On July 3, 1292, in the open-air loggia of Orsanmichele in central Florence, where grain merchants sold their grain to feed a growing population, a series of curative miracles occurred that contemporaries believed were associated with an image of the Virgin Mary. According to the fourteenth-century chronicler Giovanni Villani (1280–1348), the local population had for a while been gathering there every evening to chant lauds before the image of the Blessed Virgin, painted on a column inside the structure. As the fame of these miracles spread throughout the region, pilgrims streamed in from all over Tuscany to pray to...

In the late winter of 1322, the vicar general of the cathedral chapter of the Florentine church, Ranieri (also prior of Santo Stefano di Lucignano), confirmed Presbyter Bene di Nero as the new archpriest of the baptismal parish church (pieve) of Santa Maria Impruneta. Bene had previously served as one of five canons of Santa Maria Impruneta as well as rector of San Lorenzo di Castrobonizzi. The confirmation took place in the small Romanesque urban church of San Salvatore adjacent to the episcopal palace, the site where the episcopal court normally met. Later that same day, several miles to the...

Following the establishment of the priorate in 1282, ecclesiastical communities provided a setting in which a composite but divided elite with international connections was able to coalesce and take shape in the early decades of the fourteenth century. This was the same stable yet divided ruling caste that was able from the late 1320s to govern the city for the generation before the arrival of the Black Death, “when Florence was at the height of its wealth, power, and prestige” and when it had embarked on an “expansionist policy” in Tuscany.¹ Indeed, ecclesiastical institutions helped forge a ruling caste that...

On the last day of July of 1327, Bindo da Calenzano and two other men rode out of the city of Florence on mules to collect grain rents owed their bishop in the fertile Pesa River Valley south of the city. The three men spent twenty-eight days on that trek. Bindo left for posterity a careful accounting of their expenses, including the two lire and ten soldi needed to feed his two companions, Massiotto and Stefano.¹ The amount of grain rents collected by Bindo that summer was substantial. He brought much of it back to the city for sale to...

At the end of the thirteenth century, between 1287 and 1289, one the most charismatic intellectuals in Florence, the friar Pietro Olivi (d. 1298), was teaching at the Franciscan friary of Santa Croce. One of his principal ideas was that an excessive preoccupation with temporal affairs on the part of many churchmen was corrupting ecclesiastical institutions, not to mention the original mendicant ideal. The young Dante Alighieri was probably a student of Olivi’s and of Ubertino da Casale (d. circa 1330) at the Franciscan friary school. The influence on the poet of the Ubertino’s masterpiece, Arbor vitae crucifixae Jesu, shaped...

That the commune of Florence was a chosen instrument of God’s will on earth was a theme that had become increasingly evident in Florentine political, literary, and visual culture after the middle of the thirteenth century. This was a claim common to other communes as well, including Brescia, Bologna, and Siena, which saw in their own patron saints Petronius (Bologna) and the Virgin (Siena) the signs of divine favor. However, the commune of Florence seemed especially to many contemporaries of Dante to be a New Jerusalem. The rapidity by which Florence had become the foremost city in Tuscany was a...

Among the many essays written by John Updike and published by the New Yorker magazine was a meditation on the future of religious faith in contemporary America. In that piece, the American writer and critic found inspiration in the Florentine weather. While staying at a hotel near the cathedral in Florence, Updike awoke in his room in a fit of anxiety, “having consented, against my better judgment, to write this piece on the future of faith.”¹ From his room he watched an intimidating thunderstorm begin, one of those loud and rain-soaked storms that are so common in Tuscany in the...