
 
 Ruble. 5 vols. Paris, 1864 +. 
 Montalvo, A. "Relazione della guerra di Siena." Edited by Ricomanni 
 
 and Grottanelli. Torino, 1863. 
 
 "Monte (II) dei Paschi di Siena," etc. See Mengozzi. 
 "Monumenta Germanise Historica." Hanover, 1826 +. 
 Muratori, L. A. "Rerum Italicarum Scriptores." 25 vols. Mediolani, 
 
 I723-5 1 - 
 Muratori, L. A. " Antiquitates Italicae medii aevi." 6 vols. Mediolani, 
 
 1738-42. 
 Norton, C. E. "Historical Studies of Church-building in the Middle Ages." 
 
 London, 1881. 
 
 "Ordo omciorum ecclesise senensis." Bologna, 1766. 
 Paoli, C. "La battaglia di Montaperti" (in vol. II of "Bulletino della 
 
 societa senese di storia patria." Siena, 1869). 
 Paoli, C. "II Libro di Montaperti." Vieusseux. Firenze, 1899 (vol. IX 
 
 of "Documenti di Storia Italiana"). 
 Paoli C. "Siena alle fiere di Sciampagna." In Conferenze della com- 
 
 missione senese di storia patria. Siena, 1898. 
 Paoli, C. "I Monti o fazioni della Repubblica di Siena" (In "Nuova 
 
 Antologia," August, 1891). 
 Paoli and Piccolomini. "Lettere volgari del secolo XIII." Romagnoli. 
 
 Bologna, 1871. 
 Pasqui, U. "Documenti per la storia della citta di Arezzo." Vieusseux. 
 
 Firenze, 1899 (vol. XI of "Documenti di Storia Italiana"). 
 Pecci, G. A. "Storia del vescovado di Siena." Lucca, 1748. 
 Pecci, G. A. "Memorie Storico-critiche della citta di Siena." 4 vols. 
 
 Siena, 1755. 
 
 "Periodico di Numismatica." (Since 1868.) 
 Petrarca. "II Canzoniere." 
 Piccolomini, ^Eneas Silvius (Pope Pius II). "La storia di due amanti." 
 
 Milan, i. 1864. 
 
 Pliny. "Natural History" ("Historia Naturalis"). 
 Polidori, F. L., and Banchi, L. "Statuti Senesi. 3 vols. Romagnoli." 
 
 Bologna. 1863-77.
 
 426 PRINTED WORKS REFERRED TO 
 
 Professione, A. "Siena e le compagnie di ventura." Civitanova-Marche, 
 
 1898. 
 
 Ptolemy. "Geography." 
 Repetti, E. "Dizionario geografico fisico-storico della Toscana." 5 vols. 
 
 Firenze, 1833-45. 
 
 Richter, L. "Siena." Seemann. Leipzig, 1901. 
 Rondoni, G. "SenaVetus." Fratelli Bocca. Torino, 1892. 
 Rondoni, G. "Tradizioni popolari e leggende di un comune medioevale 
 
 e del sur contado." Firenze, 1886. 
 
 Rossetti, D. G. "Early Italian Poets." Dent. London, 1904. 
 Salvemini, G. "Magnati e Popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295." Firenze, 
 
 1899. 
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 Savigny, F. C. "Geschichte des Romischen Rechts im Mittelalter." 7 
 
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 kiers zur Kirche." Leipzig, 1899. 
 Scudder, Vida. " Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters." Dutton. 
 
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 Sermini, G. "Novelle." Vigo. Livorno, 1874. 
 Sozzini, A. "Diario delle cose awenute in Siena dal 20 Luglio 1550 al 28 
 
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 "Studi Giurdici dedicati a F. Schupfer." Bocca. Torino, 1898. 
 "Studi Senesi nel Circolo Giuridico." 20 + volumes. Siena. 
 Tacitus. " Historiae." 
 Thureau-Dangin, P. "S. Bernardino da Siena." (This Italian edition is 
 
 fuller than the original French.) Siena, 1897. 
 Tocco. "L'eresia nel medio evo." Firenze, 1884. 
 Tommasi, G. "Dell* Historic di Siena." Venezia, 1625. 
 Toti, A. "Atti di votazione della citta di Siena." Siena, 1870. 
 Ugurgieri, A. "Le pompe senesi." 2 vols. Pistoia, 1649. 
 Vasari, G. "Le Vite de' piu eccellenti pittori," etc. Edited by G. Milanesi. 
 
