a place of some slight importance, high up on the hill above it, looking like a part of the bleak mountain side. This whole region, the desert of Accona, is wild and barren in the extreme, save where the strenuous labour of these Olivetan monks has effected some cultivation; the convent itself appears as an oasis in a wilderness of cretaceous precipices, or balze. As we mount, it gets wilder and more bare in front, while round and behind us an ever grander and more spacious outlook opens; Siena is dimly seen in the distance, Monte Amiata rising higher and higher to the south, and, more westward, that loftily placed last home and refuge of the battered Republic, heroic Montalcino with its towers. At last we reach the monastery portal, guarded with a machicolated tower like a fortress; a long avenue of cypresses leads down to the church with its massive square tower and the convent buildings, built into the ravines. They are built of a rich red brick which, as Addington Symonds notes, “contrasts not unpleasantly with the lustrous green of the cypresses, and the glaucous sheen of olives.”

It was, as we have seen, in the very year of the Emperor’s death in Buonconvento below, 1313, that Bernardo fled to this solitude. The son of Messer Mino Tolomei (the head of the Ghibelline section of that normally Guelf house) and Fulvia Tancredi, he was born in 1272, and christened Giovanni. After a boyhood of piety and study, he was made doctor by the Studio of Siena and knight of the Holy Roman Empire by Albert of Hapsburg—which latter event was seized by the Tolomei as an occasion for displaying all the wealth and splendour of their clan. He had a dazzling career as leader of the social and intellectual life of the city, though the stories told by his ecclesiastical biographers, of his becoming practically ruler of the Republic, are obviously nonsense; such things did not happen to noblemen while the Monte de’ Nove held sway. Then came his conversion. He had been going to deliver a philosophical discourse in the Studio, so runs the legend, when he was suddenly stricken with blindness. In the darkness he saw visions, prayed to the Blessed Virgin and recovered his sight at her intercession. Instead of his promised lecture, he poured out an impassioned homily upon the contempt of the world.[169] He distributed all that he had to the poor, retaining only a little land in this desert of Accona, to which he now went forth with two noble companions, Patrizio Patrizi and Ambrogio Piccolomini. The three began by raising with their own hands a little chapel to St Scholastica. Giovanni now dressed in the roughest hermit attire, and took the name of Bernardo. Men began to flock to him, and certain Guelfs, suspecting a Ghibelline plot, are said to have attempted to take his life by poison. Praying at the spot where now is the great portal of the church, Bernardo beheld a silver ladder stretching up to Paradise, with Angels leading white-robed men upwards to Christ and the Madonna. Accused of heresy, Bernardo and Ambrogio were summoned to Avignon, where Pope John XXII. received them kindly and recommended them to Guido Tarlati, the warrior bishop of Arezzo, who (in accordance with a special communication from the Madonna, says the legend) gave them a rule of life, armorial bearings and the white habit.

Thus the Order was founded and Bernardo began to build the church and convent, over which the Archangel Michael and the fiends renewed the war that they had waged in Heaven before the creation of the world. After having been frequently sent by the Pope to heal the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines in many towns of Italy, at last in 1348, when the terrible Black Death was ravaging the peninsula, Bernardo assembled his monks, bade them leave the convent, going two and two to every town and city to tend the plague-stricken, and all to assemble once more in Siena, two days before the Feast of the Assumption, in the convent that he had founded outside the Porta Tufi. All arrived safely, as he had promised them. On the vigil of the Assumption, he addressed them for the last time. Then, a few days later, he died; the rest took the pestilence, and the greater part of them passed away with the people they had come to tend.

At present the Olivetani have been almost everywhere suppressed. Here a few monks remain, their superior being regarded as merely the custode for the government, and there are a certain number of students. The Abbate Generale of the Order resides at Settignano.

The frescoes of the greater cloister were painted in the days of the Abbate Generale Fra Domenico Airoldi of Lecco. They illustrate the legend of St Benedict, as told by Pope Gregory the Great in the second book of his Dialogues. They were begun by Luca Signorelli in 1497, who painted eight frescoes beginning in the middle of the story, and then went away to undertake greater work in the Duomo of Orvieto. In 1505 and 1506 Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, who had known Fra Domenico in Lombardy, took up the tale, and, while he told it in line and colour, kept the whole convent in an uproar with his japery. “It would be impossible to describe,” says Vasari, “the fun that, while he worked in that place, those fathers got out of him, for they called him the big lunatic (Il Mattaccio), nor the mad pranks he played there.”

