Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People
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ESTABLISHING INDEPENDENCE: LEONARDO BRUNI’S HISTORY OF THE FLORENTINE PEOPLE AND RITUAL IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY FLORENCE Brian Jeffrey Maxson* In late medieval and Renaissance Europe, history and ritual inter- sected to create and legitimize new foundation stories for old cities. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a city’s foundation story explained where that city fit into the broader world of European poli- tics, particularly in relation to the Emperor and the Papacy. Moreover, these foundation stories legitimized governments and their territorial claims by explaining from where a city derived the authority to exist, make laws, and rule others. Fourteenth and fifteenth-century historians refashioned these his- torical foundations and subsequent narratives to fit the changing needs of the present. Revising history created consistency between a city’s present policies and alliances and its past actions. However, rewrit- ing history also inevitably created contradictions with older stories and challenged any political or legal claims based on them. Centuries before the establishment of scientific principles for the evaluation of historical arguments, fifteenth-century historians and their governors were virtually powerless to establish the legitimacy of new historical narratives in the face of opposing textual or political claims. There- fore, cities turned to ritual to establish their latest version of the past as more accurate than all others. As it did for countless other objects, ritual established the legitimacy of the historical narratives that cities couched into binding ritual moments. This article argues these points using a case study of the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni’s pre- sentation of his History of the Florentine People to the Florentine gov- ernment in 1428 and 1439.1 * I would like to thank Beth Condie-Pugh, Maarten Delbeke, Cody Neas, and Minou Schraven for their suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the Center for Research and Development at East Tennessee State University for its financial support for the research in this article. 1 A handful of scholars have made cursory comments on these presentations with- out exploring their significance further. See Wilcox D.J.,The Development of Florentine 80 brian jeffrey maxson Florentines traditionally used ritual and history to grant legitimacy to their city and its republican government. As Richard Trexler has argued, by the late fourteenth century the lack of a regal figure in the city’s government created a void in the political and social order of the city. Regal figures legitimized governments and the agreements that they and their citizens made. Without such a figure, Renaissance Florentines could not make honorable agreements between themselves or with outsiders. Thus, they turned to public rituals to create a means to do so. Rituals provided a substitute for the legitimizing presence of regal figure in the city. In doing so, rituals established legitimacy for an illegitimate social order, honor for the system of patronage in the city, and trust for a distrustful city of merchants.2 In short, public ritual provided Florentines with a forum to create binding agreements. Ritu- als bound their participants to the focus of the ritualized action and guaranteed that these bonds were sincere, legitimate, trustworthy, and honorable. While cities needed ritual to make such agreements, they could not do so in the absence of a legitimating regal presence. The Florentines also used history to deal with this problem. Tradi- tionally, the chronicles of Florentine history had tied their origins to foreign princes. Like rituals, these historical links offered the legiti- macy that the growing Florentine Republic lacked. In fact, even from the city’s earliest extant chronicles, the Florentines traced their ori- gins to the first Roman Emperor Julius Caesar.3 With this founda- tion story, they placed themselves under the theoretical power of the Holy Roman Empire, the rulers of which claimed to be descendants of the old Roman Empire. From the early fourteenth century, the city had added Charlemagne as a second founder to its historical narra- tive. Starting with the Chronicle of Giovanni Villani in the fourteenth Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: 1969) 3–5; Han- kins J., “Notes on the Composition and Textual Tradition of Leonardo Bruni’s His- toriarum Florentini populi libri XII”, in Coulson F.T. – Grotans A.A. (eds.), Classica Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday (Turnhout: 2008) 100; Zaccaria R.M., “Il Bruni cancelliere e le istituzioni della Repub- blica”, in Viti P. (ed.), Leonardo Bruni Cancelliere della Repubblica (Florence: 1987) 112–113; Viti P., “Leonardo Bruni e il Concilio del 1439”, in Viti P. (ed.), Firenze e il Concilio del 1439 (Florence: 1994) 572–573. 2 Trexler R.C., Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca: 1980) 9–43, esp. 19 and 43. 3 Rubinstein N., “The Beginnings of Political Thought in Florence: A Study in Medi- aeval Historiography”, in Ciappelli G. (ed.), Studies in Italian History in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Rome: 2004) 5–6..