Florentina libertas in the Context of the Internal Political Conflict in Florence in the Fourteenth-Century

Abstract

The  notion of florentina libertas  was developed between the end of the  fourteenth and the beginning of the  fifteenth centuries by the ‘humanist chancellors’, Coluccio Salutati and especially Leonardo Bruni. It is a liberty  that has a strongly republican connotation. This article  provides a historical contextualization of the discourse on libertas.  Starting from a number of documentary sources, it  shows that the republican ideology of the humanist chancellors is a learned reworking –  made in a changed political climate – of a political discourse that emerges in  Florence between 1343 and 1378.  The discourse on libertas that emerges in those decades is  closely connected to the political confrontation inside Florence rather than to the military and ideological struggle against foreign powers.  It is, above all, an openly partisan discourse developed by a specific social and political coalition in order to promote its own political agenda.