Giovanni Villani

Italian historian

• Born: c. 1275
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: 1348
• Place of death: Florence (now in Italy)

In his Chronicle, Villani conveyed an empirical account of the Italian communes and laid the foundation for a historiography based on human will and action.

Early Life

Giovanni Villani (joh-VAHN-nee veel-LAH-nee) was born into a wealthy merchant family in Florence. It may be assumed that Villani, like most sons of merchants, went to a grammar school to learn Latin and then to another school to learn computation on the abacus. Thereafter, he most likely apprenticed with a merchant firm, perhaps the Peruzzi company, with which his name was first associated. He served as an agent and partner in this great merchant banking house in Flanders off and on from 1300 to 1307. From his intimate knowledge of the affairs of Philip IV, it has been conjectured that he had contact with the French royal court. In Florence, international trade and banking were integrally linked, and at some point, Villani entered the guild of bankers. He witnessed and contributed to Florence’s golden age of commerce when the city served as Europe’s banker and one of its chief centers of trade. After 1308, Villani continued to act as a representative of the Peruzzi, but he was no longer a formal partner. In 1322, Villani became a member of the rival merchant company of the Buonaccorsi. His participation in the Buonaccorsi firm reflects his independence, for he appears to have been one of the principal partners, which would have required a sizable investment.

Life’s Work

In a manner similar to that of other Florentine merchants, Villani served abroad in his early adulthood and accumulated knowledge and wealth. He thus possessed the leisure and experience to participate in the Florentine Republic from 1316 to 1341. In addition to numerous minor offices, including responsibility for coining money and for the city walls, Villani held the position of prior, the most prestigious and powerful in the Florentine government, in 1316, 1321-1322, and 1328. Though he apparently never fathered children, he married twice, his second wife being from the wealthy family of the Pazzi. This marriage into the highest echelon of Florentine society and his political offices best indicate Villani’s social prominence in the city of Florence.

In 1338, Villani’s economic and social fortunes suffered a disastrous blow that affected the entire Florentine merchant community. In that year, the Buonaccorsi suffered bankruptcy, as did the Bardi and Peruzzi companies. Villani was sent to the infamous Florentine prison, the Stinche, for his debts, and he never recovered his wealth or prestige. From 1342 to 1343, the Florentines experimented with rule by a dictator, which led to a more popular government composed of new citizens, many of them from the Florentine countryside. Villani held no offices after 1341 and felt alienated from the rule of the new governors. In his history of Florence, he frequently criticized these newcomers for their presumption and political ineptitude. Villani died in 1348 from the plague while describing in his history the devastating power of that terrible disease.

The fame of Villani derives from his Croniche fiorentine (Chronicle, 1896). The Italian edition was completed by F. G. Dragomanni in four volumes dated 1844 to 1845, though it has never been fully translated into English. Villani informs the reader that he was stimulated to write his history of Florence while on a pilgrimage in Rome for the Great Jubilee of 1300. Excited by the ancient monuments and the great deeds of Roman heroes and stirred by the belief that Florence was the daughter of Rome, Villani determined to memorialize the numerous accomplishments of his native city. On the basis of internal evidence, critics have judged that he began to write in the 1320’s or even as late as the 1330’. He probably did conceive of writing the history in 1300, beginning to accumulate materials then or soon thereafter. He also may have sketched the chief events of the period of Florentine political conflict from 1301 to 1304, which he knew at first hand. It was only in 1322, however, that he began to treat Florentine history fully. From that year until his death, Villani appears to have written contemporaneously with the events and to have recorded all the important occurrences that came into his purview. In the 1330’s or early 1340’, he decided on the overall form of the work, to which he added chronicles of the final years.

The Chronicle is composed of twelve books, with the first six dealing primarily with events before Villani’s lifetime. In the broadest analysis, Villani’s Chronicle remains in the tradition of medieval histories because it places the events of fourteenth century Florence within a universal history that begins with the Tower of Babel as a dispersal of Adam’s descendants. In the first book, Villani narrates the history of Rome intertwined with the mythical origins of Florence and its rival to the north, the small hilltop town of Fiesole. This Etruscan town was to serve Villani as the source of enmity and social conflict within Florence, a conflict that could be overcome only through the triumph of Roman virtues implanted within the Florentines by Julius Caesar’s founding. Books 2 through 6 center on Florence’s dealings with the two great medieval superpowers, the Roman Empire and the Papacy. Villani claimed that Charlemagne had refounded the city after the Gothic king Totila had destroyed it; Villani believed that Florence was to play an important role within the divine order by participating with the Papacy in the Guelph alliance.

Villani drew heavily from Roman and Christian legends as well as from a number of thirteenth and early fourteenth century Florentine chronicles. From the latter, he took a knowledge of specific events and the ideology of Florence’s preeminent place in Christendom and Christian history. Utilizing these earlier chronicles and his personal observations, Villani in books 7 through 12 recounted the history of Florence through 1348. Here he demonstrated an empirical knowledge of both the daily political and social life of his town and the larger political questions that troubled all Europe.

