Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France 9781442670891

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1. Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context
Chapter 2. Italians and the French Reformation: Lyons, 1562
Chapter 3. The Italians at Lyons: Usury and Heresy
Chapter 4. The Italians and the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre
Chapter 5. Background to a Massacre: The Italian Courtiers and Bankers
Chapter 6. Anti-Italian Discourses
Chapter 7. The Estates of Blois
Chapter 8. The Court Italians and the Gathering Storm
Chapter 9. The Flight of the Italians
Chapter 10. The Last of the Italians
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ANTI-ITALIANISM IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

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HENRY HELLER

Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2003 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3689-9

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Heller, Henry, 1938Anti-Italianism in sixteenth-century France / Henry Heller. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3689-9 l. Italians - France - History - i6th century. 2. Xenophobia France — History — i6th century. 3. Nationalism — France — History - i6th century. I. Title. DC1H.3.H442OO2

944'-0045i

02002-902601-6

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Preface vii Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

3

1 Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context 7 2 Italians and the French Reformation: Lyons, 1562 28 3 The Italians at Lyons: Usury and Heresy 51 4 The Italians and the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre 80 5 Background to a Massacre: The Italian Courtiers and Bankers 93 6 Anti-Italian Discourses 114 7 The Estates of Blois 137 8 The Court Italians and the Gathering Storm 160 9 The Flight of the Italians 183 10 The Last of the Italians 206 Conclusion 227 Notes 231 Bibliography Index 295

267

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Preface

On the eve of the Second World War France was internally divided by social conflict and by fear of another war. In the Card region of the Midi such tensions even helped to revive centuries-old conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. Police reports from 1939, furthermore, noted an upsurge of xenophobia among the population against foreigners living in the region. According to these reports, many inhabitants believed that strangers, be they Spaniards, Italians, Germans, or Jews, represented a potential political and economic danger.1 Four hundred years earlier, likewise in the midst of war, the presence of foreigners also stirred resentment in the Midi. At Lyons a cahier des doleances for the EstatesGeneral, which met in 1576, complained about the presence of aliens on French soil: 'experience has sufficiently demonstrated that foreigners, and particularly the Italians, do not come to the Kingdom to seek to serve the King or the well-being of his subjects. Rather they come to gain their own particular profit. They do so by making use of certain subtle devices in which they excel above all other nations/2 In this earlier case then it was the Italians who were singled out for attack. The xenophobia of the Lyonnais against Italians was by no means exceptional. Much of France both north and south at that moment was in the grip of a deep wave of anti-Italian feeling. As in 1939 this xenophobia expressed itself at a time when France was threatened by war and internal division. Indeed, the religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics, which was still evident around Nimes at the outbreak of the Second World War, was the focal point of France's troubles in the sixteenth century. It is this sixteenth-century case of French xenophobia directed against the Italians that is the subject of the present work. Indeed, this study has been undertaken in part out of a conviction that there, is an essential

viii

Preface

continuity between the problems of early modern and modern French history. Xenophobia is hardly the dominant note of French history. Yet in times of stress it is a recurrent theme of French national experience. The continuity of that experience is above all to be found in the existence from the sixteenth century onwards of a centralized state. With the institution of the French royal state, the issue of who was or was not a member of the national community posed itself as an issue for the first time in political rather than religious terms. Whether the presence of foreigners in the kingdom served the interests of the king and his subjects became a major issue. Whether strangers should or should not be allowed to naturalize themselves became a matter of debate. Indeed, the status of strangers in France became a more acute problem in the context of the internal religious divisions and weakened central government of the late sixteenth century. As in later periods of French history, there were many Frenchmen who were prepared to argue that the religious, political, and economic divisions of the country were generated by the strangers in their midst. The influence of the Italians was perceived as a token of the political and economic weakness of France. In the meantime, the notion of a more closely unified national identity as a means of tying together a hopelessly divided religious community gained support. Such a common political identity could perhaps replace a hopelessly fractured religious unity. The exclusion of the Italian alien could become a substitute for the elimination of the heretic. As we shall see, expulsion of the foreigners proved to be an effective means of at least temporarily overcoming religious and political divisions. Above all it turned out to be an effective mechanism of strengthening the state, which at the beginning of the seventeenth century more than ever emerged as the indispensable institution in French society. Purifying the state proved to be a more practical goal than cleansing the realm of religious dissidence. As such part of the social charisma which had been invested in religious worship was transferred to the veneration of the royal state. The rise of hostility toward foreigners is, then, part of the history of the so-called secularization of French politics. Diverse strands of sixteenth-century French anti-Italianism have been studied over the last hundred years, including those that developed among French humanists, anti-Machiavellians, and opponents of the late Valois court. This study tries to link these studies with the history of economic and financial opposition to the Italians that became particularly evident in the major urban centres of the kingdom. Historically there has often been a close tie between religious and ethnic conflict.

Preface

ix

It is certainly the case with respect to French hostility toward the Italians in the early modern period. Perhaps unfairly both French Protestants and Gallicans identified the Italians with the cause of ultramontane Catholicism. The consciousness of sixteenth-century Frenchmen, indeed Europeans, was above all shaped by religion. But the growth of trade and overseas exploration increasingly brought the different European peoples into contact with one another and with non-Europeans. In recent years there has developed a growing interest in the largely negative reaction of Europeans to Africans, American aboriginals, Arabs, Ottomans, and Jews. Likewise, a literature has begun to emerge on the antagonisms between the different European peoples in the early modern period. As a result, I have endeavoured to set this study of French anti-Italianism within the historiography of early modern nationalism, racism, and ethnic conflict. I would like to express my gratitude to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council for supporting my archival research on this project as well as my earlier research work on early modern French history. Thanks also to the librarians and archivists of the University of Manitoba, the Bodleian Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Archives Nationales, the Archives d'Etat of Geneva, Archives Municipales of Lyons, and the Archivio di Stato of Lucca for their kind assistance. Barbara Bennell and the other members of the staff of the document delivery service of the University of Manitoba library have been especially helpful to me. I owe a special debt to Sandra Ferguson of the History Department, University College, for helping me to prepare this manuscript for publication. The editors at the University of Toronto Press have been extremely congenial and helpful seeing the work through the press. I am especially grateful for the editorial help of Miriam Skey. Most of all I would like to thank my wife, Joanne, and children, Sharon, Shana, David, and Rebecca, who have stood by me through my years of travel, research, and writing.

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Abbreviations

AEG

Archives de 1'etat de Geneve

AM

Archives municipales (Lyons)

AN

Archives Nationales (Paris)

Arch. Stato Archivio di Stato (Lucca) BN

Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris)

DBF

Dictionnaire de biographie fran false

DBI

Dizionario biografico degli Italiani

R

Registre du Consistoire (Geneva)

RC

Registre de Conseil (Geneva)

Reg. BVP

Registres des deliberations du Bureau de la ville de Paris, ed. Francois Bonnardot et al.

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ANTI-ITALIANISM IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

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Introduction

This work is a case study of early ethnic conflict in European history. In this ethnic clash a small but powerful Italian diaspora resident in France came under attack by xenophobic elements of the French population during the tumultuous late sixteenth century. An upper stratum of Italian wholesale merchants, bankers, ecclesiastics, and courtiers constituted a quasi-colonial elite which exercised inordinate power in the French kingdom, especially under the last Valois kings Charles IX and Henri HI. Italian nobles and courtiers acquired exceptional power and were rewarded with large numbers of offices and pensions. At the same time Italian ecclesiastics acquired an unprecedentedly high number of offices in the French church. Italian bankers came to control the finances of the state and oversaw the imposition of new taxes on the increasingly hard-pressed French population. During this period Italian humanists and artists were given preference at court over their French counterparts. The court itself became more and more Italian in its language and manners. The cultural and political ascendancy of the Italians was closely linked with the powerful role that Italians played at the summit of French economic and commercial life. Italian cultural, ecclesiastical, political, and economic power provoked an increasingly strong reaction from French humanists, lawyers, ecclesiastics, nobles, merchants, and plebeians. The anti-Italian reaction, which began first among humanists and then took root among merchants, spread to Huguenots and nobles and, ultimately, to the urban Catholic population. Bits and pieces of this anti-Italian reaction have been studied by literary scholars, political theorists, and economic and social historians, but until now its overall course has not been systematically and comprehensively investigated. Yet as we will see anti-Italian xeno-

4 Introduction

phobia increased throughout the latter half of the sixteenth century and played an important role in the events surrounding the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the Estates-General of Blois in 1576-7, the Catholic League Revolt, and the triumph of Henri IV. The research on anti-Italianism embodied in the following chapters will throw light on several important aspects of late-sixteenth-century French history. The Italian involvement in the Calvinist uprising of 1562 will be re-examined. Using the resources in the Genevan archives, it will be shown that many more Italians in Lyons belonged to the Calvinist community than is commonly thought. It will be argued that the extent and historical importance of Protestant influence among this powerful group has not been sufficiently understood. A new perspective on the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day will be set out. It will be demonstrated that, alongside the Huguenots, Italians were likewise subjected to mob violence both prior to and after the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The attitude of the court toward the two groups played an important part in determining their fate. At one level this investigation of the roots of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre will serve to reassert the traditional historiographic view that stressed the key role of the court in this mass killing. But it will also put into question the now dominant view that the Massacre was a strictly religious affair. Anti-Italian discourse had anti-Semitic undertones. Above all this reflected the similar economic role of Italian and Jewish money-lenders. As a result the relationship between early modern anti-Semitism and antiItalianism will be explored. In this respect this study of anti-Italianism will serve to illuminate the social if not the religious roots of antiSemitism in the early modern period. Following the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, anti-Machiavellianism became a feature of the reaction against the Italians. It will be argued that the rational and empirical approach to politics reflected in the thought of the Florentine philosopher was seen as a threat to the religious and legal absolutes of a still traditional society. Italians came to be seen as embodiments of such moral relativism. The anti-Italianism of the Huguenots will be examined. But stress will also be laid on the hitherto virtually ignored anti-Italianism of the League. It is in the period of the League that the political impact of anti-Italian xenophobia reached a climax. The vehement attack on Italian economic and financial influence during the Estates-General of Blois (1588-9) was an important expression of the growing organized strength of a national bourgeoisie, it will be argued. The activities of the Italian financiers

Introduction 5

under Charles IX and Henri III will be tied together and detailed for the first time. Their role in the sale of rentes, offices, and the organization of national syndicates to farm the gabelle and the customs will be set out. As a result the background of the seventeenth-century Bourbon financial regime will be clarified. I hope to show that anti-Italianism in sixteenth-century France was a specific type of ethnic antagonism strongly tied to the religious preoccupations of the period. What is notable about this sixteenth-century French case is that ethnic exclusion was conceived as part of the solution to religious conflict. As such it helped to create a new sense of national identity based on the state rather than religion. The Roman Catholic religion revived, to be sure, but was not able to re-establish its monopoly over the religious identity of the French people. Good history is always rooted in the facts and problems of the past. But such history must also be contemporary history developing out of an awareness of the present. Despite or because of the recent tendency toward globalization, ethnic conflict has not disappeared but grown worse in recent decades. In France the legacy of anti-Semitism persists. Of equal if not greater significance is the hostility directed toward the African and Arab minorities resident in France. Ethnic conflict is by no means confined to France, but is today a major problem in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa as well. I will endeavour to show that ethnic hostility in late-sixteenth-century France had its distinctive features. Yet I also hope to demonstrate it had certain universal characteristics. Like the ethnic conflicts of the present, early modern anti-Italianism was based on an ethnocentrism that is culturally universal. Like the ethnic conflicts of the present, early modern French antiItalianism became dangerous when it was inflamed by a struggle over material resources. In this case, the antagonism between French and Italians played itself out as a conflict over money, markets, and political power.

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CHAPTER ONE

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context

In 1562 French Catholics and Protestants began killing one another in religious civil war. The conflict over religion that broke out in that year was to drag on for decades. These wars based on religious differences became the main preoccupation of those who lived through the latter part of the sixteenth century. The ups and downs of the interminable conflict, the apparent impossibility of compromise, and the upheaval and death that accompanied the wars shaped the experience of a whole generation of Frenchmen. But the wars of religion that divided sixteenth-century Frenchmen coincided with a less well-known outbreak of hostility that also troubled the period. The French turned their anger not only against one another, but also against the Italians living in their midst. It is this eruption of xenophobia rather than the religious conflict that is the subject of this book. Rich and powerful Italians in Lyons and Avignon became focal points of popular hatred even before the outbreak of the religious wars. Stirred up by sympathizers with Calvinism, hostility against Italian influence in Lyons was inflamed by sharpening socio-economic conflicts. In the case of Avignon anti-Italian sentiments seem to have been aroused by increasing resentment of political domination by the papacy. But whether directed against what was perceived as economic or political domination, the enmity against Italians in the two cities assumed the form of an amalgam of ethnic and religious animosity. Overt hostility toward Italians at first was limited to the towns of the southeast of France. It was here that the Italian influence was most evident. Animosity was directed in the first place against the wealthy and talented bankers, merchants, humanists, and nobles among Italian emigrants to the kingdom. The thousands of Italian labourers and crafts-

8 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

men who had migrated to France from Savoy, Piedmont, or elsewhere in the Italian peninsula were only a secondary consideration. In any event anti-Italian feeling then spread from the Midi to Paris and to other French provinces. This followed the migration of Italian nobles and financiers to Paris and the royal court from the 15505 onward. Attracted by the patronage of the Florentine queen Catherine de' Medici, a large number of Italians invaded the court. Among the most prominent of these courtiers were Rene de Birague, who became chancellor of France, Albert de Gondi, count of Retz and marshal of France, and Louis de Gonzaga, count of Nevers. In addition to these outstanding courdy figures, hundreds of other well-born Italians received military or episcopal appointments or were given pensions by the French monarchy in the reigns of Charles IX and Henri HI. In the wake of these socially superior place-seekers, there came to court as well a group of upstart financiers from Lyons, Florence, Lucca, and Milan. Because of their ability to provide ready credit, socially obscure figures like Scipio Sardini, Oratio Rucellai, and Sebastian Zamet made themselves indispensable to the financially hard-pressed French monarchy. As a result they came to control the finances of the Crown during the 15705 and 15805. In the eyes of many French nobles the Italian invaders had seized the principal officers of the state and taken control of the patronage of the court. In a tract emanating from the Huguenot nobility at the outbreak of the second civil war (1567), the Florentines at the court were compared to the despised Jews. The rootless Italians, according to this pamphlet, move from place to place. As such they are like the wandering Jews. They are fundamentally different from the sedentary French, who are seen as deeply attached to the soil of their homeland. The foreign speech and the strange places from which these itinerant Italians hail are alien to native-born Frenchmen. The instability and mobility of such strangers is fundamentally threatening to the essential order of French society. As a result, finding common ground with such foreigners is next to impossible.1 In contrast to the rootedness of the nobility of France, the Italians are viewed as incomprehensibly alien and cosmopolitan. They are subversive to the existing order and are without any real attachment to the soil of the kingdom. At the same time as the nobility was expressing its disdain and suspicion of the Italians who had invaded the court, the notables, bourgeoisie, and craftsmen of Paris and other towns were voicing their irritation at the Italians as well. The townsmen were particularly upset by the rapid

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context 9

increase in taxes for which they held the Italian financiers responsible. From the perspective of the urban population, the newly contrived fiscal devices and expedients recommended to the king by the Italians were the cause of a dramatic increase in the burden of taxation on Frenchmen. Once again the complainants compared the foreigners living in their midst to the Jews. The Italians (all Italians) were held to be literally sucking the blood of the unfortunate French people. On the eve of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, this popular xenophobia flared up into accusations against Italians resident in Paris of kidnapping and murdering children for their blood in the manner of the Jews. These denunciations, deeply rooted in popular Catholic consciousness, became the occasion for mob attacks on members of the Italian community in the streets of the city. Contemporaries saw this outburst in June 1572 as a dress rehearsal for the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of French Protestants that shortly followed.2 The Catholic mob in Paris, it seems, could potentially have massacred the Italian foreigners as well as the Huguenots. As this incident demonstrates anti-Italian feeling among the French was, thus, no longer confined to the Huguenot nobility. It was by then deeply embedded in the consciousness of the Catholic nobility and populace. But it was among Huguenots that hostility reached white heat following the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. In the eyes of Huguenots, Catherine de' Medici and her Italian entourage were responsible for the mass murder of Protestants. Moreover, the slaughter was not the outcome of an unpremeditated attack, but the result of a calculated Italian plot. Notions of political expediency found in Machiavelli's writings played an important role in confirming the idea of a conspiracy. As a consequence, what had been Machiavelli's rather positive initial reputation in France was transformed. Until the massacre Machiavelli had been known in France as an important Italian military theoretician and historian. When he was considered as such most commentaries on his writings were quite favourable. But from the time of the massacre his name became a by-word for the kind of political treachery, immorality, and tyrannical rule that was held to be characteristic of the Italian nation. 'Machiavellian' became an epithet directed at first against the queen mother and the Italian courtiers. Ultimately, it became an insult directed against Italians as a whole. Having been made scapegoats at Saint Bartholomew's Day for the troubles and divisions afflicting France, the Huguenots tried to turn the tables by throwing the blame on the Italian foreigners. In a series of

1O Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

pamphlets and treatises, Huguenot publicists argued that it was not they who were responsible for the civil wars, economic crisis, and political and moral chaos of France. Despite religious beliefs that differed from those of the majority, they claimed that French Protestants were as loyal to France as those who followed the old religion. It was not the Huguenots, but the aliens, i.e., the Italians, who, they charged, were responsible for the wars, oppressive taxes, religious divisions, and immorality in high places that afflicted the kingdom. Such accusations hit home. Threats and attacks against Italians increased noticeably, especially in the streets of Paris. A second Saint Bartholomew's Massacre directed against the Italians rather than the Huguenots appeared to be in the offing. In the summer of 1575 antiItalian riots involving thousands of Parisians troubled the French capital. At the Estates-General of Blois the next year the kingdom's three orders were able to find common ground by uniting in protest against excessive Italian influence in the court and over the fiscal system that they were said to control. Anti-Italian feeling continued into the next decade although at first in somewhat muted form. Its persistence was assured by the increasing Italian dominance over the finances of the crown. Notable too was the hostility to Italian influence that emerged within ecclesiastical and legal circles. The powerful Gallican lobby among members of the French church and judicial elite reacted against the attempted imposition of the decrees of the Council of Trent in France. At the same time, resentment erupted among the French clergy over the growing burden of royal taxes on the church. An Italianized papacy was seen as selling out the French church to the king in the pursuit of its own interest. Gallican-minded clergy and lawyers bridled at the growing influence of the Jesuit order, which was viewed as an instrument of Roman power. While these grievances were essentially questions of ecclesiastical politics, they were often voiced in terms of excessive Italian influence over the French church. Italian control over the church and royal finances was perceived as based on too great an Italian influence over the court, which under Henri III was seen as stained by corruption and perversity. While hostility toward the Italians was somewhat narrowly focused or muted in the first part of the 15805, it burst out into the centre of national politics again during the period of the dominance of the Catholic League. The program of the League made the issue of the financial and political influence of the Italians in France a central question. The League-controlled Estates-General of 1588 threatened to institute a commission of inquiry against the fiscal crimes of the Italian financiers.

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context

11

Under suspicion of supporting the royal party, most of the influential Italians abandoned Paris and Lyons and saw their property and goods confiscated. In the meantime the economic crisis of this period visibly eroded the financial and commercial basis of Italian influence. Economic nationalism was a key element of the program of re-unifying the kingdom and restoring royal power under Henri IV. The reduction or elimination of Italian financial and economic influence constituted a central element of the policies of the new king. Henri may have had to take an Italian princess Marie de' Medici as his consort but in doing so he was able finally to write off his immense debt to the grand duke of Tuscany. Indeed, Italian control over state finances was reduced, if not quite eliminated, by Henri's first minister, Sully. At the same time an assertive economic protectionism implemented by Barthelemy de Laffemas led to a gradual decline of Italian control over the French economy. Resentment over Italian influence was to reassert itself to a certain extent during the ascendancy of Concino Concini and Cardinal Mazarin in the following decades. But in the seventeenth century the numbers of Italians in the royal court and Gallican church declined precipitously. Their diminishing influence at court and in the Gallican church as well as over state finances and economic life led to the fading of anti-Italian sentiment. It is this relatively brief xenophobic episode against the Italians in latesixteenth-century French history that is the subject of this book. The transitory quality of this episode has the advantage of making its cultural, political, and economic dimensions more apparent than other more celebrated and prolonged examples of early modern ethnic hostility or racism. Hostility to the Jews or Moors is historically more complicated and deep-seated. The developing antipathy toward Africans and aboriginals in the New World is likewise part of a complex and long drawn-out process. On the other hand, the sudden upsurge and then rapid dissipation of this enmity toward Italians in France is a particularly clear-cut and more readily comprehensible instance of ethnic hostility in the early modern period. It should at once be made clear that ethnic animosity was at best a subsidiary issue in late-sixteenth-century France or in Europe as a whole. The principal problems of France in this period were the religious civil wars and the challenge to the authority of the royal state. Yet the emergence of anti-Italian feeling should be seen as closely related to these religious divisions and the attendant political crisis of the French state. The influx of Italians into the kingdom in the first place and the subsequent development of hostility toward them were connected to the

12 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

attempt to build and maintain a powerful French royal state. Fiscal and commercial privileges were granted to the Italians by the powerful French king Louis XI in the late fifteenth century. Confirmed by his Valois successors in the following decades, such royal privileges were responsible for the emergence of the fair of Lyons as a great financial and commercial emporium in the first part of the sixteenth century. Dominated by powerful Italian merchants and financiers, this great marketplace in the south of the kingdom helped to provide the monarchy with the resources and international connections necessary to pursue its goals as a great European power. In particular, the financial support of these Italians provided the monarchy with the means to pursue its political ambitions in the Italian peninsula. The subsequent growth of Italian influence at the court and over the finances of the state under the Valois kings had at first to do with the effort to maintain these political objectives in Italy. But by the 15605 ongoing and increasing Italian influence became a sign of the growing financial insolvency and internal political weakness of the monarchy. Unable to raise the funds necessary to carry on the conflict with the Huguenots, the Valois kings were forced into an ongoing relationship of fiscal dependence on Italian bankers and financiers. At the same time Charles IX and Henri III were faced with a French high aristocracy whose ambitions threatened to tear the kingdom apart. Given the increasing unreliability of the French aristocracy in a religiously divided and war-torn kingdom, the Valois turned to Italian ministers, courtiers, and military captains as the most reliable instruments of royal authority. If Charles IX could not readily control the Guise or Montmorency, he could more or less bank on the Strozzi and the Gondi as foreigners who were directly dependent on him. In reaction to royal patronage of such foreigners, anti-Italian sentiment spread among frustrated members of the French aristocracy. Their ambitions at court thwarted, French nobles complained of Italian upstarts enjoying the favour and confidence of the king and the queen mother in preference to members of the supposedly reliable French nobility. At a more popular level hatred of the Italians stemmed from the growing number of fiscal expedients introduced by the Italian financiers. These latter measures were designed in part to provide the monarchy with the resources necessary for its attempts to reassert control over the kingdom. In other words, the expression of anti-Italian feeling in respect to patronage and taxes represented a way of indirectly challenging royal authority. Study of the ups and downs of anti-Italian feeling,

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context 13

thus, can provide insight into some of the principal episodes of the political history of sixteenth-century France. The investigation of anti-Italianism can also illuminate the nature of the religious divisions in France in the period. The religious issue was undoubtedly central to the civil conflicts of late-sixteenth-century France. In France and elsewhere in Europe religion was paramount in popular as well as elite consciousness. Indeed, it was at the focal point of the psychological life of most Europeans. The ritual and liturgical consciousness of most of the population was governed by the traditional religion's calendar of festivals and holidays. Moreover, the artistic and intellectual energy of the cultural elites of the period continued to be mainly devoted to religious subject matter. A powerful institution in its own right, the church was an important adjunct of the authority of the state. Indeed, in this period of confessional conflict the future of the church as an institution was the central issue of political life. Precisely because it was so central an institution it cannot be detached from other factors. Religion in the sixteenth century was thus closely interwoven with other political, social, and cultural factors that must be taken into consideration. Beyond these incontrovertible realities, we should not assume that religion proper is to be taken as an independent variable that is not subject to further analysis. The fact is that religious belief and practice are not things unto themselves, but can be properly subject to sociological, historical, and psychological investigation.3 The sharpening of anti-Italian feeling in the sixteenth century was thus closely connected to changes in the nature of Western Christianity. A proper understanding of anti-Italianism must reckon with the fact that the nationalization and territorialization of religion sharply increased in sixteenth-century France as elsewhere in Europe. Religion was more and more seen in national terms and, indeed, helped to foster the growth of political nationalism. As a consequence the developing sense of a distinctively Gallican or French church intensified. In particular the conflicting outlook and interests of the French church in contrast to the Catholic Church of Rome and Italy were magnified by patriotic clergymen and laity. The power of Italian clergy who held benefices in the French church was increasingly questioned by both Gallicans and Huguenots. Hostility toward an Italianized papacy was seen by some as a way of reconciling French Catholics and Huguenots. Most scholars agree that modern nationalism was a product of the French Revolution. In particular, that era saw the mobilization of the masses in terms of nationalist political goals to a degree that was unprec-

14 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

edented. In the period 1500-1789, on the contrary, widespread illiteracy, the persistence of popular and regional dialects, poor communications, and institutionalized social and political inequality inhibited the development of a popular identification with the nation. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that a limited sense of nationalism began to develop among some sectors of the population in the late Middle Ages. In that period the term 'nation' still bore the restricted meaning of a corporation of foreign students, merchants, or clergy. That connotation persisted into the sixteenth century. The Italians who were resident in the city of Lyons, for example, were legally defined as part of the Florentine, Luccan, Milanese, and Genoese nations. Students at the Universities of Paris, Orleans, and Toulouse were divided similarly into so-called nations.4 Yet clearly a conception of nation in the wider, modern sense began to appear in the fifteenth century. At the Church Council of Constance (1417), for example, a discussion arose as to what constituted nationhood. On that occasion, the English delegation expressed the view that the essential elements or signs of nationhood were a blood relationship marking a people off from others. In addition to this assertion of kinship, the delegates from England defined nationhood as a habit of unity or as a peculiar language or territory that served as the people's dwelling place or homeland.5 Consciousness of the heroic and ancient traditions of the French monarchy and people were reinforced in the fifteenth century by the victorious conclusion of the wars against the English inspired by the acts of Joan of Arc. Indeed, a sense of French national consciousness helped to fill the vacuum created by the increasingly visible decay of feudal, ecclesiastical, and imperial institutions.6 National sentiments were seen to rest on the evolution of laws, customs, and traditions that went back over centuries. The sixteenth-century consolidation of territorial monarchies strengthened the sense of national consciousness in France as well as in England, Spain, and Russia.7 Such a concurrent evolution accords with the view that nationalism itself was a by-product of state building. The emergence of the institutions of the royal territorial state encouraged the development of a nationalist ideology centred on the monarchy. From this perspective it is not surprising that such sentiments were strongest in those who were part of or who were dependent on the emergent royal state apparatus. Those who frequented the royal court, sat in the law courts, collected taxes, or fought the king's wars were early proponents of the new political ideology of the nation. But nationalist sentiments were not limited to noble courtiers, churchmen, soldiers, office-holders,

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context 15

jurists, lawyers, and writers and scholars. A sense of national consciousness disseminated from these groups to include more broadly the landed elites and the urbanized population who saw themselves as part of the emergent national territorial state and economy. In no case was this more true than in France.8 A succession of writers proudly described the nature, history, and constitution of the emergent French state, which was closely bound up with the notion of an increasingly powerful monarchy.9 A self-consciously French school of jurisprudence emerged under the influence of the new humanist legal studies.10 French humanists more and more began to make claims for the distinctiveness and importance of French culture particularly as compared with that of Italy. As a result there emerged a deeper appreciation of the achievements of French civilization and an awareness of the French language as a medium of learned and artistic expression.11 A certain idea of citizenship based on rights to property and office within the French state began to emerge founded on the notion of permanent residence and the fulfilment of certain duties.12 Rivalry and comparison with other nations, it should be emphasized, was an intrinsic feature of the development of this French national consciousness. A sense of difference, indeed, competition with other nations was arguably an inherent characteristic of these developing nationalist feelings. Nationalism affirms itself by an insistence on what national identity is, but also by emphasis on what it is not. From this perspective, anti-Italian ism emerged as an aspect of a burgeoning sense of French nationalism. But the emergence of a French national consciousness, it must be stressed, was not simply the product of the appearance of the early modern state and the coincident increasingly self-conscious awareness of French history, law, and language. Prior to the emergence of a sense of national identity in the Renaissance, a sense of ethnic identity was widely prevalent already during antiquity and the Middle Ages, according to Anthony Smith. It was this sense of a people's common religion, name, language, myths, and historical past as well as attachment to a certain territory which provided the foundation for a modern sense of national consciousness among certain European peoples, including the French. According to Smith, national consciousness crystallized from this ethnic identity with the emergence of the political institutions of the modern territorial state.13 Bearing in mind the vicissitudes of historical evolution which constantly impact ethnic identity, Smith's view of the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism still makes considerable sense in the European experience.

i6 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

Smith singles out religion above all as the most important factor influencing a pre-modern sense of ethnic identity.14 His view is confirmed by the recent work of Colette Beaune on the birth of French national consciousness in late medieval France. According to Beaune, such a consciousness was born above all out of a specifically French sense of the practice, customs, and traditions of the Catholic Church. The focal point of this consciousness was undoubtedly religious, but it was simultaneously political. It found its central focus in the ideal and ceremonies of what was seen as the sacred French monarchy.15 It was not simply that the head of state became associated with certain religious practices. Rather, it was that the political person of the monarch was invested with a quasi-religious aura. The emergence of a French national religious faith was in the process slowly transformed into faith in the French political nation. In the first part of the sixteenth century this religious sense of national consciousness was somewhat obscured by the development of a more secular and humanist conception of nation and national identity. The aggrandizement and consolidation of the royal state through war was its principle theme. It was buttressed by emphasis on the extension of French law and the triumphs of French literary culture. Such a conception found favour especially among humanists and lawyers inspired by Roman political thought and culture. But this late medieval religious sense of nationhood was to be strongly reiterated by the Catholic party especially during the French wars of religion. Indeed, the identification of Catholicism as the French national religion is a striking feature of both moderate and extremist Catholic thought during this period. Moderate Catholics attempted to steer a middle-of-the-road course in the religious wars based on French ecclesiastical nationalism. They put forward this middle path against what were regarded as Huguenot and League religious extremists. From this Gallican perspective, the Catholic Church in France was a deeply embedded French institution. French national identity was closely connected to the survival and continued independence of the French church. According to Gallicans, political control of the church in France was vested rightfully in the monarchy. But in making this assertion they stressed the ecclesiastical independence of the French church from Roman and Italian control. The elimination of Italian influence from the French church became an important preoccupation of Gallicans. Gallican notions were particularly evident in the thinking of the judicial and ecclesiastical elites.16 Both Gallicans and more extreme Catholics believed that Catholicism

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context

17

was integral to French identity. It was not possible to be really French without being loyal to the Catholic religion. Extremists took this a step further. In the eyes of radical Catholics, the state was seen simply as the civic and political expression of religious values and traditions. This did not imply complete subservience to Rome. Rather it was based on the complete equation of Catholicism and French national identity. Moreover, it was an attitude entirely compatible with a strong prejudice against Italian ecclesiastics and financiers. Radicals emphasized that the deeply rooted traditions, rituals, and beliefs of the Catholic faith were part of the essence of French political nationality. The lack of religious unity and consequent popular unrest threatened both society and the state. The development of France had been the result of its attachment to the Catholic faith. The monarchy was more a sacred than a secular institution. On the other hand, the church itself was understood as a profoundly French institution. Without the Catholic Church, the future of the kingdom was in doubt. The French kingdom was a mystical body before it was a political body. French national identity emerged from devotion to the church. The cohesion of the state rested on its religious unity. As for personal identity, to be authentically French one had to be a Catholic.17 The identification of ecclesiastical organizations and practices with specific European nations had been growing since the late Middle Ages.18 This is obvious in the case of the Gallican and Anglican Church, but it is also true with respect to the churches in Germany, Spain, and Italy. The Reformation, which saw the creation of independent national confessions in England, Holland, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, and to a lesser extent in France, Switzerland, and Germany strengthened the identification between a people or nation and a church.19 Commenting on this phenomenon, the French jurist Charles Dumoulin, for example, saw the Reformation as having allowed nations to recover their kingdoms and political powers from the usurpations of the papacy.20 In the case of sixteenth-century France the identification between church and nation was never able to become total. At the time that Dumoulin was expressing these opinions in the mid-i56os, many French Calvinists were still committed to the idea that the kingdom of France could be converted to Protestantism. But after the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day few Calvinists could continue to cherish the goal of a national French Calvinist church. Having failed to convert France to Calvinism, the Huguenots increasingly tended to support a more secular view of the state.21 Many Catholics in the early years of the civil wars

