Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy [Reprint ed.] 0754665089, 9780754665083

Table of contents :
List of Illustrations ix
List of Maps xiii
Introduction xv
Note on Cover xix
Part I: Communes and Despots
1. Communes and Despots: The City State in Late-Medieval Italy / P. J. Jones 3
Part II: Power and Restraint
2. The Use of Sortition in Appointments in the Italian Communes / Daniel Waley 27
3. Magnate Violence Revisited / Carol Lansing 35
Part III: Political Thought: Theory and Practice
4. Communes and Despots: Some Italian and Transalpine Political Thinkers / Robert Black 49
5. The Myth of the Renaissance Despot / Benjamin G. Kohl 61
6. Conflicting Attitudes towards Machiavelli’s Works in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Rome and Florence / Humfrey C. Butters 75
Part IV: Communes and Despots: Some Case Studies
7. From Commune to Regional State: Political Experiments in Fourteenth Century Cremona / Marco Gentile 91
8. The Gonzaga Signoria, Communal Institutions and 'the Honour of the City': Mixed Ideas in Quattrocento Mantua / David S. Chambers 105
9. Giangaleazzo Visconti and the Ducal Title / Jane Black 119
10. 'Whatever’s Best Administered is Best': Paolo Guinigi 'signore' of Lucca, 1400–1430 / Christine Meek 131
11. The Mouse and the Elephant: Relations between the Kings of Naples and the Lordship of Piombino in the Fifteenth Century / David Abulafia 145
12. Communes and Despots: The Nature of 'Diarchy' / John E. Law 161
13. Concepts of 'Libertà' in Renaissance Genoa / Christine Shaw 177
Part V: The Case of the Medici
14. Prato and Lorenzo de’ Medici / F. W. Kent 193
15. The Early Years of Piero di Lorenzo, 1472–1492: Between Florentine Citizen and Medici Prince / Alison Brown 209
16. Muddying the Waters: Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio / Catherine Kovesi 223
17. The Medici Dukes, 'Comandati' and Pratolino: Forced Labour in Renaissance Florence / Suzanne B. Butters 249
Part VI: Culture, Art, and Patronage
18. Giovanni Bellini and the Background to Venetian Painting / George Holmes 281
19. Communes, Despots and Universities: Structures and Trends of Italian Studi to 1500 / Peter Denley 295
20. 'Aedificia iam in regales surgunt altitudines': The Mendicant Great Church in the Trecento / Julian Gardner 307
Epilogue
21. 'Communes and Despots': The Opening Paragraph / Trevor Dean 331
Index 343

Citation preview

Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

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Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Edited by John E. Law and Bernadette Paton

First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © John E. Law, Bernadette Paton and the contributors 2010 John E. Law and Bernadette Paton have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice .. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Communes and despots in medieval and Renaissance Italy. 1. City-states – Italy – History – To 1500. 2. Italy – Politics and government – 1268–1559. 3. Despotism – Italy – History – To 1500. 4. Italy – Kings and rulers. I. Law, John E. (John Easton) II. Paton, Bernadette. 320.4’5’09024–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Communes and despots in medieval and Renaissance Italy / [edited by] John E. Law and Bernadette Paton. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6508-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. City-states—Italy—History— To 1500. 2. Despotism—Italy—History—To 1500. 3. Italy—Politics and government —1268–1559. I. Law, John E. (John Easton) II. Paton, Bernadette. JC352.C66 2010 945’.04—dc22 2010008300 ISBN 9780754665083 (hbk)

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Maps Introduction Note on Cover

ix xiii xv xix

Part I: Communes and Despots 1

Communes and Despots: The City State in Late-Medieval Italy P.J. Jones

3

Part II: Power and Restraint 2

The Use of Sortition in Appointments in the Italian Communes Daniel Waley

27

3

Magnate Violence Revisited Carol Lansing

35

Part III: Political Thought: Theory and Practice 4

Communes and Despots: Some Italian and Transalpine Political Thinkers Robert Black

49

5

The Myth of the Renaissance Despot Benjamin G. Kohl

61

6

Conflicting Attitudes towards Machiavelli’s Works in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Rome and Florence Humfrey C. Butters

75

vi

Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Part IV: Communes and Despots: Some Case Studies 7

From Commune to Regional State: Political Experiments in Fourteenth Century Cremona Marco Gentile

8

The Gonzaga Signoria, Communal Institutions and ‘the Honour of the City’: Mixed Ideas in Quattrocento Mantua David S. Chambers 105

9

Giangaleazzo Visconti and the Ducal Title Jane Black

119

10

‘Whatever’s Best Administered is Best’: Paolo Guinigi signore of Lucca, 1400–1430 Christine Meek

131

The Mouse and the Elephant: Relations between the Kings of Naples and the Lordship of Piombino in the Fifteenth Century David Abulafia

145

12

Communes and Despots: The Nature of ‘Diarchy’ John E. Law

161

13

Concepts of Libertà in Renaissance Genoa Christine Shaw

177

11

91

Part V: The Case of the Medici 14

Prato and Lorenzo de’ Medici F.W. Kent

193

15

The Early Years of Piero di Lorenzo, 1472–1492: Between Florentine Citizen and Medici Prince Alison Brown

209

Muddying the Waters: Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio Catherine Kovesi

223

The Medici Dukes, Comandati and Pratolino: Forced Labour in Renaissance Florence Suzanne B. Butters

249

16

17

Contents

vii

Part VI: Culture, Art, and Patronage 18

Giovanni Bellini and the Background to Venetian Painting George Holmes

281

19

Communes, Despots and Universities: Structures and Trends of Italian Studi to 1500 Peter Denley

295

Aedificia iam in regales surgunt altitudines: The Mendicant Great Church in the Trecento Julian Gardner

307

20

Epilogue 21

Index

‘Communes and Despots’: The Opening Paragraph Trevor Dean

331 343

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List of Illustrations

Cover: Domenico Morone (1442–1528), Cacciata dei Bonacolsi. Museo del Palazzo Ducale, Mantua. Reproduced by permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali, Mantova. 8.1

8.2 8.3 16.1

16.2

16.3

16.4

16.5

Mantua, Piazza Erbe, formerly il Broletto, showing Palazzo della Ragione. Mantua, Archivio di Stato, Archivio fotografico Calzolari, n. 138 Prot. N. 2147/28.14.00 (1). 107 Antonio Pisanello, medal (obverse) of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Capitano (1407–), first Marchese of Mantua (1433–1444). 109 Bartolomeo Melioli, medal (obverse and reverse) of Ludovico Gonzaga, Marchese of Mantua (1444–1478). 114 Leonardo da Vinci, ‘Paese con lago’. Landscape drawing on the feast day of Santa Maria della Neve, 5 August 1473. Pen and ink, 190×285 mm. © Gabinetto Fotografico, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. 227 Eighteenth-century copy of an illustration from c.1450 showing the lakes of Sesto, Bientina and of Fucecchio. Archivio di Stato, Lucca, Deputazione Nuovo Azzeri 3, c.98, tav. IV. Reproduced with permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, protocol no. 3796. Further reproduction in any form is not permitted. 228 Leonardo da Vinci, map of the country north-west of Florence, with the proposed route of a canal from Florence to bypass Pisa, 1502–04. Black chalk gone over in pen and ink and wash, on white paper, 24×36.7 mm. The Royal Collection, Windsor 12685r. © 2008 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 230 Lock chain affixed to the wall of the Basilica of the Santissimo Crocifisso, Borgo a Buggiano, with commemorative plaque and coats of arms of the victorious towns. Photo author. 233 Lucantonio degli Uberti, Florentia, so-called ‘Chain Map’, woodcut copy after engraving attributed to Francesco Rosselli, 1482. © Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 235

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Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

16.6

16.7

16.8a, b 16.9

17.1

17.2

17.3

17.4

17.5

17.6

18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4

Archivio di Stato, Florence, Piante dei Capitani di Parte Guelfa, cartone XX, 13. Detail showing the ducal Medici coat of arms over Ponte a Cappiano and the re-created Lake of Fucecchio. 242 ‘La Valdinievole, seconda metà del XVII secolo’. View of the reconstructed Lake of Fucecchio, Archivio di Stato, Florence, Bartolommei, filza 175. 243 Plaques erected on the bridge at Ponte a Cappiano by Cosimo I de’ Medici. Photos author. 245 ‘Pianta del padule di Fucecchio con i suoi affluenti e le circonstanti fattorie medicee’ (sec. xviii). Archivio di Stato, 246 Florence, Piante dei Capitani di Parte Guelfa, cartone XXVI, 2. Jacques Callot. Landscape with donkey and peasant taking off his shoe (Capricci di varie figure di Iacopo Callot, The Florentine set). AN113446001. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 250 Man suffering jerk of the rope is saved by the miraculous image of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Mantua. Photograph from Giuseppe Papagno, Piero Coda, Roberto Brunelli, Renzo Margonari, Carlo Prandi, Attilio Zanca, Santa Maria delle Grazie: sei secoli mantovani di arte storia e devozione (Patrocinio di: Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana di Scienze Lettere ed Arti e Pro Loco di Curtatone), Mantova, editoriale sometti (1999), Fig. 34, p. 119. 262 Two openings from the Quaderno di creditori per lavori di Pratolino (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Giurisdizione Toscana 3701, ff. 66v-68r), listing men and animals called up from named parishes in the week of 8 May 1579 to work on Pratolino’s lake, noting the number of days each worked and the sum each was paid. 264–5 San Vitale. Pratolinum Magni Ducis Hetruriae. Woodcut of site (c.1639), possibly dating to c.1588. Photograph courtesy of Alessandro Vezzosi. 266 Bernardo Sansone Sgrilli. View of the Villa at Pratolino from San Jacopo. AN482945001. The Trustees of the British Museum. 267 Staia of sand transported by parishioners from Porta San Gallo to Pratolino’s work site, May 1569 – November 1570. Table  author. 269 Giovanni Bellini, Feast of the Gods. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Widener Collection). 282 Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child with two Female Saints. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. 285 Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in Ecstasy. Frick Collection, New York. 287 Francesco del Cossa (and others), fresco of the Months. Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara. 292

xi

20.1 20.2 20.3 20.4 20.5 20.6 20.7 20.8 20.9

Perugia, S. Domenico. Photo author. Padua, Sant’Antonio. Elevation. Photo author. Toledo, Cathedral Trascoro. Photo author. Naples, S. Lorenzo. Choir. Photo author. Rome, S. Maria in Aracoeli. Nave. Photo author. Florence, S. M. Novella. Nave. Photo author. Treviso, S. Niccolo. East end. Photo author. Florence, S. Croce. Nave. Photo author. Pietro di Oderisio, Clement IV. Photo author.

309 311 313 316 317 319 321 323 325

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List of Maps

A B C D

E F

Medici villa and garden at Pratolino (1571–74). Materials transported to building site © author. Medici villa and garden at Pratolino (1572–73). Bricks and tiles transported from Florentine kilns to building site © author. Medici villa and garden at Pratolino (1572–74). Wood transported to building site © author. Medici villa and garden at Pratolino (1572–74). Parishes supplying commandeered labourers and animals to transport unspecified materials to building site © author. Medici villa and garden at Pratolino (1578–79) Materials transported to building site © author. Pratolino’s lake at nearby Fontanella. Two months in 1579 (28 March–20 May) © author.

272 273 274

275 276 277

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Introduction

At the memorial service for Philip Jones held in Brasenose College, Oxford, on 24 June 2006 some of his former doctoral students thought it would be a good idea to organize a seminar in his memory. Such was the interest expressed in this proposal, at first in Britain and then more internationally, that it was quickly decided to replace an afternoon seminar with a two-day conference. The revised proposal attracted the support of both Brasenose and the British Academy; and with the help and hospitality of the former and the generous financial support provided by the latter, a successful conference was held in the College on 6 and 7 September 2007.1 This and the fact that the papers presented at Oxford, and those offered by scholars unable to attend, were closely focused on the theme of ‘Communes and Despots’ encouraged us to look for a publisher. The publication of essay collections can be difficult, and we were delighted to find that Ashgate accepted our general proposal and appreciated the quality of the individual contributions. The theme that shaped both the conference and this collection was chosen for two principal reasons. Philip Jones began his research in late medieval Italian history on the subject of the medieval lords or signori, with his doctorate on the Malatesta of Rimini. Some of his earlier publications were concerned with the nature of Malatesta rule, and his doctoral thesis was published as The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State by Cambridge University Press in 1974.2 His last major published work marked a return to this theme. The Italian CityState: From Commune to Signoria was published by Oxford University Press in 1997, and when he died he was actively engaged on a second volume.



See the conference review by Hester Schadee, ‘Communes and Despots in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: a Conference in Memory of Philip Jones, Brasenose College, Oxford’, Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies (April, 2008): 16–17.  For details of Jones’s life and work see the obituaries by Trevor Dean (Independent, 3 May 2006, p. 40) and Chris Wickham (Guardian, 13 May 2006, p. 35), and Dean ‘Philip J. Jones, 1921–2006’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 161 (2009): 207–31. See also Karl Leyser, ‘Philip Jones: an Appreciation’, in Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham (eds), City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Essays presented to Philip Jones (London, 1990), pp. ix–x.

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Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Another reason behind the choice of theme was more related to the historiography of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy, and to changing views of the relationship between the communes and the socalled ‘despotisms’. Many of the views accepted by historians until well into the second half of the twentieth century were formed over a century ago;3 differences between communal and ‘despotic’ regimes were perceived and argued over by contemporaries in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and the discussion, taken up by later historians, became particularly intense before and after the Second World War, for example in the work of Hans Baron.4 Jones’s contribution to this debate was typically vigorous, direct and independent. In 1965, when many if not most historians of Italy were still in thrall to the Burckhardtian idea of the ‘Renaissance state’, he published ‘Communes and Despots: the City State in Late-Medieval Italy’, the title essay of this volume.5 In it he questioned the ideological ‘positions’ too readily adopted by those involved both as participants and as historians. He suggested that communal and despotic regimes were closer together in terms of aims, failures and composition than has often been acknowledged. He put forward the novel – indeed, quietly radical – suggestion that the ‘communes’, which had been held to represent the ideal of the self-governing city state of Hans Baron’s ‘civic humanism’, had more in common with the ‘despotisms’ to which they had been traditionally opposed than they were at variance with them – however much the ‘communes’ and their rhetoricians may have regarded themselves as different. Apart from a few short and inevitably doomed regimes when the popolo held sway, Jones claimed, both the communes and the despotisms consisted of oligarchies held in place by a system of carefully controlled checks and balances which restricted the government of the socalled ‘communes’ to a few families, a type of oligarchy on which the ‘despots’ also depended for their power. This idea was so original as to pass almost unnoticed on its first publication, and for many years the ‘Renaissance state’ continued to feature on undergraduate teaching programmes in the English-speaking world. But like scientific theories, new ideas in history gradually trickle down to the general consciousness, and few students today would accept the idea of the ‘Renaissance state’ without question. Fewer still would recognize that the seeds of this dissent were sown in the dry cynicism of Jones’s essay, in his



For some recent surveys of this historiography see Andrea Gamberini, Lo Stato visconteo (Milan, 2002); Isabella Lazzarini, L’Italia degli Stati territoriali (Rome-Bari, 2003); Humfrey C. Butters, ‘La storiografia sullo stato rinascimentale’, in Marcello Fantoni (ed.), Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa. Storia e storiografia (Vicenza, 2005), pp. 121–50.  Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (2 vols, Princeton, 1955); see also James Hankins, ‘The “Baron Thesis” after Forty Years and some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56 (1995): 309–338.  Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 15 (1965): 71–96.

Introduction xvii

‘deeply disillusioned view of the nature of most regimes and the false imagery of their conflicts’.6 But perhaps the challenge offered by Jones’s article has never been fully enough answered. More recently, many historians of late medieval and Renaissance Italy have abandoned debates over liberty and tyranny in favour of less ideological, more ‘fashionable’ (and often better-funded) subjects. It seemed timely and appropriate, then, for both the conference and the resultant volume to revisit the theme of ‘communes and despots’. It was decided to republish Jones’s original contribution to the TRHS as the ‘keynote’ article in this collection. For permission to do this we are very grateful to the Royal Historical Society. We would also like to acknowledge the support of Brasenose College and the British Academy. Professor Chris Wickham was extremely helpful, and the Society for Renaissance Studies funded bursaries to allow postgraduates to attend. We are profoundly grateful to Professor Joe Connors, director of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti, Florence; their generous Lila Acheson Wallace–Reader’s Digest Publications Subsidy has assisted in the publication of the volume and has allowed us to include valuable illustrations. Thanks are also due to Tom Gray at Ashgate for his patient advice, and to Andrea Gáldy in Florence for her much-appreciated help in obtaining images. Finally we would like to thank our contributors who have been most supportive of the project as a whole and our editorial requirements in particular. Unfortunately, George Holmes died as the volume was in preparation, and Ben Kohl when it was nearing completion; their essays in this collection stand as further testimonials to their great contribution to Italian Renaissance studies. We would like to thank Anne Holmes, Judy Kohl and Alison Smith for their help in finalizing their papers. At the conference, George Holmes gave a very effective introduction, speaking both as a friend and as a fellow historian. He suggested that Jones’s work – particularly his contributions to the Einaudi Storia d’Italia – was appreciated more in his adopted country, Italy, than in Britain; indeed, in Italy he is widely regarded as ‘il maestro’. This volume is intended to underline, and celebrate, an important aspect of Philip Jones’s contribution to late medieval and early Renaissance Italian history. It has been compiled with some trepidation; many at the conference observed that Jones himself would have cringed at the thought of an event and a volume in his honour. However, as grateful members of his remarkably extended ‘brigata’, we hope he would have been quietly appreciative. John E. Law Bernadette Paton



Lesyer, ‘Philip Jones’, p. ix.

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Note on the Cover Illustration

The cover illustration depicts the expulsion of the Bonacolsi from Mantua and the installation of Luigi Gonzaga as lord of the city in 1328. The painting was executed by the Veronese artist Domenico Morone in 1494 on commission from Marquis Francesco Gonzaga, probably to commemorate the dynasty’s arrival in power. The painting, in oils on canvas and measuring 163 x 315 cms, is in the Museo del Palazzo Ducale, Mantua. On the left, the Gonzaga and their allies are shown entering the city. The foreground depicts the overthrow of the Bonacolsi, and the death of their leader, Passerino. In the background, Luigi Gonzaga is shown taking an oath before the citizens of Mantua on the steps of the cathedral. However, Morone represents the city of Mantua as it appeared in the late fifteenth century. The buildings on the right, the Palazzo del Capitano and the Domus Magna, were taken over by the Gonzaga from the Bonacolsi, while the cathedral façade was the work of the Venetian Delle Massegne brothers, c. 1400. The Gonzaga also commemorated the event with an annual palio, a horse race on 16 August. Philip Jones recognized the events of 1328 as a classic example of the arrival of a dynasty to signorial power in a review published in the English Historical Review.1 An excellent analysis of the painting was carried out by Jane Martineau for the Splendours of the Gonzaga exhibition, held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from November 1981 to January 1982.2



English Historical Review, 107 (1992): 442–3. David Chambers and Jane Martineau (eds) Splendours of the Gonzaga (London, 1981): 103–4. 

Part I

Communes and Despots

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1 Communes and Despots: The City State in Late-Medieval Italy1 P.J. Jones

It is a commonplace of political history that in the later Middle Ages the city states of north and central Italy were the scene of a conflict in the theory and practice of government between two contrasted systems: republican and despotic (or in contemporary terminology, government ‘a comune’, ‘in libertà’, and so on, and government ‘a tiranno’, signoria or principato). The conflict began about the mid-thirteenth century, and in most places, sooner or later, was settled in favour of despotism. As early as 1300, in fact, in purely territorial terms, the contest was becoming uneven: much of Lombardy with Piedmont, Emilia and Venetia, and most of Romagna and the Marche, were under despotic rule; and already certain writers, like Albertino Mussato, were beginning to speak, with classical reminiscence, of a predetermined cycle in the development of states.2 There was much to encourage such beliefs, even though, in the congested political society of medieval Italy, the development of states was seldom wholly free. From an early stage, indeed, the decline of communal institutions was accompanied by a process of regional consolidation, in which, independently of forms and principles of government, the larger states swallowed up the small. In this way, by the fifteenth century, a number of territorial powers had emerged – Milan, Florence and Venice, Mantua and Ferrara – which shared, by uneasy balance of influence, the control of Upper Italy. But through all phases of territorial politics the advance of despotism was maintained.3 At the close of the Middle Ages there were few towns which 1

This paper first appeared in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 15 (Cambridge University Press, 1965): pp. 71–96. It is reprinted here with the permission of the editors and CUP. The more elliptical references in footnotes have been expanded. 2 Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Municipal Progress and Decline in the Italy of the Communes’, in Donald J. Gordon (ed.), Fritz Saxl, Memorial Essays (London, 1957), pp. 165 ff. 3 Interregional politics, indeed, contributed much to this result: Ernesto Sestan, ‘Le origini delle signorie cittadine: un problema esaurito?’, Bullettino dell’Istituto storico

4

Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

were both independent and freely self-governing; fewer still which could look back on a history of unbroken liberty. Even by those most concerned to preserve it, the day of the small, independent, commune was admitted to be over.4 And certainly, in retrospect, for most communes the period of effective autonomy, between feudal and despotic rule, must have seemed brief enough: a few generations of turbulent self-rule or partial self-rule in the shadow of local feudatory or magnate. In an age when, even in Italy, most government was seigneurial or royal, what is remarkable is not the return to monarchy, but rather its interruption.5 For Italian political theorists monarchy remained the common ideal of government, not only for civilian and canon lawyers or academic philosophers, but also for humanist writers, of whom a number in the fifteenth century composed conventional tracts on the rule of princes.6 Princely rule, however, was not the exclusive ideal. On the contrary, it was precisely in the later Middle Ages, when monarchy was everywhere gaining ground and political indifference increasing, that Italy was swept, in the words of one writer, by ‘a current of republicanism’ in sentiment and doctrine.7 The inspiration of both ideals was no doubt often literary, and their expression rhetorical and abstract: in differing degrees monarchists and republicans alike fed upon classical tradition, as interpreted in the legal and philosophical learning of the Middle Ages or rediscovered by humanistic study; and both were concerned with ideas more than programmes of political action. But, for all the divorce existing between the active and contemplative life, the time and place of these writings, and the themes commonly developed, betray quite clearly also the influence of events. Such influence is evident in the new emphasis laid by Marsilius of Padua and others on the principle of popular sovereignty;8 it is evident even more in the theory, consecrated by Bartolus, of the sovereign city state and of tyranny as a usurpation of sovereign civic authority;9 but most of all it is evident in a new preoccupation with the rival merits of despotic and communal government. Hints of this appear quite early in chronicle-writing and satire. Then, from the later-fourteenth century, as republican Florence and Venice became involved in growing conflict with italiano, 73 (1961): 64 ff. 4 Philip J. Jones, ‘The End of Malatesta Rule in Rimini’, in Ernest F. Jacob (ed.), Italian Renaissance Studies (London, 1960), p. 249. 5 Despotism first spread, in fact, with the collapse of Hohenstaufen monarchy, though the institutional antecedents (podesteria, etc.) were older. 6 Cf. Giuseppe Ferrari, Corso sugli scrittori politici italiani (Milan, 1929); Felix Gilbert, ‘The Humanist Concept of the Prince’, Journal of Modern History, 11 (1939): 449–483. 7 Francesco Ercole, Dal comune al principato (Florence, 1929), p. 231. 8 See Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Marsilius of Padua and Italian Political Thought of his Time’, in Beryl Smalley, John Hale and Roger Highfield (eds), Europe in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1965). 9 Ercole, Dal comune al principato, pp. 248 ff.; Da Bartolo all’Althusio (Florence, 1932), pp. 92 ff.; Francesco Calasso, ‘I1 problema storico del diritto comune’, in Studi in onore di Enrico Besta, vol. 2 (Milan, 1939), p. 498.

Communes and Despots: The City State in Late-Medieval Italy

5

the despotism of Milan, professional literati began increasingly to take sides: principles of ‘civic humanism’ emerged, and the power of the pen began to be compared with the power of the sword. Florence, in particular, became a centre of republican diplomacy and propaganda, and, nurtured largely by war, a specifically Florentine folk-lore of republicanism developed, a belief, partly conventional, partly sincere, in the sturdy democratic virtues of the Florentine business class. The Venetians were less demonstrative, but their constitution, misinterpreted, became the republican ideal. Less vociferous also were the partisans of despotism, but they engaged in the literary war; and so, in scattered writings, polemical and academic, the elements were slowly prepared of a debate about government, which, purged of rhetoric and redefined in realistic terms, was brought to a conclusion by Machiavelli, Guicciardini and others in the sixteenth century. The arguments on both sides were predictable and simple. The republicans’ theme was liberty, liberty in the double sense of elective government and independence of foreign domination. The monarchists’ theme was order, peace and unity. Both claimed to represent the rule of law (not least in defence against the other), and both expressed devotion to cultural values. In recent years this political literature has received unstinted study from historians;10 fugitive though it often is, there seems little danger of it dying of neglect. Some doubt remains, however, about its practical influence,11 and, even more, it must be said, about its relation to political reality. That disagreement might be sharp between principles and practice is a fact confessed by contemporary observers. It appears most emphatically in the relations between states, where constitutional differences were no bar to common action by despotisms and republics or to a common policy of subjugating neighbours in the name of political ‘freedom’.12 What remains indeterminate is the effect, within states, of differences of regime and the true 10

See for example Ercole, Dal comune al principato, and Da Carlo VIII a Carlo V (Florence, 1932); Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1955); Augustin Renaudet, ‘Humanisme, histoire et politique au Quattrocento’, in Studi in onore di G. CaIò (Florence, 1955), pp. 281 ff.; Rudolf von Albertini, Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein im Übergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat (Bern, 1955); Eugenio Garin, ‘I cancellieri umanisti della repubblica fiorentina’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 71 (1959): 185–208; Renzo Pecchioli, ‘Il “mito” di Venezia e la crisi fiorentina intorno al 1500’, Studi Storici, 2 (1962): 469 ff. 11 Even within Florence: Gennaro Sasso, ‘“Florentina libertas” e Rinascimento italiano nell’opera di Hans Baron’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 69 (1957): 264–268; Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Changing Views of the Intellectual History of the Renaissance since Jacob Burckhardt’, in Tinsley Helton (ed.), The Renaissance: a Reconsideration (Wisconsin, 1961), pp. 27–52; Baron, ‘Machiavelli: the Republican Citizen and the Author of “The Prince”’, English Historical Review, 76 (1961): 231 ff., 251 ff.; Claudio Varese, Storia e politica nella prosa del Quattrocento (Turin, 1961), pp. 30, 63, 114 ff., 140, 142. 12 Thereby debasing the word libertas to an almost meaningless term: see for example Ferdinando Gabotto, ‘L’attività politica di Pier Candido Decembrio’, Giornale ligustico di archeologia, 20 (1893): 260; Natale Carotti, ‘Un politico umanista del Quattrocento: Fr. Barbaro’, Rivista Storica Italiana, series 5, vol. 2 (1937): 20 ff.; Baron, Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, passim.

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measure of contrast between communes and signorie. In no sense, it need hardly be said, was it a contrast of democracy and dictatorship.13 Despotic government was not totalitarian; communal government, though sometimes called democratia, knew nothing of manhood suffrage. By the statutes of most Italian towns, qualification for citizenship, and even more for office, was restricted almost exclusively to property-owning burgesses of local origin and prolonged residence. Rustics, the largest class, though combined in rural communes, were defined by law as natural inferiors and were almost nowhere granted political rights; nor were the humbler townsmen, the wage-workers and ‘plebei’ (Giannotti); nor finally were the citizens of independent towns, incorporated by conquest in expanding territorial states. Though allowed some powers of self-government, they were not admitted to political representation. Representative parliaments, in Italy as elsewhere, were the creation not of urban but of feudal regimes. Under the rule of the richer republics, Venice and still more Florence, subordinate communities were degraded to a position of colonial dependence and ruthlessly exploited in the economic interest of the dominating town. ‘Florentina libertas’ was for Florentines alone.14 But if political rights, on republican principles, were narrowly distributed, narrower still, in republican practice, was the normal distribution of power. Despite all constitutional checks and balances, power in the Italian communes clung obstinately to wealth and migrated with movements of wealth, and through all revolutions of political and economic regime, oligarchy, in fact or law, was the predominant form of government. In the first century of the commune this represented, in contemporary language, government of those called minores or pedites, who constituted the populus, by the class of maiores or milites, a composite group of feudal gentry and merchants, who in Florence, for example, may have numbered some 100 families. In a few towns, notably Venice, this patrician regime survived unchallenged for as 13 In the following discussion references have been minimized. For background facts and bibliography see Luigi Simeoni, Le signorie (2 vols, Milan, 1950), Nino Valeri, L’ltalia nell’età dei principati (Verona, 1950), and the general histories of Italian law and government, from Antonio Pertile Storia del diritto italiano dalla caduta dell’Impero Romano alla codificazione (6 vols, Torino, 1896–1902) to Calasso (‘I1 problema storico del diritto comune’) and Giovanni De Vergottini, Lezioni di storia del diritto italiano. Il diritto pubblico italiano nei secoli XII–XV (Milan, 1950). On despotism particularly see Ernst Salzer, Ueber die Anfänge der Signorie in Oberitalien (Berlin, 1900); Antonio Anzilotti, ‘Per la storia delle Signorie e del diritto pubblico italiano del Rinascimento’, Studi Storici, 22 (1914); Federico Chabod, ‘Del “Principe” di Machiavelli’, Nuova Rivista Storica, 9 (1925); Giovanni Battista Picotti, ‘Qualche osservazione sui caratteri delle signorie italiane’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 43 (1926); Gino Masi, ‘Verso gli albori del principato in Italia’, Rivista di Storia del Diritto Italiano, 9 (1936). 14 Cf. for example Dina Bizzarri, ‘Ricerche sul diritto di cittadinanza nella costituzione comunale’, Studi Senesi, 32 (1916); Ercole, Dal comune al principato, p. 244 (and references there); Georg Dahm, Das Strafrecht Italiens im ausgehenden Mittelalter (Berlin, Leipsig, 1931), pp. 22 ff.; Agostino Zanelli, Delle condizioni interne di Brescia dal 1426 al 1644 (Brescia, 1898), pp. 84 ff.; Michele Lupo-Gentile, ‘Le corporazioni delle arti a Pisa nel secolo xv’, Annali Scuola Normale di Pisa (1940): 197 ff.

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long as the commune lasted; but in most places, from about 1200, it began to break up. On the one hand the governing class fell apart into rival factions; on the other the populus or popolo, enriched by trade and enlarged by urban immigration, began to rebel against magnate domination, and in the course of the thirteenth century secured a share, and in places control, of the communal government. These fratricidal divisions, partly of social origin, more often political or personal, are the familiar theme of medieval Italian history. More difficult to establish is their effect on the tenure of power. A common result of party warfare was mass emigration and persecution; hundreds of citizens were excluded from political life. Against this, the emancipation of the popolo certainly admitted large numbers to nominal rights of government, though in places it also resulted in partial or total disfranchisement of the grandi (at Florence in 1295 about 150 families).15 But at no time did the popolo include the whole people, or even the whole commune. Rather was it a ‘party’, the pars populi, for which the property qualification might be higher than that for the commune.16 The groups most powerfully represented were the richer trade guilds, especially the guilds of bankers, business men and industrialists – the popolani grassi. At Florence in the 1330s over 70 per cent of all major offices were held by members of the three wealthiest guilds: Lana, Cambio and Calimala. Then, in 1343, by a popular revolution, the full corporation of 21 guilds gained access to governing power. The effect of this, it has been calculated, was to render eligible for high office some 3,500 men, from a total urban population of 75,000–80,000 souls. In the sequel the number increased slightly, but at no stage was more than one-tenth of the eligible class effectively qualified for office, about 750 persons at most, and of these an excessive proportion were still drawn from the upper guilds or from client lower guildsmen.17 Such was the type of government described by contemporaries as democratia and represented by Florentines as an egalitarian, broadly-based polity; and indeed, as long as it lasted, the Florentine constitution of the mid15 Robert Davidsohn, Geschichte von Florenz (4 vols, Berlin, 1908), vol. 2, part 2, p. 474. Cf. Gina Fasoli, ‘Ricerche sulla legislazione anti-magnatizia nei comuni dell’ alta e media Italia’, Rivista di Storia del Diritto Italiano, 12 (1939). 16 As for example at Modena: Carmen Vicini, La caduta del primo dominio estense a Modena (Modena, 1922), p. 57. On the size and membership of the popolo cf. Maria Antonietta Zorzi, L’ordinamento comunale padovano nella seconda metà del secolo xiii (Miscellanea di storia veneta, 1931) cap. 1; William Montorsi, La ‘Matricola Popolare’ di Cremona del 1283 (Annali della Biblioteca governativa di Cremona, 13, 1960); Enrico Fiumi, ‘La popolazione del territorio Volterraneo-Sangimignanese ed il problema demografico dell ‘“eta comunale’”, in Studi in onore di Amintore Fanfani (6 vols, Milan, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 269–270. Faction strongly influenced the definition of class: Emilio Cristiani, Nobiltà e popolo nel comune di Pisa (Naples, 1962), pp. 78 ff. 17 Marvin B. Becker, ‘Some Aspects of Oligarchical, Dictatorial and Popular signorie in Florence, 1282–1382’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2 (1960): 430; ‘Florentine popular government (1343–1348)’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106 (1962): 368, 378; ‘An Essay on the “novi cives” and Florentine Politics, 1343– 1382’, Medieval Studies, 24 (1962): 46 ff.; Gene A. Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378 (Princeton, 1962), pp. 66–67, 90.

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Trecento, un-Athenian though it was, was probably as democratic as any regime, in the larger medieval communes. But it did not last, and few regimes were ever like it. The popular movements of the thirteenth century merely raised, without solving, the problem of the governing class. Nowhere did the popolo extinguish the magnati or even suppress their partisan divisions. In most towns their powers were undiminished. Even where disfranchised, they retained their wealth and influence, in both church and state, and their old ambition to dominate; and in this they were readily joined by the popolani grassi, who adopted their habits and out1ook.18 And so, whatever the form of government, a conflict persisted everywhere between patricians and plebeians, between those who, in Machiavelli’s words, desired freedom in order to rule and those who simply desired it to be secure;19 everywhere the patrician class, whatever its social affinity, continued to fight factiously for power; and everywhere the final effect of internal dissension was the same: the large neutral majority, the ‘homines communes’ (Bartolus) who, with a civic spirit far older than humanism, kept the administration going, grew increasingly apathetic, ceased to attend the councils,20 and left political action to their betters. And this withdrawal was rendered all the easier by an independent tendency, from the thirteenth century on, to concentrate authority, for the sake of speed and efficiency, in small executive councils, magistracies, and plenipotentiary committees or balie.21 In every way, therefore, institutionally and politically, the irresistible trend, as even republicans recognized,22 was to 18 Even anti-magnate laws were only fitfully enforced. Cf. for example Fasoli, ‘Ricerche sulla legislazione anti-magnatizia’, especially pp. 240 ff.; Niccolò Rodolico, La democrazia Fiorentina nel suo tramonto (1378–1382) (Bologna, 1905), pp. 163 ff.; Becker, ‘The Republican City State in Florence’, Speculum, 35 (1960): 42; Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, passim; Cristiani, Nobiltà e popolo nel comune di Pisa, pp. 71 ff, 102 ff., etc.; Paul Coles, ‘The Crisis of Renaissance Society: Genoa 1488–1507’, Past and Present, 11 (1957): 17–47. 19 Discorsi, i, p. 16. Cf. Donato Giannotti, Della repubblica fiorentina, ed. Luigi Carrer (Venice, 1840), pp. 36–38. 20 On the problem of non-attendance see for example Lionello Giommi, ‘Come Reggio venne in potestà di Bertrando del Poggetto (1306–1326)’, Atti e memorie. Deputazione di storia patria per le antiche provincie modenesi, 5th series, 13 (1920): 56–58; Albertini, Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein, pp. 380, 420. Cf. Rubinstein, ‘Politics and Constitution in Florence at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, in Jacob (ed.), Italian Renaissance Studies, pp. 176 ff. 21 Not to be confused with the political trend towards despotism, closely related in practice though they often were: Salzer, Ueber die Anfänge der Signorie in Oberitalien, pp. 81 ff.; Ercole, Dal comune al principato, pp. 249–50; Masi, ‘Verso gli albori del principato in Italia’, pp. 119 ff., 156 ff.; Becker, ‘Some Aspects of Oligarchical, Dictatorial and Popular signorie in Florence’, p. 431; Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 59, 70–71, 393, 395; Albertini, Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein, pp. 381 ff.; Cesare Paoli, ‘Del magistrato della balia nella repubblica di Siena’, Atti e memorie della sezione letteraria e di storia patria della R. Accademia dei Rozzi di Siena, 3 (1876–9), pp. 115–159. 22 Not least Leonardo Bruni: Baron, Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, pp. 293, 370–371, 575. Cf. Varese, Storia e politica nella prosa del Quattrocento, pp. 112, 114; Sasso, ‘“Florentina libertas”’. Like Dante’s imperialism, humanist republicanism was an ‘ epitaph instead of a prophecy’. Cf. Becker, ‘The Republican City State in Florence’, p. 50.

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restrict supreme office, the unpaid honores,23 to a group of dominant families, the ottimati, principali, beneficiati and so on. Their numbers varied with circumstance. At Siena in the early Trecento they were barely more than 60 in an urban population of c.50,000. At Florence, in 1459, they were about 365. At Siena again, in 1497, they were declared to be 350, with 1,829 members, in a population of roughly 25,000.24 The political creed of this urban patriciate is clearly stated, at the end of the period, by the aristocratic Guicciardini and other Florentine writers. According to them, government belonged properly to the wealthy and the wise. Democracy was a dangerous delusion, which identified liberty with licence. But if government by the many threatened government by the few, then it was better to have government by one.25 Not surprisingly similar views were entertained by despots. ‘It seems to me’, wrote the duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, ‘that it’s better to obey a prince or king, whatever his disposition, than submit to being governed by a rabble of artisans or by rulers of whom we cannot even tell who their fathers were.’26 Such precise opinions are not often recorded; but, that they represent the traditional prejudices of the Italian upper class, there can be little doubt. And it is in these class prejudices, aggravated by the rise of gente nuova and enflamed by antimagnate laws, that the source of Italian despotism must be principally sought. Not only did most despots derive from the upper class, as feudatories like the Visconti, or plutocrats like the Medici. From Ferrara in the early-thirteenth century, where the first stable signoria was formed, to Florence in the earlysixteenth century, where the last was successfully established, the interests which promoted or most readily accepted despotism are to be identified primarily among members of this class. If they could not be natural rulers, they would be natural counsellors. No doubt a single formula cannot cover all cases. There were some ephemeral signorie which were founded by noble demagogues, ‘class traitors’ as they have been cal1ed;27 while others, more enduring, arose through popular magistracies or by acclamation in popular assemblies. But popular acclamation is no proof of popular initiative; rather 23 As distinct from minor offices, paid but powerless: Guido Pampaloni, ‘Fermenti di riforme democratiche nella Firenze medicea del Quattrocento’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 119 (1961): 42 ff. 24 Julien Luchaire, Documenti per la storia dei rivolgimenti politici del comune di Siena dal 1354 al 1369 (Lyon, 1906), pp. xxvii–viii; cf: William M. Bowsky, ‘The Buon Governo of Siena (1287–1355)’, Speculum (1962): 368 ff., Giuseppe Martini, ‘Siena da Montaperti alla caduta dei Nove (1260–1355)’, Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria, 68 (1961): 106–107; Pampaloni, ‘Fermenti di riforme democratiche’, 48 ff.; Carlo Falletti-Fossati, ‘Principali cause della caduta della repubblica senese’, Atti della R. Accadamia dei Fisiocritici di Siena (1873) pp. 91–92; cf: David L. Hicks, ‘Sienese Society in the Renaissance’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2 (1960): 416. 25 Albertini, Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein, pp. 42 ff., 107, 231 ff. and passim. 26 Gianluigi Barni, ‘La formazione interna dello stato visconteo’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, new series, 6 (1941): 34. 27 Ernesto Sestan, ‘Siena avanti Montaperti’, Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria, 68 (1961): 62–64.

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were mass assemblies repudiated as a tyrannical device in towns where republican institutions were temporarily re-installed. And this is only one sign that the most strenuous resistance to incipient signorie came from the middle-class popolo.28 However popular in form, in Italy unlike the ancient world, the origins of despotism lay in oligarchy rather than democracy.29 Democracy, it is said, was bound to follow, not precede despotism.30 For its successful realization was needed first the formation of an absolute state, superior to all divisions, and in this, it is claimed, a precocious start was made in Italy, when signori succeeded to communes. The argument implies no disparagement of the communes. In the general revival of government, common to medieval Europe, the first steps, in Upper Italy, had been taken by the towns. Beginning with the rudest elements they had managed to construct, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, an elaborate constitution, a strong administration, and the nucleus of a permanent bureaucracy. At the same time they had striven to restore the ancient unity of town and territorium, and assert, in fact if not in doctrine, the principle of legal sovereignty within the boundaries of the civitas. Externally, they had freed themselves, in Tuscany and the North, from all but the titular supremacy of the Empire, and in the States of the Church, from all but the minimum claims of papal suzerainty.31 Internally, they had waged war on private jurisdiction, challenged feudal immunities and ties of fealty, and, by the class legislation of the popolo, reduced the legal and fiscal privileges of the nobility.32 They had also gone further than most medieval states in contesting the privileges of the Church, taxing the clergy, disputing and even suppressing the payment of tithe, and passing drastic mortmain laws to limit church property.33 In law, particularly, they had evolved, by 1300, from a confusion of Germanic custom, case-law, and Roman jurisprudence, an impressive body of statutes; and beside the justice of statute they had started to develop an equitable 28 See for example Salzer, Ueber die Anfänge der Signorie in Oberitalien, pp. 45, 63, 72 ff., Zorzi, L’ordinamento comunale padovano, pp. 184 ff; Albertini, Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein, pp. 82–83; Pampaloni, ‘Fermenti di riforme democratiche’, p. 32 ff. 29 Cf. in this sense, as against the ‘democratic’ interpretation of Salzer, Anzilotti, Ercole and others: Ferdinando Gabotto, ‘Il Comune di Cuneo nel XIII secolo e le origini comunali in Piemonte’, Bollettino storico-bibliografico subalpino, 5 (1900–1901): 40; Masi, ‘Verso gli albori del principato in Italia’, pp. 65 ff., 73ff., 104 ff., 127, 149 ff.; Sestan, ‘Le origini delle signorie cittadine’, p. 68. Cf. also below, pp. 92–93 [this vol. pp. 20–22]. Fuller treatment of this critical question will be given elsewhere. 30 Alessandro Visconti, La pubblica amministrazione nello stato milanese durante il predominio straniero (1541–1786) (Rome, 1913), p. vi. 31 Ercole, Dal comune al principato, pp. 208 ff., 331 ff. 32 Fasoli, ‘Ricerche sulla legislazione anti-magnatizia’, pp. 240 ff.; Giuseppe Salvioli, Storia della procedura civile e criminale (Milan, 1925), pp. 6 ff. 33 Gaetano Salvemini, Studi Storici (Florence, 1901), pp. 39–90; Silvio Pivano, Stato e chiesa negli statuti comunali italiani (Turin, 1904); Gioacchino Volpe, Medio Evo italiano (Florence, 1923), pp. 197–214; Zorzi, L’ordinamento comunale padovano, pp. 85 ff.; Luigi Prosdocimi, Il diritto ecclesiastico dello stato di Milano (Milan, 1941), pp. 97 ff., 140 ff.; Catherine E. Boyd, Tithes and Parishes in Medieval Italy (Cornell, 1952), pp. 178 ff.

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jurisdiction which disregarded ius scriptum in the name of humanitas.34 In the process of legislation they had gone far to substitute territorial for personal law, supersede private initiative in the execution of justice, and revive the notion of crime as an offence against the state.35 Progress was equally marked in the sphere of public finance. In indirect taxation, the communes exhibited great ingenuity in devising gabelles and customs duties; in direct taxation they replaced the primitive hearth-tax (focaticum) by a new form of propertytax (libra), which was graduated according to wealth on the basis of cadastral surveys (estimi, catasti);36 and in the management of revenue they began to adopt from business practice advanced techniques of accountancy.37 The uniformity of development, in all branches of government, was not the product of chance. Despite political disunity, there was a lively exchange of statutes and institutions, which prepared the way from an early date for regional systems of law and administration. Similarly in economic policy, protectionist though it was, towns worked to establish some regional uniformity, by standardizing measures and negotiating treaties for the equalization of coinage.38 In discussing communes and signorie, however, and the transition from one to the other, it is customary to emphasize, in common with contemporary critics, not the creative achievement, but the practical deficiencies of the Italian city state. Too often, it is pointed out, the elaborate constitution, which the statutes describe, concealed a confusion of offices, courts, and councils, created but never coordinated by successive revolutions.39 Similarly the administration, however intricate, was still too much dependent on private service and hand-to-mouth expedients. For military defence, as late as the fifteenth century, there was no regular army, nor, except in Venice, any permanent fleet.40 For the routine conduct of government the judiciary and bureaucracy were often insufficient and persistently underpaid. Accordingly, under all regimes, justice was denounced as ineffective and corrupt, open to 34 Calasso, ‘Il problema storico del diritto comune’, p. 495; Woldemar Engelmann, Die Wiedergeburt der Rechtskultur in Italien (Leipsig, 1938), pp. 77 ff., 99 ff., 128 ff.; Luigi Prosdocimi, ‘La formazione dell’unità giuridica medievale’, in Ettore Rota (ed.), Questioni di storia medioevale (Milan, 1946), pp. 607 ff. On the complex question of aequitas, however, cf. Guido Kirsch, Erasmus und die Jurisprudenz seiner Zeit (Basel, 1960), pp. 36 ff., 407 ff. 35 Carlo Calisse, Storia del diritto penale italiano (Florence, 1895), pp. 168 ff. 36 See Enrico Fiumi, ‘L’imposta diretta nei comuni medioevali della Toscana’, in Studi in onore di Armando Sapori (Milan, 1957), pp. 329 ff. 37 Federigo Melis, Storia della ragioneria (Bologna, 1950), pp. 399 ff., 527 ff. 38 Masi, ‘Verso gli albori del principato in Italia’, p. 95; Sergio Mochi Onory, L’applicazione pratica del diritto statutario (Città di Castello, 1927), p. 14 and passim; Filippo Carli, Storia del commercio italiano, vol. 2 (Padua, 1936), pp. 128–129; Luciano Banchi, ‘Breve degli officiali del comune di Siena compilato nell’anno MCCL’, in Archivio Storico Italiano, 3rd series, 3 (1866): 82; Carlo M. Cipolla, Studi di storia della moneta (Pavia, 1948), p. 51, note 4. 39 For example Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 58–59, 69 ff.; Cristiani, Nobiltà e popolo nel comune di Pisa, pp. 230–231. 40 Jacques Heers, Gênes au XVe siécle (Paris, 1961), pp. 98, 270.

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manipulation by the optimates. The influence of wealth was encouraged by the widespread survival in municipal law of the Germanic system of money penalties for crime and fixed tariffs of fines; the death penalty, even when imposed, was commonly commuted for the rich.41 In other ways also statutes countenanced inequality before the law. In many towns peasants were punished more severely than burgesses; under the class laws of the popolo, nobles paid more heavily than commoners; and by a large number of statutes landowners were granted generous powers of imprisonment and distraint over their tenants, and employers over their workmen.42 The fiscal system, as it finally evolved, was hardly less inequitable. In all communes the country was taxed more harshly than the town; in most, movable wealth escaped direct taxation; while at Florence and certain other large cities direct taxes were neglected, or for burgesses even suppressed, in favour of a system of redeemable government loans, secured against items of income.43 The effect of this, at the best, was to pervert state finance in the interest of the rich, who could lend, for themselves and others, on profitable terms; at the worst it involved nothing less than the practical transfer of public revenue to a narrow financial oligarchy. Such was the result, by the fifteenth century, at Florence, Bologna, and, most conspicuously, Genoa, where in 1405 the shareholders of the public debt took over the control of revenue, and eventually some political powers as well.44 Hence P.C. Decembrio’s gibe that the Genoese could not distinguish public from private rights, and Machiavelli’s description of Genoa as two states not one.45 By later writers, familiar with the modern state, the Machiavellian analysis has been extended to the Italian cities generally: they were not sovereign

41

See for example Luigi Chiappelli, ‘L’Amministrazione della giustizia in Firenze durante gli ultimi secoli del medioevo e il periodo del Risorgimento, secondo le testimonianze degli antichi scrittori’, in Archivio Storico Italiano, 4th series, 15 (1885): 31 ff., 180 ff.; Calisse, Storia del diritto penale italiano, pp. 236 ff.; Mochi Onory, L’applicazione pratica del diritto statutario, pp. 40, note 3, 44; Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 64, 130–131; William M. Bowsky, ‘The Impact of the Black Death upon Sienese Government and Society’, Speculum, 39 (1964): 12, 22. 42 Cf. Calisse, Storia del diritto penale italiano, pp. 188 ff.; Dahm, Das Strafrecht Italiens im ausgehenden Mittelalter, pp. 12, 22 ff.; Fasoli, ‘Ricerche sulla legislazione antimagnatizia’, pp. 240 ff.; Luigi Zanoni, Gli Umiliati (Milan, 1911), p. 160; etc. 43 Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 92 ff.; Bowsky, ‘Impact of the Black Death’, p. 11 ff., 23; Salvatore Bongi, Inventario dell’Archivio di Stato di Lucca (Lucca, 1876), vol. 2, pp. 127–129. 44 Becker, ‘Essay on the “novi cives”’, p. 54; Louis F. Marks, ‘The Financial Oligarchy in Florence under Lorenzo’, in Jacob (ed.), Italian Renaissance Studies, pp. 123 ff.; Gianfranco Orlandelli, ‘Note di storia economica sulla signoria dei Bentivoglio’, Atti e memorie della Deputazione di storia patria per le province di Romagna, new series, 3 (1953), 207 ff.; Heers, Gênes au XVe siécle, pp. 98, 125, 140 ff. The humanist maxim, derived from Sallust, ‘publicae opes, privata paupertas’, was in these towns reversed. 45 Piero Lucca, ‘La rivolta di Geneva contro Milano nel 1435 e una lettera inedita di Pier Candido Decembrio’, Bollettino della societa pavese di storia patria, new series, vol. 4 (1952): 22–23; Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, Lib. viii, sub a. 1484.

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communities, and their authority was not single but divided.46 However independent in practice, they continued to acknowledge in theory, and reluctantly in fact, the supremacy of imperial or, still more, papal overlordship;47 however much anti-clerical, they were forced to recognize the privileges of the c1ergy;48 and however much anti-feudal, they all tolerated in varying degrees the persistence of feudal franchise.49 As the greater communes expanded, their jurisdiction was regulated by individual compact with dependent towns and lords, who were often more nearly confederates (accomandanti) than subjects. Territorially, therefore, the city state was never unified, but remained throughout an association of communities and powers.50 No doubt the same was true of other medieval regimes. Peculiar, rather, to the Italian towns, was the composite structure of the communal polity itself. It evolved as a combination of semiautonomous groups and institutions; and among these the majority of citizens only too readily divided their allegiance. First and most fundamental was the family-group or clan. Though never, like the early polis, a coalition of clans, the Italian commune, in all its history, knew no more powerful influence than that defined by Leon Battista Alberti as ‘the strongest of all bonds, the bond of blood’. In Italy, as elsewhere, loyalties and functions which, in the early Middle Ages, had been claimed by the family, were surrendered only reluctantly to the re-emergent state. The large family unit, especially among the nobility, was defended by rules of law, administration, and inheritance. Its members lived together, under a close common discipline, and their home was often literally a castle: a fortified keep or tower within the city walls, with drawbridges and all the apparatus of war, in later times including private artillery. The clan was expected to cooperate in all activities, but in none so much as defence. Accordingly one inveterate custom of communal society was the practice of vendetta. The vendetta rested as a duty of honour on all members of the family, and recourse to public justice was considered an indignity: in the Florence of the great merchant dynasties, Bardi and Frescobaldi, ‘justice’, it is said, was regarded still ‘as a private prerogative rather than a public responsibility’.51 Feuds were often bitterly ferocious, and by encouraging habits of personal violence, especially among magnati, they aggravated social conflict; yet law and public opinion 46 For example Pietro Vaccari, ‘La concezione dello stato corporativo medioevale’, Rendiconti dell’Istituto Lombardo di scienze e lettere, 71 (1938). 47 Ercole, Dal comune al principato, passim; Masi, ‘Verso gli albori del principato in Italia’, p. 172; Rubinstein, ‘Firenze e il problema della politica imperiale al tempo di Massimiliano I’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 116 (1958); Philip J. Jones, ‘The Vicariate of the Malatesta of Rimini’, English Historical Review, 67 (1952). 48 As Marsilius of Padua complained: Defensor Pacis, dist. II, cap. xxiii, pt. 11; see also note 33 above. 49 For a good example see Zorzi, L’ordinamento comunale padovano, pp. 85 ff. 50 Cf. Guido Mengozzi, ‘La costituzione dello stato fiorentino nel cinquecento’, Rivista italiana di sociologia, 15 (1911), pp. 84–85; Heers, Gênes au XVe siécle, pp. 592 ff. 51 Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, p. 62. Cf. Michele Barbi, ‘La tenzone di Dante con Forese Donati’, Studi Danteschi, 9 (1924): 59.

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were slow to condemn the feud, and most Italian statutes tried only to restrain it. Nor was it only by the right of vendetta that the family restricted the action of the state. Consolidated in large groups, with up to 100 men-at-arms, many clans increased their strength still further by artificial unions, consorterie or alberghi, and in the thirteenth century these family federations often came to form nothing less than communes on their own. They had elected officials, councils or parliaments, jurisdiction and police powers, and codes of private statute. Some of these codes survive, and perhaps no records come closer to the facts behind the theory of the city state. Most explicit are certain clanstatutes from thirteenth-century Lucca, which provide that in the event of political disturbance the members should meet and decide: ‘whether to serve the commune or to serve each one his friends’.52 The issue is succinctly put: for the state, or against it. The dilemma, however, should not be pressed too far. In the Italian towns, service for the commune was often indistinguishable from service for friends. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century no complaint recurs more insistently in Italian political writing, and no fact is more frankly confessed, than that men practised politics for office and sought office for family advantage – to gain access, as one Florentine put it, to the public ‘manger’, the mangiatoia of lucrative appointments, government contracts and leases, tax-farms and the rest.53 It was largely against the excesses of family power and influence that the popular movements in the commune were directed; and during periods of more democratic rule, there are certainly signs that law and government tended to become more impersonal and controls more strict on violence and vendetta.54 But it was not only with ties of kindred that the commune had to contend. Beyond the family were other associations – the trade guild, the social class, and most of all, the party; and it is characteristic that, like the consorterie, the guilds, the parties, and even the social classes, all came to assume a corporate organization, modelled on that of the commune. They exacted oaths of fealty, they had laws and jurisdiction, assemblies and officials, and in certain cases they established military or para-military formations. Nominally these groups were all subject to the commune; practically they were rival corporations, which strove to absorb the commune and identify the 52

Franco Niccolai, I consorzi nobiliari ed il comune nell’alta e media Italia (Bologna, 1940), p. 31, and passim. See also, on the foregoing: Nino Tamassia, La famiglia italiana nei secoli xv e xvi (Milan, 1910), especially pp. 59 ff.; Calisse, Storia del diritto penale italiano, pp. 232 ff.; Dahm, Das Strafrecht Italiens im ausgehenden Mittelalter, pp. 17 ff., 90 ff.; Rubinstein. La lotta contro i magnati a Firenze (Florence, 1939); Heers, Gênes au XVe siécle, pp. 564 ff.; Cristiani, Nobiltà e popolo nel comune di Pisa, pp. 81 ff. 53 Pampaloni, ‘Fermenti di riforme democratiche’, p. 16, note 10. Not that all posts were desirably lucrative; troublesome offices were a difficulty to fill: Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 77 ff.; Demetrio Marzi, La cancelleria della repubblica Fiorentina (Rocca S. Casciano, 1910), pp. 96, 175. 54 See particularly Becker, ‘The Republican City State in Florence’, pp. 47 ff.; ‘Essay on the “novi cives”’, pp. 55 ff.; ‘Florentine Popular Government’, pp. 375; and ‘Florentine “libertas”: political independents and “novi cives”, 1372–1378’, Traditio, 18 (1962): 393 ff., 405 ff.

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state with a class or party. By the later-thirteenth century they had generally achieved their aim. In many towns the organization of the popolo had in effect replaced the commune, in most the commune had become officially Guelf or Ghibelline, and, however democratic the form of government, membership of a particular class, party, or guild, had almost everywhere become a qualification for citizenship or office. In the great majority of city states the triumph of corporate interest, whether popular or partisan, marked the final phase of republican independence. In a few towns like Florence the commune survived, but only to continue the conflict with sectional loyalties, in which eventually party once again prevailed over the state. And from the partisan state emerged the despotic state. However different in detail the constitutional process of their rise, nearly all Italian despots were alike in one thing: they came to power first as leaders of faction. By origin, therefore, Italian despotism was the product of restrictive tendencies, oligarchical and factious, in states imperfectly sovereign and unified. This focuses attention on the question, how far, by 1500, the despots managed to repudiate their origins and remove the imperfections of the city state. Formally, it is well known, the city state long remained unmodified, in its laws and institutions, by the revolution of political system; and what changes occurred were often prepared or accompanied by similar developments under republican regimes. Not only did the name and corporate notion of the commune survive; the communal constitution also persisted, with its magistrates and councils, through which, with varying degrees of freedom, the subordinate community continued to elect officials, enact laws, and raise and administer taxes.55 One particular sign of this formal partnership between commune and despot was the indifference with which, in many towns, lords as powerful as the Visconti continued until quite late to draw fixed salaries like common magistrates.56 No less evident was the conservatism in law and administration. In law, the municipal statutes, supplemented by ius comune, remained the basis of justice; and although commonly revised and reinforced by seigneurial decree, they suffered little change of substance. There is evidence of an increasing claim by the state to responsibility for the punishment of crime, and a growing severity in penalties for offences; but this was common to all regimes, and in spite of it, under lords and communes alike, the habit of feud continued, and in places also the ancient right of kindred to a share

55 Cf. for example, Picotti, ‘Qualche osservazione sui caratteri delle signorie italiane’, pp. 22–23; Ercole, Dal comune al principato, pp. 108 ff.; Masi, ‘Verso gli albori del principato in Italia’, pp. 131 ff.; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, pp. 223 ff.; Caterina Santoro, ‘Gli uffici del comune di Milano nel periodo visconteo-sforzesco’, Archivi d’ltalia, 2nd series, 17 (1950). 56 Mario Tagliabue, ‘La politica finanziaria nel governo di Giangaleazzo Visconti’, Bollettino della societa pavese di storia patria, 15 (1915), p. 26; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, pp. 225–226.

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of money fines.57 Similarly, in state finance and accountancy, contrary to some opinions, the despots were responsible for no great technical advance.58 The prevailing forms of taxation remained unchanged, and so did the trend of development in military and all other charges on the population. Indirect taxes were the richest source of revenue; of other burdens, armed service and corvées were levied only from the rural areas; townsmen, when not wholly exempt, commuted such services to money.59 For waging war, therefore, despots, like republics, relied mostly on mercenary companies, reinforced by rural levies, though from the later Trecento some signori were starting to retain a small corps of permanent, stipendiary troops (provvisionati, and so on).60 With the notable exception of military organization, which they mistook for a political issue,61 contemporary publicists paid little attention to administrative detail. For republican writers the survival, in despotic states, of communal institutions was a mere ‘pasci-popolo’,62 a sop to popular sentiment, which could not conceal the realities of power. Whatever the constitutional forms, under despotism all political matters, from rights of citizenship upwards, 57 Calisse, Storia del diritto penale italiano, pp. 177 ff., 240 ff.; Dahm, Das Strafrecht Italiens im ausgehenden Mittelalter, pp. 284, 299 ff., 313; Engelmann, Die Wiedergehrt der Rechtskultur, pp. 265–268; Niccolai, I consorzi nobiliari, pp. 24–26; Domenico Zaccarini, ‘Delitti e pene negli stati estensi nel sec. xvi’, Atti e memorie della deputazione provinciale ferrarese di storia patria, 27 (1928): 10–11. 58 In the duchy of Milan under Filippo Maria Visconti, and perhaps already under Giovanni Visconti, (monthly) statements and budgets are found prescribed: Tagliabue, ‘La politica finanziaria nel governo di Giangaleazzo Visconti’, p. 28; Caterina Santoro, ‘Ordini di Filippo Maria Visconti per l’amministrazione delle entrate ducali’, in Studi in onore di Amintore Fanfani, vol. 3, pp. 465 ff.; but there are republican parallels to this: Pietro Rigobon, La contabilità di stato nella repubblica di Firenze e nel Granducato di Toscana (Girgenti, 1892), p. 133 and passim. 59 Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, pp. 231–233, 237, 239; Pietro Sitta, ‘Saggio sulle istituzioni finanziarie del ducato estense’, Atti e memorie della deputazione ferrarese di storia patria, 3 (1891): 137, 159, 164; Agostino Zanelli, ‘Brescia sotto la signoria di Filippo Maria Visconti (1421–1426)’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 9 (1892): 398; Aldo De Maddalena, Le finanze del ducato di Mantova all’epoca di Guglielmo Gonzaga (Milan, 1961), p. 58. 60 Sitta, ‘Saggio sulle istituzioni finanziarie del ducato estense’, p. 120; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, p. 233; Marco Formentini, Il ducato di Milano (Milan, 1877), pp. 85 ff. Analogous, and common to despotisms and republics, were condotte in aspetto: Daniel M. Bueno De Mesquita, ‘Some Condottieri of the Trecento and their Relations with Political Authority’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 32 (1946): 219–241. That signori, however, like some republican régimes, preferred their subjects unarmed, is a charge without foundation. Cf. the following note. 61 Contrary to humanist (and later) belief (on which see Charles C. Bayley, War and Society in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, I961)), the growing prevalence of mercenaries over militias, from c.1200, was the product, not of failing political virtue, but of technical changes common to the whole of Europe: Luigi Simeoni, ‘Note sulle cause ei danni del mercenarismo militare italiano del 1300’, Atti e Memorie della Reale Accademia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti di Modena, 5th series, 2 (1937): 136 ff. Cf. Daniel P. Waley, ‘The Army of the Florentine Republic from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century’, in Nicolai Rubinstein (ed.), Florentine Studies (London, 1968), pp. 70–108. 62 Antonio Missiroli, Astorgio III Manfredi, signore di Faenza (1488–1501) (Bologna, 1912), pp. 39–40.

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were controlled if not decided by the lord.63 If communal councils met, their work, numbers, and attendance, were all determined from above. The general councils especially retained little power, and in places their membership was drastically reduced; while the smaller councils, though still conceived as representing the commune, were in practice transformed into administrative organs of the despot. Similarly, all officials of importance were appointed by the signori, and often prolonged in office beyond the statutory term. Statutes, like government, now rested on the sanction of the despot: his decrees took precedence of the codes and common law, and in the administration of justice he claimed and freely exercised an exclusive right of dispensation.64 The same power was exercised in respect of taxation. Financial rights were commonly among the last to be surrendered by the commune; but whatever the conventions in use, final control of revenue belonged in practice to the lord, and it was only a matter of time before the imposition, collection, and administration of taxes passed in form as well as fact to the lord and his officials. In most cases this redistribution of authority between commune and lord was a natural development from the plenitude of power (arbitrium, and so on), with which the great majority of despots had been invested at an early stage of their rise. To begin with, such power derived almost everywhere from an act of popular election, repeated with each new ruler; but, as time went on, an increasing number of signori contrived to reduce the ceremony of election to a mere matter of form. This they did, in part, by securing hereditary tenure of power by direct grant or by associating heirs with the government; but a no less favoured device was to seek from the nominal overlord, emperor or pope, the title of temporal vicar, or later of margrave or duke, which without any actual surrender of power conferred an independent warrant for the exercise of authority.65 As far as possible also, the signori tried to dissociate themselves from the partisan allegiance with which they began: after a suitable interval, 63 On what follows cf. Salzer, Ueber die Anfänge der Signorie in Oberitalien, pp. 255 ff.; Tagliabue, ‘La politica finanziaria nel governo di Giangaleazzo Visconti’; Bueno De Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti (Cambridge, 1941), pp. 50 ff.; Santoro, ‘Gli uffici del comune di Milano’, and Gli Uffici del dominio sforzesco (Milan, 1948), pp. xvii ff.; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, pp. 226 ff.; Simeoni, ‘La ribellione di Fregnano della Scala e la politica generale italiana’, Atti e memorie dell’Accademia di Agricoltura Scienze e Lettere di Verona, 5th series, 16 (1938): 257–309. 64 Calisse, Storia del diritto penale italiano, pp. 224–225; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, p. 228. Related was the lord’s concern with ‘political’ offences, ‘treasonable’ words and actions: Calisse, Storia del diritto penale italiano, p. 201; Giuseppe Pardi, ‘Borso d’Este, duca di Ferrara’, Studi Storici, 15 (1906): 30 ff., 38, 178; Adriano Cappelli, ‘Per un libello contro Galeazzo Maria Sforza’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 3rd series, 7 (1897): 147 ff.; but in republics also politics interfered with justice: Salvioli, Storia della procedura civile e criminale, pp. 24–25; Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, pp. 108–109, 112–113, 198, etc. 65 For details and bibliography see Ercole, Dal comune al principato, pp. 76 ff., 280 ff.; Masi, ‘Verso gli albori del principato in Italia’, pp. 110 ff., 126 ff.; Jones, ‘Vicariate of the Malatesta’.

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exiled factions were restored; persons of all denominations were drawn into service; and the very names of parties were proscribed.66 And so both the partisan and electoral basis of despotic rule were slowly superseded: to the figure of the factious leader, with delegated power from the commune, succeeded the figure of the Prince, who delegated power to the commune, and was expected to exert an equal authority over all sectional interests.67 For this ideal of princely rule evidence has been found, not only in the theory, but also in the practice of despotism.68 Thus, intermittently, it can be shown, signori sought to enforce greater equity in the administration of justice and the distribution of taxes between different classes and different parts of their dominions; even in the smaller signorie the tendency appears to release rural districts from dependence on the towns, and smaller towns from subjection to the larger. In defiance of local discontent despots drew their servants from all over their territory and all over Italy.69 The Visconti and the Sforza even made use of clerks, excluded from secular office under the commune. They also allowed the clergy access to urban statute, from which they had formerly been debarred as forenses.70 Such levelling of status was simply part of a wider policy to assert untrammelled authority over all forms of privilege, corporate or territorial. Wherever they could, the despots acted, like Bernabò Visconti, as ‘pope, emperor and lord’ in their domains. So independent lordships were forced into submission, and feudal grants from outside subjected to authorization. Unlicensed clan-associations were also forbidden, at least in the state of Mi1an;71 and everywhere the trade-

66 For example: Salzer, Ueber die Anfänge der Signorie in Oberitalien, p. 22; Anzilotti, ‘Per la storia delle signorie’, p. 82; Barni, ‘La formazione interna dello stato visconteo’, p. 36; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, pp. 243–244; Gino Sandri, ‘Un “Quaternus condempnationum comunis Vincentie” e la sorte degli ultimi guelfi Vicentini’, Archivio Veneto, 5th series, 23 (1938): 179 ff. 67 According to some, from a position ‘above the law’: see, for example, Pietro Ghinzoni, ‘L’inquieto ossia una tassa odiosa del secolo XV’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 11 (1884): 510, 512. 68 As well by contemporary writers (cf. Giacinto Romano, ‘Un giudizio di Andrea Biglia sulla funzione storica dei Visconti e del Ducato di Milano’, Bollettino della società pavese di storia patria, 15 (1915): 138 ff.; Ubaldo Meroni, ‘La più antica filigrana conosciuta e una rima volgare inedita del XIV secolo’, Annali della Biblioteca Governativa e Libreria Civica di Cremona, 5 (1952) fasc. 1), as by modern historians, for example Mengozzi, ‘La costituzione dello stato fiorentino’; Anzilotti, ‘Per la storia delle signorie’; Francesco Cognasso ‘Ricerche per la storia dello stato visconteo’, Bollettino società pavese di storia patria, 22 (1922): 121–184; Nino Valeri, La libertà e la pace (Turin, 1942), pp. 26 ff.; Simeoni ‘Signorie e principati’, in Rota, Questioni di storia medioevale, pp. 424 ff.; Cipolla, ‘I precedenti economici’, in Storia di Milano, vol. 8 (Milan, 1957), pp. 350 ff. 69 Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti, pp. 181–182; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, p. 243. 70 Prosdocimi, Il diritto ecclesiastico, pp. 27 ff., 38 ff., 288 ff. 71 Niccolai, I consorzi nobiliari, p. 24; Barni, ‘La formazione interna dello stato visconteo’, p. 35.

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guilds were reduced to subordination and deprived of political power.72 The privileges of the Church were more recalcitrant, and in the smaller despotisms, of the Papal States especially, remained virtually free from interference; but in the Milanese dominions they continued to be closely restricted: benefit of clergy was generally allowed, but clerical appointments were controlled by seigneurial licence, clerical wealth was regularly taxed, without papal or local consent, and clerical property was limited by statute.73 It was in the larger states, finally, and most conspicuously Milan, that the common subjection of different groups and territories to one overriding authority began to assume expression, from the mid-fourteenth century, in a certain community of law and administration. General decrees were published, statutes were extended from one town to another, and local courts were opened to citizens of other communes. In the Milanese dominion, under Giangaleazzo Visconti, regional courts were created for the eastern and western territories; and in a number of states, central appeal courts were introduced, the administration of finance slowly centralized, and in all branches of government the impersonal power of a specialized bureaucracy increasingly interposed below the personal power of the lord.74 It is in tentative developments like these that the first beginnings have been seen in Italy of a new kind of state, the ‘Renaissance’ state, unitary, absolute, and secular, built on new foundations and a new class structure, and serving as a model to the rest of western Europe.75 Yet, measured beside the achievements of western monarchy, they are perhaps not remarkable; and even in Italy itself, it is hard to draw sharp differences between work done by despots and that begun by communes and continued independently by contemporary republics. In much of their policy, indeed, republican Venice and Florence would seem to have been less tolerant than despots of autonomous authority, clerical, feudal, or urban.76 What rather calls for emphasis, in the 72

For references see Franco Valsecchi, Comune e corporazione nel medio evo italiano (Milan, 1949), pp. 39 ff., 60 ff., 90–91. 73 Prosdocimi, Il diritto ecclesiastico, pp. 83 ff., 293 ff.; Giustino R. Orsini ‘La giurisdizione spirituale e temporale del vescovo di Como’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 8th series, 5 (1954–1955): 133. See also Pardi, ‘Borso d’Este, duca di Ferrara’, pp. 151 ff. 74 Salvioli, Storia della procedura civile e criminale, pp. 14, 560 ff.; Tagliabue, ‘La politica finanziaria nel governo di Giangaleazzo Visconti’, pp. 43 ff.; Barni, ‘La formazione interna dello stato visconteo’, pp. 36 ff., 49 ff., 55, 63 ff.; Prosdocimi, Il diritto ecclesiastico, p. 288; Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti, pp. 45 ff., 54 ff., 312 ff.; Giuseppe Galli ‘La dominazione viscontea a Verona (1387–1404)’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 54 (1927): 497 ff. Like republics, signori also promoted some regional uniformity in weights, measures and coinage: see, for example, Angelo Mazzi, ‘Nota metrologica: il patronus misura milanese del sale’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 28 (1901): 44 ff. 75 Federico Chabod, ‘Y a-t-il un état de la Renaissance?’, Actes du colloque sur la Renaissance (Paris, 1958), pp. 64 ff., 70–72; Garrett Mattingly, ‘Some Revisions of the Political History of the Renaissance’, in Helton, The Renaissance, a Reconsideration, p. 11. 76 For the last see, for example, Pietro Silva, ‘Ordinamento interno e contrasti politici e sociali in Pisa sotto il dominio visconteo’, in Studi Storici 21 (1913): 22.

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constitutions of despotic states, is the obstinate survival of diversity and privilege. In the domain of law, local statutes continued to vary widely, even in the most ruthlessly centralized states, and in a number of critical cases, so powerful a lord as Giangaleazzo Visconti was unable to impose uniformity of law or reciprocity of rights between towns. Laws, courts, and jurisdictions were confused and contradictory, and in the costly muddle resulting, the poorer litigants particularly suffered. Uncontrolled custom persisted, and even the corpus of seigneurial decrees remained uncodified.77 The unification of despotic states was never more than rudimentary. It is sufficient to note the frequency with which lords shared their dominions on inheritance or divided them by appanage.78 Rarely did their native towns assume the status of capital cities; and where, as at Milan, a capital did develop, one effect was to give the citizens a privileged place in preferment which offended local feeling. In all the subject communes local feeling and privileges remained indomitably strong, and so, very often, did the old party loyalties and divisions. In a number of towns, indeed, as late as the fifteenth century, the authority of signori was still indissolubly tied to partisan support. And so it is not surprising that, at moments of political crisis, the most imposing of despotic states fell apart in the space of weeks or days, as happened twice in the duchy of Milan, in 1402 and 1447.79 To the end of the Middle Ages, therefore, the unity of despotic states remained more personal than territorial, based rather on centralization of authority than equalization of rule. And this appears even more clearly in the policy of signori towards classes and corporations. They were more concerned to authorize than eradicate privilege. Thus the trade-guilds, though reduced to subordination, retained their courts and jurisdiction, and in Milan and certain

According to Machiavelli (Discorsi ii. 2, 11) republics were harsher to subject towns than monarchs. Cf. page 6 above; but see also note 79 below. 77 Salvioli, Storia della procedura civile e criminale, pp. 16, 23 ff., 191 ff.; Visconti, La pubblica amministrazione nello stato milanese, pp. 112, 269; Zaccarini, ‘Delitti e pene negli stati estensi’, p. 57; Prosdocimi, Il diritto ecclesiastico, pp. 151–152; Alessandro Lattes, Il diritto consuetudinario delle città lombarde (Milan, 1899), chapter 1, and passim. 78 Salzer, Ueber die Anfänge der Signorie in Oberitalien, pp. 232 ff.; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, pp. 229–230. 79 Chabod, ‘Del “Principe” di Machiavelli’, pp. 47 ff.; Barni, ‘La formazione interna dello stato visconteo’, pp. 17 ff., 40 ff.; Santoro, ‘Gli uffici del comune di Milano’, passim; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’; Nino Valeri, L’eredità di Giangaleazzo Visconti (Turin, 1938); Zanelli, ‘Brescia sotto la signoria di Filippo Maria Visconti’, pp. 389–390, 400 ff.; Carlo Capasso, ‘Guelfi e ghibellini a Bergamo’, Bollettino della Biblioteca Civica di Bergamo, 15 (1921). As under republics, local economic interests were sacrificed to those of the capital: Gino Barbieri, Economia e politica nel ducato di Milano (Milan, 1938), pp. 40, 130 ff., 235, etc.; Cipolla, ‘The economic policies of governments: the Italian and Iberian Peninsulas’, in Cambridge Economic History, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 403–404, 417. This is only one reason for questioning the theory that signori promoted economic prosperity: cf. Masi, ‘Verso gli albori del principato in Italia’, pp. 96 ff. (against Anzilotti); Cinzio Violante, ‘Storia ed economia dell’Italia medioevale’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 73 (1961): 532 (against Cipolla).

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other towns, the powers of the courts merchant were actually increased.80 Similarly the clergy, where subject, as in the duchy of Milan, to the claims of secular government, were in practice granted increasing fiscal immunities, obtaining by charter of privilege what, in canon law, was their right. Most signori, in fact, though ready enough to occupy ecclesiastical property by lease or feudal tenure, were lavish of gifts and favours to the Church. But the beneficiaries were mostly the greater monasteries and prelates, not the clerical order at large.81 The same distinction occurs in the secular policy of despots. Though commonly said to have shown favour to the peasantry, in reality they did little to moderate rural burdens, and nothing at all to reduce the judicial privileges of citizens and landlords.82 Nor were such measures to be expected. Themselves great landowners, it was from the class of gentiluomini that most despots came; it was by this class that they largely rose to power; and it was through this class, finally, that they principally governed and were recommended to govern. With the accession of signori, the popolo, with its class laws and organization, was almost everywhere suppressed.83 Nobles and patricians held the leading posts (or emoluments) of church and state, and they also dominated the municipal assemblies, which progressive reduction of membership made increasingly aristocratic in composition.84 As Machiavelli 80

Salvioli, Storia della procedura civile e criminale, pp. 97–103; Masi, ‘Verso gli albori del principato in Italia’, pp. 99 ff.; Barbieri, Economia e politica nel ducato di Milano, pp. 37 ff., 97.ff., and passim; Valsecchi, Comune e corporazione nell medioevo italiano, pp. 60–72. The further statement, that signori favoured craft guilds and workers against merchants and manufacturers (Sylvia Thrupp, ‘The Gilds’, in Cambridge Economic History, vol. 3, p. 240; Cipolla, ‘The economic policies of governments’, in ibid., pp. 426, 428–429), awaits demonstration. 81 Prosdocimi, Il diritto ecclesiastico, pp. 27 ff., 110 ff., 148 ff.; Tagliabue, ‘La politica finanziaria nel governo di Giangaleazzo Visconti’, 68 ff.; Galli, ‘La dominazione viscontea a Verona’, pp. 496–497, 508. 82 Emilio Nasalli Rocca, ‘I decreti signorili viscontei e sforzeschi e il diritto Agrario’, Archivio Vittorio Scialoja, 4 (1937). Cf. Visconti, La pubblica amministrazione nello stato milanese, pp. 123–124; Zaccarini, ‘Delitti e pene negli stati estensi’, pp. 21, 29, 63; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, p. 37; Gerolamo Biscaro, ‘La battaglia di Carcano e i privilegi concessi dal comune di Milano agli abitanti di Erba e di Orsenigo’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 36 (1909): 297–312; Fabio Cusin, ‘Le aspirazioni straniere sul ducato di Milano e l’investitura imperiale’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, new series, 1 (1936): 290; Anzilotti, ‘L’economia toscana e l’origine del movimento riformatore del secolo XVIII’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 73 (1915), and ‘Il tramonto dello stato cittadino’, ibid., 82 (1924): 72–105. 83 Fasoli, ‘Ricerche sulla legislazione anti-magnatizia’, pp. 272–273; Lorenzo Astegiano, Codex Diplomaticus Cremonae (2 vols, Turin, 1896–9), vol. 2, p. 324; Emilio P. Vicini, Respublica Mutinensis (2 vols, Milan, 1929), vol. 1, p. xx. Under certain rulers the signoria represented little more than a return to aristocratic licence; conversely, where popular government was temporarily revived, anti-magnate legislation was introduced or restored: Zorzi, L’ordinamento comunale padovano, pp. 64 ff.; Dahm, Das Strafrecht Italiens im ausgehenden Mittelalter, p. 14, note 29; Vicini, Respublica Mutinensis, vol. 1, p. xx. 84 Chabod, ‘Del “Principe” di Machiavelli’, pp. 43 ff., 54; Santoro, ‘Gli uffici del comune di Milano’, pp. xvii, xxix ff.; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, pp. 242–244, etc. By 1500 council membership was becoming hereditary (see, for example, Mamante

22

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was among the first to observe, aristocracy and monarchy went together. Identifying republics with social equality and lordships with inequality, he remarked that a prince, without a nobility, could not administer government, and that where no nobility existed, it would have to be created.85 That the Italian despots, however, as is sometimes affirmed,86 created a new nobility and built their power on upstarts, is far from evident. New men, of course, there were. There always are. But this is a fact of biology as much as history. What history rather shows is the tenacious survival in Italy of old-established families, both feudal and patrician, within a narrow class of optimates (250 or so at Milan, a mere 30 to 40 at Camerino), which, through all political changes, seems not to have varied much in size nor greatly in composition. Of the signori it is truer to say that, from a combination of families, old as much as new, they established their own clientela of magnates and vassals, using the well-tried devices of intermarriage, privilege, and feudal benefaction. With the resurrection of monarchy, feudalism also revived.87 Beside the older feudal lordships, which although reduced to dependence were rarely reduced in power, a growing number of new fiefs were granted, often endowed with ampler rights than the old; and if this increased the number of places independent of the towns, it also reversed the unifying process by which the towns had once subdued them.88 No less common than feudal grants were grants of tax-immunity, the effect of which was to shift a growing burden to the lower classes. It is not in the despotic states, but in the republican state of Florence, that the most radical experiment is found in equitable taxation. Under the despots tax inequality flourished, to the profit of rich and noble, and so too did the privileges of magnates before the law.89 Rabozzi, ‘Lotte in Novara fra antica e nuova nobiltà sotto la dominazione spagnola’, Bollettino storico per la provincia di Novara, 39 (1948): 5; Widar Cesarini-Sforza, ‘Il consiglio generale e le classi cittadine in Piacenza nel secolo XVI’, Bollettino storico piacentino, 5 (1910): 74), a trend evident also in towns under the republican rule of Venice: see Zanelli, Delle condizioni interne di Brescia. 85 Francesco Ercole, La politica di Machiavelli (Rome, 1926), pp. 147–148, 152. 86 For example by Cipolla, ‘I precedenti economici’, in Storia di Milano, vol. 8, pp. 350 ff. 87 A fact which, on Roland Mousnier’s definition of absolutism (‘Quelques problemes concernant la monarchie absolue’, in Relazioni del X Congresso Internationale di Scienze Storiche, vol. 4, pp. 6–9, 12–15), would disqualify the Italian principality. 88 See for example: Sitta, ‘Saggio sulle istituzioni finanziarie del ducato estense’, 133; Chabod, ‘Del “Principe” di Machiavelli’, p. 47; Zaccarini, ‘Delitti e pene negli stati estensi’, pp. 8, 60; Masi, ‘Verso gli albori del principato in Italia’, p. 78; Barni, ‘La formazione interna dello stato visconteo’, pp. 17 ff.; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’; Gian Piero Bognetti, ‘Per la storia dello Stato visconteo’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 1927, pp. 267 ff.; Emilio Nasalli Rocca, ‘Il decreto del Maggior Magistrato e la sua giurisdizione’, Bollettino storico piacentino, 30 (1935) and ‘Il patriziato piacentino nell’età del principato’, in Studi in onore di Cesare Manaresi (Milan, 1953), pp. 239 ff.; Bueno de Mesquita, ‘Ludovico Sforza and His Vassals’, in Jacob (ed.), Italian Renaissance Studies, pp. 184 ff. 89 Salvioli, Storia della procedura civile e criminale, p. 24; Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti, pp. 227 ff., 295; Jones, ‘End of Malatesta Rule’, pp. 226–227; Luigi

Communes and Despots: The City State in Late-Medieval Italy

23

Privilege, it is true, was not equivalent to power. Incapable of ruling themselves, or keeping rule to themselves, the patrician class had in effect surrendered one to preserve the other, and clearly the unwritten compact had been kept. But in Italy of the despots, as in France of the ancien regime, respect for privilege was the ultimate sanction of power. ‘Be especially careful’, wrote Leo X to the young Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘not to give offence to the notables (case).’90 The impolicy of doing otherwise was proved by more than the Medici. Whenever, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, signorie were overthrown, the occasion, more often than not, was offence to the notables, in their property, their persons, or their honour. Despotism, in its fall as in its rise, was regulated by the same class interests. ‘In all ages,’ it has been said, ‘whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the fasade.’91 This observation, inspired by Roman Italy, may be extended also to medieval Italy. Between republics and despotisms the resemblances seem at least as great as the differences. In political organization both prolonged the past without radical alteration; and not the least striking resemblance between them is their unqualified failure, in common with other forms of European government, to support the fashionable concept of ‘Renaissance state’ or ‘Renaissance monarchy’.92 Rather do they confirm the view which sees, all over Europe, from the close of the early Middle Ages, a continuous development in the theory, practice and ‘reason’ of the state:93 itself part of a larger movement, economic as well as political, which transgresses the traditional frontiers of ‘medieval’, ‘Renaissance’ and ‘modern’ history.94 In Italy at any rate the ‘Renaissance state’ is a fiction to be banished from the books. Here, down to the eighteenth century, government remained, in the words of one observer, ‘an invincible confusion’ (‘une foule d’incohérences’);95 and not till the eighteenth Balduzzi, ‘Degli antichi statuti di Bagnacavallo’, Atti e memorie della deputazione di Storia patria per le provincie di Romagna series two, 1 (1875) : 156–157; Ettore Verga, ‘Le sentenze criminali dei Podestà milanesi 1385–1429’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 28 (1901): 116; Giuseppe Salvioli, ‘Per la storia della proprietà in Italia’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial -und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 3 (1905): 151; Pietro Ciapessoni, ‘Per la storia della economia e della finanza pubblica pavesi sotto Filippo Maria Visconti’, Bollettino della società pavese di storia patria, 6 (1906): 383 ff., 611; Tommaso Zerbi, La banca nell’ordinamento finanziario visconteo (Como, 1935), pp. 216, 256–257. 90 Archivio Storico Italiano, series 1, Appendix, 1 (1842–1844), p. 300. 91 Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939), p. 7. 92 For some divergent definitions of which see: Chabod, ‘Y a-t-il un état de la Renaissance?’, and Mattingly, ‘Some Revisions of the Political History of the Renaissance’; James Russell Major, Representative Institutions in Renaissance France, 1421–1559 (Madison, 1960), pp. 3 ff. 93 See Gaines Post, ‘Ratio publicæ utilitatis, ratio status und “Staatsräson” (1100– 1300)’, Die Welt als Geschichte, 21 (1961): 8 ff., 71 ff. 94 Armando Sapori, ‘Medio evo e rinascimento’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 115 (1957); Jones, ‘Per la storia agraria italiana nel Medio Evo: lineamenti e problemi’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 76 (1964): 287–288. 95 Agostino Paradisi, in Franco Venturi, ‘Ritratto di Agostino Paradisi’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 74 (1962): 721.

