A huge topic, no question.

But I like to think about it.  Here’s a woodcut of Florence, followed by a description of what the evolving city would have been like around 1300.  It starts to fire the imagination of Florence taking shape as the jewel it would soon become :

“Under the government of the Guelphs, Florence grew and prospered. All its main streets…had been paved…[under the leadership] of a Milanese Podesta, Rubaconte da Mandello….the city’s population…seems to have increased to about 45,000, considerably more than London’s and some eight times that of Oxford, even though the university there was by that time well established.

The city’s banking houses were making immense profits through their dealings with foreign powers, in particular with the Kings of France and Sicily and with the Pope;

The trade of the city was increasing in volume year by year. Merchants dealt in spices and dyes, hides and silks, sendal [a type of silk] and taffeta, gold brocades and braid, and above all in wool.

 

Vast quantities of woolen cloth and bales of raw wool were imported from northern Europe, mainly from France, the Low Countries, the Algarve, Spain, and by the end of the 13th century, from England.

The wool was refined and dyed in the numerous workshops of Florence, the finished bolts of cloth being sold through so many agents beyond Tuscany’s borders, in French fairs and English markets, Flemish towns and Mediterranean ports.  Pope Boniface VIII was to say that the Florentines had become a kind of 5th element: wherever earth, air, fire, water were to be found there were sure to be Florentines as well.

In all weathers flat-bottomed barges piled high with cloth could be seen drifting down towards Pisa on the Arno, whose waters–polluted with dyestuffs, tannin and rubbish, when not dried up–drove the workshop’s mills and filled the tanks in which the wool was washed and dyed.

The dyes used were faster, and of purer, brighter color, than any to be found elsewhere in Europe.  Some were of local origin: yellow dyes came from the crocus fields near San Gimignano; but the ingredients for others had to be transported from far away, insects for cochineal from the shores of the Mediterranean, lichen for the red dye known as oracle from Majorca, cinnabar for vermilion from the Holy Land. The bitter juice of aloes which made th eyes fast came from Alexandria and the Levant.

Throughout the year thousands of ill-paid men [and women] were hard at work in the city’s shops, in wash-houses and stretching-sheds, as well as in their own cramped houses, undertaking the numerous processes through which the imported wool had to pass, the fulling, spinning and carding, the combing, weaving, stretching and trimming, as well as the washing and dyeing and drying.

Nor was it only textiles that left Florence by river or on the backs of pack-horses which made their slow way to the coast or ambled north across the Apennines to Venice for shipment to the ports of the eastern Mediterranean; grain was exported, too, oil and livestock, timber and the fine wines of Tuscany.

In this commerce the banks of Florence played an essential part, not only in supplying capital and in the investment of money for their clients, but in all manner of other activities, including the ensuring of ships and cargoes. As inventors of double-entry bookkeeping and the forerunner of the cheque, and as creators of the gold floor, and lire, sold and denier, later the lsd of British capitalism, the Florentines were already regarded as the world’s leading experts in international commerce; and their banks had the reputation of being safer and more solid business houses than any others.”

The arts were flourishing in this bustling capital as well.  By about 1300, “the last of the magnificent mosaics, some by Florentines, some by a master mosaicist from Venice, had been finished.  Andrea Pisano, a sculptor from Pontedera, who was succeed Giotto as capomaestro of the Campanile, was commissioned by the rich Arte di Calimala to provide wax models from which the bronze doors for the south side of the Baptistery might be cast.

Here are the works: the mosaic masterpiece in the dome of the baptistery,  the South Doors of the same structure by Pisano, and the Campanile by Giotto.

 

 

 

Christopher Hibbert, Florence, the Biography of a City, (New York and London, 1993) pp. 23-4 and 49. Illustrations are from all over the internet.