 9 vols. Sansoni. Firenze, 1880 + 
 Villani, G. "Croniche." Edited by F. G. Dragomanni. 4 vols. Firenze. 
 
 1844. 
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 Firenze, 1893. 
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 Torrini. Siena, 1890. 
 Zdekauer, L. "II constitute del comune di Siena dell' anno 1262." Hoepli. 
 
 Milan, 1897. 
 
 Zdekauer. " Lo studio di Siena nel Rinascimento." Hoepli. Milan, 1894. 
 Zdekauer. "Sulle origini dello studio di Siena." Siena, 1896. 
 Zdekauer, L. "La vita privata nel dugento." " La vita publica nel dugen- 
 
 to." Two lectures published with documents. Siena, 1896-7. 
 Zdekauer, L. "Sugli Statuti del Monte Amiata" (see "Studi Giuridici 
 
 dedicati a F. Schupfer"). 
 "Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft." 
 "Zeitschrift filr Handelsrecht."
 
 INDEX 
 
 ADEODATTJS, bishop of Siena, 24, 27. 
 
 Agniolo di Tura, 211. 
 
 Alaric, 12, 13. 
 
 Aldobrandeschi, 40, 65; as lords of 
 Grosseto, 122; at Montaperti, 
 178, 180; and the Nine, 203-4; 
 slow decay of, 231-2. 
 
 Alexander VI (Pope), 403. 
 
 Alleluia (The) of, 1233, 251. 
 
 Ambrogio (The Blessed) of Siena, 
 
 255- 
 
 Andrea Dei, 198, 205. 
 
 Ansano, Sant', Sienese protomartyr, 
 ii, 22, 28, 85, 183, 317. 
 
 Antimo, Sant', 41. 
 
 Aquinas (Saint Thomas), on gam- 
 bling, 349- 
 
 Arbia, 176, 179, 182. 
 
 Ardengeschi, 40, 61, 62, 65. 
 
 Arezzo, quarrel with Siena over 
 eighteen parishes, 22-4, 52, 76; 
 bishop of acquires immunities, 
 42; divides body of Sant' Ansano 
 with Siena, 85; is subjected to 
 Florence, 389. 
 
 Army, composition of in cities, 164- 
 6; army of Siena, 281. 
 
 Arti. See guilds. 
 
 Asciano, 157, 161. 
 
 Augustus, founder of Roman Siena, 
 9- 
 
 BABYLONISH Captivity, terminated, 
 270. 
 
 Balestre (cross-bows), 166-7. 
 
 Baiia, 128, 129, 130; as governing 
 committee, 399-400. 
 
 Banking companies of Siena, 99, 
 109; their connection with the 
 papacy, 110-12; the Buonsignori 
 112-3; signs of decay of, 225; ac- 
 quire castles in the contado, 236-7. 
 
 Baratteria. See gambling. 
 
 Barili, 335. 
 
 Bartoli (Taddeo), 326. 
 
 Battaglie. See games. 
 
 Bells (of Siena), 296-8. 
 
 Beneventum (Battle of), 187. 
 
 Benincasa, Jacopo and Lapa, par- 
 ents of Saint Catherine, 259. 
 Benvenuto di Giovanni, 328. 
 Bernardino (San), 355; sermons of, 
 
 394- 
 
 Bernardo (The Blessed), 255. 
 
 Biccherna, 144-6; housed on Cam- 
 po, 296. 
 
 Bishop of Siena, acquires immuni- 
 ties, 42^-4; receives submissions of 
 nobles, 63; himself subjected to 
 Siena, 63; review of his position, 72. 
 
 Black Death. See grande mortalita. 
 
 Boccaccio, 211, 241; popularizes the 
 novella, 356. 
 
 Bolgano (the Sienese mint), 147; on 
 Campo, 294. gj 
 
 Boni homines, 49-50. 
 
 Borghesi (Niccolo), assassinated, 
 400-1. 
 
 Borgia (Caesar), 402, 403. 
 
 Breve consulum, 54, 128. 
 
 Buonconvento, 201. 
 
 Buonsignori (The), 112-3. 
 
 Byzantine art, 311-2. 
 
 CACCIACONTI, 40, 61, 62 (note), 65, 
 i57, 230. 
 
 Calabria (Duke of), in Siena, 397. 
 