Villani structured his narration of events on the belief that history has several meanings. His history frequently illustrates the working out of divine judgment as sinful figures eventually come to earthly punishments after a season of success. Thus, God’s will finds expression in historical time, often through the use of one historical personage to punish another. God’s justice, however, triumphs in the world only to be tested again through another people’s or individual’s vices. Villani sought a confirmation of religious and moral beliefs in the events of history: In his chronicle, history is a stage for the conflict of moral forces and, insofar as historical individuals represent states and institutions, political forces.

Villani also recounted fully the round of natural events, particularly unusual storms, eclipses, and portents. The Florentine chronicler often explained the behavior of individuals and natural phenomena by the movement of comets, stars, and planets. Moreover, the devil and Providence play important roles in the {I}Chronicle{/I} by influencing both human decisions and the natural world. Next to these irrational explanations of behavior, however, are rational analyses of human will, thought, and act. At times these analyses are integrated with an intimate knowledge of the natural environment to yield a convincing explanation of human character and events. Villani is best and justly known for his empirical description of the world of the Florentine merchant of the fourteenth century. Historians have thoroughly explored his chronicle for information on Florentine life in the fourteenth century, in part because he describes it in intimate detail. His chapter on Florence in 1336-1338 demonstrates a statistical frame of mind. As one of the first demographers, he judged the size of the city’s population; the number of adult males, foreigners, nobles, and knights; the number of males and females born each year; and the number of students in grammar schools, schools of computation with the abacus, and schools of Latin and logic. He noted the number of churches, abbeys, and parishes along with the names of their priests and friars. He celebrated the guilds, especially those of merchants and bankers, noted the number of members and shops, and estimated their output. He focused particularly on the achievements of the Florentine cloth industry. Though scholars have suggested that he exaggerated the number of shops and the amount of cloth they produced, Villani’s account enables the reader to gain a sense of the complexity of cloth manufacturing and sale in a premodern city. He describes in considerable detail the amount of food brought into the city in 1280 and notes the quantities of wine, grain, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, and melons.

Villani initiated a family practice of writing chronicles. Soon after his death in 1348, Villani’s brother, Matteo, took up the craft of writing history. Matteo continued many of Giovanni’s practices, including an emphasis on morality (perhaps heightened in the new history because of the depression resulting from the Black Death), a chronological ordering of events, and a penchant for detailed description. Matteo’s history of Florence also was ended by the plague when in 1363 he succumbed to the disease. Matteo’s son Filippo continued the family tradition of writing history; he wrote one book that narrated the events of 1364.

Significance

Villani’s Chronicle should be judged as the best expression of the writing of Italian history in the Middle Ages, combining two qualities of medieval historiography. In common with the chronicles of monasteries and towns, it recounts in vivid detail the events that the chronicler believed deserved attention, from natural events to human accomplishments and viciousness. His chronicle also places these events within a divine ordering of nature and history. Villani could have borrowed this providential view of history from a variety of sources, but he ultimately draws it from the church fathers, particularly Saint Augustine.

Within these traditional qualities, Villani began several novel practices that came to fruition in Italian Renaissance history writing. Particularly significant was his close analysis of political motivation, a focus that came to be one of the hallmarks of Renaissance historiography . His explanations of human character and values often are complete and convincing, undermining his supernatural and magical explanations and rendering them superfluous. It is important to note, however, that his history does not demonstrate the influence of classical rhetoric, which added structure and a more complex awareness of audience to the histories of the Italian Renaissance Humanists.

Bibliography

Armstrong, Lawrin D. Usury and Public Debt in Early Renaissance Florence: Lorenzo Ridolfi on the Monte Comune. Toronto: Pontifical Institue of Mediaeval Studies, 2003. This work, which includes a translation of Lorenzo Ridolfi’s Tractatus de usuris, examines the role of debt in Florentine society and, in so doing, sheds light on the circumstances in which Villani found himself.

Brucker, Gene A. Florence, the Golden Age, 1138-1737. Berkeley: University of California, 1998. A general work that looks at Florence during its most powerful years and later decline and provides background material for understanding Villani. Includes information on the economy, politics, the Church, and daily life. Bibliography and index.

Holmes, George. Florence, Rome, and the Origins of the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Looks at the conditions that existed in Florence and Rome and led up to the Renaissance. Bibliography and index.

Villani, Giovanni. Villani’s “Chronicle”: Being Selections from the First Nine Books of the “Chroniche fiorentine” of Giovanni Villani. Translated by Rose E. Selfe. 2d ed. London: Constable, 1906. A translation of selected chapters of the Chronicle through 1321. Though the selections were intended to aid in understanding Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802), they convey a good sense of the general ordering of the history of Florence in the medieval period and in the age of the great poet.