History

This brief survey of central Italy's long and complex history is oriented toward Tuscany, but Umbria is covered as well. Once we hit the Renaissance, the focus shifts primarily to Florence, which quickly became the leading power and controlled most of Tuscany until the 19th century.

Tuscan Roots: From Prehistory to The Etruscans

Although Neanderthals, ancient Homo sapiens, and Paleolithic and Bronze Age humans left some of their bones and tools lying about, and the 9th-century-B.C. Villanovian Iron Age culture (possibly immigrants from the north) has helped fill museums with pot shards, things really didn't start getting lively in central Italy until the Etruscans rose to power.

The most widely accepted theory is that the Etruscans came from modern-day Turkey in Asia Minor -- at least, that's what the ancient Romans believed -- and arrived in central Italy in the late 9th or early 8th century B.C. The fact that their language isn't Indo-European but appears similar to some Aegean dialects helps confirm this theory, but there are others who now feel the Etruscans may have risen from native peoples in central Italy, perhaps a combination of the Villanovians, local tribes, and travelers from Asia Minor. Whatever the case, these Etruschi or Tuschi formed the basic cultural/political force in the region that's now named for them, Tuscany.

The Etruscans are a bit of an enigma. Much of what little remains to tell us of them -- that which hasn't been corrupted by later Roman influence -- consists of tombs and their contents, and it's difficult to reconstruct an entire culture simply by looking at its graveyards. Etruscan society may have been more egalitarian than later Western cultures, or at least women appeared to have more of an active role and a higher status in daily life. Historians say they loved to throw parties, have banquets, go on the hunt, and the like -- but that may just be what they chose to celebrate in the few paintings and many carvings they left us. While we can read their language, what script we have goes into little beyond death, divination, and the divine.

What historians are more sure of is that Etruscans became enamored of the Attic culture of Greece and adopted many of the Greek gods and myths, as well as many Greek vases, in the 6th century B.C. This era coincided with the height of their considerable power. In fact, from the late 7th century until 510 B.C., Rome was ruled by Etruscan kings of the Tarquin dynasty. Although the Etruscan empire spread south almost to Naples, east to the Adriatic, and west onto Corsica, the heart and core called Etruria covered an area from the Arno east to the Apennines and south to the Tiber, encompassing most of Tuscany, half of Umbria, and northern Lazio.

The Etruscans surrounded their cities with massive defensive walls, were adept bridge builders, and developed sophisticated canal, sewer, and irrigation systems for their cities and fields, draining marshy lands for farming and sinking wells and cisterns and carving plumbing systems in the rock beneath their cities. (The famous Roman plumbing network was started by the Etruscan kings of Rome.)

Well before this time, around 1200 B.C., Indo-European Italic peoples had wandered into Italy from the north. The Samnites and Latins continued south, but the Umbri tribes decided to settle in the Apennines and valleys east of the Tiber, which flows through the middle of modern-day Umbria. Their loosely defined zone of cultural hegemony encompassed what is now northern and eastern Umbria and the Marches over to the sea, as well as corners of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. (Modern city descendants include Gubbio and Città di Castello, as well as Assisi and Todi, both of which later became Etruscan and then Roman.) All we really know about the Umbri is they had a highly developed religion based on reading prophecies in animal sacrifices and the flights of birds -- Gubbio's famous Eugubian Tables bronze plaques tell us this much. When the Roman influence spread north in the 3rd century B.C., the Umbrian cities for the most part allied themselves to the Latins, were awarded Roman citizenship early, and enjoyed a large degree of autonomy from authorities in Rome. Aside from the usual city rivalries and moderate clashes between expanding empires, the Umbrians appear to have lived more or less amicably with their Etruscan neighbors.

At the close of the 5th century B.C., the Etruscan empire was pushed back from the south by the Greeks and from the north by the Celtic tribes. After expelling the last Etruscan king, Tarquin the Proud, and setting up a republic, Rome in the 3rd century B.C. started nipping at the heels of Etruria itself.

Enter the Romans: The Founding of Florence

In the 3rd century B.C., that Latin city on the Tiber called Rome began its expansion, and some of the first neighboring peoples to fall were the Etruscans. Some cities, such as Perugia and Arezzo, allied themselves with Rome and were merely absorbed, while others, including Volterra and Orvieto, were conquered outright. The Romans brought with them the combination of a highly conservative (some say stagnant) culture coupled with a certain degree of adaptability to local religious beliefs and social modes that allowed their empire to stay solvent for so long. As the Romans gained power over the entire peninsula, the removal of political barriers and the construction of roads allowed trade to develop and flow relatively uninhibited.