 Camarlingo (The), 145, 373. 
 
 Camollia (terzo). See terzi and 
 porla. 
 
 Campo, 212; its position, 276; gov- 
 ernment buildings erected on, 294; 
 form of, 301; fountain on, 304; 
 jousting on, 330-40; life on, 348- 
 52; games on during siege (1555), 
 416-7. 
 
 Caorsini, 101. 
 
 Capella di piazza, 209. 
 
 CapUano di gtterra, 204. 
 
 Capocchio, 257. 
 
 Captain (The) of the People, 134, 
 142. 
 
 Carroccio, 78, 167-8. 
 
 Castellano, 235. 
 
 Castel Vecchio (castellum vetus), 8, 
 43, 276. 
 
 427
 
 428 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Castiglione d'Orcia, 240-1. 
 
 Castruccio Castracane, 202. 
 
 Catherine (Saint), 258 /.; her re- 
 tirement, 260; enters the world, 
 261; her ecstasies, 263; and 
 Niccold Tuldo, 265-6; and Flor- 
 ence, 267 ff.; and the pope, 268 ff.; 
 at Avignon, 268-9; death of, 272; 
 her Letters, 355. 
 
 Cecco Angiolieri, 353-4. 
 
 Chains (of Siena), 201. 
 
 Champagne, fairs of, 96 ff. 
 
 Charlemagne, destroys Lombard 
 kingdom, 30; is crowned em- 
 peror, 30. 
 
 Charles IV (Emperor), comes to 
 Italy and Siena, 213, 218-9; de- 
 feated by the Sienese, 221-2, 262. 
 
 Charles V (Emperor), protects 
 Siena, 405-6; Siena revolt against, 
 407; orders siege of Siena, 408 ff.; 
 abdicates, 419. 
 
 Charles of Anjou, 186, 187, 188, 189, 
 190. 
 
 Chiusdino, 362, 376, 385. 
 
 Christian, archbishop of Mainz and 
 Italian legate, 56. 
 
 Chronicles (mediaeval), character- 
 ized, 207-8. 
 
 Church (The), sources of power, 72- 
 74; dangers threatening, 92-93; 
 denounces usury, 102; elasticity 
 of, 250; the Great Schism, 271. 
 
 Church (The) of Siena, relation to the 
 state, 74-76; early dependence of 
 state on, 86-8 7, 294 ; clergy of, 280- 1 . 
 
 Cistercians (Order of), 362, 363; 
 ideal of, 366; decay of, 376-7; 
 leaves San Galgano, 381. 
 
 Cities, struggle against feudal sys- 
 tem, 33-4; Lombard and empe- 
 ror, 55; Tuscan and emperor, 55- 
 6; necessity of struggle against 
 feudalism, 60; league in 1197 of 
 Tuscan cities, 65. 
 
 Citta (terzo), 276-7. 
 
 Churches (Sienese): S. Cristofano, 
 86, 141, 294-5, 307; San Pellegri- 
 no, 86, 145; San Domenico, 260, 
 2 73> 37! San Francesco, 307; 
 Cathedral, history of, 283 ff.; 
 Duccio paints for, 315. 
 
 Cimabue, 313-4. 
 
 Clement VII (Pope), and Siena, 
 405-6. 
 
 Clement VII (Anti-Pope), elected, 
 271. 
 
 Clergy (of Siena), its ramifications, 
 280-1. 
 
 Colle (Battle of), 188-9. 
 
 Comitatus, 36; dissolution of, 39; 
 corresponds with diocese, 153; of 
 Florence-Fiesole, 153-4. See con- 
 tado and county. 
 
 Commerce, first quickening of in 
 Middle Age, 96; early Sienese, 
 99-100; growth of, 113; com- 
 merce as source of Sienese wealth, 
 117; reprisals, 118-9; as cause of 
 political expansion, 1212; in 
 fourteenth century, 2256. 
 
 Communal liberties, misconception 
 as to their origin, 25; their real 
 origin, 45 ff. 
 
 Commune, birth of, 52; task of in 
 Siena, 281-2. 
 
 Companies of Adventure, 244-7, 
 
 377-9- 
 
 Company of the Hat, defeated (1363), 
 218, 246. 
 
 Conrad (of Hohenstaufen), 171. 
 
 Conradin (of Hohenstaufen), 136, 
 187-8. 
 