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century, when despotism became ‘enlightened’, was any attempt made to impose an egalitarian state. In this period, in all states, the same interests prevailed, power and office were effectively restricted to the same privileged order, and from the mass of people, under republics and despots alike, the same complaints monotonously arise: against unjust taxation, against corrupt and costly justice, against local and personal privilege.96 In the language of Tudor England, government for them was ‘nothing but a certain conspiracy of riche men procuringe their own commodities under the name and title of the Common Wealth’. Nor did political writers take a very different view: to Bartolus, to Machiavelli, to Francesco Vettori, all Italian governments were ‘tyrannies’ – of party, of class, of despots. In a more sombre spirit, they shared the opinion later expressed by Dr Samuel Johnson, when invited to comment on the theme of political liberty: ‘Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another.’

Brasenose College, Oxford

96

Also, from the early-fifteenth century, against the practice of the sale of offices: Giorgio Giulini, Continuazione delle Memorie di Milano, 3 (Milan, 1771), p. 616; Verga, ‘Le sentenze criminali’, p. 104; Sitta, ‘Saggio sulle istituzioni finanziarie del ducato estense’, p. 147; Zaccarini, ‘Delitti e pene negli stati estensi’, p. 8; Santoro, ‘Gli uffici del comune di Milano’, pp. xvii–xviii; Mousnier, ‘Le trafic des offices à Venise’, Revue Historique de Droit Français et Ètranger, 30 (1952): 552–563.

Part II

Power and Restraint

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2 The Use of Sortition in Appointments in the Italian Communes1 Daniel Waley

An introductory word is perhaps required on the background to the topic treated in this paper. In my view, some form of oligarchy was inevitable within any city-republic. The only apparent constitutional alternative was the rule of an individual, a ‘lord’, but recent research has tended to emphasize the crucial role of the party, or adherents, within an apparently tyrannical regime. An investigation of the methods of election to office employed within medieval Italian communes is thus an investigation of the constitutional procedures of an oligarchy. These ‘cities’ (each seat of a bishopric was a civitas) were normally, by modern standards, not very populous, and it has been suggested that in 1300 only 26 communities in northern and central Italy had a total number of inhabitants exceeding 20,000. Within these centres the minority which played a politically active role would have been known to all, or at least to the other residents of their own region (the ‘third’, ‘quarter’, ‘fifth’, and so on). Ambition must be assumed as an element common to the citizens of these places, but this will have been assessed in different ways according to contrasting viewpoints. As the thirteenth-century chronicler of Asti saw things, the thieving adherents – the latroncoli – of the popolo gathered in assemblies and tried to achieve appointment to offices within the commune ‘in order to gain hold of the commune’s revenues’. Yet what appeared to hostile opinion as selfish ambition contained a strong element of self-defence. Those who did not hold office had no say in the commune’s fiscal measures, and hence they would be more heavily taxed. The principle of numerical majority was prevalent in the secular activities of medieval Italy, in contrast to the notion – important in the ecclesiastical world – of a sanior pars. A common feature of communal constitutions was 1

This paper is an English version of an unpublished talk given in French to a seminar of the École Normale, Paris, in 1992. It was accompanied by a handout, in place of which is substituted as an appendix a list of the sources on which the paper was based.

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‘indirect’ election: that is, election in two or more stages. Statutes concerned with electoral methods, when prescribing election or choice by drawing lots, employed the noun sors (whence ‘sortition’). The counters drawn, when choice was by lot, were termed brevia, these being either blank or bearing the title of the office in question, and the man drawing the breve thus inscribed became the office holder or, in the case of indirect elections, the elector in the next stage. Eligibility was naturally a matter of crucial importance. Normally any man who had filled an office was automatically debarred from re-election to it for a certain period and the same ban might apply to his relatives. Such ineligibility was described as devetum (in Italian divieto). In certain instances there was also a financial barrier against the eligibility of poorer elements. Since the office-holder might have to repay to the commune losses suffered during his tenure, it was an obvious precaution to draw a line making ineligible, for example, any men having property assessed for taxation at a value below 100 lire. Naturally the effect of the divieto in limiting re-election was to enlarge the category of office-holders and hence to limit the control of a narrow oligarchy. I shall discuss briefly the electoral arrangements of two communes – one large, the other small – before proceeding to a more quantitative analysis. At Bologna (statutes of 1288) one identical form of election applied to at least 172 of the city’s offices. It was not applicable to the most junior officers, such as guards and messengers, and it should be noted that the total number of Bologna’s office-holders at this time may have been as high as 1,800. The brevia used for Bologna’s elections bore 2,000 names, divided equally between the city’s four quartieri. Four other bags contained 2,000 brevia, of which 172 were inscribed with the titles of 172 communal offices, whilst the other 1,828 were blanks. A child had the task of drawing from the two bags, one being the ‘name bag’, the other the ‘office bag’. When the breve drawn from the latter was not a blank, the title of the office and the name drawn from the former were at once read aloud. The statute laid down that the dimensions of the brevia had to be identical, to prevent any possibility of fraud in the draw. The person drawn for an office was not himself to be its holder, but its nominator. What followed was a form of indirect election, since at this stage the nominator’s role was to name the holder of the office in question. He had to announce immediately the name he had chosen. Various categories of ineligibility were defined. Close relatives of the nominator were barred, also the members of his household, and general divieti applied to the outgoing office-holder, to those with tax assessments below certain sums (varying according to the office) and to all men aged over 70. At Montepulciano (statutes of 1337), the second example chosen, choice by lot played a much less significant role. This was a smaller place, which did not become a diocesan see until the sixteenth century. At Montepulciano there were 28 principal communal offices, including councillors but excluding the officers of the Guelf party, who were chosen by their predecessors in office. Eleven of the 28 were named by the commune’s main officials, the Five, whilst

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seven others were selected by the Five in consultation with certain ‘wise men’ (savi, sapientes). Only eight of the 28 officials in question were selected by a process of indirect election. Electors were drawn by lot to participate in the election of the five rectors of Montepulciano’s hospitals and that of the three notaries of the commune’s judicial courts. This last election involved three phases. In the first place, the officials of the guild of notaries drew up a list of those eligible. Then the same guild officials, with the Five, shortened the list, eliminating certain names. Finally, those names which remained were placed in a bag for the process of drawing by lot. I shall now attempt a quantitative approach, taking into consideration the electoral methods of 16 communes. Statutory codes survive from many of the communes of medieval Italy. Fifteen such codes, not including those analysed here, are referred to in the useful work of Edoardo Ruffini Avondo,2 whilst several others are mentioned in Professor Hagen Keller’s article ‘Wahlformen und Gemeinschaftsverstandnis in den italienischen Stadtkommunem’.3 The 16 communes considered here made use of 29 different methods of election, 20 of these involving more than one stage, whilst in the nine others methods consisted of a direct choice. In four instances, among the latter nine, the choice was made by sortition. Of the 20 instances of indirect election, eight only made no use of a draw by lot, whilst the other 12 involved an initial process of sortition followed by election or nomination. The examples given here illustrate a very broad spectrum. Some communes insisted on sortition as a compulsory element in every election to office. Thus at Como (1209) ‘statutum est quod electores potestatis et guardatorium turrium et castrorum iurisdictionis Cumarum eligantur ad sortem in credenzia Cumarum sicut alii officiales’. At Verona (1276) ‘omnia offitia debeant elligi ad brevia’, and an almost identical formula prevailed at Parma (1282). On the other hand some communes forbade the use of sortition or made no mention of it. Unlikely though this may seem, my treatment of the constitutional complications of the communes has erred in the direction of oversimplification. It is time to move on to realities. I shall begin with Padua, a city noted for its judges and teachers of law. The choice of the leading officials of the Paduan popolo began with sortition within the council. Twenty-eight councillors (seven from each quarter of the city) drew from the bags the brevia of which the non-blanks were inscribed ‘Elector’. The 28 electors thus drawn had the right to become electors or to pass on this role to another eligible person. The 28 selected proceeded to choose by vote the eight anziani (two per quarter). The procedure for many other offices at Padua – but not for judicial or notarial posts – was as follows. Initially a list had to be drawn up of eligible persons. This involved possession of a minimum tax assessment of 2

Edoardo Ruffini Avondo, I sistemi di deliberazione collettiva nel medioevo italiano (Turin, 1927). 3 Hagen Keller, ‘Wahlformen und Gemeinschaftsverstandnis in den italienischen Stadtkommunen’, Vorträge und Forschungen, 27 (1990): 345–74.

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25 lire for the humbler functions, of 200 lire for the more responsible offices (elsewhere 200 or 500 were normal minima). A stage of sortition followed. As at Bologna, the cedule had all to be of identical weight and dimensions. The right to nominate could be passed on by those successful in the draw to father, son, brother or the son of a brother. At Modena, in the case of certain notarial offices, the electors were chosen by lot, but they in turn required confirmation by the podestà and a body of savi. Failing this consent, the person drawn had himself to nominate a replacement. It would be possible to cite a quite bewildering variety of processes involving indirect election. Not surprisingly, cases occurred in which an election was declared null because the processes had not succeeded each other in the correct order. At Treviso (1283–1284) five stages were involved in the election of a podestà. The outgoing podestà had to name eight persons, who in turn named a list of 12. These proceeded to draw up a new list of eight, who finally produced three names from which the council made an eventual choice. At Asti (1379) the drawing of lots among the councillors at the end of their period of office determined which of them should be the electors of the electors to the next conciliar body. Such a role for predecessors in office was widely adopted. Is it possible to trace any chronological development in this field? The small amount of evidence available from the consular period – that is roughly the twelfth century – suggests that the consuls were chosen by indirect election (there were electores electorum consulum) with no element of sortition certainly at Genoa and Pisa and probably elsewhere (Pistoia and Volterra). Coming to the period of the podestà, it should be noted that the degree of authority possessed by this official of the commune must in practice have varied greatly. Brunetto Latini in his Trésor treats his position as analogous to that of the monarch in France. This surely exaggerates his standing, yet the treatise Oculus Pastoralis implies much the same, stating that it was the podestà who chose the commune’s councillors. The podestà could clearly not be selected solely by lot (but see the system at Treviso mentioned in the preceding paragraph), since he always came from another commune, usually a distant one. Yet sortition could play some part in his selection. At Vicenza (1264) the greater council, consisting of 400 members, named the city whence the podestà was to be recruited. A process of sortition within the council then produced a list of 20 electors, five from each quarter of the city. The next stage was an election which reduced this body from 20 to eight names. The eight then named three candidates, after which the great council again came into play, producing an order of preference among these three. In what might be termed ‘the period of the popolo’ the podestà was superseded as the commune’s highest authority by a local organization of guilds or by representatives of the city’s regional zones. Sortition could play an important role in such a constitution and usually did so. However, there was no question of its disappearance when lords and territorial states tended to replace the regime of the popolo. At Orte, in papal territory and now in the province of

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Viterbo, the statutes of 1584 laid down that the annual office of massarius – charged with overseeing the commune’s property and its archive – was to be chosen by sortition. Orte selected its other officials and its councillors by other methods, only the massarius being selected by lot. I suggest that there was no general chronological development in this matter and that recourse to sortition, rather than diminishing, grew or declined according to local circumstances. Did the role of sortition vary according to the region? Certainly there were influential cities within each region. Spoleto’s arrangements (1296) resembled those of nearby Perugia, and it seems likely that the statutes of Bologna were similarly influential in Emilia, and that Florence enjoyed the same role in Tuscany. Yet, however important such imitation may have been, it is more striking that each commune showed a resolve to assert constitutional differences and to have its own methods. The theoretical bases underlying such methods would have been taken for granted rather than discussed in the commune’s councils, hence the views of contemporaries on the merits of election and sortition are never revealed to us. Treatises on government and chronicles are silent on such perceptions, the latter being more forthcoming on military and meteorological topics. Certainly there were lengthy and bitter discussions in council meetings on the use of sortition in particular instances, but the major implications of resort to any particular technique seem to have needed no theoretical justification. One episode may be cited at this point. In 1223 Piacenza was faced by an impasse in the selection of its podestà. The electors were compulsorily confined for several days, without food. Eventually it was decided to replace this set of electors, of whom 100 were representatives of the nobility and 100 of the popolo. The new body, of 60 nobles and 60 popolani, achieved a settlement, but the chronicler makes no useful comment on this crisis. Some clear conclusions seem to arise from the material presented here. Although sortition was certainly not universal, it played an important part in the constitutional techniques of the Italian communes. It should be noted that the lot was often employed also in non-political contexts. At both Genoa and Florence, for instance, it was used in assigning to co-holders the various parts of a lineage’s palazzo. As for its employment in communal appointments, this was most commonly an initial stage in a process of indirect election; as noted by Ruffini Avondo, normally the process of lot was used to decide not the officials finally appointed but the personnel of their electors. A characteristic statute of Treviso (1224) assigned such an intermediate role to sortition. First a list was drawn up of men eligible to serve as the commune’s notaries, after which this rotulus of names was the subject of a draw by lot to determine the order in which they were called to fill the vacant posts. At Florence (1329) the system of ‘bagging’ (imborsazione) was a technique for placing in order of appointment men whose names had emerged from a rigidly oligarchical method of ‘scrutiny’.

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In considering the use of sortition it is necessary to emphasize the allimportant role of the preliminary barriers governing eligibility for office, such as the fiscal qualifications. I would suggest that the cautious use of sortition in the selection of electors to office should be seen as a technique for achieving a certain degree of democracy within an oligarchical regime. As a constitutional method the ‘lot’ normally indicates the presence of a controlling oligarchy aware of the dangers of a narrow monolithic regime and concerned to spread political power within the body of oligarchs. There must also have been occasions when jealousies and rivalries within an oligarchy led to sectional groups favouring sortition as a constitutional brake which could re-establish a concensus or prevent a critical disruption. The rules governing eligibility, particularly those barring the less well-to-do, would have served to eliminate the politically suspect and thus have acted to preserve the continued control of a governing class. Nevertheless, sortition would not have been compatible with a rigidly closed and narrow oligarchy such as that of the échevins of Ghent so vividly depicted by Henri Pirenne.4 Moreover, sortition was considered particularly appropriate to certain types of appointment and to certain circumstances. Offices which involved financial responsibilities and temptations – rather than financial expertise – were one instance. It was difficult to assign such posts by a direct voting system. A second category, an important one, was appointment to posts for which there was no competition. Some fair method had to be found for filling offices which most would seek to avoid. Then the lot could be employed on its own, not merely as a stage in a process of indirect election. An example was that of the massarius at Orte (see above). The phrase ‘draw the short straw’ is a reminder of this use of sortition. The ‘short straw’ is too familiar a locution to require illustrative examples, but the French nursery rhyme which relates how the starving crew of a shipwrecked vessel dealt with their plight may serve as a dramatic instance: ‘On tira à la courte paille Pour savoir qui serait mangé, Le sort tomba sur le plus jeune, C’est donc lui qui sera mangé‚’ (etc.)

No doubt it was not only in Italy that the lot was used to allocate unwelcome tasks. Yet sortition also played a part in the choice of officials and councillors, including senior offices and judicial posts in major cities such as Padua, Parma, Modena and Siena. It was rarely used on its own and would thus not have been decisive in determining crucial appointments. Nevertheless I would suggest that the Middle Ages in Italy constituted a golden age for the use of sortition in the selection of office holders.

4

Henri Pirenne, Anciennes démocraties des Pays Bas (Paris, 1910).

The Use of Sortition in Appointments in the Italian Communes

33

Appendix Statutes Bologna: Statuti di Bologna dall’ anno 1245 all’ anno 1267, ed. Luigi Frati (Dei monumenti istorici pertinenti alle provincie della Romagna, 3 vols, Bologna, 1869– 77). ––– , Statuti del populo di Bologna del secolo XIII, ed. Augusto Gaudenzi (Deputazione di storia patria per la Romagna, Bologna, 1888). Como: Statuti di Como del 1335, ed. Guido Manganelli (Deputazione di storia patria per la Lombardia sezione di Como, vol. 1, Como, 1936). Genoa: Leges Genuenses. Historiae Patriae Monumenta, vol. 18 (Turin, 1901). Modena: Statuta Civitatis Mutine, ed. Cesare Campori (Parma, 1864). Montepulciano: Statuto del comune di Montepulciano (1337), ed. Ubaldo Morandi (Florence, 1966). Perugia: Statuti di Perugia dell’anno MCCCLXXIII, ed. Giustiniano Degli Azzi (Corpus Statutorum Italicarum, Rome, 1913–16). Pisa: Statuti inediti della città di Pisa dal XII al XIV secolo, ed. Francesco Bonaini (3 vols, Florence, 1854–7). Pistoia: Breve et Ordinamenta Populi Pistorii, 1284, ed. Lodovico Zdekauer (Milan, 1891). ––– , Statutum Potestatis Comunis Pistorii, 1296, ed. Lodovico Zdekauer (Milan, 1888). Spoleto: Statuti di Spoleto del 1296, ed. Giovanni Antonelli (Florence, 1962). Treviso: Gli Statuti del comune di Treviso, ed. Giuseppe Liberali (3 vols, Venice, 1950–55). Verona: Gli Statuti veronesi del 1276, ed. Gino Sandri (Venice, 1940). Vicenza: Statuti del comune di Vicenza MCCLXIV, ed. Fedele Lampertico (Venice, 1886). Volterra: Statuti di Volterra (1210–24), ed. Enrico Fiumi (Florence, 1952). Texts Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou Trésor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley, 1948). Oculus Pastoralis, ed. Dora Franceschi (Turin, 1966).

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3 Magnate Violence Revisited Carol Lansing

The problem at the centre of Philip Jones’s research – the relationship between communes and despots, or signori – is closely intertwined with longstanding debates over the magnates. Many towns in the mid- to late-thirteenth century imposed severe restrictions on a list of elite lineages whom they termed magnates, on the grounds that they posed a violent threat to their neighbours and to the good and peaceful state of the commune. This was linked to the gradual shift to limit political participation to members of guilds and popular societies. The details varied from town to town, but magnates were required to post a large security against the possibility that they might commit a crime, and were subject to severe penalties if they did harm a popolano. Special judicial mechanisms were developed to facilitate denunciation of magnate offences. At the same time, systems designed to muster popular militias were strengthened to provide a counterweight to the military power of magnates, their allies and retainers. These efforts by medieval Italian communes to impose restrictions on noble families were driven in part by the realistic fear that one of them might take over as signore.1 The restriction of the magnates has been one of the most debated problems in the historiography on the medieval Italian city states. The classic debate over these measures asked whether the shift to guild-based rule was a structural change, as an older nobility was displaced by the borghesia. The alternative view, advanced first by Nicola Ottokar, is that the urban elite was mixed, and the restriction of the magnates another turnover within a homogeneous ruling class.2 Clearly, both were in part true: some magnate individuals and families 1 On the rise of signori, see Philip Jones, The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford, 1997), chapter 4, parts v–vi. 2 The classic debate was Gaetano Salvemini, Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295 (Florence, 1899; 2nd edn, Milan, 1966) and Nicola Ottokar, Il Comune di Firenze alla fine del Dugento (Florence, 1926, 3rd edn, Turin, 1974). The bibliography on the magnates is vast: see for a current list Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Retour à la cité: Les magnates de Florence, 1340–1440 (Paris, 2006), pp. 465–90. See also Carol Lansing, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Princeton, 1991).

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continued to participate in civic life and in fact were integral to communal politics, while others pursued economic and political strategies in opposition to the commune. In this contribution, I will discuss two tendencies in the scholarship over roughly the last two decades. First, scholars have examined the continuing roles of magnates in governance, particularly in Bologna, and downplayed differences between magnates and their elite opponents. Second, other recent work has returned to an emphasis on noble violence. Finally, I will turn to accounts of noble violence in denunciations to the Florentine Executor of the Ordinances of Justice, to argue that those records suggest that magnate violence was in part a strategy of domination. In the 1990s, historical scholarship in the Italian language in particular tended to normalize the magnates, emphasizing their ongoing political and institutional roles. Much of this work has centred on Bologna, where the effort to restrict magnates originated, a full decade before the Florentine Ordinances of Justice of 1292. The Bolognese model had been somewhat neglected, setting aside the classic study by Gina Fasoli. The 1990s saw a flurry of archival studies of Bolognese elites and politics.3 In fact, Bologna provides a much clearer case than Florence. To examine that literature requires a brief look at the Bolognese narrative, far less familiar to English-language readers than the Florentine. As Antonio Pini pointed out in 1995, the Bolognese societas populi originated in guilds, not arms and neighbourhood societies as it did in most towns. It was, Pini thought, less a matter of neighbourhood associations, and more class driven.4 The gradual establishment of popular institutions led to the creation in 1255 of the Capitano del Popolo, a popular version of the podestà. The university was central to Bolognese politics in several ways. Most notably, the student population was crucial to the local economy, a fact that bolstered papal influence, since the curia was capable of moving the Studio elsewhere. Guelf–Ghibelline divisions were thus sharp, and civil wars between the pro-papal Geremei and pro-imperial Lambertazzi factions led in 1274 to the expulsion of as many as 10,000 Lambertazzi. In 1279 the emperor handed the town over to papal sovereignty, and the papal rector and new podestà Bertoldo Orsini attempted a short-lived reconciliation of factions. Popular efforts at pacification were led by the charismatic scholar and notary Rolandino Passageri and initially took the form of popular militias. In August 1282, despite opposition from the podestà and the Capitano del Popolo, Rolandino Passageri led a commission made up of ministrali, representatives of the guilds and arms societies, together with sapientes, advisors elected by those societies. 3

Nikolai Wandruska, Die Oberschichten Bolognas und ihre Rolle während der Ausbildung der Kommune (12. und 13. Jahrhundert) (Frankfurt am Main, 1993); Giuliano Milani, Istituzioni comunali bolognesi e bando dei Lambertazzi: 1274–1292 (Tesi di laurea, Facoltà di Lettere, Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, 1992–1993); Scritture d’esclusione. Condanne politiche e documentazione nell’Italia comunale: il caso di Bologna (Tesi di dottorato, Università degli Studi di Firenze, 1999). 4 Antonio Pini, ‘Magnati e popolani a Bologna nella seconda metà del XIII secolo’, Magnati e popolani nell’Italia comunale (Pistoia, 15–18 meggio 1995) (Pistoia, 1997), pp. 371–96.

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This commission wrote the first anti-magnate ordinances, listing 92 magnates from 40 families.5 The laws were reinforced in 1284 to address the problem of the proliferation of false accusations, as well as chaos in the contado caused by the large number of exiles. The laws were briefly abolished in 1292 after the execution of Guido da Cuzzano with one of his sons and 18 associates, but reinstated a few weeks later. The laws effectively remained in place until the imposition of papal lordship in 1327. Despite the Sacred Ordinances, nobles filtered back into political influence in a number of ways, including inscription in the arms societies and also as sapientes advising the popular council of anziani, as Giuliano Milani has shown.6 Another essential point is that intellectuals from the university faculty were actively involved in drafting the ordinances that sought to restrict the magnates. Sara Menzinger has closely analysed the roles of sapientes participating in Bologna’s councils, 1282–1284.7 And of course they served on balie, advisory committees of sapientes. Lawmakers and their advisors surely hoped to reinforce institutions; as Pini has argued, the Ordinances can be read as an effort to move conflict from armed confrontations to disputes in the law courts and town councils. The effect of the statutes was also rhetorical. They portrayed an orderly urban community through norms for adult male behaviour. The Sacred Ordinances can be read as an effort by university professors to imagine an orderly community. The notary who drafted the Sacred Ordinances requiring magnates to post 1000 libra security within a month used a powerful visual image to justify this extraordinary measure: ‘volentes et intendentes quod lupi rapaces et agni mansueti ambulent pari gradu’ (‘wishing and intending that rapacious wolves and tame lambs walk at an equal pace’). Massimo Giansante has analysed the origins of this image in the Book of Isaiah’s discussion of the peaceable kingdom.8 But there is a clever difference. This is not the peaceable kingdom in which the lion lies down with the lamb and wolves and sheep feed together. The point instead is to find a way to enable them to coexist. The wolf will presumably remain rapacious, but making him post a large security and defend his interests in the courts will allow the lamb a chance. Another aspect of the tendency to normalize the magnates has been to see them as a constructed threat. Andrea Zorzi in a 1995 article on the Florentine Ordinances of Justice stressed the idea that the Florentine laws restricting the magnates served primarily as a means of ideological legitimation of the new corporate regime. Zorzi rightly criticized work – including my own – that was 5

Pini, ‘Magnati e popolani’, p. 392. Giuliano Milani, ‘Bologna’s Two Exclusions and the Power of Law Experts’, (2002), available on Reti Medievali: http://fermi.univr.it/RM/biblioteca/scaffale/ m.htm#Giuliano%20Milani. 7 Sara Menzinger, Giuristi e politica nei comuni di popolo: Siena, Perugia e Bologna, tre governi a confronto (Rome, 2006), chapters 3 and 4. 8 Massimo Giansante, ‘Uomini e angeli. Gerarchie angeliche e modelli di potere nel Duecento’, Nuova Rivista Storica 81 (1997): 349–72; ‘I lupi e gli agnelli. Ideologia e storia di una metafora’, Nuova Rivista Storica 83 (1999): 215–24. 6

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too quick to see recourse to the vendetta as a pattern opposed to public justice, rather than as a part of larger familial strategies of conflict resolution that moved in and out of the courts. Popolani as well as nobles had recourse to the vendetta, and reprisals were legal provided they were proportional to the offence. The vendetta thus could serve to regulate violence. Zorzi’s larger point was that the magnates were a political construct. He sees in late thirteenth-century political language a campaign to discredit the magnates, or as he put it a genuine effort to demonize them.9 This was a political discourse – taken up by the chroniclers as well as the lawmakers – that exaggerated magnate violence and demonized their forms of oppression of popolani. It was for this reason, Zorzi argues, that chroniclers emphasized vendetta as typical of magnates, rather than diffused through the society; they were suggesting that only the magnates threatened ‘the peaceful and tranquil state of the commune’. He writes, ‘The solidarity of the interests of the “popolo” was also forged through the demonization of the adversary and the manipulation of consensus.’10 The reason the laws designed to discipline magnate behaviour were often ineffective was that their real point was to legitimate the popular regime. In the last five years, scholars have returned to an emphasis on the predatory aspects of noble culture. Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur in his 2003 Cavaliers et citoyens analysed the culture of urban elites before about 1250. He argued for a common elite military culture in the twelfth and thirteenthcentury communes, terming them the militia. They comprised the upper 10–15 per cent of the urban population in most towns and were defined not by titles but by their ability to fight on horse.11 These were, he thinks, knights without lords, though intertwined with feudal nobles from the countryside. Maire Vigueur emphasizes their culture of predation, annual raiding parties into the countryside termed cavalcate. A cavalcata was a raid by knights and their followers, who would sack, burn, and carry off whatever livestock and goods they could. Maire Vigueur argues that milites into the thirteenth century routinely launched cavalcate during the summer, the season of war, and that the point was spoils as much as diplomacy by other means. When communes turned in the mid-thirteenth century to reliance on a civic militia it was a significant change, challenging an older military regime. While Maire Vigueur’s primary interest was knights before the imposition of laws defining

9 ‘[U]na vera e propria opera di demonizzazione dei Magnati.’ Andrea Zorzi, ‘Politica e giustizia a Firenze al tempo degli Ordinamenti antimagnatizi’, in Vanna Arrighi (ed.), Ordinamenti di giustizia fiorentini (Florence, 1995), pp. 104–148. The quote is from p. 137. 10 Zorzi, ‘Politica e giustizia’, p. 138: ‘La solidarietà degli interessi di « popolo » si forgiava anche attraverso la demonizzazione dell’avversario e la manipolazione del consenso.’ 11 See Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, ‘L’ufficiale forestiero’, in Ceti, modelli, comportamenti nella società medievale (secoli XIII–metà XIV) (Pistoia, 2001), pp. 75–97, and his Cavaliers et citoyens. Guerre, conflits et société dans l’Italie communale XIIe–XIIIe siècles (Paris, 2004).

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them as magnates, the implications for the magnates seem to me clear: that they were the primary heirs of this predatory military culture. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber’s 2006 Retour à la cité is a study of the Florentine magnates after 1340, with an emphasis on their gradual reintegration into the city. She argues overall that the problem driving the restriction of the magnates was their violence and the need for public order, and sees them as characterized by a sense of impunity and a lack of self-control. The use of knighthood as a criterion for magnate status, she suggests, was not so much because of its associations with nobility, but because knights posed a danger because they carried weapons.12 Klapisch-Zuber relied in part on a remarkable body of sources: denunciations to the Florentine Executor of the Ordinances of Justice. This was an office created in 1306 to defend the popular constitution and ensure the enforcement of the Ordinances. The Executor like the podestà was an outsider appointed for a semester, with his own officials. Unlike the podestà, the Executor explicitly could not be a knight. The official became the guarantor of the legitimacy of the Florentine legal system more generally, handling not only denunciations of magnates but sindications of former outsider officials and civic officers accused of misuse of office, as well as oversight of the prisons.13 The Executor held his tribunal in the palace of the priors, next door to the Capitano del Popolo. Men of the popolo had the opportunity to go into the tribunal to report on noble misbehaviour; magnates and women were not allowed in the building. Women called as witnesses were questioned on the steps. Anyone could drop a written denunciation in a tamburo, a sort of mailbox, outside the building. The denunciations could be anonymous but had to include a list of witnesses. They were both civil and criminal: one of the earliest to survive is the complaint of a wet-nurse left unpaid by a Rossi.14 The Executor and his officials along with the Capitano opened up the tamburo, read and copied the denunciations once a week, on Fridays. If a charge fitted within their legal parameters, they were obligated to hold an inquest. Then if they found sufficient legal grounds for proof, they would relate the case to the podestà, to be tried in his court. People actively made use of this system. A denunciation was often preferable to a direct accusation, for several reasons. A denouncer could remain anonymous, and was not liable if the charge was unproven. Further, since this became an ex officio inquest, the court could convict on some charges and acquit on others. If a person lodged an accusation, the entire charge had to be proven. If not, the accuser could be held liable for the costs of the defence. As Klapisch-Zuber points out, there were many false accusations, and of course accusations by magnates. 12

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Retour à la cité. Les magnats de Florence, 1340–1440 (Paris, 2006) cites her earlier articles on the magnates as well. 13 There is an excellent recent account of the nature of the office in the Sistema Informatico section of the Florentine archive website: archiviodistato.firenze.it/siasfi/. 14 ASF, Atti del Esecutore degli Ordinamenti di Giustizia (hereafter Atti del Esecutore), 7, f. 3r.

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The records survive only from after July 1343 because the earlier ones were burned in the fire in the Camera del Comune that was part of the tumultuous expulsion of the signore Walter of Brienne. They have been studied by Zorzi and Claudia Caduff as well as by Klapisch-Zuber. Caduff published a fine analysis of the denunciations of 1345–1346, thoroughly grounded in Florentine politics and law.15 Among other things, she found that three quarters of the denunciations in that period came from the contado. Most were unsuccessful: in 1345, the Executor acted on only about one denunciation in four. Caduff emphasized magnate violence against women and clerics, as well as their exercise of seigneurial rights, points to which I will return. Klapisch-Zuber analysed a sample of denunciations of magnate violence to the Executor, from the years 1344–1350, 1367–1377 and 1400–1405. Klapisch-Zuber treated them not as a measure of noble criminality, but rather as a source for popular perceptions of the magnates. Some conclusions are very clear. Almost all the accused magnates came from urban families (80 per cent), with the Rossi drawing by far the most denunciations. One in seven accusations involved illicit occupations of houses and lands, especially of church properties: one in four of that group were attacks on clerics and their goods. Eleven per cent of the victims were women and 40 per cent of that group was raped, significantly higher than the percentage of rape charges in the civic courts. Overall, KlapischZuber emphasizes their violent exploitation of the resources of the contado. I would like to build on the analysis of Caduff and Klapisch-Zuber by arguing that the denunciations also suggest that magnate violence could be a way to reinforce informal lordship. Magnate culture – whatever the social origins of particular lineages – was in part based on forms of domination. Actions constructed in terms of rage and violence could in practice serve as strategies to force obedience. I have read the earliest of the Executor’s criminal registers, 1343–1348, and have assembled 143 criminal cases. The various aspects of the court’s procedure were recorded in different registers, and not all of them survive, but as far as possible I have attempted to reconstruct how these cases came out: when there were multiple denunciations for the same offence, when witnesses and the purported victim were actually willing to testify, when the Executor’s judge considered that the case was proved and reported it to the podestà’s court, when the ultimate result was a conviction. This contribution is an initial analysis; I intend to pursue this material further, with emphasis on detailed reconstruction of community responses. In what circumstances were villagers willing to testify? The serious cases were largely from the contado and district, as Caduff suggested. Overall, of the 143 cases I have analysed, 93 were assaults; 24 of those were urban, 61 rural and the remainder uncertain. There were 14 charges of homicide, only one of them urban, a case that was unproven and in fact led to a false witness charge against those who testified to a killing.16 15 Claudia Caduff, ‘Magnati e popolani nel contado fiorentino: dinamiche sociali e rapporti di potere nel Trecento’, Rivista di storia dell’agricoltura 33 (1993): 15–63. 16 The initial denunciations for homicides are Atti del Esecutore 1, ff. 20r, 22r,

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The rural denunciations include 17 cases in which not an individual but an armed band led by magnates attacked.17 One example is an Adimari attack on a mill. The denunciation was dated 11 December, 1344.18 Two Adimari with eight armed followers rode to a mill, stole all the goods in it, particularly the metal and the grain, burned the building and then robbed and burned a house as well. This seems to me an instance of the kind of cavalcata described by Maire Vigueur. Attacks on clerics and church property often took this form: a band of armed men rode to a church, assaulted or even killed the priest, and carried off property. The cases reinforce George Dameron’s argument that ecclesiastical patronage rights and church property were at the centre of the struggle over the magnates.19 It may be that these were not simply raiding parties but efforts to assert or regain control of patronage rights over these valuable properties, an issue I plan to research further. To give another instance among many, on 11 August 1346, Scolaio della Tosa went to the rural parish of Santa Maria a Carraia, got into an argument with the priest in the choir of the church, and hit the man with his sheathed sword. The priest escaped to the campanile and rang the bell to summon help.20 The Della Tosa lineage had long exercised extensive rights over the Florentine church, and Scolaio may well have demanded something of the priest on that basis.21 The denunciations to the Executor, particularly those from the countryside, strongly suggest that magnate violence could be a weapon of domination.22 Nobles, male and in some cases female, used rage and violence to reinforce claims to land, resources and labour. One vivid example survives in the sentences of the court of the podestà. A man named Chele Nutini from San Godenzo in the Mugello denounced and accused Count Guido Domestico, of the very powerful Guidi counts. The denunciation is dated 30 March 1345. The charge was explicitly according to the forms of the Ordinances of Justice, although I do not know whether it was heard first in the Executor’s court. The Guidi had ceded San Godenzo to Florence in 1344, just two years before. Chele’s position may have been based on this jurisdictional change. Chele, terming himself a free popolano of the city and people of Florence, charged that Count Guido had ordered him – as if he were the count’s man, his fidelis – to 25r, 27r, 30r, 46r; 21, ff. 69r, 76r; 50, ff. 7r, 25r, 31r; 51, ff. 16r, 39r, 46r; 96, f. 10r. The false witness charge is 89, f. 16r. 17 The initial denunciations for attacks by armed bands are Atti del Esecutore 1, f. 16r, 22r, 46r; 21, ff. 54r, 69r; 33, ff. 38r, 49r, 59r; 50, ff. 31r, 39r (two cases); 66, f. 3r; 68, f. 9r; 96, ff. 31r, 61r, 92r, 112r. 18 Atti del Esecutore, 1, ff. 16r–19v. See ASF, Capitano del Popolo 1, f. 3r for the inquest. 19 George Dameron, ‘Revisiting the Italian Magnates’, Viator 23 (1992): 259–82. See also George Dameron, Florence and its Church in the Age of Dante (Philadelphia, 2005). 20 Atti del Esecutore 69, ff. 47r–50v. 21 See Lansing, Florentine Magnates, chapter 4. 22 There is a rich literature on Florentine lordship and the contado. See Giovanni Cherubini, Signori, contadini, borghesi. Ricerche sulla società italiana del Basso Medioevo (Florence, 1974); Paolo Pirillo, Costruzione di un contado. I Fiorentini e il loro territorio nel Basso Medioevo (Florence, 2001).

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travel to one of the Guidi castles, in Romandola, and perform guard service. When Chele refused to go to the castle or serve as his fidelis, Count Guido, ‘seeing that Chele was amused by his order’, ‘driven by rage’ took over 50 of his men to Chele’s house. They stole all of his grain, wine, household goods and even his animals. Then, they burned the house. ‘Persevering in his rage’, Count Guido then had his men cut down all the trees and vines on Chele’s land and even burned the chestnuts. Chele was left with scorched earth. Count Guido was contumacious and therefore convicted in absentia, sentenced to pay damages, restore the property, pay a hefty fine and if captured to be burned.23 However, the odds of enforcement of the sentence were slim. I suspect that the next time Count Guido ordered a man to go on guard service, the fellow would have complied. Rage enforced noble claims. Violence could force compliance with noble demands and also intimidate witnesses and victims. Of course, not all of the magnates charged with attacks were wealthy and powerful men, or the heirs of the older nobility. These cases date from roughly 50 years after the imposition of the Ordinances, and many of the magnates were significantly weakened. Some were evidently desperate. The violent strategies they employed, it seems to me, follow a pattern of force and intimidation. Mannolo of the Nerli was denounced on 24 March 1346 for going to a hospice at the bridge over the Greve on the road to Pisa. The owner had recently died and his son, Ser Manecto, had taken over. Mannolo demanded his annual payment of grain. Ser Manecto responded that he knew his father had paid it but that Mannolo had no rightful claim and he was not going to pay the grain. Mannolo took him by the throat and squeezed until the innkeeper clearly had to choose between death and compliance. He gave in. The case was reported anonymously, and four witnesses testified to it. When the victim, Ser Manecto, was called in, he denied the whole thing. The witnesses were lucky they were not charged with false testimony.24 One result was that country people had legitimate fear of reprisals. Some denunciations explicitly speak of fear. Geri di Maruccio Cavalcanti was denounced in December 1346 for a homicide committed almost nine years earlier, in August or September 1337. The denouncer explained that the whole parish knew of it ‘but out of fear the family … does not dare to demand justice’. The denouncer asked the Executor to investigate ‘so that these pessimi grandi do not dare to devour the blood of the poor popolani. I also remind your most just office that the witnesses written here for the most part are labourers held by the Cavalcanti and out of fear hide the truth.’25 Apparently, some witnesses did testify, since the marginalia indicates that the case was referred to the podestà’s court. People could be persuaded to testify against nobles only with great difficulty because of the fear of reprisals. The safest course was to turn up 23 24 25

cedula.

ASF, Podestà 135, ff. 260v–261r. Atti del Esecutore, 51, f. 35r. Atti del Esecutore 51, f. 16r. See Capitano de Popolo 35, ff. 25v–26r for the

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– avoiding a 25 libra fine for noncompliance – but to deny all knowledge. This was onerous, particularly for country people who had to walk to Florence, stay overnight, take the oath and testify, then return home. The dynamics can be revealing. Someone denounced Giovanni di Guelfo de Pulcis for clobbering Grasso di Guccio in the head with the pommel of his sword, so that he fell to the ground with his face covered with blood. People came running and urged him to make a denunciation, but he explicitly non volle denuptiare. Someone did nevertheless, on 21 January 1344, listing 23 witnesses. Three told the story to the court; the rest, including the apparent victim, denied it. The three witnesses were then charged with false testimony, confessed and were put in the Stinche, the aptly named Florentine prison.26 Perhaps it was a false charge, a common occurrence, but it is also quite possible that the assault did take place, the victim feared to testify and those who did ended up confessing to false testimony under unbearable pressure. Again, Jacopo de Bardis was denounced for repeatedly hitting Gualterino di Duccio Parenti over the head with a wine jug. Gualterino died of his injuries. On 6 March 1346, the court summoned 19 witnesses from Gualterino’s parish of San Niccolò in Calenzano, as well as the doctor who treated him. All 20 testified that they knew nothing of the case.27 It is difficult to track how often witnesses denied all knowledge overall, but one register in which the court notary recorded procedural details is vivid. A register derived from the tenure of Michelucccio Johannelli de Micheloctis of Perugia (January–May 1347–1378) includes 42 cases sparked by denunciations of magnates.28 Twenty – almost half – were dropped because either the witnesses or the victim or both denied all knowledge. In four of the 20 dropped cases the victims themselves denied it; in two cases only the victims testified, so the case was unproven. So for example Sagliano Benazi from Cersina testified that Gherardo Mari of the Adimari sent his men to steal his grain, and then sold it, but none of the eight witnesses spoke up, so the case was dropped. Of course, it is hard to measure how often witnesses did not testify out of intimidation rather than for some other reason. Perhaps at times they genuinely knew nothing. Arson was a potent weapon. Niccolò di Nosso Buondelmonti was denounced for a series of attacks, including running down a priest on horseback and cutting him down with his sword. He was also accused of going with a band of ‘fanti’, troops, in July 1343 to a Piero Chiano’s house in Mercatale, at night. Niccolò threatened to burn the house with Piero and his children in it if he did not pay 10 gold florins. When Piero cried out for mercy, people of the community came running but turned back when they saw Niccolò. The only exception was a smith called Padella. He was persuaded to give Niccolò

26

Atti del Esecutore 21, f. 37r. Atti del Esecutore 51, ff. 46r–47r. They were summoned on 6 March and testified on 8 March. 28 Atti del Esecutore 96. 27

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the money to rescue Piero. The Executor did hold an inquest: 21 witnesses, including Padella, stated that they knew nothing.29 There was of course a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate demands – but it could be blurred in practice. It also is important to remember that even if a demand was legal, peasants might have to be forced to comply. Sometimes, actions denounced as crimes were deemed legal, or at least outside Florentine jurisdiction. In 1346, the court was notified that three of the Alberti Counts of Mangona had ordered one of their henchmen to kill a man called Giusto di Sozzo of the village of Santa Margarita in Mangona. After extensive debate and even a vote by the Priors, the court did not proceed because the Alberti and not Florence had legal jurisdiction over Mangona and its people.30 There are also repeated references to the use of family prisons. KlapischZuber pointed out that the Agli were known for their private prison and use of torture, something the chronicler Dino Compagni claimed was said of the Bostichi as well.31 This was related to the legal jurisdiction of lords like the Alberti. Other cases raise the problem of the uses of rape and lordship. KlapischZuber, following Caduff, found that nobles were charged with rape four times as often as the general population.32 We have come to understand that rape can be a weapon of war. Was it also at times a weapon of lordship, a way to dominate and humiliate, men as well as women? In one lurid case from April of 1347, Cherico de Pazzi sent his tenant named Dino out to collect wood, and then attempted to rape his wife Francisca. She resisted, and Dino returned to find Cherico dragging her towards the bed and beating her. Cherico initially told him to keep silent, and he would improve his condition: tolerate my sexual use of your wife, and I will make you one of my boni homines; trade sexual honour for betterment of status. Dino refused, a fistfight ensued and Cherico was denounced to the Executor. The pattern of the witnesses in the inquest is revealing: the village men, even the priest, initially were not willing to speak, but the women were, including Francisca. Were they combatting a longstanding pattern, or simply outraged at Cherico’s behaviour? Cherico was convicted of assault and attempted rape and paid a 600 libra fine. Two months later, his son Cinozzo retaliated against Francisca, striking her with the pommel of his sword and then attempting to kidnap her, probably again intending rape.33 He also was convicted of the assault. In a number of episodes women were kidnapped and raped repeatedly. One spectacular case involves Angelo Panziere de Ricasolis. According to 29

Atti del Esecutore 51, f. 39r–v. The inquest is Atti del Esecutore 54, ff. 72r–74r. Atti del Esecutore 50, ff. 31r; 65, ff. 4r–5v; 68, f. 7r; 69, f. 15r. 31 Klapisch-Zuber, Retour à la cité, p. 109, and Dino Compagni, Cronica, ed. Gino Luzzato (Turin, 1968), p. 100. 32 Klapisch-Zuber, Retour à la cité, p. 125; Caduff, ‘Magnati e popolani’, pp. 39–43. 33 Atti del Executore 51, ff. 48r–50r; 54, ff. 81r–83r; 69, ff. 5v–12r, 51r–52v. The sentences are ASF, Podestà 155, ff. 92r, 285r–v; Podestà 149, ff. 19r–21v. 30

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the denunciations, one Sunday in May 1344 he attacked a married woman nicknamed Banbina in the piazza of San Bartolomeo de Stielle, knocking a pot off her head. Two weeks later, he threatened her husband Poccia with a sword, saying ‘I am going to have you killed’, then carried Banbina off against her will and held her for many days in his house, having sex and committing adultery with her. Then in August he did have Poccia killed, ordering two men to butcher him and bring back proof. They ambushed Poccia on the road to Siena and brought back one of his hands, which Angelo fed to his dogs.34 Angelo ultimately was condemned in the podestà’s court on 18 February 1345; the sentence was cancelled on 4 May because of a council decision, and he paid a fine. Banbina apparently became his concubine. In sum, there is clearly validity to scholarly efforts to normalize the magnates. The nobles were needed to govern, and popular communes like Bologna found ways to slip selected magnates back into power, often in advisory roles. It also is surely the case that the popular regimes sought to demonize the magnates in order to consolidate and legitimate their own rule. However, this does not mean that magnate violence was not a genuine threat. The records of denunciations by contadini to the Florentine Executor of the Ordinances of Justice strongly suggest that magnate violence was not only a matter of a lack of self-control and sense of impunity, but could also be an effective strategy. This was true whether or not their claims had any legitimate basis. Count Guido Domestico used a show of violent rage to devastate a man’s property because he was unwilling to perform guard service. Mannolo de Nerli choked a man until he agreed to comply with an annual payment of grain that he believed to be illicit, and until he was too frightened to testify. Cherico de Pazzi told one of his labourers that if he tolerated the rape of his wife, he could be one of his boni homines. This was the calculated use of violence to dominate a rural population.

34 Atti del Esecutore 33, f. 41r is the kidnap denunciation. Atti del Esecutore 50, f. 25r is the homicide denunciation. Atti del Esecutore 50, ff. 33r, 45r are efforts to carry out the sentence against his kinsmen. His sentence is Atti del Esecutore 56, ff. 19r–20r.

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Part III

Political Thought: Theory and Practice

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4 Communes and Despots: Some Italian and Transalpine Political Thinkers Robert Black

In ‘Communes and Despots’, Philip Jones drew attention to two alternative political theories corresponding to the contrast in practice between communes and despots: For Italian political theorists monarchy remained the common ideal of government, not only for civilian and canon lawyers or academic philosophers, but also for humanist writers, of whom a number in the fifteenth century composed conventional tracts on the rule of princes. Princely rule, however, was not the exclusive ideal. On the contrary, it was precisely in the later Middle Ages, when monarchy was everywhere gaining ground and political indifference increasing, that Italy was swept … by a ‘current of republicanism’ in sentiment and doctrine.1

It is easy to illustrate these preferences among Italian writers. Dante’s advocacy of monarchy is too well known to be repeated here, but his contemporary Egidio Colonna (alias Giles of Rome) argued in favour of oneman rule too: All the universe is directed by one ruler, God … If, therefore, the government of the whole universe is assimilated to the government which ought to be in one person, since the city is part of the universe, all the more should the government of the whole city be reserved to one house.2

Giles’s preferences are readily understood: the residual might of the great aristocracy, as Jones frequently observed, had often overwhelmed the Italian 1

Philip J. Jones, ‘Communes and Despots: the City State in Late-Medieval Italy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 15 (1965): 71–96, 72; this volume, chapter 1, p. 4. 2 Aegidius Romanus, De regimine principum libri III, Liber II, pars I, cap. XIV, (Rome 1556) f. 154v, trans. James M. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1992), p. 69 (adapted).

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city republics, and it is not hard to recognize in Giles – a scion of a particularly illustrious Italian noble house – an opponent of popular civic republicanism based on social equality: Never from many humans will one society or polity occur naturally, unless it is natural that some rule and others serve. Therefore, some are naturally lords, and some naturally servants.3

Pro-monarchical statements could come from unlikely sources in Italy. One was Coluccio Salutati, who, although chancellor of the Florentine republic, still advocated monarchy in his treatise, De tyranno, published in 1400: Is it not sound politics, approved by the judgement of all wise men, that monarchy is to be preferred to all other forms of government, provided only that it be in the hands of a wise and good man? There is no greater liberty than obedience to the just commands of a virtuous prince. As there is no better or more divine rule than that of the universe under one God, so human sovereignty is the higher the more nearly it approaches that ideal. But nothing can be more like this than the rule of one man … Among the kinds of government … monarchy has precedence over all the rest.4

De tyranno was written in the summer of 1400, when, in the throes of war against Milan, the Florentines had their hopes pinned on a new emperor who would revoke the ducal title accorded to Giangaleazzo Visconti by King Wenceslas. Since 1397 Florence had been the moving force behind the effort, in alliance with the imperial electors, to depose Wenceslas on the grounds that he had debased the dignity of the empire by alienating imperial prerogatives when he created Giangaleazzo duke of Milan. In this period Florence may have been hostile to Wenceslas but was anything but anti-imperial, and Salutati’s political thought ran in tandem with Florentine diplomacy. At a time when Florence’s efforts on behalf of a renovatio imperii culminated in the deposition of the discredited Wenceslas and the election of Rupert of Bavaria, Salutati published his strongly pro-monarchical and pro-imperial De tyranno.5 Another pro-monarchical chancellor of the Florentine republic was Bartolomeo Scala. In his Apologues of 1481 Scala rejected democracy and criticized republics for lacking constancy and stability; not the people but only leaders of states could command virtue, which was the prerequisite of sovereignty. All this has obvious Medicean overtones, and Scala went on to argue that among leaders of states exercising sovereignty Cosimo de’ Medici 3

Aegidius Romanus, De regimine, Liber II, pars III, cap. XIII, f. 225v, trans. Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 76 (adapted). 4 Coluccio Salutati, Il trattato ‘De tyranno’ e lettere scelte, ed. Francesco Ercole (Bologna 1942), p. 32, trans. Ephraim Emerton, Humanism and Tyranny (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), p. 108. 5 Robert Black, ‘The Political Thought of the Florentine Chancellors’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), p. 993; Theodor Lindner, Geschichte des deutschen Reiches unter König Wenzel, vol. 2 (Braunschweig 1880), pp. 504–6; Daniela De Rosa, Coluccio Salutati: il cancelliere e il pensatore politico (Florence, 1980), p. xiii.

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had been foremost as a result of his special virtue and wisdom. The Medici may not have portrayed or presented themselves as princes of Florence, but they do not seem to have been averse to arguments in favour of monarchy mounted by their close associates, as for example in Scala’s On Laws and Legal Judgements of 1483: How much better therefore … one could live according to the direction of a good man and a good judge under the guidance of nature (which is always free and immune to any outside ordinances, fully attending to what has to be decided in every eventuality according to the time and circumstances of each), than according to the necessity which men imposed on themselves … For just as sailors without their captain are borne hither and thither at random and often perish, smashed against the rocks, engulfed by waves, or, driven by gusts of wind, are borne where they cannot later be recovered by human means; or as a flock of sheep is dispersed if it loses its shepherd; or as soldiers are thrown into confusion and suffer death and other dangers without their commander: so, if you neglect, scorn and reject the ruler, custodian and leader of all human affairs and actions, you must expect and suffer the worst.6

Unqualified republicanism is easy to illustrate among Italian political writers too. An early example comes from Brunetto Latini (c.1220–1294). Aristotle had repeatedly stated that, in the abstract, monarchy was the best form of government,7 and Latini learned his views from the Compendium Alexandrium compiled from the Ethics.8 But in the Trésor, Latini reversed the preference, putting communal – that is republican – government first: ‘The first is of kings, the second is of aristocrats, the third is of communes, the last of which is the very best among the others.’9 The most categorically republican scholastic was Ptolemy of Lucca (c.1236– 1327). He reduced Aristotle’s six-fold classification to two: regimen despoticum and regimen politicum, defining the latter as one carried out according to law for the benefit of the majority of the people.10 He therefore assimilated regimen regale with regimen despoticum (‘includendo in despotico etiam regale’11) and argued that a republican system (regimen politicum) was always preferable: ‘Regimen politicum regali praeponitur’.12 He boasted that republicanism

6 Bartolomeo Scala, De legibus et iudiciis dialogus, ed. Lamberto Borghi, La bibliofilia, 42 (1990), p. 70, trans. Alison Brown, Bartolomeo Scala, 1437–1497, Chancellor of Florence. The Humanist as Bureaucrat (Princeton, 1979), pp. 291–2. 7 Aristoteles latinus. Ethica Nicomachea, trans. Robert Grosseteste, ed. René A. Guathier (Leiden, 1972), pp. 313–14. See also Politics III, XII.1. 8 See Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Marsilius of Padua and Italian Political Thought of his Time’, in Beryl Smalley, John Hale and Roger Highfield (eds), Europe in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1965), pp. 44–75, p. 51. 9 Cited by Rubinstein, ‘Marsilius’, p. 51. 10 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978), p. 54. 11 Cited by Rubinstein, ‘Marsilius’, p. 52, note 3. 12 Cited by Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 100, note 20.

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above all flourished in Italy,13 which was a region where freedom was so highly prized that it was impossible for tyranny to prevail.14 Republican government was also preferred by the ancient Romans, he argued.15 Ptolemy was a consistent champion of the Roman republic and critic of the empire, celebrating republican institutions and heroes such as Cato and Cicero, and vilifying Julius Caesar as a usurper.16 Another committed republican was Marsilius of Padua (c.1270 – c.1342). He argued that, in every political community, sovereignty belonged to a legislator consisting of the ‘populum seu civium universitatem aut eius valenciorem partem’. ‘It seems clear that Marsilius intends the “weightier part” to include all free adult males of all classes, with the exception of a very few “deformed” men, whose lack of reason would impede or prevent the implementation of the common good.’17 Marsilius went on to say that the legislator can devolve the administration of government (pars principans) into the hands of various types of regime, including an elective monarchy (such as the Roman empire), but a republic remains for him the best form of government. ‘Individual legislators are liable to make laws to suit their private rather than the public interest: “the authority to make laws belongs, therefore, to the whole body of citizens or to the weightier part thereof … For since no one knowingly harms … himself, it follows that all or most want a law conducive to the common benefit of the citizens”. Unlike St Thomas and Giles of Rome he did not consider a monarch best fitted to procure the common good of the people.’18 ‘Marsilius … believed in popular sovereignty in every case as the best means to the common good.’19 Most North European political thinkers in the later Middle Ages were guided by their immediate experiences and so wrote in terms of monarchies, but sometimes they had positive comments to make about republics too. All things being equal, Aquinas was a monarchist, but, in a frequently cited passage, he eloquently argued for the advantages of republicanism over monarchy: Just as Sallust relates, it is incredible to recall the rapid expansion of Rome once liberty was achieved. For it often happens that men living under a king are somewhat reluctant to strive for the common good: they think that the effort they make will benefit someone else, not themselves … But when they see that the common good is not in the control of one man, they no longer regard it as the property of an external individual but as though they were looking after what belonged to them. Hence experience teaches 13

See Rubinstein, ‘Marsilius’, p. 52, note 2. See Skinner, Foundations, p. 54. 15 See Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 103, note 25. 16 See Skinner, Foundations, p. 55. 17 James M. Blythe, ‘“Civic Humanism” and Medieval Political Thought’, in James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism. Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 30–74, at p. 64; Blythe, Ideal Government, pp. 196–7. 18 Rubinstein, ‘Marsilius’, p. 73. 19 Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 65. 14

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that a city administered by annually elected magistrates will attain greater power than a king who rules over three or four cities. And small exactions by kings seem more onerous than heavy burdens imposed by a community of citizens. All this can be seen in the growth of the Roman Republic. For the plebs enlisted in the army; and they paid the soldiers’ wages, and when the communal treasury could not meet the cost of their pay, they donated their private savings to the public cause.20

Peter of Auvergne (1240s–1304), a pupil of Aquinas’s and bishop of Clermont, was a monarchist.21 Nevertheless, he also showed sympathy for popular republican government, distinguishing between populaces which are, and are not, vile or bestial. In the latter case, they are more fit to rule than an oligarchy: A bestial multitude … is born to be under despotic rule. A well-persuasible multitude mixed from the wise and the common is another thing … [this] second multitude … ought more to rule than the few virtuous. The reason is that … it is more expedient for that to rule which attains simultaneously to those three things which are necessary to rule than that which only attains to two. But this is that multitude, for in so far as there are prudent men in it it has prudence and virtue, and in so far as there are many it has potency. But the few attain to two, and therefore, it is more expedient that such a multitude dominate than the few virtuous.22

If there is a city with notable equality and liberty, then it is better for it to enjoy rule by the populace rather than by middling elements.23 Despite his theoretical preference for monarchy,24 Nicole Oresme (c.1320– 1382), an important French scientist, theologian and ecclesiastic, favoured the Roman Republic and condemned the Empire. The Republic had thrived while the people behaved sensibly and operated a constitution with power shared by monarchical consuls, aristocratic senators and democratic tribunes. But when the Romans relinquished all power to an absolute emperor, their polity deteriorated, their prosperity ended and their power declined.25

20 Thomas Aquinas, De regimine principum ad regem Cypri, lb. I cp. 5, in Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia, ed. Roberto Busa (7 vols, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1980), vol. 3, p. 596. 21 [Peter of Auvergne,] Questiones super Politicum, 3.q.16.295vb, cited from Paris Bibliothèque Nationale ms. latin 16089, by Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 83. 22 Peter of Auvergne, Questiones, 3.1.15.295rb–295va, cited by Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 80, from Paris Bibliothèque Nationale ms. latin 16089 (trans. adapted). 23 Peter of Auvergne, In octo libros Politicorum Aristotelis expositio, Liber IV, lectio X, cap. 643, in Thomas Aquinas, In octo libros Politicorum Aristotelis, ed. Raimondo M. Spiazzi (Turin 1966), p. 224. See Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 90, note 34. 24 Nicole d’Oresme, Le livre de Politiques d’Aristote, Livre 3, ch. 20; Livre 7, ch. 10; Livre 7, ch. 29: ed. Albert D. Menut, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 60 (1970), pp. 145, 291, 324. See Blythe, Ideal Government, pp. 217–18, note 48. 25 Oresme, Le livre de Politiques, Livre 5, ch. 25, pp. 242–3. See Blythe, ‘Civic Humanism’, p. 43, note 37.

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Engelbert of Admont (c.1250–1331) saw much to praise in the republican government current in Italy at the turn of the fourteenth century, particularly the more popular type of regime in which the power of the nobility was limited: [In order that] choice of podestàs and consuls and the establishment of statutes permitting or forbidding something proceed without fear and danger according to virtue and truth, individuals express their consent for this side or that not through words but through certain lots which they call ballots. This seems very reasonable and considered since according to Aristotle in the first book of the Rhetoric, ‘there exist two things which especially impede right counsel: fear and error’. In ballots fear is guarded against through lot because it is not known who consents to a proposition or is against it. But error is guarded against by art, because everyone is free to counsel, which seems rather useful. But since nobles for the greater part aspire more to power and their own pre-eminence and to the good of their own [following] than to the common good, for this reason cities under a better government are accustomed rarely to choose or admit nobles to the consulate and to governments, but they choose good men according to virtue and love from the common people.26

Before becoming a Benedictine abbot in Salzburg and Admont, Engelbert had spent several years studying in Padua, and there is little doubt that he acquired his knowledge of, and indeed predilection for, Italianate civic republicanism from his Paduan experience. Another northerner with long experience of Italy was the German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), who emerges as an opponent of kingship and champion of popular sovereignty: Legislation ought to be adopted by all those who are to be bound by it or by a majority of their representatives because it should benefit the common good and what touches all should be approved by all. Therefore it is best for a commonwealth [republica] to be ruled by laws rather than by the best of men. For where laws do not rule, there is no polity [i.e. good government].27

Jones ends his article by assimilating republics and despotisms: Between republics and despotisms the resemblances seem at least as great as the differences. In political organization both prolonged the past without radical alteration … In this period, in all states, the same interests prevailed, power and office were effectively restricted to the same privileged order, and from the mass of people, under republics and despots alike, the same complaints monotonously arise.28

26 Engelbert of Admont, De regimine principum (Regensburg, 1725), Tractatus I, cap. VII, p. 22; trans. Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 127 (adapted). 27 Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, ed. and trans. Paul E. Sigmund (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 208–9. See Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 255, note 24. 28 Jones, ‘Communes and Despots’, pp. 94–5; this volume, chapter 1, pp. 23–4.

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Jones’s analysis is echoed in contemporary political theory – albeit with less overt cynicism. Mixed monarchy and political relativism were the theorists’ way of saying that there was not such a difference between communes and despots. Such an approach was often favoured in Northern Europe. Thomas Aquinas had been raised in the south of Italy under one of medieval Europe’s most centralized governments and, moreover, had spent his maturity in Paris under increasingly authoritarian Capetian rule. Yet not even he was an uncritical absolute monarchist. On the contrary, he favoured a mixed monarchy, in which the authority of the king was tempered by the nobles and the people: The best order of rulers is in some city or kingdom, in which one is placed in authority according to his virtue who has precedence over all, and under him are some ruling according to virtue; and nevertheless such rule pertains to all, because they can be chosen from all and they are chosen by all. Such is the best polity, well-mixed from kingdom, insofar as one has precedence over all, and aristocracy, insofar as many rule according to their virtue, and from democracy, that is from the power of the people, insofar as princes can be chosen from the people, and election of princes pertains to the people.29

Repeating Aristotle’s views about how climate determined the best form of government,30 Engelbert of Admont declared that there was no one ideal constitution: We do not intend to say that this or that polity is the best or worst of all; because, just as Aristotle says in the third book of the Ethics: ‘Perhaps the best polity has not yet been discovered’ … To find … a king who does nothing beyond reason, or a good and virtuous consul who in nothing exceeds the mean of virtue, or a rich and powerful individual who intends nothing according to reason and virtue but all according to his will – this happens rather according to imagination and intellect than according to the thing and act. We can more readily invent such persons mentally than discover them in reality.31

John of Paris (c.1250–1304), a leading Dominican preacher in Paris and famous as a publicist for Philip IV in his conflict with Boniface VIII, tended to favour monarchy over aristocracy or democracy: Every multitude, with each seeking his own good, will dissipate and be dispersed into diverse parts unless it is ordered to the common good through someone who has care of the common good … It is more useful for the government of a multitude to be ruled by one who has precedence according to virtue than by many or a few virtuous men.32 29

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Prima secundae, quaestio 105, ar. 1, in Busa, Opera omnia, vol. 2, p. 503; trans. Blythe, Ideal Government, pp. 51–2. 30 Blythe, ‘Civic Humanism’, p. 67. 31 Engelbert, De regimine, Tractatus I, cap. XVII, p. 38; trans. Blythe, ‘Civic Humanism’, p. 67. 32 John of Paris, Tractatus de potestate regia et papali, in Johannes Quidort von Paris:

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But, in Aristotelian vein, he refused to be categoric: Secular power has more diversity because of its secular nature and because of the diversity of climates and complexions … Thus, it is not necessary for all the faithful to be united in some common polity, but there can be diverse modes of living and diverse polities depending on the variations of climate, language, and condition of men, and that which is virtuous in one nation is not virtuous in another.33

William of Ockham (c.1285–1347), perhaps the most influential philosopher of the later Middle Ages, who, after studying at Oxford, was condemned as a heretic by the papacy and spent the end of his life in the service of the anti-papal emperor, Louis of Bavaria, knew that, in the abstract, Aristotle thought that monarchy was the best form of government.34 But he also recognized Aristotle’s republican sympathies, inclining him to favour rotating government in order to prevent sedition. In contrast, his own preference, in stable circumstances, was monarchy: Aristotle argued that it was expedient for everyone to participate in government, sometimes as rulers, sometimes as subjects, probably because he feared that, unless all men of equal worth were allowed to have a share in government, dangerous sedition might arise. But if there are no such anxieties about sedition, and if a suitable candidate is found, then it is best for him to become king, even for his entire life.35

Nevertheless, William showed inclinations towards relativism: as far as he was concerned, it was the common good that counted; otherwise it did not matter how a government arose: Since jurisdiction or power must benefit the common good, it does not matter by whom it is instituted.36

Another relativist was the French philosopher and scientist, Jean Buridan (c.1292 – after 1358), who observed that God sometimes imposed one-man rule, sometimes a more pluralistic regime:

Über königliche und päpstliche Gewalt, ed. Fritz Bleienstein (Stuttgart, 1969), chapter 1, p. 76; trans. Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 146 (adapted). 33 John of Paris, De potestate, chapter 3, pp. 82–3; trans. Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 145 (adapted). 34 William of Ockham, Dialogus de potestate papae et imperatoris, Pars III, Tractatus I, Liber II, cap. II, in Monarchia Sacri Romani Imperii, ed. Melchior Goldast, vol. 2 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1614), p. 790. See Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 181, note 4. 35 William of Ockham, Dialogus, Pars III, Tractatus I, Liber II, cap. XVII, in Goldast, Monarchia, vol. 2, p. 802. For more examples of Ockham’s monarchism, see Blythe, Ideal Government, pp. 181–2. 36 William of Ockham, Octo quaestiones de potestate papae, Quaestio 3, ch. 9, in Guillemi de Ockham opera politica, ed. Hilary S. Offler et al. (ed. 2, Manchester, 1974), vol. 1, p. 111.

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God sometimes provides for one secular ruler alone over the faithful, but sometimes he decides and orders that there should be several.37

He even went so far as to say that, in the contemporary world, the rule of law without a king was preferable to royal government without law.38 Relativism too was a key idea in the political thought of Nicole Oresme, one of Buridan’s pupils.39 But he also recognized the validity of other forms of government: Naturally some peoples want to be governed by a king and some by a small number of virtuous people and some by all the citizens or by themselves. And the government which is suitable by nature and is expedient to one people is not suitable to another because of the variety of customs and the size of the region and the times and other circumstances.40

Ideally, Oresme preferred a mixed monarchy, but that might not suit all situations: Suppose a people simply cannot achieve the best form of government; the legislator must ascertain what form of government is the best that can be achieved by that people.41

Although some Italians echoed the monarchism typical of Northern political thought, others adopted the Aristotelian relativism characteristic of ultramontane scholastic philosophers. One Italian relativist was Bartola da Sassoferrato (1314–1357). He qualified constitutions according to size. For the smallest communities, popular republican government was most suitable, for example in his native city of Perugia; medium-sized towns were best suited to aristocracy, as in the contemporary examples of Venice and Florence; only the largest states were suited to monarchy, the current example being the Roman Empire.42 Another notable example here was the Ferrarese Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola, who attained fame as a religious and political reformer in Florence. Like Aristotle and his scholastic followers, he declared that: In principle, the civil [republican] form of government is good, aristocracy is better, and kingship is best. Given that the aim of government is the union and peace of the people, this union and this peace are much more readily attained and preserved under the rule of one than under more than one, and under the rule of a few rather than under a crowd … Unified power, moreover, is more effective than dispersed power, as fire is hotter 37 Jean Buridan, Questiones super octo libro Politicorum Aristotelis, Liber VIII, Questio 5 (Paris 1513), f. 113v. 38 Buridan, Questiones, Liber III, Questio IV, f. 34v. 39 See note 24 above. 40 Oresme, Livre de Politiques, Livre 3, ch. 26, ed. Menut, p. 163; trans. Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 237 (adapted). 41 Oresme, Livre de Politiques, Livre 4, ch. 1, ed. Menut, p. 165. 42 Blythe, Ideal Government, pp. 174–5.

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when all the fuel is burning in one place than when it is scattered and burns here and there.43

This might be true ‘assolutamente parlando’, but there were some peoples who could not abide monarchy because they were required by their nature to be ruled by a ‘governo civile’, a popular republican government: If we make a careful examination of the views and arguments of learned men … they say that monarchy is the appropriate form of government for people who are by nature servile, lacking in spirit and intellect … but people who are intelligent, spirited and bold cannot readily be ruled by one man, unless he plays the tyrant … as has always been clear in Italy.44

Echoing the arguments of Aristotle and the scholastics, Savonarola suggested that climate determined the appropriate form of government: In the warm climates of this hemisphere, men are more timid … because they have little blood, and therefore in such places people allow themselves easily to be ruled by one leader alone … In cold climates, where there is an abundance of blood but little intellect, men are similarly passive and subject themselves to one lord and master. But in the middle zones, such as Italy, where blood and intellect are copious, men do not tolerate submission to one leader alone … Therefore it is the view of learned theologians that, in places where men’s nature will apparently not abide a superior, government by the many is better than by one alone.45

The most famous example of relativism comes from Niccolò Machiavelli. Although the connection he made between social structures and political forms was original, nevertheless his geographic focus does recall Savonarola – a figure with whom he was notably preoccupied46 – and earlier scholastic writers: I should point out that the term noble is used of those who live in leisure on the abundant revenue of their estates, without having anything to do either with their cultivation or with other forms of labour essential to life. Such men are a pest in any republic and in any province; but still more pernicious are those who, in addition to the aforesaid revenues, have castles under their command and subjects under their jurisdiction. Of these two types of men there are plenty in the kingdom of Naples, the Papal States, the Romagna and Lombardy. It is due to this that in these territories there has never arisen any republic nor any constitutional government, for men born in such circumstances are entirely contrary to any type of 43 Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra Aggeo con il Trattato circa il reggimento e governo della città di Firenze, ed. Luigi Firpo (Rome 1965), pp. 442–3. 44 Savonarola, Prediche, pp. 446–7. 45 Texts cited by Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Savonarola on the Government of Florence’, in Stella Fletcher and Christine Shaw (eds), The World of Savonarola. Italian Elites and the Perceptions of Crisis (Aldershot, 2000), p. 43, note 12. 46 See letters to Ricciardo Becchi (9 March 1498) and to Francesco Vettori (26 August 1513); Prince, vi, xii; Discourses, I.11.45.56, III.30; Decennale primo, v. 157.

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civic life. In territories so organized no attempt to set up a republic could possibly succeed. To reform them, should anyone want to do so, the only way would be to set up a monarchy. The reason for this is that, where the raw material is so corrupt, laws do not suffice to keep order; it is necessary to have, besides laws, a superior force, such as the reins of a monarch, with absolute and excessive power to bridle the excessive ambition and corruption of the overmighty. This argument is confirmed by the example of Tuscany, where, small though the region is, one sees that there have long been three republics, Florence, Siena and Lucca; and the other cities of this territory are servile only to the extent that, in spirit or with their institutions, one sees that they either maintain or want to recover their liberty. All this is due to the absence in that territory of lords with castles and nobles (or hardly any); instead there is such equality that a wise man, with a knowledge of ancient civic customs, could easily establish there a constitutional government.47

Philip Jones was sometimes sceptical about the correspondence between political theory and political reality: The inspiration of both ideals [monarchism and republicanism] was no doubt often literary, and their expression rhetorical and abstract: in differing degrees monarchists and republicans alike fed upon classical tradition, as interpreted in the legal and philosophical learning of the Middle Ages or rediscovered by humanistic study; and both were concerned with ideas more than programmes of political action … In recent years this political literature has received unstinted study from historians … Some doubt remains, however, about its practical influence, and, even more, it must be said about its relation to political reality.48

Nevertheless, Jones also recognized that: For all the divorce existing between the active and contemplative life, the time and place of these writings, and the themes commonly developed, betray quite clearly also the influence of events.49

The texts cited above would particularly tend to confirm the latter of Jones’s views: few medieval or Renaissance political writers inhabited a world of classical, rhetorical, literary or idealistic detachment. Their modes of expression – especially in the case of scholastics – might have been abstract, but their doctrines were tempered by the realities of contemporary experience as well as by an often extensive knowledge of history.

47 48 49

Machiavelli, Discourses, I.55; trans. George Bull (London 1970) (adapted). Jones, ‘Communes and Despots’, pp. 72–4; this volume, chapter 1, pp. 4–5. Jones, ‘Communes and Despots’, p. 72; this volume, chapter 1, p. 4.

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5 The Myth of the Renaissance Despot Benjamin G. Kohl

This paper examines a paradox: how the terms ‘Renaissance despot’ and ‘Renaissance despotism’, widespread in the historical literature on Italy 1250– 1500 in the Anglophone world since at least the 1870s, are now increasingly called into question as valid historical concepts to describe the signorial regimes of the city states of north and central Italy. Indeed, in the recent Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance the terms ‘despots’ and ‘despotism’ are given only in inverted commas. The blurb for one of the contributors reads: ‘Dr Law’s interest in late medieval and Renaissance Italy covers such subjects as Venice and its empire, the growth of the territorial state, “despots”, Italian courts, and the “discovery” of the Italian Renaissance in the nineteenth century.’1 Even more recently, in a chapter on ‘Governments and Governance’, John Najemy writes: ‘Modern historians have tempered the harsh judgement that once damned the signori as tyrants (without necessarily seeing them as benevolent fathers), and it is no longer fashionable to call them despots.’2 So it seems that the call issued in the Introduction to my book on Padua under the Carrara, published in 1998, is being answered. There I wrote: The cunning and ruthless Renaissance despot, avid for power and contemptuous of the usual sanctions of law and morality, has long held sway over the popular image of the Renaissance lord. Developed in the late nineteenth century in the liberal, if sometimes sensationalistic treatments of Renaissance Italy of Jacob Burckhardt and John Addington Symonds, the image of the brutal and illegitimate ‘despot’ has maintained a strangely tenacious hold on the historical imagination. The term despot is clearly an anachronism, unknown in late medieval Italy, and applied mistakenly to the lords of the early Renaissance.3

1 2

Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2003), p. xv.

John M. Najemy, in Najemy (ed.), Italy in the Age of the Renaissance: 1300–1550 (Oxford, 2004), p. 189. 3 Benjamin G. Kohl, Padua under the Carrara, 1380–1405 (Baltimore, 1998), p. xvii.

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I then went on to define a tyrant, largely following the definitions of Bartolus of Sassoferrato, as a lord who ‘had not gained office by popular election or sanction by a higher authority, such as pope or emperor (de defectu tituli), or because he ruled illegally and against the welfare of his subjects (ex parte exercitii)’. And I concluded with the plea that ‘one result of this book will be to banish the term despot from the vocabulary of late medieval Italian politics and encourage the adoption of the less charged and more accurate signore, or lord’.4 At the risk of transforming this paper into a memoir, I propose in the first part to explain how I came to write those words, and how the unease I felt with the term ‘despot’ developed into a full-scale attack on the vision of politics contained in Burckhardt’s Renaissance, mentioned above. I shall then go on, in the second part, through a comparison of Padua and Venice, to examine the similarities as well as the differences between signorial and republican regimes. In 1968, as I finished my dissertation on the signoria of Francesco il Vecchio, I came to believe (following the essays of Roberto Cessi and Vittorio Lazzarini5), that Il Vecchio’s regime was in some respects tyrannical, certainly in employing legal fictions and deathbed confessions to obtain the property of his subjects.6 But in other respects he was a just lord sharing the tasks of governing with the organs of the Paduan commune and acting as the father of his subjects, as Petrarch advised in Seniles XIV.1, which behaviour Burckhardt used to define the ideal prince of the period at the beginning of the section entitled ‘The State as a Work of Art’.7 Indeed, as I studied the normative treatises of the period I came to realize that none of the humanist works originating in Padua at least portrayed the Carrara rulers as the despots described in Burckhardt’s Renaissance. Some years later, when I translated Petrarch’s treatise on princely rule for an anthology of humanist texts, edited with Ronald G. Witt, I began to view the work as largely favourable to the Carrara lord, critical of some of the excesses of court life, but seeing him as capable of just rule.8 Following the examples of the good Roman emperors, the lord of Padua could be an ideal prince, as depicted in the tradition of the late medieval Fürstenspiegel, where 4

Ibid., pp. xvii, xviii. Roberto Cessi, ‘Il malgoverno di Francesco il Vecchio, signore di Padova’, Atti dell’Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 66 (1906–7): 737–48, and Vittorio Lazzarini, ‘Storie vecchie e nuove intorno a Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara’, Nuovo Archivio Veneto, 10 (1895): 325–63. 6 Kohl, ‘The Signoria of Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara in Padua, 1350–1388’ (Johns Hopkins University dissertation, 1968); chapter 1, ‘Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara, Lord and Tyrant of Padua’, pp. 1–53. 7 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. Samuel G. C. Middlemore (1878, reprinted New York, 1930), p. 28. 8 Francesco Petrarca, ‘How a Ruler Ought to Govern His State’, in Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt (eds), The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society (Philadelphia, 1978), pp. 35–78. 5

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earlier scholars have placed Petrarch’s work. Immersed at the same time in the teaching of Hans Baron’s Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, I decided to single out Giovanni Conversino da Ravenna as a special object of study. The result of this was papers on his works and thought, and of fellow humanists, especially Pier Paolo Vergerio, and eventually an edition of his Dragmalogia, done with an accomplished Latinist.9 Baron had depicted Conversino’s dialogue on the preferable way of life as a product of an ideology developed at the despotic courts,10 but I saw it more as an honest attempt, using a Venetian and a Paduan as interlocutors, to weigh the comparative merits of a signorial over a republican regime. Though coloured, of course, by Conversino’s mistreatment as a tutor in the households of Venetian nobles and his hope for employment by the Carrara lord, the dialogue praises the efficiency and especially the benefits of patronage to humanists and scholars that a lord and his court can bestow. Convinced by the validity of Baron’s vision of a world of republics and lords, and by the concept of civic humanism, I even coined my own counterbalancing concept of ‘subdital humanism’, where I argued that, just as Florentine civic humanists extolled the benefits the citizen (the civis) derived from republican rule, my north Italian humanists, chiefly Conversino and Vergerio, described the benefits the subject (the subditus) enjoyed under the rule of a just and wise prince. This essay, written in 1970, later appeared in the annual Medieval Culture, a selection of papers from the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo.11 The study of another type of normative text, quite different from Petrarch’s letter, Conversino’s dialogue, and Vergerio’s orations, confirmed my view of the inappropriateness of the term ‘despot’, at least as applied to the Carrara lords of Padua. This was the codex the Liber statutorum communis Padue of 1362, commonly called the Statuti Carraresi. At the onset of the computer age I spent several summers making a complete transcription of this lengthy manuscript, which defined the government of the Paduan commune as it functioned under Francesco il Vecchio. Incorporating large sections of legislation from the late thirteenth century, the code retained almost all the features – podestà and his family, court and tax system, protection of university and guilds, and obligations of the peasants of the contado toward the city – of Padua’s communal government that the Carrara lords swore to protect and defend at their accession to rule.12

9 Giovanni di Conversino da Ravenna, Dragmalogia de eligibili vite genere, ed. and trans. Helen L. Eaker, introd. and notes Benjamin G. Kohl (Lewisburg, PA, 1980). 10 Hans Baron, Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (2 vols, Princeton, 1955) vol. 1, pp. 109–20. 11 Kohl, ‘Political Attitudes of North Italian Humanists in the Late Trecento’, Studies in Medieval Culture 4 (1974): 418–27. 12 Padua, Biblioteca Civica, MS B.P. 1237, passim. This reading is emphasized in my ‘Government and Society in Renaissance Padua’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1972): 205–21, especially pp. 207–8, and my entry, ‘Carrara, Francesco, il Vecchio’, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 20 (Rome, 1977), pp. 649–56.

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My views on the continued existence, even vitality, of Padua’s commune in the more mundane tasks of government were confirmed in a summary in English of each of over a thousand individual statutes defining every facet of government. A rereading of Francesco Ercole’s classic essay on the ‘Comuni e signori del Veneto’, and its emphasis on ‘diarchy’, validated my view of shared tasks of government between lord and commune.13 So when I turned to writing my book on Padua under the Carrara in the 1980s, I was ready to jettison the concept of the Italian Renaissance despot as an anachronism. But I still was not sure why the concept had become so pervasive and so powerful. To be sure, the Greek term, despotes, and its Latin neologisms – principatus despoticus, despoticum, despoti – were in use in fourteenth-century Europe, but not, of course, to describe the lords of early Renaissance Italy. Despotes, meaning ‘lord’ or ‘master’, was a late Byzantine title, first used to describe the office of the heir presumptive to the emperor, or co-emperor, or as an epithet for the highest nobility. Later it was a title the emperor bestowed on his sons, or on individuals in charge of the large appanages of Thessalonike, Morea and Epiros, and it was also adopted by the kings of Bulgaria and Serbia. The despotate of Epiros came to be recognized by western diplomatic sources in the fourteenth century, and the Venetian senate received embassies from, and exchanged diplomatic correspondence with, officials they called the despotus, or despoti, of Morea, Romania, Jannina and other cities in Albania in the second half of the Trecento.14 The other usage of principatus despoticus, despoticum in late medieval Latin translations of and commentaries on Aristotle’s works, especially his Politics, is much more complex.15 As is well known, the term in Greek antiquity denoted the head of a family, ‘père de famille’, or the master of slaves. But in Aristotle’s Politics, despotism became a legitimate form of government over men who were by nature slaves. Thus, Asiatic despotism was based, not on force, but on consent, so the reigns of despots, unlike tyrants, were stable, of long duration, and without the problems of violent succession that tyrants often faced. But though the power of Asian despots was in that sense royal, it also partook ‘of the nature of tyranny, because they ruled despotically and according to their own judgment’ (Politics 3.8, 1295a). Further, though the despot might rule according to law, he did not rule in the common interest, but to his own advantage. Finally, according to Aristotle, despotism was always related to the institution of slavery, for among the Greeks there was a class of free men capable of holding office and ruling others, whereas among the barbarians, all were slaves by nature. 13 Francesco Ercole, ‘Comuni e signori del Veneto’, Nuovo Archivio Veneto, new series, 19 (1910): 255–337. 14 See ‘Despotes’ in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (3 vols, Oxford, 1991), vol. 1, p. 614; Kohl, The Records of the Venetian Senate on Disk, 1335–1400 (New York, 2001); e.g. Kohl ## 2071, 2249, 3177, 3606, 3608, 3616. 15 See Claudio Fiocchi and Stefano Simonetta, ‘Il “principatus despoticus” nell’aristotelismo bassomedievale’, in Domenico Felice (ed.), Dispotismo. Genesi e sviluppi di un concetto filosofico-politico (2 vols, Naples, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 71–94.