Beginning from the side of the cloister adjoining the monastery church, we have first nineteen scenes by Bazzi. We see Benedict as a youth leaving his father’s house at Norcia to go to study humanities at Rome, his faithful nurse (who plays the same part in the original legend) riding with him on a donkey; and then, his leaving the Roman schools, “instructed with learned ignorance and furnished with unlearned wisdom” as Pope Gregory has it, because scandalised at the dissolute lives of his fellow-students. These two frescoes show that Bazzi had been impressed by Pinturicchio’s work at Siena; they recall Enea Silvio setting out from Genoa and the Congress of Mantua. In the third, Benedict mends the borrowed sieve that his nurse had broken, and the townsmen hang it up at their church door, “to the end that not only men then living, but also their posterity, might understand how greatly God’s grace did work with him upon his first renouncing of the world.” Here we see Bazzi himself, a fine piece of self portraiture, surrounded by his pet birds and beasts, wearing the knightly robes and sword that had been discarded by a gentleman of Milan who had just entered the Order, and which the Abbot gave him in part payment for his work. Next, Benedict meets Romanus on the way to Subiaco. Then, while Romanus lets down a loaf of bread to Benedict in his cave, the devil, “envying at the charity of the one and the refection of the other,” hurls a stone and breaks the bell with which Romanus used to signal to his young friend; the painter’s pet badger calmly drinks at a pond the while. Next, a certain priest, by divine inspiration, brings a dinner to Benedict on Easter Day. In the seventh fresco, Benedict instructs the shepherds who found out his retreat; “and for corporal meat, which they brought him, they carried away spiritual food for their souls.” Then he rolls among thorns, to overcome a temptation of the flesh that the devil put into his mind by the representation of “a certain woman which some time he had seen.” After that, certain monks, by their persistence, induce him against his will to become their abbot. Finding him too austere, they attempt to poison him; but when he makes the sign of the Cross over the cup, it breaks in pieces, and he goes back unharmed to his solitude. Bazzi has made the ill-favoured monk, who was most insistent in urging Benedict to be abbot, the one to offer him the poisoned cup. Then, as many flock to him, he builds the twelve monasteries at Subiaco. In the twelfth fresco, one of the finest of the series, Benedict receives Maurus and Placidus, the young sons of the Roman nobles Equitius and Tertullus, who are accompanied by a splendid troop of retainers. Next, he beats the devil out of a monk who would not say his prayers; he makes a fountain spring forth on the top of a mountain; he makes the iron head of a bill that had slipped into the water return to its handle again. Now Placidus has fallen into the lake and Maurus, at the bidding of the man of God, runs upon the water and delivers him, after which “he both marvelled and was afraid at that which he had done,” but Benedict ascribes it entirely to his obedience. This is a particularly attractive picture, with the sweet boyish faces of the two young monks. After another miracle (of which the subject is not quite obvious), on either side of the door, we come to the attempt made by the priest Florentius to kill Benedict by a poisoned loaf; the Saint’s tamed crow, somewhat unwillingly, takes it away where no man can find it, to return presently for his own usual allowance. In the nineteenth fresco, Florentius tries to corrupt the monks by sending a band of young and beautiful women to the convent, to inflame their minds by dancing and singing. This was a subject far more after Bazzi’s own heart than were the trivial miracles of monastic legend, and in the exquisite group of women, with their Leonardesque faces, their subtle suggestion of rhythmic movement, he has produced a masterpiece. Vasari tells us that the painter originally shocked the worthy Abbot by representing this scene in a more realistic fashion (in which, we may add, he would only be following St Gregory’s own version of what happened), and that he was afterwards compelled to drape the figures.

Beyond this last fresco, there stood originally a door that led to the great refectory. It was closed between 1530 and 1541,[170] after which Bazzi’s son-in-law, Bartolommeo Neroni or Il Riccio, painted upon the new wall the fresco we now see. It represents St Benedict sending out Maurus and Placidus as missionaries, the one to France, the other to Sicily.

The eight frescoes that follow are Luca Signorelli’s, but they hardly rank among his best works and are, in addition, in a bad state of preservation. In the first is the punishment of Florentius; the devils have thrown down his chamber upon him and are carrying off his soul; while Benedict, hearing what has happened, laments greatly, “both because his enemy died in such sort, and also for that one of his monks rejoiced thereat.” In the second, he converts the inhabitants of Monte Cassino from their worship of Apollo. In the third, he exorcises the devil who sat upon the stone and prevented the monks from raising it, and the idol of brass, which they dug up upon the spot and which seemed to set the convent on fire. In the fourth, he raises to life the young monk upon whom the devil had thrown a wall. The fifth is an admirable piece of genre-painting, intended to illustrate St Benedict’s discovery by revelation that some of his monks had disobeyed him and eaten out of the monastery. Two monks are eating and drinking in a primitive diningroom of the epoch (not an inn, as usually stated, but

what St Gregory calls “the house of a religious woman”), waited upon by women—fine robust daughters of the people; the Saint is just seen, discovering to them their fault, on the right in the section of the wall. In the sixth scene, we have the story of the devout layman, the brother of Valentinian the monk, who was induced by a companion to break his fast on a journey. The two remaining frescoes, the last that Signorelli painted here, are of a far higher order and more characteristic of his grand manner. They represent Totila, King of the Goths, testing Benedict’s supernatural wisdom by sending one of his officers to him, disguised as himself; and then, when the Saint recognises the deceit and rebukes the man, Totila comes in person with his army, falls down before him and listens meekly to his words. In both, Signorelli gives us a superb representation of the fierce mercenary soldiery of his own day, and the work is full of his characteristic vigour and delight in powerful, strenuous manhood. Here, alone in the series, do we begin to recognise the future author of those unapproachable masterpieces at Orvieto.