 Constitution (Sienese) of 1262, 75, 
 130; and usury, 105; analysis of, 
 140 ff.; and the potesta, 143-4; 
 and heresy, 258. 
 
 Constitution (The) of 1309-10, 
 analysis of, 196 ff. 
 
 Constitution (The) of Siena, origin 
 of, 129. 
 
 Consuls, origin of, 50; consuls of 
 Siena, 51-2, 128; evolution of, 
 54; passing of, 67; originally city 
 nobles, 69, 131; of peasant com- 
 munities, 233-4. 
 
 Contado, rule of Nine in, 202-4; 
 problems and conditions of, 229 ff.; 
 insecurity in, 239^. Seecomitatus. 
 
 Contrade (ward societies of Siena), 
 
 346-7- 
 
 Cosimo (Duke of Florence), 409, 
 414, 417; acquires Siena, 419-20. 
 
 Council (The) of the Bell, 131; exer- 
 cises sovereign power, 141; re- 
 duced importance of, 197; hous- 
 ing of, 294-5, 299; power of 
 passes to Balia, 399-400. 
 
 Count (local ruler), 36-7, 39, 44-5, 
 47, 55-
 
 INDEX 
 
 429 
 
 County of Siena, geographical lim- 
 its, 37- 
 
 Cozzarelli, 335. 
 Croce di Travaglio, 276. 
 Cruelty (mediaeval), 252-3. 
 
 DANTE, and Siena, 115, 124, 152; 
 as throwing light upon the man- 
 ners of his day, 151-3; and Fari- 
 nata, 1 70; and Bocca degli Abba- 
 ti, 181; and Provenzano and 
 Salvani, 188; and Henry VII, 
 200; and highwaymen, 241; and 
 Capocchio, 257; and Fonte Bran- 
 da, 303-4; and the game of 
 Zara, 351; and Cecco Angiolieri, 
 
 354- 
 
 Democracy, in Italian communes, 
 68; as basis of the Sienese consti- 
 tution, 127; its limited character 
 in Siena, 194 ff. 
 
 Divieto (prohibition to export food), 
 238. 
 
 Dodici. See Twelve. 
 
 Dodicini. See Twelve and monte. 
 
 Dofano, church at, 85. 
 
 Dominicans (Order of), 376. 
 
 Duccio di Buoninsegna, his life and 
 works, 310-9. 
 
 ECONOMIC decay (of Siena), 225. 
 Economic policy, of government of 
 
 Siena, 237-9. 
 Emperor, Holy Roman, 32; his 
 
 weakness, 33-4. 
 Episcopatus (diocese), 36. 
 Etruscans, 4-8. 
 Ezzelino (lord of Treviso), 253. 
 
 FAIRS, of Champagne, 96 ff.; Italians 
 at, 98; Sienese at, 99; banking at, 
 106-8. 
 
 Famines (in Siena), 210. 
 
 Farinata degli Uberti, 170, 178, 185; 
 saves Florence, 186. 
 
 Federighi, 300, 333. _ 
 
 Feudalism, origin in Italy, 31-2; 
 characteristics of 33-4; around 
 Siena, 40-42; emperor upholds, 
 60; decay of, 204, 229-31; rela- 
 tions of lords and peasants under 
 233-4; persistence of, 248. 
 
 Feuds (of families in Siena), 208 ff., 
 242-3. 
 
 Fifteen (The). See Riformatori. 
 
 Filippo (Fra) Agazzari, 355. 
 
 Florence, consuls of, 52; resists 
 seizure of Montepulciano by 
 Siena, 66; and the coinage of 
 money, 108; commercially jealous 
 of Siena, 121; wars with Siena, 
 I49ff-i head of Tuscany, 199, 202, 
 388; quarrels with pope, 267-9; 
 and the Renaissance, 326-7; new 
 ambitions of, 389-92. 
 
 Florin (The), 108. 
 
 Folgore da San Gimignano, 340,353. 
 
 Forteguerri, 40, 61, 237. 
 
 Fortini (Pietro), 356. 
 
 Fountains: Fonte Branda, 259, 303; 
 Fonte Nuova, 304; Fonte d'Ovile, 
 304; Fonte Follonica, 304; Fonte 
 Gaia, 304-5. 
 
 Francesco di Giorgio, 328. 
 
 Francis (Saint), in Siena, 70, 376. 
 
 Franks, invade Italy, 30; their ad- 
 ministration, 36. 
 
