The order of the three words on the banner tells its own story. Read from the bottom up — Fiducia, Perseverantia, Temperantia — and you have the order of moral development as the late scholastics understood it. You begin in trust, in God or in lord or in the fellowship of arms. Trust held against time becomes perseverance. Perseverance refined by judgment becomes temperance, the governing virtue that keeps the other two from curdling into credulity and obstinacy. The crowning word sits on top because it is, in the medieval mind, the word that crowns the soul. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that the English mercenary captain Sir John Hawkwood, who served Florence between roughly 1364 and his death in 1394, kept three words burned into the inside of his shield where only he could see them. The chronicler Filippo Villani recorded them around 1395 as fides, durare, modus — faith, endure, measure. Trust, hold, govern. The order finds its way to the men who need it.
The bridle and bit at the heart of the shield is the canonical emblem of temperance. The image came from Aristotle's metaphor of reason as charioteer governing the horse of appetite, descended through Cicero's De Officiis of 44 B.C. and adopted into Christian moral theology by Aquinas. Giotto painted Temperantia on the wall of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua in 1305 with a sheathed and bound sword, her bridle implied by the binding. Cesare Ripa codified the iconography in his Iconologia of 1593, ruling that Temperance must hold a bridle in her right hand. Every educated medieval and Renaissance viewer would have read a bridle on a shield as Temperantia on sight. The vocabulary was that settled.
Why the Three Together
Two virtues can be balanced; three must be ordered. The order tells you what the bearer believes about how a soul is built. This shield believes the soul is built from the ground up — trust first because nothing is built without it, perseverance second because trust without persistence is a flicker, and temperance last because the other two need a governor or they consume themselves. It is not the order of the schoolroom. It is the order of the road, the order a man arrives at after he has been knocked off a horse a few times and chosen to remount.