18 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

likewise believed that the religious unity of France under the monarchy could be restored. A state policy of vigorous persecution and compulsion would restore religious uniformity. It is true, that faced with the disappointing religious opportunism of the Valois or subsequently the terrible prospect of a Protestant succession to the throne, some zealous Catholics lapsed into an ultramontane position. In the eyes of such diehards, personal loyalty to Rome superseded a sense of allegiance to the French monarchy.22 On the other hand, the majority of Catholics gradually abandoned the idea of religious uniformity in favour of the notion of national unity and political peace. Despite these complications, the identification of nation and religion strengthened in sixteenth-century France. In this light it was hardly surprising that some Frenchmen came to regard the Roman Catholic Church as a peculiarly Italian institution. An excellent example of this tendency to associate Italians with Roman Catholicism can be seen in the wake of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. In the months following the bloodletting in Paris, the Huguenots deliberately arranged the publication of Camillo Capilupi's Lo Stratogema di Carlo, re diFranda, contro gli Ugonotti, rebelli diDio esuoi.2S Capilupi had for many years been a low-level servant of the Gonzaga interest at Rome. In the immediate aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, he attempted to raise his stock at the papal court by publishing a heroic interpretation of Charles IX's actions at Saint Bartholomew. In Capilupi's work the queen mother Catherine de' Medici was treated as a secondary figure. Instead, the young King Charles IX was pictured by Capilupi as having played the decisive part. The king's decisions were seen not as an improvisation, but as being long deliberated and calculated. Moreover, it was the hand of God which guided the young monarch. As portrayed by Capilupi, Charles IX had acted out of a sense of Counter-Reformation Machiavellianism. Capilupi's Machiavellianism embarrassed the papacy, which tried in vain to block the work's publication. But the Huguenots seized upon the text as proving the existence of a Machiavellian conspiracy behind the Massacre. They arranged for its immediate translation into French.24 The preface to the French edition from the pen of an unknown Huguenot explains to the reader that the book completely conforms to the morality of both the author's nation and his religion. The Italians and the Roman Catholic Church both maintain that there is no greater virtue than dissimulation, especially in matters of vengeance.25 According to the argument of this preface, the Italian nation and the Catholic religion are both actuated by a common Machiavellian morality based

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context 19 on deceit and calculated violence. The Catholic faith has assimilated the worst supposed characteristics of the Italian people. That this would be the view of a French Huguenot in the wake of the Saint Bartholomew's Massacre is hardly surprising. Viewing the Roman Catholic Church as essentially the instrument of guileful Italians became a standard theme of Huguenot propaganda. But the idea of the essentially Italianate nature of the Roman Church was already an axiom among French Gallicans. French suspicion of the meetings of the Council of Trent, for example, was rooted in the idea that the Council was dominated by Italians. Explaining the failure to send delegates to Trent in 1561, the French government complained to the papal nuncio that the bishops at Trent were Italians, unlettered, personal dependents of the pope, and as the latter's agents not likely to listen to a French point of view.26 Italian domination of the papacy and the College of Cardinals is, furthermore, underlined in the work of the Gallican lawyer Guy Coquille.27 Coquille's nationalism was already evident in his early work through his defence of the so-called mos gallicanus against Roman law. But it was no less present in his writings under Henri IV, which were focused on the defence of the independence of the Gallican church from Roman control. In his Autre traicte des libertez de Veglise de France (1603) the Italianate nature of the papacy is emphasized. Referring to the claim of the popes to exercise direct administrative and judicial control over the bishops in the church, the Gallican Coquille notes that this would be tolerable if the popes were elected by the common consent of all the Christian nations. However, he points out that the popes are chosen only by the cardinals of the Roman Church whom the popes themselves have chosen and of whom three quarters are Italian. Indeed, he concludes, for the last two centuries all the Popes have been Italians except for three or four.28 Religious and ecclesiastical nationalism commonly expressed itself through such anti-Italian prejudices. Anti-Italianism was by no means the dominant theme of late-sixteenthcentury French history. Religion and politics were more important. But it certainly was an important sub-theme which can illuminate the central political and religious questions of the period. My interest in the investigation of this particular episode of ethnic antagonism has been aroused by more than a scholarly enthusiasm for the problems of early modern history. While founded on serious research into an important episode in early modern French history, this work has a wider purview. The fact is that today we live in a world in which ethnic antagonisms have once

2O Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

again become matters of serious political concern. There is no more current political topic at the beginning of this new century than xenophobia, racism, and nationalist exclusion. Open world markets, global communication, and increased international migration have produced a certain homogenization and assimilation of cultures. But while this is the main trend, in reaction to it one sees serious outbreaks of ethnic antagonism and racism. Ethnic conflict in ex-Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, Rwanda/ Burundi, Palestine/Israel, and Sri Lanka constitute major threats to international peace. Less explosive but no less real tensions are evident between French and English in Canada, Basques and Spaniards in the Iberian peninsula, and Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in the Indian subcontinent. The plight of the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, of Turks in Germany, and of Gypsies who are bearing the brunt of ethnic resentment in the states of East Europe are of deep concern. To this list of conflicts we must add the ongoing subordination of indigenous and black populations to European white populations in North and South America. In no developed country has recent ethnic antagonism been more intense than in France. In the 19805 and 1990s a stagnant economy, chronically high unemployment, and the ongoing erosion of traditional French culture fostered an organized political reaction in the form of the National Front. The hostility of this right-wing party is directed primarily against Arab immigrants from North Africa and black immigrants from French West Africa. But the racism of the National Front is historically connected with that of the extreme right-wing anti-Semitism that was current in France between 1880 and 1945. In those years the scapegoats of this well-organized current in French politics were the Jews, international bankers, and Masons. Today Jews and international bankers are still a problem in the eyes of the National Front. But it is above all the Arabs and the blacks who are thought to be subverting traditional France. Biological racism being somewhat out of fashion as a result of the Holocaust, much is made of the supposed cultural incompatibility of such migrants with French society and values. There are good reasons, then, for trying to investigate examples of ethnic hostility in the past bearing in mind today's problems. It might be objected by some that there is really no relationship between modern French racism and a phenomenon like sixteenth-century anti-Italianism. Modern racism, it is believed by some, was a product of the prestige of biological science and its misapplication in the nineteenth century. As such the definition of racism entails the notion of inherent physical or

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context 21

biological inferiority. Such ideas of biological superiority or inferiority, it is claimed, did not exist in the sixteenth century. Our subject, it should be stressed, is French anti-Italianism. It is in the first place a story of ethnic hatred and xenophobia. Dwelling on whether such anti-Italian sentiments were racist seems in large part a semantic question. As such it seems neither here nor there. On the other hand, one should at least note that Kim Hall has argued forcefully that the view that regards racism as confined to the biological misconceptions of the nineteenth century is part of a general reluctance among Renaissance historians and literary scholars to concede the reality of early modern racism.29 One may take Hall's point provided that one understands that racism itself cannot be understood as having a stable and fixed meaning. Historically, racism has assumed different forms from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.30 If racism is based on a conception of biological superiority and inferiority then certainly the French nobility had such a conception. The nobility's right to rule other Frenchmen was justified at various times by the supposed purity of its blood.31 In reaction members of the third estate denounced this aristocratic conception of innate virtue.32 The purity of blood of the French was also invoked in comparing them with their Spanish enemies. The French were represented as being of pure Christian origin. In contrast, the Spaniards were characterized as a mixture of Jews, Arabs, Blacks, Moors, and Mohammedans. According to one writer, two thirds of the Spaniards are Jews, Marranos, Mohammedans, or Saracens, and the rest are Moors of Grenada.33 Here the Spanish elite's self-conception of blood purity and Catholic orthodoxy was turned against them.34 The French were represented as racially and religiously homogenous in contrast to the religiously and ethnically mixed and, thereby, inferior Spaniards. Notable in this insulting conception is the almost casual confusion between religion and ethnicity. Indeed, in this case the difference in religious constancy is claimed to be rooted in the purity of French blood. The supposed biological inferiority of the Italians was even invoked as part of the anti-Italian polemics of the sixteenth century. The Italian humanists saw themselves as the proud restorers of the cultural traditions of their ancestors the Romans. But the humanists of northern Europe developed a certain scepticism toward such claims. Thus, already in a letter to Guillaume Bude, Erasmus speaks of the degeneration of the Italians as compared with the Romans. He accounts for it by referring to the mixing of the blood of the Romans with the barbarians. Noel du Fail

22 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

and Etienne Jodelle repeat these ideas.35 In a politique tract of 1576 that reviews the history of the Jews and Italians in France the Italians are referred to as a 'race of usurers.'36 But it should be stressed that it was the moral rather than the biological degeneracy of the Italians that was attacked most frequently. Prior to the religious wars the Italians were already under attack from French writers for their supposed cruelty, affectation, bombast, charlatanism, infidelity, greed, and irreligion.37 During the religious wars the tone of rhetorical denunciation intensified in proportion to the political and social crisis. Italians were now described as amoral tyrants, adieists, bloodsuckers, murderers, and homosexuals. These traits were somehow seen as inherent in the national character. Sixteenth-century anti-Italianism, we conclude, does have certain affinities with contemporary xenophobia although the cultural context has profoundly changed. Part of the reason for this likeness lies in the fact that ethnocentrism, including a sense of ethnic superiority, is a nearly universal phenomenon. Such sentiments were the case even among aboriginal peoples. The Algonkian termed the Inuit 'Eskimos' or eaters of raw meat, while 'Iroquois' was a French version of an Algonkian word that meant 'snake' or 'adder.' The Algonkian name for themselves is 'Ne-e-no-il-no,' which means 'perfect people.' In Africa the Zulus regarded all other tribes as inferior beings and the ancient Greeks, of course, thought all peoples not of their own culture to be barbarians.38 Among early modern Europeans negative stereotypes of others were common not least among scholars. In 1585 Mercator, for instance, drew up a list of the various German and European peoples according to their supposed typical characteristics: The Francons are simple, blockish, and furious; the Bavarians sumptuous, gluttons, and brazen-faced; the Sweeds light, bablers and boasters; the Thuringeans distrustfull, Slovene, and quarrelsome; the Saxons dissemblers, double-hearted, and opinionative; the Belgians good horsemen, tender, docible, and delicate; the Italians proud, revengeful and ingenious; the Spaniard disdainfull, cautious, and greedie; the Gaules proper, intemperate, rash-headed; the Cimbrians high-minded, seditious, and terrible; the Saramates gluttons, proud, and theeves; the Bohemians cruell, lovers of novelties, filtchers; the Illyricks variable, malicious, and ryotous; the Pannonians rude, superstitious; the Grecians miserable.39

Louis Le Roy noted in 1576 that 'on the whole the Spanish are haughty ... the English and Scots proud, the Greeks cautious and subtle,

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context 23

the Italians wary, the French bold.'40 Such lists, which were common in the period, undoubtedly reflected widespread and rather thoughtless disdain based on popular prejudices against diose regarded as foreigners. Between Europeans, then, the attitude toward cultural differences was strongly ethnocentric. It was even more so with respect to nonEuropeans. Its fundamental premise was that of the Adamic uniformity of humanity. Any departure from this original cultural norm was assumed to be deviant. Variations in institutions, customs, and habits between peoples were considered the result of human foibles. Furthermore, the transmission of cultural traits from one group to another was associated with cultural corruption and decline.41 Ethnic prejudice freely mingled with bias based on religion and class. Appealing to the French nobles to abandon their rebellion in the 15705, Jean du Tillet urged them to consider how fortunate they were to be born French rather than barbarian, Christian rather than Mohammedan, rich and free rather than enserfed and dependent.42 Class prejudice unself-consciously mixes here with religious and ethnic bias. Another Frenchman claimed in 1588 that civil war was unworthy of the French, but was characteristic instead of the Indians of Calicut, the Cannibals, the Madeiran Islanders, Canary Islanders, and the barbarians of most distant Garamantes.43 In such attitudes we can already glimpse a sense of European superiority toward Third World peoples based on an assumed superiority in religion, political order, social organization, and level of material culture. These writers are claiming that Frenchmen in the civil wars are behaving uncharacteristically like heathens and savages. Indeed, what is notable is the relationship between the outbreak of anti-Italian hostility and the social and political extremism of the religious wars. It is this context of social and political extremism that also links sixteenth-century xenophobia with more contemporary examples. Outbreaks of ethnic violence have occurred in situations of extreme social and political tension in both the past and the present. If we seek comparisons that are temporally closer to late-sixteenth-century France, the anti-Italianism of that period most closely resembles episodes of ethnic hostility that occurred toward the close of the Middle Ages. Already familiar to us is the Castilian hostility toward Jews and converses, which unfolded in a context of intense social tension.44 The ideological conflict between the Poles and the Teutonic Knights in the late Middle Ages was undoubtedly also strongly coloured by ethnic conflict, the more so as the social and ethnic exclusivism of the Knights intensified as their political and military situation became increasingly precarious.45 Czech and German antagonism reached a paroxysm during the Hussite

24 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France Revolution. In this case religious and social conflict undoubtedly played their parts. The hostile discourse that developed on both sides, nonetheless, had a strongly ethnic favour.46 A substantial literature has emerged on the shock of the European encounter with the peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia in the early modern period. The bibliography on the largely negative character of Jewish-Christian relations in this period is also impressive. On the other hand, until recently there has been little interest in ethnic relations among Europeans. A pioneer series of essays on the image of the Other in Europe appeared in 1992 under the editorship of Jean Dufournet, Adelin Charles Fiorato, and Augustin Redondo.47 In this collection stress is laid on the importance of the growth of the territorial state in affirming national identity while at the same time exacerbating ethnic tensions. In the meantime the Reformation and wars of religion helped to produce other forms of estrangement and difference. A colloquium on the Other in European experience at Villeneuve d'Ascq in 1994 included several studies that dealt with the early modern period.48 Notable was a paper by Jean-Francois Dubost on foreigners in France during the Ancien Regime.49 The Otherness of the foreigner in the early modern period was likewise the subject of a recent colloquium whose deliberations have recently been edited by Marie-Therese Jones-Davies.50 Growth of interest in this subject has evidently been related to the problems of ethnic conflict and racism in contemporary European and French culture.51 Concern with these matters has even begun to extend backward into the Middle Ages. The American review The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies recently devoted a ground-breaking special issue to race and ethnicity in the Middle Ages.52 While interest in the overall problem of inter-ethnic conflict in early modern Europe is relatively recent, concern with the role of Italians in France during the period is long-standing. Cultural conflict between French and Italian humanists in the sixteenth century has interested scholars since the beginning of the last century.53 The extensive, nuanced, and meticulous studies of Franco Simone during the 19605 marked a watershed in this respect.54 From an entirely different perspective the publication of Richard Gascon's economic history of Lyons in the sixteenth century opened new perspectives.55 The central axis of this work investigates the Italian bankers and silk merchants who made up the dominant economic stratum of this metropolis. A useful complement to Gascon's work is the recent study of the Italian community of Lyons by Jacqueline Boucher.56

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context 25

Analysis of the Italian influence on France forms an element of Boucher's earlier dissertation on the court of Henri III.57 The reaction against Italian power is an important part of this investigation. Boucher's analysis should be supplemented by Pauline M. Smith's study of the anticourtier trend in sixteenth-century French literature.58 The first comprehensive study of French anti-Italianism was carried out by Lionello Sozzi.59 Sozzi analyses French hostility from the perspective of the growing cultural nationalism and presumed sense of ethical superiority of French humanists. Jean Balsamo's more recent analysis of the same subject likewise stresses the literary and moral aspects of Franco-Italian antagonism.60 Emphasis is put on the psychological dimensions of xenophobia in a way that echoes the conceptions of Melanie Klein. Through a kind of projective identification the Italians were seen as exhibiting traits that the French found obnoxious in their own countrymen. While Balsamo's view represents an important insight it also no doubt reflects in part his own preoccupation with contemporary French xenophobia. A similar concern marks the magisterial study of the Italians in France in the period 1570-1660 by Dubost.61 Underlying both Balsamo's and Dubost's work is the assumption that the sovereign territorial state and the development of a national culture is the norm of modern history. From this perspective the existence of quasi-autonomous Italian communities in France represented a kind of anomaly which had to be overcome. From the perspective of these authors the more or less inevitable process of integration is what is of concern. But today with the weakening of the nation state we ought to remind ourselves that the process of political centralization and cultural integration in sixteenth-century France was far from automatic. While assimilation of Italians did occur, as we shall see, the counter-tendency toward maintaining a sense of separation was equally strong, if not stronger. The Italians at Lyons in the first part of the sixteenth century, and especially the Italian elite, lived in a kind of exclusive enclave in the midst of the French population. The four Italian nations enjoyed special economic and judicial privileges. Rather like the small yet powerful European colonial populations in Third World countries in more recent times, the Italian elite inhabited a special part of the city, built their mansions in the Italian style, worshipped apart from the rest of the population, spoke Italian more than French, and supported a largely Italian literary and culinary culture. Hostile Frenchmen compared the

26 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

Italian presence in France in a somewhat exaggerated manner to the Roman imperial occupation of ancient Gaul. The Roman conquest had, however, been in fact largely military and political rather than economic. Perhaps a more appropriate if still inexact comparison is to the contemporary Spanish and Portuguese occupation of the New World. As with Italian influence in France, it included a cultural and religious as well as political and economic dimension. Neither example is exact. Italian cultural and religious influence in France was real. But Italian hegemony over France was founded on economic rather than political command. The disunity and weakness of the Italian states limited the extent of Italian political control. Italian influence in France lacked political coherence and, therefore, ultimate staying power. On the other hand, the issue of unequal economic relationships is critical to understanding the development of economic as well as cultural anti-Italian feeling. While not ignoring other causes of hostility between Frenchmen and Italians, this study stresses the importance of these unequal economic relationships. In doing so it endeavours to integrate an understanding of the increasing economic hostility against the Italians with the growing reaction against Italian thought and culture. Italians at the court or resident in Paris in the second half of the sixteenth century tended to more readily assimilate into French society than did their brethren from Lyons. Their small numbers precluded organization into separate and autonomous nations. Residentially more dispersed in Paris than at Lyons, they also were more prone to intermarriage as part of a pattern of upward mobility into the ranks of the French nobility. Yet even in Paris in this period we still see signs of segregation in terms of a preference for the company of fellow Italians or for Italian food, language, and literature. In part these preferences may have been a response to intense and widespread anti-Italian feeling among the French population. This ongoing sense of separateness likewise implies a continued commitment on the part of Italians to strategies of family advancement that entailed ongoing ties to Italian relatives, friends, and business associates as well as to the Italian homeland itself. It also suggests a certain ongoing sense of Italian cultural and economic superiority. Italian merchants and financiers and those dependent on them living in France and elsewhere in Europe were part of what Robin Cohen characterizes as a trading diaspora.62 In this respect the Italians of the sixteenth century are comparable to the trading communities of Jews or overseas Lebanese or Chinese. Such groups scattered over wide regions

Nationalism and Xenophobia in Early Modern Context 27

had an ongoing attachment to their presumed or historic motherland and its culture. At best they had an ambiguous relationship to their host country. Contrary to the assumptions of Dubost and Balsamo, such diasporas were of two minds when it came to integration into a given national community. Such a sense of ambiguity would have been all the more pronounced in sixteenth-century France where the process of political centralization and cultural integration had only begun. Moreover, many of the Italians who emigrated to France came from city-states. Identification with a national monarchy was contrary to the political culture in which they had been raised. Under such circumstances close family ties and endogamous relationships among the Italians served among other things as a surrogate for direct contact with the motherland. At the same time eventual return to the homeland was a not infrequent occurrence and one which attracted adverse comment from French contemporaries.63 Understanding the fate of this Italian trading diaspora thus throws light on the process of eventual French political integration, which can by no means be taken for granted. Finally, I might note explicitly what I have only stated implicitly so far. It seems clear that Italians in sixteenth-century France played something of the role of Jews in central Europe. The Jews having been expelled from France in the fourteenth century, it was the Italians who assumed their traditional functions as money-lenders. Such activities were looked on askance by the rest of the population especially in difficult times. It is fascinating, therefore, to note how the anti-Italian language of the times, which spoke of bloodsuckers, crafty usurers, and cosmopolitans, paralleled the discourse of early modern anti-Semitism. The history of French antiItalianism will help to sensitize us to the socially constructed nature of such racist discourse and practice as it applies to the Jews and other ethnic minorities.

CHAPTER TWO

Italians and the French Reformation: Lyons, 1562

Exploration and discovery became an increasingly popular genre of writing as the sixteenth century progressed. As a result, an expanding stream of books on foreign travel and geography helped to widen the imagination of early modern European readers. A work which was designed to feed this growing demand for geographic knowledge was Antoine Du Pinet's Les plantz, portraictz et descriptions de plusieurs villes et fortresses, tant de I'Europe, Asie et Afrique, published at Lyons in 1564. It was produced as part of the output of Lyons's printing industry, one of the most important in Europe. A compilation based largely on earlier travel accounts, Du Pinet's work is enlivened by the author's evident first-hand and immediate experience of foreign parts and peoples. Its cosmopolitan outlook also reflects the urbanity of the place in which it was published. Lyons's polyglot population of 60,000-70,000, which included more or less permanently resident Swiss, German, Flemish, English, Portuguese, Spanish, and especially Italian merchants and bankers, made it one of the great centres of urban life on the European continent. The banking houses and fairs of Lyons connected the city to all the other principal commercial centres of Europe. The economic importance of the city is reflected in the fact that in 1522-3 the value of the turnover at the Lyons fair was nine to ten million livres. Such a figure was clearly superior to the French monarchy's fiscal receipts and four or five times the total value of coinage minted in the kingdom between 1518 and 1522. The cosmopolitanism of Lyons was enhanced by the development of its great printing industry, which exported its books into Italy and Spain. The development of this industry encouraged in turn the emergence of circles of humanist patronage and learning that were able to support

Italians and the French Reformation

29

such luminaries as Symphorien Champier, Etienne Dolet, Barthelemy Aneau, Maurice Sceve, and Louise Labe. But in 1564 Lyons's continued importance as a major European commercial centre was in serious question. Two years earlier, in April 1562, a revolutionary minority had seized control of the town with the complicity of the military governor Francois d' Agout, count of Sault. Most of the Italian merchants and bankers on whose international connections the city depended took flight. For more than a year Catholic worship was proscribed and the city was ruled by a Calvinist town council and consistory. During most of that period the great metropolis found itself under siege by royal forces. Feeding and maintaining the population became a daily preoccupation of the revolutionary Calvinist government. The future prosperity of the merchants and artisans of the town appeared compromised.1 Finally, in the early summer of 1563 royal authority over the city was restored. Readmitted into the city by royal decree, the Roman Catholic clergy found it necessary to co-exist uneasily with the Calvinist Church. Until the expulsion of the Calvinists four years later, the opposed religions were forced to compete for the allegiance of the citizens. Along with the restoration of the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church came the return of many of the Italian bankers and merchants. But ongoing religious uncertainty left the economic prospects of the city in doubt.2 During the months of Huguenot control the town council and consistory had struggled to provide the beleaguered inhabitants with subsistence and employment. At the same time they tried to carry forward their religious revolution. A regime of theocratic government, confiscation of the property of the Catholic clergy, and a program of public works for the unemployed characterized this brief interlude of godly rule. It turns out that Du Pinet for all his cosmopolitanism was either directly a part of this Calvinist experiment or followed this revolutionary experiment in godly rule at close hand. Du Pinet's commitment to the Reformation was long-standing. He had been an intimate of John Calvin since their university days in Paris in the late 15205. Later on he served as a reformed minister to various parishes in and around the city of Geneva. After 1543 he returned to France and took up residence in Lyons. While keeping Lyons as his headquarters, Du Pinet found employment as amanuensis and tutor in various aristocratic households. From time-to-time he accompanied his noble employers in travels abroad.3 In the immediate aftermath of Calvinist rule over Lyons, Du Pinet

3O Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France continued to reflect the revolutionary puritanism that inspired many of those who had been caught up in the enthusiasm of the upheaval. In 1564, for example, the year he published his geography, Du Pinet also published La tonformite des eglises reformees de France designed to assist in the implantation of reform in Lyons and elsewhere in the French kingdom.4 As part of a comprehensive program whose goal was the transfer and implantation of the Genevan model of reformed religion to French soil, Du Pinet called for severe restrictions on the operation of taverns and for restrictive sumptuary legislation to curb the taste for extravagant fashion.5 But the full extent of Du Pinet's puritan outlook is revealed in his world geography, which he published the same year. Most of his description of Lyons in this text closely follows the earlier depiction of the city by Symphorien Champier, which appeared years earlier.6 In the concluding pages, however, Du Pinet articulates a critique of existing morality from a Calvinist perspective. These passages embody not only a rejection of the sophisticated fashions and tastes being imported from Italy, but also a critique of the accompanying economic and financial control of Lyons by the cosmopolitan Italian banking and merchant elite. Du Pinet begins with the nobility. Unlike today when young nobles wear fancy or ridiculous boots that encumber them, knights of old wore armed footwear when testing their valour in jousting tournaments. Young aristocratic women dressed in purple or red scarlet instead of wearing silk. Dressed more simply, they felt as much like noblewomen as today's women of the court in their silk finery. In the past it was easy to distinguish a merchant from a noble and a nobleman from a lawyer, though they all dressed in wool cloth. In those days craftsmen and butchers did not spend outrageous sums on their wardrobes as they do today. Even those who cannot afford to buy fancy raiments wander about, steal clothes, and sell them in illegal transactions so as to be ultimately strung up as high on the scaffold as the next man. According to Du Pinet, a preoccupation with fashion has led to a decline in virtue among the nobility, a breakdown of a sense of social distinction and criminal behaviour on the part of the lower classes.7 It is the taste for silk that is at the heart of all this confusion and excess. Control over the marketing of silk is in the hands of the foreign bankers of Lyons. By means of the allure of this extravagant commodity they have drawn all the money out of the kingdom. Du Pinet notes that in this discussion of the silk industry he is deliberately trying to avoid an extended treatment of what he describes as the blood-sucking and de-

Italians and the French Reformation 31

monk usurers. He nonetheless makes reference to the way their bad advice to investors has ruined many substantial households. Du Pinet here refers in passing to the disastrous effects of the collapse of the celebrated Grand Parti in 1557. This default on the state debt led to the loss of the savings of hundreds if not thousands of small and large investors.8 Indeed, the radicalization of elements of the population of Lyons prior to the Calvinist rebellion was related to this financial calamity.9 Rather than dwelling on this particular financial disaster, Du Pinet chooses to challenge the economically dominant position of the foreign bankers and merchants in the first place. According to him, Lyons is strong in manufacturing.10 There is no other city in France, indeed, in Europe where a master craftsman is more certain of making a profit than in Lyons. In fact, the city has always been known as a place where money could be made. Du Pinet, therefore, is surprised that some think that it is the financial resources of the foreign bankers on which Lyons's prosperity depends. It is true that the management of money brings profit. But whom does it profit? Only those bankers who manipulate it, according to Du Pinet. As for those who invest with the bankers, they receive impressive returns for a year or two. But sooner or later their investment is lost through bankruptcy. Add to this the fact that - Germans excepted - the commerce of these foreigners involves a trade in things that are superfluous and destructive to the French kingdom. Here Du Pinet is distinguishing between the importation of useful German metals and metal products and the wasteful silks and luxury goods that are the stock-in-trade of the Italians. According to Du Pinet, there is an important distinction to be made between different kinds of business. There is useful and productive business, which leads to an increase in real wealth and does not induce moral corruption. Contrariwise, there is business that is morally harmful and unproductive. Therefore, Du Pinet concludes, the Lyonnais should not be so concerned about retaining the presence of the Italian bankers and silk merchants in their city. They are not so indispensable to the commercial life of Lyons as is commonly believed. Du Pinet's views, which stress the importance of the production of useful goods and attack the consumption of luxuries, is not untypical of middle class Calvinists. They are comparable, for example, to Bernard Palissy's more or less contemporary insistence that the inventiveness of the young could be better applied to creating new agricultural tools rather than to concerning themselves with making innovations in textile fashions.11

32 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

But Du Pinet had a special reason for insisting on this distinction between productive and unproductive economic activity. He was writing in the wake of the flight of the Italians from the city as a result of the takeover by the Calvinists in 1562. The catastrophic effect on Lyons of the exodus of the Italians and the subsequent siege was on everyone's mind. The revival of prosperity and the future role of the Italians preoccupied the populace of the city. Du Pinet's words were meant to reassure the public in Lyons about the economic future. According to him, if the trade in silk controlled by the Italians collapsed, Lyons could rebuild its fortunes on the basis of its wool cloth manufacture. A return to wearing simpler cloth made of wool would put an end to the sumptuary excesses and moral decline caused by the passion for silk. Du Pinet called for a moral restoration based on a restructuring of trade and manufacturing away from financial speculation and luxury consumption toward an economy based on productive and useful activity.12 Du Pinet's attitude reflects the Calvinist aspiration toward a simpler, more productive, and unified society. More immediately, his viewpoint attempts to put the best possible face on the flight of the Italian economic elite from the city. The more so as we know that in an effort to retain them or to get them to return, the Calvinist leadership of Lyons had vainly offered the Italians guarantees with respect to their property and money.13 In an attempt to make Calvinism more attractive to these economically powerful strangers, the consistory even tried to attract a moderate Italian Calvinist minister, Jerome Zanchi, to Lyons. Among other qualities that recommended him, Zanchi could preach to the Italian community in its own language.14 Evidently the Calvinist attitude toward the affluent Italian community in Lyons was more complex than is suggested by Du Pinet's attitude of good riddance. The apparent failure of the Lyonnais Calvinists to win over the Italian community was seized upon by their Catholic opponents. From the moment that royal forces re-occupied the city in the summer of 1563, the Jesuits Emond Auger and Antonio Possevino fought the Calvinist ministers tooth and nail for control of the religious allegiance of the inhabitants.15 Dividing the labour with Auger, Possevino addressed himself above all to ensuring the orthodoxy of his fellow Italians. Especially remarkable were the polemical exchanges between the two Jesuits and the leading Calvinist theologian in the city, Pierre Viret.16 Among other complaints, Viret denounced what he considered to be the ideological war being waged on the Calvinists by the two Catholic preachers.

