The viceroy nevertheless fomented opposition to Alesi, and on 22 August a combination of disaffected guildsmen and vengeful nobles murdered the Capopopolo and 12 of his close supporters. Then, just like Arcos in Naples, Los Vélez misstepped: when he arrested some guild leaders, thousands of armed citizens waving red flags took to the streets until the viceroy published the 49 Capitoli. The guilds regained control of both the fortifications and the government of the city, but their power depended upon continuing to provide cheap food. Since the sparse harvest caused grain prices to rise further, this could only be done by subsidizing the bakers, at a cost of over 1,200 ducats a day. By the end of October the city faced a deficit of almost 150,000 ducats.
The new masters of Palermo hoped to make common cause with rebels elsewhere on the island, but given the fierce particularism of the Sicilian towns, and the refusal of Messina to join the cause, this remained a chimera. Los Vélez now issued a proclamation ordering all who had fled the capital to return within three weeks or face the confiscation of all their goods, and the return of the fugitives – mostly royalists – eventually gave him numerical superiority over the insurgents. He therefore ordered the surrender of all weapons taken from the city arsenals and forbade anyone henceforth to carry arms without a permit. ‘Immediately, and it was a strange thing to see, boys and priests began to hand them over.’ Los Vélez's victory thus seemed complete. Then the stunning news arrived that a powerful fleet commanded by Don Juan of Austria, Philip IV's illegitimate son, had tried to take Naples by storm – and failed.37
41. The kingdom of Naples in revolt, 1647–8.
Although insurgency began in a few rural regions before the revolt of the capital on 7 July 1647, Salerno was the first town to follow its example (three days later). By the end of the year, over 100 communities had rebelled. Almost all continued their defiance until after the capital surrendered on 6 April 1648.
The Empire Strikes Back
News of the disorders in Palermo reached Madrid on 16 June 1647. As his ministers immediately reminded the king, the conflict with France had turned the entire Mediterranean into a war zone, which meant that orders could take weeks and even months to arrive. This delay made it ‘impossible to provide remedies from here in time, because of our distance from the place where they are needed, so that before the dispatches carrying orders can arrive there, the danger may have ceased or increased’. Concessions therefore could not be avoided. News of the revolt of Naples at first failed to change the council's prudent stance, ‘because the state of affairs over there changes from one moment to the next, and what seems appropriate today might not be so tomorrow’; nevertheless, Philip IV now took several steps to free up resources.38 In January 1647 he had declared himself ready ‘to give in on every point that might lead to the conclusion of a settlement’ in the Netherlands and signed a ceasefire with the Dutch Republic (see chapter 8 above). In September he heeded a warning from the archbishop of Valencia that ‘things are so impossible that it would be most unwise to think of adding new taxes, because at present they are both odious and dangerous’, and granted the concessions demanded by the kingdom's elite. ‘In these stormy times,’ he informed Sor María de Ágreda, ‘it is better to utilize deceit and tolerance rather than force’ where rebels were concerned – but he deceived his confidante, because he had just ordered his navy to set sail for Naples.39
Poor planning and bad luck had often thwarted the plans of Philip IV, but this time promised to be different. Don Juan had already set sail from Cádiz with Spain's main battle fleet to blockade Barcelona, when news of the French siege of Genoa arrived. The king therefore ordered his son (like the galleys of Naples) to save the city, but Don Juan had only reached Minorca when news of the revolt of Naples arrived. Philip therefore ordered him to sail there instead, in the hope of ending the troubles speedily.
