Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice 9789048525133

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Warfare and Politics

Renaissance History, Art and Culture This series investigates the Renaissance as a complex intersection of political and cultural processes that radiated across Italian territories into wider worlds of influence, not only throughout Europe, but into the Middle East, parts of Asia and the Indian subcontinent. It will be alive to the best writing of a transnational and comparative nature and will cross canonical chronological divides of the Central Middle Ages, the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The series intends to spark new ideas and encourage debate on the meanings, extent and influence of the Renaissance within the broader European world. It encourages engagement by scholars across disciplines – history, literature, art history, musicology, and possibly the social sciences – and focuses on ideas and collective mentalities as social, political, and cultural movements that shaped a changing world from ca 1250 to 1650. Series Editors Christopher Celenza, Georgetown University, USA Samuel Cohn, Jr., University of Glasgow, UK Andrea Gamberini, University of Milan, Italy Geraldine Johnson, University of Oxford, UK Isabella Lazzarini, University of Molise, Italy

Warfare and Politics Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice

Edited by Humfrey Butters and Gabriele Neher

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Flaminio Vacca’s Lion, 16th century, now located outside the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 747 4 e-isbn 978 90 4852 513 3 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789089647474 nur 685 © Humfrey Butters & Gabriele Neher / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

In memory of Michael Mallett



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 13 Warfare and Politics, Cities and Governmentin Renaissance Tuscany and Venice Editorial Introduction Humfrey Butters and Gabriele Neher

15

I Prologue Historians and the Renaissance State Humfrey Butters

27

II Warfare: Politics and Battles, Fighters and Civilians, Narration and Analysis War and Beatitude

63

Patriots and Partisans

79

The Ottoman Conquest of Negroponte (1470) and the Founding of the Venetian Convent of the Holy Sepulchre Reinhold C. Mueller

Popular Resistance to the Occupation of the Venetian Terraferma by the Forces of the League of Cambrai Simon Pepper

Picturing the News in Wartime Venice

Political Woodcut Imagery in Printed Pamphlets Inspired by the Events of the War of the League of Cambrai (1509-1517) Krystina Stermole

105

Fabrizio Colonna and Machiavelli’s Art of War 143 John M. Najemy



A Clash of Dukes

Cosimo I de’ Medici, Wilhelm of Cleves, and the ‘guerra di Dura’ of 1543 Maurizio Arfaioli

161

III Political Language and Careers, Urban Identity and Transformation, the Physical Environment Popular Ideology in Communal Italy

185

Venetian Gothic

201

Marin Sanudo on Brescia

227

Bodies Politic

241

The Price of Charles V’s Protection in Italy

265

Odious Comparisons

293

Fabrizio Ricciardelli

A Symbol of ‘National’ Identity? Richard Goy

Caterina Cornaro’s 1497 Entry and Glimpses into the Life and Politics of a Renaissance Border Town Gabriele Neher

The Environment, Public Health, and the State in Sixteenth-Century Venice Jane Stevens Crawshaw

The Example of Lucca Christine Shaw

Cosimo I, the Duke of Athens, and Florence Suzanne B. Butters*

IV Epilogue Renaissance Cities through Ruskinian Eyes

361

Bibliography of Michael Edward Mallett (1932-2008)

381

Index of Names

387

An English Architect in Italy in 1902 Stella Fletcher

Humfrey Butters and Suzanne B. Butters

List of Illustrations Picturing the News in Wartime Venice Figure 1 Title page of an anonymous pamphlet entitled La victoriosa Gata da Padua (Venice, [1509]) Figure 2 Title page of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Papa Iulio secondo che redriza tuto el mondo [Venice, 1512] Figure 3 Title page of Francesco Maria Sacchino’s pamphlet entitled Spauento de Italia [Forlì?, 1510] Figure 4 Title page of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Tutte le cose seguite in Lombardia dapoi chel signor Bartolomio gionto in campo [Venice, 1513] Figure 5 Title page of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Processo de mali fruti e pensadi omicidi de li segnori venetiani con la presa del polesine [Ferrara: Lorenzo Rossi?, 1510] Figure 6 Title page of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Pronostico e profecia de le cose debeno succedere maxime dele guere comenziate per magni potentati contra venetiani [Ferrara?, 22 January 1509] Figure 7 Title page of Bartolomeo Cordo’s pamphlet entitled La obsidione di Padua ne la quale se tractano tutte le cose che sono occorse […] (Venice, 3 October 1510)

112 114 116 118 122

125 130

A Clash of Dukes Figure 1 Bronzino – Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici, 1543, Florence, Uffizi Gallery  Figure 2 Heinrich Aldegrever – Portrait of Wilhelm of Cleves, 1540, Museum Zitadelle, Jülich Figure 3 Map of the Rhineland Campaign of 1543 Figure 4 Wenceslaus Hollar – Plan of Düren, 1647, Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek; the circle highlights the Kölntor – the ‘Gate of Cologne’ Figure 5 Wenceslaus Hollar – Plan of Düren (detail); the fortifications in front of the Kölntor were not rebuilt, but they could not have differed much from those guarding the other town gates – in this case, the Holtzpfort Figure 6 Wenceslaus Hollar – The Holtzpfort of Düren, 1664, Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale Figure 7 Daniel Specklin – The Citadel of Jülich, 1589, Museum Zitadelle, Jülich (detail); built after 1548 following the project of Italian architect Alessandro Pasqualini, the new citadel of Jülich is a perfect example of the alla moderna style of fortifications, with sloped, thick, low-profiling walls and arrow-shaped bastions which eliminated blind spots and created overlapping fields of fire Venetian Gothic Figure 1 The first floor loggia of the Molo wing of the Palazzo Ducale, c.1340-1346 or later Figure 2 The Palazzo Ducale: upper part of the Porta della Carta (1438-c.1443), with the image of doge Foscari and the Marcian lion Figure 3 Ca’ Foscari (1452-c.1457) as seen from the Rialto bridge Figure 4 The ‘twin’ Palazzi Soranzo on Campo San Polo, the left one c.1380-1410. the right in c.1475 Figure 5 Outer corner of the facade of the Ca’ d’Oro, c.1424-1428 Figure 6 The land-gate at Ca’ Foscari, with the prominent stemma of the clan Figure 7 The loggia at the Ca’ d’Oro by Matteo Raverti, 1425-1427 Figure 8 Facade of Palazzo Pisani Moretta, 1481-c.1485

163 163 164 168

169 171

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207 209 213 216 218 219 221 223

Marin Sanudo on Brescia Figure 1 Floriano Ferramola – A Tournament at Brescia, ca. 1511. London, Victoria &Albert Museum

236

Bodies Politic. The Environment, Public Health, and the State in SixteenthCentury Venice Figure 1 Benedetto Bordone, Map of Venice from Isolario (Venice, 1534) (Wellcome Library, London)  251 Odious Comparisons Figure 1 Stefano Buonsignori, 1584 Map of Florence, with author’s superimposed site indications (a-z) relating to Walter de Brienne (Duke of Athens), Florence, Istituto Geografico Militare. © Istituto Geografico Militare Figure 2 Stefano Buonsignori, 1584 Map of Florence, with author’s superimposed site indications A-I relating to Cosimo de Medici Florence, Istituto Geografico Militare. © Istituto Geografico Militare Figure 3 Giorgio Vasari and Giovanni Stradano, Leo X’s 1515 cortege in the Piazza della Signoria (1555-62), Palazzo Vecchio, Sala di Leone X: showing the San Giorgio hill and cannon salvos from the future site of Cosimo’s 1546 ‘strada’. © Studio Antonio Quattrone Figure 4 Giovanni Stradano, from Giorgio Vasari survey, Siege of Florence (1561-62), fresco, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, Sala di Clemente VII. © Studio Antonio Quattrone Figure 5 Cosimo Bartoli, Surveying points in and around Florence, from ‘Del modo di misurare le distanze’ (dedicated to Cosimo I, 1559), Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Plut. 30, 27, fol. 127v: labels include ‘[palazzo] del duca’, ‘m[ercato] nuovo’, ‘bastio[ne] di S[an] Giorgio, ‘[villa] belvedere’, and ‘[torre di] bellosguardo’ Figure 6 Alessandro del Barbiere, attrib., Fantasy view of the Neptune fountain, the ducal palace, the Uffizi ‘strada’ and the San Giorgio hill beyond, private collection. Photograph by Cosimo Boccardi, Fondazione Federico Zeri, inv. 84493 (‘La riproduzione fotografica è tratta dalla Fototeca della Fondazione Federico Zeri. I diritti patrimoniali d’autore risultano esauriti’)

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303

311 311

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Renaissance Cities through Ruskinian Eyes Figure 1 Edwin F. Reynolds c. 1915-1917 364 Figure 2 Sketches and notes made by Edwin F. Reynolds in Florence, Wednesday 2 April 1902 371 Figure 3 Plan, section, and notes made by Edwin F. Reynolds at S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, on Monday 7 April 1902 375

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank all the contributors to this work for their punctiliousness and for the patience and understanding that they have displayed in the course of a rather long journey. We should also like to thank Amsterdam University Press for the courtesy, consideration, and efficiency they have always exhibited in their dealings with us, and here it is a particular pleasure to single out Tyler Cloherty, Simon Forde, Isabella Lazzarini and Erika Gaffney. We are very grateful, too, for the illuminating comments and suggestions of the two readers for the Press. Finally, Humfrey Butters would like to thank Suzy Butters, whose many talents have been of great service to him and this work, not least that of her grasp of the arcana of the electronic world, which greatly exceeds his own. In September 2019, Humfrey Butters himself passed away in the final stages of finishing this project in memoriam of his great friend and from 1973- 2008, colleague, Michael Mallett. His work on celebrating the legacy of Michael Mallett has now become Humfrey’s final contribution to the field of study he loved.



Warfare and Politics, Cities and Governmentin Renaissance Tuscany and Venice Editorial Introduction Humfrey Butters and Gabriele Neher

After the death of Professor Michael Mallett in 2008 two academic events took place, both of which were devoted to honouring the memory of this distinguished Italian Renaissance historian. The first was a conference organized by the University of Warwick at its centre in Venice, the Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, in December 2009; the second was a session, held at the same address, of the Renaissance Society of America’s annual conference, which also took place in Venice, in April 2010. Most of the essays of which this volume is composed saw the light originally as contributions to the former or to the latter. The scholarly interests revealed in his works were very broad, both in their subject matter – political and economic, military and diplomatic history – and in their geographical range, and the present collection both reflects these and in some respects goes beyond them, features of which Mallett would have greatly approved. The fact that the University of Warwick has a centre in Venice at all is largely due to him, since more than anyone else he was responsible for the establishment and successful running of the History department’s course on Florentine and Venetian Renaissance history, which since 1967 has been taught on the spot in that city, and for assisting the History of Art department to set up its own course in Venice in the 1970’s. In the introductory essay Humfrey Butters provides a survey of the origins and development of the idea of the Renaissance state. In the fourteenth century writers in Italy began to speak of a recovery or revival after a period of darkness; for many of them this was a cultural phenomenon, but some, like Giovanni Villani and Bruni, spoke of a political revival as well. There was no

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_bune

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Humfrey But ters and Gabriele Neher

attempt, however, to marry these two conceptions, which were based upon different chronologies; and no authors before Burckhardt made a sustained effort to produce an analysis that integrated them. In Burckhardt’s great work, however, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, this integration was achieved, by maintaining that what distinguished Italy from other areas of Europe in the period, enabling it to produce the Renaissance, were the unusual political conditions that obtained in it. Northern and central Italy were not governed in the main by one ruler, but by a collection of fiercely competing city states. In this deeply competitive world it was talent and ruthlessness rather than social origins that ensured success, and in this secular and individualistic world the Renaissance Signori found natural allies in writers and artists keen to bolster the authority of generous patrons. Burckhardt did not deny the importance of the revival of classical literature and art, but argued that it was the marriage of this with the ‘genius’ of the Italian people which produced the civilization whose impact upon Western Europe he saw as revolutionary. For him it was Renaissance Italy’s blend of realism, individualism and secular attitudes which made it the birthplace of the modern world. The primary philosophical influence on Burckhardt is taken to be Schopenhauer rather than Gombrich’s favoured candidate, Hegel. The afterlife of Burckhardt’s notion of the Renaissance state is then traced through the works of modern authors such as Baron, Skinner, Pocock and Chabod. Their ideas are critically examined, and the extent of the divergencies of their views from Burckhardt’s is examined. The vigorous and learned debate between Jones, who did not believe in a Renaissance state, and Chittolini, who does, is considered, as is a recent collection of essays that addresses the same theme. Butters draws attention to the significance of Chittolini’s admission that Jones was right to maintain that medieval Italian governments were more creative and ‘modern’ than their Renaissance successors. Studies of the government of Florence’s and Venice’s regional states show that while in each case the central government was prepared to put heavy demands on the resources of its subject territories, it was also pragmatically aware of the need to respect, as far as possible, their existing constitutional rights and privileges. Nor have those accounts of the Tudor and Valois monarchies, sometimes known as ‘Renaissance monarchies’, which have seen them as standard-bearers of modernity, won general acceptance. Many recent investigations have been devoted to the study of Renaissance courts and ritual, a scholarly trend for which the work of Norbert Elias is partly responsible. Elias’s debt to Burckhardt is discussed, as are the weaknesses both in his approach, and in the structuralism that inspires some of the literature on

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the courts. The essay ends with a survey of the criticisms made of the use of anthropological methodology that is a distinguishing feature of most studies of ritual in Italian republics and principates. In the first section, Warfare: Politics and Battles, Fighters and Civilians, Narration and Analysis, siege warfare, and in particular the decisive role played by artillery, is a principal theme of Reinhold Mueller’s essay on the capture of Negroponte by the Ottomans in 1470, one of the heaviest blows suffered by Venice in the periodic wars that characterized her relationship with the Turks. A striking feature of this piece is that in addition to a lucid account of the fall of Negroponte and of the destruction of Aenos by the Venetians in the preceding year, for which the Turkish assault on the Venetian city was intended as a just revenge, Mueller addresses a neglected but undoubtedly interesting aspect of the topic: the fate of the women, some with children, who fell into Turkish hands, and were forced to watch the execution of their menfolk. Many of those who, by escaping their captors, or by being ransomed, managed to reach Venice were given financial assistance by the government. Two of them were among the founders of the Franciscan Observant convent of Santo Sepolcro and were subsequently beatified by Franciscan hagiographers, together with another co-founder and an early recruit to the convent. It was most unusual, as Mueller points out, for four beate to be associated with one convent; and it provides a telling illustration of the importance of the religious dimension to the conflicts between Venice and the Ottomans. Simon Pepper considers a crucial aspect of another war involving Venice, her struggle against the League of Cambrai. This is the nature and extent of resistance that the workers and peasants of Venice’s Terraferma dominions offered to her opponents. Serious difficulties confront an investigation of this sort: contemporary accounts, for example, were bound to be affected by vested interests, and the willingness of urban populations to surrender to the forces of the League cannot be taken as proof of affection for the French or its other members; for it might simply have reflected a keen desire to avoid the sack that military conventions allowed besiegers to inflict upon towns or cities they had been forced to storm. Pepper is well aware of the traps, and has assembled ample and convincing evidence of considerable loyalty to Venice of the lower orders of society, both rural and urban: a fact on which Machiavelli commented during a stay in Verona in late 1509. Pro-Venetian peasants and urban workers were to be found acting in a variety of roles: as scouts and messengers in territory occupied by Venice’s enemies; as members of guerrilla bands quite prepared to attack regular troops; and as components of massed contingents numbering many thousands.

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Venice’s relationship with her subjects and with the enemies that she faced in the War of the League of Cambrai is also the subject of Krystina Stermole’s essay, which through a searching examination of the woodcut images that accompanied the political pamphlets printed during the conflict seeks to cast light upon the opinions of those formally excluded from formal political life, whose views were certainly not ignored by the patriciate. The pamphlets were cheap and were often produced days after the events they recounted. The woodcuts that accompanied them were not mere ancillary items, but were clearly regarded as a form of expression in their own right, whose message could be quite independent of that of the written texts. Stermole is careful not to overplay her hand, and quite rightly remarks that in general it is frequently not clear whether the underlying messages conveyed by the pamphlets reflected the views of those who produced them, or represented, rather, the opinions that their producers thought were current among the general population. The importance of these texts and images is made clear by the fact that Venice’s opponents made use of such instruments of persuasion themselves. One keen contemporary observer of Venice’s conduct of warfare in this period was Niccolò Machiavelli, who found her deployment of mercenaries thoroughly distasteful. John Najemy addresses a significant question that has for long puzzled Machiavelli scholars: why in the Art of War did he choose as a spokesman for his views on the disastrous consequences of relying upon the services of mercenaries, and the indispensability of a citizen militia, a noble condottiere, Fabrizio Colonna, whose career and ideas would seem to have suited him, rather, to be the object of a Machiavellian diatribe. A meticulous textual and historical analysis enables Najemy to reject two, conflicting, solutions to this problem: the first, that Machiavelli chose Fabrizio because the Colonna family was close to the Soderini, and so enemies of the Medici: the second, that Fabrizio was selected in order to provide an Italian, rather than narrowly Florentine, spokesman for Machiavelli’s views, who had the additional advantage of being close to the Medici, whose patronage Machiavelli was anxious to gain. He concludes that the true role Fabrizio was intended to play in the dialogue was a dual one: on the one hand, to present a powerful statement of Machiavelli’s own position, all the more telling for being delivered by a man whose career represented its polar opposite; on the other, to produce unconvincing and self-serving justifications of the yawning gulf between that career and the ideas that he was defending. A sharp and illuminating contrast to Machiavelli’s atrabilious views about the conduct of warfare in Italy is to be found in Maurizio Arfaioli’s essay on Charles V’s siege of Düren in 1543. The Italian and Florentine soldiers

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lent to the Emperor on this occasion by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici played a star part in that critical military encounter, thanks to whose successful outcome Charles V was able to crush the Duke of Cleves-Jülich’s rebellion, and so administer a telling, though not decisive, blow to the formidable coalition that faced him, composed of the French, some German princes and the Ottomans, and also ward off a pressing threat to the Netherlands. In another respect, however, this contribution illustrates a thoroughly Machiavellian theme: the interweaving of politics and warfare. Thanks to the military assistance Cosimo provided, together with substantial financial aid, he was able to obtain from the Emperor the restitution of the citadels of Florence and Livorno, a crucial stage in the growth of ducal power and independence. The siege itself is also noteworthy from a military point of view, since it reveals the weakness of the architectural solution adopted not merely at Düren, but elsewhere in Germany, and in parts of England, in order to face the growing menace of heavy artillery, which involved reinforcing the existing walls with great masses of earth, surrounding them with deep ditches, and protecting the city gates with semi-circular bastions. This proved itself to be decidedly inferior to the trace italienne increasingly favoured by Italian military architects and their employers. The second part of the volume, Political Language and Careers, Urban Identity and Transformation, the Physical Environment, opens with Fabrizio Ricciardelli’s essay on Italian and, in particular, Florentine political conflict and the ways in which it shaped political imagery. The popular government that established itself in 1282 had recourse to a binary metaphorical opposition between wolves and lambs, which had classical and Christian roots, to describe the relationship between the magnates and the popolo. These powerful verbal images were deployed as one of the justifications for the anti-magnatial legislation that, in Florence and elsewhere, was promulgated in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries. As Ricciardelli percipiently observes, these categories could also be deployed to characterize other sorts of political conflict, as they were by Dante, and to justify by their very starkness the executions and political proscriptions suffered by the losers in these struggles. Richard Goy’s insightful study is also concerned with political values, and with a particular form of expression of them, that is, their petrification. He is concerned to bring to light the relationship between the architectural qualities exhibited by the palaces of Venetian nobles and the virtues for which Venetian government and society were meant to stand. Values such as magnificence, stability, endurance, symmetry and order, for example, could, without excessive strain, be seen as characteristics both of Venetian

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palaces and of the Venetian state. In this way architecture could contribute to the myth of Venice. Goy also shows how great was the stylistic influence of the Palazzo Ducale, that unique example of Venetian Staatssymbolik: its traceried colonnades, for example, were widely copied in the design of Venetian palaces in the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries; and so were the figures of lions, symbolizing strength and fortitude, that inhabit the external facades of the seat of government. Patrician palaces, therefore, made clear for all to see the standing and prestige of the families that built them; but, at the same time, they served as visually powerful reminders of how closely those clans were to be identified with the government of the state. In Gaby Neher’s contribution another salient feature of Venetian government is addressed: the relationship of Venice with one of her most important subject cities, Brescia. Her main source for this enquiry is Marin Sanudo’s Diaries. In her treatment of this fundamental work she makes interesting use of the suggestive comparison, drawn by Patricia Fortini Brown, between Venetian historians’ manner of recording events, with a minimum of commentary, and that employed in Venetian narrative painting. Neher’s point is that one has to read Sanudo’s descriptions carefully, in order to penetrate the true meaning of the occurrences he relates. The case study that she analyses to illustrate these themes is the visit to Brescia of Caterina Cornaro, former Queen of Cyprus, in 1497. The ostensible reason for the visit was the impending confinement of her sister-in-law Elisabetta, who was married to Caterina’s brother Giorgio, podestà of Brescia; but from the point of view of the Venetian government, since Caterina’s arrival in Brescia coincided with a series of important meetings between Milanese and Venetian military representatives, it could be used to boost Venetian prestige during these negotiations, since she could be seen as its quasi-regal representative. Even though she was not authorized to participate in these discussions, her visit provided the occasion for jousts and tournaments in which Venetian and Milanese commanders and their soldiers participated, and it attracted the attention of prominent figures in neighbouring courts, such as Isabella and Beatrice d’Este. It also served to project a glorious image of Brescia, and this, as Neher rightly observes, indirectly contributed to the fame and reputation of the city to which Brescia was subject. The nature of Venice’s relationship with her terraferma dominions is also considered in Jane Stevens Crawshaw’s enterprising essay, which investigates the problems of infection and pollution that confronted the city and its territories, and the measures taken to address them. A long-standing feature of writings dedicated to celebrating the signal and singular qualities of the Venetian Republic had been the intimate connection their authors perceived

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between those attributes and the unique physical environment of the city; but it was also true that infection and pollution could be seen as divine punishments for moral or governmental failings. Some of these discussions are to be found in medical works, since in the early modern period medical theory placed great weight upon the role of the environment in causing or combating disease, but they were certainly not confined to them, and one reason for this is that in Venice corporeal metaphors, a standard feature of medieval political thought, could be used both to describe the state and to characterize its physical setting. Cristoforo Sabbadino, for example, used parts of the body to characterize the functions of the various elements of which the Venetian lagoon was composed. The city itself he saw as the heart. All of these elements had to be kept in good working order to preserve the health of the whole. Not all commentators on infection and pollution in the Venetian state who had recourse to the metaphor of a body were uncritical of Venice itself: the nuncio Marcantonio Corfino, for example, spoke of the Venetian dominio as a mystical body, but then proceeded to attack the trade ban imposed upon Verona during the plague of 1575-1577, claiming that it would have negative effects on that entire body. On the whole, however, Venetian public health policies were distinguished by a pragmatic awareness that Venice’s interests were indissolubly bound up with those of her subject cities, so that remedies were rarely adopted that benefited the capital city regardless of their impact upon the rest of the state. Venice was not the only city to survive the Italian wars with its republican constitution intact, Lucca did so too. Christine Shaw’s essay investigates its often strained relationship with the ruler of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. What Charles V wanted from Lucca was loyalty and cash. What the city government wanted was protection and the confirmation of Lucca’s privileges, which it claimed in view of its status as an imperial city, but it found less agreeable the onerous demands of the Emperor and his representatives for protection money, destined to fund the operations of the Spanish and imperial armies. These requests were based on a wholly exaggerated view of Lucca’s ability to pay, which was itself the product of a failure to distinguish between the limited financial resources of the government and the economic prosperity of Lucchese merchants. Shaw provides a lucid and perceptive guide to the course of negotiations between Lucca’s rulers and Charles’s representatives, and shows that although Lucca often had to pay out more than she wanted, she often succeeded in securing a reduction in her contributions, sometimes by direct appeals to the Emperor himself, who was capable of showing himself less exigent than his agents. She concludes

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that this evidence, at least, shows that Charles was not prejudiced against republics as a matter of principle. One great city whose republican constitution did not survive in this period was Florence. Until 1530 those who were victorious in Florence’s political conflicts were normally content to enjoy their success within a republican context; Suzy Butters’s study considers a family, the Medici, which drastically departed from that precedent, even though duke Cosimo de’ Medici I (r.15371574) liked to represent his government as a continuation of the republic. Exploiting a hitherto unstudied ancestral connection between Cosimo and the reviled Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens, Florence’s tyrannical signore a vita (r.1342-1343), which was brought to Cosimo’s attention in 1567, she compares the steps taken by the two autocrats to consolidate their authority and military hold on the city, examining why the parallels existed, and asking whether Cosimo sought to publicise or to mask them. Both rulers, for example, would reside in the seat of republican government, the Palazzo dei Priori, extend the space around it, attend to controlling the Mercato Nuovo, and transform the defences of Florence’s Oltrarno, Walter by adding towers to the walls, fortifying its gates, and building a new street up the Costa San Giorgio hill, on whose summit he planned to build a citadel. Cosimo’s important military constructions on the hill’s slopes and summit in the 1540’s, whose complex and poorly understood history this essay reconstructs in depth, were far more ambitious, not least because they methodically but stealthily prepared the way for the family’s better known projects on the hill from 1550 onwards: the Medici acquisition and development of the Pitti property; the 1568 construction of the Belvedere; and, in 1590, the erection of a fortress below it, on the site where the Duke of Athens had envisaged his citadel. Some of Cosimo’s works were intended to protect the city against external threats, but in most cases their primary objective was to protect the Medici dukes and dynasty against internal menaces; significantly, in some cases, their true purpose could be partially masked, by the involvement of Eleonora di Toledo, Cosimo’s wife, and by defining their goals as aesthetic rather than authoritarian. Whatever Cosimo really thought of Walter of Brienne, he would have been ill advised to praise him too openly, given the unpopularity of his government and the ignominious fashion in which it was brought to an end. Butters rightly points out, however, that Walter’s title had other, more politically and socially prestigious associations for the Medici, as did a potential family link with the irresistible attractions of Athens’s cultural history. These other associations, Butters persuasively suggests, help to explain why Cosimo felt able to commission a portrait of Walter to add to his collection of copies of the portraits of famous men and

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women housed in Giovio’s museo in Como, and to publicly display it in his own museo, in the ducal palace. In the Epilogue Stella Fletcher provides a lively and informative account of how the surviving architectural monuments of the world analysed in this volume were viewed by an architect of the last century who, like Michael Mallett, resided in Warwickshire. Edwin Reynolds’s unpublished diary of his tour of Italy in 1902, which Mallett had read, not merely contains the opinions of a highly competent observer, nourished on the views of Ruskin, about the buildings he visited in Rome and Florence, Venice and Milan; but it also records in exhaustive detail the places where he stayed and the sums of money that he spent. It casts considerable light, therefore, on the nature of educated, middle-class tourism in the period before the Great War. After the Epilogue we have included a bibliography of Michael Mallett’s publications.

About the Authors Humfrey Butters (1946-2019), Emeritus Reader in History, University of Warwick Gabriele Neher, Associate Professor, The Department of Art History, University of Nottingham



Historians and the Renaissance State Humfrey Butters Abstract From the fourteenth century onwards writers began to speak of a revival in Italy after a period of darkness; for many this was a cultural one, for others a political one. Even Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Gibbon, who regarded the Renaissance as the rejection of all things medieval, did not attempt to integrate the two conceptions. Burckhardt was the first thinker to do so, finding the cause of Italy’s cultural Renaissance in the unique political conditions of the peninsula, an area which was not governed by one ruler but by a great variety of ruthlessly competing states. According to Burckhardt this produced a secular, realistic and individualistic culture with little regard for religion or social hierarchy, and great regard for political and artistic talent. The revival of classical literature and art was significant, he thought, but it was the marriage of this with the peculiar genius of the Italian people that produced a unique civilization that ushered in the modern era. The principal influence on Burckhardt was Schopenhauer, not Hegel (pace Gombrich). The extent of the debt owed by modern historians such as Baron, Skinner, Pocock and Chabod to Burckhardt’s notion of the Renaissance state is discussed, as is the illuminating controversy between Jones, who is hostile to it, and Chittolini, who is far more sympathetic. Studies of the regional states constructed by Florence and Venice reveal the heavy demands they put on the resources of their subject territories, but also their acute awareness of the need to respect existing political rights and privileges. The attempt by some scholars to see in the Tudor and Valois monarchies northern examples of Burckhardt’s Renaissance state is critically assessed. Recent investigations of Renaissance courts and of ritual, some of them inspired by the views of Norbert Elias, are considered, together with Elias’s debt to Burckhardt. The problems arising from the deployment in some of these works of theories drawn from anthropology and sociology – structuralism and functionalism – are underlined.

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_hbut

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Keywords: balance of power, bourgeoisie, capitalism, city state, civic humanism, communes, composite monarchies, courts, Dark Ages, federation, freedom, feudalism, functionalism, humanism, individualism, ‘Machiavellian moment’, merchants, Middle Ages, Myth of Venice, nobility, patronage, realism, popolo, Reason of State, regional states, Renaissance monarchies, republicanism, resident ambassadors, rhetoric, ritual, Signori, society, standing armies, Structuralism, terraferma, Unconscious, work of art, Volksgeist (spirit of a people).

Introduction There are several ways of thinking about the state, and three principal ones have been singled out by Kenneth Dyson: 1) the socio-political, found, for example, in authors such as Karl Marx (1818-1883), Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), and Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), which addresses the survival or efficacy of states; 2) the legal, which takes the state to be a set of institutions, not persons, with legally prescribed rights and duties; and 3) the philosophical, which concerns itself with the sources of the state’s authority and of the subjects’ obligation to obey it. In practice, these approaches are not rigidly divorced from one another,1 nor is this conceptual taxonomy necessarily exhaustive, for Dyson himself has a chapter entitled ‘The State as a Socio-Cultural Phenomenon’.2 These considerations point to the complexity of the subject and to the difficulty of distinguishing clearly the elements of which it is composed, derived in part from the loose nature of some of the key terms involved – such as ‘society’, ‘state’, and ‘culture’ – and from the changes in meaning they have undergone.

Political and cultural chronologies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Further problems confront the attempt to address the historiography of the Renaissance state. There is the much-disputed definition of the word An earlier version of this essay appeared in Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa, general editors Giovanni Luigi Fontana and Luca Molà, vol. 1: Storia e Storiografia, ed. by by Marcello Fantoni (Vicenza: Fondazione Cassamarca-Angelo Colla, 2005), 121-50. 1 Dyson, 10-34. 2 Ibid., 48-78.

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‘Renaissance’; and there is the fact that, as Nicolai Rubinstein has remarked, the conception of the humanists of a rebirth after a dark age, adopted by the artists, was essentially cultural.3 In the fourteenth century, the concept of an age of darkness, already used by Christian writers to refer to the period before the coming of Christianity, 4 began to be applied to culture. In his Africa, Petrarch (1304-1374) spoke of a dark age,5 and writers such as Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) and Filippo Villani (1325-1407) began referring to a revival in the arts or in literature after a long period of darkness: Boccaccio’s Life of Dante credited the poet with making possible the return of the Muses to Italy; his Decameron declared the realism of Giotto (1266/67-1337) responsible for reviving the art of painting; and Villani, in his Liber de civitatis Florentiae famosis civibus, saw Dante (c. 1265-1321), Petrarch, and Boccaccio as having rescued poetry from a long dark age and Giotto and Cimabue (c. 1240-1302) as having done the same for the art of painting.6 Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), who was the first to use the word ‘rinascita’,7 was heavily indebted to these authors. But no serious attempt was made to harmonize this cultural periodization with other ones based upon political or social developments.8 In his Historiarum ab inclinatione Romani imperii decades, for example, Flavio Biondo (1392-1463) saw the sack of Rome in 410 as initiating a new period for Europe, but he did not indicate if it had ended yet, nor did he relate it to cultural trends. His Italia Illustrata, by contrast, told a story of the decline of culture after the fall of Rome and its revival in aetas nostra.9 In his Vita di Petrarca, Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370-1444) linked the decline of letters in ancient Rome to the fall of the Republic;10 but when he and Giovanni Villani (c. 1276 or 1280-1348) in their histories of Florence saw the city as emerging from the Dark Ages, thanks to Charlemagne (740s-814), this was a purely political revival. Bruni was the first historian to speak of a ‘middle age’, a term he used to delineate the period between Florence’s ravaging by the Ostrogoth king Totila (r. 541-552) and its restoration by Charlemagne.11

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Rubinstein, ‘Medio Evo’, 429. Ferguson, 8. Mommsen, 106-29. Ferguson, 19-21. Ibid., 65. Rubinstein, ‘Medio Evo’, 429-30. Ibid., 431-32. Baron, 417. Rubinstein, ‘Medio Evo’, 433.

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About other matters, however, Bruni and Villani disagreed, such as the dating of Florence’s emergence as a free commune.12 Persistence and survival tended to be the distinguishing qualities of the history of Milan and Venice, according to their historians between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some Venetian historians saw the transfer of the ducal seat to the Rialto in the ninth century as initiating a new era; while Bernardino Corio (1459-c. 1519) argued that the rise of the Visconti rescued Milan from centuries of disorder and instability.13 But the rise of ‘regional states’, upon which some modern historians have sought to erect a new Renaissance chronology, does not play a starring role in these accounts. One feature that did excite the attention of medieval observers such as Otto of Freising (c. 1114-1158) and Alexander of Roes (d. after 1288), and many later ones, was the prominent part played by commerce and merchants in Italian society and government, a blend of republicanism and capitalism that distinguished Italy from the hierarchical states of northern Europe.14 Following in this tradition, Machiavelli attributed the disappearance or survival of Italian republics to the presence or absence of a landed nobility.15 Among Italian states, none acquired a more widespread European reputation for commercial wealth, republicanism, and political stability than did Venice. In the early sixteenth century, particularly in the wake of the Agnadello crisis, Venetians strove to develop the ‘Myth of Venice’; but most elements of it had been in existence for far longer,16 and when foreign commentators such as James Howell (c. 1594-1666) or James Harrington (1611-1677) in England, or Pierre d’Avity (1573-1635) in France spoke admiringly of the Venetian constitution or of the longevity of Venice,17 they were certainly not confining their observations to ‘Renaissance Venice’ or the period after Venice had acquired a terraferma state; and, as has been seen, these chronological categories were not used by Renaissance Venetian historians either.18

12 Ibid., 434; Bruni, History, 1:108, 110. 13 Rubinstein, ‘Medio Evo’, 438, 441-42. 14 Jones, City-State, 96, 151-52, 196. 15 Machiavelli, Discorsi, Book I, Chap. 55, 254-58. 16 Fasoli. 17 Bouwsma, 452-54. 18 Vide supra, xxxx.

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Enlightenment views of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Enlightenment thinkers such as William Robertson (1721-1793) often saw Italy’s precocious economic development, which they associated with cultural revival, as critical for Europe’s emergence from medieval barbarism.19 Voltaire (1694-1778) was one of these. His Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations distinguished itself by studying ‘culture’ in the broadest sense of the term, surveying the modes of behaviour and ways of thinking of a society, not just its arts and letters. But he did not treat the Renaissance as a separate epoch,20 and while he praised the medieval communes’ victory over the Hohenstaufen,21 he deprecated the subsequent failure of most of them to preserve their republican liberty and resist foreign domination.22 Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) took a largely similar view of Italy’s role, vigorously approving the communes’ economic success and ability to defeat both the Hohenstaufen and their own landed nobility23 and stressing Italy’s later contribution to cultural revival but making no sustained effort to link the worlds of high culture and politics or to single out the Renaissance as a period.24 For him it was the nation states of northern Europe which were destined to be the true heirs of ancient Rome.

The concept of the Renaissance state from Sismondi to Burckhardt The liberal Swiss historian Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi (1773-1842) agreed with Voltaire’s and Gibbon’s admiring view of the medieval communes, in part because as a Rousseauite he regarded political freedom as fundamental to a vigorous and healthy cultural life. But for that very reason he disagreed with their verdict on the Medici: they saw that family as enlightened cultural patrons; he regarded them as tyrants who destroyed Florentine liberty and so precipitated moral and cultural decline. 25 For him it was a people’s government and laws, rather than their climate or

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Hale, 55; Ferguson, 101. Ferguson, 89-90. Voltaire, 1:514-16, 668. Ibid., 1:703. Gibbon, 3:110-11 Ibid., 3:681-82. Ferguson, 165-67.

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racial origins, that determined their intellectual and moral character.26 He associated the rise of signori (despots) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the appearance of individuals whose brilliance was matched by their moral defects. The first sustained and sophisticated attempt to marry political and cultural periodization was Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, whose first part is entitled ‘The State as a Work of Art’.27 But for Burckhardt (1818-1897), as for Sismondi, political phenomena determine cultural ones: it was the failure of popes or emperors to impose their authority on the Italian peninsula that left it the home to a great variety of ruthlessly competitive states. Talent and calculation, rather than birth, were the essential requirements in a world in which the despot was the natural ally of the poet and the artist, the state was created like a work of art, and the Renaissance individual, the first incarnation of modern man, manifested himself. Burckhardt, however, had less interest than Sismondi in the medieval communes, and he regarded medieval man as viewing the world and his own person as through a veil, as in a dream, aware of himself only as a member of a group or party. Renaissance man, by contrast, saw the world objectively and was aware of himself as an individual. Burckhardt borrowed the formula ‘the discovery of the world and of man’ from Jules Michelet (1798-1874)28 but developed the idea much further. From the Italian humanists Burckhardt took the notion of cultural revival and their focus on great individuals, and from Vasari’s Vite he adopted the emphasis upon the realism and naturalism that he saw as distinguishing the rebirth of painting.29 Indeed, he had originally intended his study of the Renaissance to be primarily a work of art history.30 It is also noteworthy that his account of the Renaissance state is largely devoted to the behaviour of individuals rather than the development of institutions. For Burckhardt the individualism and realism of the Renaissance were more important than the revival of Classical Antiquity, significant as that undoubtedly was.31 His perception of the significance of Renaissance artists is well captured in his remark to a friend that a principal aim of his work was to penetrate to the unconscious level, of which works of art were conscious expressions.32 26 Sismondi, 1:1. 27 Burckhardt, Kultur, 1-130. 28 Kaegi, 3:684-86. 29 Rubin, 1-2; Ferguson, 63. 30 Kaegi, 3:649. 31 Burckhardt, Kultur, 171. 32 Kaegi, 3:673.

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Burckhardt’s admission strongly suggests the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who ascribed more importance to the unconscious than any other nineteenth-century philosopher, as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung appreciated,33 and who ascribed a unique status to artists and writers in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in whose third section, ‘Die Platonische Idee: das Objekt der Kunst’, they are credited with the ability to perceive the world as idea, that is, to grasp its true reality,34 an achievement Plato reserved to philosophers. Another aspect of Schopenhauer’s thought which influenced Burckhardt was his fascination with Indian philosophy’s concept of a ‘veil of illusion’ (maja), thanks to which, Schopenhauer declared, borrowing Kantian terms, we do not perceive things-in-themselves, only phenomena.35 Burckhardt, as observed above, used it to describe the consciousness of medieval man.36 Burckhardt owed far more to Schopenhauer than to the latter’s hated rival Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), with whom Ernst Gombrich (19092001) attempted to associate him. Behind Burckhardt’s idea of a ‘cultural epoch’, Gombrich maintained, lay Hegel’s concept of the Volksgeist, which stamps its character on all aspects of a culture.37 But both Voltaire and Montesquieu (1689-1755) had already spoken of the spirit of a people.38 It is true that in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte Hegel used the expression ‘the political work of art’ in reference to ancient Greece;39 but Edmund Burke (1729-1797), whose work was very popular in Germany, 40 had already referred to the state as a work of art.41 In both cases, ideas adopted by Burckhardt might well not have come from Hegel. For Hegel, moreover, as Gombrich admitted, the Reformation was of far greater significance than the Renaissance. 42 More convincing is Gombrich’s attack on the sort of cultural history practised both by Hegel and Burckhardt; for him the Renaissance was a movement, not a period. 43

33 Schopenhauer, World, 279-80 (editor’s notes). 34 Schopenhauer, Welt, 250-51. 35 Ibid., 9, 299. 36 Vide supra, xxxx. 37 Gombrich, 10 38 Burckhardt, Civilization, 10 (Burke’s introduction); Montesquieu, 1:461. 39 Gombrich, 20-21 40 Ferguson, 117. 41 Dyson, 189. 42 Gombrich, 9. 43 Ibid., 37.

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The Baron thesis and its critics One twentieth-century scholar who followed Burckhardt in sharply distinguishing a medieval from a Renaissance era, in finding the roots of modernity in the latter period, and in trying to relate culture and the state was Hans Baron (1900-1988). The distinguishing features of his Renaissance were civic humanism, humanism committed to the active and republican rather than the contemplative life and to capitalism but not individualism.44 Like Burckhardt he is not interested in institutions. The protagonist of his main work, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, is Leonardo Bruni, who, according to Baron, was led by his experience of Florence’s war with Milan in 1401-1402 to develop the theory of civic humanism, which had only emerged sporadically before then. 45 The thesis has proved extremely controversial. Scholars such as Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-1999), Jerrold Seigel, and James Hankins have argued that the humanists were primarily rhetoricians able to argue on either side of a case, not philosophers; 46 and Seigel and Hankins have also pointed out that most of the works of Bruni on which Baron relied were essentially rhetorical pieces. Bruni’s Laudatio Florentinae Urbis, for example, belonged to the genre of epideictic rhetoric, which was explicitly based upon exaggeration. Here the distinction between the meaning and the force of an utterance, discussed by the philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960), is crucial. 47 Other critics of Baron, such as Nicolai Rubinstein (1911-2002), Charles Davis (1929-1998), and Quentin Skinner (1940-), have pointed out that defences of republicanism can be found long before Bruni, in the writings of authors such as Brunetto Latini (c. 1220-1294), Remigio de’ Girolami (1235-1319), Marsilius of Padua (c. 1275-c. 1342), and Ptolemy of Lucca (c. 1236-c. 1327). 48 The sharp distinction Baron draws between medieval and Renaissance culture is not, therefore, convincing.

44 Hankins, 311; Fubini, 544-60, 562. 45 Baron, 47-78, 118-19, 191-269. 46 Hankins; Kristeller; Seigel; see also R. Black. 47 Austin, 33, 73, 100. 48 Rubinstein, ‘Dottrine Politiche’, 207-11, ‘Florentine Constitutionalism’, and ‘Marsilius’; Davis, ‘Early Florentine’ and ‘Brunetto Latini’; Skinner, Foundations, 1:39-65.

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Concepts of republicanism and the state: Pocock, Skinner, and their critics Among Baron’s defenders, one of the most ambitious is John Pocock, who sees civic humanism as playing a key role in the development of English and American republicanism. In approach, he and Skinner favour the sort of linguistic and conceptual analysis that became prominent in AngloAmerican philosophy between the wars and is still practised by many. Both thinkers attribute cardinal importance to Machiavelli. The title of Pocock’s work on the subject, The Machiavellian Moment, refers to two of the main topics it addresses: ‘the moment in conceptualized time in which the Republic was seen as confronting its temporal finitude’; and the precise juncture at which Machiavelli and his contemporaries addressed this question.49 Skinner, by contrast, dates the growth of republican ideas much earlier and tends to put the word ‘civic’ in the expression ‘civic humanism’ in inverted commas. He also stresses how radical Machiavelli’s attack upon his humanist predecessors was.50 According to Skinner, Machiavelli, and to a lesser extent Francesci Guicciardini (1483-1540), was responsible for initiating a new genre of Italian political writing concerned with ‘reason of state’.51 More broadly he sees the spread of Italian humanism north of the Alps as partly responsible for a notable linguistic change: the use of the word ‘state’ in a modern sense, in the works of authors such as David Starkey in England and Guillaume Budé (1467-1540) and Jean Bodin (1530-1596) in France.52 This significance of this last claim has been disputed. Even if it is true that medieval theorists did not use the word in a modern sense, that does not mean that they did not have a concept of the state, for as Skinner himself has pointed out elsewhere, it is crucial to distinguish concepts from words. He gives the example of John Milton (1608-1674), who declared his intention of being original but did not use the word ‘original’, which only acquired its modern meaning long after his death.53 Scholars such as Anthony Black, Bernard Guenée, and Gaines Post (1902-1987) have no hesitation about discussing medieval concepts of the state, expressed with words such as ‘universitas’, ‘civitas’, and ‘regnum’ and thought of as an impersonal entity, conceptually distinct from the individuals who in a particular era composed 49 Pocock, viii. 50 Skinner, Foundations, 1:244-62. 51 Ibid., 1:248. 52 Ibid., 2:354-56. 53 Skinner, ‘Language’, 120.

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it.54 Kenneth Pennington and Diego Quaglioni, moreoever, have both shown how much Jean Bodin, one of the thinkers singled out by Skinner for the originality of his account of the state, owed to the writings of the medieval jurists;55 while Post has shown that in the works of these lawyers a notion of raison d’état can be found, long before Machiavelli and Giovanni Botero (c. 1544-1617).56 But even in the sixteenth century, the modern notion of the ‘state-person’, an institutional subject, had not yet appeared upon the scene.57 It is clear that any study of the evolution of ideas about the state must pay just as much attention to the works of jurists as it pays to those of political theorists. It is equally certain that in examining the works of humanists one needs to take account of rhetorical genres. Bruni’s Laudatio was neither intended nor expected to be a serious work of political analysis; his work in Greek on the Florentine constitution, by contrast, was.

The Chittolini-Jones debate about the Renaissance state In the last 40 years, one of the central questions at issue in the debate about the character, or the very existence, of the Renaissance state has been that of the nature of Italian society in the period. The writings of Philip Jones (19212006) and Giorgio Chittolini, who have both made notable contributions to that debate, have much in common with the socio-political approach to the body politic identified by Dyson.58 For Jones, the key social group in Italy was that composed of the great noble families. They, and not the bourgeoisie, played the central role in the public life of the cities of northern and central Italy in the Middle Ages: their adherence was crucial for the revival of the city state;59 their factional struggles destroyed most of the communes;60 from their ranks the signori emerged as party leaders;61 and upon their support despotic and republican rule principally depended.62 Birth and lineage counted for more than individual talent, particularly in the process of

54 Guenée; Post, Studies; A. Black, Political Thought, 188. 55 Pennington, 283; Quaglioni. 56 Post, ‘Ratio’. 57 Mannori, 1-2. 58 Vide supra, xxxx. 59 Jones, City-State, 150-51. 60 Ibid., 151. 61 Ibid., 548. 62 Jones, ‘Communes’.

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rifeudalizzazione that took place in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy,63 diminishing the social differences between Italy and northern Europe and possible in the first place because the social group whose values it expressed and whose interests it served had never left the public stage, despite the rise of the popolo and the passage in some cities of anti-magnatial legislation.64 Jones finds it impossible to reconcile the role played by these great families with the existence of a Renaissance state. Chittolini does believe in a Renaissance state, tending to equate it with the ‘regional states’ formed in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He does not accept the idea that Italy underwent a process of rifeudalizzazione, because, he argues, a phenomenon of that sort would have involved a return to economic and social relationships largely transcended in the communal period.65 While he accepts up to a point Jones’s thesis that the rise of the signori represented a victory of the contado over the city,66 he nonetheless stresses the continuing importance of the cities as the most significant local components of the ‘regional state’,67 though he also sees the growing stability of governmental structures in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as naturally accompanied by the evolution ‘di strutture sociali piú rigide e cristallizzate’.68 Regional states emerged, according to him, because they were better able to survive in the competitive conditions of the Italian peninsula than the city-states that they replaced and absorbed. But the notion of a ‘Renaissance state’, particularly one prodromic of the modern one, is not rejected by Jones merely because of his stress on the cardinal and persisting role played by the great aristocratic families; he also wishes to oppose the entire chronology based on the notion that ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ are antithetical terms, and he is quite content to speak of the state-building undertaken by the communes as the ‘medieval “modernization” of the state’.69 For him the most striking, or truly original, phase in the life of the Italian city-states was the medieval rather than the Renaissance one, both in the degree of independence they won from pope or emperor and in the range and sophistication of the governmental activities upon which they embarked. The communes did not merely acquire all the

63 Jones, ‘Economia’, 343ff., 355ff., 361ff. 64 Jones, City-State, 590-91. 65 Chittolini, ‘Introduzione’, La Crisi, 12. 66 Chittolini, ibid., 21. 67 Chittolini, La Formazione, xxxi. 68 Chittolini, ‘Introduzione’, La crisi, 7. 69 Jones, City-State, 334.

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major regalian rights;70 they became ‘pacesetters’ in the art of government in Europe, whose institutions and procedures other cities and governments were happy to copy: cities elsewhere in Europe acquired consuls and podestà; while the government of the Empire was influenced by the communes in its tax policies and its administration of justice, as was the papacy in its approach to the problems of feudal lordship.71 The system of government, moreover, that the communes had developed by the thirteenth century proved so durable that even in those numerous cities where despotic replaced communal rule it survived largely unchanged until the fifteenth century.72 The signori, once they had implemented those measures essential to guarantee their own position, proved themselves in other respects to be conservatives in the main, exhibiting little of the creative drive and flair that Burckhardt attributed to them. It is significant that Chittolini does not dissent from Jones’s assertions about the institutional precocity and fecundity of the communal period; and he agrees that the regional, or Renaissance, states were less modern than their medieval predecessors.73 Although he cites Federico Chabod (1901-1960) on the new military, diplomatic, and bureaucratic resources of the former and adverts the work of Marvin Becker (1922-2004) on public finance,74 he also admits that the Renaissance state, in its efforts to bring some form of order to its territories, could not do without generous concessions and grants, or recognition of existing privileges.75 He differs from Jones in the significance that he attaches to the steps taken by governments to assert their authority or establish more central control: for example, Florence’s transformation of the territories of subject cities such as Arezzo and Pisa into podesterie or vicariates directly subject to herself,76 or the enfeoffment policy pursued by the Visconti and the Sforza, designed to ensure that those possessed of jurisdictional rights in the duchy of Milan recognized the ‘superiorità feudale’ of the duke.77 In both cases these measures established relationships of authority that lasted until the eighteenth century.78 One of the underlying points at issue in this debate is the degree of autonomy it is reasonable to 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Ibid., 349-50. Ibid., 371 and n86. Ibid., 637. Chittolini, ‘Introduzione’, La crisi, 35. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 36-37. Chittolini, ‘Ricerche’. Chittolini, ‘Infeudazioni’. Ibid., 66, 68-69; ‘Ricerche’ cit., 324-25.

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attribute to the governments of these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ‘regional states’; in other words, how far were they simply the instruments of the landed nobility? There are echoes here of the conflicting views of the state of Marx and Max Weber (1864-1920).79 There is one respect in which Jones’s account is nearer to that of Burckhardt than Chittolini’s: the sustained effort he makes to relate cultural developments to political ones. But Jones’s definition of the term ‘Renaissance’ is far removed from Burckhardt’s; he presents no stark contrast with a medieval world, nor does he see individualism as the master key. At the same time, the phenomenon he uses it to refer to is considerably weightier than Gombrich’s movement: The Italian Renaissance was the culture of the Italian commune, a public and political culture not private or apolitical, and collective not sectional: the creation not of a particular class or even a special type of city but of a particular society, the reincarnate civitas, the ‘Renaissance polis’ (Joachimsen), like renewing like.80

It is quite unjust to accuse Chittolini of avoiding the term ‘Renaissance’,81 for he often speaks of a ‘Renaissance state’, but it is perfectly true that his essays have little to say about culture.

The ‘Renaissance state’, some recent case studies: Venice, Florence, the Regno Few ‘regional states’ have been studied as thoroughly as Venice’s, by scholars such as Gaetano Cozzi (1922-2001), Michael Knapton, Marino Berengo (19282000), Angelo Ventura, John Law, Gian Maria Varanini, and James Grubb. Their views have often conflicted, but none of them is a Burckhardtian, not even Grubb, who does believe in a ‘Renaissance state’ but a ‘composite’ one rather than a Kunstwerk.82 Their discussions of the balance between the power, resources, and scope for the initiative of central government and the surviving rights, privileges, and room for manoeuvre of subject cities characteristically eschew simple solutions. Ventura argued that Venice 79 Giddens, 125. 80 Jones, City-State, 484-85. 81 Pace Grubb, xv. 82 Grubb, xv-xvi; Folin, 505, n1.

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imposed a policy of aristocratization but without creating a centralized or unified state.83 Law denied that a policy of that sort existed84 and also maintained that Venetians tended to think of their terraferma possessions as a collection of territories rather than a unified whole; however, he also drew attention to the power of intervention of magistracies such as the Council of Ten and to the Venetian government’s authority to legislate for the whole state.85 Knapton, inclined to emphasize the powers of intervention of the capital city, was equally alive to the inefficiencies of the Venetian fisc86 and the extent to which Venice’s subjects were able to exploit the rivalries between different Venetian magistracies.87 Recent work on the Florentine territorial state, in both its republican and ducal phases, has tended to stress its federative aspects. Jane Black, for example, has underlined the key role of local laws and of ‘legislative pluralism’ promoted by the central government and far removed from Bruni’s definition of a state as a territorial entity subject to one set of laws.88 This fits well with Mannori’s finding that after 1532 jurists tended to refer to the duchy as a federation of communities. This reflected the fact that Florence’s authority over its subject cities derived from the acts of submission (foedera) that bound her to each of them.89 This did not mean, however, that the central government adopted a policy of non-intervention: according to this author, indeed, the period of the Medici principate was also characterized by progressive administrative centralization and the imposition on the subject cities of a considerable burden of compulsory services.90 Fasano Guarini has also drawn attention to the heavy new taxes that the ducal government in Florence and the Spanish administration in Milan raised throughout the territories subject to them.91 Recent work on the Regno has tended to discern a similar blend of increasing demands for tax and other services on the one hand and considerable respect for legal and constitutional privileges on the other. This was a combination that produced a further consolidation of the economic, social, and political domination of the nobility in the provinces and marked 83 Ventura, passim. 84 Law, ‘Venice’, 76-77. 85 Law, ‘Venetian Mainland State’, 162-64, 167. 86 Cozzi and Knapton, 306. 87 Knapton, ‘Consiglio’, 252-54. 88 J. Black, 64. 89 Mannori, 17-23, 38-42. 90 Ibid., 138-39. 91 Fasano Guarini, 635-36.

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ministerial hegemony at the centre.92 Where radical change was attempted, such as the viceroy Pedro de Toledo’s (1484-1553) project to introduce the Spanish Inquisition into the Regno, it generally ended in failure.93 The subject of the Italian ‘Renaissance state’ has certainly continued, therefore, to attract the attention of scholars, and striking testimony to this was the appearance four years ago of a substantial collection of essays by leading authorities in the field.94 The title of the work, The Italian Renaissance State, might suggest at first glance that the volume as a whole represents a complete rejection of the case presented by Jones, who, as pointed out by one of the contributors, maintained that the ‘Italian Renaissance State’ was a fiction.95 This, however, would be a complete misunderstanding. First, because the use of expressions such as ‘late medieval’ or ‘the late Middle Ages’ is frequently found in the book when authors are referring to the period conventionally associated with the Renaissance movement, and these chronological categories were regarded as quite in order by Jones himself. Secondly, contributors often combine a full appreciation of the political and social changes that occurred in that period with handsome recognition of the survival in it of institutions, practices both formal and informal, and social and political elites that had all appeared on the scene in the preceding epoch. When changes did take place, for example in the conduct of diplomacy (Lazzarini)96 or the administration of justice (Zorzi),97 they are seen as gradual and partial, and – in the case of the Venetian territorial state, considered to be the most formidable Italian power in the fifteenth century – Knapton has emphasized its lack of ‘a single law code, a uniform tax system or even common rules for citizenship rights’.98 Thirdly, an entire essay is devoted to the role of factions and parties,99 another feature of the late medieval state whose importance Jones was particularly keen to demonstrate. It is regrettable, perhaps, that the volume does not address the question of the relationship between the Renaissance as a cultural phenomenon and as a political phenomenon; but this was the result of a deliberate and considered choice, and what the volume does offer is of such importance that it would be churlish to object to it on grounds such as these. 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Musi, 19, 76-79; Koenigsberger, 327-28. Cernigliaro, 1:xxxv. Gamberini and Lazzarini. Dean, ‘Ferrara and Mantua’, 112. Lazzarini, 425-43. Zorzi, ‘Justice’. Knapton, ‘Venice and the Terraferma’, in ibid., 147. Gentile, 304-22.

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‘Renaissance or late medieval’? Monarchies in northern Europe Outside Italy, the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries coincided with the emergence of stronger governments, which some historians have labelled ‘Renaissance monarchies’. Both France’s victory in the Hundred Years’ War and the reversion to the Crown over the next 80 or so years of most of the larger noble fiefs were powerful boosts to the Valois monarchy. The creation of the Spanish kingdom by the 1469 marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, after a period of civil strife in Aragon and Castile, was followed in 1516 by the accession of the first Habsburg ruler, Charles I (1500-1558), who in 1519 was elected Emperor; and in England the reign of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII (1485-1509), brought a definitive end to the Wars of the Roses and his son’s reign brought an end to England’s relationship with the Roman Church. Since the reigns of most of the monarchs involved in these dramatic events coincided with a greatly increased interest in Renaissance art and/or Italian humanism in England, Spain, and France, and since they themselves were often active patrons of these cultural movements, it is easy to see why their governments have been described as varieties of ‘Renaissance monarchy’ by some historians.100 As has been already observed, Enlightenment historians often saw the late fifteenth century as marking the end of the Middle Ages.101 But it is not easy to reconcile that chronology with some of the studies of monarchy in those three countries that have appeared in the last 100 years. In the long-running debate about the reign of Francis I (1515-1547), the participants have not merely advanced different interpretations of royal power; they have also disagreed about the applicability of the term ‘Renaissance’. Henri Prentout (1867-1933) and Russell Major (1921-1998) both denied that absolute monarchy was born in this period: for the former, the monarchy continued to be a contractual one, respectful of provincial privilege; for the latter, it remained ‘popular and consultative’. But Major was quite happy with the term ‘Renaissance monarchy’.102 Robert Knecht, by contrast, maintained that the Renaissance monarchy was much stronger than its predecessor but rejected Georges Pagès’s (1867-1939) claim that it was responsible for the triumph of absolutism.103 100 See, e.g., Richardson; though the author is careful to stress that in his view Renaissance monarchy was not ‘radically different from medieval monarchy’ (ix). 101 Vide supra, xxxx. 102 Knecht, 344-45. 103 Ibid., 360.

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In the case of Charles V’s dominions, historians have contrasted the Imperial dreams of Mercurino da Gattinara (1465-1530), Charles’s chancellor, with the cautious and pragmatic approach of his employer, concerned less with the construction of an Imperial administration, which might clamp together his vast and diverse territories, than with the consolidation of existing social and administrative structures. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the governance of his northern territories Charles made frequent use of his family.104 Even within Spain itself, Aragon was allowed to retain its own institutions and privileges and its separate identity, and Charles’s son Philip II (1527-1598) pursued this policy as well. One historian who has captured very effectively the character of the monarchies of Western Europe in the sixteenth century is John Elliott, who, following Helmut Koenigsberger, describes them as ‘composite’;105 it is hard to see that the term ‘Renaissance state’ does the job better.

The European Renaissance state: The Chabod thesis and its critics One distinguished Italian historian happy to employ the term ‘Renaissance state’ was Federico Chabod. It had, he thought, several characteristics that distinguished it from its medieval predecessor: standing armies, resident ambassadors, an approach to diplomacy based on the principle of the balance of power, and an increasingly salient state bureaucracy.106 Chabod’s ‘Renaissance state’ was not, however, as Burckhardt’s was, a purely Italian creation. Few historians have doubted the significance of the introduction of resident ambassadors by the Italians,107 but there has been far less agreement with regard to the other innovations listed by Chabod. Standing armies were first created by the medieval Valois monarchy,108 though in the fifteenth century they can be found south of the Alps as well; 109 and even the first employment of mercenaries cannot be attributed, as Burckhardt claimed, to the Italians, since hundred of years before they were already being used 104 Koenigsberger, 308-09. 105 Elliott, 50, 54. 106 Chabod, 602-04. 107 Mattingly, 51-76. 108 Contamine, 301. 109 Pieri, 257-64; Mallett, Mercenaries, 107-45.

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by the Anglo-Norman monarchs.110 Most historians, moreover, now see little evidence of the operation of a balance of power in Italy before 1494.111 As for the development of a state bureaucracy, recent studies – such as those of Giorgio Politi on Cremona, Marco Folin on Ferrara, and Andrea Zorzi on Florentine Tuscany – have uncovered plentiful evidence of amateurism.112 Elsewhere, for example in papal government and French royal government, cases can certainly be found of an expansion of bureaucracy, but these were associated with the sale of office, and this privatization entrenched nepotism and inefficiency.113 In England, by contrast, where Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485-1540) has been credited with replacing personal government with bureaucratic government,114 it has been pointed out that examples of bureaucratic government can be found earlier;115 that the court and the household retained their political importance;116 and, finally, that only one of Cromwell’s bureaucratic creations survived beyond 1554.117 English local government, moreover, continued to be the sphere of gently born amateurs.118 Henry III of England (1216-1272) had a favourite maxim that expressed crisply the rationale behind one key instrument of medieval government, patronage, namely: ‘He who does not give what he has, will not get what he wants’.119 ‘Renaissance’ governments were equally aware of its importance. In Florentine history, scholars including Rubinstein120 and F.W. (1942-2010) and D. Kent 121 have studied it in recent decades, but they were certainly not the first to address the topic. The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme (1903-1989) and Die Nobilität der römischen Republik by Matthias Gelzer (1886-1974) considered its role in republican Rome; The Nobility of Late Medieval England by K.B. McFarlane (1903-1966) and The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III by Lewis Namier (1888-1960) analyzed the part that it played in two markedly different periods of English political life; and Il Comune di Firenze alla fine del Dugento by Nicola Ottokar (1884-1957) assessed its 110 Prestwich, 19-43. 111 Butters, 13-31; Pillinini; Mallett, ‘Diplomacy’. For a pellucid statement of the opposing view, see Nelson. 112 Politi; Folin; Zorzi, ‘Giusdicenti e operatori’. 113 Partner, 15, 165, 197-98; Bonney, 330, 340. 114 Elton. 115 Williams and Harriss. 116 Starkey. 117 Russell, 110-11. 118 Hurstfield, 146; see also Hindle, passim. 119 Southern, 112. 120 Rubinstein, Government. 121 F.W. Kent; D. Kent.

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significance in Dante’s Florence.122 Some very recent studies of patronage have been criticized, however, for overstating its importance by their neglect of legal and constitutional matters, the development of political forms, and the formation of policy;123 and for their excessive use of terminology drawn from the social sciences, which is only distantly related to the vocabulary used by the persons and groups of persons being studied. Examples of this latter phenomenon are ‘mediation’, ‘legitimation’, and ‘recognition’.124

Renaissance courts The court has long been a particular object of interest because it provided access to the ruler, making it the most important centre for the distribution of benefits and offering to the very ambitious the possibility of influencing wider government policy. Historical study of the court has often been accompanied by an attention to the rituals and symbols of governance, a subject dear to the hearts of political anthropologists. One result of this scholarly interest has been the long list of publications sponsored by the Centro Studi Europa delle Corti. The remarkable growth of interest in the topic was in part the product of the belated publication in 1969 of Die Höfische Gesellschaft by Norbert Elias (1897-1990). This work, principally devoted to the reign of Louis XIV (1638-1715), saw the court as the central organ of the entire state administration, in a society characterized by ‘die relativ große Einheit von persönlichen und von amtlichen oder beruflichen Belangen’ [‘the relatively substantial union of personal and official or professional affairs’]; 125 and in it Elias also argued that court culture became dominant in many parts of Europe in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because court society, especially in France, ‘im Zuge der zunehmenden Zentralisierung des Staatsgefüges zur maßgebenden gesellschaftlichen Eliteformation des Landes wurde’ [‘in the course of the increasing centralisation of the structure of government, developed into the country’s dominant social grouping’].126 Elias’s work is clearly indebted to Voltaire’s sort of cultural history, particularly to Le siècle de Louis XIV, but Burckhardt’s thoughts on courts and culture also influenced him. It 122 For place and date of publication and publisher of these works, see Bibliography. 123 Chittolini, ‘The “Private”’. 124 Chittolini, ‘A Comment’. 125 Elias, 1. 126 Ibid., 281.

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is true that Elias judged the theoretical models deployed in Die Kultur der Renaissance to be arbitrary;127 but in the section of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen devoted to societies in which the state dominates culture, Burckhardt maintained that the first perfected modern example of this was the government of Louis XIV,128 of whom Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) and the Italian signori were forerunners,129 and that henceforth ‘werden die Höfe das Vorbild einer ganzen Geselligkeit; ihr Geschmack ist der allein entscheidende’ [‘the courts became the model of an entire social life; their taste alone is authoritative’].130 It is likely that Elias knew this. The extraordinary flowering of works on the court does not indicate, however, that Elias’s ideas have been found generally convincing. Many historians have been critical of his approach: Cesare Mozzarelli and Giuseppe Olmi rejected it as a typical attempt to trace the history of ‘modernizzazione’;131 Alberto Tenenti (1924-2002) and Sergio Bertelli (1928-2015) criticized it as too eager to assimilate court and state; 132 and Bertelli also dismissed the idea that it was above all the courts that dictated standards of behaviour for the rest of society, on the grounds that the role of the Church was far more significant.133 Opinions are also strongly divided about the importance and distinctiveness of the ‘Renaissance court’ and its relationship to the state. Gregory Lubkin argued that the court of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1444-1476) helped to knit his duchy together;134 Chittolini asserted that the Milanese aristocracy were lukewarm about it; 135 and Tevor Dean points out that courts could create tensions and divisions just as effectively as they could remove them.136 Features claimed to be characteristic of Renaissance courts have, moreover, been found earlier: the association of the ruler with particular saints, relics, and rites; the use of specialist advisers; or the centralization of patronage.137 Few historians seem willing to apply to Italy Jean Boucher’s bold hypothesis that in the France of Henry III (1551-1589) the court and the state 127 Ibid., 362. 128 Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, 94-95. 129 Ibid., 93. 130 Ibid., 96. 131 Merlin, 207. 132 Ibid., 212, 241. 133 Ibid., 241-42. 134 Lubkin, 81. 135 Chittolini, ‘Alcuni aspetti’. 136 Dean, ‘The Courts’, 142. 137 Ibid., 151.

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were largely identical; 138 and despite the undoubted European influence of sixteenth-century Italian works on courts and courtiers, above all Il Cortegiano by Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), some scholars have been cautious about admitting the existence of a ‘court culture’.139 Was there a ‘court’ and ‘country’ division of the sort alleged by some historians to have existed in Stuart England; or did these terms not, rather, denote ‘the same people at different times of the year’?140 One methodological defect shared by some of the accounts of court culture is their adherence to ‘structuralism’, by which is meant more than an approach based upon an interest in and investigation of structures. The term denotes, rather, the theory that the model of language to be found in the work of linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) can be applied to other areas such as the arts, customary behaviour, and mythology.141 For this reason it is not uncommon to find scholars of this persuasion referring to the ‘grammar of court society’ or ‘the rules of the game’.142 It is not surprising, moreover, to find one of these works referring to the court as a ‘structure-symbol, a form immutable in time, beyond typological varieties and political-dynastic variables’,143 since it is quite in accord with the ideas of Saussure, who declared that what the linguist studies is language viewed synchronically, not diachronically.144 Whatever the value of Saussure’s ideas about language, and they are hardly uncontroversial, it is hard to see how they can be successfully transferred to the historical study of human behaviour. The description of the court just cited has, indeed, a bizarre whiff of Platonism about it, and it is bizarre because in most respects structuralism and Platonism have little in common but also because Platonism is much more closely associated with mathematics than it is with history. One of the major criticisms of the work of structuralists is that their approach is too abstract to come to grips with and make sense of the individual and specific characteristics of the phenomena they are attempting to survey.145 One of the fundamental features of courts was that they were intensely competitive institutions, and it is hard to see how an exclusive concern with ‘grammar’ and ‘rules’ can enable a scholar to provide a fully adequate 138 Boucher; though see the lively and lucid remarks of Fantoni, ‘Corte e stato’. 139 Lippincott; Dean, ‘Courts’, 147. 140 Guy, 1020. Rightly cited by Dean at 147. 141 Pettit, 33. 142 Dean, ‘The Courts’, 138. 143 Ibid. 144 Pettit, 4. 145 Ibid., 64.

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explanation of why some persons were successful and others were not. There is an analogy here with the study of chess, a game to which politics, war, and diplomacy are often compared. A knowledge of the rules of the game is clearly indispensable, but it would not, on its own, enable one to explain, for example, why Fischer beat Spassky in the world championship; and this is partly because at that level one plays one’s opponent as much as one plays the board.

Ritual, the state, and the debate on the use of anthropology The analysis of rituals and symbols is one genre within the wider body of literature on the courts; but it has not been confined to studies of princely governments, as the work of Richard Trexler (1932-2007)146 and others on republican Florence and the work of Edward Muir 147 and others on Venice demonstrate. Much of interest has emerged from these studies, but some of them are vitiated by their flirtation with the functionalist mode of explanation, common to both Marx and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) but now the target of trenchant attacks. In this form of explanation, societies are treated as goal-directed systems, and events that occur within them – or practices and institutions that form part of them – are explained by their contribution to a goal or end-state. But the goals in question are not those consciously chosen by agents; rather, they are those that the system as a whole seeks or maintains, and the functions are not ‘manifest’ but ‘latent’ ones.148 The sort of teleology that is basic to functionalism, its inability to cope with social change, and the failure of its practitioners to demonstrate in detail the workings of a feedback mechanism are all serious flaws. Considerations such as these serve to explain why functionalism has been so vigorously criticized by leading philosophers of the social sciences since the war.149 As Alan Ryan sagely remarks: In the one area where ‘system’ has always been obvious, and processes of feedback identif iable, namely economics, no one would dream of employing functional explanations – we do not, for instance, believe 146 Trexler, passim. 147 Muir, passim. 148 The distinction is drawn by the sociologist Merton; see Ryan, 189. 149 On the defects of functionalism, see Ryan, 182-94; Homans; Elster, 28-35; Hollis, 108-13; and Macintyre, 268-69.

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that a price drops in order to clear the market of a glut; we know that the mechanism at work is one which involves the wishes of sellers to get something for their wares, and it is on this that our explanations are founded.150

In view of the number and acuity of the attacks made on functionalism, historians wedded to this mode of explanation who fail to address them put one in mind of that splendid example of American black humour, the reporter who asks the wrong question: ‘Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?’. The other weakness visible in some of this work is its optimism about the extent of the assistance that anthropological studies can render to the historian. Doubts on this subject have long been aired, both by historians and by anthropologists. The ancient historian Moses Finley (1912-1986) remarked that whereas he had found anthropology useful when writing The World of Odysseus, he found little use for it in the study of ‘archaic Greece (the period roughly between 750 and 500 B.C.), which saw the emergence of the city-state, conflicts over tyranny, the first appearance of democracy, the Theogony of Hesiod, Ionian philosophy and science, the Pythagoreans and the poetry of Sappho’.151 Towards the end of his life the English anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973), who was devoted to the project of bringing history and anthropology closer together, struck a thoroughly sceptical note: ‘There’s only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method – and that’s impossible’.152 His successor at Oxford, Rodney Needham (1923-2006), was less gloomy but adverted to the difficulties of using expressions such as ‘kinship’ and ‘marriage’ in comparative studies, since the social facts referred to failed to exhibit the common features that would make comparison, and substitution, possible. More appropriate, he suggested, would be polythetic classification, which is applicable in cases where item a shares a characteristic with item b, and item b with item c, but no characteristic is common to all three.153 Another of these tricky terms is ‘ritual’. Already in the late 1970s the Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody (1919-2015) was arguing that the word had been applied so indiscriminately to a wide range of different phenomena that it was no longer useful; 154 in 150 Ryan, 192. 151 Finley, 116. 152 Needham, 62. 153 Ibid. On ‘polythetic’ classification (Wittgenstein used the term ‘family resemblance’), see Wittgenstein, Part I, Sections 65-67. 154 Goody, 25-35.

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other words, it had become, as Henry James (1843-1916) remarked of the Russian novel, ‘a loose, baggy monster’. Goody’s point of view was substantially endorsed by a full-length study by Jean Buc, which also drew attention to the weaknesses of the functionalist approach underlying many recent studies and pointed out that rites, far from producing consensus and order, were often evidence of political and religious conflict. Modern historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, he points out, are apt to take a simplistic attitude to descriptions of ‘ritual’ events, taking them to be realistic photographs of the events depicted and neglecting the fact that the written accounts upon which scholars depend for their knowledge of what had transpired reflected the point of view, hostile or approbatory, of their authors.155 He rightly dismisses Stephen Greenblatt’s groundless idea, put forward in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, that before the Renaissance, observers did not recognize a gulf between outward behaviour and inner feelings,156 a perfect example of the survival, in slightly different conceptual clothes, of the Burckhardtian association of the Renaissance with modernity. Medieval commentators were quite capable, Goody points out, of distinguishing the two phenomena, and that is because, unlike modern historians under the spell of the social ‘sciences’, they combined a dualistic with a monistic vision of the world and did not simply assimilate religion to culture or society, in part because they did not possess the requisite terms. The sources upon which medieval authors drew shared this complicated attitude, so that, for example, as Gerard Caspary (1929-2008), cited by Buc, remarks: ‘Origen could hold at one and the same time a theology of politics that saw the Roman Empire as having a christological dimension, as being a purely secular good established by God essentially for the sake of non-Christians, and yet as also being an instrument of the Devil’.157 Medieval observers were always alive to the possibility of hypocrisy – it was, after all, the sin with which Christ had charged the Pharisees and the Sadducees – and they saw the instrumental use of religious ceremonies for political ends as the mark of the devil. For them, authentic religious ceremonies were those whose letter was perfectly aligned with their spirit.158 The scepticism that underlies Buc’s interpretations may be overdone, but it cannot simply be dismissed.

155 Buc, 8-10, 156 Ibid., 242n176. 157 Ibid., 241. 158 Ibid., 240-42.

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Buc’s work has certainly not deterred other historians from plunging into these shark-infested waters, and one good example of this is the collection of essays entitled Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture. This is a very interesting volume, and its contributors are all leading historians or art historians. It is notable, therefore, that, as the title suggests and as one of the editors observes,159 the Renaissance is not seen by the authors, on the whole, as marking a significant phase in the history of Italian ritual. A second point of interest is the cursory attention that is paid to Buc’s critique of the subject. It is true that in Samuel Cohn’s introductory essay, Buc’s study appears in a list of the ‘modern classics’ devoted to the history of ritual,160 but Cohn does not draw attention to the fact that Buc is profoundly sceptical about many aspects of the enterprise. Marcello Fantoni’s methodological essay does not even mention Buc. This is probably because the interpretation of ritual offered there is the polar opposite of his, and the extent of their disagreement is best captured by citing one of the more dramatic assertions that Fantoni makes: ‘everything is ritual’.161 This is a truly remarkable verdict on the importance of the phenomenon, but, in Fantoni’s essay at least, it is an intellectual promissory note that no serious steps are taken to honour. In one respect, interestingly, Fantoni is at one with Burckhardt: the conviction that the key to understanding human behaviour lies in the unconscious. How far an intellectually defensible case can be made for this ascription of priority to psychological phenomena situated below the conscious level is another matter entirely. Buc’s work by contrast is largely concerned with the words and concepts that those involved in ‘rituals’ had available to them.

The ‘Renaissance state’, some conclusions One sin of which studies of ritual inspired by anthropology can rarely be accused is the sort of obsession with modernity to be found in Burckhardt. There is a peculiar paradox in the fact that no account of Renaissance culture ascribed more importance to the role of the state than his did, and yet so little of interest is said in Die Kultur der Renaissance about its institutional framework. But it is equally true that scholars who study ‘regional states’ without discussing political ideas, and yet continue to speak of ‘Renaissance 159 Cohn, 3. 160 Ibid., 12. 161 Fantoni, 28.