Italians and the French Reformation

33

Viret was particularly exercised by the achievements of Possevino in missionizing the Italian community. The Italian Jesuit was enjoying considerable success in preaching against the Reformation to the returned Italians in their own vernacular language. In explaining this triumph, Viret noted in passing that Possevino's words could have an impact only on those who were theologically ignorant. Auger seized upon Viret's suggestion that the Italian community might be theologically uninformed. Somewhat casuistically, he turned this against Viret.17 According to Auger, Viret had the temerity to suggest that the Italians were ignoramuses. Auger then put himself forward as the champion of the supposedly injured Italian community. Far from being ignorant, Auger argued, the Italians are the most subtle, lively, and ingenious people in the world. For the past year the Italian community has been attending the learned and orthodox sermons of Possevino. On the other hand, they have not been willing to listen to the sermons of the Calvinist preachers, even though the latter dearly wish that they would attend them. The Italians are not easily fooled and so are not interested in lending an ear to absurdities or insults from the pulpit. Unlike the French, the Italians are not moved by every passing gust of wind. They have, furthermore, been repelled by the violence of the Huguenots. The wealth of the Italians as compared with the French makes them cautious. Indeed, Auger concludes, the Italians of all people are the firmest in the Catholic faith. It was true that the populist excesses perpetrated by the Huguenots when they seized Lyons had alarmed the Italian economic elite. In the aftermath Catholics magnified the violence that accompanied the Calvinist seizure of the city, while Calvinist apologists attempted to minimize it.18 Certainly the property of the Catholic Church had been attacked and expropriated. Moreover, demagogic rhetoric had also been an important part of Calvinist propaganda especially during the first stages of the Protestant occupation.19 Du Pinet's assault on the predatory nature of the Italian economic elite was almost certainly coloured by some of this populist discourse. But Du Pinet's attack on the Italians was not simply the product of the immediate struggle between Calvinists and Catholics for religious control over Lyons at the beginning of the 15605. It was the expression of a rising wave of nationalism that had cultural and religious as well as economic roots. In the first part of the sixteenth century the tide of Italian cultural influence in France had been quite powerful and in the main was welcome. Italian humanists, law professors, craftsmen, artists, and engineers enjoyed exceptional employment opportunities. King

34 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

Francis I was able to attract to the court such artists as Leonardo da Vinci, Benvenuto Cellini, Sebastiano Serlio, Giovanni Battista Rosso, and Francesco Primaticcio.20 In the meantime the revival of the study of Greek in Paris in the early decades of the century had been in part due to the lectures of the Italian humanist Girolamo Aleandro.21 Later Paolo Canossa, a converted Venetian Jew, was to help to strengthen the study of Hebrew at the College deFrance. The development of the humanist study of law at the University of Bourges was the result of the work of the Italian jurisconsult Andrea Alciati. Even an obscure little place like Agen in Gascony enjoyed the extended presence of celebrated Italian humanists like Jules-Cesar Scaliger and Matteo Bandello. But the Italian cultural influence was most visible at Lyons, supported as it was by a wealthy colony of merchants and bankers from Florence, Lucca, Milan, and Genoa. The salons of Mme de Gondi Marie-Catherine de Pierrerive and later that of the Countess of Retz Claude Catherine de Clermont were focal points of Italian humanist culture that were open to both Italians and French.22 The publications of the great Lyonnais printers Guillaume Rouille, Jean de Tournes, and Sebastien Gryphius reflected a humanist cultural milieu at Lyons devoted especially to translating Italian literature into French.23 Italian humanists and scholars like Ortensio Landi, Sanctus Pagnini, and Gabriel Simeoni made more or less extended visits to Lyons. Most of these several thousand Italian newcomers never bothered to become naturalized Frenchmen. In this respect the behaviour of these migrant scholars and artists mirrored that of the Italian merchants and bankers. Indeed, there can be little doubt that the great majority of these migrants remained more attached to their mother country than to France. This reflected the diaspora-like nature of this milieu. Even so the extent of the growing Italian presence is signified by the fact that an unprecedented 549 Italians did elect to obtain naturalization in the reign of Francis I.24 While in the main the attitude of French humanists to the Italians was one of respect and admiration, a sense of increasing cultural rivalry gradually came to the fore. Indeed, the roots of later intellectual competition were evident even before the expedition of Charles VIII to Italy in 1494. Conflict began in the realm of liberal arts and philology among those French who refused to overlook Italian notions of intellectual exclusiveness and superiority. Already during the late fifteenth century, the themes of the transfer of intellectual primacy (translatio studii) and

Italians and the French Reformation 35

political dominion (translatio imperil) from Italy to France were sounded.25 The strengthening of French humanist and vernacular culture and the French occupation of northern Italy in the opening decades of the sixteenth century intensified feelings of rivalry. By then the Lyonnais humanist Symphorien Champier was prepared to declare that at the very least the Italians had acquired their sense of theology and rhetoric from the French.26 Cultural clashes between French and Italians scholars intensified in succeeding years. From the 1530$ onward learned men like Guillaume Bude and Etienne Pasquier were no longer ready to accept the inferiority of French history, literature, and scholarship as compared to that of the Italians.27 Contention centred around which nation was the rightful heir of antique learning. The scholarly printer and humanist Henri Estienne announced that he had achieved superiority over the Italians in the mastery of Ciceronian rhetoric. Contrariwise, Italians such as the poet Tasso continued to dismiss the French as barbarians. The French in turn insisted on the decadence of the Italians who were no longer able by themselves to assume the legacy of ancient Rome. At the same time, the proponents of French erudition were by no means willing to write off the historic continuity between their own time and the preceding Gothic age. French culture of the medieval period, they claimed, had made it possible for the Italians to comprehend antiquity. Such views were rooted in a sense of the permanence of strong national institutions like the University of Paris, the Paris Parlement, and the French monarchy. In the course of the struggle over Ciceronianism that dates from the 152OS, the French claimed that they had absorbed the legacy of Antiquity in spirit while the Italians lost themselves in the sterile imitation of antique models. With variations these arguments were repeated throughout the rest of the sixteenth century. The learned controversy over cultural primacy between French and Italian humanists was given new life by the antagonism born of the affirmation of rival vernacular languages. The terms of such rivalry were already apparent in the Concorde of the rhetorical poetJean Lemaire de Beiges (i5ii). 28 In the face of claims of the perfection of Tuscan, Lemaire de Beiges defended the French language, which he claimed was capable of elegantly expressing all matters worthy of discussion. But his apology for the superiority of the French tongue is based above all on his knowledge of literary history. He contrasts an ancient and powerful France with its rich and long history of Gothic as well as contemporary literary achievements with an unfledged and weak Italian culture and politics.

36 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

Literary anti-Italianism was thus an increasingly strong feature of the sixteenth century. But this literary critique must be understood as coexisting with the parallel claims of French moral superiority. Defenders of France stressed the theme of French sincerity in contrast to the overly formal and artificial nature of Italian culture.29 Thus, the patron of French humanism Rene Du Bellay attacked the insincerity and artificiality of Italian Petrarchism, accusing it of formalism and a lack of directness.30 The Lyonnais humanist Barthelemy Aneau in turn denounced Du Bellay for failing to take the next step. In addition to attacking Italian artificiality, Du Bellay ought to have insisted on the popular, naive, and instinctive qualities of the French language and literary tradition. According to Aneau, an independent and authentic French national culture belies the claims of Italian cultural superiority.31 Italian aestheticism, rhetorical excess, and formalism were contrasted with the more profound thought and sincere literary inspiration of the French. It was claimed that such superiority was grounded in a deeper moral and religious sensibility.32 Indeed, Italian cultural failure was held to be in the final analysis the consequence of moral bankruptcy. Italians were attacked variously for their inherent cruelty, affectation, bombast, charlatanism, treachery, greed, and irreligion.33 Whatever Aneau may have considered Du Bellay's failures, the latter, notably, added a class dimension to this sense of French contempt for things Italian. Du Bellay compared Italian culture to commercial goods being imported into France by merchants seeking to enrich themselves. He regarded Italian culture and commodities as essentially base and ignoble commercial imports compared with the noble quality of French indigenous wisdom.34 Faced with the ongoing claims of Italian cultural hegemony based on the achievements of Latin antiquity, French humanists countered with the historic myth of Celtic origins. According to this theory of the past, the Celts were not only older than the Romans, they were the first of all the world's peoples. Celtic Gaul was the mother of the first arts and the universal source of all knowledge. Glorification of the Celtic origins of France became the historical answer to Roman and Latin cultural domination. In this context ancient writers like Cicero and Livy were seen in a new light. Italian humanists had portrayed such figures as the progenitors of a common European culture based on Romanitas. French humanists began to conceive of the ancient Romans as Italians whom the French

Italians and the French Reformation 37 aimed at rivalling and surpassing.35 Beginning with Charles Dumoulin's Commentarii in consuetudines parisiensis (1539), furthermore, nationalist lawyers began to reject the superiority of Roman law to the customary law, which had been handed down to the French from their Celtic and Prankish ancestors.36 From the perspective of constitutional history, the humanist lawyer Francois Hotman would later make the claim for constitutional government based on the Celtic and Frankish roots of the kingdom as opposed to the heritage of Roman tyranny and Italian political amorality.37 The myth of Celtic origins was one way in which the French contested the historical basis of Italian cultural dominance. An even bolder challenge was mounted through articulation of a rudimentary idea of historical progress. French and European cultural achievements, geographical discoveries, and scientific and technological progress became the basis for claims that contemporary civilization had equalled and, indeed, surpassed the classical period.38 The implication was that nothing further could be learned from studying ancient examples or teachings over which the Italians claimed a monopoly. Such was the progress being made in various intellectual disciplines being studied in the French vernacular that Jean-Pierre de Mesmes, for example, predicted that soon it would no longer be necessary for French students to waste their time studying Latin and Greek.39 It is a singular fact that this French cultural nationalism preceded and anticipated by several decades the economic nationalism reflected in Du Pinet's anti-Italianism. Indeed, this movement among French humanists calls to mind the way the romantic nationalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere in central and Eastern Europe foreshadowed the later development of modern political and economic nationalism. In this respect, the case of the humanist printer Etienne Dolet is of particular interest. As is well known, Dolet began his career under the spell of Italy and its humanist culture. Without ever renouncing his initial Ciceronianism, Dolet moved over the decades toward an increasing commitment to French vernacular literature and, finally, to calculated support for Calvinism. Whatever Dolet's religious position, atheist or early deist, he was almost certainly not an orthodox Christian of the Catholic or Calvinist variety. Behind Dolet's increasing alignment with the reformed party lay an unstable amalgam of ambition, careful calculation, financial interest, and nationalism.40 By the late 15305 Dolet's increasing commitment not only to an interest in the vernacular but also to the historiography of France marked a

38 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France turning point not only for him but also for a whole generation of French humanists. Publication by Dolet of works on translation and on the orthography of the French language signified his determination to develop the formal and expressive capacity of the French vernacular. His new enthusiasm for the study of French history expressed at the conclusion of his Commentarivrum Linguae Latinae (1538) and through the publication of Les gestes deFrancoys de Valois roy deFrance (1539) reflect his increasing commitment to a French vernacular that served nationalist ends.41 Dolet's turn to the vernacular coincided with his emergence as one of the most important printers in Lyons. Through this increasingly successful enterprise, Dolet found a way to continue to pursue his humanist interests while at last earning a decent livelihood. His earlier attempts to find a secure patron or to pursue a legal career had come to nought. Dolet's early economic fortunes perhaps reached their low point when he was suddenly forced to abandon his study of the law at the University of Toulouse following his direct challenge to the ultra-orthodox religious elite of the city.42 Even so the speeches that he delivered at Toulouse as part of this challenge constitute a remarkably audacious defence of freedom of expression. The vehement nationalism of Dolet's orations at Toulouse, furthermore, set the stage for his subsequent espousal of French classical scholarship as compared to Italian learning.43 Having been attacked by his enemies at Toulouse for his philo-Italianism, moreover, Dolet sought an occasion to distance himself from the Italians.44 The immediate circumstances of Dolet's attack on Italian humanism arose out of his reaction to what he considered the scandalous success of Giulio Camillo of Friuli.45 This Italian humanist had supposedly invented a memory theatre within which an orator could rapidly acquire all human learning including knowledge of languages. During his visit to France in 1533, he obtained the patronage of Francis I to the tune of five hundred ducats. The indignant reaction of the economically hard-pressed Dolet to the success of the Italian is found in a letter to a contemporary in which he noted that 'the imposture of the fellow could be endured were it not that by its means he is expecting to deceive the King and is meaning to practise among us in France all those devices for money-getting which he understands.'46 Referring to Camillo as 'that portentous specimen of the Italian character,' he continues: 'There is one thing which does vex me much; it is that our countrymen are so eager after, and so partial to what is barbarous and foreign that they neglect those things which they have

Italians and the French Reformation 39

at home most worthy of praise, and with a ridiculous folly admire and purchase at a great price whatever is foreign.'47 Referring to Camillo in another letter, he concludes: 'I know many in France by whose talents and attainments I hope the Italian will be made to understand that eloquence and literary renown (of which his countrymen claim a monopoly for themselves) are also common to the French, and that they will then cease to treat us as dumb children who, having neglected the study of literature, tend beyond others to weakness, and may be deluded into any scheme however mad.'48 Dolet's harsh words against the Italian humanist evidently reflect both a growing sense of cultural animosity and economic jealousy. The development of a vernacular French culture with its attendant market for French printed books accordingly represented the ultimate challenge to the continued cultural hegemony of the Italian humanists.49 Dolet placed himself in the vanguard of this movement by combining his humanist interest in the vernacular language with the printing of French books. His turn to the printing of French evangelical literature was a natural outgrowth of this process. Economic conflict between the Italian merchant and banking elite and French lesser merchants, small manufacturers, and craftsmen in Lyons and other French cities had been minimal in the first part of the sixteenth century. The Italians entrenched themselves, especially at Lyons, but their presence made itself felt as well in the other principal urban centres of the kingdom during the same period.50 Italian capital, expertise, and international connections stimulated the expansion of the French small-scale manufacturing and industrial sector. Whatever resentment existed of Italian financial and commercial supremacy was more than offset by the stimulus Italian capital and knowledge of export markets gave to the growth of French manufactures. But in the 15405 the first signs of economic conflict between the Italian elite and French merchants and craftsmen in Lyons began to appear. Sixteenth-century Lyons had attracted a swarm of Italian migrants including small-scale merchants, artisans, and day labourers mainly from Piedmont, Savoy and Lombardy. A contemporary estimated that as many as 12,000 Italians lived in the city.51 It is possible that 20 per cent of the inhabitants were Italian emigrants. The lesser folk among the Italian newcomers assimilated themselves rather easily to the French population of the city.52 Conflict between these emigrants of modest means and the rest of the population was minimal. It was to be quite otherwise with the relatively small Italian elite which

4O Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

dominated Lyons's economic life.53 A small number of Italian trading houses controlled the heights of financial and commercial life throughout the sixteenth century.54 In 1569, for example, there were 532 merchants recorded in the register of imports. Yet 74 per cent of such imports were in the hands of only thirty-three merchants. Of these the top twenty-four were Italian.55 The most important of the Italian importers were the Florentines, who dominated the spice and silk trade between Venice and France. Yet spices made up only 13 per cent of customs receipts, trailing far behind the market for silk cloth. Silk thus constituted a far more lucrative import. In this respect a mere twenty importers controlled 96 per cent of imports. Most of these importers were Luccan, Genoan, and Florentine merchants. The Italians, likewise, dominated the export of French products such as grain, salt, cloth, and books to the Italian peninsula and the Levant. Moreover, the influence of the Italian way of life on the French and other European elites greatly stimulated the demand for Italian products, which were imported to and often re-exported from Lyons. For example, arms and armour imported from Milan were in great demand not only in France, but in Spain, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in northern Europe. In Lyons the rich Italian merchants and merchant bankers constituted the elite of the social hierarchy.56 Such was their influence that Lyons was known as 'French Tuscany.'57 The wealth, prestige, and activities of the Italians raised them above other Lyonnais merchants, French or foreign. The Italians were organized in Florentine, Luccan, Genoan, and Milanese nations and each had juridical, administrative, and even religious identities and enjoyed various privileges and immunities.58 The Florentines, the strongest of these nations, had a consul, two councillors, an archive in the strong-box of the convent of Franciscans, and its own church. The other nations were less formally constituted, based on a community of interest reflected in the election of representatives or procurators as occasion warranted.59 In 1571 the largest nation was the Florentine with forty-two members, followed by the Milanese with thirty-six, and the Luccans and the Genoans, each with twenty-seven. Within each nation wealth and economic power was highly concentrated. According to the assessment of 1571, the nine most taxed of the Florentine merchants held three-quarters of the wealth of their nation. Similarly six of the twenty-seven Luccans held 84 per cent of the wealth in their community and the top two had more than 50 per cent.60

Italians and the French Reformation

41

Another characteristic of the great merchant families was the continuity of their power. The same families, constituting veritable commercial and banking dynasties, occupied dominant economic and social positions throughout the sixteenth century.61 Their participation in public celebrations, particularly royal or princely entries, was as splendid as possible. Both individually and collectively their role in charitable works, and especially in the establishment of the Aumone generate of Lyons, was noteworthy. Likewise, the Italians took part fully in the construction and maintenance of the defences of the city. Behind the scenes they exercised a determining influence over the city council, especially through their control of municipal finance.62 Italian banking and financial operations in France also included princely loans and tax farming as well as dealing with the debts and obligations of nobles, towns, and lesser merchants. Yet for all the permanence of their presence on French soil these families were slow to acculturate. Relations between the leading members of the Italian nations in Lyons and the Italian city-states from which they came remained close. Their status remained essentially that of expatriates abroad. The Luccan republic, for example, repeatedly called upon its citizens in France to contribute to poor relief in Lucca, undertook to supervise their religious behaviour, and intervened with the French court in order to maintain the extra-territorial privileges of its merchants and bankers.63 The sense of extra-territoriality went so far that legal cases originating on French soil not infrequently were settled in courts in Lucca.64 Beyond the importance of the Italians of Lyons to the economic life of France, the bankers and merchants of that city were key to the whole financial and foreign policy of the French monarchy under Francis I and Henri II. The financing of the French Italian campaigns was in large part made possible because of the support of Florentine and Luccan bankers as well as other Italian exiles. At the same time the edifice of state finances became increasingly dependent on their fiscal resources and expertise.65 At the focal point of this network of money, credit, and diplomacy at mid-century was Cardinal Francois de Tournon. Under Henri II he became primarily responsible for preserving French interests in Italy and for organizing the vast schemes of credit that made the continuation of French ambitions there possible. Indispensable to this effort were Tournon's ties to the Italian merchant bankers and political exiles centred in Lyons.66 The accumulating royal debt owing to the Lyonnais Italians led to

42 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

their growing influence over the farming and collection of taxes in the French kingdom. This system reached its first climax in the 15505 with the construction by Tournon and his Italian friends of the financial syndicate known as the Grand Parti. While it lasted, it allowed the monarchy financially to transcend the forced loans on the towns, alienations of royal lands and revenues, new taxes, and other increasingly inadequate expedients of the previous decades. It accomplished this by using these fiscal devises as collateral to mobilize vast sums of credit through the banks of Lyons. Swiss and German bankers participated, but it was the Italians, especially the Florentines - the Spini, Jacomnini, Gondi, and others - who dominated the syndicate.67 The true milieu of the Italian merchants and bankers remained the cosmopolitan one of international business. Their real ties lay with fellow businessmen from their home cities in Italy and with colonies of their respective nations scattered elsewhere in Europe. They were connected to these through their travels, family ties, commercial associates, factors, and financial agents. The Bonvisi of Lyons, for example, were closer to members of their extended family in Lucca, but also in London, Antwerp, Medina del Campo, and Marseilles, than they were to anyone in the French kingdom. The true home of the expatriate Lyonnais Italians was, thus, the Europe of commerce, of the international Italian bankers, and of the letter of exchange. It was in this world that they found their friends, godfathers for their newborn children, and marriage partners for their offspring. These ties constituted an extraordinary unity, which helped to strengthen the cohesion of the European economy while creating a sense of solidarity over and above regional connections. A certain number of the Lyonnais Italian elite did acquire letters of French naturalization, but true integration was relatively rare. Even more than other Italian migrants, the Italian bankers in Lyons lived apart from the rest of the population as part of an international diaspora. They regarded themselves more often than not as temporary residents rather than as emigrants eager to naturalize themselves.68 In the first part of the sixteenth century relations between the economic elite of the Italian nations and local merchants and urban government were cordial, based as they were on mutual benefit. Italian domination over imports and exports was partly compensated by their absence from the internal and local markets, which were left to Frenchmen. Likewise, Italian and French merchants had in common resistance both to royal intrusion into the operation of the fairs of Lyons and to the monarchy's fiscal demands.69 Yet there were signs of friction between

Italians and the French Reformation 43

Italian merchant bankers and French commercial and manufacturing interests from the 15408. In particular, opposition developed against attempts on the part of the Italians to establish monopoly positions. In 1544 a group of Florentines and Luccans, represented by Louis Bernard and Jean Baptiste Bernardin, obtained from the king the right to collect 25,000 livres on Lyons's import duty on Genoese velvet. They received this right in return for having loaned 60,000 livres to Cardinal de Tournon. The town council vehemently protested, accusing the consortium headed by Bernard of seeking to control the whole of the silk trade.70 In the 15405 there was likewise fierce resistance from Paris to the granting to two Italians of a royal monopoly on alum, a supply of which was crucial to the enormous wool cloth manufacture of that city.71 At the end of the decade the city government of Paris indignantly rejected a royal proposal for the establishment of a bank in Paris headed by an Italian, Vincent de Saint Donyno. Among other objections raised was the fear that those who controlled the bank would soon come to control and undermine the commercial life of Paris.72 Saint Donyno, undoubtedly, was an agent of the Italian Lyonnais bankers. Such developments reflect a growing tension between internationally oriented and politically influential Italian merchants and bankers and more nationally or locally oriented French merchant and manufacturing interests. In particular conflict resulted from the growing Italian effort to penetrate the kingdom's internal economy, which up to then had been largely left in French hands. The most spectacular example of such an attempted intrusion occurred at Tours at the beginning of the 15508. In the late fifteenth century a silk industry had been established in that city which employed thousands of masters and workers under royal protection. But from the beginning the manufacture at Tours was dependent on the importation of raw silk from Italy. By the 15405 the dependence of the industry at Tours on the Italian merchant-bankers of Lyons for raw materials, credit, and markets had become overwhelming. In 1550 it appears that the Luccan merchants Antoine and Louis Bonvisi attempted to take complete control over the industry through local agents. Acting on behalf of the local industry, the town council challenged this effort by Italian outsiders to make themselves dominant. Faced with this reaction, the Bonvisi backed down. But rather than drop their attack, the members of the council of Tours broadened their protest to include the activities of all of the Italian merchant-bankers at Lyons. Remonstrating to the town council of Lyons in October 1551,

44 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

they complained of the financial and commercial stranglehold of the Italians over the merchants, manufacturers, and artisans of Tours.73 Resistance against Italian intrusion into French internal commerce had meanwhile emerged at Lyons itself. The economic squeeze that became evident in the 15405 pushed the Italians into areas they had previously foresworn: direct purchases from manufacturers within the country and the redistribution of imported manufactures within the kingdom.74 The numbers of foreigners taking up residence and trading outside the limits of the fairs grew from forty-nine in 1529 to 186 in 1571. Some of these traded through French go-betweens enabling them to avoid taxes as a result.75 From 1550 onwards the city councillors of Lyons began to complain openly about Italians who had taken up residence and who were engaging in trade in direct competition with Lyonnais merchants. Growing economic difficulties in subsequent years intensified this sense of rivalry. In 1551 complaints were voiced in Lyons against Italian attempts at manipulating the currency. The leading Italian merchants and bankers suddenly demanded two-thirds payment in ecus d'or for letters of exchange and other contracts. At the same time, these merchants and bankers were said to be exporting gold specie in massive quantities from Lyons to Italy.76 Such practices by the Italians made gold more scarce, forced up its price, and increased the difficulty of repayment for debtors who more often than not were local Lyonnais merchants. Indeed, if payment could not be made in gold the debtor had to pay a prime.77 The rise in the price of gold thus meant the relative depreciation of silver, which was made worse by the profusion of bad money in circulation. In part, this downward revaluation of silver in relation to gold was the result of the increasing inflows of New World silver into Europe. But it offered the possibility of a quick profit to the Italians who controlled the financial exchanges. French merchants saw themselves as the victims of these financial manoeuvres.78 In support of these French businessmen the king issued an edict providing that commercial and credit settlements could be made entirely in French silver currency and not primarily in gold as required by the Italian merchant bankers. But the Italians were not prepared to accept this royal decree at face value. They were able to arrange that the edict not be issued at Lyons and they even tried to obtain its cancellation altogether. In turn the local Lyonnais merchants solicited the support of their town council, which decided to send further remonstrances to the king. In these they accused the Italians of artificially inflating the price of

Italians and the French Reformation

45

gold and then conspiring to require payment in gold to the great loss of French merchants.79 The representations of the French merchants of Lyons sustained by the town council ultimately prevailed. Letters-patent issued from Villers-Cotteret on 23 August 1552 ordered that debtors owing in ecus d'oror marcs d'or could discharge their obligations in livres.80 The latter half of the 15505 was to be highlighted by the failure of the syndicate of the Grand Parti. The collapse of this Italian-dominated syndicate fuelled the flames of French economic hostility as we have seen. Thus, in 1561 on the eve of the Protestant seizure of the city certain French merchants brought suit against the monopoly the Florentines had long enjoyed over the transmission of parcels and letters to and from Italy. The French litigants claimed that the Florentines had for many years been able to economically control the citizens and people of France. The Florentines had been allowed a consul for their nation and a master of the couriers to control foreign dispatches and business. It was all very well that such an officer manage Florentine business with Rome, but the Florentines were seeking to subject and subordinate Frenchmen to the same control. If they win their case, argued the French suitors, all the business of France will pass through their hands and be under their control. The court was implored not to allow this in order to protect the liberty of the French, which the king would not wish to see under the slave yoke of the alien Florentines.81 While this was a private suit, such arguments were soon to become the commonplaces of French economic nationalism. The accumulating tinder of economic as well as cultural resentment against Italian influence that we have identified helped to ignite the Calvinist revolt of 1562, especially at Lyons. But so, too, did an emergent political nationalism. At the beginning of the religious wars the primary thrust of Huguenot propaganda was to insist on their loyalty to the French monarchy. The apparent rebellion of the Huguenots was really in the service of the true interests of the king.82 The xenophobic element in this propaganda at first was directed mainly against the Guise who were denounced as aliens. In a typical Huguenot poem of the early 15605, Des Lorrains, the Guise are portrayed as both traitors and foreigners who oppress all strata of French society: Should the people suffer so many evils And be so completely ruined, Is it reasonable that foreigners Dominate the lawful through force and violence?83

46 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France Because of the intrigues of the Guise, it was asserted that the Huguenots were treated as traitors despite their fidelity to the kingdom. The Contrepoison (Paris, 1568) argued that the Guise, the papacy, and the king of Spain had seized control of the young king.84 The war that they were perpetuating in France had already caused a frightful number of foreigners to enter the kingdom and to tear at its very entrails.85 The rebellion of the Huguenots was not because of religion, but because the state was in danger.86 The patriotic posture of the Huguenots was nowhere better expressed than in the tide of a contemporary pamphlet en tided Mouvement franfais, c'est-d-dire, relation des raisons qui ont porte les reformes de se soulever et defendre la premiere, deuxieme et troisieme fois contre les persecutions du Cardinal de Lorraine... (i569) .8? But political nationalism directed against the Italians also became a feature of the Calvinist uprising. The perpetuation of the civil wars made the growing influence of the Italians a major political issue in France. It had long become so in neighbouring Avignon. It is Avignon, a quasidependency of the French kingdom, which most spectacularly illustrates this political aspect of anti-Italianism. In the papal enclave of Avignon and Comtat-Venaissin an important pro-French Calvinist movement defined itself by its aversion to Italian political domination. Avignon in the sixteenth century had gradually become an economic satellite of the Italian elite of Lyons.88 The manufacture of silk was the primary industry, but the milling of grain, pressing of oil, fulling of cloth, beating of copper, and the manufacture of paper kept the mills of the region busy. From the end of the fifteenth century the popes had increasing difficulty maintaining their sovereignty as the French monarchy attempted to assert its own control. In 1536 royal letters-patents were issued granting inhabitants of Avignon recognition as subjects of the French Crown. This allowed them to obtain offices and benefices in the French kingdom. Avignonese merchants were exempted from French customs duties in 1544. As a reflection of these realities, papal legates to Avignon were increasingly chosen from among French ecclesiastics. In the course of the legateship of Cardinal Francois de Clermont (1513-41) an evident Gallicizing of Avignonese society took place. The appointment by Paul HI of his grandson Alessandro Farnese as legate signified an abrupt reversal of this trend. Under Farnese there arrived a flood of new Italian place-seekers, some of whom found appointments as vice-legates, vicars of the archeveche, rectors, fiscal agents, and procurators. The rule of Farnese was marked by interminable quarrels between these appointees and increasing resistance to them by the

Italians and the French Reformation 47

Avignonese, who perceived a growing threat to their privileges. In the reign of Henri II, the rising level of tension expressed itself in the form of an increasingly open conflict between an organized French and Italian party. At the least, the French party aimed at a closer relationship between the territory of Avignon and the French Crown. Taking the lead on behalf of the French side was a group of privileged young gallants. To popular acclaim they carried out a series of demonstratively outrageous exploits in defiance of the legate and other representatives of papal power. At the head of this band of turbulent young men was JeanPerrinet Parpaille.89 It was around the figure of Parpaille that the Reformation crisis developed at the end of the 15505. As a result of his loyal service to France, Henri II appointed Parpaille a councillor in the Parlement of Turin. He then was named a councillor at the court of Hercule d'Este, duke of Ferrara. In 1557 he became professor of law at the University of Ferrara. Enjoying the protection of Duchess Renee de France, Parpaille began to assimilate the basic ideas of Calvinist theology. When he came back to Avignon in 1558, he returned as a devoted partisan of the French rather than the Italian party. Named to the city council, Parpaille was determined to profess law at the University of Avignon, where his father had been primicier. The Chair of law had been for many years in the hands of Italian professors including Antoine de Castro, Andre Alciati, Ayman Cravatta, and Emile Ferrati. Continuing in this line, Giovanni Angelo Papio of the University of Salerno became professor of law in 1553. His principal patron was the cardinal archbishop of Lyons, Francois de Tournon, charged with maintaining French influence in the Italian peninsula. Papio was surrounded by an entourage of aristocratic Italians who had followed him to Avignon. Around this coterie of nobles there flocked a host of other Italian students who also had been attracted to Papio's lectures in Avignon. In 1558 the professorship of law came up for renewal. In rivalry to Papio, Parpaille advanced his own candidacy, offering to teach his course for less money than his rival or even to lecture for free. By March 1559 a complete polarization within the university between Italian and French students had developed. Parpaille was acclaimed by the French students, all of whom abandoned Papio. By the beginning of 1560 Papio was forced to leave the university. This was interpreted as a great victory for the French party and a blow to the authority of the papal legate. At that moment there arrived at the Palais des Papes an order from the Roman Inquisition to burn all books prohibited by the Roman

48 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

Index. The vice-legate published a list of books to be destroyed and to set an example conducted a public auto-da-fe in the courtyard of the Palais. The university in response refused to comply with the order from Rome. More seriously, the town council rebelled against the Italian government of Farnese in the name of its ancient liberties. There were clear signs in the rebellion of the rejection of papal sovereignty and the Catholic faith.9° Empowered by his victory, Parpaille was sent by the city council to negotiate with Rome. Well-received by the new Pope Pius IV, who was anxious to conciliate the Avignonese elite, Parpaille was able to extract major concessions which confirmed and extended the privileges of the municipal government. In the wake of this success, the papal legate Farnese was forced to retire. Parpaille returned to Avignon in triumph. Taking things one step further, Parpaille and his followers next attempted to eliminate all papal interference in the government of the city. Parpaille had overreached himself. A popular Catholic reaction began to develop in Avignon and in the Comtat-Venaissin. In this context the bishop of Chiusi was sent to Avignon to negotiate with the town council. A compromise was agreed upon. Parpaille himself was summoned to Rome to answer for his openly pro-French policies. Instead, he fled to Orange and publically declared himself a Calvinist. From that city, which had completely entered the Protestant camp, Parpaille attempted to organize the military and religious overthrow of papal authority in Avignon and its region. In a speech to the popular assembly of Orange in 1562, Parpaille proposed to buy arms from the government of the city of Lyons, which had been seized by the Calvinists. To finance these arms purchases he planned to use the gold and silver captured in raids by the Calvinist party on the sacristies of the Catholic churches of the region. In this way, he said, the treasures heaped up by superstition could be given back to the oppressors of reason in the form of bullets.91 By 'reason' Parpaille evidently meant the teachings of the Calvinist religion. He also was referring to the program of the French party, which was the establishment of full French sovereignty and elimination of papal power in Avignon and Comtat-Venaissin. Parpaille was, of course, to fail in his crusade and to be put to death for his trouble. Avignon and the Comtat-Venaissin were to become bastions of the Counter-Reformation. In a military sense papal control of the territory during the religious wars was critical to maintaining the Catholic position in Provence and Languedoc. At the same time, these papal

Italians and the French Reformation 49

territories formed a convenient base from which to transplant the decrees of the Council of Trent and to extend the activities of the Jesuit and Capuchin Orders from Italy to France. But this episode does illustrate the degree to which the religious struggle was mixed up with political and ethnic conflict. In Avignon ethnic hostility toward the Italians was confused with notions of French patriotism, hostility to ecclesiastical control, the struggle for municipal liberties, cultural rivalry, and last, but not least, religious conflict. It could be argued, perhaps, that such a mixture of motives may have been the case at the beginning of the wars of religion, but not later. From this perspective the triumph of the Counter-Reformation signified the subsumption of other factors by religion. But, in fact, hostility against the Italian presence continually resurfaced in Avignon and the ComtatVenaissin over the following decades. In 1569, for example, resistance developed against the appointment of an Italian as bishop of Cavaillon. An Italian ecclesiastic complained to Rome: 'You will be entreated by many and by many arguments. But you should know that all this tends to no other end but to get rid of the Italians and to cover things up so that the Pope and Rome don't hear about them so that people here can continue to live as they please.'92 The presence of Italian troops was a cause of continual complaint: 'The Italian forces which the Pope garrisons here lead the evil-minded to make the people of the Comtat-Venaissin believe that they [the Italians] have no other purpose than to bridle them and to impoverish them by imposing continuing fiscal levies.'93 Anti-Italian feeling in France was itself undeniably fed by the Italianate character of the papacy as well. As early as 1561, for example, the nobility of Touraine denounced the export of money to Rome from the kingdom by Italians holding French benefices.94 Indeed, the Huguenots claimed that the French clergy were disloyal because they swore allegiance to the papacy. The connection between hostility to the papacy and anger toward Italians parallels the situation in Germany at the outbreak of the Reformation.95 These grievances introduce a new and important theme in the development of anti-Italianism. Until the 15605 the principal motifs of antiItalian sentiment had been cultural and economic. But clearly from the outbreak of the religious wars the excessive political influence of the Italians became a preoccupation. Italian control of the French church upset Huguenots, but also disturbed Gallicans. More urgently the growing influence of the Italians not simply over business matters but over royal finances and court politics became a source of general complaint.

5O Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

Already at the Estates-General of Orleans in 1560 the third estate demanded an investigation into the dealings of the financiers who had managed the royal finances under Henri II.96 Anti-Italian xenophobia, which had been confined to Lyons and its environs initially or limited to a restricted humanist cultural milieu, was in the process of becoming a popular and national issue. A politically based anti-Italianism emerges as a central theme of Huguenot propaganda by the late 15605. In the Protestation de par Monseigneur le Prince de Conde (1568), for example, the Protestant leader justifies his rebellion by saying that it was in order to incite the king to call the Estates-General in order to relieve the people of the fiscal oppression imposed on them by the malice of the Italians.97 A contemporary pamphlet inspired by the Protestant nobility notes that the Huguenots have rebelled because of a plot against them. But the nobility also denounce the excessive influence of the Italians in the kingdom.98 Anti-Italianism was becoming an issue around which socially and even religiously divided Frenchmen could find common ground.

CHAPTER THREE

The Italians at Lyons: Usury and Heresy

In the view of Antoine Du Pinet, the objective of the Reformation at Lyons ought to have been the re-establishment of the unity of the city on the basis of the gospel. Such a process of renewal entailed a rejection of the old religion. But it also involved the dissolution of the Italiandominated banking industry, which Du Pinet believed to be the source not of the city's prosperity, but of its moral and economic troubles. The defenders of a Catholic restoration in the city, of course, had an entirely different religious point of view. Only a return to the Roman Catholic faith would reconstitute order and heal the community. But it is surprising that the Catholic champion, the Jesuit preacher Antonio Possevino, shared a viewpoint similar to Du Pinet's when it came to the economic problems of Lyons. Like the Calvinist Du Pinet, die Jesuit Possevino linked the upheaval of the Reformation in Lyons to the uncontrolled financial speculation of the leaders of the banking industry. More to the point, according to Possevino, commercial and financial excesses had excited the hatred of the French population against the Italian community. Possevino was an eyewitness to the Reformation in Lyons. In 1562 he had preached to the Italians of the city during the Lenten season shortly before the Protestant coup de main. Faced with the impending takeover of the city by an increasingly aggressive Calvinist party, Possevino concentrated on defending basic Catholic teachings on the mass, the real presence, and the veneration of the saints. Like many other Italians, Possevino then abandoned the city during the Calvinist interregnum. In the fall of 1563, he returned to Lyons in the wake of the reoccupation of the town by the royal army. He came back at the express invitation of the Italian merchant community, which in the main had exiled itself during the period of Calvinist rule. Together with his fellow Jesuit Emond

52 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

Auger, he returned to spearhead the restoration of Catholic control over the city.1 While Possevino focused on ensuring the faith of the influential Italian community, Auger devoted his energies to prosletyzing the French inhabitants. In the eyes of the Jesuits, a restoration of Catholic spiritual control over Lyons was seen as key to the success of the CounterReformation in France.2 Possevino's unpublished memoirs as well as his letters to Diego Lainez, the general of the Jesuit Order, are important sources of information about his activities during this period.3 Engaged in ongoing polemics with Pierre Viret and other Calvinist ministers, Possevino preached on a gamut of theological issues in dispute between Catholics and Protestants. But he eventually focused on the critically important question of banking and usury. After months of careful preparations, Possevino delivered a great series of sermons denouncing the practice of usury and deposit banking as practised by the Italian nations of Lyons. Possevino memoirs and correspondence give two versions of how he came to offer these sermons. In his memoirs, written toward the end of his life, he recounts that he at first delayed treating the subject of banking and usury out of a kind of intellectual trepidation. Those who practised usury often asserted that the preachers who railed against it in fact knew little about the subject. Accordingly, Possevino spent a year preparing himself for these talks. He studied the writings of the theologians on the matter.4 But he also investigated the financial operations of the Lyonnais Italians. In particular, he sought information and advice from the most powerful of the Italian merchant bankers, including the rich Florentine merchant Lorenzo Capponi and the consul of the Florentine nation Piero-Francesco Rinuccini.5 On the basis of this practical as well as theoretical foundation, he prepared his series of homilies. Also as a result of this research, he was able to compose a little treatise on the various kinds of contracts commonly used by these merchants in order to try to clarify the moral and theological complexity of these operations.6 Such is the background to the delivery of these sermons as described in Possevino's memoirs. But in a letter written more or less contemporaneously with the sermons, a quite different picture emerges.7 Writing to a Luccan merchant in April 1564, Possevino admits that he was reluctant to preach against banking and usury not simply from intellectual timidity. Worldly prudence, that is, fear of offending the economically powerful leaders of the Italian community, made him hesitate. During his first stay at Lyons and at the beginning of his second visit, he was unwilling to

The Italians at Lyons 53

raise the subject for fear of alienating such influential men. He hoped that if he preached on other religious matters, those who heard him would be led to mend their usurious ways. But on reflection he came to the conclusion that his reluctance to deal with the question was leaving many in a state of mortal sin. He decided that his preaching office required him to address this crucial matter directly. Public sins ought, as he put it, to be publicly rebuked.8 The letter of 1564 makes clear that Possevino in the pulpit scolded his audience, which included many Italian financiers, in no uncertain terms. He bluntly asserted that banking as practised by them was a form of usury. But his final view of these financial practices and their effects on the French kingdom was made fully evident only much later. Possevino disclosed his ultimate conclusions in a place and at a time far removed from the upheavals in Lyons in the early 15605. It was at Lucca many years later that he summed up his earlier experiences. Possevino had expressed an interest in the installation of the Counter-Reformation in Lucca as early as 1568.9 Indeed, the next year 1569, the Catholic revival barely underway, he was invited to deliver a series of sermons in the Tuscan republic to assist its progress.10 Under quite different circumstances, he was summoned to Lucca once again to deliver the Lenten sermons in 1589. Much had changed in Lucca from twenty years earlier. In contrast to 1569, the city-state of Lucca in 1589 was fully in the throes of the Counter-Reformation. It was in these improved spiritual surroundings that Possevino had occasion finally to sum up his views. Possevino began these penitential sermons by recalling other occasions in which he had preached to citizens of Lucca. He had preached to Luccans not only on their own home ground, but also on many occasions in other European cities where they were part of the resident Italian merchant and banking communities. But what is notable is the degree to which Possevino harked back to his tumultuous experiences as a preacher to the Italian community at Lyons in the early 15605 almost thirty years before. In part, this may have been due to Possevino's awareness that some members of his audience had actually been living in Lyons at the time, as he took pains to remind them.11 But the more profound reason must undoubtedly have been the lasting effect that the religious crisis at Lyons of the early 15605 had had on him. The struggle against the Calvinists in Lyons in that decade had obviously left a profound mark. That experience led Possevino in retrospect to carefully ponder the reasons behind the upheaval in the city. As a result, Possevino offers us a remarkable account of the effects of the

54 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

practices of the Italian bankers on Lyons and the French kingdom. It is a view based on his own experience as well as that of some of the most powerful and well-informed members of the Italian community. In large part it elaborates on a perspective that is already evident in his correspondence of the 15605. But it also clearly reflects almost thirty years of reflection on the meaning of these events. Possevino in 1589 reiterates first of all his earlier condemnation of Italian banking practice. All the manoeuvres of the bankers, including so-called donations, deposits, exchanges and discounts, are denounced as forms of usury or of making money off the trade in money. He then refers back to the impact on the Italians of Lyons of his sermons against these practices in the 15605. He notes how carefully he had to prepare himself to deliver these homilies. But he recalls also that he found the Italian community on that occasion surprisingly receptive to his denunciation of their financial practices. According to him, the upheavals and disasters of the French religious wars that he claimed were the consequence of their destructive financial dealings had chastened the Italian community. According to Possevino, the practice of deposit banking in the forty years before the outbreak of the religious wars had led to more bankruptcies and personal financial disasters than in the whole previous history of Christianity. This is, we might note, an interesting contemporary reflection on the revolutionary effects of the first generation of European capitalism. Not only had there occurred an enormous loss of private wealth, but also the ruin of the city of Lyons and, indeed, the French kingdom. In the midst of crisis, certain merchants had even taken advantage of the desperation of widows, orphans, and virgins in order to speculate and enrich themselves on the depreciated value of the bonds of these helpless unfortunates. Possevino especially stresses the disastrous consequences of the Grand Parti. According to him, the initial success of this financial syndicate had the pernicious effect of helping to finance the construction of the Turkish fleets that had attacked Christian states. Possevino here is referring to the activities of the Ottoman Jewish banker Joseph Naci, so-called argentier du roi au Levant, who had been instrumental in arranging the involvement of the Ottoman elite in the financing of the Grand Parti.12 He claims that the Grand Parti strengthened the Protestants in Germany and greatly increased their numbers in France. He makes reference here in the first place to the involvement of certain German Protestant bankers in the organization of the syndicate. At the same time, he is pointing to

The Italians at Lyons 55

the radicalizing effects of the collapse of the consortium on the religious and social consciousness of thousands of ruined investors in Lyons and elsewhere. According to Possevino's recollection, Francis I had prompted the Lyonnais bankers to set up the system of state borrowing. In part this was done to try to deprive the French king's arch-rival Charles V of access to credit. But what began as borrowing at 8 per cent under Francis I, reached 12 or 16 per cent in the reign of his successor as a result of the operations of the Grand Parti. The politicians and bankers who persuaded Francis I and Henri II of the wisdom of these measures were in the first place inspired by the desire for profit. But they were also moved by the writings of Machiavelli, which guided their consciences. It was these evil advisers who persuaded these two kings to increase taxes. Taxes were raised not only to increase revenues, but also to pay off creditors more easily. This made it possible to draw in still more investors. Attracting investors in this way was also supposed to make it more difficult for the Hapsburg political rivals of the French monarchy to raise money. But the consequences of such measures were quite contrary to such expectations. Commerce declined and inflation soared amid the impoverishment of many craftsmen and the ruin of many peasants. Discontent and anger among the people mounted. At the same time, the wealth of the French kingdom fell into the hands of the tax gatherers and merchants who held the debt of the state. Indeed, the sudden increase in the wealth of these creditors, Possevino concludes pointedly, led to an outbreak of hostility against foreigners, especially Italians. Not only did the Grand Parti lead to higher taxes it ultimately required the alienation of the lands of the Crown as well as those of the Church. Here Possevino alludes to the massive alienations of ecclesiastical property in France that began in the 15605. Whereas prior to the appearance of deposit banking and the Grand Parti, Possevino continues, the French kingdom had flourished and was considered the restorer of Christianity, today one finds many churches and holy sites in the kingdom in a state of abandon. Not only is the kingdom in a miserable state, but many Luccans themselves have suffered losses or are threatened by such from the upheavals that have followed. In this sermon Possevino not only blames the banking practices of the Italians for causing them to be hated, but strongly suggests that they have caused the religious wars. As we have already noted, his analysis essentially agrees with that of Du Pinet. The latter also stressed the develop-

56 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

ment of immorality and the divorce of the real economy from that of the speculative one as a consequence of the operations of the Italian merchants and bankers. From a perspective opposite to that of Possevino, Du Pinet sees a link between these excesses and the rise of Calvinism. For the latter the Reformation is the answer to the economic and social evils that have arisen in the wake of the development of an economy based on avarice and luxury. Possevino, likewise, sees the link between the religious crisis and the economic and fiscal excesses of his fellow Italians. But for him the Reformation, far from being a solution, is simply one of a number of evils, including the Turkish threat, economic ruin, war, and plague, that have followed from the unscrupulous behaviour of the Italians. Possevino possibly exaggerates the degree to which the increase in taxation had impoverished the population. On the other hand, if taken with the growing indebtedness of the peasantry and urban craftsmen, increases in taxation undoubtedly accelerated the process of social polarization so evident in French society in the first half of the sixteenth century. Particularly admirable in Possevino's analysis is his sense of the connection between events at Lyons and in the rest of France. As his sermon suggests, Lyons had become the economic and financial nerve centre of the French kingdom. As a consequence, the repercussions of the activities of the Italian bankers and financiers were felt in every part of the kingdom. Moreover, as he notes these effects were not simply economic, but also social, political, and religious. In conformity with the views of the Catholic Church in the second half of the sixteenth century, Possevino's condemnation of usury was sweeping and uncompromising.13 Not only does he condemn all forms of deposit banking, but any kind of operation that entails the use of credit or what is considered as excessive profit.14 According to him, economic activity based on the loan of money was illegitimate and sinful. Indeed, an investment which brought more than 6 or 8 per cent annual profit was suspect in his view. Possevino believed it was important to the credibility of the Catholic Church to demonstrate that it would not accept the legitimacy of excess profits based on what was assumed to be exploitation.15 Possevino was convinced that the revolutionary upheavals that had engulfed Lyons and the kingdom of France had been caused by the usurious practices of the Italian banking community. It seems clear that the positive response that Possevino received to his sermons was due in part to the fact that the Italian elite itself had been shaken by these

The Italians at Lyons 57

events. Some of them, particularly the Florentines, were prepared in the short run to pay heed to Possevino as a result.16 Possevino, indeed, urged them to step up support for the dissemination of Catholic teaching in this respect as a means of safeguarding their property.17 In his sermons of 1589, he similarly warned the Luccan elite against the possibility of upheavals in their own republic similar to those in France if they did not abandon their usurious banking practices.18 Possevino's views on usury reflect a growing conservatism in the Catholic Church. The uncompromising opposition to loans at interest that marks the late sixteenth century reflects a retreat from the more qualified and tolerant view of the matter adopted by some Catholic theologians during the fifteenth century. Catholic opinion became increasingly uncompromising in the course of the sixteenth century. On the face of it, the evolution of the attitude of the monarchy in France parallelled that of the church. Indeed, royal ordinances prohibiting usury appeared more and more frequently as the century progressed. In 1582, as part of an intensification of royal efforts to suppress usury, these laws were all gathered together and appeared in a comprehensive collection of antiusury ordinances.19 But the attitude of French civil law was, in fact, far more accommodating to the taking of interest than was that of the church. Clement Marot summed up the French situation in a characteristically irreverent way: 'One is not permitted to make loans which are usurious, but one can loan at interest as much as one likes.'20 The commentary of French legist Barthelemy de Chasseneuz confirms Marot's observation. According to him, profits from usury and those from interest are not the same thing. Loans at interest to the king or loans that allow a merchant to carry on his business cannot be considered usury.21 Guy Coquille refers to what he calls permissible usury, that is, loans founded on economic utility regardless of the question of the willingness of the parties. What a reasonable rate of interest is should be left to the courts to decide.22 The jurisconsult Francois Grimaudet concluded that profiting from the use of money cannot be considered usury provided it does not violate the rules of charity, that is, lead to the exploitation of the poor.23 The dominant view among legists was that interest rates had to be maintained at moderate levels. The common opinion was that interest on a loan ought to be no more than 8% per cent. According to one jurist, rentes with returns above 10 per cent and charges on late payments on loans of more than 62/s per cent ought to be considered usury.24 The opinions of the French legal class, both Catholic and Protestant, on interest had been shaped in their basic outlines by the Calvinist legal

58 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France scholar Charles Dumoulin. In 1547 Dumoulin outlined his views in his Tractatus commerdorum et usurarum reditumque pecunia constitutorum et monetarum. The treatise was summarized and translated into the vernacular the same year.25 His perspective on this question, as a matter of fact, closely coincides with that of Calvin. Indeed, according to Jean-Louis Thireau, author of the most recent and authoritative study of Dumoulin, on the question of usury the influence of Dumoulin on Calvin was determinative.26 But what is most important with regard to the question of usury is to recall that both Dumoulin and Calvin were Gallican lawyers. As such their views represent an expression of the common consensus of the French legal community. Like Calvin, Dumoulin rejects the idea that the Old Testament prohibitions on usury were binding on Christians. Such a prohibition had been created in a specific society in a certain time and place and did not necessarily apply to current circumstances. Christ's admonition to lend hoping for nothing in return was to be taken seriously. But Christ was not a civil legislator. His commands in this case should be interpreted figuratively rather than literally so as to incite the conscience toward charity and neighbourliness. In loaning money to the poor, the lender should not expect the payment of interest in return. Indeed, in such cases charity and not loans were in order. On the other hand, there is no harm in making loans at interest to the rich who use such loans to make more money. Lending at interest in this way was a positive act. It allowed merchants to have access to capital necessary to their business operations, which they otherwise could not find. Those who loan money provide a service by creating a relationship between those who have money and those who need it. On the other hand, Dumoulin insisted that loans be made on a long-term basis. Rates should be kept at no more than 5 per cent. Loans should be made primarily to encourage productive activity. Loans for purposes of consumption should be discouraged.27 The attitude adopted by the city of Geneva appears to parallel that of Dumoulin. Even prior to Calvin's arrival, the town fathers were at pains to regulate local interest rates with an eye to protecting the poor and fostering the activity of small enterprises both urban and rural.28 Calvin's successive discussions of usury and interest sanctioned these policies. At the same time, his analysis of loans at interest left room for the further development of Genevan industry and international commercial relations. In practice, the city council in the wake of the Reformation adopted a two-track policy. It endeavoured to keep loans to the poor and small

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enterprises in Geneva as low as possible while allowing those resident merchants who carried on commercial and financial operations in France, Italy, and Germany to seek higher returns on their investments.29 Calvinists in France appear have taken a similar position to that adopted at Geneva. It is true that the third national synod of the Calvinist Church, which met at Orleans, condemned what it referred to as usury.30 But, in fact, its view of what constituted usury was close to that of Dumoulin and Calvin. The provisions of the ecclesiastical edict provide for a modest profit to be made on loans provided they were in conformity with the royal ordinances and the rules of charity. Usury, thus, is defined as loans at excessively high interest, especially to the poor. The Calvinist view based on Dumoulin, in fact, conforms closely to that of French legal doctrine accepted by both Calvinist and Catholic lawyers. The views of Dumoulin and Calvin, it can be concluded, did provide both a religious and economic rationale for making business loans at interest. In this sense it is certainly the case that their teaching represented an important if qualified step toward the acceptance of capitalist economic practices. Certainly, Dumoulin's view is quite different from that of Possevino's. The Catholic theologian rejects the idea that making money from loaning money can have any positive economic value. According to Dumoulin, loans that are closely regulated can be a spur to economic production. For Possevino, on the contrary, loans-at-interest are contrary to productive activity. Dumoulin's views had already been anticipated by previous thinkers, some of whom were Catholic theologians. But the official teaching of the church remained hostile to loans-at-interest. Indeed, its opposition increased in the second half of the sixteenth century as we have seen. But in the meantime a multitude of casuistic practices had developed designed to facilitate disguised loans-at-interest even at the expense of the poor or economically vulnerable. It was against the resulting moral and intellectual confusion that Dumoulin reacted. Indeed, at the time he wrote, Dumoulin was more interested in curbing what he considered to be the abuses prevalent in the credit market than in allowing it free reign. These abuses he laid at the doorstep of the Italians. It is noteworthy that before he begins his main arguments, Dumoulin insists that the usurious practices of the banks of Lyons must be discussed. It is in the banks of that city, largely in the hands of the Italians, that the source of financial corruption in the French kingdom lie. According to Dumoulin, twenty-five years ago interest rates at these banks were moderate and tolerable at no more than 8 per cent. But since

6o Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

then these rates have more than doubled. The rise in these interest rates is largely attributable to the wars between the German emperor and the French king. But the subject of the high interest rates being charged by the Italian bankers of Lyons immediately brings to Dumoulin's mind the even more serious situation prevalent in Italy. The rates of these Lyonnais bankers, excessive though they are, are only half those current in Italy.31 In Italy, Dumoulin notes, the practice of usury is ubiquitous. According to Dumoulin, it is true that the seigneurs and tyrants in Italy have formally prohibited individuals from engaging in such practices. But under the guise of prohibiting exploitation of the poor by private individuals, these rulers have established official monopolies that operate to their own benefit and at the expense of their subjects. Dumoulin is referring to the so-called monti di pietd found at Florence and elsewhere in Italy. Under Duke Cosimo de' Medici this institution became not only an important source of credit, but a central weapon of political power.32 According to Dumoulin, despite their apparent role as public charities, the monti di' pietd were, in fact, instruments of cruel oppression. He notes the ignominious involvement of Jews who serve as agents of the financial operations of these Italian tyrants. He here refers to the modus vivendi that was developing between these institutions on the Italian peninsula and local Jewish money-lenders.33 With evident contempt Dumoulin observes that the Italian rulers have legitimized these monopolies by receiving the sanction of the papacy. The monti di' pietd were, in fact, being set on a better financial footing by being turned into banks of deposit. An essential step was the receipt of papal permission for interest to be paid on deposits made at these banks.34 Dumoulin claimed that such permission was only granted by the Papacy in return for a guarantee of a share of the profits.35 Dumoulin's position, of course, was that no interest should be taken on loans to the poor. The Italian situation sanctioned by the popes was a caution to the rest of Christendom. In the meantime, the Italian bankers of Lyons were already collecting 16 per cent interest on loans and were promising depositors to double their principal in five or six years. In fact, they should receive no more than 8 per cent interest and should be allowed to loan money only as part of their involvement in authentic commercial activity.36 Dumoulin's strictures against usury in the sense of high interest rates on the poor or the economically weak were to be largely ignored. From the first decade of the religious wars, the number of usurious loans to the French peasantry increased apace. In the region around Lyons, the

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resident Italian bankers made a sideline out of high interest loans on the peasantry of the region exciting much resentment.37 Multiple ordinances were passed against usury and a half-hearted attempt at suppressing it was made as a result of complaints voiced at the Estates-General of Blois in 1576. But Antoine Verdier, for example, noted two years earlier the general prevalence of usury among the French themselves. According to him, there was not a mother's son in France who did not practise usury at the expense of his neighbour and was even prepared to boast of it. He concluded that it was the banks introduced into France by foreigners that were responsible for making such practices all-pervasive.38 In 1584 the Lyonnais legist Philibert Bugnyon noted that despite the ordinances against it, usury especially as practised by the Italian bankers was ubiquitous.39 Dumoulin almost instinctively identifies Italy's rulers with economic and political oppression. The papacy is viewed as the foremost practitioner of such despotism.40 Moreover, we have seen how the French, Calvinists to be sure, but also Gallicans, tended to identify Italians as a whole with the Roman Catholic faith. The French Jesuit Auger professed admiration for the Italian nation for its loyalty to Rome. Allegiance to Rome on the part of Italians appears to be taken for granted in the sermons of Possevino. It is an assumption that for the most appears quite justified. But the real story of the relationship between the people of Italy and the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century is much more interesting. The most important recent advances in the study of the Reformation have occurred in the field of German history. Yet in certain respects the most striking achievements of current Reformation scholarship have taken place in Italian studies. Given the successful religious and political repression of Italian Protestantism, the difficulties inherent to the carrying out of such inquiries have been far greater. Despite this a recent surge of scholarly interest in the Italian Reformation has developed that is comparable to the flood of research on the social history of the German Reformation.41 It turns out that, despite the ultimate victory of the Roman Catholic faith, Protestantism did strike deep roots in Italian soil in the first part of the sixteenth century. The great pioneer of Italian Reformation studies was Delio Cantimori. Cantimori's investigations focused on the study of the intellectual leaders of the Italian Reformation. He located the decisive watershed in the history of the Italian Reformation in the 15405. According to Cantimori, it was then that Italian evangelicism, which had been developing since at

6s Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

least 1513, suffered an irreversible defeat at the hands of conservative elements in the church. Cantimori then characterized the following period 1540-60 as the crisis of evangelicism in Italy and the subsequent years 1560-80 as the period of its retreat. Subsequent research centred on the religious elites has only deepened Cantimori's conclusions. It has been discovered that between the 15205 and the 15505 there was a veritable ideological war between spiritual or evangelical reformers and conservative elements at the highest levels of the church in Rome. The struggle ended with the defeat of the reform party.42 But the major accomplishment of recent research has been to uncover some elements of the popular basis of the Reformation in Italy. As a result, Cantimori's conceptualization and periodization of the reform in Italy has been largely superseded. Whereas Cantimori regarded the 15405 as a decade of retreat for the evangelical cause, recent research has revealed these years to have marked the beginnings of a veritable alternative evangelical church in Italy. Far from the period 1540-70 witnessing the effacement of the evangelical party, these decades saw the development of a real social movement aimed at organizing a new ecclesiastical order rivalling that of Rome.43 Affecting every part of Italy, from Sicily in the south to Venezia and Piedmont in the north, the Reformation sank deep roots among a minority of the merchants and artisans as well as among the elite in the towns. Certainly the influence of Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin was profound but so, too, was the effect of the teachings of the Spanish reformer Juan Valdes, whose followers in Italy created a distinct evangelical current of their own. The consensus among historians who have studied the Reformation at Lyons is that the Italians played a minor role. Gascon, for example, considers the influence of the Reformation among the Italians as 'insignificant.'44 Natalie Davis's view is more nuanced. She emphasizes the difference between the Florentines, with few exceptions loyal to the Catholic party, and the Genoese and Luccans, among whom the penetration of Protestant ideas is more noticeable. More importantly, she stresses the difference between those Italians who were closely associated with the institutions of their respective nations and those who were more willing to follow the path of assimilation into French society. It was among the latter group, she believes, that the receptiveness to Protestant ideology was greater.45 The views of Gascon and Davis both tend to confirm the opinion of contemporary observers that the Italians, particularly the wealthy merchant bankers, mainly remained loyal to the Catholic faith.

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But from my perspective the role of the Lyonnais Italians and, notably, the Luccans in the Reformation deserves closer attention. As we have seen, recent research has revealed that the influence of the Reformation in Italy was much greater than earlier appreciated. Indeed, the research of Simonetta Adorni-Bracessi has revealed the fact that Lucca from the 15405 was an important bastion of Protestantism in Italy.46 By 1589 Possevino was praising the Catholic piety of the citizens of Lucca. But as late as 1576 the resident of the Holy Office at Lucca wrote to the chancellor of the Luccan republic that at Rome everyone was saying that 'it had been revealed that virtually the whole city was heretical.'47 The strongly anti-clerical and anti-Romanist attitudes of the elite were rooted in Lucca's history as an imperial free city. Determined to maintain its independence vis-a-vis the papacy and Medici Florence, the elite of Lucca were attracted to Protestant ideas in part as a theological justification for the maintenance of the political independence of the city.48 From the time of the sojourn of Peter Martyr Vermigli in Lucca in the 15405, the leading urban families became deeply tainted by Protestant teaching. Indeed, from that period such teaching penetrated down to the town's lesser merchants and craftsmen. As Salvatore Caponetto has emphasized, the role of Lyons in the dissemination of reform books and ideas into Italy from Genoa in the north to Sicily in the south, can hardly be overstated.49 In the Italian community in Lyons it was notably the members of the Luccan nation that were particularly marked by Protestant ideas. Moreover, in the case of the Luccans resident in Lyons it was not merely those on the periphery of the community who were affected. Converts were made among no fewer than six of the ten leading merchant banking families and a large number of others, possibly a majority of the Luccans, were converted to Protestantism. But there were likewise some Genoese and even some Florentines of consequence who were won over.50 No doubt we are dealing with small numbers. But the crucial point is that mere numbers are not that important in such a politically and socially undemocratic age. The conversion of even a small minority of the enormously wealthy and influential Italian economic elite of Lyons has to be taken quite seriously. Lyons's role in the Italian reformation is apparent from the 15208. Antonio Brucioli, subsequently translator of the New Testament into the Italian vernacular, had contacts with French evangelicals in Lyons that were to be critical to his development as a reformer.51 From the 15308, when Ortensio Landi resided in the city employed in the printing firm of

64 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France Sebastien Gryphius, Lyons became a major place of refuge for Italian evangelicals.52 It was in the same decade that Bartolomeo Panciatichi, scion of one of the great Florentine-Lyonnais banking families, assimilated evangelical religious ideas while pursuing his interests as an Italian and Latin poet. A friend of the French humanist and cleric Jean de Vauzelles, Panciatichi was named an almoner to Marguerite of Navarre, helped feed the poor of the city in the famine of 1531, and provided the new Bureau des pauvres with an annual endowment of 300 livres tournois. At the end of the 15305, this offspring of one of the most powerful Italian banking families in Lyons would secredy dispatch Protestant books from France to Florence.53 In subsequent decades, the Luccan physicians Filipo Rustici and Giovambattista di Andrea played important roles in the development of the Italian Protestant community in Lyons.54 The first overt manifestation of Italian involvement in the Reformation in Lyons came in 1551. In that year Michel Pulin, an Italian merchant who normally resided in London, created a public scandal in Lyons. He was accused of having preached the gospel in a public square while organizing a clandestine religious assembly and of having seditious books in his possession.55 But the most explosive evidence of an underground Protestant movement among the Italians at Lyons surfaced not in France, but back in Lucca of all places. Late in 1551 Agostino Bastion Puccini, a failed merchant from an old patrician family who had served as a soldier in French service, accused the whole Luccan nation in Lyons of two great offences: heresy and financial corruption.56 In particular, he denounced two powerful merchant bankers Vincenzo Bonvisi and Francesco Micheli of being behind both crimes. Bonvisi and Micheli were the heads of the Lyonnais branches of two of the most important banking firms in Europe. Both were celebrated patrons of arts and letters, Bonvisi having been the patron of Ortensio Landi in the 15305. In Lucca their accuser Puccini had been able to find allies among certain citizens who were hostile to the ruling families of which the Bonvisi and the Micheli were very much a part. Significantly, Puccini had the support of the governor of Lyons Jacques d'Albon, the marshal of Saint-Andre. Likewise, Puccini was backed by Cosimo de' Medici, apparently with the motive of undermining the credibility of the Luccan elite. Puccini was assisted by a cathedral canon Domenico Menocchi, who was closely associated with Lucca's bishop Alessandro Guidiccioni. The latter was deeply at odds with the government of Lucca over the unclear and disputed line between ecclesiastical as against civic jurisdiction. But Guidiccioni was also in conflict with the civic govern-

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ment because he believed it was protecting heretics. Puccini allied with a canon of the cathedral of Lucca, Menocchi, and Stefano Liena, brother of the learned jurist and Calvinist Nicolao Liena. In December 1551, likely with the support of the Roman Inquisition, Puccini denounced Bonvisi and Micheli. He accused the two Lyonnais merchants of illegally exporting bullion from the French kingdom by transferring it secretly to Milan, Genoa, Lucca, and Antwerp. According to Puccini, the two Luccans carried out these operations not only in their own behalf, but also in the interest of the other Italian nations established in Lyons. In January, Puccini was able to obtain new evidence to support his charges. He did so by eliciting confessions from various agents and couriers who were involved in the affair. He invited them to dinner, plying them with food and drink while the conversation was busily recorded by a notary brought in for the occasion. Boasting of their achievements over dinner, the couriers and agents provided details as to how they had managed to covertly transfer large amounts of gold out of France to Italy and the Low Countries. The sensational character of this testimony is manifest if we recall the bitter struggle between these Italian bankers and the French merchant community at Lyons in 1551. As a result of growing imports of New World silver, the value of gold relative to silver and all other means of exchange markedly increased. As a result, from the spring fairs of 1550 the Italians at Lyons began to demand payment from French merchants in gold. The Italian bankers, moreover, imposed a prime of 5 per cent on French merchants to obtain gold to pay off debts owed to themselves. Meanwhile, they continued to pay their own obligations off in silver. At the same time, gold left the kingdom for places such as Genoa where the demand for it was greater even than in France. Bonvisi and Micheli, then, apparently organized this traffic on behalf of the Italian banking community at Lyons. Moreover, these bankers made even more money by exchanging their gold for silver in foreign parts and then reintroducing the silver back into France. These manoeuvres only exacerbated a deteriorating commercial climate. A royal edict of July 1551, one recalls, attempted to legislate in order to protect the French merchants. No sooner had the edict passed than the Italians began to lobby against it. In response the French merchants of Lyons drew up a remonstrance.57 It stressed that the Italian bankers only came to France to make money and that they were doing so by forcing down the price of silver in relation to gold, which they were exporting out of the kingdom. Furthermore, the Italians were colluding with one

