SOURCE: Najemy, John M. “Brunetto Latini's ‘Politica.’” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 33-51.

[In the following essay, Najemy explores Brunetto's treatment of political issues in The Book of the Treasure and The Little Treasure within the dual context of thirteenth-century Florentine civic responsibility and economic exchange.]

A curious aspect of Brunetto Latini's fate is that, despite what Dante has him say (Inferno XV, 119-120) about living on in his writing (“… il mio Tesoro, / nel qual io vivo ancora”), Brunetto's general reputation has in fact been shaped more by what others wrote about him than by his own texts. The imaginary encounter in the Divine Comedy has practically dictated the terms and context in which Brunetto is remembered, and even studied. Another of Brunetto's younger contemporaries who did much to fashion his reputation was the chronicler Giovanni Villani. Among the notable events of the year 1294 (according to the Florentine style, and 1295 in the modern style) Villani included the news of Brunetto Latini's death and also provided this memorable portrait of him:¹

In 1294 a worthy citizen by the name of Brunetto Latini died in Florence; he was a great philosopher [gran filosofo] and the most distinguished master of rhetoric, both of the knowledge of speaking well and of composing letters. He it was who expounded the Rhetoric of Cicero, and wrote the good and useful book called Treasure, as well as the Little Treasure, and the key to the Treasure, and many other books on philosophy and on vice and virtue, and he was also the letter writer of our commune. He was a worldly man [mondano uomo], but we have made mention of him because he was the one who began to teach the Florentines to be less coarse, and to make them skilled in speaking well, and in knowing how to guide and rule our republic secondo la politica.

I have left the last phrase of this passage in Villani's own words because a degree of uncertainty has persisted about what Villani meant here and, consequently, about how “secondo la politica” should be translated. Among the translations that have been offered are the following: “according to the science of politics”;² “according to political science”;³ “according to the proper political rules”;⁴ “according to Politics”;⁵ “according to policy”;⁶ and, one more that I rather like for reasons that should be clear in due course, “according to the art of politics.”⁷ Some have even thought that Villani's “politica” might allude to Aristotle's Politics, translated into Latin for the first time around 1260, just as Latini was beginning his years of exile and literary activity, and by the early fourteenth century the essential theoretical foundation for most political theorists, including Dante in the Monarchia and Marsilius in the Defensor Pacis.

Impossible as it may be to know precisely what Villani intended by “politica,” it is nonetheless clear that Latini's reputation among the Florentines had something to do with notions associated with this term and with the process by which, as Villani says, the Florentines learned to be “less coarse.” The notions of “science” and “rules” contained in many of the renderings of Villani's phrase might lead us to suppose that he was referring to some systematic exposition by Latini of political theory of the sort that one indeed finds in the Monarchia and the Defensor Pacis. But when we turn to the section of Latini's Tresor that seems the most likely place for such an exposition of “politica”—chapters 73 through 105 of book III, often referred to by the title of chapter 73, “Dou Governement des cités”—what we find is a treatise on the appointment, qualifications, duties and comportment in office of the administrative, judicial, and military official known as the podestà. Nor is it even clear how much of these pages came from Brunetto Latini himself and how much he borrowed from one or more works on the same or a similar subject. Nearly a century ago Gaetano Salvemini concluded that most of this section of the Tresor (which he referred to as Brunetto Latini's Politica) was heavily dependent on the De regimine civitatum of Giovanni da Viterbo.⁸ According to Salvemini, no more than three or four of the thirty-three chapters of the “Government des cités” have any chance of being original with Brunetto.⁹ Francis Carmody, in the standard edition of the Tresor, offered the hypothesis that both Brunetto's “Governement” and the De regimine depended on a still older and now lost prototype, but he agreed that few portions of these chapters were anything other than a translation by Brunetto of some other work or works.¹⁰ This should cause no surprise, since the Tresor is, of course, an encyclopedia and its purpose is precisely to mobilize authorities and make them accessible, not to devise “original” arguments. In any case, most recent discussions of the Tresor accept Salvemini's view that in the “Governement des cités” Brunetto Latini was following Giovanni da Viterbo's work on the office of the podestà.¹¹

But the odd thing about Latini's dependence on Giovanni da Viterbo's manual is that this Giovanni, who says that he served as an associate judge under a podestà in Florence, may have worked for a Florentine Ghibelline government and, in any case, certainly displays strong Ghibelline sympathies.¹² Davidsohn and Salvemini believed that he wrote his manual in the 1240s in Frederick II's Ghibelline Florence,¹³ and thus during the regime that was swept away by the primo popolo for which Brunetto Latini served as chancellor.¹⁴ Albano Sorbelli, on the other hand, makes a strong case for dating the De regimine to the years 1262-66 and thus to the Ghibelline regime dominated by Manfred, whose army had wrecked the primo popolo in 1260.¹⁵ The very institution of the podestà evokes the attempts of emperors beginning with Frederick Barbarossa to bring the city-states of Italy under imperial control, whereas the primo popolo fought for a decade (and successfully until the last battle, at Montaperti) to keep Florence free of the empire and the Hohenstaufen dynasty.

