A History of Siena

From its Origins to the Present Day

Mario Ascheri, Bradley Franco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351866781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

A History of Siena provides a concise and up-to-date biography of the city, from its ancient and medieval development up to the present day, and makes Siena's history, culture, and traditions accessible to anyone studying or visiting the city.

Well informed by archival research and recent scholarship on medieval Siena and the Italian city-states, this book places Siena's development in its larger context, both temporally and geographically. In the process, this book offers new interpretations of Siena's artistic, political, and economic development, highlighting in particular the role of pilgrimage, banking, and class conflict. The second half of the book provides an important analysis of the historical development of Siena's nobility, its unique system of neighborhood associations ( contrade ) and the race of the Palio, as well as an overview of the rise and fall of Siena's troubled bank, the Monte dei Paschi.

This book is accessible to undergraduates and tourists, while also offering plenty of new insights for graduate students and scholars of all periods of Sienese history.

Part I

From the origins of Siena to the fall of the Sienese Republic

1

The origins of Siena

From the Etruscans to the Romans

For all cities, their development and destiny are rooted in their unique natural environment. Rome stands as perhaps the greatest example of this truism: its seven hills made it virtually unconquerable, while the Tiber provided the Romans with easy access to the Mediterranean, allowing them to import enough food to feed a million mouths a day and to command an army and navy capable of governing its three-continent empire. Beyond just Rome, throughout the history of the Mediterranean world, all the great powers and great cities were, quite naturally, located on or near water. Millions of gallons of daily drinking water were necessary to support the populations of the largest cities, and waterways were the most efficient way to trade, conduct overseas war, and travel. Within the history of Italian cities, Genoa, Pisa, and Venice all made their fortunes and empires through their navies, while Florence’s mercantile and woolen industries depended on the Arno for production and for transporting their goods abroad. In this regard, Siena is unique: despite having no adequate natural water supply and no water access to the sea, the people of Siena would go on to build one of the most prosperous and beautiful cities in Europe, creating one of the most successful republican governments of the Middle Ages, shaping the development of Renaissance art, and becoming one of Europe’s great intellectual and cultural capitals.

At the same time, Siena was strategically located, and its location has been crucial to its wealth, vitality, and importance throughout its long history. This was true in the ancient world, with the city first developing as a trading and meeting hub in the middle of a triangle of three more important cities, namely, Arezzo, Chiusi, and Volterra, and then growing in significance in the Middle Ages, owing to its location along the commercially lucrative Via Francigena, which led pilgrims from all across Europe to Rome. At the same time, whatever its natural advantages, Siena’s natural features imposed several limitations on the city’s size and power. Landlocked and surrounded on all sides by other cities and their armies, Siena could never become the ruler of Tuscany, never mind Italy, as it found itself in regular conflict with numerous powers at its shared borders. Moreover, with the Elsa and Ombrone rivers far removed from the city center and insufficient to support a large population and its industries, coupled with its lack of a seaport (at least until the fourteenth century), Siena lacked the requisite natural resources to become a great mercantile state, let alone an empire.

Yet the first peoples to lay a claim to the area did in fact choose the site for strategic reasons: sitting on an elevated ridge that rises above the surrounding countryside of southern Tuscany, the site upon which Siena was built gave its first settlers the high ground. Before the rise of Rome in the second half of first millennium bce, the Italian peninsula of the ancient world was crowded with dozens of ethnically diverse warring tribes, each with its own language, customs, and cultural heritage. In such a violent environment, Siena’s ridge offered its earliest inhabitants the ability to withstand almost any kind of invasion. In time, it allowed them to establish their dominion over the surrounding countryside. The first people to do so, based on the existing archaeological evidence, were the Etruscans, creators of a culturally advanced civilization that flourished in the first half of the first millennium bce. Unfortunately, the Etruscans largely remain mysterious to us: despite the survival of some 5,000 Etruscan inscriptions, linguists still haven’t been able to crack the code of their language. Yet based on the survival of elegant tombs, the inscriptions, and their accomplished artisanal wares, it is clear that society has flourished in this part of Italy for nearly 3,000 years. Though the evidence for Siena is meager, scholars agree that Etruscans were the first to build a citadel at the top of the highest hill in what would become Siena and used that citadel to subdue the surrounding countryside and to retreat when under attack. In the countryside, farmers worked the fertile land, turning the region into a major center of agricultural production. The area’s steep hillsides were covered in vines and olive trees for those most precious and elemental of ancient products: wine and olive oil. In addition to serving as an Etruscan military post, the hilltop was almost certainly a site of religious importance, as well, as was the case in virtually all hilltop cities and towns in the ancient world. This most ancient part of Siena is still called Castelvecchio, meaning ancient citadel, and walking the area’s quiet, steep, and ancient streets even today, one is transported to an earlier time when controlling the high ground was even more important than having convenient access to waterways and a water source.¹