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The translation of the Politics in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke prompted late medieval writers to deal with Aristotle’s concept of the despot. In his treatment of bad monarchical rule, William of Ockham made an important distinction between tyrannical and despotic kingship, based on the notion of consent. To quote his Dialogus part 3, tract 1, book 2, chapter 6: ‘A bad king becomes a tyrant if in accordance with the law he begins to rule his subjects against their will for his own good, but if he begins to rule them with their consent for his own good, he becomes, properly speaking, a despot.’16 By contrast, Marsilius of Padua asserted that where the state is a community of free men, citizens ‘must not undergo another’s despotism (despociam): that is, slavish dominion’.17 But the pope by demanding excessive obedience, that is, consent, from the Christian faithful, ‘imposed an unjust despotism over the faithful believers’.18 Thus, the definition of ‘despotism’ as the rule of a monarch who governed with the slavish consent of subjects, who should be acting as free men, was present in fourteenth century thought. But it was applied by writers like Marsilius to the unjust rule of the pope, and certainly never to the lords of the early Renaissance city state. When Leonardo Bruni made a fresh Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics early in the fifteenth century, he replaced the terms William of Moerbeke had rendered as despoticus and principatus despoticus with dominus and dominatio, simply eliminating the Greek loan word. But later writers substituted Latin herus, herilis, and thus reintroduced the notion of a master over slaves, and the rule of a monarch over slavish men.19 Key to the purposes of understanding the application of the term ‘despot’ to Renaissance rulers is the development in the Enlightenment, in the work of Montesquieu and others, of the definition of the Asian despot who made men obedient to his rule and obtained their consent out of fear. Thus, Montesquieu added a psychological dimension to the despot, as in the Persian Letters, where despotism is depicted as a system of fear, jealousy and mutual suspicion as imposed by the master of the seraglio. In the Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu further argued that there was no justification for slavery, defined as the absolute right a master held over the life and property of his slave, for such rights were contrary to natural law. Similarly, a victor had no right to murder a captive in cold blood, and one who did should be punished as a criminal. Despotism was 16

Text in Ewart Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas (2 vols, London, 1954), vol. 1, p. 301–2. 17 Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, I.12.6, ed. Charles Previté-Orton (Cambridge, 1928), p. 52. 18 Ibid., p. 111. See also the discussion in Richard Koebner, ‘Despots and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951): 275–302, pp. 280–1. 19 My arguments derive mainly from Richard Koebner’s classic survey, ‘Despot and Despotism’ (note 18 above), and the entries: Melvyn Richter, ‘Despotism’, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (6 vols, New York, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 1–18, and Gary Ianziti, ‘Despotism’, in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (5 vols, New York, 1999), vol. 2, pp. 146–9.

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alien to a state governed by natural law and incompatible with human nature, as conceived in Enlightenment thought. In the entry in the Encyclopedie, despotism is said to derive from a sort of primitive theocracy, based on fear, as Boulanger had argued in his essay on the origins of oriental despotism. In Montesquieu’s thought it was identified with the great empires of Asia and Africa, which he had designated as ‘despotiques’. In his L’A, B, C of 1768, Voltaire returned to the etymological root of ‘despot’ as ‘père de famille’, and scorned the current identification of the title with ‘the emperor of Morocco, the emperor of China, and pope, and the Grand Turk’.20 What, then, is the missing historiographical link between the oriental despots of Montesquieu and the Encyclopedie, whose regimes were bent on instilling fear in their obedient, slavish subjects, and the terrifying, lawless despots of the Italian Renaissance as depicted by Jacob Burckhardt and John Addington Symonds? The most obvious candidate is Jean-CharlesLeonard Sismonde de Sismondi’s Histoire des republiques italiennes du moyen age, published in 16 volumes between 1807 and 1818, and made available in 1832 in a condensed English version composed by the author himself. In this encyclopedic work, the author celebrated and documented in great detail the growth of Italian freedom in the medieval city state, and also plotted the causes of its destruction in the time of the Renaissance. Sismondi did not use the term ‘despotism’ in either of what he calls in his preface ‘the two languages of freedom’.21 But he roundly condemned the tyrants, who were bent on the subversion and destruction of that freedom, as he described it in the later volumes of his work. While Burckhardt did not list Sismondi among his ‘Titles of Frequently Quoted Works’ – which are, in any case, almost all primary sources – Symonds acknowledged his debt on two occasions. He cited him first in his preface to The Age of the Despots, as among ‘books of which the most frequent use has been made in this first portion’, and then in his Memoirs. There he records that, in the early 1870s, ‘[I] began dimly to project a history of Italian culture. With this object in view I studied Sismondi and made analyses of Muratori’s Dissertations.’22 Whatever the sources of the usage, John Addington Symonds’s immensely popular and influential Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots (London, Elder, Smith, and Co., 1875) assured the use of the terms ‘despot’ and ‘despotism’ after its publication. As has been noted by John Law, lectures that Symonds gave to the sixth form at Clifton College formed much of the basis for this first volume of the Renaissance in Italy, as they did for several of his other works.23 Several scholars have observed the disjointed, episodic 20

Quoted in Koebner, ‘Despots and Despotism’, p. 275. Jean-Charles-Leonard Sismonde de Sismondi, A History of the Italian Republics (London, 1875), p. v. The two languages were, of course, English and French. 22 The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (New York, 1984), pp. 233–4. 23 John E. Law, ‘John Addington Symonds and the Despots of Renaissance Italy’, in John E. Law and Lene østermark-Johansen (eds) Victorian and Edwardian Responses to 21

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character of the book, which accounts for its uneven treatment of the period, and the omission of many topics. In his Memoirs, Symonds acknowledged that the book ‘was entirely rewritten from lectures, and the defect of the method is clearly observable in its structure’. But he goes on to defend this approach by asserting: ‘I believe that I should not have obtained the initiative for a ponderous work unless I had begun by lecturing.’24 But the origins of The Age of the Despots from the lectures at Clifton College also conferred some benefits: clarity of argument, richness of examples, and the organization of the material into categories that were both memorable and readily understood. My favourite here is Symonds’s classification of ‘six sorts of despots in the Italian Renaissance’, which has affected my views on the subject ever since. Symonds sometimes calls these rulers ‘despots’, and sometimes ‘tyrants’; I would call all of them ‘lords’, for categories are inclusive, if occasionally overlapping. First are dynasties, such as the Este of Ferrara, who long ruled by hereditary right. Next are vicars of the Empire, such as the Visconti or Della Scala. Third is a large category of ‘Capitani … who used their authority to enslave the cities they were chosen to administer’; this group includes ‘almost all the numerous tyrants of Lombardy’, such as the Carrara, Visconti, and Gonzaga. Fourth are the ‘Condottieri’, and fifth the sons and nephews of popes. The sixth and largest class of despots are those ‘citizens of eminence, [who] gradually tended to tyranny’, including the Medici in Florence and the Bentivoglio of Bologna.25 The very breadth of the categories and the different origins of the numerous ruling families leads Symonds to a remarkable generalization: ‘Despotism in Italy as in ancient Greece was democratic’, which, in turn, depends on ‘the free play of ambitious individuality’ of Renaissance culture.26 The new men of the new age made the new form of government, despotism, which was more horrible in its unbridled violence than anything that Italy had ever seen. The high-flown rhetoric of The Age of the Despots accounts for yet another defect that Symonds observed in its origins as lectures. ‘A rhetorical tone survived my best attempts to rehandle the material which had been designed for declamation. Changes of style and purple patches deformed the unity and gravity of a serious historical work.’27 Readers of The Age of the Despots have sometimes quoted the remarkable purple patch where Symonds described the men of the new age: No ages of enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavour, of life artificially preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fibre of the men who were about to inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their the Italian Renaissance (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 145–63. 24 Memoirs, ed. Grosskurth, p. 236. 25 John Addington Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots (London, 1875), pp. 86–9. 26 Ibid., p. 91. 27 Memoirs, ed. Grosskurth, p. 236.

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capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment. No generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod them down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from scepticism, the despair of thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh and unperverted senses rendered them alive to what was beautiful and natural. They yearned for magnificence, and instinctively comprehended splendour. At the same time, the period of satiety was far off.28

The reader is immediately struck by Symonds’s rhetorical exaggeration of the energy and appetites of his ‘men of the new age’, and the implicit comparison with the effete scepticism of contemporary Victorian culture. Symonds’s own yearnings are transferred to the despots of the Renaissance, and much of the book tries to prove the generalizations by evincing numerous individual examples of ‘their inordinate appetite for enjoyment’, to show that these men ‘were alive to what was beautiful and natural’. While Symonds was in the throes of writing his Renaissance in Italy, the concept of the state as a work of art, created by the cunning figure of the Renaissance despot, was reinforced in the Anglophone world through the publication of an English translation of Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur des Renaissance in Italien by C.K. Paul and Company in 1878. The translation was the work of Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore (1848–1890), the thirteenth and last child of the well-to-do Birmingham industrialist William Middlemore and his wife Mary. S.G.C. was the only member of his family to attend university. He matriculated at Merton College, Oxford, at the age of 17 in October 1866, but left without taking a degree.29 Before he was 30 he had completed his translation, the only English version ever made, of Burckhardt’s Kultur, which was published in 1878, the same year in which C.K. Paul’s extensive list included such scholarly and popular works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage, a translation of Victor Lechter’s John Wyclif and his English Precursors from the German, and Linda Villari’s twovolume translation from the Italian of Pasquale Villari’s Niccolò Machiavelli and His Times. I suspect that Middlemore’s fluent version of Burckhardt’s Versuch was something of a sleeper – that is, no one at the time suspected that it would be published in hundreds of thousands of copies and run to over 20 printings by a variety of publishers. Part of its success was due to Burckhardt’s compelling depiction of Renaissance Italy in almost pointillist detail, long recognized as an early and accomplished attempt at cultural history. But its success was also due to Middlemore’s liberties with the German text, his capacity to render complex and difficult German syntax in clear, accessible and attractive English

28 Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1948), pp. 200–1, quoting Symonds, 1875 ed., pp. 10–11. 29 For this information on the translator and his family see Joseph Jackson Howard and Frederick Arthur Crisp, Visitation of England and Wales, vol. 8 (London, 1900), pp. 77–80, ‘Middlemore of Hawkesley, co. Worcester, and Birmingham, co. Warwick’.

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prose, which perhaps offered the Victorian reading public what it expected to learn about Renaissance Italy. A case in point is Middlemore’s frequent use of the term ‘despot’ itself. As has been recognized, Burckhardt used the standard German terms for despot, ‘Herrscher’ or ‘Gewaltherrscher’, and despotism, ‘Gewaltherrschaft’, almost interchangeably with the Latin-derived ‘Tyrann’ and ‘Tyrannien’, and he often employed the more neutral ‘Fursten’ and ‘Furstentumer’ for the signori and signorie of Renaissance Italy. But while Middlemore sometimes used the word ‘tyrant’ to describe these lords, he greatly favoured the terms ‘despot’ and ‘despotism’ to describe such rulers and their states. From my reading of Parts I and II of Burckhardt’s Renaissance, I count 30 instances where Middlemore introduced ‘despot’ and ‘despotism’ where the German has the terms ‘Herrscher’ or ‘Gewaltherrscher’, ‘Gewaltherrschaft’, ‘Tyrann’ and ‘Tyrannien’, ‘Fursten’ and ‘Furstentum’. In only one instance does Burckhardt use the term ‘despot’ itself, in ‘als gebildete Despoten’, which Middlemore translates as ‘in the hands of an enlightened Despot’.30 Soon after his translation of Burckhardt was published, Middlemore travelled to Italy where he married in Florence in April 1881 an American heiress, Maria Trinidad Howard Sturgis, whose family had made a fortune in the China trade. Her father, Henry Parkman Sturgis, had served as the United States Consul in Manilla, where she was born, his having been appointed to this post in 1841 on Daniel Webster’s recommendation. It seems likely that the couple resided mainly in Italy after their marriage. Middlemore’s only subsequent publication was an Italian version of first lines by Oliver Wendell Holmes, also rendered in German, Greek, and Latin, printed privately in 1888 in London as Recreations of the Rabelais Club. Middlemore died at the Hotel Bristol in Rome on 27 January 1890, aged 41. The combination of Symonds’s Renaissance and Middlemore’s Burckhardt made the despot a standard image of, and the usual term for, the Italian Renaissance prince for the next century, at least in the world of English language scholarship. It is perhaps significant that the Italian translation of The Age of the Despots is entitled L’Era dei tiranni (Turin, 1900). Typical of English scholarship in this post-Symonds world is William Boulting’s recasting and updating of Sismondi’s History of the Italian Republics in a massive volume published in London in 1908.31 Where Sismondi had unfolded the political history of medieval Italy mainly in chronological order, Boulting divided his volume into large ‘books’, each covering a distinct period, which began with a survey and then treated the history of each major city: Rome, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Florence. In this way, Boulting 30

My analysis is based on a comparison of the German text in Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Berlin, 1930), with The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. Samuel G. C. Middlemore (London, 1878). 31 J. C. L. Sismondi, History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages: entirely recast and supplemented in the light of subsequent historical research with a memoir of the author by William Boulting (London, 1908).

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was able to incorporate large chunks of Sismondi’s text, but he was also able to introduce new material. A case in point is Book IV, ‘The Dawn of the Renaissance’, where he includes a new section on ‘The Despots of Northern Italy’, derived largely from Symonds’s The Age of the Despots. In fact, with the statement ‘all sorts of people rose to the headship of States’, Boulting went on to summarize Symonds’s six sorts of despots that I outlined above.32 Much of Boulting’s subsequent discussion of the Visconti depends on Symonds as well as Sismondi’s original detailed narrative. While many popular books on the history of Italy in the early twentieth century used the term ‘despots’ to describe the lords of Renaissance Italy, even works of serious scholarship employed it. Cecilia M. Ady, in her study of the Bentivoglio of Bologna, saw the family’s rule as ‘A Study in Despotism’. For Ady the Bentivoglio, who rose to power for the preservation of the commune in Bologna, betrayed its trust. Ultimately Giovanni II could not resist the temptation to rule tyrannically, and ‘he died in exile because the people of Bologna were no longer satisfied that his rule was in the best interest of the city’.33 Thus, Ady depicts a signore who became a tyrant who ruled against the public good (ex parte exercitii), though she does not use that phrase. As I undertook my own work on the rule of the Carrara family over Padua, which some might also call ‘a study in despotism’, my views were greatly affected by three works from that annus mirabilis of British historical scholarship on the question of communes and despots, 1965. Firstly, there is Philip Jones’s famous essay, which caused me to view the ruling elite of Carrara Padua as members of a kind of oligarchy, tied to the lord by kinship, common love of Padua, and a system of material benefits, but often displaying values and interests of their own. Secondly, Daniel M. Bueno de Mesquita’s ‘The Place of Despotism in Italian Politics’ explained both why signorial regimes were concentrated on the Lombard plain, and how and why they were limited in scope and authority – in fact, a better title for that essay might have been ‘the place of the signorie in Italian politics’. Thirdly, John Larner’s Lords of the Romagna provided a comparative approach to many of Burckhardt’s ‘petty tyrants’, while emphasizing the material basis of their rule and the continuity of communal institutions under signorial regimes.34 Two later works, Werner L. Gundersheimer’s Ferrara: The Style of a Renaissance Despotism (Princeton, 1973) and Louis Green’s Castruccio Castracani: A Study of the Origins and Character of a Fourteenth-century Italian Despotism (Oxford, 1986) use despotism in their subtitles, but are, in fact, solid studies 32 33

p. 207. 34

Ibid., p. 347. Cecilia M. Ady, The Bentivoglio of Bologna. A Study in Despotism (Oxford, 1938),

Philip J. Jones, ‘Communes and Despots in Late-Medieval Italy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 15 (1965): 71–95; this volume, chapter 1; Daniel M. Bueno de Mesquita, ‘The Place of Despotism in Italian Politics’, in John Hale, Roger Highfield and Beryl Smalley (eds), Europe in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1965), pp. 301–31; and John Larner, Lords of the Romagna. Romagnol Society and the Origins of the Signorie (London, 1965).

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of signorial regimes. Gundersheimer’s book on the Este is an examination of how the institutions and culture of a signorial regime developed a distinctive ‘style’ appropriate to one-man rule over a small city-state. Louis Green’s work combines an authoritative narrative on Castruccio Castracani’s path to becoming a tyrant with a detailed consideration of what institutions and personnel of Lucca’s commune remained under his rule. Finally, John Law’s pamphlet’s The Lords of Renaissance Italy. The Signori, 1250–1500 (London, 1981) freed me forever from any need to view the Carraresi as despots. They became the lords of Padua, who sometimes may have acted as tyrants.

I now propose to test my assertion that the Carraresi were lords, not despots, by comparing the duties and powers of the last two Carrara lords of Padua, Francesco il Vecchio and his son Francesco Novello (ruled 1355– 1405) with those of that emblematic republican ruler, the contemporary doge in neighbouring Venice.35 This investigation builds on my earlier studies of the Carrara lords of Padua, and work in progress on the governance of late medieval Venice, to pose the question of how different the legal status and governing structures of signorial regimes were from those of the contemporary republic of Venice. A preliminary answer is: very similar in several respects, and very different in others. I have long been struck by a similarity of title. In the diplomatic correspondence of the period the dominus et commune Padue regularly communicated with the dux et commune Venetiarum. These contemporary legal formulas characterized the two governments when they made treaties and entered into alliances. Furthermore, both rulers, lord and doge, were elected to a life term in office, though the process of election was quite different. The election of the doge was a complicated process, and requires some elucidation. The doge was chosen by the rotation of nine committees, whose members were chosen by alternating a smaller committee, selected by lot. Its members then created a large committee by a three-fourths majority for each successful candidate. The last committee chosen by lot was the Eleven, which in turn chose the Committee of Forty-one, which elected the doge. But there were some wrinkles in this process. Members of the Eleven – who, as Marino Sanudo remarked, ‘almost elect the doge’ – could not elect themselves to the Forty-one. Therefore, it was important for leading candidates for the dogeship not to be elected too early in the process, since that might result in selection by lot – in a committee of 45 – to the dead-end committee of the Eleven. But leading candidates for the office of doge wanted friends, kin and allies on 35

These remarks are based mainly on my Padua under the Carrara, passim; ‘The Paduan Elite under Francesco Novello da Carrara (1390–1405): A Selected Prosopography’, Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 77 (1997): 206–58; my unpublished paper ‘The Politics of Electing the Doge in Late Medieval Venice’, read at the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, Miami Beach, 1 April 2005; and Gherardo Ortalli, ‘Il travaglio di una definizione, sviluppi medioevale del dogado’, in Gino Benzoni (ed.) I Dogi (Milan, 1982), pp. 13–44.

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the Eleven since they elected the membership of the Forty-one, which always included leading candidates for the dogeship. As is evident, this elaborate system of alternation of lot and election in nine committees scarcely made the election of a new doge a random process. Though it eliminated the dangers of domination of the Venetian government by faction, and of dynastic succession, the system resulted in the election of men who had been politicking for the dogeship for years. The election of the Carrara lords was even less random, since, of course, Trecento Padua was a dynastic state. The heir apparent, Francesco il Vecchio, was elected by acclamation following the assassination of his father, Giacomo II, in December 1350. That acclamation was soon confirmed by a statute of election and duties, drawn up by the then podestà, Marino Falier, and passed by Padua’s shadowy Maggior Consiglio. While it charged the Carrara lord with the protection of the Commune and city of Padua, the statute granted him broad powers to carry out those duties. They included the administration of criminal and civil justice, the right of appointment of most government officials (including the podestà of Padua and the towns of the Padovano), and the ability to legislate, enacting and modifying statutes at will. This led in 1362 to the redaction of a new communal code, which assigned the more mundane tasks of government to lesser officials appointed by the podestà or selected from the guild of judges and notaries. Thus, the powers granted the Carrara lord were extensive, centring on his ability to appoint and remove major officials at will, to conduct foreign affairs and military matters, to oversee the taxes and property of the commune, and to serve as the highest source of justice. Most significant was the virtual disappearance of the legislative councils of Padua under Carrara rule. The source of new law, new officials, and higher justice was the lord himself, aided by a corps of advisors trained in law, diplomacy and war. Under Francesco Novello, the role of these officials was formalized into a sort of privy council, the consiliarii domini, which included some of the ablest jurists and statesmen of Padua, selected by and serving at the pleasure of the ruling lord. It was precisely the ability of a large oligarchy to elect its own officials, with much smaller committees preparing legislation for approval or rejection in the Senate and Maggior Consiglio, that distinguished republican Venice from signorial Padua. The legislative and deliberative councils whose powers had conspicuously atrophied in Carrara Padua were the engines of state policy and the means of selecting office-holders in contemporary Venice. To be sure, the doge was the presiding officer over each of these five councils – the Collegio, the Ten, the Forty, the Senate, and the Maggior Consiglio – and he could, along with the ducal councillors, the capi of Forty and Ten, and certain select committees, introduce legislation in each of the councils. Of course, the doge’s proposals could be and sometimes were voted down. So the doge had the ability to affect legislation and helped to determine policy, but he never acted alone in this capacity, and his power to legislate and dictate change in policy or institutions was far from absolute.

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But it was most of all in the selection of office holders that Trecento Venice differed from Carrara Padua. In Venice this function was assigned to the Maggior Consiglio, comprising all adult noble males, who met regularly on Sunday mornings to select the officials of the Venetian state. In this context candidates for some hundreds of ordinary offices were presented by nominating committees chosen by lot for competitive election by members of the entire nobility. Only in the nominating of extraordinary, one-time-only officials for election in the Senate – as ambassadors and captains in the field, savi to propose policy, and provveditori to supervise mercenaries – did the doge and his council have special privileges. Often the doge and his councillors proposed one or two slates of candidates for these offices, and it seems their candidates were often chosen. The greatest similarity between the two states lay in the conduct of war and diplomacy. Both states regularly employed mercenary captains to lead armies in their pay, and sometimes even competed to employ the same soldiers. Of course, Venice’s naval operations were conducted by noble admirals and fleet captains, while the Carrara army was usually composed of family members serving as commanders as well as professional soldiers. But it was in the operation of their chanceries, the conduct of foreign policy, and diplomatic correspondence that the practices of Padua and Venice were most alike. Both chanceries employed professional notaries, who were well-trained Latinists, to draw up letters and diplomatic instructions, though in Venice such scribes tended to be local clerics, while in Padua they were often itinerant humanists. And in the selection of ambassadors, the nod went to seasoned diplomats who usually had considerable experience in foreign parts. Contemporaries understood the differences and similarities. The most astute observer of the Carrara court, Pier Paolo Vergerio, wrote both a treatise on Venice’s government and a history of Carrara rule in Padua. His famous educational treatise, De ingenuis moribus, addressed to Francesco Novello’s bookish third son, would have been equally useful as a manual to a possible future lord of Padua and to a young Venetian noble who aspired to become doge some day. As a young man entering service at the Carrara court in 1390 soon after Francesco Novello regained control of Padua, Vergerio composed a lively letter on the creation of a new army to win the war against Giangaleazzo Visconti. The proposed coalition was to be composed of forces in the service of the communes of Bologna and Florence under the command of two legendary condottieri, Giovanni da Barbiano and Sir John Hawkwood, Padua’s troops under Conte da Carrara, half-brother of the ruling lord, and contingents under Galeotto Malatesta and Astorre Manfredi. On one side was the army of a most powerful lord, Giangaleazzo Visconti, the Count of Virtu (‘potentissumus dominus Galeaz Virtutum comes’), and on the other, ‘societas hec populorum et principum’.36 This last phrase may be translated as ‘this league of peoples and princes’ or ‘this league of popular and signorial regimes’ – but surely not as ‘this league of communes and despots’. 36

Pier Paolo Vergerio, Epistolario, ed. Leonardo Smith (Rome, 1934), p. 48.

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6 Conflicting Attitudes towards Machiavelli’s Works in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Rome and Florence Humfrey C. Butters

A recent study of the impact of Machiavelli’s writings in the hundred years after they first began to appear in print has drawn attention to what the author sees as a striking problem confronting scholars who seek to gauge their influence: while it is possible to attain a reasonable idea of how many editions of his four main works, The Art of War, The Prince, The Discourses and the Florentine Histories, were being produced, it is less easy to find information about those who read and reacted to them. In the period 1529–1559, for example, there were ‘some 71 separate issues’ of these books; and yet in those 30 years ‘there is first-hand evidence for barely 50 readers of his works throughout Europe’.1 The wording of this last remark was hardly very happy, since even if the figure cited is accurate (which seems unlikely), it can refer only to the evidence that has so far come to light. But there is no doubt that the problem exists, even if it is less grave than Anglo takes it to be. But the problem he has identified is simply one example of a wider one: it is in general less easy to assess the influence of individual thinkers than to track the general movements of thought over time in the disciplines or literary genres to which those thinkers were contributing. In order to be able to speak with confidence of the influence of one author on another, Skinner has suggested, one should be able to show that the author influenced was familiar with the works of the writer to whom he was allegedly indebted; and that the former could not have found the ideas in question elsewhere or could not have developed them independently. This last condition, as Skinner himself admits, would be very difficult for anyone to satisfy;2 but even the second one is a testing one for

I should like to thank Professor Suzy Butters for supplying me with the two documents

to be found in the appendix, and to Dr Maurizio Arfaioli and Professor Michael Knapton for biographical or bibliographical information. 1 Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli – the First Century. Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility and Irrelevance (Oxford, 2005), p. 6. 2 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in Q.

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scholars interested in the influence of Machiavelli’s writings to meet, since he was a humanist, a student of the classics who wrote on subjects endlessly debated since classical antiquity. His writings on the art of war, for example, were heavily indebted not merely to Roman or Greek treatments of the subject, but also to Renaissance discussions of it. In the last hundred years or so tracing general movements of thought has often been taken to be tantamount to the study of the language employed and of the concepts which that language expressed. The advantage of this approach does not reside simply in its selecting a subject matter that is easier to track than that of the influence of individual thinkers on other individual thinkers; it is also the case that without a grasp of the linguistic and conceptual context within which literary works were produced, scholars will find it impossible to interpret them correctly, and in particular to understand why authors considered worthy of consideration the questions that their work or works address. But that does not mean that the study of individual thinkers is thereby rendered redundant; indeed, as Skinner has commented, it is precisely one of the virtues of this approach that it makes possible a serious appraisal of their contribution.3 The number of separate editions of Machiavelli’s works cited above certainly shows that until they were put on Paul IV’s Index of 1559, they enjoyed wide circulation in the Catholic world. Even before any of his major works were published his writings and thoughts were exciting attention. There is little question that his arguments played a significant role in convincing Piero Soderini, Gonfalonier of Justice for Life between 1502 and 1512, and numerous other members of the Florentine political class to establish a militia.4 While his social origins and his position in Florentine administration were not so elevated as to allow him to become an ambassador, the diplomatic missions with which he was entrusted show that the Florentine government had a high opinion of his political judgment. After the return of the Medici – as a consequence of which Machiavelli lost his posts in the Florentine Chancery, being later arrested and tortured on suspicion of being implicated in an anti-Medici plot – he maintained some connections with them. He and his friend Francesco Vettori, Florentine ambassador in Rome in the early stages of the pontificate of Leo X, the former Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, engaged in a lively epistolary exchange of views about the current Italian political scene, and the ambassador occasionally reported Machiavelli’s ideas to the Medici.5 They met with a mixed reception. Machiavelli’s dedication of The Prince first to Giuliano de’ Medici and then to Lorenzo de’ Medici did not achieve its intended result of Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 74–6. 3 Quentin Skinner, ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’, in James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge, 1988), p. 106. 4 Humfrey C. Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-century Florence, 1502–1519 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 104–6. 5 John M. Najemy, Between Friends. Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli–Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton, 1993).

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transforming his career prospects; but in December 1514 Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici asked Vettori what foreign policy Machiavelli would recommend for the papacy. Machiavelli argued that at this juncture a French alliance would be appropriate, and the Cardinal and the Pope expressed their keen appreciation of the case he had made;6 but the Pope then joined an anti-French coalition, and in February 1515 Cardinal Giulio warned Giuliano de’ Medici to shun Machiavelli.7 This did not mean, however, that his ideas were totally neglected. Firstly, the Medici regime’s decision to re-establish the militia, for whose previous introduction Machiavelli had been mainly responsible, was an indirect tribute to his influence. Secondly, after the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, in 1519, and thanks in part to the interventions on Machiavelli’s behalf of well-placed relations and friends, he began to receive literary commissions. He was asked by Cardinal Giulio to give the Pope his views on the best form of government for Florence, and in November 1520 the Cardinal had the officials of the university commission Machiavelli to write the Florentine Histories. In August of the following year The Art of War was published, and a month later Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, Leo X’s nephew, wrote to Machiavelli, warmly praising the work’s ability to draw upon the best features of ancient and modern warfare.8 It is not clear whether any leading members of the Medici family read The Discourses before it was published. But it is highly likely that both the Pope and Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici read Machiavelli’s Discourse on Florentine Affairs after the Death of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Younger, since they had commissioned it. Its fundamental argument, that Florence was best suited for republican government, was based on the premiss that principates were suitable only for societies that had a landed nobility, which Florence did not. Machiavelli rejected as barbarous and immoral the notion that a social class of this sort should be established in the city, in order to pave the way for princely rule. A similar argument had been deployed in The Discourses. In this case Machiavelli’s views were destined to be totally disregarded, for in 1530 the Medici returned to the city with the aid of an imperial army, overthrew the republican constitution and established a principate in its stead. The disappearance of Florentine republican government, on whose behalf Machiavelli had argued so passionately, did not prevent his works from selling extremely well in the period before they were placed on the Index in 1559. This was in part because they could appeal to a variety of tastes and interests; but it was also that radically different constructions could be put upon them. The author of The Prince was early accused not merely of being an 6

Francesco Vettori to Niccolò Machiavelli, 3 December 1514; Machiavelli to Vettori, 10 December 1514; Vettori to Machiavelli, 15 December 1514; Machiavelli to Vettori, 20 December 1514; Vettori to Machiavelli, 30 December 1514: Machiavelli, Opere (Biblioteca di classici italiani, Feltrinelli editore), vol. 6, Lettere, ed. Franco Gaeta (Milan, 1961), pp. 348–9, 351–61, 362, 363–7, 369. 7 Najemy, Between Friends, p. 311. 8 Machiavelli, Lettere, p. 413.

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advocate of tyranny, but of seeking to persuade the Medici to set up princely rule in Florence; but for the republican theorist Donato Giannotti, who knew him well, Machiavelli was both a staunch defender of republicanism and an authoritative military thinker. Moreover, while Paul IV considered that his works deserved to be put on the Index, it is clear that whatever else Leo X and Clement VII may have thought of Machiavelli, they did not regard him as a dangerous threat to sound morals or Christian doctrine. In the case of the second Medici Pope this is shown beyond doubt by the fact that in 1531 Antonio Blado was given a papal privilege to print the Florentine Histories, The Prince, and The Discourses; in the same year, moreover, the firm of Giunta received a similar privilege.9 By 1549, however, the atmosphere in Rome had become far less accommodating. In that year the Florentine Giovanbattista Busini reported to Benedetto Varchi that the works of Machiavelli had been banned and that some unidentified persons wanted anyone having a copy of them in his house to be excommunicated. Busini was clearly very upset by the news, for it prompted him to remark: ‘Dio aiuti il Boccaccio, Dante et Morgante e Burchiello.’10 This last comment is of interest, for it illustrates one way of categorizing Machiavelli’s works that could be used in their defence. They could be viewed, that is, primarily as works of literature, rather than as guides to action, and attacks on them could be characterized as assaults on the Florentine literary tradition in general. One advantage of defending them in these terms was that it was a defence some of the most important individuals involved in the work of censorship might have been disposed to take seriously. One of these men was Cardinal Ghislieri, the later Pope Pius V, and a powerful and austere promoter of Catholic reform, later to be canonized. He occupied under Pope Paul IV the important position of president of the commission that the Pope had appointed to do the groundwork for the Index. But Paul IV found the commission’s approach far too liberal and ordered it to cease its work in 1556. In the following year Ghislieri wrote to the Inquisitor of Genoa in the following terms: By banning Orlando, Orlandino, Cento Novelle and other books of this sort we would rather provoke laughter than otherwise, because such books are not read as if they were things in which one had to believe, but as myths, and as one reads many pagan books such as those of Lucian, Lucretius and similar authors; nonetheless, the matter will be discussed in the congregation of the theologians and then put before the Pope.11

It is worth remarking that these words were written by a man who in 1551 had been appointed Commissioner General of the Roman Inquisition and 9 Helena Puigdomenech, Maquiavelo en España. Presenzia de sus obras en los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid, 1988), pp. 26–7. 10 Ibid., p. 29. 11 Ludwig von Pastor, Storia dei Papi, trans. Angelo Mercati (Rome, 1963), vol. 6, p. 491, note 3.

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who in 1558 obtained the office of Inquisitore Maggiore of the Roman Church.12 Ghislieri’s example shows that one cannot assume that senior figures of the Inquisition were necessarily implacable in their approach to censorship. The Index of 1559, however, paid little heed to such fine distinctions: the works of Machiavelli, Boccaccio, and Erasmus were put on it because they were viewed as heretical.13 But attitudes markedly different from those of its authors persisted in high clerical circles. In 1562 Duke Cosimo de’ Medici approved a project to expurgate the works of Machiavelli and Boccaccio. It is of singular interest that it was Pius V’s confessor, Eustachio Locatelli, Bishop of Reggio, who was eventually employed in this task, for he would presumably not have undertaken it if he had had reason to suppose that the Pope disapproved. On 22 February 1572 he was able to write to Ludovico Martelli, a Florentine man of letters in the entourage of Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, that Machiavelli was not badly thought of, and that the Inquisition had nothing against him personally.14 Once Locatelli had come to the end of his labours their product could be sent to Florence to be given an appropriately elegant literary form. In the following year the recently created Congregation of the Index approved the proposal to entrust this latter work to Machiavelli’s grandsons. Unfortunately for the project the Congregation of the Index was not alone in enjoying powers of censorship. In the late 1570s when it produced its first catalogue of expurgated books this included the Florentine Histories,15 but on 21 October 1579 Gregory XIII declared all Machiavelli’s works to be totally condemned.16 Sixtus V further weakened the Congregation of the Index in 1588 by granting to the Inquisition as well powers to censor and prohibit books. One result of this was that when in 1596, following a proposal by the historian, Cardinal Baronio, the Congregation of the Index approved once again the idea of producing an expurgated version of Machiavelli’s works, and Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici tried to further this project together with that of producing an emended version of the Decameron, the Inquisitor General, Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santori, rejected the notion out of hand.17 Despite the failure of the campaign to produce an expurgated version of at least some of Machiavelli’s works, the fact that they appeared on the Index did not prevent their being published: in the century after his death 158 published versions of his main works have so far been identified, and a majority of these went into circulation after the Index of 1559 was issued.18 In countries and regions that had abandoned Catholicism, of course, the Index had no effect; but even in Catholic France the ban on Machiavelli’s writings was

12

Ibid., pp. 486–7. Peter Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli. Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (Princeton, 1998), p. 303. 14 Ibid., pp. 305–7. 15 Ibid., p. 322. 16 Ibid., p. 324. 17 Ibid., pp. 327–9. 18 Anglo, Machiavelli, p. 183. 13

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largely ignored.19 This, however, was not the only reason why even Catholics continued to be able to read them. One country that certainly did not abandon Catholicism was Spain, and one of its rulers who took his religion seriously and yet could read Machiavelli without experiencing a sense of moral pollution was Charles V, who was acquainted with both The Prince and The Discourses.20 The royal privilege that accompanied the first Spanish translation of The Discourses in 1550 stated that Charles had read them in Italian more than once.21 It may well be that his son, Philip II, had also read them, for the two Spanish versions were dedicated to him.22 Even after the Pauline Index, which declared that anyone reading or owning a prohibited book would be excommunicated, it is clear that in the libraries of nobles and clerics in Spain copies of Machiavelli’s works were to be found, such as that of don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza in 1575 or that of the Duque del Infantado in Guadalajara, also in 1575.23 In the library of the Escorial in 1585 there were four of Machiavelli’s works. One reason why Spaniards could continue to read the works of Machiavelli, despite the Pauline Index of 1559, was that in Spain more notice was taken of the Indexes produced in Spain, which were by no means identical to those produced in Rome. No copy of the 1547 Spanish Index survives. The 1551 Index is regarded as a quintessentially Spanish one, and yet the works that it prohibits are spiritual works of Protestant authors (or of men suspected of being Protestant), Jewish or Muslim texts, and vernacular translations of the Bible. In 1559 the Spanish Inquisitor General, Valdés, paid little attention to the Pauline Index, partly because he was preparing his own, partly because the state of relations between Philip II and Paul IV was bad, and partly because Valdés in compiling his Index had a particular enemy in mind, Bartholomé de Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, to whose Commentaries on the Christian Catechism Valdés was fiercely opposed. As a result, Machiavelli’s name did not appear in the Spanish Index of 1559, and this explains why Machiavelli’s works could continue to be read in Spain for nearly 25 years much more freely than was the case in Italy.24 This is one excellent example of the independence with which Valdés and the Spanish Inquisition were accustomed to act, and which was bitterly criticized at the Council of Trent.25 What changed this situation was the Index compiled by one of Valdés’ successors, Cardinal Quiroga, in 1583–84. This imposed an absolute ban on Machiavelli’s works; no possibility of expurgating them was considered.26 It is highly significant, therefore, that both in 1584 and in the following year don Antonio Folch de Cardona y Fernández de Córdoba, Duke of Sessa, 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Ibid., p. 173. According to the Venetian, Francesco Sansovino: ibid., pp. 18–19. Puigdomenech, Maquiavelo, p. 140. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., pp. 156–9. Ibid., pp. 41–52. Ibid., pp. 47–8. Ibid., pp. 55–7.

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who belonged to one of the principal noble houses of Spain, thought it worthwhile to try to convince the Spanish Council of the Inquisition to allow the publication of a suitably expurgated Castilian version of various works of Machiavelli. He belonged to the faction in government that was headed by the Prince of Eboli, and Quiroga the Inquisitor General was a member of the group. The failure of these petitions, it has been suggested by one Spanish scholar, may have been due to the fall of Antonio Perez, who was connected to the Eboli group; but the fact that a man of the Duke of Sessa’s exalted social standing was prepared not once but twice to press the case for an expurgated edition of some of Machiavelli’s works indicates just how popular they were.27 The same scholar has suggested that the interest shown in high political circles in Spain in Machiavelli’s writings is to be explained by the existence of a group of notables who took a cool, pragmatic and secular view of foreign policy matters and of policy towards the Netherlands, opposing the priority that in his approach to these issues Philip II gave to religious considerations. According to this theory the Inquisition was fanatically opposed to the spread of Machiavelli’s ideas because it saw them as a threat to its own position and to that of the monarchy.28 A letter of 12 May 1591 from Michele Priuli, Bishop of Vicenza and nuncio in Florence, to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfrondrato, casts a rather different light on these matters. Priuli remarked that in many parts of Italy and Spain, and particularly at the Spanish court, many people were obtaining from the local Inquisitors without the slightest difficulty licences to possess and to read the works of Machiavelli. Those who were reading his works were being referred to as ‘Machiavellians’. Priuli added that he had heard that Machiavelli’s behaviour on his deathbed had shown him to be an atheist.29 This last accusation was hardly new; it became, indeed, a standard element in the corpus of anti-Machiavellian literature that grew up in the course of the sixteenth century. If Priuli’s report is accurate, it utterly discredits the notion that the attitude of Inquisitors in Spain and Italy towards the works of Machiavelli was one of pitiless hostility. Unsurprisingly, Priuli’s remarks prompted Sfrondrato to ask him to name the Inquisitors who were handing out these licences in such profusion. In his reply of 26 May the nuncio wrote that according to a report from the Spanish court there was not a court official, nor a member of the Council of State, who had not obtained a licence of this sort. According to this same report they did not content themselves with merely reading Machiavelli; in their conduct of government and administration they were guided by the recommendations contained in his works, and it was for this reason that some of them were dubbed ‘Machiavellians’.30 If this report was accurate, it would serve to

27 28 29 30

Ibid., pp.113–14. Ibid., p. 61. Appendix, doc. 1. Appendix, doc. 2.

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refute the notion that reading and being influenced by Machiavelli’s works particularly distinguished those who opposed the policies of Philip II. In evaluating the nuncio’s remarks about the influence of Machiavelli’s work in Spain it is as well to remember that in the second half of that century it was certainly not just members of the Spanish government who were criticized for being followers of Machiavelli by those who took his works to be handbooks of vice or irreligion. William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, ministers of Elizabeth I, were both accused by a Scottish cleric, John Leslie, of being two ‘plain Machiavellians’, bent on making England a ‘Machiavellian State and Regiment’; and Cardinal Granvelle described Cecil as a ‘new man and acting in accordance with the “discourse” of Machiavelli’.31 In France, in the aftermath of the massacre of St Bartholomew’s night, Huguenot authors like Henri Estienne and Innocent Gentillet levelled similar accusations at the French government.32 One cannot be sure whether Priuli had ever read any of Machiavelli’s works, but his comments on their author certainly indicate that he was fully in sympathy with the ban on them. The synodal constitutions issued during the period in which he was Bishop of Vicenza (1579–1603) and the records of his episcopal visitations reveal him to have been a tireless proponent of Catholic reform and of the provisions of the Council of Trent.33 The Secretary of State, Sfrondrato, to whom Priuli addressed his letters, was equally clearly an austere and committed proponent of religious reform, particularly close to Filippo Neri;34 and Priuli when composing his remarks would have been perfectly aware of this. But it would be quite wrong to assume that such rigorous dedication to Catholic reform necessarily consorted with an extreme hostility towards the works of Machiavelli: as already noted, it was the confessor of Pius V, Locatelli, who was charged with the task of expurgating Machiavelli’s works, and it was Cesare Baronio, a devoted disciple of Filippo Neri, who took up the idea again in 1596.35 It may be that Priuli’s readiness to credit a report from Spain that, from his point of view, showed its governing class in such a poor light can be related to the fact that he came from an old and politically prominent Venetian family. Relations between Venice and Spain in this period could hardly be termed cordial. Since 1530 the ‘normal’ foreign policy of the Venetian republic, promoted in its early years by Gasparo Contarini, was based on neutrality between France and Spain, rather than on anything more vigorously proSpanish; but after the death of King Henry III of France in 1589 the Venetian government took a bold step that deeply shocked Madrid: it instructed its ambassador in Paris to have dealings with the Protestant Henry of Navarre, 31

Anglo, Machiavelli, pp. 334–5, and note 24. Ibid, pp. 338–9; John M. H. Salmon, Society in Crisis. France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), p. 189. 33 Storia di Vicenza. III/1, L’età della Repubblica Veneta (1404–1797), eds Franco Barbieri and Paolo Preto (Vicenza, 1989), pp. 181, 183, 186–7, 192. 34 Pastor, Storia dei Papi, vol. 10, trans. Pio Cenci (Rome, 1955), pp. 537–8. 35 Godman, Poliziano, p. 328. 32

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in effect recognizing him as the legitimate monarch.36 After Philip II’s death (in 1598) Balthasar Álamos de Barrientos, a lawyer who had worked for the government, in an extremely gloomy assessment of Spain’s position in the world pointed out that all the more important independent states of Italy longed for the end of Spanish dominance.37 The fact, however, that as a Venetian Priuli might have been especially likely to consider reliable the report whose details he passed on to the Secretary of State does not prove that it was either false or largely without foundation. It is not surprising, after all, that those involved in the government of Spain and its territories should have found rewarding the reflections of an author who was deeply interested both in the art of war and in the exercise of power over extended dominions, and who saw in Rome a military and political model to be followed. Philip II was not, unlike his father, both King of Spain and Emperor, but the variety and extent of the lands that he governed gave a certain plausibility to comparisons between himself and Roman Emperors. On a medal of 1585, for example, a depiction of the zodiac is accompanied with the words ultra anni solisque vias, a modified version of Virgil’s extra anni solisque vias, words spoken by the shade of Anchises as part of the description that he offers his son Aeneas of the future imperium of Augustus.38 Both Charles V and his son were keenly aware, moreover, of the intimate relationship between power and reputation,39 a subject central to Machiavelli’s view of government, and to the advice he offered in The Prince and The Discourses. The existence of this relationship was widely acknowledged in the fifteenth century; but no one discussed it with greater penetration than Machiavelli did.40 An awareness of its importance lay behind the Spanish government’s determination not to allow the revolt of their Netherlandish subjects to succeed. In 1628 the Count-Duke of Olivares informed his master the King that the rationale for continuing the struggle could be summed up in two words, ‘religion and reputation’.41 In 1635 he further developed the point, producing a view that closely resembles the modern ‘domino’ theory: ‘The greatest dangers [facing the Crown] are those that threaten Lombardy, the Netherlands and Germany, because a defeat in any of these three is fatal

36

Gaetano Cozzi, Michael Knapton and Giovanni Scarabello, La Repubblica di Venezia nell’età moderna. Dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica. Storia d’Italia, vol. 12 (Turin, 1992), pp. 66–7. 37 Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven and London, 2000), pp. 108–9. 38 Ibid., p. 4. 39 Ibid., pp. 89–90. 40 Humfrey C. Butters, ‘Power, Force, Diplomacy and the Roman Model in the Writings of Niccolò Machiavelli’, in Stella Fletcher and Christine Shaw (eds), The World of Savonarola. Italian Elites and Perceptions of Crisis (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 132–3. 41 Geoffrey Parker, ‘Why did the Dutch Revolt last so Long?’ in Parker, Spain and the Netherlands 1559–1659. Ten Studies (Glasgow, 1979), p. 53.

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for this Monarchy; so much so that if the defeat in those parts is a great one, the rest of the Monarchy will collapse.’42 Priuli’s remarks about the granting of licences to read Machiavelli’s works did not, however, as we have seen, solely concern Spain. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando de’ Medici, told the nuncio that while he had a licence to read them, he had not wished to do so, knowing of the many evil deeds that Machiavelli had committed during his lifetime. But he went on to say that there was not a secular princely court in Europe whose officials had not obtained licences of this sort and made use of Machiavelli’s ideas in their conduct of public business; and this applied equally to professional soldiers (presumably at a senior level). When Priuli went to see the local Inquisitor responsible for issuing licences, he admitted that there was a very great demand for them. He claimed, however, that he had issued only a few, but that he had not been able to deny them to don Pietro de’ Medici (‘don Pietro’), don Giovanni de’ Medici (‘don Giovanni’), don Virginio Orsini (‘don Virginio’), and Giovan Vincenzo Vitelli (‘Marchese Vittelli’). He added that during Lent many people had come to see him with copies of Machiavelli’s works, seeking absolution for having read them; so that this particular abuse was clearly a widespread one.43 If one considers the persons named by Priuli it is clear that in Florentine upper class circles Machiavelli’s works were very popular, despite the fact that they were on the Index. Grand Duke Ferdinand was probably being disingenuous when he said that he had not wished to read them, but his observation that the ideas they contained were taken seriously in government circles throughout Europe is very interesting and may well have been largely accurate. It was certainly not inspired by the sort of religious animosity that led Huguenots to see Machiavellians at the heart of the French government, or Catholics to detect their influence in the English one; nor was it prompted by the sort of anti-Spanish feeling that, in part at least, may have affected Priuli’s judgement on Machiavellianism in Spain. On the other hand, it may have been intended, to some degree, to justify Ferdinand’s own possession of a licence to read Machiavelli’s works. Five years later, as has been noted, the Grand Duke tried, without success, to convince the Inquisitor General to allow an expurgated version of them to be prepared. Don Pietro de’ Medici (1554– 1604) was a son of Cosimo I, and a soldier. In 1579 he was appointed a general of Italian infantry and went to Spain with the Tuscan military contingent that fought in the Spanish army that took over Portugal. He appears to have had a great interest in gambling and little interest in literature.44 Don Giovanni de’ Medici (1567–1621) was an illegitimate son of Cosimo I and served as a soldier on many fronts, including Flanders and Hungary. He had a good knowledge of military architecture, and was responsible for the plan of the Belvedere and of the new citadel of Livorno. In 1610 he was appointed Captain-General 42

Parker, Grand Strategy, p. 330, note 64. Appendix, doc. 2. 44 Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo, vol. 2 (Florence, 1925), pp. 185–94. 43

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of the Venetian Republic. He had a rich library and was often consulted by Ferdinando de’ Medici on literary matters.45 In the year after his death Domenico Niccolini, who had bought his library, wrote to don Lorenzo de’ Medici informing him that it contained some prohibited books, and that he had obtained from the local Inquisitor a licence to keep them and read them that now needed to be renewed.46 Giovan Vincenzo Vitelli, Marquis of Cetona, was an illegitimate son of Giovan Luigi di Niccolò Vitelli (known as ‘Chiappino’). Like his father he was a soldier and a knight of the Order of Santo Stefano.47 Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano and Ferdinando de’ Medici’s nephew, was married to a sister of Cardinal Montalto, a nephew of Sixtus V. He fought in Hungary against the Turk.48 We cannot know why these distinguished individuals sought a licence to read Machiavelli’s works, but most of them were soldiers, and to them his military reflections will have been of particular interest, bearing in mind Ferdinando de’ Medici’s remark, reported above, that soldiers were especially likely to be acquainted with Machiavelli’s writings. That certainly does not show, however, that those reflections, taken in isolation, were the only parts of his works that attracted them. Few works of political theory, after all, accord such a cardinal role to warfare as Machiavelli’s do, and it would not have been surprising if military men felt especially drawn to the works of a thinker who saw the waging of war as so central to the business of government. It is perfectly true that the Arte della Guerra was heavily dependent on the writings of Vegetius, Frontinus and Polybius,49 but what sixteenth-century soldiers wanted to know was not so much how the ancients waged war, but how far ancient modes of waging war might be relevant to modern conditions; and answers to that question were to be found in Machiavelli’s works. It is also true that Renaissance humanists often wrote about the contrast between ‘modern’ military modes and ancient ones, and some (though not all) contrasted the virtue of the latter with the corruption of the former; but in the sixteenth century Machiavelli’s reputation as an authority on the conduct of warfare was far higher than theirs. In many cases this reflects the fact that the soldiers and statesmen who read his works were either unfamiliar with those of his humanist predecessors, or simply did not bother to consult them. From the Venetian writer Francesco Sansovino we know that Charles V had read The Prince and The Discourses; but he also remarked that Charles was not a great reader and preferred arms to letters.50 This may well have been true of many of Machiavelli’s military readers. So that although individual ideas 45

Ibid., pp. 217–24. Domenico Niccolini to don Lorenzo de’ Medici, 11 February 1622: Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 5170, f. 169 r. 47 Giuliano de’ Ricci, Cronaca (1532–1606), ed. Giuliana Sapori (Milan, 1972), p. 23. 48 G.E. Saltini, ‘Istoria del Gran Duca Ferdinando I, Scritta da Piero Usimbardi’, Archivio Storico Italiano, series 4, 6 (1880): 365–401. 49 Anglo, Machiavelli, p. 522. 50 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 46

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of his were frequently to be found in the works of other humanists, it was in his writings that those readers became acquainted with them; and there they were integrated into literary wholes that had a greater claim to originality, and were expressed through the medium of an extremely vigorous and distinctive Italian prose style. But soldiers constituted but one section of Machiavelli’s readership. It is striking that after his works were proscribed by the Roman and, later, by the Spanish Indexes the demand for his works in Catholic Spain and Italy remained high among rulers and nobles, statesmen, administrators and clerics. Even at the upper levels of the Roman Inquisition there were those who were perfectly prepared to approve the idea of expurgating Machiavelli’s writings, rather than banning them. Of these conflicting attitudes towards his literary inheritance none is more telling than the example of Cesare Baronio and Tommaso Bozio, both intimates of Filippo Neri, the one prepared to countenance an expurgated version of Machiavelli’s works, the other dedicated to producing refutations of them.51

51 Louis Ponnelle and Louis Bordet, St Philip Neri and the Roman Society of his Times (1515–1595) (London, 1932), pp. 298–9, 521.

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APPENDIX Doc. 1: Michele Priuli to Paolo Emilio Sfondrato, 12 May 1591 (Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Segreteria di Stato, Firenze, 12A, ff. 690 r–691 v). f. 691 r: … Non voglio restar di dar conto parimente a V. S. Ill.ma et R.ma che per molti luoghi d’Italia, et in Spagna ancora, et particolarmente nella corte, pare che di presente gli Inquisitori concedino molto facilmente la licenza a ciascuno di tenire et leggere le opere del Malchiavelli, et che esse opere vadino hora molto liberamente – f. 691 v – per le mani di ciascuno, essendo già in uso fra alcuni di dire li tali sono Malchiavelisti et esso Malchiavelli, oltre che le opere sue, come Lei sa, sono prohibite, intendo di qua che fece una morte molto impia, con aperti segni nel tempo sino di spirar l’ultimo fiato di esser stato sempre un perverso atheista… Doc. 2: Michele Priuli to Paolo Emilio Sfondrato, 26 May 1591 (Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Segreteria di Stato, Firenze, 12A, ff. 705 r–708 v). f. 708 r: … Quanto scrissi ultimamente a V. S. Ill.ma et R.ma della facilità delli Inquisitori nel conceder la licenza di tenire et legger le opere del Macchiavelli, che Lei mi scrive con la soddetta sua che nomini quali siano questi Inquisitori che si mostrano – f. 708 v – così indulgenti, Le dico che dalla corte di Spagna vien scritto di qua che non c’è ministro in quella corte, et particolarmente tutti quelli del Consiglio di Stato, che non habbiano essa licenza, et che non facciano studio sopra queste opere con haverle spesso nelle mani, et non si servano d’esse ne’ loro consigli, et di maniera che alcuni di questi sono chiamati ‘Macchiavelisti’. In Italia poi occorrendomi dannare et biasmar li giorni passati al Gran Duca Ser.mo questo nome et le sue opere, mi disse l’Altezza Sua che haveva licenza di poterle legger, ma che però non le haveva volute mai legger per le molte male attioni che sapeva di quell’ huomo mentre visse; et mi soggionse che non c’era corte di principe laico che tutti li ministri di essi principi non havessero questa licenza, et non si servissero di quella lettione, et anco quelli che attendevano alle armi. Et havendo io doppo parlato col Padre Inquisitore di qua per veder come in ciò egli si governava, mi disse che la licenza era a lui ricercata quasi del continuo da molti, ma che esso era difficile in concederla, che però non l’haveva potuta negare alli Eccellentissimi Signori don Pietro, don Giovanni et don Virginio, et al Marchese Vittelli; et che questa Quaresima particolarmente molti erano stati per l’assolutione da lui per haver lette esse opere, con portargli i libri, onde l’abuso si può tenir più tosto generale che particolare…

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Part IV

Communes and Despots: Some Case Studies

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7 From Commune to Regional State: Political Experiments in Fourteenth Century Cremona Marco Gentile

More than 40 years after the publication of Communes and Despots, mainstream Italian historiography on the post-communal age and on the Renaissance state still relies on some of the assumptions which Philip Jones’s work had convincingly challenged.1 The most important of these assumptions, which over the years has become very similar to a dogma in its most radical formulations, is in fact a legacy of the Italian Risorgimento, when the era of the free communes came to be seen as Italy’s golden age in contrast with the subsequent decay under foreign rule.2 Roughly speaking, this grand narrative of Italian national specificity based on the urban primacy is still articulated along two main axes, both dating back to the nineteenth century: republicanism (a central theme at least since Sismondi), which has long been favoured by anglophone historiography, particularly – but not exclusively – in the field of intellectual history; and the close link between the cities and their own surrounding territories, which was at the core of Carlo Cattaneo’s reflections in his famous 1858 essay on the city as ‘the ideal principle’ of Italian history.3 1

Philip J. Jones, ‘Communes and Despots. The City State in Late-Medieval Italy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 15 (1965): 71–96; this volume, chapter 1. On the lasting influence of Jones’s work see, for instance, Edward Coleman, ‘The Italian Communes. Recent Work and Current Trends’, Journal of Medieval History, 25 (1999): 373–97. Still very important are Giorgio Chittolini, ‘Città e contado nella tarda età comunale (a proposito di studi recenti)’, Nuova Rivista Storica, 53 (1969): 706–19, and Giorgio Chittolini, ‘La crisi delle libertà comunali e le origini dello Stato territoriale’, in Chittolini, La formazione dello stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado. Secoli XIV e XV (Turin, 1979), pp. 3–33. 2 Cf. Gabriella Rossetti, ‘Il comune cittadino: un tema inattuale?’, in Renato Bordone and Jörg Jarnut (eds), L’evoluzione delle città italiane nell’XI secolo (Bologna, 1988), pp. 25–43, particularly pp. 42–3. For a recent survey on the subject see Elisa Occhipinti, ‘I comuni medievali nella storiografia italiana del Risorgimento’, Nuova Rivista Storica, 91 (2007): 459–530. 3 On the urban character as méta-récit see Chris Wickham, ‘Alto medioevo e identità

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It is generally accepted that the institutional development of the Italian medieval commune from the twelfth to the fourteenth century can be broadly divided into three phases: consolare, podestàrile and popolare.4 During the final stage of the process, the establishment in several cities of governments directly controlled by the ‘popolo’ created a pattern of political organization where a wide and horizontal participation in communal offices replaced the vertical structures typical of a system previously hegemonized by aristocratic clans. As a general rule, the expansion in government initiative that was characteristic of the popular regimes ‘caused an increase in the number of boards and offices and a growth in the daily documentation of public business’: an innovative documentary system was worked out in order to control the fiscal and military resources of the commune and to prosecute those unwilling to cooperate, who were labelled magnati and outlawed in various ways.5 It is often assumed that one of the most important legacies of the popular commune was a strong sense of the public interest and a governmental practice based on respect for the rules, in opposition to the customary violence of the aristocracy, whose typical means of political organization was faction, if not mere factional strife. Following this view, in fact, one may have the impression that only the popular movements and organizations could elaborate and bring out what might be called a political culture, while aristocratic policies, typically coinciding with family interest, resulted from what has been called ‘a culture of hatred’.6 The widespread tendency to consider the Italian communal cities as an early stage on the evolution towards the modern state in the West appears sometimes closely linked to the periodically re-emerging and somewhat ideological willingness to characterize popular governments as ‘democratic’.7 State-building processes are obviously related to territorial control, and the history of the Italian city state is by no means an exception; another main nazionale’, Storica, 27 (2004): 7–26. I shall not even attempt to provide a bibliography on republicanism: see, most recently, Laurent Baggioni, ‘La repubblica nella storia: la questione dell’umanesimo civile’, Storica, 35–36 (2006): 65–91. The quotation comes from Carlo Cattaneo, ‘La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane’, in Cattaneo, Scritti storici e geografici, eds Gaetano Salvemini and Ernesto Sestan (2 vols, Florence, 1957), vol. 1, pp. 383–437. Sismondi’s monumental Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge was printed in two editions between 1807 and 1818 and synthesized in 1832 in English and in French: see Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, Storia delle Repubbliche italiane, ed. Pierangelo Schiera (Turin, 1996). 4 See Giuliano Milani, I comuni italiani. Secoli XII–XIV (Rome and Bari, 2005). 5 Cf. Andrea Zorzi, ‘The Popolo’, in John M. Najemy (ed.), Italy in the Age of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2004), pp. 145–64, p. 149; see also Milani, I comuni italiani, for an up-to-date bibliography. 6 Jean–Claude Maire Vigueur, Cavalieri e cittadini. Guerra, conflitti e società nell’Italia comunale (Bologna, 2004), p. 388. 7 Cf. Mario Ascheri, La città stato (Bologna, 2006), and, on three Lombard case studies, Riccardo Rao, ‘Signorie cittadine e gruppi sociali in area padana fra Due e Trecento: Pavia, Piacenza e Parma’, Società e storia, 118 (2007): 673–706. On this historiographical line see Andrea Zorzi, ‘Fracta est civitas magna in tres partes. Conflitto e costituzione nell’Italia comunale’, Scienza e Politica, 39 (2008): 61–87 with an extensive bibliography which is impossible to provide here.

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legacy of the popular commune, in fact, was seen to be control over the contado. The subjugation of their surrounding territory is often supposed to have been pursued systematically by the cities, and achieved to such an extent that the bricks for the future building of the regional states were provided by the thirteenth century city states.8 The alleged success of the cities in subduing and organizing the contado, however, is still to be verified: northern Italy and Lombardy in particular pose serious problems to the paradigm. First of all, we should bear in mind that virtually all our sources, including chronicles, come from the cities and were shaped by an urban cultural environment. How much of the well-ordered picture of a subjugated countryside comes to us from the outstanding ideological awareness shown by the popular governments and their propaganda? To what extent do the statutes and the libri iurium, in which the rights claimed by the communes were carefully recorded, reflect reality? These questions are not as trivial as they might sound, for at a closer look, in fact, the thirteenth century Lombard cities do not seem to have had a very tight grip on their diocesan territories, despite their claims. Even if we limit ourselves to the best-known cases, the most recent and accurate surveys on the subject admit that cities such as Bergamo, Brescia and Como failed in disciplining their territories.9 Worse still, communes like Piacenza, Parma and Reggio had to deal with a powerful landed nobility, which until well into the first half of the Cinquecento was the main factor in the local political competition.10 Recent studies have shown that in the Trecento even the Milanese contado was full of castles belonging to families that were influential both in the city and in the countryside, not to mention the numerous branches of the Visconti lineage, with their privileges and fiscal exemptions.11 We know very little about cities like Novara, Vercelli and Alessandria, but that little is somewhat disturbing: and yet the invariable conclusion is that the urban

8 See for example Isabella Lazzarini, L’Italia degli stati territoriali. Secoli XIII–XV (Rome and Bari, 2003). It is perhaps worth noticing the renewed success enjoyed in recent years by the expression ‘territorial state’, which tends to replace ‘regional state’ as being better suited to emphasizing the urban-centred nature of a political entity made up of cities, which in turn control their contadi and organize themselves around a signore or a dominant city. 9 Gian Maria Varanini, ‘L’organizzazione del distretto cittadino nell’Italia padana dei secoli XIII–XIV (Marca Trevigiana, Lombardia, Emilia)’, in Giorgio Chittolini and Dietmar Willoweit (eds), L’organizzazione del territorio in Italia e in Germania: secoli XIII– XIV (Bologna, 1994), pp. 133–234. 10 See at least Daniele Androzzi, Piacenza 1402–1545. Ipotesi di ricerca (Piacenza, 1997); Marco Gentile, Terra e poteri. Parma e il Parmense nel ducato visconteo all’inizio del Quattrocento (Milan, 2001); Letizia Arcangeli, Gentiluomini di Lombardia. Ricerche sull’aristocrazia padana nel Rinascimento (Milan, 2003); Andrea Gamberini, La città assediata. Poteri e identità politiche a Reggio in età viscontea (Rome, 2003). 11 Andrea Gamberini, ‘Il contado di Milano nel Trecento. Aspetti politici e giurisdizionali’, in Andrea Gamberini, Lo stato visconteo. Linguaggi politici e dinamiche costituzionali (Milan, 2005), pp. 153–99.

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pattern of territorial organization (‘all in all’, or ‘as a whole’) was alive and well.12 Unsurprisingly, the long-lasting success of such a strong paradigm has not produced much analytical research on local case-studies. There are very few recent books on the society and institutions of the Lombard cities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries;13 we know very little about the ongoing social and political dynamics in these urban societies or about the relations between communal institutions and central government. As for the whole Visconti period (1277–1447), a serious lack of primary sources has to be taken into account, for the central archive of the Milanese lords before 1450 is almost completely lost.14 The Cremonese sources for the first half of the Trecento are particularly poor: this city, therefore, has been studied even less than the Lombard average. Nevertheless, the history of Cremona in the fourteenth century provides an excellent case study for understanding, in its broad outline, Lombard political evolution in the transition from commune to regional state. My argument here will focus on three interrelated aspects: institutional change in the shift from commune to signoria, and eventually to the regional state; factions, because during the fourteenth century Cremona developed her peculiar, tripartite factional configuration, which would prove a resilient structure in the long run; and relations between the city and the contado, with particular reference to the political influence exerted on the city by a small number of families which cannot be properly considered part of the urban elite, for they belonged in fact to a social group I shall refer to as landed aristocracy.15 In Cremona, the popular regime which emerged after the signorie of Oberto Pallavicino and Buoso da Dovara (1250–1266) seems to have enjoyed a very short time span.16 The popular government was officially established in December 1270, with the election of anziani in representation of each quarter

12 Gian Maria Varanini, ‘Governi principeschi e modello cittadino di organizzazione del territorio nell’Italia del Quattrocento’, in Sergio Gensini (ed.), Principi e città alla fine del Medioevo (Pisa, 1996), pp. 96–127 (p. 106); cf. Milani, I comuni italiani, pp. 118–20. For a recent overall discussion see now Andrea Gamberini, ‘Principe, comunità e territori nel ducato di Milano: spunti per una rilettura’, Quaderni storici, 127 (2008): 243–65. 13 Among the exceptions is Patrizia Mainoni, Le radici della discordia. Ricerche sulla fiscalità a Bergamo tra XIII e XV secolo (Milan, 1997). 14 The archives of the Visconti were almost wholly destroyed during the dynastic crises of 1385 and 1447: see Alfio Rosario Natale, ‘Archivi milanesi del Trecento’, ACME, 29 (1976): 263–85; Alfio Rosario Natale (ed.), Stilus Cancellariae. Formulario visconteosforzesco (Milan, 1965), pp. x–xii; Alfio Rosario Natale, ‘Per la storia dell’archivio visconteo signorile. Notai alla corte viscontea di Pavia’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 141 (1983): 531–90. 15 I avoid the use of the term ‘nobility’ as in the Italian late medieval and early modern context it can generate misunderstandings: see Arcangeli, Gentiluomini di Lombardia, pp. ix–xxxiv. 16 Cf. the remarks of Philip J. Jones, The Italian City–State. From Commune to Signoria (Oxford, 1997), p. 585.

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(or gate) of the city and the appointment of a captain from Pistoia.17 Only 30 years later, however, under the institutional cover of the popolo, the political and financial hegemony of a powerful aristocratic family, the Cavalcabò, marquises of Viadana, had already taken shape. Towards the end of the century Cavalcabò Cavalcabò had been able to concentrate in his hands the whole fortune of his lineage. He lent to the commune of Cremona huge sums of money on a regular basis, and some nearby cities too, such as Lodi, borrowed money from him. The finances of the commune were thus under his control, and by his death (c.1306), the Cavalcabò were informally considered the lords of the city.18 In 1310 Henry VII’s descent into Italy seemed to change the situation radically.19 To the disappointment of his supporters, he initially declined the leadership of the imperial faction, for he ‘had not come on behalf of a party, but for the whole’.20 On that basis, during his first weeks in Italy the king pursued a thorough policy of peacemaking between the factions of the Lombard cities. Cremona swore fealty to Henry on 4 January 1311: the members of the ‘Barbarasi’ faction (exiled since the expulsion of Buoso da Dovara in 1267) were then able to return to their homes, but the cohabitation lasted only a few weeks. On 12 February, in Milan, Guido della Torre rebelled against the emperor; the Cavalcabò did the same six days later. Guglielmo Cavalcabò took the decision to resist Henry against the advice of a part of his faction, the former pars Ecclesie (the Church party), known in Cremona as the ‘Capelleti’. When the Imperial army came, however, Guglielmo fled with his closest supporters; the dissidents, led by Sopramonte Amati, begged the king’s pardon, but Henry remained adamant. It is generally accepted that the seizure of the city by the imperial troops marked the end of the communal age in Cremona, and the punishment was indeed harsh. The walls were destroyed, as well as the houses of the rebel families, and 71 citizens among the leaders of the Capelleti faction were banished. Last but not least, the king deprived the commune of the jurisdiction over the contado, granting privileges to medium-sized boroughs such as Pizzighettone and Soncino, where he sent his own officials.21 17

François Menant, ‘Un lungo Duecento 1183–1311. Il Comune fra maturità istituzionale e lotte di parte’, in Giancarlo Andenna (ed.), Storia di Cremona. Dall’alto medioevo all’età comunale (Azzano S. Paolo, 2004), pp. 282–363 (pp. 330–1). 18 See Giancarlo Andenna, ‘Cavalcabò (de Cavalcabobus) Cavalcabò’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 22 (Rome, 1979), pp. 393–4; Patrizia Mainoni, ‘La gabella del sale nelle città dell’Italia del nord, secoli XIII–XIV’, in Patrizia Mainoni (ed.), Politiche finanziarie e fiscali nell’Italia settentrionale (secoli XIII–XV) (Milan, 2001), pp. 39–85 (pp. 53–4); Menant, ‘Un lungo Duecento’, p. 355. 19 On Henry VII’s expedition see William M. Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy. The Conflict of Empire and City-State 1310–1315 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1960). 20 ‘Nec pro parte venerat, sed pro toto’: cf. Nicolai Episcopi Botrontinensis ‘Relatio de itinere italico Henrici VII imperatoris’, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 9, ed. Ludovico Antonio Muratori (Milan, 1726), col. 889. 21 For a detailed account of the events see Agostino Cavalcabò, Le ultime lotte del comune di Cremona per l’autonomia. Note di storia lombarda dal 1310 al 1322 (Cremona,

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The military retaliation against Cremona and the measures taken against the rebels drastically changed the way Henry’s policy was perceived all over Italy. The very moment he issued sentences of banishment for political crime, he was adopting the same practice of political exclusion used by the communal regimes, thus renouncing the role of impartial referee which he had claimed when he had crossed the Alps.22 In Cremona, Henry appointed an executive board of 16 anziani, all members of the Imperial party. Sopramonte Amati was thrown into prison – where he died – together with many of the local notables of the pars Ecclesie who had refused their compliance to Guglielmo Cavalcabò. The bishop, Rainerio Porrina, considered too close to the late Boniface VIII, was expelled too. This behaviour seriously damaged Henry’s legitimacy all over Italy, and strengthened the accusations of tyranny which were being levelled against him.23 At this point, a clarification about factions and their names is required: this is a most important issue, because these names and their changes mark the institutional developments in the long term. In Henry VII’s day the Lombard factions did not call themselves Guelfs and Ghibellines. These two names, imported from Tuscany, definitively established themselves in the Lombard environment during the 1320s, also as a consequence of the crusade called by John XXII against the Visconti and their followers and the subsequent trials for heresy;24 it is very likely that the factional tradition of many northern aristocratic families took definite shape at that time. During the first years of the fourteenth century the name ‘guelfi’ was used only in alliance treaties or in the general leagues stipulated between Florence, Bologna, the Angevins and the Lombard cities and lords who rebelled against the Empire. The future Ghibellines, on the other hand, were a step behind on the road from concrete to abstract, that is from the pars domini Imperatoris (of Frederick II) to the pars Imperii and finally to the Ghibelline party. They never chose to call themselves Ghibellines, since Ghibelline was originally a defamatory epithet used by the supporters of the Church to delegitimize political opponents.25 In Cremona, during the second half of the thirteenth century, the local factions called themselves ‘Capelleti’ and ‘Barbarasi’ (later ‘Troncaciuffi’, roughly ‘quiff cutters’), which matched respectively the pars Ecclesie and the pars Imperii. 1937), which provides a most useful selection of documentary and narrative sources. 22 Giuliano Milani, L’esclusione dal comune. Conflitti e bandi politici a Bologna e in altre città italiane fra XII e XIV secolo (Roma 2003), pp. 426–7. 23 Gabriele Zanella, ‘L’imperatore tiranno. La parabola di Enrico VII nella storiografia coeva’, in Mauro Tosti Croce (ed.), Il viaggio di Enrico VII in Italia (Città di Castello, 1993), pp. 43–56. 24 On the trials see Lodovico Frati, ‘La contesa fra Matteo Visconti e papa Giovanni XXII secondo i documenti dell’Archivio Vaticano’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 15 (1888): 241–58; Francesco Cognasso, L’unificazione della Lombardia sotto Milano, in Storia di Milano, vol. 5, La signoria dei Visconti (1310–1392) (Milan, 1955), pp. 3–571 (pp. 131–54). 25 Rosa Maria Dessì, ‘I nomi dei guelfi e ghibellini da Carlo I d’Angiò a Petrarca’, in Marco Gentile (ed.), Guelfi e ghibellini nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Rome, 2005), pp. 3–78.

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This assonance with hair (Capelleti, Troncaciuffi) and beard (Barbarasi) has been explained with reference to the custom of letting one’s beard and hair grow as a sign of mourning.26 In this sense, Capelleti and Barbarasi are more ‘universal’ names than Guelfs and Ghibellines, since they are an expression of the general tendency of any political society, however simple or complex, to divide sooner or later in two; whereas the spread and the ultimate success of the names Guelfs and Ghibellines reflects a particular need for coordination of party names, at an international level (Church, the Angevins, Florence), or at a national or regional level, but always within a localized area. Henry VII’s direct rule over Cremona lasted only a few months. In 1312 Guglielmo Cavalcabò seized the city, driving out the imperial faction, but he died soon after and the signoria of the city was taken over by the general captain of the Guelf party in Lombardy, the lord of Parma Giberto da Correggio. The hegemony of the Cavalcabò family over the Capelleti, however, was no longer tolerated by his emerging rival Ponzino Ponzoni, and Giberto could not prevent a split in the Cremonese pars Ecclesie. In February 1313, when the chapter of the cathedral was summoned to appoint the new bishop, the candidate of the imperial party was elected thanks to the votes of some ‘Guelf’ canons, who rejected the Cavalcabò man. The result was a schism in the local Church, which lasted for a few years and further complicated an already entangled situation. Within about 20 years, from 1313 to 1334, Cremona had as lords Robert of Anjou, Giberto da Correggio, Giacomo Cavalcabò, Ponzino Ponzoni, Giacomo Cavalcabò again, Galeazzo Visconti, Ludwig of Bavaria, John of Bohemia and eventually Azzone Visconti, by whom Cremona was brought into the Milanese orbit once and for all. It is not easy (nor, perhaps necessary) to unravel this chaotic flow of events.27 For our purpose, it will suffice to highlight some aspects of the main points which I mentioned at the beginning: that is, factions, landed aristocracy, relations between the city and its territory, and institutional developments. With regard to factions, after a final and rather obscure experiment of cohabitation between the partisans of the Empire and those of the Church in 1316–1317,28 the old pars Ecclesie split definitively into the Capelleti (later called Guelfs) led by the Cavalcabò, and the Maltraversi, led by the Ponzoni. Quite distinct from these two remained the future Ghibelline party, the Troncaciuffi. This tripartite scheme featuring Guelfs, Ghibellines and Maltraversi became Cremona’s peculiar political feature for over two centuries, until the Italian Wars. The unceasing struggle to rule the city most obviously took place in the countryside, where the control exerted by the commune had quickly melted 26

Menant, ‘Un lungo Duecento’, pp. 320–1. For further details see Marco Gentile, ‘Dal comune cittadino allo stato regionale: la vicenda politica (1311–1402)’, in Giancarlo Andenna (ed.), Storia di Cremona. Il Trecento. Chiesa e cultura (Azzano S. Paolo, 2007), pp. 260–301; and for the years 1311– 1322 Agostino Cavalcabò, Le ultime lotte. 28 A ‘guelforum ac gibolengorum mixta comunitas’, according to Albertino Mussato, De gestis Italicorum post Henricum VII. Sette libri inediti, ed. Luigi Padrin (Venice, 1903), p. 6. 27

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away. Lineages such as the Cavalcabò, the Pallavicini and the Ponzoni, but also the Sommi, the Dovara and the da Borgo, had lands, castles, ports on the river Po, and men and other resources useful for pursuing the conflict. A contemporary chronicler informs us that, when Cremona eventually surrendered to Azzone Visconti in 1334, the authority of the commune did not extend beyond the city walls.29 As to institutional developments, the only reliable evidence is provided by the statutes issued by Robert of Anjou in 1313. It is not easy to tell how much the project stated by this compilation of norms reflected the political and institutional reality.30 In any case, in the statutes the king and the ‘commune and populus of Cremona’ enjoyed equal rights: the signatories agreed on ‘pacts and conventions’ which could not be modified without the consent of both contracting parties, and had to be integrally observed. In the Angevin statute we find the typical diarchy between commune and populus projected onto the double office of royal vicar and captain of the popolo, though complicated by the cohabitation between the popolo and pars Capelletorum (sometimes called pars Ecclesie), where the faction probably represented the interests of the military aristocracy and its clients. The Guelfs are never mentioned and the proimperialists are called Ghibellines, but also Troncaciuffi or ‘party, supporters and followers of the late Buoso da Dovara’, being ipso facto excluded from civic offices and subject to the penalties traditionally inflicted on public enemies, such as the confiscation of property and the destruction of houses. What is really striking in the Angevin statutes is the reaffirmation of the prominent political role of the popolo, which presents itself as opposed to the nobles;31 there are norms against the magnati, for instance the nobiles are forbidden to hold offices in the guilds. But in spite of these statutory norms and after another obscure episode in 1317, when the abbas Populi Egidio Puerari was killed while trying to reconcile the Ponzoni and the Cavalcabò, the popolo faded out and disappeared as an institutional and political force, to emerge again for the last time – as we shall see – 70 years later. During the years of the direct dependence on the Empire under Ludwig of Bavaria (1327–1330), and above all during the signoria of King John of Bohemia (1331–1333), the Cremonese commune still seems able to negotiate on equal terms with its political counterparts. In both cases the sovereignty of the emperor and of the king concealed the informal signoria of a local political actor, Ponzino Ponzoni. The big change occurred in 1334, with the submission of the city to the lord of Milan Azzone Visconti. It has been argued that the Visconti tried to avoid the emergence of a dualism between the prince and the subject cities 29 ‘Chronicon Parmense ab anno MXXXVIII usque ad annum MCCCXXXVIII’, ed. Giuliano Bonazzi, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, second series, vol. 9/9 (Città di Castello, 1902), p. 230–1. 30 ‘Statuta Cremonae tempore regis Roberti generalis domini civitatis et districtus’, in Codex diplomaticus Cremonae, 715–1334, ed. Lorenzo Astegiano, vol. 2 (Turin, 1896), pp. 26–40. 31 Cf. Ugo Gualazzini, Il ‘Populus’ di Cremona e l’autonomia del Comune. Ricerche di storia del diritto pubblico medievale italiano con appendice di testi statutari (Bologna, 1940).

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as a structure within their dominion in three main ways: by the assumption of a central role in the process of peacemaking between local factions, by the reduction of the territory subject to urban jurisdiction, and through reform of the local statutes.32 In the case of Cremona it is possible to identify such a pattern, even if Azzone did not have time for a statutory reform, which was undertaken by his heirs immediately after his death in 1339. The end of civil strife attributed to Azzone was remembered and stressed with great emphasis in the prologue to the new statutes;33 in fact, it is possible to see here the beginning of the shift from a system which implied the exclusion of a party to the benefit of its opponents to a new, inclusive scheme where factions were able to live together under the lord or a prince. In 1335, in a plea addressed to Azzone by Oberto Pallavicino junior concerning the restitution to the exiles of their properties, the imperial party still did not call itself the Ghibelline party, but the ‘party of lord Buoso da Dovara and of marquis Oberto Pallavicino’. Nine years later, in 1344, another plea submitted by Federico Pallavicino to Giovanni and Luchino Visconti shows us a major change and the definitive entry in the regional dimension; Federico’s protégés now call themselves ‘Ghibellines of the city and the district of Cremona’.34 The consolidation of the Visconti signoria did not bring about corresponding improvements in the city’s control over the surrounding territory, because the lords of Milan not only generally confirmed and even granted new immunities to the local signorial families, but granted privileges to the castra and to the boroughs of the contado too. Relevant changes occurred instead at institutional level. The statute reformed by Luchino and Giovanni Visconti in 1339 let the old city councils survive. These were, at the time, the Arengo or Concio Civium, that is a general assembly of the heads of the families; the General Council or Consiglio dei Quattrocento and the Consiglio dei Duecento, whose responsibilities partly overlapped and whose members were elected on a territorial basis, according to parish and quarter of residence; the socalled Consiglio della Caravana, which was by then just a roll of citizens suitable for public offices; and an executive committee of 16 sapientes.35 After Luchino’s death, Giovanni Visconti introduced a significant reform. He suppressed the two councils of the Quattrocento and Duecento and replaced 32 Francesco Somaini, ‘Processi costitutivi, dinamiche politiche e strutture istituzionali dello Stato visconteo–sforzesco’, in Giancarlo Andenna, Renato Bordone, Francesco Somaini and Massimo Vallerani, Comuni e signorie nell’Italia settentrionale: la Lombardia (Turin, 1998), pp. 681–786 (pp. 748–52). 33 Statuta et ordinamenta comunis Cremonae facta et compilata currente anno Domini MCCCXXXIX, curati ed aggiornati con le riforme del decennio successivo, ed. Ugo Gualazzini (Milan, 1952), p. 7. 34 Cf. Archivio di Stato di Parma, Comune, b. 88*, 11 April 1335; ibid., 27 January 1344. 35 See Ugo Gualazzini, ‘Preliminari osservazioni sugli statuti cremonesi del 1339’, in Ugo Gualazzini, Gino Solazzi e Agostino Cavalcabò, Gli statuti di Cremona del MCCCXXXIX e di Viadana del secolo XIV. Contributi alla teoria generale degli Statuti (Milano, 1953), vol. 1, pp. 3–225.

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them with a council of 152 members (the last two were probably chancellors or clerks), reducing the number of Sapientes to 12. It is very unlikely that the divisibility into three came from the willingness to give voice to the three classes of rich, middle-class and poor,36 particularly if we look at what was happening during the same years in other Lombard cities. Two rolls of members of the Consiglio dei Duecento, the first one from 1341 and the second one from 1347, help us to understand. In the first we find Ponzino Ponzoni, Donnino Pallavicini and Ugolino Cavalcabò respectively in the thirty-eighth, in the forty-eighth and in the one hundred and twenty-first place, without honorific titles, apparently citizens among other citizens; in this levelling it is perhaps possible to perceive a residual influence of the popolo. Six years later, however, things had changed. The new list starts with the ‘noble knight’ Ponzino Ponzoni, the ‘noble knight and marquis’ Donnino Pallavicini, and the ‘noble marquis’ Guglielmo Cavalcabò; these three are the only names preceded by the ‘d’ of dominus, another clear mark of social eminence.37 Even though in the 1347 roll it is not yet possible to distinguish clearly blocks of family names related to factional groups, it is nonetheless evident that the spirit of Giovanni Visconti’s reform implied a special emphasis on the role played by Guelfs, Ghibellines and Maltraversi, as the following events will make clearer. After Giovanni’s death, the Visconti dominion was divided between his nephews: Galeazzo II had the western part of the state and Bernabò the eastern section, Cremona included. Recent scholarship has shown how the administration and the bureaucracy of the two parts of the state underwent quite different if not opposite evolutions: Galeazzo and Bernabò did not share the same idea of signorial power and governmental practice. Simplifying a little, it is possible to say that Galeazzo chose to strengthen the central organs and to extend the role of the signorial chancery, whereas Bernabò reduced his chancery as much as he could and delegated power to his wife Regina della Scala and to his legitimate sons, who were entrusted the government of some cities. These divergent patterns of organization matched different conceptions of signorial power, with special regard to the administration of justice. Galeazzo II and after him his son Gian Galeazzo shared what we might call a legalistic attitude, respectful of the forms and of the local customary laws: as a consequence, Galeazzo did not undertake a major campaign of statutory reforms in the cities subject to his rule. Bernabò was different. He stressed the role of the lord as lex animata and his power of derogation; henceforth, in the eastern part of the Visconti state we find radical reforms of city statutes, and in general Bernabò showed little respect for the autonomy of the local

36 That is divites, mediocres and pauperes, as argued by Ugo Gualazzini, Gli organi assembleari e collegiali del comune di Cremona nell’età visconteo–sforzesca (Milan, 1978), pp. 31–7. 37 Cf. Archivio di Stato di Cremona, Comune, Archivio segreto, Diplomatico, n. 325, 7 August 1341; ibid., n. 2141, 14 March 1347.