Whether Latini did indeed use the De regimine as (one of) the source(s) for these chapters of the Tresor,¹⁶ it seems unlikely that the “politica” for which he was remembered had much to do with these pages. If we expected the “Governement des cités” to build on, reflect, or defend the political context in which Brunetto Latini first emerged as a prominent figure, this section of the Tresor must be considered something of a disappointment. Quite apart from the question of its originality or lack of the same, it is largely (although not entirely) devoid of what we would call political theory.¹⁷ The government (in our sense of the term) of a commune like Florence was much more than the office of the podestà, who was not a ruler, but a hired official, elected or appointed from another city for a limited term of six months or a year. The podestà presided over the commune's criminal court and usually had administrative command over the internal police and the communal army. He did not make law; he enforced it. And he did so according to terms and agreements spelled out with great care and solemnity at the time of his election.¹⁸ The popular regime installed in 1250 subordinated the office of the podestà to that of the newly created capitano del popolo,¹⁹ an office that was in turn suppressed with the Ghibelline victory of 1260²⁰ (although it was later revived and became a fixture of the Florentine constitution). Again, the curious thing is that Brunetto Latini, a prominent supporter (why else would he have been exiled?) of the popular government that invented a whole alternative constitution in place of the podestaral commune, should have taken precisely the office of the podestà as his main subject in the most explicitly “political” section of the Tresor. Part of the answer may be that the new podestà of Florence in the aftermath of the Guelf victory of April 1267 was none other than Charles of Anjou himself.²¹ In these pages Brunetto may have intended to offer advice to Charles concerning the nature, and especially the proper constitutional limits, of the office that the distant king delegated to his vicars.

One possible explanation for the lack, or limited character, of political theorizing in the “Governement” might be that, as a former government notary and writer of official letters and documents for the commune, Latini was expected to remain apart from the polemical and ideological disputes surrounding particular parties, regimes, and constitutions. But, unlike later chancellors, he seems to have had a certain role in politics, to judge at least from his frequent participation in the 1280s and 1290s in the legislative councils and other advisory committees and his election to the priorate in 1287.²² Another and perhaps more likely reason for his caution in the Tresor is that he wrote the book in exile sometime after 1260 as he hoped and waited for a return to Florence with the Guelfs and their Angevin protectors and for a resumption of his old post. Latini knew that Florence under Charles of Anjou would be, politically, a very different place from the Florence of the primo popolo and may have concluded that he had a better chance of winning and keeping the favor of the Angevins if he did not advertise too loudly the policies and sentiments that had animated the defunct popular government. A certain historiographical tradition sees in these decades of Florentine political history only the two aristocratic parties of Guelfs and Ghibellines, supported by their foreign alliances, taking turns throwing each other out of the city. According to this view, Charles's victory of 1266 over Manfred and the Guelf restoration of the next year returned to power essentially the same Guelf regime that had been sent into exile in 1260. But the primo popolo had in fact presented itself as a third and neutral force, at least at the outset, between Guelfs and Ghibellines, and determined to put an end to the factional wars and the excessive power of the great families on both sides. This government kept the participation of Guelfs and Ghibellines in the new popular magistracies and councils roughly even and at levels that did not usually exceed a quarter of the officeholders. It disbanded the formal association of knights and reduced the towers belonging to aristocratic families to a maximum height of twenty-nine meters. The primo popolo promulgated a constitution based on the division of the city into twenty military companies, whose elected heads represented their districts in the councils and participated, together with the consuls of the professional corporations or guilds, in the election of the chief magistracy of the Anziani.²³

Manfred and the Florentine Ghibellines swept away the popular constitution, and, after a brief attempt at its restoration²⁴ between the expulsion of the Ghibellines in November 1266 and the arrival of the Charles's army in Tuscany in April 1267, the Angevins and the Florentine Guelfs did the same thing.²⁵ Nothing was more predictable than that Charles and his banking allies among the Guelf elite would not waste one moment considering the claims of the old popolo. Brunetto Latini certainly knew this, and, given the dependence of the exiles on Angevin power even simply to return to Florence, he must have decided that it was pointless, and perhaps even dangerous, to introduce into the Tresor any extended theoretical defense of a kind of government in which, to say the least, Charles and the Guelf bankers had no interest. That Latini had in mind an Angevin and Guelf audience seems in any case clear from the additions he made, in the revised version he prepared after his return to Florence, to the historical chapters of the first book.²⁶ The expansion takes the account of universal history to 1268 and includes some scathing passages about Manfred, claiming that he murdered his father Frederick, his brother Conrad, and his nephew Conradin (Tresor 1.97).²⁷ Whatever the accuracy of such stories, this was explosively anti-Hohenstaufen stuff. No one had to persuade an old popolano like Brunetto to believe the worst of Manfred, and it is not difficult to imagine a Brunetto Latini as astonished at Manfred's place in Dante's Purgatory, and thus among the saved, as Dante the pilgrim claims to be at Ser Brunetto's place in Hell. But the fact that Latini added this material to a second version of the Tresor after 1267 does suggest that he was revising his book with Charles and the Angevins in mind.²⁸

So where is “la politica” in Brunetto Latini? If we begin with the word itself and the contexts in which he uses it in the Tresor,²⁹ we find that he does indeed use “politique” in connection with the “governance” of cities. Right at the beginning of the “Governement des cités,” in chapter 73 of book III, he writes that “master Brunetto Latini wishes to fulfil for his friend what he had promised him at the beginning of the first book, where he said that his book would conclude with politics [que son livre defineroit en politique], that is with the government of cities, which is the highest science and the most noble offices there is on earth, as Aristotle proves in his book.”³⁰ (Latini seems to be referring here to the Ethics, however, not the Politics.) Despite this praise of the nobility of politics, the sense of “politique” as implied by the chapters that follow on the duties of the podestà seems rather narrow. And, in fact, in the very next sentence Latini acknowledges this narrowness and also makes it clear that he has a broader notion of “politique”: “Although politics includes generally all the arts [tous les ars] necessary to the community of men, nevertheless the master will not involve himself [here] with what does not pertain to the person of the lord and his right office.”³¹ In other words, in these pages he is going to talk about only one aspect of a much larger subject, and he does not want his readers to suppose that what he will say about the duties of “lords” exhausts the theme of “politique.”

