Florence: from the oligarchic families to the “Bankers of God”. The guilds, the wealth, and the meaning of “citizen”

Δεν διατίθεται περίληψη στα ελληνκά.We owe to Dante and to Machiavelli; they bequeathed to us the chiaroscuro Florentine world, steeped either in the most charming tales or in the doctrine of hegemony. However, what about the period that flows between the late medieval age and the dawn of Renaissance? The history of the most outstanding city­state of central Italy usually comes to us through one­sided narratives. We are familiar with its parexcellence art and the renaissancial interpretation of man; the activities linked to trade, to wool merchants and bankers, sponsors of artists that beside their huge impact on the birth of the Renaissance set the origins of the modern banking system. However, we are generally unaware of the city’s poverty­stricken people, labourers who produced the notorious Florentine wealth. Therefore, the paper intends to shed light on the two societies inside the community; the wealthy Families alongside the minimum­wage workers of the guilds: although they were also taxed for the wars and the constructions of secular and religious buildings, contributing to the city’s safety and beautification, they were excluded from political rights. To enter the reality of the late 13th and early 15th century Florentine life, one has to penetrate beneath the varnish of Priorato delle Arti and its self­interest, down to the common peoples’ actual lives. Based on a set of chronicles, the paper presents the two “faces” of Florence aggregating into six broad cases, i.e., (1) Guelphs and Ghibellines, (2) the strengthening of the Guilds, the increasing division of labour and the wages, (3) the wealth of the Families and the political elites network, (4) the Monte comune financial system and the fiscal crisis, (5) the labourers, considering as part of the community but having a limited role in it, (6) the republican city­state followed by the centralization of political partiesauthoritarianism. A heterogeneous world of patron­worker relations and civil­political movements developed at the same stage, revealing that the people’s identification with the activities of the community along with the class struggle led to the emergence of the “citizen”