Rome managed to conquer Etruria and the rest of the Italian peninsula in the third century bce, though it would be a couple more centuries until the Romans would build much more than a military garrison in the area. In fact, the historical record for Roman Siena remains silent until the reign of Augustus. Following a series of bloody civil wars that left large parts of the peninsula depopulated and, more broadly, brought an end to the Roman republic, Augustus (ruled 27 bce–14 ce) enacted a major building program to rebuild and repopulate numerous Roman colonies, including Saena Julia, as Roman Siena was called. Like all Roman cities, Saena Julia had a forum for trade, temples for prayer, baths for recreation, and public fountains.² We don’t know the exact site of the baths or fountains, so it is hard to judge the scale or sophistication of the Roman aqueducts without knowing how close to the elevated city center they lay. However, we can say with certainty that it was in Roman times when Siena first became a city, using slave labor to exploit the surrounding hills and their fertile land. In 90 ce, its citizens received Roman citizenship, and shortly thereafter, Siena begins to appear regularly in the written record, including in the writings of Pliny, Ptolemy, and Tacitus. In fact, the second-century Roman historian Tacitus provides us with our first glimpse of the Sienese people in a story he shares dating to the time of Vespasian. Tacitus recounts that a Roman senator visited Siena, expecting to be greeted as an honored guest. Instead, the Sienese satirically treated him to his own mock funeral, earning a reprimand from the Roman Senate for dishonoring one of its senators. If nothing else, this story suggests that already by the first century ce, Roman Siena had enough power and independence that its people could get away with this kind of irreverence as a form of political protest. At the same time, given that Tacitus’ story of the mock funeral is our only snapshot that survives from Roman Siena, we can safely say that the city was never particularly important during the Golden Age of Rome, just a small Roman city on a hill, like so many others.

In fact, we know almost nothing about life in Siena until the second half of the seventh century ce, more than 500 years after Tacitus. The reason for this absence in the historical record is the decline and collapse of Roman authority in the West that coincided with destabilizing invasions by various Germanic tribes. Like so many other cities across the peninsula, Siena often found itself in the crosshairs of larger political and military conflicts, first between Romans and Germanic armies in the fifth century. The following century was even more devastating to the peninsula. The Byzantine emperor Justinian (d. 565) fought an ultimately doomed decades-long war to attempt to reconquer the western Mediterranean from the victorious Germanic tribes. During this chaotic, uncertain, and transitory period of Roman and then Germanic rule, urban inhabitants were often forced to flee to the countryside to engage in subsistence farming, as city populations collapsed owing to unreliable food supplies, a lack of public justice, and unmaintained aqueducts. Perhaps counterintuitively, the lack of any historical evidence from this period of Sienese history is, in itself, quite revealing. So complete is the silence in the written and archaeological records that it is possible that the invasions (by Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths, and then Lombards) and wars led to the near collapse as well as the wholesale destruction of settlements in Roman Siena.

Lombard and Carolingian Siena

What we can say with certainty is that by the time evidence of life in Siena returned, in the second half of the seventh century, the population and its system of governance had changed radically. Most critically, the Lombards controlled the city and for the first time in its history, bishops became important players on the scene, a crucial development in our ability to recover the city’s history, owing to the written nature of medieval Catholic culture. The Lombards (or literally, the Longbeards, who were yet another fierce Germanic tribe) first invaded Italy in 568 and found quick success in establishing control over much of the peninsula, as the wars between Justinian’s armies and the Ostrogoths had only recently concluded, leaving Italy decimated and its borders vulnerable. In fact, the only places where the Lombards did not find success were in those coastal cities that would have required a navy to control: the port towns of Ravenna, Genoa, and Venice to the north, and Bari, Tarento, Otranto, and Naples to the south. Rome’s decline was particularly dramatic, with the population declining from a million in the time of Augustus to under 50,000 by the year 800 and the ancient monuments already by that time in a state of decay. Yet Rome maintained its independence from Germanic rule, thanks to the Roman Church’s alliance with Constantinople and the religious authority that the popes claimed as the heirs to Rome’s history, both its Christian and imperial past. Though it would take centuries before the papacy would become particularly powerful, it was during the time of Lombard rule in Italy when we first see the bishops of Rome (starting with Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century) begin the process of centralizing their rule and convincing others that they held religious authority and even secular power over all of Christendom.

Figure 1.1Map of known Lombard and Carolingian settlements, as recorded in surviving documents from the eighth and ninth centuries

Where the Lombards did conquer, they were ruthless, and according to their own contemporaneous chronicler, they killed off the Roman ruling class, composed of both civic leaders and landowners, and made everyone else subject to their power, exacting a third of their produce as tribute. In the decades following their conquest, the Lombard kings settled in Pavia, located in the southern part of the province that, not coincidently, is called Lombardy today. From there, they ruled through the support of two types of representatives, gastalds and dukes. While dukes tended to be given a greater amount of autonomy, gastalds were more explicitly connected to royal power and served at the pleasure of the Lombard king. Gastalds ruled across Tuscany, including in Siena.