Latini's broader definition of “politique” is grounded in the notion of “the arts necessary to the community of men [les ars ki besoignent a la communité des homes].” This will already be familiar to any reader who remembers that “politique” first appears in chapter 4 of book I, where it is mentioned with ethics and economics as one of the three subdivisions of the second, or practical, branch of philosophy. Later in this same chapter there is a passage that shows how deeply implicated Latini's “politique” is in the language of arts, trades, and professions:³²

The third is politics, and without a doubt this is the highest wisdom and most noble profession [mestier] there is among men, for it teaches us to govern others, in a kingdom or a city or a group of people [un peuple] or a commune [comune], in peace and in war, according to reason and justice. Thus it teaches us all of the arts and trades [tous les ars et toz les mestiers] necessary to the life of men, and this occurs in two ways, for the one is in deed and the other in word. The one way, that is, in deed, consists of the daily trades involving hand and foot, that is, metalsmiths, weavers and shoemakers, and the other trades necessary for the life of men, and which are called mechanical; those which are in word are those which involve mouth and tongue, and these consist of three disciplines: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.

This understanding of “politique” is, of course, Aristotelian in its theoretical assumptions and basic arguments, as a glance at the opening pages of the Ethics will reveal. But the specific language Latini employs also builds on some key terms of the political and social discourse of the Florentine popular movement that began to take shape in the early thirteenth century, rose to power in the decade 1250-60, and reappeared in the popular revival of 1266-67 and again, and in force, in the 1280s and 1290s. The important terms are arte, mestiere, comune, and, of course, popolo itself.³³

Particularly significant in this group is arte, which carried two related meanings: a profession or trade in the sense of a mestiere, and a professional corporation, or guild. The first part of book II of the Tresor, which Latini openly presents as a translation of passages from Aristotle's Ethics, begins with a discussion of the purposes of “arts and doctrines.” Although “each art has a final goal which guides its works,” he writes (II, 2), “universal arts are more worthy and more honorable than the others, because the particular ones are found through the universal ones.”³⁴ Then, without actually using the word “politique,” Latini alludes to his “politics” when he says (II, 3) that

the art which teaches how to govern a city is the most important and the sovereign and the mistress of all arts [li ars ki ensegne la cité governer est principale et soveraine et dame de tous ars], because under it are contained many honorable arts, such as rhetoric and military science and governing one's household; furthermore, it is noble because it gives order and direction to all those arts which are under it and which bring about its fulfillment [compliement], and its end is also the end and fulfillment of the others.³⁵

This sounds remarkably like an allegory of the constitution of the primo popolo, in which the professional and military associations were indeed the constituent parts of the political whole, and in which parts and whole reciprocally legitimated each other. Latini may not have intended this as any kind of veiled representation of the popolo's constitutional experiment, but statements about the leadership of the “art which teaches how to govern” and “gives order and direction to all those arts which are under it” may have been deeply ingrained habits of thought for the exchancellor of a government in whose workings representatives of both the guilds and the military companies took part.³⁶

Thus the “politica” that underlies Brunetto Latini's lessons to the Florentines about how to “guide and rule the republic” appears to combine two notions around the concept of arte: “politica” itself as an arte—a set of practices and skills learned and refined through continual exercise; and the city too as an arte, or, perhaps, an arte writ large—a community of persons exercising “politica” as they live and ply their trades. In passages scattered throughout book II, and thus again heavily dependent on Aristotle, Latini offers the figure of the artier—the artisan or tradesman, but, in a Florentine context, unmistakably the guildsman, or artefice—as a model of the ideal citizen. The fundamental assumption behind the figure of the artier is that people who learn an arte well are formed by it and live by its rules, and not by their own inclinations. Thus, according to the third chapter of the second book:³⁷

The correct teaching is that a person should do what his subject's nature allows him to do [Le droit ensegnement si est que l'en aille selonc que la nature le puet soufrir], that is, that he who teaches geometry must follow geometry's rules, which are called proofs, and in rhetoric he must follow its arguments … ; and so it is that each artisan [chascuns artiers] judges well and tells the truth about what belongs to his trade [juge bien et dist la verité de ce ki apertient a son mestier], and in this lies the subtlety of his sense [et en ce est son sens soutil].

Latini contrasts the figure of the artier who acquires subtle sense, judgment, and the habit of telling the truth—all good civic virtues—with the man who merely “follows his inclinations.” The next sentence affirms that “the knowledge of how to govern a city is not for a young person or for a man who follows ses volentés.”

The art of “politica” is thus also a vision of civic education. An arte was understood to be a set of practices that could be taught and learned, matters in which one could give good instruction or advice based on experience. In book II, chapter 31, adapting passages from the sixth book of Aristotle's Ethics, Latini says that “all sciences and all disciplines [toutes sciences et disciplines—and “discipline” already suggests teaching] and each thing we know can be taught, and everything we can learn is of things already known.” In the same chapter even wisdom is brought under the umbrella of arte: “Wisdom [Sapience] is the dignity and advantage … of a man in his trade [Sapience est la dignité et l'avantage de l'ome en son mestier], for when one says of a man that he is wise in his art [sages en son art], then his value and worth in that art are shown.”³⁸ The first part of this sentence, in which Brunetto defines wisdom as excellence in a trade, changes Aristotle's argument in the Ethics VI.7, where it is argued that this sense of wisdom reflects a frequent habit of speech, but that other definitions are to be preferred.³⁹ Latini almost seems impelled here by an underlying conviction about practitioners of trades as ideal citizens. When he expounds the Aristotelian doctrine that virtue resides in the middle between extremes, he again offers the artier as a model: “Every artisan strives to maintain the middle ground in his art and to abandon the extremes” (II, 15).⁴⁰ That artisans act in this way also makes them exemplars of the kind of justice required in exchanges of services and goods: “Citizens who live together in a city serve one another, for if a man needs something another person has, he receives it and gives him his reward and his payment according to the quality of the thing, until there is just middle ground between them.” Latini's examples take him again to the world of artisans in their guilds: “that is to say, if the smith has something which is worth one and the cobbler has something which is worth two, and a carpenter has something which is worth three, and each needs things from the others, there must be some way of bringing about equality, because one is worth more than the other, so that they turn to the middle point, which is equality among them” (II, 29).⁴¹ Or this: “Justice is halfway between gaining and losing, and it cannot exist without giving and taking and exchanging; for the cloth merchant gives cloth in exchange for something else he needs, and the ironworker gives iron for something else” (II, 38).⁴² From this passage it would seem that, for Latini, justice actually emerges from the practices of exchange among artisans. Here, too, Latini's observation of guild life in Florence and other cities must have nourished the conviction and supplied the examples: every guild was of course a court whose consuls regularly rendered justice in civil cases.