Bazzi now takes up the tale in the seven remaining frescoes. In the first, Benedict foretells the destruction of Monte Cassino. The Saint himself is barely seen in a corner, the picture representing the event that he foretold. Monte Cassino is burning, while in the foreground is the Lombard host, superb groups of horsemen in every attitude, which recall Leonardo’s famous Battle of the Standard which, however, it seems probable that Bazzi could not then have known.[171] After this, we are back in the region of petty miracles. Meal is miraculously brought to the monks in time of famine. Benedict appears in vision to the abbot and prior, whom he has sent to build an abbey near Terracina, and shows them how it is to be done. Two nuns, whom he threatened with excommunication because they would not bridle their tongues, cannot rest after death, but are seen to rise from their graves and leave the church at the time of the Communion, until he makes an oblation for them and (apparently) gives communion in some mystical way to their unquiet ghosts. A young monk, “loving his parents more than reason would,” cannot be buried after death, until Benedict bids them lay the Sacred Host upon his breast. Another monk, wishing to forsake the abbey, finds a terrible dragon in the way. A poor countryman, fallen into the hands of the Goth Zalla, “an Arian heretic who, in the time of King Totila, did with monstrous cruelty persecute religious men,” is marvellously loosed from his bonds at the sight of the man of God and Zalla himself moved to repentance. This closes the series of Benedict’s life. “Certainly,” says Peter to Gregory in the Dialogues, “they be wonderful things which you report, and such as may serve for the edification of many: for mine own part, the more that I hear of his miracles, the more do I still desire.” And we may feel disposed to say the same, if we have a Signorelli or a Bazzi to paint them.

There are a few other frescoes by Bazzi in the convent. Between the cloister and the church are Christ at the Column and Christ bearing the Cross, works of intense spiritual expression, and another variously described as Benedict giving his rule and Bernardo founding his order of Monte Oliveto. On the stairs leading to the dormitories are the Coronation of the Madonna and a Pietà, and, at the rooms of the Abbate Generale, over the door, a Madonna and Child with St Michael and St Peter. Outside the church a striking Madonna and Child in marble, ascribed to Fra Giovanni da Verona, watches over the tombs of the brethren. The church itself has been modernised. An old picture of the three founders is said to mark the place where Bernardo saw the Archangel Michael descend from Heaven in flashing armour to drive away the devils who were threatening to destroy the foundations of the building. It contains excellent intarsia by Giovanni da Verona, especially on the reading desk and choir stalls, and there is similar work by him in the library of the monastery.

Pope Pius II. came here in 1463, and in his Memoirs (those famous Commentarii Rerum Memorabilium) we are given an account of his visit.[172] He marvelled at the situation of the place and the wonderful industry by which the monks had reclaimed so much of the desert soil, on the very brink of the precipice, and at the excellent architecture of the monastery. He found the woods and gardens as delightful to linger in, as we do to-day, and struck the keynote of the feeling of every modern visitor to these monastic houses of the past; “pleasant places of refreshment for the monks, more pleasant still for those to whom, after they have seen, it is lawful to depart.” On the second evening of his stay, the Pope supped with the monks in the refectory; while they were at table he bade his choristers come in, who sang the new hymn that his Holiness had composed in honour of St Catherine of Siena, “with such soft harmony that they drew sweet tears from all the monks.”

CHAPTER XI

San Gimignano

San Gimignano of the Beautiful Towers is a place of frowning grey and brown walls and towers, of mysterious alleys, of shimmering olive-trees and fields of flowers that lie beyond, of flaming skies at sunrise, of clamorous bells at nightfall. Hardly, indeed, would he be pressed who should be called upon to award the crown of beauty to any one, rather than another, of the smaller towns of central Italy, though San Gimignano would perhaps deserve it. “No other town or castle in Tuscany,” wrote Gino Capponi, “retains more of the Middle Ages and was less invaded by the ages that followed; in those towers, and in the churches and in the houses of massive stone, is still something that cannot be covered up by the thin plastering of modern times; ancient memories keep their possession of it, the new life has hardly entered in.”[173] High up on the side of one of the hills of the Val d’Elsa—

as Mr Swinburne sings of it—it watches the fertile valley of the Elsa spread below, while to the north, beyond Certaldo (haunted still by the spirit of him who wrote the Human Comedy of the Middle Ages), the

