Written by: Nategrey
A Brief Comparison of Florence and Venice Florence and Venice were the economic powerhouses of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. While there are vast differences between the two great cities, there are also some striking similarities, the most outstanding being their devotion to commerce. To both the Florentines and the Venetians, riches had an extraordinary significance. To be rich was to be honorable and to be poor was a disgrace (Hibbert Medici 32). The Florentines had a saying that “no one poor would ever find it easy to acquire honor and fame by means of his virtue; poverty throws virtue into the shadows and subjects it to a hidden and obscure misery.” This idea was equally true in Venice. Wealth and poverty were not only personal traits of esteem or distain; they were thought to reflect on the Republics as a whole. Rich men were an honor and a glory to the entire Republic and it was a citizen’s patriotic duty, along with serving in the military when called, and serving in the government, to gain as much wealth as possible (Hibbert Venice 53). This civic attachment to wealth is the central likeness between the two city-states. “[Florence] was a city of squares and towers, of busy, narrow, twisting streets, of fortress-like palaces … convents, nunneries, [and] crowded tenements, all enclosed by a high brick and stone crenellated wall.” (Hibbert Medici 20). By the 14th century, over 50,000 people lived within the city’s ramparts; less than in Paris or Venice, but more than in most other European cities, including London. For administrative purposes, Florence was divided into four districts called, quartieri, which were in turn divided into four wards. Every quartieri had it’s own distinct character and was generally distinguished by the trades that were carried on there (20-21). The city itself was a city of industry, and raw products flooded in from all over Europe to be finished, polished and dyed. Also, foreign governments routinely deposited large sums of money in Florence’s immense banks, and many rulers and great Lords were known to be indebted to Florentine bankers (Hibbert Florence 29).
Theoretically, every member of the city’s twenty-one guilds had a say in the city government. In truth, a few very powerful families exercised a great deal of influence in determining the views of the city leaders and what course the Republic’s policies would take. Thousands of ordinary workers, non-shop owners, laborers and peddlers were prevented, by law, from forming their own guilds and were left at the mercy of the merchants and the tradesmen. Of Florence’s guilds, there were seven of key importance, and fourteen of nominal value. Of the seven major guilds, that of the lawyers enjoyed the highest prestige; followed by the guilds of wool, silk, and cloth merchants. The Guild of the Bankers was the foremost competitor with these “big-four” for city power, but the bankers suffered ostensibly from the stigma of being moneylenders. The sixth guild encompassed many trades: doctors, apothecaries, shopkeepers, merchants who sold spices, dyes and medicines, and artists and artisans. Finally, the seventh guild looked after the interests of cloth dealers and craftsmen of fur and animal skins. The minor guilds tended to be those with members of relatively humble trades such as: butchers, tanners, leatherworkers, smiths, cooks, masons, innkeepers, tailors, and bakers (Hibbert Medici 25).
The actual government was formed this way: the names of all those guild members over age thirty who were eligible for election were placed in eight leather bags. Every two months there would be a public ceremony in which names were drawn out at random. Men who were known to be in debt were ineligible, as were those who had already served a recent term or were related to men whose names had been drawn. The citizens eventually selected were, for the next two months, known as Priori, and the government they constituted, the Signoria (Hibbert Medici 26). There were never more than nine men in the Signoria, six of them represented the major guilds, two of them the minor guilds, and the ninth became the standard-bearer of the Republic. The Florentines were immensely proud of their system which, compared to other city-states, was a stable and just democratic republic. In practice however, Florence wasn’t democratic at all. The inequities are in the open. Not only were unskilled workers excluded from government, but those descending from Nobility were also barred from participating in the government (28). Furthermore, Florence imported great numbers of foreign household slaves who were considered property of their owners and enjoyed essentially no rights at all.
From around 1270 onward, the city’s trades began to increase in great strides. Most Florentine merchants dealt in spices, dyes, hides, silk, cloth and taffeta, gold, and above all, in wool. Vast quantities of wool were imported every year from northern Europe and brought to Florence to be finished and dyed. Florentine dyes were considered faster, purer and of brighter color than any other found in Europe at the time. The legendary banks of Florence worked hand-in-hand with the city’s textile industries, and they supplied capital and investment money for the merchants and insured their shipments and cargoes. The Florentines were the inventers of double-entry book keeping and of the precursor to the cheque, and they were regarded for hundreds of years as the world’s leading experts in international finance (Hibbert Florence 24). In 1252 the bankers of the city issued small gold coins that came to be known as Florins. The Florin rapidly gained universal confidence and was soon considered the standard of currency across Europe (Hibbert Medici 32).