These are some of the dimensions of social experience and political conviction embedded in Brunetto's version of Aristotle's famous dictum that “man is a social animal” (Ethics, I.7). In chapter 5 of book II, Latini paraphrases and adapts Aristotle by claiming that “It is a natural thing for a man to be a citizen and to live among men and among other artisans [Naturele chose est a l'home k'il soit citeins et k'il se converse entre les homes et entre les artiers].”⁴³ Here citizen and artisan (or guildsman) become one and the same, and the force of the equation lies not only in the assertion that artisans are citizens, perhaps even the best citizens, but also in the implication that only artisans can truly be citizens: an idea that the revived popular movement of a generation later converted into constitutional and electoral policy by declaring, in the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, that only members of the politically recognized guilds could be eligible for the office of the priorate.⁴⁴ In the discourse of the Florentine popolo, the association of concepts of politics and governance with the “arts,” and thus with guildsmen and their trades, was so close that, in at least one passage where Latini's French text does not make the connection, the Tuscan Tesoro does. In Tresor II.12, Latini comments that “the whole thrust of our book concerns delight, for Heracles said that in important matters it is necessary to have skill [art], and therefore the whole purpose of the governor of cities [l'ome ki governe les cités] is to bring delight to its citizens in the appropriate things and at an appropriate time and place.”⁴⁵ In the Tuscan text “art” is, of course, “arte,” but “the man who governs cities” has become the “artefice della scienza civile.”⁴⁶ The ruler himself is thus an artisan/master of civic science and the knowledge of politics. Whoever translated the Tresor into Tuscan, it was the political discourse of the Florentine popolo that made of the ruler of cities a master guildsman of the political art.

The passages that establish the link between Brunetto Latini's “politique” and the language and assumptions of the Florentine guild community are scattered throughout the Tresor like so many pieces of a buried treasure. Perhaps because, as suggested earlier, he thought it more prudent not to do so in a work probably intended for Angevin eyes, in the Tresor Brunetto nowhere reveals the controversial implications of his “politique” for Florentine society. But in the Tesoretto, his allegorical poem about the education of a knight by the Virtues, he does indeed expose the more polemical side of his “political art.” From the outset the poem shows its concern with Florentine politics, and especially the factional wars that yielded the disaster of 1260 and Brunetto's own exile. He says that Florence was “The Lady of Tuscany” when the “wise commune” sent him on his diplomatic mission to Spain, but he adds, parenthetically, that one part/party of the city, the Ghibellines, was living in exile (vv. 118-122: “ancora che lontana / ne fosse l'una parte, / rimossa in altra parte, / quella d'i ghibellini, / per guerra d'i vicini”).⁴⁷ On the way back from Spain he hears the news of the defeat at Montaperti: “the Guelfs of Florence / through poor preparation / and the force of war / were gone from the city / and the damage was great / in prisoners and men killed” (vv. 157-162).⁴⁸ The early pages of the Tesoretto thus announce and lament the disastrous consequences of the partisan conflicts between Guelfs and Ghibellines, still unresolved despite the efforts of the primo popolo. Latini follows this with a first and general hint of the civic ethic that he will contrast with the destructive behavior of the upper class factions: “every man coming into the world / … is born / to parents and relations, / and then to his city-state [Comuno]”; and to this he adds that he knows of no one “Whom I would wish to see / Have my city / Entirely in his control, / Or that it be divided; / But all in common [per comune] / Should pull together on a rope / Of peace and of welfare, / Because a land torn apart / Cannot survive” (vv. 166-169, 171-179).⁴⁹ Filial loyalty to one's “comuno” [sic] and notions of peace and the common good frame the warning against (and the fear of) the strong man, to whom—such is the implication—some Florentines may be tempted to have recourse as the only solution for the ills of factionalism. Was this a warning to Charles of Anjou? Or to Brunetto's fellow citizens not to let Charles take too much power (as Manfred had)?

Halfway through the poem Brunetto the character wanders in a desert in a savage country without streets or pathways. Lamenting his lack of “arti” in circumstances in which he sorely needs them (vv. 1194-1195: “s'io sapesse d'arte, / quivi mi bisognava”),⁵⁰ he meets the figure of Virtue, “chief and savior / Of refined custom / And of good usage / And good behavior, / By which people live [capo e salute / di tutta costumanza / e de la buona usanza / e d'i be' reggimenti / a che vivon le genti]” (vv. 1240-1244).⁵¹ “Costumanza,” “usanza,” and “reggimenti” signal the beginning of the lessons of civic comportment to be imparted by Virtue's daughters and the other women in the great court. Of all the wonderful things he saw and heard, the poet wishes to speak here of what he heard spoken by four of the ladies—Cortesia, Larghezza, Leanza, and Prodezza (Courtesy, Generosity, Loyalty, and Prowess). These four, he says, he “believes” and “adores” more than the rest “because their decorous aspect / seems more gracious to me / and is known to people through experience [perché 'l lor convenente / mi par più grazioso / e a la gente in uso] (vv. 1340-1342).”⁵² But these lessons are not offered to him; he watches and listens as the Virtues impart instruction to a knight, “un bel cavalero,” who is to learn how he must comport himself “in his trade” (“come nel suo mistero / si dovesse portare”) (vv. 1367-1369). That it should be a knight who stands in need of this education is the most direct reflection of the extent to which the social dimension of this allegory emerges from the politics of the primo popolo. Knights in Florence belonged to the elite of powerful families that filled the ranks of the Guelf and Ghibelline parties. Knighthood, not nobility, defined the circle of elite rank and prestige associated with the great families,⁵³ and until 1250 the corporate association of the knights (the universitas militum) had sent representatives on a regular basis to meetings of the commune's executive committee, together with the communal consuls and the consuls of the association of Calimala merchants.⁵⁴ The primo popolo, as already noted, disbanded this formal association of the knights and kept the presence of knights in the committee of the Anziani and in the legislative councils at negligible levels.⁵⁵ It was the class associated with knighthood that the popolo identified as the chief danger to civic peace, as the growing popularity of the legend of the Buondelmonti murder shows. The occasion that leads from insult to injury to murder in this famous story is a celebration of the conferral of knighthood on a member of the upper class.⁵⁶ No Florentine reader of the Tesoretto would have failed to note that Brunetto's choice of a knight in the role of the disciple of the Virtues evoked the long and sorry history of violent conflicts inflicted on the city by the families that so prized their knighthoods. It also alluded to the popolo's attempts to discipline this unruly elite.

