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3 results

  • Four - Rape As a Weapon of War

  • Péter Bokody, University of Plymouth
  • Book:
    The Imagery and Politics of Sexual Violence in Early Renaissance Italy
    Published online:
    13 January 2023
    Print publication:
    26 January 2023, pp 101-145

  • Summary

    Giovanni Villani, in his chronicle, reports that, in 1117, Pisa and Florence formed a military alliance. Pisa asked for protection against Lucca, while their troops were busy in Mallorca besieging a Saracen stronghold (Figure 4.1).1 The safeguard from Lucca meant a Florentine military presence right at the doorstep of their neighbors, the problematic nature of which did not escape the attention of the author. Villani explains at length the measures taken by the Florentine army to avoid any potential attack on women in Pisa while their men were away.

    [They] encamped two miles outside the city, and in respect for their women they would not enter Pisa and made a proclamation that whosoever should enter the city should answer for it with his person; and the one who did enter was accordingly condemned to be hung. And when the old men who had been left in Pisa prayed the Florentines for love of them to pardon him, they would not. But the Pisans still opposed and begged that at least they would not put him to death in their territory; whereupon the Florentine army secretly purchased a field from a peasant in the name of the commonwealth of Florence, and thereon they raised the gallows and did the execution to maintain their decree.2

    In this passage, Villani implicitly acknowledges the threat posed to the women of the city even by allied forces. He underscores in a benign military context that armed men around unprotected women can trigger violent scenarios. In this sense he regards the possibility of wartime rape a customary consequence of military exploits. We do not know whether the disobedient soldier did commit something beyond entering the city, but he is judged for violating the “respect for Pisan women” against the backdrop of a permanent possibility of rape. In addition, the passage also highlights the importance of perception. The long negotiation between the Pisan elders and the Florentines involving the request for pardon and the purchase of land underscores the determination of the latter to prevent any potential accusation of sexual violence or adultery. Two hundred years after the event, Villani is still interested in maintaining the gallant and rape-free image of Florence, and through this attempt he adopts a condemnatory approach toward sexual violence.

The Mythological Origins of Renaissance Florence
  • The City as New Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem
  • Irina Chernetsky
  • Published online:
    07 August 2023
    Print publication:
    13 October 2022
  • In this book, Irina Chernetsky examines how humanists, patrons, and artists promoted Florence as the reincarnation of the great cities of pagan and Christian antiquity – Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. The architectural image of an ideal Florence was discussed in chronicles and histories, poetry and prose, and treatises on art and religious sermons. It was also portrayed in paintings, sculpture, and sketches, as well as encoded in buildings erected during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Over time, the concept of an ideal Florence became inseparable from the real city, in both its social and architectural structures. Chernetsky demonstrates how the Renaissance notion of genealogy was applied to Florence, which was considered to be part of a family of illustrious cities of both the past and present. She also explores the concept of the ideal city in its intellectual, political, and aesthetic contexts, while offering new insights into the experience of urban space.

  • WEALTH AND MATERIAL GOODS IN MEDIEVAL ITALIAN CIVIC HISTORIOGRAPHY

  • LAURA K. MORREALE
  • Journal:
    Traditio / Volume 77 / 2022
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    13 December 2022, pp. 185-233
    Print publication:
    2022

  • This article examines a corpus of over forty Italian civic histories produced from the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth century, when the wealth of many of the peninsula's inhabitants increased significantly. Evidence from this corpus demonstrates that attitudes about wealth in historical writing changed over time and argues for a shift from a more static to a more dynamic representation of material goods in these texts. The novel mechanisms for accruing wealth that developed in the Italian urban context were important factors in the historigraphic turn, but as the period wore one, changes in the types of people writing history also contributed to modified presentations of wealth in their writings. Whether describing the display of luxury or its regulation, civic improvements or the destruction of a town's buildings by warring factions, taxation in a city or the corruption of its offiicials, views towards material goods in medieval Italian urban histories were neither wholly positive nor negative. Rather, the historiographic value of material goods was complex. The frequency with which wealth was a topic of discussion in civic histories highlights how the peninsula's inhabitants were coming to terms with the influx of wealth and the material goods they could acquire as members of their urban communities.