 Frederick I (Emperor), 55, 56. 
 
 Frederick II (Emperor), 168-9, 170, 
 374- 
 
 GAIXJANO (San), his life, 362-3. 
 
 Galgano (San), history of abbey of, 
 362 ff.; services to Siena, 373-4; 
 decay of, 380 ff. 
 
 Gambling, 349-5*- 
 
 Games (Sienese), jousting, 338-40; 
 elmora, 341-2; pugna, 342-4, 4*75 
 pallone, 344, 417; polio, 344-7. 
 
 Gastald, a Lombard official, 20-21, 
 47, 88. 
 
 Gates of Siena). See porta. 
 
 General Council. See Council of the 
 Bell. 
 
 Gentiluomini. See grandi and monte. 
 
 Ghibellines, 136, 137, 155, 169; 
 their triumph (1260), 185-6; ex- 
 cluded from office, 196. 
 
 Ghiberti (Lorenzo), 358-60. 
 
 Ghino di Tacco, 241. 
 
 Gian Galeazzo (lord of Milan), 
 390-2. 
 
 Giordano, Count of San Severino, 
 173, 176; commander-in-chief at 
 Montaperti, 178; enters Florence, 
 185; identifies the body of Man- 
 fred, 187. 
 
 Giotto, renews painting, 313-4, 319. 
 
 Giovanni Colombini (The Blessed), 
 256.
 
 430 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Giovanni (San), d'Asso, 61, 236-7. 
 
 Godipert, judge of Siena, killed by 
 the Aretines, 23. 
 
 Grande mortalita (1348), 208,2 10-11, 
 299. 
 
 Grandi, 69, 70, 133; excluded from 
 office, 138-9, 193; in revolution 
 (1355), 213-5; t heir wa y of u ' vin g> 
 278-9; Pius II labors in behalf of, 
 394-6. 
 
 Gregory IX (Pope), 268; returns to 
 Rome, 270. 
 
 Grosseto, capture by Siena, 122-3; 
 in revolt, 173; under the Nine, 203, 
 231. 
 
 Guelphs, 136, 137, 169; Florence as 
 head of, 155, 172, 199; their tri- 
 umph "in Tuscany, 190; their 
 triumph in Siena, 197, 199. 
 
 Guidi (The), 155, 156, 157, 161, 185. 
 
 Guido da Siena, 311, 312. 
 
 Guidoriccio da Fogliano, 321. 
 
 Guilds, origin in Siena, 114; the 
 wool guild, 114-5; regulations as 
 to, 1 1 6; their weakness, 117; 
 merchant guild in control, 195-6; 
 small guilds against Nine, 205-7; 
 guilds under the Twelve, 216-7; 
 decay of wool guild, 226-7; signifi- 
 cance of, 281. 
 
 HAWKWOOD, SIR JOHN, 247, 378-9. 
 
 Henry II (King of France), ally of 
 Siena, 409. 
 
 Henry III (Emperor), issues di- 
 ploma to Bishop of Siena, 42-3. 
 
 Henry VI (Emperor), grants charter 
 to Siena, 56-7; effect in Tuscany 
 of death, 64, 158; protects San 
 Galgano, 364. 
 
 Henry VII (Emperor), comes to 
 Italy (1310), 200; before Siena, 
 201-2. 
 
 Heresy, in Siena, 256-7. 
 
 Hohenstaufen (The), 136, 171, 191. 
 
 Hospital (Sienese) of the Scala, 90-2; 
 during siege (1555), 416. 
 
 IMMUNITIES, episcopal, 32-3, 41; of 
 
 bishop of Siena, 42^". 
 Innocent III (Pope), protects San 
 
 Galgano, 365. 
 Inquisition (in Siena), 258. 
 Interdict, against Siena, 111-2; 
 
 against Florence, 268. 
 
 Italian race, origin of, 28-9. 
 
 Italy, Union of, 29-30, 249, 421; 
 political development of in four- 
 teenth century, 388; threatened 
 by France and Spain, 396; invaded 
 by France and Spain, 401, 408. 
 
 JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA, fountain of 
 305, 327; as innovator, 332-3. 
 
 Jerome St., laments the capture of 
 Rome, 12. 
 
 Julius II (Pope), 380. 
 
 Justice, organization of in Siena, 
 146-7. 
 
 LADY (Our) of Mid-August. See 
 
 Virgin. 
 
