octagonal church, the Baptistery, which he says travel-
ers assured him was the most beautiful in the world; its
other churches and public buildings, whose siting and
arrangement he compared, following an old Florentine
historical tradition, with those of similarly named Ro-
man monuments; the dimensions of its walls, towers,
and bridges; and even the emblems on the banners of
its militia and the decoration on its war cart, or car-
roccio. He is also aware that Florence is not just a city
but a European power, and his ability to see Florence
as part of a greater world is one of his main merits as
a historian. Giovanni also likes to include a good story
or a vivid detail, from wherever it comes. He touches
on such topics as astral portents, monstrous births, cos-
tumes, public feasts, civil and religious rituals, relics,
epidemics, earthquakes, inscriptions, apparitions, the
lions behind the communal palace in Florence, coins,
Gog and Magog, Muhammad, what might have hap-
pened, famous men (like Aquinas, Dante, and Giotto,
of whom he writes pocket biographies), sea battles,
sermons, governments, and expedients for increasing
public revenue. Given such variety, it is no wonder that
many critics have accused Giovanni Villani of being
episodic and lacking a unifying theme or point of view.
Porta believes that Giovanni did revise the chronicle
extensively but that his main purpose was probably to
introduce new information at many points—a process
made easier because the chronicle is for the most part
organized not thematically but year by year.
Giovanni certainly wants to instruct as well as en-
tertain and inform his readers. He says that he wants to
show future Florentines which actions of their predeces-
sors they should imitate and which they should avoid.
The guidance he offers is more moral than intellectual.
It is true that much shrewd commentary on business,
politics, and war is scattered through his book, but he
has no single large lesson to teach. His analysis of the
secondary causes of a particular Florentine victory or
defeat can be thorough and penetrating, as, for example,
in his explanations of the failure of Florence to acquire
Lucca after the death of Castruccio Castracani. Very of-
ten, however, he is content—as a devout and right-think-
ing Florentine Guelf—to attribute such disasters to the
wrath of the deity at the wickedness of the Florentines:
their pride, avarice, and envy. Giovanni knows the Old
Testament well, and his God, like Yahweh, is swift to
punish. Sometimes, particularly in the later books of his
chronicle, he seeks scientifi c, or at any rate astrological,
explanations; but he consistently denies that the infl u-
ence of the stars negates free will or men’s responsibility
for their actions, and he expresses again and again his
conviction that the stars are immediately and totally
subject to God’s commands. He does try to account
rationally for one great problem in thirteenth-century
and early fourteenth-century Florence: factionalism.
He does so by a literal application of Dante’s metaphor
about the opposition between the two peoples who, ac-
cording to Florentine legend, shared in populating the
city, the allegedly “noble and virtuous” Romans and the
allegedly “rough and fi erce” Fiesolans. For Dante, “Ro-
mans” were all those willing to submit to the emperor’s
laws; “Fiesolans” were those “barbarians” who resisted
it. For Giovanni Villani, the two names designate two
peoples who actually participated in populating Flor-
ence and whose imperfect mixing produced chronic
strife. He fi nds the story of this mixing in the Chronica
de origine civitatis (written before 1231) and its Ital-
ian translations. (It is very unlikely that he was able to
fi nd the origin, as some scholars have maintained, in
the so-called Malispinian chronicle, which was almost
certainly written after his own and was largely copied
from a compendium of his work.) In the Chronica de
origine civitatis, the Roman origins of Florence were
exalted and Julius Caesar himself was included among
the founders of the city; but though the Fiesolans were
represented as fi erce enemies of the Romans, they were
not depicted as barbarians. This Giovanni could have
found in no surviving work before Dante’s Inferno,
circulated c. 1314. Probably Giovanni was also para-
phrasing Dante’s words in Paradiso (15.109–111), as
Aquilecchia (1965) has suggested, when he referred
in Book 9, Chapter 36, to the rise of Florence and the
decline of Rome.
Up to this point in his chronicle, Giovanni is mainly
concerned with describing the steady ascent, despite
occasional disasters, of Florence, the child of Rome.
Afterward, misfortunes multiply and the direction of
Florence’s development is not so clear. But Giovanni
retains much of his optimism until the 1340s, the imposi-
tion and overthrow of Walter de Brienne’s regime, and
the subsequent fi nancial crash. Neither communal nor
personal calamities slowed the chronicler’s busy pen.
It continued right up to his death to provide an invalu-
able picture of the attitudes of the fourteenth-century
oligarchy of Florence toward its past and present, and,
especially for the period from c. 1320 to 1348, a narra-
tive source for medieval Florentine history of inexhaust-
ible richness and variety.
See also Dante Alighieri; Malispini, RicordanoFurther Reading
Editions
Villani, Giovanni. Cronica, 8 vols., ed. Ignazio Moutier. Florence:
Magheri 1823. (Reprinted in Florence: Coen, 1844; Milan:
Borroni e Scotti, 1848.)
——. Selections from the First Nine Books of the “Croniche Flo-
rentine” of Giovanni Villani, trans. Rose E. Selfe, ed. Philip
H.Wicksteed. Westminster: A. Constable, 1896.
——. Cronisti del Trecento, ed. Roberto Palmarocchi. Milan:
Rizzoli, 1935, pp. 153–466.VILLANI, GIOVANNI