The vast city had become a soft target. After the murder of Masaniello, several ‘special interest groups’ disrupted public order: on a single day, 300 students, 500 silk workers and even the musicians and chaplains of the viceroy's palace took to the streets in protest against their situation. The fickle crowds blamed Genoino for this chaos, and he fled to Arcos seeking protection – but the viceroy promptly arrested him and sent him to Sardinia with secret instructions that he should be murdered on arrival.40 In the last week of August, Francesco Arpaja, still Eletto del popolo, persuaded the viceroy to accept a new constitutional programme known as the 58 Capitoli. This document confirmed the division of power in the city between nobles and the people; it exiled and deprived of civil rights those whose houses had been torched during the riots; and it reserved all offices in the kingdom for natives, and ordered all ‘foreign’ clerics to depart. More radical still, Arpaja persuaded the viceroy to depose the royal judges and replace them with 12 new ones, all of them local lawyers who had proven their ability to defy the Spanish authorities. Not without reason, the local chroniclers called these developments ‘a new revolution’.41
Such was the situation when, on 1 October 1647, Don Juan of Austria arrived off Naples with his battle fleet and 9,000 troops. Instead of using his advantage to ‘negotiate from strength’, Don Juan unwisely accepted Arcos's advice to attack, and for more than a day the guns of the fleet and the citadels bombarded the city, in preparation for a massed assault. However, artillery fire directed by Gennaro Annese, an armourer who lived in the Piazza del Mercato, forced the Spanish fleet to withdraw from the harbour while the city militia (honed by three months of drill) repulsed the Spanish troops with heavy losses. Don Juan agreed to a truce, but refused to ratify the 58 Capitoli, and so on 17 October 1647 Annese, assisted by the lawyer Vincenzo d'Andrea, issued a ‘Proclamation’ that repudiated Philip IV's sovereignty over Naples. Five days later Annese became ‘Generalissimo of the People’ of Naples and ‘the people raised a black and red banner on the tower of the Carmine church, signifying that they would fight to the death’. Annese ‘read out in a loud voice’ a letter from the French ambassador in Rome offering on behalf of Cardinal Mazarin to send a fleet and money to support the ‘Most Serene Republic of Naples’, which would ‘henceforth live under the protection of the king of France’.42 Spanish power in Italy – and therefore perhaps the future of Spain as a great power – now hung in the balance.
Naples expected much of Mazarin, a native of the kingdom, but he remained cautious, knowing better than anyone that Francophiles formed a minority there and that a French invasion might alienate the majority. He therefore rejected the offer to place Naples under French protection. Instead, the cardinal concentrated on the ‘big picture’ – how best to exploit recent developments to secure an advantageous peace on all fronts – and he believed that the mere prospect of losing Naples and Sicily would suffice to secure more concessions without having to lift a finger (and, more important, without spending a sou). He therefore deployed all remaining resources on a campaign to wrest Milan from Spanish control.43
The Enigma of Lombardy
In the early seventeenth century, the duchy of Lombardy boasted a population of about 1.2 million, a density of almost 200 people per square mile – the highest in Europe outside the Low Countries. An English traveller found it ‘plentifully furnished with all things’ and ‘so pleasant an object to mine eyes, being replenished with such unspeakable variety of all things, both for profit and pleasure’, that it seemed ‘the paradise of the world. For it is the fairest plain, extended about some two hundred miles in length, that ever I saw, or ever shall.’ War and devaluation in Germany, Lombardy's principal trading partner, temporarily wrecked this paradise; but the duchy slowly recovered until in 1628–9 torrential rains ruined two harvests, raising bread prices to the highest level of the century just as troops from both Germany and Spain arrived to fight the war of Mantua. They brought with them bubonic plague.44
Perhaps one-third of the duchy's population died between 1628 and 1631, and its economy collapsed. In the cities, house rents plunged by up to three-quarters