 Libra di Montaperti, 165. 
 Lira (property tax), 148. 
 Liutprand, king of the Lombards, 
 
 24, 27. 
 
 Lodo (The) of 1203, 154, 159. 
 Loggia della Mercanzia, 307; of the 
 
 Piccolomini, 307. 
 Lombards, coming of, 14, 15; extent 
 
 of conquests in Italy, 16-7; 
 
 Roman institutions and, 18-9; 
 
 their administration, 20-1; Latin- 
 
 ization of, 26-7; fail to effect 
 
 Italian unity, 29-30. 
 Lombardy, revolt of cities against 
 
 emperor, 55. 
 Lorenzetti (Pietro and Ambrogio), 
 
 their work, 322-5. 
 Lucca, acquires charter from Henry 
 
 IV, 58- 
 
 Lupertianus, bishop of Arezzo, 22-3. 
 Lysippus, statue by, 359-60. 
 
 MACCHIAVELLI, 400, 401. 
 
 Maconi (Stefano), 265. 
 
 Magna Tavola, 112-3. 
 
 Maitano (Lorenzo di), 286, 332. 
 
 Malavolti, their feud with the Pic- 
 colomini, 208-9. 
 
 Manenti, 40, 61. 
 
 Manfred, 171; and Siena, 172-3; 
 opposed by Charles of Anjou, 186- 
 
 7- 
 Mangia (la torre del), history of, 297- 
 
 8. 
 
 Marciano (battle of), 412. 
 Maremma, in revolt, 172, 173. 
 Maria (Santa) della Scala. See 
 
 Hospital.
 
 INDEX 
 
 431 
 
 Marignano (Marquis of), commands 
 Spaniards (1554-5). 400-19- 
 
 Masaccio, 327. 
 
 Matteo di Giovanni, 328, 329. 
 
 Matthew Paris, denounces the Ital- 
 ian bankers, 101. 
 
 Maurus, early bishop of Siena, 21,22. 
 
 Medici (Cosimo de'), 398, 400, 404. 
 
 Medici (The), acquire Siena, 410-20. 
 
 Mezza genie (of Siena), 192-3; in 
 political control, 195-6. 
 
 Memmi (Lippo), designer of crown 
 of the Mangia, 298. 
 
 Milites, 132, 166, 339. 
 
 Monasteries (Sienese), II Monistero, 
 88; Sant' Antimo, 41, 88; San 
 Salvatore, 42, 61, 88; San Gal- 
 gano, oo, 362 ff.; Lececto, 90; 
 San Franceso, 90; San Domenico, 
 oo; Pontignano, 90. 
 
 Monluc (Blaise de), governor of 
 Siena, 411-9. 
 
 Montalcino, its capture (1202), 66, 
 159; siege (1260), 175; its capt- 
 ure (1260), 184; Sienese Republic 
 in, 418, 420. 
 
 Montaperti (Battle of), ,179^. 
 
 Monte, defined, 216; the monti of the 
 fourteenth century, 216, 220; the 
 monte del Popolo, 224; monti of the 
 fifteenth century, 393-5; ascend- 
 ency of the Noveschi, 397-405. 
 
 Monte Amiata, 203, 231. 
 
 Monte Maggio, 156. 
 
 Montemassi, 203, 321. 
 
 Monte Oliveto, 255. 
 
 Montepulciano, quarrel over, 66, 
 159-60; attack on by Siena (1207), 
 161; attack (1229), 162, 164; 
 captured (1260), 175; captured 
 (1261), 184; under the Nine, 203; 
 in revolt (1357), 217; revolt of 
 (1387). 390-1. 
 
 NEROCCIO DI LANDI, 328, 329. 
 Nicholas, Count of Rocca, 230-1, 
 
 233- 
 
 Nine (The), origin of, 137; policy of 
 137-8; basis of power, 193 ff.; 
 foreign policy of, 198-200; do- 
 mestic relations of, 204 ff.; merits 
 of, 212-3; fall of (1355), 213-4; 
 and the cathedral, 285, 287; and 
 Duccio, 316; frescoes in chamber 
 of, 322-5. 
 
 Nobles (of Siena). See grandi. 
 Nave (I). See Nine. 
 Noveschi. See Nine and monte. 
 
 ORDER of Penance, joined by 
 Saint Catherine, 260-1. 
 
 Orvieto, cathedral of, 292; sculp- 
 tures at, 332. 
 
