Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy

Katherine Ludwig Jansen

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400889051
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Medieval Italian communes are known for their violence, feuds, and vendettas, yet beneath this tumult was a society preoccupied with peace. Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy is the first book to examine how civic peacemaking in the age of Dante was forged in the crucible of penitential religious practice.Focusing on Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an era known for violence and civil discord, Katherine Ludwig Jansen brilliantly illuminates how religious and political leaders used peace agreements for everything from bringing an end to neighborhood quarrels to restoring full citizenship to judicial exiles. She brings to light a treasure trove of unpublished evidence from notarial archives and supports it with sermons, hagiography, political treatises, and chronicle accounts. She paints a vivid picture of life in an Italian commune, a socially and politically unstable world that strove to achieve peace. Jansen also assembles a wealth of visual material from the period, illustrating for the first time how the kiss of peace—a ritual gesture borrowed from the Catholic Mass—was incorporated into the settlement of secular disputes.Breaking new ground in the study of peacemaking in the Middle Ages, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of Italian culture in this turbulent age by showing how peace was conceived, memorialized, and occasionally achieved.

CHAPTER ONE

Preaching, Penance, and Peacemaking in the Age of the Commune

Blessed are the peacemakers

for they shall be called children of God.

—MATTHEW 5:9

IN 1425 THE RULING MAGISTRACY of Siena invited Bernardino of Siena (d. 1444), one of the great lights of the Franciscan Observance, to preach a cycle of sermons for the moral edification of its citizens. During his three-month residency in the city, he preached at different venues, including the Sala dei Nove, a chamber of government sometimes called the “Hall of Peace,” in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena’s town hall. In a sermon given on Sunday, June 3rd, he invoked the hall’s celebrated murals, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, another celebrated son of Siena. Those frescoes, executed almost a century earlier, depicted an allegory that illustrated the positive effects of good government and the prophecy of a dire future if tyranny were allowed to reign in its stead.¹ Bernardino had been preaching on the theme of peace for some years, and had established so sterling a reputation as a peacemaker that, by the time of his death, it was cited as proof of his sanctity during his canonization process.² Burnishing that reputation in 1425, Bernardino used the Hall of Peace murals as both stage set and heuristic device when, gesturing toward the frescoes on Good Government, he informed his audience that his theme for the day was “War and Peace”:

Turning toward Peace, I see goods circulating, I see dancing, I see the building of houses, I see fields and vines being worked and planted, I see people going out on horseback to the hot springs, I see young women on their way to be married, I see flocks of goats and sheep. And I see a man hanged to uphold holy Justice. And to facilitate these things, everyone lives in holy peace and concord.

But then, turning toward the opposite wall, which shows the misfortunes that bad government and discord have the potential to unleash, Bernardino conjured a hair-raising description that matched the pictorial narrative point-by-point:

On the contrary, turning to the other side, I don’t see any goods; I don’t see any dancing. Instead I see someone being killed; I don’t see any houses being built; instead I see devastation and arson; no one is working the fields or pruning the vines, no one is sowing, no one goes out to the hot springs or pursues pastimes anymore; I don’t even see anyone venturing outside the city walls. O women! O men! The dead man, the woman assaulted, flocks only as prey, treacherous men killing each other. Justice, her scales broken, lies bound hand and foot on the ground.³

One can only imagine the shudders that ran down the collective spine of the audience as Bernardino prophesied a future without peace. Surely it must have stirred the city fathers’ corporate will to prevent such a terrible fate. For over a century the republican governments of central and northern Italy had envisioned peace and security as the ends of good government, but the persistent question had become: how to achieve those ends? How could war and discord be transformed into peace and concord? Naturally Bernardino had the solution to hand. Repentance. Through penance one made peace with God. It was the foundation stone upon which every other type of peace—peace with one’s family, one’s neighbor, one’s enemy—was to be constructed. Two years later, in another sermon cycle also delivered in Siena, the preacher refined and reframed his discussion, noting, “There are two types of peace: the one within and the other without.”⁴ The one within—the peace of the heart—was attained only through moral reform, the result of true penance.

Bernardino stands near the end of a long line of medieval preachers who entwined the topics of penitence and peace in their sermons, the subject of this chapter. The deep connection between the two subjects may not be self-evident today, but it was an affiliation that medieval Christians regularly encountered if they were attentive to the messages transmitted in the sermons of their preachers.⁵ The sermon of Luca da Bitonto, invoked in the preface of this study, is a case in point. This chapter shows that the various religious movements of the later Middle Ages, usually viewed as distinct and independent entities, should be understood collectively as peace movements that took the form of penitential processions. Led by laypeople or friars, all these movements shared a theology that linked peace to penance, the motor, they believed, that drove social and political change. I argue, moreover, that civic peacemaking practices of the late medieval period can only be fully understood as products formed in the religious matrix this chapter establishes, one that firmly yoked together peace and penance. Forged in the crucible of late antiquity, the marriage of peace and repentance developed out of the ritual kiss embedded in the Mass. Its original function was to bind and unify in peace and fraternity what was sometimes a fractious early Christian community. As we shall see in chapter 5, by the late antique period, theologians had added a new layer of meaning to the kiss, construing it as a ritual of reconciliation, our point of departure.⁶