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another to carry out these policies knowing that the French merchants had no other way of obtaining credit or of paying their debts except by dealing with them. If the Italians were able to get the royal edict annulled, argued the remonstrance, commerce and manufacture in the kingdom would cease. For some time many of these Italians have given up commerce for exchange and, especially, deposit banking, otherwise, known as usury. From being merchants of commodities, the complaint of the French concluded, the Italians have become merchants of money. The French merchants, we have seen, eventually prevailed with the king who, in August 1552, confirmed the original royal edict protecting them from having to pay debts off to the Italians in gold. It is notable that they were supported not only by the town council of Lyons but by certain Luccans, including Louis Bernard and Mathieu Balbani. According to Gascon, even the Bonvisi refrained from opposition. Opposition was spearheaded by the Florentines, leading Gascon to conclude that they were behind the whole affair.58 But we have seen from the revelations at Lucca that this was far from the case. It was rather the Luccans Vincenzo Bonvisi and Franceso Micheli who masterminded the whole operation. It was the Luccan nation above all that was embarrassed. The accusations launched by Puccini at the end of 1551 in the midst of this conflict at Lyons could only have inflamed the situation. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that the reluctance of the Luccans to fight the enforcement of the royal edict is connected with the sensational revelations that had been made at Lucca. The involvement of the governor of Lyons Jacques d'Albon, marshal of Saint Andre, on the side of Puccini lends additional weight to this possibility. The expose of the secret and illegal financial operations of the principal Luccan bankers was bad enough. But Puccini had gone a step further by revealing the heresy of these same financial operatives. According to him, Bonvisi and Micheli were living contrary to the customs and morals of the church. He asserted that the two bankers did not believe in the real presence in the Eucharist. Moreover, they considered it sufficient to confess to God alone and that resort to the priest was simply for absolution. They rejected the notion of purgatory, insisting that humanity was saved by the blood of Christ alone. Puccini furthermore claimed that Bonvisi and Micheli had publicly questioned the practice of vigils and fasts. Indeed, they maintained that all of the ceremonies of the church except the mass were superfluous. Holding that God acts everywhere, the two patricians expressed indigna-

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don over the worship of the saints and the veneration of images. According to them, such practices, to which mainly naive and uneducated women were devoted, were simply means toward the enrichment of unworthy friars. By their lights the pope was a simple bishop. As a result, papal bulls, jubilees, and indulgences were of no significance. On the contrary, Bonvisi and Micheli believed in the priesthood of all believers and the possibility of all those having faith being able to administer the sacraments themselves. Fully convinced of the truth of these ideas, Bonvisi and Micheli were actively promoting them in the Luccan community in Lyons. They were sustained in their opinions by the constant reading of the works of Bernardo Ochino, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and Phillip Melancthon among other heretical authors. Puccini had learned of these matters through his dealings with Bonvisi and Micheli as well as two other Luccans, Matteo Balbani and Giussepe lova. Puccini's testimony was confirmed by that of other witnesses. It is further supported by the fact that Micheli emigrated to Geneva in 1556.59 Puccini's revelations were designed to create a scandal. Those who supported these charges believed that they would shake the power of the Luccan elite both in Lucca and in Lyons. Indeed, the uncovering of this combination of secret financial manipulation and underground heresy was shocking. But such was the power of this elite in Lucca that it was the accusers rather than these two powerful members of the elite that suffered the consequences. The proceedings against Bonvisi and Micheli at Lucca were quashed. Puccini was condemned to life in prison by the Luccan government. Finally, the canon Domenico Menocchi, who had supported Puccini, was excluded from the college of canons of Lucca by a vote of his fellow canons.60 The Luccans in residence in Lyons were drawn to the the teachings of the Calvinist Reformation for a variety of reasons. Clearly the traditional anti-clericalism and anti-papalism of the civic elite of Lucca played its part. No doubt, too, the simplicity, logic, and moderate egalitarianism of Calvinism appealed to them as it did to many merchants all over Europe. As has been pointed out, the Reformation was a kind of religious enlightenment that attempted to challenge what were seen as the irrationalities and superstitions of medieval ecclesiastical religion. Based on the reported opinions of Bonvisi and Micheli, this played an important role in forming their convictions. On a less exalted level, we should also recall that the Italians in Lyons were themselves increasingly unpopular. In the

68 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

eyes of some Protestant Italians, anti-clericalism might have appeared as a means of deflecting hostility against themselves by redirecting it against the church. The extensive contacts of the Luccan elite in Lyons with such Protestant centres as London, Antwerp, and Frankfort no doubt helped to reinforce their Protestant sympathies.61 Close contact between Luccan merchants and Calvinists at Lyons and Geneva may have been even more important.62 Protestant teaching about the use of money might have seemed more rational to the Luccans than the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Possevino, for example, noted that among the Italian nations at Lyons it had been the Luccans who most strongly resisted his blanket condemnation of making loans at interest.63 Indeed, in a letter of 1565 Possevino reports that he had even been reproached by the government of Lucca for remonstrating in his sermons against the taking of interest. According to the Luccan rulers, such matters should have been broached in private rather than publicly.64 Perhaps men like Bonvisi and Micheli regarded the more nuanced Calvinist view of interest-taking as more reasonable than the wholesale rejection of it by the Catholic authorities. Bonvisi and Micheli escaped punishment for their indiscretions. Indeed, faced with the growing possibility of persecution, on the one hand, and popular religious and social unrest in Lyons, on the other, Bonvisi, if not Micheli, retreated into a kind of Nicodemite quietism.65 Meanwhile, in the 15505 the Luccan republic was forced to respond to increasing signs of the spread of heresy among its citizens at home and abroad. It was particularly as a result of growing political pressure from Florence and Rome that the government of the city-state was required to crack down.66 Repression of religious dissent by the republic led to an exodus of individuals from influential Luccan families to Geneva. In 1558 the Luccan authorities warned its citizens resident in France and the Netherlands against attending Protestant sermons or having any contact with Genevan heretics. Luccan citizens living in these places were to appoint commissioners to police the religious opinions of their countrymen. In particular, they were to report to the republic's Offizio sopra la religione those who took communion at Easter and those who failed to do so. At the same time, the government of the republic took measures to inspect letters and packages arriving from France, which was acknowledged as a major conduit of heretical literature from across the Alps into the city.67 Despite the attempts at repression by the Luccan republic, Calvinism

The Italians at Lyons 69

was deeply entrenched among its citizens living in Lyons at the beginning of the 15605. The merchant Giuliano Calandrini helped organize the Calvinist consistory in the city.68 Of the ten leading Luccan families, six, including the Arnolfini, Balbani, Bonvisi, Burlamacchi, Cenarni, Guidicionni, and Micheli, were contaminated.69 Already in 1561 the city council admonished its citizens at Lyons to avoid staining the reputation of the city by becoming tainted with heresy.70 Terrified by threats from Rome and Florence, the next year the republic published a harsh set of decrees against its citizens who were involved in heresy while resident abroad.71 Of these measures the most notorious was that calling upon Luccans living abroad to assassinate their fellow citizens living in foreign countries who were heretics. In response the Calvinist Luccans of Lyons were able to get the Huguenot aristocracy to intercede with the French king. As a result, Charles IX saw fit to denounce the decree of the Luccan republic. In no uncertain terms he castigated it as an attempt to directly infringe on French sovereignty. He ordered the governor of Lyons to safeguard royal jurisdiction from interference by Italian governments by protecting those merchants in Lyons who were threatened by extra-territorial interventions.72 At the same time, in a letter to the government of Lucca, the king protested any attempt to interfere in the affairs of the French kingdom. He warned of the evil consequences of a measure calling for the assassination of heretics on French soil. The king concluded his missive by threatening reprisals against Luccans, including even religiously orthodox Catholics in France, if the measures were not revoked.73 Royal intercession on behalf of those suspected of heresy represented an important attack on the traditional extra-territorial privileges of the Italian nations at Lyons. It is commonly believed that when the Huguenots seized Lyons in 1562 the Italians largely withdrew from the city, taking their money with them. Yet the flow of migrants was not entirely in one direction. For example, there is the case of Pompeo Diodati, the twenty-year-old son of the wealthy Luccan merchant Niccolo Diodati. By 1562 the family had become convinced Protestants more and more ill at ease with the religious repression in Lucca. In that year Pompeo accompanied Alessandro Bonvisi to Savoy where the latter had been named Luccan ambassador. But out of curiosity, Pompeo left Piedmont and went to Lyons two weeks before the Huguenot seizure of the city. The city having fallen to the Calvinists, Pompeo made a public profession of faith there.74 Indeed, it was noted that it was especially the youth from elite Italian merchant

yo Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

houses in Lyons who were attracted to the Calvinist faith, drawing in other members of the Luccan community.75 There were over two hundred Luccans living in Lyons at the beginning of the 15605. These included not only merchants and bankers, but also printers, weavers, factors, clerks, and muleteers.76 By February 1562, two months prior to the Calvinist seizure of the city, it was reported that many of these, including women and children, were taking Calvinist communion.77 Following the return of royal authority, Lyons remained a haven for Luccan Calvinists.78 A report from agents of the Luccan Offizio sopra le religione of December 1564 notes that the republic's laws against heretics were being well observed everywhere in France except in Lyons.79 But it was not only among the Luccans that Calvinism found favour. There is, for example, the instance of Agostino Centurione, a member of a powerful Genoese family established at Lyons.80 Already well into his fifties, Centurione remained in Lyons during the Protestant occupation. Clearly a convinced Protestant, Centurione was heavily involved in efforts to strengthen economic and political ties between Lyons and Geneva. At the same time, he and others made efforts to spread the Reformation into his home region of Liguria. Another example of a non-Luccan Protestant is the Florentine astronomer and astrologer Francesco Giuntini.81 Giuntini was a Carmelite friar trained in theology and astronomy. In 1555 he published an edition of Boccaccio's Decameron for which he was roundly criticized by the evangelical Ludovico Castelvetro. Fleeing Florence and the Carmelite order, he went first to Venice, where he worked as a proofreader and astrologer. Next he moved to Lyons, where he found employment at the celebrated Giunti press. In the meantime, he had been won over to Calvinism. The Calvinist consistory of Lyons, which dominated the city during the Huguenot interregnum, included such Lyonnais Italians as Barthelemy and Henri de Gabiano, Sebastien Honorat, Benoit Malespine, Paul Minutili, Pompeo Dananza, Baptiste Gatian, and Baptiste Gallity.82 Turco Balbani, one of the leaders of the Italian Calvinist Church in Lyons, noted that during the disturbed period 1561-3 many of the Italian faithful suffered material deprivation and even went bankrupt, deprived as they were even of their personal possessions.83 Even after the return of royal authority and the Catholic clergy to Lyons, it was reported that many Italians, not necessarily only Luccans, were going to listen to the Calvinist preachers of their own free will.84 The Genevan archives are an important source of information on Italian Protestants in Lyons during the 15605. Many of them made their

The Italians at Lyons 71

way to Geneva from Lyons after the suppression of Calvinism in 1567. In addition to those already mentioned, a survey of the Genevan archives yields the names of at least twenty-five more Italians who were associated with the Lyonnais Calvinist church. Some, of course, were members of the elite families we already have noted. But others were lesser merchants, artisans, and workers. Salvador de Lucques and Vincent Barthelemy, for example, were from Lucca.85 Others were from Verona, Milan, Piedmont, and Naples. Moreover, some of these plebeian Italians living in Lyons tried to integrate themselves with the French Calvinist community. It was noted, for example, that David Apothicaire had taken the trouble to learn French so that he could understand the sermons preached in the vernacular.86 This apparently was a rare occurrence among Italians at Lyons. The labourer Etienne Rivoire of Cavour in Piedmont lived in Lyons in the early 15605 where it was reported he had been a member in good standing of the Calvinist Church. Prior to that he had followed the anti-Trinitarian Piedmontese George Biandrata to Poland.8' There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of Italians in Lyons rejected the Reformation. Given the economic and political constraints on the Lyonnais Italians, the continued allegiance of most of them to the Catholic religion is not at all surprising. But as this discussion has tried to suggest, not a few, including members of the economic elite, were tempted by or even won over to the new faith. Contrary to Auger, who stressed the undivided Catholic loyalty of the Italians, the appeal of Calvinism in fact transcended the ethnic divide between the French and the Italians. There was, then, good reason for Possevino's apostolate among the Lyonnais Italians in the 15605. It was designed to assure continued Catholic dominance over this powerful expatriate community and to win back those who had strayed from the faith. Possevino's success is suggested by the case of the ex-friar Giuntini, whom we have already mentioned. At the time of his arrival in Lyons, Giuntini had converted to Calvinism. Having found employment at the Giunti press, Giuntini soon revealed himself to be an enterprising fellow. He began to lend money at interest, notably, to the workers in the printing industry and in time accumulated a small fortune. Indeed, according to Possevino, he was not above embezzling the meagre savings of these workers.88 Yet Giuntini proved useful to Possevino. Possevino presumably encountered Giuntini at the press of Giunti where the latter had found employment. At Giunti's press Possevino had embarked on an extensive publishing program,

72 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France producing books to counter the propaganda of the Huguenots. Possevino treated the apostate Giuntini indulgently and initiated his return to the Catholic Church.89 Giuntini's reconversion was the occasion of a public abjuration before the assembled Italian community at the church of Notre Dame de Confort. Indeed, Giuntini, being the trained theologian that he was, went on to preach a series of sermons to the Italian community countering the teachings of Calvin.90 Despite waverers like Giuntini, there was a considerable body of Italian Protestants in Lyons in the 15605 who continued to resist the appeals of Possevino to return to the old church. Under the leadership of the lawyer and merchant Niccolo Balbani the Italian Calvinists were large and organized enough to establish their own Calvinist Church.91 Balbani tried by all means to oppose Possevino's attempts to re-establish Catholic control over the Italian community. In direct response, for example, to Possevino's Trattato del Santissimo Sacrificio della Messa, Balbani published Trattato primo (secondo) dette risposte fatte ad un libretto di Messer Antonio Possevino della Messa.92 Notable in this work is Balbani's attack on the Nicodemites, presumably those in the Italian community who feared the loss of wealth or favour as a result of following the gospel.93 Balbani followed up his polemic against Possevino's work on the mass with the publication of two sermons on how the Calvinists celebrated the Holy Supper.94 Another Calvinist protagonist of Possevino in these years was Scipione Calandrini.95 He was the bastard son of a rich merchant and banking family who fled to Geneva from Lucca in 1559. There he served as a minister to the Italian community. In the mid-i56os he found himself in Lyons along with other Italian Calvinists face-to-face with the Catholic counter-offensive inspired by Possevino. Possevino had published a defence of the idea that the works of Denis the Areopagite were, indeed, those of the disciple of Saint Paul. Calandrini sent Possevino a refutation, to which the latter responded in a letter filled with passionate indignation. Calandrini published both Possevino's rather ineffectual letter and his strong answer. The latter is notable for the quality of its philological analysis.96 This exchange, however, should not be seen as merely a learned debate, but was part of a struggle for influence between Catholics and Protestants in the Italian community. There is no question, then, that in the heyday of the Reformation movement in France the Italian community was far from united around the pole of loyalty to Roman Catholicism. A not insignificant minority had rallied to Calvinism. There can be no simple equation of the Italians

The Italians at Lyons 73

with the Catholic party or with loyalty to Rome. Indeed, the Italian Calvinists in the main were to prove themselves loyal followers of their new confession. Under the guidance of Niccolo Balbani, the Italian church at Geneva displayed an extraordinary respect for the discipline imposed upon it by the consistory of Geneva. On the other hand, from our perspective, it is interesting that the Italian converts were the object of persistent suspicion in the eyes of their fellow Protestants in France and Geneva. Du Pinet's negative attitude toward the Italian bankers reflects the economic resentment felt against them not only by Lyonnais Protestants, but on the part of the French population as a whole. But such attitudes were shared by the largely Protestant urban populations in Switzerland, including Geneva.97 Made up largely of religious refugees, Italian emigration to Switzerland was at its height between 1550 and 1580. At Geneva during that period Italians made up about 10 per cent of the emigrants to the city. All told the number of Italian emigrants in Geneva fluctuated between 800 and 1000, with lesser numbers settling in Zurich and Basle. As in France, the Italians by and large were richer, better educated, and more highly skilled than the indigenous population. As a result of these advantages and increasing economic difficulties in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Italians met obstruction to their entrepreneurial initiatives from Swiss city governments and urban public opinion. In Geneva opposition to the Italians came from the native-born, but also from migrants from France.98 In 1557, for example, a proposal by certain unnamed parties to establish a private bank was rejected.99 The next year Italian cloth manufacturers who had received a privilege to produce cottons were accused of producing fustians in competition with established local producers.100 Attempts by Italians to enter the printing industry were stubbornly resisted.101 Of the 329 printers, book dealers, or workers involved in the printing industry between 1550 and 1564 only six were Italians. In a measure designed to exclude most immigrants from this industry, as of 1562 only those who were bourgeois of the city were allowed to become printers. It is true that over the next fifteen years the number of Italians in the book business nearly doubled. But the numbers involved in the publishing industry remained well below the percentage of Italians in the total population.102 At Basle, Zurich, and Berne the situation for Italian refugees was particularly difficult. To be sure the authorities felt morally bound to receive the Italian refugees, but only under certain conditions. The

74 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

guilds of Zurich, for example, prohibited foreigners from carrying on economic activities which competed with their members. Many Italians found that they were forced to accept work that was unskilled or low-paid or else leave the city altogether. At Basle an edict of 1546 refused settiement to all Italian refugees who were not rich or whose admission did not lead to the creation of new economic activity. At Berne Italian emigrants were welcomed provided they settled in the small towns and villages of the state and there created new enterprises that could alleviate the situation of chronic unemployment. Despite severe restrictions at Geneva, then, citizenship could be more easily obtained there by Italians than at Basle, Zurich, and Berne. At the same time, as in Lyons the Italians in the Swiss towns do not seem to have been particularly anxious to socially integrate themselves. They created their own autonomous churches with their own pastors and consistories, ecclesiastical discipline, physicians, wet nurses, and system of welfare. At Geneva from 1574 the Italians maintained their own company of militia. Most Italians worked for commercial or industrial enterprises controlled by their fellow Italians. Not until the end of the sixteenth century did the Italians organize any commercial enterprise involving local bourgeoisie or French refugees. Finally, as in Lyons, the Italian community was characterized by a low rate of endogamy, especially, among the elite.103 The Italians were, thus, socially and culturally largely isolated from the indigenous communities in the Swiss cities. No doubt this was in part due to the discrimination they suffered. It may have also been due to the belief among the first generation of Italian refugees that they would soon return to Italy, which they believed would be opened to the gospel in the near future. But undoubtedly, too, the Italian community in Switzerland as in France was a diaspora. Their continuing social and economic advantages depended on maintaining ties to the Italian community in the Peninsula and abroad while avoiding local assimilation. Comparison between the Italian diaspora in Lyons and Switzerland allows one to test the importance of religion as a factor in sixteenthcentury social life. Clearly religion was important enough to drive some Italians into exile from their home cities. Furthermore, religion caused Swiss Calvinists to welcome the Italians to their towns as a matter of conscience. But as at Lyons religion did not erase social and economic conflict or homogenize cultural differences. Indeed, cultural differences helped give rise to religious disputes between the Italians and those of French culture who took their lead from Calvin.

The Italians at Lyons 75

As it developed the Italian Reformation was marked by a broad religious diversity in a spectrum which ranged from Lutheranism and Calvinism to Anabaptism, anti-Trinitarianism, and spiritualism. It extended from a popularly based Waldensianism to those in aristocratic circles who adhered to the thought of Juan Valdes. This great diversity was due not simply to the individualism, rationalism, and republicanism that marked Italian Renaissance culture, but also to the development of the Reformation there within the extreme political divisions of the Peninsula.104 While we should not exaggerate the degree of nonconformity which existed in the Italian community, it is, nevertheless, true that the biblically based dogmatism and intolerance of Calvin and his loyal followers did not sit well among many rationalist, spiritualist, and individualist Italian religious thinkers. For those who had committed themselves to such intellectual and religious liberty, it was extremely difficult to accept ecclesiastical and intellectual conformity. Furthermore, the patriotism and republicanism that marked the notions of church reform of certain Italian exiles proved foreign to the mind-set of the French Calvinists.105 The seeming religious unreliability of the Italians drew Calvin's fire as early as the 15505. He was convinced that the anti-Trinitarian element in the thought of Italian evangelicals was inspired by the arch-heretic Servetus. He raised the subject of their inconstancy in the Defensio orthodoxia fidei de sacra Trinitate (1554). According to him, there was no question that the Italians were sharp-minded. But this undoubted acumen led them into vain curiosity and a taste for empty subtleties. Ultimately, it caused them to fall into religious error and into dispute with one another.106 Italian resistance to Calvinist discipline is manifest in the case of the editors of the first Latin edition of Machiavelli's Prince. It was printed in Basle by two Italian religious refugees Pietro Pena and Silvestro Tegli. Publication followed the placing of the work on the Roman Index and the burning in effigy of Machiavelli by the Jesuits at Ingolstadt in 1559. The printing of the Prince by the two Italian Protestant exiles was, thus, an instance of defiance of the official Catholic position. It should be noted, however, that Tegli had also suffered persecution for his views at Geneva and had felt constrained to move to the intellectually freer atmosphere of Basle. The year the Prmc^was placed on the Index Calvin himself had condemned its point of view. In a passage deliberately added to the 1559 edition of the Institutes, Calvin underlined the unbreakable link that must exist between politics, faith, and theology. In

76 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

publishing the Princein Basle, Perna and Tegli were taking their distance from such a conception in the name of rationalism and individual judgment.107 Theodore de Beze, like Calvin, emphasized the inconstancy of the Italians. In a letter to Heinrich Bullinger in 1564, he refers to the efforts of the Calvinist leadership at Lyons to recruit Jerome Zanchi as minister of the Italian church. Beze notes the benefits of installing someone as solid as Zanchi as minister to the Italians at Lyons. According to Beze, Lyons is another Corinth where there congregate many of those restless minds the Genevan church is not prepared to tolerate. These people flock to Lyons especially, where, without fear of retribution, they can assume one position or another in front of their compatriots, who love such subtleties only too much. If one does not oppose to them someone capable of bridling these overly curious minds, one can legitimately fear that these mischief-makers will compromise the proper teaching of the gospel. Beze notes that he is here, of course, alluding to the Italians. Indeed, he contrasts the Italians with his own compatriots, the French. The latter, he observes, are well-endowed so that, despite the machinations of Satan, the truth of Christ is strongly established among them.108 The French have a capacity for unity and discipline, which the Italians apparently lack. Beze's fears were realized when the Piedmontese lawyer Luigi Alemmani, supported by the Florentine merchant Cappone Capponi, challenged the Lyonnais and Genevan churches over the significance of the Holy Supper. Reviving the position of Zwingli, they insisted on a purely symbolical interpretation of the Eucharist. Equally upsetting to Beze was the refusal of the two Italian dissidents to accept the discipline of the Lyonnais and Genevan churches.109 Expelled from the church of Lyons, Alemanni is identified on the back of a letter to Beze as 'a perturber of the church of Lyons and subsequently a convert to Judaism at Constantinople with Laurencin, a rich Lyonnaise merchant.'110 Had they become Jews or more likely had they turned to anti-Trinitarianism? In any case the reference to the Italian Alemanni's conversion to Judaism is both a religious and an ethnic slur. Religious infidelity is accounted for by an ethnic insult. The reaction of the Calvinists to Alemanni must be understood against the background of more than a decade of conflict. Following the martyrdom of Servetus at the hands of Calvin, a wave of revulsion swept the Italian Protestant exile community in Switzerland. It was the Italians at Basle who were most free to express their indignation. They took the

The Italians at Lyons 77

lead in condemning Calvin and the Genevan church while defending spiritualist and anti-Trinitarian interpretations of the Bible.111 At Geneva the anti-Trinitarian Giorgio Biandrata fled persecution in 1558.112 But the friends of Biandrata in the Italian community were still regarded as a threat. One of these, Valentin Gentile, was condemned in a public trial in which his supposed sexual indiscretions were used to establish his guilt. Those holding Biandrata's view were branded by the Company of Pastors as esprits fantastiques.11* As part of these proceedings a public attestation of faith was imposed on the members of the Italian church of the city. Eight members of the Italian community tried to resist signing the required document. Among these was the Luccan physician and scholar Filippo Rustici who had fled to Geneva from Lyons in 1555. In 1557 Biandrata had served as godfather at the baptism of Rustici's son. At first Rustici refused to sign the confession of faith, but capitulated under threat of expulsion from the city.114 The apparent lack of discipline of the Italians appalled the Genevan consistory and government. The Luccan Simone Simoni had been a professor of philology at Geneva since 1565. In 1567 he quarrelled with the head of the Italian church Niccolo Balbani. The apparent reason for the fight was the failure of Balbani to invite Simoni to the wedding ceremony for his daughter. At the wedding banquet Simoni called Balbani an idiot, cow, ass, and someone who shits and pisses through his nose.115 But the major reason for Simoni's anger appears to have been the pastoral discipline exercised by Balbani. It was even said that Simoni had gathered a group of young people around him in order to challenge Balbani's authority. It was further reported that he had visited Troyes in France where, having been confronted over his religion, he denied that he was a Calvinist. Troyes, it will be recalled, had until lately been the bishopric of his Nicodemite compatriot Antonio Caracciolo. Asked at Troyes what his religion was, Simoni was said to have responded that he was whatever religion the king permitted in his kingdom.116 Simoni was arrested on his return to Geneva and brought before both the secular court and the consistory. He was accused not only of causing disorder and challenging authority, but of religious heterodoxy as well. He was required to publicly apologize to Balbani and left Geneva for France.117 The defection of Simoni reflects the fact that the religious deviations of the Italians were not invariably toward anti-Trinitarian or Anabaptist radicalism. True, the Genevan records do contain the name of some thirteen Italians who took this direction. But more often than not deviation assumed the form of a convenient Nicodemism in the face of

78 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

Roman Catholic persecution. It is possible to quantify the degree of Italian deviancy based on the surviving documentation. Between 1550 and 1557 we have the record of some 1146 criminal cases.118 This is far less than the actual number of cases, but it is statistically significant.119 Of these cases fifty-nine or 4.1 per cent involved Italians. During these years Italians constituted never more than 5.5 per cent of the population. Italian involvement in criminal cases was thus close to or below the percentage of the population who were Italians. But if the Italians were more or less law-abiding in criminal matters they were less so in religious and moral questions. For the period 155069 we have the record of some 3973 cases of excommunication from the Holy Supper.120 Of these 245 or 6 per cent involved Italians. Since Italians never exceeded 5.5 per cent of the population the numbers involved in religious or moral deviancy was evidently somewhat greater than the norm over the period. But the numbers are more striking if we differentiate between the period 1550-60 and 1560-9. In the first period 4.4 per cent of such cases involved Italians. In the second period 7.2 per cent were Italians. Indeed, in the last three years 1566-9 no less than 9 per cent of such cases involved Italians. During this decade the number of Italians in Geneva was increasing, but never exceeded 5.5 per cent of the overall population. Cases of religious or moral deviance among Italians were, thus, almost double the norm. Ideological suspicion against the Italians inspired a state of constant vigilance against them on the part of the Genevan religious and civil authorities in the years that followed.121 Their attitude is reflected in their treatment of Alexande Maranthra, an Italian schoolmaster. In 1573 this ex-Dominican's request for employment was rejected on the grounds that he was full of Italian and monkish vanity.122 This Genevan denunciation of Italian vanity is not very different, we should note, from earlier condemnations of Italian affectation and bombast by French humanists. The anti-Italian discourse had changed from questions of language and morality to matters of faith but the suspicion of the Italians remained constant. Conversion to Calvinism thus mitigated but did not erase ethnic tension between French and Italians. The dissidents against Calvin's teachings in the Italian church at Geneva were always a minority. Moreover, in France the circumstances of civil war were to ensure that Huguenots and Italian Calvinists were to work together. But as we have tried to make clear, economic conflict and cultural differences persisted between French and Italian Calvinists. Indeed, the individualistic and rationalistic tendencies of the Italians

The Italians at Lyons 79

made it difficult for some of them to accept the discipline required by the new confession. Religious dissent then could excite a renewed sense of ethnic antagonism. Overall, there can be little doubt that confessional differences tended to exacerbate national conflicts. Jesuits like Auger tried to suggest that the Italians to a man were loyal to the Catholic faith. While rejecting any notion of unanimity, modern scholarship concurs with the idea that the Italian nations at Lyons remained predominantly Catholic. There is no disputing this view. But we have tried to emphasize the importance of those Italians, especially Luccans, who did become Protestant. Numerically, the Luccans were an insignificant minority, but the importance of their riches, connections, and influence cannot be overstated. It was important that Protestantism became rife among the elite of the Luccan families at Lyons. Evidently, the attraction of Calvinism for this element in Lyons was related to the new religion's importance in the republic of Lucca. The more rational attitude of Calvinists toward business loans, among other matters, may have had its appeal as well. But we have also tried to suggest that conversion to these ideas may have been seen as an attempt to mitigate the hostility towards the Italians that had developed in Lyons itself. If the Italian bankers were increasingly hated because of what was regarded as their economically exploitative activities, the growing popularity of Calvinism may have been seen as a way of softening such tensions. More importantly, a common hatred of the Catholic Church on the part of Frenchmen and Italians might have seemed a way of deflecting hatred against the latter.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Italians and the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre

The traditional view of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre dating back to the sixteenth century has stressed the primary responsibility of the court dominated by Catherine de' Medici in the affair. In recent years the court's role in the tragedy has been minimized and the popular nature of the Massacre highlighted. Jean-Louis Bourgeon, notably, has insisted that the mass killings followed not from a deliberate strategy emanating from the court, but rather from its loss of control over events. It was the court's failure to retain its command over urban politics that allowed popular fury in Paris to explode against the Protestants.1 Denis Crouzet, likewise, sees the Massacre as rooted in a popular outburst that signified the collapse of the monarchy's political vision of religious compromise and peace.2 In Crouzet's view, furthermore, the Massacre entailed the acting out of deeply embedded irrational impulses fuelled by religious belief. Finally, Barbara Diefendorf has seen the Massacre as following from the monarchy's failure to control a rising current of popular violence.3 Yet it is noteworthy that the Protestants were not the only group menaced by the violence of the Parisian mob during the 15705. During that decade Italian courtiers, bankers, and merchants, but also craftsmen, musicians, and servants were threatened with attack and butchery by the agitated Parisian populace. As early as 1569, the Venetian ambassador to the French court reported that Italians were in danger of attack in the streets of Paris. Indeed, he noted that this had been the situation for the last two years.4 In June 1572, two months before the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's, there was a riot in the streets of the city against the Italians. The mob was inflamed on this occasion by the accusation that the

The Italians and the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre 81 Italians were kidnapping and murdering young children in order to siphon off their blood. The homicide of these innocents was explicitly connected to influential figures at the court. It was rumoured by some that the blood was being collected by the Italians so that the duke of Anjou could bathe in it to help him cure a secret illness. Others asserted that it was the queen mother Catherine de' Medici herself who was making use in some way of the blood of the slain children. Such fantastic reports no doubt reflect underlying public hostility against not only Italians in general, but against the queen mother and her royal sons in particular. In any case, unable to get at the personages of the court, the populace vented its anger against more accessible Italian targets in the city of Paris. Several Italians had their houses sacked. Others were hunted down and attacked in the streets of the city. Some were killed and others thrown into prison.5 Writing seven years afterwards, an anonymous Huguenot narrator of these events closely connects them with the great massacre of the Protestants that was to follow shortly. According to this account, the mob wished to play out this farce to prepare the way for something still greater to come, that is, Saint Bartholomew's Day.6 These riots were one more milestone in a series of popular disturbances leading from the riots around the Cross of Gatines in 1569 to Saint Bartholomew's Day three years later. The implication of this Huguenot account is an interesting one. It suggests that although the mob eventually attacked the Protestants as scapegoats, it might alternatively have fallen on the Italians, who could also have served as targets. The Italians were not singled out because they were religious deviants. But they were certainly identified as outsiders, indeed aliens capable of preying on young children. There was widespread satisfaction among Italians both in France and in Italy at the outcome of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's. We have already remarked on the delight expressed by Camillo Capilupi in his Lo Stratogema di Carlo, re diFrancia, controgli Ugonotti, which was published in Rome in 1572. Moreover, as is well known, the rulers of Florence and Savoy as well as the pope sent their congratulations to Charles IX for crushing an odious conspiracy by killing the Huguenot leaders.7 An anonymous Tuscan writing to Duke Cosimo in the same year, noted ecstatically: 'What could one now wish from this truly great Charles, from his most glorious mother and from those two other Caesars, his brothers?'8 At the conclusion of this Florentine account of the Massacre, the author notes that the Italians living in Paris helped some of those who

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were in danger. But the members of the Italian community did not come to any harm themselves. Indeed, according to him, there was no sign of such a threat.9 Contrary to this view, other Italians perceived themselves in imminent danger of massacre by reason of both their ethnicity and Protestant religion. In the 15605 a substantial number of Luccan financiers had established themselves in Paris.10 Among these were some Protestant families including those of Girolamo Arnolfini, Michele Burlamacchi, Benedetto and Giuliano Calandrini, and Pompeo Diodati.11 Anti-Italian as well as anti-Protestant feeling was rife before the Massacre according to their accounts.12 These families felt themselves to be in mortal peril during the popular upheaval. Were it not for the help of their Italian neighbours, they might well have been butchered like their French co-religionists.13 Later they arranged for the transport of their financial holdings outside of France by means of their Italian connections. Indeed, there were other Italians living in Paris who were not Calvinists who believed that the massacre of Huguenots might have turned against others as well. The Venetian ambassadors, for example, believed that Saint Bartholomew's might have become a popular uprising against the upper classes as a whole. According to the account of the Venetians, it was almost a miracle that popular anger did not direct itself against affluent Catholics as well as Protestants in hopes of booty and pillage.14 Undoubtedly, this remark is a reference to the several hundred Italians among other foreigners living in the city. Thus, a few months after Saint Bartholomew's Day, in November 1572, rumours swept the capital of a renewal of the massacres aimed against both the Huguenots and the Italians. On 18 November the king and court left Paris. That night the whole city was forced to stand to arms throughout the hours of darkness on account of such reports. According to the account of the papal legate Antonio Maria Salviati, popular hatred of the Italian nation was the result of the taxes said to be imposed on the people at the instance of the Luccan banker Scipio Sardini.15 In the years following the Massacre, fears of another popular uprising aimed at the Italians were recurrent. At the beginning of February 1574, for example, the king himself took note of such rumours. Addressing himself to the Provost of Merchants, Charles IX noted that word of another Saint Bartholomew was sweeping through Paris. He demanded that those spreading such rumours be punished.16 Two months later a Spanish priest long resident in France reported to Philip II on the tense situation in the French kingdom. He noted that there was much resentment against the government of Charles IX and his Italian entourage.