Apennines bar the eyes’ further progress. Behind it, to the west, are hills that command a view of Volterra and the distant Mediterranean. The woods that once gave the little town its picturesque name—“Il Castello della Selva,” the “Castle of the Wood”—have almost disappeared. In their place it is surrounded with olive plantations, which temper with their silvery softness the austerity of the towers and the walls:—

The people are mediaeval still. You may see them throng the churches as in the old days of simple faith, or hear them among the vineyards and in the beanfields answer each other in the rispetti and strambotti of a more primitive Tuscany. The place is miserably poor, in marked contrast to the smug prosperity of its neighbours, Poggibonsi and Certaldo. Living is exceedingly cheap, but there is no trade, and what little work there is, is but scantily paid. Yet the people are full of old-world dignity and courtesy, and seem cheerful in spite of it all, even down to the little beggar bambini who pursue the foreign visitor with insatiable demands for foreign stamps and soldi, or pester him with unseasonable offers to serve as guide.[175]

Like most other small Italian towns, the origin of San Gimignano—il nobile castello, or il florido castello di San Gimignano—is hidden in legendary clouds. There is, of course, a tradition of a Roman foundation, a castle built by Silvius, a young Roman patrician involved in Catiline’s rebellion, of Attila’s hordes of Huns hurled back by a sudden apparition of St Geminianus the martyred Bishop of Modena (whence the change of name from Silvia to San Gimignano), of a great palace built by Desiderius King of the Lombards, of privileges granted by Charlemagne. All these things are presumably mere fables. Luigi Pecori, the historian of his native town, supposes that in the sixth or seventh century, when the devotion to St Geminianus was widely spread, a church was built to his honour here, that people gradually gathered round it, until by the beginning of the eighth century there was a regular town, which was fortified by a castle; and as it was then surrounded and defended by woods, it was called the Castello di San Gimignano or the Castello della Selva. Be that as it may, the first authentic mention of the place is in a document of the early part of the tenth century.

From the tenth to the twelfth century, San Gimignano was subject to Volterra and more particularly to the Bishop of that city; but in the course of the twelfth century, its people were gradually winning their way to virtual independence and self-government, like the other communes of Tuscany, and like them beginning to exert supremacy and authority over the petty nobles of the small castles in the vicinity. By the year 1200, they had practically attained their liberty. At this time they had consuls, three or four elected annually, with a special council of fifty and a larger general council “which met only in cases of peace or war, usually in the Pieve, and always at the sound of the bell, as though Religion with her solemn voice invited the citizens into her own sanctuary to provide for the public weal.”[176] Hitherto the Bishop of Volterra had appointed two rectors, rettori, in whom the judiciary power was vested; but in 1199, instead of these rectors, we begin to find a Podestà, elected by the Council of the Commune, the first being Messer Maghinardo Malavolti of Siena. At first, a native of the place was sometimes elected; but after 1220 the Podestà was always a foreign noble (usually, but not invariably, from Siena or Florence), who judged civil and criminal cases, presided over the meetings of the General Council and led the forces of the Commune in war; he brought with him a judge and a notary with a certain number of attendants, berrovieri, and was not allowed to entertain nor to receive hospitality from the citizens. All this was more or less the same, on a smaller scale, as what took place at this epoch in Florence or Siena; but here in San Gimignano the effect of the appointment of a Podestà was not to reduce the authority of the consuls, but rather to abolish that of the rectors of the Bishop of Volterra, and we find him exercising his magistracy side by side with the consuls for a longer period here than in the larger communes. For the rest, his term of office was originally one year, but it was afterwards reduced to six months; the same Podestà, however, was frequently re-elected.

Hitherto San Gimignano had consisted of the Castello Vecchio, surrounded by the old walls and with those grim antique gates, of which the remains stand to-day in the shape of the two portoni, with a suburb outside. But now, at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries, the new circle of walls was built to inclose the Castello Nuovo, as it was called; this is the seconda cinta, the second circuit of walls that still surround the place.