and the textile industry atrophied; in the countryside, up to one-third of all farmland lay uncultivated for lack of labour and demand. Once more, Lombardy recovered swiftly. An Italian who resided in the duchy's capital later wrote that from 1630 to 1634 ‘I saw a sudden transformation: from being an almost depopulated city, it again became recognisable as Milan.’ Admittedly the city's woollen textile industry never recovered, but other economic activities took its place – above all the manufacture of silk, glass and armaments. As late as 1646, an English visitor to the capital found it had enough ‘trade to support it in a flourishing condition’ so that it was ‘thronged with artisans of all sorts’; while another noted that the city was ‘full of … rare artists, especially for the works of crystal’.45
Few visitors mentioned that Philip IV maintained a standing army of 10,000 men in Lombardy, with sometimes as many again marching through on their way to uphold Spain's interests in northern Europe, while in wartime the duchy might be defended by 40,000 combatants. Each soldier required food, lodging and pay, and many used force to extract them from the local population, creating widespread hardship and resentment. In May 1640 the city of Milan sent a special envoy, Carlo Visconti, to protest to the king and his ministers about the ‘excesses’ of the soldiers, about the city's annual deficit of over 200,000 ducats and public debt of almost five million, and about ‘the introduction of so many new taxes and the notable increase in old ones’. Visconti arrived at court just after the Corpus de Sang, and stressed to the king how ‘the events in Catalonia’ stemmed from precisely the same ‘excesses of the soldiers’ experienced by Lombardy. Visconti claimed that, as he described the abuses, the count-duke of Olivares ‘exclaimed “Jesus, Jesus” many times’.46 Some ministers warned the king that ‘although the loyalty of your vassals [in Lombardy] is so great, in such turbulent times we should not reduce them to total despair’ and ‘that right now we should treat vassals with much kindness’, but instead Olivares demanded more contributions towards the war effort in Spain. ‘It is easier to recover all the places’ lost in Italy, he argued, ‘after we have regained what we have lost in Spain, than to keep them if we lose what we have here’.47
The fall of Olivares and the crushing French victory at Rocroi in 1643 (see chapter 9 above) led the central government to resolve that, ‘With the scarce resources that exist to make war on all fronts, it seems that we must try to reduce our commitments as much as possible’. Henceforth, Italy would have to pay for its own defence, leading a royal official in Milan to warn the king in July 1647 that ‘we have only survived until now by selling our assets, by imposing extraordinary taxes, and by suffering miseries that would not be believed’. At just this moment, the rebellions in Naples and Sicily reduced the flow of funds to Milan even further, so that, ‘having used all the techniques that human ingenuity can devise’, and having spent in advance all revenues for the next three years, the soldiers and civilians faced starvation.48
Cardinal Mazarin confidently expected this desperate situation to provoke a rebellion and sent troops across the Alps ready to exploit it. His expectations came close to realization in August 1647 when, inspired by the revolt of Naples the previous month, manifestos went up in the streets of Milan ‘saying, in so many words, “Long live the king of Spain, but let the loaves of bread be big and let the excise duties be abolished”’, and threatening that the houses of government ministers would be burnt down.49 Two months later Giuseppe Piantanida, a Milan confectioner, was arrested in possession of numerous printed manifestos calling on his fellow citizens to support a forthcoming French invasion that would ‘end the insupportable oppression that the entire people [of Lombardy] suffer under the evil government and tyranny of the ministers of Spain’. Afterwards, Piantanida promised, all would ‘again enjoy the same inviolable privileges conceded to them by the most august Emperor Charles V’ a century before.50 Under torture, Piantanida implicated not only some Milanese nobles but also the neighbouring duke of Modena; and, shortly afterwards, the duke invaded at the head of a French army – but the extreme weather thwarted them: torrential rains, which made all roads impassable, stopped the campaign in its tracks. ‘The heavens,’ Mazarin wryly observed, ‘sent the Spaniards reinforcements in the form of rain.’51 A year later another group of conspirators, hoping to exploit Spain's preoccupation with the revolts of Catalonia, Portugal, Naples and Sicily, divided the city of Milan into four quarters, each one with its own ‘squadron’ of insurgents who would converge on the city centre yelling ‘Long live liberty’ and ‘Death to the tyrants’. Meanwhile French forces besieged Cremona, the second city of the duchy, until the Fronde suddenly deprived Mazarin of the resources to support them (see chapter 10 above). Once again, the revolt fizzled out.
France's inability to send effective assistance to the conspirators cannot by itself explain why chronic fiscal pressure combined with war and disastrous harvests failed to shake the loyalty of Lombardy. Many contemporaries remarked on this paradox. A Francophile Venetian observer expressed his exasperation at the ‘incorruptible loyalty’ of the Milanese at a time when ‘the Spanish Monarchy was preoccupied with the rebellions in Catalonia and Portugal, the uprising of Naples, [and] the attacks on the [Spanish] Netherlands by powerful French and Dutch armies’. It was particularly remarkable, he continued, that no member of the elite had faltered in his loyalty; rather ‘many of them have fought worthily in this war, raising infantry and cavalry at their own expense, and devoting their own wealth’ to uphold the Spanish cause ‘in the most pressing needs of state’.52
Why? Some might ascribe such passivity solely to the troops stationed in the duchy, many of them in citadels that dominated the leading towns; but, although a few thousand ill-paid troops certainly acted as a deterrent, they could not hold down a hostile population of more than a million indefinitely. Rather, the potential of France to exploit any revolt in a matter of weeks encouraged Philip IV and his ministers in both Milan and Madrid to avoid confrontations and to foster a ‘convivenza’ (convergence of interests) with his Lombard vassals. On the one hand, the king abated or abridged several fiscal privileges previously enjoyed by the elite, and tried to ensure that all social groups paid a reasonable share of the ‘many new taxes’ about which Carlo Visconti complained. In particular, Spain did its best to equalize the burden of both taxation and billeting between town and countryside, and between the various social groups. Although these efforts did not always produce the desired results, they mitigated at least some grievances and created a favourable general impression. On the other hand, the government left the balance of power within Lombard society largely intact, while offering numerous economic, political and career opportunities to ensure that the elite (whether nobles, clerics, university professors or local government officials) became ‘stakeholders’ in the survival of Spanish rule. Thus, the government offered attractive rates of interest on its loans, and never declared bankruptcy, encouraging the elite to buy government bonds – which committed them to Spanish success, because a French victory would mean the loss of both principal and interest. Likewise the government increased the number of troops raised locally by the elite to defend the duchy (the proportion of the total rose to one-third in the 1650s) – again committing the elite to Spanish success, because if the troops mutinied, or if their officers defected, those who had raised them would forfeit everything that the king of Spain owed them. Finally, the clergy deposited 1.5 million ducats in the duchy's public bank, which paid higher returns than agriculture, trade or industry – creating another important group of stakeholders, because the bank made substantial loans to the government, and therefore a successful rebellion against Spain would jeopardize all investments in it, including those of the clergy.53
Finally, two economic factors softened the impact of both war and climate change in seventeenth-century Lombardy. First, as every foreign visitor noted, the duchy was extraordinarily prosperous: the high-value manufactured goods of the towns generated profits for the elite and jo
bs for the rest, while its fertile fields produced an abundance of crops and livestock. Although the burden of billeting remained heavy, Lombardy could thus absorb its impact far better than (say) Catalonia. Second, the catastrophe of 1628–31 had drastically reduced demographic pressures. Precisely because famine, plague and war in those years reduced the duchy's population by perhaps one-third, many of the survivors accumulated substantial assets, so that during the 1640s, when the extreme climatic events stunted the growth of even the hardy trees that Antonio Stradivarius would later use to make his unique violins (see chapter 1 above), consumption did not dangerously exceed production. The earlier trauma helped Lombardy to survive the Little Ice Age without political insurrection.54
The Republic of Naples
Gennaro Annese did not lie when he announced ‘in a loud voice’ in the Carmine church that the new Republic of Naples enjoyed French support. Although Cardinal Mazarin did not ‘believe that the [Republican] project could succeed’ and was reluctant to accord it official recognition, Duke Henry of Guise, a descendant of the French rulers of Naples and Sicily, who happened to be in Rome when the troubles began, claimed to have a letter of commitment signed by Louis XIV, and he travelled to Naples to provide assistance.55 The new regime displayed remarkable self-confidence, issuing over 250 printed edicts during the winter of 1647 that commanded or forbade a wide variety of acts in the name of ‘The Most Faithful Republic’. It also sponsored publications about other successful revolts against Spain (for example, by the Dutch and the Catalans); commissioned an ‘official history’ of its achievements by Giuseppe Donzelli, a celebrated physician and chemist of the city who had kept a diary of events; and sponsored a series of paintings of the main events of the revolution from a talented young artist, Micco Spadaro (Plates 18 and 21).56 On the political level, the new regime discussed convening a ‘States-General’ (on the Dutch model) for the 12 provinces of the kingdom and urged all Neapolitans to defy the Spaniards ‘in defence of the liberty of this kingdom, which involves at the same time working for the longed-for liberty of Italy’.57
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