One hundred and sixty miles from Florence, sitting within a shallow lagoon on the edge of the Adriatic, lay Venice. From her birth, Venice showed an exclusively commercial character. The city began in ancient times, shortly before the fall of Rome, when people fled from barbarian hoards onto the shallow islands of the lagoon. Life on the barren islets was Spartan and her early people had to tax their ingenuity for survival. They were able to thrive by producing salt from the marshes and by catching fish and exchanging their products with people on the mainland. Thus, the Venetians were a people born of trade (Pirenne 82). As history progressed, the city found itself in an entirely unique situation. Thanks to her isolated watery position, the Germanic tribes who over ran the continent were unable to gain possession of, or pillage the city. Venice remained, therefore, under the nominal sovereignty of the Byzantine Emperor. After Constantinople fell, Venice only strengthened her situation. With territorial holdings and economic influence in both Italy and the Mediterranean basin, she was in a position to dominate trade between the West and the East for centuries (83-85).
By the time the Middle Ages were wrapping up, the entire Republic had become a kind of sovereign merchant company. All galleys were required to meet state specified standards. Privately owned and operated vessels were obligated to conform to all city standards and meet inspection if they were to be allowed the right to sail with the huge convoys of four to five hundred ships that departed from the lagoon every two months. The goal, which was achieved, was to ensure that every ship which sailed under the Venetian flag could maintain the same speed, ride through the same storms, and could be repaired using the same techniques and with the same supplies (Hibbert Venice 53). The industries that existed in the city and within the lagoon were also subject to meticulous regulations. “Skilled artisans were forbidden to practice in other cities; the export of materials essential to their work was forbidden; [and] the divulgence to outsiders of arcane methods of manufacture was a capital offense” (53). The guilds to which artisans and merchants belonged, while basically self-governing, tended in effect to be just one more of the many agencies of government control (53-54).
The Venetian government itself was much less straight forward than that of Florence. From the beginning, authority in Venice was invested in a leader known as the Doge. Originally it was intended that the Doge’s power be limited by advisors and Tribunes, but as centuries passed, the office of the Doge grew increasingly autocratic. Consequently, in 1172, it was decided that a new constitution was necessary. This cut off the Doge’s power and led to the creation of a Maggior Consiglio, or Great Council, which was to be comprised of leading citizens nominated by the districts of Venice, called sestieri. Around the beginning of the thirteenth century, there also emerged a Senate, appointed by the Great Council, which became the chief decision-making body of the Republic (Hibbert Venice 20). While Florence praised itself for its democratic pretensions, Venice made no attempt to hide its true nature. No one outside the older Venetian families was ever admitted to the government. The Great Council retained the right not only to appoint and dismiss all the ministers of State, but also the representatives of the sestieri, so that in effect it became a self-perpetuating oligarchy (20).
That oligarchy was devoted wholly to commercial interests, and trade was the life force of Venice. Through the centuries after the fall of Rome, Venice carved out for herself an exclusive trading monopoly within Italy and throughout the Levant. From her unique position, neither fully in the West nor in the East, Venice was able to capitalize on all fronts. Her ships transported products from the countries on both her sides: wheat and wine from Italy, wood from Dalmatia, salt from the Veneto, and slaves from the shores of the Adriatic. As Venice grew richer, she constantly sought to create more markets in the East for good produced in Italy and Europe, and markets in the West for the goods she unloaded in her harbors (Pirenne 86-87). “No scruple had any weight with the Venetians. Their religion was a religion of business men” (86). Any reservations merchants may have had about the morality of their respective businesses were largely dispelled by large profits. Wealth commanded respect as well as comfort; and Venetian merchants like Florentine ones, subscribed to the view that wealth acquisition was a civic duty. Simply put, as merchants grew richer, so did the city (Hibbert Venice 54).
Florence and Venice are not exact copies of one another. There could scarcely two more diverse and special cities. Florence, as a center of industry, imported raw materials and exported finished products. Venice was the great trade epicenter of Europe and facilitated the exchange of goods from all over the known earth. Both cities were republics, but while Florence claimed to be democratic, Venice took no pains to hide its oligarchy. Furthermore, Florence was firmly centered in the West. Its leaders had ties to the kings and Lords of Europe, and the city was squarely within the orbit of Rome and the Pope. Venice on the other hand was oriented more toward the East and to Constantinople, and she had no qualms about choosing to deal with the Muslims over the Christians if it was in her interest to do so.
However, even with the distinctive differences between the two city-states, they share one intrinsically common core facet, their devotion to economic success. Both were economic powerhouses of Europe. Florentine banking and Venetian trade carried their respective influences sky high. The wealth generated from both cities reintroduced Europe to the gold standard, and both the Florentine Florin and the Venetian Ducat became the standard of stable currency across Europe and the Mediterranean. In both cities, the pursuit of money was considered to be a cardinal virtue and a civic duty. Wealth was seen as both a personal honor and as an honor to city. In fact the city’s governments themselves, being made up of merchants and businessmen, were purely economically minded. In pursuit of wealth and civic glory, nearly any immorality or vice could be dispelled by the promise of great profits (Hibbert Venice 53).
Works Cited: Hibbert, Christopher. Florence: The Biography of a City. London: Viking, 1993. ---. The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1975. ---. Venice: The Biography of a City. London: Grafton Books, 1988 Pirenne, Henri. Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade. Trans. Frank D. Halsey. Princton, NJ: Princton University Press, 1925.