 Otto I, king of Germany, conquers 
 Italy, 32. 
 
 Ovile (a quarter of Siena), 206, 223, 
 226. 
 
 PALACES: Palazzo Pubblico, his- 
 tory of, 293^7".; Palazzo Tolomei, 
 302; Palazzo Sansedoni, 302; 
 Palazzo Salimbeni, 302; Palazzo 
 GrottaneUi, 302; Palazzo Buon- 
 signori, 302; Palazzo Saracini, 
 302; Palazzo Piccolomini, 307; 
 Palazzo Spannocchi, 307; Palazzo 
 Nerucci, 307. 
 
 Polio (The), 344-7. 
 
 Pallone. See games. 
 
 Pannochieschi, 40. 
 
 Parish, as unit of administration, 47. 
 
 Parlamentum, 54, 130. 
 
 Pazzi (Jacopo dei) at Montaperti, 
 181. 
 
 Peasants, their share in overthrow of 
 nobility, 2325; their condition, 
 232-3; their burdens under city 
 rule, 237/. 
 
 Pedites, 132, 166. 
 
 Petrucci (Pandolfo), career of, 398- 
 404. 
 
 Petrucci (The), their failure as a 
 family, 404. 
 
 Philip II (King of Spain), surrenders 
 Siena to Cosimo, 419-20. 
 
 Piccolomini (The), their feud with 
 the Malavolti, 208-9; reinstate- 
 ment of, 395. See Pius II. 
 
 Pier Pettignano, 254-5. 
 
 Pietro (Lando di), 286, 334. 
 
 Pisa, acquires charter from Henry 
 IV, 58; architecture of, 290; con- 
 quered by Florence, 392; revolts, 
 402. 
 
 Pisano (Giovanni), 285, 288, 331. 
 
 Pisano (Niccol6), 284, 330-1. 
 
 Pius II (Pope), canonizes Saint 
 Catherine, 272; a great builder, 
 307; as novelist, 356; as human- 
 ist, 357; his Sienese policy, 392-6.
 
 432 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Plebs (pieve), 47-8. 
 
 Poggibonsi, 157-9. 
 
 Pope, frustates Italian unity. 30; 
 temporal aspirations, 31; a bank- 
 ing power, 100; at Avignon, 262. 
 
 Popolo (il), of Siena, 70, 133. See 
 societas popoli senensis. 
 
 Popolo minuto (il), 220. 
 
 Populus (a city parish), 48. 
 
 Porta: Porta Santo Viene, 84, 183, 
 306; Porta de' Pispini (same as 
 Santo Viene); Porta Camellia, 
 besieged, 156, 163; encounter be- 
 fore (1260), 174; Antiporta of, 
 306; battle before (1526), 405; 
 Porta Romana, 306; general im- 
 pression of gates, 305. 
 
 Potesta, 67; origin of in Siena, 67, 
 133; his powers, 142-4. 
 
 Poveri Gesuati, founded, 256. 
 
 Prison (of Siena), 299. 
 
 Provenzano Salvani, 188-9, 2 95- 
 
 Proweditori. See Biccherna. 
 
 Provisino (coin), 107. 
 
 Pugna. See games. 
 
 RAPPRESAGLIE, 118-9. 
 
 Renaissance, effect on Sienese archi- 
 tecture, 307; resistance to by 
 Sienese, 327; slow progress of, 
 357-9; effect on fate of San Gal- 
 gano, 379-80. 
 
 Riformatori, their origin, 220; their 
 rule, 221-4; attempt to heal local 
 feuds, 222. 
 
 Rocca di Tintinnano, 230, 233, 234, 
 235; in hands of Salimbeni, 236, 
 243; capture of 244. 
 
 Roman Institutions, in Lombard 
 period, 18-9. 
 
 Roman Law, its revival, 38, 147. 
 
 Rossetti (Dante Gabriel), 340, 353, 
 354- 
 
 Sacre rappresentazioni, 352. 
 
 Salimbeni (The), 99, 139, 177; their 
 feud with the Tolomei, 208-9, 2I 9> 
 242-3; allied with the Dodicini, 
 219-20; acquire castles, 220, 236, 
 237, 243; and Charles IV, 221-2; 
 their wars with Siena, 243-4. 
 
 Salimbene (Fra) of Parma, 150, 151; 
 on religious enthusiasm, 251. 
 
