VILLANI, GIOVANNI. - He is the greatest representative of Florentine bourgeois historiography of the fourteenth century. He belonged to a family of the Popolo of S. Procolo and was engaged in the mercery trade. His father was a Villano di Stoldo who is said to have been a member of the Signoria in 1300; his will dates from 1321 and in it the four sons G., Filippo, Francesco, and Matteo are mentioned.
The firstborn Giovanni, the historian, must have been born in the 13th century, perhaps even before 1275-80. At the beginning of the following century Giovanni was already a partner of the Compagnia dei Peruzzi and was its representative at the Roman Curia. This explains how the Villani belonged to the Black party: politics and commerce were joined. Giovanni tells us in his work that he was in Rome in 1300 for the Jubilee, but he does not speak of his commercial activity. In the following years the affairs of the Company took him to France and to Flanders; to this stay are owed the ample reports on the events of Flanders and on the battle of Courtrai. In 1307 he was in Bruges; in the following years he was already in Italy, in Siena. Around 1309 Giovanni must have left the Compagnia dei Peruzzi. After 1310 the phase of his political activity begins. In 1316 he was appointed prior, then he was ambassador to Pisa to negotiate peace, then official of the mint. In 1321 he was again prior; then he was appointed official for the construction of the walls. In 1327 the Duke of Calabria placed him in charge of the coinage. Assignments followed one another: V. was in his mature years and had great prestige in Florence. In 1329 he was occupied with negotiations to establish an agreement with the German mercenaries of Gerruglio, then he was official for the building of the doors of S. Giovanni, then for the construction of the bell tower of the Badia. In 1331 he was camurlingo for the construction of the walls; the assignment brought him the accusation of embezzler. He was tried; he had to give an account of his administration. In 1341 he went to Ferrara as a hostage for the 250,000 florins stipulated in the agreement with the Scaligeri for the purchase of Lucca: he remained there two months. In 1342 he was in Florence as a witness to the events of the duke of Athens. In all these years he had carried on commercial activity in the Compagnia dei Bonaccorsi. The bankruptcy of the Bardi in 1345 involved him and as a merchant «cessans et fugitivus» he had to resign himself to the prison of the Stinche. The Liber carceratorum recorded his release from prison under guarantee on 4 Feb. 1345. V. died of plague in 1348 and was buried at the Annunziata in the chapel of the Crucifix. He had married twice: by monna Sibilia he had three children: Giovanni, Bernardo, Francesco; by donna Mona di Francesco de' Pazzi he had Arrighetta, Villano, Matteo.
The Cronaca of V. is apparently connected to the impressions made on his mind by the monuments of ancient Rome seen during his stay of 1300 and by the reading of the ancient historians. Compagni too alludes to the monuments seen in Rome at the Jubilee. V. could hardly have attended to his work before returning from his travels: even the readings of the ancient historians to which he alludes are certainly not from his youth. V. set about compiling from the chronicles that had the widest circulation (e.g., Martin of Poland) in order to produce a work that would prove useful to anyone who might wish to write in the future. The work turned out to be divided into 12 books; in the first six biblical and Roman history is treated: with book VII the narrative of the history of Florence begins, from the descent of Charles of Anjou to 1332; from 1333 to 1348 the events are narrated in books XI and XII.
The division of the material certainly depends on the time employed in the composition and on the years in which V. wrote. According to the custom of chroniclers the events are narrated year by year, but often there is an attempt to go beyond the chronological order and to link events in a causal order. V. is an entirely medieval writer. He narrates portentous things, he sees in events divine Providence that rewards and punishes. The purpose of the work is in fact to teach the Florentines to avoid vices, to live virtuously, to govern the State wisely. A moralist writer then; even when he speaks of business, he judges by the medieval criterion of good and evil, of the corruption of new men, of the simple, sober customs of an age he regrets. But apart from this inadequacy of his in judging, he recounts, even with liveliness, the economic and financial activities of the Florentines of his time, revealing great competence and capacity to see what concerns commercial life. Then his style, which is usually poor, even heavy, far removed from the vigorous passion of Dino Compagni, rises and becomes robust. Thus when he sketches the figure of some personage with marked lines, he seems to reveal the merchant's habit of seeing and judging with robust synthesis the people with whom he deals. Certainly his narration usually resolves itself into the exposition of innumerable minute facts, of episodes without verification, without criticism, which the merchant keeps in mind only to know the vicissitudes of princes and personages with whom he may have to deal in business, but whose why and how he does not care to know, it being enough for him to have more or less precise reports. Usually these are reports that Florentine merchants transmitted from the great information center, Avignon, or from other French-Flemish commercial centers, reports basically accurate but embellished and often even transformed so as to make them romantic and fantastic.
A problem already discussed, but on which there are still no definitive conclusions, is that of the structure of the Cronaca and of its sources. Thus the question of the relations between V. and Dante has been examined. Contacts between the two authors were noted: a common source has been suspected, others thought of the possibility of interpolations or corrections by V. himself. Thus the relations between V. and the Malispini chronicle have been discussed: here too res sub iudice.
The work of Giovanni V. was continued by his brother MATTEO who wrote the events from 1348 to 1363 in 10 books, but with a sustained, solemn style. Matteo's son, FILIPPO, who was a man of letters, a humanist, a reader of Dante in Florence, added another book to the work of his uncle and father, carrying the narrative to 1364. From the Cronaca of G. V. compendia in prose and verse were soon made, such as the Centiloquio of Pucci.