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states’, owe their readers an explanation. After all, it can hardly be claimed that, as institutional structures, regional states were more ‘classical’ than city-states. Grubb justifies his use of the expression by arguing that ‘political actors required classical principles for governance’,162 but those, as many scholars have shown, were precisely what communal governments had in the Dugento, and that might be one argument in favour of using the term ‘Renaissance’ to refer to a broader stretch of time than scholars commonly distinguish in their discussions of it. But one problem with applying the word to Italy is that, as Jones points out and as Burckhardt saw, she had never lost her links with Antiquity: ‘From the early Middle Ages everything distinctive of Italy, in society and culture, was ‘Roman’ or ‘Romanesque’ (or ‘proto-renascent’)’.163 And it was this rather than a precocious ‘modernity’ that made her genuinely unusual.

Bibliography Austin, John L., How to do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Baron, Hans, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Black, Anthony, Political Thought in Europe 1250-1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Black, Jane, ‘Constitutional Ambitions, Legal Realities and the Florentine State’, in Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power, ed. by William Connell and Andrea Zorzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48-64. Black, Robert, ed., Renaissance Thought: A Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Bonney, Richard, The European Dynastic States, 1494-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Boucher, Jean, ‘La commistione fra corte e stato in Francia sotto gli ultimi Valois’, in La corte in Europa, ed. by Marco Cattini and Marzio A. Romani (Brescia: Grafo, 1983), 93-130. Bouwsma, William J., ‘Venice and the Political Education of Europe’, in Renaissance Venice, ed. by John R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 445-66. Bruni, Leonardo, History of the Florentine People, vol. 1, ed. and trans. by James Hankins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 162 Grubb, xvi. 163 Jones, City-State, 52.

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Buc, Philippe, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by Samuel G.C. Middlemore, ed. by Peter Burke and Peter Murray (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). —, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Berlin: T. Knaur, 1928). —, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, ed. by J. Oeri (Berlin and Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1905). Butters, Humfrey, ‘Politics and Diplomacy in Late Quattrocento Italy: The Case of the Barons’ War (1485-86)’, in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, ed. by Peter Denley and Caroline Elam (London: Westfield, 1988), 13-31. Cernigliaro, Aurelio, Sovranità e feudo nel Regno di Napoli (1505-1557), vol. 1 (Naples: Jovene, 1983). Chabod, Federico, ‘Esiste uno stato del Rinascimento?’ in idem, Scritti sul Rinascimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 593-601. Chittolini, Giorgio, ‘Di alcuni aspetti della crisi dello stato sforzesco’, in Milano e Borgogna: due stati principeschi tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. by Jean-Marie Cauchies and Giorgio Chittolini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 21-34. —, ‘A Comment’, in Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power, ed. by William Connell and Andrea Zorzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 333-45. —, ‘Infeudazioni e politica feudale nel ducato visconteo-sforzesco’, in idem, La formazione dello stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 36-100. —, ‘Introduzione’, in La crisi degli ordinamenti communali e le origini dello stato del Rinascimento, ed. by Giorgio Chittolini (Bologna: Mulino, 1979), 7-50. —, ‘Introduzione’, in idem, La formazione dello stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), vii-xl. —, ‘The “Private”, the “Public”, the State’, in The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600, ed. by Julius Kirshner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 34-61. —, ‘Ricerche sull’ordinamento territoriale del dominio fiorentino agli inizi del secolo XV’, in idem, La formazione dello stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 292-352. Cohn, Samuel, Jr., ‘Introduction: Symbols and Rituals’, in Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture, ed. by Samuel Cohn, Jr., Marcello Fantoni, Franco Franceschi, and Fabrizio Ricciardelli (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers), 1-14. Contamine, Philippe, La guerre au moyen age (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1980).

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Cozzi, Gaetano, and Michael Knapton, Storia della repubblica di Venezia, dalla guerra di Chioggia alla riconquista della terraferma (Turin: Unione TipograficoEditrice Torinese, 1986). Davis, Charles T., ‘Brunetto Latini and Dante’, Studi medievali, 8 (1967), 421-50. —, ‘An Early Florentine Political Theorist: Fra Remigio de’ Girolami’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 104 (1960), 662-76. Dean, Trevor, ‘The Courts’, in The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600, ed. by Julius Kirshner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 136-51. —, ‘Ferrara and Mantua’, in The Italian Renaissance State, ed. by Andrea Gamberini and Isabella Lazzarini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 112-31. Dyson, Kenneth, The State Tradition in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Elias, Norbert, Die höfische Gesellschaft: Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969). Elliott, John, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present, 137 (1992), 48-71. Elster, Jon, Ulysses and the Sirens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Elton, Geoffrey R., The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). Fantoni, Marcello, ‘Corte e stato nell’Italia dei secoli XIV-XVI’, in Origini dello stato: processi di formazione statale in Italia fra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. by Giorgio Chittolini, Anthony Molho, and Piero Schiera (Bologna: Mulino, 1994), 449-66. —, ‘Symbols and Rituals: Def inition of a Field of Study’, in Late Medieval and early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture, ed. by Samuel Cohn Jr., Marcello Fantoni, Franco Franceschi, and Fabrizio Ricciardelli (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2013), 15-40. Fasano Guarini, Elena, ‘Gli stati dell’ Italia centro-settentrionale tra quattro e cinquecento: continuità e trasformazioni’, Società e storia, 6 (1983), 617-39. Fasoli, Gina, ‘Nascita di un mito’, Studi storici in onore di Gioacchino Volpe, vol. 1 (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), 445-79. Ferguson, Wallace K., The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Miffin, 1948). Finley, Moses, ‘Anthropology and the Classics’, in idem, The Use and Abuse of History (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 102-19. Folin, Marco, ‘Il sistema politico estense fra mutamenti e persistenze (secoli XVXVIII)’, Società e Storia, 20 (1997), 505-49. Fubini, Riccardo, ‘Renaissance Historian: The Career of Hans Baron’, Journal of Modern History, 64 (1992), 541-74. Gamberini, Andrea, and Isabella Lazzarini, eds., The Italian Renaissance State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Gelzer, Matthias, Die Nobilität der römischen Republik (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912).

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Gentile, Marco, ‘Factions and parties: problems and perspectives’, in The Italian Renaissance State, ed Andrea Gamberini and Isabella Lazzarini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 304-322. Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols. (London, 1788; repr. London: F. Warne, [1869?]). Giddens, Anthony, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1973). Gombrich, Ernst H., In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Goody, Jack, ‘Against Ritual: Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic’, in Secular Ritual, ed. by Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Meyerhoff (Assen: Van Gorcum Ltd., 1977), 25-35. Grubb, James S., Firstborn of Venice: Vicenza in the Early Renaissance State (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Guenée, Bernard, L’Occident aux XIVe et XVe siècles: les États (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1971). Guy, John, review of The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. by David Starkey, English Historical Review, 105 (1990), 1019-21. Hale, John R., England and the Italian Renaissance (London: Faber and Faber, 1954). Hankins, James, ‘The ‘Baron Thesis’ after Forty Years and Some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni’, The Journal of the History of Ideas, 56 (1995), 309-38. Hindle, Steve, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1640 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). Homans, George, ‘Bringing Men Back In’, in The Philosophy of Social Explanation, ed. by Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 50-64. Hollis, Martin, Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Hurstfield, Joel, ‘Social Structure, Office-Holding and Politics, Chiefly in Western Europe’, in The New Cambridge Modern History, ed. by R.B. Wernham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 126-48. Jones, Philip, ‘Communes and Despots: The City State in Late-Medieval Italy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 15 (1965), 71-96. —, ‘Economia e società nell’Italia medievale: la leggenda della borghesia’, in Storia d’Italia Einaudi, Annali, vol. 1: Dal feudalesimo al capitalismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 185-372. —, The Italian City-State 500-1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Kaegi, Werner, Jacob Burckhardt eine Biographie, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1956). Kent, Dale, The Rise of the Medici (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

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Kent, Francis W., ‘Patron-Client Networks in Renaissance Florence and the Emergence of Lorenzo as “Maestro della Bottega”’, in Lorenzo de’ Medici: New Perspectives, ed. by B. Toscani (New York: P. Lang, 1993), 279-313. Knapton, Michael, ‘Il Consiglio dei Dieci nel governo della terraferma: un’ipotesi interpretativa per il secondo ’400’, in Atti del convegno Venezia e la terraferma attraverso le relazioni dei rettori, ed. by Amerlio Tagliaferri (Milan: Giuffrè, 1981), 237-60. —, ‘Venice and the Terraferma’, in The Italian Renaissance State, ed. by Andrea Gamberini and Isabella Lazzarini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 132-55. Knecht, Robert, Francis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Koenigsberger, Helmut G., ‘The Empire of Charles V in Europe’, in The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 2: The Reformation 1520-1559, ed. by Geoffrey R. Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 301-33. Kristeller, Paul O., ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance’, in idem, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 92-119, 150-63. Law, John E., ‘The Venetian Mainland State in the Fifteenth Century’, in idem, Venice and the Veneto in the Early Renaissance (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, Variorum, 2000), 153-74. —, ‘Venice and the Closing of the Veronese Constitution in 1405’, in idem, Venice and the Veneto in the Early Renaissance (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, Variorum, 2000), 69-103. Lazzarini, Isabella, ‘Renaissance Diplomacy’, in The Italian Renaissance State, ed. by Andrea Gamberini and Isabella Lazzarini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 425-43. Lippincott, Kristen, ‘The Neo-Latin Historical Epics of the North Italian Courts: An Examination of “Courtly Culture” in the Fifteenth Century’, Renaissance Studies, 3 (1989), 415-28. Lubkin, Gregory, ‘Strutture, funzioni e funzionamento della corte milanese nel Quattrocento’, in Milano e Borgogna: due stati principeschi tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. by Jean-Marie Cauchies and Giorgio Chittolini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990). McFarlane, Kenneth B., The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Machiavelli, Niccolò, Il Principe e Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, Opere, vol. 1, ed. by Sergio Bertelli, 2nd ed. (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968). Macintyre, Alasdair, ‘Is a Comparative Science of Politics Possible?’ in idem, Against the Self-Images of the Age (London: Duckworth, 1971), 260-79. Mallett, Michael, ‘Diplomacy and War in Later Fifteenth-Century Italy’, in Lorenzo de’ Medici. Studi, ed. by Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Florence: Olschki, 1992), 233-56.

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—, Mercenaries and their Masters (London: Bodley Head, 1974). Mannori, Luca, Il sovrano tutore. Pluralismo istituzionale e accentramento amministrativo nel principato dei Medici (secc. XVI-XVIII) (Milan: Giuffré, 1994). Mattingly, Garrett, Renaissance Diplomacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). Merlin, Pierpaolo, ‘Il tema della corte nella storiografia italiana ed Europea’, Studi storici, 27 (1986), 203-44. Mommsen, Theodore, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the Dark Ages’, in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. by Eugene Rice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), 106-29. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, vol. 1, ed. by Victor Goldschmidt (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1979). Muir, Edward, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Musi, Aurelio, Mezzogiorno spagnolo. La via napoletana allo stato moderno (Naples: Guida, 1991). Namier, Lewis, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1961). Needham, Rodney, Against the Tranquility of Axioms (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). Nelson, E.W., ‘The Origins of Modern Balance-of-Power Politics’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 1 (1942), 124-42. Partner, Peter D., The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Pennington, Kenneth, The Prince and the Law, 1200-1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). Pettit, Philip, The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977). Pieri, Piero, Il Rinascimento e la crisi militare italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1952). Pillinini, Giovanni, Il sistema degli stati italiani, 1454-94 (Venice: Libreria Universitaria, 1970). Pocock, John G.A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Politi, Giorgio, Aristocrazia e potere politico nella Cremona di Filippo II (Milan: SugarCo, 1976). Post, Gaines, ‘Ratio publicae utilitatis, ratio status and Reason of State 1100-1300’, in idem, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State 1100-1322 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 241-301. —, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State 1100-1322 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).

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About the Author Humfrey Butters (1946-2019), Emeritus Reader in History, University of Warwick



War and Beatitude The Ottoman Conquest of Negroponte (1470) and the Founding of the Venetian Convent of the Holy Sepulchre Reinhold C. Mueller Abstract After a long siege, on 12 July 1470 Mehmet II’s troops conquered the island city of Negroponte (Eubea), a colony crucial for the Venetian maritime state after the fall of Constantinople. Two days after the sack the sultan made his triumphal entry into the city and ordered the massacre of the adult male population, both colonials and members of the Venetian government in loco, in revenge for a similar action by Venetian troops exactly one year earlier, during the sack of Aenos (Eno), near the Dardanelles. The hero of that sack, the Venetian captain-general Nicolò da Canal, now became the villain when he refused to order his outnumbered fleet to relieve besieged Negroponte, and was ordered brought back to Venice in chains to await trial. Women and children were carried off as slaves and held for ransom. A number of the colonial women in time made their way to Venice and petitioned for government aid; two of them co-founded a convent of Franciscan tertiaries, the convent of the Holy Sepulchre, on the site of a hospice for female pilgrims on Venice’s Riva Schiavoni. In the church was a “grotto” designed by Tullio Lombardo and meant to represent the sepulchre in the Holy Land. Some of the nuns, considered capable of working miracles, were raised to the status of beate by Franciscan hagiographers. Keywords: colonial populations, division of booty, enslavement of females, female shame-faced poor, galley-borne cavalry and infantry, hagiography, holy women, Late Middle Ages, a lombardesque “grotto” of the Holy Sepulchre, massacre of males, military strategy and sacks, military vendetta, Observant Franciscans, ransom, Venetian maritime state, the Vita of suor Chiara Bugni

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_muel

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The story of the beautiful Anna, daughter of Paolo Erizzo, the outgoing bailo of Negroponte, who preferred beheading to surrendering her virginity to the desires of the victorious sultan Mehmet II, is a fabrication. It was the basis of a novel by Vincenzo Antonio Formaleoni, published in 1783, before being represented in the opera Anna Erizzo, ovvero la Presa di Negroponte, ballo tragico storico in cinque atti, produced in Venice by Antonio Monticini for Carneval, 1836-1837; the tale was also the theme of several paintings. It is interesting here because there is a connection between the story of this fictional Venetian heroine and that of one of the protagonists of our story: the beautiful, young Beatrice Venier, whom we shall encounter anon. I became interested in war and beatitude when a student asked to study the unpublished Vita of a Franciscan tertiary, Chiara Bugni (1471-1514), written by a well-known humanist and cabalist, the Observant Franciscan friar Francesco Zorzi of the convent of San Francesco della Vigna. The connection between war and beatitude became immediately evident: the founders of the female convent of the Holy Sepulchre on Riva Schiavoni (now the Caserma Cornoldi, next to the site where Petrarch had resided in the 1360s), were survivors of the massacre of Venetians and colonials by the Ottoman Turks upon their conquest of Negroponte in July 1470, and a number of them were soon considered beate by Franciscan hagiographers.1 Primary sources for the military part of the story – the conquest of the city and island of Negroponte, the ancient Euboea – are partly letters of eyewitnesses copied into diaries, partly second- and third-hand narratives, partly epic poems. They report figures of the number of ships, combatants, and fatalities, numbers that are often not credible even when penned by eyewitnesses. The city’s archives were naturally destroyed during the sack, and contemporary Turkish sources are few. By contrast, archeologists have unearthed a large hoard known as the ‘Chalcis Treasure’ (Chalcis is the Greek name for the capital city of the island of Negroponte), buried at the time of the siege in 1470, which is being studied at the Victoria and Albert Museum and at the British Museum.2 For the holy part, we have Zorzi’s Vita but also Marin Sanudo’s entries in his diaries. Being a relative of Zorzi, Sanudo often reports receiving inside information on the case of the renowned and holy nun, and his Vita dei dogi contains crucial material for the fall of 1 Mueller and Zarri, eds., La Vita e i sermoni di Chiara Bugni; Mueller, ‘Ambienti’, puts the present theme in a larger setting. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Genadius Library, Athens, in 2010 and at the University of Gerona in 2012, as well as at the conference to celebrate the memory of Michael Mallett. 2 See, for example, McLeod.

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Negroponte and the events leading up to it; they will be cited in due course. Secondary sources are valuable but not exhaustive.3 Sultan Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople nearly two decades earlier, planned and led the assault on Negroponte personally, creating a kind of pontoon bridge consisting of ships and boats to permit men and supplies to reach the island from the mainland without having to navigate the straits (today there is a proper bridge in place). On 20 June 1470 the first Turkish troops reached the island, and heavy seige cannons strategically placed around the city began firing from land and sea; the Turkish cavalry initiated attacks on the island itself on 25 June, involving supposedly 2000 horsemen who ‘cut to pieces’ males over age fifteen, surely mostly Greeks, and enslaved the others. The assaults on the city were four. The first two occurred on 25 and 30 June and the third on 5 July, when the treason of the constable Tommaso Schiavo was revealed by an old woman and the traitor hung by his feet from the government palace in full view for the Turks to see. These first three attacks were successfully repelled, with a huge loss of life among the Turks (the estimates reported by contemporaries range from 5000 to 16,000 per assault, in part by burning them after having ‘dusted’ them with gunpowder, while some Turkish ships were destroyed by the cannons of the defenders); at the same time, however, breaches had been made in the city’s walls by the Turkish heavy artillery. The last assault began on 8 July; the sultan’s determination to ‘finish the job’ may have been hastened by the appearance at a distance of the Venetian fleet on 11 July, made up of only half the ships the captain-general Nicolò da Canal had requested. Notoriously, the fleet stood by impotently, and the captain-general turned down an offer by one of the galley commanders to ram the line and set fire to the Ottoman ships forming the bridge. On 12 July the first Turkish troops entered the city through a breach in the walls on the side of the Giudecca, the Jewish quarter (or one of them), and fighting began in the piazza and in the streets, but the fate of the defenders after such a long siege was inescapable, and the city fell the same day. On 14 July – and shortly we shall see the importance of the date – the sultan himself made his triumphal entry into the city and, upon the request for mercy, promised to save the necks of the defenders of the last tower (the Torre del ponte), who agreed to surrender. It is a well-known story that the commander of the tower, the former bailo Paolo Erizzo, who had refused to return to Venice in the face of the danger to the colony, was sawed in half 3 Fincati, ‘La perdita di Negroponte’; Setton, Chap. 9: ‘Paul II, Venice, and the Fall of Negroponte (1464-1471)’, 298-308; Stavrides, 168-173.

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between two boards, his neck indeed saved, as had been promised. Turkish casualties were extremely high: the friar Giacomo Pugliese set the figure for the last assault at 27,000 dead, for a total of 77,000 in the four assaults, figures that were quite impossible, for both Christian and Ottoman sources put the size of the Turkish army at 50-60,000 men (although one source, the humanist Cippico, writing shortly thereafter, actually reported double that: 120,000 troops). 4 The sultan ordered a massacre of the population (as Sanudo wrote much later: ‘comandò fosse fato gran crudeltà’); the eyewitness Giovan Maria Angiollelo, a Vicentine whose brother had died defending one of the city gates, reported that the city was ordered to be sacked and that survivors were taken from their hiding places and bound together by the neck like beasts (come … bestie). Then all males of age (che aveano barba) were ordered brought into the piazza to be beheaded, the rest divided up amongst their captors as slaves, who hopefully would bring their owners ransom money. Again the numbers are probably exaggerated but Angiollelo wrote as follows: the men were ‘about 800 in number and they were forced to kneel in a circle, their hands tied, and he [the sultan] had their heads cut off; the women, girls and youths below age eighteen were sold, bartered and given as gifts according to the desires of those who had captured them’.5 The survivors, that is, were considered part of the loot and the private property of whomever had dragged them out of hiding, according to traditional procedure holding at the time of a sack. This accomplished, on 15 July the sultan turned the city over to his son and departed.6 4 The best narrative sources for the fall of Negroponte are Malipiero, 46-67, and Sanudo, Le vite dei dogi,1423-1474, 2:125-43 (cf. Neerfeld, who attributes the Annali to Pietro di Giorgio Dolfin); Cippico; Ventura; and Romanin, 4:345-49, and the letter of a Milanese in his Appendix, doc. IX. For a balanced evaluation of the conduct of the captain-general, see Lane, Venice, 358-59. 5 ‘[Erano] circa ottocento e, loro legate le mani, li fecero inzenocchiar a cercuito tondo ed a tuti gli fece tagliar la testa; e le donne, donzelle e giovinetti maschi, da disdott’anni in giù, furono venduti, donati e baratati, secondo il parer di quelli i quali gli aveano pigliati’ (Angiolello, XIII, 12-13). 6 Borsari, 27-28; Concina. For the practice of holding captives as slaves until their redemption, see, before our years, the fall of Trebizond in 1462, described in a letter by Giorgio Amyrytzès addressed to Cardinal Bessarion, in Vast, 264-65, and later, in the decade after the fall of Venetian Albania, 1474-1479, in Orlando, 64-71. It might be mentioned here that Mehmed II or, rather, Gedik Ahmed Pascia in his name, proceeded in an analogous fashion in the conquest of Otranto, the city on the heel of the Italian ‘boot’ in 1480-1481. There the victims of Turkish scimitars are still revered as the ‘800 martyrs of Otranto’, and since 2013 as martyrs of Christ: see Houben, La conquista turca. In the most recent study, Bianchi, Otranto 1480, a scholarly book albeit without footnotes (the bibliography is excellent), the author shows that the ‘martyrs’ died in the defence of their city, hardly in defence of their faith; surely the same can be said of the victims of the

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Credible news reached Venice on 8 August, and the city went into mourning. The fall of Negroponte was compared in gravity by some to the loss of the whole Terraferma (as was reported by the Milanese ambassador in Venice), by others to the loss of Brescia, the largest city under Venetian rule, and reckoned to be worth one million ducats. The captain-general, Nicolò da Canal, after having been hailed as a hero the year before, as we shall see, was ridiculed for his weakness and indecision; he was considered ‘better suited to reading books than to command at sea’ (‘atto più presto a lezer libri cha a governar le cosse da mar’). The Milanese ambassador in Venice, however, said that da Canal was merely a scapegoat for the general incompetence of the Venetian government in foreseeing the threat in time and preparing for it properly; Frederic Lane suggested that he was probably more afraid of the effects of the ‘sensationally’ large cannons that the Turks were deploying in the assault than of the ‘forest on the sea’, as the Turkish fleet of 300 sails was reported to constitute. Da Canal was promptly replaced on 19 August by Pietro Mocenigo and ordered brought home in chains; all the wealth he had accumulated during his term of duty – basically loot from the sacking of cities and towns – was sequestered and turned over to a fund for ransoming colonials who had been captured and enslaved by the victorious Ottoman troops. The fall of the city was recounted by bards and poets, and, as Margaret Meserve has written, it became the first important event in the history of the Renaissance to be carried by the printing press, which in that very year was being established in the major cities of Italy.7 The Venetian governors were killed, some sawed through as we saw above, others decapitated; a Venetian messenger sent out to the island was impaled. Bodies were thrown into the sea to avoid their infesting the air. According to reports of the survivors, the women and children were forced to witness the massacre before being tied together and, probably later in the month, carried off into slavery in other parts of the Empire, some conceivably to serve, most to await being ransomed. Some boys, including Angiollelo himself, were trained as janissaries and brought up as Muslims.8 There are no reports of rape, perhaps forbidden by customary law holding during a sack, but rape was mentioned (after 1471) by the Franciscan Giacomo della massacre at Negroponte a decade earlier. Note the coincidence of the figures: 800 victims both in 1470 and in 1480. 7 Schmitt; Meserve; Albanese. 8 Malipiero, 56-58; Sanudo, Le vite dei dogi, 1423-1474, 128, 147. Erizzo’s fate was recounted by the eyewitness Paolo Andreozzo, one of the few males who succeeded in escaping (Fincati, La perdita, 302).

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Marca, later canonized. The victories of the Turks were punishment for the sins of the Italians, he preached, but, referring to the fall of Negroponte, he continued: ‘Consider Christian lands put to the sack, the killing of men, the blood of Christians shed over the land, noblewomen dishonored, virgins and widows raped, small children killed, churches desecrated’.9 The accounts became part of the propaganda immediately launched by the Venetians in order to convince their allies to contribute to the urgent preparation of a crusade against the Turks, once an attempt to retake Negroponte had failed and brief peace negotiations had proven unsuccessful. The reports sent by the Milanese ambassadors in Venice to Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza constitute the best independent source for this phase, while the deliberations of the Senate (in the series Senato Secreta in the Venetian State Archives) provide the texts of the letters sent to the sovereigns of Italian and European states, beginning with those sent, as early as 10 August, to the Venetian ambassadors at the court of Rome, where the pope was the Venetian Paul II (Pietro Barbo).10 The commission of the new captain-general Pietro Mocenigo was consigned to him by the doge Cristoforo Moro only on 30 August. Before talking of the survivors of the fall of the city, we should take one step backward to investigate the sultan’s aims. The buildup of the Ottoman fleet and army and the plans to take Negroponte – we learn from a Venetian merchant writing from Chios in February of 1469 – were the direct consequence of the Venetian captain-general Nicolò da Canal’s suprise attack, sack, and destruction of Aenos, a city near the entry to the Dardanelles that Mehmet II himself had conquered in 1456. Da Canal took the city on 14 July 1469, a year to the day before the sultan’s triumphal entry into Negroponte. The date confirms beyond any doubt the sultan’s aims: while it may be that he was worried about the arrival on the horizon of the Venetian fleet, he was particularly determined to celebrate an anniversary deeply felt, the crowning achievement of a long-planned vendetta, by entering Negroponte in person on 14 July 1470. That such concern for memory and chronology was important for military commanders is clear already in the military tactics employed in the fourteenth century, as we know from the exploits of John Hawkwood and his employment with the Florentine army.11 9 ‘Et considerando le terre cristiane messe ad saccomano, occisione de homini, sangue cristiano sparso sopra la terra, le nobili donne svergognate, le vergini et vidue desonestamente violate, li mammoli picculi occisi, le ecclesie violate …’ (Bartolomei Romagnoli, 178). 10 For the language of the accounts that were immediately printed, see Beer and Ivaldi, eds., Guerre contro i turchi, esp. ‘La persa de Nigroponte’, 1.2, p. 28, stanza 3, and p. 35, stanza 18; ‘Questo è il lamento di Negroponte’, 1.3, p. 57, stanza 18; p. 75, stanza 91, and p. 76, stanza 93. 11 Caferro.

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For the assault on Aenos and the sacking of the city we finally have a particularly credible source: a four-page letter to the doge written by the captain-general himself immediately after the successful attack, a letter full of details of the enterprise in all its phases, found by Sanudo and copied into his Vite dei dogi, only recently edited critically.12 Da Canal described the coordinated surprise attack by the galeotti – actually marines, by that time13 – and by the mounted soldiers (stradioti) riding a total of 115 horses disembarked from galleys before daybreak. Fifteen of the horsemen were commanded by Tommaso Schiavo, the future traitor; incentive to fight was provided by the licence to sack the city; and da Canal, who in his letter began to describe the loot collected over five hours, gave up after describing what was very likely his own share and told the doge to await the letters that would soon arrive from the officers and the crews, although he estimated the city of Aenos to have been richer than Corfu, Modon, and Negroponte combined. He carried off 2000 anime, including over 80 Turkish women (‘beautiful women dressed in silk and excellently decked out in jewels’; donne bellissime tutte vestitte di setta et optimamente hornate), sixteen of whom were wives of officers serving with the Turkish fleet; their fate is not known, but the standard practice for Venetians was to hold such valuable ‘property’ for ransom. Another account stated that among the persons carried off to Negroponte, the next port of call of the fleet, were 200 Greek-Christian women, who, after falling victim to the Venetians in this tragedy, were very likely to fall victim to the Turks the following year during the assault on Negroponte; and Greek-Christian churches reportedly were desecrated by the Venetian military force.14 As regards the janissaries guarding the tower at the main gate, da Canal reported twice: ‘All were cut to pieces’ (Tutti sono statti tagiati a pexi). The city, suburbs, gates, and towers were set ablaze, with the help of a cache of fine gunpowder the Venetians had uncovered. The bookworm commander, with a doctorate from the University of Padua, pulled out a quotation from Psalm 118, attributing the success of the enterprise to the Lord himself: ‘This [work] was accomplished by the Lord himself and it is wonderful in our eyes’ (‘a Domino factum est istud, et est mirabile in oculis nostris’).15 Toward the end of the letter he reported: 12 Sanudo, Le vite dei dogi, 1423-1474, 118-22, 124. 13 Lane, ‘Naval Actions and Fleet Organization’, 161. 14 Malipiero, 44; 45 for the author’s criticism of the captain-general’s inciting the sultan to revenge, cited by Ventura. 15 Ps. 118:23; the continuation, verse 24, was obviously taken for granted, foreseeing the celebrations in Venice when the news arrived: ‘Hæc est dies quam fecit Dominus; exsultemus, et lætemur in ea’ (‘This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it’).

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‘To the praise of God and to the consolation and honour of your Highness, such slaughter and depredation of the enemy was achieved with the death of only one galeotto, while six were injured but all of them, by the grace of God, are well’.16 Here we have the model of the concerned commander, reporting to the doge the well-being of his oarsmen and his marines. Of Aenos left in flames he could only say, safely aboard his galley, Qui fo Eno (‘Here once was Aenos’); it was razed to the ground. When the news of the fall of Aenos reached Venice, there were in fact days of celebrations, processions, jubilation, and much ringing of church bells. A word about the ground forces used at Aenos is in order. The action had to be swift, especially after two of the Turkish lookouts eluded the trap set for them and raced to call in reinforcements. The galleys carried horses, as said above, a total of 115 which were employed by stradioti; galeotti were turned into fighting men on the land; footsoldiers were taken from each galley, each man protected with a particular and appropriate kind of armour, first in platoons of 30 from each galley, led by a standard-bearer, half with crossbows, longbows, and firearms (schiopetti), half with swords and shields, then following them at a distance platoons of 20 men per galley, these armed with lances. Organized in pincer formations, all arrived together under the walls, just as planned, da Canal reported proudly, while the fleet rounded the cliff into sight of the city. The first group picked off defenders from the walls while others brought up ladders and still others broke down the gates; according to the account, the attackers entered the city within an hour. Da Canal singled out to the doge the leadership and courage of one of the noble patroni of the galleys, Marco da Lezze. The letter represents a rare description of a battle plan and of the battle itself. That the success of the venture could backfire was only understood too late, and the captain-general was punished not only for his pusillanimity when faced with the superior Turkish forces at Negroponte but also for the unbridled assault unleashed on Aenos the previous year that had triggered the sultan’s ire.17 16 ‘A lauda de Dio et consolacion et honor di vostra sublimità, tanta stragie et preda fatta di inimici è seguida con la morte di un sollo galioto et feridi circa 6, qualli tutti per la gracia di Dio stano bene’. 17 Babinger, 403-04, 415; the sack of Aenos was followed by that of Focea Nuova, further cause of the sultan’s wrath. Malipiero (Annali, 45) cites the letter of a Venetian merchant in Chios dated 14 February 1470 in which the writer foresaw the sultan’s desire for revenge: ‘che’l se tegna offeso delle prede fatte l’istà passado, e particolarmente della presa della città d’Evo [Aenos], e che’l vogia vegnir contra Negroponte’ (‘that he will be offended by the booty taken during the past summer and especially by the conquest of the city of Aenos, such that he will want to attack Negroponte’).

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Remaining for a moment again with the military part of the story, it must be said that following the defeat at Negroponte, once more revenge and vendetta instigated revenge and vendetta. A futile attempt was made by da Canal to reconquer the city, once reinforcements arrived, and in the battle two galley commanders (soracomiti) were killed, one of them Giovanni Tron, son of Nicolò Tron, successor shortly thereafter (in December 1471) to doge Cristoforo Moro. (Tron is known for the fact that, in mourning for the death of his son, he wore a beard, prominent in his portrait on the heavy silver coin, the lira tron, struck during his reign.) The commission of the new captain-general of the fleet, Pietro Mocenigo, was formally to secure the defence of the remaining Venetian possessions, from Corfu to the Aegean, but informally to wreak havoc on Ottoman ports and port cities. The annals of the fleet’s military actions, penned by the Dalmatian humanist Coriolano Cippico, a commander on board the captain-general’s galley, recount the naval actions from the time the Senate passed the order that each war galley take aboard ten horses, necessary for the stradioti, the light cavalry. The fleet received the order to sack and destroy Turkish ports, sparing those on the western shores since their populations included Christians, while singling out as targets for the sack the ports of Anatolia, ‘which were full of barbarian people, infidels and adherents of the Mohammedan sect’. The author outlines the ‘normal’ procedure for the sack (secondo l’instituto) when recounting that of the island of Delos: one-tenth of the booty was reserved for the captain-general; special treasurers (camerlenghi) were named to handle the division of the booty amongst all claimants; goods taken but not desired for keeping were sold at auction on the spot, after which prisoners were sold and cash divided, ‘according to custom’ (secondo l’ordinario). Mocenigo was made doge in December 1474, in recognition of his successes in the Levant. Cippico’s Latin tract on the exploits of his captain-general was published in Venice in 1477, a year after Mocenigo’s death. Visitors to the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo will recall his funeral monument by Pietro Lombardo, one of the most famous of the Venetian Renaissance, which reminds the onlooker of Mocenigo’s capture of Smirne and Famagosta and says unabashedly ex hostium manubiis, that is, ‘this monument was financed by booty taken from the enemy’.18 With the military background in place, we can now pass on from war to beatitude, the second half of this story. The fact that the sack of Negroponte, the most important base in Venetian ‘Romània’ following the fall of Constantinople, was due to revenge and vendetta for the sack 18 See Fincati, ‘L’armata di Venezia’, also for the division of booty amongst the victors.

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of Aenos of course changed nothing for the victims, Latins and Greeks. Survivors, mostly women and children, trickled back to Venice – or, as colonials, arrived in Venice for the f irst time – over the following years, some after escaping, some after being ransomed. A list drawn up in May 1471 of widows and orphans to be ransomed, with the money for doing so, was long enough that the there was no room for it in the parchment register of the Senate; after signalling four cases, the rest were recorded on paper and attached to the respective filza, alas no longer extant.19 Other sums were allocated for dowries and pensions in favour of survivors, some mothers, widows, and children of members of the Venetian colonial government, some colonial women who had lost everything and who now were literally shame-faced poor once they reached the safety of Venice. In early March 1475, nearly five years after the conquest of Negroponte, a group of fifteen women, most of them nobles accompanied by young children presumably ransomed from slavery not long before, drafted a moving appeal to the Senate asking for aid in kind that would permit them to survive. They recounted that they had seen their husbands, children, and relatives decapitated and dismembered, that they themselves had been spared only to be enslaved. They noted in their plea that their fate was known a tuto el mondo, meaning that they were aware of the Lamenti in verse and in prose that had been spread across Europe by the nascent printing press beginning only months after news of the fall of the city reached the West. The plea for aid, in volgare, is moving; it was published in the late eighteenth century (and translated into Latin!) and has now been edited critically.20 Here is the text in English translation: We, the most unfortunate women in the world, your noblewomen born in Negroponte, mothers and daughters, sisters and wives of the most faithful martyrs of Christ and of your most illustrious Signoria, humbly present ourselves, fallen as we are from riches, status and happiness. You know well of our misery and unheard of calamity, of which the lamentations and the voices already echo abroad in every language and in every people. Much more so must they be heard by you, at whose feet we arrive after 19 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato Mar, reg. 9, fol. 95 r (16 May 1471); the importance of the provision was underscored by Romanin, 4:350n (transcribed in Mueller, Ambienti, 71-72n21). 20 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato Terra, reg. 7, fols. 69v-70r (11 March 1475, edited in Mueller, Ambienti, Appendix I). Sanudo, Vite 1474-1494, 1:12-13, provides only the names of the supplicants.

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the horrible enslavement by the Turks; our clothing is miserable, our faces are pallid, our eyes as of persons lost, eyes which saw the bloody Turkish swords cut to pieces our sons, husbands and relatives; but the cruelty of the barbarians spared us miserable women and it was a miracle that we did not die then and there out of fear and sorrow, for the Divine Majesty wanted to make us examples to the whole world of women once happy, of great prosperity, cast down by misfortune after the loss of our fatherland, the horrible massacre of our menfolk, after the unbearable, barbaric slavery and other evils, we are forced to plead for bread at the doors of strangers. We therefore beseech you, in your clemency and compassion and for the merits and sincere faith of those most faithful martyrs who fought in the name of Christ and of your Serene Highness and died in Negroponte, deign not to give but to lend us, for the short time left to us, a roof and shelter to which we can retire and lament together our horrible fate, and [deign] to give us the bread necessary to sustain our sad souls in afflicted bodies until death. We do not seek to remake our lost fortunes, or to concern ourselves about our honors and the nobility of our ancient lineages; we ask only a secluded place where we can live out our burdened lives, a place which, once we have died, will revert to you, to whom we humbly commend ourselves.

The total of 27 mouths to be fed were granted flour, wine, and firewood; some were put up in the monastery of SS. Filippo e Giacomo across the canal behind the ducal palace, others in the Vioni hospice on the Riva Schiavoni dedicated since 1409 to female pilgrims awaiting passage to the Holy Land. The history of these colonial women – all natives of Negroponte, according to the petition – remains to be written, but two of those on the first list were among the founders of the Franciscan Observant convent of the Santo Sepolcro: the young and beautiful Beatrice Venier, and Polissena Premarin. According to the hagiographical material attached to the Vita of their younger consorella Chiara Bugni, the two had escaped Negroponte early: the former had been saved by an apparition of the Virgin from the intention of committing suicide as the only way of saving her virginity ‘from the military license of the barbarians’ and had miraculously been led to a ship aboard which she found Polissena Premarin, an older unmarried woman she already knew, likely a relative (given the close marital ties that existed between these two colonial families). It may be assumed that both women, and possibly many others, had taken vows of chastity in case they were saved from death at the hands of the Turks; the Vita reports that the Virgin who appeared to Beatrice Venier specifically asked her to found a

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convent in Venice.21 As founding members of the convent, both were early considered particularly holy, the former elected to be the second abbess, and both were written up by the Franciscan hagiographers as ‘beate’ of the order. The list of 1475 contains the names of three other Premarin women, plus that of the widow of Antonio Premarin, killed in 1470. The two colonial refugees were welcomed by two Venetian women who became co-founders of the convent: Maria da Canal and Orsa Usnago (Orsola her name in religion). Da Canal was a common noble surname in the colony; it is not impossible that she was a person willing to dedicate her life to God in the aftermath of the disgrace to her family name caused by the inaction at Negroponte of the captain-general Nicolò da Canal. Suor Orsola would become the ‘spiritual wet-nurse’ (nutrice spirituale) of Chiara Bugni and principal confidant of Chiara’s biographer, Francesco Zorzi, the humanist and Franciscan Observant of the nearby convent of San Francesco della Vigna. Beatrice, Maria, and Orsola vied with one another as performers of miracles, all dutifully recorded by the Franciscan hagiographers. The Venetian males who welcomed the refugees included men from the branches of the Giustinian family known as ‘di Negroponte’, since for generations they held in fief from the government of Venice the castles of Styra and, at the southern end of the island, Karistos, both of which inevitably fell to the Turks on 17 July 1470. One of the family, Giustiniano di Antonio Giustinian, himself a treasurer in the colonial government in 1465, was one of the administrators of the Vioni hospice in 1484, precisely when it was about to become part of the new convent of Santo Sepolcro. Several other relatives followed him in that position, including Antonio di Paolo Giustinian, a former lecturer in philosophy at the School of the Rialto and ambassador both to the Empire and to Rome; he was also one of the laymen called in to judge the credibility of suor Chiara’s miracles. Other administrators were related to other foundresses, such as Pietro Usnago, a notary and brother of suor Orsola, and Matteo di Giovanni Premarin, relative of Polissena, both of whom entered the group of six commissioners in 1493.22 Thereafter the story of the convent becomes of interest to art and architectural historians, and Matteo Ceriana has outlined the incorporation of smaller buildings into a larger structure capable of housing, by the 21 On vows, the second lamentation cited above, note 10, reads ‘quanti voti facevan chon fervore / sol perché gli scampassi il buon Signore’ (‘how many vows they fervently made / in the hope that the good Lord would save them’). 22 See Mueller, ‘Pubblico e privato’. The Usnago were immigrants from Milan, three of whom received Venetian citizenship in the mid-Quattrocento (Mueller and Guzzetti, eds., , the databank civesveneciarum.net).

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mid-Cinquecento, 60 professed nuns and 20 novices.23 But the fascinating part involves the minorite Francesco Zorzi’s own role in the invention of the grotto of the Holy Sepulchre meant to recall that of Palestine (Zorzi himself had made the pilgrimage in 1494), a macchina designed by Tullio Lombardo, with figures sculpted by Lorenzo Bregno and Tullio Lombardo and destined precisely for the extreme devotions of the beatific suor Chiara Bugni, with whose Vita this whole story began.24 The passage from the horrors of war to beatitude, the latter itself not without its horrors (the reader has been spared the gruesome details of the Saviour’s blood and the Virgin’s milk miraculously bestowed upon suor Chiara), should be clear by now: female survivors of the Turkish massacre of colonial and Venetian males above age eighteen in Negroponte in 1470, refugees from the colony, arrived in Venice in the years following the sack. Some of them founded the cloistered minorite convent of the Santo Sepolcro on the Riva Schiavoni; three of the founders plus an early young acquisition were beatified by Observant Franciscan hagiographic tradition. Four beate from a single convent in a single generation might constitute something of a record.

Bibliography Manuscript Sources Archivio di Stato, Venice Senato Mar Senato Terra

Printed Sources Albanese, Gabriella, ‘La storiografia umanistica e l’avanzata turca: dalla caduta di Costantinopoli alla conquista di Otranto’, in La conquista turca di Otranto (1480), tra storia e mito, ed. by Hubert Houben, 2 vols. (Galatina: Congedo, 2008), 1:319-52. Angiolello, Giovan Maria, Viaggio di Negroponte, ed. by Cristina Bazzolo (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1982). Babinger, Franz, Maometto il Conquistatore e il suo tempo (Turin: Einaudi, 1957).

23 Sperling, Table A1. 24 See Ceriana, and the illustrations following p. 240.

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Bartolomei Romagnoli, Alessandra, ‘Infedeli, ebrei ed eretici: tipologia degli esclusi nella predicazione di san Giacomo della Marca’, in San Giacomo della Marca e l’altra Europa. Crociata, martirio e predicazione nel Mediterraneo Orientale (secc. XIII-XV): atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Monteprandone, 2425 novembre 2006, ed. by Fulvio Serpico, Quaderni di San Giacomo (Tavernuzze: Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino, 2007), 157-78. Beer, Marina, and Cristina Ivaldi, eds., Guerre contro i turchi, 1453-1570, vol. 4 of Guerre in ottava rima, ed. by Marina Beer, 4 vols. (Modena: Panini, 1988-1989). Bianchi, Vito, Otranto 1480, il sultano, la strage, la conquista (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2016). Borsari, Silvano, L’Eubea veneziana, posthumous (Venice: Deputazione di storia patria, 2007). Caferro, William, John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Ceriana, Matteo, ‘La chiesa e il monastero del Santo Sepolcro di Venezia ai tempi di Chiara Bugni’, in La Vita e i Sermoni di Chiara Bugni, clarissa veneziana (1471-1514), ed. by Reinhold C. Mueller and Gabriella Zarri, Temi e Testi, 89 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011), 31-61. Cippico, Coriolano, Petri Mocenici imperatoris gestorum libri tres (Venetiis: Per Bernardum Pictorem & Erhardum Ratdolt, 1477), later editions entitled De bello asiatico. Concina, Ennio, ‘Zorzi da Negroponte: nobili, schiavi, stratioti’, in Venezia – Eubea, da Egripos a Negroponte, ed. by Chryssa A. Maltezou and Cristina E. Papakosta (Venice and Athens: Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini, 2006), 109-16. Fincati, Luigi, ‘L’armata di Venezia, 1470-1474’, Archivio veneto, 34 (1887), 31-72. —, ‘La perdita di Negroponte (luglio 1470)’, Archivio veneto, 32 (1886), 267-307. Houben, Hubert, ed., La conquista turca di Otranto (1480), tra storia e mito, 2 vols. (Galatina: Congedo, 2008). Lane, Frederic C., ‘Naval Actions and Fleet Organization, 1499-1502’, repr. in his Studies in Venetian Social and Economic History, ed. by Benjamin G. Kohl and Reinhold C. Mueller, art. 8 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1987). —, ‘Venice, a Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Malipiero, Domenico, Annali veneti dall’anno 1457 al 1500, Archivio storico italiano, 7, Part 1 (1843), Part 2 (1844). McLeod, Bet, ‘Some Aspects of the Finger-Rings in the Chalcis Treasure at the British Museum’, in Intelligible Beauty: Recent Research on Byzantine Jewellery, ed. by Chris Entwistle and Noël Adams, British Museum Research Publications, 178 (London: British Museum, 2010), 233-36.

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Meserve, Margaret, ‘News from Negroponte: Politics, Popular Opinion, and Information Exchange in the First Decade of the Italian Press’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), 440-80. Mueller, Reinhold C., ‘Ambienti ecclesiastici e laici attorno alla figura di Chiara Bugni’, in La Vita e i sermoni di Chiara Bugni, clarissa veneziana (1471-1514), ed. by Reinhold C. Mueller and Gabriella Zarri, Temi e Testi, 89 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011), 63-122. —, ‘Pubblico e privato nel dominio veneziano delle isole greche a metà Quattrocento: il caso dei Giustinian’, in Venezia e le isole ionie, ed. by Chryssa Maltezou and Gherardo Ortalli (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 2005), 71-100. —, and Linda Guzzetti, eds., civesveneciarum.net databank. —, and Gabriella Zarri, eds., La Vita e i Sermoni di Chiara Bugni, clarissa veneziana (1471-1514), Temi e Testi, 89 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011). Neerfeld, Christiane, ‘Historia per forma di diaria’. La cronachistica veneziana contemporanea a cavallo tra il Quattrocento e il Cinquecento (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 2006). Orlando, Ermanno, Migrazioni mediterranee. Migranti, minoranze e matrimoni a Venezia nel basso medioevo (Bologna: il Mulino [for the Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti], 2014). Romanin, Samuele, Storia documentata di Venezia, 10 vols., 2nd ed. (Venice: Giusto Fuga, 1925). Sanudo, il giovane, Marin, Le vite dei dogi, 1423-1474, ed. by Angela Caracciolo Aricò, 2 vols. (Venice: La Malcontenta, 1999-2004). —, Vite dei dogi, 1474-1494, ed. by Angela Caracciolo Aricò, 2 vols. (Padova: Antenore, 1989-2001). Schmitt, Oliver Jens, ‘Der “tragische Untergang” Negropontes im Spiegel italienischer Diplomatenberichte der Renaissance’, in Byzantina Mediterranea. Festschrift für Johannes Koder zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. by K. Belke et al. (Wien, Köln, and Weimar: Böhlau, 2007). Setton, Kenneth, The Papacy and the Levant, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978). Sperling, Jutta G., Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Stavrides, Théoharis, The Sultan of Vezirs: The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vezir Mahmud Pasha Angelovic (1453-1474) (Leiden: Brill, 2001). Vast, Henri, Le cardinal Bessarion, 1403-1472. Etude sur la chrétienté et la rénaissance vers le milieu du 15. siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1878; repr. Geneva, 1977). Ventura, Angelo, ‘Canal (da), Niccolò’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 17 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani, 1974), 662-68.

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About the Author Reinhold C. Mueller, Professor of Medieval History, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (retired)



Patriots and Partisans Popular Resistance to the Occupation of the Venetian Terraferma by the Forces of the League of Cambrai1 Simon Pepper Abstract Much ink has been spilt by historians examining the social divisions within Venice’s Terraferma population during the War of the League of Cambrai (1509-1517). Defeat at Agnadello (1509) saw most of the Republic’s territory quickly over-run and occupied by the forces of the League, an occupation which saw the rural peasantry and urban working classes generally supporting the Republic, while the nobility was often divided in its loyalties. These divisions shape the background to this essay; but the essay itself focuses on more pragmatic questions. Did the lower orders fight for Venice? What forms did the resistance take? Did any such armed resistance contribute positively to the Venetian war effort? What can be reported about local leadership and the balance struck between spontaneous action and resistance organised and controlled centrally? What arms were available to the resisters? The essay seeks to address these questions by tracking the incidents (often horrific) reported in the early months of the war in the rural communities of Piove di Sacco in the Padovano, Mirano on the approaches to Mestre, the city of Treviso which uniquely remained in Venetian hands throughout the conflict, Feltre sacked many times, the violent borderland of the Valsugana and the city of Brescia, scene of the conflict’s most destructive sack following the failed uprising of 1512.

1 I am grateful to the late Professor Lauro Martines (UCLA), Professor Samuel Cohn (Glasgow University), Dr. Gaby Neher (University of Nottingham) and Dr. Jill Moore (Birkbeck, University of London) for valuable comment and assistance. My thanks also to the anonymous publisher’s reader for a number of valuable suggestions. The paper in short form was presented to the Michael Mallett memorial session of the Renaissance Society of America Conference, Venice, 2010.

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_pepp

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Keywords: artillery, forms of armed resistance, peasant resistance versus noble collaboration, personal weapons, resistance leadership, Small War, War Crimes

The war fought by Venice against the League of Cambrai from 1509 to 1517 saw a number of important sieges and great battles, starting with the disastrous defeat of the Republic’s forces at Agnadello on 14 May 1509 and the loss within weeks of nearly all of the Venetian Terraferma possessions. Most of the f ighting, however, was characterized by the frequent change of ownership of castles and villages, minor actions, raids and skirmishes, and the widespread loss of civilian life and property as armies foraged aggressively for provisions, pillaged, or implemented scorched-earth defensive strategies. This low-intensity but enormously destructive form of war was known in the early modern period as ‘small war’.2 Early modern small war generated its full measure of horrors.3 The War of the League of Cambrai also involved the resistance of the peasantry and urban working classes who – in marked contrast to much of the nobility and urban elites of the occupied territories – generally remained loyal to Venice. The pages of Marino Sanudo and other contemporary reporters (not all of them Venetian) are studded with stories of loyalty to the Republic by villani, contadini, and urban workers, and the cries of ‘Marco! Marco!’ which so enraged the occupiers. 4 Sanudo, of course, was desperate to demonstrate support for Venice in its darkest hour, and this must be kept in mind when using his Diarii as a primary source. But the f ine grain of his reporting is essential when it is the incidents of small war (often trifling in themselves) which provide the raw material for an exploration of the contribution of ordinary peasants and urban workers to Venice’s war effort. Why one class would fight for Venice and another would not is a question much easier asked than answered. Michael Mallett and Christine Shaw have suggested that many of the subject patriciate resented Venice’s decision to keep the army intact for the defence of the capital rather than disperse it in garrisons for the defence of the Terraferma cities, and entertained 2 Pepper, ‘Aspects’, 195-201; Shaw. 3 See Martines for the horrors visited on civilians. 4 Enemy testimony is best. The Florentine emissaries to the League, Nasi and Pandolfini: ‘a noi è parso vedere, in queste città che possedevanno e Veneziani, li artigiani e gente bassa mirabilmente affezzionati a San Marco, li gentilhuomini inimicissimi’ (20 July 1509), quoted in Cervelli, 347.

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illusions – quickly enough dispelled under the realities of occupation – about the restoration of their own traditional privileges under the distant rule of foreign monarchs. If some urban elites saw regime change as an opportunity, the peasantry often saw the clock turning back to the feudal regimes predating Venetian rule as well as loss of access to a system of law which, for all of its imperfections, was better than its alternatives.5 Angelo Ventura rejected notions of class ‘loyalty’ per se, arguing that the lower orders resented Venetian impositions but hated Venice less than they hated their own landlords.6 For others it was the enforced rupture of business links with Venice – the strong pull of established agricultural, craft, and industrial markets and supply chains in both directions – which may have provoked resistance from impoverished peasants and ruined tradesmen.7 Communal and family politics and rivalries were significant in many subject cities; while for communities on the borders of the Terraferma the war which started in 1509 revived historic disputes and as well as recent memories of violence.8 In this debate it is easy to forget that many of the Terraferma nobility supported Venice. In the faction-ridden and semi-feudal Friuli – where much of the nobility was indeed strongly pro-Imperial – the lower orders initially followed Antonio Savorgnano, the charismatic hereditary colonel of the Adunanza militia until in 1511 he changed sides and fled to Austria, where he was hunted down and killed by Venice’s agents.9 Popular leadership of the Republic’s cause in the Friuli then passed to Girolamo Savorgnan, head of the cadet branch of the family and a bitter rival of Antonio. There must have been many other less-celebrated exceptions to the simplicities of solid class loyalty. The young Vicentine noble, Luigi da Porto, would later be severely wounded fighting for Venice in the Friuli but first may have attempted to join the French in the immediate post-Agnadello confusion. Commenting on his family’s predicament under German occupation in the crisis summer of 1509, Luigi remarks that they were at once fearful of denunciation as Marcheschi, grateful for the protection of senior Imperial officers quartered in their Vicenza palace, but forced to trim: ‘E già a noi Da Porto, che chi vince

5 Mallett and Shaw, 91-93. For access to law, see Povolo. 6 Ventura, 167-273. 7 The industrial and commercial impact was particularly acute in Brescia, where France enforced the cutting of trade links with Venice and promised favourable connections with Milan but of course failed to deliver. Pasero, Francia, Spagna and ‘Il dominio francese’. 8 Cavalieri; and Bona. 9 For the tangled affairs of the Friuli, see Muir, Mad Blood Stirring and ‘Was there Republicanism’.

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siamo presti ud ubbidire …’.10 This essay does not pretend to resolve highly complex issues which for many years have fascinated historians of Venice and continue to do so in the publications from the recent fifth centenary of Agnadello.11 My questions are different. Did the villani of the Terraferma f ight for Venice? If so, what forms did armed resistance by the lower orders take, and did their actions ever contribute significantly to the defence and eventual recovery of Venice’s mainland territories? Were civilians and those civilians pressed into military service – as so often depicted – merely victims of the war?12 Did military leadership emerge from the ranks of the peasantry or urban working classes (as classic guerrilla warfare theory leads us to expect), or was action invariably driven by nobles or landowners, the traditional leaders of early modern society? These questions too are potentially misleading in their apparent simplicity. It should be said at once that armed resistance was very dangerous. Just as in Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494-1495, the French ruthlessly applied the conventions of medieval siege warfare by killing the defenders of places which fell to storm.13 In the early days of the war, the French stormed the fortress of Medelacho (on the Venetian bank of the Adda, near Bergamo), massacring men, women, and children.14 Brisighella in the Venetian-held Romagna was also sacked by invading papal forces and ‘quasi tuta ruinada, et tutti facti presoni quelli che dentro erano, si homeni come done’.15 Shortly afterwards Venice sacked Trevi (modern Treviglio) when it was recaptured by the Republic from the French just before Agnadello. Trevi was a Venetian town. Its sack by Venice was punishment for its earlier failure to put up a proper defence against the French, no doubt to avoid a sack.16 Accounts suggest a reprisal which was intended to be carried out under controlled conditions, rather than the frenzy of looting, rape, and murder that might follow a contested assault. A contingent of Brisighelli who had personal 10 Clough, Luigi da Porto, Libro I, Lettera XXVII, 27 August 1509, 420; and 288 for Luigi’s unexplained journey to Milan in July (q.v. Lib. I, Lettera XXVI, 418), which Clough believes could have been an attempt to secure a French condotta. See also Clough, ‘Love and War’. 11 Gullino; and Varanini, ‘La terraferma di fronte’, as well as Varanini, ‘La Terraferma veneta nel Quattrocento’; Nicoletti; Rossi; and Gasparini; Grubb is still valuable. 12 Classically Ruzante’s protest: ‘Cancaro ai campi e a la guera e a i soldè, e ai soldè e a la guera!’, 16. 13 Keen; The Laws of War; Pepper, ‘Siege Law’. 14 Sanudo, Diarii, 8:141, 27 April 1509. 15 Ibid., 164, 4 May 1509. 16 Ibid., 129, 25 April 1509, lists thirteen places threatened with sack if they did not return to obedience of the signoria.

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scores to settle because of papal actions in their own district were released first into the recaptured city, but any control was quickly lost, the town set on fire, and Venetian officers had to intervene to rescue women and children.17 According to Sanudo, the affair caused deep outrage in the army and in Venice.18 But a clear signal had been sent. Bergamo and Brescia both surrendered when approached after Agnadello by the victorious French army, the citadels holding out only for a few days longer. The city of Cremona surrendered too, but here the fortress remained in Venetian hands for a month, bombarding the city until it was betrayed to the French.19 Verona, Vicenza, and Padua all refused entry to the retreating remnants of Venice’s army. These last cities were all east of the Mincio, which had been agreed at Cambrai to mark the future French (western) and Imperial (eastern) sectors of the occupied Venetian Terraferma. The leading citizens were anxious to surrender to the Emperor and proved easy prey to the pretensions of the renegade Leonardo Trissino to represent Maximilian.20 At Padua an initial breakdown in loyalty was quickly transformed into open hostility and the establishment of an aggressively anti-Venetian ‘rebel’ regime, which held power for some weeks until overthrown on 17 July 1509 by the surprise recapture of the city in a Venetian coup de main. Venice then poured troops, volunteers, and arms into Padua, reinforced its walls, and in September and October successfully defended the city against the combined forces of the Hapsburgs, the French, and their Italian allies in the League. Until the siege of Padua, the only major Terraferma possession to resist a serious assault in the weeks following Agnadello was Peschiera, and here, after almost a week of bombardment, the French repeated the harsh lesson of Medelacho. Peschiera’s breaches were stormed, and the entire surviving garrison was massacred. In Guicciardini’s account and in Sanudo’s first 17 Trevi’s recapture by Venice was virtually bloodless: 51 French ‘personi da conto’ held for ransom, 1500 Gascon foot released with a promise not fight against Venice for a year, and the men-at-arms stripped of their armour and war-horses and given ‘uno ronzino tristo uno, e col medemo sacramento li lassono andar’ (ibid., 209-10, 10 May 1509). The Brisighelli knew of their own town’s fate and the slaughter of 50 fellow soldiers when the French first took Trevi (ibid., 149, 29 April 1509). The sack was followed by an exodus of deserters loaded with loot, causing Venice to announce savage measures to restore discipline. Common deserters would lose their noses and ears; officers would be executed. (ibid., 223-25, 9-11 May 1509). 18 Ibid., 238: ‘quelli nephandissimi brisighelli, homini rapinosi et de pessimo sorte et conditione. Non si potria exprimere le rapine, saccomani facti et sceleragine usano dicti brisighelli, odibile a tutto lo exercito de la nostra illustrissima Signoria.’ 19 Ibid., 382, 8 June 1509. Cremona was Venetian only from 1499 to 1509, having come to the Republic from Milan by the Treaty of Blois (1499). 20 Ibid., 405, 15 June 1509.

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reports, the Venetian castellan and the noble proveditor survived the assault, but both were hanged on the orders of Louis XII, who had been present at the siege. Strictly speaking, the laws of war justified no quarter in the assault and its aftermath, and there were numerous precedents for the subsequent executions, which were seen as the penalty for contumacy. But this part of Italy – hitherto largely untouched by the wars – was still capable of shock at such a stern exercise of royal authority, and the hanging of the castellan’s young son was seen as particularly harsh.21 A substantial part of the watermens’ district of occupied Padua was sacked and partly burnt down by the Emperor’s troops following the murder of two German soldiers and nocturnal cries of ‘Marco! Marco!’22 The fighting around Vicenza in 1510 provided perhaps the most shocking incident when some 6000 civilians took shelter in an extensive system of tunnels formed from stone quarrying and defended the entrance, only to be smoked out by fires which almost certainly killed more than 1000 of them (and perhaps many more). The events at the Grotto di Mossano were almost certainly the work of irregular ‘adventurers’ accompanying the armies, described in one source as Germans and in another as Spaniards. They were apparently sufficiently frightful to be regarded as a war crime, and the Chevalier Bayard hanged the culprits at the tunnel entrance.23 In small war the boundary between resistance and self-defence is often difficult to establish. Here the case of Piove di Sacco is instructive for what it can tell us of divided loyalties in a rural community, centred on a small town with impressive tower-gates but otherwise rudimentary medieval fortifications. Piove di Sacco lies between Venice and Padua, close to the lagoon but for practical purposes much closer to Padua than to Venice.24 21 Guicciardini, Book 8; Sanudo, 8:329 and 333, 31 May and 1 June 1509. Sanudo provides a curious sequel. The proveditor, Antonio Bon, bribed the hangman and escaped, arriving back in Venice via Ferrara to be rewarded with the lucrative post of Salt Commissioner for his brave defence when so many of his compatriots had shamefully abandoned their posts (ibid., 429, 23 June 1509). The castellan, Andrea del Riva, and his son both died; but to help the family, Riva’s nephew was appointed crossbowman for ten years on the galleys of Flanders, a post which allowed him to trade profitably on his own behalf. For another escaper, Vico da Perosa, see ibid., 485, 4 July 1509. Three Germans from Peschiera’s garrison also escaped: ibid., 499, 9 July 1509. I have yet to find an atrocity with ‘no survivors’ (a constant refrain in this grim history). 22 Lazzarini, 56, 29 June 1509; and Sanudo, 8:453-54, 28 June 1509. 23 Bembo, 3, Bk. 10, 117-19. Bembo estimates 6000 men, women, and children sheltering in the tunnels of whom ‘a great number’ died; Guicciardini has ‘more than 1000’ killed; Caldogno, a local chronicler (189-90), suggests 1200 fatalities. Bayard’s Loyal Serviteur estimates more than 2000 dead, 169-70. 24 I owe much of the material on Piove di Sacco to Dr. Jill Moore, with whom I visited the town in 2010.

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By the early sixteenth century its surroundings were studded with farms and villas owned by citizens (both rich and not so rich) from each of the neighbouring big cities. Mixed property ownership would reflect political divisions, particularly in the summer of 1509 when control of Padua was being contested and Piove became highly vulnerable to predatory soldiery. Retreating Venetian troops were attacked here in June 1509, perhaps in support of the rebel Paduan regime, but without clear evidence of motives it is as likely to have been self-defence against elements of a broken army dangerously out of control. Near Piove di Sacco on 4 June, supplies en route to Venice were intercepted and pillaged.25 Was this an act of war, or the action of desperate peasants seizing an opportunity to make good their supplies in the face of almost certain future hardship? After Padua declared for the Emperor, a ‘rebel’ podestà had been appointed to govern Piove di Sacco, which historically and constitutionally formed part of the Padovano.26 Socially and politically, however, Piove seems to have marked a watershed. Sanudo – who owned property in the area but was certainly not wealthy – notes that Venetian nobles, desperate to recover crops and farm revenues from the Padovano, were going as far as Piove and then sending local representatives closer to Padua, as less likely to be arrested.27 However, foreign news was still reaching Venice through Piove.28 Early in July Piove witnessed a stand-off when the Sanguinazi, a leading Paduan rebel family, confronted Venetian landowners attempting to collect their crops. The Venetians responded by arming their own villeins ‘quali tutti son marcheschi’.29 There are features emerging here of a localized civil war which would pit the Sanguinazi and their allies the Buzzacarini against the Venetian loyalists in the Piovà and which would see rebel partisans riding with the League’s raiders and pointing out the properties of loyalists for destruction.30 Nicolò Sanguinazo – the leader of his family – was captured in 1514 and brought to Venice where, after interrogation by the Ten, he was strangled in the middle of the night.31 Piove di Sacco was stealthily occupied by Venetian troops in mid-July 1509 and became one of the launchpads for the surprise attack of 17 July which 25 Sanudo, 8:348, 4 June 1509. 26 Ibid., 366, 6 June 1509. 27 Ibid., 408, 16 June 1509. 28 Ibid., 428, 23 June 1509. 29 Ibid., 499, 9 July 1509. 30 The standard source, unobtainable in Britain, is Bonardi. See also Zapperi, 634-35; and S. Olivieri Secchi, 646-48. 31 Sanudo, 19:242-43, 12 November 1514.

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recaptured Padua.32 The Paduan-appointed podestà of Piove was apparently complicit in this operation and, after its success, was released ‘per aversi ben portato con nostri in ogni cossa’.33 Was he a Venetian sympathizer all along, or did he change sides as Venetian forces took over the town? We only know that others were not so fortunate. A Paduan collaborator was hanged on 17 July in the main square by a mob shouting ‘Marco! Marco!’34 At the end of August 1509 local peasants hunted down a group of Buzzacarini rebels and handed them over to Venetian officers to be confined in the cabione in Venice.35 According to Sanudo, peasants from Piove on their own initiative captured the nearby town of Monselice, which had been occupied by 50 Ferrarese soldiers, who then took refuge in the castle.36 Piove di Sacco’s luck ran out in September 1509, possibly because of its record of resistance but perhaps simply because the place was now in a hot war zone. On 7 September, with the Imperial army moving to encircle Padua, the Piovans defied an Imperial herald’s demand to surrender the town and to pay a collective ransom of 3000 ducats. Five thousand or so villani closed on Piove demanding weapons. They were issued with bows and arrows.37 Five days later the town suffered the first of several wartime destructions, as it fell to the imperialists with the usual brutalities visited on the women and a mass flight to safety in Venice.38 However, as League forces withdrew from their unsuccessful siege of Padua, Piove di Sacco was again liberated. In December 1509, the podestà (by now a Venetian appointee) led 500 Piovan peasants to fight in the Po Delta.39 The willingness of significant numbers of Piove di Sacco’s peasantry to fight for Venice was clearly not limited to the defence of hearth and home. Sanudo’s reporting of events in the Piovà suggests a strong element of spontaneity in the actions of the peasantry. However, the stakes were too high for the immediate Venetian hinterland around Mestre and Marghera 32 Sanudo, 8:19, 15 July 1509, for the preparations. 33 Ibid., 525, 17 July 1509. 34 Ibid., 525, 17 July 1509. There is a blank in the diary where Sanudo evidently planned to insert the collaborator’s name. 35 Sanudo, 9:98, 28 August 1509. Four of the Buzzacarini were held, but their estate factor and two servants were evidently released. The cabioni were the wooden cages erected inside public buildings in Venice as overflow accommodation for the Republic’s many prisoners. 36 Ibid. Evidently a brief occupation in the confused situation just before the siege of Padua. 37 Ibid., 150, 7 September 1509, specifies ‘freze, archi etc, et li fo dato’. 38 Ibid., 152-53, 11 September 1509. 39 Ibid., 385. The arrival of the contingent commanded by sier Zuan Antonio Barbaro, Proveditor of Piove, was reported by Zuan Paulo Gradenigo, Proveditor General of the Polesine (the Po Delta zone of operations) on 14 December 1509.

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to rely on local initiative. Here the Republic intervened directly to organize and stiffen popular resistance by appointing, at the end of June 1509, Alvise Dardani as special proveditor of Mirano and Uriago (modern Oriago). 40 His letter of appointment gives him the title ‘provisori vicariatum Mirani et Stiani’ (or Stiliani, presumably Stigliano, south of Noale). All of these places feature in his roving commission. 41 Mirano is six miles west of Mestre, and Oriago is now part of the Mestre-Marghera urban area. Alvise Dardani was an ‘original citizen’ (a rank just below the nobility), a notary by profession and a senior official in the Venetian civil service. 42 A property owner in Mirano, he was welcomed there ‘con jubilo’ and at an advanced age began an active wartime career which would see him lead a large contingent of locally recruited Marcheschi in the seizure of Padua on 17 July. He ranged far and wide through the area bounded by Mestre, Gambarare, Padua, Camposampiero, and Noale as the Republic prepared for the expected siege of Padua (in which he served) and, after it, to organize resistance in what remained an active war zone. Dardani’s appointment gave him custody of Mirano’s castle but no regular troops except for a bodyguard of six provisionati; although on taking up his post he estimated that his area could raise about 1400 ‘huomini tutti valorosi et fidatissimi’ aged between 20 and 50 years. 43 He requested body armour and helmets for 200 of them, suggesting an assessment which had identified potential front-rank fighters. From early July he pressed the senior officers in Mestre for as many crossbowmen as possible, plus 50 regular infantry and 100 stradioti (60 for his main base at Mirano and 40 for the castle at Stigliano, which was bigger but no less important).44 The stradioti light cavalry recruited in the Balkans were much in demand for their fighting qualities and mobility, which made them ideal for reconnaissance and the interception of mounted raiders. But they often proved unreliable and indisciplined, as Dardani discovered when, after vigorous correspondence and personal appeals, a small contingent of 40 stradioti was posted to him from Mestre. Only 30 arrived in Mirano. Nine promptly deserted, and a further three reported sick. 45 Twenty-four hours 40 Sanudo, 8:454, 28 June 1509. For Dardani’s wartime correspondence and previously unpublished family history, see Grubb, Family Memoirs, 130-227. See also De Peppo, ‘Memorie’ and ‘Dardani, Alvise’. 41 Ducale dated 2 July 1509, printed in Grubb, Family Memoirs, 130-31. 42 De Peppo, ‘Dardani, Alvise’ and ‘Memorie’. 43 Dardani to the doge, 3 July 1509 (Grubb, Family Memoirs, 132-34) and Dardani to the Proveditori Generali, i.e., Gritti and senior command group, 6 July 1509 (ibid., 142). 44 Dardani to the Ten, 3 July 1509, ibid., 132-34. 45 Dardani to the Ten, 12 July 1509, ibid., 157-60.

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later only thirteen of the original 21 stradioti were ready to ride, the others all ‘claiming to be sick’.46 This at a time when the Sanguinazi raiding parties in the Piovà were reported to be fifteen to 20 horsemen strong. 47 In the critical days leading up to the seizure of Padua, Dardani’s despatches to the podestà in Mestre, the Ten in Venice, and the proveditori generali (the army command group headed by Andrea Gritti) contain the reports of spies on events inside Padua, the state of bridges and any guards, the availability of boats, water levels on the approaches to Padua, and the latest intelligence on enemy troop strengths. Mirano itself was in lock-down. Four sentries were posted on the castle walls and two in the campanile exchanging watch-cries three or four times an hour. At the sound of the bell, all the men of the town would muster in the square: 100 standing ready by night and 50 by day, plus ten of his ‘own men’ armed either with crossbows or longbows and another ten carrying firearms. Six roads leading from the town were blocked with ditches and barriers guarded by archers. Every night, mounted patrols went out as far as Camposampiero. 48 These measures suggest a concern to seal the town to prevent intelligence seeping out to Padua about the preparations (such as the lodgings ordered to be made ready in Mirano for 1400 provisionati and a concentration of villani) for the surprise attack on 17 July. Alvise Dardani’s account is written from a senior officer’s perspective, of course, but his notarial training and civil-service background in the Auditori Nuovi comes through in an almost pedantic concern for accuracy (and the associated costs of feeding troops and workers). On arriving in Mirano he had estimated 1400 contadini ready to bear arms, but his own column for the seizure of Padua’s Ognisanti gate comprised 133 German foot allocated to him at the last minute and 4000 peasants from his wider district. After the Porta Ognisanti had been taken, Dardani assisted Gritti in securing the other Paduan gates with teams of ‘25 fidati di miei’ – evidently his own picked men and roughly equivalent in number to those from Mirano who had been armed by the Republic and himself. He relied heavily upon ‘his men’ because the 133 regular German infantrymen (who spoke no Italian) had to be extricated quickly from the liberated city where they were at risk of attack because of the bad feeling caused by recent atrocities. 49 Large rounded figures are often suspect, but those provided by the civil servant 46 ‘Li altri dicono esser amalati’: Dardani to the podestà of Mestre, 13 July 1509, ibid, 160. 47 Intelligence from Dardani to the podestà of Mestre, 12 July 1509, ibid., 156. 48 Ibid. 49 Dardani to the Ten, 18 July 1509, reporting the capture of Padua, ibid. 168-70. On language difficulties with Germans, see Dardani to Antonio Querini in Camposampiero, 18 July 1509, ibid. 170-71.

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Alvise Dardani are reassuringly of the same order as those cited earlier for the forces mustered by Piove di Sacco. In some of the bigger occupied cities, the lower orders often resisted in places where the patriciate either actively supported the invaders or refused to oppose them. Residents of the Borgo San Zeno in Verona famously rescued pieces of the Lion of St. Mark statue which had been destroyed by the civic leaders.50 When French forces first approached Verona with plans to sack the separately walled enclave of San Zeno for its Marchesco sympathies, they found the district well defended and withdrew to camp outside the city.51 Venetian plans to retake the city by surprise late in 1509 identified the Borgo as one of their objectives, where they could expect support from inside the walls.52 The atmosphere within occupied Verona (particularly in the Borgo di San Zeno) remained tense. Niccolò Machiavelli was based in Verona in late 1509, following Venice’s successful defence of Padua and the recapture of Vicenza. He described a riot in the San Zeno district when Spanish soldiers broke into a house. The inhabitants defended themselves, and the tocsin was rung on a local church bell, bringing the people onto the streets and creating alarm throughout the city.53 The bell-ringers were hanged on this occasion, but following a similar incident in April 1510, the ‘campanari’ accused of contacting Andrea Gritti (proveditor with the army then threatening the city) were horribly ‘squartati vivi’ in the Piazza dei Signori.54 It was in occupied Verona, too, that Machiavelli observed the defiance of a Marchesco partisan brought before the Bishop of Trent, the Emperor’s representative: Yesterday evening one of them who was taken before this bishop, said he was a Marchesco and that [if he could not be a Marchesco] he wanted to die … so the bishop had him strung up, but neither a promise to save him nor other kindnesses would shake him of this opinion. Thus, considering everything, it will be impossible to hold onto these lands as long as these peasants are alive.55

50 Sanudo, 8:374, 7 June 1509, and 476, 1 July 1509. 51 Sanudo, 9:67, 17 August 1509. Although Verona was in the Imperial sector, the French risked a diplomatic incident by moving in, frustrated by delays in the arrival of Maximilian’s troops. 52 Ibid., 333, 22 November 1509 and 346, 26 November 1509. The operation was aborted. 53 Machiavelli, 3:1202-03, letter to the Ten, 7 December 1509, describing events on 4 December. 54 Vecchiato, 24-25. 55 Translation from Muir, ‘Was There Republicanism’, 150. Machiavelli was the Florentine representative at the League headquarters.

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Urban resistance potentially tied down large numbers of occupying troops, making for additional difficulties in feeding them. When combined with partisan activity in the countryside, we have one face of classic low-intensity warfare. Machiavelli once again spotted the key point. Late in 1509, he reported from Verona, it took an escort of more than 500 horsemen to bring 100 packhorses into the city.56 Sometimes it was militarily more effective to allow an enemy to occupy cities or fortresses and then to bleed them in their efforts to maintain supplies. Occasionally the possession of a key town proved critical. In Treviso, popular opposition to the planned surrender of the city to Emperor Maximilian not only saved the city for Venice but also can be said to have turned the tide of the war. In Treviso, as elsewhere, the city fathers were determined to surrender to the Emperor, but in June 1509 the Venetian proveditor seized upon street demonstrations from the lower orders and, after initial hesitation, promised tax concessions, burnt the books in front of a cheering crowd, and swung events in Venice’s favour.57 Venetian troops were rushed in to support the loyalists, arrest the leading rebels, and begin to turn Treviso into a fortress. When Padua was recaptured shortly afterwards, Andrea Gritti and the senior officers preparing to defend the much bigger city insisted that Treviso was equally important and had to be reinforced – even sending troops of their own for this purpose.58 With Treviso, Padua, and the Venetian redoubts on the lagoon, Venice was now able to fight the war from a core of three defended localities. We might call it the Venetian Triangle. It was always possible to penetrate the triangle: witness the sack of most of the small towns and villages in the Triangle and the fires seen burning in Mestre – and even on the Lido – at different times during the long war. However, an enemy could not remain within it for very long without coming under attack from different directions. As Andrea Gritti put it: ‘fra Triviso et Padoa, se l’inimici se meteranno, saremo sempre da ogni canto per far el 56 ‘E’ Viniziani … corrono e’ loro Stradiotti spesso infino qui ad due miglia. E pure ieri tolsono ad costoro piú di cento cavalla da saccomanno, in modo che questo dì sono iti con scorta di piú che cinquecento cavalli’. Machiavelli to the Ten, from Verona, 29 November 1509, 3:1196. 57 Modern accounts in Nicoletti, 30-32; and Gasparini, ‘La fuga’, 114-15. Sanudo, 8:389-90, 10 June 1509, reports the burning of the books. See also Santalena; and Brunetti. 58 Dispatch from the provveditori with the army to the Senate, from Padua, 29 July 1509, in Priuli, 43: ‘habiamo proposto per la guarda di questa cità, et per quella de Treviso, lochi tuti doi dela importantia notta ala Serenità Vostra’. Two days later: ‘Nui non podemo star salvo cum suspecto de Treviso … se per caso el non fusse sta provisto sia certa la Serenità Vostra che ’l si atrova quella cità in non pocho pericolo; la qual è di tanta importantia, che a nui par non se li debi manchar de ogni debita provision’, 13 July 1509, in ibid., 44.

