As the 13th century came to an end, Italy had not yet recovered from the disasters of the age of Frederick II. Milan was dominant among the Lombard communes and was soon to make its bid for hegemony in northern Italy. Florence, meanwhile, had increased in size, wealth, and power to become the dominant force in Tuscany and the chief bulwark against the ambitions of the Visconti, a powerful Milanese family. The papacy vacillated under Angevin influence, while the kings of Naples carried on a vain war to retake the island of Sicily from the Aragonese. External influences, especially from France, increasingly dominated the political life of Italy, culminating at the turn of the century in the disastrous conflict between Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) and King Philip IV (the Fair) of France (1285–1314). Italy had escaped imperial dominance only to fall under the shadow of the French. Perhaps there is a certain irony in the country’s exchange of one heir of Charlemagne for another. Economic developments
The 13th century witnessed an enormous increase in prosperity not only in the maritime cities but also in the growing centres of the cloth industry, especially the woolen textile industry in Tuscany. Venice came to dominate the rich trade with the Byzantine Empire, especially after the Fourth Crusade (1204). Genoa, which eclipsed Pisa in the latter part of the century, expanded its trade in the western Mediterranean and in Provence. During the second half of the 13th century, Florentine influence, benefiting from close ties with the Angevins and the papacy, prospered in the kingdom of Sicily. The new wealth left an imprint on Italian cities. By the end of the century, the first mansions of the rich, although small by later standards, began to adorn the cities, alongside new municipal buildings and the churches of the mendicant orders, especially of the Franciscans and Dominicans. Cultural developments
The culture of this period reflects both the new wealth and the tensions it generated in Italian society. The legal culture that had flourished in Bologna in the 12th century came of age in the 13th century and spread to other parts of Italy. Lawyers formed a large educated class with an appreciation of rhetoric and grammar and some taste for poetry, history, and philosophy. In the first half of the century the court of Frederick II was an important centre for these studies, as is evident in the letters of Pietro della Vigna, the emperor’s chief spokesman. The chronicle of Riccardo of San Germano proved the best that the century would produce. Frederick’s court also attracted figures such as Michael Scot, whose translation of mathematical and scientific treatises from Arabic into Latin made Sicily an important centre for their transmission. Frederick’s own study De arte venandi cum avibus (“On the Art of Hunting with Birds”) drew not only on earlier writings but also on his own and his contemporaries’ observations and experience. The incipient Dominican studium in Naples produced Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest thinker of the age. Frederick, however, did not continue the rich Norman tradition of mosaic art and architecture, best represented by the Palatine Chapel in Palermo and the cathedrals of Cefalù and Monreale. Instead, Frederick was more noted for his castles, especially his starkly beautiful Castel del Monte in Puglia.
Cosmati mosaic (c. 1085–1132); detail of the floor in the choir of the church of San Nicola, Bari, Italy.SCALA/Art Resource, New York
Thirteenth-century Rome saw a flourishing of the arts in sculpture and in the stonework and mosaics of the Cosmati that adorn the walls of such churches as San Paolo Fuori le Mura and Santa Maria in Trastevere. By the end of the century, Arnolfo di Cambio, whose work in Florence was to gain him greater fame, produced important sculpture in Rome. But Rome was chiefly the centre of the papacy and of an international clerical culture. Although the papal chancery grew apace in this period, producing thousands of polished letters in its distinctive style, other studies found little place there. It was more devoted to practice than to study.
Secular legal studies, grammar, and rhetoric took deep root in the north. Fresh ideas streamed across the Alps from France, influencing the writings of figures such as Albertanus of Brescia, while these same ideas drew numerous Italians northward, including the Florentine scholar Brunetto Latini. In Milan, Bonvesin da la Riva, poet and eulogist of his city, composed his De magnalibus urbis Mediolani (“Concerning the Great Works of the City of Milan”) in 1288. At Padua, Rolandino reacted against the incursions of Ezzelino da Romano in his Chronicle. While in exile from Florence in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri, the greatest of all Italian poets, completed his towering epic poem, The Divine Comedy. Dante’s literary art found its visual equivalent in the brilliant frescoes of Giotto di Bondone in Padua (Arena Chapel), Florence (Santa Croce), Assisi (Magdalen Chapel in the lower church of San Francesco), and Naples (destroyed). James M. Powell John Foot Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries Characteristics of the period
The failure of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II and his successor kings of Sicily to dominate Italy in the course of the 13th century left the peninsula divided among a large number of effectively independent political units. The inability of rulers from beyond the Alps to impose their authority upon it was clearly and finally demonstrated by the expedition (1310–13) of Henry of Luxembourg, crowned as Emperor Henry VII. An idealist who believed that he, as God’s secular vicar, had a divine mission to restore peace to “the garden of the Empire,” Henry entered Italy in 1310 with the consent of Pope Clement V (1305–14) and seemed at first to prosper. He sought, as an honest broker, to reconcile Guelf (i.e., pro-papal) and Ghibelline (i.e., pro-imperial) factions, but it was soon apparent that any attempt to override those old loyalties entailed a massive assault upon the political status quo, a revolution that would be fiercely resisted. Florence, in particular, opposed not only any concession to its enemies but any restoration of imperial power.
In these circumstances Henry was increasingly driven into exclusive alliance with the opponents of the Guelfs and became himself merely a leader of a faction. As a result, both the papacy and King Robert of Naples, who had originally favoured his coming to the peninsula, returned to their traditional anti-imperial stance. The dream of peace by imperial fiat dissolved, and Henry turned to war, but his death from fever at Buonconvento, near Siena, in August 1313 broke the hopes of the imperialists forever. Later emperors who intervened from the north—Louis IV (the Bavarian; 1327–30) and Charles IV of Bohemia (1354–55, 1368–69)—came with much more limited aims, not as universal monarchs but as short-time players on the Italian scene, seeking there such limited gains as the prestige of imperial coronation at Rome. However much these emperors maintained their formal de jure claims to rule, any imperial central authority in Italy had disappeared. In its place stood a complex, often chaotic grouping of many rival powers whose hostilities and alliances fill, in wearisome detail, the pages of contemporary chroniclers.
This political disunity went along with other divisions in a peninsula that manifested sharp regional differences in climate, land formation, economic development, customs, and language. (A 13th-century chronicler praises a contemporary as a skilled linguist because of his fluency in “French, Lombard, and Tuscan.” There was no common literary language before Dante—and then only in verse, not prose.) These very pronounced diversities have led many commentators to rule out any attempt to construct a general unified history of Italy in this period and to insist that a coherent synthesis must be based upon its constituent parts. For these authors, the only true history will consist of separate accounts of the six major powers—Sicily, Naples, the Papal States, Florence, Milan, and Venice—together with those of some 15 to 20 minor powers—such as Mantua, Montferrat, Lucca, and Siena—which were scattered among them. (This ignores the ambiguous case of Genoa, extremely powerful economically but pitifully weak politically.)