To refer to the knight as the practitioner of a mestiere already signals the project of what I will now call his “politicization”: his education, or training, in the norms and practices that the Tresor associates with the practitioners of trades: in that “subtle sense” and faculty for judging the “middle ground” characteristic of one who knows and exercises his arte. Larghezza tells the knight to avoid gambling, unless, that is, joining a game is necessary to “uphold honor with friends or lords,” and to avoid harsh language if he loses;⁵⁷ to stay out of brothels (much better to love a “worthy woman”) and taverns; and not to indulge to the point of excess in eating and drinking.⁵⁸ Cortesia, from whom we might expect lessons in the ways of the court, takes over at this point and urges on the knight prudence in public speech, evidently in a civic context: he must be cautious in speech (“nel tuo parlamento / abbi provedimento”), not speak too much and think before speaking;⁵⁹ he should avoid excessive and needless expenditures and engage in productive work because “he who does not endure exertion [durare fatica], / so that he can be of worth, / let him not think himself included / among worthy men / just because he is of a well born family [perché sia di gran genti].”⁶⁰ Cortesia also warns the knight to refrain from flirting and to shun love affairs.⁶¹

Leanza continues the training of the knight: never lie; always keep your word and promises; “and whoever places his trust in you / him you should always protect and guide [E chi di te si fida, / sempre lo guarda e guida].”⁶² The sanctity of contract was, of course, fundamental to mercantile and guild society. Then Leanza brings the knight face to face with his civic responsibilities, with the obligation to nurture the same reciprocal trust vis-à-vis his commune that she has urged on him in his dealings with individuals: “And I want you to be true and loyal [diritto e leale] to your Commune,” and never allow it to perish. Leanza assumes that the knight, once properly in command of this civic ethic, will take his place in the deliberative assemblies and in the courts of the commune. “And when you are in the council / always keep to the best: / let neither entreaties nor fear / push you into bad judgment [E quando se' 'n consiglio, / sempre ti tieni al meglio: / né prego né temenza / ti mova in ria sentenza].” “If you offer testimony / let it be full of loyalty; / and if you hand down decisions concerning others / preserve [the rights of] both parties / so that in no way / will you do wrong to either.”⁶³ The instruction the knight receives from the Virtues encapsulates the moral order and the sense of civic responsibility of the popolo and its guildsmen: the kind of ethic of restraint, moderation, and duty that one finds in a Dino Compagni or a Giovanni Morelli or in any number of middle-rank Florentines who were not members of the elite of great families—the ethic not usually found in these great families, and certainly not in the thirteenth century.⁶⁴

The knight's education culminates in a lesson on the avoidance of vendetta and pointless violence spoken by the Virtue Prodezza: “Keep yourself always / from doing injury / or violence to any living man: / the more powerful you are, / the more you must watch yourself, / because people never hesitate / to speak badly / of a man who always harms others.” Then comes perhaps the most remarkable bit of advice offered to the knight, remarkable both for its optimism about the rule of law and law's capacity to negotiate disputes, so characteristic of regimes of the popolo, and also for the unlikelihood that many members of the knight's class, as Brunetto must have known, would actually act on this advice. “I urge you / that if you are wronged, / courageously and effectively / defend your rights. / But I advise this: / that if with a lawyer [ligisto] / you can handle the matter, / I would like you to do so, / because it is greater prowess / to put a brake on madness [mattezza] / with sweet and evenly spoken words / than to come to blows.”⁶⁵ (The image of an offended knight seeking the services of a lawyer to avoid the degeneration of a dispute into open conflict may make us smile, perhaps with affection, at Brunetto's touchingly naive optimism, but it was the kind of gesture that good popolani did sometimes make.) Self-defense is of course permitted, and Prodezza devotes many lines to telling the knight that he should indeed confront, and without fear, enemies that he cannot avoid. But he should make every effort to steer clear of the danger of reviving old vendettas. Thus the knight should show a potential enemy courtesy and give the impression of having honored him. He must never show him “harshness or fierce villainy [asprezza / né villana fierezza],” because—and here the language of Prodezza's lesson establishes significant contact with the “political art” of the Tresor—“maestria / refines courage more / than does just wounding [your enemy] [però che maestria / afina più l'ardire / che non fa pur ferire].” And just a few lines further on: “maestria crowns / force and strength, / delays the vendetta, / prolongs haste, / places it in oblivion, / and extinguishes folly [ma maestria conchiude / la forza e la vertude, / e fa 'ndugiar vendetta / e alungar la fretta / e mettere in obria / e atutar follia].”⁶⁶

Holloway translates “maestria” as “self-control,” and the choice has much to commend it. “Maestria” evokes those passages from the Tresor in which Latini represents the practitioners of trades as persons who do not merely follow their “volentés” or inclinations, but who learn and observe, and are restrained by, the rules of their arte or mestiere. Dante himself connects the notion of arte to restraint and control (the “fren de l'arte” of Purgatorio, XXXIII, 141). In these pages of the Tesoretto it is the Florentine elite, that unruly assemblage of powerful and hotheaded families that counted so many knights in their ranks and spent much of their time fighting each other and dragging the entire city into the disaster of civil war, that is treated to a lesson in “maestria,” in self-control, in comportment grounded in the rule of moderation, in the faculty of subtle judgment, and thus in the “politica” of the guildsmen—masters in their arts. And here perhaps is another reason why Brunetto regularly referred to himself as “li mestres” and “il maestro.”