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Some were ready to carry out a massacre or Sicilian Vespers against them.17 The popular anger of the Parisians against the Italians boiled over in 1575, three years after Saint Bartholomew's. Already in April a brother of Scipio Sardini was assassinated and there were rumours of attacks on other Italians.18 At the beginning of July 1575, an Italian captain named Ascagni killed a university student.19 The students on the Left Bank took up arms and mobilized. They attacked many houses and killed some Italians living in the Saint Germain quarter not far from the university. Many of the richest Italians in the city lived in this area. Among the most informative accounts of these proceedings are those from the pen of the papal nuncio Salviati.20 In his first report of 3 July he notes the ongoing student demonstrations. But he concludes that it is really the municipality that is inciting them.21 Salviati's follow-up report sent out two days later is much fuller. Repeating the earlier account, Salviati notes that on the night of 3 July events took a serious turn. The disturbances were no longer confined to the students. Many of the ordinary inhabitants of the city assembled, clearly bent on some considerable undertaking. Salviati's analysis of the crowd can be usefully supplemented by a report forwarded to London by an English agent. According to this observer, 1200-1500 dissolute and lawless men called les enfants de la Matte met in secret at eleven at night to plan the attack on the Italians. Their design was to assault the houses of the rich Italians while making sure to assasinate Chancellor Rene de Birague as well as Oratio Rucellai, Scipio Sardini, and Louis Dadiacetto.22 Indeed, Albert de Gondi, count of Retz, and Louis de Gonzaga, duke of Nevers, are named as additional targets of the conspirators by the Florentine ambassador.23 Thus, it seems clear that the movement was not merely a social upheaval, but an uprising with the political object of destroying the most powerful Italians in the capital.24 According to Salviati, all together some 6000 rioters assembled in two groups, the one near the Church of the Grand Augustins in the Saint Germain quarter and the other near the Porte Sainte Antoine at the other extremity of the city. According to the English account, a creature of Birague, one Pompeio, who had been himself a member of the enfants de la Matte, betrayed the plans of the conspirators to Birague, the chancellor. Despite this foreknowledge, the authorities were unable to suppress the rioters immediately. The city was troubled for two nights and a whole day by their disorders. Three of the five suspected leaders were caught. All were commoners.25 The sympathetic reaction of public opinion to those arrested helps to

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illuminate further the context of anti-Italian sentiments among Parisians. One of those prosecuted and executed by the authorities was a certain Captain la Vergerie. According to the chronicler Pierre de 1'Estoile, la Vergerie's only crime had been to say in public that people should side with the students against the Italians. Yet Estoile admits that in doing so he urged people to sack the houses and cut the throats of the so-called Italian buggers. According to Estoile's account of his speech, la Vergerie had insisted that the Italians and those who supported them were ruining France. Estoile noted that many honest men or respectable Parisians were upset by what they regarded as the high-handed nature of the trial against la Vergerie. The court had been hastily constituted by Chancellor Birague and certain maitres des requetesat the order of Catherine de' Medici. People found the impromptu trial and death sentence passed on la Vergerie extraordinarily high-handed from a legal point of view. They were scandalized by a judicial proceeding that seemed to be part of an attempt to establish a foreign tyranny to the prejudice of the laws of France.26 In other words, the legal process was a hastily constituted tribunal controlled by the court Italians contrary to French law. This was not the last attempt by the Parisians to attack the Italians. In the fall of 1578 the Tuscan ambassador reported yet another effort to organize a massacre of the Italians. The leader of the scheme this time was someone called Captain Perre, described as an influential politician with an important popular following in the city.27 It is possible that this was Claude Perre, procureur de la ville, who resigned his office in 1579 in favour of his brother.28 In any case, Perre was said to have mobilized a large number of Parisian citizens behind his enterprise. According to the account of the Tuscan ambassador, the plan was nothing less than a scheme to renew the fete of Saint Bartholomew's, this time directing it against the Italians rather than the Huguenots. Perre decided to launch his attack against the Italian community under cover of night. Fearing interference from the watch, he tried to get the captain of the guard to join the conspiracy. But the captain of the guard, instead, informed the king. Perre and his principal followers were thrown into prison.29 The anti-Italianism rife among the municipal elite and common people of Paris represents a new stage in the development of this kind of xenophobia. It evidently contrasts with the culturally or religiously inspired hostility of French humanists or Huguenots. It is different from the politically and socially based jealousy of the French nobility. This popularly rooted xenophobia differed from earlier kinds by virtue of its greater readiness to resort to violence. But undoubtedly, too, it differed

The Italians and the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre 85 from other kinds of anti-Italianism in emanating from a popular milieu which was passionately Catholic. In order to understand its inspiration more deeply we should try to enter the imagination of the ordinary Parisians of the period. The original attacks against the Italians in 1572 provides us with an important point of entry into the mentalite of this population. The anonymous Huguenot chronicler of these events notes that the crowds that assaulted the Italians at that time called them marrabets?0 In order to understand the meaning of this verbal insult we have to go back a generation or so in the popular history of Paris. In the summer of 1532 a rumour swept the city that so-called marrabais italiens had entered Paris. It was alleged that these aliens had secretly kidnapped little children and killed them in order to extract their blood. The population of the city was outraged and such marrabais as could be found were hunted down and severely beaten. But the chronicler of these events in Paris in the reign of Francis I concludes that in the end these rumours were all found to be lies.31 The term marrabais is used by Rabelais (III, 22): 'By God he is an ingenious sophist, full of arguments and naive at the same time. I reckon he is a marrabais. '32 A marrabais is someone who wears a hat a la marrabaise, that is, in the fashion of the hats worn by the Jews in Spain. A marrabais, then, is a marrano or converse. Those who were attacked in 1532 were Italians who were taken to be marranos. Forty years later, in 1572, the Parisian crowds were evidently making the same association between Italians and marranos. In part, this may be because Italy had been relatively open to Jewish and marrano migration from Spain. Some Jews and marranos who had taken refuge in Italy then entered France. But clearly, too, the money-lending and mercantile activities of the Italians were associated in the popular conception with the financial and commercial dealings of the Jews. This is confirmed, for example, by a remonstrance by the city of Paris to the king in 1575. At the heart of this document were complaints about the fiscal exploitation of the Parisians by the Italians who are referred to as foreign financiers. In this regard, the document complains about those who are practising 'most Jewish usury,' who should be severely punished. Otherwise, commercial life cannot be restored.33 Jews were despised in sixteenth-century France. For a Jew to live openly in Paris was virtually impossible. True, on the eastern frontier of the kingdom a handful of Jewish families were allowed to establish themselves in Metz. They were permitted to reside there as merchants in

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order to serve the garrison installed in the city by the French under Henri II in the 155OS.34 Likewise, during the first part of the sixteenth century several hundred Jewish families lived off petty trade and usury in the papal territories of Avignon and Comtat-Venaissin. But in the latter case the number of Jews was sharply reduced following a papal order of expulsion in 1569-35 The situation for ex-Jews or New Christians was somewhat better. In the papal territories, for example, small numbers of Jews had converted and had become part of the local elite. At Bordeaux, Bayonne, Saint Jean-de-Luz, Biarritz, and elsewhere in the south of France, scattered populations of Spanish and Portuguese New Christians were permitted to establish themselves, were officially protected, and were accorded letters of naturalization. Certain of their numbers enjoyed economic or legal success and were able to become part of the urban patriciate of these towns.36 Over most of the rest of France, including Paris, Jews were more an absence than a presence. Yet, despite their absence or insignificant numbers, Jews were detested by the French in the sixteenth century. They were regarded as a pariah nation subsisting on the margins of the Christian world. Their social condition was described by the French historiographer Louis Le Roy. Having been ruined by the Romans, Le Roy noted, the Jews live as poor dependents, supporting themselves by the exercise of vile trades like usury and selling second-hand clothes. They have no houses, lands, or other landed property, nor do they exercise any kind of government. They are despised, in a state of subjection, and insupportably afflicted. Notwithstanding the misery and the calamities which weigh on them, they are not permitted to engage in religious debate with Christians. Indeed, they were expelled from England, France, and, lately, Spain on account of the blasphemies that they had spewed out against Jesus Christ.37 It is true that Jean Bodin spoke well of the Jews as early as the La response... a M. deMalestroit (1568). In this work Bodin perceptively noted that the development of France's commerce with the Ottoman Empire has been one of the ongoing sources of the kingdom's economic strength since the reign of Francis I. The activities of Jews from Spain and Portugal who have taken refuge in lower Languedoc Bodin held to be largely responsible.38 More typical is the attitude taken toward Jean Maynier, baron of Oppede, first president of the Parlement of Provence. Both Catholics and Protestants denounced him for being responsible for the massacre of the Vaudois. He was condemned as a tyrant and as an exJew to boot.39

The Italians and the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre 87 In 1567 the court poet Philippe Desportes was outraged when the treasurer of the Parties Casuelles, Francois de Portia, withheld a royal financial gift. The Fortia were in fact marranos of Catalan origin who had settled in Provence. The affronted Desportes responded with his Satire against a Jew: Jews, vermin of the earth, you were not born with a spirit eager for combat. Most courageous usurers, your most glorious and war-like deeds are to loan at a hundred percent, bear false witness, do us damage through treason, and to murder us as the Jews have done by polluting the wells with poison. These are your towers, your revenge, Your pistols, daggers and lances.40 Assuming the guise of New Christians did not preserve those of Jewish descent from anti-Semitic attack. For all his interest in Hebrew and Cabala, Guillaume Postel was not above denouncing such marranos. Writing to Theodor Zwinger of Basle, Postel took note of what he considered the large numbers of marranos who had settled in the south of France. Thinking of themselves as Christians, Postel notes, they insinuated themselves into the households of the dukes of Bourbon and Montpensier in the first place and then into those of other great aristocrats by making loans. Finally, according to Postel, a French chancellor of marrano blood, whom he delicately refrains from naming, opened all of France to them and, thereby, exposed the Christian religion to every kind of mockery and contempt.41 Although he admits that these converts believed themselves to be Christians, Postel does not accept them as such. Blood is apparently thicker than holy water. The Jew was thus as much the outcast in the sixteenth century as he had been in the fourteenth century. Associating the Italians with the Jews in the way that the Parisians did in 1572 was thus to expose the former to every sort of contempt. More seriously, to accuse the Italians of seizing and killing children for their blood was to extend the blood libel against the Jews to them. Certainly, it was the blood libel that the Italians were accused of in the riots of the summer of 1572. But we cannot entirely dismiss as a phantasm the reports that members of the court were appropriating the blood of the young. The chronicler who records these accusations notes that this siphoning of blood was supposedly being done for therapeutic

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reasons on behalf of the duke of Anjou. But as has been pointed out by Charlotte Wells, the drinking of human blood for health reasons had been recommended by none other than the Medici protege physicianphilosopher Marsilio Ficino.42 In his De Vita libri tres (1489) the following passage appears: Careful physicians strive to cure those whom a long bout of hectic fever has consumed with the liquid of human blood which has been distilled at the fire in the practice of sublimation. What then prevents us from sometimes also refreshing by this drink those who have already been in a way consumed by old age? There is a common and ancient opinion that certain prophetic old women who are popularly called witches [stringes] suck the blood of infants as a means, insofar as they can, of growing young again. Why shouldn't our old people, namely those who have no [other] recourse, likewise suck the blood of a youth? - a youth, I say, who is willing, healthy, happy, and temperate, whose blood is of the best but perhaps too abundant.43

It is possible that drinking the blood of young men was by the midsixteenth century a not uncommon Italian therapeutic practice. In any case, a translation of Ficino's work had been published in Paris in 1541.44 Accordingly, it is not inconceivable that the duke of Anjou or the queen mother might have adopted this remedy based on medical advice. But clearly this had nothing to do with the charge that the Italians were kidnapping and killing young Parisians for their blood. Ficino stresses that it is necessary to employ the blood of a willing youth who is very much alive. The charge clearly has to do not with Ficino's prescription, but rather with the blood libel against the Jews. Apparently, the recommendation of Ficino had been transformed in the popular imagination into the notion of the ritual murder of young children for their blood. This transformation may itself have been facilitated by a reading of the first part of the passage from Ficino which notes the practice of witches drinking the blood of children to renew their youth. In France and Italy witches, Jews, and the magical use of blood were sometimes associated.45 As for the Jews, it was common belief in the Middle Ages that they parodied the mass by manufacturing paschal wafers out of the blood of Christian children, which they obtained by ritual murder. Such accusations had been revived in the celebrated ritual murder case in Trent in 1472 and continued to be propagated, particularly in Central Europe on the eve of the Reformation. The widespread association of the Jews with

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sorcery, deep-seated popular belief in the magical properties of blood, and the intensification of belief in the notion of Eucharistic sacrifice played their part in reinforcing belief in a diabolical Jewish counterritual of blood sacrifice.46 The accusations of ritual murder against the Italians in 1572 should be seen against this context. They clearly echo the charges made against the marrabais forty years earlier. But this association of the Italians with the Jews, it should be pointed out, tends to confirm the primacy of feelings of religious animosity over those of ethnic hostility in this period. Identifying the Italians with the religious enemy of Christianity, the Jews, made it easier to despise them. The importance of religion in the development of anti-Italianism among the Paris populace is confirmed in a dispatch from the Venetian ambassador in March 1575 shortly before the outbreak of the summer riots of that year. Popular hostility against the Italians, he reports, has been stimulated by sermons by a celebrated Parisian preacher. In these homilies the preacher called for driving the Italians out of the kingdom because they are ruining the people of France. According to the Venetian ambassador, his words were giving impetus to others inveighing against the Italians. The preacher's remarks were received with applause and delight by the populace, so much so that for several days they could speak of nothing else.47 Anti-Italian feeling was already running high even without the sanction of religion. Such animosity had now been given a licence of approval by one of the celebrated preachers in the city. Parisian anti-Italian feeling thus employed the idiom of popular Catholic anti-Semitism. At the same time, it associated the Italians not simply with the Jews but with the Huguenots who were the actual victims of the 1572 massacre. In a recent important work, Frank Lestringant has reminded us of the importance of the struggle over the mass to understanding the nature of the Catholic-Protestant conflict.48 In this connection, he recalls how decisive for the French Reformation was the Affaire des placards of 1534. The vehement attack on the mass by Antoine Marcourt and his associates marked their break as reformers from a whole conception of Christianity founded on the sacrifice of an embodied deity. At the same time, these attacks provoked a massive and officially sanctioned Catholic reaction.49 At the heart of the Catholic response was the notion of Protestant sacrilege against the mass. But this reaction had begun even prior to the Affaire des placards. Writing in 1564, the Protestant polemicist Jean-Louis Micqueau noted that the Parisian clergy in 1533 were denouncing 'Lutherans' who were stealing and killing children for their blood.50 The

go Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

charges made against certain Italians the year before were extended to the Protestants the next year. Both the Italians and Protestants represented fresh threats to the community. But they were popularly perceived in terms of a demonology that was already centuries old. As a recent important article by Luc Racaut has demonstrated, heretics had been accused of the blood libel as early as the time of Saint Augustine.51 Considered as subversive and alien, both Protestant heretics and Italians were amalgamated in the well-established popular medieval myth of Jewish profanation of the mass and ritual child murder.52 Moreover, far from this association with infanticide being exceptional, it became a recurrent accusation made against the Italians and Huguenots. Thus, we find it becoming the justification for the anti-Italian riot in Paris weeks before Saint Bartholomew. But it is likewise a standard accusation against the Huguenots ridiculed by Agrippa d'Aubigne's Les Tragiques: 'All are moved against these Christians by rumour that they eat children, that they meet by night, extinguishing candles and mingling together incestuously, adulterously and illicitly.'53 As we have seen, there were Italian Protestants. But in the popular conception, Huguenots and Italians were diametrically opposite, separated from one another on matters of religion and economic interest and practice. Yet, by a kind of psychological legerdemain, they were associated together as alien and criminal in the popular imagination alongside the ancestral Jewish enemy. Parisian anti-Italian feeling thus had a popular foundation rooted in Catholic faith. Moreover, it was based in grievances that had an immediate impact on the lives of ordinary Parisians, namely, new and unwelcome taxation. According to the Venetian ambassador the people were united against the idea of further taxes. Referring back to Saint Bartholomew, he noted that the city of Paris is known for its Catholicism and its affection for the king. Nonetheless, it now agitated against the Italians who are seen as responsible for these new taxes. He fears a Sicilian Vespers against them.54 In the ambassador's eyes, the Italians are identified with the Catholic cause and loyal service to the king but the Parisians have now turned against them even so. Parisian anti-Italian feeling thus was based in the xenophobia of the common people. Moreover, it was rooted in grievances, namely, new taxes that had an immediate impact on the lives of ordinary Parisians. Among new and unpopular taxes reputedly proposed or implemented by the Italians were ones on baptisms, weddings, funerals, and the drawing up of contracts.55 One of most egregiously unpopular taxes

The Italians and the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre 91 prior to the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's was one allowing the collection of a surcharge on food served in taverns and inns. This was accorded to the Italian courtier Giulio Cesare Brancaccio. Brancaccio was a Neapolitan noble who had served the Emperor Charles with distinction in campaigns in North Africa, Piedmont, and Germany. Accused of the homicide of a Spanish soldier, he deserted to the French in !554- Part °f the circle of Neapolitan exiles at the French court, he joined the Guise expeditions against Naples (1557) and Calais (1558).56 Naturalized in April 1563, he received the monopoly in part as a result of a payment of 150,000 livres tournois to Regnier de Sanzay, a gentleman of the king's chamber.57 So great was the outcry against this tax on food service on the part of the Parisians, that Brancaccio was forced to hire a publicist to write a pamphlet to try and defend himself. The anonymous apologist noted that he had undertaken to compose his tract in order to defend the honour of one of the king's esteemed servants. The pamphlet, which likely was published in 1565, was entitled Descharge et protestefaite enfaveur du seigneur Jule Brancasse, gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du roy sur ce quefaussement on luy a improprement d'avoir invente quelques impositions sur le peuple. According to its anonymous author, popular rumours assert that Brancaccio is bent on inventing new impositions to place upon the people. In reality, Brancaccio has merely tried to enforce the royal edict of January, 1563 fixing prices.58 The pamphlet, furthermore, argues that the monopoly given to Brancaccio will enable him to enforce common standards and so lower prices. It was this monopoly along with numerous other taxes and impositions imposed on the populace that fuelled popular discontent in the years leading up to the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's as well as the anti-Italian riots of the 1570s. Anti-Italian xenophobia, thus, had its roots in mass discontent. As such it mobilized the plebeian population of Paris through a constellation of deeply embedded fears and antagonisms. It was able to do so by drawing on a fund of traditional prejudices against religious and other aliens. Popular hostility to the Italians was based as well on real economic grievances. But it would be a mistake to regard this hostility as confined to the plebeian population. As our narrative has already suggested this current of animosity was shared by the notables and merchants of the city as well as by elements of the nobility. The development of popular anger was, in effect, sanctioned by similar feelings among the urban and even court elite. In order to understand its full dimensions, therefore, we have to link it with the rise of Italian influence at the court

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and their power over the finances of the state from the 15505. The extent of Italian influence has to be more fully explored. The ongoing political and financial control of the Italians led to a diplomatic conjuncture that played a large part in determining the character of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day.

CHAPTER FIVE

Background to a Massacre: The Italian Courtiers and Bankers

Until the 15508 Italian influence in France was limited essentially to the realms of economics and culture. The accession of Henri II signified the entry of Italian nobles into the royal court and the growing intrusion of the Italians into French politics. With the support of Catherine de' Medici, they began to be appointed to important positions at court and in the army.1 As a consequence, they became involved directly in matters of state. At the same time, the growing financial difficulties of the monarchy deepened the already great dependence of the French Crown on the financial resources and expertise of the Italian-Lyonnais bankers. Some of these shifted their activities from Lyons to Paris, involved themselves more deeply in state loans and tax-farming, and gained entry into the court and nobility. Economic and cultural antagonism to the Italians continued to develop. But in addition the increasing Italian presence at the court and influence over state finances began to stir up political and social hostility toward them among members of the court and among the Parisian populace. It is this antagonism that provoked the anti-Italian riots of the 15705. The growing presence of Italian nobles in France arose out of the political and military struggles of the Italian wars. Substantial numbers of Italian soldiers and mercenary captains enlisted in the French armies during the wars on the Italian peninsula, motivated by a sense of personal fidelity to the French monarchy or for reasons of economic expediency. Captains from such celebrated Italian families as the Trivulzi, Visconti, Gonzaga, Este, and Birague organized and led companies in royal service. Some Italians from banking families like the Gadagne, Strozzi, and Condi used their military commands in the French army as a means of bridging their passage from the world of commerce and

94 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

banking into the ranks of the nobility. The political and social ambitions of these families were strengthened by the financial services they were able to make available to the French king. At the same time, the migration to France of many of these nobles or would-be nobles was clearly related to the wavering military and political fortunes of the French in the Italian conflict.2 With the outbreak of the religious wars, Italian military men took an active part especially in its early phases. In the 15605 Italians constituted on average about 5 per cent of the royal army. Some forty Italian nobles served in the French army during this period, including the Fieschi and Fregoso of Genoa, the Strozzi of Florence, and the Ornano of Corsica. Most of the Italian mercenary commanders came from Tuscany and the Papal States. In 1562, at the beginning of the first religious war, Pope Puis FV dispatched his own nephew to France with 2500 infantry. During the second civil war, which began in 1567, troops from Piedmont and the Papal States joined Strozzi's army in Poitou. In 1569, Pius V raised 4000 foot and 800 horse from central Italy to fight in France under the count of Santa Fiore. They were accompanied by 1000 others sent by Duke Cosimo de' Medici of Florence. These Italian forces figured prominently in the defence of Chatellerault and the battle of Moncontour.3 Subsequent decades saw a decline in the numbers of Italian troops and nobles fighting in the royal army. But a considerable number of Italian nobles were still able to command companies including the duke of Atrie, the count of Beynes, Charles and Ludovic de Birague, Camille Fera, Guillaume de Gadagne, and the count of Mirandola. Other captains who served the French crown in this period like Jules Centurion, Pandolfe Cenami, and Masin del Bene came from the ranks of Italian merchant and banking families.4 At the court of Henri II the Florentines and Neapolitans made up two distinct factions, the Florentines being the most numerous and influential. While in general supporting the Guise party, both elements also fostered the ongoing ambitions of Henri II in the Italian peninsula.5 Under Henri the chief banks underwriting the Italian campaigns were those of the Florentine bankers Gadagne and Strozzi. The founder of the family fortunes of the Gadagne, the Florentine Thomas I, helped to finance the original Italian campaign of Charles VIII. Later, he provided the funds that made possible the celebrated extravaganza of the Camp of the Cloth of Gold. His successor Thomas II became one of the chief creditors of Francis I. Alderman of the city of Lyons, farmer of the

Background to a Massacre 95 gabelle of the city, and an extensive investor in rural properties, he entered the French nobility as Gadagne of Beauregard.6 Control of the Gadagne bank in the 15505 devolved upon Albisse Delbene. Delbene came from a Florentine-Lyonnais banking family in the service of the French Crown since the reign of Louis XII. Named 'general and superintendant of moneys leaving the Kingdom,' Delbene raised millions of livres in loans for Henri II and as a result gained access to much of the tax revenue of the state as collateral.7 His successors made notable careers as courtiers, soldiers, and ecclesiastics.8 The Gadagne-Delbene bank was essentially a commercial operation. Its rival the Strozzi bank had a quite different character. According to Rabelais, its head Filippo Strozzi was, after the Fuggers, the richest merchant in Christendom. But the Strozzi bank was a political as well as commercial enterprise. Its concerns had as much to do with the politics of Florence as with the accumulation of profits. From the beginning of the reign of Henri II, the Florentine party at court appeared as a compact, active, and resolute group at the head of which were the Strozzi. Filippo Strozzi had owed his importance in the first place to his service to the Medici. But from being the most loyal servant of the Medici, Strozzi became the head of the anti-Medicean party scattered throughout Italy and abroad. In their intimate gatherings held by preference in the house of the celebrated poet Luigi Alemanni, these Florentine exiles in France poured out their hatred of the tyrant of Florence, Cosimo de' Medici.9 Strozzi's wife Clarisse, daughter of the banished Piero de' Medici, helped to raise her orphaned niece Catherine de' Medici. Strozzi made a substantial contribution to the latter's dowry at the time of her engagement to Henri Valois, the future King Henri II. Following the death of Filippo Strozzi in 1538, his sons passed into the service of the French monarchy. Piero Strozzi, cousin and favourite of Catherine, became a marshal of France in the final stages of the Italian campaigns. Leone Strozzi studied at Padua, then entered the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, becoming commander and prior. Henri II named him gentleman of the king's chamber and captain general of the royal galleys in the Mediterranean. He commanded and reorganized the French fleet with considerable success. In the meantime, financial support for the careers of Piero and Leone rested with their brother Robert, who controlled the family bank. Appointed gentleman of the royal bed chamber by Henri II, he was seldom at court. Operating largely from Venice, he carried on business with the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the Strozzi bank at

96 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

Lyons helped to mobilize the financial resources of the Italian bankers resident there on behalf of the French monarchy.10 By the reign of Henri II, significant numbers of Italians had gained appointments in the various royal households of the court. In the reign of Charles IX the number of such appointments grew to ninety and in the reign of his successor Henri III to no less than 178.11 In 1549 royal pensions were distributed to seventy-seven Italians. By 1577 Henri III was pensioning a total of 243.12 At the same time, the presence of Italian artists, architects, engineers, musicians, riding-masters, and gardeners reinforced the Italian presence at court.13 More striking was the rise of certain Italians into the highest councils of the state. In the reign of Charles IX, three courtiers, Louis de Gonzaga, Rene de Birague, and Albert de Gondi, enjoyed the highest confidence of the king and Catherine de' Medici. The emergence of these Italians was not based simply on personal preference on the part of the king or the queen mother. It was felt that Italians were more dependent and, therefore, more reliable than were the feuding members of the French high aristocracy. The latter were divided by religious animosity and endowed with independent bases of power. On the other hand, the Italians had no other source of political influence but the favour of the king. They advocated moderate political policies to be pursued by a strengthened government which could continue to protect them and which represented the best hope for reestablishing religious peace. Louis de Gonzaga was a younger son of the duke of Mantua who passed his adolescence at the court of Henri II. By 1557 he was naturalized and was a captain of a hundred men-at-arms serving in Picardy. Eight years later (1565), he was a leading figure at court and a peer through marriage to Henriette of Cleves, heiress to the Duchy of Nevers.14 Rene de Birague was raised as part of the Milanais patriciate, studied law at Avignon, and helped to organize French military and judicial control of Piedmont. In 1565 he was named lieutenant-general of the duke of Nemours, governor of Lyons. Called to serve in the council of the duke of Anjou, he was made garde des sceaux in 1570 and named royal chancellor in 1573-15 Albert de Gondi was born at Florence and was raised in Lyons by his banker father Antoine and his mother Marie-Catherine de Pierrevive. He was twenty-two when his mother was summoned to assist Catherine de' Medici at the court. In 1547 he was present at the coronation of Henri II. Pursuing a military career, he took command of a company of men-at-arms in 1559. In the reign of Charles IX, he became

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one of Catherine de' Medici's principal councillors. In 1565, through marriage to Claude Catherine de Clermont, he became count and later duke of Retz and Marshal of France.16 Condi's position at court was buttressed by ongoing behind-the-scenes financial operations including strategic investments in land, annuities, and royal loans.17 While the Italian influence grew at court, it was reinforced by the increasing presence of Italian bankers and financiers in Paris. In part, this Italian influx was due to the attraction of the court in which Catherine de' Medici was a leading source of influence and patronage. More to the point, the court and government over which she presided was chronically insolvent. Italian dominance over royal finance had been more and more evident since the reign of Francis I. From the 15405, Italian financiers had become central to providing ready cash necessary to the monarchy's military operations. In the reign of Henri II, the credit and expertise provided by the Italians became indispensable to keeping the finances of the state afloat.18 The fiscal administration of the state itself remained for the most part in the hands of French office-holders. Likewise, the fiscal system continued to be based on the faille, aides, and gabelle. But the immediate provision of credit and the discovery of additional revenue to meet current expenses through the financial skills of the Italians proved indispensable. Accordingly, the flotation of rentes, the extension of loans, large-scale tax-farming, and new fiscal devices under the control of the Italians came to be the heart of the fiscal system of the last Valois. Such activities required a continuing and growing presence of Italian financiers in Paris and at the court. While many of these Italians maintained a direct or indirect relation to the banking houses of Lyons, increasing numbers established themselves in Paris. Included in their number were a substantial number of Luccans and Florentines. The Italians were all the more prepared to move to Paris because of the increasing economic difficulties evident at Lyons and, indeed, internationally from the beginning of the 15605. Deteriorating economic conditions made involvement in financing the French monarchy a more attractive investment than trade or commercial banking.19 The growing presence of the Italians in Paris is signified by evidence in the notarial records that register their loans to Parisian merchants, ecclesiastics, and nobles.20 Notable among these transactions is a loan in 1563 by Albert de Condi of 5000 limes tournois to the leading Parisian cloth manufacturer, Jean Gobelin.21 But so, too, is the record of Lancelot and Giovanni Rubinio of Lucca, bourgeoisie of Paris who in conjunction

