In the early days the communes had been run largely by aristocratic alliances, yet their expansion and growing wealth seemed to require the participation of other classes, especially the cities’ merchants and bankers. These were after all the chief generators of wealth, important figures not only in the communes but also in the panorama of European trade, which they dominated. Risking piracy or shipwreck at sea or robbery on land, they were the men who supplied such needs and luxuries of the material life as leather from Córdoba, wool from the Cotswolds, sugar from Damascus, spices from the Levant, tuna from Sardinia, ceramics from Majorca, sword-blades from Toledo, almonds from Valencia and raisins from Màlaga. Not surprisingly, they felt entitled to some say in government and resented their exclusion from office.
Merchants, bankers and the rest of the middle classes – from lawyers and doctors to shopkeepers and artisans – were grouped in the city’s guilds. The 12,000 citizens of Prato had fifteen guilds, of which the most important, representing the town’s chief industry, was the Arte della lana, the wool merchants’ guild. In the hierarchy of Florentine guilds of the period the most influential were those of judges, bankers, doctors, dealers in silk, traders in wool and furriers, who were much in demand in winter because pelts were cheaper than cloth. Florence’s Arte dei medici e speziali, which included doctors, surgeons, dentists and opticians, had over a thousand members: after passing their exams doctors had to promise to refrain from taverns and brothels and in return they were rewarded by the city with a horse, an attendant and exemption from paying taxes.8 Surviving Florentine guildhalls, such as those of the silk makers and the wool merchants, are among the city’s loveliest buildings.
From the beginning of the thirteenth century associations between members of various guilds were formed under the term the popolo, though the word itself is misleading because people later regarded as ‘the people’ – the poor, the peasants and the unskilled workers – were excluded from it. The popolo consisted of many different types of guildsmen pressing for political concessions from the nobles; its richer members, such as merchants and lawyers (known as the popolo grasso), aspired to office, while its poorer members, such as shopkeepers and artisans (the popolo minuto), demanded equitable justice and taxation, matters in which nobles often had an unfair advantage. Class distinctions, however, were seldom precise, and the factions that fought and rioted in the cities were rarely homogeneous. Nobles sometimes joined the popolo, guildsmen often sided with the aristocracy, and men of the popolo minuto frequently fought against the adherents of the popolo grasso.
Urban conflicts increased at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Armed bands of the popolo managed to expel the nobles of Lucca in 1203, and the popolo took power in that city again in 1250 and shortly afterwards in Bologna and Genoa as well. Even Siena, more peaceful than most cities, suffered sporadic riots, risings and coups in the three decades after the overthrow of the Nine in 1355: the popolo were in power from that year to 1368, when an uprising put leaders of the popolo minuto into government. Yet the triumphs of the popolo were really limited to Tuscany, especially Florence, where the popolo minuto shared power for much of the fourteenth century; in only a handful of towns in Lombardy, Emilia and the Veneto did it enjoy more than a transient success.
Urban violence was not only between classes or economic interests. Aristocratic factionalism – too many nobles competing for too few offices – often developed into warfare. As the magnates lived in cities rather than castles in the country, they felt the need to build urban strongholds in the form of medieval skyscrapers, towers sometimes 200 feet high, a phenomenon now best represented in the small town of San Gimignano and in the city of Bologna, where twenty-two of its more than eighty towers are still fully or partially standing; Florence in its heyday contained even more, perhaps as many as 150. Such structures were clearly designed for military purposes, to serve as watchtower and refuge and defensive bastion, but they were also objects of prestige value, of ostentation and arrogance and the desire to intimidate. They answered to man’s perennial yearning to build higher than his neighbours, to ‘tower over’ others.
Class, competition and vendettas all contributed to factionalism; so did distant loyalties to the empire and the papacy. Yet the victory of one faction over another seldom resulted in peace. Once they had expelled or exterminated their opponents, triumphant Guelphs could be relied upon to turn against each other in town after town – Parma, Florence, Reggio, Piacenza, Imola, Modena and indeed others. The feud in Florence between the strongly pro-papal ‘Black Guelphs’ and the more conciliatory ‘White Guelphs’ forced Dante into permanent exile.
Looking back from the foreign invasions of the sixteenth century to the medieval experience of the city-states, Francesco Guicciardini, the great Florentine historian and statesman, admitted that the ‘calamities’ that Italy was enduring might have been avoided if the country had been united. Nevertheless, there would not have been such wealth, such merchandise, such a ‘splendour of innumerable noble and beautiful cities’, under a single power; thus he was glad that neither Frederick nor anyone else had emerged as king of all Italy.9 In any case rivalry between communes had certain healthy aspects: it assisted civic patriotism and loyalty to a city, and it promoted artistic competition between neighbours. Furthermore, rivalry did not invariably degenerate into violence. Communes were sometimes able to cooperate – as they demonstrated in the various incarnations of the Lombard League. They might have no desire for unity or federalism but they were prepared to form tactical, temporary alliances to ward off a threatening outsider.
Left to themselves, however, the communes had a natural tendency to expand – to strengthen a border, thwart a rival, acquire more agricultural land – and expansion was inevitably achieved at the expense of weaker neighbours. From the beginning of the fourteenth century it was clear that Florence, which had once lagged behind Lucca and Pisa, would become the dominant power in Tuscany and thus a city to be feared and even hated by other cities. Poor Prato, only eleven miles from Florence, never had a chance. It was absorbed in 1350, soon followed by Arezzo, Pisa and eventually Siena; only Lucca remained permanently beyond the Florentine reach. Other cities were as predatory and successful, notably Milan and Venice, which between them came to control most of the north and the north-east. Wars between the cities continued for a hundred years from the Black Death until the Peace of Lodi in 1454, which established the Lega Italica (Italian League), whose members pledged to come to each other’s defence. By that time power in the peninsula was effectively divided among Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples and the Papal States.
The internal factionalism of the cities, so incessant a feature of the thirteenth century, raised doubts about the viability of communal government. Decades of anarchy and violence left people yearning for strong leadership even if they lost some of their liberties as a result. Communes thus began to welcome dictators in the Roman sense, men who would lead their cities in a crisis and retire soon afterwards. As it turned out, however, the most successful ‘temporary’ leaders refused to retire and instead became ‘signori’ and founders of dynasties. It would be simplistic to describe this process as a descent from democracy to tyranny, but the change was significant: decisions were now made by one man, whose successors were his descendants. Not many people, it seems, reacted to this development by weeping for lost liberty or sighing for a return to the commune.
Signorial rule was more common in the north, where feudalism was invigorated as a result, than in Tuscany, on the other side of the Apennines. By the middle of the thirteenth century it had come to Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Cremona, Pavia and Piacenza. Some cities, such as Genoa, Bologna and Perugia, oscillated between old and new regimes before opting for one, Genoa eventually returning to republicanism and Bologna and Perugia becoming signorial. Others succumbed quickly to powerful and enduring dynasties such as the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Malatesta in Rimini, the Montefeltro in Urbino, and the Visconti and Sforza in Milan. The
heads of the Estensi family became lords of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio in the thirteenth century and, though later deprived of Ferrara by the pope, they carried on as dukes of Modena (one of their daughters marrying the Stuart King James II) until overthrown by nationalists in 1859.
The signori would not have got where they did without being clever, ruthless, rich and intimidating. Yet few of them were as cruel as Ezzelino da Romano, aptly placed by Dante boiling in blood in the seventh circle of the Inferno. He was one of the monsters of Italian history, who called himself ‘Vicar of the [Trevisan] March’ and terrorized the cities of Verona, Vicenza, Treviso and Padua in the first half of the thirteenth century. Some of the others were generous and up to a point civilized, such as Oberto Pallavicini, Ezzelino’s counterpart in the west, or Luchino Visconti in Milan, the most talented and sympathetic of all, a man whose family ruled over much of Lombardy and the north until 1447.