Many of the old cities flourished, and the general prosperity led to the founding of new cities throughout the region, especially as retirement camps for Roman soldiers. While the Etruscans were keen on building cities on hilltops -- both for easy defensibility and to leave more valley land free for farming -- the Romans preferred flat ground along rivers, which allowed them to lay out exacting street-plan grids oriented precisely to the points of the compass. They were fanatically single-minded about city planning, rarely wavering from this model.

During the lull of the later Roman Empire, Christianity quickly spread throughout much of central Italy -- Lucca even claims to have converted in the 1st century A.D. through the efforts of one of St. Peter's own followers, though Pisa tries to one-up its neighbors by claiming a church first built by St. Peter.

Looking for Etruscan Remains -- If you want to check out some Etruscan remains, head to the following towns: Volterra (a museum, a city gate, and walls), Chiusi (underground aqueducts to tour and many tombs in the area), Arezzo (a museum), Cortona (a museum and tombs), Perugia (a city gate and a well), and Orvieto (tombs, museums, underground tunnels to tour, and a well). There are also major Tuscan finds collected at the archaeological museum in Florence.

Goths, Lombards & Franks: The Dark Ages

As the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century A.D., Germanic tribes swept down from the north and wreaked mayhem on central Italian cities as group after group fought their way down to Rome in a sacking free-for-all, pillaging all the way south and often on the way back north as well. A few tribes decided to engage in a bit of empire-building themselves. The Ostrogoths got Ravenna on the Adriatic coast, and when the Byzantine Empire established its base there, it often made attempts to conquer Italy, starting with the first lands it came to: Umbria and Tuscany. The Goths swept down in the 6th century A.D., and one of their leaders, Totila, conquered Florence in A.D. 552.

Perhaps the strongest force in the Dark Ages was the Lombards, who, after settling in the Po Valley in the north of Italy (Milan's region is still called Lombardy), expanded south as well starting in the mid-6th century. They established two major duchies in central Italy, one based at Lucca, which governed most of Tuscany, and the other at Spoleto, which took care of most of Umbria. When their ambitions threatened Rome (now a church stronghold) in the 8th century, the pope invited the Frankish king Pepin the Short to come clear the Lombards out. Under Pepin, and, more important, his son Charlemagne, the Lombards were ousted from Tuscany and Umbria.

The Lombard duchy at Lucca was merely replaced by a Frankish margrave, with Tuscany ruled by powerful figures like the Margrave Matilda. Charlemagne gave the lands he took from the duchy of Spoleto directly to the pope, but the pontiffs gradually lost control over the region as they busied themselves with other concerns.

With the breakup of Charlemagne's empire in the 9th century, the German emperors started pressing claims over the Italian peninsula. The thorny question of who should wield temporal power, the pope in Rome or the German emperor, embroiled European politics on the larger scale for several centuries. (The effects of this struggle on Tuscany and Umbria are discussed under "Guelfs & Ghibellines: A Medieval Mess," below.) On the smaller scale, central Italy was plunged into political chaos out of which emerged for the first time the independent city-state republic known as the comune.

The Medieval Comune: An Imperfect Democracy

In the late 11th century, merchants became wealthier and more important to the daily economic life of the small Italian cities, just as the old landed aristocracy was becoming obsolete with the collapse of the feudal system. Many of these merchants were minor gentry who began to get involved in trade and in big business like the textile industry and banking. They organized themselves into guilds and gradually became the bourgeois oligarchic leaders of the cities. The self-governing comuni they established weren't the perfect democracies they've often been made out to be. While many were ruled by popularly elected councils, usually only the guild members of the middle class were enfranchised. The majority of city laborers, as well as the rural farmers, remained powerless.

In a tradition first inaugurated by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whose empire tenuously extended through the area in the early 13th century, these councils became primarily legislative, while the executive power was placed in the hands of a podestà. This sort of governor or mayor was usually brought in from out of town to govern for a set period of time (often a year). It was believed an out-of-towner would be less likely to play favorites with the local powerful families or factions vying for power and could therefore rule more evenhandedly.