Reconciliation was at the very heart of the sacrament of penance as it developed and was then subsequently codified by Pope Innocent III (d. 1216) at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Canon 21, omnis utriusque sexus, decreed that every member of the Church was now required to make an annual confession of sin in order to partake in communion. The council furthermore compelled the Christian faithful to fulfill all penances imposed by priests. Excommunication and the prohibition of Christian burial awaited those who did not comply. Henry Charles Lea likely overstated its significance when he called canon twenty-one “perhaps the most important legislative act in the history of the Church,” but his point is well made that this was a new and very different expression of the sacrament.⁷ Though auricular confession had been part of local practice before the thirteenth century, it had never before been decreed as an obligation on a universal scale, supported by the full weight and power of ecclesiastical sanctions. This newly reformulated idea of penance was important for many reasons, not the least of which was that, as we shall see, it became the primary message broadcast by the friars through their preaching. Reconciliation was the connective tissue that linked the ideas of peace and penance together. Through the sacrament of penance—which now included a confession of one’s sins—one reconciled with God, while one reconciled with one’s enemy by means of a peace contract, a different but analogous sort of confession of guilt.

The interlocking story of peace and penance begins in the years just prior to the Fourth Lateran Council. It was a period in communal history when the cities of central and northern Italy had liberated themselves from imperial and episcopal yokes, and had begun experimenting with new popular forms of government. But it was a time not without tribulations. From local feuds and factions involving magnates and popolo, to Guelf and Ghibelline strife within and without the city walls, to wars against the empire or papacy—not to speak of the Crusades and other external conflicts—blood feud, violence, and warfare dominated the landscape up and down the Italian peninsula. Nor should we forget the strain put on ordinary citizens inside the urban walls, as demographic pressures caused cities to expand at previously unheard-of rates. In the case of Florence alone, the commune’s population tripled (perhaps even quadrupled), as immigrants from the countryside migrated to the city over the course of the thirteenth century. It is no wonder that violence often exploded on the streets, as already teeming urban spaces became even more overcrowded, and city dwellers were forced to accommodate newcomers, particularly in the Oltrarno neighborhood.

One response to the pervasive violence that characterized the period was to form peace movements. Cries of “peace and mercy” were the sparks that flew from a sort of spontaneous combustion that galvanized everyday folk who, in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, began to search for a way to usher in the period of respite prophesied by Isaiah, who foretold: “My people will sit in the beauty of peace” (Isaiah 26:3). In surveying the terrain from the thirteenth to early fifteenth century, we will meet many people—both men and women—who were peacemakers or leaders of religious revivals that were dedicated to peace. All were shaped by convictions, imagery, and ritual rooted deeply in the soil of medieval Christianity. Many were priests, but many were laypeople, the latter often penitents, who lived their lives according to the precepts of penance, imagined as a life converted from sin and devoted to acts of repentance, expiation, self-mortification, and alms-giving, not infrequently held together by the bonds of voluntary poverty. This path was envisioned as a permanent process, a life’s work, which called for constant vigilance and attentiveness to the pitfalls of the secular world. Those pitfalls included vanity, lust, gambling, magic, and usury, a catalogue made famous by Bernardino of Siena’s fire-and-brimstone sermons denouncing them.⁸

The polemics of the preachers notwithstanding, many of the movements and practices that emerged in this period were led and inspired by laypeople. Indeed they were often first on the scene to agitate for peace. We shall see, however, that the mendicant orders, which arrived in the urban centers of Italy in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, often co-opted local nonviolence movements. The resulting pacification campaigns led the friars to work closely with city magistrates to promote peace and concord through the reform of local statute law. By leveraging their spiritual authority, the friars acted as mediators and facilitators to settle what were often deep-seated antagonisms and conflicts that, left unchecked, had the potential to explode and wreak havoc in the crowded urban spaces where people lived cheek by jowl. But it was their sermons, some still extant, that formulated a path to peace and rallied their followers toward action. They showed how peace could be achieved by putting it into a Christian framework of penance and reconciliation. This chapter, then, examines some notable examples of preachers of peace (be they clergy or penitents), their sermons, and the penitential peace movements that periodically burst onto the urban landscape throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It also begins the work, continued in subsequent chapters, of examining the social practices their words and deeds inspired. I range widely through the territory of central and northern Italy in order to bring as many voices into the conversation as possible, but attentive readers will note that throughout this chapter I periodically return to Florence to analyze the impact that these religious peacemakers and practices had on the city.

“THE TRANQUILITY OF ORDER”: SAINT AUGUSTINE AND THE PREACHERS

Like so many medieval ideas, the intertwining of peace and repentance was indebted to Augustine of Hippo, who formulated a definition of “peace” in The City of God. He argued that “the peace of all things is the tranquility of order.”⁹ As always, his meaning is far more complex than that deceptively simple sentence suggests at first glance. Above all, he meant that the body and soul maintain equilibrium—peace—when all parts are arranged in fitting and harmonious order. But that harmonious order had been disturbed notoriously through original sin, when the will itself became unhinged, at war with itself, and at odds with the Lord. The fall of man had brought about a discordium malum that was incompatible with the tranquility of order.¹⁰

By the later Middle Ages, the healing balm of the penitential sacrament—administered through equal parts contrition, confession, and absolution—was the medicament believed to restore the delicate balance that ord...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Translation, Names, Dating, and Currency
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1. Preaching, Penance, and Peacemaking in the Age of the Commune
• CHAPTER 2. Pax et Concordia
• CHAPTER 3. Pax est Pactum
• CHAPTER 4. Feud, Vendetta, and the End of Exile
• CHAPTER 5. Picturing Peace: Rituals and Remembrance
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index