Brunetto Latini and the primo popolo stand at, or near, the beginning of the long process by which the Florentine elite of great families was transformed from a warrior class, easily given to violence, vendetta, and the politics of intimidation, to a self-styled civic aristocracy that internalized and even propagated an ethos of law, contract, accountability, restraint, and moderation that it learned from the popolo and to which it had once been so hostile.⁶⁷ Although this transformation would not be complete until the fifteenth century, the so-called second popolo of the mid-1290s was a landmark moment in this forced conversion. Giovanni Villani, then a young man from a family not of the elite, but who became a business partner of some of the most illustrious of those elite families, witnessed and wrote about the second popolo's contribution to this historic confrontation from a vantage point of familiarity with both classes and perhaps also with some divided sympathies.⁶⁸ Villani called the popular government of the 1290s the second popolo, thus linking it to the already legendary government of 1250-60, which became the primo popolo. The government of 1250-60 could have been remembered only, or primarily, for its military successes and the expansion of Florentine power in Tuscany. But the connection promoted by Villani (and no doubt shared by many others) between the primo popolo and the government of the mid-1290s, which revived the legal category of the magnates, requiring them to post surety for good behavior, subjecting them to special penalties for violent crimes, and depriving them of the right to sit on the executive committee of the priorate of the guilds, served to preserve the memory of the similar aims of the earlier popolo that had also tried to rein in the city's turbulent and undisciplined, but wealthy and powerful, families. It may have been Villani's awareness of the historical precedent represented by the primo popolo in the domestication of the Florentine elite that led him to acknowledge the chancellor of that regime as the one who “began to teach the Florentines to be less coarse … and to guide and rule our republic secondo la politica.”

Notes

1. Giovanni Villani, Cronica, VIII.10.

2. Charles T. Davis, Dante's Italy and Other Essays (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), p. 168.

3. George Holmes, Florence, Rome and the Origins of the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 75.

4. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:40; also used by Randolph Starn, “The Republican Regime of the ‘Room of Peace’ in Siena, 1338-40,” Representations 18 (1987), 13.

5. Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 12.

6. J. K. Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy: The Evolution of the Civil Life, 1000-1350 (New York: St. Martin's, 1973), p. 93.

7. Charles S. Singleton, ed. and tr., The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Commentary, p. 257.

8. Edited by Gaetano Salvemini in Bibliotheca iuridica medii aevi, vol 3, Scripta anecdota glossatorum vel glossatorum aetate composita (Bologna: Monti, 1901), pp. 215-280.

9. Gaetano Salvemini, “Il Liber de regimine civitatum di Giovanni da Viterbo,” first published in the Giornale storico della letteratura italiana XLI (1903), 284-303, and reprinted in G. Salvemini, La dignità cavalleresca nel Comune di Firenze e altri scritti, ed. Ernesto Sestan (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1972), pp. 358-370.

10. Li livres dou Tresor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), pp. xxxi-xxxii. This edition will be cited as Tresor.

11. See, for example, Skinner, Foundations, 1:40; also Holmes, Florence, Rome, and the Origins of the Renaissance, p. 79. Lauro Martines agrees that this part of the Tresor “most resembles” the De regimine civitatum, but he accepts Carmody's hypothesis that “some prototype, now lost, probably stood behind the genre”; Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (1979; reprint ed., Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 117. Charles Davis has doubts about “whether the Liber [De regimine civitatum] or the Tresor was written first or whether one depends on the other—or both on a common source.” But he too accepts that the section on politics at the end of the third book “probably draws on John of Viterbo's” treatise; Dante's Italy, pp. 168-169 and n. 12. Fifty years ago, Albano Sorbelli (“I teorici del reggimento comunale,” Bullettino dell'Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo LIX [1944], 31-136; see pp. 99-101) rejected the idea that the political chapters of the Tresor have anything to do with the De regimine, in part because he arrived at a different dating of the latter (on which, below).

12. Giovanni da Viterbo's Ghibellinism is readily apparent from chapter 127 (“De duabus potestatibus, scilicet domino Papa et Imperatore, et de duobus iuribus, scilicet divino et humano”), which concludes with the statement that “Utraque tamen potestas, scilicet, spiritualis et temporalis a domino deo est,” and especially chapter 128 (“Quod omnis potestas sit a deo”), which contains this passage: “Imperium enim deus de celo constituit; imperium autem semper est. Imperatores vero proferendi leges a deo licentiam acceperunt; deus subiecit leges Imperatori et legem animatam eum misit hominibus. … Patet igitur supradictis rationibus et constitutionibus utramque potestatem et utrumque gladium a deo esse” (De regimine civitatum, pp. 265-266).

13. Salvemini, “Il Liber de regimine civitatum,” p. 358; Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze (Firenze: Sansoni, 1973), 5:45, note 3.

14. Gianfranco Folena believes that the De regimine was composed in the 1250s, probably in 1253, chiefly because of passages in chapters 134 and 135 (on pp. 271-273 of the edition cited in note 8) containing references to events of that year; see his “‘Parlamenti’ podestarili di Giovanni da Viterbo,” Lingua nostra XX (1959), 97-105, esp. 100. But Folena seems not to have considered Sorbelli's far more detailed discussion of the question some years earlier.