Though the Lombards explicitly rejected a great deal of Rome’s past, they did embrace one aspect of Roman rule: they governed from cities, many of which, as we have seen, had been largely depopulated if not abandoned. Such was the case in Siena, which the Lombards chose to make a cornerstone of their power in southern Tuscany. The reasons for their investment in Siena are obvious: Rome remained the only great international Christian city in the west, and from Siena, the Lombards could control much of the traffic heading to and from the eternal city. In fact, Siena’s elevated location gave the Lombards control over a crucial portion of what was becoming the most important thoroughfare on the peninsula, the nascent Via Francigena that connected all of Europe with Rome.

The seventh century brought not only the return of secular power in Siena, in the form of gastalds of Lombard descent, but also the first evidence of episcopal authority in the city. While it is certainly possible that Siena was made a bishopric before this point, given that all of the other medieval Tuscan dioceses of any import were established centuries before, the evidence for Siena suggests that after decades of serving as an administrative center and military outpost for the Lombards, Siena was only made a bishopric in the seventh century. In fact, the earliest evidence of bishops in Siena dates to 650 ce, when the Lombard king appointed a fellow Lombard elite named Maurus to govern what was a small bishopric, consisting of little more than just the city of Siena. In the century that followed, Siena’s bishops found themselves in a position that those Etruscans a millennium before had known only too well: attempting to carve out their own territory at the expense of neighboring powers.

Figure 1.2Via Francigena. Map of the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome. The oldest extant description of the Via Francigena, dating to the end of the tenth century, records each of the stops listed on this map

In fact, the most famous incident in Siena’s first thousand years of history, the city’s prolonged conflict with Arezzo, was the result of exactly this issue: Siena’s seventh- and early eighth-century bishops seeking to expand their territorial claims over their neighbors. More specifically, Bishop Maurus and his successors claimed that the diocese of Siena should match the (much larger) dominion of Siena’s gastald. Siena’s bishops claimed a great swath of land to the east comprising 18 parishes that had traditionally been under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Arezzo. At stake was not only theoretical spiritual authority but also larger matters of wealth and power, in the form of control of the parishes, tithe collection, and the administration of church property. Matters between the two cities led to bloody conflict. The bishop of Arezzo was eventually forced to retreat, though the Sienese suffered the loss of one of their judges in the fight.

Not insignificantly, the land under dispute was believed to house the relics of that figure who during this time would become so central to Sienese memory: Ansano. As the tradition goes, during the time of the Emperor Diocletian, a young man named Ansano (ca. 284–304 ce) came to Siena to convert its people, only to be swept up in the Great Persecutions of the day and martyred in the Sienese countryside in 304 ce. In fact, Ansano’s shrine at Dofana was located directly in the middle of the contested territory, and it was during this time within the context of the fight with Arezzo that the Sienese, judging from the surviving records, first began to venerate Ansano as their chief patron saint. Siena’s bishops rooted their territorial claims in Ansano, whom they held up as Siena’s first bishop and thus as their predecessor. Surviving sources indicate that in this fight between bishops that took place in 711, the “whole people of Siena” (universus senensis populus) stood united against Arezzo’s bishop and demanded that Siena’s bishop be given jurisdiction over the contested territory. The fact that the people themselves got involved in the matter suggests that already by that time, the larger population had shared interests connected to the land, and that they viewed their bishop as a legitimate ruler who could advance their cause. In addition, this conflict took place at a time when the relic trade was booming and pilgrims were increasingly flocking to Rome to visit its catacombs and the relics of its early saints. At a time when all cities and their bishops were scrambling for power, Ansano quite literally helped the bishops of Siena succeed in creating a valuable territory under the control of the decayed and depopulated urban center, located near the old citadel on the hill, in what was then the only part of the city that existed: Città. More broadly, Siena’s control over Ansano’s relics was part of a broader effort to ensure that the city became an essential stop for people traveling the Via Francigena on their way to Rome.

The death of Siena’s chief judge and the retreat of Arezzo’s bishop was just the beginning of a 500-year conflict between the two cities. A few years later, in 714, the Lombard king tried to resolve the issue by siding with Arezzo, as its diocese was older and its borders had traditionally extended right up to the city of Siena. Thus, he insisted the Sienese renounce the contested territory. But the Sienese refused to let the issue stand, viewing the territory as simply too valuable to their growing ambitions to cede. The conflict with Arezzo provides us with our first real glimpse into the medieval city: the period of Lombard rule had undeniably elevated the strategic importance of Siena, as the gateway to Rome to the south with easy access to areas of Lombard control in the north. The documents make clear that Lombard Siena was growing and that its inhabitants used whatever means available, including political and legal means, as well as appeals to Saint Ansano and even the explicit threat of violence, in their efforts to expand the city’s influence and its control over the region. It was also during the Lombard era when the great monasteries of the Sienese co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I From the origins of Siena to the fall of the Sienese Republic
• Part II From the age of the Medici to the present day
• Index