The most elevated political thought and the most varied forms of human development are found united in the history of Florence, which in this sense deserves the name of the first modern State in the world.Here the whole people are busied with what in the despotic cities is the affair of a single family.That wondrous Florentine spirit, at once keenly critical and artistically creative, was incessantly transforming the social and political condition of the State, and as incessantly describing and judging the change.Florence thus became the home of political doctrines and theories, of experiments and sudden changes, but also, like Venice, the home of statistical science, and alone and above all other States in the world, the home of historical representation in the modern sense of the phrase.The spectacle of ancient Rome and a familiarity with its leading writers were not without influence; Giovanni Villani confesses that he received the first impulse to his great work at the jubilee of the year 1300, and began it immediately on his return home.Yet how many among the 200,000pilgrims of that year may have been like him in gifts and tendencies and still did not write the history of their native cities? For not all of them could encourage themselves with the thought: 'Rome is sinking;my native city is rising, and ready to achieve great things, and therefore I wish to relate its past history, and hope to continue the story to the present time, and as long as any life shall last.' And besides the witness to its past, Florence obtained through its historians something further a greater fame than fell to the lot of any other city of Italy.
Our present task is not to write the history of this remarkable State, but merely to give a few indications of the intellectual freedom and independence for which the Florentines were indebted to this history.
In no other city of Italy were the struggles of political parties so bitter, of such early origin, and so permanent.The descriptions of them, which belong, it is true, to a somewhat later period, give clear evidence of the superiority of Florentine criticism.
And what a politician is the great victim of these crises, Dante Alighieri, matured alike by home and by exile ! He uttered his scorn of the incessant changes and experiments in the constitution of his native city in ringing verses, which will remain proverbial so long as political events of the same kind recur;14 he addressed his home in words of defiance and yearning which must have stirred the hearts of his countrymen.But his thoughts ranged over Italy and the whole world;and if his passion for the Empire, as he conceived it, was no more than an illusion, it must yet be admitted that the youthful dreams of a newborn political speculation are in his case not without a poetical grandeur.He is proud to be the first who trod this path,16 certainly in the footsteps of Aristotle, but in his own way independently.His ideal emperor is a just and humane judge, dependent on God only, the heir of the universal sway of Rome to which belonged the sanction of nature, of right and of the will of God.The conquest of the world was, according to this view, rightful, resting on a divine judgement between Rome and the other nations of the earth, and God gave his approval to this empire, since under it He became Man, submitting at His birth to the census of the Emperor Augustus, and at His death to the judgement of Pontius Pilate.We may find it hard to appreciate these and other arguments of the same kind, but Dante's passion never fail s to carry us with him.In his letters he appears as one of the earliest publicists, and is perhaps the first layman to publish political tracts in this form.He began early.Soon after the death of Beatrice he addressed a pamphlet on the State of Florence 'to the Great ones of the Earth,' and the public utterances of his later years, dating from the time of his banishment, are all directed to emperors, princes, a nd cardinals.In these letters and in his book De Vulgari Eloquentia (About the Vernacular) the feeling, bought with such bitter pains, is constantly recurring that the exile may find elsewhere than in his native place an intellectual home in language and culture, which cannot be taken from him.On this point we shall have more to say in the sequel.
To the two Villani, Giovanni as well as Matteo, we owe not so much deep political reflection as fresh and practical observations, together with the elements of Florentine statistics and important notices of other States.Here too trade and commerce had given the impulse to economic as well as political science.Nowhere else in the world was such accurate information to be had on financial affairs.The wealth of the Papal court at Avignon, which at the death of John XXII amounted to twenty-five millions of gold florins, would be incredible on any less trustworthy authority.Here only, at Florence, do we meet with colossal loans like that which the King of England contracted from the Florentine houses of Bardi and Peruzzi, who lost to his Majesty the sum of 1,365,000 gold florins (1338) their own money and that of their partners and nevertheless recovered from the shock.Most important facts are here recorded as to the condition of Florence at this time:
