by Peter Burke
L50 servant, Venice, c.1500
L50 apprentice shipwright, Venice, c.1500
L40 chaplain, Milan, c.1500
L40 servant, Florence, c.1450
As we have seen (above, p. 200) contemporaries were conscious of these complexities. There is no need to repeat their descriptions of society. What is required by the general argument of this study is a discussion of the extent to which Renaissance Italy was distinctive in its social structure, as it certainly was in its culture. This discussion will be focused on two questions. Was Italian society open? Was it bourgeois?
The first question can be rephrased more precisely. Was social mobility higher in Italy than elsewhere in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? In this formulation, the difficulty of giving it a straight answer will become more obvious. Individual cases of upward mobility are striking. Giovanni Antonio Campano, for example, a shepherd boy who became a university lecturer in Perugia and was made a bishop by Pius II, illustrates the traditional function of the Church as an avenue for advancement. Nicholas V, the so-called humanist pope, lived in poverty in his student days, although he was the son of a professional man, a physician. Bartolommeo della Scala was a miller’s son who became chancellor of Florence. Scala’s coat of arms featured a ladder, with the motto ‘step by step’ (gradatim). These were obvious heraldic puns on his name but also an appropriate symbol of his social mobility. His Apologia discusses great men of humble birth.61 Less impressive to contemporaries, but of greater interest to posterity, are the cases of peasants turned artists, from Giotto to Beccafumi (above, pp. 53–4).
The literature of Renaissance Italy suggests a society which was unusually concerned with social mobility. Some of the literary references are hostile, such as the sixteenth Canto of Dante’s Inferno, with its critique of Florence for ‘the upstart people and the sudden gains’ (La gente nuova e i subiti guadagni). Others are more favourable, such as Poggio’s dialogue On True Nobility, which fits in better with the image of life as a race which the best man wins (above, p. 205). There was considerable interest in ancient Greek and Roman examples of men of humble origins rising to high place. The dominant value system (in Tuscany at least) favoured social mobility. However, a famous study of America in the mid-twentieth century revealed serious discrepancies between the theory and the practice of social mobility, discrepancies which cannot be discounted for earlier periods.62
It is unfortunately impossible to measure the rate of social mobility in Renaissance Italy. The evidence is too fragmentary and the different systems of taxation, and so on, in different states make precise comparison virtually impossible.63 This is particularly unfortunate in a field where the historian who does not make a statement about quantities says virtually nothing, for there is virtually no society without some measure of social mobility and no society where mobility is ‘perfect’ – in other words, where the status of individuals has a purely random relation to that of their parents. All societies are somewhere in between these two extremes; what matters is the precise position.
All the same there are good reasons for asserting that social mobility was relatively high in the cities of fifteenth-century Italy, and above all in early fifteenth-century Florence, with ‘new men’ (gente nuova) coming in from the countryside and becoming citizens and holding office in number sufficient to alarm patricians such as Rinaldo degli Albizzi, who, according to a contemporary chronicle, launched a violent attack on these new men in a meeting held in 1426.64 The competitiveness, the envy and the stress on achievement of the Florentines (discussed above, p. 204) look very much like characteristics of a mobile society.
By the later fifteenth century, however, the ranks had closed. In Padua, Verona, Bergamo and Brescia, the change came earlier, perhaps as a result of their incorporation into the Venetian empire. In Venice itself there was little opportunity for new men to enter the patriciate throughout the period, whatever mobility there may have been at lower levels.65
The second question which this section attempts to answer is whether Italian society of this period may reasonably be described as ‘bourgeois’. That it was bourgeois has been the assumption of many historians of the Renaissance, as we have seen, but this bold statement needs to be hedged about with at least a few qualifications and distinctions.66
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Italy was one of the most highly urban societies in Europe. In 1550, about forty Italian towns had a population of 10,000 or more. Of these, about twenty had a population of 25,000 or more, as follows (figures have been rounded to the nearest 5,000).67
210,000 Naples
160,000 Venice
70,000 Milan, Palermo
60,000 Bologna (1570), Florence, Genoa (1530)
50,000 Verona
45,000 Rome (55,000 in 1526)
40,000 Mantua, Brescia
35,000 Lecce, Cremona
30,000 Padua, Vicenza
25,000 Lucca, Messina (1505), Piacenza, Siena
20,000 Peruia, Bergamo, Parma, Taranto, Trapani
In the rest of Europe, from Lisbon to Moscow, there were probably no more than another twenty towns of this size. About a quarter of the population of Tuscany and the Veneto was urban; in all the regions of Europe, only Flanders is likely to have had a higher proportion of townspeople.
It must not be assumed that all these townspeople were bourgeois. Renaissance Florence and other cities rested on the backs of what contemporaries called the popolo minuto, the ‘labouring classes’.68 Florence has been described as ‘two cities’ of rich and poor, even if the potential conflict between these two groups was reduced by patron–client relations, solidarity between neighbours and opportunities for social mobility.69 All the same, the relative importance of Italian towns is obviously linked with the relative importance of merchants, professional men, craftsmen and shop-keepers. All these groups are sometimes called ‘bourgeois’; none of them fits the traditional model of a society divided into clergy, nobles and peasants. However, it is necessary to distinguish between them. Rich merchants were sometimes important as patrons. The craftsmen sired the artists, while the professional men sired the writers and humanists, whether they were lawyers (Machiavelli’s father), physicians (Ficino’s father), notaries (Brunelleschi’s father) or professors (Pomponazzi’s father).
To go beyond these relatively precise points requires speculation. Was there an affinity between Renaissance values, notably the concern with abstraction, measurement and the individual, and the values of one or more groups within the bourgeoisie? The analogies are obvious enough, but the point must not be made too crudely. Machiavelli was a master of political calculation, but he expressed contempt for Florence as a city governed by shop-keepers (uomini nutricati nella mercanzia), and he described himself as ‘unable to talk about gains and losses, about the silk-guild or the wool-guild’.70
There are other links between the social structure of Renaissance Italy and its art and literature. The importance of the lineage and the value set upon its cohesion, in noble and patrician circles at least, helps explain the importance of the family chapel and its tombs, the focus of a kind of ancestor worship. No ancestors, no lineage. Large sums of money were spent on palaces partly because they were a symbol of the greatness of the ‘house’ in the sense of the family. Loggias might be built (as, in the most famous case, that of the Rucellai in fifteenth-century Florence) as a setting for feasts and other rituals involving a large group of kinsmen. On the other hand, a breakdown of the cohesiveness of the extended family may well have encouraged Renaissance ‘individualism’ (the self-consciousness no less than the competition).71
Finally, this brief survey of Italian society suggests that the ambiguous status of the painter, the musician and even, to some extent, the humanist are special cases of a more general problem: that of finding a place in the social structure for everyone who was not a priest, warrior or peasant (above, p. 200). If the status of the artist was ambiguous, so was that of the merchant. It is prob
ably no mere coincidence that it was in cities of shop-keepers, Florence in particular, that the artist was accepted most easily. It was probably easier for achievement-oriented merchant cultures to recognize the worth of artists and writers than it was for birth-oriented military cultures such as France, Spain and Naples. It is no surprise to find a relatively mobile society like Florence associated with respect for achievement and also with a high degree of creativity.
THE ECONOMY72
The fact that towns were larger and more numerous in Italy than elsewhere does a good deal to explain the importance in the social structure of the different ‘middle classes’, such as the craftsmen, merchants and lawyers. But this explanation leads to a further question: why were towns so important in Italy?
Once established, towns were able to maintain their position by their economic policies. Cities generally controlled the countryside around them, their contado, and they might enforce at the expense of the countryside a policy of cheap food for their own inhabitants, as a study of Pavia, for instance, has demonstrated.73 The contado was also forced to pay more than its share of tax, which must have been an incentive for the more prosperous peasants to migrate to the city. Revolts against cities by their rural subjects were not uncommon; Tuscan highlanders rebelled in 1401 and again in 1426 against their domination by Florence.74 Citizens also enjoyed legal and political privileges which inhabitants of the countryside lacked. In the sixteenth century, pregnant women used to come into Lucca from the contado to give their children the advantages of birth within the city walls.75 No wonder that there was an Italian proverb to the effect that the countryside is for animals and the city for men.