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debito’.59 The Venetian Triangle in the War of the League of Cambrai was to prove every bit as significant militarily as the later Austrian Quadrilateral. Fortress Treviso, however, involved the construction of a ring of broad new earth-filled ramparts and circular bastions, fronted by demolitions to clear lines of fire and an outer much wider band of devastation (the guasto), which included flooding on some approaches. All of this destruction prompted a mass exodus of population and a very real need for the broad backs and strong arms of peasants drafted into the city as construction labourers.60 Not all of the Terraferma cities could be defended effectively. Towns on the approaches to the Triangle (such as Castelfranco, Cittadella, Vicenza, Legnago, and Montagnana) were contested fiercely, changing hands repeatedly. Vicenza (a key forward position) changed hands no fewer than 24 times between 1509 and 1517, being, at once, difficult to defend because of its topography, too far from the Triangle for effective support, and too close to Verona (which served as the main Imperial base for most of the war), with an effective supply line (effective, that is, when supplies were available from Austria) from Trento down the Adige and Lake Garda.61 Towns further away in the Friuli and the upper Piave valley had to fend for themselves, although these areas had seen recent conflict and there was a reservoir of local military experience.62 Feltre lay in ashes after only a few months of war and three sacks which had seen the city’s sub-Alpine timber buildings go up in flames, giving Venice a martyred community and interesting questions for modern historians about exactly who was responsible for the destruction.63 On the ‘wrong’ side of the mountains and reached through a narrow pass, Feltre was also too far away for support; as was signalled by the Venetian withdrawal of the town’s valuable heavy artillery to safety in Treviso.64 Paolo Paruta gave an account of the Senate debate in 1514 about whether or not to send a relief expedition to Osoppo, where Girolamo Savorgnano was defending his family’s hill-top fortress with his retainers and peasants against the Austrians. Anywhere other 59 Ibid., 7 August 1509, 453. 60 Nicoletti, 34-37; as well as Gasparini, 114-18 and 120-21; Concina, for the wartime guasto; and Concina and Molteni, 82-92, for the fortifications. 61 Clough, Luigi da Porto, 279, for Vicenza’s many occupations and liberations. 62 Both the Friuli and the upper-Piave and Cadore regions had seen the defeat of Maximilian’s forces in 1508. The Friuli was invaded (and often deeply penetrated) almost every year of the first Turkish War (1470-1480) and, at the beginning of the second Turkish War, saw the final Turkish deep raid in 1499, which penetrated westward to Pordenone (Corbanese). 63 Bona. 64 Ibid., 100-01.

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than Padua and Treviso was expendable, he explained, because ‘the whole success of the war [would] depend on the preservation of these two cities’.65 Small group actions in critically located key points would occasionally achieve tactical successes. Castelnuovo di Quero was seized at the end of June 1509 by local forces and used briefly as a base from which to harass Imperial forces moving along the valley of the Piave.66 La Scala, commanding the eastern (Venetian) end of the Valsugana, was another contested strongpoint, seized by partisans from Feltre after the 17 July recapture of Padua, lost shortly afterwards but recovered in December when its castellan reported ‘tenendo la Scala, questa parte è sicura’.67 By February 1510 it was held by 50 soldiers, with 800 men strengthening its fortifications.68 Such positions, of course, would be abandoned in the face of a determined counter-attack by a force equipped with siege artillery. Irregulars waging what is now called asymmetric warfare do not fight it out with superior forces unless they enjoy significant local advantages. Most famous of all such local exploits was the defence of the Canal di Ferro, the narrow valley through which the Imperial Road led from Austria into northeast Friuli. In July 1509 an Imperial invasion column some 8000 strong approached the Friuli along this highway, one of the few routes through the mountains sufficiently level for the transport of heavy artillery. Fifty men from Venzone had been rushed to reinforce the border castle at Chiusa, but it was the action of local partisans which turned the defence of Chiusa into a Venetian victory, stopping the progress of the Imperial column by blocking the road with rocks rolled down from the heights.69 A shot from the castle killed the Imperial chief gunner. The Austrians were compelled to withdraw, eventually rerouting a much smaller and lighter artillery train through another pass which debouched into the Friuli above Cividale.70 Without their heavy guns the Imperial forces were unable to destroy the relatively old-fashioned fortifications of Cividale. The successful defence of Cividale provided another early boost for Venetian morale.

65 Paruta, Lib. II, 76. See also Pepper, ‘Defending the Frontiers’. 66 Sanudo, 8:432, 25 June 1509; 8:485, 4 July 1509. The present castle at Quero together with its curtain wall blocking the river road was rebuilt after almost total destruction in World War I. 67 Sanudo, 9:388, 15 December 1509. 68 Ibid., 508, 2 February 1510. 69 Sanudo, 8:491, 7 July; 498, 9 July 1509. 70 The best account is the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Fondo Borghese, I, 9, fols. 171 r-174v, in a papal copy probably dating from the invasion scare of 1570: ‘Tutti i Passi del Friuli per viene (sic) in Italia’.

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Much more common – indeed becoming almost routine as the war ran on – were the exploits of peasant scouts and messengers, who ran enormous risks in territory patrolled by Venice’s enemies. In this undercover war, the partisans’ finest stroke was the capture of a significant leader in the League, the Marquis of Mantua. Early in August 1509, spies reported a convoy making its way from Verona to Mantua, loaded with loot and the pay for Mantua’s part in the summer campaign in support of the League. A cavalry raid was mounted on Isola della Scala (just inside Venetian territory), where the convoy was breaking its journey. Just before dawn the Venetian attack killed half of the Mantuan escort and captured most of the others, but the Marquis himself – who was not expected to have been with the convoy71 – jumped out of the window of his lodgings clad only in his nightshirt and hid in a field of millet where he was captured by a group of villani who had apparently been shadowing the raid. They handed their prisoner over to the Venetian officers, who took him under strong escort to Padua, and thence to Venice, where he was lodged in conditions of the highest security amidst wild celebrations.72 Coming soon after the retaking of Padua, the capture of the Marquis lifted Venetian spirits still further. Moreover – most unusually – the four villani were named in the record, taken to Venice to be received by the doge and rewarded with pensions and gifts of fine robes. One of them, presumably the leader, was given a much bigger pension than the others, a dowry for his daughter, and permission to bear arms, giving rise to the suspicion that – although all were described as villani – not all of them were equally plebeian.73 Some of the peasant bands were clearly effective fighting units. At the end of August 1509 Venetian officials in Padua reported the death of Galasso da Carpi (scion of another noble family divided by the war). His fine horse was amongst some 20 brought into the city by a party of villani and sold for 25 ducats, although said to be worth 200. On it being recognized as Carpi’s 71 Andrea Gritti to the Senate: ‘estimando io che ’l dovesse trovar le gente del Marchese, e non il Marchese, iudicando che ’l fosse in Verona …’, in Documents supplement to Priuli, 453. 72 Sanudo, 9:41-42, 10 August 1509; Bembo, Book IX, 11-13. 73 The leader received 100 ducats a year for life and a dowry of 100; the other three only 50 ducats a year. The ‘licentia d’arme’ suggests elevation to noble status and thus tax exemptions (but not, of course, in Venice itself). Others also expected to be rewarded, and the record becomes confused. Sanudo, 9:62, 14 August 1509, names the leader as Domenego de Venturin del Termeno, and ibid., 63, 15 August 1509, records ‘Marco di Rimano conestabile quale ha menato la praticha di prender il Marchese’ granted 200 ducats a year. Vecchiato, 27, records even bigger cash rewards to three cavalry officers and to Lucio Malvezo, who led the raid from Legnano. Zamperetti, 98, reports that Girolamo Pompei (captain of the balestieri) was given the fief of Illasi, near Verona, for his capture of the Marquis.

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steed, it was realized that Galasso himself had been killed by partisans near Revolon, together with some 30 infantry and 20 mounted archers – a substantial body-count for a peasant band.74 Another skirmish on the borders of Ferrara a year later was recounted in detail by the Protonotario of Montagnana, Leonardo di Grassis. A Ferrarese raiding party had been spotted moving along the Venetian bank of the River Adige towards Albaredo, supported by a boat filled with schiopeti (men armed with a light form of early arquebus, or musket), uno sacro (a small artillery piece), and four other bronze cannons. Venetian stradioti drove off the enemy cavalry but found the armed boat already engaged by contadini who – on hearing the village’s alarm bell – had turned out with longbows, crossbows, and some firearms. These weapons are specified. From two riverside mill buildings the contadini had fired down into the boat, wounding fifteen of the crew and throwing them into the river. The Ferrarese threw overboard some arquebuses but were unable to jetison the artillery. Four f ine bronze pieces and the saker were captured.75 A year into the war, peasants on the Ferrarese border were evidently armed not only with longbows but also with the crossbows and firearms, which previously would have been too expensive for most peasants. The defenders of Albaredo now had artillery too. The arming of irregular forces raises interesting problems. In 1509 peasants still generally used longbows for hunting. To Andrea Gritti in Padua, repeatedly calling for arms for his volunteers, bows and arrows were ‘their natural weapons’.76 Hunters needed few specialized arrows and were often able to recover them. For war, mass-produced anti-personnel arrows were used in vast quantities. Sanudo records the issue to the men of Piove di Sacco of ‘freze, archi, etc’, in that order, suggesting that the issue of arrows – for men already probably armed with bows – was the priority.77 Venetian infantry had been armed with handguns since the mid-fifteenth century, and by 1493 the Friulian militia (in an area where Turkish raiders still represented a real threat) was expected to muster 4000 men, to include 1000 each of handgunmen, crossbowmen, archers, and foot lancers (men carrying pikes shorter than the 18-foot weapon carried by Swiss pikemen and requiring 74 Letter from the Captain of Padua in Sanudo, 9:103, 29 August 1509. We are not told the strength of the peasant force. Bembo, 3, Book IX, 19-20, says 20 cavalrymen and 60 infantry were made prisoner. 75 Sanudo, 9:593, 11 November 1510. 76 Mallett and Hale, 351. 77 Sanudo, 9:150, 7 September 1509, specifies ‘freze, archi etc, et li fo dato.’

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correspondingly less skill and group discipline).78 This is a higher percentage of missile weapons than in the Spanish army, which is normally believed to have pioneered the tactical use of handguns.79 In the early sixteenth century, arquebuses were used by only about 10% of the troops in Spanish infantry formations, rising gradually to approximately equal numbers of shot to pike by 1600.80 The skill element in the use of missile weapons is significant here. It took a lifetime of exercise and practise to use the longbow effectively but only a few weeks of training to turn a civilian into an effective crossbowman or arquebusier.81 We have already seen Dardani’s 200 picked men equipped with body armour; and half of his ‘own men’ (presumably employees or tenants) armed either with longbows or crossbows, and the other half with firearms. Breastplates were also issued to villani from Gambarare (between Piove and Mirano) on loan from the arsenal ‘et siano preparate a far il bisogno, perche sono marcheschi’.82 Where irregulars defended river crossings, fortification construction sites, or the defended refugee perimeters established outside Margera and Fusina on the margins of the lagoon, small artillery pieces were also supplied, with gunners. Guns were also supplied to work details of villani building fortifications at the demolished bridges of Graizzi and Noventa, near Piove di Sacco, following incidents where villani had been forced to withdraw in the face of light artillery.83 Ammunition resupply – arrows, bolts, powder, shot, and match, exceptionally even cannonballs – presents obvious difficulties for irregular forces in the field. Hence perhaps the desperate plea for weapons and ammunition from Zuam Dolfin, proveditor of Feltre, reporting a highly destructive punitive raid by 1500 villani and 40 light horse on the Valsugana villages (Imperial territory) ‘ben fornito de homeni bellicosi’ believed to have played a leading role in the sack and burning of Feltre: ‘vol lanze, freze, passadori, archi, polveri et balote, perchè, a voler far imprese con villani inexperti, el sono cosse disperate; pur non mancherà’.84 Inexpert fighters, then as now, were profligate with ammunition. Were the Venetian irregular forces able to sustain their contribution in a war which lasted until 1517? War weariness certainly features in many 78 Mallett and Hale, 79. 79 Hall, 179-90. 80 Parker, 277; also Hall, 178-79. 81 Guilmartin, 135-57. 82 Sanudo, 8:499, 9 July 1509. 83 Sanudo, 9:47, 11 August 1509. 84 Sanudo, 11:501-02, 9 October 1510. Whether the Imperial subjects in the Valsugana (and the branch valley up the Tesino) were actually responsible for the burning of Feltre is immaterial. The report remarks, almost incidentally: ‘Et za 23 anni fo etiam brusato per li nostri’.

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sources, but three years into the war – in February 1512 – villani provided most of the fighting manpower for the Venetian seizure of Brescia, which was to lead to the disaster of its prompt recapture by the French and one of the most terrible sacks of the Italian Wars. The uprising itself was led by discontented Brescian patricians headed by Count Luigi Avogadro, who had initially thrown in his lot with the French but now again changed sides. The uprising was supported by a flying column of Venetian troops commanded by Andrea Gritti, but it brought with it no siege artillery and was therefore reliant on help from within the city.85 Success hinged on the availability of armed support from the mountain valleys to the north of Brescia. These had been centres of resistance from the very earliest days of French occupation. Only days after Agnadello, Sanudo reported Marchesco support from the Val Trompia, the Val Sabbia, and the Riviera del Garda (the west bank of the lake). In mid-June 1509 the castle at Anfo on Lake Idro had been shamefully abandoned by its Venetian castellan, only to be reoccupied by ‘li homeni di la valle’ and used as a base for pro-Venetian partisan activity.86 A contingent of 500 Brescian volunteers had joined the defenders of Treviso just before the Venetian recapture of Padua, having made their way to the active theatre of operations through occupied territory.87 Men from this hill country made up the bulk of the force which now surprised the small French garrison of Brescia in 1512, making their entry through an imperfectly blocked riverbed which ran through the city, while Gritti’s column made a diversionary attack in front of the gates. Although the city quickly fell to Venice, the small French garrison held out in the fortress, where they were reinforced by troops force-marched from Bologna by Gaston de Foix and let into the stronghold through a sally port. The French then assaulted the city from inside it, fighting their way down through the streets, slaughtering both fighters and civilians indiscriminately. Different estimates of the volunteer numbers range from ‘between four and five thousand’ to as many as 10,000.88 85 Pasero, Francia and ‘Il dominio francese’. Dr. Gabriele Neher, University of Nottingham, kindly allowed me to consult her thesis chapters describing the topography. 86 Sanudo, 8:397, 13 June 1509. 87 Bembo, 3, 9-11, writes that the partisans went first to Padua where they were welcomed by Gritti before being posted to Treviso; Sanudo, 8:497, 8 July 1509, reports their arrival in Treviso ten days before Gritti took Padua. 88 The Cronaca Milanese gives Gritti 8000 men and Avogadro 6000 villani; Jean le Veau writing to Margaret of Austria says ‘between four and five thousand’ men from the valleys; the Diario Udinese says ‘circha 8000 paesani tuti armati’. These sources are extracted in Vasco Frati, 2:171 and 193-94. Pasero, ‘Il dominio francesc’, 257ff., accepts Sanudo’s figure of 10,000 ‘montanari e contadini, raccolti dall’Avogadro e dagli altri capi’.

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The Val Trompia contingent made their last stand where a monument was later placed beside a mass grave for more than 1000 dead. The irregular forces raised at Brescia by the Val Trompia and the Val Sabbia – even allowing for exaggeration and the notorious unreliability of contemporary military statistics – numbered many thousand. In 1509 Treviso’s defenders reported 10,000-12,000 peasants with another 6000 inside Padua, the implication being that these were useful labourers and potential fighters, not refugees.89 The small communities close to the lagoon put substantial numbers into the field – perhaps as many as 5000 rallying to the defence of Piove di Sacco and 500 following the Venetian podestà to fight in the Polesine. Dardani led more than 4000 from the Mirano district to Padua in July 1509, with a small additional contingent of 133 German infantry and a handful of stradioti. The punitive expedition which devastated the Imperial frontier settlements along the Valsugana in revenge for the sack of Feltre comprised 1500 villani, 40 light horse, and a surprisingly large number of proveditori and captains accompanying the raid. These combinations of irregular forces, stiffened with small units of regular infantry and light cavalry, are mentioned frequently. I have used the term ‘irregular forces’ instead of ‘guerrillas’ because today the latter is often understood to indicate small parties of fighters. Some may well have been the ‘friendly brigands’ – Mallett and Hale’s words, again suggesting small groups – prone to disperse in the face of superior numbers or imminent threats to their homes.90 Many, as we have seen, proved to be substantial units, well able to perform usefully in small war. It is difficult to provide definitive answers to questions about leadership. Alvise Dardani was very much a civilian, as was Andrea Gritti, who transformed himself during the long war into a highly competent military commander. As doge, Gritti earned the sobriquet Fabius Maximus, which may well have obscured his active (sometimes daring) front-line war record.91 At the end of 1510 Dardani was recalled to be elected Grand Chancellor of Venice, effectively head of the civil service.92 Already sickening, he died before taking up office and was given a state funeral.93 Other ‘civilian’ leaders 89 Mallett and Hale, 351. 90 Ibid. Despite the mythology, the original ‘guerrillas’ of the Spanish resistance to Napoleonic France also operated in strength, often as complete small armies with their own cavalry and artillery. 91 Finlay, ‘Fabius Maximus’. See also Davis. 92 Dardani’s election, Sanudo, 11:687-88, 22 December 1510. 93 Dardani’s funeral, Sanudo, 12:66-67, 18 March 1511. Sanudo says his age was 82, but his memorial stone gives it as 79, either way too old to be serving in the front line.

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were much less prominent. At the end of July 1509, Alessandro Bigolino, a Paduan loyal to the Republic, presented himself in Venice seeking ‘certi cavali lizieri e fanti’ and was granted a condotta for 100 light horse and 200 foot.94 The next day he appeared again, thanking the signoria for the condotta but pointing out that he did not actually want one. He needed the temporary use of 200 light horse and 500 infantrymen to stiffen his following of 4000 villani, which he was already leading against Cittadella, where his own property was threatened by the Germans. He was given 300 light horse and 500 foot.95 Bigolino (evidently a landowner) was apparently fighting another private war, and doing so with a largely private army. Later he was singled out by Pietro Bembo for his effectiveness.96 Sanudo records a number of petitions from volunteers for ‘experienced’ military leaders, but whether these were for field commanders or the NCO types needed for basic training in weapons handling we do not know.97 At a time when young nobles such as Luigi da Porto could be given command of a troop of cavalry, with little to offer save birth and enthusiasm, it is interesting that the villani wanted ‘capi experti’. Was the leader of the peasant gang which captured the Marquis of Mantua already enough of a gentleman for a licence to bear arms? Mario Brunetti found similar difficulty in establishing the proletarian credentials of the two Trevisan popolari credited with initiating the demonstrations which saved their city for Venice. Both were later raised by the Venetian Senate to the civic nobility of Treviso (not without controversy in that city, it should be said).98 Most of the material discussed here dates from the early months and years of the war. It also focuses on the Triangle of Padua, Treviso, and the lagoon, only occasionally touching on the many ‘other wars’ waged on the frontiers and in the different cities of the Terraferma. As the seemingly endless conflict dragged on (and as my own research continues), further opportunities may present themselves for military talent to emerge from amongst former civilians, both rich and poor. ***

94 Sanudo, 8:72, 31 July 1509. 95 Sanudo, 9:5, 1 August 1509. 96 Bembo, 3, 7. 97 ‘Di Treviso. Chome erano molti villani adunati insieme, e desideriano aver un capo …’, Sanudo, 8:571, 30 July 1509. Following the raising of the siege of Padua: ‘Molti villani erano sublevadi; ma voleano capi experti …’, Sanudo, 9:335, 23 November 1509. 98 Brunetti publishes the documents; Nicoletti, 29-32.

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Robert Finlay reported Sanudo’s account of an Ottoman ambassador visiting Venice shortly after the war. The Turk had been shown the magnificent view of the lagoon from the campanile of San Marco and remarked that it would be an easy task for the sultan’s army to throw a bridge from the mainland to conquer Venice. Nettled, a patrician replied to this unseemly boast: ‘My lord ambassador, be advised that in our late cruel war, when all the kings in the world were against the signoria, not one man in this city was killed. All was accomplished with money and the deaths of foreign soldiers. The city was crowded with people, as full as an egg, but it could not be taken’.99 It was a great put-down. As far as the city of Venice was concerned (if one ignores deaths from disease), it was more or less true. On the Terraferma it was a different story. It was not only money that kept loyalist fighters in the field, and not only foreign soldiers who died.

Bibliography Bembo, Pietro, History of Venice, ed. and trans. by Robert W. Ulery, Jr., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2008). Bona, Andrea, ‘Feltre dopo Agnadello: dal ‘mito’ dell’incendio alla realtà di una guerra di confine’, in La Battaglia di Agnadello e il Trevigian, ed. Danilo Gasparini and Michael Knapton (Sommacampagna [Verona]: Cierre edizioni, 2011), 97-112. Bonardi, Antonio, ‘I padovani ribelli all Repubblica di Venezia (a. 1509-1530). Studio storico con appendici di documenti inediti, del Prof. A. Bonardi’, Miscellanea di storia Veneta edita per cura della reale deputazione veneta di storia patria, Series 2, 8 (Venezia: [a spese della Società], 1902). Brunetti, Mario, ‘Treviso fedele a Venezia nei Giorni di Cambrai’, Archivio veneto, 23 (1938), 56-82. Caldogno, Giacomo Matteo, Una cronica vicentina del Cinquecento, ed. by Jeannine Guerine-Dalle Mese (Vicenza: Accademia Olimpica, 1983). Cavalieri, Paolo, ‘Qui Sunt Guelfi et Partiales Nostri’: Comunità, patriziato e fazioni a Bergamo fra il XV e XVI secolo (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2008). Cervelli, Innocenzo, Machiavelli e la crisi dello stato veneziano (Naples: Guida, 1974). Clough, Cecil, ‘Love and War in the Veneto: Luigi da Porto and the True Story of Giulietta e Romeo’, in War, Culture and Society in Renaissance Venice: Essays in Honour of John Hale, ed. by David S. Chambers, Cecil H. Clough, and Michael E. Mallett (London: Hambleton, 1993), 99-128.

99 Finlay, Politics, 164.

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—, Luigi da Porto: Lettere storiche 1509-1513, ed. by and trans. by Giovanni Pellizzari (Costabissara (Vicenza): Angelo Colla, 2014). Concina, Ennio, La macchina territoriale (Rome and Bari: Electa, 1983). —, and Elisabetta Molteni, La fabrica della fortezza: l’architettura militare di Venezia (Modena: Banca Popolare di Verona, Banca S. Geminiano e S. Prospero, Poligrafico Artioli, 2001). Corbanese, Girolamo G., Il Friuli, Trieste e l’Istria grande atlante storico-cronoligico comparato, II, Nel periodo veneziano (Udine: Del Bianco, 1987). Davis, James C., ‘Shipping and Spying in the Early Career of a Venetian Doge, 1496-1502’, Studi veneziani, 16 (1974), 97-108. De Peppo, Paola, ‘Dardani, Alvise’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 32 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1986), 763-65. —, ‘Memorie de veneti cittadini: Alvise Dardani cancellier grande’, Studi veneziani, n.s. 8 (1984), 413-53. Finlay, Robert, ‘Fabius Maximus in Venice: Doge Andrea Gritti, the War of Cambrai, and the Rise of Habsburg Hegemony, 1509-1530’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 988-1031. —, Politics in Renaissance Venice (London: Benn, 1980). Frati, Vasco, et al., Il sacco di Brescia: Testimonianze, cronache, diarii, atti del processo e memorie storiche della ‘presa memoranda e crudele’ della città nel 1512, 3 vols. (Brescia: Comune di Brescia, Fondazione Banca credito agrario bresciano, 1989-1990). Gasparini, Danilo, ‘La fuga dalla città di Treviso’, in La Battaglia di Agnadello e il Trevigiano, ed. by Danilo Gasparini and Michael Knapton (Sommacampagna [Verona]: Cierre edizioni, 2011), 113-27. Grubb, James S., ed., Family Memoirs from Venice (15th-17th centuries) (Rome: Viella, 2009). —, ‘When Myths Lose Power: Four Decades of Venetian Historiography’, Journal of Modern History, 58 (1986), 43-94. Guicciardini, Francesco, Storia d’Italia, ed. by Silvana Seidel Menchi, 3 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1971). Guilmartin, John Francis, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Gullino, Giuseppe, ‘La classe politica veneziana, ambizioni e limiti’, in L’Europa e la Serenissima: la svolta del 1509. Nel V centenario della battaglia di Agnadello, ed. by Giuseppe Gullino (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 2011), 19-34. Hall, Bert S., Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

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Howard, Michael, George J. Andreopolos, and Mark R. Shulman, eds., The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). Keen, Maurice.J., The Laws of War in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965). Lazzarini, Vittorio, ‘Un diario padovano del primo Cinquecento’, Bollettino del Museo Civico di Padova, n,s, anno 3 [vol. 20] (1927), 39-57. Loyal Serviteur, Histoire du seigneur de Bayart: le chevalier sans paour et sans raprouche (1530, repr. Paris: E. Droz, 1927). Machiavelli, Niccolò, Legazioni e commissarie, ed. by Sergio Bertelli, 3 vols. (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964). Mallett, Michael, and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars 1494-1559 (Harlow: Pearson, 2012). —, and John Hale, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice c. 1400-1617 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Martines, Lauro, Furies: War in Europe 1450-1700 (London et. al.: Bloomsbury Press, 2013). Muir, Edward, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). —, ‘Was there Republicanism in the Renaissance Republics? Venice after Agnadello’, in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State, 1297-1797, ed. by John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 137-67. Nicoletti, Gianpier, ‘Dopo Agnadello: danni di guerra, tensioni sociali e trasformazioni urbanistiche a Treviso e nella Marca Trevigiana’ in La Battaglia di Agnadello e il Trevigiano, ed. by Danilo Gasparini and Michael Knapton (Sommacampagna [Verona]: Cierre edizioni, 2011), 29-64. Olivieri Secchi, Sandra, ‘Buzzacarini, Ludovico’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 15 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1972), 646-48. Parker, Geoffrey, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567-1659 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Paruta, Paolo, Historia vinetiana di Paolo Paruta cavaliere, e procuratore di S. Marco (Venice: Eredi di Tomaso Giunti e Francesco Baba: 1645). Pasero, Carlo, ‘Il dominio francese ed i tentative veneti per il recupero della città’, in Storia di Brescia, dir. Giovanni Treccani Degli Alfieri, 5 vols. (Brescia: Banca S.Paolo di Brescia, 1961), 2:227-96. —, Francia, Spagna, Impero a Brescia 1509-1516 (Brescia: Supplemento ai ‘Commentari dell’Ateneo di Brescia’, 1957).

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Pepper, Simon, ‘Aspects of Operational Art: Communications, Cannon and Small War’, in Warfare in Europe 1450-1750, ed. by Frank Tallett and David Trim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 181-202. —, ‘Defending the Frontiers of Venice: Fortification and Defensive Strategy in the Friuli before Palmanova’, in L’architettura militare di Venezia in terraferma e in Adriatico fra XVI e XZVII secolo, ed. by Francesco Paolo Fiore (Florence: Olschki, 2014), 3-20. —, ‘Siege Law, Siege Ritual, and the Symbolism of City Walls in Renaissance Europe’, in City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective, ed. by James D. Tracy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 573-604. Povolo, Claudio, L’intrigo dell’onore. Poteri e istituzioni nella Repubblica veneta tra Cinque e Seicento (Verona: Cierre, 1997). Priuli, Girolamo, I Diarii, ed. by Roberto Cessi, in Rerum italicarum scriptores (RIS), n.s. 24, Part 3, vol. 4 (Città di Castello and Bologna: S. Lapi, 1912-1933). Rossi, Franco, ‘Venti di guerra nei dispacci di Andrea Gritti, Provveditore generale in campo’, in La Battaglia di Agnadello e il Trevigiano, ed. by Danilo Gasparini and Michael Knapton (Sommacampagna [Verona]: Cierre, 2011), 87-96. Ruzante (Angelo Beolco), Primo dialogo: Parlamento de Ruzante che iera vegnù de campo, in idem, Due Dialoghi, ed. by Ludovico Zorzi (Turin: Einaudi, 1967). Santalena, Antonio, Veneti e imperi: Treviso al tempo della lega di Cambrai (Venice, 1896; repr. Rome: Multigrafica, 1977). Sanudo, Marino, I Diarii di Marino Sanudo, 58 vols., ed. by M. Fulin et al. (Venice: Visentini, 1879-1903). Shaw, Christine, ‘Popular Resistance to Military Occupation during the Italian Wars’, in The Culture of Violence in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Samuel K. Cohn and Fabrizio Ricciardelli (Florence: Le Lettere, 2012), 257-72. Varanini, Gian Maria, ‘La terraferma di fronte alla sconf itta di Agnadello’, in L’Europa e la Serenissima: la svolta del 1509. Nel V centenario della battaglia di Agnadello, ed. by Giuseppe Gullino (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2011), 115-61. —, ‘La Terraferma veneta nel Quattrocento e le tendenze recenti della storiografia’, in 1509-2009. L’ombra di Agnadello: Venezia e la terraferma, ed. by Giuseppe del Torre and Alfredo Viggiano (Venice: Ateneo Veneto, 2010), 13-63. Vecchiato, Lanfranco, ‘La vita politica economica e amministrativa a Verona durante la dominazione veneziana (1405-1797)’, in Verona e il suo territorio, ed. by Vittorio Cavallari and Piero Gazzola, 5 vols. (Verona: Istituto per gli studi storici veronesi, 1995), 5.1, 1-398. Ventura, Angelo, Nobiltà e popolo nella società veneta del ‘400 e ‘500 (Bari: Laterza, 1964).

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Zamperetti, Sergio, ‘I 5000 fanti di Leonardo Trissino. Venezia e il suo dominio di Terraferma alla luce di Agnadello’, in 1509-2009. L’ombra di Agnadello: Venezia e la terraferma, ed. by Giuseppe del Torre and Alfredo Viggiano (Venice: Ateneo Veneto, 2010), 65-101. Zapperi, Ada, ‘Buzzacarini, Aleduse’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 15 (1972), 634-35.

About the Author Simon Pepper, Professor, School of Architecture, University of Liverpool



Picturing the News in Wartime Venice Political Woodcut Imagery in Printed Pamphlets Inspired by the Events of the War of the League of Cambrai (1509-1517) Krystina Stermole Abstract We have long known that political communication in Renaissance Venice involved not only the ruling patriciate, but also the vast popolo, and that it took place everywhere, not just in the halls of state. While much of it took an ephemeral form – such as oral debate or even idle gossip – a body of printed news pamphlets recounting and commenting on contemporary political and military events has survived to shed an invaluable light on popular political communication in early Cinquecento Venice. Produced for profit by entrepreneurial popolani, these news pamphlets were accessible to a broad public, for they were printed in hundreds of copies, affordably priced and sold most often on the street. Their production in Venice boomed during the turbulent War of the League of Cambrai (15091516), when the republic’s very existence was threatened by a formidable enemy alliance. As a response to Venetians’ desperate need for up-to-date news, wartime news pamphlets contributed to popular political debate because they presented openly biased accounts of recent events – either pro- or anti-Venetian – in the accessible medium of poetic verse. What is more, their popolano creators frequently enriched them with figurative woodcuts, usually on the title page, thus pairing verbal and visual forms of political expression. Until now the pamphlets’ f igurative imagery has attracted little attention, despite the fact that it would have been accessible to an even broader public than its textual counterpart, for its interpretation required neither verbal literacy nor a knowledge of Italian, and it could be seen throughout the streets of Venice and beyond even by those who did not purchase it. A focussed exploration of the visual formulas and symbols this imagery employs reveals that news-pamphlet woodcuts were a remarkably varied and adaptable means of popular

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_ster

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political expression, one that could even operate independently of the verbal narratives with which they appeared. Keywords: cheap print, figurative woodcuts, news pamphlets, political communication, popolani, popular imagery, representations of war, stato da terra, Venetian terraferma, War of the League of Cambrai

Much scholarship on early modern Venice has been dedicated to the elucidation of the myths crafted over time to express various aspects of Venetian identity, particularly those designed to communicate the Republic’s supposed political perfection and the purported harmony and unanimity of its governing patriciate.1 However, in the knowledge that the political reality of Venice was far more complex than such myths suggest, scholars have been investing more energy in the attempt to construct a more nuanced portrait of political life and communication in the Renaissance city. The exploration of surviving verbal evidence in particular – from texts in printed and manuscript form to, more recently, oral communication, including informal chatter and gossip – is helping to reveal how political debate and conflict manifested themselves in the Venetian context, especially in times of social, spiritual, or military crisis,2 as well as shedding light on the varied ways in which the Venetians who did not belong to the ruling patriciate – namely, the citizen class, or cittadini, and the vast popolo – participated in political communication. Although these non-nobles were unable to contribute to the city’s political decision-making in official ways, the cittadini were heavily involved in the administration of the state, and the broader popolo actively cultivated opinions about the Republic’s policies and actions to which the governing nobility paid attention.3 In conjunction with the ever-increasing study of the political activity of the lower orders, the recent ‘spatial turn’ in early modern studies has been helping to reveal how pervasive political communication was. Rather than being confined to the halls of state, it permeated the entire city, transpiring everywhere from the streets and

1 See, for example, Fasoli. 2 See, for example, Libby; Crouzet-Pavan; De Vivo; and Horodowich, ‘Gossiping Tongue’ and Language and Statecraft. 3 Interest in the popolo has increased significantly in recent years; see Judde de Larivière and Salzberg. For a discussion of the political expression of the popolo more specifically, see Rospocher and Salzberg (which provides an excellent discussion and review of the literature in this field); Rospocher, ‘“Non vedete la libertà”’; and Judde de Larivière, La révolte.

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squares to taverns and churches. 4 In other words, in contrast to the calm, contained, and orderly image promoted by the Republic’s carefully crafted myths, political life in Renaissance Venice is best described as having been everywhere and having involved everyone.5 The discussion that follows aims to further expand our understanding of the complexity of political communication in and through Venice and across its social classes by bringing together the verbal and the visual. To do so, this essay gathers and analyzes a little-studied body of woodcut imagery produced for pamphlets printed in northern Italy in response to one of the most arduous conflicts in the Republic’s history: the War of the League of Cambrai (1509-1517). Due to its especially tumultuous nature, the war led to an acute interest in the news of military and diplomatic events on the Terraferma, and the result was a war of words that paralleled the physical clashes taking place on the battlefield.6 The situation particularly encouraged writers, printers, and publishers from the lower ranks of society to explore the market for printed accounts of recent events.7 Printed in large runs, sold throughout the city both in shops and on the street, priced cheaply enough that most could afford them, and often enriched with figurative woodcuts, the accounts were part of a then-burgeoning urban culture of ‘cheap print’.8 Due to their popular production, wide accessibility, and broad appeal, these news pamphlets provide precious evidence of informal political communication in early modern Venice. However, while the verbal narratives of these pamphlets have received a reasonable amount of scholarly attention,9 little consideration has been given to the figurative prints that often accompanied them, which one scholar has outright dismissed as ‘token woodcuts’ designed merely ‘to advertise … wares’.10 While some news-leaflet imagery does f it this description, 4 On the spatial turn as well as its impact on Venetian scholarship, see esp. Rospocher and Salzberg. See also De Vivo; and Judde de Larivière, ‘Du broglio à Rialto’. 5 During the War of the League of Cambrai in July 1510, the merchant Martino Merlini put it quite poetically: ‘Avemo tanto pien la testa di zanze che non so che dirte, semo tuti strachi’; from the transcription in Dalla Santa, 1594. 6 On this war of words, see Sherman, and Rospocher, ‘“Non vedete la vostra libertà”’. 7 See Rospocher, ‘Versi pericolosi’, esp. 396. 8 On Salzberg’s definition of ‘cheap print’, see Ephemeral City, esp. 19-28. 9 For the most recent research on sixteenth-century news pamphlets’ historical and political content, see Beer et al.; Meserve; Petrella; Rospocher, ‘Propaganda e opinione pubblica’; and Salzberg, Ephemeral City, 104-10. 10 This expression was used by Hale, 147. As an example of one of the prints’ vicissitudes in the scholarly literature, the woodcut depicting the siege of Padua in 1509 on the title page of Bartolomeo Cordo’s La obsidione di Padua (discussed here below, pp. **), the Italian literary

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even the small fraction of such ephemeral publications to have survived 11 reveals that there was significant experimentation with the possibilities that custom-made imagery in news pamphlets afforded, especially during the Italian Wars. What is more, a comparison of the woodcuts’ content and communicative tools with those of the texts they accompanied indicates that their makers and sellers were employing them as a medium of political expression unto itself, one that could operate in parallel to, and sometimes remarkably independently of, the pamphlets’ verbal narratives. In fact, the visual imagery was even more accessible than the verses of these publications, both physically – being most often on a pamphlet’s title page and sold unbound on the streets, they could be easily seen and taken in in a mere glance, even by those who did not purchase them – and interpretatively – they did not require either verbal literacy or linguistic fluency. From early on, the trading port of Venice was an important hub of information about events transpiring beyond the lagoon.12 Until the fifteenth century, news had travelled predominantly by handwritten documents and word of mouth, but the advent of the printing press offered a new means of disseminating information. At least as early as the 1470s, the city’s burgeoning printing industry began to experiment with the production and sale of cheap pamphlet-length publications recounting or responding to current events.13 The production of this material seems to have increased markedly with the outbreak of the War of the League of Cambrai in 1509, a conflict which was fought over the possession of Venice’s extensive mainland holdings and which pitted the Republic against a series of formidable alliances historian Antonio Medin claimed the woodcut lacked ‘any historical value’, specifically because it failed to present an accurate depiction of Padua (L’obsidione di Padua del MDXI, xxxix), while more recently Hale expressed only lukewarm interest insofar as the print ‘made an effort to be a real illustration’ (147). Two of the few exceptions to this dismissive scholarship are Petrella; and, although it does not focus on the visual imagery, recent work by Massimo Rospocher, including ‘Il papa in guerra’ and Il papa guerriero: Giulio II nello spazio pubblico europeo. 11 Historians surmise that as much as 90 percent of such popular print has perished. See Hirsch, 11. See also Labarre; and Harris. 12 See, for example, Burke; and Neerfeld, esp. ‘Venezia, centro di informazione’, 137-74. 13 On the early history and strength of the Venetian printing industry, see the following seminal studies: Brown; Lowry, Aldus Manutius and Nicholas Jensen; Nuovo and Coppens; and most recently, with an emphasis on ‘cheap print’, Salzberg, Ephemeral City. On the early production of news-inspired printed pamphlets, see Meserve. On the production of printed material in response to the War of the League of Cambrai, see, for example, Niccoli, Profeti e popolo; and Rospocher, ‘“Non vedete la libertà”’. For useful collections of news pamphlets printed in Italy between the last decades of the fifteenth century and the end of the sixteenth, see Beer et al.; and Petrella.

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involving most of Europe’s greatest powers.14 Since the war was serious enough to threaten Venice’s very survival and was also characterized by unprecedentedly large-scale battles whose outcomes were rarely predictable or clear, news about diplomatic and military events on the Terraferma became of greater and broader interest than ever before. Early sixteenth-century publications relating the news were usually unbound pamphlets only a few sheets in length that often fail to identify author, publisher, printer, or date. Designed to yield a profit, they were printed with low-quality ink and paper and were probably produced in the hundreds.15 To draw upon the largest possible number of buyers as a means of guaranteeing profitable sales, the pamphlets were very affordably priced, usually costing only a bezo or one or two quattrini – the same as the wartime cost of three or four eggs.16 Since the value of the news they related was in part dependent on its timeliness, they were often produced very rapidly, frequently mere days after the incidents they recounted.17 Contemporary sources indicate that they could be purchased throughout Venice, in printers’ shops and bookstores, as well as from ambulant vendors circulating in the city’s streets and public squares.18 Thus news pamphlets were widely diffused and cheap to acquire, 14 On the League of Cambrai’s motivations and goals, see Cipollini; Seneca, 91-122; Cervelli, 149-63; and Gilbert. For detailed accounts of the war’s events through time, see Romanin, 5:123-229; and Pieri, 399-535. 15 The records of the printshop of San Jacopo di Ripoli in Florence indicate that in the late fifteenth century, leaflet-length publications could be printed in runs as large as 500 or 1000 copies; Conway, 199, 202. 16 The diarist Marin Sanudo records the cost of a four-leaf pamphlet as ‘un bezo’ (Sanudo, vol. 9, col. 335 [22 November 1509]), while only months earlier he notes that seven eggs cost one soldo, the equivalent of 2 bezi (ibid., vol. 8, col. 408 [16 June 1509]). The bezo was a low-value bronze coin (one bezo = six soldi = one and a half quattrini) that was the only kind in plentiful supply during the war; on this, see ibid., vol. 19, col. 414 (1 February 1515), and vol. 20, col. 155 (30 April 1515). In fact, shortly before the Cambrai War, a large quantity of bezi were minted to allow the poor to buy their daily necessities; Tucci, 782. For additional documentation on the pamphlets’ cost and accessibility, see Wagner and Carrera, 344, 396, 398; and Salzberg, Ephemeral City, 20. 17 In a letter to his brother, Venetian merchant Martino Merlini wrote: ‘Te mando una frotola fata novamente da Ferrara; l’è da zorni 4 che la xe fata, e da poi è seguido altro che non è suxo; per zornata se ne farà dele altre, e per i primi con mior nove, piazendo a Dio, te le manderò’; Dalla Santa, 1597 (10 August 1510). 18 Already at the beginning of the war, Girolamo Priuli remarked in December 1509: ‘Se vendeva a Venetia per le piaze & sopra il ponte dil Rialto segondo il solito li frotoli li verssi in rima in le canzoni dele ruyne […] nel teritorio ferarexe & delarmata veneta in pado[vano] contra il Ducha ferarexe [?] in vergogna sua’; Girolamo Priuli, ‘Diarii’, MS Prov. Div. 252-c, vol. 5, fol. 55r-v. The merchant Martino Merlini notes that ‘charte de nove se vende per la tera’; Dalla Santa, 1604 (3 July 1512). On the selling of cheap print of all kinds on the streets, see Salzberg, ‘Selling Stories’ and Ephemeral City, esp. Chap. 2, 47-72. In the letters written by the merchant

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making them a unique medium of political expression and communication for the period. They were not only produced by members of the lower orders, but also within reach – both physically and financially – of an unprecedentedly broad public that ranged from the lofty nobili to the lowly popolani. What is more, their regular sale on the Rialto Bridge and in the city’s streets and squares placed them in the same urban spaces in which we now know political communication thrived, allowing them to contribute to a ubiquitous, if informal, political debate. As the patrician Girolamo Priuli remarked in his diary in the first devastating weeks of the War of the League of Cambrai, ‘everyone wanted to express their opinion’ on current events, and they did so ‘in all of the squares, in the loggias, on the Rialto, in the churches, on the streets, in the barber shops and in the taverns’.19 Wartime news pamphlets also display a more direct connection to oral communication. Their verbal narratives were customarily written in verse, taking the form of song-like poems, dialogues, or laments.20 More often than not they employed the lilting ottava rima and theatrical rhetoric of medieval chivalric romances, the most popular battle stories of the day. The appropriation of a familiar and broadly appealing literary model as a medium for relating and interpreting contemporary events made good business sense.21 However, it was also partly a result of the fact that many of the verses appearing in news pamphlets were initially composed for public recital by professional street performers or balladeers (cantimbanchi or cantastorie).22 Notably, wartime news leaflets did not convey information objectively; rather, their content was the product of careful selection and interpretation, unabashedly exhibiting a clear bias. Whether this reflected their producers’ own attitudes or the opinions these profit-seeking entrepreneurs believed to be the most diffused among the public, and hence the most saleable, remains unclear in most cases. Like their chivalric models, and in line with their popular character, news pamphlets often incorporated figurative woodcuts. One usually appeared on Martino Merlini to his brother that have survived, he indicates more than once that he or his nephew Piero is sending news leaflets about Venetian events as well as others; see Dalla Santa, 1597, 1604 (10 August 1510, 15 September 1510, and 3 July 1512). 19 Priuli, Diarii, 246. [vols. 1, 2, and 4 have been published as I Diarii di Girolamo Priuli – see bibliography.] 20 See Quondam, esp. 8-9. 21 On the format and physical characteristics of popular printed literature in general as well as of chivalric works more specifically, see Grendler. 22 On street singers in connection with news-related pamphlets, see Salzberg, ‘In the Mouths of Charlatans’ (parts of which have been reworked in idem, Ephemeral City, Chaps. 3 and 4); and Salzberg and Rospocher.

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the front page, where it would have been readily visible even to mere passersby, as the pamphlets were sold unbound, and others were sometimes incorporated within or after the text.23 The quickest and cheapest way to include woodcut imagery was to reuse blocks already cut for other publications, most frequently ones representing generic battle scenes created for the very same chivalric romances that served as the literary model for the pamphlets’ verses.24 In such cases, the recycled imagery would have offered nothing more than a general indicator of a news leaflet’s martial content and popular nature. However, some news-pamphlet woodcuts were more complex, many being designed and cut specially for the leaflets in which they appeared. Although it is difficult to speculate about trends or preferences in pamphlet imagery, given how few have survived, the extant prints nonetheless reveal the employment of different visual tools and languages. There seem to have been two main types: the representation of one of the events narrated in the accompanying text, and more generalized political imagery employing readily recognizable symbols in a more suggestive, metaphorical way. An early example of a custom-made woodcut produced for a publication inspired by wartime events appears on the title page of the four-leaf La victoriosa Gata da Padua (Figure 1).25 Although the Imperial forces had taken the Venetian city of Padua at the beginning of the war on 6 June 1509, Venice had quickly reclaimed it on 17 July of the same year. This victory was Venice’s first over the League, and although the Germans would return to retake Padua with a terrifying array of artillery in the autumn, the Venetians held firm until the onset of winter obliged their attackers to retreat.26 Marin Sanudo’s and Priuli’s diaries both recount that even before Maximilian’s withdrawal had begun, the residents of Venice had filled the streets, shouting or singing the crude verses that Padua’s Venetian defenders had supposedly composed and chanted during the siege.27 23 On the sale of printed works, even most book-length works, without a binding, see Grendler, 452. 24 On the frequent recycling and copying of woodcuts in news pamphlets both within the same shop and by different publishers, see the discussion in Petrella, 55-80, 113-15, 128, 136-39, 152-61. 25 La victoriosa Gata, Munich, Staatsbibliothek (d’Essling, pt. 2, bk. 2, 646, cat. no. 2580; Sander, 2:918, cat. no. 5370). 26 On the sequence of events surrounding Padua’s loss, recapture, and defence, see Lenci. 27 After describing the episode of the gatta, Priuli says: ‘Donde fu facta una canzone, la quale sarà qui in questa libro in le charte bergamine, che diceva in su su su chui vole la gatha, venga fuori al bastione, che in la zima de uno lanzone trovaretti ligatta et cetera, che fu posto in stampa, et per tuta Padoa et Venetia il giorno et nocte dali putti et altri hera cantata questa canzone per disprectio deli inimici’; Diarii, 359 (25 September 1509). Sanudo, too, mentions the same song in print two months later; Diarii, vol. 9, col. 335 (22 November 1509).

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Figure 1 Title page of an anonymous pamphlet entitled La victoriosa Gata da Padua (Venice, [1509])

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Res/4 P.o.it. 318#Beibd.2 © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München

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This song is reproduced in a pamphlet entitled La victoriosa Gata da Padua, possibly printed a few days before the Germans’ definitive retreat.28 The title-page woodcut, for its part, shows the weakest, and thus most strategically important, defence tower in Padua’s walls near the northern Codalonga gate.29 The location would have been clear to a contemporary viewer, because the Venetian defenders there had taunted the besieging forces in a very creative way by extending a live female cat bound to a lance over the ramparts. Since the largest siege engine used to breach the walls was traditionally known as a gato, the female cat – or gatta – was intended to cheekily instigate the enemy to attack.30 Though simple, the woodcut depicting the gatta incident seems to have been designed to highlight the gutsy courage that had allowed Padua’s Venetian defenders to hold the city. Not only are the defenders outnumbered by the attackers, who are already trying to scale the ramparts and claim the cat, but the German artillery used to assail the city – probably the most extensive and powerful ever assembled and deployed31 – has already wreaked havoc on Padua’s walls, reducing them to rubble. Other pamphlet woodcuts presented more metaphorical content by employing well-known political symbols. The French cock, for instance, made multiple appearances in pro-Venetian news-pamphlet woodcuts, including the custom-made one on the first page of an anonymously written leaflet entitled Papa Iulio secondo che redriza tuto el mondo (Figure 2).32 Printed in Venice in 1512, the leaflet celebrates the efforts of the Holy League formed just months earlier by the Venetians, the pope, and the kings of Spain and England to expel the French from Italy. The text begins with an admonishment to the reader/listener to fear the League, particularly ‘Venetia si soprana’, for the Venetians have succeeded in depriving the once-happy rooster of its crow.33 The woodcut appearing above these opening verses also employs the French cock, but in a more openly bellicose and visceral manner. The alliance’s members stand in a generic landscape. The doge, accompanied by a man who is probably a fellow patrician, is immediately 28 See n24 above. It is unclear whether the leaflet discussed here is the version of the text’s publication referred to by Priuli or not, for the song was reproduced multiple times; see n75 below. 29 For a detailed account of events at Codalonga during the siege of Padua, see Lenci, 146-88. 30 On the gag of the cat, see ibid., 179-81; and Medin, 333-63. 31 On the unprecedented strength of the Germans’ artillery, see Lenci, 172. 32 Papa Iulio. The print is mentioned in Rospocher, ‘Il papa in guerra’, 147 and Il papa guerriero, 159. 33 Papa Iulio, 1 r: ‘Temi, temi tuto il mondo / Papa e Spagna e Ingilterra / e Venetia si soprana / che al gallo han tolto il canto / che cantava si iocondo […]’.

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Figure 2 Title page of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Papa Iulio secondo che redriza tuto el mondo [Venice, 1512]

London, British Library, C.20.c.22.(40) © The British Library Board

identifiable due to his ducal corno and ermine-decorated mantle. The alliance’s means of restoring order to Christendom, here represented by an overturned globe surmounted by a cross, is clearly expressed in the pope’s act of skewering the rooster.

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The same French symbol appears in the custom-made woodcut appearing on the first page of a news leaflet entitled Spauento de Italia (Figure 3). In this case the accompanying text’s author is known to have been Francesco Maria Sacchino, a poet from near Forlì who may have known Dionisio Naldi, a mercenary in Venice’s employ who came from the same region.34 While the text recounts the sequence of events from Julius II’s decision to join the League of Cambrai and excommunicate Venice in 1509 to the later lifting of the interdict in 1510, the print displays a rooster in the upper left shrinking from a blade-brandishing Venetian lion shown protecting a crowned woman clinging to an oak. Though the image is rather spare, the unknown woodcutter’s use of familiar political symbols is nonetheless rich: all at once, the print conveys Venice’s aggressive resurgence against its enemies, the weakness of the French in the face of this, and the della Rovere papacy’s inefficacy in the role of Italy’s champion. In this case, Sacchino’s text seems to have provided much of the inspiration for the imagery. The leaflet’s opening verses recount how the author-balladeer had been encouraged to pick up his pen after seeing a woman identifying herself as Italy fleeing from a menacing rooster; she claimed her plight was the result of St. Mark having been put in his grave.35 However, despite the fact that the print found inspiration in the verbal narrative, it does introduce an additional political symbol not mentioned in Sacchino’s vision, the della Rovere oak.36 The woodcut’s use of the tree casts the papacy in a passive, unhelpful role, incapable of protecting Italy from the French. It also moves forward in time beyond the tragic state of affairs described by Sacchino by featuring the symbol of Mark quite literally resurrected from the dead, leaping from its tomb with aggressive energy. The result is a far more promising picture of the future – one which shows Venice revitalized, ready to engage the enemy and save the peninsula from foreigners. In fact, this uplifting mood contrasts markedly with the nature and content of the textual component of Sacchino’s pamphlet, for the latter consists predominantly of a lamento narrating Venetian recent misfortunes. It is only in the pamphlet’s final verses that the author expresses his hope 34 On the pamphlet and its author, see Beer et al., 1:63-64 (no. 77). The authors note that the poem includes a few celebratory octaves dedicated to Naldi that suggest a degree of familiarity between the poet and the condottiere. 35 ‘[I]o vidi una dongella tetra / venire contra di me dastrana parte / un galo la seguia con lale sparte / lei grida e fugge e quanto po sarietra // Stupefatto mirando tal sciagura / mi feci audace adomandar che lera / la meschina rispose: Italia obscura // Chi tha condutta dissi in tal maniera / Marco, che stato messo in sepultura / pero mi segue il Gallo e vol chio pera […]’ Sacchino, 1 r. 36 On the relationship of the pamphlet and its image to the characterization of Julius II, see Rospocher, Il papa guerriero, 146.

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Figure 3 Title page of Francesco Maria Sacchino’s pamphlet entitled Spauento de Italia [Forlì?, 1510]

Rome, Biblioteca Angelica

for the Republic’s future prospects, and when he does so he identifies the papacy’s newly minted alliance with Venice as the reason. This pairing of contrasting textual and verbal emphases is intriguing, for a buyer who had seen the image before purchasing the leaflet would have encountered something quite different when he sat down to read the words inside. Such a

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difference seems to suggest that title-page woodcuts in news pamphlets may have been occasionally exploited as a calculated means of seducing buyers with uplifting imagery. It may also indicate that while a news pamphlet’s text might convey less buoying content, its visual imagery did not have to. Unsurprisingly, the winged lion seems to have been one of the symbols to figure prominently in news-pamphlet woodcuts about Venice’s possession of its territorial holdings, both during the War of the League of Cambrai and earlier.37 As a consequence of a cluster of myths about the intertwined destinies of Mark and Venice, the symbol of the evangelist’s winged lion had long served to communicate that Venice’s citizens were a specially chosen people of God by alluding not only to the Republic’s possession of Mark’s relics but also to the supposedly divine plan that had brought the two together. One such example of a woodcut lion is found in an anonymous leaflet of 1516 entitled Tutte le cose seguite in Lombardia dapoi chel signor Bartolomio gionto in campo (Figure 4).38 The text recounts what were then the most recent events in the Republic’s efforts to reclaim its former holdings in Lombardy under the leadership of the condottiero Bartolomeo d’Alviano, Venice’s last major campaign of the League of Cambrai War. The accompanying print shows a landscape featuring mountains, a body of water, and two cities that are identified with labels as Brescia and Bergamo. Dominating the composition, thanks to its sheer size, is a winged lion, its hind legs immersed in the water and its forepaws on dry land. On the simplest level, the image would have signalled to a potential buyer the pamphlet’s pro-Venetian bias as well as its focus on recent events in Lombardy. But it must have also operated on a far more meaningful level that was just as readily understandable, for it displays Mark’s lion in its andante, or ‘walking’, form. Significantly, this visual formulation of the lion became more popular than the traditional leone in moleca, or lion appearing in a roundel, during Venice’s mainland expansion during the fifteenth century. Alberto Rizzi has noted that while the leone in moleca was associated with the city of Venice, the leone andante was particularly associated with the Republic’s territorial holdings – ‘One could even say 37 Interestingly, the same woodblock was used to provide title-page leone andante for at least four leaflet-length publications about Venice’s military presence or influence on the mainland; see Rinuccini, Istoria come il stato di Milano and Istoria noua; Francesco de’ Allegri; and Danza. 38 Tutte le cose seguite in Lombardia (d’Essling, pt. 2, bk. 2, 642, cat. no. 2567; Sander, vol. 2, 691, cat. no. 4009). The British Library catalogues its example with the tentative year of publication as 1515, but the events discussed took place during the eventful months of May and June 1513, concluding with the capture of Genoa by the French alluded to on the verso of the pamphlet’s last page.

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Figure 4 Title page of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Tutte le cose seguite in Lombardia dapoi chel signor Bartolomio gionto in campo [Venice, 1513]

London, British Library, C.20.c.22.(53) © The British Library Board

that the leone andante was more “imperialistic” or “colonial”’.39 By allowing two of the animal’s paws to be placed on land and the other two in the sea, this formulation perfectly expressed the notion that Venice exercised a divinely sanctioned control of both its maritime and mainland empires. 39 Rizzi, I leoni di San Marco, 1:140.

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Naturally, the struggle for possession of Venice’s terraferma holdings during the Cambrai War imbued the leone andante with a heightened relevance. In fact, the symbol’s rich meaning led the Republic’s enemies to destroy, deface, or steal any exemplars they encountered in Venetian territory. 40 On more than one occasion Sanudo’s diary gives voice to Venetian dismay at the wartime desecration of the Republic’s lions on the mainland. An example of this is what the French and Milanese did to the sculpture of a doge kneeling before a Marcian lion in the main square of Bergamo when they took the city. The enemy had suggestively stuffed the doge’s mouth with a (phallic) cucumber and then, under the customary inscription on the lion’s book reading ‘Peace be with you, Mark’, they had added ‘as long as he holds no territory on the mainland’. 41 To counter this insulting vandalism, a promisingly portentous account of the lion’s subsequent journey to Paris was devised. Sanudo enthusiastically reports that although the sculpture fell off the cart used to carry it three times, it always landed on its feet – ‘a very good omen’. 42 But the abuse of Mark’s lion was also occurring in the political imagery of the enemy, for that same June, a parade float produced for the French king’s triumphal entry into Milan displayed a Marcian lion being menaced from the land by a dragon – representing the Sforza – and from the water’s edge by a cock – standing in for the French – which was picking at its eyes. What is more, the depiction of the landscape around these animals had the principal towns of Lombardy labelled on it, including Brescia, Bergamo, Crema, and Cremona. 43 In a less ephemeral gesture, a historian of the town of Feltre, a Venetian city which was mercilessly sacked by Maximilian’s troops in the summer of 1510, recorded that the Germans had painted a fresco of an enormous double-headed eagle holding the neck and flank of a

40 Alberto Rizzi has coined the term ‘leontoclastia’ to describe the destruction of Marcian lions and has published widely on the subject. On leontoclastia during the War of the League of Cambrai specifically, see Rizzi, ‘Il leone di san Marco’, ‘Leontoclastia cambraica’, and ‘Colonne marciane e contesti urbani’. 41 Sanudo, Diarii, vol. 8, col. 518 (15 July 1509): ‘[Q]uando fu portato il San Marco d’oro da Bergamo a Milano, milanesi e francesi misero un coccomero in bocca al doge e sotto le lettere Pax tibi Marce scrissero Dummodo nihil habeat in terra firma’. 42 Sanudo, Diarii, vol. 8, col. 501 (9 July 1509). This became a trope that recurs in relation to the journeys of other sculpted lions transported to Milan or France as well; see ibid., col. 478 (3 July 1509). 43 The float’s description must be cobbled together from two different diary entries in Sanudo: Diarii, vol. 8, cols. 500 (9 July 1509) and 511 (13 July 1509). According to the diarist, the float was taken to the Duomo and put on display there after the procession.

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lion in its claws on the clock tower in the city’s main square, 44 an apt visual expression of Imperial vengeance. In a letter of late 1509 Niccolò Machiavelli recounted that Venetians were retaliating against such behaviour when they recovered their mainland holdings by repainting Mark’s lion everywhere but replacing his traditional gospel book with a sword. 45 While there is no independent confirmation of Machiavelli’s assertion, it is intriguing in this context of symbolic warfare that a sword-wielding lion would feature prominently in the Spauento de Italia woodcut shortly after Machiavelli penned his letter. Considering the degree to which the lion’s abuse disturbed Sanudo and Priuli, Venetians likely perceived much more in the title-page woodcut of Tutte le cose seguite in Lombardia than merely an allusion to the publication’s narrative content. Rather than the generic landscape pairing the Italian mainland and the Adriatic that usually hosts the winged lion, here the animal is confidently shown in the middle of Lombardy. The representations of Brescia and Bergamo – with the former on a plain and the latter on a hilltop – reflect the cities’ respective topographies, while their relative geographical positions imply that the body of water could be understood as Lake Garda rather than as the sea. Given the image’s timing and the context of its consumption, it was likely designed to present a comforting assertion that Venice’s control of its former Lombard territories enjoyed divine approval and was thus assured. The way in which the woodcutter has made the lion’s tail curl possessively around Brescia further strengthens this proprietary message. While the French king’s processional imagery at Milan showed these towns being pried from the lion’s grasp, the pamphlet’s woodcut displayed them securely in Venetian hands. Signif icantly, this lion seems to have been part of a larger wartime production of printed leonine imagery. In his diary, Sanudo described his visit to Padua shortly after its recovery in 1509 and noted that aside from the many flags bearing Mark’s symbol seen fluttering from balconies, printed paper lions had been posted on the doors and windows of many homes and shops. 46 As far as news pamphlets are concerned, a woodcut showing the

44 The historian was Bonifacio Pasole; his work is cited in Rizzi, ‘Leontoclastia cambraica’, 28-29. 45 Machiavelli, 3:1202. The letter is dated 7 December 1509 and was written from Verona. The type of lion described by Machiavelli was not actually common; Wolters, 225. 46 Sanudo, Diarii, vol. 8, col. 527: ‘Et im Padoa Jo vidi molte caxe con bandiere di San Marco fuora di balconi, e San Marchi, su le porte e su le botege, di carta’.

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leone andante also appears in another publication recounting the Republic’s campaign in Lombardy. 47 However ephemeral such imagery may have been, this army of lions would have helped keep the symbol and its meaning alive by making it ever more ubiquitous at the very moment that its survival was being threatened. Claire Judde de Larivière has recently found reference to a relevant incident during the war that, quite understandably, suggests that these paper lions also served as a way of signalling loyalty and patriotism. In a period when the Germans were among Venice’s enemies, some Venetian residents of the island of Murano targeted a local family of German bakers by pasting paper lions to their door as an indicator of where their loyalties should lie (and, in fact, the Germans later asserted that they, too, were marcheschi). 48 These instances of the wartime production and use of printed lions would have been all the more important given that Venice’s enemies were also using the easily disseminated medium of print to debase Mark’s lion. The French and the Ferrarese particularly exploited printed texts and images to disseminate anti-Venetian perspectives on recent events. 49 Such works were evidently available in Venice itself, for Priuli remarked that he planned to paste some into his diary, and Sanudo mentions some being brought to the city from Milan.50 The more dramatic Venetian defeats understandably sparked particular creativity on the part of anti-Venetian printers. After the Ferrarese forces destroyed Venice’s fleet on the Po River in December 1509, Priuli complained about the fact that everyone knew the enemy was churning out pamphlets celebrating the Republic’s defeat, and Giancarlo Petrella believes that a woodcut produced by the printshop of the Ferrarese publisher Lorenzo Rossi depicts this terrible loss.51 While Priuli makes no mention of this image, the figurative woodcut appearing on another enemy pamphlet was what disturbed him most about the publication. The diarist recounts that above the text, ‘they even printed an image of the doge and his councillors and senators honourably dressed ala 47 See the title page of Danza. 48 See Judde de Larivière, La révolte. 49 On French anti-Venetian propaganda, see Sherman. On Ferrarese activity in the same spirit, see, for example, Rossi, ‘La guerra dei veneziani contro Ferrara’. Some anti-Venetian figurative imagery produced in Ferrara is discussed below, pp. **. On printed papal and Imperial anti-Venetian material, see Rospocher, ‘“Non vedete la libertà”’. 50 Priuli, Diarii, 425; Sanudo, Diarii, vol. 8, col. 545 (23 July 1509). 51 On the possible depiction of the rout at Polesella, which I f ind convincing, see Petrella, 165-67, figs. 49, 50.

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Figure 5 Title page of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Processo de mali fruti e pensadi omicidi de li segnori venetiani con la presa del polesine [Ferrara: Lorenzo Rossi?, 1510]

Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana © Comune di Milano

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ducale, that is, in the Venetian way, who are shown weeping and lamenting their ruin and bad luck’.52 This description sounds markedly similar to the title-page woodcut of an anonymous two-leaf pamphlet printed in Ferrara between late December and February 1510. Entitled Processo de mali fruti e pensadi omicidi de li segnori venetiani con la presa del polesine and likely published by the same Lorenzo Rossi mentioned earlier,53 the leaflet celebrates the rout of the Republic’s fleet on the Po River in December 1509 and characterizes the defeat as divine retribution for the preceding century of Venetian mainland expansion.54 The print on the title page shows the doge and a group of his fellow patricians mourning the state of their beloved republic, represented as a pathetically tiny lion in a miniature gondola pushed offshore (Figure 5). The animal’s front paws have been severed and lie innocuously on the shore. The imagery is richly communicative, for it does more than just convey Venice’s loss of its terraferma holdings; the shameful disfigurement of the Republic’s symbol of divine approval also implied the Lord’s displeasure with Venetians. The pamphlet’s verses play on the same theme, but, notably, using different metaphors, declaring that ‘the proud lion will enslave itself to the [French] cock / and in the future will not be able to fly’.55 Interestingly, the woodcutter’s independent decision to amputate the lion’s front paws constituted a more meaningful manipulation of the animal’s symbolism than the poet’s, for these were precisely the paws that traditional depictions of the leone andante showed planted possessively on the Italian mainland. Rossi reused this powerful woodcut at least once for another anti-Venetian news pamphlet he published, the Lamento de ueneciani.56 52 ‘Et ponevanno ettiam pure in stampa sopra dicti sonetti, frotole et chanzone la ymagine del Principe Veneto et deli Conseglieri et Senatori Veneti vestiti honoratamente ala ducale, id est al modo veneto, quali piangevanno et se lamentavanno dela ruina loro et dela adverssa fortuna’; Priuli, Diarii, 425. 53 Giancarlo Petrella has carefully traced the production of a body of news pamphlets to Lorenzo Rossi through the analysis of their typographic elements and figurative woodblocks; see Petrella, 154-61. 54 Processo de mali fruti (Sander, 2:1008, cat. no. 5907bis). Although the text bears no date, it must have been printed between 22 December 1509 – the day of the battle on the Po – and late February 1510, when the pope revoked the Republic’s excommunication, for the text makes it clear that the latter event has not yet occurred. For a contextualization of the woodcut in relation to the political events of the moment, see Rospocher, Il papa guerriero, 133-35. 55 Processo de mali fruti, fol. 1v: ‘El fier leone al gal farse mancipio / e per futuro non pora volare’. 56 Priuli would have been no less happy if he had seen either of two of his other Ferrarese pamphlets by Lorenzo Rossi published shortly after the terrible rout of Agnadello in 1509, which places a woodcut showing the Venetian Senate listening to their doge under the titles Sermone

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But pamphlets printed by the enemy that recounted recent Venetian military failures also presented metaphorical imagery in other forms. A particularly remarkable image appeared on a pamphlet purporting to predict the future in a series of prognosticative verses that was printed in January 1510, again probably in Ferrara (Figure 6).57 Like the text it accompanied, the print presented a forecast of what the year 1510 would hold for Venice by depicting the struggle for the stato da terra as a well-known game called la trottola, an Italian form of bowling. While the players’ ultimate objective is clearly Venice itself – shown as the ‘kingpin’ surrounded by water – the smaller pins represent the most significant cities in the Republic’s mainland empire. Those shown knocked down by the players gathered around the game have already been wrested from the Republic.58 Since the pins representing Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso are still upright, the image must present the state of affairs in late 1509, shortly after the Venetians had unexpectedly reclaimed Padua and Vicenza from the Germans in July and November respectively. This interpretation is reinforced by the banderoles. Whereas those of the pope, the Spanish, and the French celebrate their success with variations on Caesar’s conquistatorial Veni, vidi, vici, the German emperor’s reads: ‘What was previously certain I have made uncertain’. The inclusion of a ‘wildcard’ pin bearing the head of a fool and the label MAT[T]O among those targeted by Maximilian further emphasizes that his failed campaign was jeopardizing the League’s attempt to destroy the Republic. The couplet at the bottom thus warns, ‘Take care [that] the [rolling stone] doesn’t knock down the joker, because if it does, the game is over’. If Priuli was discomfited by a woodcut showing Venice’s rulers crying, an image like this must have been equally upsetting. Not only did it depict the Republic as a helpless collection of passive, defenceless objects to be playfully claimed by its powerful enemies, but even worse, the inclusion of the pope blessing events from on high implied that God was not on Venice’s side. This was something many Venetians had already seen expressed in de l’ira de Dio contra Venetiani [Ferrara: Lorenzo Rossi, c. 1509] and Frotula noua de la rouina de venitiani [Ferrara: Lorenzo Rossi, c. 1509]. 57 Pronostico e profecia de le cose (Sander, 2:1011, cat. no. 5923). The genesis of this particular print is more complex than in many other cases, for the same imagery appears in an engraving that survives in a single impression in Munich. On this, see Boorsch, 61; and Zucker, ‘An Allegory of Renaissance Politics’ and Early Italian Masters, 266, cat. no. 2409.033. For a discussion of the textual content of the pamphlet, see Niccoli, Profeti e popolo, 27, 41-43. 58 Clockwise from the top, Pope Julius II is shown accompanied by a page holding the Della Rovere oak branch and has taken four Romagnol cities, the French have claimed four in Lombardy, Spain has captured four Apulian ports, and the Germans, represented by a soldier with the Imperial eagle, have taken Verona.

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Figure 6 Title page of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Pronostico e profecia de le cose debeno succedere maxime dele guere comenziate per magni potentati contra venetiani [Ferrara?, 22 January 1509]

Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana © Comune di Milano

woodcut imagery when the Republic was excommunicated by Pope Julius II earlier that year: at the end of one of the printed copies of the bull of excommunication, a woodcut showing the pope admonishing the doge

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and some of his senators with a wagging finger had circulated widely in the lagoon.59 With such imagery so broadly disseminated, it is understandable that some of Venice’s publishers, printers, and writers would have responded by recounting the news from a local perspective in both word and image, if not out of their own sense of patriotism, then because a sufficiently large section of the Venetian public was willing to spend a small sum for something of the kind. Regarding the potential appeal of pamphlets and their figurative imagery, it is useful to return to Priuli’s frustration about the print of the doge and senators weeping in order to ask what Venetians might have thought about these pamphlets and who might have been persuaded to purchase them. The evidence I have found suggests that feelings were mixed. Some were very eager to get their hands on pro-Venetian publications, apparently being seduced by their encouraging rhetoric. In 1510 the Venetian merchant Martino Merlini wrote to his brother Giambattista, then on business in the Levant, that he was anxiously waiting for the latest news to come off the presses. He was apparently ready to pay for anything uplifting, because he promised Giambattista that he would send new publications as soon as they had something more positive to recount.60 The patrician diarist Priuli, in contrast, seems to have had a more conflicted relationship with news pamphlets. Although he indicates a desire to acquire them himself, he also disparages them, irrespective of their political bias. He worried that such material, which was often erroneous or at least misleading, could potentially have too great an influence on people’s understanding and interpretation of current events, and he openly decried the fact that everyone – including members of Venetian society outside the governing class – felt that they had the right to comment on and provide an interpretation of Venice’s political and military situation.61 He even went so far as to suggest that the Venetian government ought to censor such publications,62 and on at least one occasion the Council of Ten agreed with him. The pamphlet the Ten barred paired the coarse verses about the gatta discussed earlier with others ridiculing the German withdrawal in a similarly coarse manner. According to Sanudo, 59 The print appears on fol. 8v of Admonitione contra li venetiani. On this, see Rospocher, ‘“Non vedete la libertà”’, 131. 60 See n16 above. 61 See the discussion of the nobility’s attitude toward and concern about the political opinions of the non-ruling members of Venetian society in Rospocher and Salzberg, esp. 106-11. 62 ‘[P]er opinione mia hera grande manch[asto] per la citade veneta di lassare vendere simel verssi in rima et frotoli inpregiuditio di alchuno dovendo molto bene considerare chel possia venire in contrario & quanto sia mutabile la fortuna’; Priuli, Diarii, vol. 5, fol. 55r-v.

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this censorship was motivated by the desire to avoid offending the German emperor. (However, he goes on to note that the government permitted three other canzoni deriding the Ferrarese to be printed and sold; clearly, not all enemies were to be feared equally.63) Such concern was not unreasonable, given how easily pamphlets travelled – we need only think of the ones that Merlini sent to his brother in the far east, or of the foreign ones Sanudo and Priuli indicate were either brought to Venice or reported as being there. As it happens, Maximilian I tried to incite a popular revolt in the lagoon by distributing leaflets bearing texts directed at the city’s popolani that derided the ruling patriciate’s selfish and harmful policies, and the government naturally tried to limit their circulation.64 So while the government may have benefited from a city rich with pro-Venetian publications about recent events, it was impossible to prevent the production and circulation of anti-Venetian ones. This problem of control must have been the primary factor that led the Ten to decree in 1519, just a few years after the war’s conclusion, that no one was to commission or produce printed verses or sell such wares in the shops and public spaces of the city; although evidence demonstrates that this order would be disregarded, the government had decided to try to stem the tide of this kind of popular political communication.65 To date I have found no instances of printed political imagery being the object of censorship,66 a fact I f ind intriguing given that f igurative works could reach a wider public than verbal texts, whose accessibility required the reader or listener to speak a given language. However, the survival of such information in the early years of the sixteenth century is admittedly sparse. We do know that the state carefully monitored another kind of popular political expression in visual form: the design and production of floats (solari) bearing f igural tableaux of statues and 63 Sanudo recounts: ‘Era stampado una canzon si chiama: La Gata di Padoa, con una altra in vilanescho di Tonin: E l’è partì quei lanziman, qual, per non offender il re di romani cussì choma si vendevano un bezo l’una, fo mandato a tuorle per li capi di X, adeo più non si vendeteno. Tamen, vene fuora altre canzon fate contra Ferara numero tre, e sono lassate vender’; Diarii, vol. 9, col. 335 (22 November 1509). For a discussion of this, see Rospocher, ‘Versi pericolosi’, 399-400. 64 On the printed material directed at the Venetians (esp. the popolo) by the Germans and distributed in Venice, see Rospocher, ‘“Non vedete la libertà”’, 135ff. 65 On the decree and its disregard, Salzberg, Ephemeral City, 6-7. 66 The only instance of the censorship of a political image I have come across involved a high-quality coloured drawing showing Doge Leonardo Loredan and other allegorical figures with the inclusion of dialogue aimed at criticizing the doge’s performance of his duties. The work was posted on a column at the Rialto and caused quite a stir, leading the state to attempt to track down and punish the artist. See Sanudo, Diarii, vol. 6, cols. 258-259 (22 November 1505).

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live actors for off icial processions.67 Designed, funded, and made by non-off icial patrons – in this context, corporate ones such as the scuole grandi and the mendicant orders – these floats seem to have enjoyed their f irst real boom in the early years of the sixteenth century, the very time that the War of the League of Cambrai was raging and news pamphlets were increasing in number. In the same vein as the float produced for the French king’s triumphal entry into Milan in 1509, the figurative tableaux often borne by Venetian solari could be inspired by political events, presenting celebrations of Venice’s allies or military successes via the pairing or interaction of holy f igures, personif ications of virtues, and major political players.68 On at least one occasion during the War of the League of Cambrai, such solari were carefully screened by secretaries of the elite Council of Ten to prevent the display of imagery that other powerful rulers might f ind offensive.69 Performances of a political nature could be more spontaneous phenomena, however. At an impromptu celebration held in the Piazza San Marco after Venice briefly reclaimed Bergamo from the French in 1512, Sanudo recounts that a large crowd enthusiastically burned a live rooster with an eel stuffed in its mouth to represent the Republic’s recent victory over the French and their Milanese allies.70 Calling to mind the rooster’s abuse in the prints appearing in Sacchino’s pamphlet and the Papa Iulio secondo che redriza tuto el mondo, this overlapping use of the same symbolic political language helps us get a sense both of the broader range of visual media employed in popular political expression and of how news-pamphlet woodcuts contributed to this. While the apparent tit-for-tat quality of pro- and anti-Venetian imagery in news-pamphlet woodcuts implies a rapid and perhaps passionate production of propagandistic material in response to very recent events, the pamphlet format was also used to explore the market for retrospective accounts of the war’s important moments. One example of this is a lengthier leaflet entitled La obsidione di Padua, or ‘The Siege of Padua’, which was published in 1510 a few days after the first anniversary of Padua’s successful defence in 1509.71 The publication presents an elegant account of the siege in ottava rima written by a Venetian named Bartolomeo Cordo. Little is known about 67 On Venetian solari in the sixteenth century, see Muir, 40-41 (esp. n60). 68 For examples of their imagery, see, Sanudo, Diarii, vol. 13, cols. 130-141 (20 October 1511), esp. cols. 134-135. 69 Ibid., vol. 16, cols. 284-290 (22 May 1513). 70 Ibid., vol. 13, col. 455. 71 Cordo, La obsidione (d’Essling, pt. 2, bk. 1, 207, cat. no. 1688; Sander, 1:382, cat. no. 2167).

