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Badia Burning: The Spectacle of Violence in 14th-century Tuscany

The Cerchi seek vengeance - 1300 (Florence)
The Cerchi seek vengeance - 1300 (Florence)
The Cerchi seek vengeance – 1300 (Florence)

Badia Burning: The Spectacle of Violence in 14th-century Tuscany

Joseph Figliulo-Rosswurm

Louisiana State University (LSU) Graduate Student History Conference: Baton Rouge, LA., March (2013)

Abstract

In this paper, I ask how peasants and law courts understood the cultural and social logic of elite violence in fourteenth-century Tuscany. Focusing on elite violence against peasants and the seizure of ecclesiastical properties, I argue that reports of violent action appealed to a widely understood view of violence as a key tool in elite identity and the pursuit of property claims. The paper was written for a general audience of non-medievalist historians.

Sometime in July 1348, five men of the Bardi, one of the elite lineages excluded from Florentine political life and labelled magnates, attacked San Cristoforo Perticaia, an isolated church in the Valdarno di Sopra. We know of this attack because its victims later lodged a denunciation with the Executor of the Ordinances of Justice, a Florentine court established in 1306 to restrain elite violence. Approaching the church, the Bardi and their armed followers found it defended by men of the local parish in the absence of the parish priest. Enraged at their defiance, the Bardi battered down the doors of the church and began shooting at the defenders with crossbows. As they attacked, the Bardi mocked their victims and the weakness of the Florentine commune. After driving out the defenders and murdering one of them, the Bardi occuppied the church and its surrounding territory in open defiance of Florence and its church.iv Although some of the Bardi were sentenced to death, the Florentine courts eventually commuted their sentences, and they were not punished.

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Click here to read this article from the Louisiana State University (LSU) Graduate Student History Conference

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