Not many years before, though Dante had denounced their luxurious manners, the Florentines seem to have frowned upon any untoward display of wealth. They had dressed very simply, the standard costume for all men who were not artisans being an ankle-length gown, buttoned down the front like a cassock. Their houses, too, had been unassuming. Even those of the richest families had been furnished with plain wooden tables and the most uninviting beds. The walls were generally whitewashed, tapestries being unpacked from chests to be displayed on special occasions only; floors were of bare stone, rarely covered with anything other than reed matting; the shuttered windows were usually made of oiled cotton. Glass and majolica ornaments were few and discreet; silverware was produced from the sideboard, or from a locked cupboard in the master’s room, for none but the honoured guest; and few families yet had forks. In more recent years, however, though the Florentines continued to enjoy a reputation for frugality, they had become noticeably less abstemious and restrained. The stone houses of the well-to-do still presented a severe, even forbidding appearance to the street; but behind the glazed and curtained windows of the upper storeys, the rooms were frequently carpeted, the walls painted with murals, hung with tapestries, religious pictures and occasionally concave looking-glasses to reflect light onto a table or desk. Fireplaces were much more common so that on cold winter nights warming-pans and scaldini – earthenware jars filled with hot charcoal – were not so necessary. Much of the furniture was painted or decorated with marquetry. The canopied beds, standing on raised platforms and surrounded by footboards, were very large – often twelve feet wide – big enough for four people or even more to sleep in them side by side, lying naked beneath the linen sheets and breathing in air made sweet by scent or by herbs burning slowly in pierced globes hanging from the ceiling.
Over their trunk hose and jacket men still wore the lucco, the scarlet ankle-length gown with long, wide sleeves and a hood attached to the neck; but many young men now preferred more gaily coloured clothes – a pink cape, perhaps, worn with a satin jacket, white stockings shot with silver lace, a velvet cap with a feather in the brim, scented gloves, golden rings and a golden chain, a jewelled dagger and a sword. There were sumptuary laws as there were elsewhere in Europe; but no one paid them much attention. Certainly the women did not. An official, who was ordered to compel women to obey the laws, submitted a characteristic report of his failure:
In obedience to the orders you gave me, I went out to look for forbidden ornaments on the women and was met with arguments such as are not to be found in any book of laws. There was one woman with the edge of her hood fringed out in lace and twined round her head. My assistant said to her, ‘What is your name? You have a hood with lace fringes.’ But the woman removed the laced fringe which was attached to the hood with a pin, and said it was merely a wreath. Further along we met a woman with many buttons in front of her dress; and my assistant said to her, ‘You are not allowed to wear buttons.’ But she replied, ‘These are not buttons. They are studs. Look, they have no loops, and there are no buttonholes.’ Then my assistant, supposing he had caught a culprit at last, went up to another woman and said to her, ‘You are wearing ermine.’ And he took out his book to write down her name. ‘You cannot take down my name,’ the woman protested. ‘This is not ermine. It is the fur of a suckling.’ ‘What do you mean, suckling?’ ‘A kind of animal.’
To the dismay of many an austere churchman, the wives of Florentine merchants were, indeed, renowned for their sumptuous clothes, their elegance, their pale skin and fair hair. If their hair was too dark they dyed it or wore a wig of white or yellow silk; if their skin was too olive they bleached it; if their cheeks were too rosy they powdered them. And they walked the streets in all manner of styles and colours, in dresses of silk and velvet, often adorned with sparkling jewels and silver buttons; in winter they wore damask and fur, showing off prized features of a wardrobe which might well have cost far more than their husband’s house. Unmarried girls of good family were not, of course, allowed such freedom, rarely being seen in the streets at all, except on their way to Mass, and then always heavily veiled. In some households young and precious daughters were not allowed out at all; they had to read Mass in their own bedrooms and to take exercise in their father’s garden or in the family loggia. When it was time for marriage their parents or guardians made all the arrangements, of which the amount of the dowry was the most significant.
Many dowries included foreign slaves whose importation had been officially authorized in 1336 after an outbreak of plague had led to a serious shortage of native servants. These slaves were generally Greeks, Turks or Russians, Circassians or Tartars, the Tartars being preferred by some households because they worked harder, the Circassians by others because they were better looking and better tempered. All were expected to be fully occupied from morning to night, as Fra Bernardino, a travelling preacher from Siena, urged housewives to remember for their own good:
Is there sweeping to be done? Then make your slave sweep. Are there pots to be scoured? Then make her scour them. Are there vegetables to be cleaned or fruit to be peeled? Then set her to them. Laundry? Hand it to her. Make her look after the children and everything else. If you don’t get her used to doing all the work, she will become a lazy little lump of flesh. Don’t give her any lime off, I tell you. As long as you keep her on the go, she won’t waste her time leaning out of the window.
Bought quite cheaply in the markets at Venice and Genoa, the slaves were usually young female children who spent the rest of their lives in bondage. An owner had complete power over them ‘to have, hold, sell, alienate, exchange, enjoy, rent or unrent, dispose of by will, judge soul and body and do with in perpetuity whatsoever may please him and his heirs, and no man may gainsay him’. They were, in fact, considered as chattels, and classed in inventories with domestic animals. Many of them became pregnant by their masters: the correspondence of the time is full of disputes arising from such inconvenience; and the foundling hospitals were continually being presented with little bundles of swarthy or Slavic-looking babies.
At least the slave, hard as she was worked, could generally be sure of eating well, for although she had few legal rights and was often dismissed in documents as a creature of little importance, she was regarded as one of the family and treated as such. In hard times she was certainly better off than the very poor native Florentines who were sometimes reduced to a diet of dried figs or bread made with oak bark. If she belonged to a moderately prosperous family she could look forward to sharing their evening meal of garlic-flavoured pasta, ravioli in broth, liver sausage or black pudding, goat’s milk cheese, fruit and wine, with an occasional pigeon or a piece of meat, usually lamb, on a Sunday. For the richer merchants, of course, there was more exotic fare. Excessive indulgence was forbidden by sumptuary laws; but, as with clothes, the laws were flagrantly disregarded and the most was made of every loophole. If the main course was to consist of no more than ‘roast with pie’, well, then, everything that could possibly be desired was tossed into the pie, from pork and ham to eggs, dates and almonds. An honoured guest of a well-to-do citizen might be offered first of all a melon, then ravioli, tortellini or lasagne, then a berlingozzo, a cake made of flour, eggs and sugar, then a few slices of boiled capon, roast chicken and guinea fowl, followed by spiced veal, or pork jelly, thrushes, tench, pike, eel or trout, boiled kid, pigeon, partridge, turtle-dove or peacock. For vegetables there was usually a choice of broad beans, onions, spinach, carrots, leeks, peas and beetroot. Finally there might be rice cooked in milk of almonds and served with sugar and honey, or pinocchiato, a pudding made out of pine kernels, or little jellies made of almond-milk, coloured with saffron and modelled in the shape of animals or human figures. Everything was strongly flavoured. A chicken minestra would be spiced with ginger and pounded almonds, as well as cinnamon and cloves, and sprinkled with cheese or even sugar. Into a fish pie would go olive oil, orange and lemon juice, pepper, salt, cloves, parsley, nutmegs, saffron, dates, raisins, powdered bay leaves and marjoram. The red sauce known as savore sanguino contained not only meat, wine, raisins, cinnamon and sandal, but also sumac which is now used only for tanning. In summer the main meal of the day in the families of most well-to-do merchants would be served just before dusk at a trestle table near to the open garden door, the guests sitting on straight-backed chairs or, more likely, on benches or the lids of chests, while musicians played softly in a far corner of the room.