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the author beyond the fact that he himself participated in Padua’s defence. The state must have approved of the work, for it granted Cordo’s petition for copyright protection.72 Although printing a celebratory blow-by-blow description of a year-old event when the war that had sparked it was still ongoing would not have qualified as ‘news’, Cordo’s narrative must nonetheless have enjoyed a timely appeal at the moment of its publication: just a few months before, the Venetians had once again successfully defended Padua against Maximilian’s troops. Like the Victoriosa Gata leaflet, Cordo’s work presented a custom-made woodcut depicting the siege (Figure 7), and this image shares a number of aspects with the earlier pamphlet’s title-page woodcut. It, too, depicts the weakest point in the city walls where the cat had been tauntingly extended over the ramparts, appropriately labelled as the BASTIONE DE LA G, or Bastione della Gatta. The woodcut also emphasizes the German artillery’s might by increasing the number of cannon, some of which are f iring, and by how it depicts the besieging army: the standard-bearer, drummer, and piper in the foreground display the slashed doublets and rakishly angled caps with ostrich feathers characteristic of German Landsknechte.73 Making the enemy seem German is especially noteworthy given that, as Cordo’s own text relates, the area around the Codalonga gate was actually defended against predominantly Spanish and enemy Italian forces.74 However, there are also some significant differences between the two prints. In the later woodcut, the plucky act involving the cat is merely alluded to, and, in fact, no human defenders appear. In their stead, the woodcutter has employed familiar visual motifs imbued with political meaning by placing heavenly protectors in the sky above – St. Mark and St. Anthony, the most important patron saints of Venice and Padua respectively. The introduction of these f igures powerfully colours the woodcut’s characterization of the event. Rather than stoking a patriotic viewer’s pride in the military virtue of the Venetian forces, as the earlier gatta print had done, it encouraged conf idence in the inevitability of victory that only divine approval and aid could guarantee. Significantly, 72 Cordo’s copyright request survives in the records of the Notatorio del Collegio; see entry no. 180 in Fulin, 174. 73 As a comparative visual example from Italy, see, for example, Martino da Udine, StandardBearer, Fifer and Drummer, engraving, c. 1510-1520, London, British Museum. 74 For instance, in the case of the first assault on the Codalonga gate, Cordo recounts: ‘Verso dil bastion venean distesi / Tutti Spagnoli con qualche alemano’; Cordo, Obsidione di Padua, fol. 12r.

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Figure 7 Title page of Bartolomeo Cordo’s pamphlet entitled La obsidione di Padua ne la quale se tractano tutte le cose che sono occorse […] (Venice, 3 October 1510)

London, British Library, C.20.c.22 (3) © The British Library Board

the inclusion of the saints and the omission of the Venetian forces both mark a departure from the keynote of the pamphlet’s verses. The poem only briefly mentions the heavenly support Venice received in protecting

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Padua, focusing far more heavily on describing and lauding the deeds of Padua’s earthly defenders.75 At one point, Cordo even intimates that Venetians ought no longer to rely on divine aid as they had in the past but instead should assert themselves and protect their city by means of their own heroic virtue.76 The difference between text and image may be a result of what was happening when the leaflet was published. Since the Venetians had only recently defended Padua against the same enemy for a second time, the printing of Cordo’s narrative would have provided a welcome reminder of a similar, and much celebrated, victory from the recent past. Considered in this context, the readily visible title-page woodcut may have been designed as an advantageous marketing technique. Instead of presenting one of the many acts of human courage described by Cordo, it showcased an image of timeless and eternal victory by implying that the heavens approved of Venice’s possession of Padua. Much like the woodcut of the leone andante dominating the Lombard landscape discussed earlier, this print, too, may have seemed to promise that Padua was destined to remain in Venetian hands, even if it were attacked again (an event that would, in fact, recur more than once in the years that followed, just as it had shortly before Cordo’s poem was printed). Whatever the case, the disjunction of the verbal and figurative narratives in the Obsidione leaflet offers another example of how custom-made woodcuts addressing recent events could function independently of the textual content they accompanied. But a further aspect of news pamphlets’ figurative imagery seems to emerge from a comparison of the two woodcuts depicting the siege of Padua. It suggests that prints inspired by the same event could be designed to target different interests or concerns in response to different circumstances. While the earlier print of the cat surely fostered a jolt of bellicose confidence at the time of Padua’s reclamation in 1509, a year later the Obsidione woodcut probably presented a seductive air of assurance – however factually unwarranted – regarding Venice’s ability and divine right to reclaim its mainland empire.

75 Cordo’s text reads like a who’s who of the defence of Padua. He mentions innumerable mercenaries in Venice’s employ along with many of the Venetian nobles who lent their aid. One of the many examples of this is his praise of the captain-general of the Venetian forces, Nicolò Orsini, Count of Pitigliano; Cordo, Obsidione di Padua, fol. 10v. 76 Ibid., 13v : ‘Con lo aiuto di Cristo e de altri santi / Comenzasti il tuo stato a dilatare / E in pace governato già anni tanti, / Sì che non creder ti deban mancare; / Ma se per colpa pur de’ celi erranti / Ad ora el ti bisogna travagliare, / Non ti mirar, ché questo è corso umano, / Cha alquanto un stagi infermo, alquanto sano’.

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This pair of images also sheds some light on the potential influence or resonance of news-leaflet woodcuts, for both the Victoriosa Gata and the Obsidione would be printed more than once: the former multiple times over a span of decades77 and the latter at least a second time in 1515.78 The fact that the second printing of Cordo’s work came off the press before the war’s conclusion suggests that whoever printed it believed that even six years later a fair portion of the population would still be interested in the work’s celebratory content and tone. In the case of the various editions of the gatta verses, at least two of the subsequent printings appeared after the war.79 Although we must interpret this fact cautiously, in view of the volume of such material that has perished, we might imagine that the work was reissued in the hope of appealing to a sense of enduring nostalgia about one of the war’s few high points, for the latest dated edition of the Victoriosa Gata is from 1549, more than 30 years after the Cambrai War’s conclusion. But what is perhaps most intriguing about the subsequent editions of these pamphlets inspired by Padua’s defence is that they all present title-page woodcuts directly borrowed from or inspired by the originals. While one of the reprintings of the gatta song re-employed the original’s figurative woodblock, at least two later ones were produced by different publishers with freshly cut blocks displaying highly derivative compositions;80 and the second edition of the Obsidione presents a highly faithful copy of the woodcut appearing in the first. Evidently, in both cases the printers involved in producing the subsequent editions had felt that the inclusion of a figurative image was important enough to be worth the time and cost of cutting a new block, and also that the new woodcuts ought to be similar to the ones that had already appeared in connection with the texts being re-editioned. Also intriguing is the fact that the Obsidione di Padua woodcut would later be reused in other pamphlets about the siege of other cities,

77 La victoriosa Gata de Padua ([Venice], 1509]) (d’Essling, pt. 2, bk. 2, 647, cat. no. 2581; Sander, 2:918, cat. no. 5370); La victoriosa Gatta da Padoua (Venice, 1549) (d’Essling, pt. 2, bk. 2, 647, cat. no. 2582; Sander, 2:918, cat. no. 5371); La vittoriosa gatta da Padova (Venice: Francesco di Salò, s.a.) (d’Essling, pt. 2, bk. 2, 646, cat. no. 2583; Sander, 2:918, cat. no. 5371). Although Salò’s edition is undated, the earliest publication associated with him is an edition of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso dating to 1527; see Edit16: Censimento nazionale delle edizioni italiane del XVI secolo, s.v. ‘Da Salò, Francesco’, http://edit16.iccu.sbn.it/web_iccu/ihome.htm. On the various versions of the song, see Medin, 307-19; Rossi, ‘Cronaca’, 504-07; and Lenci, 213-16. 78 Bartolomeo Cordo, La obsidione di Padua […] (Venice: Alessandro Bindoni, 22 November 1515) (d’Essling, pt. 2, bk. 1, 207-8, cat. no. 1689; Sander, 1:382, cat. no. 2168). 79 See n. lxxi above. 80 See n. lxxi above.

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even if the composition’s reference to the Bastione della Gatta would have been entirely out of place.81 Given that more than a thousand impressions can usually be obtained from a simply cut woodblock, the fact that the original was not reused in these cases might be explained in one of two ways. The first possible explanation is that the original blocks had been used to produce print runs so extensive that they wore out and could not be reemployed. The second is that the later editions of these texts were produced by different, perhaps rival, presses, for the pirating of texts and woodcuts by competing presses happened frequently in the sixteenth century.82 Either way, however, the implication is the same: not only did news leaflets have the potential to be profitable and appealing enough to be worth re-editioning, even many years after the events they recounted, but also their figurative imagery could accrue its own value. In instances such as those discussed here, publishers seem to have believed that their potential clients could be interested in both the woodcut and the text, thereby implying that in the community’s collective memory these images could become powerfully charged. In fact, despite their modest materials and popular content, pamphlet woodcuts help to enrich our understanding of the links between popular – and in this case ostensibly ephemeral – imagery and more elevated, enduring figurative works produced for more formal contexts. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the later revisitations of the image of the cat hung over Padua’s ramparts provides an interesting example for us to consider: the 1509 print served as the point of departure for a woodcut representing the siege of Padua produced for a refined historical poem written by the chivalric poet Niccolò degli Agostini and published in 1521.83 The volume presents an elegant ottava rima account of the events of the War of the League of Cambrai that is punctuated by a number of custom-made full-page woodcuts. The one showing Padua’s defence is labelled Questo sie lassedio di Padoa.84 Here the bastion is once again shown as a casamatta extending over a moat with the defenders waving the cat over the ramparts while the enemy discharges its artillery from behind protective rock-filled baskets. Since the imagery provides a laterally inverted version of the 1509 gatta woodcut, this 81 See Petrella, 115n170. 82 On the practice of copying texts and images among printmakers and publishers, see Pon, esp. 450; and Petrella, 55-80, 113-15, 128, 136-39, 165-67. On the apparently often collegial relationships between printers and their sharing of things such as initials, ornaments, and devices, see Rhodes, vii-viii. 83 Agostini. 84 The woodcut appears on fol. Dir.

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encourages the assumption that the later woodcutter was working directly from the earlier image. Although the later print’s composition is enriched with more visual detail, the only significant difference in its content is that it more overtly implies the assault’s eventual failure: here the breach in the wall is much smaller, and the impressive army of knights and foot soldiers that has been included within the walls seems capable of defending them. Evidently, the rough and simple woodcut of 1509 provided an acceptable model for the more elegant imagery of a historical poem despite the dramatic differences between the typologies of text each image accompanied. This offers further testimony to how deeply rooted in the contemporary cultural imagination the simple image had become. The later print’s emphasis on the human element of the city’s defence, rather than the spiritual one featured in the woodcut produced for the Obsidione, would have been appropriate to a retrospective celebration of a historical military achievement. In the light of the gatta composition’s transposition from the realm of coarse, rapidly produced ephemera to that of more refined and enduring historical works, the question of the place of news-pamphlet imagery in the broader context of Venetian visual culture arises. I would like to offer some general parallels of motif and composition to suggest that other pamphlet imagery underwent this same process. Perhaps quite predictably, some of the readiest examples are found in representations of the winged lion. Recalling the news-pamphlet lion shown dominating the Lombard landscape in 1512, a large canvas produced for the government office of the stock exchange regulators by the respected painter Cima da Conegliano seems to present a reinterpretation of the conventional leone andante formula similar to the one presented in the earlier woodcut.85 Here, too, the animal is uncharacteristically landlocked. Despite the seashells strewn on the shore, the body of water seems less the Adriatic than an inland lake. Although no one has yet identified the specific geographical location of Cima’s landscape, if indeed there is one, the view seems to combine topographical aspects of the Trevigiano and the alpine foothills.86 As a result of the changes Cima has made to the more traditional symbol, the image appears to emphasize 85 Cima da Conegliano, Lion of St. Mark with Sts. John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalen and Jerome, c. 1516, oil on canvas, 205 x 540 cm, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, originally for the Magistrato della Messetaria in the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi. For a reproduction and discussion of the image, see Humfrey, 12, 155. On how another contemporary wartime canvas depicting the leone andante for a public office – this one by Vittore Carpaccio, also from 1516 – seems to have presented a calculated response to Venice’s conflicted relationship with its terraferma holdings, see Ferrara. 86 Rizzi, Leoni di San Marco, 1:40, 2:69.

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the lion’s – and thus Venice’s – domination of the Terraferma specifically.87 Considering that the work is generally dated to 151688 – what would prove to be the last year of the Cambrai War – could Cima’s unusual twist on the traditional leone andante iconography be understood as a grander and more formal revisitation of the modest woodcut that had appeared in a popular pamphlet four years earlier? The notion would not be unheard of: Giancarlo Petrella has noted that in a frescoed portrait of Alberto Aringhieri, a Knight of Rhodes, painted in 1504 in the Cathedral of Siena, the great Pinturicchio inserted a view of Rhodes in the background that he modelled after the title-page woodcut of a contemporary pamphlet about the historical vicissitudes of the city.89 The artist clearly perceived the news-pamphlet image as a faithful topographical representation. The woodcut showing the bellicose winged lion leaping and brandishing a sword on the title page of Sacchino’s Spauento de Italia may provide another example of an iconographic element’s migration from the lower, more popular register of pamphlet woodcuts to the elevated, official one of imagery commissioned by the state. More than 80 years after the publication of Sacchino’s work, Palma Giovane painted a large votive canvas honouring Leonardo Loredan, the doge who had reigned during the Cambrai War, for the Sala del Senato in the Ducal Palace. The grand work references the historic conflict by presenting a female personification of Venice aggressively wielding a sword paired with a bellicose lion attacking a mounted female figure embodying the League. Although it is impossible to know whether Palma ever saw the much earlier woodcut, the features that painting and print have in common are nonetheless suggestive. What can be said for certain is that despite the small fraction to survive, news-pamphlet woodcuts produced around the turn of the sixteenth century, particularly in response to the events of the War of the League of Cambrai, could be far more than mere ‘token woodcuts’. Even the small handful referenced here demonstrates that they did not have to be slavish or schematic visual transpositions of the verbal narratives they accompanied. Rather, 87 On the idea that the water in the painting is a lake, see Boschini, 264; and Moschini Marconi, 1:264, cat. no. 152 (attr. to Giovanni Buonconsiglio). 88 Alberto Rizzi dates the work to ‘poco prima il 1516’; Rizzi, Leoni di San Marco, 2:69, cat. no. 731. Peter Humfrey endorses this dating, though allowing for the possibility that the work could date as early as 1506; Humfrey, 155. His desire to date the work earlier, however, could be more the result of his disappointment at the painting’s lack of inventiveness, for he remarks that the painting is ‘among [Cima’s] least inspired works’; ibid., 12. 89 Pinturicchio, Portrait of Alberto Aringhieri, fresco, 1504, Cappella del Battista, Duomo, Siena; see Petrella, 113.

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some of them improvised, glossing the events and contexts that had inspired them in independent, often sophisticated, yet also readily interpretable, ways. Being produced by enterprising members of the lower orders of society for profit and sold cheaply on the streets and in the squares to patrizio and popolano alike, these woodcuts would have enjoyed a broader visibility and diffusion than virtually any other interpretations – verbal or visual – of current events at a critical time in Venetian history. As a result, they offer a precious glimpse of popular political expression and communication in Renaissance Venice.

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—, ‘Il papa in guerra: Giulio II nell’iconografia politica al tempo di Ravenna’, in 1512: La battaglia di Ravenna, l’Italia, l’Europa, ed. by Dante Bolognesi (Ravenna: Longo, 2014), 139-55. —, ‘Propaganda e opinione pubblica: Giulio II nella comunicazione politica europea’, in Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 33 (2007), 117-57. —, ‘Versi pericolosi? Controllo delle opinioni e ricerca del consenso nelle Guerre d’Italia’, in From Florence to the Mediterranean and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Tony Molho, ed. by Diogo Ramada Curto, Eric R. Dursteller, Julius Kirshner, and Francesca Trivellato (Florence: Olschki, 2009), 381-407. Rospocher, Massimo, and Rosa Salzberg, ‘“El vulgo zanza”: Spazi, pubblici, voci a Venezia durante le guerre d’Italia’, Storica 48 (2010), 83-119. Rossi, Vittorio, ‘Cronaca: Su su su chi vuol la gatta’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 5 (1885), 504-07. —, ‘La guerra dei veneziani contro Ferrara nel 1509: Poemetto storico contemporaneo’, Nuovo archivio veneto, 3 (1892), 47-75. Sacchino, Francesco Maria, Spauento de Italia (Forlì?, 1510). Salzberg, Rosa, Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). —, ‘In the Mouths of Charlatans: Performers as Pamphlet Publishers in Cinquecento Italy’, Renaissance Studies, 24.5 (2010), 638-53. —, ‘The Lyre, the Pen and the Press: Performers and Cheap Print in Early Cinquecento Venice’, in The Books of Venice (Il Libro Veneziano), ed. by Craig Kallendorf and Lisa Pon (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2008), 251-76. —, ‘Selling Stories and Many Other Things in and through the City: Peddling Print in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Venice’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 42.3 (2011), 737-59. Salzberg, Rosa, and Massimo Rospocher, ‘Street Singers in Italian Renaissance Urban Culture and Communication’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2012), 9-26. Sander, Max, Le livre à figures italien depuis 1467 jusqu’à 1530, 6 vols. (Milan: Hoepli, 1969). Sanudo, Marin, I diarii di Marino Sanudo, 58 vols. (Venice: Fratelli Visentini, 1879-1903). Seneca, Federico, Venezia e il papa Giulio II (Padua: Liviana, 1962). Sermone de l’ira de Dio contra Venetiani [Ferrara: Lorenzo Rossi, c. 1509]. Sherman, Michael A., ‘Political Propaganda and Renaissance Culture: French Reactions to the League of Cambrai, 1509-1510’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 8.2 (1977), 97-128. Tucci, Ugo, ‘Monete e banche nel secolo del ducato d’oro’, in Il Rinascimento: Società ed economia, vol. 5 of Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima,

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ed. by Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci (Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1996). Tutte le cose seguite in Lombardia dapoi chel signor Bartolomio gionto in campo (Venice, 1513). Wagner, Klaus, and Manuel Carrera, Catologo dei libri a stampa in lingua italiana della Biblioteca Colombina di Siviglia (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1991). Wolters, Wolfgang, Storia e politica nei dipinti di Palazzo Ducale: Aspetti dell’autocelebrazione della Repubblica di Venezia nel Cinquecento, trans. by B.H. Campana (Venice: Arsenale, 1987). Zucker, Mark, ‘An Allegory of Renaissance Politics in a Contemporary Italian Engraving: The Prognostic of 1510’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 52 (1989), 236-40. —. Early Italian Masters, vol. 24.3 of The Illustrated Bartsch, gen. eds. Walter Strauss and John T. Spike (New York: Abaris Books, 1996).

About the Author Krystina Stermole, Independent Scholar



Fabrizio Colonna and Machiavelli’s Art of War John M. Najemy

Abstract The puzzle of Machiavelli’s Art of War (1519-1520) is that he gave the name of the famous mercenary captain Fabrizio Colonna to the speaker in the dialogue who condemns mercenaries and praises citizen armies, ideas Machiavelli regularly espoused but which were certainly not shared by the historical Fabrizio Colonna. Answers have generally sought political motives. Was Machiavelli reaffirming old loyalties to Piero Soderini, who had established ties to the Colonna family and twice tried to hire Fabrizio as captain of Florence’s armies? Or was he currying favor with the Medici, who had been restored to power by the Spanish-Swiss-papal league in which Fabrizio was governor-general of the papal armies? This essay attempts a different approach that explores Machiavelli’s construction of the figure of Fabrizio in the dialogue. At the beginning Fabrizio confidently preaches the emulation of antiquity’s military practices, including citizen armies, and condemns captains who make war a full-time profession (an arte) as corrupt, fraudulent, rapacious and dangerous to the states and princes who employ them. But his interlocutor Cosimo Rucellai asks why Fabrizio has never implemented any of the ancient practices he so admires. Fabrizio’s awkward defence of himself insists, first, that the occasione has never arisen, subsequently that he has never practiced war as an arte – a denial that contradicts the reality of the historical Fabrizio – and finally that military reforms are possible only for kings with large armies. Only very reluctantly and incompletely does Fabrizio acknowledge his own complicity in the mercenary system he condemns. Through the fictional Fabrizio Machiavelli unmasks the delusions of Italy’s warrior nobles, their pursuit of private profit over public good, and their part in Italy’s subjugation to foreigners.

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_naje

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Keywords: antiquity, armies, arte (profession), citizen armies, corruption, dialogue, gentiluomini (feudal nobles), imitation, mercenaries, militia, occasione (opportunity), private, public, war

Every reader of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Art of War who knows something about the historical Fabrizio Colonna must wonder why Machiavelli gave this name to the dialogue’s main speaker, who proposes ideas about professional mercenaries, citizen militias, and military organization that are largely consonant with those Machiavelli expressed in his own voice in other works. Fabrizio Colonna was a professional soldier of the very sort Machiavelli routinely excoriated. Yet the fictional Fabrizio’s views in favour of citizen armies and his warnings about the dangers of professional mercenaries are recognizably Machiavelli’s own, so much so that some have seen the character in the dialogue as a mere mouthpiece (a ‘ventriloquist’s dummy’, Sydney Anglo calls him 1) for Machiavelli. The puzzle presented by the Art of War is why Machiavelli selected one of the most prominent of the age’s professional, mercenary captains as the spokesman for ideas that the historical Fabrizio certainly did not share. As I suggest in this essay, however, Fabrizio’s role in the dialogue consists in much more than an exposition of Machiavelli’s views on these subjects.2 The Colonna were a powerful Roman baronial family that controlled fiefs, vast territories, and towns both in Lazio in the Papal States and in Abruzzo in the kingdom of Naples.3 Between the 1480s and 1501, Fabrizio Colonna fought for and against several popes and various kings of Naples and France before joining the king of Spain’s efforts to dominate Italy.4 Having assisted Naples against the Turks in the early 1480s, for the next decade he was in and out of alliances and military contracts with King Ferdinand of Naples and Popes Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, and Alexander VI. In 1494 he signed on with Charles VIII of France and participated in the French occupation of 1 Anglo, 131. 2 In Mercenaries and their Masters, Michael Mallett astutely observed that Fabrizio’s role in the Art of War has several dimensions. According to Mallett, Machiavelli’s Fabrizio ‘epitomises the essential dichotomy in Italian attitudes towards soldiers. On the one side he was the representative of the condottieri, the faithless, violent and unprincipled mercenaries who monopolised Italy’s military skills and debased her military virtues. On the other side he represented a late fifteenth-century ideal, the valiant captain who was also a civilised and educated patron and a respected leader of society’ (257). Mallett’s recognition of the complexity of Machiavelli’s construction of Fabrizio was an important step toward a more nuanced reading of the text. 3 Serio. 4 For an outline of Colonna’s life, see Petrucci.

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Rome and Naples. After the French departed in 1495, he returned to the service of subsequent kings of Naples. But in or shortly after 1501 he allied his forces with the army of the Spanish captain Gonzalo de Córdoba, the architect of Spanish power in the South who expelled the French (who had invaded Italy a second time in 1499) and brought the Neapolitan kingdom under the control of Ferdinand of Aragon, king of Spain. Pope Alexander VI was hostile to the Colonna, but Fabrizio enjoyed a good relationship with Julius II and commanded a Spanish contingent in the papal army. When Julius formed the Holy League against France in 1511, Colonna became governor-general of the League’s army under the Spanish viceroy of Naples, Ramón de Cardona. In April 1512 he fought with the League at the battle of Ravenna in which the French defeated the Spaniards and he and Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici were taken prisoner. French victory at Ravenna seemed for the moment to ensure the survival of the Republic in Florence under the leadership of Piero Soderini. But in June of the same year, Pope Julius’s Swiss allies swooped down into Lombardy, attacked the French and forced them to abandon Italy, leaving Florence at the mercy of Julius and Spanish arms. At the end of August, a Spanish force sent into Tuscany by the League sacked Prato, threatened Florence, and allowed supporters of the exiled Medici to chase Soderini from office. Two months later, Machiavelli was removed from the government positions in which he had administered Florence’s relations with its subject territories, served as an envoy and diplomatic agent, and promoted, designed, and organized Florence’s militia. The new Medici regime abolished both the militia and the Republic’s Great Council. Although Colonna sided with the Spanish-papal League in 1511-1512, he had no role in toppling the Florentine Republic. In fact, eight years earlier, in 1504-1505, Soderini twice tried to hire him as captain-general of the Florentine forces.5 He was unsuccessful because some Florentines feared that employing Fabrizio would anger Pope Julius, who was then trying to prevent an expansion of Colonna power and territory. Others feared that Fabrizio would not be sufficiently independent of his Spanish commander to conduct operations in Florence’s best interests.6 In a compromise, two other members of the Colonna family were hired as condottieri, but neither as captain. Piero Soderini and his brother, Cardinal Francesco, evidently sought a link to the Colonna to balance the Medici-Orsini alliance (whose origins went back to the elder Lorenzo’s marriage to Clarice of the Roman 5 Butters, 84, 93-94. 6 Opinions expressed in a pratica recorded by Machiavelli, in Machiavelli, Legazioni, 4:475-82; see also Fachard (ed.), Consulte e pratiche, 9-17.

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Orsini and his son Piero’s marriage to Alfonsina of the Neapolitan Orsini) and to give the Soderini brothers and the Republic a firmer foothold in Roman politics. Even after 1512, Cardinal Francesco continued to pursue Colonna connections.7 So, according to one hypothesis, Machiavelli selected Fabrizio Colonna as his spokesman in the Art of War as a gesture to this Soderini-Colonna bond in order to express, indirectly, disapproval of the Medici and the Orsini and, retrospectively, solidarity with Piero Soderini and the Republic.8 This hypothesis might seem to be supported by the curious fact that in July 1512, after the French had been driven from Italy and with the danger of revenge from Pope Julius and the League hanging over Florence, another proposal to employ Fabrizio was presented to the councils. Piero Soderini may have thought that an alliance with Colonna would protect Florence from Julius’s wrath. But several speakers in a pratica, both allies and opponents of Soderini, rejected the idea with a variety of arguments: that Colonna would cost too much; that he would be reluctant to defy Ferdinand of Spain and the League; and, as one speaker boldly put it, that experience had shown ‘these Colonna to be insufferable [per havere provato questi Colonnesi insopportabili]’.9 Those opposed to entrusting Florence’s fate to Colonna may also have recalled that in 1510, as Julius was assembling the Holy League, Fabrizio, soon to be governor-general of the League’s army, forced the two members of his family hired as condottieri five years earlier to break ties with Florence.10 Just as in 1504-1505, so also in 1512, many Florentines evidently believed they could not rely on Fabrizio to serve Florentine interests unambiguously. It is, therefore, difficult to imagine that after 1510 Machiavelli could have seen Colonna as a friend of the Soderini Republic. According to the chronicler Bartolomeo Cerretani, in October 1512, shortly after Soderini’s expulsion and the return of the Medici, Fabrizio and his cousin Prospero ‘passed through our territory with 808 lances, headed for Lombardy, peacefully and as friends [pacifichamente et come amici]’.11 Because the Medici owed their reinstatement to Spanish arms and Colonna was on his way north to help secure Spanish positions, Cerretani can only have meant that they travelled through as friends of the new Medici 7 See Lowe, 59-62, for Francesco’s role in the employment of Marcantonio and Muzio Colonna; 114 and 126 for his ties to the Colonna after 1512. 8 Colish. 9 Fachard, ‘Implicazioni politiche’, 154-55, and Fachard (ed.), Consulte e pratiche, 330-31. 10 Machiavelli, Legazioni, 6:526 (reported in a letter from the chancery notary and coadjutor Antonio della Valle to Machiavelli in France, 30 August 1510). 11 Cerretani, 291.

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regime. Machiavelli was still in office at this moment and could not have been unaware of Fabrizio’s passage. He may also have learned that in April 1513, after Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici’s election to the papacy as Leo X, Fabrizio quickly went to Rome to congratulate the new pontiff.12 By this time, Colonna was an ally of the Medici. Yet, even if Machiavelli saw Colonna as still a friend of Soderini in 1519-1520 when he wrote the Art of War, one would have to wonder why, just when he was finally winning some favour from the Medici (the commission to write the Florentine Histories was approved by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici in late 1520), he would have risked antagonizing them by giving the lead role in the dialogue to a supposed ally of Soderini. There is, however, evidence that the Medici circle not only thought well of the Art of War but also actively promoted it. It was published in Florence by Giunti in August 1521 – something that could not have happened without Medici approval – and among the persons to whom Machiavelli had copies sent was Pope Leo’s nephew in Rome, Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, son of Jacopo Salviati and the pope’s sister Lucrezia di Lorenzo de’ Medici. The cardinal warmly acknowledged receiving the book, expressed his appreciation of it, and told Machiavelli he had read it ‘diligently’. ‘The more I’ve considered it’, he wrote, ‘the more I like it, for it seems to me that you have joined to the most excellent ancient methods of waging war everything of value in modern warfare … I thank you, therefore, for having produced this book for the general benefit of the Italians’.13 Another approach holds that the Art of War was part of Machiavelli’s efforts to enhance this reconciliation with the Medici14 by recasting his views on military matters, especially the militia, away from the specifically Florentine context in which they had originally had an anti-Medici flavour, toward a broader Italian setting in which the Medici might have welcomed his ideas in furtherance of their own territorial ambitions. Accordingly, the selection of Fabrizio Colonna as the work’s main speaker would have given his theories the prestige of association with a great non-Florentine family and with a captain who had been with Cardinal Giovanni at Ravenna in 1512. The problem with this hypothesis is that Colonna-Medici relations had deteriorated from at least 1514,15 several years before Machiavelli began writ12 Serio, 202-03. 13 Machiavelli, Opere, 2:379-80 (letter of 6 September 1521). 14 Senesi; cf. Sacco Messineo. That the Art of War should be read in the context of Machiavelli’s reconciliation with the Medici is also argued by Hörnqvist, and by Black, 213-23. 15 Serio, 209, 234.

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ing the dialogue. They reached a low point in 1516 over the Medici conquest of the duchy of Urbino, which Leo snatched from Francesco Maria della Rovere and gave to his nephew Lorenzo. Fabrizio Colonna, who had married a daughter, Agnese, of an earlier duke of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, and had his own designs on the duchy for himself or his family, incurred Leo’s anger by taking Francesco Maria’s side in the conflict.16 Consequently, even though the Medici gave their approval and imprimatur to the Art of War, the choice of Fabrizio as its chief interlocutor was not what necessarily pleased them. For all these reasons, it seems unlikely that Machiavelli’s selection of Fabrizio Colonna was politically motivated, either to gain the favour of the Medici or to hint at disapproval of them. Another approach is needed, one that pays more attention to how Machiavelli constructs the figure of Fabrizio in the Art of War – what he has Fabrizio say about himself, what his interlocutors ask him and say about him, and how the dialogue’s characterization of Fabrizio echoes what Machiavelli says elsewhere about the social and political class of which the historical Fabrizio was a prime exemplar. The setting of the imaginary dialogue of the Art of War is the garden of the Rucellai family in Florence, the Orti Oricellari, where, between c.1515 and 1519, Machiavelli attended meetings with friends who shared his literary, historical, and political interests. Among them were the dedicatees of his Discourses on Livy, written during these same years and in close connection with the conversations at the Orti: Cosimo Rucellai, who hosted the gatherings and whose death in 1519 ended them; and Zanobi Buondelmonti, who in 1522 joined a conspiracy to kill Cardinal Giulio and overthrow the Medici regime. In the fiction of the dialogue, Fabrizio Colonna is briefly in Florence, probably in 1516,17 on his way south after having fought for a long time in Lombardy, ‘con grande sua gloria’, for the ‘Re Cattolico’,18 Ferdinand of Spain. Exactly what ‘glory’ Fabrizio is imagined to have won is not clear, given that the forces of the League, in this case mainly the Swiss, with Prospero Colonna and possibly also Fabrizio among its captains, were badly defeated at Marignano (Melegnano) in September 1515 by French armies that had reinvaded Italy under Francis I and retaken Milan. Ferdinand withdrew his Spanish troops from Lombardy after Marignano, and Colonna, appointed 16 Shaw, 191. 17 Some readers believe (for unspecified reasons) that the dialogue is set in 1519: see Colish, 1160; and Verrier, 179. 18 Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra, 33.

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Gran Conestabile of the kingdom of Naples in October 1515, seems to have spent most of 1516 in the South.19 Whatever the facts of the historical Colonna’s whereabouts, the Fabrizio of the dialogue stops in Florence to visit ‘la Eccellenza del Duca’, Lorenzo de’ Medici the Younger, and to see old friends identif ied only as ‘some gentili uomini’.20 Cosimo Rucellai invites Fabrizio to a meeting at the Orti, where Fabrizio is initially puzzled by the presence of some trees he does not recognize. Cosimo explains that his grandfather Bernardo, the founder of the Orti who was fond of these trees because they were well known to the ancients, had planted them. ‘I thought so’, Fabrizio rejoins, adding that the trees ‘bring to mind certain Neapolitan barons [principi del Regno], who take pleasure in ancient gardens and shade’. Trusting that he will not give offence because he is ‘speaking among friends to discuss things [disputare le cose] and not to find fault’, Fabrizio ventures the opinion that ‘they’ (presumably both Cosimo’s grandfather and the Neapolitan barons) ‘would have done better […] to try to imitate the ancients in difficult and arduous [ forti e aspre] endeavors rather than delicate and soft [delicate e molli] things’, and to revive ‘the ways of the true and perfect antiquity, not those of the false and corrupt [ falsa e corrotta] antiquity’. For once ‘my Romans’, as Fabrizio calls them, began to enjoy such soft pleasures, ‘my native land went to ruin [la mia patria rovinò]’.21 Cosimo replies that Fabrizio has opened up precisely the discussion he was hoping for. Alluding to Fabrizio’s assurance that in a debate among friends no one should take offence at frank expressions of opinion, Cosimo asks Fabrizio to speak ‘without any hesitation’,22 just as he, Cosimo, intends to pose questions to Fabrizio without fear or reservation. Any ‘defence’ or ‘accusation’ Cosimo might utter will not be spoken with the intent of defending or accusing but only to learn from Fabrizio the truth. The ‘defence’ comes first. No one detested the ‘soft life [il vivere molle]’ more than his grandfather did, Cosimo asserts, or loved more the ‘rugged life [asprezza di vita]’ that Fabrizio praises. But Bernardo was born into an ‘age of such corruption [in tanta corruttela di secolo]’ that anyone trying actually to live that rugged and arduous life would have been scorned and maligned. Implied in Cosimo’s defence of his grandfather is that times change and 19 Serio, 222-23, 233. 20 Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra, 33. For brevity and convenience, one may translate ‘gentili uomini’ as ‘gentlemen’. As we shall see, however, in other contexts it has a more specific meaning for Machiavelli that may or may not apply to its use here. 21 Ibid., 34-36. 22 Ibid., 36: ‘sanza rispetto’, misleadingly translated as ‘without respect’ by Mansfield, 203.

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people must live according to the customs and standards of their time. This calls into question the very possibility of imitating the ancients, as Fabrizio insists Bernardo should have done. Machiavelli introduces here a little joke at Fabrizio’s expense when he has Cosimo say that, if anyone in Bernardo’s time ‘had been seen living on legumes and disdaining gold, as Fabrizio did, such a person would have been praised by few and followed by no one’.23 This ‘Fabrizio’ is not Fabrizio Colonna, of course, but, rather, Gaius Fabricius Luscinus, the legendary incorruptible Roman who refused to be bribed by Pyrrhus. This ancient Fabrizio was a man of the plebs and one of those unerringly virtuous Romans whom Machiavelli so loved to praise. That Machiavelli has Cosimo cite a ‘Fabrizio’ to illustrate the austere virtues of the old Romans already hints at the abyss between them and the modern, historical Fabrizio Colonna, despite the latter’s proprietary idealization of ‘my Romans’. Fabrizio insists he was referring not to the imitation of impossibly difficult things but to more humane things that are compatible with modern life and can still be emulated. ‘Never’, he declares, ‘will I depart from my Romans as models in any endeavour’.24 In response to Cosimo’s inquiry about which ancient customs Fabrizio would like to revive, he lists the following: ‘to honour and reward the virtues, not to scorn poverty, to respect the methods [modi] and institutions [ordini] of military discipline, to make citizens love each other, to live without factions, and to esteem private [interests] less than public [interests]’.25 Cosimo then issues a blunt challenge: he wants to know why it is, on the one hand, that you condemn those who do not follow the ancients in their actions, whereas, on the other hand, in war, which is your profession [arte] and in which you are considered excellent, one does not see that you have adopted any ancient practices [alcuno termine antico] or ones that bear even the slightest resemblance to them.

Fabrizio says he expected and welcomes this question and that, although he could answer it with an ‘easy defence [ facile scusa]’ of himself, he prefers to deal with it at length in order to give greater satisfaction to everyone present. 23 Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra, 37-38. 24 Lynch shows that Fabrizio does in fact depart from the Romans and from his own initial outline of topics for discussion. He also contends, rather implausibly, that this happens because Machiavelli transforms Fabrizio into a general prepared to f ight the enemy of the East, i.e., Christianity. See also Lynch’s translation, introduction, and ‘interpretive essay’ in Machiavelli, Art of War. 25 Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra, 38.

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To carry out such a project, he declares, preparations are necessary, and for the preparations to bear fruit and be recognized the ‘opportunity [occasione]’ must present itself. However, one who has made the preparations cannot be accused of ‘any negligence’ if the opportunity does not arise. This, Fabrizio claims, has been his fate. Because no occasione has ever come to enable me to show the preparations I have made to bring soldiery back to its ancient ways [ridurre la milizia negli antichi suoi ordini], if I have not done so I cannot be blamed by you or anyone else. I think this ‘defence [scusa]’ should suffice as a reply to your ‘accusation [accusa]’.

In its assumption that the possibility of imitating the ancients depends on the opportunity offered by the times, Fabrizio’s self-defence echoes Cosimo’s defence of his grandfather. Yet Cosimo’s sharp retort conveys more skepticism: ‘It would suffice if I were certain that the occasione has not arisen’.26 As becomes clear in the ensuing dialogue, the missing occasione – the failure of history to give Fabrizio the chance to revive Roman practices – is only part of his self-defence. Fabrizio then shifts the conversation to the reasons why he believes war should never be a full-time profession (an arte), why mercenaries are dangerous to the states that employ them, and why armies should consist of citizens who ply their civilian trades and professions (arti) in peacetime and go to war only when their country calls them. According to Fabrizio, men who practise war as a full-time profession ‘cannot live honourably from it [non possono vivere onestamente]’. Only ‘a republic or kingdom’ should practise war as an arte. No well-ordered republic or kingdom has ever allowed its citizens or subjects to engage in it as a full-time profession, and no ‘good man’ has ever done so. For no one will ever be judged ‘good’ who engages in an activity that forces him to be ‘rapacious, fraudulent, and violent’ in order to derive benefit from it at all times – in peace as well as in war. Those who practise war as a profession have no choice but to do so constantly, because the profession of war does not ‘feed them [non gli nutrisce]’ in times of peace. They are therefore compelled either to engage in ‘robberies, acts of violence, and killings’ against friends and enemies alike in order to ‘nourish’ themselves in peacetime or to trick their employers into making wars last longer. If peace does come and mercenary captains lose their stipends, they often turn their forces into freelance companies 26 Ibid., 39-40.

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(‘rizzano una bandiera di ventura’) that mercilessly plunder undefended territories. Fabrizio recalls the companies that extorted protection money from cities and inflicted great damage on those that refused to pay.27 Among the companies, he cites that of Francesco Sforza: In the time of our fathers, Francesco Sforza, in order to live in high style in peacetime, not only deceived the Milanese whose hired soldier he was, but also robbed them of their liberty and became their prince. All the other hired soldiers of Italy have been like him in that they practised war as their personal profession; and if they did not all become dukes of Milan through their evil deeds [le loro malignitadi], all the more do they deserve censure, because, without [achieving what Sforza did], they all share, were we to examine their lives, the same culpability [carichi].

As further examples of faithless and dangerous mercenaries, Fabrizio adduces Muzio Attendolo, Sforza’s father, and Braccio da Montone, both of whom betrayed Queen Joanna II of Naples. The causes of ‘such disorders’, he concludes, were ‘men who exercised the mercenary trade as their private profession [per loro propria arte]’.28 Cosimo expresses some puzzlement at this harsh critique of such legendary captains. He says he used to think of the professional military (the ‘arte del soldo’ – the paid military, but literally the ‘money trade’) as the ‘most excellent and honourable’ of all. Now, however, having heard Fabrizio’s denunciation of these renowned modern captains, he cannot understand why Caesar, Pompey, Scipio, Marcellus, and other Roman generals are held in such esteem and honoured as gods. Fabrizio begins his answer by reiterating his two basic principles: that ‘a good man’ cannot make the military his ‘arte’ and that ‘no well-ordered republic or kingdom has ever permitted its citizens or subjects to make it their ‘arte’. On these grounds, he affirms a fundamental distinction among the four Romans Cosimo cites. Caesar, Pompey, and all the others who came after the last Carthaginian war, ‘gained fame as valiant but not as good men’. The earlier generals, Scipio and Marcellus, both heroes of the struggle against Carthage, were both good and valiant men ‘because they did not make war their full-time profession [perché questi non presero lo esercizio della guerra per loro arte]’. For as long as the Republic was unstained by corruption, Fabrizio asserts, Roman nobles did not exploit 27 Ibid., 41-42. Caferro has studied the depredations and extortions inflicted on Siena by fourteenth-century companies. 28 Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra, 42-43.

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the military profession in peacetime to acquire power by violating the laws, despoiling the provinces, or ‘usurping tyrannical powers over their country [usurpando e tiranneggiando la patria]’. Nor did members of the non-noble classes ‘make themselves the clients of private citizens [aderirsi agli uomini privati]’ or participate in any ‘tyrannical assault [tirannico insulto]’ against the Republic in order to make a full-time living ‘in the profession of war [con l’arte della guerra]’. In that early time, captains and soldiers alike were more than happy, at war’s end, to return ‘to private life [alla vita privata]’, ‘each to his [civilian] profession [ciascuno tornava all’arte sua]’. And no one attempted to live from the spoils of war.29 A ‘well-ordered city’, like Rome before the middle of the second century BCE, should allow only the ‘publico’ – the state – to make war its ‘arte’.30 Once again, Cosimo is not satisfied. He accepts Fabrizio’s precepts as appropriate for republics. But what about princely states? Would not kings want to surround themselves with men who make war a full-time profession? No, Fabrizio replies, a well-ordered kingdom should flee from such men (he calls them, with some irony, ‘artefici’ – artisans!), because they ‘are, in and of themselves, the corruption of their king and in every way the agents of tyranny [solo essi sono la corruttela del suo re et in tutto ministri della tirannide]’. Kingdoms that tolerate them are not ‘bene ordinati’.31 Fabrizio explains that for centuries the Romans avoided the dangers of a permanent army that might make war its arte by rotating its ranks. Later, however, ‘first Octavian and then Tiberius, thinking more of their own power than of the public good, began to disarm the Roman people in order to rule them more easily’. To the same end, they created the Praetorian Guard, which became a permanent force exercising ‘la milizia per loro arte’ and soon aimed its ‘insolence’ against the emperors themselves, creating, removing, and even killing them at whim. From this disastrous ancient example, Fabrizio draws the conclusion that, when wars end, rulers who wish to live securely should not only want their infantry to return home to their civilian professions, but ‘must also want [debbe volere]’ their noble captains (‘principi’) to return ‘to governing their populations [governare i loro popoli]’ and ‘gentili uomini’ to return to the cultivation of their lands.32 Machiavelli chooses Fabrizio’s words carefully, emphasizing what kings should want and do, with the implication that they do not always want or 29 30 31 32

Ibid., 44-45. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 47-48. Ibid., 49-50.

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do what they should or, even if they do, often do not succeed in sending their armies home when wars end. Fabrizio’s mention of ‘principi’ and ‘gentili uomini’ echoes an important passage in book 1, chapter 55 of the Discourses on Livy where Machiavelli identifies these two categories of nobles and claims both to be inimical to republics. Observing that, alone in Europe, the German-Swiss cities have escaped the corruption of religion and ethics, he attributes this to their policy of ‘not permitting any citizen to live in the manner of a gentiluomo’ and maintaining instead ‘a level equality [una pari equalità] among their citizens’. Equality here is the absence of noble status and titles, or, put positively, equality before the law. Machiavelli asserts that these northern cities have remained free of the corruption pervasive in the rest of Europe because they are ‘extremely hostile [inimicissimi]’ to the ‘signori e gentil­ uomini’ in their region. Realizing that he needs to ‘clarify’ what he means by ‘gentiluomini’, Machiavelli defines them as those who live in idleness (‘oziosi’) on rental income from landed possessions, without engaging in direct cultivation of their lands or other effort to make a living. Such men, he says, are ‘pernicious’ in any republic or country. ‘Even more pernicious’, however, ‘are those who, in addition to possessing landed wealth, also rule over fortified towns [comandano a castella] and have subjects who obey them’. These are in effect feudal lords (‘princes’, as Fabrizio calls them in the Art of War, in their own territories). Machiavelli contends that in each region the strength or weakness of ‘gentiluomini’ and ‘signori di castella’ has determined the political geography of Italy. Their prominent presence in the Kingdom of Naples, the ‘Terra di Roma’ (more or less modern Lazio), the Romagna, and Lombardy is the reason why no republic or ‘civic life [vivere politico]’ has ever arisen in those regions, for ‘such kinds of men are hostile to all civilità’ – to civic life and republican governance. In the territories they dominate, republics are impossible and only monarchy is feasible. This is so because, where the ‘matter’ is so corrupt – the corruption here being the private power of feudal barons – that laws are insufficient to restrain it, a ‘greater force’ – the power of a king (‘una mano regia’) – is needed to rein in ‘the excessive ambition and corruption of the powerful’. Only by eliminating such nobles would it be possible to establish a republic in these areas; and, conversely, only by creating a landed aristocracy and giving them ‘castella e possessioni [fortified towns and lands]’ would it be possible to institute a principality in regions where ‘equality’ had previously prevailed.33 Machiavelli repeats the essence of this analysis in the 1520 Discourse on 33 Machiavelli, Discorsi, 175-76.

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Florentine Affairs after the Death of the Younger Lorenzo de’ Medici. In Florence, he writes, where there is ‘very great equality’ among citizens, princely rule can be instituted only by introducing ‘inequality’ and creating many ‘nobili di castella e ville’. These newly minted nobles, ‘together with the prince, would keep the city and the entire region suffocated with arms and with their followers [tenessino con l’armi e con l’aderenzie loro suffocata la città e tutta la provincia]’.34 These are the two principal assets – arms and a following, the latter ranging from factions to private armies – with which gentiluomini and signori di castella sometimes sustain a prince’s power or, as Fabrizio explains, sometimes escape the prince’s control. Knowing now how Machiavelli understood the term ‘gentiluomini’, we can wonder what he meant to suggest in adding the (perhaps only apparently) insignificant detail that, visiting in Florence, Fabrizio wished ‘to see again some gentili uomini with whom in the past he had been associated’. In emphasizing the danger to the security of a prince or a republic of powerful warrior nobles who refuse to go home when wars end, who demand stipends in peacetime, and who command private armies, Fabrizio describes dysfunctions of the arte della guerra that come uncomfortably close to his own situation. The Colonna themselves were gentiluomini and signori di castella with extensive landed estates and jurisdiction over territories and populations. Although Fabrizio does not initially admit this, they – and he – were among those who should have returned to governing their ‘subjects’ in peacetime. Cosimo is quick to point this out, albeit indirectly. Again praising Fabrizio’s ‘ragionamento’ and claiming never to have thought of these matters in this way, he confesses to still more doubts prompted by his awareness that ‘many signori and gentili uomini support themselves in peacetime through military activities, such as your peers [come sono i pari vostri] who take regular stipends [provisioni] from rulers and cities’.35 Fabrizio does not deny it and adds that keeping cavalry (‘genti d’arme’) permanently employed is a ‘corrupt and not a good system’ because ‘these men who make war their profession […] would give rise to a thousand problems’ every day in the states that employ them if they had large enough contingents of soldiers. Most of them, being relatively few in number and unable to constitute real armies, ‘cannot often do serious damage. Nonetheless, they have done so many times, as I told you happened with Francesco Sforza and his father and with Braccio [da Montone] of Perugia. So I do not 34 Discursus florentinarum rerum post mortem iunioris Laurentii Medices, in Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra, 631-32. 35 Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra, 50-51.

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approve of this custom of keeping cavalry full time; it is corrupt and can cause great problems’.36 Fabrizio’s twice-expressed negative judgement of Francesco Sforza stands in sharp contrast with what Machiavelli had written about Sforza some years earlier in chapter 7 of The Prince. There he had distinguished between those who become princes through virtù and their own arms and those who become princes through fortuna and the arms of others. Sforza was Machiavelli’s example – indeed, his only modern example – of a prince who gained his state ‘con una grande sua virtú’ and who rose ‘from a private station to become duke of Milan’.37 But this sentence in The Prince quietly overlooks the nature of Sforza’s ‘private station’, which was, of course, that of a professional mercenary and feudal lord who possessed expansive territories and a private army. In the Art of War, Sforza becomes one of those ‘pernicious’ signori di castella whose private interests undermine states, both republics and kingdoms, and weaken their defences. Machiavelli further elaborated this more critical perspective on Sforza in the Florentine Histories.38 Fabrizio does finally admit that he too is complicit in this ‘ordine corrottissimo’ because he accepts the peacetime ‘stipends [provisioni] reserved for me and other captains’. Instead of hiring paid professionals, wise republics and kings should employ their own citizens as military commanders and should want them to return home, each to his ‘arte’, after the conclusion of a war. But he quickly retreats from this admission of complicity by offering a second exculpatory justification (the first being the absence of the occasione) for his failure to break away from the corrupt system he has just described. He now denies, in a surprising reversal, that he has ever practised war as a profession, a denial that patently contradicts the reality of the historical Fabrizio: ‘Because you have cited me’, he tells Cosimo, I wish to take myself as an example [io voglio essemplificare sopra di me]. I tell you that I have never practised war as a profession [non aver mai usata la guerra per arte], because my arte is to govern my subjects and defend them, and, in order to be able to defend them, to love peace and to know how to make war. And my king rewards and esteems me not so much for my understanding of war as for my ability to advise him in peace.

36 Ibid., 52. 37 Machiavelli, Il principe, 40. 38 See my ‘Cosimo de’ Medici and Francesco Sforza in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories’.

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And with that, Fabrizio declares that he shall have no more to say on the subject and that, if Cosimo and the other interlocutors are not satisfied with this answer, they should ask someone else for a better one.39 The issue evidently puts him uneasily on the defensive. This is a crucial moment in Machiavelli’s construction, and deconstruction, of the figure of Fabrizio. He has him stumble into self-deception and denial in defending himself with the argument that he is not, after all, a professional soldier. Fabrizio’s claim that he has ‘subjects’ to ‘govern and defend’ underscores the reality of the historical Fabrizio Colonna’s social and political status as a feudal lord. He is, in fact, one of those signori di castella who should have – but too often did not – return home to govern and defend their territories and subjects when wars ended, but also one of those ‘pernicious’ nobles whose ‘excessive ambition and corruption’ destroy republics and threaten princes. The fictional Fabrizio’s tardy and hesitant inclusion of himself among the captains who fail to go home at war’s end suggests that the historical Fabrizio neglected the responsibilities of governance and defence of his territories. Moreover, in claiming that his king – presumably he means Ferdinand of Spain, who was also king of Naples – rewards him more for his advice in peacetime than for his expertise in war, Fabrizio also alludes to the contradiction between the solemnly declared obligation of loyalty to ‘his’ sovereign and the bewildering multitude of rulers that the historical Fabrizio served as mercenary captain. The fictional Fabrizio echoes the delusions and self-serving idealizations of Italy’s noble and feudal elites (as Castiglione similarly lets some of his speakers do in the Libro del Cortegiano40). But he also conveys Machiavelli’s judgement that, far from governing and defending ‘their’ populations, these full-time professional captains too often became ‘rapacious, fraudulent, and violent’ threats to the states they claimed to serve while at the same time making impossible the citizen armies Fabrizio claims to admire. At the end of the seventh and last book of the Art of War, Fabrizio returns yet again, this time unprompted and on his own, to the accusation directed at him in book 1 and offers a third explanation – ‘for my further justification [per piú mia giustificazione]’ – of his inability to introduce the military reforms he trumpets. He now insists that reviving ancient military practices is possible only for ‘princes’ of states large enough to assemble armies of 15,000 to 20,000 men from among their own subjects. For a captain with a smaller army, ‘nothing is more difficult’. Even the most excellent 39 Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra, 53. 40 See my ‘Arms and Letters’.

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commanders would be unable to create good armies ‘in a foreign country [in una provincia aliena] full of corrupt men unaccustomed to honourable obedience’. Fabrizio insists he could not have created a well-disciplined army, because ‘the only armies I have ever commanded or can command are foreign [ forestieri], composed of men loyal, not to me, but to others. I leave it to you to decide if among such soldiers it is possible to introduce the reforms of which I have spoken today’. Machiavelli may allude here to the Spanish troops the historical Colonna commanded, although his forces also included Italian soldiers. Whoever his troops were, Fabrizio laments their lack of loyalty to him. ‘What can I promise that would induce them to love or fear me out of respect [con reverenza], when, at war’s end, nothing causes them to feel any common purpose with me [convenire meco]?41’ Although Fabrizio presents this as an unavoidable circumstance over which he had no control, Machiavelli’s point is surely that this was intrinsic to the system of professional, mercenary arms in which Fabrizio Colonna willingly participated. Machiavelli’s Fabrizio bitterly denounces the laziness, immorality, and lack of discipline and obedience in the soldiers he commanded and, by implication, in all modern soldiers in mercenary companies like his own. In the end, he also blames the princes of Italy for the lack of military preparedness that left them and their states ‘prey to whoever attacked them. From this resulted the terrifying events, sudden flights, and astonishing defeats of 1494; and in this way three powerful Italian states [Naples, Milan, and Venice] have been repeatedly sacked and devastated’. 42 The fictional Fabrizio’s righteous indignation must ring hollow, however, when we recall that the historical Fabrizio fought with France’s invading army in 1494 and subsequently with the armies of Spain. His several self‘justifications’ evince desperate denial in which he points the finger of blame at everything and everyone – the missing occasione, the insufficient numbers of his forces, the deficient loyalty of the soldiers, and, finally, Italy’s indolent princes – except himself. Yet his indictment in book 1 of professional captains who make war their arte had already placed much of the responsibility for Italy’s catastrophe on freelance military captains like himself. The Fabrizio of Machiavelli’s dialogue has more than one voice: while he advocates the reforms Machiavelli himself promoted, he also represents the inability of Italy’s warrior nobles to acknowledge their precarious loyalties, their choice of private advantage over public good, and their complicity in Italy’s subjugation to foreigners. The Art of War 41 Machiavelli, L’Arte della guerra, 283-85. 42 Ibid., 287.

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artfully unmasks the willful blindness of Fabrizio’s class of ‘gentlemen’ military captains.

Bibliography Anglo, Sydney, Machiavelli: A Dissection (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969). Black, Robert, Machiavelli (London: Routledge, 2013). Butters, Humfrey, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence, 1502-1519 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Caferro, William, Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Cerretani, Bartolomeo, Ricordi, ed. by Giuliana Berti (Florence: Olschki, 1993). Colish, Marcia L., ‘Machiavelli’s Art of War: A Reconsideration’, Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998), 1151-68. Fachard, Denis, ed., Consulte e pratiche, 1505-1512 (Geneva: Droz, 1988). —, ‘Implicazioni politiche nell’Arte della guerra’, in Niccolò Machiavelli politico storico letterato, ed. by Jean-Jacques Marchand (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1996), 149-73. Hörnqvist, Mikael, ‘Machiavelli’s Military Project and the Art of War’, in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. by John M. Najemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112-27. Lowe, Kate J.P., Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy: The Life and Career of Cardinal Francesco Soderini (1453-1524) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Lynch, Christopher, ‘The Ordine Nuovo of Machiavelli’s Arte della guerra: Reforming Ancient Matter’, History of Political Thought 31 (2010), 407-25. Machiavelli, Niccolò, Art of War, ed. and trans. by Christopher Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). —, L’Arte della guerra. Scritti politici minori, ed. by Jean-Jacques Marchand, Denis Fachard, and Giorgio Masi (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2001). —, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. by Giorgio Inglese (Milan: Rizzoli, 1984). —, Legazioni. Commissarie. Scritti di governo, vols. 4 and 6, ed. by Denis Fachard and Emanuele Cutinelli-Rèndina (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2006 and 2011). —, Opere, 3 vols., ed. by Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1997-2005). —, Il principe, ed. by Giorgio Inglese (Turin: Einaudi, 1995). Mallett, Michael, Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (London: Bodley Head, 1974).

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Mansfield, Harvey C., ‘An Introduction to Machiavelli’s Art of War’, in Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 191-218. Najemy, John M., ‘Arms and Letters: The Crisis of Courtly Culture in the Wars of Italy’, in Italy and the European Powers: The Impact of War, 1500-1530, ed. by Christine Shaw (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 207-38. —, ‘Cosimo de’ Medici and Francesco Sforza in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories’, in The Medici: Citizens and Masters, ed. by Robert Black and John E. Law (Florence: Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2015), 349-64. Petrucci, Franca, ‘Colonna, Fabrizio’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 27 (1982): http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/fabrizio-colonna (Dizionario-Biografico)/. Sacco Messineo, Michela, ‘La funzione del dialogo nell’Arte della guerra’, in Cultura e scrittura di Machiavelli. Atti del convegno di Firenze-Pisa, 27-30 ottobre 1997 (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1998), 597-624. Senesi, Maria Enrica, ‘Niccolò Machiavelli, l’Arte della guerra e i Medici’, Interpres, 8 (1988), 297-309. Serio, Alessandro, Una gloriosa sconfitta: i Colonna tra papato e impero nella prima età moderna (1431-1530) (Rome: Viella, 2008). Shaw, Christine, The Political Role of the Orsini Family from Sixtus IV to Clement VII: Barons and Factions in the Papal States (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo, 2007). Verrier, Frédérique, ‘Machiavelli e Fabrizio Colonna nell’Arte della guerra: il polemologo sdoppiato’, in Niccolò Machiavelli politico storico letterato, ed. by Jean-Jacques Marchand (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1996), 175-87.

About the Author John M. Najemy, Emeritus Professor of Late-Medieval and Renaissance History, Cornell University



A Clash of Dukes Cosimo I de’ Medici, Wilhelm of Cleves, and the ‘guerra di Dura’ of 15431 Maurizio Arfaioli Abstract On August 24, 1543, at the end of three hours of vicious f ighting, the army of Emperor Charles V stormed the heavily fortified town of Düren in modern North Rhine-Westphalia. The unexpected fall of Düren (‘Dura’ in Italian vernacular) – held by many to be impregnable by assault – marked the spectacular and sudden conclusion of the rebellion of Duke Wilhelm of Cleves against the Imperial authority, causing a sensation throughout Europe. Among the protagonists of that bloody day were the soldiers and officers of the regiment of Florentine infantry attached to the Imperial army. This essay will outline the history of the participation of the Medici troops in the 1543 campaign in Northern Europe – a conflict that was destined to be remembered for a long time in Italy as the ‘guerra di Dura’. Keywords: bastioned trace, early modern epic, trace italienne, pike-andshot, military history

1 I wish to thank all the friends and colleagues who helped me while I was writing this article, in particular: Lorenz Böninger, Andrea Gáldy, Lisa Kaborycha, Daniela Lamberini, Roberta Piccinelli, and Patrizia Urbani. Thanks are also due to the Stadt- und Kreisarchiev Düren and in particular to Berit Arentz, who kindly provided me with the information and materials I needed. Finally, I wish to acknowledge once more my everlasting debt to my late mentor Michael Mallett, a true scholar who made excellence seem easy to achieve.

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_arfa

162 Maurizio Arfaioli

I sing of Charles, forever holy and august, His wrath against the Duke of Guelders, And of every broken and burned palace and wall Of Düren, and of its grave, horrendously loud ruin.2 G. Magi, Cinque primi canti della guerra di Fiandra, I, 5

The political and diplomatic consequences of the 1543 Genoa meeting between the Duke of Florence, Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574) (Figure 1), and his liege lord Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) have been extensively studied from the Florentine point of view.3 This is hardly surprising, since the ensuing restitution to Cosimo I of the citadels of Florence and Livorno, occupied by Imperial troops in the aftermath of Alessandro de’ Medici’s murder (6 January 1537), marked a veritable turning point in the history of ducal Florence. However, up to now very little attention has been devoted to the meeting’s military consequences and to the Florentine military contribution to the early stages of what the German historian Karl Brandi (1848-1946) defined as Charles V’s ‘Grand Plan’ of 1543. 4 By the time of his momentous journey by sea to Genoa – where he arrived on 25 May 1543 – the Emperor was a man in great need. Following the disastrous outcome of his seaborne expedition against Algiers in 1541, Charles V’s international prestige was in tatters. He had spent the best part of the previous year watching as his hereditary domains in Spain, Austria, and the Low Countries were attacked by France and its allies – a dangerous front that ranged from rebellious princes of the Holy Roman Empire to the mighty Ottoman Empire.5 And in fact the Emperor’s arrival in Genoa was the just the first step of an ambitious strategy by means of which Charles V intended to re-establish his authority and his reputation, beginning from where they were most directly and dangerously challenged: the Habsburg Low Countries. The first item on Charles V’s agenda was to put an end to the rebellion of young Duke Wilhelm (1516-1592) (Figure 2), ruler (from 1539) of the united duchies of Cleves, Jülich, and Berg. Following the death of his distant relative Charles II (1467-1538), Duke of Guelders, the Duke of Cleves had challenged 2 ‘Canto del sacro CARLO e sempre Augusto, / contra il Duca di Ghelleri il furore; / e ogni palazzo, e mur rotto e combusto / di DURA, e ‘l grave, horrendo alto romore.’ Magi, 7r. 3 Spini, 195-214. 4 Brandi, 450-86. 5 For a general overview of the military situation, see Tracy, 183-87; Knecht, 210-17; and Black, 80-81.

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A Cl ash of Dukes

Figure 1 Bronzino – Portrait of Cosimo

Figure 2 Heinrich Aldegrever – Portrait

I de’ Medici, 1543, Florence,

of Wilhelm of Cleves, 1540,

Uffizi Gallery

Museum Zitadelle, Jülich

the Emperor’s rights over the inheritance of the duchy of Guelders and of the county of Zutphen. To make good his claims, Duke Wilhelm had first played the English card, marrying his sister Anne (1515-1557) to one of Charles V’s greatest rivals, King Henry VIII (1491-1547). After the controversial annulment (9 July 1540) of Anne’s six-month marriage with the King of England, William allied himself with France, assisting the Valois troops in their attacks against the Habsburg Netherlands. Furthermore, having openly embraced the Lutheran faith, William had sought admission to the Schmalkaldic League, threatening to place a Protestant and pro-French wedge between Charles V’s hereditary domains in the Low Countries and the lands of the Holy Roman Empire (Figure 3). Yet, given the level of overextension reached by the Habsburg forces and the dire state of Imperial finances, to achieve that aim before the end of the 1543 campaigning season the Emperor would need the financial and military support of his Italian subjects and allies. Seizing the opportunity, Cosimo I rushed to Genoa and offered Charles V 150,000 scudi and an infantry colonnello 2000 men strong in support of his expedition, receiving in exchange the keys to the citadels of Florence and Livorno – and with them, full sovereignty for the duchy of Florence. Florentine money was more than welcome, of course, but the other half of Cosimo I’s offer was of great interest as well, because the Duke was in control of one of the largest and best recruiting areas in the whole peninsula.

164 Maurizio Arfaioli Figure 3 Map of the Rhineland Campaign of 1543

A colonnello was the Italian equivalent of a German Regiment: an autonomous administrative and tactical unit composed of a variable number of companies, each led by a captain and placed under the command of a colonel.6 The colonnello raised in Florentine territory was to be made up of ten companies, each composed of 200 men, and was to be led by Camillo Colonna (?-1558), one of the leading Italian military entrepreneurs in Imperial service.7 6 The term ‘colonnello’ indicated both the unit and its commander. To avoid confusion, in the present article the English word ‘colonel’ will be used when referring to the commander, the equivalent Italian word when referring to the unit. On the topic, see Arfaioli, Black Bands, 12-15. 7 On the life and career of Camillo Colonna, signore of Zagarolo, see Petrucci, ‘Colonna, Camillo’.

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As commander and main contractor of his unit, the choice of his subcontractors, the captains, was generally a colonel’s prerogative. However, owing probably to the considerable hurry and to the need to please Cosimo I, Charles V allowed the Duke to select five captains – Morgante da Castiglione, Giovanni da Pescia, Giordano Orsini8 (1525-1564), Count Achille Bernardini della Massa, and Ercole Ballotta. Colonna chose the other five himself: Fazio da Pisa9 (?-1543), the Count of Ghiaggiolo,10 Lanzino dal Borgo, Caruso Fermiano, and Count Ugo da Cesena. Yet, the involvement of the Florentine military in the recruitment of Colonna’s colonnello did not stop there. Since his rise to power, Cosimo I had managed to establish an effective monopoly over Tuscan military entrepreneurship at all its levels. Not only was it illegal to raise troops in Florentine territory without a ducal patent but also those willing to enlist had to be already members of the territorial bande of the ducal infantry militia.11 The bande’s captains acted either as middlemen or directly as subcontractors, as in the case of Morgante da Castiglione, who at the time was the captain of the ducal banda of Pescia. Furthermore, if the desired quota was not reached (which was always the case with large orders of troops destined to serve far from home) only the Duke could order his local officials to locate suitable candidates and convince them to enlist – or, if everything else failed, order them to do so. The soldiers of the newly formed unit may have served under the Imperial flag, but they were and remained men of the Duke of Florence. In addition to the presence in the colonnello of many of the intermediate cadres (captains, sergeants, corporals, and so on) of the bande under which the men regularly trained and served, the cohesion of the unit would be enhanced by the presence in the Imperial army of the Florentine forces’

8 As a scion of the Orsini of Monterotondo (the same branch to which Clarice Orsini, wife of Lorenzo il Magnifico, had belonged), Giordano was a distant relative of Cosimo I and would have a distinguished career in Medici service up to 1551. In that year he broke with both the Medici and the Empire and entered French service. 9 Though Fazio had been a soldier of Giovanni de’ Medici (Cosimo I’s father), in the days that followed Alessandro’s murder, Fazio held the key citadel of Livorno (of which he was castellan) for the Emperor and not for the new Duke. The loose-tongued Fazio had afterwards become a source of constant embarrassment for Cosimo I in his native Pisa, and in 1542 the Duke had him arrested and put on trial. His appointment probably did not please the Duke at all. See Spini, 83, 98, 122, 124, 208, 209. 10 Probably Count Giacomo Malatesta di Sogliano (1530-1600). 11 On the Florentine bande, see the now badly outdated but well-documented work of Ferretti, 1:248-75 and 2:58-80.

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lieutenant general, the experienced Stefano Colonna12 (?-1548). Upon Charles V’s direct request, Cosimo I had reluctantly agreed to temporarily release from his service his trusted top-ranking general so that he could serve as maestro di campo generale (field-marshal-general) of the Imperial army. Finally, the level of the importance attached by Cosimo I to the success of Charles V’s expedition was highlighted by the numerous courtiers and soldiers in Medici service who joined the Imperial army as venturieri (gentlemen adventurers) serving at their own expense. Among these were two of the handful of people who would enjoy Cosimo I’s favour and trust (and, maybe, his affection) throughout his reign: his cameriere segreto (gentleman of the chamber) Leone Santi from Carpi; and his favourite lancia spezzata13 (broken lance), Giovan Luigi ‘Chiappino’ (the Bear) Vitelli14 (1519-1575). In fact, it is to Vitelli’s volunteering in the 1543 campaign that we owe the only printed account detailing the role played by Florentine troops in Lower Germany. In 1551 the young Girolamo Magi (1528-1572) tried to win the patronage of Vitelli (by then a rising star at the Medici court) by publishing his Cinque primi canti della guerra di Fiandra, an epic poem in which he celebrated Chiappino’s youthful exploits during the 1543 campaign. Being a jurist by training and philologist by vocation,15 Magi tried to compensate for his weak poetic talent by filling his halting lines with scholarly references and historically accurate details taken from sources that are lost to us today. Magi’s efforts to carve a position for himself at the court of Cosimo I met with very little success, but his canti remain a precious (though convoluted) source of information on the 1543 campaign.16 12 Cosimo I was and would remain throughout his reign captain-general of all Florentine forces. In ducal service since 1541, Stefano di Francesco Colonna (from the Palestrina branch of the Colonna family) was considered one of the best Italian soldiers of his time; Petrucci, ‘Colonna, Stefano’. 13 Once used to indicate the chief of a lancia (the basic sub-unit of heavy cavalry) whose mercenary company had been disbanded and was now being paid directly by a state, by the time of Cosimo I the term ‘lancia spezzata’ had acquired a new meaning and now referred to a personal retainer (not even necessarily a soldier) of a prince. 14 See Arfaioli, ‘Alla destra del duca’, 271-78; and Promis, 428-46. 15 Girolamo Magi (or Maggi) from Anghiari was gifted with a truly versatile intellect. A pupil of the philologist Francesco Robortello (1516-1567) and an admirer of Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), who wrote the preface of his canti, Magi would eventually achieve some success as a military architect. Sent to Cyprus in 1571 by the Republic of Venice, Magi was among the defenders of Famagusta when the city fell to the Turks. Brought to Constantinople, Magi died there, executed after an unsuccessful escape attempt. See Carpané; and Lamberini, 26-34. 16 In fact, only the third and fourth canti are devoted to the events presented in this article. The first two narrate the otherworldly journey of Chiappino Vitelli to Mars’s Heaven, and the last deals with a prophetic dream that Charles V had.

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Charles V crossed the Alps at the head of a small army of 4000 Spanish, 4000 Italians, and 600 light cavalry, reaching Innsbruck on 9 July 1543. After crossing the Danube at the height of Ulm on 20 July, the Imperial army marched towards Speyer, where on 28 July it was joined by the German troops whose enlistment Charles V had ordered before leaving Spain and which amounted to about 16,000 infantry and 6000 heavy cavalry. On 5 August, burdened with a formidable artillery train, the massive Imperial army began to descend the Rhine valley to Bonn, where on 18 August it mustered in preparation for the invasion of the duchy of Jülich. The Emperor was impressed favourably by the warlike appearance of the Florentine troops. However, as Captain Giordano Orsini put it (20 August), thanks to Camillo Colonna’s meanness, Cosimo I’s men had marched through Germany ‘on a pilgrimage like so many friars’. In other words, the soldiers were positively starving, and their pockets were empty. Yet there was also some good news: word was that the army was about to attack the large and wealthy town of Düren – ‘Dura’ in Italian early modern vernacular. The Italian soldiers counted on harvesting a rich booty there.17 Thus on 22 August the Imperial army camped in sight of the walls of Düren, a town that Giovanbattista Ricasoli (1504-1572), Bishop of Cortona and Florentine Ambassador in the Imperial camp, described in a letter to Cosimo I as being about twice the size of Empoli18 – a town near Florence that at the time counted about 2500 inhabitants. Early the following day Charles V called upon Düren’s garrison and inhabitants to surrender and swear allegiance to him as the sole legitimate Duke of Guelders. Having received a scornfully negative answer,19 the Emperor ordered preparations to be made to take the town by storm. His resolve was strengthened by the arrival of the 12,000 infantry and 2000 cavalry led by René de Châlon, Prince of Orange (1519-1544), which completed the town’s encirclement. As the engravings executed by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677) almost a century after the events narrated here show in detail,20 Düren’s defences were 17 Giordano Orsini to Cosimo I, Bonn, 20 August 1543, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 362, fol. 285r. 18 Giovanni Battista Ricasoli to Cosimo I de’ Medici, Düren, 26 August 1543, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 166r. 19 According to the Protestant historian Johannes Sleidanus, resistance to the Imperial army was greatly encouraged by the rumour (still widespread in Germany) that the Emperor had in fact drowned while returning from Algiers and that an impostor had taken his place. See Sleidanus, 207. 20 After the siege of 1543, Düren lost most of its strategic importance, and the town defences were never upgraded. On Wenceslaus Hollar and Düren, see Appel, 23-28, 33-46.

168 Maurizio Arfaioli Figure 4 Wenceslaus Hollar – Plan of Düren, 1647, Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek; the circle highlights the Kölntor – the ‘Gate of Cologne’

a good example of the technical solutions elaborated in northern Europe to counter the growing weakness of traditional defensive architecture in the face of the increasingly destructive power of modern heavy artillery (Figure 4). Though it eventually turned out to be an architectural dead end, in the course of the first half of the sixteenth century that style of fortifications – based on reinforced, expanded versions of pre-existing architectural models – had enjoyed considerable success in areas such as Germany and England that, unlike Italy, had not been exposed to systematic large-scale invasions and prolonged high-intensity conflicts.21 Düren was surrounded by medieval-style walls – that is tall, vertical, and relatively thin walls punctuated with round towers. However, Düren’s city walls had been rampired from the inside (that is, earth had been piled up behind them), and from the outside they were surrounded by two deep 21 On the evolution of the round bastion and the birth of the trace italienne, see Parker, 26-28; and Duffy, 3-7.

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Figure 5 Wenceslaus Hollar – Plan of Düren (detail); the fortifications in front of the Kölntor were not rebuilt, but they could not have differed much from those guarding the other town gates – in this case, the Holtzpfort

ditches with steep sides that Bishop Ricasoli esteemed to be ‘about threecane wide [about 9 metres] with water 2 ½-arms deep [c. 1.40 metres]’, divided by a prominent terreplein that prevented the enemy artillery from hitting the base of the enceinte.22 Further, the town’s gates were guarded by sturdy roundels – semi-circular bastions that projected from the city walls and worked as effective artillery platforms (Figure 5). Garrisoned with five of the best companies of Duke Wilhelm’s Geldrian infantry (more than 1500 men) plus one of cavalry and placed under the authority of governor Renaud de Mérode (?-1543), by local standards Düren was believed to be impregnable by assault and had enough supplies to resist a prolonged siege. In effect, according to Duke Wilhelm’s plans, under the walls of Düren the Emperor was meant to lose time, troops, and, possibly, face, thus giving time for winter and the French to come to his rescue. Despite Düren’s impressive fortifications, however, Charles V had good reason to believe that his hopes of quickly overrunning the town’s defences were not unfounded. He knew he could count on large numbers of experienced soldiers who had cut their teeth on the deadly angular geometries of the trace italienne. 22 ‘larghi circa tre canne con acqua di braccia 2 et ½ di fondo’; ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 166r-v.

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And so it was that on 24 August 1543 (St. Bartholomew’s Day), at dawn, about 30 pieces of heavy artillery opened fire on the tract of the city walls that the previous day’s reconnaissance had identified as the most exposed: the one at the left of the Kölntor (the ‘Gate of Cologne’). For long hours a squadron of crack Spanish and Italian troops – the two nationi of the Imperial army with the best record when it came to assault operations (not to mention those in the greatest need of plunder) – waited for the attack signal, while the Imperial artillery pounded Düren’s defences. Aligned under the walls of Düren, Florentine soldiers were in the limelight. Following the sudden resignation of the other Italian Colonel – the Genoese Antonio Doria (1495-1577) – the Florentine troops of Colonna’s colonnello formed the bulk of the Italian arm of the assault column. And, as they joined the heavily armed and armoured ranks of young Italian and Spanish gentlemen soldiers who (as it was customary) had volunteered to spearhead the assault, the Florentine venturieri found themselves side by side with the scions of some of the more illustrious Italian dynasties. That day the ranks included even the young Duke of Camerino (and future Duke of Parma) Ottavio Farnese23 (1521-1586), who was still working hard to win the respect and the trust of his father-in-law Charles V. However, the progress of the Imperial batteries proved to be very slow. Two hours into the afternoon, the fire of the Imperial artillery, directed by the Marquis of Marignano Giovanni Giacomo Medici24 (1497-1555), had opened a breach in Düren’s walls at half-height, large enough for three men to pass side by side. At that point the tension of waiting, the thirst for loot, and the wish to prove their worth to the Emperor, who observed the events from the top of a nearby hill, prevailed over military discipline. Vying with each other, Italians and Spanish threw themselves against Düren’s defences in almost complete disorder. Fortunately for Charles V’s men, the bombardment had already highlighted the limitations and weaknesses of the town’s northern-style fortifications. Though they permitted a wide range of fire, hollow round 23 Magi, 86v. Caught between the nepotistic ambitions of his grandfather Pope Paul III and the distrust of his father-in-law Charles V (whose illegitimate daughter Margaret he had married in 1538), Ottavio had been wounded during the Algiers expedition in 1541. Firmly at the side of Ottavio, Chiappino Vitelli probably recognized his own elder brother Paolo (1519-1574), military adviser and bodyguard to the young Duke of Camerino. 24 Missaglia, 126. In spite of his surname, the Marquis of Marignano was a Milanese soldier with no family ties to the Medici of Florence. Nevertheless, twelve years after the events, Giangiacomo Medici would lead Florentine armies to victory during the Siena War (1554-1555). On the life and career of Giovanni Giacomo Medici, see Giannini.

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Figure 6 Wenceslaus Hollar – The Holtzpfort of Düren, 1664, Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale

bastions were exposed and vulnerable to intense artillery fire and could neither provide nor receive an effective flanking fire. The well-aimed fire of Marignano’s batteries had inflicted serious damage to the tower and redoubt of the Gate of Cologne, causing a partial collapse which (by sheer chance) resulted in the death of Renaud de Mérode and most of his staff officers. The assailants were able to approach the crumbling tower and conquer it by escalade, using ladders and grapnels, or helping themselves with daggers or pike-heads fixed in fissures in the walls. In doing so, they gave rise to the legend of the wild men, half black and half brown, brought by the Emperor from faraway countries, who were capable of climbing any wall with their bare hands (Figure 6).25 Having secured that position, the Spanish and Italians soldiers then descended into Düren’s double moat, heading for the narrow breach. Wave after wave, hundreds of soldiers descended or climbed steep muddy ditchsides or advanced immersed up to their chests in stagnant water under intense artillery and arquebus fire, making their way among a rising number of dead and wounded. As they approached the breach, the assailants were showered with heavy stones and attacked with the fire of rudimentary flame-throwers, amid intense heat and the dense smoke emitted by trails of gunpowder that were set on fire by the defenders as the assault progressed. 25 Kohlrausch, 275.

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All the Spanish or Italians who managed to fight their way up the steep and unsteady ramp formed by the debris of the breached wall (rampired walls always collapsed outwards) were either killed on the spot or forced to withdraw by the Geldrians tenaciously defending the breach. For more than two hours the assault continued unabated, its outcome uncertain. As the Bishop of Cortona, an eyewitness of the event, put it: Our soldiers fought to their greatest disadvantage, and in spite of all that, as some of them went beyond the ditches, they were several times repelled and killed with greatest valour by the enemy. Nevertheless, they kept exposing themselves to the same danger. The most vicious assault seen, perhaps, for many years lasted three hours, with fortune showing herself favourable now to one, now to the other side. Finally, Italic and Hispanic valour overcame the nature of the site, which was indeed very difficult, and to everyone’s admiration they leapt at the wall, and finally entered the town.26

As usual, whether the Spanish or the Italians had the honour of having been the first to enter Düren’s breach would be bitterly disputed.27 Unsurprisingly, pro-Florentine sources maintain that the first man to jump down into the town through the high and narrow breach was Spinoso da Terni, a soldier in Cosimo I’s service,28 and that the first Italian flag planted on the spot was that of Giordano Orsini’s company, brandished by one Gallo d’Arezzo.29 Armed with sword and rotella (a small round shield), his corselet covered in blood and mud, the bearlike Chiappino Vitelli – ‘a gentleman more robust than all others’,30 as Magi put it – entered the breach in time to engage the 26 ‘Combattevano li nostri con grandissimo disavantaggio, et con tutto questo passando alcuni li fossi furono più volte ributtati et morti con grandissimo valore dalli inimici. Però sempre si rimettevono al medesimo pericolo. Per 3 hore durò il più aspro assalto che si sia fatto son forse molti anni, mostrandosi la fortuna hora a questa, hora a quella parte favorevole. In ultimo il valor Italico et Hispano sforzò la natura del sito certo dificillimo, et con grandissima admiratione di ciascuno saltorno alla muraglia et finalmente entrarono nella terra’; ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 166r-v. 27 Brantôme, 14-16. 28 Adriani, 215. 29 Magi, 84v. Gallo paid a high price for his bravery, as he was almost immediately knocked down by a shot in the genitalia. 30 ‘un signor degli altri il più robusto’; Magi, 7r. Magi’s words were not mere flattery. Mostly remembered today for his prodigious girth, in his young age Chiappino had been a big, muscular man known for his physical as well as martial prowess. Not by chance, Bartolomeo Ammannati thought about sculpting Chiappino in the guise of Hercules, and Lodovico Domenichi took inspiration from the story of Samson to create his device.

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defenders as they mounted the last, desperate resistance, ‘slashing open the skull to this, the side to that’.31 As the Emperor’s men began to pour into the city in growing numbers, the morale of Duke Wilhelm’s soldiers collapsed, and they started to run en masse towards the town’s opposing gate while the angry Spanish and Italian soldiers hacked at them mercilessly. Most of those who somehow managed to find their way out of Düren would be either killed in the ditches or hunted down like game by Orange’s cavalry.32 At the end of the day, more than 700 Geldrian soldiers lay dead, while Spanish and Italian casualties amounted to 120 dead and 300 wounded. In spite of the attentions of the Emperor’s personal physician Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564),33 most of the wounded would die in the following days. Among the Florentine ‘persons of account’ who had died in the assault was Captain Fazio, whose body Bishop Ricasoli saw with his own eyes lying in the inner moat, taken by death in the act of fighting ‘as a worthy man’.34 Leone Santi had seen his brother fall in front of him but had kept on advancing towards the breach, earning Camillo Colonna’s praise.35 Ultimately, the level of difficulty of the enterprise and the superb valour of the men who had just carried it out was effectively summed up by Bishop Ricasoli, who wrote to his master in Florence that the site could hardly have been stronger had it been provided with flanks – that is, with proper bastions. Further (added the bishop), had Düren been defended by just 300 Italian or Spanish soldiers, the Imperial army would never have taken it.36 Charles V granted those who had conquered Düren the right to sack it until sunset, placing as the only limit the safeguard of women and children, who were taken to safety within the town’s churches. As is often the case, civilian 31 ‘apre a questo le testa, a quello il f ianco / il gran CHIAPPIN senza trovar mai posa / e l’armatura ha tutta sanguinosa’; Magi, 93r. 32 Bishop Ricasoli’s account of the event constituted the main source for the narration of the sack of Düren furnished by Adriani, 212-13. For other first-hand accounts of the storming of Düren, see ASF, Mediceo del Principato 1852, fol. 41 r-v (also ASF, Medici Archive Project, Doc ID# 21428); Charles V to Mary of Hungary, Düren, 25 August 1543, in Compte Rendu, 132-35; and Brom, 135-51. For the local historiography, see Schiffers, ‘Die Eroberung Dürens’, 145-48, and ‘Eine Flugschrift’, 29; Van Laak, vols. 13, and 14. 33 ‘albis / linteolis tergi miserorum vulnera curat / ut pater, ut medicus Vesalio et astitit usque / insigni medico’: Falletti, 1547, fol. 32r. It is possible that the negotiations that would eventually bring Vesalius to the Studio of Pisa started on that occasion. 34 ‘in quanto huomo da bene’; ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 166v. 35 Camillo Colonna to Cosimo I de’ Medici, Düren, 25 August 1543, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 362, fol. 344 r. 36 ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 167r.

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casualties are not known, but though undoubtedly far from bloodless, the sack of Düren was in effect carried out in a rather thorough and orderly (if callous) manner, and it did not turn into an orgy of plunder, rape, and bloodshed, as it was often described in later sources.37 According to the Bishop of Cortona’s final estimates, the sack yielded about 70,000 scudi – which arrived not a moment too soon, because the Florentine soldiers ‘would have starved had it not been for the sack of Düren, where everyone gained something, whether a little or very much’.38 Among others, Giovanni da Pescia managed to accumulate enough cash to enable him to lend the bishop 250 scudi, to remit to Florence – 70 of which, Ricasoli noted, had been minted in Florence.39 For the rest, Charles V displayed considerable leniency towards the defeated: the Emperor had only two out of the numerous prisoners hanged on the spot, while four others had two fingers of the right hand cut off. Sunset put an end to the sack, but not to Düren’s misery. During the night a fire of unknown origin destroyed most of the town, forcing its inhabitants to seek refuge outside the walls, where they found themselves once again exposed to the greed and violence of the soldiery – this time in the guise of the Emperor’s German troops. By the time Charles V and his army resumed their march, on 27 August, Düren was reduced to a smoking ruin. ‘Certainly a pitiful sight, but worthy of such a great obstinacy’, concluded the good bishop. 40 The Emperor, however, had achieved the desired effect. The example set at Düren ensured that, as it arrived under the walls of Jülich (30 August) and Roermond (2 September), the Imperial army found the city gates open and their inhabitants willing to renew their oath of fidelity to Charles V. On 7 September, near Venlo, deserted by his subjects and by his allies, Duke Wilhelm himself stepped into the Imperial pavilion and knelt in front of Charles V, admitting his guilt and placing himself at the Emperor’s mercy. According to the terms of the Treaty of Venlo (signed the following day), William retained all his titles but agreed (among other things) to renounce his Lutheran faith and his claims over Guelders, forsake his French alliance

37 Nouveau Dictionnaire, 376-77; Froude, 279-80. 38 Giovanni Battista Ricasoli to Cosimo I de’ Medici, ‘dal campo’, 12 November 1543, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 191 r. 39 ‘si morivon di fame se non era il sacco di Dura, dove o poco o assai ciascuno ha guadagnato’; ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 168r. 40 ‘Spectacolo certamente miserando, ma condegno di tanta obstinatione’; ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 168r.

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and his marriage (by proxy) with Jeanne d’Albret (heiress to the crown of Navarre; 1528-1572), and marry into the Imperial family. 41 The relief provided by the sack of Düren to the Florentine rank and file proved brief. Thanks to their colonel’s greed, to the poor logistics of the Imperial army, and to the fact that many soldiers had not enlisted voluntarily, desertion was quickly becoming a serious issue among the Florentine troops. Stefano Colonna’s sudden departure (11 September) from the Imperial camp, and the disturbing news coming from home 42 that had prompted the Emperor to permit Colonna (and only him) to return to Florence, precipitated the events. To save the situation, on 12 September the captains of the Florentine colonnello decided to hold a parlamento (parley) with their soldiers. Gathering the troops in order to listen to their grievances and parley with them was a move that could have unexpected and dangerous outcomes – it could even trigger a mutiny. However, on that occasion military discipline, social cohesion, and the promise of some measure of fiscal relief for the time they were serving abroad kept the troops from clamouring openly. As the Bishop of Cortona was glad to report to his master, the Florentine soldiers in the end ‘all unitedly and together answered that they wanted to serve His Majesty faithfully and for as long as he wanted’. 43 However, that did not heal the growing rift between the Florentine troops and their commander, Camillo Colonna, who, moved by greed and pursuing his own personal agenda, systematically slandered Cosimo I’s soldiers, belittling their efforts and putting them in a negative light in front of the Emperor.44 Florentine money and troops were one of the pillars of the Habsburg power over the Italian peninsula. However, with the exception of his powerful father-in-law Don Pedro Álvarez de Toledo (1484-1553), Viceroy of Naples, 41 William of Cleves would marry Maria (1531-1581), daughter of Charles V’s brother (and future emperor) Ferdinand I. 42 Barely weeks after Charles V’s arrival in Genoa, the massive Ottoman fleet (more than 110 galleys) led by Hayreddin Barbarossa (c.1478-1546) had entered the Ligurian Sea. Only two days before the fall of Düren, a joint Franco-Ottoman force had conquered the city of Nice (22 August), and the Ottoman fleet was set to winter in the French harbour of Toulon – an unprecedented fact that boded ill for the extensive and vulnerable Tuscan coastline. Given the circumstances, Cosimo I asked the Emperor to send his troops home, but Charles V allowed only Stefano Colonna to return to Florence to organize the defence. 43 ‘tutti unitamente hanno risposto volere servire a Sua Maestà fedelmente et quanto a quella piacerà’; Giovanni Battista Ricasoli to Cosimo I de’ Medici, 12 September 1543, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 191v. 44 Giovanni Battista Ricasoli to Cosimo I de’ Medici, Valenciennes, 15 November 1543, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 333r.

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the Emperor’s Italian ministers at every step opposed the consolidation of Cosimo I’s power and his growing political weight and autonomy in the context of the Italian Habsburg system. Determined to press his advantage, Charles V moved his army into French territory, laying siege to the strategic stronghold of Landrecies (21 October). For all that, as more Spanish and German reinforcements poured into the Imperial camp, the already depleted Florentine unit was progressively withdrawn from the front line and did not play a major role in the campaign’s subsequent engagements. The case was different for the Florentine venturieri, who after Düren attached themselves to the Imperial light cavalry, largely formed by Ferrarese lancers under the command of Francesco d’Este45 (1516-1578). Brother to the Duke of Ferrara Ercole II d’Este (1508-1559) and already a soldier of renown, Francesco would also be the protagonist of the other epic poem written to celebrate the 1543 campaign: De bello Sicambrico libri IIII of Girolamo Falletti46 (1518-1564). On 25 October, the Florentine venturieri found themselves involved in the engagement that took place near the town of Guise, where Este’s corps was attacked by the French light cavalry under the command of Cosimo I’s personal nemesis (and distant cousin): Piero di Filippo Strozzi (1510-1558). 47 At the end of a furious mêlée, the Imperial cavalry – caught by surprise by the lightning sortie from Guise of Strozzi’s mounted arquebusiers, many of whom were Florentine exiles – was forced to withdraw in disorder, and its commander, Francesco d’Este, was captured without even having had the chance to put on his armour. A member of a traditionally pro-French Italian dynasty that had temporarily sided with the Empire out of political necessity, Francesco d’Este (who, after all, had been named after King Francis I) would be set free after only three months of captivity and without paying a ransom. Nevertheless, the capture of his poem’s hero at Guise forced the poet Girolamo Falletti to cut short his De bello Sicambrico at the capture of Düren. 48 A different destiny awaited the hero of Magi’s Cinque primi canti. 45 Falletti, 35v. 46 It is worth pointing out that in 1543 Falletti was a student at the University of Louvain and was personally involved in the defence of the city against the incursions of Duke Wilhelm’s ‘rebels’. See Pignatti. 47 One of the foremost Italian military commanders in French service, Piero was the son of Filippo Strozzi (1489-1538), a pro-Republican leader who had been captured by the Imperial troops at Montemurlo (1537) and had killed himself to avoid being handed over to Cosimo I. In the years that followed his father’s death Piero would become one of the driving forces behind France’s Italian strategy. 48 Unsigned avviso, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 4301, fol. 279r.

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Though his horse was wounded by a scimitar cut to its head, Chiappino managed to extricate himself and to rescue the Count of Carpegna (probably Pietro di Carpegna, 49 1514-1586), who had been captured by the enemy.50 Charles V’s move finally elicited the reaction of King Francis I (1494-1547), who made his appearance on the scene at the head of a massive army, which, on 28 October, was camped near Cateau-Cambrésis. For a while a direct clash between the Most Christian King and the Holy Roman Emperor seemed imminent. However, in the end Francis I contented himself with having been able to send reinforcements and supplies into Landrecies, while Charles V moved his army away from the city to engage him in battle and decided to withdraw (5 November) without taking further risks. After all, one Battle of Pavia (1525) was more than enough. Upon receiving news of Francis I’s strategic retreat, Charles V led the pursuit in person at the head of the Imperial vanguard, but in spite of violent skirmishes the Emperor was unable to prevent even the French rearguard from taking shelter behind the forest of Ardennes, together with the rest of the Valois army. Eager Chiappino was among the horsemen who rode up to the very fringes of the forest and in range of the French arquebusiers positioned there to cover the withdrawal of their host. On that occasion Vitelli was hit in the head and in a shoulder, but his sallet and pauldrons held fast, and he was not wounded.51 With the end of the campaigning season, the Emperor decided to abandon the siege of Landrecies, sending most of his troops to their winter quarters and discharging the rest. And so ‘the Italian troops, having been avariciously treated by their colonel, returned to Italy almost destroyed; men who, in spite of their having acquitted themselves well at the conquest of Düren, were not rewarded in any way’.52 The surviving venturieri did not return rich from the Low Countries either, but their participation in the Imperial campaign in Flanders on behalf of their duke would not pass unnoticed, and it would be the foundation of many successful careers in ducal service. After his successful debut at Düren, Chiappino Vitelli was one of the most successful Italian military commanders of his generation, becoming Captain General of the ducal cavalry (1555), Captain General of the ducal infantry 49 Count Pietro di Carpegna enjoyed a successful military and diplomatic career in Medici service, eventually becoming the sixth Grand Constable of the Order of Saint Stephen. 50 Magi, 62r. 51 Magi, 62v. 52 ‘le genti italiane, essendo dal loro colonnello state avaramente trattate, quasi distrutte se ne tornarono in Italia; le quali benché havessero fatto buona pruova nella presa di Dura, non furono in cosa alcuna riconosciute’; Adriani, 227.

178 Maurizio Arfaioli Figure 7 Daniel Specklin – The Citadel of Jülich, 1589, Museum Zitadelle, Jülich (detail); built after 1548 following the project of Italian architect Alessandro Pasqualini, the new citadel of Jülich is a perfect example of the alla moderna style of fortifications, with sloped, thick, low-profiling walls and arrow-shaped bastions which eliminated blind spots and created overlapping fields of fire

(1557), and first Knight (1562) and then first Grand Constable (1565) of the newly established Order of Saint Stephen. In 1567 Vitelli entered Habsburg service, becoming the first Italian General of the Army of Flanders. The pattern followed by Leone Santi’s career would be much less conspicuous. Throughout most of his active career messer Leone would figure just as the captain of one of the standing companies of the ducal light cavalry, but in fact he was the ‘eyes and ears’ of his master wherever they were most needed. In 1565, however, he was appointed first Grand Treasurer of the Order of Saint Stephen. The Duke of Florence would not forget the captains of the colonnello. Among the others, by 1547 Ercole Ballotta and Giovanni da Pescia would enter Cosimo I’s direct service as captains of two bande of the ducal infantry. In 1548, moreover, Captain Ercole married Maddalena di Francesco Bacci, sister of Nicolosa Bacci, Giorgio Vasari’s wife.53 And eventually, as far as Cosimo I was concerned, the considerable expenses and the risks he had taken by sending some of his best soldiers so far from Florence at a critical juncture had turned out to be a very good investment. Even though it was soon obscured by events of greater significance such as the Schmalkaldic War (1546-1547), for a brief time the star of 53 Lepri and Palesati, 13-14, 43-46, 49-51, 120.

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the ‘guerra di Dura’ (as the 1543 campaign in northern Europe was called in Italy) shone brightly in Italy and abroad. The sensational storming of Düren became one of the founding events of the Italian military narrative of the period and marked the successful debut of the Florentine troops on the international stage. It was an auspicious beginning for the ambitious and farreaching programme of institutional reforms and territorial expansion that would turn the duchy of Florence (and then the grand duchy of Tuscany) into one of the leading regional powers within the area of Habsburg hegemony. Nonetheless, while the fall of Düren sounded the death knell for Duke Wilhelm’s ambitions to emerge as a major autonomous political player in the Rhineland, it also produced an acceleration of the process of diffusion of the trace italienne beyond the Alps (Figure 7). Following his humiliating defeat, Duke Wilhelm became an admirer of the bastioned trace and in a matter of years had the defences of his states entirely updated, turning his capital city of Jülich into one of the foremost examples of alla moderna fortified cities of northern Europe.

Bibliography Manuscript Sources and Abbreviations Archivio di Stato, Florence (ASF) Mediceo del Principato 1852, 362, 4301 Medici Archive Project (MAP) Doc ID# 21428 Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960-2014) (DBI)

Printed Sources Adriani, Giovambattista, Istoria de’ suoi tempi (Florence: Giunti, 1587). Appel, Heinrich, Wenzel Hollar in Düren. Die topographischen darstellungen Dürens bis zum Jahre 1664 (Düren: Dürener Geschichtsverein, 1957). Arfaioli, Maurizio, ‘Alla destra del duca: Chiappino Vitelli nel contesto degli affreschi vasariani del Salone dei Cinquecento’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 51 (2007), 271-78. —, The Black Bands of Giovanni (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2005). Black, Jeremy, European Warfare,1494-1660 (London: Routledge, 2002). Brandi, Karl, Carlo V (Turin: Einaudi, 1961).

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Brantôme, Pierre de, Memoires de Messire Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantôme, I (Leyden: Chez Jean Sambix, 1666). Brom, Gisbert, ‘Een Italiaansch bericht over den laatsten Gelderschen Oorlog’, Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap, 35 (1914), 135-51. Carpané, Lorenzo, ‘Maggi, Girolamo’, in DBI, 67 (2006), 347-50. Compte rendu des séances de la Commission Royale d’Histoire, 9 (1857), 132-35. Duffy, Christopher, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1494-1660 (London: Routledge, 1997). Falletti, Girolamo, De Bello Sicambrico libri IIII (Venice: Manuzio, 1547). Ferretti, Jolanda, ‘L’organizzazione militare toscana durante il governo di Alessandro e Cosimo I de’ Medici’, Rivista Storica degli archivi Toscani, 1 (1929), 248-75, 2 (1930), 58-80. Froude, James Anthony, History of England: From the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, IV (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1858). Giannini, Massimo Carlo, ‘Medici, Giovanni Giacomo (detto il Medeghino)’, in DBI, 73 (2009), 77-81. Knecht, Robert Jean, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (London: Fontana Press, 1996). Kohlrausch, Friedrich, History of Germany from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1852). Laak, Ludwig Van, ‘Die Eroberung Dürens im Jahre 1543 – unter bes. Berücksichtigung neuer Quellen’, Heimatblätter (Düren), 13 (1935), 97-99, and 14 (1935), 107-10. Lamberini, Daniela, ‘Invenzioni fatali: gli ingegneri militari di Girolamo Magi (Maggi), da Anghiari (1528 ca.-1572), al servizio della Repubblica di Venezia’, Bollettino ingegneri, 7 (2007), 26-34. Lepri, Nicoletta, and Antonio Palesati, Fuori dalla corte: documenti per la biografia vasariana (Montepulciano: Le Balze, 2003). Magi, Girolamo, Cinque primi canti della Guerra di Fiandra (Venice: Comin da Trino, 1551). Missaglia, Marco Antonio, Vita di Giovan Iacomo Medici marchese di Marignano (Milan: P. Locarni & G. Bordoni, 1605). Nouveau Dictionnaire historique des sièges et batailles mémorables, II (Paris: Gilbert, 1808). Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Petrucci, Franca, ‘Colonna, Camillo’, in DBI, 27 (1982), 279-80. Petrucci, Franca, ‘Colonna, Stefano’, in DBI, 27 (1982), 443-45. Pignatti, Franco, ‘Falletti, Gerolamo’, in DBI, 44 (1994), 469-73. Promis, Carlo, Biografie di ingegneri militari italiani (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1874).

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Schiffers, Hans, ‘Die Eroberung Dürens von 1543 nach der Erkelenzer Chronik – Zur 600-Jahrfeier der Stadt Erkelenz’, Heimatblätter (Düren), 3 (1926), 19, 145-48. Schiffers, Hans, ‘Eine Flugschrift über die Belagerung Dürens von 1543’, Heimatblätter (Düren), 6 (1929), 29, 107-10. Spini, Giorgio, Cosimo I e l’indipendenza del principato mediceo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1980). Sleidanus, Johann, Histoire de la Reformation, 3 vols. (The Hague: Le Courrayer, 1767). Tracy, James, Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

About the Author Maurizio Arfaioli, Senior Research Fellow at the Medici Archive Project



Popular Ideology in Communal Italy* Fabrizio Ricciardelli Abstract The history of the Italian city-republics between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was characterized by a constant division between political alignments, a division which was a continual source of political struggles that themselves led to the expulsion of the members of one side or the other from the city. The political struggles in Italian communes between magnates and popolani were so vicious and unrelenting that the losers (the magnates) were marginalized from the city, their goods and indeed their whole lives taken from them. A metaphor, when used repeatedly and publicly, can be a powerful political weapon. To identify the magnates communal governments, led by the popolo, used the image of wolves terrorizing innocent and weak lambs to stigmatize those who were seen to wield too much power and thus were a threat to the state as bestial, ravenous creatures. By comparing themselves to meek lambs and their enemies to aggressive wolves, communal governments led by the popolo were ironically acting as wolves in sheep’s clothing – violently attacking their enemies through word and deed. Keywords: Common Good, greed, Italian city-state, magnates, popolo, pride, wolves and lambs

* I should like to express my gratitude to my mentor Humfrey Butters for giving me the opportunity to carry out this research project since the time of the conference in honour of Michael Mallett held in 2009 at the University of Warwick, Venice. I should also like to acknowledge the generous help I have received from Pierangelo Schiera in the form of searching and frequent discussions on this subject, which I partially addressed in ‘Lupi e agnelli nel discorso politico dell’ Italia comunale’, in The Languages of Political Society (see Bibliography). It is thanks to the support of Kent State University that I was able to complete this work.

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_ricc

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In communal Italy between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the inside and the outside, the centre and the periphery were seen as and associated with social organization. For communal citizens, to be excluded meant being considered outlaws as well as common criminals, normally persecuted for heresy, blasphemy, gambling, or sexual deviance. The city was always understood to be a community circumscribed within its own physical and institutional space. Being excluded by the hometown was to be beyond the pale of fortification which served to define, defend, and contain it not only in times of siege but also in the rhythms of everyday life. A citizen’s natural condition was to live where he was born, where the tombs of his ancestors provided continuity. This natural condition was that of living within the context of a community of neighbours united by ties of kinship and proximity. Like pilgrims, those who were forced out of their homeland were pushed and pulled across a world as changeable as their own condition. Those who suffered political exclusion did so as the result of individual or group negation of the dominant order, the accepted norms of cohabitation, and the rules and the laws in force. Those who were forced into exile lived far from their own soil or their own land, beyond the confines of their patria. The widespread practice of pushing rivals and enemies to the edges of society was meant to separate them from their social identity and sacred life.1 A city was a defined physical space, usually marked out by city walls, which in its aggregation of structures contrasted with the surrounding countryside devoted to farming. It was also a legal space, a place in which certain statutes applied, certain legal privileges pertained, and certain jurisdictional rights were exercised. It was furthermore a social space, a location for persistent and frequent interactions that created a keen awareness of the distinction between members of the community and outsiders. And, of course, it was an idea, a place identified by a name and symbols that elicited a certain sensibility which was manifest as civic virtue. A city in the late medieval Italian world was a mystic body, a place that made possible a politicized community of people who shared the same values respecting its sacred laws. The idea of civitas was spiritually charged, and communal citizens perceived it as ‘divine’. The more erudite communal citizens searched through Scripture and the patristic commentaries to find evidence of the City of God and to absorb the idea of the New Jerusalem, where they could test their moral attitudes and learn to

1

Ricciardelli, ‘Introduzione’, 11-18.

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subordinate selfishness and pride to the so-called Common Good (bonum commune).2 With the rise of governments of the popolo in the thirteenth century, city-states were perceived by their citizens as vicars of God, with the same authority as the Emperor. The experiment of the communal city-states bound forever in the West the urban space to the idea of the Pythagorean harmony, to the earthly form of the music of the spheres. Being an enemy of this harmony, promoted and developed by communal values, was understood as a clear violation of natural as well as civic law, so that city governments were authorized to frustrate and punish wrongdoers through criminal justice.3 The sacrality of city space was counterbalanced by the constant recurring phenomenon of the division of urban oligarchies. New political landscapes were always the expression of oligarchic divisions which caused civil battles and violence. The phenomenon of the marginalization of political opponents became a constant trend in city-states, because during the thirteenth century – and for extended periods of time in the following two centuries – political factions, war, violence, murders, bloodshed, fear, plots, and conspiracies were part and parcel of everyday life and public psychology. 4 All those who were considered enemies of the community could be persecuted by the community itself. All those who committed crimes associated with the holding of public office, with intrigues and sedition against the commune and with debt, entitled the community to prosecute them. Every citizen belonged to a state which could prosecute its political enemies, with the aim of compensation, securing reparation of an economic sort (fine) or of a physical nature (death sentence). Those who were considered enemies of the community could be assimilated to those sentenced for crimes. The denial of civic status sanctioned by statutory regulations was so far-reaching in such cases that if someone who was subjected to a ban for political offences was murdered while in prison by one of his fellow prisoners, the crime was allowed to go unpunished. Many sentences provide further evidence of the harsh treatment reserved for traitors to the state: monetary fines and death sentences carried out in the normal way were not 2 Muir, 229-68, in the section on Government as a Ritual Process, stresses that ‘Italian cults became the seedbeds for civic virtue and loyalty’ (233). On the creation and evolution of the city as an ideal space, see Garin. 3 Edgerton, 25. 4 On city-states as independent political entities made up of a city and its surrounding contado (subject territory), see Waley; and Jones.

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the worst punishments captured refugees had to fear; some had to undergo particularly humiliating sorts of execution, such as that of being dragged behind a mule until dead.5 In communal Italy methods of communication were very limited. Without the use of television, telephone, radio, Internet, or the postal service, communication took place in the form of books, primarily written for the literate classes and the people wealthy enough to afford them (the church, the nobility, and the merchant upper class). Lower classes had access to communication through musical signals, audible commands, messengers, or visual signals such as the raising of a standard, banner or flag. Rites, ceremonies, and emotional images contributed to the goal. The constant division between political alignments was a continual source of political struggles that themselves led to the expulsion of the members of one side or the other from the city. From the times of the struggles between Guelfs and Ghibellines at the beginning of the Duecento, expulsion of the enemy party through lists of proscription was a consequence of political bipolarity. The dichotomy between the magnates and the popolani arising in the second half of the same century can be viewed in a similar fashion. The political struggles in Italian communes between magnates and popolani were so vicious and unrelenting that the losers were executed or physically excluded from the city, their goods and indeed their whole lives taken from them. In this tense atmosphere a metaphor, when used repeatedly and publicly, can be a powerful political weapon. Communal governments in the late Duecento and early Trecento used the image of wolves terrorizing innocent and weak lambs to stigmatize those who were seen to wield too much power and thus were a threat to the state as bestial, ravenous creatures. The metaphor is in some ways problematic – it offers no hope of conciliation between the differing parties, as only in paradise can wolves coexist peacefully with lambs. Moreover, unlike the image of a city as a fierce and proud lion, the image of the people as lambs could suggest to other states that the city was weak, an easy victim for a foreign wolf. Nevertheless, this image must have been considered singularly effective, as it appears repeatedly in legal documents, processional standards, decorations of government buildings, and poetry in communal city-states. The example of Florence demonstrates how fear and aggressively divisive politics were a part of communal society. From 1282 the Florentine regime

5 On the harsh treatment reserved for traitors, see Ricciardelli, ‘Le modalità’, and ‘Violence and Repression’.

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was controlled by the popolo, the middle ranks of urban society composed of families not as old as the aristocratic lineages.6 Dino Compagni (c. 1255-1324) describes in his Cronica the creation in Florence of this government of the Priors of the Guilds, a new executive office for a new social class, that of the merchants: These officials were chosen for a term of two months starting 15 June 1282. When that term was finished, six officers were chosen, one for each sixth of the city, for a term of two months starting 15 August 1282. They were called the Priors of the Guilds; and they stayed secluded in the tower of the Castagna near the Badia so that they did not have to fear the threats of the powerful. They were given permission to carry arms in perpetuo, along with other privileges, and they were given six servants and six guards.7

From the very beginning, the new government needed literally to be fortified and guarded, because of the ‘threats of the powerful’. Nevertheless, the Priors were successful in marginalizing the magnates through physical violence, economic coercion, and campaigns of verbal and visual imagery, so that they retained control of the city for more than 250 years, until July 1531,8 when Alessandro de’ Medici (1510-1537) entered the city and subsequently transformed it into a duchy.9 The popolo was the class of those who were involved in one of the city occupations: skilled workers and masters, small traders and entrepreneurs, teachers and lawyers, doctors and notaries; that is, all those – as Alison Brown has written – who ‘played an independent role in government as members of guilds’.10 From the beginning of its tenure, the government of the popolo had one main goal: the marginalization from public offices of the old nobility. Eleven years after its appearance on the political scene in 1282, the regime of the popolo saw to the passage of the Ordinances of Justice. With these ordinances it implemented a political strategy for marginalizing the 6 On the variety of the social composition of the popolo, see Shaw, 149-85. 7 ‘Il detto ufficio fu creato per due mesi, i quali cominciarono a dì XV di giugno 1282: il quale finito, se ne creò sei, uno per sestiero, per due mesi, che cominciorono a dì XV d’agosto 1282. E chiamaronsi Priori dell’Arti: e stettono rinchiusi nella torre della Castagna apresso alla Badia, acciò non temessono le minaccie de’ potenti: e potessono portare arme in perpetuo: e altri privilegi ebbono: e furono loro dati sei famigli e sei berrovieri’; Compagni, 17-18. 8 Luzzati, 227. 9 On the fall of the Florentine Republic, see Von Albertini; and Luzzati, 218-27. On the same moment, see Butters; and Stephens. 10 Brown, 292.

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magnates, using the very same methods that the magnates had exploited when they were in power. The dispute between factions of the old urban aristocracy, which had taken the form of the conflict between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, culminated in the defeat of the Ghibellines in Benevento in 1266, after which the Ghibellines were marginalized from Florence and many other city-states in northern and central Italy through lists of proscriptions, sentences of ban, and confinement. The same sentences of exclusion were inflicted on magnates from 1293 onwards.11 The popolo was legitimizing itself through the politics of exclusion: all those who were declared magnates – or those who had had a knight in their lineage during the last 20 years – would have to pay, as security for their good behaviour, 2000 gold florins to the commune. With the publication of the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, the government of the popolo ensured that magnates were kept from public offices.12 The magnate who refused to submit himself as a good citizen would be expelled from the community as a rebel, and the consequences of the expulsion in such cases were severe. Magnates who were subjected to ban would be deprived of any protection of their own persons and patrimony, would be vulnerable to humiliation, and would be obliged to suffer the confiscation or destruction of their economic goods. These penalties were connected to others, such as the prohibition of bearing arms in public places or the prohibition of gathering together groups of allies around the families of magnates. If the magnates violated these legal norms, they would be punished with the confiscation of their goods and exclusion, as enemies of the entire city. There were ways of circumventing the law – the magnate who changed name and blazon could re-enter the city.13 However, the intention of the law was to allow the new mercantile regime to eradicate from society the old urban aristocracy. Despite its loopholes, the law was successful, enabling the merchants’ families who formed the Guelf elite to control the commune throughout the fourteenth century.14 The campaign to discredit the magnates and other perceived enemies in Florence and elsewhere centred around the metaphor of the wolf and 11 Ricciardelli, The Politics of Exclusion, 59-105. See the use of women in the anti-Ghibelline propaganda following the case of Umiliana dei Cerchi (1219-1246) studied by Benvenuti. 12 Ricciardelli, The Politics of Exclusion, 89-94. On the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, the ‘Florentine paradigm’, and the construction of the myth of the Italian Renaissance, see Fantoni, 277. The new edition of the Ordinances of Justice is in La legislazione antimagnatizia a Firenze. 13 Klapisch-Zuber, 227-80. 14 See Hankins, 1-13, where the author writes that Renaissance republicanism ‘represents a step away from the populist guild republicanism of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’ (12).

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the lamb. 15 The Florentine example demonstrates how in the mature phase of communal society, members of the political class had recourse to the image of men as beasts, so that the haven of rationality – evidently identif ied with the sacred space of the city-state – should be defended from ferocious, rapacious beasts. Popular governments had created a new way to persecute and marginalize political opponents, but the same members of the popolo could become victims of the political mechanism they had invented. The first sentence of the Libro del chiodo (written on 18 January 1302 and signed by Cante dei Gabrielli da Gubbio (c. 1260-c. 1335) on behalf of the new Florentine regime of the Black Guelfs) was against three members of the popolo: Donato Alberti, Lapo Ammoniti, and Lapo Biondo. Not all of them were magnates, but all were accused of graft and corruption (baracteria). They were charged with having contributed to the social disruption of the flock because, as wolves, they had scattered the virtuous sheep.16 The binary opposition of the metaphor remains clear – wolf/lambs, corrupt/innocent, oppressor/victim – but the terms no longer align with the distinction between popolo and magnates. Instead the metaphor dramatizes the formation of factions within the popolo. Likewise the metaphor could be used against the Florentines by other states. When the Republic of Siena was governed by the Nine between 1289 and 1355, the defence of Sienese libertas was reinforced with slogans intended to destroy the political credibility of every possible external enemy. The government of Sienese merchants, guarantors of political freedom, used the metaphor of the ‘false prophets’ to demonize the political action of the Florentines, as is shown in the Cronaca senese attributed to Paolo di Tommaso Montauri (1381-1431) in which the aggressive wolves (the Florentines) are those who menace the good and peaceful state of the meek lambs (the Sienese).17 Notarial records from Bologna define the grandi (magnates) as ferocious wolves always ready to menace the meek lambs; but an acute chronicler such as the Franciscan

15 Ricciardelli, ‘Lupi e agnelli’. 16 ‘qui gregem laudabilem fecerunt disgregare’; Ricciardelli, Il libro del chiodo, 5. On the sentences of 1302, see Ricciardelli, ‘Dal Libro del chiodo’, 10. 17 ‘Sanesi udito lo ‘nbasciadore f iorentino come aveno sposto per carità, niente di meno molto bene e’ Sanesi sapevano el contrario e come era loro operatione, e per questo e’ 25 Sanesi magiormente lo’ crebe magiore sospesione, e credettero i Fiorentini essare iscusati e dimostrare non essare loro a proferire l’aiuto, intervene a loro come el detto del vangelo: “Attendite a falsis prophetis: qui veniunt ad vos in vestimentis ovium, intrinsecus autem sunt lupi rapaces”’; Paolo di Tommaso Montauri, Cronaca senese, 819.

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friar Salimbene de Adam (1221-1288) defines the meek lambs of Parma as aggressive bees.18 The loaded image of the antagonism between the wolf and the lamb is an ancient one. The rich medieval production of fables goes back to Latin authors such as Phaedrus (c. 15 b.c.-c. a.d.50). The characters of Phaedrus’s fables are animals speaking the language of the men of their time: they represent men’s dispositions and faults: the lion embodies strength and arrogance, the fox sly and low hypocrisy, the hawk rapacity, the donkey resigned submission. The dog (resembling in this the mutability of human nature) embodies by turns loyalty, greed, and self-satisfied servility; the wolf represents treacherous greed; the lamb persecuted meekness. The moral concluding Phaedrus’s fable of the The Wolf and the Lamb (the oppressor and the oppressed) drinking at the same stream warns of false prophets who oppress the innocents: Longing for water, to a single brook/ Came the Lamb and the Wolf. / High up the stream the Wolf was,/ Down the bank was the Lamb. / Then, the ravenous roused his voice/ and started taking umbrage at the Lamb./ ‘How dare you muddy the water/ I’m drinking?’. And the meek, / ‘Please, how should I do as you complain,/ if it’s from you to me the stream descends?’/ By truth bewildered, says he, /‘Six months ago you talked behind my back’./ “This cannot be, Sir’ – the lamb replied –/ ‘cause six months ago I was not’./ ‘So it was your old ram, the one who did’. / And take it and leave it, but wrong was he./ To those was written this/ Who never want to admit how wrong they are/ And with any pretence/ Always try to oppress the innocent.19

Likewise in the Bible, St. Matthew exhorts: ‘beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves’.20 The wolf is dangerous not only because it is bestial and ravenous but also because it is treacherous. Human wolves must be exposed as such, to save the real lambs from slaughter. The feral metaphors and parables of pagan antiquity and the Bible were repeated and amplified in bestiaries, compendia of moralized tales about animals that were popular throughout Europe 18 Guarisco, ‘Il “popolo” e le pratiche della vendetta’, 151. 19 ‘homines […] qui fictis causis innocentes opprimunt’; Fedro, 448. 20 ‘Attendite a falsis prophetis qui veniunt ad vos in vestimentis ovium, intrinsecus autem sunt lupi rapaces’: Matt. 8:15. For some of the wolf and lamb images from the Old Testament, see Eccl. 13:17, Ier. 11:19, and Isaiah 11:6; for some other examples from the New Testament, see Matt. 10:16, John 21:15-17.

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beginning in the twelfth century. Of the many bestiaries that survive in several languages, few discuss wolves. Exotic animals with strange behaviour could offer a more vivid memory device than such common creatures as wolves, sheep, and dogs. When wolves do appear, they are wholly negative figures of rapaciousness and avarice.21 The wolf is ubiquitous in communal political imagery, presumably for the same reason that it is rare in bestiaries – the wolf was a common animal, and so people who had heard its cry or seen the havoc it could wreak on livestock would have an immediate visceral reaction to it. Because wolves were associated with treachery, and the image of the wolf was evoked to warn of false prophets, the image of the beast was also used to warn of the insidious dangers of heresy. During the early Middle Ages the identification of the wolf with the heretical had encouraged the development of hostile attitudes to the animal, as is shown by the commentary of St. Ambrose on the gospel of Luke, where it is written that we ‘should associate heretics with wolves, which are laying traps in the sheep-fold of Christ […]’).22 The fountain was seen in the Middle Ages as a symbol of social aggregation. Finished in 1278, the programme of the Fontana Maggiore in Perugia adapted traditional themes to new purposes. The government of the popolo aimed to symbolize the recent urbanistic and economic renewal and bear witness to the presence of new political forces. The metaphor of the wolf and the lamb reveals the need to underline the dangers represented by those who oppress the innocent on false pretexts while promoting the unworthy. And again in Perugia, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the animal tale is repeated in the nearby Sala dei Notari, the meeting hall of the Palazzo dei Priori. Here the government of the popolo commissions from a follower of the painter Pietro Cavallini some frescoes on the walls representing legends, fables, maxims, and biblical stories: the political use of the metaphor of the wolf and the lamb is used to warn of the dangers that threaten the proper course of city life and its institutions.23 This metaphor is made literal in the fresco of Andrea da Firenze (active from 1346-d. 1379) painted between 1365 and 1368 on the southern wall of 21 ‘Lo lupo è ne lo pecto eismesurato, / enello pecto e nella boccatura. / però a lo Nemico è asemeliato, / de modo, de volere e de natura, /ké forza e rape, tanto è scelerato, / subitamente l’anima devora; / non se reteine, tanto è svergognato, /de tentare l[a] umana natura; / forza del pecto: el mortale asalto / ke dà de [la] luxuria, tentanno; / forza de bocca: la golositate /kon ke fa fare a li omini tal salto, / tardo si ne ristora poi lo danno: / però folle è ki tene sua smistate’; ‘Bestiario’, 5. 22 Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanensis Opera, 230. 23 Frugoni, 170-71.

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the Spanish chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Here the glory of the Dominicans is celebrated through the hierarchical order of medieval society. The composition depicts a carefully constructed theological programme in which the positions and proportions of the figures are determined by theological significance. In the lower section of the painting, closest to the viewers, St. Peter Martyr signals the dogs (symbolizing the Dominican friars, Domini canes) to tear wolves (figures of heresy) to pieces. The dogs, white and black like the monastic dress of the Dominicans, defend the Church by attacking the dangerous and heretical wolves.24 Wolves could also be figures of clerical hypocrisy. Wolves could wear many guises – sheep’s clothing, shepherd’s clothing, or monk’s clothing. In Romanesque sculpture, wolves appear dressed as monks, an image similar to the more common one of the fox wearing a religious dress.25 Another image mocking clerical corruption is in the woman’s gallery of Parma cathedral, where two sculpted wolves wearing the scapular learn asinine dogma from a donkey, who also wears the scapular.26 Dante, a Florentine whose life and art were famously haunted by factionalism and the politics of exclusion, uses the metaphor of the wolves and the lambs repeatedly in the Divine Comedy. Rapacious wolves cause wars – they are figures not only of individual vice but also strife on a massively destructive scale.27 Following St. Matthew, Dante wrote: ‘from here on high one sees rapacious wolves / clothed in the cloaks of shepherds’.28 The treacherous wolf this time takes on a human guise, reversing the famous biblical image of the good shepherd. In the Divine Comedy wolves are evoked as general figures of evil and treachery and in reference to specific contemporaries. To Fulceri da Calboli (d. 1340),29 the persecutor of the White Guelfs, the 24 On which see Schüssler. On political meanings of the pictorial representation, see Polzer. 25 Varty, 51-59. 26 Taddei, 69-72. 27 ‘vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra / del bello ovile ov’ io dormi’ agnello / nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra’ (‘can ever overcome the cruelty / that bars me from the fair fold where I slept / a lamb opposed to wolves that war on it’); Alighieri, La Divina commedia, Paradiso, XXV, vv. 4-6 (hereafter cited only by canticle, canto, and verse) [this translation, as well as the following ones, are from http://www.worldofdante.org]. 28 ‘in vesta di pastor lupi rapaci / si veggion di qua sù per tutti i paschi’; Paradiso, XXVII, vv. 55-56. 29 Fulceri da Calboli, nephew of Rinieri, was elected podestà in Milan in 1298 and in Modena in 1306. Between 1299 and 1300, as well as in the second semester of 1321, he was captain of the people (capitano del popolo) in Bologna. The most famous term in office of a podestà was that of Fulceri da Calboli in Florence in 1303, who acted as representative of the power of the Black Guelfs and the instrument of political persecution of the White Guelfs. He was elected to continue the political and judicial action started by Cante dei Gabrielli da Gubbio (the podestà who signed

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poet says: ‘I see your grandson: he’s become a hunter / of wolves along the banks of the fierce river / and he strikes every one of them with terror’.30 In the allegorical encounter that opens and frames the Divine Comedy, the she-wolf (the traditional symbol of avarice), the leopard (lust), and the lion (pride) prevent Dante from ascending the slope.31 For Dante, greed (cupidigia) occupied the first place among capital sins; it had dethroned pride (superbia), the primary sin in feudal culture.32 A few years later, in his fresco in the Sienese Palazzo Pubblico, Ambrogio Lorenzetti depicted the figure representing Tyranny presiding over the court of Bad Government accompanied by figures representing associated evils: cruelty, treachery, fraud, rage, division, and war, as well as vainglory, pride, and avarice.33 With the prominent and reiterated image of the wolf, Dante evokes the cruelty and the violence of factionalism, using the mental categories that characterized the society of which – despite himself – he was an integral part. Dante, by choice and perforce, lived outside his native Florence in the latter part of his life, and so would have realized that the image of the wolves and lambs was not an exclusively Florentine one. This culture of factional violence penetrated into the ordinary legislation of many northern and central Italian city-states as a reaction to the conflict between magnate families. Because of their wealth and social behaviour, the traditional urban and country aristocracy were deemed to be aggressive wolves. In Genoa in 1257, the election of Guglielmo Boccanegra (d. 1274) as capitano del popolo for ten years was announced by the seal of the popolo on which it was written that ‘repressing the magnates, the popolo of Genoa is the lamb among lambs’.34 Another example can be found in Viterbo, where in 1281 the contraposition between the magnates and the popolani is full of hate, as shown by the slogan adopted by the popolani: ‘long life to the popolo, let the wolves die’.35 In 1282, in Bologna, The Sacred and Most Sacred Ordinances (Ordinamenti sacrati e sacratissimi) stigmatize the magnates as aggressive the ban of Dante) and Gherardino da Gambara: on this, see Ricciardelli, The Politics of Exclusion, 98-104. For other examples in La Divina commedia in which Dante uses the example of the wolf to connote evil in society, see Inferno, VI, vv. 74-75; Inferno, XV, v. 68; Purgatorio, XIV, vv. 49-51; and Paradiso, XXV, v. 6. 30 ‘Io veggio tuo nepote, che diventa / cacciator di quei lupi in su la riva / del fiero fiume e tutti li sgomenta’; Purgatorio, XIV, vv. 58-59. 31 Inferno, I, vv. 13-30. 32 Little. 33 Lansing, 184-85. 34 ‘Populus Jani magnos reprimens est agnus in agnos’; Fasoli, 130n271. 35 ‘viva il popolo e morano i lupi’; Salvemini, 51.

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wolves (lupi rapaces) in opposition to the meek lambs (agni mansueti).36 The same distinction is made in Pistoia in 1296, where in the statute of the podestà the aggressiveness of the wolves is contrasted with the docility of the popolo.37 In 1306 in Modena, the meek lambs, that is the merchants, are opposed to the aggressive wolves, that is the magnates; in 1365 the urban aristocracy is marginalized in Imola with the same metaphor; in Anagni the political party of the popolo is called the party of the lambs and that of the magnates the party of the wolves.38 Marin Sanudo the Elder (c. 1260-1338) writes that Venetians considered the many communities of ‘good Christians’ living in Armenia as menaced by the ‘predatory Turks’, compared, in his Liber Secretorum (1306-1307), to wolves that destroy all legitimate political authority.39 The wolves in this last case are the bestial other, the heretics who threaten Christendom. The metaphor of the wolves and the lambs was widely disseminated at all levels of society in many forms: laws, judicial sentences, campaign slogans, sublime poetry, and public and private visual culture. The Cronica of the Anonimo Romano describes the symbolic painting hung by Cola di Rienzo (c. 1313-1354) in the Civic Chamber when he returned to Rome in 1344: On the right side of the upper level there were four orders of different animals with wings who were holding horns to their mouths and blowing as if they were the winds who made the tempest in the sea and who ought to have aided the endangered ship. In the first order were lions, wolves, and bears; the caption says, ‘These are the powerful barons, evil rulers’. 40

Cola, who was known for his fiery rhetoric, used visual allegory to convey his message. He needed to go beyond the traditional allegorical imagery used in civic spaces (images of such virtues as Justice and of victorious battles) in order to revile the magnates. A completely new allegory, however, is incomprehensible, and so the painting combines well-known images – the 36 ‘Volente set intendentes quod lupi rapaces set agni mansueti ambulent pari gradu’; Fasoli, Part 1, 102-03, and 130n271. 37 Statutum potestatis comunis Pistorii, XXVIIIIn1, quoted in Ortalli, 101n162. 38 Fasoli, part. I, 130, 271. On these themes, see Ortalli, 95-107; and Raveggi. 39 ‘a tertia parte habet lupum: scilicet Turchos, qui destruunt dominium et Regnum’; Sanudo il Vecchio, book 1, chap. 5, v. 2. See also Curzi. 40 ‘Nello lato ritto parte de sopra staievano quattro ordini de diverzi animali colle scelle, e tenevano cuorni alla vocca, e soffiavano come fussino vienti li quail facessino tempestate allo mare, e davano aiutorio alla nave che pericolassi. Lo primo ordine erano lioni, lopi et orzi. La lettera diceva ‘Questi so’ li potienti baroni riei rettori’; Anonimo Romano, 107. On this, see also Musto, 104-29, esp. 105.

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ship beset by winds and wild beasts, including the wolves – in order to construct a diagram of Cola’s republican ideas. In all of these states, the evocation of wolves demonizes the enemy and legitimizes the worst kind of violence against that enemy. One exception proves the rule. The popular Ordinances of Prato of 1292, which were defined as sacrata, or sacred, record that ‘because the aggressiveness of the wolf should go hand in hand with the docility of the lambs, [and for this] the government will provide and pay for a banner in which the wolf will be portrayed close to a lamb, both eating in a white field, with a red sword over their heads, and this vexillum will be called the banner of justice’.41 In contrast to the violent vituperation elsewhere, here the government used this normally divisive metaphor to evoke a paradisiacal coexistence. The wolf, marauder of meek lambs, a metaphor with an ancient history, took on new life in the Duecento and Trecento as a way to describe the threats that magnates posed to the newly formed communal governments of Italy. Wolves were not only distant metaphors but also a terrifying reality, as the actual animals were seen through the lens of centuries of myth. Their nocturnal howling was seen as a demonic cry. 42 Wolves ranged in the countryside but formed a central part of the mythology of cities. When wolves did venture into the city, the effect must have been particularly unsettling, more than the violation of civilization by other wild animals. The chronicler Giovanni Villani (c. 1275-1348) thought one such incident was worthy of note. In 1346 he refers to the ‘big and wild’ wolf that entered the city of Florence and was killed by the Florentine citizens. 43 Literally in this incident, and metaphorically in many texts and images, the wolf is the animal that violates the city, the seat of the new values of the mercantile bourgeoisie. By comparing themselves to meek lambs and their enemies to aggressive wolves, the communal governments were ironically acting as wolves in sheep’s clothing – violently attacking their enemies through word and deed. This form of political propaganda based on dividing society into binary opposites, taken over from the previous aristocratic regimes, 41 ‘Affinché la rapacità del lupo e la mansuetudine dell’agnello vadano di pari grado, è stabilito che […] si faccia un vessillo a spese del Comune di Prato con sfondo bianco e con le immagini del lupo e dell’agnello che mangiano insieme e con una spada rossa sopra le loro teste, e che si chiama vessillo della giustizia’; Gli ordinamenti sacrati e sacratissimi di Prato dell’anno 1292, 342. 42 Cherubini writes that ‘quello che costituiva per gli uomini del passato l’elemento più terrificante del lupo [era] il suo carattere demoniaco, cioè il lungo ululato notturno’ (205). 43 ‘Nel detto anno, all’entrante di gennaio, di mezzodì uno lupo grande e salvatico entrò per la porta a San Giorgio, e scese giù, e corse, essendo isgridato, quasi gran parte d’Oltrarno; ma poi fu preso e morto alla porta a Verzaia’; Villani, 3:427.

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permitted the popolo to marginalize political opponents, magnates and non-magnates alike. By identifying political opponents as bestial, feral, aggressive, and corrupted, governments of the popolo legitimized and gave collective sanction to their persecution and repression.

Bibliography Alighieri, Dante, La Divina commedia, ed. by Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio, 2nd ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 2009). Anonimo Romano, Cronica, ed. by Giuseppe Porta (Milan: Adelphi, 1981). Benvenuti, Anna, ‘Umiliana dei Cerchi. Nascita di un culto nella Firenze del Duecento’, Studi Francescani, 77 (1980), 87-117. Bestiario moralizzato di Gubbio, in Biblioteca dei classici italiani, ed. by Giuseppe Bonghi, www.classicitaliani.it. Brown, Alison, ‘Changing Perceptions of City and Citizens in Late Medieval Italy’, in eadem, The Medici in Florence: The Exercise and Language of Power (Florence and Perth: Olschki and University of Western Australia Press, 1992), 281-303. Butters, Humfrey C., Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence, 1502-1519 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Cherubini, Giovanni, ‘Lupo e mondo rurale’, in Giovanni Cherubini, L’Italia del basso Medioevo (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1996), 197-213. Compagni, Dino, La cronica di Dino Compagni delle cose occorrenti ne’ tempi suoi, ed. by Isidoro Del Lungo (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1913-1916). Curzi, Gaetano, ‘Allegoria dell’embargo e propaganda per la crociata nelle opere di Marin Sanudo il Vecchio’, Storia dell’Arte, 89 (1997), 5-26. Diacciati, Silvia, and Andrea Zorzi, eds., La legislazione antimagnatizia a Firenze (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 2013). Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr., ‘Icons of Justice’, Past and Present, 89 (1980), 23-38. Fantoni, Marcello, ‘Il Rinascimento fiorentino’, in Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa, vol. 1: Storia e storiografia, ed. by Marcello Fantoni (Vicenza: Angelo Colla, 2005), 265-84. Fasoli, Gina, ‘Ricerche sulla legislazione antimagnatizia nei comuni dell’alta e media Italia’, Rivista di storia del diritto italiano, 12 (1939), Part I, 86-133, and Part II, 240-309. Fedro, Favole, ed. by Fernando Solinas (Milan: Mondadori, 2007). Frugoni, Chiara, A Distant City. Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Garin, Eugenio, ‘The Ideal City’, in idem, Science and Civic Life in the Italian Renaissance (Gloucester, MA: Anchor Books, 1969), 21-48.

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Gli ordinamenti sacrati e sacratissimi di Prato dell’anno 1292, in Statuti del popolo di Bologna del secolo XIII. Gli ordinamenti sacrati e sacratissimi colle riformazioni da loro occasionate e dipendenti ed altri provvedimenti affini, ed. by Augusto Gaudenzi (Bologna: Merlani, 1888), 341-54. Guarisco, Gabriele, ‘Il “popolo” e le pratiche della vendetta a Parma’, in Conflitti, paci e vendette nell’Italia comunale, ed. by Andrea Zorzi (Florence: Florence University Press, 2009), 131-51. Hankins, James, ‘Introduction’, in Renaissance Civic Humanism, ed. by James Hankins, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1-13. Jones, Philip, The Italian City-State. From Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, Ritorno alla politica. I magnati fiorentini 1340-1440 (Rome: Viella, 2009). Lansing, Carol, Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2008). Little, Lester K., ‘Pride Goes before Avarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom’, American Historical Review, 76 (1971), 16-49. Luzzati, Michele, Firenze e la Toscana. Seicento anni per la costruzione di uno stato (Turin: Einaudi, 1986). Montauri, Paolo di Tommaso, ‘Cronaca senese’, in Rerum italicarum scriptores, 15.6 (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1937), 689-835. Muir, Edward, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Musto, Ronald G., Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003). Ortalli, Gherardo, Lupi, genti, culture. Uomo e ambiente nel Medioevo (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). Polzer, Joseph, ‘Andrea di Bonaiuto’s Via Veritatis and Dominican Thought in Late Medieval Italy’, The Art Bulletin, 77 (1995), 263-89. Raveggi, Sergio, ‘Appunti sulle forme di propaganda nel conflitto tra magnati e popolani’, in Le forme della propaganda politica nel Due e Trecento, ed. by Paolo Cammarosano (Rome: École française de Rome, 1994), 469-89. Ricciardelli, Fabrizio, ‘Dal Libro del chiodo: i regesti delle condanne del 1302’, Argomenti storici, 5 (1998), 7-30. —, ed., Il libro del chiodo (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1998). —, ‘Introduzione’, in I luoghi del sacro. Il sacro e la città fra tardo Medioevo ed Età moderna, ed. by Fabrizio Ricciardelli (Florence: Mauro Pagliai, 2008), 11-18. —, ‘Le modalità dell’esclusione politica a Firenze nel tardo Medioevo’, in Escludere per governare. L’esilio politico fra Medioevo e Risorgimento, ed. by Fabio Di Giannatale (Milan and Florence: Le Monnier, 2011), 32-48.

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—, ‘Lupi e agnelli nel discorso politico dell’Italia comunale’, in The Languages of Political Society: Western Europe, 14th-17th Centuries, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Andrea Zorzi (Rome: Viella, 2011), 269-85. —, The Politics of Exclusion in Early Renaissance Florence (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). —, ‘Violence and Repression in Late Medieval Italy’, in The Culture of Violence in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., and Fabrizio Ricciardelli (Florence: Le Lettere, 2012), 55-79. Salvemini, Gaetano, Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295, ed. by Ernesto Sestan, 2nd ed. (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966). Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanensis Opera, Pars IV: Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam. Fragmenta in Esaiam (Turnhout: Brepols, 1957). Sanudo il Vecchio, Marin, Liber secretorum fidelium Crucis super Terrae Sanctae recuperatione et conservatione […] (1611; Jerusalem: Massada Press, 1972). Schüssler, Gosbert Arthur, ‘Zum Thomasfresko des Andrea Bonaiuti in der Spanischen Kapelle am Kreuzgang von Santa Maria Novella’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 24.3 (1980), 251-74. Shaw, Christine, Popular Government and Oligarchy in Renaissance Italy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006). Statutum potestatis comunis Pistorii anni MCCLXXXXVI, ed. by Ludovico Zdekauer (Milan: Tagliacozzi, 1888). Stephens, John N., The Fall of the Florentine Republic, 1512-1530 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Taddei, Ilaria, ‘Il linguaggio dell’insulto. Palii e altri rituali di derisione (secoli XIII-XIV)’, Annali aretini, 13 (2005), 65-77. Varty, Kenneth, Reynard the Fox: A Study of the Fox in Medieval Art (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1967). Villani, Giovanni, Nuova cronica, ed. by Giuseppe Porta, 3 vols. (Parma: Guanda, 1991). Von Albertini, Rudolf, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato. Storia e coscienza politica [1950], trans. by Cesare Cristofolini (Turin: Einaudi, 1970). Waley, Daniel, The Italian City-Republics, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Longman, 1988).

About the Author Fabrizio Ricciardelli, Director of Kent State University Florence



Venetian Gothic A Symbol of ‘National’ Identity? Richard Goy Abstract This paper outlines a number of aspects of the design of the late gothic Venetian palazzo, in relation to its urban role within the city as a whole, and in the manner in which its design evolved over the period from the Ca’ d’Oro (1430s), via Ca’ Foscari (1450s) to the very last gothic palaces built within a few years of the end of the Quattrocento. First, it discusses the overall imago urbis, as described in words by Marin Sanudo and visually by de’ Barbari, both at the end of the fifteenth century. This section raises the philosophical issue of the perfectible whole, of a city whose form could ultimately be developed to be regarded as ‘perfect’. The discussion then turns to the Palazzo Ducale, the great exemplar, the building that represents and signifies the Republic in several ways: for example, as the cradle of justice and the seat of stable government. Ca’ Foscari is discussed as the most prominent example that grew out of the design principles of the Palazzo Ducale, and the paper then analyses several key decorative and functional details of the late gothic palazzo, all of them imbued with symbolic meaning. Finally, the paper reviews the overall design of the last generations of gothic palazzi, most of them restrained and disciplined, but a number of which pay homage to the Palazzo Ducale in the detailed design of their window tracery. Keywords: design development and derivation, Gothic palazzi of the Quattrocento, gotico fiorito and fiori, imago urbis, investment in real estate, lions, ostentation and restraint, perfectible city, population increase, res publica, scudi and stemmi, symbolism of architectural details, symmetry, window tracery

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_rgoy

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This essay raises a number of issues regarding Venetian gothic architecture and what we might term ‘national identity’, that is, identity with the Venetian Republic and its institutions. Within the present space limitations, some can only be discussed very briefly, although there is scope for considerable further research on several of these issues, as I hope will become apparent. The issue of gothic architecture as an expression of the collective identity of the Republic, and of the nobility in particular, has been very little discussed in the standard surveys of Venice’s architectural, social, or political development. This essay suggests a few lines of more detailed research to explore these links further. I will start with two quotations, one from Petrarch and the other from Marin Sanudo the Younger, with apologies if they are perhaps a little over familiar. First, Petrarch: the one home today of liberty, peace and justice, the one refuge of honourable men … Venice, rich in fame, mighty in her resources, but mightier in virtue, solidly built on marble, but standing more solid on a foundation of civic concord, ringed with salt waters, but more secure with the salt of good counsel(Petrarch, on arriving in Venice to settle, in 1364).

More than a century later, in 1493, Sanudo claimed that the Republic’s governance was based on ‘prudentia, fortitudine, magnificentia, benignita’ et clementia.’1 A few lines later, he writes: Atorno, da tutte do le bande (of the Grand Canal) e case de patritij, et altri bellissimi, da ducati 20,000 in zoso … Etiam quella che fu del Serenissimo Principe nostro Francesco Foscari – hora de soi heriedi – di grandissimo precio, et assa’ altre che longo saria a raccontar … Ditte case, ovvero pallazzi, fabricate a modo nostro in tre, et Quattro soleri eminenti et belli, dove in cadauno puol habitarvi una massaria benissimo … [in addition, they have] scale di piera viva, balconi, overo f inestre tutte de veri.2

These, therefore, were the qualities of the Republic and its splendid capital city, as perceived by, respectively, an appreciative visitor and a patriotic native, the latter then launching into his famous, lengthy laudation of his

1 Sanudo, De origine, 20-21. 2 Ibid.

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city, beginning with the fine palazzi that not only lined the Canalazzo but now also loomed majestically over many parish campi.3 By the time that Sanudo wrote, of course, Renaissance architecture had arrived in the city, with the early examples of San Michele in Isola, San Giobbe, and the Arsenale land-gate giving a taste of what was to come over the next few decades. 4 But Sanudo lived in what was chiefly a gothic city, and it was that which he was describing in Laus urbis venetae. I would like to discuss some of the unique qualities of the city and those of the Republic as a whole, and the ways in which at least some of these qualities came to be reflected in its physical fabric. It may not be immediately apparent, for example, how a quality such as Sanudo’s ‘clemency’ can be transformed into stone and marble, although some of his other qualities – magnificence being perhaps the most obvious one – can be directly applied to the city’s fabric. Other qualities, noted by other writers, such as stability and endurance, as applied above all to the institutions of government, can quite easily be translated into built form, not least in our recognition of the fact that, five centuries later, so much of that built form is still with us today. There are other architectural qualities and attributes, such as symmetry, that again do not perhaps lend themselves very obviously to the image of the Republic in a literal or visual5sense but that can nevertheless be said to contribute indirectly to the governance of the Republic in the sense of order, stability, and the legendary ‘pyramid of power’ of the res pubblica. Even the ‘pyramid of power’ itself can be said to have balance and symmetry, both in a rather literal and in a more metaphorical sense.6

The parts and the whole It is clear from the above laudations and many other eulogies, by both native Venetians and visitors, that the entire city was regarded as a single entity or organism, an urbs that could be perfected in a way that was different 3 There is a long excerpt in English in Chambers and Pullan, 4-21. 4 For the Arsenale, see Goy, Building Renaissance Venice, 141-49; for San Michele, see Lionello and Loredana Puppi, 18-40; and for San Giobbe, see McAndrew, 254-55. 5 For a comprehensive contemporary description of the ‘pyramid of power’ and the roles of the numerous agencies of the Republic, see Sanudo, De origine, 85 et seq. The literature on the ‘myth of Venice’ is extremely extensive, but Rosand provides a useful summary. 6 The original wood blocks for Jacopo de’ Barbari’s famous ‘VENETIE MD’ are in the Museo Civico Correr, Venice. There are prints in the Museo Correr, the Museo Storico Navale and elsewhere; see Balistreri-Trincanato; Zanverdiani; and Romanelli et al.

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from any other city in Europe. This view derives in a general sense from its unique site, and the Marcian legend associated with it, but more specifically from the fact that it was defined by a God-given natural element, water, and thus circumscribed and delineated in its essence not by Man but by God and Nature. Most medieval cities were defined by defensive walls, clearly established and made by man, not ordained by God or Nature, and thus deficient in that essentially deistic creational process. In many cases, as well, this man-made, notionally finite terrestrial urban form was diluted; for example, by extra-mural ribbon development along the radial routes and by the often intensively cultivated immediate contado. This perfectible whole was certainly what Jacopo de’ Barbari illustrated a few years after Sanudo’s laudation, with its proud, bold title Venetie MD across the top of the woodcut. This was the triumphant mid-millennial city, frozen (for now) in time and space, a model to be understood and appreciated as a whole, possibly even to be emulated elsewhere. To the extent that the city was perfectible, therefore, each noble who built a fine new palazzo, either on his parish campo or on the banks of the Grand Canal, was taking the city one step closer towards this (still rather undefined) condition of perfection. And to that extent, therefore, we can also identify that sense of civic and national pride, coupled with some hard-nosed pragmatism and realism: the nobleman was not only glorifying the city of which he was a proud and patriotic citizen, but also was maximizing the value of his bricks-and-mortar investment. An ideal combination, therefore, of patriotic pride, fiscal acumen, and practical necessity. Let us look a little more closely at Sanudo’s view of the city and its fine palazzi. Venetian palaces were all built a modo nostro, as he put it, ‘in our own way’or: ‘our own manner’.7 Clearly there is a sense of specific identity in this phrase, a reflection of local civic and national pride: ‘not in the way that they build them elsewhere’. This is the way we do things here, and, of course, the not very subtle implication is that we do them better. Naturally, Sanudo’s modo nostro was to a substantial extent the direct result of necessity in Venice’s unique physical environment. The palaces were all built on ‘forests’ of timber piles driven into the clay: ‘et si fa sora palli con gran inzegno le fondamente in acqua’.8 The clear message here (and elsewhere in the text) is that the city was built by the resourcefulness, determination, and ingenuity of the Venetian people, in a physical environment that most other Italians would have considered impossible. These 7 Sanudo, De origine, 21. 8 Ibid., 20.

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piled foundations are, of course, invisible to the visitor, who simply sees the magnificent façade built on top of them, rising, miraculously, straight out of the water. It was almost as if these Venetians were defying the very rules of nature and gravity itself. Sanudo himself was a practical man, and he pointed out that sites along the Grand Canal were the most prestigious and that land values at San Marco and Rialto were the highest in the city, just as they remain today. He himself lived at the Ponte di Megio, near the rather remote San Giacomo dall’Orio, so was perhaps a little more aware than were some other nobles of the drawbacks associated with not living near the corridors of power. His journey to the Maggior Consiglio, for example, on Sundays, to participate in debates and votes, must have taken him some time. His own palazzo, which survives, is late Trecento gothic, although its canal façade was modernized in the early Renaissance, probably during or just after his own lifetime.9 He was also fully aware of the cost and value of building and owning a large palazzo and the very substantial investment that its construction meant to the patrician clan concerned. Perceptively, he grouped the value of these palazzi into three ‘classes’: firstly, the ‘premier league’, i.e. those very few valued at around 20,000 ducats. Next are those worth from 10,000 to 20,000; and thirdly, those worth between 3000 and 10,000 ducats. In the ‘premier league’, only two palazzi are specifically named: Ca’ Foscari (to which I will return); and the lost palazzo of the immensely wealthy Zorzi (Giorgio) Corner, at San Maurizio, which Corner had purchased from the Malombra for 20,000 ducats, hence Sanudo’s knowledge of its real market value. It was said that Corner had also spent a further 10,000 ducats on restoring it. (The palazzo was to be destroyed by fire in 1532, replaced by the splendid palazzo by Jacopo Sansovino that we see today.)10 Sanudo concluded this section by observing: et anche qualche una di manco precio [i.e. less than 3000 ducats], ma poche, che sono iterum fabricate’] [‘and also some of lesser value, although few, which have been repeatedly (re)built].11 The implication of this comment is that there was considerable pressure, perhaps partly social peer pressure, partly economic, to rebuild, and thus maximize the value of one’s real estate. It is important to note that these figures are what Sanudo estimated the palazzi to be 9 His house is at Santa Croce 1740. It still bears a late fifteenth-century Sanudo stemma on the façade (Arslan, 330 and n124; and Rizzi,439, item 152). 10 Sanudo De origine, 20-21. For Palazzo Corner at San Maurizio, see Howard,134-46; and Morresi, 118-29. For a contemporary account of the fire, see Sanudo, I Diarii, 56: 751-54. The vivid diary extract describing the fire (16 August 1532) is also in Sanudo, I Diarii: pagine scelte, 607. 11 Sanudo, De origine, 21.

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worth on the market, not what they cost to build. Francesco Foscari paid considerably less than 20,000 ducats for the old Palazzo da le Do Torri (probably 5,500 ducats; see below), but we do not know how much it cost him to rebuild.12 My own highly tentative conclusion as to the cost of building Marin Contarini’s Ca’ d’Oro in the 1420s was around 4000 ducats, but this may well be a significant underestimate, and he had to pay no land costs or any expense for driving new foundations.13 During the mid- and later Quattrocento there was also a degree of pressure on available land in the city, which may well have led to some inflation of land costs. Although its extent was physically finite (until later reclamation schemes), the city’s population increased from around 85,000 in 1422 to around 150,000 by the end of the century, according to Sanudo. A dramatic increase over 80 years (around 80%), and highly significant in an urban context already highly developed. It is worth noting, too, that the reclamation of what came to be known as the Tereni Nuovi was first proposed in 1494, precisely to ease pressures on land supply.14

The primary exemplar My more detailed discussion begins with the most important civic building in the city: the symbolic and stylistically influential Palazzo Ducale. As the symbol of the governance of the Republic, its design was to have great significance and considerable influence. The Molo wing was begun in 1340, and its tracery was to become a leitmotiv for the private noble palazzo of the gotico fiorito period. The palazzo’s upper loggia, in particular, was to have a number of progeny – albeit appropriately more modest in scale – all over the city.15 Its most characteristic element, a stone quatrefoil set into a circle, was to be adopted by the patriciate with great enthusiasm. I suggest that the adoption of these key motifs can itself be considered to some degree patriotic: the sincerest form of flattery, since, by taking up these stylistic motifs, the Venetian nobleman was saying, in effect, I wish the design of my new palazzo to reflect, and be visually associated with, that of the seat of government of my Republic, the Republic that I help to rule and sustain (Figure 1). 12 D. Romano, 246. 13 Goy, The House of Gold, Appendix 1, 276. 14 For the Tereni Nuovi, see Gianighian and Pavanini; and Concina, 200-05. 15 Dellwing; Schuller, 351-431.

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Figure 1 The first floor loggia of the Molo wing of the Palazzo Ducale, c.1340-1346 or later

The adoption of these traceried colonnades, and their adaptation to form the polifore of the upper hall or portego of the private palazzo, is one of the great glories of late Venetian gothic. Their adaptation in this manner was not only refined, elegant, and spectacular but also served the highly practical function of bringing as much light as possible into the long, deep

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hall behind.16 We should be fully aware that these traceried colonnades were technically quite difficult to build and were also expensive; so, again, this association with the seat of government was also saying to the world: Look, not only am I expressing my patriotism, my identity with the state, and my advanced, sophisticated tastes but I also have plenty of bags of ducats to pay for this rich, elegantly carved stonework. Back at the Palazzo Ducale, the final stage of the external envelope to be constructed was the Porta della Carta, begun by Bartolomeo Bon in 1438 and probably completed around five years later. As is equally well known, its (very prominent) sponsor was the doge himself, Francesco Foscari, then already on the throne of San Marco for some fifteen years. This is not the place to discuss the complex iconographic programme of the Porta, but it suffices to say that every element of this iconography had either a clear Republican symbolism or an equally clear reference to Foscari and his patronage: or both.17 (Figure 2). The Porta can be regarded as the ultimate expression of Venetian gotico fiorito, despite one or two well-known hints of the Renaissance in its design. It was arguably as much an overt advertisement for Foscari’s sponsorship as it was a work dedicated to the Republic of Justice and its guardian Evangelist.18But, largely because of its extraordinarily complex character, its unique practical function and its heavy load of symbolism and iconography, the Porta was far less influential architecturally than might perhaps have been expected. It really was sui generis in almost every way, and it was the palazzo itself, that much broader symbol of the Republic, that had a far greater influence over the patronage of the nobility in their own houses, from the late Trecento and into the first decades of the Quattrocento.

16 Typical plans of gothic palazzi can be found, for example, in Maretto (130, 132-33, 139, 142, 144, 147). It is also worth noting that the typical structural arrangement of the medieval palazzo was such that nearly all of the building’s dead load was carried by the four parallel walls that stood orthogonal to the façade; the façade thus carried very little load, other than its own weight, and hence the polifora to the great hall could incorporate such relatively light, open tracery. 17 For the Porta della Carta, see S. Romano; Goy, House of Gold, 266-70; and Wolters. 18 The elements that derive most clearly from Foscari’s direct influence are the large relief depicting him kneeling in front of the winged lion; and the four figures of the Virtues, three cardinal and one theological: Temperance, Charity, Prudence and Fortitude (D. Romano, 147-53). As he points out, these four virtues are those of Foscari himself, not of the government of the Republic, and they found later expression in his own funerary monument in the Frari (ibid, 328-29).

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Figure 2 The Palazzo Ducale: upper part of the Porta della Carta (1438-c.1443). with the image of doge Foscari and the Marcian lion

How to make your mark A wealthy Venetian noble wishing to make his mark on his city with a notable architectural statement had several potential approaches from which he could choose, depending on his specific circumstances. These can be summarized as follows. First, he could marry well and obtain, as a dowry (official or otherwise), a substantial palazzo belonging to his new wife’s family. This was Marin Contarini’s approach at the Ca’ d’Oro. Contarini demolished the Zeno house down to its foundations (but retained them) and built anew on top of them.19 Secondly, he could buy an existing palazzo on the open market and radically modernize it, almost certainly also at significant cost. As we have seen, Zorzi Corner apparently took this approach at San Maurizio; Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel also shows evidence of this ‘radical modernization’ approach.20 Thirdly, he could buy an existing house and its land, demolish it, and start again with a tabula rasa. This was Francesco 19 Goy, House of Gold, 50-57; Rössler, 54, 172-83. 20 Arslan, 163, 236, 318, 322, 324; Maretto, 148-50; Rössler, 290-94.

