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CHAPTER 1
Preaching, Penance, and Peacemaking in the Age of the Commune
Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.
— MATTHEW 5:9
IN 1425 THE RULING MAGISTRACY of Siena invited Bernardino of Siena (d. 1444), one of the great lights of the Franciscan Observance, to preach a cycle of sermons for the moral edification of its citizens. During his three-month residency in the city, he preached at different venues, including the Sala dei Nove, a chamber of government sometimes called the "Hall of Peace," in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena's town hall. In a sermon given on Sunday, June 3rd, he invoked the hall's celebrated murals, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, another celebrated son of Siena. Those frescoes, executed almost a century earlier, depicted an allegory that illustrated the positive effects of good government and the prophecy of a dire future if tyranny were allowed to reign in its stead. Bernardino had been preaching on the theme of peace for someyears, and had established so sterling a reputation as a peacemaker that, by the time of his death, it was cited as proof of his sanctity during his canonization process. Burnishing that reputation in 1425, Bernardino used the Hall of Peace murals as both stage set and heuristic device when, gesturing toward the frescoes on Good Government, he informed his audience that his theme for the day was "War and Peace":
Turning toward Peace, I see goods circulating, I see dancing, I see the building of houses, I see fields and vines being worked and planted, I see people going out on horseback to the hot springs, I see young women on their way to be married, I see flocks of goats and sheep. And I see a man hanged to uphold holy Justice. And to facilitate these things, everyone lives in holy peace and concord.
But then, turning toward the opposite wall, which shows the misfortunes that bad government and discord have the potential to unleash, Bernardino conjured a hair-raising description that matched the pictorial narrative point-by-point:
On the contrary, turning to the other side, I don't see any goods; I don't see any dancing. Instead I see someone being killed; I don't see any houses being built; instead I see devastation and arson; no one is working the fields or pruning the vines, no one is sowing, no one goes out to the hot springs or pursues pastimes anymore; I don't even see anyone venturing outside the city walls. O women! O men! The dead man, the woman assaulted, flocks only as prey, treacherous men killing each other. Justice, her scales broken, lies bound hand and foot on the ground.
One can only imagine the shudders that ran down the collective spine of the audience as Bernardino prophesied a future without peace. Surely it must have stirred the city fathers' corporate will to prevent such a terrible fate. For over a century the republican governments of central and northern Italy had envisioned peace and security as the ends of good government, but the persistent question had become: how to achieve those ends? How could war and discord be transformed into peace and concord? Naturally Bernardino had the solution to hand. Repentance. Through penance one made peace with God. It was the foundation stone upon which every other type of peace — peace with one's family, one's neighbor, one's enemy — was to be constructed. Two years later, in another sermon cycle also delivered in Siena, the preacher refined and reframed his discussion, noting, "There are two types of peace: the one within and the other without." The one within — the peace of the heart — was attained only through moral reform, the result of true penance.
Bernardino stands near the end of a long line of medieval preachers who entwined the topics of penitence and peace in their sermons, the subject of this chapter. The deep connection between the two subjects may not be self-evident today, but it was an affiliation that medieval Christians regularly encountered if they were attentive to the messages transmitted in the sermons of their preachers. The sermon of Luca da Bitonto, invoked in the preface of this study, is a case in point. This chapter shows that the various religious movements of the later Middle Ages, usually viewed as distinct and independent entities, should be understood collectively as peace movements that took the form of penitential processions. Led by laypeople or friars, all these movements shared a theology that linked peace to penance, the motor, they believed, that drove social and political change. I argue, moreover, that civic peacemaking practices of the late medieval period can only be fully understood as products formed in the religious matrix this chapter establishes, one that firmly yoked together peace and penance. Forged in the crucible of late antiquity, the marriage of peace and repentance developed out of the ritual kiss embedded in the Mass. Its original function was to bind and unify in peace and fraternity what was sometimes a fractious early Christian community. As we shall see in chapter 5, by the late antique period, theologians had added a new layer of meaning to the kiss, construing it as a ritual of reconciliation, our point of departure.
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Reconciliation was at the very heart of the sacrament of penance as it developed and was then subsequently codified by Pope Innocent III (d. 1216) at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Canon 21, omnis utriusque sexus, decreed that every member of the Church was now required to make an annual confession of sin in order to partake in communion. The council furthermore compelled the Christian faithful to fulfill all penances imposed by priests. Excommunication and the prohibition of Christian burial awaited those who did not comply. Henry Charles Lea likely overstated its significance when he called canon twenty-one "perhaps the most important legislative act in the history of the Church," but his point is well made that this was a new and very different expression of the sacrament. Though auricular confession had been part of local practice before the thirteenth century, it had never before been decreed as an obligation on a universal scale, supported by the full weight and power of ecclesiastical sanctions. This newly reformulated idea of penance was important for many reasons, not the least of which was that, as we shall see, it became the primary message broadcast by the friars through their preaching. Reconciliation was the connective tissue that linked the ideas of peace and penance together. Through the sacrament of penance — which now included a confession of one's sins — one reconciled with God, while one reconciled with one's enemy by means of a peace contract, a different but analogous sort of confession of guilt.