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political bodies, displaying a style which was considered brutal by many of his contemporaries.38 In spite of Bernabò’s straightforwardness, his political achievements were uncertain. The letters written by him and by his son Ludovico to their officials in Cremona show that several times they tried to impose radical provisions which were withdrawn once the impossibility of enforcing them became clear.39 Bernabò’s relations with the landed aristocracy fluctuated as well. At the beginning, the Pallavicini seemed to enjoy his favour, but in 1371 he confiscated two of their castles in the Parmense, thus provoking a rebellion of their subjects.40 As for the Cavalcabò, after the initial confirmation of their privileges and jurisdictions, Bernabò managed to exploit a family feud between two rival branches of the lineage and in 1375 seized their seat of Viadana, which was kept by the Visconti until 1379.41 Interestingly, in 1355 Bernabò ordered that Giovanni Ponzoni be given equal power within the city councils as his father Ponzino.42 This happened because as soon as Bernabò had become lord of Cremona he had reformed the statutes, drastically limiting the bargaining power of the commune; moreover, he had reformed the city councils, declaring that he was doing it to remove civil dissent. To achieve this, he had abolished the Council of 152, bringing it back to 200 members.43 But his prompt satisfaction of Giovanni Ponzoni’s request shows us that it was very difficult to deny the factions an institutional role, which was true not only for Cremona, but for the whole dominion. In a decree issued in 1379 Bernabò had to admit that the only way to grant justice was to recognize the relevance of the bipolar scheme: subsequently, in the cities where the podestà was a Ghibelline, the vicar and the criminal judge had to be Guelfs, and vice versa.44 In 1385 the choleric lord was betrayed and deposed by his nephew Gian Galeazzo and soon after murdered in prison. Cremona opened the gates to the new lord’s troops six days after the fall of Bernabò. The surrender pacts (capitoli di dedizione) submitted by the Cremonese commune to Gian Galeazzo document the last attempt of the popolo to win a prominent political role. The first article informed the prince that the ‘virile’ popolo of Cremona had taken control of the city alone, without the consent of the nobles, and had decided to hand the city 38 Andrea Gamberini, ‘Istituzioni e strutture di governo nella formazione dello stato visconteo’, in Gamberini, Lo stato visconteo, pp. 35–67. 39 Some examples in Gentile, ‘Dal comune cittadino allo stato regionale’, pp. 284–7. 40 Angelo Pezzana, Storia della città di Parma, vol. 1 (Parma, 1837), p. 109. 41 Agostino Cavalcabò, ‘Le vicende storiche di Viadana (secoli XII–XV)’, in Ugo Gualazzini, Gino Solazzi and Agostino Cavalcabò, Gli statuti di Cremona, vol. 2 (Milan, 1954), pp. 159–216 (pp. 192–5). 42 Repertorio Diplomatico Visconteo, ed. Elia Lattes (Milano, 1911), p. 140. 43 Ugo Gualazzini, Gli organi assembleari, pp. 42–9. 44 Francesco Cognasso, ‘Ricerche per la storia dello Stato visconteo. Lettere di messer Bernabò ai suoi officiali in Cremona’, Bolletino della società pavese di storia patria, 22 (1922): 121–84 (p. 176).

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over to the lord of Milan. In the following articles, a group which defined itself as the popolo minuto demanded the restoration of the old city councils and claimed for itself a share in the communal offices, so that all the citizens, whatever their wealth, could take part in the process of decision-making. Typically, Gian Galeazzo took his time responding, and his answers were ambiguous and evasive. He ignored the popolo, to avoid recognizing it; he addressed himself instead to the ‘citizens’, thanked them for their support and conceded very little.45 In a few months, his ambiguity materialized in a decree and in a new reform of the city councils. The decree strictly forbade any complaining about the taxes and speaking ill of the Signoria. Above all, it forbade mention of the ‘popolo’; the only words allowed would be ‘commune’ and ‘community’, so both the noble and the plebeian, both the grand and the small, could be represented.46 The reform restored the council of Giovanni Visconti’s times, brought back to 150 members and divided into three groups, 50 for each ‘squadra et parte’ – that is, for each faction.47 The tripartition was extended to the executive board of the sapientes (which became nine), to various public committees, and even to some guilds (for instance the consules of the merchants). In other words, with Gian Galeazzo the factional system obtained official recognition and became a pervasive political and institutional factor. Some aspects of this emerging configuration are worth highlighting. A few urban lineages are divided into two different party loyalties. While, on the one hand, these are important and rich families, on the other the division affects a very small number of lineages. Out of 10 families, seven are split into Ghibellines and Maltraversi, and three into Guelfs and Maltraversi, but none are split between Guelfs and Ghibellines.48 A major change from the mid-century councils is the absence of the signorial lineages; the Cavalcabò and Pallavicini are not to be found among the councillors anymore, nor is the main branch of the Ponzoni represented. If we compare Cremona with the nearby city of Parma, we observe a similar evolution. The members of two city councils, held in Parma in 1343 and in 1347, were not registered according to factional loyalty, but according to residence; among the citizens we find the chiefs of the main local signorial lineages – the Rossi, the Sanvitale, the da Correggio and the Pallavicini. When in 1387 Gian Galeazzo reduced the general council of Parma to 200 members, in the only surviving list of names the councillors are registered in an order which is only apparently casual, since four groups corresponding to the four local ‘squadre’ or factions are clearly recognizable.49 Already at that stage, Parmesan signorial families did not send their prominent members to the city councils any more, 45 Ugo Gualazzini, Gli organi assembleari, pp. 145–9; cf. Biblioteca Trivulziana di Milano, manuscript 1428, ‘Decreta ducalia pro Cremona’, f. 1–2. 46 Ibid., f. 3v, 15 October 1385, Milan. 47 Ibid., f. 12r–12v, 4 May 1386, Milan. 48 For further details see Gentile, ‘Dal comune allo stato regionale’, pp. 294–5, where I discuss Ugo Gualazzini’s interpretation, based on the concept of social class. 49 Archivio di Stato di Parma, Comune, b. 492, 7 February 1343, Parma; Pezzana, vol. 1, Appendice documentaria, pp. 3–6.

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as their Cremonese counterparts did. But giving up communal offices did not mean that the political influence of the landed aristocracy on the cities was reduced; quite the opposite, as the events following Gian Galeazzo’s death in 1402 would make clear. On the other hand, the trajectory of outstanding Cremonese families like the Sommi, the da Borgo and the Dovara, which through the fourteenth century tended to lose their signorial and landed character and whose members sat in the city councils on a regular basis, thus closing themselves into an exclusively urban horizon, shows us their social and political decline in the new regional framework. In late medieval and early modern Lombardy the power of the great families was proportional to their capability to keep town and country together, and to exert political influence on both a city and on its contado; faction was the main bonding agent between urban and rural environment. Broadly speaking, Gian Galeazzo’s policy was based openly on respect for the factional balance in the cities and all over the Milanese state. This respect went together with the attempt to discipline factional groups and to exploit them as a stabilizing factor; the prince legitimized factions and placed himself above them, taking on a bipartisan attitude in spite of the Ghibelline tradition of the Visconti dynasty. In a revealing decree issued in 1401, the duke of Milan deplored the fact that in Bergamo, Crema, Soncino and Cremona some Guelfs had been compelled to swear to be good and perpetual Ghibellines, and had been coaxed into signing notarial acts which certified their new factional allegiance, thus disowning what the duke defined their ‘nature’. To restore this natural order, he stated the right to be Ghibelline or Guelf according to the will of the individual.50 The 1401 decree gives us the sense of the transition from commune to regional state: there is no exclusion and banishment of the opposite party as a whole, nor is there yet the delegitimizing and elimination of parties which all over Europe would characterize the rise of the modern state, particularly from the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the Milanese duchy factions live together, for they are recognized as an essential component of the regional state.51 If we were to define a ‘Lombard’ late medieval political model, that would be one of its most important features: unlike Florentine Tuscany and the Veneto, in Lombardy ‘the contado fostered faction’52 and continued to do so throughout the fifteenth century and until the midsixteenth century, reflecting the importance of rural lordship as a pattern of social and political organization. From that point of view too, Cremona and the Cremonese provide an exemplary case. 50

Biblioteca Trivulziana di Milano, manuscript 1428, ‘Decreta ducalia pro Cremona’, f. 73r, 1401 April 22, Belgioioso. 51 Cf. Marco Gentile, ‘“Postquam malignitates temporum hec nobis dedere nomina …”. Fazioni, idiomi politici e pratiche di governo nella tarda età viscontea’, in Gentile (ed.), Guelfi e ghibellini, pp. 249–74; Marco Gentile, ‘Discorsi sulle fazioni, discorsi delle fazioni. “Parole e demonstratione partiale” nella Lombardia del secondo Quattrocento’, in Andrea Gamberini and Giuseppe Petralia (eds), Linguaggi politici nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Rome, 2007), pp. 381–408. 52 Philip J. Jones, The Italian City–State, p. 580.

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8 The Gonzaga Signoria, Communal Institutions and ‘the Honour of the City’: Mixed Ideas in Quattrocento Mantua David S. Chambers

As is well known, first the Bonacolsi and then, from 1328, the Gonzaga took over the commune of Mantua to rule as Captains of the People and Imperial Vicars. This essay will investigate some mixed features of the Gonzaga regime in the fifteenth century, illustrating from one example in eastern Lombardy the theme expounded by Philip Jones in his famous article nearly half a century ago.1 The original statutes of the commune do not survive, but revisions under Rinaldo and Butirone Bonacolsi in 1313,2 and evidence from the Gonzaga period, suggest that signorial domination of Mantua was only relative before 1400. Their further revision between 1396 and 1404, by a jurist from Piacenza, Raffaele Fulgosio, under the Captain Francesco I Gonzaga, made the situation clearer.3 Judicial and fiscal appointments, including the podestà (supreme judge) and the massaro (finance officer), were under the Captain’s control; the administration was wholly subject to his arbitrary will; his decrees could dispense with statutes and his consilium4 could overrule the older judicial bodies. 1

Philip J. Jones, ‘Communes and Despots. The City State in Late-Medieval Italy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 15 (1965): 71–96; this volume, chapter 1. 2 Carlo D’Arco, Studi intorno al municipio di Mantova, vol. 2 (Mantua, 1871); Statuti Bonacolsiani, ed. Ettore Dessa, Anna Maria Lorenzoni and Mario Vaini (Mantua, 2002). 3 Archivio di Stato, Mantua, Archivio Gonzaga (hereafter ASMn AG) b. 2003, also Biblioteca Comunale, Mantua (hereafter BCMn), MS 775. See Mario Vaini, ‘Gli statuti di Francesco Gonzaga IV Capitano. Prime ricerche’, Atti e memorie dell’Accademia Virgiliana di Mantova, new series, 56 (1988): 187–214, esp. pp. 190–3; also his Ricerche Gonzaghesche (Florence, 1994), pp. 11–15; Isabella Lazzarini, ‘Il diritto urbano in una signoria cittadina: gli statuti mantovani dai Bonacolsi ai Gonzaga (1313–1404)’, in Giorgio Chittolini and Dietmar Willoweit (eds), Statuti, città, territori in Italia e Germania tra Medio Evo ed Età Moderna (Bologna, 1991), pp. 381–418; Fra un principe e altri stati. Relazioni di potere e forme di servizio a Mantova nell’età di Ludovico Gonzaga (Rome, 1996), pp. 14–22. 4 On this body, already documented in 1414, see Cesare Mozzarelli, ‘Il Senato di Mantova: origine e funzione’, Mantova e i Gonzaga nella civiltà del Rinascimento (conference papers, 1974) (Mantua, 1977), pp. 67–8.

106 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Yet there were some surprising features in the 1404 statutes, above all in Book Two, Chapter 12, which contained detailed prescriptions about three civic councils, to which there are only vague references in rubrics One and Ten of the Bonacolsi statutes. First of these was a Greater Council of Four Hundred, though the rubric admits the practical difficulty of gathering together such a large body. Probably this was a formalized version, already found under the Bonacolsi, of the ancient arengo, the mass meeting of citizens. There are also provisions for the Council of Anziani (Elders). First heard about as a body of 12 in 1293,5 the Anziani were a sort of senate, the most important of the three councils, meant to advise and approve. Finally, there was the Minor Council, the members of which had certain executive functions at a popular level, discussed below. According to the 1404 statutes the three councils represented the city’s districts, based upon a division into four quarters each containing five contrade (neighbourhoods). For the Council of Four Hundred, out of each contrada 20 of the ‘best and most capable’ (aptiores) male citizens were to be elected. Eligibility depended on residence in Mantua six years, an age threshold of 20 – but voting rights only for those over 25 – and a limit of two members per family. Another hurdle was that names must be approved by the Captain, though it is not clear how the initial nomination and screening was to proceed. The Council of Anziani,6 in total 44, of whom 36 were representatives (nine per quarter), and a further eight supernumeraries, had to be nominated by the podestà or another person delegated by the Captain, and elected in the Council of Four Hundred on the first Sunday after 1 December. Their job concerned the daily business of the commune; they had a two-year term of office, and could not refuse or resign except in case of illness. The Minor Council of Twenty consisted of the heads (capi) of the 20 contrade, ‘good and approved men’ (‘bonos et probos viros’), who would hold office for a six-month term; they had to be ‘mature in age and outlook and capable of managing public business’.7 Every January and July they were to be elected by the Four Hundred. The elections had to be by scrutiny and a ballot using black and white beans. Nothing is laid down about their names being approved by the Captain, though they would already have to have been approved simply in order to be members of the Four Hundred. There was a further control, however; they were not permitted to assemble except in the presence of the podestà or another person deputizing for the Captain. Whether any independent opinion was allowed to members of these councils after the process of selection and election is not clear from the statutes, but one might infer that both the Four Hundred and the Anziani were meant to ratify whatever was laid before them; in practice perhaps all that they did eventually was to ratify the (hereditary) succession of a new Captain.

5 6 7

Lazzarini, ‘Il diritto’, p. 397. ASMn AG b. 2003, f. 203v. Ibid., f. 201r.

Fig. 8.1

Mantua, Piazza Erbe, formerly il Broletto, showing Palazzo della Ragione (right), Mantua.

108 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Nothing is laid down in the 1404 statutes about places of council meetings. In the case of the Four Hundred, solemnly summoned by bell, a meeting might have had to be – as with the ancient arengo – in the open air, probably in the platea comunis Mantuae, the space overlooked by the statue of Virgil writing, and known since the nineteenth century as Piazza Broletto.8 Indoor alternatives might have been the nearby church of Sant’Andrea or the Palazzo della Ragione with its large upper hall, though several hundred people trooping in and disturbing the benches of the civic magistrates cannot have been very welcome. For the Anziani, too, no location is specified, although their thirteenth century predecessors had their own chamber.9 Nor did the Minor Council have a prescribed meeting place. In practice the heads of the contrade, or 20 members of the Minor Council, survived better than the other two bodies. Back in the Trecento their main function had been tax assessment;10 and maybe they still functioned in this area during the fifteenth century. Perhaps, too, they were informers about public morality and security. Essentially they had police duties and were particularly useful concerning plague control. Thus they were called upon by a proclamation (grida) in 145111 and in 1506, when an emergency council of citizens was convoked to decide whether the outbreak of sickness was plague – which it was – and what measures should be taken. Among the orders issued was one requiring the capi de le compagnie in each contrada to inform the charity workers who distributed bread which persons were neediest.12 In this context, the decline or disappearance of Mantuan traditions of political liberty and participation, importance has always been given to the fire in 1413 which badly damaged one of its thirteenth-century civic palaces,13 destroying the archives of both the commune and the notariate. It is explicitly mentioned in the rhyming chronicle of Bonamente Aliprandi (c.1350–1417),14 8 Ercolano Marani, ‘Vie e piazze di Mantova. (Analisi di un centro storico) n. 30: Piazza Broletto’, Civilta Mantovana, 15 (1968): 139–99, esp. pp. 147–65. 9 Ibid., p. 160. 10 Vaini, ‘Gli Statuti’, p. 198. 11 ASMn AG b. 2038–9 fasc. 5, f. 6v (3 July 1451): ‘Le persone che occurreno infirmarse in le lor famiglie e habitatione ... debia subito denotar al capo de la contrata.’ 12 Ptolomeo Spagnoli to Marquis Francesco, Mantua, 14 March 1506: ‘Si sono hoggi convocati messer Zoampetro, il conte Zoanne, messer Jacomo Suardo, Alexio, il rector di l’hospitale, Zoancarlo, maestro Antonio da Gido, il Zaita et alcuni altri citadini, et insieme hanno disputato il caso de questa infirmità.’ (ASMn AG b. 2469 c. 48); Giovangiacomo Calandra wrote to the Marquis on 28 April: ‘Si piglia una nova ordine cioé che per persone discrete si habi a dispensare il pane de contrata in contrata a li case dove si saperà per li capi de le compagnie che si habino persone bisognose.’ (Ibid., c. 155). 13 Stefano Davari, I palazzi del antico comune di Mantova e gli incendi da essi subiti (Mantua, 1888, reprinted 1974, pp. 37–55) is rather confusing. Davari contended that it was not the ‘palatium vetus’, built in 1227–1241, but a ‘palatium novum super Brolettum’, first heard of in 1250, which was burnt in 1413. Marani (‘Vie e piazza: Piazza Broletto’, pp. 157–66) clarified that the ‘palatium vetus’ was the one burnt in 1413, and it overlooked the space then (but not now) known as ‘Broletto’. 14 ‘A vintioto de marcio per a drito/ a Mantua brusò lo palazo regio de la Rasone/

Mixed Ideas in Quattrocento Mantua 109

himself a member of a long-established civic family, a lawyer who had in 1388 had been a member of the Four Hundred – so it operated at that time – and in 1399 massaro of the commune. Aliprandi, however, was also an enthusiastic servant of the ruling family. The reference – towards the end of his highly proGonzaga compilation – strikes the reader forcibly, since he generally excludes any allusion to ancient liberties and communal institutions, harping instead on victories and beneficent happenings under Gonzaga rule. Aliprandi wrote that the Palazzo della Ragione was burnt, but this cannot have been the palace which normally went by that name in the fifteenth century15 and is still known by it today. The latter is the porticoed building which overlooks Piazza Erbe, identified as the ‘new palace’ (palatium novus) of 1250 (see Figure 8.1). The building burnt in 1413 was the ‘old palace’ (palatium vetus). As both were seats of judicial administration both might have been called a `palazzo della ragione’; at least this seems the best way to understand Aliprandi. Fig. 8.2 Antonio Pisanello, medal (obverse) of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Capitano (1407–), first Marchese of Mantua (1433–1444).

per li scrituri chi brusono fu a Mantua aflito.’ Aliprandina o Cronica de Mantua: Appendix to Antonio Nerli, ed. Orsini Begani, Breve Chronicon, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 24, part 13 (Città di Castello, 1908), p. 177. On Aliprandi see Giuseppe Coniglio in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 2 (Rome, 1960), pp. 463–4. 15 For references to it by that name in the 1460s and 1470s see below, notes 46 and 47.

110 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

No doubt the fire was a disaster for Mantuan legal administration, but it does not explain the disappearance of the two principal councils. Maybe the adolescent Gianfrancesco Gonzaga (see Figure 8. 2), who had succeeded as Captain and Vicar in 1407, was responsible, either through his delegation of authority to the brothers Carlo and Stefano Albertini da Prato for much of the period 1410–1414, when they aimed to make the signoria more tyrannical,16 or else through his reaction to the Albertini conspiracy. Or should we assume that it was part of a prevailing trend, and reflected the view among signorial rulers or their advisers that such bodies were obsolete and obstructive? Among parallels was fourteenth-century Padua dominated by the Carraresi, where the principal councils virtually ceased to meet, and the eighteen selected Anziani (prescribed in revised statutes in 1362) were reduced after 1388 to eight, or two per quarter.17 Had Raffaele Fulgosio been indulging in make-believe in 1404 (but if so, why?) by including and elaborating constitutional bodies for Mantua which simply did not correspond to reality?18 Was, in short, the apparent eclipse of these councils a symptom of the – far from straightforward – decline of the ‘popolo’ in Italian political systems?19 But then how should we interpret the one piece of evidence suggesting that the Council of Four Hundred was still being summoned, at least as late as 1419? This is the proclamation on 14 May 1419 announcing that a serious matter has come to the attention of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Imperial Vicar, Captain and ‘segnor generale’. Since attendance at meetings of the statutory councils had become very slack, a fine of two ducats would be imposed on any citizen for every failure to attend.20 This remarkable document may confirm 16 Francesco Tarducci, ‘Gianfrancesco Gonzaga signore di Mantova (1407–1420)’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, series 3, 17 (1902): 310–60; series 3, 18 (1902): 33–88; Cesare Mozarelli, Mantova e i Gonzaga dal 1382 al 1707, estratto from the UTET Storia d’Italia, vol. 17, ed. Giuseppe Galasso (Turin, 1987), pp. 10–12. 17 Angelo Ventura, Nobiltà e popolo nella società veneta del ‘400 e ‘500 (Bari, 1964), pp. 52–92; Benjamin Kohl, ‘Government and Society in Renaissance Padua’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2 (1972): 205–21; Padua under the Carrara 1318–1405 (Baltimore, 1998), esp. pp. 40–2, 59, 245. 18 Philip Jones cited the less well-known case of Faenza where Astorgio Manfredi allowed communal institutions to survive as a mere ‘pasci-popolo’ (‘Communes and Despots’, p. 87; this volume, chapter 1, p. 16). Lazzarini, ‘Il diritto urbano’, p. 407, even calls the prescriptions in Book XII ‘un anacronismo difficilmente spiegabile... queste assemblee siano completamente esautorate già nel 1313’. 19 Christine Shaw, Popular Government and Oligarchy in Renaissance Italy (Leiden and Boston, 2006) does not generally discuss the vestiges of ‘popular’ elements and institutions in north Italian signorie; Gonzagan Mantua is not mentioned, but there are some interesting passages about the papal city of Bologna (esp. pp. 187–91) where, although the Sedici were all powerful, incorporating both legatine and Bentivoglio authority, a Council of Elders (Anziani) and a Council of Six Hundred apparently persisted. 20 ASMn AG b. 2038 fasc. iii no. 60 (14 May 1419): ‘Li citadini non veneno ali consegli ordinati, specialmente al conseglio mazore de quatrocento, quando se da li sorte de li officiii del comune de Mantoa.’ Lazzarini, ‘Il diritto urbano’, p. 408, mentions this grida, in support of the hypothesis of ‘progressiva atrofizzazione’.

Mixed Ideas in Quattrocento Mantua 111

that the withering away of the communal councils was not due so much to tyranny as to public apathy and contentment with the regime.21

****

Even if the statutory councils of Mantua were moribund, and a grovelling collaboration prevailed, it seems that the Gonzaga did not wish to eradicate every trace of civic concern and responsibility among the relatively well-todo (benestanti). This is not only illustrated by the retention of the heads of the contrade. For example, the Captain Francesco I had also instituted an elected body known as the Consorzio di Santa Maria della Cornetta, which had responsibility for all hospitals and other charitable foundations in the city. By statute it consisted of 64 persons chosen from the most respectable and suitable male citizens.22 These ‘councillors’ had no right to refuse service and faced penalties for negligence. The surviving transcript of a register of membership from 1407 to 147923 shows that places were filled from time to time after vacancies had accumulated (the contrada of residence and sometimes the cause and date of each individual member’s death is recorded);24 replacements were elected by the remaining ‘councillors’ and their names had to be approved by the council of the Captain (from 1433 Marquis) of Mantua. In 1433, for example, as many as 36 were appointed.25 A curious fact is that in this register of names of the newly elected members, from 1455 onwards the maximum number of councillors is quoted at the head of each group not as 64 but as 100.26 It was almost as though the council of the Consorzio had been fused – or confused – with one of the old communal councils, meant to represent the whole body of citizens.27

21

Philip Jones addressed the problem of non-attendance (‘Communes and Despots’, pp. 77, 88; this volume, chapter 1, pp. 8, 17). 22 ASMn Fondo D’Arco, b. 48 (miscellaneous notes and transcripts by Carlo d’Arco) cc. 192r–194r: ‘Viri cives qui notabiliores et ydoneores...fuerunt.’ On the Consorzio and its benefactors (n.b. Bonamente Aliprandi, mentioned above), see Isabella Lazzarini, Gerarchie sociali e spazi urbani a Mantova dal Comune alla Signoria gonzaghesca (Pisa, 1994), pp. 102–3. 23 ASMn Fondo D’Arco, b. 48 cc. 194r–207r. 24 E.g. one of the seven newcomers of 3 November 1456, Benedetto son of Uberto Strozzi, died on 25 September 1482 ‘ex una bombarda in Soave’ (c. 203v). 25 Ibid., c. 199v: ‘36...per consiliares consortii loco deficientium die xxii junii 1433 et approbati per consilium illustris et excelsi domini marchionis.’ 26 E.g. c. 204v: ‘Cives xxiv additi in numero centum electum die 8 januarii 1465’; c. 205r: ‘cives xxvii in numero centum die ultimo decembri 1470.’ 27 Carlo D’Arco, in Studi intorno al municipio di Mantova, vol. 4: Serie dei Massari del nostro Comune 1328–1573 (Mantua, 1873), did not make the distinction clear when referring to individuals elected ‘consiliarii’ in the fifteenth century, referring also (p. 122) to a ‘registro consiliarum Comunis Mantuae Cod. ined[ito]’, which is either the present transcript or another document which does not survive. Most of the names cited in this list of massarii are previous to 1407, but he gives one example as late as circa 1445 of ‘Vivaldo Strada ... habitans in contrata Pusterlae electus fuit consiliarius et massarius Comunis’.

112 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Another body important in the day-to-day government of Mantua, which was composed of elected – or rather approved – representatives, was the city’s principal corporation or merchant guild (universitas mercatorum), in practice dominated by the wool, or woollen cloth guild. Their sphere was limited but essential to the city’s economy and prosperity. It appears that Francesco I, as Captain with plenitude of power, had taken control of this body, and had its new statute compiled in 1399–1400. Twelve councillors had to be elected (by voting with beans) annually in the first week of January; they held office for a year and had to accept it or pay a fine. Three of them were made senior officials, called ‘heads’ or ‘consuls’, and these consuls nominated the new councillors. The whole structure depended on the Captain, however, because each year’s retiring consuls had to ask him to nominate their successors five days before the end of the old year; only if he refused to do so was it left to themselves to propose names.28

**** Consultation of public – if somewhat elite – opinion also occurred in fifteenthcentury Mantua, and was sometimes carried out across a rather broader spectrum than just the prince’s trusted councillors and cronies. This was manifest in 1430 when Gianfrancesco Gonzaga called for advice from a number of leading citizens, both long-established and newcomers. Some of them were summoned to the court (meaning, presumably, a signorial audience chamber) and others were approached separately for their written opinions. The depositions of 22 of them have survived, plus two summaries of proposals, one drawn up anonymously and one by a certain Andrea Gonzaga.29 From these fascinating documents a dissident note, even if coated in professions of servility, may sometimes be detected. Eight of the respondents were merchants, and the most common proposals were concerning the poor state of the woollen cloth industry in Mantua, and measures required to rectify this and to stimulate the local economy and the stagnant level of population. But three of them were lawyers, one of whom was a judge, another a notary, and these inserted, between the lines, some quasi-critical reflections on the signorial government. It is striking, however, that none of them complained about suspension of meetings of the Four Hundred or the Anziani, or about the councils’ failure to function as laid down in the statutes. Francesco Abbati, apparently a scion of one of the oldest Mantuan families with a prominent past in communal affairs, expressed varying points of view. Embarking on a servile note towards the Captain, referring to ‘your city and your subjects’, he continued, more daringly, to declare ‘Your Lordship must 28

Attilio Portioli, Le corporazioni artiere e l’archivio della Camera di Commercio (Mantua, 1884); ‘Lo statuto dell’università maggiore dei mercanti di Mantova’ (Mantua, 1887); Lazzarini, Fra un principe, pp. 166–9. 29 Mantova 1430. Pareri a Gian Francesco Gonzaga per il governo, ed. Maria Antonietta Grignani, Anna Maria Lorenzoni and Anna Maria Mortari (Mantua, 1990), from documents in ASMn AG b. 2002; introduction (pp. 1–49) by Cesare Mozzarelli.

Mixed Ideas in Quattrocento Mantua 113

learn to love the common good more than your own.’30 Although he listed for urgent attention first the land (‘l’arte della terra’) – a statement of priority which would surely have pleased Philip Jones – he gave as the second urgent need the wool guild, and third, he stressed the need for an increased population. In addition, he recommended the appointment of a grammar master, a jurist to train notaries – as required under the statutes – and an official with control over roads, bridges, and riverbanks, all salaried by the commune. The lawyer Alessandro Ramedelli, while describing himself as the ‘lowest worm’ (‘io, minimo vermicello’), professed his awareness of the ruler’s concern for the ‘well being and profit’ (‘bene e utilidade’) of both citizens and contadini, declaring himself concerned for ‘the honour of the republic’, perhaps distinguishing the city from its princely superstructure.31 Nicolò Prendilacqua, a recent emigrant from Verona, demanded proper application of the statutes concerning retail consumption – that is, butchers, bakers, taverns, and so on – obliquely distancing himself from princely decrees.32 Several of those consulted referred to the burnt-down civic palace. The prevailing suggestion was that it should be rebuilt or restored, but one of the main concerns was that it provide storage space for the goods of visiting merchants. Otherwise, they declared, it would be better to pull down the ruins and make a large and beautiful piazza.33 One of the more intellectually ambitious respondents was Nicolò de Antis, a civil lawyer, who wrote in Latin. He protested about the loss of independent authority of the podestà, and his substitution sometimes by a vice-podestà, appointed by the Captain; the podestà’s election and that of his staff, he insisted, and their salaries and term of office, should conform to the statutes.34 Another pompous writer in Latin, presumably also a lawyer, Giovanni Rozzi, was deferential, but made a point of praising Gianfrancesco’s father,35 perhaps to imply an unfavourable comparison. For all we know, the practice of selective consultation may have continued from time to time in later years, under Ludovico Gonzaga (Marquis 1444–1478, see Figure 8. 3–4) and his successors, although no similar clutch of depositions has come to light. During the absence of Marquis Francesco II in the summer of 1495, when he led allied forces against the French army in retreat from Naples, his wife Isabella d’Este consulted a large body of leading citizens about local problems. She sought their advice with particular urgency when riots occurred, owing to the scarcity or high price of bread. Isabella assured the Marquis in a letter about these consultations, that nobody in the world 30

‘Bisogna che la Signoria Vostra intenda ad amar più lo ben comuno cha’l proprio’: Mantova 1430, pp. 108–11, at p. 108. On the Abbati or Abati see Lazzarini, Fra un principe, esp. pp. 382–9. On p. 383 however she warns that this Francesco may have been from a different Abati clan. 31 Ibid., pp. 94–6. 32 Ibid., pp. 97–8. 33 Ibid., p. 128 (Giacomo Roselli); also in the ‘sintesi anonima’, p. 160. 34 Ibid., p. 134; also in the ‘sintesi anonima’, p. 162 . 35 Ibid., pp. 140–5

Fig. 8.3

Bartolomeo Melioli, medal (obverse and reverse) of Ludovico Gonzaga, Marchese of Mantua (1444–1478).

Mixed Ideas in Quattrocento Mantua 115

cared more for ‘this republic’ than she did;36 a year later she wrote that all she knew about public affairs (‘cose del stato’) was that everyone was attending to the harvest, which was bad everywhere. This was probably meant literally, not as a reflection about the prevalence of self-interest.37 In 1496 Marquis Francesco convoked 50 of ‘the leading and best citizens’ to advise on matters concerning ‘the public welfare and safety of the regime’ (‘il bene publico et la salute del stato’);38 delayed for several days, it was even referred to as a ‘parlamento’ and expected to vote a levy to pay for military expenses.39 In the crisis of June 1510, Isabella seems to have taken soundings of opinion about ways of dealing with Marquis Francesco’s capture and imprisonment in Venice, though she rejected such a consultation about the proposal for her son Federico to be sent as hostage.40 Isabella’s exclamations in 1496 raise the question what was understood by such words as republica and stato in signorial Lombardy. The former seems to have been employed even in Mantuan proclamations, implying no notions of liberty, but rather a body in which the public good and signorial benevolence were identical. For example a proclamation of 5 March 1449, concerning the urgent need for repair of the merchants’ meeting hall (casa del mercato), starts by affirming Marquis Ludovico’s concern for the ‘honour and profit of his republic’ (‘al honore et utilitade de questa sua republica’), above all in not 36 Isabella d’Este to Marquis Francesco, Mantua, 30 June 1495: ‘Essendo io qua, non se potea parlare ne scrivere de questa cosa ch’el non seguisse a carico mio et de tanti zentilhomeni cum li quali consulto tutte le cose del momento ... scio ch’el non è persona al mondo che habia magior amore a Vostra Signoria et a questa republica como ho io ... chi havesse havuto altro opinione dovea allegarla quando tutti li officiali furono convocati et consultati inseme cum li zentilhomeni et consiglieri ... le cose qui del stato, cum consilio de questi magnifici zentilhomeni et officiali, governarò pro forma che non haverà molestia ne danno et tutto se farà cum beneficio de le subditi.’ (ASMn AG b. 2992 lib. 5 ff. 49v–50v.) 37 Isabella to Francesco, Mantua, 30 June 1496: ‘De le cose qui del stato io non scio che altro scrivere se non che ogni uno attende a fare li recolti soi, quali universalmente sono tristi.’ (Ibid., f. 60r.). 38 Ptolomeo Spagnolo to Isabella d’Este, Mantua, 18 July 1497: ‘Li aviso come il mio Illustrissimo Signore [Marchese Francesco Gonzaga] ...vole venire a Sancto Benedicto et sabbato ritrovarsi a Mantua, ove fa convocare per quello dì cinquanta de li principali et meglior citadini, a li quale vole parlare, et ho visto alcune littere scripti per questo a quelli citadini che sono fora, quale toccano ch’el prefato signore li vole rasonare di certe cose concernente il bene publico et la salute dil stato.’ (ASMn AG b. 2449 c. 438.). 39 Spagnolo to Isabella, Mantua, 21 July 1497: ‘Il mio Illustrissimo Signore hogi vene a Sancto Benedicto. Diverse sono le opinione se dimane el sia per venire a Mantua o no; li citadini convocati si reducono dentro’; same to same, Mantua, 23 July 1497: ‘Il mio Illustrissimo signore e a Sancto Benedicto...dimane venirà dentro et farasi il parlamento, il quale (secundo intendo) `e in summa de dimandare sei millia ducati dare a le zente d’arme.’ (Ibid., cc. 439, 440.) 40 Draft letter of Isabella d’Este to Giacomo d’Atri and Battista Scalona, 12 June 1510: ‘Ni parse temptar gli animi di Gentilhomini et citadini principali per haver consilio et aiuto loro in tal caso, quali trovassimo dispositi a mettere la robba et vita per la liberatione del Signor suo et conservatione dil stato.’ ASMn AG b. 2192 (Minute della Cancelleria).

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allowing that the merchants’ hall, near the butcher’s shop, should fall into ruin, ‘to the great deformity and damage of the city and disgrace of the said republic.’ Stato, meanwhile, cannot be understood simply as the ‘dominant regime’, as identified in Medicean Florence by Nicolai Rubinstein.41 Admittedly, this sense of the word may be intended in a letter of 1484, shortly before the death of Marquis Federico, when Gianfrancesco Gonzaga of Bozzolo wrote to ask his nephew Francesco, the subsequent Marquis, ‘if there is anything I can do for the stato.’42 But stato in Isabella d’Este’s letters of 1495–96 and 1510, quoted above, seems more equivalent to respublica, as employed in some of the more sententious opinions of 1430, merely conveying a sense of ‘the public power’ or ‘honour’. In this sense it also occurs sometimes in chancery documents in Sforza Milan.43 The Mantuan chronicle or memoriale of Andrea Schivenoglia, written between 1466 and 1482, provides further food for thought about quasi-political ideas current despite Gonzaga domination. Andrea was a rural property owner, but well-connected in the city of Mantua, both by family – his mother belonged to the large Andreasi clan – and, as seems evident from his text, by a network of informants. What is interesting above all about this chronicle – of which a full, annotated edition is in preparation44 – is a strong sense of the city and its identity. The author attempts, besides a year by year record of events, an analysis of social and economic categories, with lists of Mantuan leading families including comments upon their past and present status. Andrea does not write eulogistically about members of the Gonzaga family; he even fails to note the death of Marquis Ludovico under the year 1478. Perhaps he resented the lack of favours shown to himself, though two of his brothers were in Gonzaga service. He tends to praise the Gonzaga only in so far as they enhanced the fabric and prestige of the city, for instance in repairing streets and public buildings, or marrying into exalted dynasties, or, in the case of Francesco, second son of Marquis Ludovico, acquiring a cardinal’s hat. His prevailing criterion of approval is ‘l’onore della città’. In other words, 41 Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Notes on the Word stato in Florence before Machiavelli’, in John Gordon Rowe and William H. Stockdale (eds), Florilegium Historiale. Essays presented to Wallace K. Ferguson (Toronto, 1971), pp. 313–26. Rubinstein nevertheless cited alternative usages in Florence. 42 Gianfrancesco to Francesco Gonzaga, Bozzolo, 11 July 1484: ‘Se posso cosa alcuna per lo stato o per altro che importa a la Signoria Vostra Quella me comanda.’ (ASMn AG b. 1800 c. 93.) 43 Daniel M. Bueno de Mesquita, ‘The Sforza Prince and his State’, in Peter Denley and Caroline Elam (eds), Florence and Italy. Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein (London, 1988) pp. 161–72, esp. p. 167. 44 In a long-awaited edition by Rodolfo Signorini, from the autograph original, BCMn MS 1019. An incomplete version, with many alterations, was edited by Carlo D’Arco, in Giuseppe Müller, Raccolta di cronisti e documenti storici lombardi inediti (Milan, 1857). For discussion of the content see Ercolano Marani, ‘Andrea da Schivenoglia testimone della coeva società mantovana’, Civiltà mantovana, new series, 7 (1985): 7–15; also Lazzarini, Fra un principe, pp. 84–5, 91–5.

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if the collective ‘honour of the city’ was abused, signorial government was unacceptable. For example, Schivenoglia records the outrage felt in Mantua by an intervention of Marquis Ludovico, supported in 1449 by a papal bull, to amalgamate the charitable foundations of the city, above all to take over his grandfather’s foundation of the Consorzio of Santa Maria della Cornetta, whose governor (massaro) was meant by statute to be elected, together with supporting councillors. The new plan was evidently to establish a single large hospital along the lines of Francesco Sforza’s Ospedale Maggiore in Milan. Schivenoglia reported the city was in uproar45 about this takeover or ‘restructuring’. Similarly, Marquis Ludovico was as high-handed as his father and grandfather in 1467, when he resumed Marquis Gianfrancesco’s resented practice of replacing the podestà by a vice podestà. This aroused Schivenoglia’s wrath just as it had angered some of the consultants in 1430: ‘a bit of the city’s honour was taken away,’ he wrote. Ludovico had appointed as vice-podestà, and later renewed in office, Beltramino Cusatri da Crema, whom Schivenoglia dubbed ‘a tyrannical man’ (‘homo tiranno’).46 But Schivenoglia was abusive about other officials too, such as Giacomo da Palazzo, a leading Chancery secretary, whom he characterizes as an overbearing character, who wore a doctoral robe in spite of not being a scholar.47 On the other hand, Marquis Ludovico wanted to be acclaimed the benefactor of Mantua by restoring and embellishing communal buildings. In the early 1460s, soon after the papal Diet of Mantua which was supposed to launch a crusade, Ludovico was concerned not only with refurbishing the Palazzo del Podestà, but also the Palazzo della Ragione. This concern is expressed in an interesting letter addressed to the members of his consilium, in which he insists that the hall (sala) of the palace should be fully refurnished with benches for the magistrates and notaries; his only interest in this, he professed, was ‘the common good’ (‘ben comune’).48 To this end, over 10 years later, he had a tower added to the Palazzo della Ragione on which was fixed, in December 1473, the famous astrological clock – a praiseworthy act in Schivenoglia’s opinion.49 45

MS, f. 52: ‘Molti li zitadini se turbono’; Lazzarini, Fra un principe, p. 87. MS f. 49r: ‘Recordanza che de l’ano 1467 fo tolto via uno pocho de honore che avia la città de Mantoa’. On Beltramino see David Chambers and Trevor Dean, Clean Hands and Rough Justice. An Investigating Magistrate in Renaissance Italy (Ann Arbor, 1997). 47 MS f. 28r. 48 Marquis L. Gonzaga to the ‘Dominis de Consilio’, 15 September 1462: ‘Perché credemo ch’el palazzo del potestate debia esser reducto in forma ch’el ge poterà andar a star dentro, voressemo in questo tempo ... d’esser insieme cum esso potestate et cum Jacomo da Palazo pigliare qualche ordine a la sala de la rasone, e veder quanti bancheti è necessario farli e quanti notari glie bisognano, et quelli ve pare siano più sufficienti, perché nui non deliberamo nì per amicicia nì per parentella de mettergie alcuno, ma solamente attender a quello che sia utile e ben comune.’ (ASMn AG b. 2888 lib. 49 f. 42v.) 49 MS f. 61: ‘Foe posto lo arloio suxo lo torione decho de lo palazo di la raxone’. On 46

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Even if Mantua, both city and territory, was subordinated to a family without serious rivals and on its way to European princely status, its citizens seem still to have cherished some features from the more distant past. Not least was this expressed in civic hagiography and iconography. Possession of a relic of Christ’s Blood, and legendary visitations by St Andrew and by the centurion Longinus, were no mean sources of patriotic pride. Even Schivenoglia, who betrays little religious zeal or dread in his chronicle, lists it as a high ‘honour’ that no less than seven Mantuan prelates (including various abbots) were entitled to wear a mitre.50 Above all, it was a source of pride that Mantua was the scene of Virgil’s birth and upbringing. Monuments to the ancient poet were erected and projected, not statues of Gonzaga rulers; in the late fifteenth century his image was used on coins as well as that of the reigning Marquis. The distinction between comune and signoria was still not wholly clear, even in Mantua. Consent to the regime may have depended on a perception that, even if the Gonzagas did not sustain all communal institutions, at least they strove on the whole for ‘l’onore della città’.

the clock, see Rodolfo Signorini, L’Orologio astronomico (Mantua, 1992). 50 MS. f. 49r: ‘Nota che Mantoa solia esser in questo tempo più onorata che non era citade qui in torne zoé Mantoa avia 7 mitry li qually possia comparne in Roma e per tuto el mondo per honore e richeze.’

9 Giangaleazzo Visconti and the Ducal Title Jane Black

Giangaleazzo Visconti’s investiture in 1395 as imperial prince and duke of Milan was his family’s most dramatic symbol of success. Imperial recognition had always been particularly important for Giangaleazzo, preoccupying him from the moment he came to power. The imperial vicariate originally granted in 1355 to his father and uncles had been revoked by Emperor Charles IV.1 But within four months of his own accession in 1378 the old emperor had died and Giangaleazzo immediately began petitioning Wenceslas, new king of the Romans, for another vicariate, finally receiving it on 15 February 1380. By contrast, Bernabò Visconti, Giangaleazzo’s uncle, having refused to acknowledge the revocation of his vicariate, had not bothered to request a new one. It was said that he was too full of pride and arrogance to go begging for such endorsement.2 Giangaleazzo, on the other hand, still not satisfied, was campaigning within five years for an even more illustrious title, either royal or ducal. Promising 100,000 florins with which to fund his progress through Italy, he finally prevailed upon Wenceslas to draw up the diploma of 1395. Giangaleazzo sought further concessions over the next two years, chiefly in the diploma of 13 October 1396, which, among other privileges, extended the ducal title beyond the confines of Milan to his other subject cities, created the county of Pavia and arranged for the succession.3 As imperial princes the Visconti would enjoy a pre-eminence far above any mere signori: it was a spectacular achievement. 1 The diploma is published in Caterina Santoro, La politica finanziaria dei Visconti, Documenti, vol. 1 (Milan, 1976), pp. 97–101. 2 ‘Elatus superbia ac arrogantia, numquam a dicto Serenissimo Principe Wenceslao investituram petere, nec obtinere curavit.’ Annales mediolanenses ab anno MCCXXX usque ad annum MCCCCII ab anonymo auctore, ed. Ludovico Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 16 (Milan, 1730, reprinted Bologna 1980), col. 788. 3 The diploma of 1396 is published in Johann C. Luenig, Codex Italiae diplomaticus (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1725–35), vol. 1, cols 425–32. Giangaleazzo was now duke of Brescia, Bergamo, Como, Novara, Vercelli, Alessandria, Tortona, Bobbio, Piacenza, Reggio, Parma, Cremona and Lodi, to list just the major towns.

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What extra prerogatives Giangaleazzo expected as a result of his new status is not immediately obvious, for he and his predecessors already commanded huge powers. From the time that Azzone Visconti had first become signore in multiple communes during the 1330s, the Visconti had been given charge of local administration and authorized to negotiate and commit resources on behalf of their subject communes.4 They had the right to confirm, amend and annul local laws, raise taxes and hear judicial cases. Their decrees took precedence, being issued in defiance of any contrary local statutes or provisions.5 The 1335 statutes of Como, for example, affirmed that whatever the dominus ordered was to be regarded as law and observed as such for all time.6 The statutes of Cremona declared in 1339 that Luchino and Giovanni Visconti were lex animata in their lands.7 Long before Giangaleazzo was made duke, the Visconti regarded their people as subjects8 and were themselves considered princes: the local jurist and public servant, Signorolo degli Omodei, appreciated back in the 1340s that, in juridical terms, the Visconti had assumed the role of emperor in their own dominions.9 That analogy was reinforced by means of the imperial vicariate, conferring on Bernabò, Galeazzo II and Matteo ‘all the superiority and jurisdiction’ which the emperor himself enjoyed; as Angelo degli Ubaldi said of Giangaleazzo after he had acquired his own vicariate, ‘he is a prince in his lands and enjoys the powers of a prince.’10 4 The act of submission made to Azzone in 1329 by the Milanese, which provided a model for later agreements, is published in Francesco Cognasso, ‘Note e documenti sulla formazione dello stato visconteo’, Bollettino della Società Pavese di Storia Patria, 23 (1923): doc. 3, 123–8. 5 On this issue see Gian Paolo Massetto, ‘Le fonti del diritto nella Lombardia del Quattrocento’, in Jean-Marie Cauchies and Giorgio Chittolini (eds), Milano e Borgogna. Due stati principeschi tra medioevo e rinascimento (Rome, 1990), pp. 58 ff and Franca Leverotti, ‘Leggi del principe, leggi della città nel ducato visconteo-sforzesco’, in Rolando Dondarini, Gian Maria Varanini and Maria Venticelli (eds), Signori, regimi signorili e statuti nel tardo medioevo, Atti del VII Convegno del Comitato nazionale per gli studi e le edizioni delle fonti normative, Ferrara, 5–7 ottobre 2000 (Ferrara 2003), p. 5. 6 ‘Quicquid ipse dominus per litteras, vel alio modo, iuxerit vel statuerit sit et intelligatur esse lex et pro lege perpetuo ab eis debeat observari.’ Statuti di Como del 1335. Volumen magnum, vol. 1, ed. Guido Manganelli (Como, 1936), p. 17. 7 Statuta et ordinamenta comunis Cremonae facta et compilata currente anno Domini MCCCXXXIX, ed. Ugo Gualazzini (Milan, 1952), Rub. CIL, p. 204. 8 Luchino and Giovanni often referred in decrees to their ‘subjects’: see for example the decree Quod subditi gaudeant Statutis Mediolani. non obstante quod onera non subeant of 8 June, 1345 which mentions the peaceful condition ‘nostrorum subiectorum’. Antiqua ducum Mediolani decreta (Milan, 1654), p. 2. 9 For example, Signorolo degli Omodei, Consilia (Milan, 1521), number 22 (incipit ‘In quaestione vertente inter commune Mediolani’), paragraph 15: ‘Item cum principem a quo iura descendunt, non debeamus intelligere esse actorem iniuriarum.’ See Jane Black, Absolutism in Renaissance Milan: Plenitude of Power under the Visconti and the Sforza 1329–1535 (Oxford, 2009), p. 2, note 159. 10 Angelo degli Ubaldi, Consilia (Lyon, 1539), number 217 (incipit ‘In causa accusationis’), paragraph 1 ‘Dominus comes in terris suis princeps est et principis fungitur potestate’. The consilium refers to proceedings which took place after Lodi had passed from Bernabò’s rule to Giangaleazzo’s in 1385, but before the duchy.

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In addition, the Visconti had been able to use the vicariate to bolster their claim to plenitude of power with its authority to overrule laws and individual rights, a claim accepted in the legal world.11 Given that the investiture could not, in practice, add much to his powers over the communes, it might be concluded that Giangaleazzo’s desire for the ducal title was largely for the sake its immense prestige. But in fact his motives were more specific: his own explanation was that he feared being labelled a tyrant, a concern that can be traced to his relationship with Bernabò.12 During the first seven years of his rule Giangaleazzo had been dominated by his uncle, who, by the time Giangaleazzo himself came into his inheritance, had been a commanding figure for more than 20 years. Particularly vexatious was Bernabò’s control of the city of Milan. The division of lands agreed after the death of Giovanni Visconti in 1354 had given Giangaleazzo’s father, Galeazzo II, the western territories, with Bernabò ruling in the east. Milan itself was to have been governed by the brothers jointly; but despite that agreement Bernabò had taken sole charge of the city. Giangaleazzo’s bitterness came to a head after the failure of his scheme for a second marriage. His first wife Isabella of Valois having died, he had made plans in 1377 to marry Maria, heiress to the recently defunct King Federico III of Sicily; he himself would then become king of Sicily. That ambition had been foiled by the pope, but, alarmed at the prospect, Bernabò had pressured Giangaleazzo into accepting a double union with his own family. In 1380 Giangaleazzo and his sister Violante had duly married Bernabò’s children, Caterina and Ludovico. Azzone, Giangaleazzo’s only son, was likewise to have married into Bernabò’s family.13 Not content with seeing Giangaleazzo lose his independence, it was rumoured that Bernabò’s sons were plotting an outright annexation of his territories.14 The year 1385 opened with Bernabò’s preparing yet another 11

See Black, Absolutism, pp. 54 ff. Giangaleazzo made this statement to the Florentine ambassadors in 1387, at that stage hoping for the title of King of the Lombards: ‘E poi disse ch’egli aveva intenzione di mutar nome e lasciare in tutto il nome del tiranno, e non disse loro il nome che prendere volea; ma altra volta avea usato di dire ch’egli volea prendere nome di Re de’ Lombardi.’ Cronica volgare di Anonimo Fiorentino dall’anno 1385 al 1409, già attributo a Piero di Giovanni Minerbetti, ed. Elina Bellondi, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 27, part 2 (Città di Castello, 1915), p. 48. 13 Daniel M. Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan (1351– 1402). A Study in the Political Career of an Italian Despot (Cambridge, 1941), pp. 23–4. Giangaleazzo’s indignation at being pushed into these marriages was revealed in the accusations he drew up against his uncle on the latter’s imprisonment in 1385: see Luigi A. Ferrai, ‘La politica di Gian Galeazzo Visconti nei rapporti diplomatici coi Valois nei primi anni del suo principato (a proposito de una nova redazione del Processo contro Bernabò)’, Archivio Storico Italiano, series 5, vol. 22 (1898), 64–5. The final blow was Azzone’s death in 1381, leaving Giangaleazzo with no male heir, the loss all the more devastating in the light of Bernabò’s fifteen legitimate offspring, whose marriages connected him to the chief ruling families of Europe. 14 ‘Anno Christi MCCCLXXXI de mense novembris dictus Dominus Comes Virtutis, videns quod non poterat habere in uxorem dictam Reginam Siciliae, accepit in uxorem excelsam Dominam Caterinam, filiam domini Bernabovis Vicecomitis, et 12

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spectacular marriage alliance for his own family, the union of his daughter Lucia to Duke Louis II of Anjou, and organizing an expedition to put the couple on the throne of Naples. It must have been clear to everyone that Giangaleazzo’s interests were being ruthlessly sidelined; nevertheless it would have been difficult to imagine the drama that was to ensue. On 6 May 1385 Giangaleazzo carried out medieval Italy’s most spectacular coup, capturing and imprisoning for life Bernabò and his sons Rodolfo and Ludovico; Bernabò died seven months later.15 Giangaleazzo easily made good his grip on his uncle’s dominions: given the chance to loot Bernabò’s palaces, and with the promise of tax cuts, the Milanese submitted without opposition. The Consiglio Generale met and transferred authority over the city to Giangaleazzo and his heirs.16 Bernabò’s other cities capitulated within the next few days.17 Giangaleazzo had explained that he wanted an official title because he no longer wished to be known as a tyrant. By tyrant he meant usurper, or tyrannus ex defecto tituli; for such, he feared, was now his position in Bernabò’s lands. What he required was ‘a just title for that which he held’.18 For the next decade his diplomacy was dominated by the need to establish his right to Bernabò’s lands. He set about formulating a justification for his seizure of power in a letter to Florence and Bologna, written immediately after the submission of Milan.19 He began by condemning Bernabò’s usurpation of his rights over the city (as agreed in the division of lands of 1354); he went on to refer to the support Bernabò had consistently given to his enemies, to the numerous attempts on his life and to other outrages. Nevertheless, so Giangaleazzo protested, the events of 6 May had had nothing to do with revenge. The violence had been initiated by Bernabò and his sons with the aim of seizing Giangaleazzo himself and annexing his territories. The attack had been foiled only by the foresight and skill of Giangaleazzo’s bodyguard. According to this dedit in uxorem dictam Dominam Violantem sororem suam, Domino Ludovico filio dicti Domini Bernabovis, credens se melius cum eis pacificare. Et non obstantibus praedictis, filii dicti Domini Bernabovis tractabant auferre dominium dicto Domino Comiti, ut dicunt.’ Chronicon placentinum, ed. Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores vol. 16 (1723), col. 543. 15 Rodolfo lived until 1388, Ludovico till 1404. Giacinto Romano, ‘Il primo matrimonio di Lucia Visconti e la rovina di Bernabò’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, series 2, 20 (1893): 585–611 explains some of Giangaleazzo’s motives. 16 According to the Annales Mediolanenses, col. 788, Giangaleazzo was appointed dominus generalis of the city ‘sine strepitu et sine aliqua contradictione’. 17 Francesco Cognasso, ‘L’unificazione della Lombardia sotto Milano’, in Storia di Milano: Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri, vol. 5 (Milan, 1955) p. 520, note 1. Cities made their own particular conditions, as seen for example in the document of 1 June 1385 in which Giangaleazzo replied to the demands of the Cremonese; the document is published in Ugo Gualazzini, Gli organi assembleari e collegiali del comune di Cremona nell’età visconteo–sforzesca (Milan, 1978), pp. 145–9. 18 This is what Giangaleazzo’s envoys to Bologna were instructed to say in connection with negotiations with Pope Urban VI: see Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti, p. 171. 19 The letter, dated 8 May 1385, is published in Francesco Novati, ‘Per la cattura di Bernabò Visconti’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, series 4, vol. 5, anno 23 (1906): 133–4.

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version of the coup, Bernabò’s capture was an act of pure self-defence. At the end of the letter Giangaleazzo proclaimed the happy outcome of this act of treachery: both he himself and the people of Milan had been liberated from Bernabò’s domination. But a week later Milanese ambassadors were told to present a different justification.20 By now it had become clear that the coup involved the whole of Bernabò’s lands, not just Milan itself. Any allusion to his uncle’s usurpation of power in Milan would have highlighted the fact that seizing the whole of Bernabò’s territories was a far more fundamental violation of the agreed division of territories. No further mention was therefore made of Giangaleazzo’s rights in Milan. Instead ‘the liberation of Bernabò’s lands and people from cruel servitude’ became the focus of Giangaleazzo’s justification: ‘Afterwards, following the capture of Bernabò and his two sons, the Count of Virtue entered Milan and was warmly received by the citizens, nobles and people alike, thanking God that they had been liberated from such a cruel yoke of slavery. The nobles and people of the other cities and lands held by Bernabò and his sons unanimously, without exception, and without any prompting from Giangaleazzo, assumed control of the other territories, and then voluntarily submitted to him.’21 A much more detailed list of accusations was drawn up, with Bernabò’s conduct being put forward as the reason why people of all classes in Milan and elsewhere had initiated the change of regime.22 Giangaleazzo was now making it clear that his claim to legitimacy in the captured territories was based entirely on the concept of popular sovereignty. But popular election could not in itself provide a solution to the problem of legitimacy; for Bernabò and his sons had enjoyed imperial recognition. Giangaleazzo had been careful to apply for a renewal of the vicariate in 1380, whereas Bernabò had not. But his own vicariate expressly protected Bernabò’s rights in the city of Milan.23 With regard to Giangaleazzo’s claim 20

The Instructions, comprising a list of accusations against Bernabò, are partially published in the Annales Mediolanenses, col. 797; as shown by Novati (‘Per la cattura di Bernabò Visconti’, pp.137–8), these instructions formed the basis of the official indictment or Processus subsequently drawn up by Giangaleazzo. The Processus is published in Ferrai, ‘La politica di Gian Galeazzo Visconti’, pp. 62–8. 21 Ferrai, ‘La politica di Gian Galeazzo Visconti’, p. 68: ‘Nam postquam, post captionem praefati Domini Bernabovis, et duorum filiorum, idem dominus comes Mediolani intravit, per cuius cives tam nobiles quam populares fuit benigne receptus, gratias deo agentes, quod a tam crudelissimo servitutis iugo liberati essent; nobiles et populares aliarum civitatum et terrarum quas tenebant dominus Bernabos et filii unanimiter, nemine discrepante, absumpserunt in se dominium aliarum terrarum, absque aliquo consilio praefati domini comitis. Et post modum sponte se supposuerant praefato domino Comiti.’ 22 The accusations against Bernabò included writing an insulting letter of condolence to Giangaleazzo on the death of his son Azzone; plotting to assassinate Giangaleazzo’s mother, Bianca of Savoy; putting an evil spell on his wife, Caterina; and planning to poison Giangaleazzo himself. See Ferrai, ‘La politica di Gian Galeazzo Visconti’, pp. 62–6; an analysis of the accusations is made by Novati, ‘Per la cattura di Bernabò Visconti,’ pp. 137–8. 23 Wenceslas had warned in the diploma that Giangaleazzo and his heirs were

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to authority in Milan, therefore, the vicariate had become a liability. What Giangaleazzo needed was a title which would have the effect of cancelling those awkward guarantees. That was precisely what the investiture of 1395 achieved: Wenceslas made the city and its contado into a duchy, exclusive control being granted to Giangaleazzo. As the Milanese historian Andrea Biglia later explained, the creation of the duchy put an end to the uncertainties associated with the period of the vicariate: ‘What shall I say of this city of ours, which had been controlled in the name of the Empire for so many years that it was hardly able to say whom it did have as a ruler, or whether it was free, or held under the domination of another.’24 Giangaleazzo could not now be labelled a tyrant in Milan itself; but there were grave doubts about his position in the rest of Bernabò’s lands. His vicariate, covering only territories he had inherited, not those he had seized, inevitably showed up the weakness of his claim to the latter. To get round this Giangaleazzo petitioned for the second investiture, dated 13 October 1396: all cities and territories under his domination, both his own and Bernabò’s, were listed together, with another duchy being created of these. ‘It was advantageous [for Wenceslas] to have as his subject a duke rather than a tyrant,’ explained Giangaleazzo’s chief legal expert, Baldo degli Ubaldi (1327–1400), with reference to the second investiture. 25 The rights given to Bernabò in his vicariate of 1355 and acknowledged in Giangaleazzo’s of 1380 had now been altogether superseded. This was spelt out in the new investiture, bestowed ‘notwithstanding other titles which have been created, conceded or granted to other people in the above [lands] by us or our predecessors in the Empire’.26 There was a further problem, however. The 1380 diploma had given Giangaleazzo specific powers: as imperial vicar he had been granted ‘preonly given those rights which they would have had if Bernabò and his heirs had also been granted a vicariate in the city: ‘Et hoc … sine laesione aliqua … patrui tui Bernabovis de Vicecomitibus et eius haeredum … Ita tamen quod praesens concessio … habeat talem, tantum et non minorem effectum qualem et quantum haberet si ipsa concessio facta foret praefato Bernabovi.’ (Jean Dumont, Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens, vol. 1, p. 147). 24 Biglia’s oration given in 1425 commemorating Giangaleazzo’s death: ‘Quid dicam de hac ipsa nostra civitate, quae tot annos per nomen imperii occupata, vix poterat agnoscere quem dominum haberet, liberane an alterius arbitrio teneretur?’ (quoted in Giacinto Romano, ‘Un giudizio di A. Biglia sulla funzione storica dei Visconti e del ducato di Milano’, Bollettino della Società Pavese di Storia Patria, 15 (1915): 141). 25 Baldo, Consiliorum sive responsorum, vol. 1 (Venice, 1575), number 333 (Incipit ‘Ad intelligentiam sequendorum’), paragraph 1: ‘Et sic expedit habere potius subditum Ducem quam tyrannum.’ This consilium has been edited by Kenneth Pennington, ‘Allegationes, Solutiones, and Dubitationes: Baldus de Ubaldis’ revisions of his consilia’, in Manlio Bellomo (ed.), Die Kunst der Disputationen. Probleme der Rechtsauslegung und Rechtsanwendung im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1997), pp. 54–65. 26 Luenig, Codex, vol. 1, cols 431–2: ‘Et praedicta omnia et singula valere volumus et obtinere effectualem roboris firmitatem, non obstantibus quibuscunque legibus, iuribus, constitutionibus, clausulis derogatoriis et aliis concessionibus, infeudationibus aliisve titulis per nos, sive per praedecessores nostros in Imperio, aliis factis, concessis vel collatis super praemissis.’

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eminence, and comprehensive jurisdiction and power’ to be exercised on the emperor’s behalf; a detailed inventory of these rights, judicial, executive and legislative, had been included. The vicariate had been replaced; but the 1395 diploma had not given Giangaleazzo any such specific prerogatives, so that he was in danger of being left in some respects worse off than before. The 1396 investiture addressed this complication too: the diploma granted Giangaleazzo all the powers in his lands which the emperor enjoyed, just as had been bestowed on him in the vicariate.27 In addition, by granting exclusive rights of succession to Giangaleazzo’s own descendants, the 1396 diploma was designed to supplant that aspect too of the division of territory agreed in 1354. Giangaleazzo’s motives for seeking the title of duke were not so much to acquire extra authority over his subject cities as to put the finishing touches to his destruction of Bernabò. To understand the duchy as a great achievement for the Visconti dynasty is therefore not quite accurate: it was a victory for Giangaleazzo himself in a desperate family conflict. There were, as a result of Wenceslas’s diplomas, two distinct duchies (the so-called Duchy of Lombardy supposedly unifying the titles in 1397 being a later fabrication). By granting Giangaleazzo authority over all his cities, the two diplomas solved the immediate problem of legitimacy. But the nature of the jurisdiction being conferred was not explained precisely, leaving presentday historians divided, some emphasizing the survival of local autonomy and identity under the duchy, others seeing the investiture as instrumental in creating a homogeneous territorial state. Philip Jones recognized ‘the obstinate survival of diversity and privilege’ in despotic states, appreciating the vitality of local statutes, courts, guilds and factions, and the presence of an independent clergy.28 For contemporaries an understanding appeared to depend on a correct interpretation of the Peace of Constance of 1183, in which Emperor Frederick I had promised to respect the right to self-government of the Lombard communes. It was in connection with Giangaleazzo’s campaign for the ducal title that Baldo degli Ubaldi composed, in 1393, his work on feudal law, Commentaria in usus feudorum, in which he attempted to explain the powers of jurisdiction that would come with an imperial title.29 In that work Baldo made the assertion that the emperor’s pledge to uphold the Peace 27

Luenig, vol. 1, Codex, col. 429 : ‘Tu Johannes Galeaz tuique descendentes et successores duces Mediolani etc. possitis et valeatis … de … quibuscunque quae regni gubernationem et conservationem … ducatuum praedictorum concernent, providere et, prout vobis videbitur et placuerit, valeatis, et alia gerere, facere et expedire in ducatibus Mediolani etc praedictis, quod nos et Romani Reges et Imperatores gerere, facere et expedire possemus, etiam de plenitudine potestatis.’ The rights given in 1380 were in fact more than restored: whereas the Visconti had previously had to base their plenitude of power on a liberal interpretation of the imperial vicariate, Giangaleazzo’s plenitude of power was now officially sanctioned. 28 Philip J. Jones, ‘Communes and Despots: the City State in Late-medieval Italy,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, series 5, vol. 15 (1965), p. 91; this volume, chapter 1, p. 20. 29 The defining study of the work is by Cristina Danusso, Ricerche sulla ‘Lectura feudorum’ di Baldo degli Ubaldi (Milan, 1991).

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of Constance had been binding for 30 years only.30 In truth, Baldo was wrong: he had conflated the Peace of Constance with the sworn agreement to uphold its terms for the period of 30 years signed in 1185 by members of the Lombard league.31 Baldo was later ridiculed as a senile old man for his mistake;32 but his insistence that the emperor’s oath had lapsed was needed in order to plug a serious gap in the investiture of 1396. Again, as with the first diploma, the second investiture came in two parts: the creation of the duchy, and the granting of it to Giangaleazzo. Having established an additional duchy from the other Visconti cities and their dependent territories, Wenceslas assigned the whole entity to Giangaleazzo, together with all the iura, iurisdictiones and imperii which imperial dukes normally held from the emperor or possessed in fief from the Empire (including the giving and receiving of rights and the conferring of fiefs).33 The diploma did not make Giangaleazzo himself ‘sole possessor of mero e misto imperio’ in the duchy, as has sometimes been assumed:34 he had only those imperia and iurisdictiones which dukes normally enjoyed in their role as imperial fiefholders. A significant element of the second duchy were the contadi and distretti, or what it called the iurisdictiones, imperia and regalia enjoyed by the cities over their surrounding territories. As explained later by Martino Garati (d. 1453),35 professor of civil law in Pavia (quoting Baldo), Giangaleazzo had ‘two ducal fiefs, the latter with all imperium and regalia’.36 The regalia in this context were, the diploma explained, control over roads, rivers, mills, tolls and other assets in the countryside. Garati was writing in connection with 30

Baldo, Commentaria in usus feudorum, De Natura feudi, Rubr. (Lyon, 1552), f. 25r : ‘Licet pax fuerit perpetuo contracta, tamen obligatio versus civitates Lombardiae non fuit contracta nisi per xxx annos, ut patet in textu dictae pacis.’ 31 In fairness to Baldo, it has been pointed out that the oath in question was frequently included with texts of the Peace itself: see Gero Dolezalek, ‘I commentari di Odofredo e Baldo alla Pace di Costanza’, in La pace di Costanza 1183: un difficile equilibrio di poteri fra società italiana ed Impero (Bologna, 1984), p. 64, and Mario Ascheri, ‘Quicquid cantet ecclesia: la pace di Costanza da Odofredo a Baldo degli Ubaldi’, in Carla Frova, Maria M. Nico Ottaviani, and Stefania Zucchini (eds), VI Centenario della morte di Baldo degli Ubaldi 1400–2000 (Perugia 2005), p. 470. 32 This was the verdict of Charles Dumoulin (1500–1566); see Dolezalek, ‘I commentari’, pp 66–7, note 29. 33 Luenig, Codex, vol. 1, col. 427: ‘Assignamus…tibi…Joh. Galeaz…ducatum sive principatum huiusmodi cum omnibus honoribus, nobilitatibus, iuribus, iurisdictionibus, imperiis, privilegiis et immunitatibus, quemadmodum ducatus sive principatus insignes ab illustribus Romanis imperatoribus seu regibus possidentur vel tenentur, seu possideri consueverunt hactenus.’ 34 E. g. Federica Cengarle, Immagine di potere e prassi di governo: la politica feudale di Filippo Maria Visconti (Rome 2006), pp. 72–3. 35 On Martino de Garati see Ingrid Baumgärtner, Martinus Garatus Laudensis: ein italienischer Rechtsgelehrter des 15. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, 1986). 36 Garati, Lectura in opere feudorum (Basel, 1564), Book 1, Title 7, on the words ‘natura feudi’, para. 11: ‘Nam praefatus Dux habet duo feuda ducalia et ultimum feudum cum omni imperio et regalibus et vidi utrunque feudum. Sic ego quoque vidi et legi, simul dicit hic Baldus.’

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authority in the distretti, both the imperium and regalia he mentioned being the rights of cities over their territorial possessions. The distretti were to be the focus of a key policy: Giangaleazzo and his successors aimed to consolidate their dominions by gradually removing these territories from the control of cities and independent signori. That would be achieved either by the grant of independence (separazione) to local communities within the distretti, or through enfoeffments (now that a feudal title had been created). And yet here lay one of the chief snags of the second diploma: in order to claim possession of the iurisdictiones, imperii and regalia belonging to the cities, the duke had to be sure that Wenceslas was in a position to concede those rights, and that he had in fact done so. But on this point the diploma was ambiguous: the duchy was described as including the cities with their territorial rights, without specifying whether the distretti had been transferred to Giangaleazzo direct, or whether they were still attached to the cities themselves. Hence the importance of a constructive interpretation of the Peace of Constance, the agreement that had explicitly guaranteed the jurisdiction and regalia of the communes over their own distretti. If the imperial oath to uphold the Peace was still in force, it would mean that Wenceslas had not been at liberty to transfer those regalia to the duke, leaving the latter’s authority in the distretti seriously compromised. Baldo’s statement that the emperor’s oath had lapsed after 30 years was therefore of crucial importance.37 The oath being no longer in force, in his view, ‘if the emperor wanted to give me a castrum belonging to a particular city with jurisdiction, he could do so; that is because all jurisdiction and every districtus belongs to the emperor, unless he has previously given it to someone else.’38 The oath was no longer binding; the emperor had taken back the jurisdiction which the communes had over their distretti; Wenceslas was therefore free to grant to the new duke the territorial rights guaranteed in the Peace of Constance. Baldo had dedicated his Commentaria in usus feudorum to Giangaleazzo, aiming to support him in his quest for the necessary powers to consolidate his hold over the duchy. In view of the importance of Baldo’s statement on the lapse of the oath, it is not surprising to find that every one of the main North Italian jurists who wrote about fiefs supported his teaching, including Martino Garati, Jacopo Alvarotti, Giovanni da San Giorgio of Alexandria (Cardinal Mediolanensis), Alessandro Tartagni, and Francesco Corte junior, all eminent figures in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.39 37 This point is explained by Cengarle, Immagine di potere, pp. 65–70. The Peace of Constance had begun to attract renewed interest in the fourteenth century, as communes were taken over by signori: see Dolezalek, ‘I commentari’, pp. 61 and 71; and Ascheri, ‘Quicquid cantet ecclesia’, p. 463. 38 Baldo, In usus feudorum, De natura feudi, Rubr, f. 25r, para. 3: ‘Cave tibi, quia licet pax fuerit perpetuo contracta, tamen obligatio versus civitates Lombardie non fuit contracta nisi per xxx annos, ut patet in textu dictae pacis, in vers. xxx annis. Et ideo si imperator vellet mihi concedere aliquod castrum alicuius civitatis cum iurisdictione, posset quia omnis iurisdictio et omnis districtus apud principem est nisi prius concessisset alteri.’ 39 Dolezalek, ‘I commentari’, p. 65. Naturally the cities themselves took a different

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And yet, on the vital issue of the Peace of Constance, there was a divergence of opinion that historians have found perplexing.40 Paradoxically, the Peace was recognized by Giangaleazzo: it appeared in the revised statutes of Milan, which he formally confirmed on 4 January 1396.41 Moreover, included along with the Commentaria in usus feudorum in the same dedicatory manuscript was Baldo’s Commentariolum on the Peace of Constance. That work was a celebration of the Peace, ending with a glorious paean ‘“Brave actions are performed for one epoch; but things put in writing to benefit the republic last forever.” O great and imperishable is the fame that is championed by honour.’42 Odofredo (d. 1265) in his gloss on the Peace had written that the 30-year time limit did not mean that ‘the peace does not survive once this time has elapsed, because the peace agreement was granted in perpetuity not temporarily’. To that Baldo added: ‘Or say that the time limit included here applies to the emperor’s oath, not to the concessions and other clauses in the Peace; you should stick to that. Time limits added to something which is susceptible to such limitation affects only that, and nothing beyond the item to which it refers.’43 Here was Baldo’s explanation of what he had said in In usus feudorum: the emperor could break aspects of the Peace if he so chose because his oath was temporary; but in other respects the structure created by the Peace of Constance remained intact. In support of that argument, there was Baldo’s statement in the commentary on the Decretals, which he composed shortly after completing the Commentariolum and In usus feudorum: ‘The numerous agreements contained in the Peace of Constance entered into by Emperor Frederick and the cities of Lombardy should be observed by those who succeed him in the Empire, unless [those agreements] happen to threaten the Empire’s well-being.’44 Martino Garati’s works followed the path laid down by Baldo. As has been mentioned above, he supported Baldo’s thesis on the expiration of the oath, view, believing their rights had been usurped. 40 See, for example, Ennio Cortese, Il diritto nella storia medievale (Rome, 1995), p. 442. 41 Statuta iurisdictionum Mediolani, in Historiae patriae monumenta, Leges municipales, vol. 2, part 1 (Turin, 1876), col. 1010. 42 Baldo, Commentariolum super pace constantiae, Haec sunt nomina (Lyon, 1552), f. 127v: ‘Dicit enim Vegetius (secundo [libro], De militari disciplina) “Unius aetatis sunt quae fortiter fiunt. Quae vero pro utilitate reipublicae scribuntur, aeterna sunt.” O quam magna et indelebilis fama, cui militat honor.’ 43 Baldo, Commentariolum, Triginta annis, f. 126v: Odofredus’s gloss was ‘Non autem dicas, tempore hoc elapso, pacem amplius non durare, cum perpetuo non ad tempus haec pax concedatur,’ Baldo adding, ‘Vel dic quod tempus adiicitur hic iuramento imperatoris, non concessionibus et aliis capitulis pacis, et hoc teneas. Tempus enim adiectum alicui determinabili, determinat solum illud, et non aliud ad cuius determinationem non est appositum.’ 44 Baldo, In decretalium volumen (Venice 1595), De probatio, c. 1, (X. 2, 19, 1): ‘Item per hunc textum probatur quod multa pacta inita inter imperatorem Federicum et civitates Lombardiae, quae continentur in pace Constantiae, servanda sunt per imperatores qui imperio successerunt, nisi forte essent contra statum imperii.’ On the dating of the commentary see Vincenzo Colli, ‘Le opere di Baldo. Dal codice d’autore all’edizione a stampa’, in VI Centenario, pp. 77ff.

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as shown in his Lectura feudorum,45 while in a special lecture given in Pavia two years earlier in 1444, he had emphasized that the rest of the Peace was still valid.46 The lecture, or as Garati called it, the Dubia disputata (beginning ‘Laudensis cum titulo’), is one of the few contemporary analyses of what might be called the constitution of the duchy.47 In it Garati pointedly denied that ‘all authority and jurisdiction was handed over to the duke of Milan’ in the 1396 diploma, ‘because when he conferred the duchy on the duke of Milan, the supreme prince (that is to say, the Emperor) hardly deprived the cities of Lombardy of their jurisdiction; nor could he have done so without the utmost cause on account of that much-discussed Peace of Constance. On this point see the first chapter of Baldo’s commentary on the Peace.’48 The purpose of Garati’s lecture of 1444 was to show that the duchy contained a heterogeneous complex of separate entities: ‘As a consequence of the settlement of Constance,’ he wrote, ‘the cities of Lombardy these days enjoy merum et mixtum imperium, so that in terms of civil and criminal law each city constitutes a separate province.’49 45 Garati, Lectura in opere feudorum, Book 1, Title 7, De natura feudi on the words, ‘natura feudi,’para. 11: ‘Neque obstat Pax Constantiae quia respondeo secundum Baldum quod pax fuerit perpetua inter imperium et Lombardos. Tamen obligatio non duravit nisi usque ad triginta annos.’ 46 The lecture, Dubia disputata per dominum Martinum Carractum de anno mccccxliiii dum legeret in studio Ticinensi, originally published in Disputatio in materia legitimationum (Pavia, 1499) is partially published by Jane Black, ‘The Limits of Ducal Authority: a Fifteenth-century Treatise on the Visconti and Their Subject Cities’, in Peter Denley and Caroline Elam (eds), Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein (London, 1988), notes 26–30, pp. 157–9. The Dubia disputata was known of but had not been found before the publication of that article (see Giglioli Rondinini Soldi, Il tractatus De Principibus di Martino Garati da Lodi (Milan, 1968), p. 121 and Baumgärtner, Martinus Garatus, p. 34). 47 Cengarle devotes welcome attention to Garati’s lecture in her analysis of Filippo Maria Visconti’s feudalization policy. But I cannot agree that his statement on the continuing force of the Peace of Constance was simply a minor technical point, ‘frutto non tanto di un’elaborazione teorica quanto di necessità pratiche legate al contesto del consilium’ (Immagine di potere, p. 71). What Cengarle calls a consilium was actually a public lecture, the whole purpose of which was to show that, in law, cities within the duchy were separate entities. Garati himself referred elsewhere to his lecture on the relationship between the duke and his subject cities, for example in his Tractatus de fisco, quaestio 106, where he wrote: ‘An hodie dux Mediolani habeat et sic in eum translatum sit ius civitatum Lombardie, vide disputationem quam feci in studio Papiensi anno proxime preterito, incipit Laudensis civis, ubi pulchre.’ (Tractatus universi iuris, vol. 12, Venice, 1584–86, f. 3v). 48 Garati, Dubia disputata (‘Laudensis cum titulo’) in Black, ‘The limits of ducal authority’, p. 158, note 30: ‘Non obstat secundum argumentum quod hodie omne imperium et omnis iurisdictio sit translata in dictum ducem Mediolani, quia respondeo quod princeps suppremus, scilicet imperator, conferendo ducatum duci mediolani modo privavit urbes Lombardie iurisdictione sua; nec posset, sine causa maxima ex tanta deliberata Pace Constantie, cap.1 ubi Baldus.’ 49 Garati, Dubia disputata (‘Laudensis cum titulo’) in Black, ‘The limits of ducal authority’, p. 157, note 27: ‘Hodie ex iure Constancie civitates Lombardie habent merum et mixtum imperium ut probatur in Extravaganti De pace Constancie, cap.

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The reason for the confusion over the Peace of Constance appears to lie in the very different authority enjoyed by the Visconti over the cities, which had been built up over many years, compared to that which they commanded in the distretti. Even after the creation of the duchy, the bulk of local government continued to be based on the traditional system of communal statutes, podestà and councils, all now strictly controlled by the duke; communal self-rule therefore remained an essential element of administration.50 It was for that reason that Baldo had dedicated to Giangaleazzo, alongside his commentary on fiefs, the Commentariolum on the Peace of Constance. That work comprised a description of the rights guaranteed at Constance, including the communes’ right to draw up statutes and to elect the podestà with merum et mixtum imperium.51 Officials of the new type, directly dependent on central government, such as referendari appointed by the Visconti for financial affairs and commissari for judicial and other matters, continued to grow in importance under the dukes; but these agents functioned alongside communal officers. Having achieved a firm grip over communal institutions, Giangaleazzo and his successors were happy to accept that cities had the right to self-government. It was the cities’ authority over their surrounding territories that was the battleground. The investitures of 1395 and 1396 were complex documents: their genesis lay in the political and legal disarray in which Giangaleazzo found himself after the coup of 1385; their impact in terms of ducal authority depended on the curious status of the Peace of Constance. That agreement had to be considered, like Schroedinger’s cat, to be simultaneously both alive and dead.

1, ibi tam in civilibus quam in criminalibus, et sic quelibet civitas Lombardie hodie est provincia.’ For the context of this point see Black, ‘The limits of ducal authority’, pp. 151–3; there is further analysis in Cengarle, Immagine di potere, pp. 73ff. 50 See Giorgio Chittolini, ‘Alcune note sul ducato di Milano nel Quattrocento’, in Sergio Gensini (ed.), Principi e città alla fine del medioevo (Pisa, 1996), pp. 413–31 and ibid., ‘Governo ducale e poteri locali,’ in Gli Sforza a Milano e i loro rapporti con gli stati italiani ed europei (1450–1535), (Milan, 1982), pp. 27–41. 51 Baldo, Commentariolum super pace constantiae, Imperialis clementiae, paras. 18–21, f. 119r–v. He said, for example: ‘Potestates … non habebant ante pacem iurisdictionem in criminalibus, sed hodie conceditur eis.’ (para. 18).

10 ‘Whatever’s Best Administered is Best’: Paolo Guinigi signore of Lucca, 1400–1430 Christine Meek

Paolo Guinigi came to power in a coup d’état in 1400 and ruled until overthrown by another coup in 1430. In fact Lucca had had a troubled history in the fourteenth century, but had enjoyed 30 years as a free commune until this was brought to an end in 1400. Paolo Guinigi thus came to power in a city that had an ideological commitment to independence and self-government and bitter experience of the opposite. While the Guinigi had exercised an increasing influence over the city in the 1380s and 1390s, even some of their erstwhile closest supporters seem to have been lukewarm or hostile, either to an open signoria as such or perhaps to Paolo Guinigi personally.1 Nevertheless he did succeed first in getting himself elected Captain and Defender of the city and then in making himself signore. He might be thought to have good reason to go carefully, but in fact he displayed attitudes and engaged in acts that look unwise and provocative. It was common for signori to retain pre-existing communal institutions and rule alongside them, whatever the actual power relations might be. Throughout the decades when Lucca was ruled by outside powers, including the period of Pisan rule and also the regime of Castruccio Castracani, there had continued to be Anziani and councils. Under Paolo Guinigi there were no Anziani and councils for nearly 30 years. And he not only made these changes; he stressed them. In April 1401 he wrote ‘the dominion of the whole city of Lucca, its contado and fortia now resides in us and the power and authority of the General Council has ceased’.2 He spoke of ‘my city’, ‘my territory’, ‘my subjects’, ‘my 1 Le Croniche di Giovanni Sercambi Lucchese, ed. Salvatore Bongi (3 vols, Rome, 1892), vol. 3, pp. 9–10. For the earlier history of Lucca, see Louis Green, Castruccio Castracani: A Study on the Origins and Character of a Fourteenth-Century Italian Despotism (Oxford, 1986) and Lucca under Many Masters: A Fourteenth-Century Italian Commune in Crisis (1328–1342) (Florence, 1995); Christine Meek, Lucca under Pisan rule, 1342–1369 (Cambridge, MA, 1980) and Lucca 1369–1400. Politics and Society in an Early Renaissance City-State (Oxford, 1978). 2 Governo di Paolo Guinigi 1, f. 31v, 8 April 1401 (hereafter cited as GPG):

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camera’, even ‘my Podestà’. Since there was no other source of authority than himself, since the financial resources of the city were his to do with what he liked, and since he himself chose the podestà and all other officials, even the most minor, this language did no more than reflect the realities of the situation. Paolo was very conscious of his position as signore, indeed as prince; he often referred to acts as particularly fitting for a prince, for example, when he wrote ‘the glory of a prince lies in the peace and riches of his subjects’, while making a quite minor administrative change.3 Paolo maintained a certain distance from all but his most intimate associates. Very shortly after he came to power he began to rebuild the citadel on the site of the Augusta, Castruccio Castracani’s impressive fortification and a symbol of signorial and outside rule; it had been the seat of the Pisan rectors while Lucca was ruled by Pisa from 1342 and 1369. He also rebuilt and expanded the old palace of Castruccio Castracani nearby in the contrada of S. Pietro in Cortina, buying up adjacent houses. None of these buildings now survives, so it is difficult to say exactly what they were like,4 but it is clear from the financial records that Paolo Guinigi maintained a considerable establishment and once the citadel was built the staff of guards increased markedly.5 He also conducted dynastic ceremonies lavishly. Sercambi’s chronicle has several accounts of the splendour with which the signore’s marriages and those of his eldest son Ladislas and daughter Ilaria were celebrated and also the funerals of his mother and three of his wives.6 It must all have been very different from republican times. Yet there is no indication of any internal discontent. Unrest among the lower classes had never been a feature of Lucchese internal history and the elements in Lucchese society which had been active in political life, appearing regularly in councils and the college of Anziani, apparently accepted the abolition of these bodies without protest or any signs of resentment, even though only a small proportion of these men found a role at the court of the signore. Such plots as there were are found not among those Lucchese who were previously politically active and now found themselves subjects of a signore and excluded from participation in political life. They were among the signore’s own intimates and even his relatives: his second cousin, Nicolao

‘Quoniam in nos hodie residet universae dominium civitatis lucane eius comitatus et fortie et cessat potestas et auctoritas consilii generalis.’ (All documents cited are in the Archivio di Stato in Lucca.) 3 Statuti del Comune di Lucca 6, Statuto del 1372, f. clxxviiii 2, 1 July 1409. 4 For Paolo Guinigi’s building activity, see Clara Altavista, Lucca e Paolo Guinigi (1400–1430), la costruzione di una corte rinascimentale. Città, architettura, arte (Pisa, 2007). 5 Camarlingo Generale 84–6, 111, 112, 378. 6 Sercambi, Croniche, vol. 3, pp. 56, 126–7, 254–7 (weddings), 120, 231–2, 233–4 (funerals). See also Franca Ragone, ‘Le spose del signore, scelte politiche e ceremoniali alla corte di Paolo Guinigi’, in Stéphane Toussaint (ed.), Ilaria del Carretto e il suo monumento. La donna nell’arte, la cultura e la società del ‘400, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi di Lucca (Lucca, 15–17 settembre 1994) (Lucca, 1995), pp. 119–36.

