Bringing Medieval Italy to Life

I have admired Tinney’s writing since I read her novel, A Thing Done, a few years ago. Now she has published a second novel, Lady of the Seven Suns, which I reviewed. I am delighted to host this engaging essay on medieval Italy–an excellent complement to reading her novel about the woman St. Francis called brother.

Guest Post by Tinney Heath

I write fiction set in medieval Italian cities. I didn’t originally intend to choose a bit of history that is obscure, often misunderstood, and never featured on a television miniseries, but that’s what I did.

How I got there

I was poking around in the Italian Renaissance when I got to wondering “Why then? Why there?” I took a tentative step back in time and discovered a whole raft of fascinating stuff that happened before the Medici, before Michelangelo, before the Borgia pope. I picked up speed as I moved backwards beyond the Black Death, because, trust me on this, nobody wants to hang around in 1348.

So onward I went into the past, until I finally came to a screeching halt at Dante (1265-1321). I began to learn about the eternally squabbling Guelf and Ghibelline political parties, about medieval urban warfare, mighty defensive towers and magnificent frescoed churches, an explosion of glorious poetry and a sea change in the visual arts, about Florentine magnates and the audacious experiment of rule by the popolo.

But even in the early 14^th century I could hear the siren song of an earlier time. So backward I went yet again, through precarious and turbulent times, until I hit a speed bump and came to a stop in the first decades of the 13^th century.

What I found

I discovered a period rich in surprises, with all the vices and virtues of humanity prominently on display. As a bonus, you get saints, not to mention all that complicated pope-emperor conflict. My first book, A Thing Done, is based on the 1216 incident that triggered the Guelf-Ghibelline split in Florence. My second, Lady of the Seven Suns, begins in that same decade and involves a wealthy Roman noblewoman’s friendship with Francis of Assisi. Both are based on fact, and both are set in cities: ATD in Florence and LSS in Rome and Assisi.

Why Cities

By the turn of the 13^th century, most of the action was in the cities, and people were moving there in droves. Florence’s population tripled (some say quadrupled) over the course of the 13^th century, as former country-dwellers sought their fortunes in the cities. To accommodate such rapid growth, the city had to expand its surrounding defensive walls twice during those years.

When you squish that many people together inside walls, things happen. Wonderful, terrible, predictable, inexplicable, funny, and tragic things. Sometimes they all happen to the same people.

Within the walls of Florence, Rome, and Assisi I found merchants and nobles, popes and antipopes, saints and sinners, knights and ladies, jesters and cardinals, crusaders and monks, musicians and politicians, poets and polemicists, all in the days before glass windows, before wall fireplaces with chimneys, and before the great upsurge of religious confraternities. The Crusades were still trundling along, the great families were scheming and jockeying for power, and the pope had just ordered his bishops to leave their hunting dogs and falcons home when they traveled. Fire, flood, famine, and political exile all took their toll, as did illness, which spread rapidly in the cities’ crowded conditions.

Wars broke out, individuals and cities changed allegiances and then changed back again, and new religious movements sprang up everywhere. The Church was omnipresent in people’s lives, for good and ill.

There was, in fact, never a dull moment, however much medieval people must sometimes have wished for one.

Women

I have a special interest in medieval women’s lives. Not the queens and empresses, but normal women, surviving and trying to flourish in an emphatically patriarchal society. Rich women, poor women, working women, saints, prostitutes, mothers, daughters, nuns, wives, mistresses—all have their stories, but history tends not to tell us very much about them, and I love digging around in the footnotes to find out more. It is a kind of detective work that I very much enjoy.

I’ve written about women in medieval Italian cities working behind the scenes for political advantage, and about women who were willing to upend their lives and give up everything in the name of faith. I follow women’s lives as they risk everything for a marriage or a pregnancy or for the sake of their children, adapt to rapidly changing conditions with a mixture of grace and pragmatism, or weigh their own desires against their families’ honor. I sympathize as they ponder the advantages and disadvantages of a religious vocation versus a desirable marriage (or an unwanted one), or a remarriage versus an independent widowhood, often with little power to make that decision for themselves. I love the stories of those women who did manage to make their own decisions, and I suspect there were many more of them than we know about today.

My theme

It irritates me to hear medieval people described as uniformly ignorant, miserable, and without autonomy. You even hear it said that all medieval lives were “nasty, brutish and short.” That sort of thing makes me get all nasty and brutish, and I was already short.

They were people. They were resourceful; they could survive in situations that would defeat most of us modern folks. They were as imaginative and bright and capable as we are. Yes, they faced adversity in all its many forms. But they also partied, fell in love, sacrificed for what they believed, and fiercely protected those they cared about. They liked a good meal, a pleasant day, a beautiful sunset, a compliment, just as we do.

They are not so very different from us.

If there is a theme in my writing, it is human resilience. My characters lived in challenging times, and it comforts me to think that if civilization made it through that mess, maybe we 21^st century folk will manage to muddle through ours, though we may need to rustle up a few saints of our own to pull it off. After all, those mighty towers—or their bases, at least—are still standing. Not even the bombs of World War II could eradicate them. May humanity prove as stubborn.

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