[4] However, historian Kenneth R. Bartlett notes that, in contrast to his Renaissance-era successors, "his reliance on such elements as divine providence links Villani closely with the medieval vernacular chronicle tradition.

He provided intricate details on many important historical events of the city of Florence and the wider region of Tuscany, such as construction projects, floods, fires, famines, and plagues.

After observing the well-known ancient monuments of Rome and acknowledging its renowned historical personages, he was inspired to write the Cronica, a universal history of Florence in a strictly linear, year-by-year format.

[20] Villani often expressed an optimistic viewpoint in his writing; this changed with the short-lived regime of Walter VI of Brienne, a despot invited to Florence and granted signoria.

[21] In fact, after experiencing his own financial troubles, a terminated career, and the failure of Florence in international affairs, and witnessing a host of different natural calamities and the onset of the Black Death in Europe, he became convinced that the apocalypse and final judgement was near.

[28] Hunt asserts that the failures of the Florentine banks seems closely tied to the expansionist policy of Florence in Tuscany, hoping that newly conquered territory would yield greater security for their trade with northern Europe, but instead resulted in costly campaigns and little profit.

[31] Like other Florentine bankers and companies having difficulty with bankruptcy at the time, in September 1342 they supported the move to invite Walter VI of Brienne to become the next signor of Florence.

[32] After the overthrow of the Brienne regime and a subsequent but short-lived aristocratic signoria, the novi cives or new families—some even from the lesser guilds—rose up in late September 1343 and established a government that provided them with much greater representation in officialdom.

[35] Yet by the 1350s the general attitude towards the novi cives had changed much, as even Villani's brother Matteo depicted them in a heroic light for being united in a coalition with the merchants and artisans to curb oligarchic power.

[37] However, he did find civic pride in that the whole city—including the novi cives—had joined together in an uprising against Walter VI, whose sins of imposing tyranny were, to Villani, sufficient justification for the violence needed to overthrow him.

[40] The Chronica de origine civitatis was composed sometime before 1231, but there is little comparison between this work and Villani's; mid-20th-century historian Nicolai Rubinstein states that the legendary accounts in this earlier chronicle were "arbitrarily selected by a compiler whose learning and critical faculties were considerably below the standard of his age.

[42] To emphasize the imperial greatness of Florentine history, Villani also asserted that the city was given a second founding when it was rebuilt by Charlemagne (r. 800–814 as Holy Roman Emperor)—which was absent from the Chronica de origine civitatis.

[47] Historian Felicity Ratté states that the validity of this comment should be heavily scrutinized considering the Florence statutes of 1290 that designated employment for individuals in charge of locking the city gates.

[48] In 1300 or shortly after, Villani began working on the Cronica, which was divided into twelve books; the first six deal with the largely legendary history of Florence, starting at conventionally biblical times with the story of the Tower of Babel up to the year 1264.

[50] He outlined the events in his Cronica in 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.

[9] For example, De Vries states that he wrote one of the most accurate accounts of the Battle of Crécy during the Hundred Years' War, including information that the archers were placed precariously behind the English and Welsh infantry, not on the flanks as others asserted.

[55] While describing detailed events unfolding within the city, Villani would name every individual street, square, bridge, family, and person involved, assuming his readers would have the same intimate knowledge of Florence as he did.

[53] For example, he recorded that in Florence there were 80 banks, 146 bakeries, 80 members in an association of city judges with 600 notaries, 60 physicians and surgical doctors, 100 shops and dealers of spices, 8,000 to 10,000 children attending primary school each year, 550 to 600 students attending 4 different schools for Scholastic knowledge, 13,200 bushels of grain consumed weekly by the city, and 70,000 to 80,000 pieces of cloth produced in the workshops of the Arte della Lana each year, the latter having a total value of 1,200,000 gold florins.

[9] When detailing the construction of the Florence Cathedral and the artist Giotto di Bondone as the designer of the new bell tower, Villani called him "the most sovereign master of painting in his time.

"[51] Historian Louis Green writes that the Cronica was written with three general assumptions about morality[63] which shaped the organization of the work, "[channeling] events into recurring patterns of significance.

[63] For example, Villani described the story of Count Ugolini of Pisa, who at the height of attaining his ill-gotten wealth and power was overthrown and eventually starved to death along with his sons.

[66] Villani wrote: ... it seems that it happens in the lordships and states of earthly dignitaries, that as they are at their highest peak, so presently does their decline and ruin follow, and not without the providence of divine justice, in order to punish sins and so that no one should place his trust in fallacious good fortune.

[66] Green points out that in Villani's writing there are two significant earthly powers that seem to be exempt or immune from this theory of immorality leading to downfall: Florence and the papacy.

He wrote of many instances where holy men offered prophetic statements that later proved true, such as Pope Clement IV's prophecy on the outcome for the Battle of Tagliacozzo.

[78] Historian J.K. Hyde states that the Nuova Cronica of Villani is representative of the strong vernacular tradition in Florence, appealing to the people of the time as a narrative that was "easy to read, full of human interest and occasionally spiced with novella-type anecdotes.

[79] The Cronica is also an incredibly rich historical record; its greatest value to modern historians is its descriptions of the people, data, and events experienced by Villani during his lifetime.

[40] Historian Mark Phillips states that all subsequent Florentine accounts of the tyrannical regime of Walter VI of Brienne—including those by Leonardo Bruni and Niccolò Machiavelli—were based upon the primary source of Villani's Cronica.

[83] On Villani's estimation that a third of Antwerp's population died off during the Great Famine of 1315-1317, the early 20th-century historian Henry S. Lucas wrote, "not much faith can be placed in such statistics which are little better than guesses.

Nor did his devotion to the justification and glorification of Florence permit him to see in the altered fortunes of his city a repetition of the pattern of decline he had illustrated in the histories of the great dynasties of his age.