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Guinigi, the bishop of Lucca in 1400;7 messer Iacobo Viviani, a lawyer who was one of his confidants and diplomats in 1407–1408;8 Nicolao di Francesco, called ‘de Berla’ Guinigi, who – if the family trees preserved in the Archivio Guinigi are correct, was a sixth cousin – in 1409;9 and, most notoriously, the signore’s influential and trusted secretary, ser Guido da Pietrasanta, in 1420.10 Interestingly the first three – though not ser Guido da Pietrasanta – were eventually pardoned and returned to favour and, despite Sercambi’s criticisms of Paolo’s excessive and ill-judged clemency, never gave trouble again, but served the signore faithfully as envoys and members of his council.11 The judicial record of messer Iacobo Viviani’s condemnation gives some idea of how Paolo’s lordship appeared to his subjects in the early years of his rule. In 1407 messer Iacobo had been approached by Lucchese exiles to join in a plot against Paolo Guinigi. He had not shown much enthusiasm, though he did not reveal the plot and had at least one further meeting with the plotters. Filippo Salviati, who was also involved, asked how the Lucchese could bear to have a fellow citizen rule over them.12 Messer Iacobo replied that you would not find three people in Lucca ready to plot against him, and went on to say that there were three things that the Lucchese liked about him: one was that he kept his hands off their purses, another was that he would not hear of any indecencies over women, and the third was that he had never up to that point been cruel, but on the contrary extremely merciful.13 As a judgement on Paolo Guinigi’s regime this cannot be regarded as ideal from the historian’s point of view. It dates from 1408, which is rather early in his rule, and a close collaborator of Paolo Guinigi, such as messer Iacobo Viviani, would not normally be thought a reliable witness to the way the signore’s subjects regarded him; but in fact he lost Paolo’s favour and suffered a period of exile as a result of this particular incident and his judgement on the Lucchese attitude to their signore is fairly measured, so it seems worthwhile to discuss his views in some detail.

7

Sercambi, Chroniche, vol. 3, p. 21. GPG1, f. 95r, 1 June 1408. 9 GPG1, f. 128v, 3 May 1408, Archivio Guinigi 151, f. 61v. 10 GPG1, f. 101v, 1 November 1420. 11 For messer Iacobo, GPG2, f. 34v, 12 September 1410, elected councillor, f. 109v, 31 December 1419 (L. style 1420); for Nicolao Guinigi, mitigations of sentence, GPG1, ff. 140v, 30 August, 142v, 7 October 1409, pardoned, GPG2, f. 122r, 4 January 1414, elected councillor, f. 13v, 22 February 1415. 12 Potestà di Lucca 5139, Inquisizioni 1408, ff. 194r–197r, at f. 195r, Sentenze e Bandi 114, folios unnumbered, but ff. 43r–43v: ‘Come sostenete vuy esser segnorigiati da uno ciptadino?’ 13 Potestà di Lucca 5139, f. 195r, Sentenze e Bandi 114, ff. 43r–43v, with slight variations in spelling: ‘Non credo che sia in Luccha tre persone apte a tal facenda … vedeti eli a tre cosse principali de che molto icitadini se contentano. Una e che non tocha la borsa a persona, l’altra che per se ne per altri vol sentire desonesta de donne; la terza che fino a qui nonne stato may crudelle ma molto misericordioso in contrario, a chi fa de se grande carastia et e molto streto nello expendere.’ 8

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The statement that Paolo Guinigi kept his hands off his subjects’ purses should probably be understood as meaning that he was not making extraordinary or arbitrary financial demands on the Lucchese. It needs to be seen in the light of the situation of the years immediately preceding his rule, when Lucca had been fighting a war against neighbouring Pisa, which had necessitated serious and unwelcome financial sacrifices. A study of Lucchese finances under Paolo Guinigi presents problems, however. Much financial material survives, but it is nothing like complete or continuous. In particular there is a lack of information on the revenues as whole, but what material is available suggests that the revenues under Paolo Guinigi were similar in their sources and comparable in amount to what had been available under the republican regime after 1369. There are records for the second semester of 1405, when the camarlingo generale received the equivalent of 35,500 florins, and for the second semester of 1410, when he received the equivalent of about 29,000 florins.14 On the admittedly somewhat hazardous assumption that the receipts for the first semester were on a similar level, annual revenues would be approximately 71,000 florins in 1405 and 58,260 florins in 1410. Sercambi’s chronicle provides a budget for expenditure around 1424 of 62,220 or 56,220 florins, which seem to represent gross expenditure and net expenditure respectively.15 The figures are also very roughly in line with receipts for the 1370s, when the camarlingo generale received 60,000–65,000 florins per year in 1373–1375 and 65,000–70,000 in 1375–1380.16 The revenues under Paolo Guinigi derived – as did those for the 1370s and indeed for several decades before that – from many indirect taxes on the import and export of goods, and charges on various types of foodstuffs and on particular categories of people and the exercise of certain activities, though there were some changes in the way these were administered. One of the most striking aspects of Paolo Guinigi’s financial administration, and one which makes it difficult to get a clear idea of his revenues and more particularly his expenditure, is the payment of large sums in cash to the signore himself, either from the camarlingo generale or from some other office, such as the salt gabelle. Paolo received over 15,500 florins in cash between 16 March 1401 and 19 January 1402, for example, and 6,001 florins from the camarlingo generale between August and 31 December 1408, plus 13,737 from the salt gabelle in 1408.17 There is no real indication of what this money was for, though 1,500 florins paid to him in July 1408 was specifically said to be 14 Camarlingo Generale 84, 85 and also 86, which contains fragments of accounts for 1403–1419. 15 Sercambi, Croniche III, p. 357. He does not explain the discrepancy between the two figures, but since much of the expenditure was on salaries, which were liable to a deduction of gabelle at 16d in the £1, it seems likely that they represent gross and net expenditure. This is supported by the figures for part of the expenditure of ‘fiorini .LV. m .IIII.c .LXXVI lordi, che vegnono netti fiorini .LI.m’, p. 356. 16 Meek, Lucca 1369–1400, p. 48. Unfortunately the sources do not permit a calculation of the revenues for the last twenty years of the fourteenth century. 17 Camarlingo Generale 111, ff.171r–179r, 378, ff. 100r, 101r.

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for the purchase of grain.18 There is no reason to assume that the large sums in cash passing through the hands of the signore were destined to be spent on courtly extravagance. For one thing, some of the expenditure recorded in the camarlingo generale’s accounts was for jewels and other luxury goods and for the maintenance of the household, so there was no effort to cloak such expenses in anonymity. Some of the money paid to Paolo Guinigi in cash may also have been used in this way, but it is difficult to envisage luxury expenditure on the scale of tens of thousands of florins. One possible use of these large sums is for building. In addition to the citadel and the new palace of S. Pietro in Cortina, Paolo built another palace at Pietrasanta. Work was proceeding on this in 1408. He also built the palazzo de’ borghi, now known as the Villa Guinigi. According to Sercambi, 36,000 florins had been spent on this by 1423 and it needed 40,000 florins to finish it.19 There was work on other buildings, secular and religious, including the rebuilding of a bridge destroyed during the war against Pisa. While there are records of some expenditure on these projects in the camarlingo generale accounts, these are not sufficiently complete for it to be possible to say whether or not any of them was completely funded through the public treasurer. The impression given by Sercambi’s chronicle and the political records of Paolo Guinigi’s regime is that he had ample financial resources until the very last months of his rule, and that he was in a position to indulge in any luxuries he wished. He made no clear distinction between public expenditure and his own private expenses; indeed it would not be entirely easy to say what was public and what was private in Lucca under Paolo Guinigi. But there is little indication of increased financial pressure on his subjects. The sources of revenue seem to be the traditional ones. Lucca still had a public debt, dating from the 1370s and the financial efforts necessary to obtain Lucca’s independence, but there is no sign that it increased under Paolo Guinigi.20 Of course, the main reason for this lack of financial pressure was that Paolo Guinigi’s rule was very largely a period of peace until Lucca came under attack from Florence at the end of 1429. With regard to indecencies over women, it is perhaps surprising to find this so prominent as to be named as the second of three aspects of Paolo Guinigi’s regime that the Lucchese approved of, even in a society where honour was so important. It is not easy to discuss a negative, particularly regarding something as ill-defined as indecencies over women, nor indeed to demonstrate Paolo Guinigi’s personal involvement in preventing them. Firstly there is no indication in the sources that Paolo Guinigi himself or any of his relatives or close associates were ever involved in sexual scandal. Paolo had a

18

Camarlingo Generale 378, f.105r. Sercambi, Chroniche, vol. 3, pp. 208–9. 20 The holdings of individuals are recorded in Imprestiti 11–16 for 1368–1395, and 17–20 for the period of Paolo Guinigi. There was still a Massa et Dovana Salis in 1458, Archivio de’ Notari 1a 478(ii), ser Cristoforo Turrettini, ff. 80r–82r. 19

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natural son by a slave in the interval between his second and third marriages, but no one would have considered that worthy of remark.21 There are, of course, a number of cases of sexual offences in the judicial records. One example of a scandal that apparently arose from the breaking off of marriage negotiations concerned the Domaschi and Turrettini families. Monna Elena, the widow of Giovanni Domaschi, disrupted the Christmas Day sermon in the Dominican church of San Romano in 1412 by upbraiding Francesca, the daughter of Nicolao Turrettini, for denying that she was married to Monna Elena’s son, Benedetto, and saying that, married or not, the couple had slept together. Mother and son were brought to court the next day and made to retract their accusations. They were nevertheless severely punished; Monna Elena was fined £100, and Benedetto was fined £300 and sentenced to a year’s banishment.22 One case which must at least have given rise to gossip was the adultery of the prominent lawyer messer Gerardo di Matteo Vegnutelli with Nanna Mattei of Siena, widow of maestro Andrea Gori of Florence. While it was unusual for a man to be prosecuted for adultery in what was clearly a consensual relationship with no injured party in the person of a husband, the couple were fined £150 each.23 The only recorded involvement of Paolo Guinigi himself in either of these cases was that he quite quickly reduced the fines imposed, which does not seem to indicate a particularly rigorous attitude.24 But there was one scandal involving a woman in which the signore came under pressure from all sides. Clara, the wife of the prominent citizen Niccolò Malpigli, apparently planned to flee from Lucca with the sculptor Giovanni da Imola, with whom she seems to have become infatuated. Since, apart from the Malpigli, she herself was a member of the Angiorelli family and was related to the Arlotti and Sembrini, while Giovanni da Imola was an assistant to Jacopo della Quercia, at that time working on the Trenta chapel in San Frediano, important influences could be brought to bear. Paolo Guinigi on the whole maintained a rigorous and consistent attitude. He stressed to those who interceded for Giovanni da Imola that the offence was a very serious one 21 Archivio Guinigi 151, f.61v. This is a note on a Guinigi family tree and is dated 1457. The slave subsequently died but Paolo took responsibility for the child, Stefano, who is included in Sercambi’s estimate of Paolo’s expenses (Chroniche vol. 3, pp. 355, 357, 359), and was recorded as still alive in 1457. 22 Capitano del Popolo 21, unfoliated. Fines were in buona moneta, a money of account with a fixed value of 58s. to the florin. 23 Sentenze e Bandi 130, f. 34, 19 June 1416. The terms of the condemnations suggest that they may have allowed themselves to be surprised together. 24 The fines on Monna Elena and Benedetto, imposed on 19 January 1413, were reduced to a total of £216 13s. 4d. on 28 January and Benedetto was to be released from prison, if they gave sureties. He could then stay in Lucca and its territory for eight days, but was not to go out in the city by day; GPG2, f. 103v. For messer Gerardo Vegnutelli, GPG2, f. 41v, 16 October 1416. This reduction did not apply to Nanna, whose fine had been paid on 29 June by her guarantor, Stefanino de Chiatri, to be recovered later from her dotal goods. There is no indication that she petitioned, which messer Gerardo almost certainly did.

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and that there was an injured party who could hardly be denied the justice he was demanding. On 28 April 1414 the sculptor was condemned to a fine of 300 florins, and since he was quite unable to pay, he remained in prison. It was not until 20 April 1417, nearly three years later, that the signore agreed to reduce his fine to 100 florins and Giovanni da Imola was able to beg and borrow enough finally to obtain his freedom.25 Paolo Guinigi can also be shown to have been involved in an attempt to reform Lucchese nunneries after some of their inmates were involved in scandals, notably one involving a Lucchese abbess and one of the cathedral canons. Paolo Guinigi strongly supported, and indeed perhaps inspired, the bishop of Lucca’s attempts to obtain authorization from the pope to suppress some of the smaller convents, transferring the nuns to stricter orders in or near the city itself.26 Paolo Guinigi in general seems to have been somewhat puritanical, ordering his council to take action against gaming, which cannot have gone down very well, since some of his councillors were themselves seriously addicted to it.27 The third aspect of Paolo Guinigi’s regime mentioned by messer Iacopo Viviani was his mildness and clemency. These qualities were very central to Paolo Guinigi’s idea of the role of a prince. In June 1404 he wrote that humanity and clemency illuminate a prince as the stars do the heavens, while on 14 July 1415 he elaborated on this, putting princely mercy on a religious basis when he stated that ‘in the same way as, out of a certain fragility, it is innate for men to sin, so similarly from an innate magnificence it is natural for princes to show mercy. Neither can, nor should, the guilt of subjects be so great but that it may know the clemency of lords, for this is the virtue that renders us most acceptable and conformable to God.’28 Both of these preambles were followed by decrees that might equally well have been made under a communal 25 GPG2, f. 54v, 20 April 1417, and GPG6(1), ff. 49r, 19 March, 51v, 15 April, 56v, 9 July, 57r, 16 July, 59r, 17 September 1414 and f. 80r, 27 May 1416 for letters in reply to those making representations on Giovanni’s behalf. The involvement of Jacopo della Quercia has attracted considerable attention to this case; see Eugenio Lazzareschi, ‘La dimora a Lucca di Jacopo della Guercia e di Giovanni da Imola’, Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria (1925): 3–37, and James H. Beck, Jacopo della Quercia (2 vols, New York, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 357–63. 26 Discussed in detail in Giuseppe Benedetto, ‘Fra corruzione e riforme: i monasteri femminili della città e del territorio di Lucca nella seconda metà del Trecento e nel primo trentennio del Quattrocento’, in Ilaria del Carretto e il suo monumento, pp.165–97. 27 GPG6(2), pp. 79–80, 31 August 1415. The letter mentions ‘Johanni et Arrigo et Nicholo nostro nipote’ as having been warned about this in the past without effect, and to be told now that if they offend again they will be made an example of. ‘Johanni’ may be Giovanni Sercambi, for whom there is independent evidence of his addiction to gambling. ‘Nicholo nostro nipote’ may be the son of Paolo’s dead brother Lazzaro, but the identity of ‘Arrigo’ is more doubtful. 28 GPG1, f. 119r, 12 June 1404 ; GPG2, f. 19v, 14 July 1415: ‘Cognoscentes quod sicut hominibus ex quadam fragilitate insitum est peccare ita principibus ex innata magnificientia proprium est misereri. Nec tanta debet aut potest esse subditorum culpa quin dominorum misericordia cognoscatur. Hec enim virtus est illa qua nos magis deo reddit acceptos et conformes.’

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regime, but Paolo Guinigi does seem to have taken his prerogative of mercy very seriously and to have granted pardons and mitigations on a greater scale than did the previous regime. He continued the long-established practice of freeing prisoners on the religious feasts of Christmas Day, Good Friday and S. Croce, and added dynastic occasions, freeing six men who were in prison for debts to the commune on the occasion of his assumption of power,29 and others to celebrate his marriages and the birth of an heir.30 In 1400 and again in 1404 the signore decreed a ‘taxa’, that is a scale of greatly reduced payments for the cancellation of banns.31 Despite the parade of princely clemency, such arrangements were similar to those under the preceding communal government; they went back at least to the 1370s, when, as one councillor succinctly expressed it, ‘utile esset lucrari pecunias et homines’.32 Quite apart from these measures Paolo regularly granted reductions and remissions of penalties and dues. Almost 1,100 such grants are recorded between January 1401 and October 1429; more of his acts are of this type than fall into any other category. The grants are, however, very varied and not easy to analyse briefly; nor do they show total consistency – perhaps it cannot be expected that clemency will always be exercised in exactly the same way. But certain observations can be made. Fines and sums due to the camera were not normally simply waived; mitigations were usually more limited and they were not indiscriminate. In some cases a ‘penalty of a quarter’ on top of the original fine had been incurred for failing to pay on time; these penalties were quite frequently remitted, though the fines or dues themselves still had to be paid in full.33 The signore was also frequently prepared to allow 29

GPG1, f.12v, 24 November 1400: ‘Tamquam gratus beneficiis sibi divinitus collatis.’ The decree specified that it was not to apply to anyone in debt to a private individual. 30 GPG1, f. 81r, 5 February 1403, f. 130v, 25 September 1404, f. 41v, 22 December 1405. These acts were expressed in religious terms, for example, at the birth of an heir: ‘Volens de successibus et gaudiis suis non solum temporalem letitiam sed etiam spiritualem demonstrare gaudium et solaium. Ad reverentiam omnipotentis dei qui omnium bonorum causa et origo est qui generosam et inclitam prolem maris infantis eidem sua benignitate concessit.’ f. 130v, 25 September 1404. GPG1, f. 74v, 17 April 1407, GPG2, f. 40v, 18 September 1416. Five more prisoners were released to celebrate the marriages of Paolo himself and his son Ladislas in 1420: GPG2, f. 118v, 4 August 1420. Since such release applied only to those who had been in prison for some time, who had not been similarly released on a previous occasion, who had made peace with their victim where applicable, and who were not guilty of crimes such as blasphemy, which rendered them ineligible for release on a religious feast, there may have been a shortage of suitable candidates on some occasions. 31 GPG1, ff. 119v–122r, 12 June 1404. The term for taking up the taxa was extended on 12 August and 12 December 1404 and two men were allowed its benefit at a later date: GPG1, f. 101r, 7 September 1408, f. 125r, 16 March 1409. In the 1420s many mitigations of penalties were on the basis of the application of the taxa. 32 Minute di Riformagioni 2, p. 295, 19 February 1379. Meek, Lucca 1369–1400, pp. 93–4, 126. The terms Paolo Guinigi offered were, however, more generous. 33 Examples, GPG1, f. 62v, 27 April 1402, f. 31r, 3 September 1405, GPG2, ff.

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a perpetrator of a crime the ‘benefit of peace’ with his victim, which reduced the fine to a half, even if the document had not been produced within the statutory time limit or there was some other technical difficulty; but these mitigations did not cancel the fine itself nor prejudice the need for peace with the victim.34 Some mitigations of dues were said to be made out of consideration of the poverty of the beneficiary, or his extreme old age or physical disability; in these cases reduction or remission was allowed for dues assessed on the person, but full liability was maintained for any property the beneficiary held.35 Many of the concessions no doubt resulted from petitions, although this is not often stated. Others were granted out of consideration for someone in Lucca or outside who had interceded: the bishop of Lucca;36 the signore’s consort, Piagentina da Varano in several cases shortly after her marriage;37 the signore’s secretary, ser Guido da Pietrasanta;38 and the Florentines,39 or Pistoiese40 or men of Pietrasanta, for men from their locality.41 While some concessions were to individuals who had got into arrears with their obligations or stood as guarantors for friends or relatives who had then let them down, or to those who had committed minor offences or were having difficulties in paying their fines, others were made to people who were less obviously deserving. A number of individuals were pardoned fines for offences against the sumptuary laws, though such offenders were unlikely to be either poor or ignorant.42 Some distinctly undeserving characters had their fines reduced. Francia, the wife of Cristoforo di Francesco of Siena, had her sentence of £300 and a whipping reduced to a simple fine of £100. The decree gives no details of her crime, but in fact she had incited a thirteen-yearold girl to steal cash from her mother’s chamber and then accuse two local women she said she had seen commit the crime.43 There were mitigations of penalties for men who had deliberately defrauded the gabelle – for example by paying duty at the much reduced rate for the passage of goods through 23r–23v, 28 April 1410, f. 117r, 15 November 1413. These are composite volumes with several different sets of foliation. 34 Examples: GPG1, f. 55v, 24 December 1401, f. 12r, 6 February 1405, GPG2, f. 128r, 6 June 1414, f. 37v, 21 July 1416. 35 Examples: GPG1, f. 111r, 24 January 1404, f. 128v, 25 July 1404. Poverty is mentioned so frequently as to seem conventional. 36 GPG1, f. 19r, 13 April 1405 (two cases). 37 GPG1, f. 113v, 21 December, 22 December 1408, f. 118v, 15 February 1409, f. 121r, 8 February 1409. 38 GPG2, f. 122r, 27 December 1413 (L. style 1414). 39 GPG1. f. 60v, 22 September 1406. 40 GPG1, f. 61v, 24 September 1406. 41 GPG1, f. 82v, 11 February 1403, f. 109v, 3 January 1404. 42 They do, however, include a slave, a tanner and two tailors who had made the offending garments; GPG1, f. 50v, 5 June 1402, GPG2, f. 117r, 15 November 1413, GPG1, f. 50v, 19 April 1406, GPG2, f. 42v, 22 October 1422. 43 GPG2, f. 31r, 27 June 1410. Original sentence, Capitano del Popolo 19, unfoliated, 21 June 1410.

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Lucchese territory and then selling them in Lucca, or hiding animals liable for a gabelle of 3 soldi in a flock of sheep that were charged at only 1 soldo each.44 Even officials who had been derelict in their official duties or notaries who had produced false documents or committed perjury might eventually be pardoned the full consequences of their acts.45 It is impossible to say how frequently petitions were refused. There was certainly not mercy for everyone. Simone di Jacobo Simone, Paolo’s household treasurer and one of his councillors, was found guilty of financial oppression of the signore’s subjects and peculation at the expense of the signore himself. He fell from power in 1411 and disappears from the records.46 When Pagano dal Portico was found to have a deficit of 1,770 florins in his accounts as camarlingo generale he was pursued with the full rigour of the law, despite the fact that he was Paolo Guinigi’s cousin and had served him faithfully in that office for a number of years, and there was no suggestion that he was guilty of corruption.47 There are letters of Paolo Guinigi in reply to those pleading on behalf of offenders that show that not all pleas were successful,48 but the number and the scope of mitigations and reductions of penalties that were granted suggest that when Paolo spoke of ‘his customary clemency and generosity’,49 this was not without justification. However, one important aspect of Paolo Guinigi’s exercise of clemency was his concern for the rights of others. He felt entitled to waive penalties that were due to the camera, since he himself would be the only loser, but some fines were shared between the signore’s camera and the vicariate and some offences had a victim. Paolo Guinigi did not feel entitled to ride roughshod over their rights. Thus the taxa made it clear that the reductions of fines applied only to the part of the bann due to the Lucchese camera, stipulating specifically that the vicariates were not to suffer loss. Similarly it was necessary for anyone who wanted to benefit from the taxa to have peace with his victim, where applicable.50 Some of the concessions made to individuals subsequently specify that they are limited to the part of the fine due to the camera and this was probably normally the case, even where this is not explicitly stated. 44 GPG2, f. 45v, 10 March 1411, f. 128v, 18 June 1414. There are many mitigations of penalties for relatively minor offences, such as failure to declare all family members or rents or property liable to gabelle, but also some for more serious infringements; GPG1, f. 54v, 18 June 1406, GPG2, f. 32v, 30 May 1416. 45 Examples: GPG1, f. 10r, 1 January 1405, GPG2, f. 137v, 25 December 1421 (L. style 1422), f. 63v, 15 August 1426. See also GPG1, f. 126v, 13 April 1409: pardon of ser Vito Pini who had been condemned to the loss of his right hand, exile, confiscation of property and ineligibility for offices for ‘falsitate’, and GPG2, f. 84r, 15 March 1428, pardon of ser Marco Martini who had removed records from the archive. 46 GPG2, f. 53r, 29 April 1411. 47 GPG2, ff. 81r–81v, 9 January 1419. Esattore Maggiore 19 contains extensive details of the confiscation of all his property down to the most minor household items. 48 GPG6(1), f. 54r, 15 May 1414, f. 98v, 27 May 1417. 49 GPG2, f. 14v, 6 April 1415. 50 GPG1, ff. 119v–122v, 12 June 1404.

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This respect for the rights of others, and desire that everyone should have his due and no one be deprived of what he was entitled to, was in fact a fundamental aspect of Paolo’s approach to government, although it is not among the things that messer Iacobo Viviani comments on. The records for Paolo’s administration are patchy, and when he was in Lucca much must have been done by word of mouth in personal communication with his secretary, ser Guido da Pietrasanta, his council and his chancery officials. But he was at times absent from the city for weeks and even months at Pietrasanta or elsewhere, and on these occasions information and instructions had to be conveyed by letter. The survival of some of these letters provides some idea of the workings of the administration and the principles on which it operated. There are letters from ser Guido da Pietrasanta, sending news, talking about minor problems and passing on requests – and also saying that he has done what the signore ordered about various specific matters. Paolo Guinigi also had a small council, consisting of nine men selected by himself. The survival of a group of letters for the early months of 1410 show that both the council and the signore were very actively involved in administration. The number of references to people appearing before Paolo Guinigi in person is striking, and suggests that he was holding regular audiences in Pietrasanta. But petitions could also be made to the council in Lucca, so that frequent exchange of information, opinion and instructions was necessary if administrative confusion were to be avoided. In some cases Paolo Guinigi had already taken decisions and wrote instructing his council to carry out the necessary formalities to implement them. But more frequently he referred petitions to the council, instructing them to enquire into the facts of the matter and take action accordingly. When the men of Casoli, involved in a lawsuit with a certain Boncursello da Pugliano, wanted the case to go to arbitration, Paolo Guinigi forwarded a letter from them to his councillors with instructions that, if there were no legal obstacle and no injury would be done to anyone, they were to arrange for arbitrators to be appointed, so that poor men would not have their resources eaten up by litigation.51 Several petitions involved the estimo of rural communes. Paolo Guinigi’s policy was that everyone should pay his proper share but no more than his proper share, and he instructed his council to take action to ensure this in a number of specific cases. When Colognora di Valdiroggio petitioned that a certain Stefano da Castello had been included in the new hearth count but claimed exemption as a noble, Paolo Guinigi wrote to his council that he wanted everyone to have his due and no one to suffer injury, so that if Stefano was indeed exempt, the council should provide that neither he nor the commune of Colognora should be held liable for his hearth.52 51 GPG6(2), pp. 19–20 (modern numeration in pencil), 6 January 1410. These letters once formed part of the Archivio Sardini and are calendared together in Carteggio di Paolo Guinigi, 1400–1430, (Regesto del R. Archivio di Stato in Lucca, vol. 3, i), ed. Luigi Fumi and Eugenio Lazzareschi (Lucca, 1925), parte 1a, no. 38, pp. 21–2. 52 Ibid., pp. 31–2, 22 February 1410. For other cases, see pp. 15–16, 4 January, pp.

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It is, however, possible to find exceptions to this concern for the rights of others and Paolo Guinigi could be high-handed if he had made up his mind as to what should be done. When the friars of S. Agostino needed a particular house belonging to the church of S. Bartolomeo in Silice to enlarge their convent, Paolo Guinigi wrote that the friars were to have the house regardless of the fact that Filippo Ciuffarini, who lived there as a tenant, was unwilling to give it up.53 When the prior of S. Maria Forisportam appeared to be intending to appeal to Rome in a lawsuit, Paolo Guinigi came down very forcefully against this without regard to the legal niceties. He instructed his council to send for him and make it clear that he could take the case to any court he chose in Lucca itself, but that he was not to go outside on pain of the lord’s displeasure.54 But all this was rather exceptional. Paolo Guinigi was very conscious of the extent of his powers as signore, but also of the need for care and restraint in using them. His basic attitude was paternalistic and benevolent; he was responsible for the welfare of his subjects and would have to answer to God for his actions. He regarded clemency as a quality particularly fitting in a prince and exercised his power to grant pardons and mitigations on a large scale, but not without due regard for the rights of others. He also wanted to preside over a regular and orderly regime. He was particularly reluctant to intervene in cases that were still pending. He wrote to Niccolò da Uzzano and other Florentines, who had written in favour of a certain Minazo di San Marcello: ‘Matters are in the hands of my podestà of Lucca, who is an extremely discreet man and exercises his office with great prudence and justice, so that I am sure that he will wish to find and discover the whole truth, and once he has will do his duty and what his honour requires.’55 This might, of course, be simply a tactful way of refusing their request, but he showed a similar attitude in a letter to ser Guido da Pietrasanta, which referred to a purely internal matter and was not intended for a wider audience. He forwarded a letter from the bishop of Lucca, so that ser Guido could see what was being asked (this is not specified, but seems to have involved proroguing the term in a lawsuit), and continued: ‘As you know, when this matter has come before us on previous occasions we have always replied that we did not wish to take any action and especially not on the basis of absolute power, because we do not want to depart from our ordinances and statutes; but if this proceeds from the will of the parties who are asking and urging it, we will be content to do as they ask, if this can rightly be done.’56 23–3, 18 February, pp. 43–4, 12 March, pp. 45–6, 13 March 1410. 53 Ibid., pp. 33–4, 24 February 1410. 54 Ibid., pp. 13–14, 2 January 1410. 55 GPG6(1), f. 47v, 4 February 1414. 56 GPG6(2), pp. 71–2, 29 August 1415: ‘Carissime noster. Riceve questo di dal vescovo di costi nostro consorto una lectora con una supplicatione le quali ti mandiamo con questa alligata accio che tu possi vedere quelche dimandino. Et come tu sai quando altra volta questa materia cevenuta dinanti sempre abbiamo risposto di non volere fare

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When in August 1430 a group of citizens burst in to carry out a coup against him, Paolo Guinigi protested: ‘You well know my assembled citizens, that you have never received anything from me but good and that I have never given injury to any one of you.’57 This did not prevent him being taken prisoner and his lordship of Lucca brought to an end, but the claim was recognized as justified to the extent that it would be dishonourable to do him physical harm. His benevolent and well-intentioned rule may well explain why his regime in Lucca lasted as long as it did with little or no opposition.

alcuna cosa et maxime de potentia absoluta perche non vogliamo sforviare li nostri ordini et statuti, ma se di volonta de le parti ipsis petentibus et instantibus procedesse saremo contenti di fare quell che dimandino se di ragione far si puo.’ 57 Michael Bratchel, Lucca 1430–1494. The Reconstruction of an Italian City-republic (Oxford, 1995), p. 18, quoting the Lucchese chronicler Giuseppe Civitali.

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11 The Mouse and the Elephant: Relations between the Kings of Naples and the Lordship of Piombino in the Fifteenth Century David Abulafia

I The lordship of Piombino was one of the smallest of the signorie in fifteenthcentury Italy, comprising the small town of Piombino itself, some surrounding villages, the fortress at Populonia and, importantly, the island of Elba together with one or two additional islands off the coast of Tuscany, such as Monte Cristo.1 Seen from this perspective its history appears marginal to that of Renaissance Italy; this region lay some way to the south of the great Tuscan 1

Paolo Ghelardoni, ‘Il territorio piombinese nel XV secolo’, in Maria Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut and Gabriella Garzella (eds) Populonia e Piombino in età medievale e moderna (Pisa, 1996), pp. 83–9. For the history of the state of Piombino the starting point is a seventeenth-century manuscript (MS 139) in the Biblioteca Civica Falesiana, Piombino, entitled ‘Memorie le più antiche che si sono potuto ricavare dalla Città di Piombino’ (hereafter: MS 139). On this MS, see Ottavio Banti, ‘Di una storia manoscritta del principato di Piombino’, in Lemut and Garzella (eds), Populonia e Piombino, pp. 91– 8. The MS was extensively used by Agostino Cesaretti, Istoria del Principato di Piombino e osservazioni intorno ai diritti della Corona di Toscana sopra i castelli di Valle e Montone (2 vols, Florence, 1788). The standard study has long been Licurgo Cappelletti, Storia della Città e Stato di Piombino dalle origini fino all’anno 1814 (Livorno, 1897); add now Nedo Tavera, L’Ascesa di Piombino al declino della Repubblica di Pisa (Florence, 1978), and very briefly Mauro Carrara, Signori e Principi di Piombino (Pontedera, 1994); see also Sergio Tognetti and Patrizia Meli, Il principe e il mercante nella Toscana del Quattrocento (Florence, 2006). The scattered historical work of the travelling railwayman Romualdo Cardarelli advanced some way beyond Cappelletti: for this period, see Romualdo Cardarelli, Baldaccio d’Anghiari e la Signoria di Piombino nel 1440 e 1441 con prefazione e introduzione sulla storia dello Stato di Piombino dagli inizi fino a tutto il 1439 (Rome, 1922), a work based on his tesi di laurea which contains a fearsome invective against a journal editor who had failed to keep the promise to publish the entire work. However, neither his projected grand history of Piombino under the Appiani, nor his history of the Spanish Presidios on the Tuscan coast, saw the light of day; see La Biblioteca di Romualdo Cardarelli (2 vols, Naples, 1994–1997).

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centres of political authority and cultural activity, such as Florence and Arezzo. Indeed, its lords, the Appiano family, were despatched there in exile from Pisa, which they had managed to lose to the Visconti ruler of Milan.2 Yet Piombino’s significance, like that of (say) the rock of Gibraltar, was out of all proportion to its size. Its rulers often attempted to look out towards the sea, and to ensure that they did not become immersed in the complex politics of fifteenth-century Italy. All the same, it was the target of armies led by such redoubtable warlords as Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, Aragon and Sicily, and Cesare Borgia. This in part reflects its strategic position, for by controlling the waters around Elba the lords of Piombino also potentially controlled the movement of traffic along the coast of Tuscany, between Italy and Corsica which was itself, though only briefly, a target of their ambitions. Piombino itself became a notable centre of trade, whose commercial links extended as far as Tunis and even the Levant. Its rulers sought to create a new Pisa, active in the trade of the Tyrrhenian Sea and of the Mediterranean beyond. To some degree they succeeded, for they were able to take advantage of the debility of Pisa after its conquest by Florence (1406); by a deft combination of piracy and trade they made their presence felt in the ports of North Africa.3 Moreover, they had natural resources to hand which were the envy of their neighbours. Since Etruscan times the island of Elba had been famed as a source of iron; Populonia still retains vast slag heaps from Etruscan and Roman times, which were themselves actively exploited for iron deposits.4 The modern standing of Piombino as second only to Taranto in the Italian steel industry continues a long and almost unbroken history of metal production in the area since antiquity. We can thus see that the lords of Piombino made up in their natural resources for the lack of extensive territory that they actually controlled; and in any case they tried to ensure that their ‘territory’ included large tracts of the open sea. At the same time, control of the great vein of iron on Elba pushed the Appiani into commercial and also political alliances with more powerful neighbours, such as Genoa, which for several decades exploited the iron of Elba, as, subsequently did Medicean Florence. For neither of these great cities was the Appiano dominion negligible, in view of its metal reserves and its position. The example of Piombino will help us understand how princely power often cooperated with traditional communal institutions in the government of a late medieval signoria. It will be seen that the Anziani of Piombino made their own 2 For the events leading up to Gherardo’s brief rule, see Ottavio Banti, Iacopo d’Appiano. Economia, società e politica del comune di Pisa al suo tramonto, 1392–1399 (Pisa, 1971); the transfer of power in Piombino is recorded by Agostino Dati in his ‘Historia Plumbinensis’, in Augustini Dati Opera (Siena, 1503), f. 237r. 3 David Abulafia, ‘From Tunis to Piombino: Piracy and Trade in the Tyrrhenian Sea, 1397–1472’, in Peter Edbury and Jonathan Phillips (eds), The Experience of Crusading, vol. 2, Defining the Crusader Kingdom (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 275–97; Eugenio Massart, ‘La signoria di Piombino e gli Stati Barbareschi’, Bollettino storico pisano, 39 (1970): 69– 118. 4 Abulafia, ‘From Tunis to Piombino’, pp. 292–3.

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decisions on important issues, working closely with the prince, so that what emerged was a co-operative, dualist government of prince and commune.

II The Appiano family which ruled fifteenth-century Piombino was of Pisan patrician origin. In October 1392 Jacopo d’Appiano, by a shameless coup d’état, established himself for a while as Capitano of Pisa, looking for outside protection to the greatest power in northern Italy, Giangaleazzo Visconti; his son Gherardo was recognized as Captain of the People before his father died in September 1398.5 But Gherardo’s reliance on the support of the Milanese revealed the underlying fragility of his power, and in 1399 he sold the city to Giangaleazzo for 200,000 florins, plus the consolation prize of Piombino, the neighbouring small towns, and Elba.6 The lordship of Piombino and Elba thus came into existence as a sort of honourable exile for the Appiano family. The lordship of Piombino must have seemed a grant of rather little consequence. Certainly, its existence could not be expected to interfere with Visconti plans for an Italian dominion which would comprise the great cities of the Lombard plain and of Tuscany. To understand the success of Piombino under the Appiano signoria, it is important to remember that the Appiani concentrated their attention on trade and industry rather than on the creation of a substantial dominion in Tuscany. They learned the lesson early on that their autonomy would depend on finding benign and powerful protectors, whether in Milan, the Tuscan cities, or Naples. Another lesson that the lords of Piombino learned was that they should not function as they had briefly tried to do in Pisa, by overriding the traditional authority of the Anziani. Gherardo confirmed the privileges of each of the small towns which fell under his sway; the general tendency under the Appiano lords was for the signore to pay close attention to the advice of his counsellors. We can think of the government of Piombino in the fifteenth century as a cooperative effort between the Appiano family and the town councils that made up the signore’s dominion. Although little can be said about the elite of early fifteenthcentury Piombino, it appears to have included other exiles from Pisa, some of whom were keen to develop the trade of the little port. The territory controlled by the Appiani was more or less evenly divided between mainland and island possessions. Its area was about 600 square kilometres, but only 250 of these were on the mainland; the rest, Elba, Pianosa, and Monte Cristo, lay out to sea.7 The wealth of the Appiani, which seems real 5

Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, pp. 39–40. Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, p. 43; Daniel Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti Duke of Milan (1351–1402). A Study in the Political Career of an Italian Despot (Cambridge, 1941), pp. 246–7; Giuseppe Ninci, Storia dell’isola di Elba dedicata a Sua Maestà Napoleone il Grande Imperatore (Portolongone, 1898), pp. 65–7. 7 Ghelardoni, ‘Territorio piombinese’, p. 83; see also Paolo Ghelardoni, Piombino. 6

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enough, was based in significant measure on revenues from the iron mines of Elba. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first concern of the Appiani was to maintain control of Elba in the face of Genoese competition. Genoa’s aspirations to rule the island, which it had occupied following the battle of Meloria with Pisa in 1284, were based on the hope of controlling its mineral resources and also its strategic value for traffic moving up and down the coasts of Italy. A small force of four Genoese galleys plus a support vessel arrived off Elba in July 1401, in the belief that they could seize the island easily. Gherardo paid off his unwelcome visitors with ‘Danegeld’ of 19,000 florins.8 Despite further attempts, the Genoese failed to gain political control of the island, though they did come to manage its mineral products later in the fifteenth century. The second concern of the Appiani was their relationship with Giangaleazzo Visconti.9 When Giangaleazzo died unexpectedly in September 1402, Gherardo Appiano had already begun to build ties with great families in central Italy, notably the Colonna: he married the sister of Cardinal Ottone Colonna, later Pope Martin V.10 Gherardo Appiano rapidly reopened Piombino to Florentine trade once the Visconti shadow had been removed from Tuscany with Giangaleazzo’s death. Florence filled the gap left by the collapse of Milanese influence in the region, offering an arrangement which fell short of political dependence. Piombino would receive a small squadron of Florentine troops when Gherardo was engaged in warfare approved by Florence, and he would also receive 3,600 gold florins each year for six years; Gherardo became the raccomandato of the Florentine Republic. This should be seen not so much as an act of political submission as a partnership, analogous to an accomandigia between business partners. However, the early death of Gherardo, in 1404, brought into effect the terms of his will which allowed Florence a substantial say in the government of Piombino: Florence was to send a governor to Piombino. Gherardo’s widow Paola Colonna, acting on behalf of the young signore Jacopo II d’Appiano, prudently renewed the raccomandigia for a further six years in 1405, well before the first raccomandigia had actually expired. The aim was clearly to free Piombino from external threats at a time when Florentine power was advancing in the region, and to benefit from the war against Pisa, which ended in October 1406 with the submission of Pisa to Florence.11

Profilo di storia urbana (Pisa, 1977). 8 Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, pp. 46–7. 9 For Giangaleazzo and Pisa, see the comments in the classic study of Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti, pp. 246–8. 10 Carrara, Signori e principi, pp. 7–8. 11 Tavera, Ascesa, p. 36.

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III In the early fifteenth century, the lords of Piombino had to steer a careful course between acceptance of Florentine direction in their affairs and the wish to retain some degree of autonomy, particularly in their dealings with other powers present in the peninsula. There was a constant risk of becoming trapped in regional conflicts which brought no obvious benefit to Piombino, such as the campaigns of Ladislas, king of Naples, in Tuscany.12 On the other hand, Piombino was keen to consolidate its hold on the limited hinterland of the Appiano capital. In fact, the success of the Florentines in defeating their foes at Anghiari in 1440 prompted the opportunistic Jacopo II to renew the raccomandigia tying Piombino to the Florentine Republic.13 However, the future of Piombino was hanging by another thread. The failure of Jacopo II to produce an heir, even a bastard son, prompted his uncle, Gherardo d’Appiano’s brother Emanuele, to claim rights of succession; an attempt to father an illegitimate son ended in high comedy, when Jacopo’s mistress gave birth to a child whose skin colour suggested that he was the son of an African servant of the lord of Piombino.14 Emanuele, for his part, had been pursuing a military career, fighting as a condottiere in Florentine and Sienese service, and then retiring to live in Troia, in the kingdom of Naples, where his southern Italian wife possessed property and where he had served Queen Joanna as a military commander.15 Emanuele’s demands that he be admitted to Piombino and granted rights of succession to his childless nephew fell on deaf ears, even when he sent a band of troops into the little state – though they achieved little and were eventually paid off by Jacopo II’s widow, Paola Colonna. Emanuele’s claims were further confounded by Paola Colonna’s deft negotiation of a marriage alliance between her daughter Caterina and Rinaldo Orsini, the count of Tagliacozzo, an experienced condottiere in his own right, who had enjoyed good relations with Pope Martin V in the past.16 A ColonnaOrsini friendship may seem a historical oddity, but the new lord by marriage of the Appiano dominion proved an effective master. Emanuele d’Appiano, still resident in the kingdom of Naples, took advantage of the seizure of the kingdom by Alfonso of Aragon – culminating in the fall of the city of Naples in 1442 – to urge the new king to lance the Piombinese boil.

12

David Abulafia, The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms 1200–1500: the Struggle for Dominion (London, 1997), p. 169. 13 Tavera, Ascesa, p. 45. 14 Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, p. 60. 15 MS 139, f. 71r–v; cf. Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, p. 59, note 2. The author of the seventeenth-century chronicle preserved in Piombino was attracted by the story that Emanuele’s wife was an illegitimate daughter of King Alfonso, but it will be seen that there are other explanations: see below, p. 158. 16 Carrara, Signori e principi, pp. 13–15.

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This, at least, is how the issue appears in the local sources.17 Of course, King Alfonso had wider regional interests, and the mere salvation of the claims of Emanuele d’Appiano was of rather minor consequence to him. Alfonso had already campaigned in Corsican waters and well knew the strategic value of the sea between Corsica and Elba. He had longstanding difficulties with Genoa, scores to settle with Florence, lingering problems with Pope Eugenius IV who had shown a distinct preference for his rival René of Anjou, and a wish to acquire much stronger influence in northern and central Italy in conjunction with his ally Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan. Catalan ships began to interfere with those of Piombino, and the Senato sent Fabrizio Tagliacozzi, a former Vicario of Piombino, to Naples to plead with the king to put an end to violence in the Piombino channel.18 Indeed, the men of Piombino were being picked on by the Genoese as well, though at this point his influence there was unusually strong and his allies in the city were briefly dominant.19 As a result, two ambassadors were sent to Genoa, one on behalf of the lord of Piombino and one on behalf of the commune – a fairly typical example of the way authority and decisions were shared in Piombino.20 The Genoese were seeking to make Piombino into some sort of tributary protectorate. The state seemed to be under pressure from all directions, and the raccomandigia with Florence was no guarantee of security. The sense that the safety of Piombino was under threat was reinforced with the death in November 1445 of Paola Colonna, which seemed to give Emanuele d’Appiano an opportunity to reiterate his own claim to the lordship. Thus the Anziani were prevailed upon formally to recognize her daughter Caterina and Caterina’s husband Rinaldo Orsini as signori of the city and its territory. Rinaldo set to work at once to complete the defences of the city by building a firm set of land walls to match the sea walls, with whose construction he had already been involved.

IV All this work was well conceived, since Alfonso of Aragon launched a vigorous campaign in Tuscany at this point.21 The death of the duke of Milan in 1447 stimulated Alfonso in his attempt to make himself master of central and northern Italy, but he was unable to persuade the Sienese to let him park his

17

Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, p. 69; MS 139, ff. 35v–37v. Archivio Storico Comunale (henceforth ASC), Piombino, Libro di Consigli no. 12, f. 49v: ‘quia vadat ad maiestatem regalem Ragonie et ei exponat innormitates quas eius fuste et alii vectores suorum terrarum faciunt’; also LC 12, f. 56r; Biblioteca Falesiana, MS 139, ff. 37r, 39v; also Cesaretti, Istoria del Principato, vol. 2, p. 20. 19 Alan F. C. Ryder, Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Aragon, Naples and Sicily, 1396–1458 (Oxford, 1990), p. 263. 20 MS 139, ff. 40v–41r. 21 Dati, Historia Plumbinensis, f. 238v. 18

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army on their territory, since they feared it would annoy Florence.22 Alfonso’s troops, blocked in Tuscany, turned towards Piombino, which was still closely linked to Florence. Yet the explanation for Alfonso’s behaviour has eluded historians. Alfonso certainly attached considerable importance to this campaign, seeing in his defeat a severe blow to his self-esteem, and rightly so. But Alfonso’s most recent biographer, Alan Ryder, says little about the king of Naples’ motives. Ryder remarks that at first Alfonso’s armies appeared to threaten Livorno and Pisa, but then they headed towards Piombino, which had ‘probably been his target from the outset’ and appeared to be a promising winter base for his armies.23 Most likely, Alfonso was targeting Piombino because of its close links to Florence and because of its value as a point from which Tyrrhenian traffic could be controlled. The usefulness of Piombino as a launching pad for operations within Tuscany was also obvious to the sixteenth-century historian of Siena, Orlando Malavolti. According to Malavolti, Alfonso sent spies to see how easy it would be to occupy Piombino.24 Any interest in the claims of Emanuele d’Appiano was bound to be secondary. But if Alfonso could gain control of Piombino, this would give him a secure base from which to extend his operations further, and it would serve as the foundation of a dominion in Tuscany which he had long been seeking. In the event the territories he managed to secure were small: Castiglione della Pescaia, on the coast south of Piombino, and the island of Giglio nearby.25 Given the participation of Florentine ships and troops in the struggle for Piombino, it is clear that this conflict rapidly developed into a confrontation between Alfonso and Florence, in which the great prize would be control of the Tuscan shore and of the waters around Elba. Thus the siege of Piombino was just as much concerned with Alfonso’s Mediterranean policies, and in particular dominion over the Tyrrhenian Sea, as it was with Tuscan affairs, notably his rivalry with Cosimo de’ Medici. Alan Ryder has cited at length a letter of the Catalan admiral Arnau de Vildemany, describing the sea battle between Alfonso’s forces and those of Florence off Piombino in July 1448. It makes plain the feeling on the Aragonese side that this conflict was really being waged against the Florentines rather than against Piombino.26 The letter emphasizes the role of the Florentines in the defence of Piombino, so that the conflict there can be seen as a sort of proxy war between Florence and Naples, in which Piombino was made to 22

Ryder, Alfonso the Magnanimous, pp 276–7. Ryder, Alfonso the Magnanimous, p. 279; Augustini Dati, f. 238v. 24 Orlando Malavolti, Historia de’ fatti, e guerre de’ Sanesi (Venice, 1599), part 3, f. 35v: ’Il Re Alfonso, hauendo considerato di quanta vtilità gli potrebb’eβere l’impadronisrsi della Terra di Piombino a far l’impresa di Toscana.’ 25 Giovanni Forte, ‘Di Castiglione della Pescaia presidio aragonese dal 1447 al 1460’, Bollettino della Società Storica Maremmana (1934): 13–43; (1935): 3–62 (also published separately, Grosseto, 1935); Ryder, Alfonso the Magnanimous, pp. 278–9. 26 Ryder, The Kingdom of Naples under Alfonso the Magnanimous (Oxford, 1975), p. 302. 23

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suffer for its close alliance with the Florentine Republic. Siena too found itself caught up in a conflict which threatened to create an Aragonese hegemony in Tuscany. Following a request from its ally in 1447, Siena sent 300 men-at-arms to Piombino, but as the menace from Alfonso became clearer, Piombino asked for still more aid.27 However, the conflict was not simply one between the entire community of Piombino, supported by alarmed neighbours in Tuscany, and the armies of Naples and the rest of the crown of Aragon. Malavolti plausibly refers to some citizens who were in league with Alfonso and were actively encouraging his enterprise.28 Of course, we should not be surprised that there were factions within Piombino, and it is obvious from the succession crises within the principality that different interests, even if their aims are hard to identify, pulled in different directions. This is not to say, however, that Alfonso made any effort to pose as the altruistic champion of a particular faction within Piombino. As has been seen, his interest in Piombino was based on wider strategic considerations. The siege of Piombino by Alfonso attracted attention on a wide scale. Antonio de Agostini, a priest from San Miniato, was the author of a Historia Obsidionis Plumbini written in truly terrible verse. For him this was a great example of resistance against ‘quel Tiranno Raonese, che non merita essere chiamato Re’, and the cruelty which he sought to inflict on Tuscany.29 The details, overlain and over-laden with classical imagery, are obviously subject to much embroidery. There is some verisimilitude in his characterization of the resistance to Alfonso as a joint effort of the signore and the commune, even if, as has been seen, Malavolti believed that unity at home was not complete: Nella terza udirete qual l’umano Signor parlamentò a’Terrazzani, E la risposta del Popol sovrano.

At the end, the poet shows how Piombino rejoices in the rule of Donna Caterina, ‘e quasi pari a lei si trova al Mondo’. The siege of Piombino proved to be one of the set piece dramas of the reign of King Alfonso of Aragon, comparable in its fame to the siege of Ancona by Barbarossa in 1173, which also gave rise to literary celebrations of the triumph of liberty over tyranny.30 This conflict was not seen as one between two signori, the king of Naples (Goliath) and the lord of Piombino (David), but as a war on which depended the liberty of the inhabitants of the Tuscan cities. The argument appears to have been that if Piombino had fallen, Tuscany would have been open to Alfonso’s armies, and victory there would have been followed by other still grander ones. Thus the withdrawal of Alfonso from the 27

Ryder, Alfonso the Magnanimous, pp. 278–9. Malavolti, part 3, f. 36r. 29 Antonio de Agostini, ‘Historia Obsidionis Plumbini’, in Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 25, cols. 320–69. 30 Notably Buoncompagno da Segna’s Liber de obsidione Ancone. 28

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siege of Piombino was seen as a defining moment in the defeat of Alfonso’s hegemonic aims in Tuscany and the peninsula. Or, differently, after Piombino, and despite the continuing campaigns of Ferrante, duke of Calabria, in Tuscany – including, as will be seen, even the entry of Ferrante’s troops within the walls of Piombino itself – the road that lay open was not the road to Florence and Siena, but the road to Lodi, where a pan-Italian peace agreement came into existence in 1454, to which Alfonso felt bound to adhere in 1455. In any case the four months of torment at Piombino produced some notable incidents. Naturally, in the first place, the domain of Piombino was occupied by troops loyal to Alfonso. Federico da Montefeltro, count of Urbino, his most loyal condottiere and ally, in the end had no difficulty gaining Baratti, near to Populonia, thereby ensuring access to the sea for the supplies the Aragonese army wished to bring from the kingdom of Naples.31 After a good harvest, food may not have been a problem for the inhabitants of Piombino at this stage, but it was for Alfonso. In a splendid exchange of chivalric courtesies, the citizens responded promptly and positively to a request from King Alfonso for some chicken, since he lacked any at his table. The Consiglio solemnly deliberated about this bizarre request, and agreed to send him 60 fowls, ‘in order to demonstrate that their generosity in replying was no less than the gallantry of the king in asking’.32 The reality was, of course, that the war brought great damage to Piombino, with harm done to outlying properties and enormous expenses that had to be met in buying and maintaining equipment.33 And yet the longer the siege lasted, the more strain it seemed to place not on Piombino but on Alfonso, who became doubtful about maintaining supply lines to Naples, and was constantly aware of the cost of paying an army that day by day seemed to achieve little more than an embarrassing number of casualties. Thus after four months Alfonso resolved to withdraw. He was aware that the defeat badly dented his prestige in Italy. The Florentines welcomed Rinaldo Orsini with open arms once the Neapolitan armies had withdrawn, offering him a substantial annuity (1500 florins a month) and a condotta on behalf of the Republic.34 Having failed to win control of Piombino in war, Alfonso acquired influence there in peace. What developed thereafter was a close political relationship between the kingdom of Naples and Piombino, in which both the largest state in Italy and one of the very smallest stood to gain clear advantages. Naples was provided with a bridgehead into Tuscany at a time when its relations with Florence, in particular, were still extremely sensitive; at the same time, 31 MS 139, f. 46v; on Naples and Urbino see Cecil H. Clough, ‘Federico da Montefeltro and the Kings of Naples: a Study in Fifteenth-century Survival’, Renaissance Studies, 6 (1992): 113–72. 32 MS 139, ff. 49v–50r; Cesaretti, Istoria del Principato, vol. 2, p 10; Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, p. 68. 33 MS 139, f. 50r–v. 34 Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, p. 80; ASC, Fondo Cardarelli (hereafter Card.) 76, f. 77r.

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Piombino benefited from the protection of a mighty force in Italian politics. That there were commercial advantages is also likely; it is hard to imagine that either Alfonso or his mercantilist son Ferrante were blind to the advantages of maintaining close links with the ruler of iron rich Elba, who also sat astride such important Tyrrhenian trade routes.35 A small state dependent on the protection of greater powers could easily find itself sucked into political contests which it did not see as its own concern. Thus, in 1454 the king of Tunis broke his existing agreements with Piombino. He imprisoned all merchants of Piombino in Tunis, arguing that the lord of Piombino, Emanuele d’Appiano, had allied himself to his own foe Alfonso of Aragon.36 The lord of Piombino wrote to the king of Tunis letters ‘in quibus certioratum facit, se non fuisse ne esse confederatum cum Rege Aragonum, nec levavit eius vexillum’.37 Yet the king of Tunis was probably right about the closeness of ties between Piombino and Naples/Aragon. By this time the Piombinesi were sending an annual tribute to Alfonso (in the form of a golden cup), and for a while they acted as host to the armies of Naples.38 Thus it was easy for the Tunisians to make the claim that Piombino was tied to Naples. Still, the Consiglio of Piombino decided that it would instruct its consul in Tunis to state that neither the lord of Piombino nor the communità had placed itself under Aragonese suzerainty or protection. But by now it was common knowledge that ‘dominus plumbini est regius tributarius’, to cite a confidential report in the Sforza archives.39

V We can trace the relationship with Naples in a 120-page printed volume of about 1760, based on studies made in 1736, and entitled Dritto della Corona di Napoli sopra Piombino.40 Its author was asked by the Bourbon king to set 35 David Abulafia, ‘The Crown and the Economy under Ferrante I of Naples (1458– 1494), in Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham (eds) City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Essays Presented to Philip Jones (London, 1990), pp. 125–46. 36 MS 139, f. 70v; Cesaretti, Istoria del Principato, vol. 2, p. 40. 37 ASC, Libri di Consigli 13, f. 238v; oddly, at this time relations between Alfonso and Uthman of Tunis were not very bad: Abulafia, ‘From Tunis to Piombino’, p. 293. 38 MS 139, ff. 53v–54r; ASC, Piombino, Card. 77, f. 1r, 9r–11v: ‘unum vas sive vassellum aureum valoris ducatorum quingentorum auri’ each year, rather than iron (original in Rome: Arch. Capitolino, Orsini II. A XVI no. 41); also Card. 77, f. 1r (fealty of Emanuele d’Appiano to King Alfonso, 1451); Card. 77, f. 14r, f. 166r–v and f. 170r (refusal of raccomandigia with Siena, 1451, 1465, in the light of obligations to Naples); Card. 77, f. 175r–v, raccomandigia with Ferrante I of Naples, 1465). These are copies of originals in Florence and Siena. 39 Archivio di Stato, Milan, Sforzesco Ducale, Potenze Estere 313 (Piombino) (hereafter: ASM, PE 313), 3 June 1456. 40 Dritto della Corona di Napoli sopra Piombino (c.1760); a copy is in the British Library, shelfmark 663.f.22. For the evidence that work on the volume began in 1736, see p. 1, introductory paragraph.

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out the arguments for Neapolitan sovereignty over Piombino, which the king of Naples was once again keen to assert. The Bourbon kingdom had been established under the terms of the Escorial Treaty of 1733, and it was to include the Tuscan Presidi, a group of small towns to the south of Piombino, arranged around the promontory of Monte Argentario, to which was added Porto Longone on Elba. These strongpoints had been held by Spain since the time of Philip II, who was anxious to secure navigation in the Tyrrhenian Sea and who also saw them as a defence against the Barbary corsairs who menaced the Tuscan shores. Under the terms of the Treaty of London of 1557, made with Jacopo VI d’Appiano who was then visiting England and looking for a patron who would restore him to power back home, King Philip II could maintain garrisons not merely in the Presidi but in Piombino, but would not interfere with the sovereign rights of the ruler of Piombino. Philip recognized the signal services that had been offered by previous Appiani to earlier kings of Aragon and to Ferdinand the Catholic, his ancestor. He was thus anxious to stress the continuity in the relationship between Piombino and the Spanish (or Aragonese) kings.41 The author of the Dritto begins with the ties that had bound Caterina d’Appiano, Rinaldo Orsini and the Florentine Republic to Alfonso of Aragon, citing a series of contemporary sources. The gift of the golden vase was to continue year by year under Alfonso and also under his successors.42 However, it appears that this golden vase was in fact Alfonso’s second choice as tribute. He had earlier tried to negotiate for a prize in base metal which was worth rather more: one or two thousand quintals of iron per annum.43 (The Genoese had similarly been obliged to present Alfonso with a golden vase as sign of their submission in 1444; while this did not bring Genoa into any of Alfonso’s many kingdoms, individual Genoese were tied to the Crown by grants of lands and titles in southern Italy.)44 Florence did not object to the new relationship, preferring to base the republic’s ties to Piombino on the old raccomandigia, which remained notionally in existence. Yet it is hard to see how things could remain the same once Alfonso of Aragon had become part of the complex political picture in Piombino. The truth was that the kingdom of Naples to the south, rather than Florence to the north, now played the decisive role in guaranteeing the continuing autonomy of the Appiano lordship. There was an excellent reason why this should be so. When Caterina died in February 1451, the succession passed to Emanuele d’Appiano, a fact which the Anziani of Piombino duly recognized, even though it was he who had vigorously challenged the former rulers some years earlier. The seventeenthcentury manuscript history talks of the Piombinesi electing Emanuele ‘ad esclusione de Genouesi, Fiorentini e Senesi’; the inhabitants of Piombino 41

Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, doc. xi, pp. 476–8. Dritto della Corona, pp. 2–7. 43 Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Barcelona, Reg. 2697, f.47v of 18 January 1450, reported by Ryder, Kingdom of Naples, p. 357 44 Ryder, Alfonso, pp. 262–3. 42

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had decided to follow the Neapolitan route to safety.45 His own ties were, as has been seen, with the royal house of Naples; but he was also very elderly, and he was not inclined to impose heavy demands on his new subjects. The capitolazioni made when he took his oath of office were very favourable to the inhabitants of Piombino. In return the inhabitants of Piombino put on a fine festa to mark the arrival of the new lord and his family from Troia in Apulia.46 One bonus was that the new signore had two sons, of whom the younger, Jacopo, eventually became his successor. However, this alliance also posed new dangers to Piombino. In the first place, the Orsini were not inclined simply to let the succession take effect. They still held the strongpoints in the principality, and even the Rocchetta at Piombino was in their hands, and had to be bombarded into submission. In the second place, an alliance with Alfonso of Naples made it difficult to deal with Alfonso’s enemies. In 1453, it was necessary to send ambassadors to Toulon to persuade Alfonso’s old adversary, René of Anjou, to prevent Provençal corsairs from attacking Piombinese shipping. Piombino demanded the release of prisoners seized by René’s sailors, and of goods which they had purloined. The costs of the embassy were to be met one third by the signore, one third by the commune and one third by Blasino (Biagino) Calefati, one of the most active merchants in Piombino.47 Emanuele’s patronage of trade, agriculture and industry suggests that he followed policies quite similar to those of greater Italian rulers such as the kings of Naples or the dukes of Milan, who also sought to maximize their revenues while paying something more than lip service to the idea that the duty of the ruler is to promote the well-being of his subjects. Emanuele also appears to have been aware of the need to placate his Tuscan neighbours, sending a magnificent medallion to Siena and thanking Florence for the help it had offered against his Orsini enemies. Amid his difficulties with the deposed ruler of Naples and the Tuscan cities, it was therefore something of an embarrassment – or ‘disturbo’, as the manuscript chronicle calls it – when Ferrante, heir to the throne of Naples, arrived in Tuscany in 1453 in the company of Alfonso’s inveterate ally Federigo da Montefeltro, count of Urbino. Ferrante, engaged in war with the Florentines, proposed to march his troops through the territory of Piombino. The inhabitants of Piombino, not unreasonably, were afraid that they were about to be besieged once again by the royal armies of Naples.48 After attacking several strong points in Florentine territory, Ferrante decided to withdraw to the Piombinese domain as winter approached. His fleet also stood off the shores of Tuscany, and the inhabitants of Piombino felt hemmed in. The lord of Piombino and the Anziani put their grey heads together and decided that, since Ferrante was coming not as an 45 MS 139, f. 56v; also ASC, Libro di Consigli 13, ff. 146–8, cited by Carrara, Signori e principi, pp. 15–18. 46 MS 139, f. 66v. 47 MS 139, f. 67r–v. 48 MS 139, f. 67v.

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enemy but in order to spend the winter on the lands of their state, they should act hospitably and offer supplies to his troops.49 In the event, the stay of the Neapolitan troops on Piombinese soil gave rise to no great difficulties. The danger of being sucked into King Alfonso’s wars receded when the Italian states negotiated what became known as the Peace of Lodi (April, 1454), to which Alfonso only rather later adhered, in early 1455. Thus Neapolitan troops were withdrawn from Tuscany and peace seemed to be in prospect.50 Piombino found itself caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Its attempts to make peace with Alfonso were seen as far away as Tunis as evidence that it had become a satellite of Naples. It was hard to see what future the raccomandigia with Florence could possibly have; Piombino had been in the acutely embarrassing position of having to host Ferrante d’Aragona’s armies following their assault on Florentine territory. Yet the evidence suggests that the Piombinesi had not learned to trust Alfonso the Magnanimous, but were filled with anxiety when Ferrante’s armies entered their territory. Moreover, the continuing presence of a Neapolitan garrison in one of the little state’s castles was bound to rankle. Jerónimo de Zurita’s annals also give some clues to how Alfonso saw the position in Piombino: the Aragonese chronicler remarks that the succession of Emanuele gave Alfonso great happiness, for he saw him as his loyal servant.51 However, the major actors were ready to leave the stage. Emanuele died in 1457, Alfonso in 1458. With the accession of Ferrante to the throne of Naples and of Jacopo III d’Appiano to the lordship of Piombino, the relations between Naples and Piombino underwent further modifications. Caution was needed, since Ferrante was having to fight for his throne, and Jacopo was well aware of events in southern Italy, about which he corresponded with the duke of Milan.52 The eighteenth-century historian of Piombino, Agostino Cesaretti, believed that Jacopo III was obsessed by the desire for independence, at least locally, and that he hoped to achieve this by staying in the shadow of the king of Naples – in other words, he understood that Piombino could retain its autonomy only if, paradoxically, it acquired a powerful ally, even master, some way from its shores.53 No doubt Jacopo was anxious to avoid further complications in his relations with Siena, for he occasionally declined to offer Siena raccomandigia and occasionally decided otherwise: he entered into his own raccomandigia with Siena in 1464, ‘facendo molti capitoli, e conventioni, come eran soliti di fare

49

MS 139, f. 68r. MS 139, f. 69r. 51 Zurita, cited in Dritto della Corona, p. 5: ‘el rey [de Aragón] tuvo contento de esto’ (Jerónimo de Zurita, Anales de la Corona de Aragón, ed. Angel Canellas López (9 vols, Zaragoza, 1967–1985), vol. 6, p. 433). 52 ASM, PE 313, 28 November 1458 (this letter refers to the prince’s servitu towards King Ferrante); ASM, PE 313, 4 June 1460 (observations on Ferrante’s fleet). 53 Cesaretti, Istoria del Principato, vol. 2, p. 45. 50

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in simil contratti’.54 Around the time of his succession the region had suffered from the intervention of Ferrante’s enemy Jacopo Piccinino, and there was a sense that the smaller entities in Tuscany would do well to stand together, but not, perhaps, too close together. For Jacopo d’Appiano saw in Naples rather than Florence or Siena the salvation of his dynasty. He entered into a relationship of raccomandigia with Ferrante on 25 August 1463, just at the moment when Ferrante was emerging victorious from his conflict with the barons. He was subsequently honoured by the king of Naples with a grant of the right to use the arms of the house of Aragon-Naples, giving rise to the later story that Alfonso was really his grandfather.55 This cannot be construed as a sign that the Appiano dynasty were close relatives of the house of Aragona, since such grants, though rare, were made by rulers who sought to strengthen their bonds with lesser princes. It is possible that Jacopo served for a time in Ferrante’s armies against the pro-Angevin forces, although there is no reflection of this in Jacopo’s correspondence with Milan.56 An awareness of Piombino’s alliance with Naples may have helped discourage the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni from attacking the principality in 1467, when his troops were in Tuscany engaged on campaigns which appear to have had the support of none of the great Italian powers.57 Jacopo III’s close relationship with Naples did not dissuade Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the new duke of Milan, from intervention in Piombino. In 1471, during a visit to Florence, he gave his support to exiled Piombinesi who invited him to seize Piombino and Elba.58 Since the Sienese had already warned the Piombinesi of the arrival of an enemy army, the town was prepared for the onslaught and was not in fact taken. The Florentines appear to have been content to stand aside and let the invaders have their way. But Jacopo decided he could not simply rely on his own resources. He told off the cowardly Florentines; and, looking to his new master, he requested Ferrante of Naples to send him troops.59 There may have been some resentment that the citizens of Piombino were obliged to supply bedding for these troops once they arrived.60 The intervention of the king of Naples in the internal affairs of Piombino was 54 Malavolti, Historia de’ fatti, part 3, f. 69r; ASC, Card. 77, f. 14r, f. 166r–v and f. 170r (refusal of raccomandigia with Siena, 1451, 1465, in the light of obligations to Naples). 55 Card. 77, f. 175r–v (raccomandigia with Ferrante I of Naples of 1463, in a document dated 1465); Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, p. 103; cf. Cesaretti, Istoria del Principato, vol. 2, p. 46; Dritto della Corona, p. 7. But the letter of 28 November 1458 from Jacopo III to Francesco Sforza already uses the name Jacobus iij de Aragonia de Appiano: ASM, PE 313. 56 Dritto della Corona, p. vii, based on Allegretti’s Memorie Senesi, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 23, col. 772, but the author badly confused Jacopo d’Appiano and Jacopo Piccinino, a foe of Ferrante; correspondence with Milan in ASM, PE 313. 57 Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, p. 104. 58 I have not so far found any reference to this in the Piombino–Milan correspondence preserved in ASM, PE 313, which is perhaps not surprising. 59 MS 139, f. 80r–v. 60 Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, pp. 110–11.

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very limited; at one point Ferrante raised the question of the ownership of two castles claimed by the bishop of Massa, but to no effect.61 When Jacopo III died in 1474 the signoria passed smoothly to his eldest son, another Jacopo, who was urged in his father’s will to respect the ties binding the Appiano dominion to King Ferrante of Naples. These ties were reaffirmed when Jacopo IV married Ferrante’s grand-daughter Vittoria in 1476.62 They were further strengthened when Jacopo took charge of troops in the army of Alfonso, duke of Calabria, in the aftermath of the Pazzi conspiracy, while Naples and Pope Sixtus IV were at war with Medicean Florence.63 It is abundantly plain that Piombino had been drawn into the Neapolitan system of alliances, alongside such minor lords as the counts of Urbino. And, given the importance that the Aragonese in Naples attached to building their power and influence in Etruria – in the area between Siena and Rome – Piombino promised to have its strategic uses not simply as a protector of the sea lanes, but also as an advance position on land. It can thus be seen that, contrary to the assumptions of the author of the Dritto, Piombino was drawn only slowly into the orbit of Aragonese Naples. Its ties to Ferrante were far more intimate than those which had bound the Appiani to Alfonso of Aragon. Naples had succeeded in working Piombino loose from its reliance on Florence, expressed in the early fifteenth-century raccomandigia agreements. Yet it would also be a mistake to exaggerate Jacopo’s dependence on Ferrante of Naples. He maintained his links with Siena and took employment as captain of the Sienese armies in 1489. Like many minor signori, he saw in the condotte offered by other Italian polities a chance to gain renown and money.

VI The history of Piombino’s relationship with the kings of Naples illuminates significant aspects of Aragonese policy in Italy in the mid to late fifteenth century. It indicates that Piombino, though small, had a strategic significance to which Naples and other powers were not blind. For the key to dominion in Tuscany and the north could lie as much in the iron foundries of the Appiano dominion as in the more visible wealth of the greater north Italian cities and states. Moreover, Piombino and Elba were of immense strategic value to kings who aimed to control the Tyrrhenian Sea. Dominating the straits that divided Italy from Corsica, Piombino was a surprisingly attractive target for the Aragonese rulers.

61 62 63

Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, doc. iv, p. 461 (for Valle and Montione). ASM, PE 313, 1 February 1476. Cappelletti, Storia di Piombino, pp. 114–17.

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Appendix List of the Appiano Rulers of Piombino Gherardo, d. 1404 Jacopo II, d. 1441, and Paola Colonna, d. 1445 Rinaldo Orsini, count of Tagliacozzo, d. 1450, and Caterina Appiano Orsini, d. 1451 Emanuele, d. 1457 Jacopo III, d. 1474 Jacopo IV, d. 1510

12 Communes and Despots: The Nature of ‘Diarchy’ John E. Law

‘Diarchy’ does not appear to have been one of the terms derived from Greek political thought and applied in the Middle Ages and Renaissance to a particular form of government, as were ‘despotism’, ‘monarchy’, ‘aristocracy’, ‘oligarchy’ and ‘democracy’.1 However, if the word lacks pedigree as a political label it was derived from Greek and means ‘dual authority’; as such it has been used to describe a state where two rulers exercised authority.2 It was in this sense that Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) applied the term to characterize the constitutional condition of the Roman Empire from the age of Augustus to that of Diocletian, when sovereignty belonged to the Senate but was largely exercised by the emperors. This is not the place to discuss the accuracy of Mommsen’s analysis in the context of imperial Rome, but the German historian’s use of the word may have appealed to Francesco Ercole (1879–1945) who used it in an attempt to define the legal and constitutional relationship between the communes and despots of north-eastern Italy in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Ercole’s article ‘Comuni e signori nel Veneto’ was first published in Nuovo Archivio Veneto in 1910.3 At the outset Ercole indicated that this was intended to be a contribution to a larger work on the Italian signori, lords, of the Renaissance, but in his 1910 study he concentrated on three Veneto regimes: the Della Scala of Verona, the Da Camino of Treviso and the Da Carrara of Padua. His chronological focus was largely on the late thirteenth

1

It had some currency in the late Roman period, but apparently not in the context of political thought. I am grateful to Fritz-Gregor Herrmann for advice on this point. 2 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford, 1897); The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (Oxford 1989). In English the word is sometimes spelled ‘dyarchy’, as in Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (London, 1982). 3 New series, vol. 19. Ercole described it as a ‘Saggio storico-giuridico’ and later published it in his collection Dal comune al principato. Saggi sulla storia del diritto pubblico del rinascimento italiano (Florence, 1929), pp. 53–118, with ‘some additions to the text and notes’.

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and fourteenth centuries, the period covering the rise, prominence and fall of these signorie or lordships. His principal aim was to examine the ‘juridical and constitutional basis’ of the three lordships, and to demonstrate that their basis was ‘democratic’, that these dynasties owed their success to the support of the ‘popolo’.4 In the case of Verona, for example, Ercole justified his view by pointing out that Mastino Della Scala was acknowledged as podestà – chief magistrate – of the city in 1259, and was elected as captain of the people possibly in 1262. Later, in 1265 and 1269, he appears as podestà of the merchants’ guild, being followed in that position by his brother Alberto from 1270.5 Here Ercole was not seeking to ignore the fact that the Della Scala had a real power base in political, military and economic terms; however he was anxious to point out that the dynasty felt it important to acquire titles to govern from the commune, and from one of the most important guilds in the city. Even more important for Ercole in charting the development of the della Scala lordship was Alberto’s election as captain of the people for life in 1277. Taking place very publicly in the central piazza of the city, the office was awarded by the nobles, magnates, anziani and the gastaldi – leaders – of the guilds, and the ‘entire population of that city’.6 For Ercole, this was not just a one-off event, but part of a procedure that was followed with each Della Scala signoria, the communal institutions intervening, or being called upon to intervene, to legitimize the succession. Later, in 1329, the election of Mastino and Alberto della Scala took place in the ‘consilium generale et maius’ of Verona, following a proposal from the podestà, and the deliberations of the anziani, gastaldi and a smaller council of 80.7 As the use of this example suggests, Ercole saw the commune involved – saw diarchy in action – even when signorial dynasties tried to establish some hereditary right to rule. Communal intervention also continued to resurface when the signori had acquired imperial vicariates to govern.8 Moreover, the commune was involved even when one regime was replaced by another. When Antonio della Scala lost the signoria of Verona in October 1387 due to a combination of diplomatic and military failure, internal dissent and the might of Giangaleazzo Visconti’s army, the commune was engaged.9 The commune of Verona presented capitula – petitions – to the in-coming regime, and that process was seen as both inaugurating and sanctioning Visconti rule. This phenomenon – the surviving participation of the commune – Ercole also perceived in the cases of Treviso and Padua, persuading him that the rise of the signori in the Veneto had not brought in an absolutist form of 4

Ercole, ‘Comuni’, p. 255–6. The most authoritative treatment of the Della Scala dynasty in the period can be found in Gianmaria Varanini’s contributions to the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 37 (Milan, 1989). 6 The anziani – literally the ‘elders’ – represented the popolo. 7 Ercole, ‘Comuni’, p. 275 8 Ibid., ‘Comuni’, pp. 295–6. 9 Ibid., ‘Comuni’, pp. 302–3. 5

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government, ‘but rather a constitutional form, which it would not be totally wrong to describe as diarchia’, creating a dual form of government, a ‘sistema dualistica’.10 The commune had managed to maintain ‘entirely its personal political autonomy’ – ‘integra la sua autonomia personalita e politica’ – which remained ‘even during signorial rule the true basis of sovereignty’ – ‘anche durante il governo signorile veramente la base della sovranita’.11 The signori had been granted unconditional and unlimited power by their subjects, bringing with it control over communal institutions, statutes, officials and assets, but this had not removed the constitutional and juridical basis of their power, which remained with the commune. As Ercole admitted, this was a ‘strange state of affairs’, and one which he identified as a source of weakness in the states of late medieval Italy.12 He was also prepared to accept that a strictly juridical and constitutional analysis of the situation was not enough.13 He acknowledged the reality of the power held by signori like the Della Scala as they asserted their authority over the cities and territories they ruled, if he offered little account of the nature of that power. He recognized that for the signori, entry to office was stage-managed, accompanied by acclamation rather than achieved by genuine election. He would probably have accepted Philip Jones’s observation that ‘popular acclamation is no proof of popular initiative’.14 However, in ‘Comuni e signori’, Ercole did not acknowledge that the ‘popolo’ was a party and not the ‘people’ – as Jones and others were to do – and did not guard against using ‘democracy’ anachronistically in the context of the late medieval Veneto.15 Moreover, the focus of his article was very much on exceptional events: a dynasty coming to power, a dynasty at the moment of succession, a dynasty falling from power, one dynasty replacing another. He did not test his theory of diarchy in the context of what might be called ‘ordinary’ politics and administration, even if he did cite cases where the commune was involved to endorse important treaties with foreign powers – but there again the circumstances were unusual. The purpose of this contribution is to discuss the validity and usefulness of Ercole’s application of ‘diarchy’ to signorial regimes in late medieval Italy. Was there an element of what today would be called ‘power sharing’ between lords and communes, or was ‘diarchy’ a legal and constitutional concept that entered the political arena only in unusual political, diplomatic and military circumstances? This contribution will consider what Jones’s own studies have to say on the subject; it will also consider Ian Robertson’s study of Malatesta rule in Cesena, before

10

Ibid., ‘Comuni’, pp. 325–6. Ibid., ‘Comuni’, p. 284, p. 326, p. 325. 12 Ibid., ‘Comuni’, pp. 335–6. 13 Ibid., ‘Comuni’, e.g. p. 301, p. 326. 14 Philip Jones, ‘Communes and Despots: the City State in Late-Medieval Italy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, vol. 15 (1965), p. 79, and above, chapter 1, p. 10. 15 Jones, ‘Communes and Despots’, p. 76, and above, chapter 1, p. 7. 11

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turning to another example – that of the Da Varano signoria of Camerino in 1404.

**** Philip Jones certainly knew of Ercole’s work, but as far as I am aware the term ‘diarchy’ never appeared in his discussion of signorial government.16 The article that lies behind this collection of essays, ‘Communes and Despots: the City State in Late-Medieval Italy’, may appear to echo Ercole’s choice of title in 1910, but in 1965 Jones was more concerned with the alleged contrasts between communes where the republican traditions and constitutional forms were preserved, and those that had succumbed to the rule of a signore, a despot. However the issue of diarchy is raised, if not explicitly, when Jones acknowledges that the identity and institutions of the commune did survive, even if compromised by the signore, and where he criticizes the view that signorial power was a levelling or unifying force, given the evidence for the survival of privileges and immunities within signorial states .17 For Jones, signorial power was more limited in practice than the term ‘despot’ might suggest. Jones comes closer to discussing the issues raised by Ercole in his work on the Malatesta signoria in Rimini and other cities in the Papal States, though the situation presented by Jones could almost be described as a ‘triarchy’, following the grant of a papal vicariate to the Malatesta, first awarded in 1355.18 Jones is convincing when he argues that a papal vicariate imposed more conditions on regimes like the Malatesta than was the case with the imperial vicariates conferred on some of the regimes in the Veneto, the part of the imperial Regnum Italicum discussed by Ercole.19 Another distinction is that while the Malatesta signoria drew its claims to legitimacy originally from the communes it ruled – as was the case with Ercole’s signori in the Veneto – for Jones this was not a process normally accompanied by formal ceremonies of election or acclamation in an arengo or parlamento as often happened in the Veneto, if one follows Ercole. Why this 16

Ercole’s Dal comune al principato is cited by Jones in ‘The Vicariate of the Malatesta of Rimini’, English Historical Review, 62 (1952): 323, and in the bibliography to The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State. A Political History (Cambridge, 1974). 17 Jones, ‘Communes’, p. 69, and above, chapter 1, pp. 15–17. 18 Jones’s doctoral thesis of 1950 was supervised by Cecilia Ady, and published with few alterations in 1974, above note 15. Research for it informed three articles: ‘The Vicariate of the Malatesta of Rimini’, The English Historical Review, 67 (1952): 321–351; ‘The End of Malatesta rule in Rimini’, in Ernest F. Jacob (ed.), Italian Renaissance Studies (London, 1960), pp. 217–55; ‘Le signorie di Sigismondo Malatesta’ in Studi Malatestiani (Rome, Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1978), pp. 5–20. Michael Mallett was virtually alone among reviewers in noting the value of The Malatesta for the study of the internal workings of a signorial state; History, 60 (1975): 438–9. For a careful study of the nature of diarchy, even triarchy, in Perugia, Christopher F. Black, ‘The Baglionias tyrants of Perugia, 1488-1540’, English Historical Review, 85 (1970) : 245–281. 19 Jones, ‘The Vicariate’, passim.

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was the case is not immediately clear. It may have been because the principal cities of the Veneto – and indeed of Lombardy – were much larger than the communes of the Romagna and the Marche in the Papal States; hence in the Veneto communal authority could not be as easily ignored or marginalized. Again, the first and second Lombard Leagues, and the long struggle against the Hohenstaufen and their allies may have left a legacy of communal independence which rising dynasties like the Della Scala could not ignore. On the other hand, in the States of the Church, the fact that papal authority was never as weakened to the same extent as the empire in the north may have inhibited the public display of communal authority in such critical areas as the granting of signorial powers to dynasties like the Malatesta. In this context it is worth noting that in formal documents produced in signorial and communal chanceries in the States of the Church, the name of the ruling pope continued to be cited, which was not the practice in the imperial Regnum Italicum.20 However, if the communes subject to the Malatesta appear to have been denied the public role of legitimizing their rulers to the extent that Ercole found for the Veneto, Philip Jones’s work on the dynasty makes it quite clear that in practice communal authority continued to exist in governmental and administrative capacities. This existence was very much a subordinate one, and if ‘diarchy’ is to be applied to the Malatesta dominions, Jones’s studies make it clear that it should not be understood in terms of an equality of power sharing, or an even balance of power, but rather in terms of a ‘dependent partnership’.21 Thus the Malatesta controlled the size, membership and frequency of communal councils, as well as attending them themselves. They appointed or approved all leading officials – notably the podestà – when they did not hold such offices in person. They enjoyed the lion’s share of revenues and imposed new levies. They decided on such key issues as war and peace. They could ignore, modify or add to statute. For their subjects and supporters, the Malatesta were the principal source of patronage and protection both at home and abroad, and the family used gifts, marriage and office to extend and confirm the circle of their supporters.22 However, if for Jones communal authority was subordinate to that of the Malatesta, it did not atrophy, let alone completely disappear, and this applied to ‘all Italian despotisms’; alongside the signore, the commune with its councils and officials survived. In the fifth Appendix to The Malatesta, Jones cites a document of 1335 where the choice of the podestà of Rimini was clearly exercised by the ‘Magnificum et Potentem Militem Dominum Mallatestam defensorem dicte Civitatis’ together with those ‘Sapientibus’– literally 20

Jones, The Malatesta, p. 308, p. 343. The same is true in the case of the commune of Camerino discussed below. 21 Jones, The Malatesta, p. 307 22 Julius Kirshner, in a very dismissive review of The Malatesta, claims that Jones ignored the issue of patronage, Church History, 44 (1975): 108–9, advising his readers to turn instead to Ercole’s ‘Monograph’, Dal comune al principato – where patronage is scarcely mentioned at all.

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‘wise men’ – of his choosing.23 Formally however this was one of a series of ‘reformationes’ – or resolutions – made in the General Council of Rimini, assembled in a customary fashion – ‘more solito’ – and presided over by the podestà and members of his famiglia – his staff – with these proceedings being formally recorded by a notary in the service of the podestà. As that document suggests, the Malatesta were prepared to allow the commune to legitimize – as well as publicize – their actions. Moreover, for Jones, the acceptance of, and participation in, their signoria by the communes under their rule, may have enabled the Malatesta to use such titles as rector, gubernator, defensor and above all dominus or signore without having to have regular recourse to the ceremonies of acclamation which Ercole finds for the Veneto. As Jones pointed out, the Malatesta continued to use such titles even after being granted papal vicariates.24 That the practice of diarchy in the Malatesta dominions was not simply window dressing is suggested by Jones in other ways. In the fifteenth century, under Malatesta rule, the notaries of Rimini continued ‘to treat the commune and its laws as the governing authority’, and the communal seal preserved its legal significance.25 Subject communes were still needed to apportion and collect taxes. Meetings of their greater councils, if infrequent, were not mere formalities. Legislation, whether in the form of statue or decree, could still be the outcome of a collaborative process, between lord and commune. Council decisions – reformationes – continued to be registered. Cities within the Malatesta dominion, but less immediately subject to their rule – like Fano – continued to have ‘every appearance of real independence’.26 The Malatesta of Rimini of 1974 was neither widely nor closely reviewed; most reviewers expressed degrees of regret at the density of the political and diplomatic narrative, though Michael Mallett acknowledged that Jones did discuss the nature of Malatesta government.27 However, earlier, Jones’s understanding of Malatesta government had been recognized in an invitation to take part in a conference to coincide with the five hundredth anniversary of Sigismondo Malatesta’s death, a conference whose proceedings eventually appeared in print.28 Jones’s contribution is entitled ‘Le signorie di Sigismondo Malatesta’. Jones recognized that within the Malatesta dominions ‘the political institutions remained subordinate to the lord’, but that the commune remained ‘in name and as a corporative concept’. Moreover ‘the communal organisation survived with its magistrates and its councils. Through them, at various levels of liberty, the subject communities (of the Malatesta state) continued to elect 23

‘The magnificent and powerful knight, (our) lord Malatesta, defender of this city’, Jones, The Malatesta, pp. 343–4. 24 Ibid., p. 301. 25 Ibid., pp. 308–10. 26 Ibid., pp. 307–11. 27 Above, note 18. 28 Above, note. 18.