98 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France with the Bonvisi were loaning money and importing silk into the city in the mid-i 56os.22 From the 15605 the Italians were increasingly heavy buyers of rentes. Typical were purchases of 300,000 livres and of 200,000 livres of rentes on the hotel de ville in 1569 by Jean-Baptise Gondi and the Genoese Paolo Spinola respectively.23 Italians were, likewise, deeply involved in purchases of rentes on the clergy. In 1563, for example, the Luccan banker, Galliot Franchiotti bought rentes on the clergy worth 150,000 livres.24 Toward 1570 the Florentine banker Louis Sertini and the Milanese Jules Reste specialized in the syndication of such rentes. But they operated in concert with Scipio Sardini, Louis Dadiacetto, Oratio Rucellai, Albert de Gondi, Arrigo Balbani, and Barthelemy Cenami.25 Buying rentes on the hotel de ville was increasingly mixed-up with the Italian financiers meeting the immediate and pressing financial needs of the monarchy. In May 1571, roughly a year prior to the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Rucellai and Sardini provided Charles IX with 1,200,000 livres in exchange for rentes on the hotel de ville. In addition to the normal interest on the rentes, the bureau de ville was obligated by the king to pay interest of 100,000 livres /annum on this loan to Rucellai and Sardini. Amid much resentment, the two Italians then forced the bourgeoisie of the city to take up these rentes at a prime.26 A similar operation was carried out by Jean-Baptiste Gondi and Davino Sardini the following summer.27 Large-scale credit operations by Italian bankers in Paris were carried out in close coordination with the Italian bankers of Lyons. In 1566, for example, Albert de Gondi himself took a loan of 260,000 livres from two Luccan-Lyonnais merchant bankers Jean-Baptiste Pandolfi and Philippe Jacomnini.28 The Bonvisi of Lyons associated themselves with Sardini in buying rentes on the hotel de ville.29 By 1571 the Sardini, Bonvisi, Dadiacetto, Rucellai, Gondi, Balbani, and Cenami had all taken up such rentes.^0 The insolvent French state was required to look not only to the Italian banks, but to the governments of the Italian states for relief. In 1562 and again in 1568, Bartelomeo Delbene was sent to Florence and Rome by Catherine de' Medici to raise money.31 In 1568-9, the duke of Florence loaned 100,000 ecus d'or to Charles IX.32 In 1573-4, Davino Sardini was the principal agent of Catherine in Italy. He is reported to have raised 2,600,000 livres in loans there. As his reward, he received 210,000 livres in rentes on the hotel de ville.^ Of the approximately twelve million livres in outstanding royal debts in 1574, it was calculated that some 750,000 was

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owed to the Italian bankers and 1,900,000 to the states of Italy.34 These included Florence, but also Rome, Ferrara, Venice, and Savoy.35 The dependence of the French monarchy on Italian loans of one sort or the other was thus considerable in the years both preceding and following the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day. The growing Italian influence over the court and royal finances inevitably produced a reaction not only among plebeians, but among wealthy Parisian merchants and notables as well as French courtiers. But this current of opposition, which was mainly focused in Paris, must be seen as only reinforcing and strengthening the anti-Italian xenophobia that had become widespread in Lyons, the economic capital of the kingdom. During the 15608 and early 15705, earlier xenophobic and protectionist sentiments had intensified. There was resentment, especially against the practice of farming the municipal taxes to Italians as well as over growing Italian control of the marketplace at the expense of local merchants. Whereas in good times French merchants had accepted their subordination to the Italians, such dependence was seen as servitude in the deteriorating economic circumstances of the 15605. Under such worsening conditions, the Italians were perceived as dangerous competitors, especially as they tried to intrude directly into the French internal market.36 Their financial operations were viewed as splitting off from trade, becoming an essentially speculative and counter-productive activity. Under the more difficult economic circumstances, which included the increasing weight of royal taxation, the traditional fiscal exemptions enjoyed by the Italians in Lyons seemed more and more intolerable. In the city's assembly of notables a powerful current of opinion against these exemptions developed, which the town councillors had to take into account. Changes in the composition of the town council also had a bearing on attitudes toward the maintenance of tax exemptions for the foreigners. The proportion of notables and of bourgeoisie on the municipal council who had retired from business grew. This increased the numbers of those who were prepared to behave in a more independent manner than, for example, active merchants who were more susceptible to pressure from the Italians. Even those traders, like the merchant drapers who remained on the council, were greatly affected by the crisis. Indeed, it was from them that there came the most vociferous complaints and the most fervent nationalist outcries.37 From 1569 to 1571 nationalist demands stand out in the remonstrances presented to the king. The drapers unreservedly subscribed to these and the silk merchants partially. Under pressure from the artisans and ongo-

ioo Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

ing economic difficulties, the merchants were more and more converted to nationalist and protectionist conceptions.38 From the beginning of the second civil war in 1567, the exemption of foreigners, including the Italians from the taitte, was increasingly challenged. Lyons had to look after its defences and did not hesitate to put native-born merchants and craftsmen in the silk industry on the tax rolls. The exemption of foreigners seemed increasingly intolerable. More and more of them were in permanent residence and exercising their trade in the marketplaces of Lyons in an ongoing fashion. Tax exemptions that dated from the time of the beginning of the fairs seemed anomalous. When the king ordered the raising of 28,000 limes in 1571, the town council decided to put foreigners on the rolls. The names of 186 foreigners including 154 Italians were added. Not only were their houses assessed, but also their household furnishings and the goods in their inventories were recorded.39 But the focal point of Anti-Italian feeling in this period was the violent and prolonged conflict between French Lyonnais merchants and the tax farmer and monopolist Louis Dadiacetto. Dadiacetto had left his native Florence for Lyons as a young man. Naturalized as a Frenchman, he became a successful merchant and banker. By the 15605 he emerged as a powerful monopolist and royal creditor upon whom was concentrated much of the mounting hostility against the Italians.40 As late as 1604 the historian of Lyons Claude de Rubys recalled that Dadiacetto had almost single-handedly destroyed the prosperity of the city.41 The royal import duty, which had traditionally been farmed by the government of the town, had been renewed in 1558 and was scheduled to lapse in eight years. In March 1564, two years prior to the expiration of this lease, the king ordered the confiscation of the city's right to this tariff and its re-auctioning along with the old import duty on silk cloth. Having unsuccessfully protested the cancellation of its right to the tariff, the town council reluctantly concluded it had little choice but to participate in the upcoming auction of the farm of the customs. The councillors offered 155,000 livres, but Dadiacetto successfully outbid the town government at 180,000 livres. Having acquired the tax farm, Dadiacetto exercised a veritable monopoly on the most lucrative imports including spices, wine, and Genoese velvet and silk cloth. Dadiacetto enforced his rights to the customs rigorously. In 1565 he wrote a letter to the king complaining of the behaviour of the city council. He accused them of arbitrarily reducing the tariff on goods that they traded, of encouraging fraud, and of resisting the collection of the customs duties. The Lyonnais merchants, including some foreigners,

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asked the councillors to protect them against the claim of Dadiacetto arbitrarily to search their premises and to inspect their account books.42 Vainly, the councillors protested to the king in the name of both the foreign and French merchants of the city. When the lease on the customs came up for renewal, the council tried to recover control.43 In the first place they attempted to reach an initial agreement with the irksome Dadiacetto. He was assured by the town of one-quarter of the receipts of the customs in case it recovered control of the tariff. But Dadiacetto's monopoly of the Lyonnais customs proved indispensable to the monarchy. On his initial receipt of the lease on the customs, he had designated 175,000 &f res a year in favour of the creditors of the Grand Parti who were mainly other Italian merchant bankers on whom the king was deeply dependent. The king's financiers and all those who had assignations on the customs favoured Dadiacetto, noting that the yield of the tariff was always greatest when controlled by an individual who had a direct interest in it. They had little confidence in the city of Lyons, which was considered too concerned with placating its own merchants. On 16 August 1570 Dadiacetto was given the farm of the customs once more for a total of six years in return for 310,000 livres in the first three years and 330,000 for the next three.44 The sums paid over to the king were immediately assigned to the royal creditors including Jean-Baptiste Gondi, Oratio Rucellai, and Baccio Delbene as well as the city of Paris. The municipality of Lyons received only 60,000 limes/year. For good measure the following year Dadiacetto received the farm of the customs on spices and silks landed at Marseilles.45 As a result, he became one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the farmers of the revenue in the kingdom. The town council of Lyons, the French merchants, and even some foreign merchants were enraged with Dadiacetto and the king had to intervene with an armed guard to safeguard his life.46 In the course of the sixteenth century, Italians had come to constitute the business elite of Marseilles as well as Lyons.47 Likewise, from midcentury this local elite had been subordinated to the Lyonnais Italian merchants and bankers. There seems to have been little overt resistance to these developments until 1572. But Dadiacetto's appropriation of the customs of Marseilles appears to have been the last straw. He was denounced as a foreigner and, exactly as at Paris, was explicitly identified with the Protestants, those other so-called aliens. Indeed, he was accused along with them of fomenting disturbances in the city.48 In Paris anti-Italian feeling was also shaped by growing Italian control

1O2 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

over royal finances and the institution of monopolies. We have already noted the popular indignation provoked by the monopoly acquired by Giulio Brancaccio over the sale of food in inns and taverns. Likewise, the Parisian elite was angered by the forced purchase of rentes imposed upon them by the Italian creditors of the king. By 1575 Dadiacetto had seized control of the customs of Rouen as well as of Lyons and Marseilles. As this directly affected Parisian commercial relations with the Netherlands and England, the city council was moved to protest.49 The drapers of Paris, in particular, chaffed at indirect Italian domination over their trade. Wool cloth manufacture was the single most important Parisian industry. Access to alum, vital to the city's cloth makers, had been controlled by foreign financial syndicates since the 15405. At the Estates-General of Orleans in 1560, the third estate complained against the control of the alum monopoly by such foreigners. Complaints against the alum monopoly exercised by the Bonvisi and then the Nobili continued through the next decade.50 But protests grew especially loud on the eve of Saint Bartholomew's at a time when the industry had begun to experience serious difficulties.51 At the time the monopoly was controlled by Oratio Rucellai acting for the Bonvisi of Lyons.52 At the beginning of 1572, a petition by Paris merchants demanded an end to the monopoly. According to these traders, there was a lack of alum available in the kingdom. Unless merchants were free to buy the mineral in Rome and Spain and to sell it freely in France, there was little hope for the cloth industry. A royal ordinance, accordingly, freed the trade save for the payment of three livres tournois/quintal to the crown.53 But Italian influence over the Parisian wool cloth industry did not disappear. An Italian presence was preserved through the purchase of a six-year farm on this excise tax by none other than Louis Dadiacetto.54 Italian attempts to set up banks in Paris were resisted. As early as 1549 Henri II had supported a proposal by an Italian, Vincent de Saint Donyno, to set up a bank in Paris. Among the objections raised by the political and economic elite of the city at the time was the fear that merchants would abandon commerce if the return on bank deposits was too attractive. It was also asserted that if a bank were established those who controlled it would come eventually to control the commercial life of the city as well. This would lead to a rise in prices and the ruin of trade. The reality of Italian financial control over the economic life of Lyons undoubtedly explains the negative attitude of the Parisian merchants. Indeed foreign, that is, Italian, control over such a bank was explicitly rejected.55

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The idea for a bank in Paris was revived by Albert de Gondi in the 15608. Gondi proposed a so-called blanque on the lines of what already existed in several Italian cities. This would take the form of a lottery with capital of four million livres. One million of these livres would be used to capitalize a bank that, according to Gondi, would eliminate usury and allow borrowers to borrow at 10 per cent interest. Once again, the city refused claiming that such a scheme would be prejudicial to the credit of the city and the king. Indeed, it insisted that the kings of France had never given their approval to a purely usurious and sinister scheme like this one advanced by Gondi.56 Attempts by the monarchy in 1567 to arbitrarily lower the return on private rentes were likewise seen as favouring the Italians. The Paris Parlement protested this measure arguing among other things that it would drive lenders to deposit their money with the Italian bankers at Lyons who were enriching themselves at the expense of the French.57 The detrimental economic and moral effects of the importation of Italian silks had been commented on by Huguenot writers and others at the time of the outbreak of the religious wars. As early as January 1564 a royal edict first attempted to impose a tax on imported silk. But this was quickly rescinded.58 Tariffs on imported manufactures were again raised in 1570. But imported Italian silks were largely exempted from the increase.59 However, in January 1572 a royal ordinance finally imposed heavy duties on the import of Italian luxury silks.60 But this reaction against the import of Italian manufactures by no means crippled the operations of the Italian bankers. True, the import of Italian manufactured silk was made more difficult. But if making money through imports was inhibited, the farm of the custom duties on this trade still offered possibilities. The farm of this duty in Paris, like the farm on the import of alum, itself became a lucrative affair for the bankers. Immediately after the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day the farm of this tax was taken by Albert de Gondi and Scipio Sardini in return for a loan to the king of 600,000 livres.61 In 1573 the farm of this tax on Italian cloth was reluctandy conceded by the city to the Florentine banker Louis Sertini.62 Bitter conflicts arose between the Parisian importers and Sertini, who attempted to closely control imports in order to insure payment of the tax. Attempts to assuage the conflict by appointing an adjudicator proved ineffective.63 Ongoing strife forced Sertini and then his successor Claude Nerone to abandon the farm on the customs. Ultimately, the city government was able to assume the lease on the farm.64 The monopolies and fiscal impositions controlled by the Italians ulti-

1O4 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France mately led to a omnibus protest by the city of Paris. In December 1575 the city of Paris presented a general remonstrance to the king on the subject of the state of taxation, the clergy, nobility, and justice in preparation for the Estates-General of Blois.65 A central part of this bill of grievances was devoted to the consequences of Italian monopolies and control of royal finances. On the question of taxes, the remonstrance asserted that since 1560 the crown had collected six million Uvres in revenues from the city exclusive of rentes and extraordinary levies. The greater part of these revenues had fallen into the hands of a multitude of foreigners.66 It was asserted that the major portion of such taxes had been raised through the farm of newly contrived impositions. These farms have never been open to native-born Frenchmen even though they have offered the best bids on them. Moreover, the farmers, notably Sertini, have been allowed to collect vastly more than they have paid for their farms. Nothing has been done to account for these sums.67 Prior to the 15705 Italian control of royal offices was relatively rare. One of the notable exceptions was Piero Buonaccorsi, son of Giuliano, a trusted servant of Francis I. Born in Florence, he arrived in France in 1531, received letters of naturalization in 1538, and became general of the finances in the generality of Rouen in 1557.68 But the increasing appointment of Italians to important offices began to stir up resistance from Parisian notables and disquiet in the nobility. In April 1572 Parlement resisted the confirmation of Scipio Sardini as keeper of les petits sceaux, that is, those of the petites chancelleries attached to the Parlement. Catherine wrote to the first president of the Paris Parlement, Christopher de Thou, to expedite the registration of the appointment. Yet a year later the Parlement was still dragging its heels.69 In March 1571 Parlement had protested the precedence given Birague over Parlement complaining that he was not chancellor but garde des sceaux.70 Birague's subsequent appointment as chancellor in 1574 provoked consternation among the nobility. The appointment apparently was related to an attempt to raise still more revenue. Birague, it was rumoured, was apparently prepared to countenance the imposition of a special tax on the nobility.71 The Paris Parlement stubbornly resisted his confirmation despite repeated royal insistence.72 Parisian reaction against the Italian presence even took on a cultural dimension. Italian actors had become increasingly popular in France throughout the first part of the sixteenth century. But it was from August 1570 onward that a rage for the commedia dell'arte began to take hold. Particularly notable was a gala performance by an Italian troupe at a

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banquet organized by Louis de Gonzaga at his hotel in Paris in March 1571. In May the celebrated Italian company of Gelosi played before the court at Nogent-le-Roi.73 Having taken the court by storm, the company decided to perform before the general public in Paris during August. The price of admission was set at between three and six sols. But despite the Italian company having received letters-patents from the king, the procureur-general intervened and complained before the Parlement. His complaint was not based on moral grounds, but rather on what he denounced as the excessive price of admission, which he claimed was 'a form of exaction on the poor people.'74 The actors were forced to produce their accounts and their performances were closed down. The language of accusation unmistakably and deliberately echoes popular resentment against what was widely believed to be the tax increases inspired by the Italians. Even Italian popular entertainment was now interpreted as another form of foreign exaction. It is obvious, then, from the telling, that the popular anti-Italian plots and riots in Paris of the 15705 took place within a broad context of antiItalian feeling. The matrix of the anti-Italian riots in Paris was the increasing public resentment against Italian fiscal and economic power. Popular hostility was given licence by the fact that such sentiments were shared by the highest elements of Parisian society. Of all these elements, it was the Protestants who were most systematically hostile to the Italians and from an early date. It was they who had first sought to mobilize such hostility politically. A pamphlet inspired by the Protestant nobility dating from the second religious war (1567) notes that the Huguenots have rebelled in the first place because of a plot against them. But also they have revolted owing to the great influence and numbers of the Italians in the kingdom. With some exaggeration the Huguenot nobles complain that an Italian, Birague, has been made governor of Lyons. At the same time, the city lies close to the territory of an Italian prince, the duke of Savoy, who claims control of it. The Marquisat of Saluzzo, which is all the territory that remains to the French in Piedmont, has likewise been put into the hands of an Italian governor. The Italians have been welcomed, cherished, given advancement, and favoured, while natural-born Frenchmen have been shunted aside. As foreigners, the Italians have no feeling for the poor people unlike natural-born Frenchman. As a result they daily invent new impositions, charges, tributes, taxes, and tolls in order to suck the people's blood.75 The traditional nobility of France had ex-

io6 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

eluded upstarts. Now people like the count of Retz, son of the Lyonnais bankrupt Antoine Gondi, has been made sieur du Peron, a knight of the Order of Saint Michel, first gentleman of the king's chamber, and a seigneur with an income of 6o,OOO livres in rent.76 The main thrust of the pamphlet is to complain about the political exclusion of the French nobility and its replacement by Italian parvenus. But in its references to the weight of taxes imposed on the commoners, there is a clear attempt to exploit and champion popular grievances against the Italians. Part of the political strategy behind such a position was clearly to deflect animosity from the Huguenots by pointing the finger at the Italians as the source of France's troubles. Charles IX was little inclined to fall in with such anti-Italian xenophobia. Not only were the Italian bankers the most immediate source of royal credit, but Italians were among his most trusted advisers. Indeed, his own mother was an Italian. On the other hand, the king was aware of the economic and financial weakness of France especially with respect to Italy. Massive imports of Italian silks were a drain on the balance of payments, on employment, and ultimately on tax revenues. It was the unbalanced nature of economic relations with Italy, which in part were responsible for the economic and fiscal crisis, that coincided with the outbreak of the civil wars. As a result, from the beginning of the reign of Charles IX the strengthening of French manufacturing and commerce became an important concern. Ernest Charriere, the great diplomatic historian of the nineteenth century, made mention of these initiatives over a hundred years ago.77 They included attempts to stimulate agricultural production, encourage technological innovation, promote mining, and facilitate commerce.78 At the conclusion of the third religious war, these policies began to be tied to an attempted dramatic redirection of royal policy under the auspices of the Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny. Admiral Coligny entered the king's council in August 1571. Coligny's overall political vision endeavoured in the first place to maintain or restore the balance of power between Valois and Hapsburg by compensating French losses in Italy by alliance with England. Secondly, it embraced the idea of extending French territory by conquests in the Low Countries and by contesting the Spanish colonial empire. Finally, it aimed at consolidating the French monarchy by uniting Catholics and Huguenots through war against Spain.79 Rapprochement with England, fundamental to Coligny's program, entailed a royal marriage whose terms are outlined in the Treaty of Blois

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signed at the end of April 1572. But the Treaty also included important commercial provisions.80 A trade treaty between the two states had been concluded in 1564. Nonetheless, duties on English frisians and wool cloth had been raised by a royal edict of 157O.81 This tariff was in retaliation for a previous measure by the English government against French imports.82 By the terms of the new treaty of 1572, extensive trading concessions were granted to English merchants. But these concessions were made in light of an English promise to transfer the wool staple from Antwerp to Rouen and Dieppe. It was hoped that France would thereby become the major transit route for goods moving between England and Italy.83 These initiatives in the direction of England coincided with a marked strengthening of protectionist measures against Italy and its manufactures. Steps along these lines had been revoked in 1564 and watereddown in 1570 as we have seen. But finally heavy tariffs were imposed on Italian manufactured silk as of January 1572. The objectives of this measure were pointed out by the French ambassador to Venice, Arnaud Du Ferrier. Du Ferrier was a strong French nationalist who likely harboured Calvinist sympathies. He had spoken out loudly in defence of French interests at the Council of Trent.84 Du Ferrier wrote to the king to compliment him on the measures against the import of Italian manufactured silk. According to Du Ferrier, despite the fact that the Venetians to a certain degree have been hurt by the king's ordinance, they, nevertheless, praise the political wisdom of this measure. Until now foreigners, notably Genoese and Milanese, have imported certain vain and useless merchandise into the French kingdom. In so doing, they have impoverished the French while extracting a million ecus d 'or a year from the kingdom. According to the Venetians, if these tariffs are strictly enforced, within a year the best artisans of Italy and Flanders will be forced to emigrate to France. Furthermore, foreigners will be compelled to send gold to France rather than exporting it from the kingdom as they do at present.85 But Du Ferrier urged the king to take these protectionist measures a step further. He noted the king's interest in improving the city of Marseilles, which potentially is the best port on the Tyrhennian Sea. According to Du Ferrier, that city is presently impoverished despite the fact that it had once prospered. The quickest way to restore its fortunes is if the king would prohibit anyone who is not a native-born or naturalized Frenchman or at least a twenty-year resident from doing business there. Such a measure would make it impossible for the economically powerful

io8 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

Genoese and Milanese to continue to block the less powerful French merchants from profiting from the city's commerce. According to Du Ferrier, the worst part of the present situation is that once the foreigners have grown rich, they and their money return to Italy. The retiring Italian merchants are replaced by other Italians. As a result, the French monarchy does not benefit from the wealth accumulated by these merchants.86 Du Ferrier is describing what amounts to a semi-colonial situation in which foreigners control the economic if not the political life of a country and remit the bulk of profits to their homeland. Clearly this was not merely Du Ferrier's view, but one which reflects resentment felt locally in Marseilles. The ambitions of French statesmen at this moment extended still further. One of the great successes of French diplomacy in the sixteenth century was the opening up of relations with the Ottoman Empire. The capitulations signed between France and the Ottomans in 1535-6 provided the basis for the further development of commercial and diplomatic relations.87 The alliance with the Turks was designed not only to counter the emperor politically, but also to offset the Hapsburg Empire's advantage in New World trade. Indeed, following the conclusion of the capitulations of 1535-6, there was a steady development of French trade to the eastern Mediterranean through Marseilles. In 1569, the French ambassador to the Grande Porte was able to conclude a new agreement that still further strengthened the French position. According to these new capitulations, the French ambassador was to be assured of precedence over other Christian states. Furthermore, it stipulated explicitly that these other states would have the right to trade in the Levant only under the protection and based on the authorization of France.88 The significance of this agreement was pointed out by the French ambassador to the Ottomans in 1572, Francois de Noailles, bishop of Dax.89 According to Noailles, in the past few years all the states of the western Mediterranean, including the major Italian city-states and Spain, have been attempting to establish independent consulates in the Ottoman realm. It was important that France resist these attempts using its diplomatic monopoly as a means of exercising ongoing political and economic leverage over its rivals.90 In other words, through the use of diplomacy it would be possible to off-set the economic advantages of other states including the Italians.91 Despite these nationalist designs, it is noteworthy that naturalized Italians in France were able to get a piece of even this cake. Thus, the naturalized Dadiacetto was able to insinuate

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himself into these plans through his monopoly over the customs of Marseilles. According to Jean-Auguste de Thou, 'while the League of princes against the Turks endured, he [Dadiacetto] had taken the lead in attempting to secure French control over the whole of the Levant trade.'92 In any case, based on these agreements with the Turks the early 15705 saw a dramatic increase in the trade of Marseilles in the eastern Meditteranean.93 French diplomacy on the eve of Saint Bartholomew's thus had farreaching, ambitions. Not only was there the conception of rapprochement with England and war against Spain for control of the Netherlands, there was also a strategy that encompassed the Mediterranean. This entailed protectionist measures against Italian manufactures, but also involved the notion of gaining leverage over the Italians through political control of the eastern Mediterranean trade. However misconceived these conceptions turned out to be, such ideas do show that one way or another an ongoing French interest in Italy and the Mediterranean was considered indispensable. Perhaps this was the Achilles heel of the nationalist economic and political strategy of Coligny. The attitude of the Florentine state and of the papacy prior to and following the events of Saint Bartholomew's Day should be taken into account. The idea that France could hope to gain new power over the Italian states had been fed by the political attitude of the Medici ruler of Florence. Alienated from the Hapsburgs by his ducal ambitions in Tuscany and, indeed, fearful of attack, Cosimo de' Medici turned momentarily to France. Promising France support for its war against Spain in the Netherlands, the Florentine ruler was even able, briefly, to enlist the support of the pope.94 But such plans, of course, were in vain. Following the battle of Lepanto (October 1571), Spanish control over the states of the Italian peninsula tightened.95 Even English interest in a war against Spain cooled. By the summer of 1572 the Guise reappeared in the court stronger than ever. Committed to the king of Spain and the emperor, close to the papacy, and surrounded by adherents in the court both Italian and French, the Guise imposed a sharp reversal on the politics of the queen mother, signalled ultimately by the assassination of Coligny.96 As we have seen, recent historical accounts have stressed the popular roots of the Massacre. This has been taken to the point of denying the responsibility of Catherine de' Medici and Charles IX. But the least one can say is that the latter's failure to extend protection to the Huguenots facilitated the slaughter. In any case, the legend of Catherine's and,

11O Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

indeed, Italian responsibility for the Massacre rapidly emerged, especially among the Huguenots. Indeed, the enthusiastic response of the papacy to the Massacre reinforced ideas of Italian complicity.97 Yet it would be unwise to magnify the extent of papal influence over France. Rome had been alarmed by the marriage of Henri Bourbon, the nearest Huguenot claimant to the French Crown, with the royal princess Marguerite of Valois. In fact, the papacy's ability to shape French policy was limited.98 Moreover, one should not overemphasize the role of the government of the Florentine Medici in these events, despite the satisfaction and relief with which Florence greeted the news of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre.99 The important point with respect to Italy is that one way or another France remained committed to its expanding Mediterranean interest and, therefore, to its ongoing connection with the Italian peninsula.100 Despite widespread hostility to Italian influence over French political and economic life, rejection of the Italian connection was not a viable policy option for the monarchy. Ultimate responsibility for the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day rests with the queen mother and Charles IX. But the involvement of the Italians of the court has to be taken seriously as well. Certainly their role was far greater than that of the governments of Italy. The sudden rejection of the idea of a war against Spain immediately prior to the Massacre was believed by the Huguenots to be the fault not only of the queen mother, but of the duke of Retz as well.101 Certainly, the complicity of Italians in the assassination of Coligny fed the notion of an Italian conspiracy. Catherine had charged Anne d'Este with finding an assassin to kill Coligny. Anne, the widow of Francois de Guise, had only too willingly agreed. The council which decided to proceed with the assassination of Coligny was made up of a majority of Italians including the Chancellor Birague, the duke of Retz, and the duke of Nevers. Nevers was one of the nobles who finally dispatched Coligny along with PierPaulo Tossinghi.108 Italians played a prominent part in the slaughter of Huguenots. Especially notorious were the Florentine Cosme Ruggieri and the Piedmontese Annibal Coconato. Count Coconato, who was in fact of obscure Piedmontese background, became particularly infamous.103 Having served the duke of Savoy, Coconato passed into French service in 1569 at the head of a company of Italian foot soldiers. His handsome face caught the attention of the royal prince Henri of Anjou who introduced him to the court. There, he became the lover of the wife of Retz as well as a double agent for both the king of Spain and Catherine de' Medici.

Background to a Massacre in

Coconato played a particularly odious role as recalled by Charles IX himself. According to him, 'Coconat was a brave and valiant gentleman, but wicked, indeed, one of the most wicked who ever was in my kingdom. Boasting of Saint Bartholomew's, I remember him saying among other things that he had ransomed up to thirty Huguenots from the hands of the people in order to have the satisfaction of having them die according to his pleasure. His pleasure was having them renounce their religion in return for a promise to spare their lives. He then stabbed them and made them languish, killing them cruelly with tiny cuts.'104 As a result of the involvement of these courtiers, the fantastic notion of Saint Bartholomew's Day as an Italian-inspired conspiracy took hold. Less than a month after the Massacre, it was said that the admiral had been warned by the Calvin ist leadership not to go to court owing to the treachery of the Italians.105 The financial support of the Crown by the Italian bankers lent credence to these notions. The enormous loans extended by these Italians prior to or after Saint Bartholomew's, which we have chronicled, must have weighed on the policy decisions of the queen mother and the king. The outcome of the Massacre represented a defeat for the Huguenots. It also amounted to a consolidation of the influence of Italian courtiers and financiers over the court. We hear little more in the wake of the Massacre of Huguenot-inspired plans for economic protectionism or proposals to stimulate the French economy at the expense of Italian interests. But in the more immediate sense the outcome of Saint Bartholomew was perceived by the Italians in Paris as a near escape. At least some of them felt threatened by the anger of the Parisian populace. As things had turned out it was the Huguenots and not the Italians who had served as scapegoats. It was a case of better them than us. But the fear and perhaps the guilt remained. We get some sense of the mood in the Italian community in Paris in the aftermath of Saint Bartholomew's in the report of the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Michiel. Michiel reported to the Venetian senate that the absence of legal process in the judgment meted out to the Protestants was stirring misgivings on the part not only of Protestants but also of Catholics. It was considered tyrannical that things proceeded by way of absolute power and without due legal process. The Massacre was being attributed to the queen as an Italian, a Florentine, and as scion of the house of the bloody Medicean tyranny. She is hated most of all, reported the ambassador, while, because of her involvement, so is the whole of the Italian nation. There is the danger that some harm may befall the Italians as a result of some evil turn of events like the death of the queen. As a result, the

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Italians could be held responsible for everything. If she died, the commanding authority with the king enjoyed by her would disappear. Authority would fall into the hands of French ministers who not only would not fear, but would be spurred to turn to every liberty and license.106 Five years later the Venetian ambassador Girolamo Lippomano reported much the same thing. According to him, Italians are deeply hated in Paris and in the rest of France. Catherine is the protector of the Italians who would find themselves in a precarious situation without her.107 Such anxieties no doubt reflected the legitimate concern that the Italians might yet be attacked by the urban mob. They also reflect a certain guilty fear of retribution. In the event the massacre of the Huguenots rather than the Italians demonstrates that in sixteenth-century France religious animosity was more important than ethnic animosity. But it must also lead us to question the idea that the massacre was a product simply of popular fury. It really mattered to the outcome that there was an Italian queen mother surrounded by an entourage of powerful Italian nobles and financiers. The Mediterranean ties of France that they represented were too powerful to be broken. Moreover, the protection of the queen mother was an indispensable shield for the Italians. Its withdrawal from the Huguenots sealed their fate. Our analysis of popular and elite attitudes toward the Italians in the court and Paris thus tends to support the traditional interpretation of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. It re-emphasizes the importance of the attitude of the court. On the one hand, the withdrawal of royal favour proved fatal to the Huguenots. On the other hand, ongoing royal support for the Italians saved them from popular violence. The relative autonomy of the Parisian populace in the execution of the Massacre certainly has to be taken into account. The mass of Parisians were not automatons to be turned on and off at the will of the court. In this respect, it seems clear that the Parisian elite and lower classes shared a common antipathy to both the Huguenots and the Italians. It must be admitted that the antipathy against the Huguenots based on religion was wider and deeper than the hatred of the Italians. On the other hand, the religious conformity of the latter did not shelter them from popular hatred. Indeed, as we have noted, in the popular imagination hostility to the Italians tended to be conveniently assimilated to religious hostility. But the contemporaneous hatred for both Huguenots and Italians by the Parisian crowd suggests that its aggressiveness cannot be accounted for in terms of religious psychology alone. Other factors, social and

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economic, were undoubtedly in play in the case of popular feelings toward the Italians. It is also likely that hostility against the Huguenots had a social as well as religious dimension.108 Certainly, the causes of the anti-Italianism that we have been examining suggest a deep-seated and continuing economic and social malaise in the Parisian population, which lies in the background to mob violence. On the other hand, the court's more or less consistent support for the Italians prevented popular violence against them from getting out of hand. Unable to get at the Italians, the mob channelled its anger toward the Huguenots who became its scapegoats. Indeed, the withdrawal of the court's protection from the Huguenots put their fate into the hands of the Parisian mob.

