Nuova Cronica - Organization

Organization

Giovanni Villani's Cronica is divided into twelve books; the first six deal with the largely legendary history of Florence, starting at conventionally Biblical times to 1264. The second phase, in six books, covers the history from 1264 until his own time, all the way up to 1346. Villani outlines the events in his Cronica, not by theme, but through year-to-year accounts; for this, he has gained criticism over the years for writing in an episodic manner lacking a unifying theme or point of view. Villani's chronicles are intercut with historical episodes reported just as he heard them, with little interpretation; this often led to historical inaccuracies in his work, making most of his mistakes in the biographies of historical or contemporary people living outside of Florence (even with well-known monarchs). However, his description of such events as the Battle of Crécy in 1346 was fairly accurate according to historian Kelly De Vries. Both Bartlett and Green state that Villani's Cronica represented a departure from medieval chronicles in that a more modernistic approach was taken in describing events and statistics, yet still medieval in that Villani relied on divine providence to explain the outcome of events.