15. Sorbelli, “I teorici del reggimento comunale,” pp. 93-99. Sorbelli reasons that Latini, who wrote the Tresor in these very years while in exile in France, would not have had the opportunity to see Giovanni da Viterbo's work. But manuscripts did circulate, and Latini may have known Giovanni da Viterbo either personally or by reputation. And, since we do not know the exact date of the completion of the first version of the Tresor, it is also possible that Latini was back in Florence soon enough after the defeat of the Hohenstaufen in February 1266 to be able to see the De regimine civitatum before completing his book.

16. This issue will not be central to my purposes in this essay, but it is worth pointing out that Giovanni da Viterbo's De regimine civitatum is a much longer and more ambitious work than Brunetto's “Governement.” The former consists of 148 chapters, some of them quite long, on 64 large two-column pages. The latter contains 33 chapters on 32 pages of normal size. The De regimine is thus at least four times longer than the “Governement,” which means that, however much Latini may have drawn from Giovanni's treatise, he was not merely copying what he found. He must have studied the De regimine carefully, selecting those parts that served his purpose and staying clear of those (like the proimperial passages) that would have damaged it.

17. Martines offers a good summary and evaluation of its contents in Power and Imagination, pp. 115-123.

18. On the institution of the podestà, see Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, 1:1032-36; Pasquale Villari, I primi due secoli della storia di Firenze, third edition (Firenze: Sansoni, n.d., but after 1904), pp. 146-151; G. Folena, “‘Parlamenti’ podestarili”; Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics (1969; reprint ed. New York: Longman, 1988), pp. 40-45; J. K. Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy, pp. 94-104; and Martines, Power and Imagination, pp. 41-44.

19. Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, 2:513.

20. Ibid., p. 704.

21. Gaetano Salvemini, “Il passaggio del Comune di Firenze a parte guelfa (1266-67),” in his Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295, reprint ed. Ernesto Sestan (1899; Milano: Feltrinelli, 1966), p. 229.

22. The evidence of his thirty-five known appearances in the councils (of the capitano del popolo, the Cento, and other bodies) between 1282 and 1292 is assembled in the biography by Bianca Ceva, Brunetto Latini: l'uomo e l'opera (Milano: Ricciardi, 1965). Robert Black contrasts Latini's career in this respect with that of most of his successors in Benedetto Accolti and the Florentine Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 128-129.

23. On the primo popolo, see especially Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, 2:506-696; also Carol Lansing, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 193-195. On the popolo generally in Florence before 1280, see Salvemini, Magnati e popolani, chapter 1, pp. 5-20. The phenomenon of the popolo in the wider context of northern and central Italy is excellently treated by Martines in Power and Imagination, chapters 4 and 5, pp. 45-71.

24. Analyzed by Gaetano Salvemini in “Il passaggio del Comune di Firenze a parte guelfa,” in Magnati e popolani, pp. 194-231; Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, 2:829-844; and Sergio Raveggi, Massimo Tarassi, Daniela Medici, and Patrizia Parenti, Ghibellini, guelfi e popolo grasso: i detentori del potere politico a Firenze nella seconda metà del Dugento (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1978), pp. 73-90.

25. Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, 2:853-856; Salvemini, “Il passaggio del Comune di Firenze a parte guelfa,” in Magnati e popolani, pp. 228-231.

26. On the two redactions, see Carmody's introduction in Tresor, p. xxxvi; also the introduction by Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin to their English translation of the Tresor: Brunetto Latini, The Book of the Treasure (Li Livres dou Tresor) (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. xii-xiii; and Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, pp. 80 and 98, n. 34.

27. Tresor, pp. 78-79. The circulation of such stories about Manfred's crimes is discussed by Mark Balfour, “‘Orribil furon li peccati miei’: Manfred's Wounds in Purgatorio III,” Italian Studies XLVIII (1993), 4-17.

28. Holloway goes so far as to say that “It appears that Brunetto Latino and his circle of bankers intended Li Livres dou Tresor for Charles of Anjou, which is why Latino wrote the work in French” (Twice-Told Tales, p. 60).

29. A helpful analytical guide to the language of the Tresor is P. A. Messelaar's Le vocabulaire des idées dans le “Tresor” de Brunet Latin (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1963).

30. Tresor, p. 391; translation from The Book of the Treasure, trs. Barrette and Baldwin, pp. 350-351. This translation of the Tresor will henceforth be cited as Treasure. Chapters 73-105 of book III of the Tresor are also translated in Medieval Political Thought—A Reader: The Quest for the Body Politic, 1100-1400, ed. Cary J. Nederman and Kate Langdon Forhan (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 71-96. But their translation misreads a large number of passages.

31. Tresor, p. 391; Treasure, p. 351.

32. Tresor, pp. 20-21; Treasure, p. 4.

33. That the words Latini wrote in French do indeed correspond to these Tuscan terms is made clear by the vernacular version of the Tresor in Del Tesoro volgarizzato di Brunetto Latini libro primo, ed. Roberto De Visiani (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1869), pp. 47-8: “La terza è Politica, e senza fallo ciò è la piò alta iscienzia e del piò nobile mistiere che sia intra li omini: chè ella no' insegna a governare le stranie gente d'uno regno e d'una villa, et uno populo d'uno comune. … E sì no' insegna tutte le arte e tutt'e mistieri, che a vita d'omo a bisogno sia.”

34. Tresor, p. 176; Treasure, pp. 145-146. Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, ed. J. A. K. Thomson (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin, 1962), I, 1, p. 25.

35. Tresor, p. 176; Treasure, p. 146. In the Tuscan version this “art” is defined as “civile”: “Adunque l'arte civile, che insegna a reggere le cittadi, è principale e sovrana di tutte altre arti per ciò che sotto lei si contengono molte altre arti, le quali sono nobili, sì come l'arte di fare oste, e di reggere la famiglia” (in Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, p. 431).