As the comuni thus stabilized their infrastructures -- after dealing with blows like the 1348 Black Death, a plague that swept through Europe and left well over half of central Italy's population dead -- they also set about roughing up their neighbors and traditional rivals. Battles were fought both to increase the city-states' trading power and to acquire more towns under their control (or at least secure subservient allies). To this end, instead of raising militia armies, they hired condottieri, professional soldiers of fortune who controlled forces of armed mercenaries. These soldiers came from all over and from all walks of life.

Many of these trade wars and ancient rivalries were fought between cities that used Europe's big power struggle of the age -- the Holy Roman Emperor versus the pope -- as an excuse to attack their traditional antagonists. Although in the end the terms Guelf and Ghibelline meant little to the parties involved (even if they did have overriding and longer-term effects on the towns that defined themselves as one or the other), the conflict between these factions comes up constantly in medieval Tuscany and Umbria, so the history behind it bears a brief overview.

Guelfs & Ghibellines: A Medieval Mess

At this time in Europe, two entities competed for absolute power over the continent, the emperor and the pope, who used the argument over who got to appoint parish priests as an excuse to vie for control of Europe. The terms that came to describe Italian supporters of the emperor and Italian supporters of the pope actually stemmed from a German conflict over imperial succession.

In the 12th century, the German throne of the Holy Roman Emperor sat empty. Otto IV's family, the Welf dynasty of Bavaria, fought for it against the lords of Waiblingen, where the house of Swabia ruled under the Hohenstaufen dynasty. The names were corrupted in Italian to Guelf and Ghibelline, respectively, and when the Hohenstaufens came out winners with Frederick Barbarossa being crowned emperor, the Ghibellines stuck as the supporters of the emperor while the Guelfs became the party that backed the pope.

In Italy, the issue was all about who got to be in charge: the old nobility, who as Ghibellines favored the imperial promise of a return to feudalism and hence their own power, or the Guelf merchant-and-banking middle class, who supported the pope and his free-trade attitudes. While these terms did mean something regarding which faction, nobles or merchants, controlled any one city, they were used mainly to define one city in terms of its opposition to rival cities. So if your rivals were Ghibelline, you'd go Guelf, and if they turned Guelf for some reason, you usually swung around to Ghibelline pretty quickly. Although they all flip-flopped to some degree, Florence (plus Lucca, Arezzo, and Perugia) turned out Guelf, which made rivals Pisa, Pistoia, and Siena Ghibelline.

The Guelf-Ghibelline conflict not only spawned intercity warfare but also sparked intracity strife between rival factions. The most famous intracity conflict occurred in Florence in the 13th century, when powerful warring clans each took up arms and called in alliances, and the city split into Guelf and Ghibelline parties, under which names the parties waged a decades-long struggle over who'd control the city government. In Florence, when the Guelfs finally won in the late 13th century, they further divided into two factions, the Blacks (Guelfs) and the Whites (Ghibellines, but only because they hated Pope Boniface VIII). When the Blacks came out on top, they exiled the Whites, among whom was a Florentine White Guelf ambassador named Dante who lived the rest of his life in exile, perfecting his poetry.

At the turn of the 14th century, when the Black Guelfs finally came out victorious, Florence began to enjoy a fairly stable republican rule -- still of the old assembly system called now the Signoria, a ruling council elected from the major guilds. Florence slowly expanded its power, first allying with Prato, then conquering Pistoia, and by 1406 adding Volterra, Arezzo, and Pisa to the cities under its rule.

As the major guilds accrued more and more power, and the top merchants seized control of Florence, the minor guilds and lesser merchants looked to one of the few renegade merchant families sympathetic to their plight. It was an upstart family that, with a bit of luck, had recently risen from virtual anonymity to become one of the most successful banking houses in the city. It was a clan without a particularly distinguished pedigree, a fact that kept them from being fully accepted by the major guild leaders who came from old Florentine families. They called themselves the Medici.

Guelf or Ghibelline? -- Though it's admittedly not the perfect measure, you can sometimes tell which a city was, at least at any given time, by looking at the battlements of the medieval town hall: The Guelfs favored squared-off crenellations and the Ghibellines swallowtail ones.

Exceptions to this are Siena's Palazzo Pubblico, which was built with blocky battlements during the briefly Guelf period of the Council of Nine, and Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, which confusingly sports both kinds.