"To arms! To arms! The masters are slaughtering people!" This is the cry of a craftsman to incite rebellion. It is July 20, 1378, in Florence, during the Chioggia Uprising, one of many that erupted across Europe in the 14th century.

Using the historical chronicles of the time, Alessandro Barbero, through this book, allows us to relive the excitement, enthusiasm, and violence of those days when a group of people decided that they did not like the future as they saw it and tried to change it.

They erupt unexpectedly. They last very briefly, sometimes only a few weeks, before being suppressed. However, during this short period, events occur that will remain forever engraved in collective memory. These are popular uprisings. History, at least over the last millennium, is filled with such critical moments.

The Middle Ages are no exception: even then, rebellion movements were common, and in their initial development, they did not seem very different from the most sweeping modern revolutions. Specifically, in the second half of the 14th century, so many uprisings occurred that it would be unfair to consider them merely statistical anomalies.

Alessandro Barbero narrates the most spectacular of these uprisings. For a long time, historians viewed their failure not only as proof that the rebels had no chance of success but also that they did not even pursue a conscious goal. Nothing could be more false! The rebels knew what they were doing, what they were fighting for, and consciously struggled for the justice of their cause!