These policies do not, of course, explain how the cities came to grow up where they did in the first place. The siting of the major urban centres of Renaissance Italy owed a good deal to the communication system inherited partly from nature and partly from ancient Rome. Genoa, Venice, Rimini, Pesaro, Naples and Palermo are all seaside towns, while Rome and Pisa are not far from the coast. Pavia and Cremona are on the Po, Pisa and Florence on the Arno, and so on. The Roman Via Emilia, still followed by the railway, links Piacenza, Parma, Modena, Bologna, Imola, Faenza, Forli and Rimini.76
These advantages are still insufficient to explain the importance of the towns of Renaissance Italy. Towns develop in response to demands from other places, either their immediate hinterland or more distant areas, because they perform services for these other places. In the case of pre-industrial Europe, it is useful to distinguish three types of service and three types of city.
First, there was the commercial city, usually a port, such as Venice and its rival Genoa. The hinterland they served was much more than the Veneto or Liguria. Genoa was no longer so great a commercial power as it had been in the thirteenth century, especially after the Turks took Caffa, its trading post on the Black Sea, but its role in the grain and the wool trade involved economic relations with France, Spain and North America.77 As for Venice, in a sense its economic hinterland was the whole of Europe because Venetian merchants were the principal middlemen in the trade between Europe and the East (Aleppo, Alexandria, Beirut, Caffa, Constantinople, Damascus, etc.), without serious competitors before the Portuguese began to use the Cape route at the end of the fifteenth century. In the early fifteenth century, Venice was one of the greatest merchant cities in the world (after Cairo, Guangzhou and Suzhou) and exported 10 million ducats’ worth of goods a year. The Venetians imported cotton, silk and spices (especially pepper), for which they paid partly in woollen cloth (English as well as Italian) and partly in silver coins minted specially for the purpose. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, 2.5 million pounds of spices came to Venice every year from Alexandria, and 300,000 ducats, besides merchandise, went back in return. The spices were resold to the merchants of Augsburg, Nuremberg and Bruges.78
Secondly, there was the craft-industrial town such as Milan or Florence. Florence was the industrial town par excellence, and cloth-making the chief industry; a late fifteenth-century description of the city lists 270 cloth-making workshops, compared with 84 for woodcarving and inlay, 83 for silk, 74 for goldsmiths and 54 for stonedressers. Through cloth-making the Florentines became involved in trade. Their Calimala guild (discussed earlier as a patron of the arts) imported cloth from France and Flanders, arranged for it to be ‘finished’ (sheared, dyed, and so on), and re-exported it.79 Cloth-making was also important in Milan, but the city was best known for its armourers and other metal-workers.80 Genoese silks had an international reputation, while Venice was famous for its glass, its ship-building and, from the 1490s or thereabouts, its printing industry; Aldo Manuzio was the most scholarly and the most famous but far from the only Venetian printer of the sixteenth century. In the sixteenth century, Venice was the most important centre of printing in Europe.81
Thirdly, there was the service city. One of the most profitable services to offer was financial. From the fourteenth century to the sixteenth, the Italians dominated European banking. The leading firms included the Bardi and the Peruzzi of Florence (till Edward III and other rulers bankrupted them), the Medici, and, at the end of the period, the Pallavicini and the Spinola of Genoa, who lent vast sums to King Philip of Spain. Capital cities offered other kinds of service – Naples and Rome, for example, were cities of officials and centres of power. In the case of Naples, the hinterland for the ‘services’ provided by judges, advocates, tax collectors, and so on, was the Kingdom of Naples or, in the reign of Alfonso of Aragon, his entire Mediterranean Empire. In the case of Rome, the hinterland was sometimes the Papal States, but for some functions it was the whole Catholic world. Rome was, as a contemporary critic remarked, ‘a shop for religion’ (una bottega delle cose di Cristo). Among its invisible exports were indulgences and dispensations. This huge business required management, and an important role was played by the pope’s bankers, from the Medici to Agostino Chigi of Siena, remembered today for his patronage of Raphael.82
Despite the growing importance of grain imports, this elaborate urban structure rested on the foundation of Italian agriculture.83 Particularly fertile was the Po valley, one of the great plains of Europe. It owed this fertility partly to nature – a well-distributed rainfall – and partly to human activity. In the course of the fifteenth century several canals were dug in Lombardy, and irrigation schemes allowed formerly waste land to be brought under the plough. By the year 1500, some 85 per cent of the land between Pavia and Cremona was under cultivation, an extremely high proportion for the period when marshes and woods were much more widespread than they are today. Dairy farming was becoming important.84
South of the Po valley the picture was less rosy. In Tuscany, although the hilly terrain restricted agriculture, the interior valleys were fertile. The Valdarno was best known for grain, the Valdichiana for wine, the Mugello for fruit, and the area around Lucca for olives. However, in the fourteenth and fifteenth century land was going out of cultivation in Tuscany, and 10 per cent of the villages disappeared altogether.85 Further south, the rocky terrain and the low rainfall in the growing season have always been obstacles to cultivation, and, despite pockets of prosperity around Naples and elsewhere, southern agriculture was in decline. There was a gradual shift from arable to pasture, accompanied by a fall in population. As in Thomas More’s England, the sheep were eating up the men.
