Giovanni Villani

Statue of Giovanni Villani in Florence

Giovanni Villani (* around 1280 in Florence ; † 1348 there at the plague ) was an Italian historian , businessman and politician.

Life

The exact year of birth of Giovanni Villani is unknown, however he was born around the second half of the 1270s. Coming from a respected Florentine family, like his father Villano di Stoldo di Bellincia , he embarked on a commercial career. Since 1300 at the latest, he was a partner in the Peruzzi trading company and was also very successful. His historical work , the Nuova Cronica , was inspired by a pilgrimage to Rome in the jubilee year 1300 , where he negotiated with Pope Boniface VIII as a representative of the Peruzzi . In the Eternal City, according to his own statements ( Nuova Cronica 8, 36), the ancient monuments made a great impression on him and he considered that numerous historians had described the deeds of the Romans , so that he now wrote a monumental chronicle of his native city of Florence intended and began with this project in the same year. From about 1302-1307 he stayed on business trips in Flanders , France and Switzerland . Between 1308 and 1312 he resigned his membership in the Peruzzi Company. He later became a partner in the Buonaccorsi company , of which Vanni was married to his sister Lapa.

As a member of the leadership of Florence, Villani was also active in urban politics and had held various important offices since 1316. From 1316 to 1317 he was a priore member of the city government and participated in the cunning tactics that led Pisa and Lucca to make peace with Florence. In 1317 he was in charge of coinage and had a list of all coins struck in Florence made. 1321-1322 he held the position of a priore again and supervised the new construction of the city walls with other citizens. In 1325 he was sent with an army against the Condottiere Castruccio Castracani and experienced the defeat of the Florentines at Altopascio . In 1328 he officiated for the third time as a priore . At that time a terrible famine was raging in large parts of Italy, from the worst effects of which Villani was supposed to try to protect Florence, which he reports in a chapter of his chronicle. He also acted as envoy, in which capacity he met the papal legate Bertrand du Pouget in Bologna in October 1329 .

In 1330, Villani supervised the manufacture of the bronze doors of the Baptistery by Andrea Pisano and the construction of the Campanile of the Badia . Some time after the death of Castruccio Castracani (in 1328), he and other wealthy merchants argued that Florence should acquire the city of Lucca for 80,000 florins , promising to contribute most of the money from their private fortune. However, this project failed due to conflicts within the then government ( Nuova Cronica 10, 143). In 1331 Villani had passed the zenith of his political career due to a fraudulent exercise of office, although he was acquitted of this charge. Nevertheless, he was still one of the wealthiest citizens of Florence in the future. In 1341 the purchase of Lucca was negotiated again, this time with Mastino II della Scala for a payment of 250,000 florins. With other residents of his hometown Villani was transferred to Ferrara as a guarantor for the contract entered into , where he lived for a few months. Towards the end of his life he was embroiled in the bankruptcy of the Buonaccorsi company in 1342, had to deal with several bankruptcy proceedings and even spent a short time in a debt prison in 1346 because he was insolvent. Released on bail, he died of the plague in the summer of 1348. His heiress became his daughter. He also had an illegitimate son named Bernardo who worked as a priest and notary.

Nuova Cronica

The historical work Villani is written in the Italian vernacular in a simple style and contains 12 (after the 1991 edition of Porta 13) books. The information that Villani received from all over Europe during his work flowed into his work, which therefore does not have the character of an exclusively urban history chronicle of Florence, although the city is always the focus of the depiction from the 4th book onwards. Like other medieval chronicles, it begins with the Tower of Babel and then brings a narrative, initially interspersed with many fables up to the 12th century and uncritically following tradition. Reports on the Trojan War , Aeneas' flight to Italy, individual events in Roman history and the Great Migration Period , then on Charlemagne up to the German emperors and their relations with Italy. The parts that deal with the period from the 13th century onwards are becoming increasingly valuable historically. Reports of events and sometimes dates, which were a long time before Villani's own lifetime, are not always accurate. For example, he falsely claims that Otto IV died in the Holy Land in 1218 .

The 6th book of Villani's Chronicle closes with the account of the arrival of Charles of Anjou in Italy (1265). The next six books describe the eight decades that followed, most of which the author himself experienced. To write this part, the author carefully studied the sources, used political and economic historical documents as well as eyewitness reports and was also able to draw on his own experience. However, here too, especially in the case of events not taking place in Florence or its surroundings, the chronicle contains some historical errors (partly depending on the sources used), but this does not harm the overall meaning. With regard to the later Emperor Heinrich VII , the month of his crossing of the Alps in autumn 1310 is incorrectly given.

Villani based himself on the Calculus Florentinus , the year counting common in Florence until 1749. Accordingly, a new year began not on January 1st, but on March 25th. The chronicle takes the Guelfish (anti-imperial) point of view, if not exaggerated: Emperor Henry VII, for whose Italian expedition Villani's 9th book is an important source, is judged quite balanced overall. Due to his commercial interest, the author also provides significant and detailed statistical information about the finances and administration in Florence of his time, the population structure that prevailed there and the crafts and schools of his hometown at that time. Although his work still shows him caught up in medieval ideas, it also contains tendencies foreshadowing the Renaissance such as the exact stating of social phenomena, the differentiated description of important people and the occasional emphatic emphasis on the eyewitnesses of the events presented.

Giovanni Villani's chronicle, which lasted until April 1348, was continued by his brother Matteo († 1363) and his son Filippo († 1405) in eleven books up to 1364.

Since the first, incomplete edition, published in Venice in 1537 and the first complete edition, published in Florence in 1559, Villani's work has been frequently edited, including in an improved form in Muratori's Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (Milan 1728). In the 19th century, among other things, an edition in 8 volumes was published in Florence in 1823, another by F. Gherardi-Dragomanni (7 volumes, Florence 1844–1847), and other new editions then appeared in Trieste in 7 volumes in 1857–1861 and in 1879 in Turin . A German translation of Books 9 and 10, which also deal with Emperors Heinrich VII and Ludwig the Bavarians , was presented by Walter Friedensburg in 1882/83 for the series of Historians of the German Past .

expenditure

• Giovanni Villani: Nuova Cronica. Edited by Giovanni Porta, 3 vols. Parma 1991 ( online ). [With a different numbering of Villani's books.]

literature

• Maria Elisabeth Franke: Emperor Heinrich VII. In the mirror of historiography. Cologne u. a. 1992, p. 133ff.
• Michele Luzzati: Villani, Giovanni . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages (LexMA). Volume 8, LexMA-Verlag, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-89659-908-9 , Sp. 1678 f.
• Franca Ragone: Giovanni Villani ei suoi continuatori: la scrittura delle cronache a Firenze nel Trecento. Rome 1998.
• Verena Gebhard: The "Nuova Cronica" of Giovanni Villani (Bib. Apost. Vat., Ms. Chigi L.VIII.296). Visualization of history in late medieval Florence. Munich 2007 online (PDF; 5.3 MB) .

Web links

• Villanis Chronicle (excerpts in English translation)
• Nuova Cronica in the Italian Wikisource

Remarks

1. ↑ This approximate year of birth of Villani is given by Michele Luzzati ( Lexikon des Mittelalters , Vol. 8, Sp. 1678).