With the thirteenth century begins the series of the wars of the Sangimignanesi. In 1202, under their Podestà, they sent a force to relieve Semifonte, then besieged by the Florentines, but ended by helping to subject the castle to their formidable neighbours. They amplified their own dominion, destroyed the fortresses of the lords of various little castles in the contado, forcing them to enter San Gimignano, and obtained Castelvecchio (which no longer exists) in 1210 from the Bishop of Volterra. They carried on a long intermittent struggle with Volterra, sometimes for the possession of Monte Voltraio, sometimes in alliance with the warrior bishop, Pagano de’ Pannocchieschi, whom his people expelled at intervals. Occasionally, Florence or Siena would intervene and compel the two small communes to keep the peace. San Gimignano even sent men to the Crusades, and two of these, Bene Trainelli and a certain Gradalone, are said to have won great honour. Within the city, there were the usual struggles between the magnates and the people, the grandi and the popolani, which came to a head in 1233, when the houses of the Knights Templars were burned, and a number of popolani, chosen from each of the then four contrade, with the rectors of the Arts, were appointed to sit with the consuls in the councils of the State. There was another tumult in 1236, which the Bishop Pagano came in person from Volterra to appease, after which the two Councils appear to have been reduced to one. In the days of Frederick II., San Gimignano was Ghibelline, took its Podestàs “by the grace of God and of the Emperor,” and sent horse and foot to serve in the imperial army. But the factions raged here, as everywhere else in Tuscany. In 1246, irritated by an unusually heavy tax upon the churches, the Guelfs rose. Headed by the sons of Guido Ardinghelli, they assailed the houses of the Ghibellines, especially those of the sons of Messer Salvuccio. The Podestà was absent at Certaldo; but he gathered troops in the contado, and entered the town while the uproar in the streets was at its height; he assailed the Guelfs who, under this combined attack and the rain of bolts and arrows from the towers, were forced to retire. There were numbers banished on both sides. Thus began the feud between the houses of the Ardinghelli and Salvucci, that was to bring San Gimignano into servitude.

Shortly after the middle of the thirteenth century, a more democratic form of government was established. Instead of the consuls, the supreme authority was vested in a magistracy of twelve, elected annually—the twelve “Captains and Rectors of the People,” two captains and one rector being elected from each quarter of the town. There was the one Council of the Commune, usually sixty in number. A special magistracy of eight presided over the public expenses (the Otto delle Spese), and the Podestà, of course, had a special council, which in San Gimignano consisted of sixteen citizens.

But in the years in which this reformation was effected, immediately after the death of Frederick II., the factions grew more furious. In June 1251 the Guelfs rose, headed by the Twelve, expelled the Ghibelline Podestà, Neri degli Uberti of Florence, and made themselves masters of the town. Then in September 1252, the Ghibellines rose, headed by Michele Buonfigliuoli. The Guelfs made their stand at the houses of the Cini and Cici in the quarter of San Matteo, where after a desperate battle—the Podestà vainly spreading the red and yellow banner of the Commune and calling upon the combatants to lay down their arms—the Ghibellines got the upper hand, sacked the houses and massacred their opponents. The Guelfs appealed to the Bishop of Volterra, Ranieri de’ Pannocchieschi, who came to San Gimignano and patched up a sort of peace between the two factions—apparently to the advantage of the Guelfs. The Ghibellines rose again in January 1253; the gates were broken down and a portion of the walls destroyed, until at last the men of San Miniato interposed and assisted in expelling the leading Ghibellines.

This is the epoch of the short, flower-like life and flower-attended death of the virgin heroine of San Gimignano, Santa Fina. Fina de’ Ciardi, born of a noble but poor family, at the age of ten contracted a horrible disease and, instead of a bed, chose to lie upon a plank of hard oak for five years, “offering herself up as a perfect holocaust to God.” She lost her father and mother, had horrible visions of the fiend in the form of a serpent. Then according to the legend, eight days before her death, St Gregory appeared to her, and told her that the end of her miseries was come, for that on the day of his feast she would be with him in Paradise. She died on March 12th, 1253, being then fifteen years old. “Hardly had that blessed soul expired,” writes the Annalist, “than the Demons in envy and rage filled the air with such fearful whirlwinds, that poor mortals were struck with horror. Against them the sound of the bells of San Gimignano, moved by the invisible hands of Angels, bore witness to the sanctity of Fina, and straightway caused those storms and infernal whirlwinds to cease. At these prodigies, the people flocked to the house of the saint, from which every one imagined that these effects proceeded. And when they arrived there, they smelt a fragrance of Paradise, and saw all the room where the sacred body was, miraculously full of flowers, as also the board upon which she lay. And when they wished to lift her from it, a part of the mortified flesh remained attached to it and straightway turned into flowers.”[177] Such are the contrasts offered by mediaeval

life and legend. The towns where the streets are still running red with the blood of the citizens, while the remains of houses and palaces are still smoking in their ruin, are visited by beings of another world, and have mystical gates and windows that open out upon the unseen.