The interlocking story of peace and penance begins in the years just prior to the Fourth Lateran Council. It was a period in communal history when the cities of central and northern Italy had liberated themselves from imperial and episcopal yokes, and had begun experimenting with new popular forms of government. But it was a time not without tribulations. From local feuds and factions involving magnates and popolo, to Guelf and Ghibelline strife within and without the city walls, to wars against the empire or papacy — not to speak of the Crusades and other external conflicts — blood feud, violence, and warfare dominated the landscape up and down the Italian peninsula. Nor should we forget the strain put on ordinary citizens inside the urban walls, as demographic pressures caused cities to expand at previously unheard-of rates. In the case of Florence alone, the commune's population tripled (perhaps even quadrupled), as immigrants from the countryside migrated to the city over the course of the thirteenth century. It is no wonder that violence often exploded on the streets, as already teeming urban spaces became even more overcrowded, and city dwellers were forced to accommodate newcomers, particularly in the Oltrarno neighborhood.
One response to the pervasive violence that characterized the period was to form peace movements. Cries of "peace and mercy" were the sparks that flew from a sort of spontaneous combustion that galvanized everyday folk who, in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, began to search for a way to usher in the period of respite prophesied by Isaiah, who foretold: "My people will sit in the beauty of peace" (Isaiah 26:3). In surveying the terrain from the thirteenth to early fifteenth century, we will meet many people — both men and women — who were peacemakers or leaders of religious revivals that were dedicated to peace. All were shaped by convictions, imagery, and ritual rooted deeply in the soil of medieval Christianity. Many were priests, but many were laypeople, the latter often penitents, who lived their lives according to the precepts of penance, imagined as a life converted from sin and devoted to acts of repentance, expiation, self-mortification, and alms-giving, not infrequently held together by the bonds of voluntary poverty. This path was envisioned as a permanent process, a life's work, which called for constant vigilance and attentiveness to the pitfalls of the secular world. Those pitfalls included vanity, lust, gambling, magic, and usury, a catalogue made famous by Bernardino of Siena's fire-and-brimstone sermons denouncing them.
The polemics of the preachers notwithstanding, many of the movements and practices that emerged in this period were led and inspired by laypeople. Indeed they were often first on the scene to agitate for peace. We shall see, however, that the mendicant orders, which arrived in the urban centers of Italy in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, often co-opted local nonviolence movements. The resulting pacification campaigns led the friars to work closely with city magistrates to promote peace and concord through the reform of local statute law. By leveraging their spiritual authority, the friars acted as mediators and facilitators to settle what were often deep-seated antagonisms and conflicts that, left unchecked, had the potential to explode and wreak havoc in the crowded urban spaces where people lived cheek by jowl. But it was their sermons, some still extant, that formulated a path to peace and rallied their followers toward action. They showed how peace could be achieved by putting it into a Christian framework of penance and reconciliation. This chapter, then, examines some notable examples of preachers of peace (be they clergy or penitents), their sermons, and the penitential peace movements that periodically burst onto the urban landscape throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It also begins the work, continued in subsequent chapters, of examining the social practices their words and deeds inspired. I range widely through the territory of central and northern Italy in order to bring as many voices into the conversation as possible, but attentive readers will note that throughout this chapter I periodically return to Florence to analyze the impact that these religious peacemakers and practices had on the city.
"THE TRANQUILITY OF ORDER": SAINT AUGUSTINE AND THE PREACHERS
Like so many medieval ideas, the intertwining of peace and repentance was indebted to Augustine of Hippo, who formulated a definition of "peace" in The City of God. He argued that "the peace of all things is the tranquility of order." As always, his meaning is far more complex than that deceptively simple sentence suggests at first glance. Above all, he meant that the body and soul maintain equilibrium — peace — when all parts are arranged in fitting and harmonious order. But that harmonious order had been disturbed notoriously through original sin, when the will itself became unhinged, at war with itself, and at odds with the Lord. The fall of man had brought about a discordium malum that was incompatible with the tranquility of order.
