Guild rule then continued virtually unchallenged until 1378. In that year the regime was overthrown not by a signore but by factions within the ruling class, which in turn provoked the remarkable proletarian Revolt of the Ciompi. In the wool-cloth industry, which dominated the manufacturing economy of Florence, the lanaioli (wool entrepreneurs) worked on the putting-out system: they employed large numbers of people (9,000, by some calculations) who worked in their own homes with tools supplied by the lanaioli and received wages by the piece. Largely unskilled and semiskilled, these men and women had no rights within the guild and in fact were subjected to harsh controls by the guild. In the Arte della lana (the wool-cloth guild), a “foreign” official was responsible for administering discipline and had the right to beat and even torture or behead workers found guilty of acts of sabotage and theft. The employees, who were often in debt (frequently to their employers), subsisted precariously from day to day, at the mercy of the trade cycle and the varying price of bread. With them, among the ranks of the popolo minuto (“little people”), were day labourers in the building trades as well as porters, gardeners, and poor and dependent shopkeepers. On occasion these poor, in Florence as all over Italy, rioted when bread was scarce, but they were normally powerless to organize efficiently against guilds and governments—both of which could impose extreme penalties on anyone who defied their authority.
In effect, the poor rose to revolt only at the prompting of members of the ruling class. So it was in the Revolt of the Ciompi of 1378. In June of that year Salvestro de’ Medici, in an attempt to preserve his own power in government, stirred up the lower orders to attack the houses of his enemies among the patriciate. That action, coming at a time when large numbers of ex-soldiers were employed in the cloth industry, many of them as ciompi (wool carders), provoked an acute political consciousness among the poor. In their clamour for change, the workers were joined by small masters resentful of their exclusion from the wool guild, by skilled artisans, and by petty shopkeepers. Expectation of change and discontent fed upon each other. In the third week of July, new outbreaks of violence, probably fomented by Salvestro, brought spectacular change: the appointment of a ruling committee (balìa) composed of a few patricians, a predominating number of small masters, and 32 representatives of the ciompi. Michele di Lando, foreman in a cloth factory, was appointed to the balìa as “standard-bearer of justice.”
In their six-week period of rule, the men of the balìa sought to meet the demands of the insurgents. The balìa approved the formation of guilds for the wool carders and other workers to give standing to their members, established more-equitable taxation between rich and poor, and declared a moratorium on debt. Yet, angry at the slow pace of change, the poor remained restive. On August 27 a vast crowd assembled and proceeded to the election of the “Eight Saints of God’s People.” Then they marched on the Palazzo Vecchio with a petition that the Eight Saints should have the right to veto or approve all legislation. But by now all the temporary allies of the poor were alienated from the spirit of revolt. The rich resisted, won over Michele di Lando with a bribe, called out the guild militias, and drove the protesters from the scene.
Normality was reestablished within a few days. The new guilds were abolished, and the poor returned to the impotence that was, throughout Italy, their lot. Malnutrition quenched rebellion, leadership was lacking, and the limited horizons of their lives made any ideal of betterment short-lived. The main effect of the revolt was to introduce at the top of society a regime that was narrower and more oligarchic than that which had ruled for the previous 30 years. Economic change
Meanwhile, changes in the character of the economy in town and country profoundly affected the development of both the republics and the signorie. Although scholars today often contend that in this period an “urban economy” drove northern and central Italy, in contrast to the rest of Europe, most Italians still lived on the land, and the prosperity of any town depended greatly on its contado, or the rural territory that it governed. Here, despite differences in agriculture due to different climates and types of soil, certain patterns of development occurred within the peninsula. By the end of the 13th century, tenurial serfdom had virtually died away, and other forms of landholding were evolving to take its place. Sometimes peasants worked the land as freeholders (as in fact many peasants had always done, even at the very height of the manorial system). Sometimes (and this was particularly true of large ecclesiastical estates in northern Italy) lands were let out on perpetual hereditary lease for low rents—a procedure that, in effect, often led to the virtual dispossession of church proprietors in favour of secular tenants. But the most common new tenancy from the 13th century was that in which landlords offered short-term leases in return for heavy rents either in money or, more often, in kind. Among such leases the one that came to figure most prominently, especially in well-cultivated land in central and northern Italy, was sharecropping, particularly mezzadria. In contracts of mezzadria, the landlord provided half the seed sown and in return received half of the tenant’s fruits. Frequently the contract was renewable every year—a provision that held considerable insecurity for the lessee, who was obligated to leave the land at term. Often, in order to make sure that the landlord received a full return from his lease, detailed conditions were attached on rotation of crops, plowing, digging, and harrowing. In all, this form of tenure, which was to remain a central feature of northern Italian rural life up to the mid-20th century, can be seen less as an agreement to let land than one to hire labour.
At the same time, a system of more intensive farming was developing. Before the mid-13th century, large homogeneous estates were a rarity, and it was very unusual for one proprietor to own half or more of a parish. From that time on, however, scattered portions were increasingly consolidated into united farms such as the poderi of modern Tuscany. Profits from commerce were used to build drainage, plant trees, erect homesteads, and acquire livestock, manure, and agricultural instruments. In these areas the common-field system began to disappear, common pasture declined, and a growing number of individual properties were hedged in. Labourers came to live on the farm, leaving the village to house a reserve of casual workers. Thus, by the end of the 14th century, the old landscape of dispersed strips of land and fortified villages had frequently given way to broad estates dominated by country houses, the leisure seats of urban landowners. Yet these developments were in no way uniform, even in the Emilian plain and in Tuscany, where they were most common. In the south the latifundia, the large estates that only a few major landowners owned, continued to exist, but they were now farmed with hired labour.
Evidence of bonifiche (drainage works) and the clearing of wasteland suggests a continual expansion in agricultural production up to the 1340s. So, too, trade, manufacture, and banking also prospered in that period. Within the peninsula, communes had to engage in large-scale marketing of food simply to provision the cities. For a town such as Florence, which at the beginning of the 14th century could gain from its own territories just enough food to feed its population for five months of the year, this commerce was literally a matter of survival. But, at the same time, trade in food and other bulk goods was matched by long-distance commerce in luxuries. With the decline of Pisa in the 13th century, Venice and Genoa remained the principal centres of this traffic. Venetians and Genoese had their own quarters and consulates in Syria and Palestine and at Constantinople and Alexandria. Sailing from their ports or traveling inland to Damascus and Aleppo (heads of the Asian caravan routes), they held a virtual monopoly of East-West trade, exchanging wood, steel, and arms for “spices” (the generic name for all precious goods from the East, including pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, silk, dyes such as cochineal and indigo, cotton, drugs, and sugar).