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The Last Republic: Montalcino 1553–1559

The Tamanti came up the road from Buonconvento to a town that had just lived through the most dramatic years in its history. For four years, from 1555 to 1559, Montalcino was the last capital of the free Republic of Siena.

The siege of 1553

In March 1553 Montalcino learned what its walls were for. A Spanish and Florentine army came up from the south and laid siege to the town. It was led by Don García de Toledo, son of the Viceroy of Naples and brother-in-law of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. One of its commanders, Ascanio della Cornia, was wounded under the walls on 11 April. Helped by Sienese troops, and by the emperor’s troubles on other fronts, the town held out until the viceroy recalled his son to defend Naples, and the siege was lifted.

Eighty days. The architectural historians Simon Pepper and Nicholas Adams have rebuilt the siege from the Sienese diaries, the letters smuggled out of the town and the reports of Cosimo’s own engineer. Montalcino’s weak side was the saddle to the south, where the Sienese had raised the bastion of San Martino in the winter of 1552–53, on ground now leveled for the town’s sports field, to designs by the same Giorgio di Giovanni. About a thousand soldiers and some two thousand townspeople held the town against an army that grew to about twenty thousand. The first bombardment, on 2 April, opened only a narrow breach, while townspeople carried barrels, doors, shutters and beams out of their own houses to stop it. A peasant, Tiranfallo Guidi, slipped through the lines again and again with ammunition and money; thirty-five letters from the besieged town survive in the Archivio di Stato di Siena. On 26 May a mine dug for six weeks under San Martino was sprung, and the town diarist wrote that it seemed hell had burst open, but the bastion was only cracked. In June, with a Turkish fleet allied to France threatening the coast of Naples, the army marched away under the jeers of the people on the walls. Mass was sung, a procession went through the streets, and quarrels were forgiven with the kiss of peace. The town had held for eighty days.

The townspeople gave the credit to the Madonna, and the church at the Porta al Corniolo took the name it still bears: Santa Maria del Soccorso, Our Lady of Help. A century and a half later Dr. Jacomo Tamanti and Anna Menchini built their altar in that church. The Sienese painter Giorgio di Giovanni, who also worked on the town’s fortifications, painted the siege on one of the wooden Biccherna panels of the Sienese treasury, now in the Archivio di Stato di Siena.

Siena falls

Siena itself was besieged from January 1554, and its French governor, Blaise de Monluc, left the most vivid account, though not all of it as an eyewitness. He arrived only in 1554, so the famous story of the noblewomen of 1553 came to him from others: they carried baskets of earth on their heads to raise the ramparts, in three companies dressed in violet, crimson and white. He promised the “dames siennoises” that their name would live as long as his book did. When he fell so ill that the citizens feared to see him, he dressed in crimson velvet and rubbed his face with Greek wine until it “took a little red colour”, then walked out so that the town would not lose heart. Starvation won in the end: on 17 April 1555 Siena signed its surrender to Cosimo I.

The exodus

On Sunday 21 April 1555 the French garrison marched out of the Porta Romana. With it went 435 armed citizens of the people and 242 noble citizens with their families and servants, carrying the banners and seals of the Commune. “Never in my life”, Monluc wrote, “have I seen so desolate a departure.”

They went to Montalcino and there refounded their state as the Repubblica di Siena ritirata in Montalcino, the Republic of Siena withdrawn to Montalcino, under the French marshal Piero Strozzi. The street that leads to the Madonna del Soccorso still bears his name. The church of Sant’Egidio became the Republic’s official church, the “chiesa dei Senesi”: the same parish church in which, in the next century, the Tamanti baptized their children. A Sienese chronicler recorded that “many laughed that the body of a Republic did not reach eighty men”. Even so, the exiles kept their magistrates, sent an ambassador to Rome and opened a mint.

The mint’s master was Agnolo Fraschini, who had run Siena’s mint and came to Montalcino with his own silver and tools. From June 1556 he struck gold and silver coins bearing the legend RESPUBLICA SENENSIS IN MONTEILICINO and a prayer to the Virgin, tuo confisi praesidio, “trusting in your protection”. He signed his dies with a small A in a circle. Siena, now under Cosimo, banned the coins, and on 3 July 1556 condemned Fraschini to death in his absence and put a price on his head. A gold scudo struck at Montalcino in 1556 survives in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington.

The end of independence

The end came by treaty, not by storm. The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, signed on 3 April 1559, obliged the French to leave Tuscany. Montalcino surrendered at the end of July and on 4 August 1559 passed to Cosimo I. A Biccherna panel of that year shows Philip II of Spain and Henry II of France embracing, with Siena on one side and Montalcino on the other, and for the first time the Medici arms. Cosimo strengthened the fortress with a new bastion, San Giovanni, bearing his own arms. The Sienese shield that is still carved over the Porta al Cassero became a reminder of a lost independence.

A privilege that survives

Siena has not forgotten. Before every Palio, on 2 July and 16 August, a historical procession carries the standards of the towns and castles of the old Sienese state into the Piazza del Campo. The sixty-seven banners stand for the places that stayed loyal to the Republic in exile. At their close march the standard-bearers of Massa Marittima and of Montalcino, “per storico privilegio”, by historic privilege. Montalcino’s banner, a holm oak above three hills on a white field, is carried by young people of the town.

Scipione Barnaba Tamanti, born in 1574, grew up in a town that had been, within living memory, the last capital of a free Siena. Read how the Tamanti came from Buonconvento, or walk the Tamanti’s Montalcino. The Palazzo stands in the Travaglio quarter, whose archers still compete in the town’s August and October tournaments.

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