Ciompi

The Revolt of the Ciompi was a popular revolt in Florence 1378 by wool carders known as ciompi, who rose up to demand a voice in the commune's ordering.

The ciompi were a class of labourers in the textile industry who were not represented by any guild. They were among the most radical of the lower-class groups, vegetable sellers and crockery vendors and the like, and resented the controlling power that was centred in the Arte della Lana, the textile-manufacturing establishment which guided the economic engine of Florence's prosperity, and was supported by the other major Guilds of Florence, the Arti maggiori.

In 1378, ciompi launched the Revolt of the Ciompi, a briefly successful insurrection of the disenfranchised lower classes, the popolo minuto, which remained as a traumatic memory for members of the major guilds and contributed to the support given to the Medici a generation afterwards, as stabilizers of Florentine order. The revolt briefly brought to power in 14th-century Florence an unprecedented level of democracy. The ciompi were defeated by the more conservative elements in Florentine society when the major and minor guilds closed ranks to re-establish the old order, a counter-revolution in which the knight Salvestro de' Medici played a prominent role.

In June 1378, the unguilded wool-workers took up arms and attacked government buildings. On July 21, the lower classes forcibly took over the government, placing the wool carder Michele di Lando in the executive office of gonfaloniere of justice, and showing their banner at the Palazzo della Signoria. They compelled the governing body, the Signoria, to establish additional guilds in order to grant the ciompi access to political office. During the time of ciompi control, they demanded the right to elect three of their own priors, the reduction of judicial corporal punishment, and reform the tax system.

Conflicts between the traditional guilds and the ciompi became evident. On August 31, a large group of the ciompi that had gathered in the Piazza della Signoria were attacked by forces of the major and minor guilds led by the guild of butchers. In reaction to this revolutionary episode, the new ciompi guilds were abolished, and within four years the dominance of the major guilds was restored. By 1382, all the reforms that the ciompi had introduced had officially been eliminated.

The event was a traumatic episode for the Florentine upper classes. More than a century later, Niccolò Machiavelli's Florentine Histories depicts the revolt with a series of invented debates and speeches that reflect the positions of the protagonists, seen from the patrician point of view of a later champion of state stability. As might be expected, the sculpture of the popular leader Michele di Lando (illustration, right) was not placed in a niche on the facade of the loggia in the Mercato Nuovo until the late nineteenth century, by which time historians of the Romantic generation had recast him as a leader of the people.