 Salvatore San (Monastery), 42, 61. 
 
 Sano di Pietro, 328. 
 
 Santa Fiora, 204, 231. 
 
 Santa Fiora, Count Jacopo of, 204. 
 
 Scabini, 37-8. 
 
 Schism (The Great), 271. 
 
 Self-government, origin of in cities, 
 47 ff.; in Siena by charter of Henry 
 VI, 60; working out of in Siena, 1 27. 
 
 Sermini (Gentile), 356. 
 
 Siena, situation of, 2-4; an Etruscan 
 settlement, 4-8; a Roman colony, 
 8-15; mediaeval rebirth of, 15 ff.; 
 struggle against feudal system, 35; 
 early voluntary associations in, 46; 
 relations of with emperor, 56; ob- 
 tains charter from Henry VI, 57; 
 wars with Florence, 149^".; turns 
 Guelph, 190, 192; and the feudal 
 nobles, 234-5; and the bankers, 
 236-7; and Saint Catherine, 272- 
 4; mediaeval divisions of, 276 ff.; 
 and San Galgano, 373jf.; new wars 
 with Florence, 389-92, 397; sub- 
 mits to the Visconti, 390-2; new 
 domestic broils, 393-5, 398-9, 
 405-6; and Pandolfo Petrucci, 
 398-404; siege of, 408 /. 
 
 Simone Martini, work of, 320-2. 
 
 Soarzi, 40, 61. 
 
 Societas populi senensis, plans to 
 overthrow the nobles, 132; its 
 progress, 133-5; excludes nobles, 
 139; its victory partial, 194. 
 
 Sodoma, and chapel of Saint Cath- 
 erine, 273. 
 
 Sorore, mythical founders of Sienese 
 hospital, 92 (note). 
 
 Sozzini (Alessandro), eye-witness of 
 siege, 407, 411. 
 
 Sport. See games. 
 
 Stefano di Giovanni (Sassetta), 328. 
 
 Strozzi (Piero), commands at Siena, 
 409-12. 
 
 Submissions (feudal) to Siena, 61, 63, 
 
 79, 158- 
 Superstition (in Siena), 257. 
 
 TACITUS, narrates a Sienese incident, 
 
 9- 
 
 Tagliacozzo (Battle of), 188. 
 
 Taipert, gastald of Siena, 21, 22, 23. 
 
 Talamone, acquired by Siena, 124. 
 
 Terzi (The) of Siena, 141, 165, 276; 
 rivalry of, 342, 343, 
 
 Thirteen Guardians of the Constitu- 
 tion (/ Tredici Emendatori), 142.
 
 INDEX 
 
 433 
 
 Tolomei (The), 99, 112, 139; against 
 
 the Nine, 205, 206; feud with the 
 
 Salimbeni, 208-9, 2I 9. 242-3; the 
 
 Blessed Bernardo, 255. 
 Tuldo (Niccol6), 265-6. 
 Tuscany, physical character, 1-2. 
 Twelve (The), in control, 214-5; 
 
 their despicable rule, 218-9; an< ^ 
 
 the cathedral, 287. 
 Twenty-four (The), 134-5, 177^8; 
 
 their fall, 190; and the cathedral, 
 
 283. 
 Tyrant (The), explanation of, 390; 
 
 in Siena, 398-404. 
 
 UBERTI. See Farinata. 
 Uguccione della Faggiuola, 202. 
 University (of Siena), 357-8. 
 Urban VI (Pope), elected, 271. 
 Usury, 102-4; in Siena, 105-6. 
 
 VAL DI CHIANA, war in, 408, 412. 
 
 Val d'Orcia, war in, 243-4. 
 
 Vanni (Andrea), 273, 326. 
 
 Vasari (Giorgio), on painting, 313. 
 
 Via francigena, 120, 156. 
 
 Virgin (The), worship of in Siena, 
 77; the festival of on the i5th of 
 August, 77^".; Siena dedicates her- 
 self to, 8 1 ff.; games in honor of, 
 345-7; renewed dedications, 405, 
 407. 
 
 Volterra (bishop of), founds San 
 Galgano, 362-4; loses power, 374- 
 
 5- 
 
 Visconti, 205; Gian Galeazzo, 390- 
 2. 
 
 WERNER VON URSLINGEN, 245. 
 Zara (game of chance), 351.
 
 3 1158 00093 8 
 
 
 ARY.