San Gimignano was now Guelf for a while, and sent a well-equipped little force to swell the Florentine host at Montaperti in 1260. After the battle the Ardinghelli, Pellari, Mangieri and other Guelf families fled to Lucca; the Ghibellines took over the government and recalled Neri degli Uberti to serve as Podestà. San Gimignano now followed the fortunes of Siena, as in its Guelf days it had followed those of Florence. But in 1269, after the battle of Colle di Val d’Elsa, it became Guelf again under the suzerainty of Charles of Anjou, expelled the leading Ghibellines, and took a Captain of the People in imitation of the Florentines. But the neighbouring castle of Poggibonsi still clung to the decaying cause of the Ghibellines, and sheltered the fuorusciti. It was now, in 1270, reduced by the French soldiery of Montfort, aided by the Florentines and Sangimignanesi. The splendid castle, which Giovanni Villani calls the strongest and most beautiful in Italy, and of which we still see the remains rising above the modern town, was razed to the ground, and the inhabitants were forced to descend from the hill into the plain. King Charles put the work of destruction into the hands of the Sangimignanesi and made over a portion of the territory of the “rebellious” castle to them, the rest to the Florentines. Henceforth San Gimignano adhered to the Guelf League of Tuscany, sent armed men to take part in its wars, and did a little independent fighting with the Bishop of Volterra. The small Commune began to have a voice in the counsels of Tuscany. In August 1276, the Sienese sent for peacemakers from San Gimignano, and the Podestà, Fantone de’ Rossi of Florence, with two of the citizens went at their request, “for the utility of that City and for the honour of this Commune.”

This was, indeed, the golden age of San Gimignano, from about 1270 to about 1320. According to Pecori, the population of the terra and contado together amounted to about 16,000 in the fourteenth century. The internal government grew more democratic, more definitely Guelf. Instead of the twelve captains and rectors, it was now ruled by the Otto delle Spese with the four Capitani di Parte Guelfa, and the usual credenza and General Council. In 1301 these Eight were increased to Nine, the “Nine Governors and Defenders of the Town,” whose term of office (like that of the Priors of Florence and the Nine of Siena) was two months. With the Nine was associated a giunta of twenty-four. The Podestà was publicly elected in front of the Pieve or Collegiata. All the magistrates assembled, and the Captains of the Parte Guelfa determined two cities from which he should be chosen. Then they drew by lot twelve councillors, each of whom nominated two knights from each of the two cities. They balloted for these, took the names of the eight who had received most votes, and wrote them on two tickets, four on each, which were inclosed in wax and put into a vessel of water. A child drew out one for the first six months, leaving the other for the second. Then the four names were similarly inclosed in four other wax globules, the child drew again, and the first name that came out was that of the Podestà for the next six months. The names on the second ticket, carefully inclosed in wax, were put into the custody of the Friars Minor until, at the appointed time, they were brought to the General Council and the same process repeated for the Podestà of the second six months.[178] And, indeed, the Podestà of San Gimignano had no easy task; the factions continued their aimless and deadly course, the Pellari leading the Guelfs and the Salvucci the Ghibellines, until in May 1298, the Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta came to the place and patched up a peace, which was solemnly celebrated in the Piazza.

In the following year, 1299, died San Bartolo, the Father Damian of the Middle Ages. He was the son of Giovanni Buonpedoni, Count of Mucchio in the Sangimignanese contado. At an early age he entered the Church, tended the sick at Pisa, served as a simple parish priest at Peccioli and Picchena, and at length devoted the last twenty years of his life to the service of the lepers in the leper hospital, the Leprosario of Cellole. Here he fell a victim to his heroic self-sacrifice, and suffered so terribly that he was called the Job of Tuscany. By his own last wish, he was buried in Sant’ Agostino, where, two centuries later, the art of Benedetto da Maiano raised the noble monument we now see.

The day in this epoch that has made most impression upon the imagination of posterity, probably created comparatively little excitement at the time. It was only one of many similar embassies from the allied cities of the Guelf League that came to the gate of San Gimignano on that May morning of the year of Jubilee, 1300;[179] but the young burgher who rode in, with trumpeters and others whose coats were emblazoned with the red lily, was no other than Dante Alighieri, come as ambassador of Florence to announce that a parliament was to be held for the purpose of electing a captain for the Guelf League of Tuscany, and to invite the Commune of San Gimignano to send representatives. The great new Palace of the Commune was then just finished, and the Tower barely begun. There was much Guelf fervour in San Gimignano in this year, the Podestà ordaining that, to avoid disorder and faction, every one should solemnly declare himself Guelf or Ghibelline, and that the Captains of the Party should raise a guard of six hundred men, half from the terra and half from the contado, for the custody of the town, to appear ready in arms at the sound of the bell. As we might have anticipated, when the Guelfs split into Blacks and Whites, San Gimignano was “black,” and in 1305 sent men to the siege of Pistoia.

A fierce war, on a large scale for two such small states, broke out in 1308 between San Gimignano and Volterra. There were no serious battles, but much harrying of the country and burning on both sides, and it was only ended by the intervention of Florence, Siena and Lucca. On the advent of Henry of Luxemburg, the Sangimignanesi sent men to aid King Robert and the Florentines. The Emperor came to Poggibonsi, from which he sentenced San Gimignano to pay a fine, and its walls and towers to be destroyed. Naturally, it was a mere idle threat.