36. Another echo (and anticipation) of the Florentine popular movement appears in Tresor III.87, where Latini writes that the podestà must regularly convene the advisory and legislative councils and that to such meetings should be invited, among others, “des prieus des ars” (Tresor, p. 408; Treasure; p. 367). In the Tuscan Tesoro this is rendered as “prior dell'arte” (Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, p. 491), and at the time Latini began the Tresor, the phrase must have referred to the elected heads, or consuls, of the guilds. The consuls of the guilds had in fact sometimes been included in deliberations and advisory sessions convened by the executive committee of the Anziani under the primo popolo. In the brief popular revival of 1266-67 the seven major guilds created an association and appointed representatives to a committee called the priores artium (priori delle arti). Latini's use of prieus/priori in this passage (at least in the second redaction) may have been inspired by the events of 1266-67. On the appearance in 1266 of the priores artium, see Salvemini, “Il passaggio del comune di Firenze a parte guelfa,” in Magnati e popolani, pp. 213-214.

37. Tresor, pp. 176-77; Treasure, p. 146. The Tuscan translation unfortunately omits the final phrase of the last sentence of this passage: “e questo si è però che ciascuno artifice giudichi bene e dica la verità di quello che appartiene alla sua arte” (Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, p. 432).

38. Tresor, p. 201; Treasure, pp. 169-70 (where the translation of the sentence about wisdom adds the phrase “of the art” after “advantage”).

39. Ethics, ed. Thomson, pp. 178-179.

40. Tresor, p. 184; Treasure, p. 153.

41. Tresor, p. 199; Treasure, p. 168.

42. Tresor, p. 205; Treasure, p. 173. For an important treatment of Latini's concept of justice that utilizes these and other passages, see Quentin Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher,” Proceedings of the British Academy, LXXII (1986), 1-56, esp. 15-17.

43. Tresor, p. 178; Treasure, p. 147.

44. See my Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 46-48.

45. Tresor, p. 183; Treasure, p. 152.

46. Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, p. 437: “E per tenere ragione si è detto, che nelle gravi cose dee l'uomo avere arte. Dunque lo intendimento dell'artefice della scienza civile si è che faccia dilettare i suo' cittadini nelle cose le quali si convengono.”

47. Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto, ed. Marcello Ciccuto (Milano: Rizzoli, 1985), p. 60. This edition will henceforth be cited as Tesoretto. Another edition, with accompanying English translation, that I have found very helpful is Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto (The Little Treasure), ed. and trans. Julia Bolton Holloway (New York: Garland, 1981), which will be cited as Little Treasure. The passage quoted in the text above is on pp. 8-9. I use Holloway's translation unless otherwise indicated.

48. Tesoretto, p. 61; Little Treasure, pp. 10-11. My translation.

49. Tesoretto, pp. 61-62; Little Treasure, pp. 10-11.

50. Tesoretto, p. 91; Little Treasure, pp. 62-63.

51. Tesoretto, p. 92; Little Treasure, pp. 64-65.

52. Tesoretto, p. 95; Little Treasure, pp. 68-69. My translation.

53. On knighthood in Florence, see Gaetano Salvemini, La dignità cavalleresca, pp. 101-203; and now Lansing, The Florentine Magnates, pp. 145-163.

54. Piero Santini, Studi sull'antica costituzione del Comune di Firenze (1903; reprint ed. Roma: Multigrafica Editrice, 1972), pp. 31-41.

55. Salvemini, Magnati e popolani, p. 9.

56. “Cronica fiorentina compilata nel secolo XIII,” in Testi fiorentini del Dugento e dei primi del Trecento, ed. Alfredo Schiaffini (Firenze: Sansoni, 1954), pp. 117-120.

57. Tesoretto, vv. 1427-1446, pp. 97-98; Little Treasure, pp. 72-75.

58. Tesoretto, vv. 1453-1494, pp. 98-99; Little Treasure, pp. 74-77.

59. Tesoretto, vv. 1599-1609, p. 102; Little Treasure, pp. 80-81.

60. Tesoretto, vv. 1671-1724, pp. 104-106; Little Treasure, pp. 84-87. (The translation of vv. 1720-1724 is mine.) This section of the poem has obvious connections to Brunetto's discussion of nobility in the Tresor, especially in II. 114; see the analysis by Charles Davis, “Brunetto Latini and Dante,” in his Dante's Italy, pp. 180-186.

61. Tesoretto, vv. 1825-1850, p. 109; Little Treasure, pp. 90-93.

62. Tesoretto, vv. 1877-1938, pp. 110-112; Little Treasure, pp. 94-97. (The translation of vv. 1935-1936 is mine.)

63. Tesoretto, vv. 1939-1954, p. 112; Little Treasure, pp. 96-97. My translation.

64. I thus agree with Julia Bolton Holloway that the virtues urged on the knight “are largely bourgeois virtues, not aristocratic ones.” To this she adds that Latini “has written a courtesy book … to be read not by members of the nobility, but by members of a bourgeois, republican democracy” (Little Treasure, p. xxiv). But I would guess that he did indeed want his poem to be read by the knights and other members of the class that dominated Florentine politics from 1260 to 1282.

65. Tesoretto, vv. 1995-2014, p. 114; Little Treasure, pp. 98-101. The translation is a combination of Holloway's and my own.

66. Tesoretto, vv. 2082-2104, pp. 116-117; Little Treasure, pp. 102-105. My translation.

67. I have offered an overview of this transformation in “The Dialogue of Power in Florentine Politics,” in City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 269-288.

68. On Villani and his business partners, see Michele Luzzati, Giovanni Villani e la compagnia dei Buonaccorsi (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971); and Louis Green, Chronicle into History: An Essay on the Interpretation of History in Fourteenth-Century Florentine Chronicles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 11-14.