Signorial rule was neither inevitable nor always successful in the cities where it was imposed. Venice and Siena escaped it altogether, and others rejected it after experimental periods. Cities with a weak landed nobility and a strong urban economy were less susceptible than others to the ambitions of aspiring signori. Pisa was the only great Tuscan city that was signorial for long. Florence had a republic on and off until 1530, nearly 300 years after signorial government had become established in some cities of the north. Lucca had signori at the beginning of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – with a period of Pisan rule in between – but thereafter re-established a republic that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century, when it was captured by a French revolutionary army. Napoleon Bonaparte later gave it to his sister Elisa.
REPUBLICAN ITALY
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) seems almost too good to have been true. The illegitimate son of an exiled Florentine, this generous and attractive figure was one of the great intellectuals of his age. He was a priest and a secretary at the papal chancery, yet he managed to exclude religion from nearly all his writing. At school in Padua he had studied classical Latin literature and he quickly grasped how the lessons of ancient Rome were pertinent to the republics of contemporary Italy. Writing as an adult in both Latin and Tuscan, Alberti produced books that included poetry, biographies, a comedy, treatises on philosophy, one work on diplomatic ciphers and another one on mathematics. He wrote the first Italian grammar, which promoted the use of the Tuscan vernacular, and the first book of geography in Europe since the classical era; in his work On Painting he established the rules for achieving perspective in art.
As the pope’s architectural adviser, Alberti wrote a survey of architecture in ten volumes, the most important work on the subject during the Renaissance. Yet, like other scholars of his time, he was eager to be a useful citizen and to put his theories into practice; he thus became an outstanding architect, as the churches of Sant’ Andrea in Mantua and Santa Maria Novella in Florence demonstrate. His talents were diverse but they were also complementary. He was the archetypal ‘universal man’ of the Renaissance, one of a band of remarkable humanists who in their range were the intellectual counterparts of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
Humanist thought owed much to republican Rome and much also to the republican communes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the period when patriotism and active citizenship were encouraged, when the bishops and imperial agents lost power and people recognized each other as fellow citizens rather than as fellow subjects of a remote sovereign. To civic pride, an inheritance of communal Italy, the humanists added the aim of a secular intellectual life and a spirit of scientific inquiry. They attacked superstition and the corruption of the Church, they insisted on research uncontaminated by religion or politics, and they promoted the revival of classical learning, finding and preserving Greek and Latin texts and arguing that these contained instructive and relevant material that could not be found in the Bible. Their work was supported by nobles, rulers and sometimes even a pope, men who were eager to become patrons of scholarship as well as of art. Several of these humanists were given posts in government, especially in Florence, the capital of humanism from around 1375 to 1450.
The inspiration for the humanists was the Tuscan Petrarch, who died in 1374; for them he had something of Virgil as a poet, of Seneca as a stoic and of Cicero as a stylist; he was revered too as the discoverer of Cicero’s letters to his friend Atticus. Yet the humanists of succeeding generations were not inclined to limit themselves to his precept of study and solitude. They wanted a life of service also, to be administrators as well as scholars, to advance the cause of republicanism through example and education, training citizens to strive for the ideal republic through a knowledge of history, philosophy, the classical texts and to some extent science. Coluccio Salutati was a bibliophile and chancellor of Florence, in charge of the republic’s official correspondence, while Leonardo Bruni followed him as chancellor and was in addition an historian. The combative Lorenzo Valla was a philosopher, historian and secretary to the King of Naples; he was also the man who punctured the temporal pretensions of the papacy by revealing that the ‘Donation of Constantine’ was a forgery.*
The humanists were not the first people to look to ancient Rome as their exemplar. The political instability of their commune had left medieval Florentines sighing for a new Caesar, while Rome’s populist dictator in the fourteenth century, Cola di Rienzo, had declared himself tribune, proclaimed Roman rule over the world and granted Roman citizenship to the Italian cities.† Yet Bruni and the humanists were inspired by the Roman Republic rather than by Caesar, Augustus and their heirs. Cicero was their hero, Virgil their poetic inspiration. The Florentines now saw themselves as defenders of liberty against the encroachments of tyranny, though they tended to exaggerate the resemblances with Rome, even thinking of their citizens as ‘true Roman people and descendants of Romulus’.10 Exaltation of the ancient republic sometimes had unforeseen and even undesirable consequences: several aspiring assassins of the ruling Medici in the early sixteenth century – one of them successful – were hoping to emulate Brutus, the most notorious of Caesar’s killers. Remarkable though the humanists were, their constant identification with the classical world seems sometimes naive. Italians of their time did not actually lead lives very similar to those of the ancients, except perhaps for those with villas in the countryside, and they found pageants and dancing more entertaining than gladiators and oratory. Nor did their architecture have as much in common as they seemed to think. Just as Romanesque buildings are not Roman except for their rounded arches, so Renaissance churches, even those by Alberti, do not closely resemble the pillared temples of the classical world.
