In late medieval Florence, the disenfranchised ciompi ("wool carders") were a class of labourers in the textile industry who were not represented by any guild. The ciompi 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 centered in the Arte della Lana, the textile-manufacturing establishment which guided the economic engine of Florence's prosperity.

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

A typical embroglio among factions within the grassi (the "well-to-do") sparked the uprising. Members of the lower classes, called upon to take part in late June, 1378, took matters into their own hands in July. They presented a series of petitions to the governing body, the Signoria, demanding more equitable fiscal policies and the precious right to establish guilds for those groups not already organized. Then, on July 22, 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.

The revolutionaries within the Florentine republic were backed by radical members of the usually powerless minor guilds, the arti minori. They extended guild privileges to the ciompi, and for the first time a European government, however briefly, represented all the classes of society.

But the ciompi were disillusioned within a matter of weeks that summer, when the new government failed to implement all their utopian demands. Conflicts of interests between the minor guilds and the ciompi became evident. On August 31 a large group of the ciompi that had gathered in the Piazza della Signoria was easily routed by the combined forces of the major and minor guilds. In reaction to this revolutionary episode, the new ciompi guild was abolished, and within four years the dominance of the major guilds was restored.

Machiavelli's History of Florence depicts the revolt with a series of invented debates and speeches that reflect the positions of the protagonists, seen from the point-of-view of a later champion of state stability.

After the Black Death, similar upheavals in the second half of the 14th century, in which the most downtrodden classes struck out for fairer conditions, widely disturbed European polities and were looked on by the Church and governing classes as reversals of God's natural order. Compare Jack Cade's rebellion of 1381 in England and the Jacquerie of France. See also popular revolt in late medieval Europe.

References

• G. Brucker "The Revolt of the Ciompi", in Florentine Studies, N. Rubinstein, editor (1968)
• S.K. Cohn ,The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence (1980)
• M. Mollat and P. Wolff, Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages (1973)