This was the epoch in which the poet of San Gimignano, Messer Folgore, flourished. As we have seen, his principal work is associated with Siena; but there is a second series of sonnets, eight in number, for the different days of the week, which is more connected with his native city. They are dedicated to the Florentine, Carlo di Messer Guerra Cavicciuoli, who had served San Gimignano as condottiere in the war against Volterra. A more strenuous and virile note is struck here than in the better-known Sienese series for the months, in as much as, amidst the singing and love-making, the feasting and jousting, hunting and hawking, there is at least one day of genuine fighting to be done:—

For the rest, Folgore was a furious Guelf, and when his party was crushed by Uguccione della Faggiuola, on the tremendous day of Montecatini in 1315, he hurled his defiance at God Himself:—“I praise Thee not, O God, nor adore Thee; I pray not to Thee, and I thank Thee not; and I serve Thee not, for I am more sick of it than are the souls of being in Purgatory. For Thou hast put the Guelfs to such torment that the Ghibellines mock us and harrow us, and, if Uguccione demanded duty from Thee, Thou wouldst pay it readily.”[181]

In 1319 two brothers of the Baroncetti, Messer Tribaldo and Fresco, conspired to make the first-named despot of the town. He was a leader of the Guelfs, potent in their councils, lavish with his money. With their allies and friends the two attempted to surprise the Palace; but the people rose in arms and drove them from the town; they were sentenced to perpetual banishment and their goods confiscated. “There was a knight of the Baroncetti,” writes Fra Matteo Ciaccheri in his rhymed chronicle, “and he was a mighty man: Messer Tribaldo was his name. He sought by every way and means to become lord of all, and to make himself fine with the noble mantle. Therefore was he hunted out with great fury, and Messer Fresco, for they were brothers: for all the town rose in tumult.”[182] After this the Captain of the People, whose office had hitherto been frequently held by the Podestà, became more important, and the special council over which he presided was limited to popolani. Guards were continually kept on the Tower of the Podestà and the Tower of the People; chains were made for the streets and gates, and special custodians of them appointed for each of the four contrade. But the factions grew more and more embittered, and the days of the little Republic were numbered.

Led by the Ardinghelli, the fuorusciti were ravaging the contado, when in 1332 the Sangimignanesi, headed by their Podestà, Messer Piero di Duccio Saracini of Siena, took and burned Camporbiano, which had sheltered them. But Camporbiano was in the contado of Florence. The Florentines instantly summoned the Podestà and the leaders of the expedition to appear before them, and, when they did not appear, condemned the Commune of San Gimignano to pay a heavy fine, and their Podestà, with one hundred and forty-eight men of the town, to be burned alive. When the Florentine troops were actually on the march, the Sangimignanesi begged pardon, and threw themselves on the mercy of the Commune and People of Florence, who forgave them fairly magnanimously, on the condition of taking back the exiles and making good the damage that they had done to Camporbiano, according to the valuation of the men of the latter place themselves and of the Florentine ambassadors. After this, the Florentines soon began to treat San Gimignano as a vassal State, demanding soldiers and tributes, forcing its councils to ratify their corrections of the statutes. When the Duke of Athens made himself lord of Florence in 1342, the Ardinghelli (who had been expelled again) attempted in the night to surprise the town, with the aid of the ducal forces, at the Porta della Fonte. The attempt failed, but in the following February the Commune was forced to submit to the Duke, who began to build a castle to secure his hold. A few months later, on his fall, it was razed to the ground and his adherents expelled. Again the Ardinghelli, led by Primerano and Francesco, in secret understanding with their friends within, attempted to get possession of the town, and again they were unsuccessful. Civil war now broke out in the contado, and in 1346 the Ardinghelli, with a strong force of armed men collected from all quarters, again assailed the walls. At last, by the intervention of the Florentines, a peace was patched up, and the Ardinghelli returned.

Broken in spirit by the pestilence of 1348, hopelessly in debt to the banking houses of Florence and with factions still devastating the town, in the spring of 1349 the Commune of San Gimignano was compelled to surrender the custody and government of the State to the Florentines for three years, with the conditions that the Commune of Florence should every six months send a cittadino popolano from Florence as Captain of the Guard and another as Podestà (the latter, however, elected by the Sangimignanesi themselves), and that the citizens of San Gimignano should be declared true and lawful citizens of Florence, with the same rights and privileges as the Florentines.