To maintain Italy’s high urban population, it was necessary for many farmers to produce for the market. For example, the concentration in Venice of some 160,000 people who did not grow their own food led to the commercialization of agriculture not only in the Veneto but as far afield as Mantua, the Marches and even, perhaps, Apulia. The Italian cloth industry encouraged the growing of woad in Lombardy and the keeping of sheep in the Roman Campagna and in the south, as well as in Tuscany.
This brief description of the Italian economy is intended as no more than an introduction to the question of its links with the Renaissance. Before discussing these links, however, it is necess
ary to tackle one major problem. Was the economy ‘capitalist’? Capitalism has been defined in many different ways, but it may be useful to emphasize two features of this mode of production: the concentration of capital in the hands of a few entrepreneurs and the institutionalization of a rational, calculating approach to economic problems. It may also be useful to draw distinctions between commercial, financial and industrial capitalism.86
It is not difficult to find spectacular examples in this period of rich entrepreneurs, such as Averardo di Bicci de’Medici (the grandfather of Cosimo), who left a fortune of 180,000 florins in 1428. It was possible for entrepreneurs to accumulate capital in this way because in some leading industries many of the workers were no longer independent craftsmen. Cloth-making was the industry in which the division of labour was most highly developed; contemporaries distinguished some twenty-five or more steps in the process of turning a fleece into a piece of finished cloth, and most of these stages involved a specialized occupation. In Florence, several of these jobs, such as beating, sorting and combing the wool, were carried out in large workshops, which it is tempting to regard as ‘factories’, by men who were paid by the day. Much of the spinning was done by women living at home, but they might still be dependent on the entrepreneur who supplied them with the raw material. In Genoa and Lucca, the silk merchants provided not only the raw material but also spinning machines and workshops, which they hired out to spinners who worked for them, as they hired looms out to weavers.87 This system is very different from industrial capitalism in the nineteenth-century sense of large-scale organization and direct control by the manufacturer, but it is clear that the entrepreneur played a central role and that he exercised considerable control by indirect means.
The numerate mentality of Italian townsmen has already been discussed (above, p. 209). What needs emphasis here is the existence of institutions which both expressed and encouraged this mode of thought and the existence of a complex credit structure which depended on abstraction and calculation and included banks, a public debt, commercial companies and even maritime insurance. As we have seen, banking was something of an Italian speciality in this period. Besides banks, there were also communal pawnshops (Monti di Pietà), which spread in the later fifteenth century with the encouragement of the Church. These Monti borrowed money as well as lending it, and paid regular interest. They were modelled on the public debt, the Monte commune, which had been set up in Florence in the middle of the fourteenth century, thus making the citizens into investors in the state. Florence also had a ‘Dowry fund’ (Monte delle doti), in which the investor received his money back with interest at the marriage of his daughter.88 Commercial companies existed, and it was possible to invest in them without taking part in their management and with only a limited liability in the case of the company’s failure. It was also possible to insure against the loss of ships – Venice was the great centre of marine insurance – while, in Genoa, husbands could even insure against the risk of their wives dying in childbirth.89