kings were making, can be summed up quite succinctly. In a way, the
easy part was seizing power. The real challenge would be to retain it,
especially when Walter turned his attention to the painful business
of reform.
The most urgent problem facing the newsignior was, of course,
extremely high government spending, most of which was swallowed up
by the war with Pisa. Walter’s negotiations with that city led, not to the
recovery of Lucca, but to honourable and acceptable terms. Although
this was surely the right course of action, it was widely criticized at the
time, not least because Walter had been raised assigniorprecisely to
recover Lucca.^133 Turning to the public accounts, Walter suspended
the assignment of indirect taxes to debt repayment and interest. He
reintroduced theestimo(a direct tax levied within Florence itself ), whilst
also ensuring that revenue was collected more efficiently out in the
countryside. This cocktail of policies might have been well-suited to
rescuing the commune’sfinances, but it was very damaging to the
Florentine banking elite and their business interests. Indeed, Walter
made a difficult situation very much worse when he encouraged a large
number of exiles to return to the city, adding to the elites’sense that their
dominance was under threat.^134 Recognizing, then, that he would be
hard pushed to retain much support at an exalted level, Walter con-
sciously reached out to the social classes below them–thepopolo. For
example, he released the dyers from their subordination to the powerful
Wool Guild, and encouraged them to set up one of their own. Similarly,
Walter allowed six brigades of workers to parade, for thefirst time, in the
civic festivities that he held in the summer of 1343.^135 Although Walter
himself was soon ousted, as we shall see, his brief ascendancy had proved
quite sufficient to blow the stopper off the bottle. The elites who replaced
him were overthrown, in their turn, within two months of his expulsion,
and the‘Third Popolo’(or‘Third Popular Government’) was set up.^136
Walter’s brief, unforgettablesignoriabecame afixture in Florentine
history: the‘tyranny of the duke of Athens’. It would not be an exagger-
ation to say that, with the benefit of hindsight, he became the Republic’s
bête noire:thefigure who had come closest to forcing the citizens into
perpetual servitude, with the aid of a whole gallery of evil henchmen
(such as William of Assisi, Cerettieri de’Visdomini, Simon of Norcia,
and so on and so forth). Wefind this theme again and again in the city’s
historiography. Perhaps it receives its best and fullest expression in
(^133) See de Sassenay,Brienne, 214–15.
(^134) Ibid., 216–17; and Najemy,A History of Florence, 135–6. (^135) Ibid., 136–7.
(^136) Ibid., 137–9.
A Florentine Tragedy 169