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officials, promulgate laws and collect and administer taxation.’29 The Malatesta became invested with full powers on a hereditary basis in their principal cities and they could operate above the law, their enemies regarded as traitors. The Malatesta influence was widely felt, from the grant of citizenship to the membership and meetings of communal councils. Key communal officials became Malatesta appointments, and signorial decree could take precedence over statute. The Malatesta controlled the bulk of public finance.30 However, subordination to Malatesta rule did not lead to a centralization or unification of a ‘Malatesta state’; ‘as elsewhere there was a greater centralisation of authority than a unification of administration.’ Everywhere within the Malatesta dominions there survived ‘a communal constitution, ready to take up an independent existence whenever the signoria began to decline’. Moreover – and as that last comment suggests – the constitutional and administrative position was mirrored in a social and political dimension. The Malatesta did try to control faction and they did reduce the power of the guilds. They made some concessions to contado communities, and they did favour some ‘new men’. But Jones was sceptical about the emergence of a new ‘Renaissance state’. Local elites and holders of local privileges remained largely in place, and accepted, under Malatesta rule, ready to emerge when the regime weakened.31 The Studi Malatestiani collection contains essays which stress the Malatesta ascendancy in Rimini particularly in terms of the prehistory and history of the Castel Sismondo, the citadel that dominated the political, religious and commercial heart of the city.32 Probably Jones would not have disagreed with their conclusions, but an endorsement of his understanding of the nature of Malatesta rule in institutional, political and social terms is provided by Ian Robertson in a chapter included in the second volume of the Storia di Cesena edited by Augusto Vasina.33 **** Galeotto Malatesta had possibly attained an ascendancy in Rimini by 1376, though members of the dynasty had earlier held office there as podestà or capitano.34 Galeotto owed his position to his family’s power in the Romagna and the Marche; they had held papal vicariates over Rimini, Fano, Pesaro and Fossombrone since 1355. Galeotto could draw on considerable military and financial resources, whereas Cesena experienced heavy loss of life and property during its sack by Breton mercenaries in February 1377. He also 29

Jones, ‘Le signorie’, pp. 10–11. Ibid., pp. 11–12 31 Ibid, pp. 12–17. 32 Piero Sampaolesi, ‘Castel Sismondo’, Studi Malatestiani, pp. 105–16 and Pier Giorgio Pasini, ‘Rimini nel Quattrocento’, ibid., pp. 117–58. 33 ‘Cesena: governo e societa dal sacco dei Brettoni al dominio di Cesare Borgia’, Storia di Cesena, vol 2: Il Medioevo (Rimini, 1985), pp. 5–92. Throughout, Robertson acknowledges the work of Philip Jones. 34 Ibid., pp. 10–12. 30

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benefited from the support of Urban VI, whose representative confirmed him as governor of the city on 20 December 1378, and the dynasty’s position was further strengthened by the grant of a vicariate on 2 January 1391.35 Bearing in mind the periods of political weakness suffered by the Roman papacy during the Schism, and even following the restoration of a single papacy by the Council of Constance, it would be tempting to conclude that the Malatesta could exercise their power in Cesena – and elsewhere in their dominions – without restraint. Robertson, however, follows Jones in arguing that the Malatesta did not create a centralized state with Rimini as its capital; rather Cesena enjoyed considerable autonomy, and Robertson supports his interpretation by examining closely the working relationship between lord and commune, drawing on a significantly rich communal archive to do so.36 The Malatesta were rarely present in Cesena in person and governed through a vicar general. The podestà, once a communal appointment, now became a signorial nominee, and the Malatesta also made appointments to other offices like the chancellorship, and in areas concerned with the administration of justice, the collection of revenues and the government of the contado, though such positions could be assigned to Cesenati.37 A general council and a smaller council of anziani continued to meet, but their members took oaths of loyalty to the government and their meetings were presided over by that regime’s representatives. More importantly council membership could be manipulated, and in 1379 the greater council was reduced from 96 to a more manageable 72 members.38 For Robertson, ‘certain key functionaries of the commune were transformed into functionaries nominated by the signore’, and he points to the fact that signorial decrees had a growing impact on the commune and that public revenues were largely in signorial hands.39 However, Robertson argues that the reduction in the commune’s power and activities should not be exaggerated: the commune never became reduced to a cipher. Communal officials, even when appointed by the Malatesta, were still subject to the traditional process of scrutiny – sindacato – at the close of their term of office. A proposal by Malatesta di Galeotto to reduce the size of the greater council even further was rejected.40 The council of anziani never became an expression of signorial authority or an extension of the court, and the communal councils could have a role in shaping signorial decree. The commune managed the difficult tasks of the distribution and collection of the tax revenue, and the farming of indirect taxes.41 It was involved in the import of grain and other necessities, and in the attempt to regulate the price of foodstuffs on the market. It supervised the activities of the guilds and the city’s 35 Ibid., pp. 8–17. In December 1379, the Malatesta were recognized as papal rectors of the Romagna. 36 Ibid., p. 23. 37 Ibid., pp. 24–5. 38 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 39 Ibid., pp. 30–3. 40 Ibid., p. 32. 41 Ibid, pp. 43–4.

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trade fairs. If the Malatesta initiated major public works – the reconstruction of the cathedral, a new rocca or citadel, the Biblioteca Malatestiana – the commune was involved in raising revenues and supervising building work. If the issues of war and peace were determined by the Malatesta, the commune had to deal with such matters as the repair of defences and billeting of soldiers.42 Moreover, for Robertson the commune survived in political and social terms. Up to a point he agrees with Jones that a ‘Malatesta interest’ – or party – was created as the signorial dynasty favoured some outsiders as well as more established families. But the exercise of signorial patronage and the ties of clientage did not dissolve the ruling citizenry in Cesena, or turn them into an extension of the Malatesta court.43 Robertson was able to identify a local elite of between 20 and 30 families who could support the Malatesta while their ascendancy proved to be effective and beneficial. However, Sigismondo Pandolfo’s misjudgement of the balance of political and military power in Italy – and his place in it – and his long confrontation with the papacy and its allies damaged the interests of the dynasty’s subjects as well as its own wealth, influence and credibility. On 26 August 1463 Sigismondo’s brother, Domenico Malatesta – Malatesta Novello – was forced to agree that Cesena would return to the rule of the Church in the event of his death without legitimate male heirs. When that duly happened, on 20 November 1465, his nephew, Roberto, abandoned the idea of securing the signoria of Cesena. Bereft of allies and facing both external and internal opposition, he surrendered the city on 7 December 1465.44 For Robertson, the surviving and still functioning oligarchy in Cesena saw a brighter future in distant papal rule rather than with a failing and beleaguered signorial dynasty. In a subsequent contribution on Cesena, Robertson summed up his view of the situation. The commune through its institutions did retain some substance of power, which was neither trivial nor peripheral. Moreover, there was a social dimension to the relationship of commune and lord: some newer families were beneficiaries of signorial patronage, but so too were the longer established. Taken together, and with the survival of ‘communal structures’, a sense of communal identity was perpetuated ‘which was always at least potentially distinct from the Signoria, and which stood ready to make itself actually distinct should the Signoria, for one reason or another, lose the capacity to satisfy its subjects.’45 Robertson would appear to concur with Jones on the existence of a balance – albeit a shifting balance – of power between commune and despot within the Malatesta dominions. Both were drawing on relatively rich and 42

Ibid., pp. 36–7. Ibid., p. 37. Pier Giovanni Fabbri argued for the continuity of communal statute under the Malatesta in his ‘Il dominio malatestiano a Cesena’, in Luigi Borgia et al. (eds), Studi in onore di Arnaldo D’Addario (4 vols, Lecce,1995), vol. 4, pp. 1245–60. 44 Robertson, ‘Cesena’, pp. 57–61. 45 Ian Robertson, ‘Neighbourhood Government in Malatesta Cesena’, in F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons (eds), Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1987), p. 100. 43

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continuous communal records. Where these do not survive, it might be tempting to conclude that such a balance of power did not exist or surfaced only in moments of extraordinary crisis, as may be suggested by Ercole in the examples he examined from the Veneto. That this was not necessarily the case is suggested by the Da Varano lordship over Camerino in the Marche. **** The Da Varano acquired an ascendancy over Camerino in the Marche in the late thirteenth century. As in the case of the Malatesta, their signoria was based on lands, rights and retainers in the area, enabling them to extend their authority to other towns and cities in the region. They also tended to be loyal to the Guelf, or papal, cause, which brought them a variety of titles to govern their patchwork of dominions, culminating in the grant of a papal duchy in 1515. From 1434 to 1444 a communal regime was reinstated under the aegis of Francesco Sforza, and between 1502 and 1503 Camerino was absorbed into a Borgia duchy. Otherwise the Da Varano regime was unbroken until 1539 when Giulia, the daughter of Giovanni Maria da Varano – who had died in 1527 – was forced to surrender her city and duchy to Paul III.46 From all this period, scarcely any original records from the communal archive survives in Camerino itself, but disputes arising over the succession to the duchy did result in material being preserved elsewhere for reasons of dynastic interest: in Modena (the Este, Borgia and a rival branch of the Da Varano);47 in Parma (the Farnese)48; and in Pesaro (the Della Rovere).49 Obviously, the interests of the Church have insured that material is preserved in the Vatican Library and Archives. The marriage of Guidobaldo della Rovere – heir to the duchy of Urbino – to Giulia da Varano in 1534 explains why so much documentation on Camerino is preserved in the Ducato di Urbino archive now in the Archivio di Stato of Florence.50 Even when taken together this material is fragmentary – as 46 For the Da Varano, unlike the Malatesta, there is no readily accessible, authoritative, narrative history, but a chronology and much other useful information can be found in Marta Paraventi (ed.), I Da Varano e le arti a Camerino e nel territorio (Camerino, 2003). Maria Teresa Guerra Medici summarizes the family’s history and bibliography in Famiglia e potere in una signoria dell’Italia centrale (Camerino, 2002). In English a still useful account is given by James Dennistoun in Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino (3 vols, London, 1909), vol. 3, pp. 49–93. See also John E. Law, ‘Relazioni dinastiche tra i Della Rovere e i Varano’, in Bonita Cleri et al. (eds), I Della Rovere nel’Italia delle Corti (4 vols, Urbino, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 21–34. For relations between the Malatesta and the Da Varano, Giacomo Boccanera, ‘Rapporti tra Malatesta e Da Varano’, in Studi Malatestiani, vol. 5 (Rimini, 1990), pp. 5–25. 47 Archivio di Stato di Modena. For reasons that remain unclear, Rodolfo IV took up residence at the Este court, where he died in 1464. His heirs periodically claimed a share of the succession; John E. Law, ‘The Ending of the Duchy of Camerino’, in Christine Shaw (ed.), Italy and the European Powers (Leiden–Boston, 2006), p. 81, p. 84, p. 87. 48 Archivio di Stato di Parma (ASP). 49 Biblioteca Oliveriana. 50 One of the first historians to use the Ducato di Urbino archive in the Archivio

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well as scattered – but it does throw some light on relations between the Da Varano and their principal subject commune of Camerino. No documents appear to survive suggesting that the Da Varano depended on at least a show of popular support and acceptance to inaugurate their rule, formal demonstrations of ‘diarchy’ as Ercole found for the signorial regimes of the Veneto. However, the commune of Camerino did continue as a recognized legal entity. For the fourteenth and even the fifteenth century there is documentation that shows that the papacy and its representatives in the Marche could still regard the commune as responsible for paying both ordinary and extraordinary levies of taxation.51 On 8 August 1527, following the death of Giovanni Maria da Varano, his widow Caterina had the detailed terms of his will read out in Italian at the gates of the rocca of Camerino to ease the succession of his only legitimate offspring, Giulia, and her own role as her daughter’s ‘tutrix’ and ‘gubernatrix generalis’ of the duchy.52 After Giulia’s marriage to Guidobaldo della Rovere, Caterina’s transfer of the rocca to her daughter and son-in-law on 16 December 1534 was documented before witnesses who included the prior of the city’s guild of notaries.53 Following the surrender of the duchy to Paul III on 3 January 1539, Giulia sought to protect her interests by calling on witnesses to record that Camerino had previously accepted her authority: in 1527 she had entered the city ‘to great applause and joy’, and later she was ‘called the “duchessina” by everyone’.54 As Jones suggested in the case of the Malatesta, the signorial dynasty valued the consent and acceptance of its subjects, even if this was not formalized in constitutional or contractual terms. Moreover, as Jones argued for the Malatesta ‘state’ in general, and Robertson for Malatesta rule in Cesena in particular, the commune continued to have an administrative role. In the case of Camerino, this is confirmed, not only by the commune’s fiscal relationship with the papacy mentioned above, but also by the survival of some of the acts – the reformationes – of the communal councils.55 Admittedly, the surviving record is not at all extensive di Stato of Florence (henceforth: Ducato) for a study of Camerino was Bernardino Feliciangeli, Notizie e documenti sulla vita di Caterina Cibo-Varano (Camerino, 1891). 51 For the fourteenth century, documentation once listed as Ducato, Classe IV, Divisione A has now been transferred to the Archivio Diplomatico of the ASF; for the fifteenth century, Ducato, Classe I, Pezzo XIII; item 3/15. 52 Ducato, Classe III, Pezzo III, ff. 55r–58v and f. 77v. 53 ASP, Carteggio Farnese-Estero, Camerino, Cassa 1a, 147. 54 Ducato, Classe I, Pezzo XIV, item 24. For these events, see my ‘Relazioni Dinastiche’ and ‘The Ending’, as well as Feliciangeli’s biography of Caterina, above note 49. 55 Ducato, Classe I, Pezzo XIII, item 3. Older indices to the ASF render ‘pezzo’ as ‘filza’. As is the case with many of the ‘filze’ – or ‘stitchings together’ – in the Ducato di Urbino archive, this has a miscellaneous character. The reformationes are written on paper, and cover 144 pages, each measuring 21 X 30 cms; for the most part they are written on both sides. The pagination is later and masks the fact that the pages have not always been bound in chronological sequence. This may support the view – suggested below – that this item had little significance for later archivists and antiquarians, more interested in dynastic histories and claims.

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in chronological terms, covering only 1404. Moreover, as is generally the case with the atti or reformationes of communal councils in this period, it does not consist of a full account of conciliar deliberations, but only a summary of those proposals that were approved. However, the Camerino reformationes appear as an accidental survival from a once – presumably – extensive archive. They do not contain copies of documents of special significance – treaties or papal bulls, for example – and may well constitute a record of ‘business as normal’ regarding the commune in the early fifteenth century. For the most part the reformationes record meetings of the captains of the city’s eight guilds, together with 20 ‘good men’ chosen from each of its three administrative districts or terzieri.56 Their meetings were generally presided over by the podestà and/or the captain of the people, both of whom – in conformity with communal tradition – were foreigners elected for a six month term. Their meetings were also clearly public affairs – summoned by bells, trumpets and heralds – and took place in communal buildings, or occasionally on the platea, the piazza, in front of the cathedral; tradition is also suggested by the recurring use of the phrase ‘as is customary’ – ‘more solito’. Conformity is also suggested by other aspects of the recorded procedure. Normally the podestà and captain seek advice; a member of the Council steps forward ‘to the customary place from which to address the meeting’ – ‘ad locum arengationum consuetum’ – invokes God’s name and presents a proposal which is then balloted upon. Only the successful proposal is recorded, and the vote in favour is always overwhelming if not always unanimous. The business before the Council normally concerns such matters as the supply and pricing of foodstuffs, the raising of taxation and the election of councillors and communal officers. The Da Varano are never listed as members of the Council.57 However, when it came to certain key matters their presence and influence is recorded in reformationes. For example, the Da Varano and Camerino traditionally adhered to the Guelf cause, and on 9 January 1404 discussions took place ‘on account of the arrival of the cardinal of Florence’, representing Boniface IX. 58 The guild captains met in the piazza in front of the cathedral together with ‘certis sapientibus cum consiliariis credentie’; the latter were presumably councillors to the Da Varano as is suggested by the fact that their meeting took place ‘in the presence of the magnificent lord Rodolfo’. 59 Unanimously it was agreed to 56

This confirms Robertson’s suggestion – based on Cesena – that neighbourhood organization could continue to function under signorial regimes, ‘Neighbourhood Government’, passim. The terizieri of Camerino still survive, but as part of the ‘heritage industry’, Fiorella Paino, Il Terziero di Muralto (Camerino, 1996). 57 Jones records that the Malatesta could appear as members of the councils of Rimini. 58 Urbino, Cl. I, Pezzo XIII, f. 58v. The ‘cardinal of Florence’ was Angelo Acciaioli (1349–1408); cardinal bishop of Ostia, he had been bishop of Florence from 1383 to 1385, and was a close associate of Boniface IX and of Ladislas king of Sicily, with whom the Varano were allied; entries in The Catholic Encyclopedia, The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, and below, note 60. 59 Literally, ‘with certain wise men and councillors of trust’. Their lord was

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honour the cardinal – and hence Rodolfo – with the gift of a palio – an expensive length of cloth – and ‘in other appropriate ways’. The influence of the Da Varano can also be detected in matters of importance to the internal workings of the commune. The Reformationes record the election of the doctor of law Cristoforo Nicolai di Cristoforo from Faenza as captain of the people for six months from 1 January 1404.60 The letter of appointment set out the composition of his entourage and various other obligations, including a gift to the city’s sacred ‘captain and leader’ the Blessed Venanzio. It did not record the actual process of election, though the letter was written on behalf of the guild captains, the council of the people and Rodolfo. It also spelled out his oath of office, his promise to serve: Ss Peter and Paul; the patrons of Camerino, Venanzio and Ansovino; the court of heaven; Boniface IX and his cardinals; Ladislas king of Jerusalem and Naples, and his princes, barons and lords; the Guelf cause; the ‘magnificence and increase and good state’ of Rodolfo, his sons, heirs and supporters; to his office as captain; to Camerino and its territory.61 One of Rodolfo’s sons, Gentilpandolfo, was among the dignitaries present at the ceremony which took place, summoned by bells, on the piazza before the cathedral. The commune was therefore not excluded from the process surrounding the appointment of its captain, and it is important to note that the captain accepted that the commune would carry out of scrutiny of his conduct – as was traditional – at the end of his term of office. However, the record of the Reformationes, suggests that – as in the Malatesta dominions – the signore made, or at very least approved of, this key communal appointment. **** The term ‘diarchy’ which Ercole tried to introduce into the discussion of signorial regimes has not achieved much currency among later historians. This may be because the term lacked ‘credentials’ in the history of political thought. It may be because Ercole’s later close identification with the Fascist regime discredited his work.62 It may also be because his approach was too legalistic and too focused on special circumstances and events, rather than on the dayto-day nature of signorial rule. This leads to another possible explanation: the absence of communal reformationes for the regimes he discussed.

Rodolfo III, 1399–1424. 60 Loc. cit., ff. 55r.–57v. 61 Ladislas was perceived as a champion of the Guelf cause. For the loyalty of the Da Varano to Ladislas, Fabrizio Ciapparoni, Statuta comunis et populi civitatis Camerini (Naples, 1977), xiii–xv, p. 324; John E. Law, ‘The Da Varano Lords of Camerino as condottiere Princes’, in John France (ed.), Mercenaries and Paid Men (Leiden and Boston, 2008), p. 94, p. 97. 62 Entry by Luca Lo Bianco in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani. Had Ercole’s admiration for a regime ‘shared’ between duce and monarch been encouraged by his reading of the relationship between signori and communes?

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The slender survival of material relating to the commune of Camerino in the Ducato di Urbino archive in Florence, and elsewhere, suggests that archivists and antiquarians may have been more interested in the court – in the ruling dynasty – than in subject communities; in turn, this may have shaped the direction of later research. The Da Varano palace in Camerino survives, whereas the buildings of the medieval commune do not, and this is reflected in the local historiography.63 Possibly for these reasons, a continuing role for the commune has been largely – if not entirely – overlooked. Certainly, Ercole’s own careful scrutiny of the evidence available to him and the examples and sources discussed above suggest that ‘diarchy’ may have some validity in describing the relationship between ‘communes and despots’. His use of the adjective ‘democratic’ in the context of some surviving communal institutions now appears anachronistic, but replacing it with ‘broadly based’ is more acceptable. Again, a possible implication of the term ‘diarchy’ – suggesting an equal balance of power between ‘commune and despot’ – is negated by Ercole’s own writings as well as by other research, though it would be interesting to examine those cases where the commune attempted to reject signorial rule, as in the case of Imola and the Alidosi in 1363.64 Finally, the uncritical adoption of a concept like diarchy could give the impression of a stable situation, whereas the Camerino reformationes suggest that the ‘working’ relationship between the Da Varano and the commune could vary, depending on whether the provision of fish or relations with the pope was on the agenda. However, Ercole was right to argue that the commune did survive as a concept with a legal identity. If it did not hold the initiative, it was not shut out of ‘high politics’, and government continued to be carried out very publicly. Moreover, the commune, and other institutions within the community, continued to have a considerable administrative role in important areas, a role that involved a broad elite of its citizens. If Ercole did not develop much of a socio-political character to the diarchy he detected in the Veneto that dimension does appear to have existed in the Malatesta and Da Varano dominions, preserving a citizen elite ready to take over if the ruling dynasty failed. In the case of Camerino this can be seen in the period when the city became incorporated within a Borgia duchy (1502–1503). Cesare Borgia captured Camerino in July; he held overwhelming military supremacy, but his success – which led to the elimination of most of the Da Varano dynasty – was aided by the city’s inhabitants, eager to reach an agreement – a ‘trattato’ – to avoid a sack. 65 On 13 September 1502 a formal surrender of the commune was staged 63

The palazzo comunale in Camerino, in a bad state of repair, was demolished around 1960. I am indebted to Pier Luigi Falaschi for this information, as well as for his help with other aspects of the history of Camerino and the Da Varano. 64 John Larner, The Lords of the Romagna (London, 1965), pp.156–7. 65 These events, and Borgia rule in Camerino, are discussed in John E. Law, ‘City, Court and Contado in Camerino’, in Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham (eds), City and Countryside in late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Essays presented to Philip Jones (London,

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after mass in the cathedral, and in the presence of the guild captains and many of the citizens and people; the city’s keys were presented; this was regarded as representing the ‘real and actual handover’ – the ‘traditionem realem et actualem’ – of the city, as Ercole argued for the Veneto.66 Later, following an attempted Da Varano coup, Lodovico Clodio advised the Borgia regime on how to rule the city and its territory. No mention was made of communal institutions or officials, but a great deal was made of the factions and interests in the city and contado potentially ready to welcome the Da Varano back should the Borgia regime fail, as it – and they – did. Philip Jones did not explicitly measure the regimes he studied in terms of ‘diarchy’, but the evidence for signorial rule in Camerino confirms the shifting balance of power between ‘communes and despots’ he detected in the case of the Malatesta lordships in the Romagna and Marche. In general, the dynasty may have abandoned seeking endorsement of their rule from their subject communes but, as Jones pointed out, when Galeotto acquired Cervia in 1383 he felt it expedient to have the commune formally acknowledge his authority.67

1990), pp.171–182. 66 Ducato di Urbino, Cl. I, Pezzo XVI, item 2. 67 Jones, The Malatesta, p. 329

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13 Concepts of Libertà in Renaissance Genoa Christine Shaw

The Genoese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not given to defining what they meant by libertà. They did use the term, and it was obviously one of great significance for them, as it was for the citizens of other Italian republics. Princes who had or wanted to have signoria over Genoa also used it, as did their officials, although they were no more inclined to define what they meant by it than were the Genoese. Historians writing about Genoa have sometimes defined or described what they think libertà meant to, and for, the Genoese, but how one historian understands it can be quite different from how another does. For Riccardo Musso, ‘this simply meant that there was no dependence on a foreign lord’,1 but he also argues that such was the disorder in Genoa under the doges of the mid-fifteenth century that that type of regime could not be called ‘libertà’ either. For him, the Genoese finally achieved libertà only in 1528, when the political institutions of Genoa were radically remodelled to break the grip of the factions supporting the rival dogal families of Adorno and Campofregoso.2 On the other hand, Arturo Pacini, who has written a detailed study of the 1528 reforms and their genesis, states that ‘for the Genoese, “libertà” meant having a Doge at the head of a state that was constituted as a “Republic”’.3 When Doge Pietro Campofregoso was considering the different types of regime that might govern Genoa, however, he used ‘stato di libertà’ to signify a regime in which there was no doge, or signore. In 1457 he declared that he was ready to renounce the dogeship (in return for a payment of 20,000 florins), provided he was assured that he would not be replaced by one of his Adorno rivals, and that the commission dealing with the change of regime ‘would

1 Riccardo Musso, ‘Lo “stato cappellazzo”. Genova tra Adorno e Fregoso (1436– 1464)’, in Studi di storia medioevale e di diplomatica, 17 (1998), p. 226. 2 Ibid., p. 288. 3 Arturo Pacini, ‘I presupposti politici del “secolo dei genovesi”: La riforma del 1528’, Atti della società ligure di storia patria, 104 (1990), p. 97.

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create a government of libertà’.4 The year before, he had asserted that a ‘stato di libertà’ could not possibly last for very long; if he left, the city would be sure to fall into the hands of the Adorno, or of the king of France.5 One of Pietro Campofregoso’s predecessors as doge, Agostino Adorno, when he was trying to win over the citizens to the idea of submitting Genoa to the king of France in 1395, advanced the argument that it would be good to ‘bring a signore on board’. This would ‘maintain the libertà of this city’, so that it was not brought to ruin by discord among the citizens, although he also suggested, as an alternative, that they could come together to institute a form of government acceptable to every Genoese ‘and maintain our libertà without a signore’.6 Not many Genoese were persuaded by his argument that submission to a signore could preserve libertà, as the records of the debates that continued over the next year make plain.7 One of the more perspicacious contributors to those debates, Clemente Facio, who said he was astonished that anyone should advocate the permanent loss of libertà, was convinced that the Genoese should not submit to the king of France or the duke of Milan, but should try to find ‘another way of living in libertà’. But if he opposed submission to the king of France, he readily acknowledged the submission of the Genoese to the emperor, which he appears to have thought compatible with libertà but not with submission to the king.8 Arguments about the significance of libertà under the aegis of the Empire would come to the fore in the sixteenth century, as Genoa and other Italian states strove to come to terms with the overweening power of Charles V. Few Genoese would have regarded their libertà in the same way as the Spaniard Gómez Suárez de Figueroa. In 1547, when he had already been ambassador in Genoa for nearly 20 years, while advising Charles V that most Genoese attached great importance to their libertà9 and would not want the emperor ‘como absoluto señor’, he nevertheless thought that building a fortress, garrisoned by 500 Spanish soldiers, and having a minister appointed by the emperor in charge of criminal justice, would be found compatible with it.10 Obviously, the word libertà could not only mean different things to different people, but understanding of the concept could change over time; perhaps the 4

Archivio di Stato di Milano, Archivio Sforzesco, b. 412 (Franco Assereto to Giorgio de Annono, 21 November 1457, Serravalle, citing a document in the doge’s name that had been affixed to the offices of the Casa di San Giorgio): ‘Fariano stato di libertà.’ 5 Ibid., b. 411 (Pietro Cotta to Francesco Sforza, 12 November 1456, Genoa). 6 Eugène Jarry, Les origines de la domination française a Gênes (1392–1402) (Paris, 1896), Doc. X, p. 425. 7 Ibid., pp. 424–502. 8 Ibid., Doc. XIV, p. 447. For a discussion of Genoese concepts of libertà as revealed in these debates, see Serena Ferente, ‘Guelphs! Faction, Liberty and Sovereignty: Inquiries about the Quattrocento’, History of Political Thought, 38 (2007), pp. 592–5. 9 ‘Hazen mucho caso desta su libertad.’ 10 Massimiliano Spinola, Luigi T. Belgrano and Francesco Podestà (eds), ‘Documenti ispano-genovesi dell’Archivio di Simancas’, Atti della società ligure di storia patria, 8 (1868): pp. 101–3: Gómez Suárez de Figueroa to Charles V, 30 January 1547, Genoa.

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emphasis on different aspects of the complex nexus of ideas invoked by, or associated with, the word libertà changed, as might the value put on them. It will be argued here that libertà, in the sense of political independence, of not being subject to rule by another power, came to be valued increasingly by the Genoese by the later fifteenth century and early sixteenth century, and that their perception of the relation between that kind of libertà, and libertà in the sense of self-government, also changed at that time. The Genoese had plenty of experience of the dominion of other powers during the period under consideration here – the late fourteenth to the midsixteenth century. They submitted their city to the king of France from 1394 to 1409, the Marquis of Monferrato for a brief period in 1409, to Filippo Maria Visconti from 1421 to 1435, the king of France again from 1458 to 1461, to the Sforza dukes of Milan from 1464 to 1477, and from 1487 to 1499, and to the king of France three more times from 1499 to 1512, 1515 to 1522 and 1527 to 1528. After that, the Genoese had to ward off suggestions that the city should submit to Charles V, having been more or less dependent on him, if not formally subject to him, from 1522 to 1527 as well. When Genoa was not under the dominion of an external prince, the head of the government of the republic was the doge. The fifteenth century doges, particularly those from the Campofregoso family, were increasingly inclined to see themselves as lords of Genoa, and to aspire to be regarded as princes, signori, but this was not how the Genoese saw the position of the doge, nor what they wanted it to be. To understand how the Genoese understood the concept of libertà, it is necessary to understand how they thought of the government of their city and their state. Their attitude to their civic government and to holding political office was a pragmatic one: a sense that citizens should take their share of the burdens of government if called on to do so, but a sense that this was a chore, rather than an honour or a source of social prestige. Civic government was not exalted into a sphere in which a man could exercise or display virtue, and they were not inclined to laud the moral value and dignity of participation in the direction of the affairs of the community. The Genoese wanted to be free to trade, and they wanted to be protected from their enemies, particularly those that might hinder trade; they wanted government expenditure, and the taxes raised to pay for it, to be kept as low as possible. They did not nurse dreams of great expansion of their territory. If they were ready to contest with their neighbours the possession of certain places, especially strategically placed strongholds on routes over the mountains that hemmed in the city, they had no aspirations to emulate their rival Venice in becoming a major power in Italy.11 To their contemporaries, the Genoese appeared to be ‘skilful and rich businessmen, devoid of idealism and civic spirit’.12 Libertà to the Genoese 11 For a fuller exposition of these arguments, and a discussion of the scanty literature and plentiful sources on the civic government of Genoa in the fifteenth century, see Christine Shaw, ‘Principles and Practice in the Civic Government of Fifteenth-century Genoa’, Renaissance Quarterly, 58 (2005): 45–90. 12 Giovanna Petti Balbi, Genova medievale vista dai contemporanei (Genoa, 1978),

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could be said to signify the freedom to live their own lives, to look after their own affairs. For a variety of reasons, different groups might feel, in certain circumstances, that this could be more easily accomplished if Genoa was ruled by an external signore, rather than governed by a doge. Members of only two families in the fifteenth century, the Adorno and the Campofregoso (known collectively as the cappellazzi, the ‘big hats’), were serious contenders for election to the dogeship. Doges were paid a salary, and not a generous one, and had only modest military resources placed at their disposal in peacetime: infantry to garrison the fortresses under communal control and to provide a small palace guard. While they had some powers of patronage, being able to make appointments of officials in Genoese territory in Liguria, even in this they had to have regard for the factions that dominated the Riviere and the mountains. In the city itself, their powers to appoint officials were much more limited, and all public offices had to be divided equally between nobles and popolari, between Blacks (Guelfs) and Whites (Ghibellines), and among the popolari, between merchants and artefici (who included, for example, notaries). This applied to the main executive committee, the Anziani and the special commissions, the Balie, appointed to handle difficult matters or those requiring secrecy. Doges were expected to govern with these committees, and to summon councils to advise and decide on matters of importance; they were not expected to take major political decisions on their own initiative. Communal finances were under the watchful eye of the Officio della Moneta, which met without the doge. Most revenues from customs dues and other indirect taxes went to the Casa di San Giorgio, which was a public financial institution but not a governmental one, and the doge had no role in its administration. In consequence, and to their frustration, doges could not control the finances of the commune, and the financial restrictions placed on them did much to inhibit their ambitions to behave like lords of Genoa. Doges were reliant on the support of their factions, Adorno or Campofregoso, to bring them to power and to keep them there. Often their government would be avowedly partisan. Leading members of the opposing faction would generally go into exile, but many would remain in Genoa. Few, if any, doges felt secure for very long, or did not have to face some challenge, either from their factional rivals or from within their own family. Sometimes, if he could persuade another power that it was in their interest for that particular doge to be there, a doge could get a pension or a subsidy that enabled him to bolster his position by hiring some extra infantry. Sometimes, rather than give way to rivals, doges would prefer to come to terms with a prince and surrender dominion over Genoa to him. In such circumstances, doges usually hoped to stay on themselves with the support of the prince, exchanging the title of governor for that of doge, but otherwise yielding little of substance. The office of doge itself was the only one that was not shared by nobles and popolari; only popolari could become doge. Part of the doge’s title was ‘defensor populi’, and some doges would be ready to play this card on occasion, to p. 56: ‘Abili e ricchi uomini d’affari, privi di ragioni ideali e di afflato civico.’

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antagonize, even attack the nobles, to take a stance as a defender of the interests of the people and of the comune against them. Both Pietro Campofregoso and his brother Paolo, for example, did this. Many nobles, most notably those from the four major clans – the Grimaldi, Fieschi, Doria and Spinola – had their primary power base in the Riviere and the mountains, where they had lands, fortresses and partisans who would rally to fight for them. Some of the lands they held were imperial fiefs; some were held of the duke of Savoy, or the duke of Milan. Their political horizons were not bounded by the city of Genoa and its trading interests, and they had no particular reason to cherish Genoese libertà. Nor might they feel much compunction about looking to the duke of Milan or the king of France as a potential lord of Genoa: there were times when many considered a foreign lord preferable to a cappellazzo doge. Popolari, in general, appear to have been more attached to the political independence of Genoa, less ready to adopt the expedient of turning to a foreign lord. Their perception – one justified by experience – was that signori from outside Genoa, and in particular the kings of France, were inclined to favour the nobles, especially in Genoese territory. It was the popolo that was the driving force in the rebellions against the rule of Filippo Maria Visconti in 1435, and of the French in 1461. French favour towards the nobles provoked the uprising of 1506 which turned into rebellion. Nevertheless, the popolo was not opposed to rule by an outside lord in any circumstances; they could settle for that, at least for a while, if it brought peace to the city. If, for many of the most powerful individuals and families of Genoa, the idea of an independent republic meant less than their own personal interests and those of their factions, their feuds and their rivalries, other Genoese, who were not primarily concerned with the complex struggles for power and influence of the major families and factions, might also be ready to compromise Genoese independence, if that promised them and their city a quiet life, allowing them to get on with their own business. That did not mean that they would be content to resign all responsibility for the government of their republic to the lord or his officials. When a doge made his bargain with the prince to whom he was surrendering Genoa, the terms he negotiated usually concerned only his own personal interests, the money and lands he wanted for himself and his family as compensation.13 It was left to the offices of the civic government – the Anziani, or a special commission appointed for the task – to negotiate the terms on which the republic would submit to the prince, and they would make it clear that if the Genoese were prepared to compromise their libertà in the sense of their independence of external rule, they were very unwilling to compromise their libertà in the sense of control over their own affairs. Essentially, all they wanted was for the prince to send a governor, who would have the powers and the salary of the

13 See, for example, the terms that Paolo Campofregoso wanted from Francesco Sforza in March 1464, in Albano Sorbelli, Francesco Sforza a Genova (1458–1460), Saggio sulla politica italiana di Luigi XI (Bologna, 1901), pp. 271–5.

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doge, and who would govern together with the Anziani.14 What they looked for from a prince was that he should provide protection against their enemies, keep the factions in check, and foster impartial justice: ‘keep us within the law, in peace and in fear.’15 A doge who came to power as a faction leader, whatever his intentions, could never be accepted as a neutral head of the republic, evenhanded in his treatment of all Genoese. When, in 1477, the ducal council of Milan tried to recover control of Genoa – in rebellion after the assassination of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza – by appointing an Adorno governor, they expressed a hope that he would be impartial, just, and promote reconciliation. Prospero Adorno, however, warned that he had to reward his family and his allies and could not behave like the ‘Lombard governors’, because he had to conserve his friends and keep his enemies down.16 This was the logic that made the Genoese in general feel that if they had to submit to the dominion of a prince, they would prefer that he sent a governor from outside Genoa who would take on the role of the doge within the civic government, rather than have a Genoese doge with the title of governor. Princes, and the governors they sent, were naturally not satisfied with such limited powers. They might invoke the concept of libertà, as Jean, Duke of Calabria, did when he was governor of Genoa for Charles VII, and an address was read on his behalf to a council of over 200 citizens. The king was minded, they were assured, ‘to maintain you in true libertà and peaceful government, and to observe, indeed to increase all your graces, privileges and immunities, and to think of everything which would exalt your republic’.17 But what the kings of France and the dukes of Milan wanted was to be the effective rulers of Genoa. Even if they initially had to accept the restrictive terms the Genoese desired, they would soon try to have them changed, to have more power, and a freer hand. It was the terms agreed when they accepted the dominion of the king of France in 1396 that were the basis for signoria over their republic, as the 14 See, for example, the terms of submission to Filippo Maria Visconti in Jean Du Mont, Corps universel diplomatique de Droit des Gens (8 vols, Amsterdam, 1726–1781), vol. 2 (1728), part 2, pp. 159–66, nos. CI and CII; Riccardo Musso, ‘Le istituzioni ducali dello “Stato di Genova” durante la signoria di Filippo Maria Visconti (1421–1435)’, in Luisa Chiappa Mauri, Laura de Angelis Cappabianca and Patrizia Mainoni (eds), L’età dei Visconti: Il domino di Milano fra XIII e XV secolo (Milan, 1993), pp. 65–111; for the terms of the agreements of November 1421, see pp. 69–71. 15 Contribution of Corrado de Pontremoli to a debate in Genoa in 1396 about whether the city should be surrendered to a lord (Jarry, Les origines de la domination française, p. 481): ‘Qui teneat nos in jure, pace et timore.’ 16 Letter from Gian Angelo de’ Talenti to Duchi of Milan, 14 May 1477, Genoa, cited in Riccardo Musso, ‘“El stato nostro de Zenoa”. Aspetti istituzionali della prima dominazione sforzesca a Genova (1464–1478)’, in Serta antiqua et medievalia V. Società e istituzioni del medioevo ligure (Rome, 2001), p. 214. 17 Genoa, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Segreto (henceforth ASG, AS), 560, f. 136v, 20 November 1458: ‘De mantenerve in vera libertà e pacifico stato, et observarve immo augumentarve ogni vostre gratie, privilegii, immunitate che habiate e pensare in su tute quelle cose le quali debiano exaltare la vostra republica.’

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Genoese saw it. These were the terms that remained their point of reference throughout the fifteenth century. The Genoese accepted King Charles VI – and his successors – as ‘true lord’ (‘verum dominum’) of the city and its territories; the king was to send a governor, who was to be one of his ultramontane subjects. The governor and the Anziani were to rule and govern in the name of the king, according to the ordinances and statutes of the city of Genoa. Together they were to appoint the podestà and other officials, who were to administer justice according to the law, customs and statutes of Genoa; together, they were to be responsible for the appointment of the Anziani’s successors. If the governor was ill, or if, for any cause that seemed reasonable to him and to them, he was absent from the city, he could appoint a lieutenant, who had to be, like him, an ultramontane subject of the king. If the governor or his lieutenant could not or did not want to attend a meeting, the Anziani could meet without him, and their decisions would be as valid as if the governor had been present. The title of the governor was to be ‘gubernator regius et communis et populi defensor’ and he was to have the salary of the doge, and pay the expenses of his officials and household himself, as the doge did. The banner to be flown from Genoese buildings and on Genoese vessels was to have the arms of the king of France on one side, and of the Empire on the other; but the arms of the comune of Genoa were not to be removed from their accustomed places. The king was formally to promise to defend the city of Genoa and its possessions, and the persons and property of the Genoese, who were to enjoy the privileges of French subjects, including trading privileges in any territory under the king. Neither the governor nor the king himself could alienate or transfer to another the possession of any Genoese subject territory, nor separate them from the jurisdiction and government of the city. They could not impose any new tax. The only revenues from Genoa that were to go to the king were to be the salary of the governor and of the garrisons of 10 fortresses that were to be put under the control of the king; otherwise all territory, jurisdiction and revenues were to remain with the comune of Genoa.18 It is scarcely surprising that the French soon claimed that the king had been given to understand that the Genoese would not insist on, or would renounce, these terms, and that they would give him unreserved and absolute lordship over Genoa – ‘ils donroient au Roy la seignourie purement et absoluement’.19 Yet whatever their representatives who negotiated the terms of the agreement may or may not have promised or hinted at the time, the Genoese were not prepared to renounce them. Filippo Maria Visconti had more success in getting the Genoese to acquiesce in substantial modifications of the agreement that his procurators had made with them in November 1421. Effectively, he had won Genoa by force, and although he ratified the terms, which were based on those regulating submission to the king of France in 1396, he did not like them and wanted them changed from the start. Francesco Carmagnola, the Milanese commander who had led the campaign to take Genoa and was one of the signatories to 18 19

Jarry, Les origines de la domination française, Doc. XXIII, pp. 517–32. Ibid., p. 392.

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the November agreement, soon prevailed on the Genoese to renounce it and to give the city freely to the duke, for his honour, promising them that if they did this they would have much better conditions from him, as privileges and graces.20 Although the new terms brought by the Genoese delegation sent to Milan to swear fealty to the duke evidently reflect a Milanese template for the government of Genoa, Filippo Maria approved them only in part. Instead of one governor, there were to be four presidenti to govern with the Genoese (this arrangement did not work and in November 1422, Carmagnola returned as governor). Appointments of castellans, and of the podestà of Genoa and Savona, were reserved to the duke. Offices would be distributed among the Genoese, but only with the consent of the Presidents. Judicial appeals would go to the Presidents and the Anziani – an important point for the Genoese. Public money was only to be spent after consultation with the citizens ‘as is customary’, and there were to be no new taxes imposed – except those the duke might order for the defence of the city and its territory. This was only one of the ways in which Filippo Maria Visconti reserved to himself powers to intervene as he saw fit in Genoese affairs. He did not agree to delegate entire control over expenditure to the Presidents and Anziani; most significantly, he would not make any commitments that would restrict his freedom of action with regard to Savona and other places subject to Genoa.21 It was this agreement of 1422 that formed the basis for that made with Francesco Sforza when the Genoese submitted to him in 1464. He had been invested with the city as a fief by Louis XI of France, and had forced Doge Paolo Campofregoso to leave. If Genoa had not quite been conquered by Milanese troops, the Genoese were still not in a position to drive a hard bargain. To their request that he should send a governor who would govern with the Anziani, the duke replied that if necessary he would send not only a governor but others ‘who would rule and govern the city’, making no specific mention of the role of the Anziani. He reserved to himself and his own officials greater powers to make appointments to offices, while promising that they would be given to Genoese; he reserved the right to impose new taxes and to order expenditure of public money; while agreeing to judicial appeals remaining in Genoa, he made an exception for those ‘pertaining to the state’.22 The circumstances in which the Genoese submitted to Milanese dominion in 1488 were quite different, and, although they could not obtain the degree of libertà they wanted, they did not have to accept a return to the conditions instituted in 1422 or 1464. The doge, Cardinal Paolo Campofregoso, 20

Giorgio and Giovanni Stella, Annales genuenses, ed. Giovanna Petti Balbi, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new edn, vol. 17, part 2 (Città di Castello, 1975), pp. 349–50. 21 Du Mont, Corps universel diplomatique, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 166–8, no. CIII; Musso, ‘Le istituzioni ducali’, pp. 73–5; Gian Domenico Oltrona Visconti, ‘Economia e politica nella “deditio” di Genova a Filippo Maria Visconti (1422)’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 108–9 (1982–3), pp. 65–83. 22 Du Mont, Corps universel diplomatique, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 304–9, no. CCXXXII; quotation p. 308: ‘pertinentibus ad statum’; Musso, ‘“El stato nostro de Zenoa”’, p. 207.

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increasingly unpopular and losing his grip on the city, agreed to its submission to the duke of Milan in July 1487, becoming governor for the duke instead of doge. In August 1488 he was deposed, but he held out in the Castelletto, the main fortress of the city. Neither the Adorno nor the Fregoso faction was able to gain the upper hand, and with Milanese troops on their way in support of Paolo Campofregoso, it was decided to send an envoy to Milan.23 His instructions reveal that the Genoese were hoping to compromise their libertà as little as possible. He was to give assurances that the city had not been moved to think of its libertà, and to avert any danger of tyranny, in order to renege on the undertakings that had been made to Duke Giangaleazzo Maria and to Lodovico Sforza – the effective ruler of Milan for his nephew the duke. Encouraged by the loving words of the Sforza to believe that what they wanted was ‘the quiet and libertà of this city’ without any part in its administration, the general council had agreed ‘the mode of government of this city should be changed to a more public and communal form’, so that it ‘could enjoy that repose that was impossible under the previous form’. If asked how Genoa intended to be governed, the envoy should reply that they were minded to put Genoa ‘in pure and free libertà’ under the tutelage of the duke.24 What was in fact agreed with the Milanese was that Agostino Adorno should replace Paolo Campofregoso as a governor appointed by Lodovico Sforza for 10 years. In theory, Genoa was to be governed in accordance with the same regulations as under Francesco and Galeazzo Maria Sforza.25 In practice, Agostino’s position was more like that of a doge. A Milanese resident commissioner who advised the governor was the true representative of the Sforza in the city, but he could not dictate to Agostino Adorno and the civic government. This was a quite different regime from the first period of Sforza dominance. Nevertheless, Genoa’s subordination to the duke of Milan, together with the history of Genoa’s past submission to the king of France, meant that when the duchy of Milan was conquered for King Louis XII in 1499, the French considered Genoa was part of the package. The Genoese had little choice but to submit to the king; they hoped that he would confirm their privileges and immunities. A governor sent by the king’s lieutenant in Italy, Giangiacomo Trivulzio, was already in the city when the Genoese sent an embassy to Louis, and was present at the meeting at which the 24 envoys were given their authority. In the circumstances, the vagueness of their formal instructions concerning what form of government they had in mind is understandable; they were to ask the king for confirmation of terms and privileges previously 23

Agostino Giustiniani, Annali della Repubblica di Genova, ed. Giovanni Battista Spotorno, 2 vols (Genoa, 1854), vol. 2, pp. 547–52; Bartolomeo Senarega, De rebus genuensibus commentaria, ed. Emilio Pandiani, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new edn, vol. 24, part 8 (Bologna, 1929–32), pp. 3–7. 24 ASG, MS. 652, pp. 806–7: 16 August 1488. 25 Senarega, De rebus genuensibus commentaria, pp. 8–9; ASG, AS 635, ff. 35r–36r, 13 September 1488.

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granted by the kings of France and the dukes of Milan and such new ones as they saw fit to request.26 Negotiations between the envoys and the commissioners appointed by the king did not go smoothly. The French lawyers had gathered together and studied the terms granted in the past and were basing their arguments on those of Filippo Maria Visconti, which were the least acceptable to the Genoese.27 In the end, a compromise was reached, and the Genoese won some significant concessions, including the stipulation that the governor should rule with the Anziani.28 The terms agreed were based on those of 1396, rather than those of 1422, but with greater reservations of royal authority, including in relation to the governor acting with the Anziani, the imposition of new taxes and the reservation of offices to the Genoese.29 After the rebellion of 1506–1507, and Louis’s entry into Genoa as a conqueror, these privileges were literally torn up and burned.30 New ones were promulgated, which were not framed as responses to petitions from the Genoese. There were fewer references to observance of the statutes and customs of the comune, and more powers assigned to the governor. In the 1499 terms, for example, the Genoese had asked for appointments to offices to be made by the governor and Anziani; and the king had reserved his authority. In the 1507 terms, appointments were to be made by the governor alone.31 The remaining years of this period of French dominion until 1512 saw the greatest inroads into Genoese self-government. There were long and difficult battles against a French judicial official who asserted that the governor had the right to act without the Anziani and to intervene in every civil case, arguing that the terms of 1507 were not a reciprocal agreement but a grant by the king that he could vary at will. Never, under any regime, under the king of France or the duke of Milan or a doge, ‘has the form of our civic government been altered’, the Genoese protested.32 They instituted a new office of the ‘Conservatori dei 26 Luigi Tommaso Belgrano, ‘Della dedizione dei Genovesi a Luigi XII re di Francia commentario’, Miscellanea di storia italiana, 1 (1862), pp. 568–76, and Documents I and II, pp. 593–611, for the authority and instruction given to the embassy; Senarega, De rebus genuensibus commentaria, pp. 74–6. 27 Belgrano, ‘Della dedizione dei Genovesi a Luigi XII’, pp. 623–4: Antonio Gallo to the Officials of San Giorgio, 9 October 1499, Milan. 28 Ibid., pp. 627–8: Antonio Gallo to the Officials of San Giorgio, 17 October 1499, Milan. 29 Ibid., pp. 634–58, Document XIII; for another perspective on the French legal claims to sovereignty over Genoa, see Fabien Levy, ‘Gênes, ville de France? Aspects juridiques de la domination française à Gênes’, Atti della società ligure di storia patria, 12 (2007) : 329–56. 30 Emilio Pandiani, ‘Un anno di storia genovese (giugno 1506–1507), con diario e documenti inediti’, Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 37 (1905), Doc. XLV, p. 533–50. 31 Belgrano, ‘Della dedizione dei Genovesi a Luigi XII’, p. 646; Pandiani, ‘Un anno di storia genovese’, p. 542. 32 ASG, AS 2177, cc. 173v–174r: instructions to Genoese ambassadors at the French court, 10 March 1508, Genoa; see Pacini, I presupposti politici, pp. 51–78; Levy, ‘Gênes, ville de France?’, pp. 351–4.

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Privilegii’, and when the French objected that only the king had the right to interpret privileges, the Genoese ambassador replied that the function of the office was not to interpret the privileges, but to defend them against abuse.33 The troubled years of Louis XII’s dominion over Genoa marked a turningpoint in Genoese attitudes to dominion over their republic by princes, bringing home to them more acutely than ever before the implications of the compromise of their libertà in the sense of self-government, if they surrendered their libertà in the sense of political independence. But the fundamental problem of the mismatch between what the Genoese wanted in return for the surrender of their independence, and what the princes who assumed signoria over Genoa and the officials they sent to represent them expected to enjoy, had been evident long before. Princes were not content merely to appoint a governor to take on the role of the doge, and to extend their protection at their own expense over Genoa and Genoese merchants and goods abroad. The attractions of signoria over Genoa were the strategic advantages it could bring – entry into Italy for the French, an outlet to the sea for Milan – and the expectation of access to the ships and the wealth of Genoa. But the ships and the wealth did not belong to the city or republic of Genoa, but to individual Genoese and to the financial institution, the Casa di San Giorgio. Dominion over Genoa did not bring control over the resources of the Casa di San Giorgio, which was not a state institution. As a community, the Genoese were unwilling to provide money, or to pay more taxes. They did not want to take part in the wars waged by their lords, unless they saw their own advantage in it, as when they joined Filippo Maria Visconti fighting Alfonso of Aragon. They did not want to be dragged into conflicts that might hinder trade or jeopardize Genoese merchants or goods abroad. Apart from the substitution of a governor for the doge, they did not want any institutional change. They wanted the Anziani to be fully involved in governing Genoa and its territory, no outsiders to be appointed to offices there, and no legal appeals to be made to tribunals outside Genoa. Problems also arose out of differing conceptions of whom the territory of Genoa belonged to. The Genoese generally, especially the popolari, were insistent that this territory remained subject to the comune, while the princes regarded the territory as being directly subject to them – hence the significance of the question whether the governor alone could appoint officials in the Riviere and the mountains, or whether the Anziani should be involved. Such offices had generally been at the disposal of the doge, so in that respect governors were behaving like doges if they made appointments themselves. If they did so, however, the likelihood was that they would ignore the customary distribution of offices among the factions, and perhaps appoint non-Genoese. Hence, too, the strength of feeling aroused when princes and governors manifested their conception of direct dominance over the territory by granting communal lands or strongholds to individuals, especially if the beneficiaries were not Genoese. And if the princes and their officials were inclined to be sympathetic to the 33

ASG, AS 2177, cc. 281–2: Stefano de’ Vivaldi, 21 February 1510, Blois.

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longings of the Savonese not to be subject to Genoa, and saw advantages in promoting the port and trade of Savona, the Genoese passionately resented what they regarded as a threat to the revenues of the Casa di San Giorgio, and the trade and prosperity of the city of Genoa.34 Factional conflict – above all, conflict between rival Adorno and Campofregoso aspirants to the dogeship – was the principal cause of the Genoese repeatedly losing their independence. By the later fifteenth century, these factions seem to have been losing their grip, as more and more Genoese grew tired of them, and of the problems they caused. The resolution of the general council in August 1488, invoked in the instructions to the envoy sent to Milan, that ‘the mode of government of this city be changed to a more public and communal form’, so that Genoa ‘could enjoy that repose that was impossible under the previous form’, made this explicit.35 Such feelings may well have been strengthened by the Italian Wars, as exiled Campofregosi and Adorni promised to pay large sums of money for support for their attempts to return to Genoa and become doge, money that the Genoese, not the new doge, would be expected to pay.36 Not surprisingly the Genoese strongly resented this practice of ‘selling the homeland in this way’,37 and a decree was passed in July 1513 condemning as a ‘public enemy and rebel of this city and this republic’38 anyone attempting to become doge or governor of Genoa for another power, who offered money to princes or army commanders in return for aid.39 It was not new for aspiring doges to ask for support from other powers to help them gain power. But the Italian Wars, with the advent of large armies of French, Spanish and Imperial troops whose commanders were perpetually short of money to pay their men, had significantly raised the stakes. The French wanted to recover their signoria over Genoa, while the enemies of France, and in particular Charles V, were determined they should not. Genoa became caught up in the campaigns, exposed to attack and siege, even to sack, as by the Imperial troops in 1522. Whomever their republic might be subject to, Genoese merchants would be regarded as an enemy by some other power, and they and their ships and goods subject to reprisals, confiscations, exclusions and expulsions. Prospects of lasting stability and unfettered independence for Genoa with a cappellazzo doge at the head of the government were worse than ever. The dominion of a prince, the loss of libertà in the sense of independence, had appeared to offer the chance of internal peace and external protection 34

Musso, ‘“El stato nostro de Zenoa”’, pp. 230–6; Musso, ‘Le istituzioni ducali’, pp. 100–11; Pacini, I presupposti politici, pp. 52–60. 35 ASG, MS. 652, pp. 806–7: 16 August 1488: ‘Ch’el modo del governo de questa Repubblica se debba variare in forma più publica e commune, per la quale questa città possa godere della quiete che sotto la prima forma era inpossibile.’ 36 Pacini, I presupposti politici, pp. 190–1. 37 ASG, AS 678, f. 166r, 31 October 1513: ‘Vendere a questo modo la patria.’ 38 ‘Hostis publicus et rebellis huius civitatis et rei publice.’ 39 Pacini, I presupposti politici, pp. 191–2.

Concepts of Libertà in Renaissance Genoa 189

– without, the Genoese fondly believed, any need to compromise or alter the institutions and ethos of their civic government. Not only had the princes and their officials tended to have different views on how the government should be conducted, but now the dominion of princes brought the threat of war and destruction to Genoa. Independence began to look like the best way to achieve peace and protect their trade; the Genoese sense of the meaning and significance of libertà had shifted. But many Genoese now believed that if they were to maintain their independence, once achieved, they would have to rid their government of the influence of the factions. It was this belief that gave rise to efforts to promote unity by a fundamental reform of Genoese political institutions, efforts that culminated in 1528, but began over 20 years before, in 1506. The new form of government had biennial doges, a radically changed structure of councils and committees, and the distribution of all those to be considered eligible for political office into 28 alberghi, all of which were to be called noble. It was associated with Andrea Doria, because it was finally instituted after his arrival at Genoa with his fleet in September 1528 had helped to end the last period of French signoria. But his role had simply been to lend his support to plans that had been made earlier that year, plans that the governor for François I, Teodoro Trivulzio, had been unable to prevent. Arturo Pacini has convincingly demonstrated the connection between the wish to find security, to extract Genoa from involvement in international conflict, and the efforts to promote union and reform the government. The Genoese themselves recognized that it had been ‘unione’ and ‘reforma’ that had secured enduring ‘libertà’, and had prevented Genoa from again falling under the dominion of a foreign prince.40 Through the reforms, and the union they expressed and were intended to foster, the Genoese managed to break the grip of the divisions between the Adorno and Fregoso, and Blacks and Whites, on the political institutions and the political life of Genoa. The attempt to lose the distinction between nobles and popolari was less successful. Tacitly, ‘old’ nobles and ‘new’ nobles were given equal shares of all offices, with the biennial dogeship alternating between them, and tensions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ nobles would be a major threat to the stability of the reformed republic. Paradoxically, it was Andrea Doria, a scion of one of the major noble families, the man who held a quasi-signorial influence over the political life of Genoa until the end of his very long life, who became the guarantor of Genoese libertà. Charles V’s need for his admiral’s private fleet of galleys gave Doria the leverage to extract from the emperor a specific undertaking to respect the libertà of the Genoese republic. Charles confirmed Genoese libertà by letters patent in 1536, when he conferred the status of a duke on the office of doge.41 But he did in fact entertain the idea of exercising direct rule 40 41

p. 274.

Uberto Foglietta, Della Republica di Genova (Rome, 1559), p. 132. Arturo Pacini, La Genova di Andrea Doria nell’Impero di Carlo V (Florence, 1999),

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over Genoa, both before and after this. When he suggested in the early 1530s that the Genoese might reinforce their status as an imperial city by declaring themselves ‘a subject of the Empire while remaining a republic’,42 they saw no advantage at all in this; becoming subject to the Empire would not be ‘to the profit or the honour of this republic’.43 Even the imperial envoy, Figueroa, warned the emperor that ‘although they are divided amongst themselves … they would unite to preserve their libertà’.44 Andrea Doria always stood firm on the promises that Charles had made to him to respect the libertà of Genoa. Arguably, not the least of his services to the Genoese republic was to outlive Charles V, although he was over 30 years older than him – Doria lived on until 1560. By then, Charles’s successor as king of Spain, his son Philip, had no reason to want Genoa to be subject to the Empire, and the Genoese had become accustomed to their libertà, valued it, and were determined to preserve it.

42

Quoted in ibid., p. 284: ‘Sudditi de lo imperio rimanendo republica.’ Quoted in ibid., p. 292: ‘Fruttare né al uttile né al honor di questa republica.’ 44 Spinola, Belgrano and Podestà, ‘Documenti ispano-genovesi’, p. 116 (Figueroa to Charles V, 10 February 1547): ‘Aunque son divisos entre ellos … serian unidos para conservar su libertad.’ 43

Part V

The Case of the Medici

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14 Prato and Lorenzo de’ Medici F.W. Kent

I Curzio Malaparte once wrote that Lorenzo de’ Medici ‘lacked only one attribute of true magnificence: he was not from Prato’.1 A mid-twentieth century Pratese is here teasing the shade of the Quattrocento Florentine, for if Lorenzo cared little for Prato and its people, many Pratesi felt precisely the same about him and his family. There was of course no getting away from one another, for commanding historical and geopolitical reasons. As the Medici increased their authority over Florence and its territory after 1434, they and their nearest Tuscan neighbour had to find a modus vivendi, which they did by putting up with, and using, each other – but rarely without suppressed tension or open conflict. All of this is a continuation, writ small, of the larger story of Prato’s subjugation to Florence from the time when Dante warned his fellow citizens of the jealous resentment their proud expansionism bred in Prato and other nearby towns.2 Ceded to Florence early in 1351 by the king of Naples for 17,500 gold florins, Prato and its countryside – despite its size a ‘terra’ or ‘castrum’, not a ‘comune’ or ‘civitas’ – became part of the contado of Florence. Its government, supervised by the Florentine podestà, was forbidden to legislate against the ‘rule, the lordship, the honour, the jurisdiction … or the rights which the commune of Florence has or claims for itself in the said land of Prato.’3 Florence had secured a vital strategic point only 10 miles north-west of the city, possessed of a formidable Hohenstaufen castle situated precisely where one of the major passes through the Apennines quite abruptly expands 1

Maledetti Toscani (Milan, 1997), p. 76. My thanks to Sabina Sestigiani for research assistance, and to Carolyn James for commenting on the essay in draft. 2 Divina Commedia, Inferno, XXVI. 7–9. 3 Cited by Alison Brown, ‘The Language of Empire’, in William J. Connell and Andrea Zorzi (eds), Florentine Tuscany (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 32–47 (p. 33). In general, see Prato, Storia di una Città, (Florence, 1986–97), 4 vols, each with its own editor (henceforth Prato).

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into the valley of the Bisenzio and the fertile plain beyond. It would not do to have domestic or foreign enemies in charge of Prato. Under Florentine domination the town remained a major textile producer and agricultural centre, and the economic and other interests of the two cities inevitably became enmeshed. As the fifteenth century progressed, Florentine artists increasingly worked on commissions awarded them by Pratese institutions, to the extent that Prato has been described as, artistically speaking, a quarter of Florence.4 For centuries a steady stream of pious Florentines visited the chapel in Santo Stefano that held the Virgin’s girdle in safe-keeping; especially on 8 September, when the showing of the relic to the populace coincided with a famous livestock fair to which Machiavelli jokingly refers in Mandragola.5 If there was a certain merging of interests and experiences, it is not clear that Florentine economic and political control of Prato was so mild and advantageous as to quash any ‘excessive nostalgia for liberty lost’.6 A recent study of the city between 1403 and 1412 suggests that its government experienced at best a fraught and ‘ever more complicated … autonomy’.7 While the dominant city’s political authority was tolerated at that time, Florentine fiscal pressures on the Pratesi were deeply resented. In 1391, resentment at heavy taxation had brought 600 Pratesi into Florence to demonstrate (a significant proportion of the plague-devastated population),8 and it persisted. Political plotting against Prato’s overlord was not unknown, and hardly fizzled out. A notary had conspired in 1375 to hand his city over to the cardinal of Bologna.9 Giovanni Morelli tells us that rebellion was fermenting in Prato and other places as Giangaleazzo Visconti marched south in 1402. In Prato itself, a citizen loyal to Florence reported the discovery of ‘a plot by the Guazzalotti family to give this place to the Milanese duke’.10 There was to be another 4 Prato, vol. 1, ii, p. 925. See, in general, Eve Borsook, ‘Fra Filippo Lippi and the Murals for Prato Cathedral’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 14 (1975): 1–148; Anna Padoa Rizzo, La Cappella dell’ Assunta nel Duomo di Prato (Prato, 1997). See now Alick M. McLean, Prato: Architecture, Piety and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State (New Haven-London, 2008). 5 The Literary Works of Machiavelli, ed. and trans. John R. Hale (Oxford, 1961), p. 13. 6 Prato e i Medici nel ’500 (Rome 1980), p. 19. 7 Veronica Vestri, ‘Istituzioni e vita sociale a Prato nel primo Quattrocento’, Prato, Storia e Arte, 34 (1993), supplemento: 1–56, p. 28. 8 Gene Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1977), p. 142; Enrico Fiumi, Demografia, movimento urbanistico e classi sociali in Prato (Florence, 1968); Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London, 1985), chapter 2. 9 Alessandro Gherardi, ‘Di un trattato per far ribellare al Comune di Firenze la terra di Prato nell’anno 1375’, Archivio Storico Italiano, series 3, 10 (1869): 3–26. 10 Renato Piattoli, ‘Di un ignoto tentativo di Gian Galeazzo Visconti per far ribellare la terra di Prato nel 1402’, Archivio Storico Pratese, 10 (1931): 37–41 (henceforth ASPr); Giovanni Morelli, Ricordi, ed. Vittore Branca (ed. 2, Florence, 1969), pp. 397. The Guazzalotti was a magnate lineage which had come close to establishing a lordship in the 1340s. See too Gabriele Badiani, ‘Andrea Guazzalotti, il medaglista dei papi, e una famiglia di magnati’, ASPr, 71 (1995): 5–117.

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anti-Florentine conspiracy in 1422.11 The Pratesi had been ‘most unhappy’ at Florence’s acquisition of their city in 1351, Matteo Villani had remarked, and a few of them at the very least remained so.12 Florentine disdain for Prato must have been almost as hard to bear as the city’s fiscal policies, as when an expatriate friend told Francesco Datini that on arriving back ‘it was as if I were in the land of the Philistines: all delight is spent, and anyone living here is ashamed to be alive.’13 How the early Medici dealt with Prato, and the city with them, is a subject about which there is still something to say. Earlier historians of the town chose to dwell upon its period of ‘optimum vitality’ before 1350, after which Prato was seen to have lost its ‘personality’ along with its independence.14 The standard histories barely mention Lorenzo, save in the context of his wellknown activities at Poggio a Caiano and S. Maria delle Carceri.15 Florence–Prato political relations are treated as strictly an institutional matter, a perspective that excludes consideration of the largely informal but very effective modus operandi adopted by Lorenzo, as unofficial leader of the Florentine regime, in his dealings with the town. The story is worth recounting. Quattrocento Prato, drastically underpopulated and indubitably under the heel of Florence and, increasingly, of the Medici, still emerges from its telling with considerable ‘personality’, indeed with a certain dignity. As Philip Jones would have predicted, there survived a distinctive pratesità, Prato patriotism: ‘In all the subject communes local feeling and privileges remained indomitably strong, and so, very often, did the old political loyalties and divisions.’16 As for Lorenzo, his quite strenuous efforts to control Prato, for Florence’s sake and for his own dynastic and partisan purposes, provide a telling and fresh example of how he micro-managed certain situations. Thanks to recent studies,17 we know a good deal about how the Medici increased their personal authority in the Florentine territories, but the special case of Prato remains unexamined. For Prato was not Pistoia, ‘the second eye of your dominion’ as Antonio Marchetti described his city to Lorenzo18, where great and old families that the 11

Brucker, Civic World, p. 443, note 214. Villani is cited in Prato, vol. 1, ii, p. 1000. 13 Ser Lapo Mazzei, Lettere di un notaro a un mercante del secolo xiv, ed. Cesare Guasti (2 vols, Florence, 1880), vol. 1, p. 370. 14 See, for example, Ferdinando Carlesi, Origini della città e del comune di Prato (Prato, 1904), p. vii. 15 Storia di Prato (3 vols, Prato, 1980); Prato, vol. 1, ii, p. 2. 16 Philip Jones, ‘Communes and Despots’, as in this volume, chapter 1. 17 Robert Black, ‘Lorenzo and Arezzo’, in Michael Mallett and Nicholas Mann (eds) Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics (London, 1996), pp. 217–34; Stephen Milner, ‘Lorenzo and Pistoia: Peacemaker or Partisan?’, ibid., pp. 235–52; Connell and Zorzi, Florentine Tuscany; Patrizia Salvadori, Dominio e patronato: Lorenzo dei Medici e la Toscana nel Quattrocento (Rome, 2000), who suggests that there was more opposition to Lorenzo than is often assumed. Cecilia Hewlett, Rural Communities in Renaissance Tuscany (Turnhout, 2008), now discusses Florence’s relations with smaller communities. 18 Cited in F.W. Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore– 12

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Medici were bound to respect waged endemic warfare. Nor was it the more peaceable Arezzo, ‘the home of the muses in our times’, as Leonardo Bruni put it,19 many of whose leading men and houses maintained firm friendships with Lorenzo. Baccio Lioni, Lorenzo wrote on one occasion of this Aretine client, is my ‘very old friend and familiar, whom I can only love for his goodness and faith’.20 Nowhere does Lorenzo write of his Pratese clients in this way; and they only occasionally and formulaically employ the language of amicizia when writing to him. Lorenzo and most Pratesi, it seems, did not enjoy those functional but often long-lived and deeply felt ties of friendship that bound Medici clients from other subject towns to their ‘gran maestro’. Lorenzo appears to have visited Prato only intermittently: for the fair on occasions and perhaps when his prize racehorses ran in the palio there.21 On one occasion early in 1478 he did discuss contemporary French poetry in Prato with a friend.22 By contrast, Lorenzo was throughout his life often in Pisa, a city he liked very much, and from the early 1470s put much energy into establishing its university. Prato received only the crumbs from this intellectual feast, when several times between 1482 and 1495 the Studio was moved there temporarily because of plague.23 There is almost a studied Medici neglect of the town on the Bisenzio, a necessary involvement in its politics aside. As for Lucrezia Tornabuoni, for all her extensive ecclesiastical patronage, especially in and around Pisa, and her devotion to Our Lady, Lorenzo’s mother paid little attention to Prato, centre of a major Marian cult and well known for its pious foundations.24

II There was inevitably a Medici pre-history to Lorenzo’s involvement in Prato’s affairs. Prato’s Eight Priors had duly written to Cosimo on 14 October 1434 to congratulate him on his happy return from exile, moving quickly to a perennial issue for the city: ‘the interests and preservation of Francesco di Marco’s Ceppo, the pillar of this whole community … because in the past it

London, 2004), p. 125. 19 Cited by Robert Black, Benedetto Accolti and the Florentine Renaissance (Cambridge, 1985), p. 15. 20 Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lettere, vol. 12 (February–July 1488), ed. Marco Pellegrini (Florence, 2007), p. 458. 21 Giulio Giani, ‘Il Palio a Prato’, ASPr, 3 (1920): 8–14, p. 11; Mallett, ‘HorseRacing and Politics in Lorenzo’s Florence’, in Mallett and Mann, Lorenzo the Magnificent, pp. 253–62, p. 258. 22 Gino Corti, ‘Il Boccaccio citato in due lettere a Lorenzo de’ Medici’, Studi sul Boccaccio, 21 (1993): 275–8. 23 Aldo Petri, ‘Una laurea conferita a Prato dall’Università Pisana il 25 Febbraio 1486’, ASPr, 37 (1961): 69-71. 24 F.W. Kent, ‘Sainted Mother, Magnificent Son: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Lorenzo de’ Medici’, Italian History and Culture, 3 (1997): 3–34.

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has been most indecently afflicted.’25 There had indeed been very early and unwelcome Florentine interest in this richly endowed charitable institution set up by Francesco Datini (died 1410).26 Cosimo’s correspondence thereafter reveals a certain involvement in Pratese affairs. He intervened in the 1430s to have Donatello complete the superb exterior pulpit at Santo Stefano that the Pratesi had commissioned from that artist and Michelozzo. In this and another project his brother Lorenzo also acted as middleman.27 Prato dutifully sent a letter of condolence upon Cosimo’s death.28 It was his children, however, who became specialists in managing the family’s relations with that town; first Giovanni, who played a similar role in other subject cities, and then the cleric Messer Carlo, Cosimo’s illegitimate son. The priest was appointed proposto of Prato in 1460. Three years later, when the church of Santo Stefano was detached from the diocese of Pistoia and put directly under papal supervision, Carlo acted as the town’s de facto bishop until his death in 1492. Then Lorenzo’s clerical son, Giovanni, took up this and his other local benefices. The half-brothers Carlo and Giovanni di Cosimo had uneasily divided the spoils. On one occasion the proposto issued a remarkable rebuke to Giovanni when the two found themselves supporting different candidates for a hospital post and Carlo felt himself treated as an ‘underling’; next time, the priest wrote, ‘don’t so much play the big shot because my wishes should count as much as yours.’29 Despite such internal demarcation disputes, the Medici thought of themselves as Prato’s ‘gran maestri’. This position they sought to consolidate against rivals from other great Florentine families, precisely as they did in other subject cities. Neri Capponi had been one such contender in Prato and elsewhere in the 1440s. In 1463 Luca Pitti, soon to challenge Medici authority within Florence, had been voted a gift by a Prato government eager to ‘keep the friendship of such a man’.30 Accustomed to living with factional politics in their own city, the Pratesi were surely on this occasion hedging their bets in their dealings with the increasingly divided leaders of the Medici regime in Florence itself. Two years earlier, the town had ceded formal authority to three Florentines – Luigi Ridolfi, Francesco Orlandi and Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici – to reform their 25

Archivio di Stato, Florence (henceforth ASF). Archivio Mediceo avanti il Principato (henceforth MAP), 11, 40: ‘Le ragioni e conservatione del Ceppo di Francescho di Marcho, il quale è sostegno di tutta questa comunità … perché molto sconciamente è stata nel passato gravata.’ 26 Vestri, ‘ Istituzioni e vita sociale’, p. 31. 27 Francesco Gurrieri, Donatello e Michelozzo nel pulpito di Prato (Florence, 1970), pp. 19, 21; Ferdinando Baldanzi, Della chiesa Cattedrale di Prato (Prato, 1846), p. 253. 28 ASF, MAP, 163, f. 26v, 3 August 1464. All dates are in modern style. 29 ASF, MAP, 7, 244, 7 May, no year: ‘Non mi facciate sì gram maestro ché le vogle mie abbino andare di pari colle vostre.’ MAP contains a number of Carlo’s letters to Lorenzo and other kinsmen; see too Protocolli del Carteggio di Lorenzo de’ Medici, ed. Marcello del Piazzo (Florence, 1956), Index (henceforth Protocolli). For Carlo, see too Baldanzi, Della chiesa Cattedrale, pp. 169–81; Giovanni Battista Picotti, La giovanezza di Leone X (Milan, 1928; reprinted Rome, 1981), pp. 94, 111–12, 141. 30 Cited in William J. Connell, La città dei crucci (Florence, 2000), p.140, note 25.

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electoral system and oversee the ‘luoghi pii’. These were the Ceppo Vecchio, Datini’s newer Ceppo, and several hospitals. The point of this Florentine intervention was to put a stop to faction, to government ‘a sette et a parti’, and almost certainly it was not a mere pretext.31 References both by Pratesi and Florentines to the town’s divisive party politics continue throughout our period.

III Just three months before his death in early December 1469, the Pratesi authorities voted to have Piero’s arms painted in their audience chamber.32 This was no doubt to reassure the young Lorenzo of the city’s loyalty to his family, a subject on which he may have begun to harbour doubts. For the past four years or so the Medici heir apparent, as part of his political apprenticeship, had been fishing in the waters of Pratese politics and patronage. He received letters from Pratesi seeking his support, and in turn exacted favours; as when in 1465 the city appointed his candidate to the plum job of notary to the Danni Dati ‘considering the love and affection your late Cosimo … and Piero your father, always bore this people, and in the hope Your Magnificence will do the same.’33 The going was not always so easy, however. Just as Piero had been politely but firmly informed in the same year that the Eight could not comply with a request of his,34 two years later Lorenzo received a letter from the governors of Datini’s Ceppo declining to dispense alms to his poor client. It was not the usual time to dispense largesse, the harvest was not yet in, and taxes were high, they argued, though they would try to please him at the appropriate time ‘according to ancestral practice.’35 In October 1468 Lorenzo was informed by Vanozzo di Piero Rocchi, who was to prove as good a Pratese partisan as he was to find, that an appointment for which the young Medici was pushing was experiencing difficulties in winning approval in the Council, despite (or perhaps because of) Vanozzo’s lobbying.36 For the next few years of his early and insecure ascendancy, Lorenzo’s difficulties with Prato increased, and the city’s with him. In January 1469 Medici refused a handsome wedding gift – a silver cooling dish, on which were sculpted the arms of the Medici and Prato – despite the town’s dispatching an embassy to persuade him to reconsider. Lorenzo’s motives for doing so the Pratese records do not reveal to us. Perhaps the gift was premature for a wedding still some months off, or was considered too extravagant. For 31

Archivio di Stato, Prato (henceforth ASP). Fondo Comunale, 7, no foliation. ASP, Diurnini, 103, f. 32r. 33 ASF, MAP, 20, 156, 10 July 1465: ‘Considerato l’amore e l’afectione à sempre portato a questo popolo quella buona memoria di Cosimo vostro … et simile Piero vostro padre, sperando simile farà la Vostra Magnificentia.’ 34 Ibid., 93, 465, 28 August 1465. 35 Ibid., 22, 132, 24 July 1476: ‘sechond(o) l’usanza de’ nostri antecessori’. 36 Ibid., 23, 216. 32

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their part the Pratesi were upset, carefully storing the precious object away in a sacred place, the chapel of the Virgin in Santo Stefano.37 It was retrieved many years later – whether in a spirit of frugality or irony, or both – as a gift, duly restored, to be offered to Lorenzo’s son Giovanni, their proposto recently made a cardinal. The present was again refused, but in a courteous spirit that left the Pratesi with unruffled feelings.38 Riccardo Fubini is surely correct in suggesting that in 1469, however, there had been ‘a state of distrust and unpleasantness’ between the two parties.39 Once married, Lorenzo went north on a semi-diplomatic mission. Although he stopped in Prato, dining with his uncle Carlo, the podestà, ‘and others of his companions’, he did not apparently receive visits from local clients, as he was to do immediately afterwards on arriving in Pistoia.40 It is perhaps not surprising that one of the first rebuffs Lorenzo received as a patronage broker upon taking over the Florentine regime in early December was from Prato, which two weeks later declined to appoint his nominee as grammar master there.41 On 6 April 1470, tumultuous events in Prato forced upon Lorenzo the first major challenge he faced as he struggled to assume authority. The exiled Florentine Bernardo di Salvestro Nardi and his followers took the city from within by stealth and imprisoned the Florentine podestà, Cesare Petrucci, amidst shouts of ‘Long live the Marzocco and the Florentine exiles, and down with the estimo’; or so the pro-Medicean chronicler Vanozzo Rocchi tells us.42 Order was quickly restored later in the day by the Eight Priors, who imprisoned Nardi and his men. Lorenzo urgently requested the armed intervention of the duke of Milan, and wrote to his cousin, Gualterotto Bardi, ruler of the small county of Vernio just north of Prato, ordering him to have retainers ready pending an official Florentine command to repress the revolt.43 In Florence itself, or so Sacramoro assured the duke of Milan, the new Laurentian regime had firm support.44 Alessandra Strozzi’s correspondence rather conveys a sense of chaos: ‘For two hours there was complete confusion, with people running about the streets, and particularly around Lorenzo di Piero’s house.’ 37

Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lettere, vol. 1 (1460–474), ed. Riccardo Fubini (Florence, 1977), p.155 (henceforth Fubini); ASP, Diurnini, 103, ff. 98r–99r, 105v. 38 Picotti, La giovanezza di Leone X, p. 318. An important document concerning this affair in ASP, Patrimonio Ecclesiastico, 646, f. 99r, was kindly shown me by Mayu Fujikawa. 39 Fubini, p. 155. 40 Letter by Gentile Becchi: Angelo Fabroni, Laurenttii Medicis Magnifici Vita (2 vols, Pisa, 1784), vol. 2, pp. 54–6. 41 Fubini, pp. 155–57. 42 Ruggero Nuti, ‘Cronachette del Quattrocento’, ASPr, 19 (1941): 121–30, p. 129. 43 Archivio di Stato, Milan (henceforth ASM), Archivio Sforzesco (henceforth Sforzesco), 278, no foliation, Sacramoro da Rimini to Duke of Milan, 6 April 1470; Orsola Gori, ‘Per un contributo al carteggio di Lorenzo il Magnifico: lettere inedite ai Bardi di Vernio’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 154 (1996): 253–378, p. 328, who gives a welldocumented account of the revolt (pp. 328–30). 44 ASM, Sforzesco, 278, no foliation, 6 April 1470, Sacramoro to the Duke; see too ASF, Consulte e Pratiche, 60, f. 101r.

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There had been an earthquake, Strozzi continued, precisely at the time that ‘that poor creature [i.e. Nardi] had entered Prato’. This coincidence, combined with the judicial violence that followed the failure of the conspiracy, made Alessandra think ‘we were close to the end of the world (finimondo)’.45 The Pratese authorities might themselves have foiled the plot, but it is clear enough that it had backing within city and territory. Nardi confessed under torture that ‘he believed himself to have a following of friends’ among his ‘large kinship and friendship network’ there; and support as well from the duke of Modena, Borso d’Este, and in Pistoia ‘on account of some secret pacts they had there’.46 Even before Nardi’s capture, Sacramoro had informed his master that the exile first succeeded because of ‘the support he had within’, and further commented on how the general population had neither helped nor hindered the coup – as if waiting to see how events unravelled, we might think.47 He revised his opinion in a subsequent letter, perhaps because this was hardly the version of troublesome events that Lorenzo and Florence wanted put around Italy.48 Some days later, however, the Milanese ambassador reported that he did believe after all that this Prato business ‘had a certain backing in rustic circles around Prato and Pistoia’; if Nardi had been lucky enough to hold out longer, the revolt might have succeeded with reinforcements from inside and without.49 Families implicated in the plot were fleeing, Sacramoro continued, whereupon Florence had appointed two commissioners to offer what was in effect an amnesty to anyone not already charged, ‘admonishing them’, as the Ferrarese envoy informs us, ‘that for the future they should not allow themselves to fall into such error’.50 The Milanese ambassador adds, however, that the two had also to ‘keep an eye on those mountains’.51 Machiavelli was later well-informed in arguing that Nardi had had support in Prato and Pistoia and their territories, that the Pratesi were angered by the pride and avarice of their Florentine masters.52 Neither for the first nor last time, contemporaries bundled together notoriously volatile Pistoia and its nearest 45

Alessandra Strozzi, Lettere di un gentildonna fiorentina, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence, 1877), pp. 605–6. Piero del Tovaglia reported to the Marquis of Mantua that the Florentines feared exiled citizens had support within the city: Archivio di Stato, Mantua, Archivio Gonzaga, 1100, f. 455r, 16 April 1470. 46 ASM, Sforzesco, 278, Sacramoro to the Duke, 7 April 1470: ‘se credeva havere seguito dali soi amici’; ‘per havere lì grande parentela et amicitia’; ‘per alcune intelligentie che ce haveano’. 47 Ibid., 6 April: ‘intelligentia che l’havea dentro’. 48 Ibid., second letter of 6 April; Gori, ‘Per un contributo’, p. 330. 49 ASM, Sforzesco, 16 April: ‘havea pur qualche fondamento in quella villanaia di fora di Prato et de Pistoia’. 50 Antonio Cappelli, ‘Lettere di Lorenzo de’ Medici … conservate nell’Archivio Palatino di Modena’, Atti e memorie delle RR Deputazioni di storia patria per le provincie modenesi e parmensi (sez. di Modena), 1 (1863): 231–320, p. 251. 51 ASM, Sforzesco, 278, 16 April: ‘havere etiam l’ochio a quelle montagne’. 52 Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘Istorie fiorentine’, in Tutte le Opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence, 1971), pp. 809–11.