By the later Middle Ages, the healing balm of the penitential sacrament — administered through equal parts contrition, confession, and absolution — was the medicament believed to restore the delicate balance that ordered body and soul and its relationship with God. When an individual came to the Lord with a contrite heart, peace was established, an inner spiritual tranquility. And interior peace was imagined as the bedrock on top of which exterior peace and concord could then rise. Indeed it was the prerequisite for familial peace, harmony between neighbors, and civic concord, all of which adumbrated dimly the glorious peace of the celestial city, "the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God."
Caritas, or love, was the key. Its blazing heat melted even the hardest hearts. Aldobrandino Cavalcanti (d. 1279), a Dominican preacher who spent most of his career in Florence, citing Job 41:24, likened the heart, hardened through sin, to a cold stone; but that spiritual hardness — much like ice — could be liquefied, thawed through the fire of ardent caritas. Love, or more specifically love for Christ, would ignite the flame of contrition, leading to the penitential act of confession. The culmination of the rite looked forward to a reconciliation in the form of forgiveness or absolution, whereupon inner tranquility or peace would be restored.
Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), a contemporary and confrère of Aldobrandino, made a similar argument in the Summa Theologiae while clarifying the relationship between charity and peace. Love, according to Thomas, is to be understood as a constituent element of peace. Though not itself a virtue, peace was an attribute of charity, the highest of the three theological virtues infused at baptism. Peace "is the work of charity directly, since charity, according to its very nature, causes peace." Quoting the tract on divine names by the late antique Neoplatonic Christian philosopher now known as PseudoDionysius the Areopagite, Thomas argues that "love is a 'unitive force' as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv): and peace is the union of the appetite's inclinations." In addition to Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas was clearly echoing Augustine, who had suggested that peace "of the irrational soul is the harmonious repose of the appetites." And that union or inner peace, the two great theologians agreed, was the basis for establishing exterior peace with family, neighbors, and fellow citizens, otherwise designated as concord.
Giordano da Pisa (d. 1311), a Dominican friar steeped in Thomastic thought, whose career was spent preaching in the public squares of Florence, took the message of peace and charity to the streets. In a sermon given on January 31, 1304 (1305), during a particularly violent period in which both the Whites and Blacks, the Guelfs and Ghibellines, were causing such turmoil in the city that the pope was forced to send Cardinal Niccolò of Prato to Florence as special envoy to negotiate what turned out to be a failed peace, Giordano waded into the fray to preach a message of peace. Preaching in the vernacular at Santa Maria Novella, he informed his audience in no uncertain terms that peace depended on the indwelling of Christ in the heart:
It's not peace, no, when you don't forgive from the heart but remain in bad faith. But when Christ is the mediator, it's the real thing because it's from the heart. And when is Christ the mediator? When a person is moved to pardon his enemy solely out love for Christ: "I don't want to lose Christ on account of your enmity: I want to pardon you to have Christ." Now these are good peace settlements, secure ones, because they are the ones where Christ is the mediator.
Invoking as he did le paci buone and le paci secure, Giordano knew well the profile of good and secure peace settlements made in accordance with the norms prescribed by Florentine statutory law.
Even if the Dominican firebrand Savonarola (d. 1498) thought otherwise, the Order of Preachers did not stand alone as peacemakers in this period. Peacemaking and penance were a natural fit for the early Franciscans too, as the pope had mandated expressly that they exhort penance in place of preaching on the mysteries of the Church, difficult matters which required a more advanced and rigorous theological education. And there was no doubt that the faction-riven communes were in need of models and brokers of peace. Thus the marriage of peacemaking and penance turned out to be a felicitous union, well suited to both the needs of the Friars Minor and society at large.
Some of the earliest Franciscan documents testify to Francis's preoccupation with peacemaking. His testament discloses that the Lord revealed to him his familiar salutation, "May the Lord give you peace." But Francis did more than greet people in the name of peace; he actively sought to craft it. Though none of his sermons survives, Thomas of Spalato paints a vivid portrait of the efficacy of the saint's preaching on peace in Bologna in the year 1222: In the same year on the Feast of the Assumption of the Mother of God, when I was a student at Bologna, I saw Saint Francis preaching in the piazza in front of the Palazzo Pubblico, where almost the whole city had convened. The beginning of his sermon dealt with angels, men, and demons, and continued to discuss the three rational spirits. The sermon of this ignorant man seemed worthy of no little admiration, even though he did not keep to the method of a preacher but of a concionatore. Indeed, the whole manner of his speech was calculated to extinguish enmities and to encourage the making of peace agreements. His tunic was dirty, his person unprepossessing and his face far from handsome; yet God gave such power to his words that many factions of the nobility, among whom the fierce anger of ancient feuds had been raging with much bloodshed, were brought to reconciliation.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Peace And Penance In Late Medieval Italy"
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