CHAPTER SIX

Anti-Italian Discourses

Growing Italian influence over the court and over the finances of the kingdom had provoked increasing disquiet during the 15605. The subsequent Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day and the apparent consolidation of Italian political and economic control of France turned such unease into a storm of hostility. The outburst of anti-Italian xenophobia following the Massacre was directed in the first place against Catherine de' Medici and her leading Italian courtiers. But it was aimed as well against Italian merchants, bankers, nobles, clerics, and soldiers. While never crystallizing into a fully articulated ideology, these currents of antiItalian sentiment were expressed in a flood of xenophobic discourse. Such utterance was in part aimed at overcoming the religious divisions among Frenchmen by uniting them against a common foreign enemy. Donald R. Kelley has interpreted the period of the French religious wars as giving birth to the first ideologies in the modern sense. According to Kelley, the development of ideology during the wars of religion is above all manifest in the mobilization of religious beliefs to serve political goals.1 But the ideological battles of the period were not fought over purely religious principles. They were also contested through the deployment of more secular modes of thought in support of these beliefs. The ideas of limited government of the Huguenot theorists, for example, were counter-posed by the concept of sovereignty elaborated through the more or less politique perspective of Bodin. While less intellectually coherent than these theories, the discourses of anti-Italianism represented another such stream of nonreligious political propaganda. Such rhetoric became an ancillary subtext to the more fully fledged antiabsolutist political ideologies that appeared in the wake of Saint Bartholomew. In Paris and northern France, the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's

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struck the Huguenots a heavy blow. In the wake of this attack, the conversion of Calvinists to the Catholic faith or their flight from the north of France dramatically reduced Huguenot numbers. As a result, in the north of the kingdom the Huguenots could no longer be considered a credible threat to the Catholic Church. The reduced numbers of Protestants who remained in northern France lived under the sufferance of the now overwhelming Catholic majority. In the meantime, the monarchy sought to take advantage of its victory over the heretical party by extending its campaign to the south of the kingdom. It attempted to break the back of the Huguenot cause in the Midi by besieging the great Protestant fortress at La Rochelle. From February until June 1573 the royal army mounted attack after attack in an ultimately vain attempt to take the city.2 Indeed, while holding onto La Rochelle, the Huguenots were able to strengthen themselves generally in the Midi by organizing into a loose confederation of towns and provinces extending from Grenoble to Saint Jean-d'Angely. Huguenot defiance also took an ideological form. Resistance to unbridled royal power was justified by the political theories of the so-called monarchomachs Theodore de Beze, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, and Francois Hotman.3 The latter's Franco-Gallia, in particular, used history as a means of justifying the struggle to establish a constitutional monarchy in the face of what was perceived as Valois tyranny. In the course of his historical and constitutional narrative the baneful influence of the Italians plays its role. An intrinsic feature of the arbitrary rule of the Valois, according to Hotman, was Italian domination over the kingdom. Italian ascendancy under the Valois was pictured as part of a long-term historical attempt of the Italians to subjugate France. The Italians and their antecedents were pictured in Hotman's account as the ultimate agents behind historically prolonged and continuing efforts to undermine the liberties of the French. In Hotman's view, the contemporary struggle against the Italians represented a revival of the historic campaign of both the Celts and Germans against Roman tyranny.4 According to Hotman, France's current problems stem from the fact that the kings of the sixteenth century had undermined the constitution of the kingdom, which had been established only after long struggles against the Romans throughout antiquity. Under the constitution, finally established in the early Middle Ages, the French kings had acted as representatives of the whole people organized through their estates. Monarchs who proved tyrannical could be removed by the popular assembly of these estates. Hotman believed that the establishment of this by now long-standing

116 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

constitutional order had been the consequence of an extended historical struggle for national independence. According to him, the French nation originated from a fusion of the Celts and Germans - two peoples who were distinguished by their solid moral and martial virtues. They had perfected these qualities in an ongoing conflict with the Romans. The past experience of the Celts in fighting Roman power he conceived as closely analogous to that of the contemporary French struggle against Italian control. It was true that after an initial struggle of 800 years between Celts and Romans for control of the world the Romans had triumphed. The Celts lost their independence to Roman conquest. But the struggle against the Romans did not end. The Celts under Roman occupation did not lose their taste for liberty and their hatred for their conquerors. Indeed, according to Hotman, Roman treatment of the conquered Celts fuelled the flames of resistance. Citing Caesar, Hotman describes conquered Gaul as having been reduced to the status of a Roman province. Like present-day France, its system of justice and laws was altered and its people subjected to Roman authority and oppressed by perpetual servitude. Recalling the current domination of French commerce by the Italians, Hotman describes Gaul under Roman rule as having been overrun by Roman merchants. No Celt could transact any business except through a Roman citizen. No silver coin circulated in Gaul without passing through the hands of Romans. Further parallelling the current state of affairs, Roman soldiers were garrisoned on the population, while taxes and tributes were levied on them. For that purpose, the Celts were required to accept Roman tax gatherers who sucked out the blood of the provinces. Finally, the Celts were oppressed by the prohibition of local customary laws in favour of Roman law. Magistrates bearing the authority and insignia of the Roman people were appointed to administer justice in the provinces.5 Throughout Hotman's account, allusions to the state of contemporary France form a subtext just under the surface of the description of the sufferings of the Celts under Roman rule. The Celts ultimately sought an ally in the neighbouring Germanic peoples, whose constitution was remarkably free and whose aspirations and tendencies resembled those of the Celts. These were the Franks or free men as their name suggests. The Franks made a sort of perpetual league with the Celts against the Roman oppressors, raided occupied Gaul on different occasions, and, finally, in concert with the indigenous Celtic population, freed the country of Roman rule. In the course of

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liberating Gaul from the Roman yoke, the two peoples constituted a single nation, Franco-Gallia or Gaule Franke. Over the millennium that followed the French, then, lived under free institutions obeying kings that the people had themselves chosen. Accounting for the undeniable dynastic continuity of French royalty over the medieval period, Hotman admits that the kings were selected generally from the same family. But he insists that their choice was determined in the last instance by the elective rather than the hereditary principle. Political decay and corruption had set in during the last two centuries and, particularly, under the Valois. The monarchy became absolute, the hereditary principle triumphed, and the convocation of the EstatesGeneral turned into a memory. The presence of the great beast of ancient Rome, meanwhile, was reincarnated in the papacy. Once again, France was infested with Roman tax collectors, office holders, mercenary soldiers, and, especially, pettifogging lawyers whose headquarters was the Parlement of Paris. This kind of lawyer, that is, one under the influence of the Italian jurist Bartolus, had been brought to France as a result of the Babylonian exile of the papacy. It was the constant relations between courtiers and lawyers from Avignon with those of France that had planted the seed of this kind of legalistic squabbling.6 Hotman's work thus provided the deep historical context for the elaboration of contemporary anti-Italianism. Struggle against the Italians was not simply based on the accidents of the present day. Rather, this conflict had profound historical roots. The Italians, including the papacy, were pictured as bent on trying to revive the ancient Roman tyranny over the French. History was in the course of repeating itself. But the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew did not merely intensify hostility toward the Italians in general. It enormously magnified enmity directed toward one Italian in particular, namely, the queen mother, Catherine de' Medici. From the Huguenot perspective, she had played the central role in the unfolding of the tragedy. According to a widespread sentiment in Huguenot ranks, the rule of women and especially of a foreign woman was inherently perverse. Catherine's dominion and especially her key role in the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre reflected the deviant course France had taken under Italian domination. Focusing Huguenot misogyny on Catherine gave it an anti-Italian twist. Hotman chose not to attack Catherine directly. Instead, he devoted a chapter of Franco-Gallia to the history of the role of women in the government of the French kingdom. His object was to show that women

n8 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France

should be excluded not only from inheriting the French throne, but also from exercising regency over it. In a very one-sided review of the French past, he tried to demonstrate that whenever women have been vested with ultimate political authority the result has been disastrous. According to Hotman, this was proved by the history of such figures as Fredegonde, Brunehaut, Plectrude, wife of Pepin d'Heristal, Judith, wife of Louis the Pious, Blanche of Castille, mother of Louis IX, and of Isabelle of Bavaria, wife of Charles VI, all of whom had provoked civil war. The role of foreign women who enjoyed authority in France had been particularly calamitous. Brunehaut is especially singled out in analogy to Catherine. Hotman conceded the fact that she was a Spaniard, but emphasized that she was entirely dominated by an Italian favourite Poclaide. According to Hotman, she brought up her sons (sic, grandsons) viciously so that they became mortal enemies and took to fighting one another in the course of a protracted war. Ultimately, she poisoned one of these offspring and had the son of the other killed. She was responsible, furthermore, for the deaths of numerous other members of the royal family. At last she was tried, cruelly tortured, and executed.7 Despite the attack of Hotman and others, Catherine found admirers, notably among the Italians and courtiers. For example, reporting to the Venetian senate following Saint Bartholomew's Day, the ambassador Giovanni Michiel summed up an Italian consensus by concluding 'that as a result of this last action she had completely proved herself.'8 In Italian diplomatic circles Catherine's role in the Saint Bartholomew's Massacre was seen as a brilliant political coup. A less political but even more enthusiastic reaction to her part in the Saint Bartholemew's Day Massacre is embodied in the verse of the court poet Jean-Antoine de Barf's A la Reine Mere du Roy: It is to God that we owe such a famous victory But after God, most wise Queen, It is your courage which we must greatly praise. You inspired your sons to sanction a just vengeance Which allowed such a swift triumph over The enemies of France.9

More serious apologies for Catherine came in the form of two pamphlets. One derived from the pen of a parlementaire in the queen mother's service, Antoine Matharel. The other was by Papire Masson, professor

Anti-Italian Discourses 119 of law at the University of Angers and an intimate of Carlo Boni, bishop of Angers, a member of Catherine's Italian entourage.10 Their defence of Catherine formed part of an attack on the theories and historical evidence in Hotman's Franco-Gallia. Matharel and Masson objected to Hotman's attempt to link the origins of modern France with the anarchic and feudal institutions of the barbarian tribes. Hotman had identified the beginnings of France with those forces that had destroyed the Roman Empire. In their eyes, Hotman was championing medieval barbarism at the expense of classical order. Indeed, they held that Hotman's work was premised on sedition and rebellion.11 Masson's Responsio ad maledicta Hotmani cognomento Matagonis (1575) took Hotman to task, especially, for his attacks on the regency of Catherine. In particular, he tried to refute Hotman's contention that it was contrary to French law that a woman exercise a regency over the Crown. Hotman's intent in attacking the notion of a female regency, according to Masson, was to undermine Catherine in order to plunge the kingdom back into civil war. In addition, the historical evidence supporting Hotman's attack on female regencies was carefully reviewed and found inadequate. Hotman responded with the pseudonymous Matagonis de Matagonibus, decretum bacaulaurai, Monoitoriak adversus Italogalliam sive antifrancogalliam Antonii Matharelli Alvergeni (1575). As the title suggests, Hotman believed his opponents were trying to substitute an Italian theory of the origins of France for his own notion of a German and Celtic one. The Italogalles, a party made up of Italians as well as their French followers, promote the idea of an Italian origin for France. They see France as historically a dependency of Rome. But in this polemic Hotman focuses his attack not on arguing about the historical origins of France, but on contemporary Italian domination over the kingdom. The Italogalles are a fifth column striving to ensure Italian control over the kingdom. In the dedication to Matagonis de Matagonibus, he rejects the charge of his opponents that he had fled into exile following the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Yet, he demands that they confess 'if it is not more honourable for him to have left this country where in two days by treason Itallogalles had killed 30,000 good Francogalles, and if it is not... shameful for his country to have deprived itself of such a citizen and man of law.'12 Matharel and Masson had asserted that Hotman had a preference for Germany and that he aspired perhaps to turn Frenchman into Germans. Such a charge was evidently directed against the fact of the German origins of Hotman's family. Hotman dismissed the accusation as ridicu-

12O Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France lous, while charging the Italogalles with all the evils that afflicted France. Certainly a nation of Germanogalles would be better that one of Frenchified Italians or Italianized Frenchmen. German moderation might temper Gallic fickleness. According to Tacitus, the Germans are superior to all other peoples in martial courage and loyalty. Considering that in France 30,000 people have been massacred with impunity in two days, the Germans believe that no race surpasses in perfidy and cruelty the race of Italogalles. And many would say that it would be preferable for the inhabitants of France to become Germanogalles rather than Italogalles. At the present time, we see the fruits of treason, perfidy, poltroonism, atheism, magic, necromancy, and sodomy - all vices fostered by the Italogalles. A knock-kneed son of a bankrupt (Albert de Gondi, count of Retz) governs the army, an ignorant hangman (Chancellor Birague) is in charge of justice. Italian publicans control the gabelles, customs duties, failles, and the rest of the public finances. Lyons and Paris are full of Italians. The farm of the tithe and the principal financial assets and revenues of the bishoprics and abbeys are in the hands of the Italians, who are sucking the blood and marrow of the poor Franco-Galle people. Who conceived, directed, and executed the massacres and carnages? The Italogalles. Who invented all these taxes and impositions that are flaying the poor people? The Italogalles. Who counselled war? The Italogalles. Who even now obstructs peace with all their sophist inventions and lies? The Italogalles.13 It is from Hotman's appreciation of the disaster of an Italian-dominated present, then, that his historical perspective of the Franco-Gallia was generated. In the wake of Hotman's writings, the Protestants as a whole adopted a uniformly negative view of Catherine de' Medici. The Vindidae contra tyrannos, like the Franco-Gallia, refrains from naming her directly. But she is obliquely denounced for being among the queens who have seized the government illegally and corrupted their sons so that they could continue to rule.'4 But the gloves really come off in the poetry of Agrippa d'Aubigne who does everything possible to blacken Catherine's name. He refers to her as the 'impure Florentine' or as 'the Florentine plague.' In his Miseres, he accuses Catherine of adopting the Florentine policies of divide and rule, of favouring the Italians to promote tyranny, and of aiming to ruin the French. D'Aubigne continually associates her with the diabolical politics of Machiavelli.1-5 But as is well known it is in Henri Estienne's Discours merveiUeux de la vie, actions et deportements de Catherine de Medicis, Royne-mere that we find the most sweeping and comprehensive Huguenot attack on Catherine.

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Estienne likely wrote this work in mid-1574 after the death of Charles IX and before the accession of Henri of Anjou as the new king.16 In this treatise Estienne unleashed a flood of misogynistic invective against Catherine that found an enthusiastic reception. The Discours merveilleux appeared in no less than ten editions in 1575-6, including those published in Latin, German, and English. No doubt, Catherine deserved much of the opprobrium that Estienne heaped upon her. But the vehement terms in which his work was couched suggest the outpouring of a deep-rooted misogyny shared by Estienne and his contemporaries. As such, Estienne's Discours merveilleux became the foundation of the ongoing and long-lived legend of the wicked Italian queen.17 At the time that Estienne was writing, the fundamental objective of the Huguenots was to put an end to their political isolation. In this respect, the first breakthrough for the Huguenot cause was the conclusion of an alliance with Henri Damville-Montmorency, governor of Languedoc. Damville increasingly distanced himself from the political and religious policies of the court. Ruling Languedoc with scarcely any reference to Paris, he attempted to find grounds for compromise between Huguenots and moderate Catholics. In the meantime, the Huguenots were able to find other allies. At the court the principal opposition figure was the youngest brother of the king, Francois d'Alencon. With the next in line to the throne, Henri of Anjou, out of the way in Poland, Alencon sought, increasingly, to make himself felt on the national stage. In the court, his ambitions were frustrated by the dominant Guise faction, which associated him with other moderate Catholics like DamvilleMontmorency and his brother Francois Montmorency, governor of Paris. Around Francois d'Alencon, therefore, there crystallized a court faction of marginalized moderate Catholics and Protestants including Francois Montmorency, Henri de Conde, and Henri of Navarre. In writing the Discours merveilleux against Catherine, Estienne was seeking common ground between such moderate Catholic and Huguenot nobles. Fundamental to the strategy of the treatise then is to play upon the presumed objections of a French male and warrior nobility to being ruled by a foreigner and a woman to boot. This objection is reinforced by emphasizing the immorality of Catherine's behaviour, which is explained by her gender and low birth. It is her plebeian origins and womanhood that explain her policies, which are aimed at undermining the French nobility and French kingdom. Ultimately, the source of her amoral nature lies in her Italian and Florentine roots. Estienne begins by wondering whether handling the subject of

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Catherine will not sully him. He questions whether he will be made sick at heart as a result of stirring and sniffing such a villainous and stinking brew.18 He even affects a certain chivalry in claiming not to want to injure her personally despite her evil deeds. Nonetheless, he undertakes the work because of the great harm she is doing to France.19 Despite disclaimers, the note of personal animosity is unmistakable from early on. As the earlier reference to stinking and vile brew suggests, Catherine is pictured as a witch-like figure.20 Indeed, the theme of the castrating mother surfaces immediately. The queen-regent goes on living and ruling us, Estienne asserts in the introduction, beating and whipping us while we pretend not to feel it. It is as if through her magic wand and witch's brew she has made us into brute beasts and stripped away our humanity. As a result of the sense of helplessness that she has induced, Estienne feels compelled to undertake this work to show who it is that holds us in her grip.21 As a matter of fact, following the death of her consort Henri II, Catherine had dressed herself in widow's black and adopted a matronly coiffeur, which emphasized her growing stoutness and maternal appearance. She understood that the sacrifice of her femininity was part of the price of power for a woman. Men were more likely to obey someone who looked like a mother than a wife.22 In reaction, Estienne chose to interpret her dowager-like appearance as that of a witch. At one point, he portrays her as an unnatural mother who corrupts her sons so that they would be unfit to rule.23 Catherine is represented as the quintessential Italian. According to Estienne, among the nations Italy is first in subtlety and finesse. These qualities are most refined in Tuscany and, above all, in Florence. But when this science of deceit is found in a person of no conscience, as often happens among the Italians, one can only imagine the evils that will ensue.24 Catherine is above all the product of the country and city from which she originated. He proceeds to trace the rise of the Medici in order to show how her actions in France are the outcome of the particular history of her Italian family. Of low birth, the family enriched itself through usury and banking. It won the favour of the people of Florence by bribing them with gifts. Then, by various kinds of corruption, the Medici made themselves masters of the city. Estienne concludes that the goal of the Medici in Florence was to eliminate the most ancient and noblest of families so as to facilitate the establishment of their family tyranny.25 If Catherine is allowed to continue to govern in France, the nobility of the kingdom of France can expect the same fate.26

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The Florentines have no conscience, affect a false piety, love only themselves, and despise all those who are superior in virtue, nobility, or any other quality. Above all, they hate anyone to whom they are obligated. The Medici embody all these characteristics, but are distinguished by certain distinctive traits. They are marked in the first place by an extravagant generosity toward the unworthy, a generosity based on using the property of others. Secondly, they are characterized by a brutal voluptuousness. Finally, they are especially noted for a very deep capacity for dissimulation that makes them capable of every sort of treason.27 Estienne, then, recalls the history of Catherine's uncles, the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII. According to Estienne, the history of their pontificates was marked by the unscrupulous promotion of empty crusades and the sale of piety. At the same time, the Medici popes busied themselves rewarding their Tuscan and Florentine relatives as well as their friends and servants. Simultaneously, they gave themselves up to dissolution and prodigal expenditure. All the while, they promoted war and division between Christian princes.28 Catherine's father was someone who devoted himself to all kinds of villainy, adultery, incest, and the pursuit of blind ambition.29 At Catherine's birth, astrologers predicted the destruction of the house into which she would marry and the ruin of the place in which she would reside.30 The ruin of Valois France was sealed by her nascence. There follows a systematic account of the reign of Henri II and Charles IX in which all the disasters that befell France are placed at her feet. Estienne singles out the importance of the influence on her of her Italian advisers, especially her supposed lover Albert de Gondi, the count of Retz. The profits of the heavy taxation laid on the people were expended by what Estienne describes as 'a variety of Italian mushroom who possessed her and was on the verge of being appointed by her as the unique governor of the king and the kingdom.'31 Gondi is a Florentine of Marrano origin. His father was a Lyonnais banker who was twice bankrupt. His mother was a prostitute and procuress in the same city.32 Every day, Gondi invents a multitude of new tax schemes to oppress the people. The whole fiscal system has been put into the hands of Italians who have divided the kingdom between them. They command all the princes of the blood with a cudgel and are attempting to reduce them to the status of valets.33 Estienne attempts to demonstrate that the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day was designed to exterminate not simply the Huguenot nobles, but the nobility as a whole.36 The siege of La Rochelle was but a

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continuation of this policy. It is Retz and Nevers whom Catherine selected to lead the royal campaign. They were selected precisely because they were foreigners who feel no sense of patriotism toward France. Moreover, they are Italians who glory in betrayal and in killing their enemies by surprise. Both are in the pay of the king of Spain.35 The point of the siege of La Rochelle was to continue the campaign of extermination of the nobility initiated at Saint Bartholomew's. According to Catherine, there could never be a lack of nobles. There are plenty of Italians and French of low estate who could take the place of those who were killed off.36 On the death of Charles IX, Catherine continued to act as regent through an act of usurpation. According to the Salic Law, women have no more right to be regents than to succeed to the throne. When they are allowed illegally to serve as regents, the French pay the price for the abuse of the laws of the kingdom. The danger does not lie so much in the prospect that Catherine will wear a crown or be called queen. Rather, it lies in that she will govern while continuing to be subject to the immoderate passions that dominate her. Her uncontrollable lust puts her under the control of the first man who has the subdety to put himself in her graces by the services that he renders her.37 The spectre of Gondi once again reappears, made powerful by virtue of the apparently uncontrolled lust of the queen mother. The rule of Catherine has to be overthrown. 'What are you fearful of?' Estienne asks rhetorically. 'She is only a woman, a foreigner, an enemy hated by everyone. She is only emboldened by our cowardice, is made enterprising by our faint-heartedness, is able to murder as a result of our complicity.'38 She is not going to change her ways. This is evident to the clergy of the kingdom by virtue of the taxes she is forcing them to pay and the devastation wrought by the Italians she is appointing to ecclesiastical offices. The nobles are being massacred and their wealth dissipated, while the honours and dignities due to them are given to foreigners. Taxes are raised to finance the construction of useless residences and to enrich certain foreigners. As a result, a little beggar like Gondi has become one of the richest seigneurs in France.39 Basing his arguments on Hotman's Franco-Gallia, Estienne reviews the history of France to demonstrate that the government of women from Fredegonde in Merovingian times to that of Anne de Beaujeu and Louise of Savoy has invariably led to disaster and civil war. He particularly singles out the Visigothic princess Bruenhaut whose government of Merovingian France brought disaster. He concludes that 'Brunehaut was

Anti-Italian Discourses 125 a Spaniard, Catherine Italian and Florentine, both strangers who had no sense of affection or amity toward the kingdom. But the Italian can deceive the Spaniard and the Florentine any other Italian.'40 Estienne's attack on Catherine, we have noted, must be seen as part of the development of the propaganda of the Malcontent party. His work was just one of a series of treatises that appeared between 1574 and 1576 designed to justify the emerging alliance between moderate Catholics and the Huguenots.41 The ideas in these tracts include the increasingly widespread interpretation of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in which not only the Huguenot nobility, but the old nobility of both faiths were seen as targets.42 According to this propaganda, the goal of royal policy was the establishment of a tyranny after the example of the Ottoman sultanate.43 The old nobility was to be replaced by a more compliant new one. In order to resist this lawless policy, the unity of moderate Catholics and Huguenots was essential. The old nobility derive their legitimacy by right of blood and inheritance, not by the sanction of royal power. As such, the princes of the blood and the chief aristocratic families have a right to share power with the king through their participation in the royal council. Likewise, the nobility as a whole has the responsibility of maintaining the laws of the kingdom. The king is only the administrator of the kingdom and the idea of absolute royal power is out of the question.44 The program of the Malcontents was thus an amalgam of elements designed to appeal to both the moderate Catholic and the Huguenot nobility. Anti-Italianism was a central theme of this approach helping to rally and unify patriotic opinion against the foreigner. One of the principal pieces of propaganda that emanated from this group was La FranceTurquie c'est a dire, conseils et moyens tenus par les ennemis de la couronne de France pour reduire k royaume en tel estat que le tyrannie turquesque.45 As the tide of the work suggests, this treatise argued the existence of a conspiracy of evil royal councillors who plotted the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's and whose ultimate objective was to institute a Turkishstyle tyranny in the French kingdom. The introduction is purportedly by an Italian, a Florentine who supposedly was a party to the deliberations of this conspiratorial group but who, out of pity, has made them known to the anonymous French author.46 This publication produced a response entitled L'Antipharmaque du Chevalier Poncet — a not very convincing rebuttal. This work was in turn answered by the Lunettes de christalpar lesquelles on veoyt clairement le chemin tenu pour subiuger la France, a mesme obeissance que la Turquie pour servir de

126 Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France contre-^joison a I'antipharmaque du chevalier Poncet. In this work, we have a fully articulated attack on the Italian influence over the kingdom. According to this treatise, France is in a state of ruin as a result of being governed by women and foreigners. The author has in mind Catherine, Retz, Nevers, and Birague. Employing what is claimed to be a common Italian tactic, it is claimed that this clique of foreigners poisoned Charles IX, Antoine de Croy, prince de Porcien, Claude de Savoie, count of Tende, Henri-Robert IV de la Mark, duke of Bouillon, Antoine de Crussol, duke of Uzes, and Marguerite, the late queen of Navarre. They have put other princes and great aristocratic figures such as the king's brother Alencon as well as Henri de Conde, Henri Damville, and Francois, Guillaume, and Charles de Montmorency on trial. Great nobles like Francois de Vendome, Vidame of Chartres, Louis de Bourbon, duke of Montpensier, and Jean de Daillon, seigneur of Lude, and the seigneur of Chavigny all have been victims of attempted assassination at their hands. All these assaults prove the truth of the Florentine who claimed that the intent of the conspirators was to get rid of the old nobility both Catholic and Protestant.47 The attempt to replace the old nobility is reflected in the creation of many new nobles and the conversion of many abbacies, priorships, and other ecclesiastical benefices to simple tonsures so as to be able to appoint people under their direct control. The best marriages are being reserved for Italians. It is the Italian faction dominating the government that has encouraged the large emigration of Italians into the kingdom. There are already 12,000 living in Lyons alone. The purpose of this policy favouring the entry of as many Italians as possible is to help the Italians at court to establish the yoke of tyranny throughout France.48 The matter of Dadiacetto's control of the customs of Lyons is brought up. He has been given this monopoly in deliberate preference to French merchants and the government of the city of Lyons. The aim is to deprive French merchants of financial resources and give them to Italians, facilitating the flow of money out of France to Italy. Not only does Dadiacetto control the customs of Lyons, he also now has control of that of Rouen despite the protests of the Parisians. The Italians have come to control French exports to the extent that there are no French merchants to be found in Spain, Portugal, England, Scotland, Flanders, and Germany to say nothing of Italy. Italians now control all the tax farms and offices having to do with foreign commerce.49 In the view of this anonymous writer, France has lost its political and economic autonomy to the Italians. The kingdom had become at best a

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semi-colony of the Italian city-states. But France was being ruined not only by the control of the Italians over politics and commerce. It was being undermined by their moral corruption as well. The Italians are poisoning Frenchmen with every kind of vice including usury, deceit, treason, sodomy, and licentiousness. The presence of the latter is attested to in the book by Pietro Aretino, which it is claimed contains the principal articles of Italian faith and religion which so disfigure France today. The reference is to Aretino's notoriously obscene Ragionamento.50 As regards the books of the Italians, those of Aretino are meant to torture the soul, while those of Machiavelli are designed to torment the body. It would be better to return to the simplicity, goodness, and naive virtue of our fathers and elders. In order to do so the foreigners must be expelled. A final anti-Italian theme is the charge that they dominate the French church. Italians control benefices worth at least 560,000 limes, while French priests and monks die of hunger. The Gallican clergy and Calvinist ministers, to say nothing of other Frenchmen, could be supported from such revenues. No doubt there are some foreigners who should be allowed to remain in the kingdom. But they should not be able to occupy offices. Today, there are so many that hold offices that one can scarcely keep count of them.51 In September 1575 Alencon fled the court in Paris and made his way to Dreux. There he issued a declaration against the tyranny of the Guise and the foreigners whom he claimed controlled the government. It was the abandonment of the laws of France by these elements which was the source of the anarchy besetting the kingdom. Claiming that the princes, nobles, clergy, citizens, and bourgeoisie looked to him for a remedy, Alencon called for the ouster of the foreigners, for a meeting of the Estates-General, and for patriotic unity between Catholics and Protestants. Alencon's declaration was the subject of an extensive commentary by one of his followers, the Huguenot jurist Innocent Gentillet.52 Gentillet is best known as the author of the most comprehensive and systematic attack on Machiavelli's work. His Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et mainteniren bonne paix un royaume ou autre prindpaute contre Nicole Machiavel Florentin became the foundation of Anti-Machiavellianism in the late sixteenth century. But Gentillet's extended commentary on Alencon's declaration serves to place his attack on Machiavelli squarely into the broader context of Malcontent and Huguenot anti-Italianism.53 Gentillet's attack on the Italians takes up the matter of religion first of

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all. Having two religions in the same kingdom, Gentillet acknowledges, is a bad thing. But having two religions both of which recognize Jesus Christ and his commandments is better than the Catholic and atheist one that the foreigners link together. In other words, sincere French Catholicism and the hypocritical Roman version of Catholicism are sharply distinguished. Despising all piety, the foreigners have disseminated and even translated into French the work of Machiavelli, which is full of contempt for religion.54 Elaborating on Alencon's declaration, Gentillet's commentary stresses the connection between Italian political control and the subversion of the laws of the kingdom. Ordinances of both Charles VII and Louis XI had prohibited foreigners from holding offices and benefices. It is true that exceptions had been made under Charles VIII as a result of the Italian campaigns. But these had been revoked under Louis XII. Yet today the principal estates and governments of the kingdom are in Italian hands. The alien Birague's control of the highest judicial office in the kingdom, the chancellorship, is the source for the lawyer Gentillet's special indignation. Birague, on the one hand, is completely ignorant of law and letters. On the other hand, his tenure of office has been marked by a malicious guile that enables him to conceive all manner of illegalities including new taxes, massacres, perfidies, and sundry other kinds of tyrannical behaviour.55 It is thought by some that the imposition of new taxes and illicit sale of offices are the result of the civil wars. On the contrary, the cause of the civil wars is the avarice of the Italians who seek revenue from new taxes and the sale of offices using the wars as a pretext.56 The corruption of the laws against the sale of offices and the holding of offices by foreigners has led to an infinite number of other corrupt practices as well as murders, massacres, robberies, and civil wars.57 It is the rule of foreigners that is promoting abandonment of the law and the establishment of tyranny.58 Gentillet attempts to put the present situation in historical context. The political power and influence of the Italians stems from their accumulation of money through the exercise of usury. Louis IX had prohibited Italians and Jews from carrying on such practices. But the Italians persisted in carrying on their usurious enterprises so that eventually the king banished them and confiscated their goods. But after his death the Italians returned. Alongside the Jews who learned from them, they resumed their usurious activities. For between Jews, Lombards, Italians, and Marranos there was not and there is not much difference. Indeed,

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these names are all synonyms for one another as they are each equally honourable. Philip IV once again banished both Jews and Italians, but the latter were readmitted following the establishment of the papal court at Avignon. On the occasion of their readmission to France, they were prohibited from opening banks and practising usury. 'But,' Gentillet concludes, 'despite this edict this race as ever would not relent, committing the most serious and egregious acts of usury.'59 With Gentillet, the identification of the Italian with the despised Jew is total. According to him, both carry out the same economic role. Both practise an alien religion. Indeed, Gentillet's characterization of the Italian as synonymous with the Jew is in its way a confirmation of the socially and historically constructed nature of the Jew in traditional European society. In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, anyone who carried out the disreputable, if indispensable, function of money-lender was liable to being taken as a Jew. In the absence of Jews, it is evident that the Italians assumed this role in sixteenth