accurate statistics about such things as armies, tax
revenues, cloth production, wine consumption, coin-
age parities, and the number of castles in private and
in communal hands. No doubt his collection of such
quantitative information was greatly facilitated by the
various offi ces and appointments entrusted to him by
his city and his guild. Apart from his three priorates,
these were mostly fi nancial. As a municipal offi cial, for
example, he supervised the commune’s money and the
building of a stretch of the third circle of walls. As an
offi cial of the Calimala guild, he served on the mercan-
zia council of eight and oversaw the making of Andrea
Pisano’s bronze doors for the Baptistery. He also went
on some diplomatic missions: he was sent to Cardinal
Bertrand de Pouget in Bologna in 1329 and a little later
to negotiate (unsuccessfully) for the surrender of Lucca.
Most of his offi ceholding was in 1320–1330. After that,
he may have been under a cloud, having been tried
for barratry in 1331 for his part in building the walls,
even though he was cleared of the charge. The fact that
Charles of Calabria, then lord of the city, entrusted to
the Buonaccorsi company the collection of the taxes
from three of the six districts of Florence to pay for
the building of those very walls may not have helped
Villani’s reputation. But real disaster came later, in 1346,
after the collapse of the great Florentine commercial
companies. Then Giovanni was imprisoned for alleged
misconduct as the representative of the Buonaccorsi in
negotiations with the communal government about their
bankruptcy liabilities. Giovanni does not mention this
personal disgrace, but he does express remorse for his
share of responsibility in the losses of the small investors
in the great companies. We do not know how long his
imprisonment lasted. He died in 1348, some two years
after it began, and was buried in Florence in the church
of the Santissima Annunziata. His brother Matteo and
his nephew Filippo continued his chronicle.
For the most part, the opinions Giovanni Villani
expresses in his chronicle are remarkably balanced and
moderate. His patriotism as a Florentine, for example,
was real but not exaggerated. He knew that Florence was
sometimes unjust to its neighbors, and though he praised
its resilience and resourcefulness in times of crisis, he
often deplored its lack of talent for war. He disliked
signori and signorial government, but he could not
always conceal his admiration for a despot as brilliant
as Castruccio Castracani, despite the defeats Castruc-
cio infl icted on Florence. Giovanni favored republican
government and connected it with political liberty. But
he bitterly condemned factional strife and considered
the rule of a benevolent signore like King Robert of
Naples sometimes necessary to restrain it. Villani was
also critical of republican regimes representing one
class, whether that class was aristocratic, mercantile,
or (especially) artisan.
Giovanni was not only a moderate patriot and repub-
lican but also a moderate, though very loyal, Guelf. The
rival Ghibelline party had been driven out of Florence
in the late 1260s, before Giovanni was born, at the same
time that the rule of the Ghibellines’ Hohenstaufen
patrons in southern Italy had given way to the rule of
Charles of Anjou, called in by the pope to govern the
kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Ghibellines remained
strong in the north and in some parts of Tuscany, but
Guelf Florence, Angevin Naples, and the papacy, despite
occasionally violent quarrels, were linked by strong
economic and political bonds. For Giovanni, these bonds
seem to have been ideological as well, reinforced by
sincere religious feeling. He regarded Charles of Anjou
as a new Charlemagne, summoned to Italy to rescue
the Roman church from the Hohenstaufen Lombards.
Giovanni devoted perhaps his most sustained literary
effort to a long and eloquent account of Charles’s Italian
campaigns. He also portrayed Florence as usually an ally
of the church, from the struggle between Pope Gregory
VII and the Emperor Henry IV in the late eleventh
century down to his own time. The intervals during the
later period when the pope and Florence were at odds
worried Giovanni, as did the taxation of the Florentine
clergy without their consent by his own commune. At
the same time, he did not hesitate to criticize individual
popes and Angevin rulers for avarice and immorality,
and his fellow Guelfs for factionalism. He thought that
the expulsion of the White Guelfs in 1302 was dis-
graceful, but he was glad that their assault on the city
in 1304 did not succeed. He was also glad that Henry
VII failed to capture Florence in 1312, but he said that
the emperor’s original intention had been to deal justly
with Guelfs as well as Ghibellines. Such urbane judi-
ciousness was appropriate to a rich businessman who
numbered kings and princes among his acquaintances
and had wide experience of the world.
In the prologue to the Nuova cronica, Giovanni says
that his pride in the noble origins of his city and his desire
to delight and instruct his fellow citizens had impelled
him to write its history. In Book 9, Chapter 36, he relates
that he began to write in 1300, after returning to Florence
from Rome, where he had participated in the great papal
jubilee. Seeing the ancient Roman ruins, reading the
ancient histories, and refl ecting on the decline of Rome
had inspired him to tell the story of the rise of Florence,
an offspring of Rome. Whether or not Giovanni began
his chronicle immediately after his return to Florence,
it is evident that he wrote primarily for Florentines and
that one of his main purposes was to celebrate their
successes without omitting their blunders and failures.
The history of no other European city except Rome had
hitherto been told at such length. Giovanni also conveys
a sharp awareness of developments in the physical shape
and monuments of Florence—for example, its centralVILLANI, GIOVANNI