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Foscari’s approach, and his new palazzo also required new foundations, since Ca’ Foscari was to stand not on the ‘footprint’ of the earlier house but right at the water’s edge, at the front of the site.21 Fourthly, and finally, he could assemble a large site by the piecemeal acquisition of a number of smaller sites (with or without houses on them), such that he ultimately assembled a plot large enough to support his ambitions. This was probably the course taken by the Pesaro at San Beneto, and was certainly the course that the same clan took two centuries later at San Stae.22 The case of Ca’ Foscari Doge Foscari and his extraordinary political career have been discussed by several writers recently, notably in Dennis Romano’s fine biography, as well as Ennio Concina and Giuseppe Gullino.23 Foscari remains a pivotal figure of the Quattrocento, partly for his obvious longevity and political importance but also (in our context) because his dates (r. 1423-1457) coincide with the final era of Venetian gotico fiorito. The design of Ca’ Foscari, begun after he bought the site from the Republic in May 1453, probably for a ‘discounted’ 5,500 ducats, had to reflect its unique site in volta dil canal. Foscari clearly bought the site with the intention to demolish the earlier Palazzo de le Do Torri (which he did immediately); equally clearly, he had a grand new architectural statement in mind. He also needed to take account of the two new Giustinian palazzi which were then under construction right next door, a little ahead of Foscari’s own construction programme. They were probably not yet complete when he started on site, but he had to take their design and appearance into account. Ca’ Foscari is grandiose and imposing, but it is basically a highly developed traditional Venetian palazzo; Foscari himself, of course, was primus inter pares, the elected head of state of a Republic, not a hereditary prince or a pope who ruled by divine authority. His perception thus seems to have been that his new palazzo should be balanced, symmetrical, dignified, and thereby reflecting his own republican role and the attributes of the state itself. It should also respect the city’s urban traditions and its physical context. It 21 D. Romano, 246-48; Rössler, 184-89. The latter states that at least some of the older foundations were re-used, and this may indeed have been the case. Views differ, however, on this matter (Schulz, 29). 22 For Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, see Rössler, 266-70. For the later Ca’ Pesaro at San Stae, see Hopkins, 220-37. 23 Concina, 224-28; Gullino.

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should not be stylistically discordant, therefore, as Marin Contarini’s brightly decorated new palazzo arguably was. But it could certainly be large. There were other reasons for its size, in addition to its physical prominence in the urban context. Two of them were practical and pragmatic. Foscari had a large extended family, and although one of his brothers had died early, the other, Marco, was still alive, and after his marriage to Margherita Marcello, they had many children. As Gullino has pointed out, the staff and servants of such an extended household would have probably been at least equally numerous, such that the entire household numbered several dozen in all. 24The other practical, pragmatic reason was that, although requiring great initial capital outlay, investment in real estate was (as it nearly always is) a sound long-term place to put your money. Assuming that you could raise the capital, it made little sense not to build as large a new house as possible.25It was a statement of sound investment and of commitment to your own successors as well as, indirectly, to the longevity of the Venetian patriciate and the immutable Republic itself. So, as we all know, the result was grandiose, stately, symmetrical, and large; its quatrefoils and tracery, naturally enough, were taken from the Palazzo Ducale, where Foscari had lived for so many years. However, Foscari was acutely aware of stylistic developments elsewhere, and as is also well known, there are again discreet hints of the Renaissance here, just as there are at the Porta della Carta. Here they are manifested in the broad stone frieze with its two winged putti, probably imported from Tuscany. Foscari was a close personal friend of Cosimo de’ Medici, who was exiled from Florence in 1433 and welcomed into Venice by Foscari in person. In 1445, after his return to Florence, Cosimo began his own new palazzo on the Via Larga, but it was probably not complete until the late 1450s; a very different design for a radically different urban and political environment. Externally, at least, Michelozzo’s towering pile is a solid, rugged fortress of power, and Francesco was probably kept well aware of progress on site from the relazioni of the Republic’s ambassadors to Florence. There are many points of distinction between the architectural approaches of Cosimo and Francesco. For example, Michelozzo was effectively 24 Gullino. 25 For a detailed discussion of Cosimo’s palazzo, see Goldthwaite; he also discusses Palazzo Strozzi in considerable detail. Some of my comments in these paragraphs will be developed further in a future paper of my own.

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the Florentine ‘court architect’, with a life-long relationship with the Medici, a role with no precise equivalent in the Serene Republic, although key figures such as Bartolomeo Bon played a more discreet but nonetheless influential role. However, the urban roles played by the two palazzi also had some important similarities, despite their very different architectural styles. Both palazzi occupy a pivotal location in the city’s fabric, and are visible from some distance: Foscari’s from as far as the Ponte di Rialto; Cosimo’s from the vital and highly symbolic vantage point of the Baptistery to the south26 (Figure 3). We do not know much about progress on Foscari’s own palazzo, although it must have been built fairly rapidly. He had not yet moved in when he was forced to abdicate, and moved into a family house at Santa Margherita, where he died on 1st November 1457; Ca’ Foscari was completed shortly thereafter. He clearly had substantial funds to underwrite such considerable expenditure in such a relatively short period. Foscari was certainly wealthy, although exactly how rich we do not know. Unusually for a Venetian patrician, he owned feudal estates on the Terraferma, at Zelarino, and several properties in the city, including one, the Osteria della Corona, on a very valuable site on the Riva degli Schiavoni; it was demolished in 1589 to build the new prisons of the Republic. He also owned the Castelletto, a rather notorious whorehouse at Rialto, near the lost church of San Mattio; it is interesting to look at Ca’ Foscari today and realize that it was partly indirectly funded by income from prostitution. 27,28 Ca’ Foscari (and, arguably the Porta della Carta) remains his personal public memorial. The site is just as memorable today; the façade can be seen in its entirety from the Rialto Bridge, and, in fact, remains in sight when walking down the whole length of the Riva del Carbon as far as Ca’ Farsetti. Its orientation is such that it catches the full morning sun for much of the year, thus performing a dramatic role on the stage of the Canalazzo, a monument to himself, his clan and his Republic.

26 There is a significant issue here regarding building costs and their relationship to the size or scale of the building itself. For example, an expensive piled foundation could support three or four upper storeys with almost no difference to the design (and hence cost) of the foundations, but clearly with the advantage of a whole additional storey if a four-storey house was built. Similarly, a significant increase in floor area, of say ten percent, can be gained by increasing the extent of perimeter wall by only three percent. For the household, see Gullino, 87. 27 D. Romano, 299. 28 For Foscari’s last days, see ibid., 300-31; for Jacopo, see ibid., 292-93.

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Figure 3 Ca’ Foscari (1452-c.1457) as seen from the Rialto bridge

The palazzo and the campo Many of the great later gothic palazzi stand not on the Grand Canal, however, but on a parish campo. Palaces such as Palazzo Zaguri (San Maurizio) and Palazzo Pesaro (San Beneto) dominate their local squares, epitomizing the social status of their owner. One has a sense almost of possession of the campo itself in the way that these fine houses tower over their neighbours, sometimes more dominant than the parish church itself. These same nobles, of course, also patronized these churches, and were intimately associated with both church and campo, sometimes for centuries. The Soranzo, for example, still own part of the palazzo that they acquired on Campo San Polo almost exactly 600 years ago; every time one of these palazzi was rebuilt (usually larger and finer) the owners were thereby reasserting their influence over their own ‘patch’ of the city. More prosaically, they also gave employment to at least some of the local parishioners as gondoliers or domestic servants. Whether on campo or Canalazzo, therefore, it was equally important to project the appropriate image: of wealth and power, certainly, but also of taste and refinement, epitomizing the commitment

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and continuity of the noble casada, and by extension, once again, of their Republic.29 So the palazzo dominated its campo by virtue of its sheer size and richness of finish and appearance. Later, of course, this almost proprietorial relationship became more overt, notably in the patronage of parish churches, where the historic, discreet patronage of a chapel inside was ultimately replaced by overt displays of patronage outside: f irst at San Zulian (begun 1553) with Tommaso Rangone; and later, even more flamboyantly, by the entire façades paid for by the Barbaro (Santa Maria del Giglio), the Fini (San Moise), and the Cappello (twice) with two façades for Santa Maria Formosa. But such ostentatious patronage was still some way in the future.30

God (and symbolism) in the details I would now like to reduce the scope of my discussion and look closely at three specific detailed elements of these late gothic palazzi; fiori, stemmi, and lions. Fiori Gotico fiorito takes its name from the fiore that caps the extrados of the window and portal arches of these palazzi, the term itself deriving from Latin floreo, to bloom or blossom. The English term, ‘finial’, is of different etymology and derives from fine, meaning end or termination. Both are correct, but the former is more accurately expressive; although there is a fair amount of variation, most fiori are indeed stylized flowers. These are frequently lilies, although the representation is not always very clear, particularly as many are badly corroded by time. The lily is the symbol of the Virgin, and also more generally represents virginity, purity, and light. It is often shown in representations of the Annunciation, for example, when it is held by Gabriel. The cult of the Virgin was of enormous importance in the Venetian Republic, accounting for many feast days and numerous church dedications. The lily is also the attribute of a number of saints, some 29 On Palazzo Zaguri, see Arslan, 176, 236; Rössler, 258-65; and Maretto, 152, 238. On Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, see Arslan, 319-20; and Rössler, 266-70. On Palazzo Soranzo at San Polo, see Arslan, 92, 100, 133, 158; Maretto, 131-39; and Rössler, 57-61. 30 For Rangone at San Zulian, see Sherman, 15-31.

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particularly important to Venice, notably Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua. Such a symbol, therefore, would have been widely recognized throughout the city. There are a number of fiori, however (e.g. at Palazzetto Contarini Fasan and Palazzo Gritti at Sant’Angelo) that resemble a flame rather than a flower; perhaps these are representations of the Holy Spirit or of caritas.31 Close examination of a few examples, all physically close together around Santa Maria Formosa, will show that they vary significantly in detail. At Palazzo Donà, for example, on the campo itself (Castello 6123), the very fine portal is capped with a fiore that incorporates both a head and a scudo, perhaps unique. Adjacent is another portal (Castello 6126) that shows how inappropriate (and how rare) is the use of soft yellow tufa stone for such features in the Venetian environment: basically, it dissolves with the weather. There is another example, different again, on Palazzo Pisani, near Santa Marina (Cannaregio 6103), while what looks more like a giant cabbage than a fiore tops the splendid land gate of Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel (Cannaregio 6099), only a few yards away. So there was much scope for individuality in these under-appreciated little details. Two examples from the contiguous Palazzi Soranzo at San Polo (San Polo 2169 and 2170) are particularly useful chronologically. The left-hand palazzo is the earlier of the two, probably built in two stages, c.1380 and c.1410, while the right-hand palazzo is considerably later, probably c.1474. The first has no fiori at all, while the second has fiori to all of the principal windows. Together, therefore, they provide a useful approximate terminus post quem and timeframe for what was to become a ubiquitous feature of all later Venetian gothic palazzi (Figure 4). Lions The lions to which I refer here take three distinct forms, which for the purpose of identif ication I have called sentinel lions, corbel lions, and spandrel lions. The first, the little sentinel lions, are posted on the outer corners of the balconies of Quattrocento palazzi. The second takes the form of a corbel, decorative certainly, but with a practical function in supporting these same balconies. The third are the little lion faces, purely decorative, that appear in the triangular spaces between the ribs of tracery or the extrados of arches.

31 See, for example, Muir, 138-40, 141-45, 152-53.

216 Richard Goy Figure 4 The ‘twin’ Palazzi Soranzo on Campo San Polo, the left one c.1380-1410. the right in c.1475

Why all these lions? None of them – in any of the three manifestations – are winged, patriotic, Marcian lions but are, rather, all generic, ‘normal’ lions. The ‘normal’ lion, of course, has many attributes other than those God-given qualities added by the incorporation of the Evangelist’s wings. The lion is a universal symbol of strength, power, fortitude, and dominion, all of which virtues would be considered entirely suitable attributes to adorn the palazzi of the Venetian nobility. A number of these lions adorn the external façades of the Palazzo Ducale, undoubtedly intended to reflect just these qualities. The spandrel type, for example, is set into the triangular spaces between the extradoses of the arches of the main colonnades; an early use of the motif, certainly after 1340, although difficult to date with precision, since progress documentation is so scanty. They were later diligently taken up elsewhere, including the extrados of the Porta della Carta, 1438-1443. Lions in their corbel manifestation support the great Molo window balcony (c. 1400), and lions are incorporated into the capitals of the upper windows of the Molo façade (Sala del Maggior Consiglio). Clearly, by the time of completion of the Molo wing (c. 1424), and perhaps some decades earlier, precedents had been set for the broader

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use of this creature in these different ways.32An early example of the lion corbel appears to be that at Palazzo Venier, near San Martino, probably mid-Trecento.33 Not at all surprisingly, there is a great proliferation of lions on the rich, complex façade of the Ca’ d’Oro (c. 1421-1428): lion corbels to all the balconies; little sentinels on the outer corner of these same balconies; and even a small, slightly lost lion on the corner of the rope-moulding facing the vaporetto stop. Other sentinel lions abound on the fine houses of the mid-Quattrocento: Palazzo Bembo at Rialto; Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei; and no fewer than four on the long lower balcony at Ca’ Foscari (but none on the upper one)34 (Figure 5). They really do all seem like little guards or sentinels, far too small to be intimidating (typically only 250 to 300mm high), but nevertheless they appear to be imbued with an almost mystical power and symbolism: strength, resilience, fortitude. (They are certainly tenacious enough to have survived for more than 500 years, despite the vulnerability of their location.) And their early quasi-patriotic use at the Palazzo Ducale seems to have sanctioned their use later elsewhere. As a universally recognized symbol, the lion would be instantly recognizable to Venetians and visitors alike: the lion of strength and fortitude, quite distinct from the winged lion of the Evangelist and the Republic. Scudi and stemmi The third of my three key details is perhaps the most obvious means of identification and association: the incorporation of the family arms into the external façade of the palazzo. All Venetian patrician clans registered in the Libro d’Oro had a legally recognized coat of arms, which itself, of course, formed one element of the collective history and identity of the Republic as a whole. The date when they first started to appear on palace façades, however, is difficult to define with precision, since early uses seem to have 32 The dates of construction of, and progress on, the Molo wing have been debated for decades. For some observations on the elusive Filippo Calendario, the putative ‘architect’, see Lionello Puppi, 99-103; and Schuller, esp. 353-54. In the upper spandrels of the first floor colonnade, i.e. between the quatrefoils and the entablature, the little lion faces are replaced by stylized roses. The rose is a symbol of the Virgin, again, and thus relates to the fiori. The fact that they are of white Istrian stone may further emphasize their symbolic purity. This motif was again taken up in a number of late gothic private palazzi that incorporate quatrefoils and tracery, such as Palazzo Pisani Moretta and Ca’ Foscari. 33 On Palazzo Venier, Castello 2452, see Arslan, 90. 34 For Palazzo Bembo, see Arslan, 321.

218 Richard Goy Figure 5 Outer corner of the facade of the Ca’ d’Oro, c.1424-1428

been rather tentative, and were not worked into the design of the façade but simply fixed onto it, possibly some time after the façade itself was built. They are also sometimes at a high level, weather-worn, and difficult to read. A useful example here again seems to be the splendid double Soranzo palazzo at San Polo, where the older house has no scudi on the façade. The later house, though, by now fully mature gotico fiorito, has a family stemma

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Figure 6 The land-gate at Ca’ Foscari, with the prominent stemma of the clan

right in the middle of the façade, fully integrated with its design, above the polifora of the portego.35As noted above, the later house probably dates from the c.1470s, some decades later than the Ca’ d’Oro. Indeed, as early as the 1420s, Marin Contarini had placed his own large scudo prominently in the centre 35 For Palazzo Soranzo, see n29 above.

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of the right part of the façade of the Ca’ d’Oro and had it painted and gilded: no residual shortage of self-confidence there. In fact, it may well have been Contarini’s self-confidence that set the precedent for others to follow suit.36 Although the water façade of a palazzo was highly prestigious, the spandrel of the arch of the land gate was arguably an equally natural place to locate the family arms, and we have many surviving examples. One of the earliest and (once again) most ostentatious is Matteo Raverti’s stemma for Marin Contarini, made in 1426-1427.37 Doge Foscari took no chances and decided to cover both approaches to his new palazzo with his arms, one in the centre of the famous frieze on the Grand Canal façade, and the other above the land gate. This widespread distribution of the family arms thus represented not only a clear expression of direct ownership and title, but also, by extension, identified the patrician casada with the Maggior Consiglio, the Senate, the Collegio, the whole structure of the governance of the Venetian state: no scudo meant no participation in government; conversely, no participation in government meant no proud family escutcheon. And this was also true of the small but extremely important citizen class, many employed by the Republic as lawyers, accountants, and so on; they too had their Libro d’Argento and their own family arms (Figure 6).

Ostentation and discipline Mention of the Ca’ d’Oro again brings me back to another important point about these late gothic palazzi. Contarini’s new palazzo was, and remained, sui generis in its richness and opulent refinement. There was no palazzo built afterwards (i.e. after about 1435) that even attempted to match or emulate its richness (Figure 7). Now, although this was precisely what Contarini intended, it is worth asking ourselves why this was the case. There were other extremely wealthy patrician casade in the city – the Corner, for example, perhaps above all – who could certainly have afforded an equally rich spectacle, but none built one. I am not aware of any direct pressure or influence brought to bear by the Republic itself, and there was no codified law against architectural pompe as 36 Contarini’s scudo on the façade of the Ca’ d’Oro was decorated with alternating stripes of gold and ultramarine, the two most costly colours obtainable; see Schuller, 312-19, and esp. figs. 37 and 40. 37 Goy, House of Gold, 122-23. The documents are located in ASV, Procuratori di San Marco de Citra, B.269 bis, L. III, fols. 5v-6r; and L. IV, fols. 8v-10r.

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Figure 7 The loggia at the Ca’ d’Oro by Matteo Raverti, 1425-1427

there were in other areas of daily life, such as fashion and jewellery, although, of course, there may well have been much ‘behind the scenes’ peer group pressure. The state agency that we might have expected to manage and control such matters was the Piovego; although they were much concerned about the strict control over issues such as building lines and (more surprisingly) altane, they seem to have exerted little control over less clearly definable issues such as aesthetic or sculptural ostentation38 And we can therefore perhaps regard the stately, restrained, almost majestic quality of Ca’ Foscari as Francesco’s own measured response to Marin Contarini, this excessively ostentatious interloper on the Grand Canal. Instead, what we do find in the years after c.1435 is a concentration on order, symmetry, and dignity, that we could quite easily identify as a ‘backlash’ against ‘Contarinian’ excess. And the great exemplar here, the model, the benchmark, still remains the Palazzo Ducale. It is not too diff icult to imagine that, having seen Contarini’s lavish display, the nobility collectively reflected, and thought: well, this is all very splendid, and it has certainly beautified further the great aquatic highway of our capital city, but Contarini is still only one 38 For a useful insight into the scope of the activities of the Piovego in this period, see Crouzet-Pavan.

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noble among dozens, all of precisely equal legal status; he has been rather excessive, breaking some kind of consensus, and drawing too much attention to himself as a somehow unique figure. Whatever the precise thinking of the rest of the nobility, the practical results are very clear to see: the keynotes of nearly all post-Contarini palazzo façades are indeed order, symmetry, dignity, and elegance, and all drawn from a basic architectural vocabulary that had been established on the Molo a century earlier. Again, it was if the nobility wished to say: ‘This is still our exemplar, the home of the Republic itself. If we wish to take a model from which to draw, we go back to the fons et origo, not to the ostentatious newcomer’. It is true that we still do f ind a few rather exciting variants of the famous quatrefoil tracery: for example, at Palazzo Giovanelli, and the delightful Palazetto Contarini Fasan. But they are conspicuously rare. Indeed, we find an interesting dichotomy in a few of these last great gothic houses: they are both deeply conservative and (in a qualified sense) quite innovative. The conservatism derives from the basic configuration of the house, its tripartite structure, its vertical hierarchy of functions, disposition of rooms, arrangements of solids and voids. The innovation, in palazzi such as the Loredan dell’Ambasciatore, Pisani Moretta, and Contarini Corfù, comes (almost solely) from the tracery of the piano nobile windows39 (Figure 8). It is striking, in fact, especially after around 1460, just how restrained some of these façades are, albeit with beautifully refined detailing. Many eschew complex tracery altogether, in favour of a kind of rich minimalism. Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, the largest and one of the last gothic palazzi ever built in Venice, has no eye-catching interlocking tracery, no daring pendant tracery, nothing resembling Contarini’s tour de force 30 years earlier. Nor has the refined Palazzo Duodo at Sant’Angelo, or the splendid double Palazzo Bembo at Rialto. 40 I am not aware of any detailed analysis as to why at least some examples of the very last flowering of Venetian gotico fiorito should be so refined, and yet so relatively unadventurous. It has been suggested that perhaps the loss of Constantinople in 1453 led to some kind of existential crisis of confidence 39 For Palazzo Loredan dell’Ambasciatore, see Arslan, 246, 320; and Rössler, 161-64. For Palazzo Pisani Moretta, see Arslan,247-48, 328; and Maretto, 150, 152, 158, 161, 190. For Palazzo Contarini Corfù, see Arslan, 247, 320, 328; and Rössler, 285. 40 For Palazzo Duodo at Sant’Angelo, see Arslan, 321; for Palazzo Bembo on the Riva del Carbon see Maretto, 278; and Arslan, 14, 321.

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Figure 8 Facade of Palazzo Pisani Moretta, 1481-c.1485

among the patriciate. I am not personally convinced that this was the case. An event more likely to have engendered such caution, it seems to me, was the financial crisis within the Republic itself, and the resultant emergency fiscal measures introduced by the Senate in December 1453. There was also undoubtedly deep concern regarding Francesco Sforza’s assumption of the duchy of Milan. Periods of economic and political uncertainty frequently

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give rise to an almost involuntary or subconscious reining-in of external expressions of extravagance. 41 Ten years later, in 1463, and as a result of the costs of the Turkish wars, a direct property tax was levied for the first time. This replaced earlier attempts at taxation based on estimated overall wealth, such as the estimo of 1379 (itself largely based on voluntary statements by the families concerned), and almost certainly slowed down the rate of construction of new palazzi. Although such a tax was not unprecedented (there had been earlier forms of tax on property in 1425 and 1438), it marked a decisive shift in the evaluation of landed property, and it was followed in 1474 by the first catastico, recording all details of real estate, whether house, shop, warehouse, or productive land, all identified by their precise location on a campo or a calle. 42 Ultimately, then, I propose that the metaphorical and aesthetic shadow cast by the Palazzo Ducale was so long and dominant – and resonant – that it remained influential for decades after its completion, as a national symbol and exemplar. It created many progeny, too, in the form of Ca’ Foscari and many other fine private palazzi, all indebted to this key exemplar. By extension, therefore, the use, adaptation, or modification of its key architectural elements or motifs was, in a sense, also a way of identifying the patrician clan with the government of the Republic itself: a symbol of national identity.

Bibliography Manuscript Sources Venice Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV) Procuratori di San Marco de Citra

41 Luzzatto, 165. 42 Ibid., 164 et seq., 89-90. It is worth clarifying that direct tax demands did remain in place as forced loans in the period until the crisis of the 1450s. The 1379 estimo remained the basis for these assessments. The 1463 decision was taken by the Senate on 15 June. The Dieci Savii alle Decime (at Rialto) were formally instituted in their permanent form on 15 November 1477, by the Senate, to manage and keep records of these new tax-raising processes. Unfortunately, all of their earliest records were destroyed by the disastrous fire at Rialto on 10 January 1514.

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Printed Sources Arslan, Edoardo, Venezia Gotica (Milan: Electa, 1970). Balistreri-Trincanato, Corrado, and Dario Zanverdiani, Jacopo de’ Barbari: Il Racconto di una Città(Venice: Cetid, 2000). Chambers, David, and Brian Pullan, eds., Venice: A Documentary History 1450-1630 (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). Concina, Ennio. Tempo Novo: Venezia e il Quattrocento (Venice: Marsilio, 2006). Crouzet-Pavan, Elizabeth, ‘Politica e Pratiche dell’Habitat nell’Epoca Gotica a Venezia’ in idem; and Paola Pavanini, L’Architettura Gotica Veneziana, ed. by Francesco Valcanover and Wolfgang Wolters (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2000), 235-42. Dellwing, Herbert, ‘Il Traforo’, in L’Architettura Gotica Veneziana, ed. by Francesco Valcanover and Wolfgang Wolters (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2000), 195-204. Gianighian, Giorgio, and Paolina Pavanini, ‘I Tereni Nuovi de Santa Maria Mazor’ in Dietro I Palazzi: Tre Secoli di Architttura Minore a Venezia 1492-1803 (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1984), 45-57. Goldthwaite, Richard A., The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Goy, Richard J., Building Renaissance Venice: Patrons, Architects and Builders (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). —, The House of Gold: Building a Palace in Medieval Venice (Cambridg: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Gullino, Giuseppe, La Saga dei Foscari: Storia di un Enigma (Verona: Cierre, 2005). Hopkins, Andrew, Baldassare Longhena 1597-1682 (Milan: Electa, 2006). Howard, Deborah, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). Luzzatto, Gino, Storia economica di Venezia dal XI all’XVI secolo (Venice: Marsilio, 1995). Maretto, Paolo, La Casa Veneziana nella storia della città (Venice: Marsilio, 1986). McAndrew, John, Venetian Architecture of the Early Renaissance (Boston: MIT Press, 1980). Morresi, Manuela, Jacopo Sansovino (Milan: Electa, 2000). Muir, Edward, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Petrarch, ‘De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia’, trans. by Hans Nachod, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948, p.12).

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Puppi, Lionello, ‘Geografia di un Crinale: Filippo Calendario tra Storia e Leggenda’ in L’Architettura Gotica Veneziana, ed. by Francesco Valcanover and Wolfgang Wolters (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Storia ed Arti, 2000), 99-103. — and Loredana Olivato Puppi, Mauro Codussi (Milan: Electa, 1977). Rizzi, Alberto, Scultura Esterna a Venezia (Venice: Stamperia di Venezia, 1987). Romanelli, Giandomenico et al. A Volo d’Uccello: la Rappresentazione di Città nell’Europa del Rinascimento (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1999). Romano, Dennis, The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1373-1457 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007). Romano, Serena, The Restoration of the Porta della Carta (Venice: The Venice in Peril Fund, 1979). Rosand, David, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Rössler, Jan-Christoph, Palazzi Veneziani: Storia, Architettura, Restauri (Verona and Trento: Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Scripta Edizioni, 2010). Sanudo the Younger, Marin, ‘De Origine, Situ et Magistratibus Urbis Venetae’ in La Citta’ di Venetia (1493-1530), ed. by Angela Caracciolo Arico’ (Milan: CisalpinoGoliardica, 1980). —, I Diarii, ed. by Renato Fulin et al. (Venice, 1879-1903; repr. Bologna, 1969-1970). —, I Diarii: pagine scelte, ed. by Paolo Margaroli (Vicenza: Neri Pozzo Editore, 1997) Schuller, Manfred, ‘Il Palazzo Ducale di Venezia: Le Facciate Medioevali’ in L’Architettura Gotica Veneziana,ed. by Francesco Valcanover and Wolfgang Wolters (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Storia, ed Arti, 2000), 351-450. Schulz, Jürgen, The New Palaces of Medieval Venice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). Sherman, Allison, ‘Soli dei honor et Gloria’? Cittadino Lay Patronage and the Art of Identity Formation in Renaissance Venice’ in Architecture, Art and Identity in Venice and its Territories: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard,ed. by Nebahat Avcioğlu and Emma Jones (Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT, USA, 2013), 15-32. Wolters, Wolfgang, ‘Ipotesi su Bartolomeo Bon architetto’ in L’Architettura Gotica Veneziana,ed. by Francesco Valcanover and Wolfgang Wolters (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2000), 273-79.

About the Author Richard Goy, Practising Architect and Independent Architectural Historian



Marin Sanudo on Brescia Caterina Cornaro’s 1497 Entry and Glimpses into the Life and Politics of a Renaissance Border Town Gabriele Neher Abstract In 1497, Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, visited the city of Brescia. Ostensibly, Cornaro was on a family visit, attending to the confinement of her sister-in-law. This article argues that Cornaro’s much publicised visit to Brescia, celebrated in a series of magnif icent spectacles and tournaments, served rather a different purpose, and made Brescia the location for complex diplomatic discussions between the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Milan. Brescia was a key military outpost of the Venetian Republic in the 1490s. Straddling Venice’s border with Milan, it was uniquely suited to play host to a military peace summit and it became the stage for a celebrated joust, the subject of Floriano Ferramola’s A Tournament (1511, Victoria & Albert Museum, London). The splendour of the joust, and the attention paid to Caterina Cornaro’s visit, is also captured by Marin Sanudo the Younger, who provides a vivid account of the spectacle. Keywords: early modern warfare, fresco, gender, identity, material culture, triumphal entry

Marin Sanudo the Younger (1466-1536) remains best known for his diaries, compiled between 1 January 1496 and September 1533. These diaries were published by a team of Italian scholars in 58 volumes between 1879 and 1903 and are usually referred to as the ‘Fulin edition’.1 To date – not surprisingly! – these Diaries remain untranslated except in excerpts – and they represent 1 Sanudo, Diarii.

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_nehe

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at one and the same time an invaluable source of information and probably the single most fearful and forbidding collection of primary sources available to students and scholars of Venetian history.2 What makes the Diaries such an interesting (and formidable) source is the fact that Sanudo compulsively and almost obsessively collected information but rarely revised or edited substantial parts of what he had gathered; it should also be acknowledged that his writings were not always ‘his’, so the voices in the Diaries vary, presenting a wonderful mosaic of snapshots and perspectives. These may lack interpretation and a unifying voice, but arguably this is where their greatest value lies as primary sources. Sanudo’s sources – and correspondents – varied widely and included letters, despatches, addresses, epitaphs, and orations, but he also drew on the plethora of gossip readily available in Renaissance Venice.3 In addition he asked friends and acquaintances to correspond with him; Sanudo readily drew on these informants and does not always make it clear what is his and what is information he has gleaned second-hand. Once he had collected his information, he recorded it in his manuscript and then sometimes played with, and commented on, the information, often by drawing up a list. In fact, lists and categorizing of information is what makes Sanudo such a valuable source. 4 Not only does he provide bits of raw information but he also provides a lens through which to view and interpret the material – and looking at his reactions to a contemporary event, even if he seemingly provides no commentary, no explanation at all, can in fact provide quite a few insights. The best exposition of how this approach works, has been provided through discussion of the Venetian ‘eyewitness’ style of painting. In her 1988 study of Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio, Patricia Fortini Brown emphasized that (some) Venetian painters often employed narrative strategies that expressed ‘existing perceptual skills that Venetians exercised in recording the world around them. […] it gives us an idea of what artist and viewer both saw and what they wanted others to see’.5 The key concept discussed by Brown is that of a ‘“period eye” mobilized to create a “period” version of truth’; crucially, for her argument, this way of painting relates to a way of writing and recording history: Venetians told stories and related history through the means of images recording events, through ‘a mode of pictorial representation that appeared to trivialize the historical event by denying primacy of place to its dramatic core … a 2 Labalme and White. 3 Cowan; De Vivo; Horodowich; E. and T. Cohen. 4 Sanudo, De origine; also Vite dei Dogi. 5 Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 132; Baxandall.

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richly described ambient setting further obscured the narrative point of the enterprise by embedding it in circumstantial detail’.6 In other words, the narrative strategies at play in Venetian images often seem to privilege the incidental, marginal detail over the ‘narrative’, when in fact the detail constitutes and substantially enriches the experience of the event related. It can certainly be argued that Sanudo’s rich and varied writing offers the sort of kaleidoscopic view Brown describes with reference to Venetian eyewitness images, and occasionally Sanudo is best in trying to make sense not of what he can observe first-hand in Venice but of what he hears of what is happening elsewhere on the Venetian Terraferma. By looking in particular at two passages from the Diaries relating to one of Venice’s most prized military possessions, Brescia, I am suggesting that a closer look at one of these might show a different narrative to the one that seems initially foregrounded and might also raise questions about the ways in which diplomacy was conducted in Venice. This concern relates closely to themes and ideas that Michael Mallett first explored and touched on in 1981 and later refined in his seminal study, co-authored with John Hale, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State in 1984.7 Mallett, in typical style concerned with troop movements, troop concentration, and their strategic deployment, referred to a passage from volume 1 of the Diaries (763-67) and commented on the rather unusually frequent military references found within it. He emphasized the rarity of such concentrated and repeated references to military men and hardware and concluded that the passage highlights just how much Brescia was dominated by the presence of troops, the residence of key military personnel, and its thriving weapons industry. Brescia, on the westernmost border of the stato di terra, where Venice rubbed shoulders rather uncomfortably with Milanese territories, had served as de facto headquarters of the Venetian army since 1427, and by 1497 Sanudo reports a concentration of 39,000 men in the area. My interests in the passage are less concerned with the numbers of stradiotti and balestrieri and general men-at-arms; I want to argue that we need to look beyond the military hardware, which will allow us to get a little bit of a glance at the conduct of political business. It would appear that, for want of a better term, the ‘civic rituals’ and festivities of the Terraferma offered more than opportunities for entertainment and the celebration and visual affirmation of rule by Venice over territories in the northeast of Italy.

6 Brown, ‘Painting and History’, 263. 7 Mallett; Mallett and Hale.

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Brescia – and in particular its significance as a military site, staging post, and cultural centre in its own right – is certainly worth introducing in some detail, best done by calling on another contemporary voice, this one that of Pietro Casola, who visited Brescia in 1494 en route to Venice and thence to Constantinople and the Holy Land. At the time of his visit, Brescia was a prosperous city of close to 50,000 inhabitants and served as the headquarters of Venice’s standing army on the Terraferma.8 Casola’s fulsome account singles out the stately palaces of Brescia as comparable to those of his native Milan (high praise indeed!), drawing particular attention to the Loggia, which was then rising on the Piazza Maggiore. Casola also comments on the strength of Brescia’s fortifications and military presence, as well as the abundance of provisions on show: in the city there are beautiful houses for the citizens, and so many artificers of every kind that I almost seemed to see Milan [in la citade belle caxe per citadini, è spessa de ogni artificio, ita che me pariva veder quasi Milano] … There is a beautiful palace elaborately adorned, where the Governors of the city live. It is well supplied with munition, and especially with land weapons of every kind; it is a thing worth seeing. The Loggia, begun in front of the piazza, will be a beautiful sight when it is finished. [Ha uno bello palacìo assai ornate unde habitano li rectori di quela; è ben provisto de monitione, maximamente de arme terrestre de ogno fogia. È cosa digna al viso humano. Bella cosa de vedere sera la logia, comenzata in ante la piazza, quando sera fornita].9

The public face of Brescia – civic, military, and religious – is rich, abundant, and well-ordered, and Casola is quite clear about the overlord presiding over this rich and magnificent city: He who called this city ‘Brixia Magnipotens’ made no mistake, because it is so opulent. It was formerly held, together with the surrounding country, by whoever obtained the dominion of Milan; now it is subject to the Signoria of Venice.

8 By the sixteenth century, Brescia was, after Verona, the second biggest town on the Terraferma. In the figures returned by the Venetian podestà for 1495, Andrea Barbarigo listed 48,560 inhabitants of Brescia. See Neher; and Pasero, ‘Il Dominio Veneto’, 74-82. See also Frati et al., 64. On troops, see Mallett; and Mallett and Hale. Mallett mentions as many as 15,000 troops stationed in and around Brescia in the 1490s; Sanudo puts the figure at 39,000. 9 Newett, 119.

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(E però, colui chi disse: ‘Brixia magnipotens’ non pigliò errore alcuno, siando la citade tanto opulent insema con lo contado. Fu, alter volte, signorezata da chi obteneva al dominio de Milano; ora se tene per la signoria de Venezia).10

Casola, in the course of his travels, frequently comments on public order and the wealth of a city, and he especially likes to compare the places he visits; in Casola’s eyes, Brescia outstrips its closest economic rival, Verona, despite Verona’s obvious appeal: I had better say nothing about the beauty given to the said city [Verona] by the great river called the Adige, which passes through the centre and is crossed by so many and such fine bridges, lest I should err in overpraising. There is a great abundance in the said city, though less than at Brescia. [quanto faci bella dieta] ciutade [Verona] quello grande fiume, chiamato Adese, che li passa per el mezzo, con tanti ponti e cossi belli che meglio è tacere per non errare in el laudare. È dicta citade asai habundante, non al pare però de Bressa].11

As Casola’s comments show, appearances, both public and private, matter to the Renaissance beholder; in fact, information about prosperity and political rule are imparted from the appearance and abundance of public and private provisions. Casola, a noble Milanese canon on the way to the Holy Land, shows himself to be acutely aware of a city’s political allegiance and the close relationship between a city’s prosperity and good government, and he expects these connections to be expressed in the civic and religious buildings and spaces he encounters.12 Magnificence and splendour or, more precisely, ‘the Aristotelian and Thomist notion of magnificence as revived by fifteenth-century humanists’, were essential and expected aspects of display; arguably, this becomes particularly important in contested locations and at times of crisis.13 In the case considered here, Sanudo records a visit by Caterina Cornaro (Corner), the deposed Queen of Cyprus, to Brescia in September 1497. Caterina’s brother Giorgio (Zorzi) served a term as podestà in Brescia, and Caterina’s visit was ostensibly occasioned by her sister-in-law’s imminent 10 11 12 13

Ibid., 120; Paoletti, 79. Newett, 121. On Casola, see ibid., esp. 13-17. Shepherd, 47. See also Fraser Jenkins; and Lindow.

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confinement (in fact, Elisabetta Morosini did give birth to a boy during Caterina’s visit, as is faithfully recorded by Sanudo). In reality though, Caterina’s visit became the occasion of a series of magnificent jousts and tournaments that brought together Venetian and Milanese captains-at-arms. Pageantry abounded, and as ever in the political landscape of Renaissance Italy, pageantry facilitated diplomacy. Or, to put it differently: the Republic of Venice employed the seigniorial and princely means of entertainment for political means, and, arguably, this afforded the powerful Cornaro family, with its long-established significance as a quasi-princely family in the East, a disproportionate amount of influence on the Terraferma. Dennis Romano suggested in his study of the life of Francesco Foscari that the Venetian acquisition of its mainland territories in the first half of the fifteenth century had a profound influence on the perception of the nature of rule, arguing that this tension between democracy and autocracy ultimately led to Foscari’s dramatic downfall in 1457.14 In Brescia in 1497 this conflict remains apparent, but played out on the mainland, away from the urban theatre of Venice itself, and effectively utilizing the deposed Queen of Cyprus as a proxy prince to provide the context for delicate diplomatic discussions from which Caterina herself was excluded. As Mallett and Hale discussed in 1984, the late summer/autumn of 1497 was a seminal turning point in the politics of both Venice and Milan, with the rapid breakup of the Holy League realigning political alliances at the eve of the French invasion of 1499.15 In May 1497 Venice had dismissed Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, as its captain-general for his ‘francophile tendencies’, and Niccolò Orsini, Count of Pitigliano, emerged as Venice’s leading condottiere. Both Gonzaga and Orsini were at Brescia in September 1497, as were at least two members of the Sanseverino family: Galeazzo (the son-in-law of the Duke of Milan) and his brother Gaspare, better known as Fracassa. The presence of senior Venetian officials – carefully recorded by Sanudo – was again formidable, and all of this points to the fact that the ‘family’ visit of Caterian Cornaro to Brescia became ‘hijacked’ to serve as cover for intense political negotiations. The story unfolds in Sanudo: he carefully recorded Caterina’s departure from Asolo with a retinue that included several Venetian noblemen, including Girolamo Lion and his wife Caterina Gambara, with stops at Bassano, Vicenza, and Verona before being met at Desenzano by a delegation from Brescia that included her brother, at Ponte San Marco by a group of 40 youths, and at Rezzato by Niccolò Orsini and Brescia’s capitano, Francesco 14 Romano, 84. 15 Mallett and Hale, 59-61.

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Mocenigo, before finally reaching one of Brescia’s five city gates, Porta de Santo Nazaro, with her by now sizeable retinue. Her triumphal entry into Brescia took place on 4 September 1497. In the event, Caterina was to stay until November before leaving Brescia accompanied by her brother, who left his post as podestà early in order to take up an appointment as capitano of Verona. Giorgio, almost ironically, was replaced as podestà of Brescia by Marin Sanudo’s cousin Marco, the self-same Marco who had visited Brescia fourteen years earlier as a savio di terraferma, accompanied by a seventeen-year-old Marin, who penned his Itinerarium on that occasion. Marin Sanudo himself was not present, but he drew on a letter written by Nassino de’ Nassinis, Brescian envoy to Venice, who discharged a commission – or obligation – to report on the range and splendour of the festivities celebrating Caterina’s entry into Brescia. Nassino’s letter records the entry into Brescia; Sanudo then expands the entry by adding a list of the parties making up the procession on 4 September, and he then faithfully records a further series of festivities that ranged from a triumphal entry to splendid banquets, dances, and a joust.16 It should be noted that Sanudo’s interest in the three-month-long visit only covers the first week of Caterina Cornaro’s stay in Brescia; it was during the first week of her stay that the tournaments and visits took place, and following the departure of the Milanese delegation, Caterina embarked on a much more domestic tour of visits, effectively assuming the role of the dutiful aunt.17 Cornaro’s visit attracted considerable interest amongst the neighbouring courts; the festivities at Brescia in the first week of her stay, for example, are referred to in the correspondences of both Isabella and Beatrice d’Este, who were particularly interested in details relating to outfits worn.18 Interestingly, while Sanudo spends a great deal of effort on listing the clothes worn by Venetian officials, we have no record of Caterina’s attire. I would suggest that this is a further indication of the actually quite marginal and incidental role the deposed Queen of Cyprus played in this political pantomime. It should be emphasized, though, that appearances were preserved, that Caterina was afforded the greatest honour, and that ‘tutti uno ore dicono che in Roma non seria sta possible haver fatto più honor’.19 Nassino de’ Nassinis, Sanudo’s Brescian source (ambassador to Venice), is at pains to stress that nothing 16 Sanudo, Diarii, 1:762-67. 17 Caterina left Brescia on 10 November 1497, accompanied by her brother Giorgio; Pasero, ‘Il Dominio Veneto’, 202. 18 Cartwright, 142. 19 Sanudo, Diarii, 1:762.

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has been neglected to welcome Caterina, ‘daughter of St. Mark’, acting as the representative of the Serenissima. Caterina entered Brescia on 4 September 1497 through Porta San Nazaro with a retinue made up of Brescian, as well as Venetian, noblemen and women. She proceeded towards Santa Maria dei Miracoli and on towards her chosen lodgings, the palace of Lodovico Martinengo.20 Some of the details of her entry provide a tantalizing glimpse of the splendour of the occasion: the streets along which Caterina was travelling to her lodgings were covered in ‘pani’, cloth of gold and tapestries, in a clear reference to Brescia’s status as a thriving centre of textile manufacture. At Porta San Nazaro, Caterina dismounted and was seated on a platform, accompanied by Niccolò Orsini, Count of Pitigliano, and Giorgio Corner and his colleague, Brescia’s capitano, Francesco Mocenigo. Together with ‘altri signori e zentilhomeni’ they witnessed a splendid military parade, followed by a procession of the Queen’s women, clerics, members of the College of Law, and finally, the Bishop of Brescia himself, all clad in their most sumptuous garb, made of silk and brocade. Caterina then proceeded on horseback to the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, under a canopy of ‘damaschino bianco’ (white damask) manufactured in Brescia. Caterina visited the church, prayed briefly, making her way slowly towards her lodgings in Ludovico Martinengo’s palace – the self-same palace previously occupied by Francesco Bussone, Count of Carmagnola, who had conquered Brescia in 1426 prior to his ignominious fall from grace. Incidentally, we know that Francesco Gonzaga, another disgraced ex-commander of Venice’s army, was safely hosted in Luigi Avogadro’s palace.21 Caterina, on her journey towards the palace, was entertained by a series of triumphs and apparati, with Nassinis mentioning, in particular, that Caterina was addressed by Diana and her nymphs, with a Cupid singing most sweetly, and this was pulled along on a triumphal cart by four white horses in the guise of unicorns. Alas, Nassinis’s appetite for exhaustive descriptions did not match that of Sanudo, and he remarked drily: ‘non posso più extenderme’ (I cannot go on any more)! He assured Sanudo, though, that ‘de la multitudine de populo, non vi scrivo. Era una maraveglia’.22 Sanudo, not satisfied with Nassinis’s overly terse description, then provides in the Diaries a detailed list of the names of the captains, the size of their troops, and the numbers of floats participating in the event. As Mallett remarked, what is unusual about 20 This provides a tantalizing glimpse with regards to the duties of the podestaressa entertaining honoured guests; her function appears to mirror that of the dogaressa, as discussed by Hurlburt. 21 Reference to Carmagnola from Mallett. 22 Sanudo, Diarii, 1:763.

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Sanudo’s entries are the numerous references to men-at-arms, lending the entertainments for Caterina’s visit the air of a military showcase. Sanudo’s detailed account reads like a list of ‘who’s who’ of the condottieri in the service of Venice in 1497. Venice’s captains paraded into Brescia with their men-at-arms on 4 September; those of rival Italian courts – in particular, that of Lodovico il Moro Sforza of Milan, recently confirmed as Duke of Milan by imperial edict – entered in the following days, separately and staged for maximum impact. First to arrive, on 5 September, was Fracassa (di Sanseverino), accompanied by a retinue of 150 ‘boche’, including 120 men, twelve on horseback, and mules, together with his wife, Margherita Pio. Fracassa took up lodgings in the palace of Count Gambara (Giovanni Francesco), where he was joined, three days later, by his brother Galeazzo. The legendary Sanseverino brothers, particularly Galeazzo, held first place amongst the captains of the Milanese army. True to form, Galeazzo entered in the most splendid fashion imaginable, with a retinue of 200 horses and 28 mules. He entered Brescia from the west, through Porta San Giovanni, and his retinue wound its way towards Caterina’s lodgings in the Martinengo Palace. According to Sanudo, ‘la raina … vene a vederli a la finestra e tuti li fece honorevol riverentia’.23 Galeazzo then joined his brother Fracassa in Giovan Francesco Gambara’s palace. The following day, Sanseverino received a delegation in the Gambara palace that included Zorzi Corner and Mocenigo (the capitano, Orsini, and ‘tutti li zenthilhomeni’). There is no further mention of Caterina, so clearly, Saturday 10 September 1497 is the key date for the diplomatic exchanges that were organized almost under ‘cover’ of this particular event. While the men then competed at a joust held over the following three days, on 11, 12 and 13 September (won by Antonio di Castelnovo, one of Fracassa’s men-at-arms), their wives (we know that Fracassa for one had brought his wife with him) joined in the masques, dances, and banquets hosted in the evenings. Zorzi Corner’s wife Elisabetta Morosini, the podestaressa, was in confinement, yet what we get here is an ever-so-tantalizing glimpse into the social world of the stato di terra, at times mimicking, and at times differing, from that of the metropolis.24 It certainly becomes apparent that the role of Venetian gentlewomen on the Terraferma needs further research. It should also be emphasized that, to date, we know very little of the role that the governors’ wives and households played in this context. Holly Hurlburt’s study on the role of the dogaressa in the social life of the Serenissima has 23 Ibid., 766. 24 Massarotto; Hurlburt.

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Figure 1 Floriano Ferramola – A Tournament at Brescia, ca. 1511. London, Victoria & Albert Museum

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looked into the significant cultural and ceremonial role she played, but it is clear that the podestaresse, for example, played a significant cultural and ceremonial role in the cities of the stato da mar. What also remains little understood is the significance of the powerful families of the stato da mar in the political life of the mainland; families such as the Cornaro (with their established links to Cyprus), or the Dandolo, remained powerful office holders in the various domains of the stato da mar, as well as actively engaged in the political life of Venice, and on some occasions, documents such as Sanudo’s Diaries reveal a far more complex picture of power practised by these families than official records suggest.25 While there are no known surviving visual records of this event, it is possible to get an impression of just what view visitors to Brescia in 1497 might have taken away with them through a reference to Floriano Ferramola’s celebrated view of a Tournament at Brescia (Figure 1) (Piazza della Loggia), on display in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum), generally dated to 1511. Ferramola’s fresco proudly shows the open space in front of the (still incomplete) Palazzo della Loggia, taken up by jousting. Ferramola offers an oblique view into the square, which allows the spectator to catch a glimpse of the activities beyond the open archway but also to observe the actions of two groups of men and women converging towards each other at the front of the image. The three women, moving from the left towards the right, are chatting, and one is playing coquettishly with a spazzola, a very fashionable fan made up of feathers.26 All three are resplendent in their sumptuous dresses, proudly displaying striped bodices and rich sleeves, and in their depiction – which is in every respect as vivid as Ghirlandaio’s celebrated depiction of ladies of the Tornabuoni family – Ferramola emphasizes the wealth and bellezza of Renaissance Brescia. Attention then turns to the spatial delimitation of the square: the tall, crenellated walls surrounding the space of the joust. The walls framing the image are those of the old Visconti citadel, yet far from serving as a reminder of military domination, the walls have been appropriated by large numbers of spectators as convenient vantage points for watching the spectacle in the square below. Chittolini reminds us of the picturesque aspects of festivals: the town criers who, in the days beforehand, would announce the coming of the festival and who were despatched round the contado so that everyone could make preparations; the proclamations for the shops to 25 O’Connell. 26 Welch.

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close; the interruptions of work and of judicial sessions; the orders to clean the streets and squares; the equipment and decoration of houses, of public and private palaces and of religious buildings; the torches and peels of bells.27

Certainly Ferramola’s splendid fresco, originally one of a series of nine, shows Brescia and its citizens at their prosperous and peaceful best, displayed to great advantage against the backdrop of the magnificent piazza and its new buildings. Of course, the magnificent piazza proudly displayed here was a very recent creation, constructed in the decades following the onset of Venetian rule in Brescia and a symbol of the new civic unity and prosperity of a city under Venetian rule. Brescia’s internal spaces during the period under discussion here were remarkably subdivided, not only by the presence of forbidding internal walls but also by the city’s subdivision into four quarters (Cittadella [Santo Stefano], San Faustino, San Alessandro, and San Giovanni), which were subdivided into a further seventeen ‘quadri’ (districts).28 Brescia had five city gates (Pille, Torre lunga, S. Alessandro, San Nazaro, and San Giovanni), and each of the main quarters had a distinctive character of its own, with their separate histories, demographies, and alliances, marking out individual neighbourhoods. In this context, the creation of a new piazza that was to serve as the seat of a new republican government takes on added significance, as the square and its adjacent buildings represented the creation of a bespoke space unaffected by previous alliances and becomes instead a signifier of the importance of a new and prosperous Brescia that plays a significant part in the diplomatic life of Renaissance Venice in its own right.

Bibliography Baxandall, Michael, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). Brown, Patricia Fortini, ‘Painting and History in Renaissance Venice’, Art History, 7 (1984), 263-94. —, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). Cartwright, Julia, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua 1474-1539 (London: John Murray, 1907). 27 Chittolini, 70. 28 Sanudo, Itinerario, 70; Ferraro, 19.8.

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Chittolini, Giorgio, ‘Civic Religion and the Countryside in Late Medieval Italy’, in City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Essays Presented to Philip Jones, ed. by Trevor Dean and Chris Wickham (London and Ronceverte: The Hambledon Press, 1990). Cohen, Elizabeth, and Thomas Cohen, ‘Open and Shut: The Social Meanings of the Cinquecento Roman House’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 9.1 (2001-2002), 61-84. Cowan, Alexander, ‘Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice’, Journal of Early Modern History, 12 (2008), 313-33. De Vivo, Filippo, ‘Pharmacies as Centers of Information and Sociability in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies, 21 (2007), 505-21. Ferraro, Joanne, Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650: The Foundations of Power in the Venetian State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Fraser Jenkins, A.D., ‘Cosimo de’Medici’s Patronage of Architecture and the Theory of Magnificence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 33 (1970), 172-90. Frati, Vasco, Renata Massa, Graziano Piovanelli, and Franco Robecchi, Brescia. Le città nella storia di Italia (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1989). Horodowich, Elizabeth, ‘The Gossiping Tongue: Oral Networks, Public Life and Political Culture in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies, 19 (2005), 22-45. Hurlburt, Holly S., The Dogaressa of Venice, 1200-1500: Wife and Icon (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Labalme, Patricia, and Laura Sanguineti White, eds., Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, trans. by Linda L. Carroll (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Lindow, James, The Renaissance Palace in Florence: Magnificence and Splendour in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Aldershot and London: Ashgate, 2007). Mallett, Michael E., ‘L’Esercito Veneziano in Terraferma nel Quattrocento’, Armi e Cultura nel Bresciano 1420-1870. Supplemento ai Commentari dell’Ateneo di Brescia (1981) (Brescia: Tipo-Lito Fratelli Geroldi, 1981), 181-96. —, and John R. Hale, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice c. 1400 to 1617 (1984; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Massarotto, Anna Paola, ‘The Venetian Civic and Military Governors in Padua during the Sixteenth Century – Raison d’Etat, Political Prestige and Public Promotion of the Arts’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2005). Neher, Gabriele, ‘Moretto and Romanino: Religious Painting in Brescia 1510-1550. Identity in the Shadow of La Serenissima (unpublished PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2000). Newett, Margaret M., Canon Pietro Casola’s Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494 (Manchester: At the University Press, 1907).

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O’Connell, Monique, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Paoletti, Anna, ed., Viaggio a Gerusalemme di Pietro Casola, preface Jeannine Guérin dalle Muse (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001). Pasero, Carlo, ‘Il Dominio Veneto fino all’incendio della Loggia (1426-1575)’, in Storia di Brescia, ed. Giovanni Treccani degli Alfieri, vol. 2 (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1963/64), 1-396. —, ‘Dati statistichi e notizie intorno al movimento della popolazione bresciana durante il dominio veneto (1426-1797)’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 9th series, 1 (1961), 71-97. Romano, Dennis, The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari 1373-1457 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007). Sanudo, Marin, Itinerario per la terraferma veneziana, ed. by Gian Maria Varanini (Rome: Viella, 2014). —, De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae ovvero La Città di Venetia (1493-1530), ed. by Angela Caracciolo Aricò, glossary by Paolo Zolli (Milan: Cisalpino-La Goliardica, [1980]). —, Le vite dei dogi (Città di Castello: Tipi dell’editore S. Lapi, 1900-1911). —, I diarii di Marino Sanudo, 58 vols. (Venice: F. Visentini, 1879-1903; repr. Bologna: Forni Editore, [1969-1970]). Shepherd, Rupert, ‘Republican Anxiety and Courtly Conf idence: The Politics of Magnif icence and Fifteenth-Century Italian Architecture’, in The Material Renaissance, ed. by Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Welch, Evelyn, ‘Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Studies, 23.3 (2009), 241-68.

About the Author Gabriele Neher, Associate Professor, The Department of Art History, University of Nottingham



Bodies Politic The Environment, Public Health, and the State in Sixteenth-Century Venice Jane Stevens Crawshaw Abstract The uniqueness of the Venetian lagoon environment was widely praised by early modern contemporaries. The discovery of infection and disease, however, threatened to sully the reputation of Venetian society as well as the city’s miraculous and preservative situation. In their explanations of natural disasters, early modern writers employed a number of techniques to sidestep this particular, intellectual quagmire by declaring that the source of Venice’s health problems lay in areas beyond the city – on the land or in the water. Even then, however, authors did not find themselves on entirely solid ground; discussions of Venice’s wider environment were highly politicised as a result of the city’s dominions on the mainland (Terraferma) and at sea (Stato da Mar). This chapter will use contemporary writings on the environment, including the famous debate between Alvise Corner (Cornaro) (c. 1484-1566) and Cristoforo Sabbadino (1521-1586) on the land and the water as the source of Venice’s health problems, to illustrate how ideas about the city’s identity and health were reconciled with ideas about the state. The image of the body was used to reshape Venice as a city, a lagoon, and a territorial state, according to convenience. A study of these images illustrates that, rather than simply charting change over time in the establishment of an early modern state, it is vital to recognize the malleable, changeable and flexible nature of the idea. Keywords: air quality, dredging, environmental writings, infection, siltation

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_craw

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The walls were constructed from water, the gates and the roads of water: to preserve those same walls, towers, roads and gates there was no need for stones, chalk, wood or hardware but instead only faith, prudence and justice – things which are never lacking in this Divine city.1

This reflection by the Venetian Cristoforo Sabbadino (c. 1487-1560) on his native city and its environment is typical of a long tradition within Venetian writing of connecting the protective and defensive nature of the lagoon with the ideal nature of the Venetian Republic. The early ‘praise of the city’ tradition offered its readers examples such as Francesco Sansovino’s (1521-1586) portrayal of Venice as a city which defied the impossible in its setting as well as in its liberty, political stability, piety, economic success, and social tolerance.2 Such descriptions of Venice’s divine defences may seem incompatible with the city’s sixteenth-century medical and environmental histories, replete as these are with episodes of infection and pollution. In these instances, the source of sickness was thought to lie in acts which invoked the wrath of God, who, as Creator, worked through elements of the natural world. Pollution and infection, therefore, sullied the reputation of the city’s miraculous and preservative situation. In their explanations of natural disasters, early modern writers employed a number of techniques to sidestep this particular intellectual quagmire by declaring that the source of Venice’s health problems lay in areas beyond the city – on the land or in the water. Even then, however, authors did not find themselves on entirely solid ground; discussions of Venice’s wider environment were highly politicized, given the city’s empires on the mainland (terraferma) and at sea (stato da mar).3 This chapter will use contemporary writings on the environment, including the famous debate between Alvise Corner (c. 1484-1566) and Cristoforo Sabbadino on the land and the water as the source of Venice’s health problems. In the final section, accounts of the perceived impact of the Terraferma on the health of Venice are discussed alongside examples of public health practice in the context of plague epidemics. In the course of the discussion, various authors use the image of the body to portray Venice as a city, a lagoon, and a territorial state according to convenience, 1 ‘le ha fabricate le mura di acqua: le ha fatto le porte e le strade di acqua: che amantener le mura, le torri, le strade e le porte: no’ le bisogna pietri, calcina, legnami né ferramente: ma solamente fede, prudentia e giustitia, delle quai. mai è mancata né è per mancar questa Divina città’, ASV, Sea, 231, primo discorso, fol. 68v. 2 Sansovino, Venezia città nobilissima. 3 For Venice, see Appuhn, Forest. For comparative material, see Warde.

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in order to strengthen their arguments about how the health of the city could be improved. An exploration of these works, therefore, illustrates how civic identity was reconciled with ideas about public health and the state. It also contributes to the body of literature on the early modern state by emphasizing that, from the perspective of the environment and public health, cities were mutually affecting and each had potentially negative as well as positive effects.

The body of the lagoon In physicians’ treatises on how to improve the health of Venice, the remedy often involved treating the body of the lagoon. Corporeal metaphors were used to describe the city’s water – one author referred to it as Venice’s ‘salty humour’, and Fynes Moryson described it as being like ‘the blood through the veines of a man’s body’. 4 Physicians were often interested in the health of the lagoon as an issue in its own right and published works accordingly.5 One such example is the pair of treatises composed by Andrea Marini (1523-1570). Marini studied medicine in Bologna, Padua, and Paris before moving to Venice. He published a treatise on the work of Johannes Mesue the Younger on medical simples, and a copy of his recipe for theriac was reprinted as part of the treatise of Andrea Gratiolo on the plague.6 His two discourses on the environment, Sopra l’aere di Venezia and Sopra la laguna di Venezia, were finished in 1566, although unpublished at the time of his death.7 The texts interrelate with the purpose of illustrating that for physicians ‘to consider the air [in Venice], it was necessary also to speak about the lagoon’.8 Despite the overtly medical nature of the texts, particularly the former, they have been considered in line with works on interventions in the physical environment and rarely used by historians interested in public health. This trend has been even more pronounced since the inclusion of the two treatises in the series edited by Roberto Cessi and Niccolò Spada 4 Leoni; Moryson, 163. 5 Despite the prefaces of these authors, who described themselves as mere physicians, unschooled and unskilled in the technical and practical aspects of managing the lagoon, their interest and qualifications for writing become clear in the course of their texts; ASV, Sea, 119, fol. 295r (4 November 1574). 6 See Gratiolo; and Antichi scrittori, 4:vi. A brief discussion of Marini’s treatises has recently been undertaken by Wheeler, 31-32. 7 Mandelli. 8 Antichi scrittori, 4:vii.

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on the Antichi scrittori d’idraulica Veneta, of which Marini’s work forms the fourth volume.9 The two works, however, were written with the purpose of understanding and improving the physical environment as an essential part of medical diagnosis and treatment. Dedicated to the patriciate of Venice, Marini’s work exemplifies the approach and structure often adopted by ‘outsiders’ to the city. He opened his treatise on the air of Venice by lauding the situation and nature of the city as divinely appointed.10 He wrote that he felt unqualified after a short residence in the city of just seven years to understand properly the nature of the unique and esoteric environment and consequently sought the advice of those with greater experience of the city.11 His purpose in writing was to illustrate that environmental knowledge and understanding were vitally important for a physician, since without it the diagnosis or treatment of a patient was virtually impossible.12 Underlying both works was a notion of a past, golden age of Venice in which the city had been kept healthy by the constant ebb and flow of the lagoon waters, which counteracted the natural humidity of the environment, with the waters acting as a renovating, cleansing, and purging force.13 The correct ebb and flow of the water was necessary to maintain the purity, the temperature, and the correct mixture of elements (temperie) within the air. This, in turn, was essential to the health of the city.14 In more recent times, however, the siltation of much of the lagoon and the consequent reduction in its size had led to a sluggish flow of water, and, instead of providing cleansing movement, the waters had become characterized by heaviness and foul smells.15 Such an argument allowed Marini to continue to celebrate the origins and location of the city whilst addressing contemporary concerns. In line with the classic Hippocratic approach, the environment was acknowledged as being just one of the two influencing factors in the origins of disease. The other was food. Much of the rest of his first treatise considered food and the ways in which it affected the body. The issue of the way in which the problems of the environment of the city could be addressed was left, to be picked up again in the second treatise. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 4:1. 11 Ibid, 4:2. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid, 4:3. 14 ASV, Sanità, reg. 12, fol. 141v (22 April 1553). 15 Antichi scrittori, 4:10. For the discussion of stench in a Venetian context, see Wheeler. This is acknowledged in ASV, Sanità, reg. 12, fol. 82r (5 July 1535).

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In Sopra la laguna, Marini developed his argument that the distinctive water of Venice was not the problem: there was simply not enough of it. This situation was also attested to by environmental interventions; for example, the low levels of water in the Grand Canal and the lagoon meant that the former was repeatedly dredged during the sixteenth century. Marini identified three principal reasons for this shrinking of the flow of water in the lagoon: the effects of the rivers that flowed into the lagoon from the mainland, of the sea, and of the actions of men. The rivers were highlighted as the most important and most damaging of this terrible trio. Marini provided three practical solutions. The first was to divert, wherever possible, those rivers proving to be the most offensive and damaging (particularly the Brenta); the second was to enlarge the basin (la conca) of the lagoon; and the third was to alter the channels between the islands of the lido (la mutazione della bocca del porto).16 Marini’s writings illustrate the ease with which contemporaries could connect the health of the city of Venice with elements – such as the terraferma rivers – associated with locations elsewhere. Contemporary recognition of the interconnectedness of the lagoon and the Terraferma is also visible in the debate between Alvise Corner and Cristoforo Sabbadino on the best way in which to improve the health of Venice.17 This clash of the titans tends to have been discussed in terms of a series of polar opposites: of theory versus practice, of nature versus technology, and, most importantly, of water versus land. Despite its prominent place accorded by subsequent historians, Alvise Corner’s sixteenth-century work was not the first to recognize the importance of the Terraferma for the health of the city of Venice. Corner’s proposals were more specific, technical, and detailed than those of previous authors. He has proven to be an intriguing and somewhat eccentric figure as well as a focus for debate and interest.18 Little about him is straightforward – he confused even the issue of his birthdate because of his own preoccupation with the issue of long life, on which he wrote a tract.19 He published various architectural

16 For a discussion of the translation of the term ‘porto’, see P. Laven, ‘Venice’, 451; and the general discussion of the lagoon environment in Goy, 5-13. 17 See the various chapters in Alvise Cornaro. The texts of the debate have been reproduced in vol. 2, parts 1 and 2 of Antichi scrittori. A reasonable overview can also be found in Ciriacono, ‘Scrittori’, 491-512. 18 Gullino. 19 Alvise Cornaro, 18-27.

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works20 but is best known for his approach to ‘santa agricultura’.21 It was on the land that Corner constructed his solution to Venice’s need to safeguard and improve the nature and conditions of the lagoon. For him, the three most important factors in retaining the health of Venice were good air, a strong site, and food supplies. It is the last feature which distinguishes his writings, although he did enter into the mainstream debate on the lagoon. Corner sent these writings to the physician Girolamo Fracastoro (1478-1553) for comment, whose interests ranged from astronomy to hydraulics.22 Despite Fracastoro’s modest and self-deprecating remark in his preface that his profession made him unsuitable to enter into such a debate, he proceeded to do so, making a critical assessment of the hypotheses offered by Corner regarding the lagoon and proposing an alternative solution, based around the idea of reshaping the lagoon bed into a series of peaks and troughs. Rather than focussing upon the importance of food types and quality, Corner’s work explored ways of increasing the volume of productive land on the Terraferma. The various implications of interventions were wide ranging. As Peter Laven noted, ‘To suggestions that these [areas of terraferma land], if drained, would yield large areas for cultivation, the reply would always come that this would destroy the overflow area for flood waters and allow fresh water to invade the lagoon’, a noxious and dangerous consequence.23 The issues surrounding irrigation and reclamation of terraferma land during the early modern period are significant.24 Often couched in terms of a clash between private and public interests, they also facilitate a discussion of the relationships between cities and the manner in which they often would go head to head. Corner’s jousting partner was Cristoforo Sabbadino, who was, during the period of his writing, the proto (expert adviser) to the Magistrato alle Acque, as his father had been before him.25 Sabbadino was by no means the only technical respondent to this debate, but his writings are considerably more voluminous than those of the rest. As such, they provide a useful series of

20 See the article by Tafuri on Cornaro’s 1560 proposal for a theatre in the bacino di San Marco, ibid., 9-27, as well as in Carpeggiani, ‘Alvise Cornaro’, 28-35. 21 This term is widely used within the historiography on Cornaro, having been coined by Fiocco (in opposition to the ‘santa antichità’ of Fra Giocondo); for details, see Alvise Cornaro, 120-27. 22 BMC, Cod Cicogna 2543. 23 P. Laven, ‘Venetian Rivers’, 209. 24 See Ciriacono, ‘Irrigazione’; and Escobar. 25 See the introduction to Antichi scrittori, vol. 2, parts 1 and 2.

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ideas and images to be considered.26 A citizen of Venice and highly versed in the technical dimensions and elements of the lagoon, Sabbadino’s writings are detailed, extensive, and lagoon-focused. His nostalgic reflections on the past glory of the city, coupled with his technical knowledge of the waters, bolstered his conviction that solutions to the problems of the health of the lagoon were to be found in the waters themselves. Each of Sabbadino’s writings begins with a general and reflective preface on the nature and qualities of the city and its location, which Sabbadino agreed must have been divinely instigated rather than of human creation.27 The deterioration of the lagoon was, according to Sabbadino (and Marini after him), caused by a combination of the effects of rivers, the sea, and men themselves. The rivers were responsible for carrying material which was then deposited and led to the silting of the lagoon in various sites. The sea carried its own share of sand and materials for silting, but, in general, it was the combination of waters and the changing nature of the tides which caused problems. Sabbadino asserts that the problems connected with the sea would not have damaged the lagoon in isolation.28 Many of the damaging effects of human intervention (and here Sabbadino addressed the works of Corner and the approach he resented explicitly) came about because too much attention was being paid to potential benefits for the Terraferma with little or no thought being given to the lagoon itself, the ultimate crime in Sabbadino’s eyes.29 Sabbadino celebrated the origins, character, and nature of the city, setting himself up as a champion of the Venetian cause. This goes some way towards explaining the almost fraternal affection he receives from some Venetian historians and writers.30 Sabbadino used a detailed exposition on the image of the body to support his argument that the health of Venice relied upon the lagoon as much as it did upon the city. He considered that the lagoon, having been created by God, was similar to the human body.31 It had been made with everything it needed to enable it to live healthily. Sabbadino identified particular areas of the lagoon as the head, arms (which brought food to the city), and legs (on which the city stood firm); these were the lidi (the ring of islands on the 26 For the writings of other ‘experts’, see ibid, vol. 3. In addition to the volumes of Antichi scrittori edited by Cessi (mentioned above), a useful collection of Sabbadino’s discourses and responses to Cornaro can be found in the Venetian Archivio di Stato, ASV, Sea, 231. 27 Ibid, libro 1, preface. 28 Ibid, fol. 13v. 29 Ibid, fol. 17r. 30 See, for example, Escobar. 31 ASV, Sea, 231, fol. 45r.

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dividing line between the lagoon and the sea), the channels between the islands of the lidi (porti), and the bodies of salt water, such as the canals, respectively.32 These were important for the well-being of the city. Even more important were the major organs. The heart of the body was the city of Venice itself. Sabbadino assessed the relationship between Venice and its lagoon through this metaphor, stating that the health of the whole body was important, but that of the heart was more important than the rest.33 The island of Chioggia was said to be the liver, and Torcello, Mazzorbo, and Burano made up the lungs. The veins were described as the canals in the middle of the lagoon. The muscles, bones, and nerves were said to be the various fondi – the areas of the lagoon bed. Sabbadino’s broad image was developed further in a section on the process by which the body lived and survived. Sabbadino’s analysis claimed that in order to retain the health, beauty, and freshness of the body it was necessary to conserve it all intact (tutto intiero). The health of the body depended upon the constant nourishment of the city in the form of food, which Sabbadino identified as the sea water, supplying, through the regular tides, a reliable supply of nutriments. As it receded, the water also removed all noxious waste elements out to sea, like the effect of vomiting. This was an extreme image of expulsion. Unlike urination or defecation, it emphasized that these noxious elements were alien substances, which were to be expelled violently. It can be linked to the common medical treatment of purging the body.34 It is also an image used in the Bible to describe the relationship between the people of Israel and the Promised Land. In Leviticus 18:28 it is written ‘If you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you’. Again, therefore, the image echoes the perceived divine nature of the city and the appropriateness of a strong reaction to polluting elements.35 Like a body which inhales and exhales, Sabbadino pointed to the circulation of the air, caused by the movement of the salt water through the canals of the city, in constant motion. In order to keep these processes healthy, it was vital, Sabbadino warned, to address the dangerous disequilibrium which existed at the time between the acqua dolce (freshwater) and the acqua salsa (salt water) of the lagoon. This issue within the environment is reminiscent of the central notion of harmony and balance within medical thought. For 32 33 34 35

On these elements of the lagoon, see the references in note 15. ASV, Sea, 231, fol. 47r. For a general discussion of medical purges, see Wear. See, in particular, OT, Leviticus 18:25 and 28.

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Sabbadino, the key issue disrupting the balance of the city’s health was not to be found in the lagoon. Instead, the fault lay on the Venetian mainland and the rivers which flowed directly into the lagoon. As Sabbadino’s metaphor illustrates, the lagoon was not discussed as a single, unified, and undifferentiated body by contemporaries. Although rituals such as the annual Sensa portrayed the city and the water as two distinct and individually coherent entities in relationship with one another, early modern authors distinguished between areas of the lagoon, particularly in discussions of health.36 Andrea Marini, for example, provided a detailed list. He considered those islands on the dividing line between the sea and the lagoon (the partiacqua) – Malamocco, Sant’Erasmo, and Treporti – to have the worst air because of the calm nature of the waters. This also applied to San Marco in Boccalama (now sunken) and San Civeranno. San Giacomo in Paludo was seen to have the advantage of the canal of Sant’Erasmo (la Carbonara) nearby, which improved its air. Another group of islands – la Certosa, Sant’Elena and the lazaretto nuovo – were placed away from the partiacqua, but their canals were shallow and slow flowing so their air was not very healthy. Torcello and Mazzorbo were considered to be marginally better placed, but their proximity to the land and various marshes meant that tides were weak, and they were also close to the point at which the waters of the rivers Sile and Pese mixed with the salt water, producing bad air. Burano was accredited with good air, as were Poveglia, the lazaretto vecchio, Santo Spirito, San Clemente, Santa Maria della Grazia, and San Giorgio in Alga.37 Marini’s divisions are not representative: authors were not united in their opinions as to which of the islands of the lagoon were healthy and which were less so. Nevertheless, there was widespread recognition that certain areas were better placed than others. In his excellent work which drew attention to the architecture of the lagoon islands, Richard Goy identified this differentiation embued with sense of health describing a conceptual division between the laguna viva, the deepest part of the lagoon, which benefited from the movement of salt water tides, and the laguna morta, closer to the mainland, which was freshwater and saw little tidal movement.38 The interpretation of the lagoon as an entity in parts made the application of the image of the body appropriate for contemporaries. For Venice, a city in which its divine creation was emphasized, the potential inherent in the 36 Muir, Civic Ritual, 132-33; this is reminiscent of Niccolò Machiavelli’s image of fortune as a woman to be tamed, in The Prince, Chapter 25. 37 Antichi scrittori, 4:4-5. 38 Goy, 5-13.

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image to designate separate areas in order to purify the whole, to fragment in order to unify, was appealing. The image was fruitfully ambiguous in regard to the place of individual parts of the lagoon environment, which were neither fully integrated not fully excluded. The differing functions of the lagoon can be seen in the various uses of the islands: religious, social, and medical. During the medieval period, monasteries or convents were often placed on the islands.39 Islands were also used for social and religious groups associated with pollution. 40 From the thirteenth century, certain trades were banned within the city and placed on lagoon islands. 41 This policy was extended during the following centuries. 42 Similar use of space was employed for the plague sick who were sent to the city’s lazaretti (plague hospitals), which were located on islands of the lagoon. Other lagoon islands were adopted as cemeteries.43 What characterizes much of the writing on this subject within the mainstream historiography is a general agreement that these islands were used by Venice for various functions, important for the city but unwanted within the central urban space. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan has characterized the space as an ‘essential periphery’ for the city and has emphasized the importance of considering the relationships of the islands with Venice individually.44 Our understanding of the connections between Venice and these islands was nuanced by Ermanno Orlando’s study of the administration of the lagoon islands. 45 A Venetian podestà governed cities of the Terraferma or Stato da Mar, as he did some of the largest islands of the lagoon from the thirteenth century (Torcello, Murano, Chioggia, Burano, and Mazzorbo). 46 Some of these communities also had local statutes and 39 By the sixteenth century, a significant number had been abandoned because of the quality of the air and the problems of monitoring discipline and behaviour. M. Laven (xxiv) comments that those ‘on more remote and swampy islands, blighted by malaria and indiscipline, were closed down’. 40 The ghetto was founded in 1516 on the site on which the waste products from an iron foundry had been thrown (the ‘geto’). In Verona and Padua too, ghettos were founded, although not until the turn of the seventeenth century. Both cities, however, had seen communities of Jews take residence during the fifteenth century and petitioned the doge to allow a separate Jewish quarter from 1541 (Calabi and Lanaro, 152). For works on the Venetian ghetto, see Cozzi, Gli ebrei a Venezia; Calabi, Camerino and Concina; and David and Ravid. 41 In 1271, for example, the conciatori di pelli were sent to the Giudecca (Spada). 42 In 1413, for example, dyeing was banned within the city. For the development of the use of islands and civic hygiene measures, see, for example, Comune di Venezia, 118. 43 ASV, Sanità, 733, fol. 1v (13 July 1576). 44 See Crouzet-Pavan, ‘Sopra l’acque salsa’. 45 See Orlando. 46 According to Crouzet-Pavan (Torcello, 132), Torcello is said to have received its first podestà in 1197, Murano in 1275, and Chioggia in 1218, but they are only documented in Torcello from 1247.