The Florentines were a proud people with much to be proud about, though they did not always see their projects through to completion: most of their principal churches were left without façades.‡ After the Black Death their economy revived rapidly, and by the end of the fourteenth century they had acquired a silk industry and a new set of bankers, among them the Medici. Their city-state had also expanded by 1433 to absorb nearly the whole of Tuscany except for Siena and Lucca. Venice may have been a more successful republic§ but – in the fifteenth century at least – Florence was the more intellectual and cultured one. Florentine painters, sculptors and architects were innovators, encouraged by the humanists and by their own study of classical forms. Several of them were scientists as well. Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome for Florence cathedral is not only an artistic masterpiece but an engineering triumph as well. With its 4 million bricks, it remains the largest masonry dome ever built, larger than St Peter’s in Rome, St Paul’s in London and the Capitol in Washington.
Another reason for Florentine self-congratulation was the system of government, the Signoria and two consultative bodies (the executive branch), the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune (the legislature), and a fairly effective civil service. The Signoria consisted of eight chief magistrates (known as priors) chosen by the four districts of the city,
and a ninth, the gonfalonier of justice. As they were elected for terms of two months only and prevented from being immediately re-elected, it was difficult for priors to accumulate power or aspire to tyranny. By 1400 some 6,000 citizens were eligible for the chief magistracies, a figure that gave Florence a degree of political participation larger than anywhere else in Europe: during the 120 years before that date members from 1,350 families became priors. The spirit of the communes and the example of Rome seemed to have helped forge a just and plausible system.11
Yet the republic never managed to solve the problem of factionalism, endemic to all city-states except Venice. Ideal theoretical systems were incapable of preventing feuding between groups of powerful families. Thus the republic was usually in a precarious position, and in the 1430s it effectively succumbed to the Medici, as later republics did in 1512 and again in 1530. The humanists despaired at the extinction of their hopes for what seemed so irrational a reason as factionalism. Leonardo Bruni remained chancellor under Cosimo de’ Medici but he no longer aspired to change his world; as a solace he read Plato in his spare time while pondering on what might have been.
One reason for the republic’s failure was its military incompetence. While its various wars against Milan may have been defensive ones, the campaigns against its Tuscan rivals were aggressive and, as it turned out, often farcical. Humiliated repeatedly on medieval battlefields by armies from Pisa, Siena and Lucca, the republic later employed its artist-scientists to combine with its soldiers to defeat the enemy by means of ingenious engineering. Already famous for his as yet uncompleted dome, Brunelleschi was dispatched in 1430 to Lucca, where he began to divert the River Serchio so as to flood the land around the city and force it to surrender. The still more ingenious Lucchesi, however, sallied out and breached Brunelleschi’s new canal, flooding the plain in an unexpected way so that it demolished a dam built by the architect and swamped the Florentine camp. Seventy years later, a new republic tried a similar tactic, although this time the plan was to divert the River Arno away from Pisa so as to leave that city without water. The engineer employed to design the project was Leonardo da Vinci, an even more versatile figure than Brunelleschi, but his miscalculations with his canal were as embarrassing as his predecessor’s. On this occasion the waterway was destroyed not by the defenders but by a storm which collapsed its walls.12
The Pursuit of Italy Page 10