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neighbour. Prato’s podestà in 1496 called for police reinforcements at fair-time because the whole zone was one ‘of numerous mortal feuds, full of exiles and people who fear no-one’.53 Precisely who these anti-Mediceans of 1470 might have been we cannot now discover. The Medici partisan who decades later told Lorenzo’s son, Piero, that among his family’s enemies at that time had been ‘Ser Raffaello’s lot’, that is the Celmi family and its supporters, cannot necessarily be relied upon.54 Whatever the case, the deliberate destruction by the podestà and Eight Priors of the judicial records touching the revolt several weeks after its suppression suggests that Lorenzo and local authorities, fearing a Pratese ‘finimondo’ of their own, very much wanted to expunge all evidence concerning it.55 A subdued Prato now granted Lorenzo’s request that his client Francesco Ottavio be appointed grammar master. Even so, the election was won in the councils only on the second attempt, and with a hardly impressive majority. Lorenzo, using conventional words that perhaps nevertheless resonated sharply in the circumstances, thanked the Eight for ‘your demonstration of faith and benevolence’; and within two years he had been conceded formal authority to appoint to this prestigious post.56 However, as if to shift the battle lines, during 1472 and 1473 members of the Pratese ruling group opposed strenuously, and according to several Florentine witnesses, deviously, Lorenzo’s attempts to appoint his friend maestro Iacopo da Pistoia as city physician. A letter of 21 December 1472 received by Lorenzo from the podestà, Tomaso Martini, explained how he had brought together the two parties in dispute over the affair, gaining from both a firm undertaking to respect Lorenzo’s wishes. There would be passed ‘a new law to the effect that in you is invested all the authority possessed by the populace of Prato’. But when this provision, apparently backed by civic leaders, was put to the councils, only 16 ‘yes’ votes from a total of over 80 emerged. This humiliation for the Florentine side provoked Martini to name the suspected ringleaders and to label them – almost all from families whom one would describe as Medici allies, including Vanozzo Rocchi – as ‘traitors’, ‘a bad type of men’.57 This minor dispute, already several months old, merits our scrutiny for what it reveals about the tenacity of all parties concerned and the deeper issues at stake. Messer Carlo de’ Medici had mentioned in a letter to Lorenzo 53

Published by Armando F. Verde and Elettra Giaconi, ‘Epistolario di fra Santi Rucellai’, Memorie Domenicane, new series, 34 (2003), pp. 268–9. 54 ASF, Carte Strozziane, I, 3, f. 151r, Carlo d’Andrea (Gherardacci) to Piero, 29 July 1493. 55 Fubini, p.155. 56 Ibid., pp. 156–7. 57 ASF, MAP, 24, 369: ‘nuova provisione chontenente inn efetto che in voi fosse dato tutta l’aultorità che à il popolo di Prato’; ‘mala qualità d’uomini.’ Salvadori, Dominio e patronato, discusses the affair (pp. 61–4). I intend to publish a more detailed study of Lorenzo’s quite independent Prato friends than is possible here, especially the Rocchi, Celmi, Gherardacci, Spighi and Migliorati families, on several of whom see for now Fiumi, Demografia, pp. 344–5, 469–70, 482–3.

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of July 1472 from Prato that all was confusion over the affair: ‘In my opinion, it’s a good thing that Prato’s on the plain only 10 miles away, rather than on our borders, so deceitful are the Pratesi. I should like never again to be bothered by them.’ The Pratesi, Carlo wrote again, ‘are too impudent both in word and deed’.58 After so much shilly-shallying and deception, Lorenzo became incensed, writing to the Eight in January 1473 that concerning maestro Iacopo’s election he had received ‘fine hopes’ from many Pratesi, only now to understand that it was being put around that the affair did not matter to him: ‘which (insinuation) very much displeases me’, he continued, ‘since I don’t take on my friends’ business as a joke’.59 The Eight disarmingly replied that despite their best intentions, ‘certain differences and other controversies amongst them’ had led to the impasse, which they had now broken by passing the appropriate law. Lorenzo accordingly elected maestro Iacopo to the post with a more than usually handsome salary.60 Pratese resentment persisted. Very soon, both maestro Iacopo and Messer Carlo were writing letters to Lorenzo complaining that the physician was being persecuted by certain ‘desperados’, according to the proposto ‘more because of their own instability than anything else’. Messer Carlo’s management style, here as elsewhere, appears to have been part of the problem, for he had advised Iacopo to get ‘very close to those of the other party’, causing further disunity within the ruling group.61 Maestro Iacopo left office late in 1477 amidst continuing controversy. The Pratesi were resolved to dock his salary for serious absenteeism, as the statutes demanded, and from the dispute flowed a stream of correspondence in the course of which Messer Carlo de’ Medici and Lorenzo again took the Pistoian’s side. Maestro Iacopo in the end was forced to compromise.62 Lorenzo’s surest friends in Prato at this time were outsiders, not members of the unreliable Pratesi ruling group, although the medalist-priest Andrea Guazzalotti, descended from the magnate family, was his client.63 Besides Messer Carlo there was another figure quite as controversial: the Hospitaller knight Messer Giorgio Ginori, from a family of loyal Medici amici and neighbours in Florence whose estates lay near Prato. This soldier, who had apparently hanged one of Nardi’s followers with his own hands, became castellan of Prato in 1472 with Lorenzo’s support. During his tenure he reported directly to Lorenzo about the hostility he encountered there, not least from the Florentine podestà, whom he believed to be Lorenzo’s enemy. This official 58 ASF, MAP, 25, 642: ‘Io per me stimo sia utile cosa che Prato sia in piano presso a Firenze x migla piutosto che ne’ confini, tale raga sono; nè più mai mi travaglarei con loro’; ibid., 28, 33: ‘piglino troppo ardire sì nelle parole come ne’ fatti’. 59 Fubini, pp. 435–7. 60 Ibid. 61 ASF, MAP, 29, 699, 20 September, no year: ‘piutosto per loro poca stabilità che per altro’; ‘Maestro Jacopo s’è dimestichato con quelli della altra parte, e tutto ha fatto a mia exortatione.’ 62 Fubini, p. 437, and MAP, 23, 689, 694; 34, 238, 254. 63 Badiani, ‘Andrea Guazzalotti’, pp. 5–117.

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had decreed that Messer Giorgio’s retainers should not go armed through the town, after they had all shouted ‘palle’, ‘Medici’, upon his taking up office: a decision that might have suggested to less partisan a figure than the knight that the podestà was merely sensitive to Pratese feelings and anxious to keep the peace. Ginori, who settled in Prato, later successfully enlisted Lorenzo’s support in having one of his retainers acquitted from a charge of killing an innocent bystander during a joust, and went on to threaten to murder Savonarola.64 More essential to Lorenzo’s surveillance of Prato were his Bardi maternal cousins from Vernio, condottieri with whom he was in continuous correspondence, and on whose armed help he had called in 1470. These Bardi kinsmen, also related to the powerful Panciatichi family in Pistoia, kept a house in Prato. A Panciatichi faction leader counter-signed Giorgio Ginori’s rather paranoid letter testifying that the Florentine podestà was Lorenzo’s sworn foe.65 It was perhaps no coincidence that it was during this difficult period of Medici–Prato relations, in early 1474, that Lorenzo acquired from a very reluctant Giovanni Rucellai the estate of Poggio a Caiano, some of it lying within Prato’s contado and only a couple of miles south-west of the town itself. From the start he stayed there frequently, living in the old mansion Rucellai had rebuilt and finally starting construction, towards 1490, of his own celebrated villa. It is true that Poggio a Caiano provided the perfect site for a country house, according to Alberti’s formulation, and that Lorenzo always wanted it for that reason. But the estate was also strategically placed on a hill from which, Donato Giannotti later observed, a viewer could survey Prato and Pistoia, as well as Florence.66 Situated so near to Prato, Poggio enabled Lorenzo to keep an eye on the town while still remaining aloof from it, participating in its affairs only when it suited him or was necessary. On several occasions he successfully applied to local institutions to acquire lands to swell his estate, whose affairs were looked after earlier on by his faithful Pistoian client, the canon Marchetti, not by a Pratese.67

IV It was in everyone’s interests that tensions should be defused, and Lorenzo held the upper hand. In early April 1475, Prato’s Council, noting the ‘many and various disputes and disorders’ among them, especially over elections, gave Lorenzo sweeping powers over the reform of offices and the statutes, 64 F.W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1977), pp. 216–7. See for the acquitted retainer, Protocolli, p.183, and Dario Zuliani, ‘La giustizia tra medioevo e rinascimento: i processi penali a Prato alla fine del ’400’, ASPr, 68 (1992): 1–168, p. 136. 65 ASF, MAP, 24, 222, 27 April 1472; Gori, ‘Per un contributo’, pp. 259–60. 66 Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, p. 125, and in general pp. 72– 5, 77–8, 135–45. 67 Salvadori, Dominio e patronato, pp. 162–6.

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the supervision of the ‘pious places’ and even the provision of university places for young Pratesi. These responsibilities were variously delegated to 24 elected ‘reformers’ and to four overseers of the statutes, who needed Lorenzo’s express approval for any action decided upon.68 The overseers included members of the Rocchi, Spighi and Gherardacci families who were to prove Lorenzo’s principal if not invariably reliable allies.69 This was at best a loose alliance between all the parties, forged in part out of a common fear of popular sentiment in the town. The provision concerning Lorenzo’s new powers insists that the electoral purses must be reformed since the shortage of candidates caused by plague had allowed into office ‘many men who for various reasons are not at all suitable to govern, nor able or knowledgeable enough to judge or discriminate with the requisite maturity.’70 The recent contested appointments, the resistance to Laurentian authority, had very likely come in part from such ‘new men’. As Jones remarked of the earlier communal period, in smaller towns such as Prato popular feelings ran closer to the surface than in cities.71 This enabling act of 1475 duly cites the precedent of 1461, when three Florentines, including Lorenzo’s father, had been conceded authority by Prato. Now Lorenzo, a private citizen, assumed it all, statutory power over a city subject to the jurisdiction of the Florentine republic. This exceptional authority was later extended to his son Piero, and grandson Lorenzo.72 One can be brief in summarizing how Lorenzo used those powers. He was in frequent contact with the Eight, reviewing a Pratese statute here,73 intervening in appointments and issuing direct orders concerning electoral matters there; as when a chancery summary of his letter of 18 June 1484 reads ‘that (the Eight) should advise the reformers to complete the reform and should they not do so within three or four days, he would be compelled to hand the matter straight back to the Signoria.’74 If the passage shows that Pratese internal wrangling continued, it also illustrates that in a sense Florentine government in Prato was becoming synonymous with Laurentian control; which is not to say that he did not still at times have to fight to get his way, as when in the early 1480s the Pratesi resisted Lorenzo’s attempt to appoint as grammar master his friend Naldo 68

ASP, Fondo Comunale, 7, no foliation, documents dated 7 and 8 April: ‘multe et varie lites et discordie’. 69 Men from these families went as ambassadors to discuss the reform with Lorenzo (MAP, 32, 170, 18 April 1475). 70 ASP, Fondo Comunale, 7, no foliation, 8 April: ‘Molti huomini che per varie cagioni non sono assai al ghoverno recipienti, nè sanno nè possono giudicare et discernere con quella maturità che saria conveniente.’ 71 Philip Jones, The Italian City-State (Oxford, 1997), p. 574. 72 ASF, MAP, 93, 377, 17 February 1515, Twelve Conservators of Prato to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici: ‘S’è data ad la Vostra Magnificentia tucta quella auctorità et potestà circa tucte le nostre cose publice, la quale già fu data a clarissimi patritij padre et avo et proavo di quella.’ 73 Fubini, p. 437. 74 Protocolli, p. 297.

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Naldi, a ‘notorious pederast’.75 Letters flowed between him and various magistracies; Florentine podestàs regularly reported to him as well as to the administration at home. From Florence, to be sure, administrative orders continued to be sent to Prato by bodies such as the Otto di Guardia and the Cinque del Contado.76 On several occasions the former were incensed that the Pratesi, who appear very prominently in denunciations of sodomy, vandalized the official receptacles for those tell-tale documents.77 So far as one can see, however, Lorenzo’s influence in Prato, sustained by the provision of 1475 and by his personal and family connections, was paramount when he chose to exert it. A good proportion of his correspondence with persons and institutions in Prato concerned patronage rather than administrative matters. Lorenzo wrote to Prato for his clients, their amici and for himself; his correspondents in their turn wrote on behalf of themselves, their families and friends and other fellow citizens.78 In the light of this observation, one should revisit Lorenzo’s best known intervention in its affairs: his decision to over-rule the city’s choice of Giuliano da Maiano as architect of the church of Santa Maria delle Carceri in favour of Giuliano da Sangallo. Designed to commemorate a Marian miracle that very quickly after 1484 had caused a sensation, the scheme was dear to Pratese hearts. A citizen committee fought to overcome Carlo de’ Medici’s initial opposition, which surely was prompted by his concern that the emergence of a new Marian cult would detract from the reputation of his well-endowed pieve. Very likely, Pratese devotion to the new cult in part expressed frustration at Carlo’s decades-long hold over the town’s principal church and relic. On one occasion Carlo banned masses in Santo Stefano in anger at the presumption of another cleric who had preached to the multitude on the site of the new cult; he was bought off by being made one of the new project’s operai.79 Lorenzo intervened soon afterwards, in circumstances that are not clear, visiting the site twice to see it for himself. Paul Davies has shown that there were Florentine objections on military grounds to da Maiano’s design, which placed the church very near to the castle, and suggests that this fact may explain the change of architect and design since ‘it would have been strange for Lorenzo de’ Medici highhandedly to impose his ideas on a civic

75

Robert Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany (Leiden–Boston, 2007), vol. 1, p. 399. 76 See, for example, ASF, Cinque Conservatori del contado, 51, f. 38r, and passim. 77 ASF, Otto di Guardia e Balìa, 91, f. 110v; Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships (New York, 1996), pp. 49, 133, 203, 224. 78 On another occasion I intend to analyse this copious correspondence in detail. According to William J. Connell’s calculation (‘Changing Patterns of Medicean Patronage’, in Gian Carlo Garfagnini (ed.) Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo (Florence, 1994), pp. 87–107), Prato ranked seventh among subject towns addressing letters to Lorenzo, but was second in importance among those receiving correspondence from him (p. 97; and see Protocolli, Index). 79 Prato, vol. 2, pp. 505–6.

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authority, albeit one under Florentine control’.80 As Davies says, Lorenzo might well have been a broker in this complicated business. If so, his was the magisterial brokerage of the maestro della bottega, convinced that just as he had the right to intervene in Pratese political affairs, it was his prerogative to use his genuine architectural expertise to impose on that city his aesthetic preferences in the important matter of the construction of a major pilgrimage church in Florentine territory. Since his ancestors had had some say in earlier Pratese artistic commissions, his right to do so decisively in this case must have seemed to him obvious. And by doing so Prato had acquired an architect whom Lorenzo much admired and who was about to start work on his villa at nearby Poggio a Caiano. Reluctantly or not, the Pratesi had to acquiesce. However, time was on their side and it was not the Medici but the city’s works committees, who had originally devised the project, that laboured for decades to bring the project to successful completion. Lorenzo made one further intervention in the project before he died, and his descendants were to make their presence felt there,81 but the beautiful marble-clad church quickly became, and remains, a focus of local life and devotion, and attracted pilgrims in large numbers from Florence and elsewhere. It has been said that Prato lacked a deep sense of pratesità because it produced no communal chronicles.82 There are, however, other ways of expressing civic identity. Prato’s particular tradition of religiosity was one, manifested in devotion to its several ‘pious places’, in the ubiquity of its street-corner tabernacles. Prato long cherished one famous Marian cult and in the 1480s created another that perhaps helped restore a sense of communal purpose and identity at a time when this was under threat. Da Sangallo’s church of Santa Maria delle Carceri was to become beloved by the Pratesi, but at first they remained prickly, perhaps because Lorenzo had imposed its design upon them. In early February 1492, just before his death and decades after his apparent quashing of most opposition to his wishes, he received from the Eight a forthright letter declining to appoint his nominee to a position in Datini’s Ceppo. Lorenzo’s man had made himself ‘suspect and odious to many people’, they explained, and ‘our populace would find it very difficult to appoint him even to one of our very modest benefices’. They did not want to appoint ‘someone who seeks (office) so importunately, using outside pressure’ – surely a direct rebuke to Lorenzo – because ‘the Ceppo is our territory’s

80

Paul Davies, ‘The Early History of S. Maria delle Carceri in Prato’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 54 (1995): 326–35, p. 330. In general see Piero Morselli and Gino Corti, La Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato (Florence, 1982), Marco Villoresi, ‘Un poemetto e una lauda sulla Madonna delle Carceri di Prato di Lorenzo di Iacopo degli Obbizzi’, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 36 (2000): 239–70, and Riccardo Pacciani, ‘Lorenzo il Magnifico: promotore, fautore, “architetto”’, in Arturo Calzona et al. (eds), Il principe architetto (Florence, 2002), pp. 377–411, pp. 393–9. 81 Morselli and Corti, La chiesa, pp. 109–11. 82 Giovanni Cherubini in Prato, vol. 1, ii, pp. 965–1007.

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heart, undertaking much business of great importance.’83 One wonders what really passed through the minds of some Pratesi, at least, when two months later they sent ambassadors to Florence on hearing ‘the sad news of the death of the illustrious Lorenzo de’ Medici’.84

V The leading Pratesi were quick to besiege Piero di Lorenzo with petitions and complaints after April 1492, sensing an emerging power vacuum. He did not grasp, as his father had done, that Prato’s affairs needed close management. The Spighi, the Rocchi, the Celmi and the Gherardacci families and parties vied for Piero’s favour, and the issues were the old ones: appointments to local office, electoral reform. Carlo Gherardacci assured Piero in July 1493 that, unlike the Celmi party, his family had been Mediceans for generations. The Medici arms were sculpted on their palace and ‘we want you to be lord of our goods and persons, both in public and private’.85 Another current of Pratese disaffection surfaced with Piero’s exile, and Savonarola’s emerging influence in Florentine affairs. The Dominican preached to multitudes in Prato in April 1496, after which a number of citizens – almost all of them humble – signed a solemn sottoscrizione. The text of the pact does not survive, but several signatories made clear its Savonarolan tenor, its evangelical republicanism, by writing, as did one man, that ‘ I desire to live well, above all in the republican way (appopolo), because that is best both for body and soul’.86 The sack of Prato by Spanish troops on their way to invest republican Florence in the late summer of 1512 shocked contemporaries but can seem to have been an almost inevitable conclusion to our story. The Ferrarese ambassador, Bonaventura Pistofilo, declaring it ‘the worst cruelty I ever saw’, corroborated reports that hundreds of non-combatants had been slaughtered, 83 ASP, Diurnini, 105, f. 79v: ‘Sospecto et odioso apresso molti …; si habino ad commettere più presto ad chi le recusa che ad chi le cercha con tanta instantia et con favori externi …; ch’l nostro popolo con grande difficultà gli commetterebbe alcuna cura di nostre cose, quantunque piccola … perchè il Ceppo è il cuore della terra nostra, di gran pondo e di molte faciende.’ Lorenzo’s request is in Protocolli, p. 485. The Ceppo officials had declined to accept a much earlier recommendation: MAP, 36, 27, 7 January 1479. 84 ASP, Diurnini, 105, f. 96r. The Ceppo Nuovo duly paid for candles for Lorenzo’s commemorative mass in Santa Maria delle Carceri (ASP, Ceppo Nuovo, 453, f.56v), as did the Ceppo Vecchio (ibid., Ceppo Vecchio, 203, f.194r). 85 ASF, Carte Strozziane, I, 3, f. 151: ‘Et vogliano siate nostro signore dell’avere e delle persone in pubricho et in private.’ See for just one example the lobbying letters of Ser Lapo Spighi to Piero – MAP, 60, 392, 543: 100, 117 – and the secret report on the unrest made by Prato’s chancellor, Ser Quirico Baldinucci, in ibid., 60, 393, 20 February 1494. The context was a Florentine statute of 15 May 1493 ordering a ‘new reform’ of Prato’s affairs: ASF, Signori e Collegi, Deliberazioni, speciale autorità, 37, ff.193r–94r. 86 Nuovi documenti e studi intorno a Girolamo Savonarola, ed. Alessandro Gherardi (Florence, 1887), pp. 69–107, p. 91.

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the sack having been carried out with systematic terror over several weeks. He related that, returning from Prato, he encountered Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici ‘who was going to view the cruel and wretched spectacle.’87 Historians have wondered what the Medici prelate might have made of the rape of the town whose spiritual leader he had recently been, for he was in some sense complicit in, if not directly responsible for, the mayhem. During the assault, Giovanni had stayed with the Spanish viceroy in the monastery of Sant’Anna in Giolica above the town and, according to its caustic chronicler, only the bravery of two monks had saved that religious institution itself from pillage.88 Whatever Giovanni’s personal emotions and religious scruples concerning the sack, for the Medici – would-be rulers of Florence – Prato was among the least biddable and deserving of the subject cities. After the sack, however, the new Medici regime moved rapidly to recompense the Pratesi.89 With the establishment of the duchy two decades later, Prato became a well-behaved part of the emerging territorial state. The city’s interests were served, to a point, by Pratesi such as Iacopo Modesti and Pierfrancesco Ricci who were also prominent Medici servants.90 If some Pratesi continued to agree with an anonymous Florentine denunciation of 1528 that declared the Medici to be ‘tyrants’ who ‘deserve to be burnt in their palace and given to dogs’ because of the sack of Prato,91 their voices were muted if not stilled. A late sixteenth century English visitor, however, provides a poignant and suggestive coda. Sir Robert Dallington quite contentedly dallied in Prato for several months, remarking approvingly on the popular devotion to the Virgin’s girdle while deploring, sympathetically, the ragged and poverty-oppressed appearance of the hordes of devotees of the cult. Prato, he concluded, had never recovered from the sack of 1512.92

87 Archivio di Stato, Modena, Ambasciatori Firenze, 11, 29 August 1512, to Alessandro da Cremona: ‘la maggior crudeltà che io vedesse mai’; ‘che andava a vedere il miserando e crudel spectaculo’; see too Il sacco di Prato, ed. Cesare Guasti (2 vols, Bologna, 1880), vol. 2, pp. 120–22. 88 Published in Prato e i Medici, pp. 193–4; see too Cristina Nardi, Sant’Anna in Giolica (Prato, 2000), pp. 24, 39. 89 Prato e i Medici, pp. 36–42. 90 Ibid., pp. 36–42, 223; Gigliola Fragnito, ‘Un pratese alla corte di Cosimo I: Riflessioni e materiali per un profilo di Pierfrancesco Riccio’, ASPr, 62 (1986): 5–57. 91 Cited by John N. Stephens, The Fall of the Florentine Republic, 1527–1530 (Oxford, 1983), p. 234. 92 A Survey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany: In the yeare of our Lord 1596 (London, 1605: reprinted Amsterdam, 1974), pp. 15–17.

15 The Early Years of Piero di Lorenzo, 1472–1492: Between Florentine Citizen and Medici Prince Alison Brown

‘He was not only hated by his enemies but also disliked by his friends, who found him almost intolerable: proud and bestial, preferring to be hated rather than loved, fierce and cruel.’ Moreover, Francesco Guicciardini went on, he lacked ‘the gravity needed for some one in his political position and spent the day playing football publicly in the street in the face of the dangers confronting the city and his family.’1 Guicciardini’s criticism of the young Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici was echoed by many other Florentine chroniclers, who almost universally attributed the fall of the Medici regime to Piero and his intimates alone. So, too, have later historians of Florence and the Medici, Picotti calling him ‘proud and impetuous’ and Pieraccini going so far as to diagnose him as a ‘deficient psychic’ whose apparent normality concealed deep anomalies.2 They present us with the problem of understanding how the precociously clever eldest son of Lorenzo the Magnificent could have become universally hated by his contemporaries and the populace at large. Was he indeed the ‘mad’ son compared with the ‘wise’ and the ‘good’ Giovanni and Giuliano – as his father Lorenzo reputedly said3 – or was he the victim of a crisis not of his making, to which Lorenzo’s ambition and external events contributed as much as Piero himself? Using as far as possible the evidence of his own letters and correspondence, what follows is an initial and necessarily brief investigation into Piero’s early years. Piero’s childhood years promised well. He was born on 5 February 1472 and after an early illness, he was calling out ‘Grandma and daddy, mama’ 1

Guicciardini, Storie fiorentine, ed. Roberto Palmarocchi (Bari, 1931), p. 94. Giovanni Battista Picotti, La giovinezza di Leone X (Milan, 1928), p. 369 : ‘l’animo superbo e impetuoso’; Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo (Florence, 1924), p. 169: one of a group of ‘deficienti psichici’. 3 Pieraccini, La stirpe, p. 170, quoting from a relazione from Rome (dated 17 March 1517) in Marino Sanuto, I diarii (Venice, reprinted Bologna, 1969), vol. 24, col. 90: ‘Ho tre fioli, un bon, uno savio, un pazo. Il bon Juliano, il savio il Papa [Leo X, consecrated 21 years after Lorenzo’s death], il pazo Piero testa grossa, etc.’ 2

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at the age of 18 months from the side door of his home.4 Although his two earliest surviving letters in the Medici archives are not in his own hand, his learned tutor Angelo Poliziano informed Lorenzo in August 1478 that Piero would soon be writing to him ‘in a fashion that will astonish you’, thanks to a master ‘who teaches writing in fifteen days’ – as indeed happened, for only four weeks later, aged six-and-a-half, Piero wrote to his father in a wellformed italic hand, promising him that despite not yet being able to write well, he would try to do better; and that he had already learnt many verses of Virgil and knew nearly the whole of Theodore Gaza’s grammar by heart.5 At the same time, the six-year-old Piero was being primed for politics by delivering the opening words (completed by his uncle) of a little speech prepared by Lorenzo for Ercole d’Este, the newly-appointed captain of Florence’s troops.6 A year later his letters to his father were in Latin, no longer submitted to his tutor for suggestions and correction – Poliziano told Lorenzo – but written all by himself ‘in one sitting’.7 Despite losing his tutor only a month later, he nevertheless continued to improve his Latin and keep up his Greek, Piero informed his father, whose travailles in the Pazzi War he confidently compared with those of Scipio driven to Carthage to get Hannibal out of Italy.8 Such was Piero’s mastery of Greek that five years later he translated into Latin Leonardo Bruni’s On the Florentine Constitution, which the chancellor Bartolomeo Scala endorsed ‘in my little old hand, as you wanted’: what a pity, Scala wrote, that Bruni hadn’t written more in Greek for Piero to improve.9 In the next two years, 1485 and 1486, Piero was busy reading Homer, as well as teaching Virgil’s Eclogues to his brother Giovanni; he then wanted to read Dio Cassius’s 4 Lorenzo de’ Medici (henceforth Lorenzo) to Niccolò Michelozzi (henceforth Michelozzi), 28 August 1472, Lettere, vol. 1, ed. Riccardo Fubini (Florence, 1977), p. 392; Lucrezia Tornabuoni to Lorenzo and Clarice, 28, 30 August, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lettere, ed. Patrizia Salvadori (Florence, 1993), pp. 72–3; ser Cristofano d’Antonio di Maso to Lucrezia, 25 September 1473, Lettere, ed. Salvadori, p. 124: ‘Nona et babo, mama’; cf. Janet Ross, Lives of the Early Medici as told in their Correspondence (London, 1910), p. 172. 5 Piero to Lucrezia Tornabuoni, his grandmother, 16 August 1476, Florence, Archivio di Stato (henceforth ASF), fondo Mediceo avanti il Principato (henceforth MAP) 85, 173; to Lorenzo his father, 3 March 1477, MAP 33, 144; to the same from Pistoia, 21 September 1478 (autograph), MAP 31, 341, Lettere d’ un bambino fiorentino, ed. Nozze Bemporad-Vita (Florence 1887), trans. Ross, Lives, pp. 212–3; Poliziano to Lorenzo, 26 August 1478, ed. Angelo Fabroni, Laurentii Medicis Magnifici Vita (henceforth Vita) (2 vols, Pisa, 1784), vol. 2, p. 182, trans. Ross, Lives, p. 210. 6 Poliziano to Lorenzo, 7 September 1478, ed. Fabroni, Vita, vol. 2, p. 184, trans. Ross, Lives, p. 211. 7 Poliziano to Lorenzo, 6 April 1479, ed. Fabroni, Vita, vol. 2, p. 186, trans. Ross, Lives, p. 216. 8 Piero to Lorenzo, received 26 and 27 May 1479, MAP 22: 474, 466, ed. BemporadVita, trans. Ross, Lives, pp. 218, 219–220. On his teachers, see Natalie R. Tomas, The Medici Women. Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 24–5. 9 Bartolomeo Scala, Humanistic and Political Writings, ed. Alison Brown (Tempe, Arizona, 1997), pp. 154–5: ‘Vetula manu mea, ut voluisti’; cf. Lorenzo, Lettere, vol. 9, ed. Humfrey Butters (Florence, 2002), p. 165, note 2.

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Roman history, which ‘having some knowledge of Greek’ – Lorenzo wrote to Ercole d’Este – ‘he has urged me to show him, since he understands it is very rare in Italy.’10 The same years saw Piero being groomed for the world of politics and patronage. After his little speech to Ercole d’Este, he wrote a letter openly criticizing his father for preventing his new tutor – who also taught his Tornabuoni cousins – from being appointed chaplain of San Lorenzo, as the Tornabuoni wanted: ‘It’s only fair that they should bestow their patronage on their own people and not be prevented from doing so by you, who are accustomed to giving your patronage to others.’11 Aged 10, he was at work in the office of the Ten of War, writing out letters for Lorenzo in the absence of other scribes, and two years later he embarked on a more formal cursus honorum by accompanying the official Florentine embassy to Rome to offer obedience to the new pope, Innocent VIII. He was four years younger than his father had been when sent on his first ‘quasi-diplomatic’ missions.12 According to Lorenzo’s instructions to Piero, he was to present himself to his father’s leading allies and in-laws as their ‘possession’, even their pawn, and to the new pope as the loving brother of Giovanni, who was already educated for the priesthood and in search of benefices. Lorenzo’s concern that Piero should not appear too learned nor assume precedence over his elders and betters does not necessarily reflect early worry about his son’s arrogance, since he gave Giovanni much the same advice on his first visit to Rome as a youthful cardinal in 1492.13 Yet in retrospect the embassy did mark a turning point in Piero’s life. While Dovizi found him on his return ‘plump, blooming, taller and now handsome, enjoying the favour of the pope and others’, his father’s first secretary, Niccolò Michelozzi, noted that Piero now seemed another person and needed Lorenzo’s bridle. Uncertain whether Piero’s long gown was made of the forbidden luxury scarlet cloth or not, Lorenzo asked Michelozzi to say a couple of words to Piero about his dress, whereupon Piero replied in tears that he did not know how he could live, since ‘I don’t have any clothes, not even any cloth, in which to appear anywhere’.14 10 Piero to Lorenzo, 11 September 1485, MAP 26, 421 (autograph), ed. Fabroni, Vita, vol. 2, p. 298; Lorenzo to Ercole d’ Este, 5 February 1486, Lettere, vol. 9, p. 165 and note 1. 11 Piero to Lorenzo, received 26 May 1479 (note 8 above), trans. Ross, Lives, p. 218. The tutor who replaced Poliziano was Martino della Comedia. 12 Lorenzo to Michelozzi, 12 September 1482, Lettere, vol. 7, ed. Michael Mallett (Florence 1998), p. 84; Francis W. Kent, ‘The Young Lorenzo’, in Nicholas Mann and Michael Mallett (eds), Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics (London, 1996), pp. 10–11; on the embassy, Lorenzo, Lettere, vol. 8, ed. Humfrey Butters (Florence, 2001), pp. 65–8. 13 Lorenzo to Piero, 26 November 1484, Lettere, vol. 8, pp. 68–79, trans. Ross, Lives, pp. 260–5; to Giovanni (March 1492), ed. Fabroni, Vita, vol. 2, pp. 308–12, trans. Ross, Lives, pp. 332–5. 14 Ser Piero Dovizi (henceforth Dovizi) to Michelozzi, 22 January 1485, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale (henceforth BNF), Fondo Ginori Conti (henceforth GC) 29, 62, f. 20: ‘Tornò Piero grasso, frescho, cresciuto et facto bello, con gratia del pontefice et altri’;

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Back home, his life resumed its normal pattern. We know from Matteo Franco’s spirited account of his return to Florence with Clarice and her children from the baths that the 13-year-old Piero was at this time regarded as both beautiful and witty. He had grown a little, Matteo reported, had the profile of an angel, ‘with quite long hair flowing down a little more than before: a pleasure to behold!’ He was, moreover, famous for his quick repartee, which made it difficult for ‘the poor thing to go outdoors without the whole of Florence falling upon him, and it’s the same at home’; Lorenzo would have to lock him in a cupboard if he didn’t want him to hear questions put to him to answer: ‘I can’t tell you how charming he is, captivating everyone who talks to him a while.’15 Piero’s studies continued, as we have seen. His letter to Lorenzo from Poggio a Caiano in September 1485 perhaps betrays a feeling of exclusion from the political life in Florence in begging his father ‘again and again’ to write to him, since he found nothing more difficult than to fill up his letter with important matters of which – as Lorenzo well knew – he was ignorant. So instead it was Homer and Virgil who constituted his news. He remained close to Poliziano, who accompanied Piero on three of his visits to Rome and helped Piero to organize the Medici library in 1490, getting books copied and the king of Hungary’s library evaluated.16 Piero’s cultural interests extended beyond his interest in ancient books, as we know from the well-known account of him showing the treasures of the Medici palace in 1490 to the Venetian humanist and diplomat, Ermolao Barbaro – who, Piero shrewdly commented, did not seem to know much about sculpture.17 When his father asked him to show them to another visitor to Florence, he left it to Piero to decide what to show him: ‘Everything in the garden and the other antiquities in the study, more or less as it seems to you.’18 He was a friend and patron of Michelangelo, who apparently made him an invaluable necklace, repaired his gems and gave Piero advice when he wanted to buy ‘ancient things, such as cameos and intaglios’.19 He was also an excellent musician and singer.20 He was a champion jouster, winning a ‘golden Lorenzo to Michelozzi, 29 April 1485, Lettere, vol. 8, p. 179 and note 9 (pp. 179–80). 15 Matteo Franco to Dovizi, 12 May 1485, Lettere, ed. Giovanna Frosini (Florence, 1990), pp. 83–85; cf. Ross, Lives, pp. 271–3. 16 Armando Verde, ‘Un terzo soggiorno romano del Poliziano’, Rinascimento, second series, 22 (1982): 257–62; Piero to Lorenzo, 8 May 1490, MAP 42, 57 (autograph, with a lyrical description of Poggio a Caiano). 17 Piero to Lorenzo, 10 May 1490, MAP 42, 59 (autograph), ed. Fabroni, Vita, vol. 2, pp. 377–9, with an extract and full bibliography in Lorenzo de’ Medici: Collector and Antiquarian, ed. Laurie Fusco and Gino Corti (Cambridge, 2006), p. 315. 18 Lorenzo to Piero, 9 May 1490, ed. Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 314, trans. Ross, Lives, pp. 316–17. 19 Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, pp. 137, 184. 20 Poliziano to Lorenzo, 5 June 1490, ed. Fabroni, Vita, vol. 2, p. 295; on his membership of several laudesi companies, Blake Wilson, Music and Merchants: the Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence (Oxford, 1992), pp. 92 (note 6), 126, 134 (note 252), 219.

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lance’ as first prize in July 1493 – a passion that is attested by the long lists of jousting armour, helmets and weapons in his rooms in the Medici palace.21 His mother Clarice even held him up as a model for his brother Giovanni in May 1485, when she and Piero were at Bagno a Morbo and Giovanni with his tutor at Poggio a Caiano. Writing to tell Giovanni that Piero was too engrossed in a game of skirmishing with clods of mud to be given his message that day, she added: ‘You should sometimes go for a walk at Poggio; tell messer Bernardo to take you sometimes.’ In fact her letter gives the impression that it was Giovanni, not Piero, who was being more pressured by Lorenzo to achieve great things, which is perhaps an early clue to future sibling rivalry.22 In 1487 Piero’s life took a new direction when he was betrothed to Alfonsina Orsini on the same day (by coincidence) that his sister Maddalena was betrothed to the pope’s son, Franceschetto Cibo, the apparently successful outcome of two of Lorenzo’s ambitious family strategies. ‘It’s been a long time’, Lorenzo confided in Baccio Ugolini, ‘since we – and all our friends – have been so happy.’23 Although Lorenzo told the Florentine ambassador in Rome that Piero needed ‘help and advice’ when he arrived there in November with his mother, his sister and his brother-in-law Jacopo Salviati, Piero nevertheless made a good impression, even if somewhat outshone by Maddalena. He comported himself fearlessly in his engagements, his uncle and brother-inlaw reported, and when introduced to the cardinals, ‘kissed those fat cheeks, as you say.’24 When he finally met Alfonsina at his sister’s wedding in Virginio Orsini’s palace at Bracciano, he was ‘extremely satisfied’, according to Salviati, who found her a most pleasing and happy child, who would satisfy Lorenzo as much as Piero.25 The marriage, which took place in Bracciano in May 1488, provided the occasion for Piero to return to Rome for a third time and receive further training in diplomacy. This time he was accompanied not only by Poliziano but also by Bernardo Bibbiena, who was the brother of his father’s new secretary, ser Piero Dovizi da Bibbiena, and only two years older than 21 Mario Martelli, ‘Il Libro delle Epistole di Angelo Poliziano’, Interpres 1 (1978): 187; Libro d’inventario dei beni di Lorenzo il Magnifico, ed. Marco Spallanzani and Giovanna G. Bertelà (Florence, 1992), pp. 80–81, 88–92. 22 Clarice to Giovanni de’ Medici, GC 29, 38, f. 35: ‘è ochupato in una certa scharamuccio … con fangho zolle aquate. Andatevi qualche volta a spasso al Poggio, dite a Messer Bernardo che vi meni qualche volta.’ 23 Lorenzo to Baccio Ugolini, 17 March 1487, Lettere, vol. 10, ed. Melissa M. Bullard (Florence, 2003), p. 165; on the bethrothals on 27 February, ibid., pp. 131–5, Excursus, 481–92 at 491. 24 Lorenzo, Lettere, vol. 11, ed. Melissa M. Bullard (Florence, 2004), pp. 366–8 (notes 11, 12), 379 (Lorenzo to G. Lanfredini, 4 November 1487), 415–19 (introd. note); Salviati to Michelozzi, GC 29, 91, ff. 28 (18 November 1487: ‘Piero si porta gagliardamente in tutto quello ha a ffare’), 29 (29 November: ‘egli baciato quelle gote grasse, come dite’). 25 Salviati to Michelozzi, 21, 22 December 1487, GC 29, 91, ff. 32, 33; cf. Bernardo Rucellai’s letters to Lorenzo, ed. Armando Verde, Lo studio fiorentino, 1473–1503, vol. 3, ii (Pistoia, 1977), pp. 802–4. On the portrait of Piero in the castle of Bracciano on the occasion of his sister’s marriage, Anna Cavallaro, ‘Il dipinto con scene della vita di Gentil Virginio Orsini’ in Bracciano e gli Orsini nel ’400 (Rome, 1981), pp. 57–68, fig. 4.

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Piero. Together, they were given the task of mollifying the pope at a time when Lorenzo’s growing influence in Italy was becoming increasingly resented in papal circles.26 Returning to Florence quickly because of his mother’s serious illness (she died at the end of July), Piero and his new spouse were made to wait outside the city at Careggi to respect the mourning decreed by Lorenzo for the death of Piero’s sister Luisa. Then all eyes were turned not to him and Alfonsina but to Maddalena’s new spouse – the pope’s son, no less – who arrived just in time for the San Giovanni festivities. Cibo was welcomed by all the leading citizens and dignitaries as well as by the populace, who, when asked why they had flowed in to the city, ‘shouted back that they had come to see the son of the Pope.’27 Despite the excitement, Cibo’s presence in Florence betrayed not only worries about his personal lifestyle but wider concerns about a clash between Florence’s republicanism and the courtly culture that Franceschetto represented, which can be detected in the careful vetting of his massive entourage and the removal of some ‘barons from Lazio’, as well as his Spanish and Catalan servants.28 So an early and perhaps controversial sign of his influence on Piero was Piero’s insistence on being accompanied to Giangaleazzo Sforza’s wedding the following January by two of Cibo’s men, ‘because here it’s impossible to find men their equal’.29 Once in Milan, Piero dazzled the court with his dress emblazoned with his personal impresa of the broncone, which everyone flocked to see – setting a standard for emulation when he went on a joint embassy to the new pope in 1492, on which 1,300 florins of a total of 9,000 florins were spent by Piero, the youngest ambassador, whose extravagance was the subject of critical comment back home in Florence. He was ‘much commended for his good manners, that is, for not wearing jewellery’, Dovizi loyally reported, without explaining that Piero had had to distribute his necklace (rumoured to be worth 200,000 florins) among his pages since it was deemed too expensive to wear himself.30 26

Lorenzo to Bernardo Bibbiena (April 1488), Lettere, vol. 12, ed. Marco Pellegrini (Florence, 2007), p. 273 (introd.), 269–70. On the embassy, cf. Verde, cited in note 16 above. 27 Lorenzo, Lettere, vol. 12, pp. 317 (note 19), 428–9 (notes 1 and 2), 461 (introd.): ‘Gridando che erono venuti nella città per vedere il figliuolo del Papa.’ On Clarice’s death, ibid., p. 473, note 21. 28 Ibid., pp. 190 (note 16), 317 (note 19), 425 (note 20). 29 Piero to Giovanni Lanfredini in Rome, 22 December 1488, MAP 59, 83: ‘perché qui non si truova di simili suoi pari.’ 30 Melissa Bullard, Lorenzo il Magnifico: Image and Anxiety, Politics and Finance (Florence, 1994), pp. 53–4 and note 36; Alison Brown, ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici’s New Men and their Mores: the Changing Lifestyle of Quattrocento Florence’, Renaissance Studies, 16 (2002): 127–9, Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 137; Bernardo Bibbiena to Giuliano de’ Medici, 19 and 28 November 1492, Epistolario, ed. Giuseppe L. Moncallero, vol. 1 (Florence, 1955), pp. 15–20: ‘era una cosa signorile’ (p. 18); Dovizi to Michelozzi, 28 November 1492, GC 29, 62, f. 105: ‘è stato commendato et miris laudibus ornato per la costumateza, che vuol dire per non havere portato gioie.’

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Piero’s visit to Milan in early 1489 also throws interesting light on the diplomatic anomalies of his public-private role. He was invited to the wedding as a mark of Lodovico il Moro’s personal esteem for him and his family, but he arrived formally with letters of credence and instructions that he followed carefully in his first public audience with Lodovico and the duke of Milan. Before he could complete his commission, however, Lodovico seated him between himself and Giangaleazzo Sforza, and after he had summoned other lords and gentlemen in from outside, they began to ‘talk about horses and enjoyable matters’.31 Yet Piero had already made his mark with his neat response to Lodovico’s words of welcome (‘if this Lord did not lack good will and force, then Florence too did not lack hope’). Thereafter Lodovico gave him precedence at court over other dignitaries and visitors, showing him the sights – ‘the castle in Milan and perhaps Pavia’ as well as all his hunts in Pavia and Vigevano – after the others had left.32 The resident Florentine ambassador messer Piero Alamanni – who was knighted by Lodovico on this occasion – was more measured in his praise of Piero than the Florentine secretary sent by Lorenzo to accompany his son. Nevertheless, even he reported that Piero was getting better all the time, and that it seemed a marvel to ‘these Lombards’, and even to the ambassadors, that for someone as young as he was, his behaviour and his replies were so good and that he argued so well about everything.33 Piero was also punctilious in executing Lorenzo’s orders in his audience with Lodovico and in visiting all the ambassadors mentioned by his father.34 Yet his and Alamanni’s letters to Lorenzo also contain hints that he was less confident and willing than he appeared. On his arrival in Milan, on 17 January, he was unable to visit Alamanni ‘secretly’ – as Lorenzo had instructed him to do – because Alamanni thought it inappropriate, wanting him instead to visit him ‘openly’ the following day. This he did, to obey ‘both you and him’, he wrote to his father, confessing that he had been uncertain what to do with both Lodovico and the duke absent from the city, but adding that he would try to follow Lorenzo’s demands (impositione) as best he could.35 Five days later he concluded his long letter to his father by saying that because he had ‘little free time’, ser Stefano would write about everything else, while to ser 31 Stefano da Castrocaro to Lorenzo, 22 January 1489, MAP 50, 23: ‘cominciorono a ragionare di cavalli et di cose piacevole.’ According to Lodovico, Piero had been invited by Giangaleazzo ‘solo…per dare a intendere che amava [Lorenzo and Piero] più che alchuno altro amico o parente che havessi’, ibid. 32 Ibid.: ‘se a questo Signore non manchava buona voluntà et forze, che ancora costì non si manchava di speranza’, a reply which Galeotto della Mirandola thought showed Piero ‘essere più che vechio’ so that ‘a ognuno, considerato la età sua, pare amirabile’; cf. ser Stefano’s letters of 25, 27 January, 1, 2 February 1489, MAP 50: 24–7. 33 Piero Alamanni to Lorenzo, 31 January 1489, MAP 59, 110, f. 120v. On Alamanni, educated in the court of Francesco Sforza and an old friend of Lorenzo’s, Lorenzo, Lettere, vol. 10, p. 35. 34 Piero to Lorenzo, 23, 30 January 1489, MAP 50, 16, 15 (both autograph). 35 Piero to Lorenzo, 18 January 1489, MAP 50, 14 (autograph).

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Piero Dovizi he complained that he’d ‘worn out his finger’ in writing to his father and wanted to return home, since ‘every hour seems like a thousand years’. He begged Dovizi to produce a letter that he could use as an excuse and concluded with words that presage uncomfortably his later dependent and exploitative relationship with his father’s secretary: ‘my good and beautiful and useful ser Piero, I am totally yours.’36 Whereas Alamanni had initially let Piero discuss Lorenzo’s letters with Lodovico, he evidently decided by the end of January, after waiting too long for a response, to conduct the interviews himself, though in Piero’s presence. And nothing more was heard from ‘our Piero’ until his return to Florence on 18 February.37 The political value of Piero’s visit to Milan should not be underestimated, however. His father’s diplomatic successes in Italy had been at the expense of the Medici’s oldest allies, the Sforza in Milan, who were threatened both by Lorenzo’s marriage and ecclesiastical strategies in Rome and Naples and by his successful intervention in the affairs of the Romagna after the murders of the lords of Forlì and Faenza in 1488. Although Lorenzo had managed to keep a precarious balance of power by first isolating Lodovico il Moro and Giovanni Bentivoglio and then winning them back by secret diplomacy, he now urgently needed their active support in order to win a cardinalate for his son Giovanni.38 So Piero’s role in restoring the old relationship between his family, the Sforza and the Bentivogli was invaluable to Lorenzo’s diplomatic strategy – as Alamanni recognized in opining to Lorenzo that if Lodovico became close to them, as he showed he wanted to do, Giovanni Bentivoglio would also return to being ‘what he was before the events at Forlì and Faenza, and little money would be needed’.39 His embassy may also have contributed indirectly to Giovanni’s election as cardinal, which was announced two weeks after he returned from Milan, on 9 March 1489; for it had been suggested in Rome by Ascanio Sforza that ‘your Piero or the ambassador, but better Piero, secretly’, should forewarn Lodovico, as a means of breaking the news to him that the cardinalate was – as Dovizi put it – entirely due to Ascanio’s efforts.40 Moreover it was Piero, not Giovanni, who was initially chosen to go to Rome 36 Piero to Lorenzo, 23 January 1489, MAP 50, 15 (above) and to Dovizi, same day, MAP 124, 15 (autograph): ‘che io sono straccho la dita’, ‘che mi pare ogni hora mill’anni’, ‘a voi, ser Piero mio buono et bello et utile, che sono tucto tucto vostro.’ 37 Alamanni to Lorenzo, 31 January, cit.; Dovizi to Michelozzi, 14 February 1489, GC 29, 62, f. 50: ‘Da Milano non è mai stato poi o lettera o imbasciata et lingua non habbiamo di Piero nostro.’ 38 Marco Pellegrini, Coniure di Romagna: Lorenzo de’ Medici e il duplice tirannicidio a Forlì e a Faenza nel 1488 (Florence, 1999), pp. 143–71; Marco Pellegrini, Ascanio Maria Sforza (2 vols, Rome 2002), vol. 1, p. 217 and note 40 below; Lorenzo, Lettere, vol. 12, p. 440. 39 Alamanni to Lorenzo, 31 January 1489, cit., f. 120v: ‘come era inanzi a’ casi di Furli et di Faenza et danari ci corrono pochi.’ 40 Lanfredini to Lorenzo, 11 February 1489, MAP 58, 59, f. 109v: ‘spacciate a Milano ad Piero vostro o al Imbasciadore, ma meglio sarebbe Piero vostro, pel segreto’; Dovizi to Michelozzi, 10 March 1489, GC 29, 62, f. 54: ‘Io vi adviso che questa impresa è tucta d’Ascanio’; cf. Pellegrini, Ascanio Sforza, vol. 1, pp. 322–31 at 326; the papal bull of 9 March is edited by Picotti, Giovinezza, appendix 2, pp. 663–71.

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to thank the pope – until Innocent demurred at over-celebrating this badly kept secret and Giovanni was sent instead.41 By the summer, however, the sight of Piero roaming the streets while his father was absent in the country increasingly worried his father’s friends. Summoned to the piazza by Jacopo Guicciardini and Pierfilippo Pandolfini, Dovizi was told that they had been discussing the problem among themselves and with a few of Lorenzo’s friends, and that they thought that since Piero was ‘now a man, so to speak, about to have children and extremely clever’, he should be given something serious to do. A week later, following a meeting at Pierfilippo’s house summoned by Jacopo, Dovizi was deputed to ‘importune’ Lorenzo to give Piero something to do – urged especially by Jacopo, who ‘had done the same for you with your father’ to great effect, ‘as you began early’ (because of his father’s death in 1469, when Lorenzo was 20 years old). Now the same should be done for Piero, and since the only two drawbacks they foresaw were minimal – the responsibility involved and ‘removing Piero from his pleasures, if not totally, at least partially’ – they urged Lorenzo to let them introduce him to all their private secrets, and give him the greatest possible reputation and authority.42 Perhaps they underestimated the second drawback, removing Piero from his pleasures, for the following year a friend cautioned him against playing football in such weather and becoming too good to play with any more. Three years later he was still at it, for two consecutive days out playing lengthy games of football ‘with a wretched Spaniard, who won from him perhaps fifty ducats’.43 Nevertheless, his repeated visits to Jacobo Guicciardini in the days before he died on 17 May 1490, and immediately on his death to condole with Jacobo’s son Piero, suggest that Jacopo may indeed have befriended Piero and given him the affectionate support that his absent father was unable to provide.44 It is also clear that Piero became more involved in government after this, as we can see from his full and frequent letters to his father the following year. Lorenzo, we are told, was giving Piero as many important jobs to do as possible – too many for Piero, who had scarcely time to rest his weary bones, according to his brother-in-law, Jacopo Salviati, though Jacopo said he was 41

Dovizi to Michelozzi, 19 March 1489 (‘L’andata di Piero è posata perché al Papa non pare, per mancho dimostratione’), GC 29, 62, f. 57v; cf. letters of 14 and 15 March, ff. 55, 56. 42 Piero Dovizi to Lorenzo, letters dated 24 July 1489 (ASF Carte Strozziane (henceforth CS), ser. I, 3, ff. 138v: ‘che essendo Piero vostro horamai, si può dire, huomo facto, per havere havere di proximo figliuoli et di singular ingegno’); 27 July, 28 July (MAP 56: 35, 36), 31 July (MAP 56: 37, f. 38r-v: ‘che Jacopo in spetie faceva questo ricordo molto volontieri per havere facto el medesimo per voi con vostro padre et per havere veduto el fructo grandissimo che se ne tracto, havendo voi cominciato a buona hora .. levare Piero da’piaceri suo, se non in tucto in qualche parte.’) 43 Alessandro Alessandri to Piero, 4 May 1490, MAP 18, 15; Antonio Bibbiena to Dovizi, 29 July 1493, MAP 72, 61: ‘con uno sciagurato spagnuolo, el quale gli ha vinti forse cinquanta ducati.’ 44 Piero to Lorenzo, 6, 10, 14, 18 May 1490, MAP 42: 54, 59, 65, 55 (‘Io subito lo intesi andai a visitare Piero suo figluolo’), all autograph.

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delighted about it himself.45 Piero also participated as an adiuncto in meetings of the Otto di Pratica, where his mentor Jacobo Guicciardini was a member from January until his death on 17 May 1490, in one of his few recorded interventions making lucid and balanced points about whether Florence should accept the two Lunigiana towns that wanted the city’s protection.46 His father’s long absences from Florence at the baths enabled Piero to play the role of gobetween, as he passed messages to and from his father and ‘the friends’ whom he encountered ‘in the piazza’ or ‘in the palace’, who were mostly members of the Otto di Pratica.47 Two incidents in 1490–1491 illustrate how this worked. After a possible attempt on Lorenzo’s life by two Neapolitans in late April– May 1490 – that was then said to have been aimed instead at Piero’s vaulting master, Vincenzio Pappacoda and his brother48 – Lorenzo was personally implicated in an uprising in Lucca in June 1490. One of the culprits had confessed that Lorenzo, through his factor Francesco Fracassini, had given him golden ducats as a reward; and although the prisoner then retracted his confession as having been extorted from him by torture, the whole of Lucca was talking about it and demanding Fracassini’s capture, to Lorenzo’s ‘considerable displeasure’.49 Writing to two Lucchese citizens, Lorenzo claimed that he did not need to justify himself, nor – he hoped – did Fracassini, who had been with the family since 1434, dealt only with the estate, and had ‘neither the temperament nor the intelligence to attempt such things’.50 Piero told his father that he left him to decide whether to act privately or publicly to limit the damage, but it was the Otto di Pratica who then appointed an ambassador (Piero Corsini) 45 Jacopo Salviati to Michelozzi, 30 January 1490, GC 29, 58, f. 2: ‘il padre gli da tanta faccenda di tanta riputatione quanta per lui si può e sovi a dire che non se gli posa le ccosche adosso, in maniera che forse alcuna volta a llui ne pare havere troppa, ma io per me non ne potrei esser più lieto.’ 46 ASF Otto di Pratica, Deliberationes, 3, f. 30r; 4, ff. 1r, 4v, 5v (citing Piero’s intervention on 21 July 1491), 7r. Described as ‘questi vostri’, Piero also met with five others (listed, three of whom, including Jacopo Guicciardini, were members of the Otto) to discuss the uprising in Pistoia in March 1490; see Dovizi to Lorenzo, 14 March 1490, MAP 56, 41. 47 ASF Otto di Practica, Deliberationes, 3, ff. 30r, 53r; 4, ff. 1r, 4v, 7r, etc.; Piero to Lorenzo, 1–3, 6, 8, 14, 23 May, etc., MAP 42: 49, 54, 57, 65, 70 (all autograph). 48 Giuseppe L. Moncallero, Il Cardinale Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, umanista e diplomatico (1470–1520) (Florence, 1953), pp. 47–48; Piero to Lorenzo, 13 May 1490, MAP 42, 63 (autograph); Dovizi to Michelozzi, 22 May 1490, GC 29, 62, f. 73, recommending that ‘Vincentio chavalchassi fuori con Piero el mancho che potessi.’ 49 Giovanni Cambi to Piero, 1, 4 June 1490, MAP 42, 79; 14, 249. On Cambi, Lorenzo, Lettere, vol. 11, pp. 203–4, note 9, and Maria G. Cruciani Troncarelli in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 17, pp. 97–9; on the incident, Michael E. Bratchel, Lucca, 1430–1498 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 75–6, 83–4; Mario Martelli, Studi laurenziani (Florence, 1965), p. 208, notes 104, 105. 50 Lorenzo to Giovanni Guidiccioni and Benedetto Bonvisi in Lucca, 12 June 1490, ASF CS ser. I, 3, f. 48r: ‘né è di natura o cervello da volere sapere o tentare simili cose’ (autograph). On Francassini, al. Gambino, see Bratchel, above, and F.W. Kent, ‘Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive in the Time of Lorenzo de’ Medici’, in F.W. Kent and Charles Zika (eds) Rituals, Images and Words (Turnhout, 2005); on Bonvisi, see Michele Luzzato in DBI, vol. 15 (Rome, 1972), p. 303.

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with a public commission to clear ‘Florence, Lorenzo or any of their men’ of any responsibility for what had happened, and it was Corsini who defused the situation by his skilful mission to Lucca.51 Piero’s own role was not negligible, however, as the hub of an information network that spread out towards his father in the south, Giovanni Cambi in Pisa, and Corsini in Lucca. No wonder he told his father on 9 June not be amazed that he had despatched the courier with so little to say, for having just sent him Corsini’s very long letter (eight densely written pages, which Corsini described as ‘a Pliny’ compared to ‘the Bible’ he had written to Piero): ‘I don’t need to write more … and here there’s nothing else at all that’s important enough to write about.’52 The second incident, in March 1491, concerned the public hanging of two men from Milan who had indulged in a spate of thefts and murder and were thought to be accomplices of Branda Castiglioni.53 The Medici were apparently involved again, although this time it was Piero’s name that was on everyone’s lips. The meeting of Piero, Dovizi and Lorenzo’s ‘primi’ (mostly members of the Otto di Pratica) was in lively disagreement about what to do. ‘If you want to tell me what you think, you can’, Dovizi concluded. ‘Your Piero raises his hands to heaven, with good reason, and he’s behaved very seriously.’ It was evidently Lorenzo’s opinion that clinched the matter (when it arrived) by being just what they and the populace wanted, according to Dovizi. Two of the men were publicly hanged from the windows of the Bargello, while the lives of the others, who included a blood relation of messer Branda, were saved. Nevertheless, the incident had revealed a terrible rumour, that since the death of ‘Calderino’, it was believed by men of every condition, big and small – including some of Lorenzo’s own friends – that ‘our Piero’ was responsible; but since learning that Piero was at Poggio a Caiano that night, the populace now said only, ‘so you see, it wasn’t Piero de’ Medici.’54 A year before his father’s death, Piero thus presents a somewhat troubling but not hopeless picture. Still a teenager, he was understandably happier jousting and playing games with his young friends, some of whom brought 51

Piero to Lorenzo, 3 June 1490, MAP 42, 83, cf. 3 and 5 June, MAP 42: 109, 88 (autograph); Otto di Pratica to Lorenzo, 3 June, MAP, 42, 84; Piero Corsini in Lucca to Piero, 5 and 8 June, MAP 97, 217; 42, 90; Corsini to the Otto di Pratica (‘copia’), 5 June, MAP 97, 214, and to Lorenzo, 8 June, MAP 42, 92. 52 Piero to Lorenzo, 9 June, MAP 42, 95 (autograph): ‘Non mi pare bisogno vi scriva altro … et qui non è cosa nessuna più di tanto momento da scrivere’; Piero Corsini to Lorenzo, 8 June, cit. (f. 93terr): ‘Come vedete, se a Piero scripsi una Bibbia, ad voi ho scripto uno Plinio.’ 53 A Milanese commissary and diplomat who had been installed as regent in Forlì in 1488: see Pellegrini, La congiura, p. 61; Lorenzo, Lettere, vol. 12, p. 310, note 7. 54 Dovizi to Lorenzo, 27 March 1491 (MAP 56, 48: ‘Se vi pare da dirmene l’animo vostro, potete farlo. Piero vostro ne alza le mani a cielo et ha ragione, et è ssi portato molto gravemente’); 30 March 1491 (MAP 56, 50: ‘nel universale non si dice se non “vedi che non fu però Piero de Medici”’); on the murder of Benedetto di Fruosino Calderini by two Milanese malviventi, hanged on 2 April 1491, see Dovizi to Lorenzo, 6 November 1490 (MAP 56, 47: ‘Questo de’ Calderini ferito dubitono si muoia’), and ASF, Otto di Guardia repubb. 88, ff. 28v, 134r.

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him into disrepute, than engaging in politics during his father’s absences, despite being clever and forthright when he did participate. Initially, his intelligence and modesty helped to ensure a smooth transition of power when his father died on 8 April 1492. Those closest to the family were clearly relieved by Piero’s behaviour in responding to everyone ‘like a Solomon’. Even the chronicler Piero Parenti commented on his modesty, his readiness to accept the advice of other citizens, and his unwillingness to show favouritism in electing the new Signoria with his colleagues.55 His brother Giovanni evidently accepted his authority. ‘It’s your job to rule, mine to carry out your commands’, he wrote to Piero on 12 April, and even a tiff with his cousins, Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco, was initially passed off as unimportant.56 Although Giovanni was once more able to outdo his brother by triumphantly returning to Florence in May 1492 as cardinal legate of Tuscany, Piero rapidly reasserted his authority over his brother in August after the ‘accursed election’ of the new Borgia pope that Giovanni had failed to prevent.57 It was ‘our Piero’ who – as the youngest member of the Florentine embassy to render obedience to Alexander VI in November 1492 – held the tail of the papal robe after the ceremony and was ‘kissed on the face’ by the pope; and it was Piero, not Giovanni, who enjoyed a secret private meeting with him on this occasion, ‘always held in the pope’s hands but kneeling’. Little wonder that he returned home not only as plump and blooming as in 1485, but also ‘full of esteem and glory: what more!’ And from then on, it was Piero, not Giovanni, who was regarded by statesmen and people alike as undisputed head of the Medici regime.58 For at least a year after his father’s death, Piero acted responsibly in continuing his father’s hands-on, double diplomacy with the Florentine ambassadors and with his own secretaries and chancery mandatories abroad.59 55 Alison Brown, ‘The Revolution of 1494 in Florence and its Aftermath: a Reassessment’, in Jane Everson and Diego Zancani (eds), Italy in Crisis, 1494 (Oxford, 2000), p.15; Piero Parenti, Storia fiorentina, ed. Andrea Matucci (Florence, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 28–9; Poliziano to Jacopo Antiquario, 18 May 1492, Letters, ed. and trans. Shane Butler (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 242–7. 56 Giovanni in Rome to Piero, 12 April 1492, ed. Picotti, Giovinezza, appendix I, 8, pp. 622–3: ‘Tuum erit imperare, meum vero iussa capessere’; Brown, ‘The Revolution of 1494’, p. 28, note 9. 57 Giovanni to Piero, 21 August 1492, ed. Picotti, Giovinezza, appendix 2, pp. 626– 8: ‘questa maladetta creatione’; on these events, ibid., pp. 375–87, 504–11, appendix 2, pp. 705–6. 58 Bernardo Bibbiena to Giuliano de’ Medici, 28 November, Epistolario, vol. 1, p. 18 (cf. note 30 above): ‘baciò in volto Piero nostro’; Dovizi to Michelozzi, 26 November: ‘sempre tenendo Piero per mani benché in ginochioni sempre’, 8 December 1492: ‘grasso, frescho, bello et allegro et pieno di riputatione et gloria: che più!’ (cf. note 14 above), GC, 29, 62, ff. 104, 106. 59 The years from 1492 to 1494 will form part of my wider study of Piero’s life. On some of the events before the invasion, see Michael Mallett, ‘Personalities and Pressures: Italian Involvement in the French Invasion of 1494’, in David Abulafia (ed.), The French Descent into Renaissance Italy, 1494–95: Antecedents and Effects (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 151–63, Brown, ‘The Revolution of 1494’, pp. 19–22.

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They enabled him to keep lines of communication open with both the pope and with Lodovico Sforza until the French invasion became an inevitability after the death of Ferrante of Naples in January 1494. Then, it seems, he panicked. Apologizing for writing too effusively to Ferrante’s successor Alfonso, Piero told the Florentine ambassador, Dionigi Pucci, that one could not overdo it when there were so many uncertainties on the gaming board.60 Two months later he admitted to Dovizi that his life depended on the latter’s ‘expedients’, this time desperately asking for his help in regaining the love of the nameless ‘R’, without which ‘I don’t want to think of saving the regime, or the good of the city, or the peace of Italy.’61 After that, he was blamed for being overtolerant towards his cousins, Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco, who were allegedly involved in a coup planned for the anniversary of the Pazzi murder on 26 April. And by the summer he was said to be ‘more hated by the people than if he was a Turk’.62 Although the scrupulous Francesco Gaddi had assured Alexander VI in 1493 that Piero ‘and the public were so closely joined that the desire of one was the desire of the other’, a year later this was no longer true.63 Piero had lost his nerve, and both he and the arrogant ser Piero Dovizi became convenient scapegoats for the 1494 debacle.64 Yet his father had left him an unenviable inheritance. Lorenzo’s ‘tightrope tactics’ and his double diplomacy were not easily imitable by others, least of all by his inexperienced young son in a world of change.65 As the distinguished ecclesiastic and old family friend Antonio Alabanti put it: ‘Piero isn’t Lorenzo’. His long letter to Piero on 22 October 1494 usefully summarizes all the reasons that brought about his downfall two weeks later – exactly as the letter had 60 Piero to Dionigi Pucci, 16 February 1494, MAP 138, 253, f. 248r: ‘In questi tempi corre su pel tavoliere un gioco di tanti accidenti che al parere mio non si può usare tanta diligentia che basti.’ 61 Piero to Dovizi, 3 and 4 April 1494, MAP 72: 70, 71 (autograph): ‘Negli expedienti vostri consiste la vita mia .. non voglo pensare a salvatione di stato o bene della cipta o quiete d’Italia’, partly cited in Giovanni Battista Picotti, ‘Il Poliziano, Piero de’ Medici e quel da Bibbiena’, in Ricerche umanistiche (Florence, 1955), p.122, note 1 ; cf. Piero to Dovizi, 28 August 1492, MAP 72, 40 (autograph), wanting ‘Giannozo’ to come for him in Prato, ‘per inparare per la via la villa della ‘R’ & lui la sa & non altri di chi io mi fidassi’. 62 ‘A me pare ch’el sia odiato più che s’el fuse uno Turco’ (20 July 1494), a Mantuan agent to Francesco Gonzaga, cited by Picotti, Giovinezza, p. 560; on the coup, Brown, ‘The Revolution of 1494’, pp. 17–19. 63 Gaddi to Piero, 11 June 1493, MAP 18, 111: ‘Risposi che voi e il publicho eri in tal modo coniuncti che quello si desiderava per l’uno si desiderava per l’altro’; on Gaddi, a chancery secretary and mandatory, Alison Brown, ‘Lorenzo and Public Opinion in Florence: the Problem of Opposition’, in Gian Carlo Garfagnini (ed.) Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo (Florence 1994), pp. 73–4. 64 Picotti, ‘Il Poliziano’, pp. 121–2, note 1, p. 122, editing on pp. 123–4 Piero’s undated response to Dovizi (MAP 72, 89, 103r, autograph), in which he said how well he had been served by him; on his arrogance, Brown, ‘Lorenzo’s New Men’, pp. 118– 19, citing Bartolomeo Cerretani, Storia fiorentina, ed. Giuliana Berti (Florence, 1994), p. 208. 65 Marco Pellegrino, Coniure di Romagna, p.148: ‘funambolica tattica’; cf. note 38 above.

222 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

predicted.66 He was in danger from enemies outside and inside, from within his own family and within the ruling group. Because they were powerful and knew where Piero went and what he did day and night, Alibanti warned Piero to protect himself better: his staff were disorderly, his chamber was open by day and in the evening, when there were ‘unknown foreigners’ and none of his own men around – as Alabanti knew to his cost when several times he had had to light the torches himself. Piero needed 500 trusted soldiers to protect him and his regime against traitors like those Piero’s grandfather and his sons had experienced, or duke Galeazzo Sforza, Girolamo Riario and Galeotto Manfredi – referring to the Pitti and Pazzi conspiracies against the Medici in 1466 and 1478, and to the assassinations of the duke of Milan in 1476 and the lords of Forlì and Faenza in 1488. Nor should he protest that this would show fear: it would create fear, and it was better to be criticized for fear than to die.67 Alabanti’s letter shows Piero at the transition between republicanism and the courtly culture of Machiavelli’s Prince, between open and closed regimes. By following the events of his early years, it is possible to see how much these events encouraged the personal and political contradictions he faced on Lorenzo’s death. His cleverness as well as his foibles are visible early on, the latter encouraged by sibling rivalries that were fed by his father’s driving dynastic and ecclesiastical ambition. This ambition also introduced Piero to the courtly lifestyle and unsavoury companions of his brother-in-law Franceschetto Cibo, which in turn encouraged the gaming and love affairs that dominated Piero’s life as he lost control of the political game. Far from behaving like a tyrant, however, it seems that Piero was unprotected to the point of negligence, his palace open and his person unguarded. And although Alabanti may have been right to condemn him for supporting Naples, Florence’s old enemy, instead of the traditional defender of its liberty, France, he was wrong to blame Piero and not his father for this policy shift. Lorenzo’s support for Naples and the Orsini was perhaps his most influential legacy to his eldest son.

66

Antonio Alabanti, General of the Servites, to Piero, 22 October 1494, MAP 100, 152, ff. 175, 175bis: ‘Dico che Piero non è Lorenzo’; very brief excerpts are edited by Benjamin Buser, Die Beziehungen der Mediceer zu Frankreich, 1434–1494 (Leipzig, 1879), p. 533, note 2; cf. Picotti, Giovinezza, pp. 554, 574. 67 Ibid., f. 175v (‘intorno forestieri ignoti’), 175bisr (‘più presto voglio essere biasemato de paura che condanato ne’ facti’).

16 Muddying the Waters: Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio1 Catherine Kovesi

I compare [Fortune] to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici is a woman who has not had a good press, either from her contemporaries or from later historians. One of the most frequently quoted descriptions of her is that by her son-in-law, Filippo Strozzi, who, on her death in 1520, suggested that her epitaph should be: ‘Alfonsina Orsini, whose death no-one [mourned], whose life everyone mourned, and whose burial is most delightful and health-giving to mankind.’2 This could perhaps be dismissed as a particularly nasty mother-in-law joke, except that there are similar descriptions of her by others. Bartolomeo Masi wrote in his Ricordanze that Alfonsina died ‘with not too much good 1

The research for this paper owes a great debt to Philip Jones, who first recommended to me that I visit the archive of Buggiano Castello. I also wish to thank Omero Nardini from the Biblioteca Comunale di Buggiano, for patient help in microfilming archival documents. 2 Archivio di Stato, Florence (henceforth ASF), Carte Strozziane, Ser. III, 143, f. 160. See also the slightly different translation of Melissa M. Bullard, Filippo Strozzi and the Medici: Favor and Finance in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Rome (Cambridge, 1980), p. 90, note 95. For other negative descriptions of Alfonsina see Sheryl E. Reiss, ‘Widow, Mother, Patron of Art: Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici’, in Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (eds), Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy (Kirksville, Missouri, 2001), pp. 125–57, at p. 125 and p. 142, note 6. Natalie Tomas has made the only positive intervention in assessments of Alfonsina, interpreting them within the framework of problems with her gender rather than the actions per se. See Natalie Tomas, ‘Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the “Problem” of a Female Ruler in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence’, Renaissance Studies, 14 (2000): 70–90, esp. pp. 82 ff; and also Natalie Tomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Aldershot, 2003), esp. pp. 107–116 and pp. 164–185.

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grace because she cared for nothing other than accumulating money’.3 This reputation for greed, particularly after the Medici returned to Florence in September 1512, and even more so after Alfonsina herself returned to Florence from the papal court in Rome in June 1515, effectively to ‘rule’ the city in her son Lorenzo’s absence, led others to accuse Alfonsina posthumously of ‘exercising that which she wanted’ in the city.4 When the Medici were exiled once more, and a short-lived attempt at reviving republican government was inaugurated in 1527, Alfonsina became the emblem of all that was bad about Medici greed and self-aggrandizing politics. Chief among the accusations laid at her feet was that she had ‘purchased’ the Lake of Fucecchio in Tuscany, but had never paid for it, and, what was worse, had drained the lake to the great detriment of the local inhabitants and fishermen, removed all the surrounding timber, never paid the 1,000 or so local workers who did the work of drainage and subsequent planting of wheat and millet in the basin of the semi-drained lake, redirected a waterway in Pescia,5 and removed the water mills at Santa Croce and Cappiano, so that, in the words of Cambi, ‘those communes will remember the damage caused by her for the rest of their lives’.6 Alfonsina was no longer alive either to defend herself or to bear the brunt of the Republic’s vented fury, but her grand-daughter, Caterina de’ Medici, was ordered, in absentia, by the Syndics appointed to review frauds in the financial administration since 1512 and to prosecute debtors to the commune, to pay a compensatory sum of 6,749 florins from her estate for this lake – despite the fact that she was only eight and was supposed to be immune from such claims.7 When Caterina’s representatives did not pay the agreed sum, the Syndics declared that the entire area of the once-existent lake should now revert to the Commune of Florence. And this is the end of the story of the Lake of Fucecchio and Alfonsina as far as most histories of Florence are concerned. And yet this standard account of Alfonsina and the lake, even taken on its own terms, raises more questions than it answers. Why did Alfonsina want the lake? Having purchased it, why did she drain it? If, as her detractors claim, she were so avaricious as to buy a lake for profit, why then would she immediately drain away a profitable source of income? The lake was one of 3

Bartolomeo Masi, Ricordanze di Bartolomeo Masi, calderaio fiorentino dal 1478 al 1526, ed. Giuseppe O. Corazzini (Florence, 1906), p. 245. 4 This description occurred in a denunciation received by the Syndics in July 1527, ASF, Balìe 46, f. 103r, 23/7/1527, cited in John. N. Stephens, The Fall of the Florentine Republic 1512–1530 (Oxford, 1983), p. 223. 5 Cambi refers to the redirection of ‘la peschola’ which I have been unable to locate, but presume is a waterway that has been renamed, or which no longer exists. 6 Giovanni Cambi, Istorie di Giovanni Cambi, cittadino fiorentino, vol. 4, in Ildefonso del Luigi (ed.), Delizie degli eruditi toscani (Florence, 1786), vol. 23, p. 28. 7 The Syndics had been appointed by a provision of 4 June 1527. For details of this provision’s violation of the constitutional reform of 16 May, which had specified that supporters of the old regime were not to be attacked, see Stephens, Fall of Florentine Republic, p. 214. The proceedings against Alfonsina and Caterina are detailed on pp. 222–4.

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio 225

the main sources of waterfowl, and of eel, pike and tench for Florence and Pistoia, especially during Lent, and on the eve of feast days, particularly that of John the Baptist. If it was the desire for profit that explains the ‘purchase’ of the Lake, it does not, on the face of it, explain its drainage. Was Alfonsina not greedy but simply arrogant and unpredictably imperious, with no thought for the local economy and local livelihoods but only for redesigning the Tuscan landscape according to whim? The puzzle deepens further when placed in the context of other opinions regarding man-made interventions on waterways expressed by Alfonsina in the lead-up to her purchase. On 18 January 1515, she wrote a letter of concern to her ‘blessed son’ Lorenzo in which she stated: I have been told that a certain Paolo de’ Libri wants to erect a water mill in a bizarre place, and to redirect water through places where it will cause the greatest damage to the people of Bucine and certain other communes. He is content to see this done, and not to care about the wrongs done to these poor people, because they have been good friends to the good memory of Piero.8

Could she have undergone a sea change in a few months, and herself become completely uncaring of the effects draining a lake had on the people who made their living from it? More puzzling still, today, in Fucecchio itself, one of the town’s 12 contrade, that of Querciola, has taken as its official emblem the figure of Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici specifically because of her status as the first to initiate what they see as the good work of draining the lake. In order to honour her memory, a woman dressed up as Alfonsina takes part in the historical pageant that precedes Fucecchio’s annual Palio delle Contrade.9 This paper argues that Alfonsina’s involvement with the Lake is more complex than appears at first glance, and that an interrogation of the standard accounts of this seemingly minor episode opens up several wider issues. First is that of the impact of Florentine domination of the contado – in this instance that of the Valdarno and Valdinievole – on the livelihoods and health of those who lived there, and on the shaping of the landscape itself over several centuries. Second, and related to this, is the issue of patronage and favour played out through the competing claims of upland farmers in the Valdinievole, versus those of lowland fisherman in the Valdarno inferiore, and the ways in which both groups exploited patronage networks in larger centres to effect their goals. Third is the way in which it highlights both the economic importance of marshlands and waterways, and their strategic importance as 8

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici to Lorenzo de’ Medici, 18 January 1514 (stile fiorentino), in Oreste Tommasini, La vita e gli scritti di Niccolò Machiavelli nella loro relazione col machiavellismo: storia ed esame critico (2 vols, Rome, 1883–1911), vol. 2, Appendice, p. 939. Piero was Alfonsina’s husband, Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici, who also had a misadventure involving water and drowned in the Garigliano river in 1503. 9 This palio commemorates a quarrel dating back to 1200. The last recorded palio was held on 14 June 1863, until it was revived in 1981.

226 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

buffer zones between competing city states – in this case, at different times, those of Florence, Lucca, Pisa and Milan. Finally, the story of Alfonsina and the lake highlights the disjunct between local memories and traditions on the one hand, and the public record of history produced by dominant centres such as Florence on the other. As Tomas has convincingly argued, it was in the interests of the Florentine Republic to present Alfonsina as the face of tyranny, and her period of predominance in the city as producing the expected results of female rule: disorder, illegitimacy, and danger. Tomas argues that similar actions, if performed by men, would not have been so labelled.10 This paper goes one step further, however, and argues that the very actions themselves, at least in this one instance, have not just been mislabelled, but completely misrepresented. The Lake of Fucecchio is today the Padule di Fucecchio, Italy’s largest inland marsh. Occupying part of a large alluvial plain, almost equidistant between Florence and Lucca, the present-day padule cover an area of about 1,800 hectares divided between the provinces of Pistoia and Florence, although this size is much smaller than that originally taken up by the marshes.11 This plain, visible in Leonardo da Vinci’s earliest dated drawing (see Figure 16.1), is bounded by the hills of the Valdinievole to the north, the hills of Montalbano to the east, the Arno valley to the south, and the hills of the Cerbaie to the west. Archival documents in Florence that detail the decision taken to drain the lake in 1515 begin with an almost fable-like quality: ‘In ancient times, in the area of the Valdinievole and the contado of Fucecchio one could find a certain lake, called the Lake of Fucecchio.’12 And yet the impression this conveys of a long existent lake is quite a false one, for the lake that Alfonsina purchased dated back only to 1436–1438 (see Figure 16.2). Before that time, the area was characterized by swamps, and numerous little rivers, rivulets and canals, which meant that a person could travel uninterruptedly by shallow boat from Pistoia to Pisa.13 The many waterways that drain into this alluvial plain drain in turn into the Gusciana river, which runs parallel with the river Arno for about 18 10

Tomas, The Medici Women, pp. 164–185. In ancient sources the Padule di Fucecchio is referred to as the Palus Uscianae, and also Lacus Focensis, see Emanuele Repetti, Dizionario geografico fisico storico della Toscana (6 vols, Florence, 1833–1846), vol. 4, p. 13. Today 230 hectares of the padule are protected as a nature reserve under the direct management of the Province of Pistoia. For further information on the present state of the padule see http://www.zoneumidetoscane.it/ accessibilita/files/padprotezioneing.html (accessed 20 August 2007). 12 ASF, Cinque conservatori del contado e del distretto fiorentino, 258, index insertion, f. 154r : ‘[N]elli antichi tempi nella regione di Valdinievole et contado di Fucecchio si trovassi un certo lago, chiamato lago di Fucecchio.’ 13 For the formation of the society of ‘navaioli’ or ‘barcaioli’ of the Arno who transported goods between Florence and Pisa see Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze (8 vols, Florence, 1956–1968) vol. 1, p. 1174 and p. 1174, note 2. For water transport in this area see David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: The Social History of an Italian Town, 1200–1430 (New Haven and London, 1967), pp. 22–3, 24, 26, and pp. 29–30 for San Donnino, the hospital on the edge of the Fucecchio swamp which aided travellers sailing to, or returning from, Pisa and the sea. 11

Fig. 16.1

Leonardo da Vinci, ‘Paese con lago’. Landscape drawing on the feast day of Santa Maria della Neve, 5 August 1473. Probably the view from Montalbano onto the Padule di Fucecchio. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

Fig. 16.2

Eighteenth-century copy of an illustration from c.1450 showing the lakes of Sesto, Bientina and of Fucecchio (labelled Valdinievole), Archivio di Stato, Lucca.

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio 229

kilometres before draining into it near Montecalvoli.14 The marshiness of the area increased through the Middle Ages because the level of the bed of the Arno gradually rose from the silts washing down into it, until for most of the year its level was higher than that of the basin of Fucecchio. The height of the waters in the plain could also be influenced dramatically by interference with the Gusciana river at its point of exit from the marshes at the town of Ponte a Cappiano, whose name indicates its primary association and function. By the lowering or raising of a lock which was built over the Gusciana at this point, the waters of the padule could be controlled; depending on its height, they would either flow into the Arno or stay put – forming a marshland or a lake respectively. Because of the supply of fish and of fertile, alluvial soil, this area in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries became quite densely populated, although always based in small rural nuclei (see Figure 16.3).15 Its position, however, equidistant between Florence and Lucca, meant that it was the constant scene of battles between the two. The strategic importance of the lock and bridge at Ponte a Cappiano was recognized by these two competing city states and, when it was destroyed in the war between them in 1325, the Florentines had it rebuilt and fortified with a tower and three drawbridges.16 The end of these conflicts and the definitive submission of the communes of the Valdarno inferiore and the Valdinievole to Florence between 1330 and 1355 gave some peace to the area, but the bridge at Cappiano also became the scene of subsequent conflicts between the Florentines and the Scaligeri and then the Visconti.17 The consequent destruction due to war and the wave of outbreaks of plague from 1348 onwards led to the abandonment of many of the little towns in the area. These problems were compounded by the ‘mal aria’ produced by the ever-increasing impaludamento, which encouraged malaria and other diseases. By the second half of the fourteenth century Cappiano was described by contemporaries as being ‘in loco solitudinis et vasti’, and the declining population led to the removal of the baptismal font from the parish

14

This river is also known as the Usciana, and in earlier sources was variously referred to as the Arme, the Aqua Nigra, Acqua Nera, and the Arno Nero. 15 Alberto Malvolti and Andrea Vanni Desideri, ‘Per una storia dell’insediamento nel territorio fucecchiese fino al secolo xiv’, Erba d’Arno, 5 (1981): 68–83. 16 The Florentines entrusted its rebuilding to two lay brothers from the Cistercian monastery of Settimo. See ASF, Diplomatico, Cistercensi, 29/3/1326 cited in Alberto Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano e il padule di Fucecchio dal medioevo all’età Lorense’, in Giorgio Galletti and Alberto Malvolti (eds), Il ponte mediceo di Cappiano: storia e restauro (Fucecchio, 1989), pp. 7–57, at p. 9. 17 For more detail see Giorgio Chittolini, ‘La formazione dello stato regionale e le istituzioni di contado: ricerche sull’ordinamento territoriale del dominio fiorentino agli inizi del secolo xv’, in Egemonia fiorentina ed autonomie locali nella toscana nord-occidentale del primo rinascimento: vita, arte, cultura: settimo convegno internazionale (Pistoia, 1978), pp. 17–20 and 58 ff, and also Michele Luzzati, Firenze e la Toscana nel Medioevo: seicento anni per la costruzione di uno stato (Turin, 1986), pp. 94 ff and 165 ff.

Fig. 16.3

Leonardo da Vinci, map of the country north-west of Florence, with the proposed route of a canal from Florence to bypass Pisa, 1502–4. The Royal Collection, Windsor 12685r. Towns identified by author.