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Figure 1 Benedetto Bordone, Map of Venice from Isolario (Venice, 1534) (Wellcome Library, London)

councils to oversee day-to-day administration. Local councils handled day-to-day administration, and local legal systems were retained. In all cases, however, ultimate power rested with the Venetian representatives. These structures of governance, Orlando argues, produced a coherent and collaborative political unit made up of a series of ‘Venices’. Surviving city plans of Venice, along with historical scholarship, highlight the changeable relationship between Venice and the lagoon based on need and context. 47 The early work of Erhard Reeuwijk and Benedetto Bordone (Figure 1) displayed the city of Venice as surrounded by a series of sizeable islands. The implication of such images was that the city was tied to these islands and indeed that they formed an integral part of the city itself. In contrast, the images that developed from Jacopo de’ Barbari’s famous plan of 1500 depicted a second, rather different, view. His plan took a bird’s eye angle which elongated and enlarged the city of Venice itself in comparison with the smaller islands of the lagoon. Very few of the islands feature in this image, although some of the plans which developed from the de’ Barbari

47 See works by Schulz, and Wilson.

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design reintroduced the islands. The ambiguity of these images of Venice reinforce the malleable nature of these relationships.

The body of the Terraferma The Terraferma, which during the sixteenth century spread west almost to Milan, included the overland trade routes and mainland rivers which connected the city with the Italian peninsula and German states. The general consensus among historians, when assessing the effects of epidemics on the Venetian territorial state, has been that the state fragmented, complicating the already-extensive body of literature devoted to definitions of the Venetian state. 48 Terms such as ‘dominion’ were used fluidly and loosely. 49 As a result, contemporaries used metaphors of the family or the body to describe relationships in recognition of the ambiguous position of the various locations. With the recovery of the Terraferma in the aftermath of the War of Cambrai (1509-1516), Venetian patrician confidence was said to increase dramatically, affecting a rhetorical return to a golden age, before corruption had crept into the Republic. This, by implication, involved a focus on the Venetian waters.50 At the same time, practical considerations, including population increases and higher demands for food supplies, caused the issue of land reclamation on the Terraferma to rise to particular prominence. Systems of governance balanced a degree of integration and independence. Economic relationships have been assessed differently.51 The Venetian territories were important sites of both manufacture and supply.52 As populations increased and the demand for foodstuffs rose so 48 Preto, 24-34. Useful volumes which provide an overview of key debates are Cozzi and Knapton; and Cozzi, Knapton, and Scarabello. Useful studies on cities of the Venetian Terraferma include Grubb; Ferraro; Muir, ‘Mad Blood Stirring’; Law; and Kohl. 49 Grubb, 15-23. 50 For an overview of the giovani in political life and the aftermath of the Wars of Cambrai, see Finlay. 51 Del Torre has claimed that it was into economic and fiscal concerns that Venice threw its administrative energy and has identified a shift in the relationship between Venice and the Terraferma between 1515 and 1530 when the systems for extracting monies from the subject territories became more consistent and efficient. 52 An important recent study has drawn attention to the relationship between Venice and the mainland for the supply of material needs in the form of wood (Appuhn, Forest). Michael Knapton has identified what he has termed a desire for and a drive towards economic self-sufficiency for the territory as a whole, both in food supplies and in manufacturing. Cozzi, Knapton, and Scarabello, 260, consider the most important products of the stato da mar and the Terraferma.

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too did the value of land and attention to the various types of land use.53 The sixteenth century has been seen as a period for a closer economic relationship between Venice and the Terraferma. It was also a period which saw greater recognition of the way in which the environments of the Terraferma and Venice interlinked – most notably because of the rivers which flowed into the lagoon. Venice had, for centuries, made use of the water of the terraferma rivers. Venice famously struggled with drinking water supplies; the proverb runs that Venice was in water but it had no water (‘Venezia è in aqua et non ha acqua’). Some sources of drinking water, such as the Brenta, were recognized as being of high quality. Many others, however, particularly water from the Bottenigo, were described during the fifteenth century as ‘bad water, potentially dangerous and the cause of death of many’.54 In 1554 residents on the island of Mazzorbo were described as so impoverished that they had been forced to resort to drinking water in place of wine; to add insult to injury, the drinking water in question was of very poor quality, being that of the Sile.55 The utility of the rivers as sources of drinking water, the role of the rivers in transportation into the city (notably through specific traghetti), and the physical connections they provided with the mainland made them significant from the point of view of public health.56 Peter Laven’s article on rivers during the sixteenth century makes the point that it is precisely because rivers do not stay at the boundaries of states that they can be contentious and threatening.57 Given that Venetian identity stressed the uniqueness of its environment and its separation from polluting elements, the challenge was to preserve this element of the myth of the city whilst concurrently addressing and recognizing the polluting potential of the terraferma rivers. The Venetian authorities had intervened in the rivers on the mainland since the thirteenth century, transforming the lagoon from a freshwater marsh to a saltwater tidal lagoon. Principally the interventions consisted of the diversion of rivers, particularly the Brenta, Piave, and Sile.58 During the early modern period a number of disputes developed regarding 53 Woolf. 54 ‘qual est pessima aqua et posset esse destructio et causa mortis multarum personarum’; Costantini, 28. 55 ASV, Sanità, reg. 12, fol. 147r (29 March 1554). 56 On the various traghetti, see the useful volume by Eleuteri and Vanin, entries 61, 148, 149, 153, 170, 173, 180, 187; and Brown, 85-112. 57 P. Laven, ‘Venetian Rivers’. 58 Appuhn, ‘Friend or Flood?’; and Ciriacono, Building on Water.

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the rivers flowing through territory in northern Italy.59 In 1541 tensions broke out between Padua and Venice regarding locks which had been introduced in 1523 and had led to a change in the water level, causing fetid air.60 Tensions also developed between cities on the Terraferma such as Verona and Padua, in 1535-1537. Padua recorded that, as a poor community, it was being forced to defend its territory against the threat of flood. Changes made to the rivers by the Veronese were said to have ruined sections of Paduan territory.61 The Paduans successfully petitioned Venice the following year but recorded in 1540 that unsupportable damage had been caused. Shamefully, it was said, Verona had not acted upon the Venetian decision. In their petition Padua invoked the issue of universal health (salute universale) to strengthen their case. Although Venetian interventions in the wider physical environment of the Terraferma could be characterized as an exercise in state building, such an interpretation would be anachronistic. Instead, a pragmatism underpinned such action, which relied upon the contemporary recognition of the interconnected nature of the environments of the cities of the Terraferma, meaning that such interventions were exercises in self-preservation as much as an opportunity to negotiate between subject cities. Areas of the Veneto were seen to be important because they also offered zones of protection for Venice. In 1539 the doge Pietro Lando wrote to Padua voicing concern at the stagnant water building up within the city and its territory and the potential for resulting mal aere. He wrote that Venice had particular cause for concern because Padua ‘had always provided a refuge for the sick of Venice because of its healthy air’.62 A common literary genre, from the time of Boccaccio’s Decameron, based its narrative around a group of nobles fleeing a city during periods of infection to the safety of the countryside. There they could amuse themselves, be distracted from the horrors of sickness, and be protected. For Venice this area was the countryside surrounding Padua or Treviso. In 1556 the ambassadors resident in Venice fled to Padua to escape infection.63 A series of letters requesting permission to carry out quarantine

59 A number of these are referenced in a useful collection of manuscripts in the BMC, Amg, for example, 329. See also the archives of the ASV, Pscc, and Sea. 60 ASV, Sanità, reg. 12, fol. 96r (30 April 1541). 61 See ASP, ACA,, Atti, b. 14, fols. 237 v (28 November 1535), 256 (11 January 1536), 273v (10 September 1536), and 444 (1 June 1540). 62 ‘la qual è stata sempre per il suo salutifero aere il rifugio delli amalati di questa città di Vene[zi]a’; ASP, Sanità, b. 543, fol. 97 (30 April 1539). 63 FGC; ISSSV; Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato 2971 (Carteggi con Venezia), fol. 599. The Florentine volume forms part of the Cini microfilm collection.

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within villas of the Padovano survives within the Paduan archives.64 The health of the mainland was important to preserve the site of refuge and to ensure protection against the importation of disease. The ability to help or hinder Venice in relation to health made the image of the body applicable to the context of the Terraferma as well as to the city and the lagoon. In 1575 the Venetian Republic received a series of three supplications from the nuncio, Marcantonio Corfino, a member of a prominent Veronese family. Corfino’s supplications were sparked by the decision of the Venetian authorities to impose a trade ban on Verona during the most serious plague epidemic of the sixteenth century, which raged between 1575 and 1577.65 Corfino claimed that enormous misery and affliction had been caused to the population of Verona and that the number that had died from the effects of the trade ban was greater than the number that had died from the plague. He wrote that it was not simply Verona that would be affected but all of the dominio, this mystical body. Corfino manipulated the conventional images and language of the territorial whole by emphasizing the importance of Venice as the head and the need for Verona to have equality with other limbs such as Padua. He said that it was impossible that the head and the body of the dominio could be well when a noble limb like Verona was infected and isolated, cut off from its blood supply. He likened the trade ban to a death sentence for a city trying to recover from an outbreak of disease. Corfino extended his medical imagery at the beginning of his third letter, writing that just as a prudent doctor applies suitable remedies and antidotes to the sick whilst they still have a pulse, so should the trade ban be lifted by Venice whilst the city of Verona was still living. He appealed to the ties of the territory and invoked the well-established metaphor of the body in order to get the ban overturned. He recognized the role that the Venetian authorities had in ensuring that disease did not spread through the territory but nevertheless tried to lift the boundaries and shrink the distance which had been imposed by Venice. Corfino’s text encourages us to recognize the enduring importance of these factors for the state during plague time – since he is protesting against the idea of fragmentation and he uses the imagery of the state to support his case. An emphasis upon the dividing lines between cities – through the introduction of plague hospitals as fortifications on the edge of cities and policies of trade bans – did not negate a meaningful, if malleable, role for 64 ASP, Sanità, b. 46, fols. 197-302 (22 November 1577-9 April 1578). 65 These are copied in ASV, Sanità, reg. 13, fol. 168r. His name is occasionally transcribed as Porfino in the letters.

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the state in shaping public health. Richard Palmer illustrated in his brilliant study of public health in northern Italy that areas could be concurrently more aware of boundaries and still cooperate, motivated by self interest.66 The potential impact of these cities on one another was recognized.67 Features of the relationship between Venice and its territorial cities in the context of epidemic disease can be identified in the assistance provided within this unit. In the aftermath of the War of Cambrai, the Venetian authorities were keen to reassert their influence in terraferma cities and assisted with the rebuilding or development of fortifications against epidemic disease. The Venetians promised 1000 ducats over the space of four years to assist with the building of a plague hospital in Padua; this money was explained as being a reflection of paternal affection.68 Subsequent letters expressed a strong degree of self-interest on behalf of the Venetians alongside charitable and ‘paternal’ concerns. Two years later, a Venetian letter articulated very great concern at the now urgent need of the Paduans: new cases of the plague were being discovered within the city walls, and there was still no location to which the infected, suspected, and their goods could be taken – a situation described as one of universal danger. The fortifications developed in individual terraferma cities had a role to play in defending the Venetian state against the importation of disease. Concurrent with the development of fortifications against plague, the Health Office archive includes a number of examples of assistance being sent between terraferma cities – under the radar and at odds with the political rhetoric of independent action in times of plague. In particular, medical personnel, including doctors and pizzigamorti (body clearers) were moved between cities in times of need.69 Information was also recognized to be vital, and through the sixteenth century the Venetian authorities requested that Health Offices be established in key cities. In the letter concerning the foundation of the Paduan Health Office, the Venetian authorities were

66 Palmer, in particular Chapter 5. 67 ASP, Sanità, b. 543, fol. 81 (18 January 1532). 68 ‘demostrar ipsa el paterno affetto della Signoria Nostra’; ASV, Sanità, reg. 12, fol. 38r (19 September 1523). 69 Wellcome library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, MS 223, 57 r (27 October 1555). Olivieri’s work in Spalato is attested to by the Procurator General in Dalmatia, Alvise Grimani, in ASV, Sanità, reg. 13, fol. 136v (9 March 1573) and described by Ascanio Olivieri in his supplication to the Health Office in ibid, fol. 134 r. ASV, Sanità, reg. 14, fol. 282v (18 August 1576); and ASV, Sanità, 730, fol. 24 r (6 September 1555). Two pizzigamorti, for example, were sent to Cattaro in 1572; ASV, Sanità, reg. 13, fol. 118r (7 July 1572); Benedetti, 22.

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clear on how and why it intended this office to operate. The Procurators of the Health Office wrote: This Health Office in Padua depends on our Office, as do the offices of all other states of our Dominion; these were created to keep us informed about outbreaks as well as to act as there may be need. As a limb of our office, built for us, for our needs, it will carry out our instructions without waiting for those of the Rettori’.70

Terraferma cities were not left under any misapprehension as to the expected flow of information to the head (Venice). In Padua, bundles of letters survive, predominantly for the second half of the sixteenth century (after the establishment of a permanent Health Office), which describe the spread of disease throughout early modern Europe. These letters attest to what Peter Burke has articulated in a different context: that Venice worked as a filter of communication and information, gathering details from correspondence with each of the cities individually and informing other parts of the territory accordingly.71 During the seventeenth century there was a discernable shift in terms of where protective structures were located within the Venetian state and from where information was designed to flow. The lazaretti of the Stato da Mar, considered in the work of Katerina Konstantinidou, became a focus of the Venetian Health Office’s attention.72 On the Terraferma, the gaze of the Health Office officials moved beyond the principal cities to focus upon two strategic sites: Primolano (about 20 miles north of Bassano del Grappa); and Pontebba (about 30 miles north of Udine).73 In both Primolano and Pontebba there had been earlier guard stations because they were strategic points on the boundary of Venetian territory. We know from material in the Museo Biblioteca Archivio Bassano del Grappa that Primolano was guarded as strategic pass on the boundary with Germany.74 In 1613 a lazaretto was constructed, which developed the site.75 A similar chronology can be identified for Pontebba, where the lazaretto was founded in 1624-1626. 70 ASP, Sanità, b.452, fol. 1 (16 January 1531). 71 Venice was among the first to introduce a system of resident ambassadors sending regular dispatches (Burke, 393). 72 Konstantinidou, ‘Gli Uffici di Sanità’ and his forthcoming article ‘Santi rifugi di sanità’. 73 See, for example, ASV, Sanità, b. 562. 74 MBABG, Scritture, 115, fasc 4. I am very grateful to Dr. Renata del Sal for making this information available to me. 75 ASV, Compilazione Leggi, b. 19, fasc 91 (7 February 1613).

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Increasingly during the seventeenth century it was to these two sites on the mainland, along with lazaretti of the Stato da Mar in Corfu and Istria, that the Venetian Health Office sent its instructions. In part, this shift developed because of the nature of plague during the seventeenth century, a period when areas of Central Europe, particularly Germany and Austria, were of concern from the point of view of infection. The shift also tells us about the early modern Venetian state. The state was not an all powerful and all pervasive, static structure but was in constant flux as a result of the circulation of wealth, individuals, and news. Channels for communication and assistance ran through the Terraferma like nerves – whose endings sent warning about health problems to the centre. To act in a way which blocked these signals or movement within the body was seriously damaging to the health of the whole. This is why Corfino could claim – something which is extraordinary to modern ears – that a trade ban was more damaging than the deadly disease of plague. To inhibit the natural order within a divinely created body would exacerbate health problems, not cure them. The idea of the body politic had a wide relevance; a strong and underplayed area of influence was in the context of disease and the environment.

Conclusion During the sixteenth century, interventions in environmental issues played an important role in displaying the Venetian state: both its scale and its limitations. Differing and deliberate uses of the image of the body to describe diverse forms of the state emphasized the inclusion or separation of various parts of the whole, according to convenience. Bodies of water could separate and connect features of urban and physical environments. For Venice in particular, the close link between the physical environment and the identity of the city meant that it was important to have the ability to emphasize or underplay links with the outside. In discussions of pollution, infection, and disease, contemporaries could blame locations or environmental features that were ‘external’ to Venice, but not without complicating relationships within the state. In order to reconcile the environmental and political links with their effects on public health, political rhetoric emphasized separation whilst, at the very same time, political governance facilitated assistance. The famous image by Carpaccio of the lion of St. Mark, with two paws on the land and two in the water, is often used to compare the status of the Terraferma and the Stato da Mar for Venice. It also shows the city as a mighty connector of the environments of the land and water and the centrepiece of a large

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state, which, like the andante lion, was characterized by movement in the form of physical, political, economic, medical, and personal connections. Even, and perhaps particularly, when one of the paws of the lion of St. Mark was infected, the unity of the whole was sustained.

Bibliography Manuscript Sources (abbreviations in square brackets) Bassano del Grappa  Museo Biblioteca Archivio [MBABG]  Scritture in Material delle Guardie, Archivio 2 [Scritture] Padua  Archivio di Stato [ASP]  Archivio Civico Antico [ACA], Atti del Consiglio [Atti)  Ufficio della Sanità [Sanità] Venice  Archivio di Stato [ASV]  Compilazione Leggi  Provveditori alla Sanità [Sanità]  Provveditore Sopraintendente alla Camera dei Confini [Pscc]  Savi ed Esecutori alle Acque [Sea]  Biblioteca del Museo Correr [BMC]  Archivio Morosini Grimani [Amg]  Codici Cicogna  Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice [FGC]  Istituto per la Storia della Società e dello Stato Veneziano [ISSSV]

Printed Sources Alvise Cornaro e il suo tempo, ed. by Lionello Puppi (Padua: Comune di Padova, 1980). Antichi Scrittori d’idraulica veneta, vol. 2: Discorso sopra la laguna di Cristoforo Sabbadino and Scritture sopra la laguna di Alvise Cornaro e di Cristoforo Sabbadino, ed. by Roberto Cessi (Venice: Ufficio Idrografico del Magistrato alle Acque, 1987). Antichi Scrittori d’idraulica veneta, vol. 3: La difesa idraulica della laguna veneta nel sec XVI relatione dei periti, ed. by Roberto Cessi and Niccolò Spada (Venice: Ufficio Idrografico del Magistrato alle Acque, 1987). Antichi scrittori d’idraulica veneta, vol. 4: Andrea Marini Discorsi, ed. by Arnaldo Segarizzi (Venice: Ufficio Idrografico del Magistrato alle Acque, 1987).

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Appuhn, Karl, A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). —, ‘Friend or Flood? The Dilemmas of Water Management in Early Modern Venice’, in The Nature of Cities: New Approaches to Urban Environmental History, ed. by Andrew C. Isenberg (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 87-92. Benedetti, Rocco, ‘Relatione d’alcuni casi occorsi in Venetia al tempo della peste l’anno 1576 et 1577 con le provisioni, rimedii et orationi fatte à Dio benedetto per la sua liberatione’, in Paolo Bisciola, Relatione verissima del progresso della peste di Milano qual principio nel mese d’Agosto 1576 e seguí al mese di Maggio 1577 … (Bologna: per Carlo Malisardi sotto le volte de Pollaroli, ad istanza di Sebastiano Balestra, 1630), 17ff. Brown, Horatio F., Life on the Lagoons (London: Rivingtons, 1900). Burke, Peter, ‘Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication’, in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilisation of an Italian City State, ed. by John Martin and Dennis Romano (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 389-419. Calabi, Donatella, and Paola Lanaro, La città italiana e i luoghi degli stranieri XIV-XVIII sec (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1998). —, Ugo Camerino, and Ennio Concina, La città degli Ebrei. Il Ghetto di Venezia: architettura e urbanistica (Venice: Albrizzi, 1991). Carpeggiani, Paolo, ‘Alvise Cornaro: gli scritti di architettura’, in Alvise Cornaro e il suo tempo, ed. by Lionello Puppi (Padua: Comune di Padova, 1980), 28-35. Ciriacono, Salvatore, ‘Irrigazione e produttività agraria nella terraferma veneta tra cinque e seicento’, Archivio Veneto, 5th series, 112 (1979), 73-135. —, ‘Scrittori d’idraulica e politica delle acque’, in Storia della cultura veneta, ed. by G. Arnaldi and M. Pastore Stocchi (Vicenza: Pozza, 1986), vol. 3: Dal primo quattrocento al concilio di trento, 491-512. —, Building on Water: Venice, Holland and the Construction of the European Landscape in Early Eodern Times (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006). Comune di Venezia: Assessorato alla Cultura e Belle Arti, Venezia e la peste 1348-1797 (Venice: Marsilio, 1980). Costantini, Massimo, L’acqua di Venezia: l’approvvigionamento idrico della Serenissima (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1984). Cozzi, Gaetano, ed., Gli ebrei a Venezia secoli XIV-XVIII (Milan: Edizioni Comunità, 1987). —, and Michael Knapton, La Repubblica di Venezia nell’età moderna: dalla guerra di Chioggia al 1517 (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1986). —, Michael Knapton, and Giovanni Scarabello, La Repubblica di Venezia nell’età moderna: dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1992).

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Crouzet-Pavan, Elisabeth, ‘Sopra l’acque salsa’: espaces, pouvoir et société à Venise à la fin du Moyen Age, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1992). —, Torcello: storia di una città scomparsa (Rome: Jouvence, 2001). Davis, Robert, and Benjamin Ravid, eds., The Jews of Early Modern Venice (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Del Torre, Giuseppe, Venezia e la terraferma dopo la guerra di Cambrai. Fiscalità e amministrazione 1515-1530 (Milan: F. Angeli, 1986). Eleuteri, Paolo, and Barbara Vanin, Le mariegole della Biblioteca del Museo Correr (Venice: Marsilio, 2007). Escobar, Sergio, ‘Il controllo delle acque a Venezia nel Cinquecento: tra progetto tecnico e progetto politico’, in Storia d’Italia, ed. by Gianni Micheli (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 104-53. Ferraro, Joanne, Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Finlay, Robert, Politics in Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980). Goy, Richard, Venetian Vernacular Architecture: Traditional Housing in the Venetian Lagoon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Gratiolo, Andrea, Discorso di peste (Venice, 1576). Grubb, James, Firstborn of Venice: Vicenza in the Early Renaissance State (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Gullino, Giuseppe, ‘Alvise Corner’, in Dizionario biografico italiano 29 (1983): http:// www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/alvise-corner (Dizionario-Biografico)/accessed 09/08/16. Kohl, Benjamin, Culture and Politics in Early Renaissance Padua (Farnham: Ashgate, 2001). Konstantinidou, Katerina, ‘Gli Uffici di Sanità delle isole ionie durante il seicento e il settecento’, Studi veneziani, 49 (2005), 379-91. —, ‘Santi rifugi di sanità. I lazaretti delle Quattro isole di Levante’, Studi veneziani, n.s., 53 (2007), 239-60. Laven, Mary, Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003). Laven, Peter, ‘The Venetian Rivers in the Sixteenth Century’, in Montagnes, fleuves, fôrets dans l’histoire: barrières ou lignes de convergence? ed. by Jean-François Bergier (St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae, 1989), 198-217. —, ‘Venice and her Dominions, 1381-1797’, The Historical Journal, 37 (1994), 447-55. Law, John, Venice and the Veneto in the Early Renaissance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2000). Leoni, Benedetto, Canzone fatta intorno allo stato calamitoso dell’inclita citta di Venetia nel como de’ maggiori suoi passati travagli per la peste (Bologna, 1577).

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Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, ed. and trans. by Stephen Milner (London: Phoenix paperback edition, 1996). Mandelli, Vittorio, ‘Andrea Marini’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 70 (2008): http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/andrea -marini (Dizionario-Biografico)/ accessed 09/08/2016. Moryson, Fynes, An Itinerary (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1971). Muir, Edward, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). —, ‘Mad Blood Stirring’: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Orlando, Ermanno, Altre Venezie: Il dogado veneziano nei secoli XIII e XIV (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2008). Palmer, Richard, ‘The Control of Plague in Venice and Northern Italy 1348-1600’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Kent, 1978). Preto, Paolo, Peste e società a Venezia nel 1576 (Vicenza: Pozza, 1978). Sansovino, Francesco, Venezia città nobilissima et singolare descritta in XIII libri (Venice, 1663; repr. Farnborough, Hants: Gregg, 1968). Schulz, Juergen, The Printed Plans and Panoramic Views of Venice (1486-1797) (Florence: Olschki, 1970). Spada, Niccolò, ‘Leggi veneziane sulle industrie chimiche a tutela della salute pubblica dal secolo XIII al XVIII, Archivio veneto, 5th series, 7 (1930), 126-56. Tafuri, Manfredo, ‘Alvise Cornaro, Palladio e Leonardo Donà: un dibattito sul bacino marciano’, in Palladio e Venezia, ed. by Lionello Puppi (Florence: Sansoni, 1982), 9-27. Warde, Paul, Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Wear, Andrew, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Wheeler, Jo, ‘Stench in Sixteenth-Century Venice’, in The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500, ed. by Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 25-38. Wilson, Bronwen, The World in Venice: Print, the City and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Woolf, Stuart, ‘Venice and the Terraferma: Problems of the Change from Commercial to Landed Activities’, in Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. by Brian Pullan (London: Methuen, 1968), 175-203.

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About the Author Jane Stevens Crawshaw, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern European History, Oxford Brookes University



The Price of Charles V’s Protection in Italy The Example of Lucca* Christine Shaw

Abstract The agenti imperiali, the officials, ambassadors and military commanders representing the Emperor Charles V in Italy, made use of his status as Holy Roman Emperor and of the claims this gave him and them to intervene in Italian states over which he did not rule directly, to aid in establishing Spanish hegemony over Italy. The example of Lucca, a small state that asked for Charles’s protection as an Imperial city, while resolutely maintaining its independence and trying to fend off demands from the emperor and the agenti imperiali for heavy financial contributions to the maintenance of the Imperial army in Italy, casts light on how this was done. It shows that even if Italian states such as Lucca might occasionally describe themselves as subjects of the Emperor, they were not prepared to be treated as though they were; it was the manner in which the demands were made, not just the amounts of money demanded, that aroused their resistance. The attitude Charles took to Lucca, his willingness to listen, eventually, to the protests of the Lucchese and to order his agenti in Italy not to oppress them or to make incessant demands on them, support the position of those who argue that he was not inherently hostile to republics. Keywords: allegiance, diplomacy, Imperial city, libertà, liberty

* This essay first appeared in the journal Estudios de Historia de España, 10 (2008), 137-64. The author is grateful to the journal for permission to reproduce it here.

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_shaw

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When Charles V first saw the Tuscan city of Lucca in 1536, so contemporary chroniclers relate, he remarked that the city was not a small town, as he had been told, but so strong that it would be very difficult to take it by force.1 The Emperor’s comment might have been a cause for concern, as well as pride, to the Lucchese. They had been trying for the best part of two decades to convince Charles and his advisers, ambassadors, officials, and commanders in Italy that Lucca was a small, weak, and impoverished state, quite unable to pay the large contributions to support the Spanish and Imperial armies in Italy that were expected of a wealthy merchant city, one that repeatedly laid stress on its status as an Imperial city to claim the protection of the Emperor. The subject of Charles V’s relations with Italy was, until quite recently, one that was avoided, even regarded with distaste by Italian historians. Charles V laid on Italy the ‘Spanish yoke’, the ‘leaden cape’ that repressed political liberties and blighted the economy: this was the prevailing view of his significance in Italian history.2 Spanish historians writing of relations between Spain and Italy have been concerned above all with the papacy. Fortunately, historians from Italy, Spain, and elsewhere have begun to turn their attention to the period of Spanish dominance over the Italian peninsula, and seriously to question long-held assumptions. The spate of conferences and publications prompted by the commemoration of the quincentenary of Charles’s birth in 1500 included important contributions that have begun to fill in the complex picture of this critical period of Italian history. However extensively old views of sixteenth-century Italy are revised, there can be no question that Charles V and those who represented him and served him were among the most influential men who reconfigured the Italian state system and political life from Milan to Sicily, or that they were responsible for the establishment of Spanish hegemony over much of Italy.3 To achieve this, they made use of Charles’s status as Holy Roman Emperor, and of the claims this gave him and his representatives to intervene in states over which he did not rule in his right as heir to the dominions of the Crown of Aragon in Italy. One of the most-debated aspects of Charles V’s reign has been the question of how he saw his role as Emperor and how his conception of that role shaped his policies. Much of the recent scholarly 1 Berengo, 265. 2 Shaw, ‘Charles V and Italy’. 3 Although there can be dispute about the extent of that hegemony and whether Genoa, for example, or even papal Rome, should be seen as part of the Spanish Empire.

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interest in Charles in relation to Italy has been directed towards the image of the Emperor, and how this was expressed in ritual, literature, and the visual arts. As yet there has been less attention paid to the question of how the agenti imperiali (as they were often called in Italian sources), the ambassadors, officials and commanders who represented Charles in Italy, used his Imperial status to further his and their political and military aims, or of the extent to which they made conscious use of it to consolidate the power of the Spanish crown, rather than of the Empire, in Italy. A study of Lucca, of the city’s relations with Charles and the agenti imperiali can contribute to our understanding of this significant question. The example of Lucca may not, perhaps, seem to furnish an obviously fruitful approach to these matters. It was a small republic, that maintained its independence, was not directly involved in the campaigns of the Italian wars, and kept as low a diplomatic profile as it could. Except for a brief period in the early 1530s, there was no Spanish or Imperial representative resident there. But this meant that when Lucca came under pressure – as the Republic frequently was during the 1520s and early 1530s – to contribute to the maintenance of the Imperial forces in Italy, the discussion of the Lucchese with the agenti imperiali about the justification for these demands took place at the Imperial court, or in Rome or in the camp of the army’s commander, rather than in Lucca. The despatches of the envoys charged with arguing Lucca’s case and reporting the responses of the Imperial representatives, or of Charles himself on the rare occasions when a Lucchese envoy was granted an audience with him, have been preserved in substantial numbers in the Archivio di Stato of Lucca. Among the wealth of sixteenthcentury diplomatic correspondence preserved in Italian archives, Lucchese sources are usually overlooked, but they provide an unexpected source of interesting insights into the period when the battle between Charles V and King Francis I of France for dominance in Italy was at its most intense. It was the Lucchese who laid claim to the protection of the Emperor for their republic as an Imperial city, not Charles and his councillors who insisted on it. In 1509, they had paid 9000 ducats to Charles’s predecessor and grandfather, Maximilian I, for confirmation of Imperial privileges granted to Lucca by Charles IV in 1369 after he had helped free the city from subjection to Pisa. 4 At a high point of his fortunes in Italy, laying siege to the Venetian subject city of Padua but, as ever, short of money, Maximilian had sent envoys to Lucca to offer the confirmation of the city’s Imperial privileges for a payment of 12,000 ducats; the Lucchese bargained 4

For a recent discussion of Lucca’s status as an Imperial city, see Adorni Braccesi and Simonetti.

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the price down to 9000.5 No power to intervene directly in the government of the Republic was claimed or conceded; no census or tribute was to be paid. Maximilian confirmed the citizens and popolo of the city of Lucca ‘in perpetuum libertatem et universa et singula privilegia’ [‘in perpetual liberty and each and every privilege’], he did not promise them protection from their enemies.6 Protection was what the Lucchese paid the French king Louis XII 30,000 tornesi for only six months later, or rather, they paid for conf irmation of protection already agreed (and paid for) in 1502, in order to avert the ill-effects of rumours at the French court that the Lucchese had assisted an attempt by papal troops to overturn the French king’s dominion over Genoa.7 In confirming that ‘susciperemus in nostram protectionem […] civitatem Lucensem’ [‘we take the city of Lucca into our protection’], the king declared that neither he nor the Lucchese intended this to be in any way prejudicial to Lucca’s status as an Imperial city.8 The Lucchese had also invoked Louis’s predecessor Charles VIII, as ‘nostro unico defensore et protectore’ [‘our only defender and protector’].9 It has to be said, however, that the Lucchese were prodigal in claims to the protection of Italian powers, native or ultramontane, republic, prince or pope. They were especially keen to be in the good graces of whoever held the duchy of Milan and was, therefore, not only their most powerful neighbour but also could grant access to the trade routes to northern Europe that were vital for Lucchese merchants. Even the weak last Sforza duke, Francesco II, after he had been allowed by Charles V to regain his rule over Milan in 1529 was assured by the Lucchese that it was the protection of the dukes of Milan that had preserved the libertà of Lucca to that day; his return to the duchy meant that they could live secure.10 Another enduring motive for wishing to be on good terms with the Duke of Milan, whoever that might be, was to help Lucca fend off the designs, long nourished by the Florentines, to annex their neighbouring republic to round off their possessions in northern Tuscany. Whatever the regime in Florence, the Lucchese were always on the watch for 5 Tommasi, 365-66. 6 Lucca, Archivio di Stato, Anziani al tempo della Libertà [henceforth ASLucca, Anziani], Capitoli 20, fols. 322-331; quotation fol. 329: 1 September 1509. 7 Tommasi, 367-68. 8 ‘preiuditium affere iuribus sacratissimi Romani imperii … supra predictam civitatem Lucensem’; ASLucca, Anziani, Capitoli 20, fols. 279-281; quotations fols. 279, 281: 6 February 1510. 9 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 616, fol. 415: instructions to Niccolò Tegrimi and Paolo Federighi, ambassadors going to the King of France (August 1495?). 10 Ibid., Reg, 618: instructions to (Cesare de’ Nobili, April 1531).

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signs that the Florentines might be planning to make a move. Yet this did not stop them at times invoking the Republic of Florence, or the Medici family, as protectors. Our peace and libertà – which, they emphasized, we desire above everything else – consists largely in the protection and benevolence of the Florentines, a Lucchese envoy sent to Florence in 1480 was to say.11 Almost identical phrases were used 50 years later in the instructions given to envoys sent to Alessandro de’ Medici, who had just been confirmed by Charles V as head of the Florentine state.12 Such protestations were often no more than diplomatic niceties, ritual expessions of respect towards powers from whom Lucca perhaps hoped for some favour, or at least good will. In themselves, they need be no more meaningful than the customary phrases of the day in which one prince would declare himself the obedient son of another. Nevertheless, in some circumstances, the protection one Italian power gave to another was considered to be more than a mere formality, that it might entail an obligation to provide effective diplomatic, even military, support. Formal public acknowledgement could be given to the relationship by the nomination in treaties or alliances of a list of cities and lords as ‘aderenti’ or ‘raccomandati’ of one or other of the signatory powers. This well-established system of connections linking Italian states through degrees of dependency and subordination was upset when the ultramontane powers – the monarchs of France, of Aragon and Castile, and the Emperor – made Italy their battleground, and themselves became Italian powers, competing for territory. As Italian states invoked their protection, it became clear that the ultramontane powers had a rather different conception of what this involved. As the system functioned in the fifteenth century between Italian states, protection did not have to be paid for. Indeed, the protector might well be expected to provide some form of subsidy to the subordinate power – money for pensions to influential individuals to ensure their support for the regime in place, for example, or condotte, military contracts that gave welcome additional income as well as

11 ‘essendosi visto per longha experientia che la pace et libertà nostra (che sopra ogni cosa da noi è bramata) consiste potissimum in la protectione et benivolentia della loro excellentie’ (that is, the Signoria of Florence); ibid., Reg. 616, fols. 8-9, quotation fol. 8: instructions to Pietro Fatinelli going to Florence, 15 May 1480. 12 ‘essendosi visto per longa experientia che la pace et libertà nostra, la conservation della quale da noi sopra ogni cosa desiderata, consiste potissimum in la benivolentia et protectione di Sua Excellentia et di quella Illustrissma casa’; ibid., Reg. 618, fols. 71-74, quotation fols. 71-72: instructions to Cesare de’ Nobili and Martino Buonvisi, going to Florence (November 1531?).

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troops to insecure signori in the Romagna.13 By contrast, the ultramontane powers expected those seeking their protection to pay for it.14 Nor was it a privilege that they expected to sell cheaply – especially when those seeking protection were perceived as wealthy Italian merchant cities. Familiar with Italian merchants and bankers throughout Europe, who were often willingly or unwillingly a source of credit to ultramontane courts, princes and their officials could be forgiven for thinking that such communities could readily supply large sums of cash. They might genuinely struggle to comprehend why their requests, or demands, for money should be met by pleas of poverty, of inability to provide the sums demanded, or at least to provide them quickly; certainly they would feel justified in taking a sceptical view of such excuses. It could take them a long time to learn that while an Italian city might be rich, the government of that city might be on a tight budget, and that however wealthy individual merchants might be, it did not mean that the communal authorities of their home cities could turn to them at will for subsidies. Lucca was one these cities. Particularly in France and Flanders, but also in Spain and England and elsewhere, the Lucchese were known as manufacturers and merchants of high-quality silk textiles, and as bankers. Repeatedly they found themselves confronted by demands for payment of sums far beyond the limits of their usual communal budget, at a time when the trade on which their citizens depended – the many workers who produced the cloth as well as the merchants who traded it – was suffering severe disruption because of the Italian Wars. Apart from the question of how much the Lucchese could be expected to pay and, indeed, on what grounds they should be called on to pay anything at all, there were further reasons for differing conceptions of the nature of the relationship between Charles V and Lucca, in the uncertainty about the implications of Lucca’s status as an Imperial city. Lucca and other ‘Imperial cities’ in Italy, such as Genoa or Siena or Verona, certainly did not have the same status as, say, Augsburg. No Italian city was represented in Imperial diets, or came under the administration of the central financial or legal institutions of the Empire. What duties towards the Empire or the Emperor himself their status as Imperial cities might imply was by no means clear. 13 The intricacies of this system of subsidies and protection in fifteenth-century Italy can be fully appreciated through the edition of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Lettere that is in progress, formerly under the general editorship of the late Nicolai Rubinstein. 14 For the effects of the takeover by the French of the duchy of Milan, which had been a lynchpin of this system in northern Italy, see Shaw, ‘The Role of Milan’.

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It was certainly not considered to be incompatible with their libertà, a concept that could be invoked both by the cities and by the Emperor and his representatives. Frequently invoked the concept of libertà may have been, but it was very rarely explicated. It would be more than likely that the word and the concept carried different weight and different significance for the citizens of republics striving to preserve their political independence – one important sense of libertà – in an Italy that had become a battleground for the major European powers, than they would carry for the representatives of a ruler perceived from the beginning of his reign as the most powerful emperor for centuries. Indications of these differing perceptions of the nature of Lucca’s relation to Charles were evident from the first exchange of courtesies between the Anziani, the main executive committee of the Republic’s government, and the Spanish ambassador in Rome, soon to become known as the Imperial ambassador, Juan Manuel, after he had sent notification to them of Charles’s election. Thanking him for this, the Anziani wrote that they prayed God to give Charles long life, ‘accio lo imperio sia gubernato sotto la prudentia di uno tanto et si invectissimo Re, et noi possiamo fruire la libertà nostra sotto la sua felicissima protectione’ [‘so that the Empire shall be governed by the wisdom of such a great and unvanquished king, and we can enjoy our liberty under his most fortunate protection’].15 They were right to think this, responded Manuel to their congratulations, passed on by the Lucchese bishop Silvestro Gigli, ‘se si existimano potere stare securi dela loro libertà […] vivendo la prefata Caesarea Maestà, per haverne quella in loco de obedientissimi et devotissimi subditi suoi, et delle quali è per havere peculiare cura et protectione’ [‘if they consider that they can be secure of their liberty … while His Imperial Majesty lives, as he holds them to be his most obedient and devoted subjects, of whom he will have particular care and protection’]. The Anziani did not describe the Lucchese as subjects of Charles – they described them to Charles as his ‘obedientes filios et servos’ [‘obedient sons and servants’]: this was the diplomatic language of respect, not subjection.16 They used the same language when writing to the French governor of Milan, Odet de Foix, seigneur de Lautrec, in January 1520, assuring him that ‘siamo semper stati et vogliamo essere boni servitori et figluoli della corona di Francia’ [‘we have always been and we wish to be good servants and sons of the crown of France’].17 But when they were concerned 15 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 540, fol. 204: Anziani to Juan Manuel, 7 July 1519. 16 Ibid., fols. 523-525; quotation fol. 525: Anziani to Charles V, 16 September 1519. 17 Ibid., fols. 535-536: Anziani to Lautrec, 1 January 1520.

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to repudiate accusations of disloyalty to the Emperor a few months later, the Anziani did describe the Lucchese as his ‘fidelissimi subditi’ [‘most faithful subjects’]; if when the King of France came in force to Italy, ‘ci fusse stato necessario pigliare la protectione di Sua Maestà’ [‘it had been necessary to take the protection of His Majesty’], they had never intended ‘derogare juribus imperii, immo ne faremo semper spetial reservatione’ [to derogate from the laws of the Empire, on the contrary, we have always made specific reservation of them’].18 When the Lucchese decided to ask for the renewal of their privileges – which was not until a year after the election – they evidently hoped that this would be an easy and inexpensive procedure. Typically, rather than send a special envoy, they entrusted the matter to a citizen of Lucca resident in Flanders, near where Charles was then resident, Niccolò Buonvisi, and authorized him to spend up to 2000 ducats.19 But the Emperor did not come to Bruges where Buonvisi was, and by January 1521 he still had nothing to report. He had not even been able to find out whether matters concerning the Empire ‘si governa in corte per li medesimi consiglieri et governatori che si governano le altre cose delli altri regni et stati, hovero se hanno consiglio et governo aparte di quelli electori o altri grandi della Magna’ [‘are governed in the court by the same councillors and officials who deal with the affairs of the other kingdoms and states, or whether they are handled by a separate council and government of the electors or other magnates of Germany’].20 When war broke out in 1521 between Charles V and Francis I, the Lucchese did not want to get involved, but hedged their bets by sending an envoy, Cesare de’ Nobili, to the Imperial court to negotiate the confirmation of their privileges and, at the same time, another envoy, Gianbattista Minutoli, to the French court to negotiate the confirmation of the protection of the king, ‘come buoni et fidelissimi figlioli et servitori che siamo sempre stati et vogliamo essere della corona di Francia’ [‘as the good and most faithful sons and servants of the crown of France that we have always been and wish to be’].21 The French were not very welcoming; the king wanted at least 15,000 ducats, his Treasurer said, and the Lucchese should agree to this quickly, or they would not have the king’s protection at any price.22 The Lucchese also turned to the Venetians, asking for their protection too, 18 Ibid., fols. 556-559; quotation, fol. 558: Anziani to Niccolo Buonvisi, 6 June 1520. 19 Ibid.; and fols. 570-572: Anziani to (Niccolò Buonvisi), 24 September 1520. 20 Ibid., fols. 587-588: Niccolò Buonvisi to Anziani, 20 January 1521, Bruges. 21 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 617, fols. 203-208; quotation fol. 205: instructions Anziani to Gianbattista Minutoli, 28 July 1521. 22 Ibid., fols. 231-234: Gianbattista Minutoli to Anziani, 3 September 1521, Lyons.

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and for their advice, because they had heard that the Emperor, in his treaty with the Florentine pope Leo X, ‘haver facto mercato della libertà nostra’ [‘has been trading our liberty’].23 Perhaps because the price was too high, the Lucchese did not buy the protection of Francis I, but word of their approach to the French did reach the Imperial court, and threatened to raise the cost of the renewal of their privileges. While the Emperor was inclined to renew Lucca’s privileges, the Imperial chancellor, Mercurino di Gattinara, told Cesare de’ Nobili, he had heavy expenses on his hands, including the cost of the war in Italy that he had undertaken ‘per reintegrar lo Imperio delle cose si li appartengano et redurre le cose di Italia a uno pacifico stato, et fermarci per lo Imperio talmente il pede che li suoi amici et subiecti possino sotto sua protectione viver sicuri’ [‘to restore to the Empire what belongs to it, and bring the affairs of Italy to a peaceful condition, and put the Empire on such a firm footing here that his friends and subjects can live securely under his protection’]. Lucca could now ‘sperare sensa sospecto alcuno godere la nostra libertà et vivere in la nostra quiete’ [‘hope to enjoy our liberty without any concerns, and live in peace’]. As Lucca would derive such ‘gran comodo et benefitio’ [‘great advantages and benefit’] from Charles’s campaigns, it was ‘honesto et necessario’ [‘fitting and necessary’] that, as ‘buoni amici’ [‘good friends’] of the Emperor, they should help him meet these expenses, as they had helped Maximilian in the past. It had been said, Gattinara claimed, that the city of Lucca, ‘bene agiatamente senza incommodo […] (essendo molto richa et mercantie)’ [‘very easily, without inconvenience […] (being very rich, and mercantile)’], could provide at least 40,000 ducats. They had, he said, paid all that and much more to have the protection of Louis XII, et havendo pagato tal somma al Re di Francia per la sua salvaguardia, della quale non ne potevammo per ogni respecto fare il capitale che di questa, si per essere lui a noi mercennario, non pastore, non essendo nostro sovrano re come è lo Impero, si per essere questa Maestà di altra grandezza come bene intendavammo, sotto l’ombra del quale più sicurtà et fermezza dello stato nostro ci si permette, si per essere Sua Maestà di una fede inviolabile, che più tosto perderia la corona, che acordato con noi ci manchasse del promisso. and having paid such a sum to the King of France for his safeguard, on which we cannot, in any respect, place such reliance as on this [of the Emperor], because he is a mercenary to us, not a shepherd, not being 23 Ibid., fols. 353-355; quotation fol. 354: instructions to Michele Poggio, 31 July 1521.

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our sovereign as the Empire is, because this majesty is greater, as we can well understand, allowing us more security and stability for our state under its shade, and because His Majesty invariably keeps faith, so that he would rather lose the crown than fail in what he promises in an agreement with us.

Even after the French would have been expelled from Italy there would be further expenses, he warned, and Charles would expect again ‘valersi delli amici suoi et delle cose suoi’ [‘make use of his friends and of what is his’]. Offers had been made to Charles, by parties Gattinara did not name, if he would agree to their having Lucca. Naturally, Cesare de’ Nobili assured Gattinara that the Lucchese could not afford anything like 40,000 ducats, nor had they paid that for the protection of the French; 9000 ducats, the sum they had paid to Maximilian, was what they had in mind. And they were confident, he said, that they would have the protection of Charles, should Leo have any designs on them, and that Charles, ‘havendo facto et facendo tanta spesa in reintegrare lo Imperio delle cose suoi non vorria cominciare da noi alienarle’ [‘having had and having still such expenses in restoring to the Empire what belongs to it, does not want to start alienating us from it’]. Their offer was much lower that had been expected, Gattinara replied, and Charles and his council would find it hard to believe the Lucchese could not pay as much as they had been told.24 Further hints that the Lucchese might find it difficult to escape as lightly as they hoped if their privileges were to be renewed came from Gattinara, when he claimed that Charles had been offered 100,000 ducats to forgo the protection of Lucca, and warned that many clauses in the agreement with Maximilian would require revision.25 The Imperial chancellor had not asserted that the Lucchese had a duty, as Imperial subjects, to give financial support to Charles V’s campaigns. Charles would look to his friends for help, was how the Lucchese envoy reported his remarks. It was the Lucchese envoy, according to his own account, who invoked the ties that should bind Lucca to the Empire, as he expressed disbelief that Charles would consider alienating an Imperial city. This was his response to the veiled threats by Gattinara that large sums had been offered to Charles not to extend his protection to Lucca. Gattinara was speaking in the familiar terms of Italian diplomacy and inter-state relations of ‘protection’ and ‘friendship’, not the language of Imperial right. If Cesare 24 Ibid., fols. 96-111; quotations fols. 97-98, 100, 105: Cesare de’ Nobili to Anziani, 8 December 1521, Oudenarde. 25 Ibid., fols. 111-122: Cesare de’ Nobili to Anziani, 9 December 1521, Oudenarde.

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de’ Nobili did not report his words verbatim, the envoy would surely have been attentive to his arguments and the terms he used to express them. Had Gattinara spoken in terms of Imperial law, de’ Nobili would have been sure to inform his government that he had done so. Back in Lucca, Gattinara’s warnings did not affect the decisions that had already been made; the Anziani looked over the privileges Maximilian had granted and could not see anything requiring alteration; and they wanted to pay less, not more, than 9000 ducats.26 If there were to be any difficulty in obtaining the confirmation of specific privileges, they instructed de’ Nobili, ‘basterebbe voi obtenessi la protection coniunctovi una declaratione come […] Sua Maestà Caesarea ci conferma tucti li privilegii concessoci per il suo Serenissimo predecessore modo qui iacent, sensa fare altra particulare mentione di cosa alcuna’ [‘it would suffice if you obtained the protection with an additional declaration that … His Imperial Majesty confirms to us all the privileges granted us by his Most Serene predecessor as they stand, without making particular mention of anything’].27 Their confidence in insisting on the terms they wanted would have been increased by the death of Leo X on 1 December 1521; evidently, news of the pope’s death had not reached the Imperial court when Gattinara had spoken to de’ Nobili. Any clause in Charles’s agreement with Leo, and with the Florentines under the pope’s aegis, which conflicted with any of the privileges Maximilian had granted Lucca could no longer be such an obstacle; and Leo, the Lucchese suspected, was the most likely source of any offers to Charles to persuade him not to protect Lucca. But there was still the problem of what Charles and the council had been told about the riches of the Lucchese: ‘che siamo homini che nel comune habbiamo 200m. scudi et in Aversa due(?) case de’ nostri che pagherenno 100m. scudi sensa quelle habbiamo a Londra, Lione et altrove, et che stando Sua Maestà forte noi faremo etc’ [‘that we are people who have 200,000 scudi in the city and in Antwerp two(?) of our firms could pay 100,000 scudi, apart from those we have in London, Lyon and elsewhere, and that if His Majesty stands firm, we will etc etc’].28 Charles himself, when he gave an audience to the Lucchese envoy, said that he had always regarded them as ‘buoni Imperiali’ [‘good Imperialists’], but like his chancellor, did not assert that Lucca was bound, as an Imperial city, to aid the Emperor financially, only that those who stood to benefit from his campaigns, like Lucca, should help to pay for them – ‘che l’animo suo 26 Ibid., fols. 135-134: Anziani to Cesare de’ Nobili, 9 January 1522. 27 Ibid., fols. 192-194, quotation fol. 194: Anziani to Cesare de’ Nobili, 13 February 1522. 28 Ibid., fols. 317-324, quotation fol. 321: Cesare de’ Nobili to Anziani, 6 March 1522, Brussels.

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non è in Italia, salvo di perservare ogni homo nello stato suo, et che noi et li altri per l’utile ne siamo per consequire doveremmo sforsarci aiutare questa impresa’ [‘that his mind is not set on Italy, except to maintain everyone in their own state, and that we and the others, for the benefits we stand to gain, should make an effort to assist this enterprise’]. His council had decided that either he should settle terms with the Lucchese himself when he came to Italy, or that it should be left to Juan Manuel, his ambassador in Rome.29 This was ominous. Juan Manuel was one of those who accused the Lucchese of being French partisans at heart, and he had written to the court – where his opinion on Italian affairs carried considerable weight – that negotiations with Lucca should be left to him, because he could drive a more profitable bargain. That it should be left in the air until Charles came to Italy in person was potentially even more worrying; de’ Nobili believed that it could only mean that if the Imperial army was victorious in Lombardy, Lucca would be given over to them ‘in preda’ [‘as prey’], to compensate for their arrears of pay.30 If there was a danger of this, it was averted by the pressing need of Charles for ready money, and the Lucchese resigning themselves to paying up to 15,000 ducats.31 This was the sum agreed, and the Imperial diploma confirming the privileges of Lucca was issued on 1 May 1522.32 Yet Lucca was immediately faced by new demands. The argument deployed by Charles V, one no doubt suggested to the young emperor by his council, that since Lucca and other Italian states stood to benefit from the Imperial campaign in Italy they should help to defray the costs of the war, became the main argument used by the agenti imperiali in Italy to back up their demands for cash from the Lucchese. They argued not that Charles, as Emperor, had the right to impose a tax on Lucca, but that he had a right to expect contributions from the city. The repeated demands that were made, and the form that the agenti imperiali and Charles V wanted the contributions to take – regular, fixed sums – made them analogous to a tax. At times they would have seemed even more akin to blackmail or extortion, because the demands were accompanied by threats of retribution, usually in the form of letting Imperial troops loose on Lucchese territory, if Lucca did not pay up. In response, the Lucchese pleaded their inability to pay – times were hard, their commerce disrupted, their territory so small 29 Ibid., fols. 342-349; quotation fol. 343: Cesare de’ Nobili to Anziani, 22 March 1522, Brussels. 30 Ibid., fols. 358-369; quotation fol. 360: Cesare de’ Nobili to Anziani (?7 April) 1522, (Brussels?). 31 Ibid., fols. 378-385: Cesare de’ Nobili to Anziani, 15 April 1522, Brussels; fols. 385-387: Anziani to Cesare de’ Nobili, 30 April 1522. 32 Berengo, 14.

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that they could not feed their people and had to buy grain at prices inflated by war and shortages. He had been told the Lucchese could easily pay 40,000 ducats, said the new Imperial viceroy of Naples, the Burgundian Charles de Lannoy, as he passed through Tuscany on his way to take up his post. They should demonstrate that they were ‘buoni Imperiali’ by helping the Emperor, who was obliged to keep up to 50,000 troops in Italy in order to expel the French; the Florentines, the Sienese, the Milanese, even the Genoese, despite the recent sack of their city, were paying, and so should they. In Lyon, he knew the Lucchese had given money to the King of France. They were already struggling to raise 15,000 ducats for the confirmation of their privileges, responded the Anziani. Any money lent to the French king in Lyon was a matter of business, and interest was being paid as for any other commercial loan.33 In Rome, Juan Manuel was stipulating that Lucca should contribute 4000 ducats a month for three months, to help keep the Imperial army together. The Emperor, he wrote, would not ask for this unless the need was pressing – he was asking as their prince, not as a tyrant: Sua Maestà non domandaria alle Magnificentie Vostre questa contributione, como mai per il passato le ha voluto gravare de cosa alchuna pichola o grande, se non vi fusse bisogno più che urgente, perche dove li tiranni [that is, the French] nullo jure hanno usurpato cotesta repubblica de più vexationi pecuniariae, Sua Maestà Cesarea come vero et buono principe intende procedere benignamente con le Magnificentie Vostre, sensa volere intrare in altri termini benche justissimi.34 His Majesty would not ask Your Magnificences for this contribution, as he has never in the past wished to place any burden, great or small, on you, unless the need was more than urgent, because where the tyrants [the French] have made several vexatious demands for money, without any right to do so, His Imperial Majesty, as a true and good prince, intends to proceed with benevolence towards Your Magnificences, without wishing to go further, however justifiably.

Not prepared to admit any excuses, Manuel quickly resorted to threats. If the Lucchese did not want to pay, they would regret it, he warned, and they would end up paying 30,000 ducats or more – ‘et poi che non volete essere buoni imperiali per amore, ve faro essere buoni Imperiali per forza’ 33 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 540, fols. 1140-1145: Anziani to Bartolomeo Arnolfini, 30 June 1522. 34 Ibid., fols. 1162-1164; quotation fol. 1164: Juan Manuel to Anziani, 6 July 1522, Rome.

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[‘and since you do not want to be good Imperialists for love, I will make you good Imperialists by force’].35 The Emperor had ordered that ‘la spesa delle guerre di Italia si supporti per le città di qua al beneficio delle quale si fa decta guerra, cioè Milano, Firenze, Genova, Siena et Lucha’ [‘the expense of the Italian wars should be sustained by the cities here for whose benefit the war is being waged, that is, Milan, Florence, Genoa, Siena and Lucca’]. The quotas had been assigned to each, and he had orders to exact them to pay the soldiers. For the months of June, July, and August, Milan was to pay 80,000 ducats, Florence, 45,000, Genoa, 24,000, Siena 15,000 and Lucca 12,000. If the Lucchese did not want to pay he would be forced to order the soldiers to come to make them pay.36 Although Manuel claimed that he was acting under orders, in Rome it was thought that he was acting on his own initiative: ‘qua è opinione universale che queste exactioni che costui vuole fare qua, da queste città di Italia, sia senza saputa alcuna della Maestà Cesarea’ [‘it is the general opinion here that these exactions which he wants to impose here, from these Italian cities, are being made without the knowledge of His Imperial Majesty’].37 Lucca did not pay the contribution Manuel claimed had been assigned to the city, and he continued to threaten reprisals, as the Anziani complained to the Italian commander of the Imperial army, Prospero Colonna, ‘fino a dire […] farebbe in modo si direbbe ‘qui fu Lucha’’ [‘going so far as to say (…) he would act in such a way that it might be said ‘here was Lucca’’].38 Consulting the Emperor about whether he approved of Manuel’s tactics, Colonna expressed his own reservations. Manuel was insisting on a military execution against Siena and Lucca to exact their proportion of the expenses of the army, and on imposing a heavy fine. He had doubts about whether it was honourable to obtain money this way, Colonna wrote, and he had consulted the duca di Sessa (Luis Fernández de Córdoba, the new Imperial ambassador to Rome), who had condemned it.39

35 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 616, fols. 916-918; quotation fol. 916: Baldassare Orsuccio, 9 August 1522, Rome. Manuel was ‘il più duro, obstinato et inexorabile cervello che mai facesse natura’ lamented the Lucchese envoy; he was a man of few words, but he wanted those words to be law (ibid., fol. 917). 36 Ibid., fols. 913-916: Baldassare Orsuccio, 10 August 1522, Rome. 37 Ibid., fols. 927-929; quotation fol. 929: Baldassare Orsuccio, 15 August 1522, Rome. 38 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 541, fols. 307-309; quotation fol. 307: Anziani to Prospero Colonna, 17 October 1522. 39 Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers, 515-516: Prospero Colonna to Charles V, 24 December 1522, Milan.

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The Lucchese paid 12,000 ducats, but once again were immediately faced with further demands. Gattinara told them that they would just have to be patient, and manage as best they could, but reassured them no force would be used; the Emperor wished the Imperial cities in Italy to agree to make certain contributions, but voluntarily: lo imperatore ha dato certa commissione et ordine al vicere di Napoli che siando facta movitiva o novità alcuna per la impresa de Italia, si facci fra le città imperiali certi ordini et compositioni unanimes et concordes che ogni homo possi contribuire a qualche pichola spesa, ma voluntarie et sponte per pace de Italia […] ma non sortendo novità alcuna, homo può stare certissimo non si habbi a fare alcuno pagamento. 40 the Emperor has given a certain commission and order to the viceroy of Naples, that should there be any disturbance or something new happens in the Italian enterprise, certain orders and settlements should be made among the Imperial cities, by unanimous agreement, that everyone might contribute to some small expense, voluntarily and willingly, for the peace of Italy […] but if nothing new crops up, everyone can be assured that no payment will have to be made.

Before this report could reach them, the Lucchese had already responded to a letter from Charles V asking for a further subsidy for the Imperial army in Italy, by protesting that they had already paid out 27,000 ducats for him, that their city was ‘exhausta in publico et in particulare’ [‘without funds, public or private’], and asking that the Emperor should write to Lannoy and the duca di Sessa, ordering that ‘non ci ponghino più gravesse né taxe’ [‘no more levies or taxes should be imposed on us’]. 41 Charles did order the duca di Sessa and Lannoy not to make any further demands on Lucca – apart from the agreement he wanted them to negotiate with the Italian states, Lucca included. He had sent them ‘podere bastante para tratar y asentar qualquier concerto que les pareciesse que convienga con los potentados de Italia y para prometterles reciprocamente que los teniemos en nuestra protection’ [‘sufficient power to negotiate and settle any agreement they may think appropriate with the powers of Italy, and to promise them in return that we will hold them under our protection’], and he wanted them to press on with that. 42 At least in this letter to his Italian commander, 40 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 541, fols. 431-436: Niccolò Cenami to Anziani, 10 May 1523, Valladolid. 41 Ibid., fols. 424-426; quotation fol. 425: Anziani to Niccolò Cenami, 15 May 1523. 42 Ibid., fols. 459-460; quotation, fol. 459: Charles V to Prospero Colonna, 30 May 1523.

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Prospero Colonna, it should be noted, it was ‘los potentados de Italia’ [‘the powers of Italy’], not just the Imperial cities, who were designated as those who were to be corralled into paying for the army. We have already paid more than our share of previous impositions, was the Lucchese response to the duca di Sessa’s approaches.43 His attitude was not entirely sympathetic, although he did seek to reassure them that neither Charles nor the agenti imperiali desired the ruin of any Italian state: ‘che la Cesarea Maestà, né tampoco lui né altro agente imperiale volevano disfare né minare patria alchuna di Ytalia, ma quelle conservare in lo proprio stato’ [‘that neither His Imperial Majesty, nor he himself nor any other Imperial agent wishes to undo or undermine any homeland of Italy, but rather to maintain them in their proper state’]. Charles could have done what he liked in Italy, especially during the period of sede vacante, the prolonged vacancy of the papal throne between the death of Leo and the election of Hadrian VI, ‘che si trovava signore di Roma, Milano et Genova, ma che quello che fa al presente le fa per conservare la libertà della Italia come si trova al presente, la quale bene firmata, come sperano in brevi tutte terre habbino a stare in la sua libertà et quiete da ogni exactione extranea’ [‘when he found himself lord of Rome, Milan and Genoa, but what he is doing at present, he is doing to preserve the liberty of Italy as it is at present; when that is settled, which it is hoped will be soon, all towns can remain in liberty and free from all external exactions’]. Lucca should not hold back: it was Charles who had kept them safe from the Florentines and would continue to do so. Now Lucca ha da volere più tosto lo bene publico della libertà di tutta Ytalia, la quale non si potria al presente conservare, senza lo exercito grande […] monstrandomi che a lui li dispiaceva tutti nostri affanni, ma che non si poteva più et che le altre città hanno patientia, et che anchora noi dovevammo correre con le altre … should rather be wishing for the public good of the liberty of Italy, which cannot be maintained at present without the large army […] showing me that he was displeased by all our troubles, but there was nothing else he could do, and the other cities were putting up with it, and that we, too, must run with the others …

43 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 540, fols. 1222-1226: Anziani to Benedetto de’ Nobili and Bartolomeo Arnolfini, 15 May 1523.

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Lucca, the envoy replied, wanted to be ‘alli servitii di Sua Cesarea Maestà come qualsivoglia altra città di Italia ceteris paribus, ma che la impossibilità ci fa parlare tenendo certo che Sua Maestà non voglia da noi excepto il possibile, cum impossibilium nulla sit obligatio’ [‘at the service of His Imperial Majesty, like any other city of Italy, other things being equal, but the impossibility of it made us speak out, feeling sure that His Majesty would only want from us what was possible, there being no obligation to do the impossible’]. The ‘taxa’ imposed on Lucca had been disproportionate to the resources of the city, as compared with those of Florence or Siena. At this point the duca di Sessa changed his tone: he did not want to threaten them, he said, but ‘volendo loro essere nummerati fra quelli che desiderano conservare questa libertà di Italia, che bisogna che paghino, caso che no, che saranno tenuti per quello che sono et che ci fara altra provisione’ [‘if they want to be numbered among those who wish to preserve this liberty of Italy it is necessary that they pay, and if they do not, then they will be judged for what they are and something else will be arranged’]. 44 The duke continued to mingle threats and blandishments, saying that non voleva gravarvi come fece Giovanni Manuello che vi misse taxa XIIm. ducati, ma che lui non voleva se non 6m. o 7m. ducati, et che questo non si faceva per volervi tenere in questa subventione di pagamenti perche non sareste liberi, ma solo in questo frangente dove ne depende la quiete et pace et tranquillo vivere di tutta la Ytalia et in spetie di cotesta città. he did not want to burden you as Juan Manuel had done, who imposed a tax of 12,000 ducats on you, but he only wanted six or seven thousand ducats, and that this was not being done with the intention of keeping you making these payments so that you would not be free, but only in this situation where the quiet and peace and tranquil life of all Italy and of this city in particular is at stake.

Florence had been asked for 40,000 ducats, Siena for 20,000; he thought Lucca had been treated generously in comparison. If the money had not been paid within fifteen days, by letters of exchange in Milan, the Lucchese should not be surprised if they suffered the same fate as Tortona, sacked

44 Ibid., fols. 1243-1247; quotations fols. 1244-1246: Benedetto de’ Nobili to Anziani, 22 May 1523, Rome.

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by the Spanish troops because they had not been paid. 45 Apparently, the Lucchese found another 5000 ducats to appease the duke. 46 Charles’s hopes of a ‘concierto’ of Italian states to support his army were not realized, but this did not stop the duca di Sessa and the viceroy Lannoy from claiming that payments from Lucca were due under the terms of the league against the French that Charles had concluded in July and August 1523 with Henry VIII of England, his own brother Ferdinand, and Venice, followed by Pope Hadrian, Milan, Florence, and Genoa. Lucca had not joined this league and had no intention of joining any league, certainly not as a principal. Lannoy sent an envoy to Lucca to demand ‘che in tractenimento del Cesareo exercito dovessimo pagarli a conto del passato a ragione di ducati 5m. il mese secondo la taxa a noi imposta in la lega facta’ [‘in support of the Imperial army we should pay arrears of 5,000 ducats a month according to the tax imposed on us in the league that has been made’]. Telling him that the duca di Sessa had already sent to them twice on the same business, the Lucchese read out to him letters from Charles V, presumably those ordering that no further demands should be made on Lucca. These did give the envoy pause, and he agreed that if they came to agreement with the duca di Sessa, it would be the same as if it was with the viceroy, although he asked for a letter to the viceory to make it clear that he had not been bribed to leave the matter in suspense.47 In Rome, the Lucchese ambassadors told the duca di Sessa that Lucca could not pay the sums being asked for but would show willingness to serve the Emperor by straining to make a payment to help defray the costs of the army. The duca di Sessa responded by stressing the great expenses Charles was undertaking, et non per sua propria utilità ma per la libertà et quiete de Italia, che si puo vedere, havendo li stati receputi missi in mano de’ patroni proprii come Milano, Genova, Firenze, Siena et simili, et che facendo Sua Maestà tanta spesa non per commodo proprio ma a beneficio di noi altri di Italia, era necessario et ragionevile dovessimo adiutare la impresa ultra vires, havendo poi ad havere una tranquilla et quiete pace in Italia, et che questa spesa non dovea durare molto. and not for his own benefit, but for the liberty and tranquillity of Italy, as can be observed, having put states such as Milan, Genoa, Florence, Siena, 45 Ibid., fols. 1248-1250; quotation 1249: Benedetto de’ Nobili to Anziani, 3 June 1523, Rome. 46 By January 1524 they calculated that they had paid out 32,000 ducats; ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 541, fols. 777-781: Anziani to Lucchese ambassadors in Rome, 21 January 1524. 47 Ibid, quotation, fol. 778.

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and so on, back into the hands of their own rulers, and that His Majesty being at such expense not for his own advantage but to the benefit of us Italians, it was necessary and reasonable that we should assist the enterprise even beyond our powers, being then to have a tranquil and quiet peace in Italy, and that this expense should not last for long.

If the Lucchese did not want to be in the league, he would not press them further, but they should consider their position, and the state of affairs in Italy, carefully, and that if ‘la Maestà Cesarea ci levasse le mani di capo, che rifugio ci resta’ [‘His Imperial Majesty removed his hands from above our heads, what refuge would be left to us’]. There were those offering tens of thousands of ducats to Charles to leave the Lucchese unprotected. Not the least of their obligations to the Emperor was his ‘havendoci con questa liga di suggietti factoci compagni’ [‘having with this league made of us, his subjects, his associates’]. But the little state of Lucca was not accustomed to enter into leagues ‘come principali, ma si bene nominata come accessoria et aderente’ [‘as principals but, if nominated, as an accessory and adherent’], the envoys protested. As they understood it, they were included in the league only as ‘buoni servitori della Maestà Cesarea et terra imperiale’ [‘good servants of His Imperial Majesty and an Imperial city’]. At this point in the discussion an envoy of the viceroy, Lodovico da Montealto, who had been sent to look for money in Florence, Siena, and Rome, argued that if the government of Lucca could not find the money, individual Lucchese should, as he and other loyal subjects of the Emperor had. He had been in Lucca, he added, and knew well that Lucca was richer than Florence or Genoa. The duca di Sessa agreed, adding that Lucchese bankers were in the forefront everywhere, and Martino Buonvisi (one of the ambassadors) alone could sustain the expense of the whole Imperial army for a year. When the envoys argued that Lucca could not afford any monthly payments, but only at best a ‘gift’ of 5000 ducats, the duca di Sessa replied that he did not want to force them to pay anything – he would leave them to negotiate with the viceroy, and they would soon see how different an experience that would be. Three out of four agenti imperiali in Italy considered the Lucchese to be ‘francesi’, he warned, and wanted to treat them as such; only he had taken their part. It was no good the Lucchese arguing they could not afford it; he knew they were very rich. Only a few hours before, someone at court had told him they could easily pay 50,000 ducats. 48 Necessity was making the imperiali 48 Ibid., fols. 783-789; quotation fols. 784-785: Cesare de’ Nobili, Michele Burlamacchi and Martino Buonvisi, 22 January 1524, Rome.

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deaf to all appeals and pitiless, the ambassadors warned their government; they knew they were doing wrong to the Lucchese and wanted to impose burdens beyond the city’s strength to bear, but they would rather Lucca succumbed than that they themselves did. 49 With difficulty, the Lucchese agreed to increase their offer to 8000 ducats. This the duca di Sessa accepted as a gift to the Emperor, not as a payment under their putative obligations to the league. The ambassadors wanted a written promise that this would be considered a quittance for all payments, present and future – the duke would only agree for the present and for the year to come.50 But for the next few years, the demands of the agenti imperiali on Lucca do seem to have abated. Their troubles were far from over, however. The following winter they found themselves ‘inter Sillam et Caribdim’ [‘between Scylla and Charybdis’].51 The French commander, the Duke of Albany, in Tuscany with his troops, demanded 20,000 ducats and some artillery pieces from Lucca. If they refused, they would offend the King of France; if they agreed, they would offend the Emperor, and their trade in Flanders, Sicily, Naples, and Spain would suffer. Pleading that they could not give any artillery, they argued that the king had always recognized their relation to the Empire, ‘siando noi Cammera di Imperio in ogni salvaguardia et protectione ci ha facto la Cristianissima Maestà ci ha sempre reservato la clausula “salvo jure imperii” perche in ogni indignatione che pigliasse la Cesarea Maestà contra di noi ci potrebbe privare delli nostri privilegii della libertà et contractarci con altri’ [‘as we pertain to the Imperial Chamber, in every agreement of safeguard and protection with the Most Christian King, there has always been the reservation “without prejudice to the law of the Empire”, because whenever His Imperial Majesty might be angry with us, he could deprive us of our privileges of liberty and make terms with others about us’].52 To avoid the pillaging of their territory, however, they had to hand over two pieces of artillery, and agreed to pay Albany 12,000 ducats. They had no choice but to pay him off, they pleaded to the duca di Sessa, to keep their city and territory safe; it did not mean they were not always ‘buoni Imperiali’.53 The duke was furious, and insisted they had done so willingly.54 But after the 49 Ibid., fols. 795-797: Cesare de’ Nobili, Michele Burlamacchi and Martino Buonvisi, 27 January 1524, Rome. 50 Ibid., fols. 813-814: Cesare de’ Nobili, Michele Burlamacchi and Martino Buonvisi, 13 February 1524, Rome. 51 Ibid., fols. 1015-1017; quotation fol. 1016: Anziani to Bartolomeo Arnolfini, 19 January 1525. 52 Ibid., quotation fol. 1017. 53 Ibid., fols. 994-996; quotation fol. 996: Anziani to Bartolomeo Arnolfini, 3 January 1525. 54 Ibid., fols. 1006-1010: Bartolomeo Arnolfini, 11 January 1525, Rome.

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battle of Pavia and the capture of Francis I on 25 February 1525, the Lucchese suffered no retribution; their excuses that they had no choice but to give Albany what he demanded of them were apparently accepted in the end. In 1528, when the French were resurgent in Italy, they were told by an official in the service of the French commander, Lautrec, that they had to make clear whether they were ‘francesi’ or ‘imperiali’, and if they were ‘francesi’, they had to demonstrate it by making regular monthly contributions as others were doing.55 The Lucchese, as always, protested that this was not possible for them, prompting a furious Lautrec to say he would not stand for a little town like Lucca holding aloof from the league supporting Francis; if within fifteen days they had not entered the league, he would declare them enemies and would do them all the damage he could, in Italy and in France.56 Fortunately for Lucca, Lautrec had more important matters in hand in the kingdom of Naples, and once again the city escaped unscathed. The meeting of Charles V and Clement VII in Bologna in the winter of 1529-1530, and the agreements made there with other Italian powers, have been generally seen as marking the establishment of Charles V as the dominant figure in Italy. While the French would continue to contest his dominion for decades, the Lucchese at least were no longer faced with demands that they choose to side with the King of France or the Emperor. They might still approach other powers – even weak rulers such as Alessandro de’ Medici or Francesco Sforza – using the language of those looking to others for protection, yet they had no real option but the protection of Charles V, although accusations were occasionally made that the Lucchese in fact favoured the French.57 In 1532, during the period of social unrest and political upheaval in Lucca known as the revolt of the Straccioni, there was some danger that allegiance to the Emperor could become more like subjection. In April 1531, the silk weavers protested against measures to reduce production of cloth, introduced in an attempt to confront the serious difficulties Lucchese merchants were experiencing in international markets. The measures were withdrawn, but the unrest continued, fuelled by dissatisfation with the increasing domination of Lucca’s government by a relatively restricted group of families. For about a year, their sway was challenged by an alliance of different social groups, and members of families hitherto unrepresented in Lucca’s government were brought into the councils. So disturbed were some of the wealthier merchant families by these developments that they 55 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 617, fols. 472-480: Pietro Angelo Guinigi, 10 January 1528, Bologna. 56 Ibid., fol. 540-543: Pietro Angelo Guinigi, 29 February 1528, ‘Tremoli di Puglia’. 57 Berengo, 218-28.

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asked Charles to intervene. The appeal was sent indirectly via a papal nuncio passing through the city, who asked the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria on behalf of some of the ‘principali’ of Lucca to write to the Emperor. Doria intimated that the Lucchese ‘principali’ would rather that Charles should send a governor to Lucca and order the marchese del Vasto, the commander of the Imperial troops in Italy, to bring his troops to the city. These would have been desperate measures indeed, if that was what the Lucchese who sent the message really had in mind. Did the message become exaggerated in transmission? In response to Doria’s letter, Charles considered sending a representative to Lucca to impose order, and if that did not work, ordering del Vasto to go there with his army, but the phrases conveying these orders were cancelled from his draft letter to his commander.58 Subsequently, del Vasto sent an envoy to Lucca – on the orders of the Emperor he said – ‘pro habenda veritate administrationis et pacificationis’ [‘to ascertain the truth about the administration and pacification’] of Lucca.59 At that time there was already a Spanish official in Lucca, Juan Abril de Marzilla, who had originally been sent there to organize the provision of supplies to the Imperial army besieging Florence in 1529-1530. After the surrender of Florence he had stayed in Lucca on the orders of del Vasto, to keep an eye on the government.60 If the idea was that he should gradually insinuate himself into the role of governor of Lucca, he was not an ideal choice for a task that would have required considerable tact and diplomacy, qualities the arrogant and overbearing Marzilla conspicuously lacked. His popularity, certainly with the leading families of Lucca, was not increased by his attempts to meddle with the Straccioni to foment the unrest.61 According to the Lucchese government, in a subsequent account of his role in these events, ‘Il signor Marsilio era molto interessato nelle nostre turbolenze et a quelle segretamente teneva mano […] e per mezzo loro lui aspirava a farsi capitano di questo popolo’ [‘signor Marsilio took great interest in our disturbances and secretly had a hand in them … and through them he aspired to become captain of this people’].62 When the Straccioni were finally suppressed in April 1532, some of the leaders took refuge in his house and were arrested there. In his protests he assumed an authority and a power to command the Lucchese that the government refused to recognize, when he came to them to 58 Ibid., 141-42. 59 ASLucca, Anziani, Colloqui, Reg. 7, fols. 3-4; quotation fol. 4: 6 March 1532. 60 Berengo, 136-37. 61 Carocci, 33-34. The aversion he aroused gives further reason to suspect that the message the ‘principali’ sent to Charles via the nuncio and Andrea Doria was altered in transmission. 62 Ibid., 34n1.

