day the expulsion of the Duke of Athens; St. Victor’s day the victory over the Pisans in 1364. Church festivals were frequently united with mysteries in Carmine, Sto. Spirito, San Felice, &c.; representations which we find shared in by the highest classes, and customary even in the second half of the fifteenth century. Various kinds of amusements took place in the open air; and the history of the Carraia bridge tells of the accident which occurred on May 1, 1304, when the bridge fell in, during a representation of the infernal regions by means of a grand apparatus.
May 1, the Calendimaggio, was the high day for the people, and the green branches on the door-posts have preserved the name of May in Italian as well as in German (and in English). It was on this day that Dante first saw Beatrice Portinari at an entertainment for children. Among the popular festivals were the Epiphany (Befana), celebrated by processions and masquerades, which are still carried on; and the Ferragosto, the Roman August holidays, where a donkey-race took place, with a buffalo-race as counterpart. Public games in which physical strength and, still more, agility were brought into play, delighted high and low. Among these were calcio and maglio: the first of which was played on the large oblong square, afterwards shut in by rows of houses which bears the name of Prato d’Ognissanti; the latter in the vicinity of the Piazza San Marco, where the Via del Maglio still reminds us of it. In the one game the feat consisted in throwing a ball with the hand; in the other it was propelled by a wooden hammer weighted with iron. We shall speak farther on of the tourneys, exercises, and festivals of the high, and the merry popular gatherings of the potenze. There was never a lack of music. The trumpeters and other musicians of the Signoria were never absent from any procession, and cheerful tunes accompanied every festival. Boccaccio’s tales and the frescoes in the Camposanto of Pisa show how music formed an integral part of social life. The most renowned instrumental performer who flourished in the second half of the fourteenth century, Francesco Landino, enchanted all by his delicate performances on the harpsichord, even in his old age and blindness.
Such were life and manners in the times preceding the rise of the Medici to power. The original simplicity no longer existed, and could no longer exist; but, in the tone and conduct of public as well as private life, the good old traditions still retained their influence. When the Romans and Neapolitans mocked at the frugal habits of the Florentines, the Florentine, seeing the anarchy and degeneracy of the former, and the effeminacy and instability of the latter, could point to his beautiful city, and the order in his private life, in which, though everything was conducted with the most scrupulous economy, the necessaries of life, and, in many cases, its luxuries, were always to be found. In Florence we find no Roman and no Neapolitan in trade and industry; but in both Naples and Rome, the principal business was in the hands of the Florentines, whose gains were profitable to their native city. Among these, in the fourteenth century, none was so conspicuous as Niccolò Acciaiuoli, who became a great and influential man at the court of Anjou, and lord of extensive possessions in Apulia and Greece, but whose heart belonged to his native city, in the neighbourhood of which he prepared his family vault. The heroic times of the Farinata, Cavalcanti, and Donati were past; but the Florentine of the later times combined the citizen and the great lord, the merchant, statesman, and patron of art, in a harmonious whole, to a degree never surpassed by the denizen of any other country.
CHAPTER V.
THE ALBIZZI AND COSIMO DE’ MEDICI.
Cosimo de’ Medici was a man of mature age when his father died. Born on September 27, 1389, the day of the saints Cosmo and Damian, he was christened after the former; and a Florentine expression blended veneration for the sacred martyrs with veneration for the ruling family, who had chosen them as patrons: ‘Per San Cosmo e Damiano ogni male fia lontana.’ His education was excellent; and, although he was intended for a mercantile life, he studied the Latin language thoroughly, and under the guidance of masters such as the grammarians Niccolò of Arezzo,[52] and Roberto de’ Rossi, acquired a taste for literature and science which remained with him, and even increased, during the whole of his long life. He was, perhaps, twenty-four years old when he married Contessina de’ Bardi. Her father, Alessandro, Count of Vernio, belonged to a family which is of note among the Florentines from the eleventh century; and from which the principal street on the left bank of the Arno, between the old bridge and that of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, derived its name. The Bardi were originally a plebeian family, but were afterwards counted among the nobility. They, with other nobles, had aided the people to break the tyranny of the Duke of Athens, but were defeated a year later in valiant strife with the same people, who would no longer suffer ‘the great’ to have any share in the government, and set on fire the houses of those who had shortly before fought beside them. Piero de’ Bardi, Contessina’s great-grandfather, then withdrew to his castle of Vernio, situated in the Apennines to the north of Prato, which had been purchased ten years before by his brother from the Alberti, and recognised by the Emperor Charles IV. as a fief held under him. The enmity between the castellans and the Florentine people grew so violent, that Sozzo, Piero’s son, was condemned by the commune in contumaciam to death by fire, under the seemingly false accusation of having coined false money in Vernio.[53] Sozzo’s son was the father of Contessina, whose mother, Milla Pannocchieschi, was descended from the ancient Sienese dynasty of the Counts of Elci, which has lately become extinct. The name of Contessina (Contessa, Tessa), which we so frequently meet with in earlier times in Tuscany, calls to mind the great Countess Matilda, whose memory was preserved by a grateful people. The enmity between the great and the plebeians, though it still prevailed, and was used as a pretext when the question of political rights arose, never at that time interfered with family alliances.
We hear nothing of Cosimo till the time when Pope John XXIII., on his eventful journey to the Council of Constance, halted in Florence. The relations between the republic and the Pope were to be traced from the time when the latter was all-powerful under his predecessor, Alexander V., as Cardinal Baldassar Cossa. When John XXIII. called upon the Florentines to send plenipotentiaries to Constance, and the counsellors were undecided, Filippo Corsini observed that they must not say ‘No’ to the Pope. He it was who had first originated the Council of Pisa, through which the way had been paved to the new assembly, and without his active assistance Florence would not have been able to resist King Ladislaus. The Pope had been already in connection with the Medici when he was legate of Bologna, and during his reign the money matters of the Curia were chiefly in the hands of Giovanni di Bicci. After John XXIII., yielding to King Sigismund’s urgency, had consented to the Council of Constance, in spite of his disinclination to a council on German soil, he was for a time in Florence, where he resided in the convent degli Angeli of the Camalduli. It was here that the Medici, with many respected citizens, visited him, and entered into negotiations with him. Here, too, he addressed to Bartolommeo Valori, in whom he had great confidence, upon his warning of the danger of holding this council in a foreign country, the remarkable words: ‘I own that this council is not to my advantage; but what can I do if my fate compels me to it?’[54] When the Pope set out for the Lake of Constance in the autumn of 1414, Cosimo de’ Medici was among his escort; not, as has been supposed, overrating the position as an aid to him in his own affairs, but simply to manage the money matters of the Holy See.
In these matters the Medici, who always remained true to John XXIII., were helpful to him even after his fall. On December 6, 1418, the deposed and imprisoned Pope drew up a bond in the Castle of Heidelberg for 38,500 Rhenish florins, which Giovanni de’ Medici and Niccolò da Uzzano, with the consent of Pope Martin V., paid by a bill on the Nuremberg house of Romel, as ransom to Duke Louis of Bavaria. When, after many difficulties, the liberated man had by means of his Florentine friends come to terms with his persecutor and obtained a safe-conduct from him, the Medici received him in Florence, where they undoubtedly aided in his reconciliation with Pope Martin. When the afflicted man, who in his misfortunes assumed a far more dignified attitude than formerly in the times of his greatness, made his last will on December 22, 1419, he appointed Giovanni di Bicci and three other distinguished Florentines as executors. That the first enriched himself with the legacy was a calumny which has long been disproved, for Baldassar Cossa left scarcely enough for his legatees to be paid.[55] The beautiful