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio 231

church of Santa Maria in 1397.18 That the population was still sparse in the early fifteenth century is confirmed by the 1427 catasto.19 The other and more constant focus of disputes was that between the inhabitants of the Valdinievole in the hills just above the padule, and those of the Valdarno inferiore, just below. The former were primarily farmers who made their living from the rich soils; the latter were, for the most part, fishermen, who made their living from the eels, fish and waterfowl of the padule.20 Throughout the Middle Ages there are records of numerous mills and fishing weirs built all along the Gusciana. These, however, further obstructed the flow into the Arno below and so also contributed to the increasing impaludamento. This meant that farmers’ lands were constantly subject to unpredictable flooding, while navigation became increasingly difficult. As early as 1279 the Lucchese authorities ordered the removal of every building along the Gusciana.21 But a few years later the weirs were being built again, and in 1288 the Lucchesi ordered that the men of Fucecchio be mobilized to destroy the barriers on the river that had been erected between Santa Croce and Santa Maria a Monte.22 When Florence established its hegemony there was a series of contradictory decisions taken first to destroy, then to re-establish the weirs. During the fourteenth century alone there were at least five demolitions and then reconstructions of these mills and weirs.23 Sometimes such disputes degenerated into armed conflicts. On the Feast of Saint John in 1343, for example, the men of Fucecchio allied themselves with the inhabitants of the Valdinievole against those of Santa Croce, Castelfranco and Montopoli over a weir that had caused stagnation all along the upper reaches of the Gusciana.24 18 Archivio Arcivescovile di Lucca, Libri antichi, note 45, ff. 129v ff, cited in Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 11 and p. 56, note 19. 19 Anna Maria Pult Quaglia, ‘Aspetti della proprietà fiorentina e medicea nella zona del padule’, in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Il Padule di Fucecchio: la lunga storia di un ambiente ‘naturale’ (Rome, 1995), pp. 107–22, at p. 110. 20 The issue of disputes between the Valdinievolesi and the Valdarnesi is a central theme in the works of Ceseri Frullani (1535–1626) who, before his career came to a dramatic and scandalous end, was the factor of Medici possessions in the Valdinievole. His works were part of his attempt to resuscitate his name: Ceseri Frullani, Gli avvenimenti del Lago di Fucecchio e modo del suo governo (1st edition 1599), ed. Adriano Prosperi and Anna Corsi Prosperi (Rome, 1988). Frullani’s arguments were taken up by Guido Grandi, who first published a detailed summary of the vicissitudes of the Padule of Fucecchio: Guido Grandi, Relazione prima del P. Maestro Grandi all’ Ill. Sig. Marchese Francesco Feroni circa il Padule di Fucecchio (Lucca, 1715), in Opuscoli idraulici: Raccolta d’autori italiani che trattano del moto dell’acque (Bologna, 1826), vol. 4, pp. 254 ff; and also Guido Grandi, Relazione delle operazioni fatte circa il Padule di Fucecchio ad istanza degli interessati e riflessioni circa le medesime (Lucca, 1718), in Opuscoli idraulici, vol. 4, pp. 276 ff. 21 Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 11 and Guido Grandi, Relazione seconda sopra gli affari di Bellavista e i lavori proposti nel Lago di Fucecchio (Lucca 1718), in Opuscoli idraulici, vol. 4, p. 271. 22 Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 11. 23 Ibid., p. 12 and Frullani, Gli avvenimenti del Lago di Fucecchio, pp. 108 ff. 24 Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 12 and Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti,

232 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

In 1347 the Florentines called upon their vicar in Pescia, Antonio Adimari, to arbitrate in another dispute between the Valdinievolesi and the Valdarnesi. He decreed that all the mills, locks and weirs be brought down, but that in recompense the communes of Buggiano, Montecatini and Monsummano should pay 400 florins.25 In 1394, however, when war between Pisa and Florence was declared, the Florentines prioritized the area as a defensive zone and, on 4 May, the Otto di Guardia were given authority to build defences there. On 16 February 1395 these officials gave Santa Croce authority to build a mill and weir on the Gusciana near the bridge.26 So, once more, constructions were built along the river, this time with the express approval of the Florentines. For the next 28 years the principal communes of the Valdinievole – Buggiano, Monsummano, Montevettolini and Montecatini – put up with this situation. But, once the threat of war with Pisa declined, they approached the Office of Fortifications in Florence in 1422, arguing that the area where the waters were overflowing was their property and not that of the Valdarno. On examining the case, this Office declared that the course of the waters of the padule and the riverbed of the Gusciana up to Santa Maria a Monte did indeed belong to the communes of the Valdinievole, and, for this reason, no one could do anything to that part of the river without their express approval. The 1394 deliberation was now cancelled, and all the works along the Gusciana were ordered to be destroyed. A fine of 2,000 florins was to be levied against anyone found impeding this demolition. Despite this threat, the inhabitants of Fucecchio and Santa Croce gradually started to rebuild water mills and other constructions as before. In December 1412, when Arrigo di Coluccio Salutati was podestà of Buggiano, there was a fierce local battle in which the Valdinievolesi destroyed the locks and mills at Cappiano and at Santa Croce, bringing back as a trophy the chain of a lock. This they hung on the façade of the church of Saint Peter the Apostle in Borgo a Buggiano (later renamed the Basilica of the Santissimo Crocifisso), affixing an explanatory plaque next to which were sculpted the arms of Buggiano, Montecatini, Montevettolini and Monsummano (see Figure 16.4).27 For the Florentines the difficulties of managing this area were increased by trying to maintain equilibrium between the inhabitants of a recently acquired frontier zone as well as considerations of using the padule as a strategic barrier.28 Indeed every time the Florentines ordered a rebuilding of the weirs there was also a threat of war. On 29 April 1430, Neri di Gino Capponi, as commissioner of the Ten on War, conforming to a deliberation taken by the Consuls of the Sea, ordered Ragionamento del dotto Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti sopra le cause e sopra i rimedi dell’insalubrità della Valdinievole (2 vols, Florence, 1761), vol. 2, pp. 7–8. 25 Antonio Torrigiani, Le castella della Val di Nievole, (Florence, 1865, reprinted Bologna, 1975), p. 42. 26 Ibid., p. 43. 27 Frullani, Gli avvenimenti del Lago di Fucecchio, p. 109, talks of similar incursions in which such trophies were placed on the walls of other buildings in the Valdinievole. 28 See Chittolini, La formazione dello stato regionale, pp. 58 ff.

Fig. 16.4

Lock chain affixed to the wall of the Basilica of the Santissimo Crocifisso, Borgo a Buggiano, with commemorative plaque and coats of arms of the victorious towns. The plaque reads: ‘MCCCCXII di Dicembre al tempo di Arrigo del Laureato Messer Coluccio Salutati, Potesta di Buggiano, furono disfatte le chiuse e mulina di Fucecchio e Santa Croce per li detti Quattro Comuni.’

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the Commune of Fucecchio to close the lock at Cappiano and to build a fort to defend the bridge.29 This had not yet occurred however when, on 6 March 1436, the Florentine signoria decided to create a proper lake in the area, the socalled Lago Nuovo.30 The official reason given for creating this was so that the Florentines, already richly provided with meats, grains, wine, oils, and other provisions, would also have a regular supply of fish; in fact as far back as 1385 the Florentine Republic had deputed some officials to make a lake wherever possible in the contado of Florence.31 Although the supply of fish was specified as the motive, it is also significant that in the immediately preceding years, 1429–1433, the conflict with Lucca, sustained by the Visconti, had brought war once again into the heart of the Valdinievole. To oversee the creation and subsequent regulation of their lake, the Florentines created a special magistracy, the Five Officials of the Lake, which was financed through the Office of Meats and Fish (later known as the Grascia). Creating the lake involved blocking the passage of water into the Gusciana at Cappiano. Here the five officials decided to erect a solidly constructed weir, built with mortar, gravel, rocks and piles on the model of that on the Arno in front of the church of Ognissanti in Florence, but higher by a braccio and a half (see Figure 16.5). An embankment two and a half braccia high was to be constructed from the weir for the length of at least a mile, and as wide as was deemed necessary to secure the lake, with a ditch dug alongside to contain any overflow.32 Next to the weir a saw mill was to be built, controlled by the Consuls of the Sea, to cut wood from the forests of the nearby Cerbaia for Florentine ships under construction or in need of repair.33 But the realization of this lake proved difficult. There were delays and unforeseen expenses due to the war with Lucca and because of unusually heavy rains. In 1438 the embankment was still under construction, although the weir was for the most part built.34 The drawn-out creation of the lake is underscored by the long period over which appeals were made to the Grascia for compensation for lands submerged. The register of the Grascia, 29

Giovanni Micheli and Paolo Micheli, ‘La disciplina dei boschi delle Cerbaie negli statuti comunali di Cerreto Guidi del 1412’, in Prosperi, Il padule di Fucecchio, pp. 63–74, at p. 67. This is detailed in ASF, Diplomatico, Comunità di Fucecchio, 29 April 1430, cited in Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 57, note 32. 30 ASF, Provvisioni, note 126, f. 427r, 1435 (stile fiorentino). 31 See Targioni-Tozzetti, Ragionamento del dotto Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, p. 203. 32 From this point on all buildings under construction and already constructed were considered the property of the Commune of Florence and entrusted to the Five Officials of the Lake. These officials also regulated fishing in the lake. All fishing was prohibited from 1 May until the end of September in order to encourage breeding. 33 The Consoli del Mare had intervened earlier in 1430, telling the Dieci di Balìa to order Fucecchio to erect a barricade and fort on the Gusciana. See ASF, Diplomatico, Comunità di Fucecchio, 29 April 1430, cited in Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 57, note 32. 34 The deliberations for the work on the Lago Nuovo are in the Biblioteca Universitaria di Pisa, n. 39 (manoscritti grandiani), f. 280 ff, cited in Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 57, note 35.

Fig. 16.5

Lucantonio degli Uberti, Florentia, so-called ‘Chain Map’, woodcut copy after engraving attributed to Francesco Rosselli, 1482, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Detail showing pescaia.

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which lists the 38 appeals received and their outcome, covers a period from 1442 to 1467.35 Among those receiving compensation was Piero di Cardinale Rucellai, who received 450 florins compensation for loss of rent because ‘in the commune of Buggiano I was damaged by the water of the lake due to the raising of the weir’.36 Madonna Pagola received compensation of just over 175 florins.37 Baldinarro di Buonacorso Adimari and the sons and grandsons of Antonio his brother were awarded 65 florins.38 The church of Saint Gregory and monastery of San Bartolommeo, both in Cappiano, were awarded 32 and 50 florins respectively;39 the friars, chapter, and convent of Santa Maria del Carmine in Montecatini were awarded 25 florins;40 and the convent of Santa Maria della Selva in Buggiano was awarded 50 florins for the loss of 13 pieces of cultivated land, all now ‘sotto l’acqua’.41 Not everyone was so fortunate. A Florentine notary living in Fucecchio made an appeal for the loss of a piece of land which yielded 30 bushels and gave him an annual rent of eight florins, which was now also under water. The officials did not, however, pay him any recompense, although no reason is given for this decision.42 In total the officials paid out 4,686 florins; in addition, the Florentines were required to pay the Commune of Fucecchio compensation for its loss of earnings from the Florentine takeover of the weir.43 It was this work, the creation of the Lago Nuovo, which fundamentally changed the ecology and livelihood of those in the area, work carried out almost 60 years before Alfonsina’s involvement. With the creation of this vast artificial lake a decisive decision had been taken by the Florentines in favour of fishing rather than farming, in favour of the Valdarnesi rather than the Valdinievolesi. There were bound, therefore, to be quite different opinions regarding the creation of the lake. The communes of the Valdinievole, however, by now united administratively under a single council with a single podestà in Buggiano, together with the vicar-podestà in Pescia, did not cease to protest. On 23 April 1471 the lock at Cappiano was lowered in an attempt to satisfy some of these complaints. But on 16 September 1471, the Commune of Buggiano sent two 35 ASF, ‘Ufficiali, poi Magistrato della Grascia’, Grascia 235, ‘Registro dei terreni occupati per la formazione del lago di Fucecchio 1443’. Although the official date of the register is listed as 1443, the appeals date from 1442 until July 1467. 36 Ibid., f. 6r: ‘Domanda di Piero di Chardinale Rucellai: … si fa noto a voi ufitiali che nel chomune di Buggiano io sono dannegiato da lacqua del lagho per chagione dell alzamento della peschaia.’ The compensation paid to him is noted on f. 87r: ‘Piero di Chardinale Rucellai de’ fiorini quattrocento cinquanta per fitti di sua beni allaghati e dannegiati nellagho di Ghusciana pel tempo passato.’ 37 Ibid., f. 98r. 38 Ibid., ff. 16r, 53r and 87r. 39 Ibid., ff. 19r, 70r and 97r; and ff. 15r, 69r, and 96r. 40 Ibid., ff. 28r, 73r and 92r. 41 Ibid., ff. 6r, 61r, and 93r. 42 The demands of this notary, Ser Andrea di Ser Giovanni Petuni, are on ibid., f. 27v. The decision of the officials is on f. 70v. 43 Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 14.

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio 237

ambassadors to Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘our most singular benefactor’, with a letter declaring that: Our poor commune, so very devoted to Your Magnificence, hoped, given the enormous loss that was caused by the Lake of Gusciana, that it would be indeed substantially restored to how it was before: when we realized afresh that said lake has increased and been rebuilt with greater height such that where at first there was harm, now the greatest detriment to our property and persons will be caused by it.44

Their pleas were successful in the short term because three days later the lock was lowered, although by 1475 they were lobbying Lorenzo once more.45 By the beginning of the sixteenth century it had become quite clear that the creation of the lake had been a failure and, in May 1508, the Ten of War wrote to Antonio da San Gallo, asking him to go to Fucecchio to examine the lake and give them his opinion as to its future.46 On 27 September 1515 the Seventeen Reformers, who had overall responsibility for the management of Florence’s fiscal affairs, passed a provision which laid out quite succinctly the history of the area from the creation of the Lago Nuovo in 1436.47 First they paid due respect to the earlier decision of the Commune to create a lake in the first place, reiterating that it had been ‘in order to have an abundance of fish’ for Florence, and that: in order to effect this, a weir was created on the river Gusciana close to Fucecchio in the place called Ponte a Cappiano, and an embankment next to said Gusciana river on the plain of Fucecchio in such a manner that the waters rose and they grew and expanded to such an extent that the surrounding land and a beautiful, fertile and ample plain in the Valdinievole were submerged.48 44 ASF, MAP, f. XXI, n. 268: ‘El nostro povero comune alla V. M. devotissimo, sperava per la perdita grandissima che faceva per chagione del lago di gusciana stando pure come prime era, essere assai ristorato meritamente: quando che di nuovo habbiamo inteso decto lago essere si cresciuto et riedificato con maggiore alteza si che dove prima danno, hora ultimo nostro detrimento de’ nostri beni et persone n’ara’ a conseguitare.’ 45 8 June 1475, ASF, MAP, filza LXXIII, n. 267. Frullani, Gli avvenimenti del Lago di Fucecchio, pp. 133 and 165, asserts by contrast the universal happiness felt by all at the creation of the lake. 46 Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli xiv, xv, xvi pubblicato ed illustrato con documenti pure inediti (3 vols, Florence, 1839–1840), vol. 2, document 45. 47 ASF, Balìe, 40, ‘Provvisioni dei 17 Riformatori del Comune dal 1513 al 1517’, ff. 92r ff. 48 Ibid, f. 92r-v: ‘Havendo notitia gli spettabili riformatori come l’anno 1435 fu ordinato per consigli opportuni della città di Firenze di [creare] ollago di Fucecchio per havere abondantia di pescie nel vostro dominio et per questo conto furono deputati cinque cittadini [come] ufitiali di detto lago con pienissima auctorità. … Et per tale effetto fu [fatta] una pescaia in sul fiume di Gusciana presso a Fucecchio nel luogo che si dice al ponte a Cappiano. Et uno argine presso a detto fiume di Gusciana nella pianura di Fucecchio in modo che l’aque altorno et crebbono et ampliorno detto lago vechio tanto che … et messono sotto aqua parte assai et una bella fertile et ampia pianura in Valdinievole.’

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However, they continued: the effect of an abundance of fish was not achieved; indeed, greater damage resulted for various reasons, principally because, as is clear in the complaints of many of the neighbouring communes and people, the lake had become a quagmire, full of wild trees and boggy in such a way that one cannot fish and, what fish there are, are not good; and such a marsh was generated, and such fogs as were very noxious to people, that it affected all of that part of the Valdinievole and, furthermore, made much damage to the fruit and olive trees, not only in the nearby towns, but in all of the Valdarno below.49

With this preamble, the Reformers were able to conclude that it would be something useful for the public and private [interest] and more laudable and salutary to be able to dry out and remove the extension of said lake and leave the bed of the old lake, so that clearer living waters would be able to achieve the selfsame fruit and abundance of fish that the old extension at the bridge had not been able to achieve.50

On 17 September 1515 they decided to reconstitute the old magistracy of the Five Officials of the Lake, whose new members were elected for the period of a year and entrusted with the task of ‘removing said New Lake of Fucecchio, either in whole or in part, and lowering said weir, and drying out said plain’.51 In the final agreements, Alfonsina, who had been negotiating behind the scenes, was given the opportunity to become the proprietor of three quarters of the drained land. The argument presented to the Grascia for granting these concessions was that in the last three years the gabella for fish had yielded only 300 lire a year, while the costs of the salaries of the officers administering the area had risen to 708 lire.52 The remaining quarter of drained land was to become the property of Fucecchio, which was given the authority to cut down all non fruit-bearing trees. According to the statutes of Fucecchio, only someone from the Commune could own territory in the area, and so, 49

Ibid., f. 92v : ‘Et dredendo fare uno effecto d’abondanza di pescie non e riuscita tale che non sie stato maggiore el danno che ne e seguito per diverse ragioni et maxime perche e s’intende per querele di molti de comuni et persone circonstanti che tale … lago e diventato pantanoso et pieno d’alberi silvestri et paludosi in modo che non si può pescare et il pesce che ve non e buono et tale pantano genera et produce nebbie assai molto nocine a corpi et tiene inserto tutto quello parte della Valdinievole et ancora fa molto danno a frutti et ulivi non solamente de paesi vicini ma ancora di tutto el valdarno di sotto e quali per la infestione di tali nebbie non si condurono alla debita per festione.’ 50 Ibid.: ‘Et pensando essi cosa piu utile al publico et al privato et piu laudabile et salutifera potendosi seccare et rimuovere laggiunta di detto lago et lasciare elletto dellago antico che e d’acque piu vive et chiare et da far quasi el medesimo fructo et abondanza di pescie et di miglio sorte che con tale aggiunta al ponte [?] non si fa.’ 51 Ibid.: ‘Potendo maxime rimouvere et levare detto lago nuovo di Fucecchio in tutto o in parte et abassare la detta pescaia et seccare detta pianura.’ 52 See ASF, Carte Strozziane, Ser. I, 17, f. 128r, cited in Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 17.

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio 239

to legitimize the arrangement, Alfonsina was declared a citizen of Fucecchio with the right to enjoy all privileges of the Fucecchiesi, and to transmit these rights to her descendants.53 The especially favourable conditions accorded to Fucecchio in these negotiations was in part to overcome a long tradition that the lands of the marshes belonged to them. As the late sixteenth-century historian Frullani observed: ‘It was necessary to smother the meat with fatty lasagna topped with cheese.’54 Alfonsina was given a five-year lease on the land with a monopoly over fishing. As part of the agreement, she was required to ensure that 50,000 pounds of pike and tench from the Gusciana would be sent to Florence each year, 35,000 pounds of which were to be supplied for Lent, and 15,000 pounds of eel, 10,000 of which were required for Lent – a total of 22 tons of fish. Nor was any fish, other than salted eel, to be exported outside the Florentine dominion.55 According to Malvolti, acquisition of land in the area was part of a programme of Medici territorial acquisitions, particularly of marshlands. If this were the case, then Alfonsina was acting not just for herself, but on behalf of her son, Lorenzo de’ Medici, as well as her brother-in-law, Pope Leo X, the latter having particularly good relations with the Valdinievolesi.56 Diane Ghirardo’s recent study of Lucrezia Borgia’s independent acquisition and drainage of marshlands in the Po valley, however, underscores the underappreciation of the possibility for patrician women to act independently in increasing their patrimony by acquiring problematic land at a good price and then working to improve its value.57 Indeed, in all of the documentation that follows, Alfonsina alone is mentioned as being involved in both the purchase and the work of drainage, and she alone was to bear the accusations that followed after her death. In the spring of 1516, the Officials of the Lake gave Alfonsina permission to proceed with its draining. The architect in charge of the works was Bartolomeo 53 See Marisa Masani, Fucecchio: Storia dalle origini ai giorni nostri (Florence, 1977), p. 105. The transactions with Alfonsina were concluded on 15 September 1515 through her procurator Ser Niccolò di Michelozzo dei Michelozzi. 54 Frullani, Gli avvenimenti del Lago di Fucecchio, p. 139. 55 ASF, Carte Strozziane, Ser. I, 17, f. 128 ff, cited in Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 17. 56 Malvolti, ‘Il ponte di Cappiano’, p. 16, and p. 58, note 53, citing also Antonio Anzilotti, La crisi costituzionale della repubblica fiorentina (Florence, 1912), p. 12 ff, and ASF, Possessioni, 820, f. 9v and f. 46r. Anna Maria Pult Quaglia also discusses Medici interests in the area in ‘Aspetti della proprietà fiorentina e medicea nella zona del padule’, pp. 111–12. For Leo X’s periods spent holidaying and hunting in the padule in 1494 see Giovanni Battista Picotti, La giovinezza di Leone X (Rome, 1928, reprinted 1981), pp. 42, 65, 507, 543, 549 and 642. 57 Diane Ghirardo, ‘Lucrezia Borgia as Entrepreneur’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (2008): 53–91, esp. p. 85. Ghirardo asserts that Borgia’s reclamation enterprise stands alone in the sixteenth century both for its scale and for the fact that it was initiated by a woman. Orsini’s reclamation works in the Fucecchio basin would bear fruitful comparison with those of Borgia.

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di Giovanni Lippi, known as Baccio Bigio, who was also employed by Alfonsina in her work on the Villa of Poggio a Caiano.58 Bigio supervised the dismantling of the existing wall and construction of a large moat, and by 24 March 1516 he had already received a consignment of 24 wagonloads of fir from the Opera of the Duomo so that he could begin work.59 Closely involved in the whole process were the communes of the Valdinievole which, with the Florentine Salvestro Neretti as podestà, were clearly delighted by the decision to drain the lake, and with Alfonsina’s involvement. On 20 June 1516, the councillors of Buggiano and the neighbouring communes met in order to approve the purchase and cost of gifts to be sent ‘to the house of Lorenzo de’ Medici and other citizens [who are] advocates and benefactors of the community of Buggiano’ for the forthcoming Feast of St John the Baptist.60 Despite this mention of Lorenzo’s name, first on the list was Madonna Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici, who was to be given a calf costing 35 florins. Second on the list was Filippo Strozzi, her son-in-law, who was sent three pairs of ducklings at a cost of 5 florins, 8 lire. Then, receiving two pairs of ducklings each, were Francesco Guicciardini, Piero Alamanni, Ser Jacopo di Martino and Giovanfrancesco de’ Nobili. Anticipating that there might be trouble from the communes of the Valdarno, on 29 June Alfonsina sent letters to Buggiano requesting that the communes of the Valdinievole form what she termed ‘the faction of the padule’ who were to be subject to herself or to any of her ministers.61 This was voted upon and passed with Giuseppe di Biagio from Colle deputed as Captain of the Faction. On 6 July, the commune of Buggiano again received a letter from Alfonsina asking for immediate help for the men of the faction of the padule and, not wanting to appear lacking in their response, they deputed Guasparino Morelli, Domenico di Sano and Francesco d’Antonio Guelfi to take action, specifying that this did not annul the authority previously given to Giuseppe di Biagio.62 A flurry of ambassadorial activity followed, with men being sent to Florence to request help in the defence of the communes now vulnerable to attack, and also to and from Pescia. On 13 July 1516, a delegation came from the vicar of Pescia requesting that 20 men from Buggiano be sent down to the ‘calle di Fucecchio’. Jacopo di Giovanni Morelli was appointed captain of the 20 chosen men and was given 42 florins to pay them and ordered to go for a 58 For more information on Bigio, including his work at Poggio a Caiano as well as at Fucecchio, see Philip Foster, A Study of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Villa at Poggio a Caiano (2 vols, New York and London, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 114–15 and p. 415, note 361, p. 416, note 362, p. 417, notes 363 and 364. See also Reiss, ‘Widow, Mother, Patron of Art’, p. 153, note 112, and p. 154, note 114. 59 ASF, MAP, f. CXLIX, n. 27, c.27r, cited by Foster, A Study of Lorenzo de’Medici’s Villa, p. 416, note 361. 60 Archivio Comunale di Buggiano (ACB), Deliberazioni magistrali, 27 (1515– 1519), f. 3v. 61 Ibid., f. 4r. 62 Ibid., f. 5v, entry for 6 July 1516.

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio 241

period not longer than six days.63 However, as subsequent entries make clear, these men were still down at the padule a month later.64 Work at the lake was clearly making some progress, however, and, on 24 August 1516, Ser Giovanni di Meo Fabbro and Demo di Bartolomeo Pelliccia were sent to the padule to assist Baccio Bigio, ‘factor and minister over said madonna’s padule’, with whatever he should need.65 On 5 September the Council of Buggiano elected 14 syndics and procurators to have the Commune’s full authority in all matters concerning the lake and the padule, and to liaise with ‘the most Illustrious Madonna Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici or her ministers or anyone else necessary in order to bring to a conclusion all matters necessary concerning the padule.’66 By now expenses were adding up. There were numerous payments for ambassadors to and from Florence, to the lake, and to Pescia, and other payments, such as that of 14 florins to Amerigho di Niccolò for having provided a quantity of bread to feed the Officials of the Grascia who had come to see the works at the padule.67 Presumably because of these extra costs, Giovanni di Jacopo proposed that an extraordinary tax of 10 soldi for each soldo of the estimo, and 10 soldi for each head of population, be levied and collected by the middle of October.68 Finally, this meeting of the Council heard that: the most illustrious Madonna Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici wants to come to spend a night in Buggiano in order to be able to go down to the padule the following morning to see the work that has been done, and how the padule has been dried out since she ordered the wall to be brought down. And since it seems to them both necessary and a duty of the community to receive and honour her according to what is required for such a woman … they depute and elect as their ambassadors to go to the aforesaid most illustrious madonna prudent men, that is: Ser Giuliano di Ser Baldessari and Amerigho di Niccolò from the Borgo; who, so elected, should invite her on behalf of the community.69

63 Ibid., f. 6v, entry for 13 July 1516. Further reference to these ‘marraiuoli’ being sent ‘alla Gusciana in factione del padule’ is found on f. 7v, entry for 27 July. 64 Ibid., f. 10v, entry for 14 August, and f. 18v, entry for 25 September. 65 Ibid., f. 11r, entry for 24 August 1516: ‘Et sopradetti spettabili ufitiali … deliberorno che Ser Fabbro et Demo Pelliccia andassino in padule per essere con Baccio Bigio fattore et ministro sopra decto padule di madonna per vedere quello bisogno.’ 66 Ibid., f. 15v. 67 The full list of these expenses is provided on ff. 11v–13r. 68 Ibid., f. 15v–16r. This proposal was voted upon and passed. 69 Ibid.: ‘Atteso come la Illustrissima Madonna Alfonsina Orssina de Medici vuole venire a Buggiano et dimorare una sera per essere di poi la mattina vegnente in sul padule a vedere quello et questo di lavoro se facto et come decto padule et remasto insecho poi che si mando giu el muro della calle et parendo a loro cosa necessaria et debito della comunità quella raceptare et honorare secondo che si richiede a una tale et si facta donna servatis servandis deliberorno … [et] deputorno et elexino per loro ambasciadori alla prephata Illustrissima Madonna li prudenti huomini cioe: Ser Giuliano di Ser Baldassari et Amerigho di Nicholo dal Borgo: e quali cosi electi la debbino invitare per parte della comunità.’

242 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Fig. 16.6 Archivio di Stato, Florence, Piante dei Capitani di Parte Guelfa, cartone XX, 13. Detail showing the ducal Medici coat of arms over Ponte a Cappiano and the re-created Lake of Fucecchio.

An additional group was elected to take on the duties of provisioning all that was deemed necessary to provide victuals for Alfonsina, her companions, and their cavalcade. It seems clear, then, that contrary to later reports of her arbitrary behaviour in the matter of the lake, Alfonsina was not issuing outrageous orders from afar, but was concerned enough about the works on the padule to assess them herself first hand. Nor was she even a casual day-tripper, but stayed in the heart of the area most affected by changes to the marsh/lake. By 12 November 1516, Lorenzo’s secretary, Goro Gheri, was able to report to her that Baccio Bigio had just returned from the Lake and ‘this morning he told me that things are going very well’.70 Although there are varying judgments on Alfonsina’s drainage of the lake, especially the attempt to create a large channel which was nicknamed the ‘Fosso della Madonna’, it is certain that, at least for the moment, there was a general improvement in the flow of water, a freshening of the air, and an increase in fishing, especially of eels. Disastrously for Alfonsina’s reputation, though, the work remained incomplete due to the death in rapid succession of Alfonsina, and the other Medici who might have been able to oversee the 70

ASF, MAP, f. CXLII, Copialettere di Ghoro Gheri, f. 304, cited in Foster, A Study of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Villa, p. 417, note 363: ‘Baccio Bigio ordinerò quanto la S(ignoria) V(ostra) commette; el quale hieri torno dal lagho e questa mactina me ha decto che le cose vanno benissimo.’

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio 243

Fig. 16.7

‘La Valdinievole, seconda metà del XVII secolo’. View of the reconstructed Lake of Fucecchio, Archivio di Stato, Florence.

244 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

work to completion: Alfonsina’s 27-year-old son Lorenzo died in May 1519; Alfonsina herself died on 7 February 1520; and Pope Leo X de’ Medici died on 1 December 1521. The drainage was left incomplete and the leasing payments that Alfonsina was scheduled to make could not be realized in time. As stated earlier, the revived Republic of 1527 then declared Alfonsina’s ownership of this lake null and void when Caterina de’ Medici failed to pay the required 6,749 florins. In 1530, when the Medici returned to power, the drained lands passed to Alessandro de’ Medici, to whom the protests of Fucecchio were now directed. The people laid claim to the quarter of the lands never given to them, and demanded the restoration of the saw mill at Cappiano, which had been put out of use since the lowering of the waters. When Alessandro failed to respond, the protests were directed to his successor, Cosimo I, who became Duke of Florence in 1537. Cosimo proved extremely interested in the Fucecchio basin, but not in the protests of the inhabitants. He decided, categorically, that a lake should be re-created, and, in a decree of 26 February 1550, instructed that the weir at Cappiano should be raised once more (see Figures 16.6 and 16.7).71 To forestall and prevent any further disputes on the vexed subject of the lake, Cosimo ordered the erection of two marble inscriptions on the bridge at Ponte a Cappiano, one in Latin, the other a translation in Italian (see Figures 16.8a and 16.8b). The inscriptions declared emphatically that: Cosimo de Medici, Duke of Florence, remade this lake from its foundations for the public benefit, and no one is to remove it again in the hope of acquiring any benefit to the countryside, knowing that every time it has been removed the use of the land below has been lost, and above there has been loss of fishing without anyone acquiring anything.

Cosimo’s decision resulted fairly soon not in a deep lake, as he had hoped, but in stagnating waters once more. Within a few weeks, according to an anonymous Florentine diary, many of the local inhabitants had turned yellow and become swollen, and soon two thirds of them were dead. Cosimo’s decision remained, however, and nothing was done to improve the health or livelihoods of the local inhabitants for the next two centuries. Between 1550 and 1756 there were 12 epidemics of malaria not just at the edge of the marshes, but in the nearby towns, including Buggiano and Montecatini.72 Finally, in the late eighteenth century, the lake became the focus of attention once more. In 1780, Duke Pietro Leopoldo ordered the lowering of the weir at Cappiano, and commanded, through a series of provisions, that the area should be drained and given over increasingly to farming (see Figure 16.9). In 1803 the Consorzio coattivo dei proprietari dei terreni del Padule was created, 71 Luca Martini was placed in charge of the rebuilding of the Lake to make an enormous basin reserved exclusively for fish. 72 Federazione italiana della Caccia (ed.), Toscana, le zone umide e la loro avifauna (Florence, 1989), and Consorzio di Bonifica del Padule di Fucecchio (ed.), Progetto pilota per la salvaguardia e la valorizzazione del Padule di Fucecchio (Ponte Buggianese, 1977).

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio 245

Fig. 16.8a and b Plaques erected on the bridge at Ponte a Cappiano by Cosimo I de’ Medici.

Fig. 16.9

‘Pianta del padule di Fucecchio con i suoi affluenti e le circonstanti fattorie medicee’ (sec. xviii), Archivio di Stato, Florence, Piante dei Capitani di Parte Guelfa, cartone XXVI, 2. Oriented with Ponte a Cappiano to the left, and the hills of the Valdinievole to the right.

Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the Lake of Fucecchio 247

and, in 1824, Duke Leopoldo II ordered a cataract to be built at Montecalvoli in order to counteract any flooding that might occur from a rise in the Arno. There was never again any attempt to create a lake in the area. This brings us back to Alfonsina who was not, it should be clear by now, merely acting imperiously and without thought for local inhabitants. Substantially more damage was caused to the basin of Fucecchio by the Republic of Florence itself, and by Cosimo I de’ Medici. The main problem for Alfonsina was that she died so soon, before any profits were realized and any payments could be made. In Machiavellian terms, she, and her immediate family, had been swamped by the torrential forces of Fortune. However, whatever other claims can be made about Alfonsina’s greed and imperious temperament, she was clearly used quite unjustly by contemporary historians of the Florentine Republic concerning the Lake of Fucecchio, to bolster a view of Medicean negligent greed. But it is not only Fortune that has been likened to torrential waters. As Angelo Poliziano noted: Unjust things cannot last, [for] justice is made like water, that, when it is impeded from its course, either breaks that barrier and impediment, or it increases and swells so much that it flows over the top.73

73

201.

Angelo Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, ed. Tiziano Zanato (Rome, 1983), p. 75, note

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17 The Medici Dukes, Comandati and Pratolino: Forced Labour in Renaissance Florence Suzanne B. Butters

The ability of authorities to oblige peasants and their animals to labour on works beyond their usual ones was by no means uncommon in medieval and early modern Italy, and it had been preceded by the rights of Roman emperors to impose labour services.1 The forms these exactions took, however, depended on the kinds of ties that bound rural workers to those in authority. These could be landowners,2 feudal lords3

1

Arnold H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 184–602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey (3 vols, Oxford, 1964, reprinted Baltimore, 1992), vol. 1, p. 76; Giulio Rezasco, Dizionario del linguaggio italiano storico ed amministrativo (Florence, 1881; new ed., Bologna, 1982), pp. 34, 717; Pier S. Leicht, Operai, artigiani, agricoltori in Italia dal secolo VI al XVI (Milan, 1959), p. 202 and note 1; Jacques Le Goff, La civiltà dell’occidente medievale, trans. Adriana Menitoni (Florence, 1969), p. 263; Giorgio Picasso, ‘Campagna e contadini nella legislazione della Chiesa fino a Graziano’, in Vito Fumagalli and Gabriella Rossetti (eds), Medioevo rurale: sulle tracce della civiltà contadina (Bologna, 1980), p. 394; Robert-Henri Bautier, The Economic Development of Medieval Europe, trans. Heather Karolyi (London, 1970), p. 39; Le prestazioni d’opera nelle campagne italiane del medioevo (IX Convegno Storico di Bagni di Lucca, 1984), intro. Vito Fumagalli (Bologna, 1987), passim, and especially Giuseppe Gullino, ‘Le prestazioni d’opera di tipo pubblico nel pieno Medioevo pedemontanto’, ibid., pp. 129–143; and Philip Jones, The Italian CityState: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford, 1997), pp. 66, 358–9, 535, 567. 2 Massimo Montanari, Contadini e città fra ‘Langobardia’ e ‘Romania’ (Florence, 1988), pp. 33–65; and Giuliano Pinto, ‘Le prestazioni d’opera nei contratti mezzadrili del Senese (secolo XIII–1348)’, in Le prestazioni d’opera, pp. 199–208. The Grand Dukes sometimes delegated public authority to landowners, to conscript their own labourers (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, henceforth ASF, Capitani di Parte Numeri Neri, henceforth CN, 1467, n. 286, memoriale of 1580). 3 Denis Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape. Geographical Change and its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth-century Italy (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1993), pp. 149– 150; Edward Muir, ‘The Idea of Community in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 55 (2002), p. 7; Marta Bartolini, Sassetta primo feudo mediceo (Volterra, 1990), pp. 13–14, 228; and ASF, Mediceo del Principato (henceforth MdP), 244, f. 85v, 21 April 1575.

250 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

or city states,4 republics5 or principates,6 or combinations of these.7 The gradual accumulation of territories, each component of which had its own historic powers and jurisdictions, was such that city states like Florence, and the Medici principate which succeeded the Florentine Republic in 1532, had accrued and consolidated sound legal foundations for commandeering peasant labourers from their contado and dominio (see Figure 17.1).8 This paper investigates how, when and why this authority was exercised, and in whose interests. Was a distinction made between the public good and that of the prince? For what kinds of projects were comandati summoned? What were the terms and conditions of their work? And were there limits beyond which the authorities were unwise to go? Fig. 17.1 Jacques Callot. Landscape with donkey and peasant taking off his shoe (Capricci di varie figure di Iacopo Callot, The Florentine set). British Museum.

We are able to explore these questions due to the unusually rich records of two ducal magistracies empowered to conscript: the Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Giurisdizione Toscana, established in 1560 to oversee the complex 4

Antonio Ivan Pini, Città, comuni e corporazioni nel medioevo italiano (Bologna, 1986), pp. 105–107; and cf. Montanari, Contadini e città, pp. 28–9, 31–2, 42–3, 46–9. 5 Cosgrove, Palladian Landscape, p. 148. 6 Ferrara provides a good example: Lino Marini, Lo stato estense (Turin, 1987), pp. 18, 49, 57; and Francesco Ceccarelli, La città di Alcina. Architettura e politica alle foci del Po nel tardo Cinquecento (Bologna, 1998), pp. 180–1. 7 Odile Redon, Uomini e comunità del contado senese nel Duecento (Siena, 1982), pp. 129–35, and passim on ‘diritti signorili’, ‘corvées’, and ‘albergaria’. 8 On these legal-administrative terms, see Rezasco, Dizionario, pp. 295–6, 373–4; P.J. Jones, The Italian City-State, pp. 360–70; Elena Fasano Guarini, ‘Principi e territori in Italia. Il caso toscano tra Cinque- e Seicento’, in Christof Dipper and Mario Rosa (eds), La società dei principi nell’Europa moderna (secoli XVI–XVII) (Bologna, 2005), p. 129; and Bastiano Arditi, Diario di Firenze e di altre parti della Cristianità (1574–1579), ed. Roberto Cantagalli (Florence, 1970), p. 295.

Comandati and Pratolino: Forced Labour in Renaissance Florence 251

rapport between Florence and its subject communities,9 and the Capitani di Parte Guelfa.10 The Parte’s responsibility for public properties involved it in commandeering, a function it had absorbed from the republican Ufficiali di Torre when Cosimo I merged the two magistracies in 1549.11 The Nove’s responsibility for keeping financial tabs on the local officials needed to make the commandeering system work, as well as for the accounts of public works overseen by the Parte,12 explain why lists of conscripts from local parishes survive in their papers (Figure 17.3).13 The involvement of these two magistracies in the realization of Pratolino, Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici’s new villa, garden and estate north-east of Florence, offers an unusual opportunity to see how the system worked in practice and, taken with other evidence, to glimpse how it was viewed by contemporaries (Figures 17.4, 17.5). We begin with a vitriolic critic of the Medici regime, Bastiano Arditi.14 Well informed, resentful and true to his working-class roots in the Camaldoli

9 Giovanni C. Pratilli and Luigi Zangheri, La legislazione medicea sull’ambiente. I. I bandi (1485–1619) (Florence, 1994), pp. 98–108; Furio Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana. I Medici (Turin, 1976), pp. 104–106; and Fasano Guarini, ‘Principi’, p. 149. 10 On the Parte Guelfa’s communal origins and functions under the principate, see Diane F. Zervas, The Parte Guelfa, Brunelleschi & Donatello (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1987), pp. 47–50; Anna Cerchiai and Coletta Quiriconi, ‘Relazioni e rapporti all’Ufficio dei Capitani di Parte Guelfa: Parte I: Principato di Francesco I dei Medici’, in Giorgio Spini (ed.) Architettura e politica da Cosimo I a Ferdinando I (Florence, 1976), pp. 185–257; Anna Maria Gallerani and Benedetta Guidi, ‘Relazioni e rapporti all’Ufficio dei Capitani di Parte Guelfa: Parte II: Principato di Ferdinando I’, in ibid., pp. 259–329; Giuseppe Pansini, ‘Le Piante dei «Popoli e Strade» e lo stato della viabilità nel granducato di toscana alla fine del secolo XVI’, in Giuseppe Pansini (ed.), Piante di popoli e strade: Capitani di Parte Guelfa, 1580–1595 (Florence, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 7–17; Giovanna Casali and Ester Diana, Bernardo Buontalenti e la burocrazia tecnica nella Toscana Medicea (Florence, 1983); and Gigi Salvagnini, Gherardo Mechini architetto di Sua Altezza. Architettura e territorio in Toscana 1580–1620 (Florence, 1983), pp. 17–59. Also authorized to conscript were Pisa’s Ufficio dei Fossi (Elena Fasano Guarini, ‘Regolamentazione delle acque e sistemazione del territorio’, in Livorno e Pisa: due città e un territorio nella politica dei Medici (Exhib. cat., Pisa, Arsenale Mediceo, etc.) (Pisa, 1980), pp. 44–6, 57–8), the Pratica Segreta (CN 1463, f. 12, 2 August 1565), with jurisdiction over Pistoia (CN 1469, f. 63, 17 May 1585), and, in 1581, ‘li Provveditori e deputati di Sua Altezza sopra le fabbriche e lavori publici, et anco li fattori generali delle sue possessioni’ (‘His Highness’s Purveyors and deputies in charge of buildings and public works, as well as the chief stewards of his estates’): ASF, Capitani di Parte, Numeri Bianchi 21, f. 13rv, 1581 bando. 11 Pratilli and Zangheri, La legislazione medicea, pp. 42–59; and Pansini, ‘Le Piante’, p. 7, note 3. 12 Pratilli and Zangheri, La legislazione medicea, p. 101, rubric 20 of the 1560 law establishing the Nove; the officials included ‘podestà’, ‘sindaci’, ‘messi’ and ‘rettori’. The Nove, concerned with local communities and finances, and the Parte, concerned with public property (‘princely regalia’) and public works, were often at jurisdictional loggerheads, Luca Mannori, Il sovrano tutore. Pluralismo istituzionale e accentramento amministrativo nel principato dei Medici (secoli XVI–XVIII), (Milan, 1994), pp. 280, note 3, 282–3, 291, note 31, 298, 300–301. 13 See below, note 103. 14 Roberto Cantagalli, in Arditi, Diario, pp. v–xxx.

252 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

area of Florence’s Oltrarno,15 this elderly tailor’s untutored but gripping chronicle of events from 1574 to 1579 includes a diatribe against those responsible for obliging Tuscan countrymen to work on the construction of Francesco’s artificial lake near Pratolino, in the agricultural estate and hunting preserve that surrounded the villa’s walls (maps A, F).16 Unlike citizens and militiamen, theoretically exempt from labour services, peasants such as Arditi’s Camaldoli neighbours just beyond Florence’s walls were obliged to work for the Parte when they were commandeered, unless age, disability or unusual circumstances exempted them.17 Francesco’s weakness, Arditi wrote, prevented him from seeing or stopping the cruelties of his ministers. Chief among these was Benedetto Uguccioni, singled out elsewhere for his treatment of comandati on the construction of Pratolino’s palace, and nicknamed ‘Heaven preserve us’ (‘Salmisia’) for his merciless administration.18 Former owner of Pratolino’s estate, Uguccioni already knew the local communities that were drawn into Pratolino’s construction well before Francesco made him its Provveditore in 1571.19 Provveditore of the Parte as well, since his appointment by Cosimo I in 1562,20 Uguccioni brought an experience of organizing labour, materials and 15

Ibid., pp. xi, xxx; and Stradario storico e amministrativo della città e del comune di Firenze, (Florence, 1913), pp. 23, 60 (entries 153 and 428, on via San Giovanni where he lived). 16 Arditi, Diario, pp. 205–207; and Suzanne B. Butters, ‘Pressed Labor and Pratolino: Social Imagery and Social Reality at a Medici Garden’, in Mirka Beneš and Dianne Harris (eds), Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (Cambridge, New York and Oakleigh, 2001), pp. 61–87, 347–361, especially pp. 70–75. 17 CN 1567, ff. 1ff, 11 August 1575; CN 1463, f. 80rv, 28 August 1566; and Luigi Atzori and Ivo Regoli, ‘Due comuni rurali del dominio fiorentino nel sec. XVI: Montopoli V.A. e Castelfranco di Sotto’, in Spini, Architettura e politica, p. 140. Guildsmen (‘artieri’) were not always exempt (Pratilli and Zangheri, La legislazione medicea, p. 170; Emanuela Ferretti, ‘La disciplina delle “comandate” e la costruzione del palazzo di Cosimo I de’ Medici a Cerreto Guidi’, Miscellanea storica della Valdelsa, Anno CVII (2001), pp. 235, 242, 243–4; and below, note 60): ‘maestri muratori’ were conscripted to work on Pistoia’s fortifications (CN 1465, n. 12, 5 June 1576; CN 1195, ff. 404–405, 17 August 1577), a practice justified by wartime precedents (Simon Pepper and Nicholas Adams, Firearms & Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth-century Siena (Chicago and London, 1986), pp. 70–71, 206, note 40; shopkeepers were exempt but not their animals (CN 1470, f. 17, 29 August 1582); guildsmen were commandeered to work on Pratolino’s lake (Butters, ‘Pressed Labor and Pratolino’, p.74); and an official of the Nove itself was forced to cart sand to Pratolino (CN 1466, n. 89, 24 September 1578). Faced with the dilemma of conscripting men not ‘compresi dalla leggie et consuetudine’ (‘[not] included by law and custom’), Francesco still had guildsmen, shopkeepers and others called up, to lighten the load on others (‘Sua Altezza non vuole sgravare loro per aggravare altri’) (ibid., n. 211, 5 December 1579). 18 Butters, ‘Pressed Labor and Pratolino’, p. 71. 19 CN 1464, nn. 49, 50, 28 March 1572, 9 February 1572; and ASF, Depositeria Generale 973, 20 February 1573. On him, see Giuliano de’ Ricci, Cronaca (1532–1606), ed. Giuliana Sapori (Milan and Naples, 1972), p. 252; Luigi Zangheri, Pratolino il giardino delle meraviglie (2 vols, Florence, 1979), vol. 1, p. 79, note 1; and Amedeo Belluzzi, ‘Bartolomeo Ammannati e il ponte a Santa Trinita’ in Amedeo Belluzzi and Gianluca Belli, Il ponte a Santa Trinita (Florence, 2003), pp. 27–8. 20 MdP 792, ff. 583rv, 20 November 1587. On the Parte’s office of Provveditore, see

Comandati and Pratolino: Forced Labour in Renaissance Florence 253

haulage on a mammoth scale; in this, he had long been supported by Francesco, whose powers as Prince Regent, between 1564 and 1574,21 had extended to Parte affairs.22 The numbers of comandati called to work on the lake, their jobs and recompense, the damages suffered by their commandeered animals, and the punishments meted out to truants have been discussed elsewhere, as have the technical challenges posed by this feat of hydraulic engineering and by other similar ones in Tuscany.23 Here we will ask other questions raised by Arditi’s account. What distances did the comandati have to travel to reach the lake’s site? And how did their numbers compare with those ordered to perform other tasks for Pratolino’s construction? Seen against the general backdrop of commandeering in grand ducal Tuscany, this should allow us to assess Arditi’s accuracy, and to compare and contrast these grand ducal practices with those of their predecessors and of other rulers in Italy. Francesco could oblige countrymen under his jurisdiction to labour on behalf of the Tuscan state because the legal authority to do so had passed from the Florentine Republic to the Medici dukes,24 that is from the sovereign body of the commune to the sovereign body of the prince.25 The communal origins of commandeering were evident in some of the terms used to describe the works performed, such as ‘lavori del comune’ or ‘fationi del comune’,26 ‘works’ or ‘labours’ for the commune, or ultimately, the community.27 Indeed, the three members of the Cantini family who petitioned Ferdinando I in 1589 to be Daniela Lamberini, ‘Il cantiere delle fortificazioni nella Toscana del Cinquecento’, in Jean Guillaume (ed.), Les Chantiers de la Renaissance (Paris, 1991), pp. 231–2. 21 Riguccio Galluzzi, Istoria del granducato di Toscana sotto il governo della casa Medici (5 vols, Florence, 1781), vol. 1, pp. 53–5. 22 For example, CN 1463, ff. 12 and 137rv, 2 August 1565 and 4 May 1566; f. 142, 12 July 1566; ff. 108r and 204r, 4 December 1566 and 8 August 1567. 23 Butters, ‘Pressed Labor and Pratolino’, pp. 70–5. 24 Vincenzo Fedeli’s 1561 relazione, ed. Arnaldo Segarizzi, in Angelo Ventura (ed.) Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato (reprint of selected relazioni from 4 vols, Bari 1912–1914) (2 vols, Rome and Bari, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 220–1; Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Vasari’s painting of The Foundation of Florence in the Palazzo Vecchio’, in Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard and Milton J. Lewine (eds), Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to Rudolf Wittkower (London, 1967), pp. 54–64; and Henk Th. Van Veen, ‘Republicanism in the Visual Propaganda of Cosimo I de’ Medici’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 55 (1992), pp. 200–209. The Florentine commune itself had assumed the authority to exact services from peasants that medieval lords had exercised in their fiefs (cf. P.J. Jones, The Italian City-State, pp. 358–9; and Muir, ‘The Idea of Community’, pp. 6–7). 25 On Cosimo I’s 1549 law against lese-majesty, an offence which was against a sovereign people under the Republic (Rezasco, Dizionario, pp. 168, 585), see Galluzzi, Istoria del granducato, vol. 1, pp. 144–6; Danilo Marrara, Studi giuridici sulla Toscana medicea: contributo alla storia degli stati assoluti in Italia, (Milan 1965, reprinted 1981), pp. 54–6; and Diaz, Il Granducato, pp. 106–107. 26 CN 1466, n. 87, 24 September 1587, used by nuns at Maiano to describe the commandeering of their animals. ‘Factiones’ (fazioni) usually referred to forced labours personally effected by peasants (Rezasco, Dizionario, p. 414; P.J. Jones, The Italian CityState, p. 567; and cf. Gullino, ‘Le prestazioni d’opera’, p. 137). 27 Cf. Muir, ‘The Idea of Community’, passim.

254 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

excused from the ‘works with animals’ ordered by Pisa’s Ufficio dei Fossi based their request on an exemption from ‘burdens and personal labours’ granted to their ancestors by the Florentine Republic in 1397.28 Jacopo Dani’s memo to the Grand Duke on this case is instructive. It makes clear, for example, the relationship between social status and labour obligations. In thanks for having opposed a potential plot against the Republic, the original Cantini and their descendants ‘were created and made nobles of the countryside, which brings with it exemption from the burdens and labours which are imposed on tillers of the soil.’29 Cosimo I had confirmed the privilege in 1550, together with that of bearing arms. The memo also illustrates how government ministers tried to respect the decisions taken or the privileges granted during the Republic while still enforcing the regulations which had been changed or introduced since 1532. Dani argued that the Cantini, like others who owned large animals in the Pisan contado, were being asked to repair the damage their animals had done to its drainage ditches; as their animals’ labour was not in the category of ‘gravezze et fazzioni personali’, no exemption was granted. The memo illustrates one way in which the grand ducal regime was able to exact the labour of animals without appearing to commandeer them as if they belonged to peasants. Commandeering allowed governments to acquire a larger workforce than they were able or willing to obtain on the open market, not least in an emergency. In 1528–1529, the Republic had used comandati during the siege to build Michelangelo’s brick-faced earthworks at San Miniato,30 and Alessandro, the first Medici duke, would use them soon after to help build the city’s first citadel.31 In the early sixteenth century, the republican administration was so efficient that huge numbers of men could be called up and deployed quickly. In 1504, Piero Soderini’s officials commandeered first 30,000 and later 60,000 opere or man-days32 to shift sufficient earth to divert the course of the Arno at Pisa; too many men, however, helped to confound this attempt to subdue the city by stopping it getting help from the sea.33 Even allowing for hyperbole, 28

ASF, Auditore delle Riformagioni 17, number 40, memorandum of Jacopo Dani to Ferdinando I, on a petition of ‘Francesco di Niccolò et altri de Cantini per conto dell’opere delle bestie all’Offitio de Fossi’, 26 January 1588 s.f. = 1589. 29 ‘Furono creati et fatti de’ nobili del contado (che importa esser’ liberi dalle gravezze, et fazzioni personali, che s’impongono ai lavoratori di terra)’. 30 Giorgio Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. and commentary Paola Barocchi (5 vols, Milan and Naples, 1962), vol. 3, p. 918. 31 John R. Hale, ‘The End of Florentine Liberty: the Fortezza da Basso’, in John R. Hale, Renaissance War Studies (London, 1983), p. 46. 32 In the context of moving earth near the Bisenzio river during the winter of 2 1580, an ‘opera’ was paid 12 soldi per day and consisted of shifting 12 braccia of earth 2 (4.09m ) a flat distance of 10 braccia (5.84m) and a height of no more than 4 braccia 2 (2.33m); 12 braccia of earth was equal to 156 baskets (‘corbelli’), each containing 1/13 2 2 braccia (.026m ) of earth (CN 1466, n. 219, 19.I.1580). At this rate, 60,000 opere moved 2 2 20,437.14m of earth at Pisa, and 27,576 opere moved 9,395m at the Fosso Navigabile. 33 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, II, II, 134, Piero Parenti, Storia Fiorentina, f. 29, August 1504: ‘Comandoronsi circa 30,000 opere del nostro contado,

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the figure of 60,000 compares logically with the 27,576 commandeered mandays expended in the first year or so of excavating Cosimo I’s Fosso Navigabile northwest of Florence,34 a similar but smaller hydraulic construction which allowed Arno boats to unload at Florence’s walls instead of at Signa.35 These examples recall the kinship between civil and military levies.36 Cosimo I and his successor Francesco I sponsored many reclamation projects in Tuscany, as well as works on its waterways, roads and public buildings; these often drew heavily on forced labour.37 Updating the region’s fortifications demanded a steady stream of sappers.38 To cast the Ponte Santa Trinita’s first pier, Ammannati needed 250–350 comandati a day,39 and when too few came he had 100 called up to work overnight.40 Local peasants were conscripted to maintain the major roads linking Florence with nearby court residences dandosi per ciascuna soldi 10 el giorno; di poi multiplicorono fino a 60,000 et finalmente si smovesse il terreno. Di poi s’arò alla fine di detti canali, et intromessesi l’acqua; nondimanco non si potendo serrare con la steccaia la bocca del corso pristino finché e fossi non fussino a sufficienza cavati, per la multiplicatione dell’opere più che non s’era disegnato, et per l’altra difficultà de’ tempi, condottasi tale materia fino quasi a tutto el mese di settembre, s’hebbe a lasciare imperfetta, non senza scorno di chi havea principiato l’opera, né senza vergogna et danno universale della città [di Firenze].’ (‘Around 30,000 opere were commandeered from our countryside, giving each 10 soldi a day; then the number was increased to 60,000 and finally the earth was moved. Then the ends of the channels were ploughed, and water introduced; still since it was not possible to close the mouth of the former water course with paling until the ditches were sufficiently dug out, and because of the increasing numbers of forced labourers or opere, more than had been intended, and because of other difficulties with the weather, this work went on until almost the end of September and had to be left unfinished, not without the ignominy of the work’s initiator, and not without the disgrace of and universal damage to the city [of Florence].’) 34 CN 1463, f. 142, 12 July 1566; my calculation is based on the daily bread supplied from Florentine bakers by the enterprise to the comandati, taking the fiorino at its 1533 value of 150 soldi (Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence. An Economic and Social History (Baltimore and London, 1980), p. 430; and Richard A. Goldthwaite and Giulio Mandich, Studi sulla Moneta Fiorentina (Secoli XIII–XVI) (Florence, 1994), pp. 63–5); it is said that 3,000 Florentine and Sienese men worked on the canal at the start (Florence, Bibilioteca Riccardiana, Moreniano 106, Diario 1557– 1591, f. 20, 29 July1565). On this project, see Daniela Lamberini and Luigi Lazzareschi, Campo Bisenzio: documenti per la storia del territorio (Prato, 1982), pp. 387–8, 390; and Daniela Lamberini, Il principe difeso: vita e opere di Bernardo Puccini (Florence, 1990), pp. 158–9, note 43. 35 MdP 232, f. 34, 29 November 1568. 36 Cf. Llewain Scott van Doren, ‘Military Administration and Intercommunal Relations in Dauphiné, 1494–1559’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 130 (1986): 79–100. 37 Giorgio Spini, ‘Architettura e politica nel principato Mediceo del Cinquecento’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 83 (1971), pp. 792–832; and MdP 5105, letter 138, 27 May 1571. 38 Hale, ‘Florentine Liberty’, p. 46; and Lamberini, ‘Il cantiere delle fortificazioni’, pp. 228, 230. 39 CN 1463, f. 26rv, 15 July 1567; Agostino Lapini, Diario fiorentino di Agostino Lapini dal 252 al 1596, ed. Giuseppe O. Corazzini (Florence, 1900), p. 155; and Belluzzi, ‘Bartolomeo Ammannati e il ponte Santa Trinita’, especially pp. 39–46. 40 CN 1463, f. 206r, 16 July 1567.

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like Poggio a Caiano.41 This practice benefited the peripatetic Medici court but records show that by at least 1318 the commune was exploiting comandati to maintain the roads essential to its trade, transport, security and reputation.42 The scale and continuing demands of these works lend credence to the figure cited in 1561 by the Venetian ambassador, Vincenzo Fedeli: ‘[Cosimo I] has available, then, a list of 12,000 sappers, all extremely robust and strong men from the country; although they were organized for use in wartime, he uses [them] in peacetime according to his needs, to repair roads, [and] to dig ditches; it is amazing to see how he diverts waters and rivers where he wants in order to bring the countryside under agricultural cultivation.’43

That Fedeli’s number coincides not only with the one given by his two immediate successors but also with the number of men that Florence was said to be able to call up in 1312, when she was threatened by Henry VII,44 is striking, but difficult to explain.45 Cosimo’s ambitious architectural programme for Florence depended on a ready supply of men to transport building materials, and the comparative reliability of conscripts often made them preferable to volunteers.46 Haulage corvées were known in the late Roman empire,47 and may have been widespread later, given their practical advantages. Under Cosimo and Francesco, the city’s gates witnessed the organized entry and exit of carts pressed into service by the state. Carters who transported private loads into Florence were commonly obliged to put their empty carts to public use before returning home, by shifting from gate to gate loads of so-called ‘public earth’,48 Arno sand or gravel for use on nearby bastions, roads and building projects.49

41

1566.

42

Ibid., ff. 13, 17 July 1565 and 137rv, 4 May 1566; and CN 1465, n. 117, 24 July

Pansini, ‘Le Piante’, pp. 7–11. Fedeli, Relazioni degli Ambasciatori, p. 224; and cf. Scott van Doren, ‘Military Administration’, pp. 83–4. 44 Lorenzo Priuli’s relazione of 1566 and Andrea Gussoni’s of 1576, in Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti durante il secolo decimosesto al Senato, ed. Eugenio Albéri (Florence, 1839–1863), series 2, vol. 2, pp. 66, 365; on 1312, see Daniel Waley, The Italian City Republics (New York and Toronto, 1969), p. 84. 45 12,000 forced peasant labourers were working on Venice’s immense Gorzon reclamation scheme in 1558 (Cosgrove, p. 148). 46 On Cosimo’s buildings, see Goldthwaite, Building of Renaissance Florence, pp. 24–6; Leon Satkowski, Giorgio Vasari: Architect and Courtier (Princeton, New Jersey, 1993), chapters 3–7; Claudia Conforti, Vasari architetto (Milan, 1993), pp. 143–208; and Michael Kiene, Bartolomeo Ammannati, (Milan, 1995), especially pp. 74–145. Volunteers were unreliable (CN, 1465, n. 263, 19 November 1578; and CN 1469, f. 874, 28 and 30 October 1586), and comandati had long been so (Pansini, ‘Le Piante’, pp. 9–12). 47 A.H.M. Jones, Later Roman Empire, vol. 1, p. 76. 48 CN 1465, n. 391, 15 October 1575; CN 1469, f. 867, 24 September 1586; and cf. MdP 245, f. 49, 4 January 1576, for a similar exploitation of empty Arno ‘navicelli’. 49 CN 26, f. 167, 18 November 1568; and CN 1465, f. 236, 31 October 1569. 43

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It is hard to judge how common the practice of commandeering private carts for public service was in Florence before the principate, but we do know of one example. In 1518 Alfonsina Orsini, daughter of nobles from the Kingdom of Naples and widow of Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici,50 had ordered that empty carts of Florentine citizens returning to the countryside carry loads of wood and stone to Poggio a Caiano, in preparation for Leo X’s visit; that Parenti reported the case suggests he considered it anomalous.51 The occasion, the French marriage of Lorenzo duke of Urbino, her son and Leo’s nephew, was certainly momentous,52 and yet the Medici family, which wielded immense political influence under the Florentine Republic between 1434 and 1494 and between 1512 and 1527, enjoyed no legitimate authority over the body public.53 Alfonsina herself was notoriously high-handed and such a ‘virile’ political manager in defence of her son’s interests that the Florentines feared their freedoms were in danger.54 But her orders do conform to commandeering under the Medici principate, when the carts of Florentine citizens were not exempt from labour services although their owners were.55 This suggests that she was familiar with the nuanced rules of commandeering, whether from the Florentine Republic or from her feudal homeland, or both. Alfonsina may have thought the occasion conferred a public status on Poggio which it did not 50

Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo (Florence, 1924), vol. 1, pp. 181, 172–88; and Sheryl E. Reiss, ‘Widow, Mother, Patron of Art: Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici’, in Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (eds), Beyond Isabella. Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy (Kirksville, Missouri, 2001), pp. 125–57. 51 Parenti, Storia Fiorentina, f. 140: ‘(Nel luglio 1518) al Poggio, possessione del Signore Lorenzo de’ Medici faceva achonciare Madonna Alfonsina grandissima quantita di lecte dicendo dovervi venire el Pontefice. Item faceva fornire il casamento delle stanze ga principiate alla absolutione della qualcosa erano comandati tutti e carri che venivano a Firenze colle richolte de’ cittadini; questi non poteano tornare e se tornarano carichi di legname il quale si levava dalla porta alla Croce e conduceasi [a] decto Poggio. Etiam altri erano comandati per portare pietre alla predecta opera.’ (‘(In July 1518) at Poggio (a Caiano), an estate of Lord Lorenzo de’ Medici, Madonna Alfonsina [Orsini] was preparing a great number of beds, saying that the Pope was going to come there. Moreover, she was having the rooms already begun in the house finished, and for this purpose all the wagons that came to Florence carrying the harvests of (Florentine) citizens were commandeered; these were not allowed to return unless they were loaded with timber picked up from Porta alla Croce and transported to said Poggio. Others were also commandeered to carry stones to that construction.’) Hundreds of cartloads of wood had already been transported from the Opera del Duomo to Poggio in 1516–1517 (Reiss, ‘Widow, Mother, Patron’, p. 135), but whether commandeered or not is unclear. 52 Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici, vol. 1, pp. 181, 279–82; Reiss, ‘Widow, Mother, Patron’, p. 137; and Humfrey C. Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenthcentury Florence 1502–1509 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 299, 301. 53 Ibid., passim; and Dale Kent, The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence 1426–1434 (Oxford, 1978); Nicolai Rubinstein, The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434 to 1494) (Oxford, 1966). 54 Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici, vol. 1, pp. 173–4, 179, 188; and Reiss, ‘Widow, Mother, Patron’, pp. 133, 135. 55 See above, text at note 48, and cf. note 17.

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otherwise enjoy. The Florentine commune had sometimes lodged state visitors in great private villas,56 and it may have conscripted peasants to transport beds and provisions to them, as the Medici dukes would do when they moved from one country residence to another.57 Pratolino would serve this same purpose, as well as housing important visitors travelling on the main road linking Florence to Bologna.58 These functions could be construed as ‘public’. Roads and waterways, used by everyone, belonged to the prince.59 In theory, then, it was for the universal good that the Medici dukes summoned peasants to maintain these essential thoroughfares, an aim reflected in the expression ‘lavori publici’, used in their laws and administrative records concerning comandati.60 So it is not surprising that such projects are praised in tracts eulogizing princely deeds and virtues. Ammirato touched on ‘the joining of rivers by means of ditches, and the moving of them for various reasons’ in his 1594 commentary on Tacitus, dedicated to Ferdinando I’s wife, Cristina di Lorena.61 His description of public projects, whereby ‘princes of valour who, sparing no expense, have, for public utility, taken care of roads, directed rivers, levelled great heights, [and] filled great depths’, recall those executed by Medici comandati. Similarly, Francesco’s taming of the unruly Arno was celebrated in paint and prose for his funeral in 1587,62 and so too his construction of Pratolino;63 both were among Giambologna’s gold

56

For example, David R. Wright, The Medici Villa at Olmo a Castello: Its History and Iconography (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 49–54; vol. 2, pp. 526–8. Hospitality rights (‘albergaria’), including military billeting, were signorial (P.J. Jones, The Italian City-State, pp. 66, 240; Redon, Uomini e comunità del contado senese, pp. 122–3; Rezasco, Dizionario, p. 19, i, ii, iii; and Chris Wickham, ‘Rural economy and society’, in Cristina La Rocca (ed.), Italy in the Early Middle Ages 476–1000 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 132, 136). The Nove was involved in ‘the lodging of gentlemen, great public figures, soldiers and captains’ (Pratilli and Zangheri, La legislazione medicea, pp. 102, 104–5, rubrics 24, 32). 57 For example, Atzori and Regoli, ‘Due comuni rurali’, pp. 142, 146; CN 1469, f. 439, 9 January 1585; cf. CN 1470, f. 10, 29 August 1582; and cf. Ferretti, ‘La disciplina delle “comandate”’, pp. 244–6. 58 Under Francesco, see Lapini, Diario, pp. 187, 203, 233, 236, 239, 246, 251, 258; and Ricci, Cronaca, pp. 85, 275, 325–6, 352–3, 391–2, 395, 494–5. 59 Mannori, Il sovrano tutore, pp. 280–1, 283–4, 286–7, and 293–5, on the increasingly centralized maintenance of roads and waterways under the Medici dukes. 60 ‘Provisione, fatta d’ordine del Serenissimo Gran Duca di Toscana, et per partito de’ molto magnifici et clarissimi signori Luogotenente, et Consiglieri della Republica Fiorentina, sopra le comandate da farsi per causa de’ lavori publici della Città di Firenze et Stato di Sua Altezza Serenissima fra le venti miglia di detta Città, publicata il dì 4 marzo 1574 [s.f. =1575 s.m.]’, in Pratilli and Zangheri, La legislazione medicea, pp. 163–70; CN 1465, nn. 129 (8 February 1578) and 391 (15 October 1575). 61 Scipione Ammirato, Discorsi di Scipione Ammirato sopra Cornelio Tacito, ed. Luciano Scarabelli (2 vols, Turin, 1853), vol. 2, p. 50, Discorso X. 62 Giovambatista Strozzi, Essequie del Serenissimo Don Francesco Medici Gran Duca di Toscana II (Florence, 1587), p. 48. 63 Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà and Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, Feste e apparati medicei da Cosimo I a Cosimo II (Florence, 1969), p. 65.

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reliefs on hard stones depicting Francesco’s deeds.64 These examples suggest that Pratolino was considered a public rather than a private work by those who helped the Grand Duke decide which deeds to select. Contemporary documents confirm this impression. Pratolino was described as ‘public’,65 obligations to work on its construction as ‘lavori del comune’ and ‘fationi del comune’,66 and a carter who agreed to transport stone there expected to be exempt from ‘altri publici’.67 Francesco was sensitive about the perception that his own constructions might be perceived as differing from other ones to which animals were commandeered; in 1575, when his legal experts drafted a rubric suggesting the contrary, he rejected it.68 In the final law, however, the distinction was retained, in the phrase referring to ‘the comandati for the service of His Highness and for public works’.69 Like army conscripts, Tuscan peasants were to be paid for their stateimposed labours.70 Comandati usually received the same as voluntary workers performing the same task,71 and, in general, administrators attempted to make their burdens as reasonable as possible. Officials tried to call up men in advance,72 and from parishes near the work site,73 while still taking advantage 64

Detlef Heikamp, in Annamaria Giusti (ed.), Splendori di pietre dure: L’arte di corte nella Firenze dei Granduchi (Florence, 1988), pp. 96–102. 65 CN 1465, n. 129, with a rescript dated 8 February 1577; and CN 1469, f. 753, 9 March 1587, referring to the Mugello fortress of San Martino. 66 CN 1466, n. 87, 24 September 1578. 67 CN 1465, n. 391, 15 October 1575. 68 Rubric proposing ‘che le bestie de fornacini fornacini [sic] o fochaiuoli, spianatori, garzoni non possino essere comandati se non per il servitio delle fabriche proprie di Sua Altezza o altro spettante a quella’ (‘that the animals belonging to kilns, firemen, sappers and errand-boys cannot be commandeered except for the service of His Highness’s own constructions or other things pertaining to him’), followed by Francesco’s rescript, ‘Questo capitolo non piace a Sua Altezza’ (‘His Highness doesn’t like this rubric’), countersigned by Lelio Torelli, 11.I.1575 (CN 1464, ff. 178ff, Benedetto Uguccioni and Carlo Pitti to Francesco I, 29 December 1574). 69 ‘Comandati per servizio di sua Altezza et de’ lavori publici.’ Pratilli and Zangheri, La legislazione medicea, I, p. 163, and cf. above, note 60. 70 Pratilli and Zangheri, La legislazione medicea, pp. 163–4, from 1575 law cited above, note 60. 71 For example, CN 1464, n. 193, 14 October 1575; and Webster Smith, Studies on Buontalenti’s Villa (New York University, Ph.D. thesis, 1959) (University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI), p. 192, 17 May 1585 (CN 1469, f. 63); for the 1575 pay rates for comandati with and without animals and/or carts, see Atzori and Regoli, ‘Due comuni rurali’, p. 140; and CN 1465, n. 389, 23 September 1575. For an exception, see CN 1463, f. 80rv, 28 August 1566, where volunteer carters transporting gravel to the Pitti palace and to Florence’s Mint earned more than comandati doing the same work on the road at Poggio a Caiano. The thousands of comandati working on the Fortezza da Basso in the 1530s were paid only with bread and wine (Hale, ‘Florentine Liberty’, p. 46; and cf. below, note 76). 72 Ammannati was reprimanded for commandeering contadini to work on the Ponte Santa Trinita with little warning, and told to give them seven or eight days’ notice (CN 1463, f. 26rv, 15 July 1567); this abuse was not new (Atzori and Regoli, ‘Due comuni rurali’, p. 141, for 1550). 73 CN 1463, ff. 26rv, 206r, 16 July 1567; CN 1470, f. 135rv, 11 November 1582; and

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of conscripting teams familiar with the site for complicated tasks.74 Labourers commandeered from afar, to work on the Ponte Santa Trinita or to transport their gravel quota from one gate to another, were assigned lodgings in the city.75 The Parte gave a meal allowance to those working on the bridge and discouraged Ammannati from making money from public workers by selling them his own wine.76 The obligation to pay labourers on site, every Saturday,77 was convenient for Medici administrators but not necessarily for men from distant parishes who had worked less than the statutory maximum of six days. Every effort was made to pay comandati promptly,78 but not always successfully.79 Tuscan officials, encouraged by Francesco, tried to avoid heavy commandeering between mid-June and mid-August,80 when exemptions were commonly granted to farmers harvesting grain,81 and building work then had to rely more heavily on volunteers.82 Agricultural pressures also contributed to higher pay rates for labourers and animals from May to October,83 and the state had to tolerate increased truancy among commandeered hired hands (‘pigionali’) when private individuals paid more than the government to get Atzori and Regoli, ‘Due comuni rurali’, pp. 141–2, for some counter-examples (1540s to 1594). 74 For example, CN 1463, f. 206r, 16 July 1567; and cf. Scott van Doren, ‘Military Administration’, p. 85. 75 CN 1463, f. 26rv, 15 July 1567; and CN 1465, ff. 235–238, October 1569, suggesting a military billeting model. 76 CN 1463, f. 26rv, 15 July 1567. Comandati for the Fosso Navigabile received bread daily worth soldi 5.4 piccoli (CN 1463, f. 142, 12 July 1566; and cf. Montanari, Contadini e città, pp. 55–6, on the medieval Lombard signorial duty (‘annona dominica’) to feed peasants performing corvées). 77 CN 1567, ff. 1ff, 11 August 1575. 78 Pratilli and Zangheri, La legislazione medicea, pp. 163–4, from 1575 law cited above, note 60. 79 Cerchiai and Quiriconi, ‘Relazioni e Rapporti’, pp. 199–201, citing the July1574 provvisione whereby river officials and employees are ordered not to defraud ‘poveri lavoranti’ (‘poor workers’) by paying them in kind, in ‘moneta di bassa lega’ (‘base coin’), or not at all; MdP 792, ff. 583rv, 584v–585r, 20 November 1587, and cf. CN 1464, n. 193, 14 October 1575 (in 1574, Uguccioni paid ‘molti poveri contadini comandati [a Pratolino], che havevano havere di loro vetture di rena et altri effetti’ (‘many poor peasants commandeered to Pratolino, who were still owed for transporting sand and for other things’) with 777 scudi of his own when funds ran short, and was eventually reimbursed); and CN 1465, n. 374, 19 April 1575. 80 For the officials, see ibid., n. 114, 21 July 1566; CN 1463, f. 26rv, 15 July 1567; and CN 1464, n. 125, 15 August 1574; for Francesco’s rescripts, see CN 1463, f. 287r, 16 June 1568; and CN 1467, f. 287, 16 June 1581. 81 CN 1463, f. 207r, 10–11 July 1567. 82 CN 1464, n. 206, B. Uguccioni to Francesco I, 8 July 1575: ‘Per riservare i contadini respetto alla segatura e battitura sono ito comandando de’ manovali pigionali per servire alla fabbrica di Pratolino.’ 83 Giuliano Pinto, La Toscana nel Tardo Medioevo. Ambiente, economia rurale, società (Florence, 1982), p. 423; Atzori and Regoli, ‘Due comuni rurali’, pp. 140–1; CN 1567, ff. 1ff, 11 August 1575; CN 1465, f. 389, 23 September 1575; and, by implication, CN 1463, f. 287r, 16 June 1568.

Comandati and Pratolino: Forced Labour in Renaissance Florence 261

their own crops harvested.84 These truants were forced to pay a fine or to work off their ‘disobedience’ for half or no pay, however.85 Seldom imprisoned,86 serious truants had their arms tied behind their backs, were hoisted aloft by a rope pulley attached to the wrists and then dropped, to hang suspended. A standard punishment was two jerks of the rope in public on market day, but on one occasion, two men suffered one jerk each at the Ponte Santa Trinita’s new pier and were left suspended from its scaffolding, to admonish the others (see Figure 17.2).87 Commandeered peasants commonly worked off their truancy,88 as did parish rectors who failed to call them up,89 but both could receive jerks of the rope,90 and rectors were sometimes condemned to temporary internal exile.91 Despite the punishments, the scale of truancy among comandati was large. Between 1574 and 1586, the Ufficio dei Fossi, in charge of water management in Pisa’s countryside, lost around 50,000 man-days of labour,92 representing a financial loss of 4,666.79 scudi.93 As they had done under the Republic, peasants went on bribing inspectors to avoid working on the roads.94 Yet replacing low-paid conscripts with highpaid volunteers was clearly no solution, for the idea mooted under Francesco of exacting money rather than labour from comandati was not implemented.95

84

CN 1464, n. 206, B. Uguccioni to Francesco I, 8.July 1575: ‘Veggendone mancar [dei manovali pigionali comandati per servire alla fabbrica di Pratolino], et andando perseverando, sono ito intendendo, e mi è detto tutto procede che in questa stagione hanno da particolari soldi 18 e 20 il dì per huomo e quivi vengon pagati a ragione di soldi 13.4 per (opera?).’ (‘Seeing that some of the hired hands conscripted to the construction at Pratolino were missing, and continued to be so, I informed myself and was told that during this season private individuals pay each man 18–20 soldi for a day’s work whereas we only pay at a rate of 13.4 soldi’.) Unlike ‘contadini’, ‘pigionali’ often failed to turn up, and in large numbers (CN 1463, ff. 204 and 206r, 8 and 16 July 1567). 85 Ibid., f. 204, 8 July 1567. 86 CN 1464, f. 181, 18 November 1575. 87 CN 1463, f. 206r, 16 July 1567. 88 Either unpaid (ibid., f. 80v, 28 August 1566, ff. 88r–90r, 13 August 1566, and ff. 204 and 206r, 8 and 16 July 1567) or by working double burdens (‘fattione doppia’) (ibid., f. 108r, 4 December 1566, and CN 1464, n. 117, 21 October 1573), or even triple, unpaid (CN 1466, n. 115, 23 October 1580, for truants from Pratolino doing 3 unpaid opere at Poggio a Caiano). 89 They had to appear themselves, with carts and oxen, to do double the work (CN 1463, f. 80rv, 28 August 1566). 90 CN 1463, f. 12, 2 August 1565 and f. 108r, 4 December 1566; CN 1464, n. 117, 21 and 26 October 1573; CN 1470, f. 135rv, 11 November 1582; and CN 1468, f. 202rv, 18 November 1584. 91 CN 1464, n. 240, (9?) March 1576. 92 Fasano Guarini, ‘Regolamentazione’, p. 46. 93 I have valued the scudo at 7.5 lire (cf. Goldthwaite and Mandich, Studi sulla moneta fiorentina, pp. 64–5). 94 Pansini, ‘Le Piante’, p. 10; and Ferretti, ‘La disciplina delle “comandate”’, p. 239. 95 S.B. Butters, ‘Pressed Labor and Pratolino’, p. 74; and Cerchiai and Quiriconi, ‘Relazioni e Rapporti’, p. 201.

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Fig. 17.2 Man suffering jerk of the rope is saved by the miraculous image of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Mantua.

Comandati and Pratolino: Forced Labour in Renaissance Florence 263

This was the pattern at Pratolino, where the number of truants rose steadily with the increased use of forced labour. Whereas the 1,000 proven delinquents out of more than 3,000 cases of truancy between 4 December 1575 and early February 1577 (an average of about 67 guilty per month) worked for free as punishment and so yielded a benefit of 333 scudi to the construction at Pratolino,96 by 1582 there was a backlog of more than 3,500 truants to be investigated, in addition to the usual numbers.97 It proved easier to collect fines from those who could pay,98 although large numbers still worked off their penalty. From the backlog alone, Pratolino stood to gain an extra 500 scudi,99 or 5,357 man-days (opere), calculated at an average daily wage of 14 soldi.100 Judged against the enormous sums spent on the construction,101 this monetary gain was not very significant, but its work equivalent was. In preferring to exact labour rather than fines from truants, Francesco avoided superfluous conscription, book-keeping, and expenditures. The smooth functioning of this intricate territorial system depended on efficiently delegated authority, rapid communication systems,102 fair selection procedures, and accurate bookkeeping. And yet only by consolidating the lists that local rectors were charged to keep of men commandeered from their parishes would officials have been able to assess the cumulative effect of conscriptions on the countryside; there is no evidence that they did so. Some insight is offered, however, by examining three of the Nove’s account books surviving from the construction of Pratolino and its lake (see Figure 17.3).103 Here, each man, with or without his animals or cart, was listed under the name 96

1577.

97

CN 1465, n. 129, memorandum to Francesco I from Paolo Vinta, 8 February

CN 1470, f. 170, 6 August 1582. Ibid., f. 199, 18 June 1582. 99 Ibid., f. 170, 6 August 1582 100 See above, note 93. 101 Fiorini 223,246.6.1 – were spent from 1571 to 1588 (ASF, Miscellanea Medicea 264, inserto 38, Spoglio del libro Generale della Fabbrica di Pratolino segnato C); the Parte’s camarlingo paid out around scudi 94,000 for it from 1 July 1577 to 28 February 1585 (CN 1469, f. 19r, Uguccioni’s report to Francesco I, 5 March 1586); and Lapini, claimed 782,000 scudi 3 lire 17 soldi 8 denari had been spent on Pratolino by the end of 1585, probably starting in 1569 (Diario, p. 169). The state’s annual public income in 1576 was 1,100,000 ducats (Gussoni, in Albéri, Relazioni, p. 361). Pratolino cost ca. 2,000 scudi/ a year to maintain in the seventeenth century (Wright, Medici Villa, vol. 1, p. 34). 102 On those linking the Parte or Nove ministers, officials and messengers to regional podestà or vicari and thence to parish rectors or sindaci, see Ferretti, ‘La disciplina delle “comandate”’, pp. 236–8; CN 1463, ff. 88r-90r, 13 August 1566 and ff. 103 and 108, 4 December 1566; CN 1464, n. 117, 21 October 1573, f. 176, 2 October 1574 and n. 193, 14 October 1575. On the lists of eligible men and animals, see CN 1466, n. 170, 17 July 1580; and CN 1467, ff. 1ff, 11 August 1575. On the chains of command involved in constructing fortifications, see Lamberini, ‘Il cantiere delle fortificazioni’, p. 231. 103 ASF, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Giurisdizione Toscana, henceforth Nove, 3701, Quaderno di creditori per lavori della fabbrica di Pratolino (1579); Nove 3702, Quaderno di creditori di munizioni della fabrica di Pratolino (1571–1574); and Nove 3705, Quaderno di rena per la fabrica di Pratolino (31 May 1569 – c.1 June 1571). A fourth account book, Nove 3704, was flooded in 1966 and has not yet been identified. 98

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Fig. 17.3 Two openings from the Quaderno di creditori per lavori di Pratolino (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Giurisdizione Toscana 3701, ff. 66v-68r), listing men and animals called up from named parishes in the week of 8 May 1579 to work on Pratolino’s lake, noting the number of days each worked and the sum each was paid.

Comandati and Pratolino: Forced Labour in Renaissance Florence 265

266 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Fig. 17.4 San Vitale. Pratolinum Magni Ducis Hetruriae. Woodcut of site (c.1639), possibly dating to c.1588. Photograph courtesy of Alessandro Vezzosi.

Fig. 17.5

Bernardo Sansone Sgrilli. View of the Villa at Pratolino from San Jacopo. British Museum.

268 Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

of his parish, and the amount of work he did registered together with what he was owed, so that everyone could be paid and absentees identified.104 The usefulness of juxtaposing parish maps is apparent when one attempts to chart the movement of these many labourers in time and space. Klapisch-Zuber’s reconstruction of Tuscany’s population in 1427, where one can pass easily from parish name to cartographic position,105 makes it possible to exploit this data on Pratolino’s comandati, and to learn about their provenance, numbers and use. Construction began soon after Francesco purchased the property in 1568,106 and many local men, presumably pleased to work near home, offered to carry sand to the new site. One nearby parish to contribute volunteers was San Jacopo a Festigliano, later known as San Jacopo a Pratolino (see Figures 17.5, 17.6).107 In the first 18 months of construction, many of its men carted sand; most contributed only a load or two, but some stand out, like the one who transported 1,056 staia (25,724.16 dry litres). There were always volunteers ready to haul sand to Pratolino from the Porta San Gallo on the villa’s side of the city, a reliable complement to the large numbers of comandati who did the same. Evidence from 1571 to 1574 shows that these ‘taglie spezzate’ came from parishes located largely between Florence and Pratolino, and just beyond.108 Men from more distant parishes would have been unlikely to volunteer (map A). It was comandati rather than volunteers, however, who more commonly transported sand to the worksite. A few, from the parishes lining the Arno southeast of Florence, gathered it from the river east of the city and took it up to Pratolino (map A). But it proved easier to commandeer carters who were not going to Pratolino to move sand from the Arno to the Porta San Gallo,109 a first leg in the journey. In 1572–1573 this gate was a marshalling point for a variety of essential materials destined for the villa. From here, comandati summoned from Florence’s immediate vicinity picked up sand, bricks, wood and iron (map A). In early 1579, a lot of sand was transported from the same gate to the fishpond at the head of Pratolino’s lawn,110 under the gaze of Giambologna’s emerging Appennine (see Figure 17.4 and map E). By now, men from a larger number of parishes were being summoned, some farther out from the building site than those previously called up. Already in 1575, Arditi was complaining about the great hardships these haulage corvées to Pratolino inflicted on peasants and their animals.111 104

Cf. Ferretti, ‘La disciplina delle “comandate”’, pp. 236–9. Cristiane Klapisch-Zuber, Una carta del popolamento toscano negli anni 1427– 1430, trans. Franco Saba (Milan, 1983). 106 Zangheri, Pratolino, vol. 1, p. 79, note 1; Webster Smith, ‘Pratolino’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 20 (1961), p. 159, notes 24, 25; and S.B. Butters, ‘Pressed Labor and Pratolino’, p. 359, note 158. 107 Nove 3705, unnumbered title fol. verso. 108 Nove 3702. 109 CN 1463, f. 403, 23 May 1569; and CN 1472 bis, n. 58, 9 August 1593, commenting on the practice in the past. 110 For example, Nove 3701, ff. 18v–23r, 47v–52v. 111 Arditi, Diario, p. 51, 5 July 1575: ‘Il contado tutto [era] venuto poverissimo e 105

Comandati and Pratolino: Forced Labour in Renaissance Florence 269

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