The mutual hatred of the Ardinghelli and the Salvucci now blazed out afresh. Temporarily allayed by the appearance of some three hundred Florentine cavalry in the town, it came to a head in 1352. In a street brawl, a certain Ser Ilario struck Michele di Pietro, one of the Nine; Rossellino di Messer Gualtieri degli Ardinghelli (the brother of the Primerano already mentioned), who was present, was made responsible and fined. The Salvucci declared that Bartolommeo Altoviti, who was Captain of the town for the Florentines, had favoured Rossellino, and contrived that he should be succeeded by Benedetto di Giovanni Strozzi. Benedetto was easily convinced by them that Rossellino and Primerano were plotting with Altoviti against him. He promptly arrested the two brothers, “young men of great expectation and following,” says Matteo Villani, “and Guelfs by disposition and birth,” and imprisoned them. They threw a letter out of their prison tower, calling upon their friends to deliver them. It fell into the hands of the Captain, who, impelled “either by zeal of his office or by his own evil disposition or by the instigation of the Salvucci, their enemies,” determined to put them to death. The Commune of Florence, believing them innocent, sent an express command to Benedetto that he should not take their lives: but the Elsa had risen in flood, and the messengers could not pass that night. The Captain, hearing that they were on the way, hurried on the execution; on August 9th, he had the two young nobles publicly beheaded in the Piazza at the foot of the steps of the Palace, together with the supposed accomplice to whom they had written the fatal letter.

Thirsting for vengeance, the Ardinghelli, on December 20th, introduced the soldiery of the lords of Picchena and of the exiled Rossi of Florence into the town by the Porta di Quercecchio. Followed by the majority of the people, they assailed the houses of the Salvucci, who were taken by surprise and made little resistance, drove them out of the place, sacked and burned their palaces and those of their adherents, and occupied the town for themselves. On Christmas Day, the Salvucci and their friends appeared in Florence, demanding the aid of the Commune under whose guardianship (they said) they had been thus robbed and maltreated. On the other side the Ardinghelli, in the name and with the authority of the Commune of San Gimignano, sent ambassadors, declaring that they had driven out the Ghibellines and would hold the town in honour of the Commune of Florence and of the Parte Guelfa. In February, the Florentines sent their Podestà, Paolo Vaiani of Rome, with a strong force of horse and foot, to restore order. Reaching the town and receiving no answer to their summons, they set their camp in hostile array and began to waste the country; but none sallied out nor made any resistance. Then the people forced the Ardinghelli to surrender. It was agreed that the Florentines should make peace between them and the exiles, should have the custody of the town for five more years, and should keep a Captain of the Guard there with seventy-five horsemen at the cost of the inhabitants, and that the Salvucci should return after six months. But the lords of Picchena having made no apology to Florence for their share in the matter, the Florentines in June destroyed their walls and fortress, “in order that this castle might no more be the cause of San Gimignano and Colle being stirred up to any rebellion.”[183]

Very striking is the last, piteous appeal of Fra Matteo Ciaccheri to his countrymen, to let the dead rest and save San Gimignano before it is too late:—

“Among the castles it is the very flower, and we are destroying it with all our might. It is the will of God, our Lord, that it should come to nought for our sin; within my heart I feel bitter grief thereat! Each of us has been hunted out, because we have turned to these factions, and we have been slain and burned and taken and robbed. For God’s sake, let us let the past be past, and each one strive to be a good brother, and look upon each other with kindly eyes. And so shall we save this noble jewel, which doth ever move my heart with love, so delightful and beauteous it seemeth to me.”[184]

But all efforts were useless. The Salvucci and the Ardinghelli would have no dealings with each other, “and they kept all the town in gloom.” Each house longed to be avenged on the other and opposed the other at every turn. At length the Ardinghelli, being poorer and weaker than the Salvucci, decided to anticipate their enemies and to urge the people to make a complete and perpetual surrender to the Commune of Florence. In spite of the protests of the Salvucci, this was decided in a general Parliament in July, 1353. The Salvucci had potent friends in Florence, whom they stirred up to get the submission rejected, on the grounds that it was not the will of the people of San Gimignano themselves, but the work of a faction. The Signoria declared that they “only desired the love and the goodwill of all the Commune, and not the lordship of that town in division of the people.” Then two hundred and fifty of the chief men of San Gimignano appeared before the Priors and Gonfaloniere of Florence, assuring them that it was the will of all their people, whose only hope of salvation lay in being accepted by the Florentines. Hearing this, the Signoria formally proposed to the Council of the People of Florence that the surrender should be accepted; but such was still the influence of the Salvucci that it was barely carried. “That which every one should have desired, as a great and honourable acquisition for his native land,” says Matteo Villani, “found so many opposed to it in the secret balloting, that it was only carried by one black bean. I am ashamed to have written it, so infamous was it of my fellow citizens. The motion being carried, the terra of the noble castle of San Gimignano and its contado and district became part of the contado of the Commune of Florence.”[185]