4 - Shadow Bureaucrats and Bureaucracy in Trecento Florence

Summary

Abstract

This chapter examines ‘shadow’ bureaucrats and bureaucracy in trecento Florence. It traces the activities of public officials whose stated jobs (bell-ringer, accountant) suggest that they had little to do with the administration of warfare, but who in fact played major roles that reveal surprising and hitherto unknown institutional continuities. Given the frequency of warfare during the period, the evidence makes clear the need for additional research and a reevaluation of the Florentine bureaucracy that takes greater and more nuanced account of the effects of warfare.

Keywords: Florence, Bureaucracy, Famiglia, Bell-ringers, Accountants, Economy

It is an historian's unalienable right to divide her/his subject matter into subfields. They allow us to make sense of the past and to structure phenomena that would otherwise be difficult to apprehend. The rubrics are, however, admittedly artificial and restrictive; and nowhere is this more apparent than with regard to medieval warfare, which occupies the self-contained and generally unpopular academic subfield of ‘military history’. In his influential essay on the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), E. R. Bridbury sought to revise the status quo, arguing that fourteenthand fifteenth-century English warfare was so ‘relentless’ that it was not an ‘anomaly’, as typically portrayed, but a ‘regular’ practice. Bridbury described war as its own ‘institution’, which he provocatively compared to the church. The portrait has helped to soften the hard edges of warfare, but its status as a distinct institution has done little to erase the disciplinary boundaries that have separated war from its broader societal consequences.

Warfare was most ‘relentless’ in fourteenth-century Italy. With its rich and contentious states in close geographic proximity and the involvement of ‘external’ players such as the papacy and Holy Roman emperors, the peninsula was rife with violence. Extant Italian chroniclers who witnessed the conflicts up close did not, however, see them as regular practice or as constituting their own ‘institution’, but rather as a deviation from the norm with profound social, political and economic consequences. Nevertheless, the academic boundary separating warfare from the pacific activities of trecento Italian states is the sharpest and most rigid of all.