Chivalry was the dominant ethos of the lay elite in high and late medieval Europe, including in Italy. Chivalric ideology helped to shape the mentality, lifestyle, and identity of nobles, knights, and men‐at‐arms and to reinforce their claims to social, political, and economic superiority. While scholars have spilled considerable ink studying chivalry's powerful influence in northwestern Europe, especially in England and France, there has been far less interest in the topic among historians of Italy. This article will examine the existing historiography on chivalry in one region of the peninsula, Tuscany, with a particular focus on the city of Florence. The traditional interpretation of chivalry found in these works is that of an ideology predominantly courtly and ceremonial in nature. This article will also introduce the newest scholarship which challenges this conceptualization of Tuscan and Florentine chivalry and offers a new interpretation that is in line with the most recent studies of chivalry in the general European context.
This chapter looks into the fate of Florentine chivalry in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It recounts the chivalric life of Buonaccorso di Nero Pitti, the scion of a prominent banking family, whose ricordanza records his remarkable efforts to fashion and claim a chivalric identity. By considering Buonaccorso's life as an example, the chapter highlights developments within that culture, as chivalric practitioners modified their behavior in certain contexts in order to preserve their access to the political and economic benefits accrued from participation in civic society. The chapter emphasizes that Buonaccorso provided a powerful example of a new model of chivalric practitioner in early Renaissance Florence: one who straddled the line between the chivalric and civic cultural communities. It concludes by showing that chivalric ideology exercised a powerful influence among a sizeable segment of the lay elite in late medieval Florence from the late twelfth through the early fifteenth centuries.
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