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protestare et comandare in nome della Cesarea Maestà che sotto pena di dugento milia ducati non debbiamo in modo alcuno metterli a tortura, ne parimente chiamare guardia alcuna di forestieri in la città nostra sensa sua noticia. Il che a noi da admiratione assai per parerci modi fuori di ogni honestà, et del consueto suo, perche qui non tiene più luogo di Cesari, né mancho puote havere hauto commissione da dicto Cesari farci tal comandamento …63 ‘protest and command in the name of His Imperial Majesty that under penalty of 200,000 ducats we should not in any way put them to the torture, or summon any guard of outsiders into our city without notifying him. This astonished us, because he appeared to be stepping unjustifiably beyond the bounds of his accustomed role, for here he no longer has any role as an Imperial representative, still less can he have any Imperial commission to issue such a command to us …

Marzilla was in no position to insist, and backed down. He left Lucca, but when Charles came to Italy for his second meeting in Bologna with Pope Clement, the suggestion was made that he might return in some official capacity. In March 1533 he sent some of his property to Lucca, signalling his intention to come back to stay. The Lucchese firmly rejected the idea. They had no need for any representative of the Emperor, who could command them directly with a simple letter.64 ‘E quando facto ogni conato non si possi fare altro che non venghi uno, venghi ogni altro che Marsilio perche lui in modo alchuno non ce lo voglamo’ [‘And when, after every effort, it cannot be avoided that one should come, let it be anyone but Marsilio who comes, because we have no wish whatsoever to have him’].65 In the face of such determined opposition, Charles did not insist on sending Marzilla or anyone else to represent him in Lucca. The proposition of sending Marzilla back may well have been raised at his own suggestion. It appears that in the early 1530s Charles and his officials were testing the boundaries of their power over the Imperial cities in Italy, trying to establish how far they could go in establishing direct rule over them without arousing unmanageable protest. Imperial garrisons were still holding the main fortresses of the Florentine state, and Charles had decided what role Alessandro de’ Medici 63 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 618, fols. 127-128; quotation, fol. 128: Anziani to Girolamo Arnolfini, ?16 April 1532. The ‘guardia di forestieri’ was a force of 100 infantry that an assembly of 1500 heads of households held on 9 April had decided should be brought to the city (Berengo, 142). 64 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 618, fols. 385-387: Anziani to Cesare de’ Nobili, 29 March 1533. 65 Ibid., fols. 305-306: instructions to Martino Buonvisi and Girolamo Arnolf ini, Lucchese ambassadors to Charles V, 5 April 1533.

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should have in the government; another Imperial garrison was based in Siena, and the agenti imperiali were trying to reform the Sienese government; and Charles was floating the idea that the Genoese might declare themselves ‘sudditi de lo imperio rimanendo republica’ [‘subjects of the Empire while remaining a republic’], a proposal the Genoese firmly declined to make.66 It is in this context, too, that the Emperor and his officials made their most determined attempt yet to impose on Lucca and other Italian states a system of regular financial contributions to the support of his armies, this time in the name of a league against Francis, intended, according to Cardinal García de Loaysa, to force him to observe the terms of the treaties of Madrid and Cambrai that he had concluded with Charles, swearing not to interfere in the affairs of Italy.67 In Bologna, a commission of three representatives of the Emperor – Louis de Flandre, seigneur de Praët, Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, and Francisco de Los Cobos – and three representatives of the pope – Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, Jacopo Salviati, and Francesco Guicciardini – who had negotiated the terms of the league, decided on the amount of money that would be needed, and allocated contributions to various Italian powers who would be expected to join it. The envoys of these powers who were in Bologna were summoned separately to attend on the commission to be told what their contributions would be. Cesare de’ Nobili was brought in after the Sienese envoys had left the room, and was invited to sit down. Speaking on behalf of the commission, Cardinal de’ Medici told him that the Emperor and the pope nulla cosa più desiderando che la pace et quiete di Ytalia hanno concluso una legha, o vero una additione alla legha facta qui 3 anni, nella quale anno incluso tutta Ytalia, et noi come membro nobile d’essa. Et che per prepararsi contra a chi tal quiete volesse interrompere è necessario provedere al principale ch’è il nervo della guerra. Et che per cio bisognano molte provigione et che a esse tutti li confederati concorrino. desirous of nothing more than of the peace and quiet of Italy, they have concluded a league, or rather an addition to the league made three years ago, in which they have included all Italy, and us as a noble member of it. And that to be prepared against who wants to disrupt such quiet, it is necessary to provide for the principal matter, the sinews of war. And for that, many provisions are needed and all the confederates should join in these. 66 Pacini, 284. 67 ASLucca, Anziani, Reg. 618, fols. 292-298: Cesare de’ Nobili and Matteo Gilio, 7 (?February) 1533, Bologna.

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First, they had decided to gather together 120,000 scudi, to be deposited (he did not say where) to be ready for any ‘accidente di guerra’, and the Lucchese had been ‘taxati’ for the sum of 6000 scudi. To keep the services of Swiss and German mercenary captains, 25,000 scudi a year would be needed; Lucca was to contribute to this pro rata. In time of war, they anticipated expenditure of 200,000 scudi a month; Lucca was to contribute to that too.68 Charles was in fact forcing the league on a reluctant Clement, who no more wished to sign up to contribute to such levies than did any of the other Italian powers. Cardinal Loaysa told the Lucchese envoy that the pope ‘he venuto come forsato, gravandoli lo spendere et parendoli cosa troppa dificile’ [‘has been dragged into it, finding the expense burdensome and thinking it too difficult’].69 None of the Imperial representatives on the commission were Italian, but the three Florentines representing the pope would have been well aware how outrageous this arrogant procedure would appear to the other Italian powers, who were supposed to be included in the league as principals. The Lucchese took their accustomed line, that they did not want to be included in the league as principals, and could not afford to make any regular contributions,70 but would resign themselves, if necessary, to make a single contribution, perhaps spread out over two years.71 The Sienese were prepared to make a single contribution of 4000-5000 scudi and pay for 100 light horse in time of war (to be under the command of the Sienese duca d’Amalfi).72 The Genoese, who recognized that they stood to benefit from a league to keep the French at bay, were prepared to make a contribution of up to 6000-8000 scudi to the war chest, provided that their share would be kept in Genoa to be available to them if needed and that any expenses they might incur for defence should be subtracted from any contributions due to the league.73 The Duke of Ferrara, who had also been assigned a quota, said he had no intention of contributing to a league to defend others, when his own territory was under threat from the pope.74 On the whole, not the response Charles and his ministers had been hoping for, but one that they should perhaps have anticipated. They proceeded, 68 Ibid., fols. 234-242; quotation fol. 234-235: Cesare de’ Nobili, 29 January 1533, Bologna. 69 Ibid., fols. 292-298; quotation fol. 295: Cesare de’ Nobili and Atteo Gilio, 7 (?February) 1533, Bologna. See Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, Book XX, Chapter VI, for his account of this treaty and the commission. 70 Ibid., fols. 243-255: Anziani to Cesare de’ Nobili (3 February 1533). 71 Ibid., fols. 268-272: Anziani to Cesare de’ Nobili and Matteo Gilio, ?mid February 1533. 72 Pecci, vol. 2, Part 3, 67. 73 Pacini, 299-300. 74 Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, Book XX, Chapter VI.

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despite the chorus of protests, to declare the league concluded on 27 February, but that did not put an end to the disputes. To obtain the ratification of the Genoese, Charles had to accept significant modifications of the terms relating to Genoa, including an undertaking that he would pay the monthly contribution of 3000 scudi in time of war they had been assigned.75 No mention was made of Lucca in the clauses of the treaty concerning the levies.76 Charles wrote to say that they had been included as his adherenti and that they had been assigned contributions of 5000 scudi ‘pro deposito’, 250 scudi towards the annual payments for the captains and 1000 scudi a month in time of war. Et quia huiusmodi foedus ad Italiae defensione otium et tranquillitatem conclusum est, et ob id potissimum ut omnes potentatus et Respublicae in bona pace et quiete conserventur, curabimus omnino pro nostra parte, vos et questam rempublicam, eiusque statum et libertatem manutenere, defendere, ac protegere, non consentiendo illam a quopiam etiam in dicto foedere comprehenso indebito molestari aut perturbari.77 And because this kind of league is concluded for the defence, repose and tranquillity of Italy, and chiefly so that all powers and republics should be preserved in good peace and quiet, for our part we shall have a care in all things to maintain, defend and protect you and the republic, its state and liberty, not consenting to it being unduly molested or disturbed by anyone, including members of this league.

For all the effort that had been put into setting up the league and the system of contributions, it never really became operative. With Venice refusing to join at all, and the pope soon negotiating the marriage of his niece Caterina de’ Medici to Henri, the younger son of the French king, the vision of a phalanx of Italian states supporting Charles’s efforts to exclude the French king from Italy proved nugatory. The Italian states, even little Lucca, even if they might occasionally describe themselves as subjects of the Emperor, were not prepared to be treated as though they were. The Lucchese had to pay a high financial price to maintain their independence, their libertà. They may have exaggerated the difficulties the payments they made caused them; the fact that they generally did pay more than they wanted to may have reinforced the suspicion of the agenti imperiali who pressed them so hard that in fact they could afford 75 Pacini, 300-04. 76 ASLucca, Anziani, Capitoli 20, fols. 372-387. 77 Ibid., fols. 388-389: Charles V to Lucca, 24 March 1533, Alessandria.

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more than they said they could. But in their estimation that the Lucchese could easily afford to pay 40,000 ducats, 50,000 ducats, and even more, the agents were probably also exaggerating. There were some indications that they knew they were asking too much; they generally settled for less than their initial demands, and their exactions eased off in the later 1520s. Moreover, it was not just the amount of money being demanded of them that aroused the instinctive resistance of the Lucchese and others; it was the manner in which the demands were made. Even when they were not backed up by threats of reprisals, of letting the Imperial troops loose on their territory to extract the value of arrears of pay by force, the idea that the Italian states should make regular fixed contributions was one that they were not prepared to countenance. Such levies might be framed as obligations under the terms of a treaty or league intended to promote the common good of Italian states, but they looked uncomfortably like a tax being imposed on subjects of the Empire. Charles himself was tempted by such schemes, not just for their financial advantage, and would have been content if they had worked. But the attitude he took to Lucca, his willingness to listen, eventually, to the protests of the Lucchese and to order his agenti in Italy not to oppress them or to make incessant demands on them, support the position of those who argue that he was not inherently hostile to republics.78 Lucca’s libertà was under greater threat from the schemes and ambitions and the desperate search for resources of the agenti imperiali in Italy, than from the Imperial ambitions of Emperor Charles V.

Bibliography Manuscript Sources Lucca, Archivio di Stato, Anziani al tempo della Libertà

Printed Sources Adorni Braccesi, Simonetta, and Guja Simonetti, ‘Lucca, repubblica e Città imperiale da Carlo IV di Boemia a Carlo V’, in Politica e cultura nelle Repubbliche italiane dal Medioevo all’Età moderna. Firenze – Genova – Lucca – Siena – Venezia, ed. by Simonetta Adorni Braccesi and Mario Ascheri (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per l’Età Moderna e Contemporanea, 2001), 267-308. 78 Reinhard.

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Berengo, Marino, Nobili e mercanti nella Lucca del Cinquecento (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1965; repr. 1974). Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain, ed. by Gustave Adolph Bergenroth, vol. 2: Henry VIII, 1509-1525 (London: HMSO, 1866). Carocci, Giampiero, ‘La rivolta degli Straccioni in Lucca’, Rivista storica italiana, 63 (1951), 28-59. Guicciardini, Francesco, Storia d’Italia (Milan: Garzanti, 1988). Pacini, Arturo, La Genova di Andrea Doria nell’Impero di Carlo V (Florence: Olschki, 1999). Pecci, Giovanni Antonio, Memorie storico-critiche della Città di Siena, 2 vols. (Siena 1755-1760; repr. Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 1997). Reinhard, Wolfgang, ‘“Governi stretti e tirannici”: Las ciudades y la política del Emperador Carlos V.1515-1556’, in Carlos V./Karl V. 1500-2000 (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Commemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 2001), 151-77. Shaw, Christine, ‘Charles V and Italy’, in The Histories of Emperor Charles V. Nationale Perspektiven von Persönlichkeit und Herrschaft, ed. by C. Scott Dixon and Martina Fuchs (Münster: Aschendorff, 2005), 115-33. —, ‘The Role of Milan in the Italian State System under Louis XII’, in Milano e Luigi XII. Ricerche sul primo dominio francese in Lombardia (1499-1512), ed. by Letizia Arcangeli (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2002), 25-37. Tommasi, Girolamo, Sommario della Storia di Lucca (Florence, 1847; repr. Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1969).

About the Author Christine Shaw, Associate Member of the History Faculty, Oxford University



Odious Comparisons Cosimo I, the Duke of Athens, and Florence Suzanne B. Butters* Abstract In 1567, Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, learned that he was related to the late-medieval dukes of Athens, a surprise to him, and to modern-day historians. Cosimo and his advisers knew well that the disadvantages of this unsuspected connection outweighed its advantages. In 1342, Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens, had been popularly acclaimed as Florence’s signore a vita, only to be ignominiously ejected by the Florentines in 1343, in response to his oppression, divisiveness, greed, cruelty and uncouth behaviour; in Florence, a city whose byword was liberty, Walter’s rule remained a touchstone for tyranny. It is striking, then, that Cosimo’s manner of occupying and controlling Florence, throughout his long rule (1537-1574), often recalled Walter’s, and that he cannot have failed to know it. One must ask, then, whether he consciously accentuated the similarities, hoped they would pass unnoticed, or strove to emphasize the differences. Did the 1567 news come as a blessing or a curse? Effective rulers are good at playing the long game, and Cosimo did just that. As a Florentine, unlike Walter who was French, he knew that his subjects were adept at drawing parallels, reading between the lines, and imagining complicated political motives behind apparently simple connections and deeds. This enabled Cosimo, from the start of his rule, to pre-empt their interpretations of his more antagonistic actions by offering explanations and solutions of his own devising, while tightening his control over his subjects’ behaviour and transforming the fabric of his capital in ways likely to guarantee his own security and dynastic future. By these means, and others, Cosimo

* Professor Suzy Butters passed away in January 2018 before this chapter had reached the final stages of proofing.

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_sbut

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was able to vitiate the odious comparisons between the duke of Athens and himself, and, when it suited him, exploit them to his advantage. Keywords: apparati, cavalieri a cavallo, cittadini, dynastic strategies, Florentine Republic, foreigners, fortifications, lèse-majesté, liberty, literati, Medici principate, merchants, nobility, palaces, plebe, political virtues and vices, popolo, precedence disputes, property acquisitions and expropriations, prospettive, public building projects, public vs private, Signori, stage sets, titles, tyranny, warfare

In 1586 the Venetian grandson and namesake of Aldus Manutius (d. 1515) published a biography of Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574), Duke of Florence and First Grand Duke of Tuscany 1. Based on manuscript and published material, Aldo Mannucci’s work (d. 1597) had been vetted by officials of the Grand Duke’s son and dynastic successor, Francesco I (r. 1574-1587).2 Mannucci’s dedication to Philip II (d. 1598) reminded the King of Spain that Cosimo had been a ruler conjoined, allied, and devoted in his deeds to the Sacred Empire, royal crown, and Philip’s father, Charles V (d. 1558).3 Mannucci’s proemio declares that Cosimo procured ‘the return to Tuscany of its ancient glory, ancient sceptres and crowns, widening the confines of Florentine imperium, and founding the principate in his family on the strongest possible foundations’.4 Having rehearsed Tuscany’s Etruscan origins and Florence’s Roman foundation, as well as its destruction by the Ostrogoth king Totila, refoundation by Charlemagne, and later history of factional strife, Mannucci addressed the family’s origins. In the early thirteenth century, he wrote, the Medici flourished in Europe and Greece, and here they acquired ‘the Duchy of Athens, and other fiefs in Morea’.5 In support, he reproduced Cosimo’s October 1567 patent to ‘Franco [sic, Francesco] and Paolo de’ Medici of Athens, our blood relatives’, making them ‘citizens and patricians’ of Florence, and invoking the ancient Medici family’s great deeds Dates from 1.I to 25.III, the first day of Florence’s new year, have been modernized. Italics within quotations are mine, as are all translations unless otherwise indicated. My thanks to Daniel Wand (University of Manchester’s Media Support team) for help with the annotations to Stefano Buonsignori’s 1584 Map of Florence and, more generally, to Maurizio Arfaioli and Humfrey Butters. 1 Mannucci 1586; Mannucci 1823 is used here. 2 Butters, Vulcan, 1:149n4. 3 Mannucci 1823, i-iii. 4 Ibid., [I]-II. 5 Ibid., 11.

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under Baldwin, ‘Emperor of the Greeks’, and his successors.6 Among the surviving documents underpinning their claim, one stands out; a copy of a Latin diploma with Italian and French translations, issued on 3 April 1255 from Constantinople’s Blachernae palace, declaring: ‘Baldwin of Flanders [II], Emperor of Constantinople, gives to Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Athens, all the abbeys in the imperial gift existing in the island of Negroponte and its dependency’.7 What might the discovery of these dukes of Athens among the Duke of Florence’s ancestors have meant to him, and to his subjects?

Florence, Athens, and the dukes For humanists, ancient Athens was paradigmatic. Leonardo Bruni (c. 13701444) modelled his Latin praise of Florence on Aristides’ eulogy of the city.8 In 1545 Cosimo eagerly awaited the publication of Sophianos’s map of ancient Greece which Oporin had dedicated to him,9 and, in 1551 his own publisher, Lorenzo Torrentino, brought out a Latin translation of Pausanias’s wellknown Periegesis Hellados.10 Francesco Vinta’s 1562 Latin carmen declared that Greek speech, even Homer’s, was insufficient to praise the House of the Medici, which shone so brightly, ‘in itself and in its ancestors’ that it surpassed ‘the great houses of Greece and Troy’.11 And in 1565 Cosimo bought all the Greek manuscripts found for Pius IV (d. 1565) when Pius V (d. 1572) cancelled their projected publication.12 Finally, Bernardo Davanzati’s 1574 funeral oration compared the ancient Athenian Kerameikos with the Uffizi’s exterior as Cosimo planned it, with statues celebrating Florence’s illustrious citizens.13

6 Ibid., 11-13; this emperor of the Latin empire of Constantinople (‘Romania’) was Baldwin II of Courtenay (r. 1228-1231, 1237-1261) (Wolff and Hazard, 819). 7 ASF, MAP 151, fols. 45 v-46; the volume includes Cosimo’s copies of documents Francesco and Paolo di Piero ‘de Medicis de Athene’ presented in Venice (5.V.1567), ‘per provare la loro discendenza’ (fols. 14-21v). 8 Baron, 193-96. 9 ASF, MdP 6, fols. 115-116, 8.VII.1545, Cosimo to Bishop of Cortona; Tolias, 153-56, 158. 10 Pausanias, Veteris Græciæ descriptio; Pretzler, 118-20. 11 Vinta; Cochrane, Florence, 39. Well-informed on Tuscany and ancient Greece (Nachlass 2:204-05), Vinta (d. 1570) was Cosimo’s minister, secretary, and intimate counsellor (Mellini, Ricordi, 26-27). 12 Barberi, 109. 13 Davanzati, 466-67; Pausanias, Guide, 1:15.

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In contrast, the Duchy of Athens recalled an ignominious moment of Florence’s republican history, only briefly mentioned by Mannucci.14 In May 1342 the Florentine government asked the Frenchman Walter de Brienne, the so-called Duke of Athens,15 to temporarily assume military powers on behalf of their weakened state16. They had liked him in 1326-1328 when he was vicar of Florence’s temporary lord (signore), Charles of Anjou, Duke of Calabria (d. 1328),17 but now Walter accumulated additional powers, to the consternation of many. Already confident in 1341 that ‘all he lacked in order to become Florence’s absolute Prince was the title, since he was feared and revered as its signore’,18 in September 1342 he orchestrated his acclamation by the city’s populace as their first-ever signore a vita.19 The dangers of bestowing supreme power in perpetuity on this uncouth foreigner soon became apparent, however.20 Within ten months the Florentines ejected the Duke of Athens, but not before he had altered Florence’s administration and finances, exercised harsh justice, undermined social and class loyalties, offended its modesty, and started to transform the city’s urban fabric.21 A fresco in the debtors’ prison depicted his expulsion on St. Anne’s day (26 July 1343), he was humiliated in ‘defaming pictures’,22 and other images of him carried verses decrying his ‘wicked vices’23; indeed, the one in the podestà’s palace had to be matted over in 1394, so the visiting Guido, Duke of Bari, a later ally of Walter’s faction, ‘would not see his onsort depicted among many other criminal citizens [of Florence]’24 . In 1494 Walter’s ‘defaming picture’ was preserved where others were erased, and it was exploited to equate his ignominious downfall with the overthrow of Piero de’ Medici and his family.25 Walter’s rule reminded Florentines how their proverbial liberty could be lost and warned potential tyrants that subjugated peoples would

14 Mannucci 1823, 9. 15 The sixth Count of Brienne (Aube) in Champagne; Walter never retook the duchy of Athens, lost by his father and predecessor (d. 1311) (Sestan; Setton, ‘Catalans in Greece’, 167-84, 189-94). 16 Paoli, 87-90. 17 Bruni, 2:262-63; Razzi, Vita 1602, 38; Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 15. 18 Razzi, Vita 1602, 41. 19 Paoli, 93-95. 20 Razzi, Vita 1602, 43, 49; Green, 478. 21 Giovanni Villani, 7:5-54; Bruni, 262-81; Machiavelli, Istorie, 189-204; Cerretani, 122-31; Paoli. 22 Giovanni Villani, 7:43-44, 54; Paoli, 83; Edgerton, 41, 69, 78-85; Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 71-72. 23 ‘Versi’; Razzi, Vita 1602, 60. 24 Alle Bocche della Piazza, 171. 25 Edgerton, 109-10n17.

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strive to regain it, even across generations.26 The memory of his tyranny helped to guarantee there would not be another signore a vita while the Republic lasted. It fell in 1530, following Florence’s capitulation to the Imperial army. Alessandro de’ Medici, already a duke,27 was temporarily appointed ‘provost in perpetuity in all offices’.28 In 1532 twelve reformers legally established the Medici principate by abolishing the city’s signoria and republican institutions, and Alessandro was made capo and hereditary ‘Duke of the Republic of Florence’, effectively its prince in perpetuity.29 Within three days of Alessandro’s subsequent assassination, on 6 January 1537,30 Cosimo de’ Medici replaced him; in 1574, he would die naturally, ‘in his beloved fatherland, at home and in his own bed’.31 Was Cosimo a tyrant? William Thomas (d. 1554) wrote that ‘[Florence] had found her long-desired liberty’ in Cosimo because he administered justice implacably, echoing the ancient and humanist notion linking justice with liberty.32 Bernardo Segni (d. 1558) and Giovanni Battista Adriani (d. 1579) argued that he was no tyrant, having been elected rather than taking power by force.33 In 1561, however, the Venetian Republic’s ambassador noted that the Florentines, ‘used to freedom’, now lived ‘in bondage’,34 and in 1566 his successor called Cosimo’s government ‘a new state of tyranny’.35 Cosimo was well acquainted with the odium attached to the Duke of Athens, by popular repute and from historians in his circle. Jacopo Pitti (d. 1589), a fervent supporter of the principate, cited Walter’s cruelty, greed, tyranny, and betrayal of political friends.36 In the 1560s Vincenzo Borghini (d. 1580) was editing the Cronica by Giovanni Villani (c. 1286 or 1280-1348), an 26 Paoli, 82. On Florentine liberty, see Bruni, 2:268-69; Dei, 79; Machiavelli, Istorie, 192-93; Guicciardini, Ricordi, 170; Rubinstein ‘Florentina Libertas’; and Hale, ‘Fortezza’, 502. 27 Ughi, 72. Charles V conferred the Abbruzzese duchy of Penne on Alessandro (1522), which passed to his widow Margaret of Austria and entered her dowry when she remarried (1538) (Donsì Gentile, 28, 35, 41, 55n8; Lefevre, index, ‘Penne’). 28 Ughi, 72-73 (Appendix VIII, 1530); Rezasco, 878-79 (Proposto). 29 Albertini, 192, 200 (27.IV.1532 provvisione); for the institutions and offices abolished, see Ughi, 76. 30 Cronaca, 1-3. 31 Puccini, 416-17. 32 Thomas, 105; cf. Guicciardini, Ricordi, 232; Fedeli, 223; Puccini, 415; Rubinstein, ‘Florentina Libertas’, 283-84; and Najemy, 471-73. 33 Albertini, 333-34n5, 347-48. 34 ‘fatti servi’; see Fedeli, 214. 35 Priuli, 62. 36 Pitti, 30, 33; Albertini, 334-39. On his financial greed, see Giovanni Villani, 7:24-25; Razzi 1602, 61; and Paoli, 107.

298 SUZANNE B. BUTTERS Figure 1 Stefano Buonsignori, 1584 Map of Florence, with author’s superimposed site indications (a-z) relating to Walter de Brienne (Duke of Athens), Florence, Istituto Geografico Militare. © Istituto Geografico Militare.*

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a Santa Croce b Palazzo Ducale (formerly palazzo dei Priori / della Signoria), with its piazza c Palazzo del Podestà (now the Bargello) d San Giorgio hill (later Pitti property) e Mercato Nuovo f ‘strada romana’ g Costa San Giorgio & San Giorgio gate h Mercato Vecchio i Uffizi j Palazzo Mozzi k ‘Bastione a San Giorgio’ m buttress-like possible gun chambers n Belluzzi’s ‘ritirata’ o Annalena monastery (partially destroyed) p edge of Camaldoli neighbourhood q ‘baluardo del cavaliere’

n r Bellosguardo hill s Belvedere t Boboli property u San Piero Gattolini ‘puntone’ v San Piero Gattolini gate in 14th -century walls w Annalena gate in the ‘ritirata’ x quarry outside the ‘cavaliere’ y Pitti property (palace and orto) z Boboli quarry aa San Giorgio intramural quarry bb San Giorgio extramural rampart in 1584 cc Santa Trinita bridge dd Via Maggio ee San Felice in piazza ff Piazza Sant’Appollinare

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eye-witness to Walter’s rule.37 Close advisor to Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574)38 and the friend, biographer, executor, and testamentary beneficiary of Benedetto Varchi (d. 1566),39 Silvano Razzi (d. 1611) used Villani’s work with other Florentine histories and ricordi for his important ‘Vita di Gvaltieri Dvca d’Athene, e Tiranno di Firenze’.40 A perpetual foreigner with an ‘unadorned and empty’ title, 41 this stateless duke repeatedly failed to retake Athens42 and, during his signoria in Florence, could not even build the surrogate ‘Castello d’Atene’ he wanted in the Arno valley.43 As Walter’s relative, Philip VI of France (r. 1328-1350), noted, ‘The pilgrim has found refuge, but in a bad hostel’.44 Little surprise, then, that Mannucci stressed the chivalric nobility of the Medici dukes of Athens and the prominence of a Medici in the 1343 conspiracies that freed Florence from Walter’s tyrannical yoke. 45

The city’s interior Many of the institutional strategies used by Walter and Cosimo to control Florence’s population could fruitfully be compared, but the ones that most impinged on public spaces and public experiences are of particular interest here, not least because their visibility allowed scope for comparing Cosimo’s deeds with those of the Duke of Athens. Naturally, both undertook essential projects first and then created the conditions needed to facilitate the implementation of others. Urban interventions usually involved property purchases, expropriations, demolitions, and contested compensations, so some projects progressed so slowly that their true scale and implications became apparent only gradually. Cosimo was adept at exploiting this phenomenon; Walter showed signs that he would have been, had he ruled better and lived longer. Both dukes thought that exercising seignorial power should coincide with seignorial residence. On reaching Florence in 1342, Walter schemed to take power from his deceptively modest base at Santa Croce, well away from 37 Folena; Scorza, 70; Rubin, 190-97, 212; Belloni and Drusi, vii-xii, 167-82. 38 Barocchi, 441; Folena, 683; Rubin, 219, 314. 39 Vasari, Zibaldone, 117-23; Razzi, ‘Vita Varchi’; Varchi, Epigrammi, 25-27. 40 Razzi, Vita 1602, 45, 50, 61, 64. 41 Bruni, 2:263. 42 Paoli, 113; Setton, ‘Catalans in Grece’, 189-91. 43 Repetti, 1:459-60. 44 ‘Albergè il est le pelerin, mais il y a mauvais ostel’ (Giovanni Villani, 7:14). 45 Mannucci 1823, 11, 15.

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the Priors’ palace (Figure 1a). 46 His appointment terms never envisaged his residence among the Priors,47 but once he secured the city’s lifelong lordship, he ejected them and moved into their palace, with his large military escort and following of French courtiers (Figure 1b). 48 The palace’s image as a civic fortress, girded to defend the city’s liberty against factions and tyranny was now replaced by that of a hostile citadel, armed against the population, sitting in their midst and flying a foreign flag.49 The Duke’s ally and Florence’s long-time friend, Robert of Anjou, King of Naples (r. 1309-1343),50 warned Walter that his state would last only if he returned the Priors to their rightful residence and lived in the podestà’s palace, as his son Charles had done.51 But Walter believed his signoria legitimate and even implied that he might found a race of kings in Florence.52 During his residence, Walter increased the palace’s already impressive defences,53 strengthening its surrounding area, screening off its lower windows, and protecting its entrances with barbicans. He could use its great belltower as a fortified retreat (rocca),54 but he also planned to build a citadel on the San Giorgio hill, a retreat well away from the palace and piazza (Figures 1b, d).55 He extended the palace’s south side and envisaged but never built a sizeable complex of structures to its north.56 For greater security he enlarged the piazza westward by demolishing private residences, and he expropriated others around the palace for his barons and troops,57 not least because he wanted to be surrounded more by ‘his faithful men 46 Giovanni Villani, 7:6, 11; Machiavelli, Istorie, 191. 47 Paoli, 89-90. 48 Ibid., 95. The Priors were moved to a private residence (Giovanni Villani, 7:13, 22; Razzi, Vita 1602, 46; Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 87n83). Walter’s personal guard (800 French and Burgundian knights), 100-plus familiars, and 4 captains lived in the palace (Razzi, Vita 1602, 51, 55; Paoli, 115, 130). 49 Paoli, 95. 50 Abulafia, 488-96. 51 Giovanni Villani translates Robert’s 1342 Latin letter into Italian (7:15-16), except for his ‘self-styled’ title (Abulafia, 489), ‘Robertus rex Jerusalem et Siciliae’. 52 Paoli, 102. 53 Ibid., 110-12; Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 82-83. 54 Ibid., 13n79, citing Dati (d. 1435). 55 ‘Preso la signoria ferrò le f inestre del palazo ag[i]ugnendovi antimuri et rechandolo in forteza, penssando fare una ciptadella in sul monte San G[i]orgio.’ (Cerretani, 126). 56 The pope forbade Walter to demolish San Romolo (N), Santa Cecilia (W), and San Pier Scheraggio (S) to enlarge the piazza, but the Priors later razed the first two (1356, 1386), for the same purpose (Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 82-84); Vasari’s Uffizi incorporated a remnant of the last (Satkowski, 25-26, 36, 42). 57 Giovanni Villani, 7:23.

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from beyond the Alps than by the families of [Florentine] citizens’.58 To gain a view of the Mercato Nuovo and the road south to Rome, Walter wanted to raze the church of Santa Cecilia west of the palace;59 this would have enabled him to better survey Florence south of the Arno (Oltrarno), with its feuding magnates, lowly artisans, and unskilled labourers (Figures 1e, f).60 Here, in 1343, he laid a new street up the Costa San Giorgio, bypassing hostile magnates and giving the Oltrarno popolani access to the San Giorgio gate and city walls in times of need.61 Walter’s plan to build a citadel on the San Giorgio hilltop confirmed the street’s military value (Figure 1g). Learning that Walter was busy building gates and towers, Philip VI ‘begged him to try to be lord over hearts, not over towers’.62 Walter favoured the Oltrarno’s disenfranchised artisans, allowing some to form their own guild.63 Festive brigades (potenze) were organized, with artisan rulers and courts that mirrored the social hierarchy in reverse.64 Their guilds disappeared with Walter, but the brigades reappeared in the fifteenth century and would be vigorously supported by the Medici dukes.65 On entering the Prato gate, Duke Alessandro’s bride, the Emperor’s illegitimate daughter, was aptly greeted by its ‘ruler’, ‘la Potentia dell’Imperatore’.66 From the mid 1540s, when he began to transform the Oltrarno,67 Cosimo promoted these ‘ancient’ festivities68 organized by the ‘plebs’, as Filippo Nerli (d. 1556) put it, with imagery that mixed Medici and Imperial arms with allusions to the Duke of Athens.69 Whether the plebe coincided with the popolo minuto

58 Paoli, 111. 59 Vasari 1568, 1:492. 60 Eckstein, 6-14. 61 Walter’s street ran up the hill’s slope (costa), from Santa Felicita to the San Giorgio gate (Giovanni Villani, 7:35). The slope took its name from the hill (‘[il] poggio de’ Magnoli, chiamato più volgarmente la Costa a San Giorgio’; Varchi, Storia, 1:581); the zone was called the ‘Costa’ (Deliberatione sopra li Sindachi, ‘Sindicheria di Costa’). 62 Paoli, 99. 63 Najemy, 136; Eckstein, 11-12. 64 Giovanni Villani, 7:28-29; Razzi, Vita 1602, 48; Trexler, 215, 219-21; Sapori, in Ricci, 215-16n1. 65 Trexler, 399-404; Rosenthal, ‘Genealogy’ and ‘Powers’. 66 Vasari to Pietro Aretino, 3.VI.1535 (Nachlass 1:67). 67 See section below, ‘The city’s southern defences’. 68 ASF, MdP, 1170, ins. 7, fol. 18, Bishop of Marsico to Pierfrancesco Riccio, 30.IV.1543; MdP 376, fol. 444, Camillo Campani to Bernardino Duretti, 16.VI.1545 (‘cose antiche’); Cronaca, 51, VI.1545 (‘certe case della città antichissime’), i.e., the potenze’s ‘residenze’ (Ricci, 519). 69 ‘[Il duca d’Atene] per farsi la plebe più amica donò loro alcune insegne, e titoli di certe loro signorie, come a’ nostri tempo [before 1556] gli usa ancora la plebe in certi giorni dell’anno nel festeggiare’ (Nerli, 15); Rosenthal, ‘Genealogy’, 223-25.

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or not,70 the social and political connotations of popolo in Florence varied.71 Marchionne di Coppo Stefani (d. 1385) wrote that Walter had called them ‘le bon popule’ but warned that this class had called for Christ’s crucifixion.72 For many, plebe and popolo were virtually synonymous, sharing the qualities of brutishness, greed, and dangerous excitability.73 Piero Vaglienti argued that ‘whoever relies on the popolo relies on shit’,74 another writer that ‘popolo and shit are the same thing’,75 and Francesco Guicciardini (d. 1540) that their ignorance and excesses led to tyranny.76 By favouring the brigades, Cosimo harnessed the popolo’s disruptive energies for his own ends. As Gianfrancesco Lottini (d. 1572) explained,77 however, and Walter’s ultimate fate had demonstrated, this policy was not without dangers. The parlamento of ‘wool shearers and low-class rabble’ that acclaimed Walter signore a vita was hastily organized78 and quickly presented the Florentines with a fait accompli by removing the Priors from their palace.79 By contrast, Cosimo’s title evolved slowly, and he chose his residence more cautiously. In January 1537 an inner group of patricians elected him not ‘lord [signore] of Florence’, as one chronicler claimed,80 but first ‘Provost’81 and then ‘Head and Principal of the government of the city of Florence and its dominion’.82 After Cosimo defeated the Florentine exiles and conspirators,83 an Imperial diploma altered his title to ‘Principal and Head of the government and “dominion” [status] of the Florentine Republic’,84 while declaring he could enjoy Alessandro’s powers and titles, including the title ‘Duke of the Florentine Republic’.85 But Cosimo himself gradually assumed the more powerful and juridically independent title ‘Duke of Florence’, quashing any 70 Nerli implied the former and Machiavelli the latter (Istorie, 197). 71 Florio, 281; Gilbert, 23-28; Trexler, 399-418; Najemy, 35-39, 176-77. 72 Paoli, 117; Najemy, 179-80. 73 177; Cerretani, 124 (‘el popolo e l’infima plebe’). 74 Vaglienti, 174. 75 Cronaca, 19 (glossator). 76 Pedretti, in Guicciardini, Ricordi, 260-61. 77 Lottini, 129-31. 78 Giovanni Villani, 7:12. 79 Cerretani, 124-25; Paoli, 94-95. 80 Buonsignori, 24. 81 Ughi, 98. 82 ‘Capo e Primario del Governo della Città di Firenze e suo Dominio’ (Marrara, 19, 21-22). 83 Cronaca, 7-10. 84 ‘Cosmum de Medicis […] vocatum ad ipsum Primatum et Caput gubernii et Status Reipublicae Florentinae.’ (30.IX.1537) (Marrara, 20). On ‘status’, see Rubinstein, ‘Stato’. 85 Marrara, 20-22.

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Figure 2 Stefano Buonsignori, 1584 Map of Florence, with author’s superimposed site indications A-I relating to Cosimo de Medici Florence, Istituto Geografico Militare. © Istituto Geografico Militare

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idea that the city-state had surrendered its historical freedom by becoming an Imperial fief.86 Cosimo already planned to move into the palace in 1538,87 but he waited. In June 1539 he married Eleonora Álvarez de Toledo, daughter of the Spanish viceroy of Naples; later, on 15 May 1540, they transferred to the palace with their infant daughter.88 Alessandro had built the Fortezza da Basso close to his residence, the Medici palace,89 but Cosimo distanced himself from the citadel, then under Imperial control, by moving from this family palace to what was then called the ‘palace in the piazza where the signoria used to reside during the popular government’ or the ‘Priors’ palace’ (Figures 2B, C).90 In contrast, Cosimo and his majordomo called it the ‘palazzo maggiore’,91 a name the unlettered would understand as the ‘greatest palace’ but the erudite knew denoted the Imperial palaces on Rome’s Palatine hill;92 soon it was called ‘the Ducal palace’ or ‘the Duke’s palace’. Cosimo’s reasons for moving were pragmatic, as Adriani recounts:93 here he could demonstrate he was absolute prince and the arbiter of government;94 he could guard the palace (the ‘chief seat of state’), house his personal guard,95 be more secure, spend less, gain in dignity, and govern with greater obedience from his citizens and vassals. Cosimo’s physician Baccio Baldini (d. 1585) noted that the palace ‘had always been the seat of the highest magistracy of the city, in essence its Prince’,96 deftly conflating republicanism with monarchy, 86 Ibid., 22; Adriani, ‘Vita’, 23-24; Albertini, 281n2. On the titles’ connotations and effects, see Marrara, 3-22; Hale, Florence, 119-21; and Najemy, 461-68. 87 ‘post scritta. Il signor Duca qui è risoluto di andar’ ad habitare nel palazzo dove stava la signoria, e già fa acconciare quelle stancie le quale erano picciole, ut in lineis [and aligned]’ (ASMa, AG 1112, Imperio Raccordati (sic, Recordati) to Duke of Mantua, 3.XI.1538; same to ducal secretary [Calandra?], 6.XI.1538). 88 Allegri and Cecchi, 3-5. 89 ASMa, AG 1111, Carlo Borromei to Giangiacomo Calandra, 22.V.1534, reporting, ‘[the fortress] verrà con una porta pocho dischosto dalla chasa dello Illustrissimo padrone [Alessandro]’; Borromei later writes, ‘[Alessandro] muterà presto chasa et tornerà nel palazo chome vero padrone et gusto [sic, giusto] signore’ (to Duke of Mantua, 16.VII.1534); see Hale, ‘Fortezza’, 513. 90 Lapini, 103, 15.V.1540; ‘Annali’, II, fol. 1039 (II.1540). 91 Pieraccini, II, 11, quoting Cosimo to Eleonora’s father on their transfer to the ‘palazzo maggiore, dove sono stanze regali’; cf. ‘il palazzo maggior in Fiorenza electo per habitation’ di lor’ Excellentie, quod faustum felixque sit [‘that it may be auspicious and happy’]’ (MdP 600, fol. 4v, Pierfrancesco Riccio ricordo, 5.V.1540). 92 Gnoli, 197; Gamucci, 56-57; Acidini, 84, 86, 124. 93 Adriani, Istoria, 281-82; on Adriani and Cosimo, see Albertini, 346-50; and Rubin, 179, 191 (figure 73), 193. 94 Cf. above, *text at n19. 95 Below, *text at n108. 96 Veen, 205-06n96.

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a loaded but legitimate legal concept.97 Riguccio Galluzzi (d. 1801) would suggest that Cosimo believed his move would help people forget the ancient liberty the palace walls recalled,98 but this is unlikely. Machiavelli (d. 1527) had written that the Priors who tried to dissuade Walter from increasing his powers had argued the opposite; that public buildings, places associated with public officials and with the banners of the city’s free organizations, would serve as perpetual reminders of Florence’s liberty.99 That Cosimo concurred is suggested by his policy of conflating the Republic’s ideals, institutions, and imagery with those of his principate.100 Traditionally the Florentine government prohibited women, children, and foreigners from living in the Priors’ palace,101 and nothing suggests that Walter planned to turn it into a family residence. Indeed, the fact that his first wife and only son were dead was a political advantage,102 just as Piero Soderini’s childlessness would allow him to be elected Florence’s gonfaloniere a vita (1502-1512), a perpetual office that posed dynastic risks.103 But the cohabitation of Soderini’s wife with him in the palace was much resented, as was the visibility of her women at its windows.104 The republican view that rulers should live apart from the temptations of family loyalties may have affected how the Florentines judged the arrival of Eleonora, her retinue, and her firstborn in the palace. But the couple quickly produced copious dynastic heirs;105 previously dangerous, these now safeguarded Florence’s future stability – as a dynastic principate, not a republic. Both Walter and Cosimo ignored the prohibition on foreigners living in the palace. The Duke of Athens, his retainers, guards, and hangers-on were French, and the presence of these vulgar foreign residents in and around the palace offended Florentines.106 Legitimate princes commonly employed 97 An ancient Roman title, ‘originalmente di maggioranza civile, non signorile, portante authorità moderata dalla legge’, Princeps later indicated a supreme sovereign ruler (Rezasco, 854). Late fourteenth-century Italian lawyers used it to indicate the city-state or the Florentine signoria, ‘the Republic’s supreme magistracy’ (Martines, 125-26, 419-28, 439), and so would Machiavelli: ‘Gli uomini diventano eccellenti e mostrano la loro virtù, secondo che sono adoperati e tirati innanzi dal Principe loro, o Repubblica o Re che sia’ (Rezasco, 854, I). 98 Galluzzi, 1:3. 99 Machiavelli, Istorie, 193. 100 Veen, 262 (indexed entries). 101 Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 21, 43n331, 97-99. 102 Paoli, 87; Sestan. 103 Razzi, Soderini, 6; Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 43-44, 99. 104 Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 43-44nn332, 336. 105 Eleven children by 1554 (Pieraccini, 2:64). 106 Above, *text at nn48, 58.

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foreign guards,107 so Cosimo’s use of Germans to guard the palace, considered more loyal and peaceable than Italians, was unremarkable.108 In contrast, the Spaniards who flooded Florence’s countryside, city, and palace were unpopular.109 Cosimo objected to overwintering the Emperor’s Spanish army, declaring his dominion was not ‘the stall and stables of all these wandering soldiers, and what’s more, the sewer of all His Majesty’s states in Italy’.110 The Spanish soldiers manning Cosimo’s citadel until 1543 behaved insolently, moving around Florence in bands, arousing ‘great apprehension and suspicion in the disarmed city’.111 The fact that Eleonora was Spanish rubbed salt in many wounds. Might a family have reduced Walter’s offensive behaviour, or that of his French troops and courtiers who behaved and dressed in the immodest French manner?112 Their violent and lascivious treatment of Florentine women, encouraged to don shameful worldly ornaments, suggests not.113 Cosimo’s behaviour contrasted markedly, at first. He curbed courtly ostentation and immodesty and reintroduced the Florentine Republic’s sober dress for officials (magistrati): the sleeveless, toga-like cloak (lucco or abito civile).114 Since he ruled, like the Republic’s Priors, as the government’s chief official (Magistrato),115 it is interesting that Cosimo himself was ‘not allowed’, as he put it, to go around Florence in a lucco,116 and he did not own one.117 Still, he dressed with such restraint that Davanzati compared Cosimo to a figure by a great painter, handsome without the need for ornaments.118 Until Eleonora’s death, he protected women’s honour, and his paterfamilial moderation contrasted with the unseemly practices of many princely contemporaries.119 107 ‘principi naturali’ (Albertini, 333-34n5). 108 Cronaca, 20; Cosimo Lettere, 61; Tomaso Contarini, 280. Most lived elsewhere (ASF, DG 642, fol. 7, 1.III.1562). 109 Cronaca, 18, 93, 128; Edelstein, 71n3. 110 Cosimo Lettere, 67, Cosimo to Giovanni Bandini, 13.I.1542. 111 Adriani, Istoria, 231. 112 Razzi, Vita 1602, 49. 113 Giovanni Villani, 7:23-24. 114 Thomas, 97; Buonsignori, 49; Mellini, Ricordi, 73-74; Carnesecchi; Currie, 36-48. 115 Baldini, in Veen, 205-06n96. 116 When Cosimo put on a lucco for his daughter’s masquerade party, Mellini (Ricordi, 74) heard him say, ‘Io pagherei buona cosa, che mi fusse lecito andare per Firenze con quest’abito; gli è pur bello, ed ha il nobile, e’l grande! [underlines mine; italics sic]’. For an examples of his usual dress, see Cosimo in the background of Fei’s Goldsmith’s Shop (before 1571) (Conticelli, ‘Guardaroba’, plate XXXIII). 117 Currie, 48. Veen (185-86, 224n76) wrongly implies that Cosimo wore the lucco. 118 Davanzati, 468. 119 Thomas, 105; Fedeli, 233-34.

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But afterwards, his overt courtship of Florentine gentlewomen threatened to stimulate plots against him, ‘since the Florentines had nothing left but the honour of their women’.120 Cosimo’s palace transformations excluded provocative defences, but the safety of his person, family, and regime still rested on the exposure of his residence to the city. His 1543 repossession of the citadel, after paying Charles V,121 offered Cosimo greater but by no means complete security. The 1546 Sienese revolt and, in 1547, Genoa’s uprising and the Duke of Parma’s assassination, served as warnings, as did major plots against Cosimo’s person.122 He employed spies (a well-known Florentine practice),123 intercepted letters,124 increased his personal guard,125 disarmed the population, prohibited assembly,126 and moved cautiously around the countryside with a large military escort.127 Cosimo’s 1549 law against treason (lèse-majesté), already recognized as a crime,128 closely associated his person with the state and promised to punish anyone wounding its majesty.129 And in 1550 he sought to improve his network of neighbourhood informers by changing their pay from a monthly salary to a reward for each reported crime resulting in a conviction.130 The Imperial minister Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle

120 Priuli, 76-77. 121 Cronaca, 15-18. Reports on the sum paid vary, from 120,000 to 400,000 ducati (Galluzzi, 1:51; Thomas, 104), but 150,000 scudi or gold scudi is most likely (Teicher, 347). Charles V was expected to restore Florence’s citadel to Cosimo once his first son was born (Tucci, 142; Adriani, ‘Orazione’, 146). 122 Galluzzi, 1:72-75, 78-86; 2:5-7; and below, *n127. 123 Fedeli, 236-37. For spies spying on Cosimo’s spies in France, see ASF, MdP 638, fol. 223, Cosimo to ‘signor Giordano’ in Piedmont, 25.VIII.1548; on Florence’s fifteenth-century ‘ispioni e cancellieri segretissimi’, see Dei, 114-15. 124 Cosimo ordered a Strozzi sympathizer to be secretly captured and his boots, cushions, and saddles searched for hidden messages (ASF, MdP 1174, ins. 1, fol. 40, Lorenzo Pagni to Pierfrancesco Riccio, 1.II.1548); Fedeli, 253. 125 Cronaca, 115; Pieraccini, 2:23. 126 Cantini, 1:170-71; Marrara, 37-38; ASF, MdP 613, ins. 3, fol. 25, Pierfrancesco Riccio memo to Cosimo, 5.VI.1547; cf. Hale, ‘Fortezza’, 503, 510. 127 Giuliano Buonaccorsi plotted to kill Cosimo while he was hunting (Cronaca, 18-19, 1543; cf. Baldini, 35; Fedeli, 234). 128 ASF, MdP 1170, ins. 6, 32, Lorenzo Pagni to Pierfrancesco Riccio, 16.X.1543, clarifying that three Florentines were arrested for sodomy, not ‘per crimen lesę Mayestatis’. 129 On this 11.III.1549 law (repr. Ughi, 171-78), see Mellini, Ricordi, 25n; Galluzzi, I, 144-46; Marrara, 54-56; and Diaz, 106-07, 232. 130 Deliberatione sopra li Sindachi; Brackett, 36, 60. On the legislation’s discussion (2-16.IV.1550), ASF, MS 4308, fols. 74v-75, 89v-101v.

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wrote to Eleonora’s father that the young duke needed no political training; ‘he already knows too much, and, if anything, is too wise and too acute’.131 This nervous combination of danger, reprisal, and grandeur was evident in Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. Commissioned by Cosimo in 1545 and unveiled in 1554,132 it dominated the piazza from the Priors’ loggia.133 Slaying the mythical Medusa, whose face turned all who viewed it to stone, revealed Perseus as a civic protector like Cosimo, but Varchi’s celebratory verse on the group’s unveiling made clear that displaying her head as a trophy to Florence’s great public square carried an implicit threat; ‘today, not only Medusa but Perseus too turns people to marble’.134 Indeed, Perseus had brandished the head quite liberally, petrifying ‘common folk’, princes, and Atlas himself.135 Heroic, martial, beautifully implacable, and provocative, Cosimo’s bronze group must have reminded many of the August 1537 judicial beheadings in the piazza, where the scaffold remained for several days in case of need.136 Did the Duke’s historians also recall Matteo Villani’s claim, that the Loggia was better suited to tyrants than the people?137 Cities needed prosperous market places, but rulers recognized the dangers posed by crowds gathering in their open spaces. The popolo minuto’s uprising against the Duke of Athens had originated in the Mercato Vecchio138 and rushed to the piazza through the adjacent Mercato Nuovo where one Florentine unsuccessfully begged them not to fight Walter (Figure 1e b).139 Had he succeeded in opening up the area between his piazza and the strategically located Mercato Nuovo,140 the rioters’ path would have been made easier, but so too Walter’s ability to deploy troops against them. The early paving of the Mercato Nuovo’s large open space highlighted its high judicial function, as well as that of housing Florentine mercantile, banking,

131 Cochrane, Florence, 49. 132 Pope Hennessy, 162-213; Conticelli, Medusa, 27-40. 133 Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 86-87; Borsook, 30-32. 134 ‘C’hoggi non sol Medusa, ma Perseo / Fanno di marmo diventar la gente’ (Avery and Barbaglia, 10-11). 135 Ovid, 112-22; Graves, 1:237-45. 136 Ughi, 104-05; Cronaca, 9; Cini, Vita, 83, 85; cf. Vasari, 7:9. Under Cosimo, judicial decapitations were mostly in Piazza Sant’Apollinare and the podestà’s palace (Cronaca, 105, 166, 204; Buonsignori, 38, 73; Edgerton (surviving records of giustiziati), 237-38; Baker (selective sample), 472-73). 137 Matteo Villani, 3:66. 138 Giovanni Villani, 7:44-45; cf. Belli, 33. 139 Machiavelli, Istorie, 200-01. 140 Roth, 25, 40; above, *text at n59.

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festive, and military activities.141 Here bankrupts were traditionally humiliated142 and those who had committed crimes within its boundaries were executed.143 Lorenzino de’ Medici would murder Duke Alessandro in his bed, but Cosimo’s historian Varchi learned from this self-styled Brutus that he had planned to assassinate him in the Mercato Nuovo.144 In the mid-1540s Cosimo transformed the Mercato Nuovo’s public space. His construction of an all’antica covered ‘loggia’ signalled his interest in the ‘magnificence and salubrity of the city’s public buildings’145 and captivated Claude d’Urfé, the French ambassador in Rome.146 Those who worked or gathered here were less enthusiastic. The five guilds due to benefit from the loggia’s construction were forced to pay for it,147 a common but resented planning practice.148 With ‘as many curses as there were grains of sand’, Cosimo’s citizens and merchants complained that the market had been built against their will and showed his increasing ‘boldness’ in acting against them.149 His 1547 initiation of intramural foundations on the Costa San Giorgio, a project involving the forcible occupation of properties and ostensibly encouraged by his wife, aroused similar antagonism (Figure 1g).150 Indeed Cosimo’s urban interventions demonstrated a marked degree of ‘boldness’ from 1545 on. One contemporary project stands out. Cosimo’s 1546 expropriation and demolition of properties between the Ducal palace and the Arno is usually understood as preparation for the future Uffizi (‘Offices’), begun in 1560 (Figure 1i).151 Houses, shops, inns, brothels, warehouses, vaults, and

141 Varchi, Storia, 2:340-41; Belli, 45-46, 54-55. 142 Borsook, 182. 143 Belli, 46 (1395), 60n190 (1325). On recent exemplary hangings, see ‘Diario 1500-1600’, fol. 51v (13.XI.1526); and Cronaca, 68 (25.IX.1547). 144 Varchi, Storia, 1:557. 145 Vasari 1568, 1:125-26; Belluzzi, 77-81, 121-122nn29-54; ASF, MdP 394A, fol. 1106, Pierfrancesco Riccio to Cristiano Pagni (19.X.1549). 146 ‘gli si mostrò la fabrica del Mercato novo, della qual non si poteva satiar’ (ASF, MdP 390A, fol. 688, Pierfrancesco Riccio to Cristiano Pagni, 25.X.1548), cf. Belluzzi, 122n54; on d’Urfé, see Cloulas, 301-02, 342. 147 Belluzzi, 77-79. 148 Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 80n16; Satkowski, 37-38; Pratilli and Zangheri, 109-11. 149 Cronaca, 109-10, IX-XI.1549. 150 Ibid., 64-65, 15.IV.1547; below, *text at nn289-94; cf. ASF, CPR 16, San Giorgio ‘muraglia’ payments, 1.III.1547-28.II.1549 (fols. 205 r, 219v), and San Giorgio and San Frediano ‘muraglia’ payments, 1.III.1549-28.II.1550 (232r). The XI.1547 landslide was lower down the slope (Buonsignori, 25; Cronaca, 71-72). 151 Lessmann, ‘Studien’.

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courts were razed to create a clearing,152 invariably called a ‘street’.153 At the time, other projects to beautify the civic centre were proposed to Cosimo: a continuous arcade around the piazza; and a single-storey administrative building topped by an open-colonnaded terrace, flanking the clearing’s eastern side154. The arcades would have offered conspirators shelter, however, while the terrace left anyone who used it exposed, and, apparently,155 it afforded direct access to Cosimo’s bedroom. Neither project was safe, then, at the time when security threats were uppermost in his mind. Cosimo rejected them. In fact, the Duke was thinking beyond the future Uffizi, to the San Giorgio hill, almost certainly in ways the Duke of Athens had considered before him. Walter had surely noted the hill’s strategic merits in 1326, when he and his wife lived in the Mozzi palace, at its foot 156 (Figure 1j). His 1343 street up the Costa San Giorgio promised access to the citadel he planned for the hilltop, an excellent location for surveying the palace and piazza below.157 In 1546 Cosimo’s critics worried about the same link between the hill and the palace: after the houses were destroyed, His Excellency was shown that the [ducal] palace was now in a worse state, with respect to the city beyond the Arno and the Costa San Giorgio that overlooked it [‘gl’era a cavaliere’], whereas before, when there were houses, only the palace’s projecting galleries [‘ballatoi’] could be seen, and many other reasons were given to him. And thus, after inflicting this destruction, there was never a sign of a house or anything else except a ramshackle street, or that he was sorry, or anything else.158

During the siege, Florentines were unable to mount an attack on their enemies from the palace, though they could monitor battles across the river

152 ASF, OP 102, ins. 1546, no fol., 29.V.1546; Cronaca, 62, 15.III.1546; Lessmann, ‘Studien’, 35-47, 355-58, 375-76n129, figure 13. 153 ASF, SRFF (previously FMR) 17, ‘Libro delle case per fare la strada dal palaco [sic] a Arno’ (10.III.1546); ASF, MP 757, fols. 3 left, 4 left (14.I, 12.IV.1549), 8 left (1549); ASF, MS 4308, fol. 94 r, describing the ‘Sindicheria del Buco’ zone; Lapini, 105; Lessmann, ‘Studien’, 356-57. 154 Satkowski, 26-29; Morrogh, 17-22; Veen, 10-11. 155 Morrogh, 18. 156 Razzi, Vita 1602, 57; Varchi, Storia, 1:81. 157 Above, *text n 61. 158 Cronaca, 62, 15.III.1546. On the Otto di Pratica’s demolitions and property valuations ASF, SRFF 17 (above, *n153); on the terms, payments and claims against valuations, ASF, RC 100 quater, 17.III.1546; ASF, OP 102, no fol., ins. 1546, 8.V.1546.

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Figure 3 Giorgio Vasari and Giovanni Stradano, Leo X’s 1515 cortege in the Piazza della Signoria (1555-62), Palazzo Vecchio, Sala di Leone X: showing the San Giorgio hill and cannon salvos from the future site of Cosimo’s 1546 ‘strada’. © Studio Antonio Quattrone

Figure 4 Giovanni Stradano, from Giorgio Vasari survey, Siege of Florence (156162), fresco, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, Sala di Clemente VII. © Studio Antonio Quattrone)

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from its tower;159 in contrast, Imperial soldiers firing from across the Arno only missed hitting the palace because their cannon cracked.160 Cosimo’s new clearing made his palace more vulnerable to this kind of attack (Figure 1b). Two of Vasari’s paintings for Cosimo confirm the point. Leo X’s 1515 Entry into Florence (after 1555, Figure 3) shows the pre-demolition urban fabric between the palace and river, with an anachronistic clearing where Cosimo’s ‘street’ would later be.161 From here, bombardiers fire cannon salvos towards the Arno, and the San Giorgio hill rises prominently beyond. Vasari stressed the palace’s vulnerability again in his Siege of Florence (1561-1562)162 by anachronistically depicting the same clearing (Figure 4). Clearings were militarily advantageous, and their absence detrimental to security. Failure to clear space on the citadel’s city side, for example, was judged militarily unwise (1530s).163 In contrast, the Republic’s 1529 destruction of Florence’s suburbs to create a pomerium had enhanced Florence’s security,164 as had the demolition of properties north and west of the Priors’ palace in 1319, ‘for the beauty and fortification of the Palace of the Florentine people’.165 A petitioner seeking compensation for properties demolished in 1546 wrote that Cosimo’s ‘street to the Arno was intended to beautify Florence and his Ducal palace’.166 The petitioner would have been ill-advised to mention that the ‘street’ indicated Cosimo’s attention was now focussed on the hill’s defences.

The city’s southern defences Cosimo anticipated threats to his person and regime, but he also had to safeguard his capital. Externally, Florence was vulnerable from the northwest plain and the southern hills (Figure 4). Walter had strengthened its high walls, towers, and fortified gates, but now low projecting bastions, flanking structures, and raised artillery platforms were needed.167 On the plain, Alessandro’s modern citadel was built to resist invasions, ‘bridle’ the 159 Roth, 231; Camerota, 89-91; Conforti, figure 133. 160 Guicciardini, Storia, 4:425, 4.XI.1529; Varchi, Storia, 1:688. 161 Allegri and Cecchi, 121-23; Muccini and Cecchi, 114-15. 162 Allegri and Cecchi, 171, with diagram showing the Florentine and Imperial positions. 163 Raymond de Fourquevaux (1554), in Hale, ‘Fortezza’, 529. 164 Ughi, 49; Rezasco, 820; Adams, 475-76; Pratilli and Zangheri, 1:22. 165 Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 79-81. 166 ASF, OP 102, ins. 1548, no fol., 12.IX.1548. 167 Thomas, 93; Pepper and Adams, 3-27.

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Florentines, and protect himself.168 In 1539 Cosimo renewed its construction and symbolically resided there in 1543 when he regained it from Charles V’s garrisons169 (Figure 2B). Florence’s southern hills presented greater problems170 (Figure 2D). Solutions suggested in 1526 included using the hills as walls (absurd),171 flattening the entire Santo Spirito quarter (‘weak and cruel’),172 or incorporating the hills into the city (costly and militarily impractical).173 Wiser but traumatic measures were found: truncating Florence’s beloved towers and adapting them to artillery;174 destroying many Oltrarno churches, monasteries, and houses in order to build retrenched walls;175 fortifying San Miniato and San Francesco (later San Salvatore) al Monte;176 and defending the San Giorgio hill (Figure 2E). Scipione Ammirato (d. 1601), uncertain about military terminology, wrote that ‘due bastìe, che oggi con militar voce torrioni, o baloardi son detti’ were built in 1527, behind San Miniato’s garden and at the San Giorgio gate (Figure 2E).177 To understand what Cosimo built on the San Giorgio hilltop, where Walter had envisaged his citadel, we must learn more about Florence’s Oltrarno defences. In 1528-1529, earthen fortifications incorporating the San Miniato hill into Florence were built to Michelangelo’s specifications.178 Following the city’s 1530 capitulation and the Medici principate’s 1532 foundation, Alessandro began their refurbishment,179 and from 1537 to 1538 and again from 1541 Cosimo consolidated and expanded them.180 His engineer Giovanni Battista Belluzzi (d. 1554) modernized and completed the San Miniato 168 Thomas, 95, 104; Hale, ‘Fortify’, 195, and ‘Fortezza’. 169 Ibid., 529. 170 Varchi, Storia, 1:577, 584. 171 Varchi-Busini, 481, Busini letter to Varchi, 2.III.1549. 172 Machiavelli, Lettere, 462; below, *text at n221. 173 ASMa, AG 1109, no fol., Giovanni Borromei to Marquis of Mantua, 8, 12.IV.1526; Machiavelli, Lettere, 462, 467 (4.IV, 2.VI.1526); Lamberini, Sanmarino, 1:94. 174 Varchi, Storia, 1:88-89, 569; Cambi, 22:299-300; Nardi, 1842, 2:174, 178; Piante di Popoli, 1:fols. 2, 3. 175 ASF, MdP 394, fol. 433, Francesco Seriacopi to Cosimo, [7.IX.1549?]; Cronaca, 47, 57, 142, 148. 176 ‘[The fortification] del monte, o vero poggio di San Francesco, o vero di San Miniato’ (Varchi, Storia, 1:679, 564); Foscari, 19. 177 Ammirato, Istorie, 100; cf. Cambi, 22:299. 178 Varchi, Storia, 1:679-81; Foscari, 19; Manetti, 47-58. 179 ‘il Duca fa riffare li bastioni che per l’assedio fece far il signor Malatesta Baiono [sic, Baglione] a San Miniato’ (ASMa, AG 1111, no fol., Imperio Racordato [sic, Recordati] to Marchioness of Mantua, 23.VIII.1536). 180 ASF, MdP 1170, ins.1, 47, Lorenzo Pagni to Pierfrancesco Riccio, 12.VII.1541; Cronaca, 12-13; Vasari 1568, 8:175.

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fortress (1543-c. 1553),181 and in July 1552 Cosimo’s Spanish garrison entered the church and monastery,182 ‘to restrain the city on that side’ (Figure 2E).183 Contemporaries called Belluzzi’s construction ‘li bastioni del monte a San Miniato’,184 ‘la fortificazione del monte’,185 ‘la nuova muraglia del monte’,186 or ‘la muraglia del monte’.187 Historians can easily confuse the last three designations with those used to indicate the San Giorgio hill (monte), so context is needed to decide whether references to works ‘al monte’ concern ‘monte San Miniato’188 or ‘monte San Giorgio’(Figure 2E, 1d).189 On the latter’s eastern slope, Michelangelo also built a bastion, reworked by Cosimo (1552-1553) (Figure 1k).190 This ‘bastione a San Giorgio’, as Buonsignori called it in 1584,191 should not be confused with the ‘baluardo di San Giorgio’, often mentioned in Cosimo’s 1540s fortification accounts. This was located on the hill’s summit, west of the San Giorgio gate, not to its east, on the hill’s slope.192 Like others,193 Cosimo Bartoli (d. 1572) used the terms ‘bastione’ and ‘baluardo’ interchangeably, so the fact that, in 1559, he called this ‘baluardo di San Giorgio’ the ‘bastio[ne] di S[an] Giorgio’ is unsurprising. Cosimo’s hilltop constructions necessarily impinged on its earlier siege defences. Vasari, who had surveyed the city from the San Giorgio hill 181 Lamberini, Sanmarino, 1:51, 84-92, 153-57. 182 Cronaca, 145; Manetti, 91. 183 Galluzzi, 1:0. 184 ASF, OP 102, no fol., Cosimo to Antonmaria Buonanni, 21.V.1541; cf. ASF, CPR 15, fol. 178rv, ordering payments for ‘la fabricha dei bastioni del monte’ (1.IV.1543-28.II.1544). 185 Averardo Serristori to Cosimo, 8.I.1538 (Legazioni Serristori, 54). 186 ASF, MdP 1170, ins.1, 47, Lorenzo Pagni to Pierfrancesco Riccio, 12.VII.1541. 187 ASF, MdP 638, fol.60, Cosimo to Pierfrancesco Riccio, 10.II.1544. 188 Pierfrancesco Riccio’s memos to Cosimo: ASF, MdP 613, ins. 7, fols. 17-18, 50-51, 79 (18.IX, 22.XI, 29.XII.1551), 52-53, 81, 7 (24.I, 3.I, 23.IV.1552); Cosimo’s to Riccio, MdP 638, fols. 373, 385 (27.II, 20.IV.1552). 189 Cronaca, 77 (12.III.1548); below, *text at nn234-56; ASF, MdP 613, ins. 3, fol. 14 rv (29.V.1547) is ambiguous. 190 Lamberini, Sanmarino, 1:157. 191 Its other designations included: the ‘bastione che si chiamava di Iacopo Tabusso’ (Giannotti, 1:258; cf. Pepper and Adams, 167); the ‘bastione della Fonte della Ginevra’ (Varchi, Storia, 1:681; Lamberini and Tamantini, 13-22); and ‘la Torre di 3 chanti verso la porta di Saminiato’ and ‘il fosso del bastione vechio di detta torre’ (ASF, CPR 15, fol. 36rv, 7.IV.1543), not to be confused with the later Torre ai Tre Canti across the river (Lapini, 109, 11.XI.1552). 192 ASF, MdP 1173, ins. 1, fol. 29, Lorenzo Pagni to Pierfrancesco Riccio, 17.I.1547; below, *text at nn235-50. 193 On the terms baluardo, bastione, bastía, torrione and puntone, see Machiavelli, ‘Relazione’; above, *text at n178, below, *nn217, 329. Tommaseo and Bellini favoured bastione over baluardo (3:552, 475), as do current Italian and English. Belluzzi preferred baluardo, but Lamberini uses both (Sanmarino, 1:154).

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for his Siege of Florence, discussed the fresco with Francesco de’ Medici in his 1567 Ragionamenti; 194 their exchanges identify the fortif ications Vasari depicted (Figure 4). West of the San Giorgio gate, two curtain walls without merlons meet at an angle or ‘corner’ (canto), which Vasari called the ‘canto di San Giorgio’ and Machiavelli called ‘un certo biscanto di muro’ (a break in the wall’s straight line).195 Vasari mentions but does not depict an unsuccessfully attacked tower ‘on the canto’,196 above which flies a Florentine People’s banner.197 Rising between the second and third cortine is a tower with external damage.198 An extramural fortification sprawls here, which Francesco calls ‘a flight of bastions […] with projections’, a ‘beautiful fortress’, and a (single) ‘bastion’. 199 Vasari concurs, and, like Guicciardini, he mentions a trench before the ‘bastione di San Giorgio’.200 Vasari describes and depicts the artificial earthen mound or cavaliere that rises behind the second cortina.201 Two gabion-protected cannons fire from its back edge,202 the danger of gunfire-produced flying masonry obviated by removing the cortina’s merlons.203 The extramural buttress-like structures, similar to those Buonsignori shows against two cortine southwest of the San Miniato gate, may be earlier gun chambers;204 now they probably obstructed mining (Figure 1m).205 Florence’s defence commissioners, who judged the cavaliere necessary, called it ‘a robust internal rampart (riparo) protecting that entire sector’,206 and Jacopo Nardi (d. 1563) described it as ‘a high and 194 Vasari 1568, 8:173-80. 195 Machiavelli, ‘Relazione’, 296; below, *n197. 196 On the 1530 attack, Vasari 1568, 8:179; Guicciardini, Storia, 4:438; Nardi, 1842, 2:200-01; Albéri, 186 (Carlo Capello to the Venetian Republic, 5.IV.1530). Vasari’s ‘la torre posta sul [‘situated on the’] canto a S. Giorgio, che volta verso la porta Romana’, which Francesco says he knows ‘è rimasta in piedi’ (1568, VIII, 179), may be a misunderstanding of Guicciardini’s ‘[la torre] a canto al [‘next to the’] bastione di San Giorgio verso la porta Romana’ (Storia, 4:438, Bk. 20,ii). 197 Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, 59-60, 99. 198 Cf. Guicciardini, Storia (above, *n197). 199 ‘quell’ala di bastioni […] con que’ risalti, […] un bel forte; […] quel bastione che tenne Amico da Venafro’ (Vasari 1568, 8:175). 200 Ibid., 179; Guicciardini, Storia, 4:438. 201 ‘dentro alle mura vi è il bastione, o cavalier che lo chiamino, che fece Malatesta, dove è messe quel pezzo d’artiglieria lungo braccia dieci, che fu nominato l’archibuso di Malatesta’ (Vasari 1568, 8:175) 202 On gabbioni, see Tommaseo and Bellini, 9:74; Pepper and Adams, 76; Lamberini, Sanmarino, vol. 1, plate 38. 203 Pepper and Adams, 103. 204 Cf. the ones Dürer designed on a ditch’s inner face (Pepper and Adams, 33, figure 13). 205 Cf. Floriani, in Promis, 65; and Sanmicheli, in Bertoldi, 67-68, 77. 206 Manetti, 49 (IX.1529).

316 SUZANNE B. BUTTERS Figure 5 Cosimo Bartoli, Surveying points in and around Florence, from ‘Del modo di misurare le distanze’ (dedicated to Cosimo I, 1559), Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Plut. 30, 27, fol. 127v: labels include ‘[palazzo] del duca’, ‘m[ercato] nuovo’, ‘bastio[ne] di S[an] Giorgio, ‘[villa] belvedere’, and ‘[torre di] bellosguardo’.

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extremely stout bank (grossissimo argine), or rather bastion’ next to the San Giorgio gate.207 Donato Giannotti (d. 1573), then occupying Machiavelli’s former government post,208 wrote that Michelangelo began the extramural ‘San Giorgio bastion’, and Florence’s Captain-General, Malatesta Baglione, initiated the hill’s intramural cavaliere.209 Varchi’s description is helpful: Inside the San Giorgio gate, to the right as one exits, there was an extremely long bastion, running all the way to the San Piero Gattolini gate, in the middle of which, above the Orto de’ Pitti, a most robust cavalier (‘gagliardissimo cavaliere’) was then built, overlooking the city walls even though they are extremely high, and here they [the besieged Florentines] positioned the massive culverin weighing 18,000 lb [6,111.76 kg] cast by messer Vannoccio Biringucci from Siena; its breech had an elephant head, and kids called it ‘Malatesta’s arquebus’.210

Segni called this ‘cavaliere’ a ‘baluardo’ (Vasari used ‘bastione’ and ‘cavaliere’ interchangeably, as others did ‘bastione’ and ‘baluardo’),211 and, like Varchi, he emphasized its great height, ‘taking possession of the city walls’.212 This suggests that it straddled the walls, but Vasari’s depiction does not suggest a cavaliere a cavallo.213 In the 1540s Cosimo strengthened the Oltrarno’s internal defences. Belluzzi masterminded the construction of a ritirata (1545-c. 1552), well-flanked walls pulled back from the vulnerable fourteenth-century ones, running ‘from the [San Giorgio] hill above the Pitti to Annalena [monastery], and from Annalena to San Giovannino in Camaldoli’ (Figures 1n, o, and 2G).214 The hilltop part was to extend from the summit’s southwest edge (the ritirata’s highest point) to the San Giorgio gate,215 forming what Adriani called ‘a long, broad baluardo that defended the summit’s walls and prevented enemies from approaching from the nearby valleys’ 207 Nardi, 2:200. 208 Albertini, 149-51. 209 Giannotti, 1:258. Lamberini and Tamantini (16-17, plate 2 [13]) incorrectly place the cavalier outside the walls. 210 Varchi, Storia, 1:681; cf. Segni, 54; Varchi-Busini, 491, Busini letter to Varchi, 30.III.1549. Nardi judged Malatesta’s culverin useless (2:200); irreparably damaged in 1543, Cosimo melted it down to make two new ones (Varchi, Questione, 63). 211 Above, *nn 193, 200; below, *n217. 212 ‘pigliava le mura’ (Segni, 54). 213 Florio, 64 (‘cavagliere a cavallo’). 214 Cronaca, 47, 17.I.1545; on retrenchments, see Pepper and Adams, 96-99. 215 Lamberini, Sanmarino, 1:154-55, plate 44.2.

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(Figures 1q to g). He distinguished between this baluardo and the ritirata proper, which formed an angle with it before descending the hill; this he called ‘a bastione of very thick walls running down the Boboli slopes, flanked where necessary’ (Figures 1q to u).216 (Confusingly, both ‘baluardo’ and ‘bastione’ could denote not only a single unit but also an extended, multiform structure).217 West of the ‘canto di San Giorgio’ a new Belluzzi bastion protected the junction of Adriani’s ‘baluardo’ and ‘bastione’. Its current designation, the ‘baluardo del cavaliere’,218 recalls Malatesta’s siege cavaliere but has yet to be found among Cosimo’s records. The ritirata’s shorter trace was easier to defend than the old walls’ long one, but not against threats from the unfortified Bellosguardo hill that dominated its western section.219 Indeed, sixteenth-century cartographers often used its eponymous tower and adjacent ‘villa Belvedere’ as fixed surveying points (Figure 5).220 Troubled by the ritirata’s projected property expropriations and demolitions, Stefano Colonna (d. 1548) recommended that the Bellosguardo hill be surrounded by walls and the ritirata renounced; Cosimo rejected his suggestion.221 When a seventeenth-century copyist of the story’s manuscript version mistakenly wrote that Colonna suggested the ‘Belvedere hill’ be surrounded by walls, confusion ensued.222 His erroneous conflation of the Bellosguardo hill’s ‘villa Belvedere’ with Cosimo’s later ‘Belvedere’ on the San Giorgio hill needs noting (Figures 1r, s).223

216 Adriani, Istoria 1834, 1:31-32. 217 Above, *n189; Florio (1598), 40 (‘bastia’, ‘bastione’), 41 (‘belloardo’, ‘bellouardo’); cf. Webster’s Dictionary (1960), 73 (bastion), 110 (bulwark). 218 Lamberini and Tamantini, 15 (21); Lamberini, Sanmarino, 1:54-55 (15a). 219 Ibid., 85, 96; Chiarini and Marabottini, 164-65, figure 99. The design of ‘il baluardo sotto quel monte [di Bellosguardo]’ was studied (ASF, MdP 391, fol. 5, Giovanfrancesco Lottini to Cosimo, 1.XII.1548), without solving the problem (‘la parte [della fortificazione] di Camaldoli è molto difetosa per essere troppo sotto il poggio di Bellosguardo’, ASF, 808, fol. 301, Antonio Lupicini to Ferdinando I, 23.IX.1589). 220 Varchi, 1:580; Camerota, 90, 92-94. 221 ‘circumdar di mura’ (Cronaca, 48-49, III.1545). Florence’s second-in-command during the siege (Franca Petrucci, 444) and dedicatee of Belluzzi’s treatise on earthen fortifications (Lamberini, Sanmarino, 1:57), Colonna was Lieutenant General of Cosimo, who funded his exequies and burial in San Lorenzo (ASF, MdP 1174, ins. 2, 29, Lorenzo Pagni to Pierfrancesco Riccio, 29.III.1548; Cronaca, 76-79; Varchi, Orazione Funerale). 222 ‘se aveva sospetto del Poggio di Belvedere, lo circondasse di mura;’ (‘Alcuni ricordi’, fol. 104v, 25.III.1545); on the copyist, see Cronaca, xii-xiii. Lamberini calls it the Bellosguardo hill twice, and the Belvedere hill once (1:93, 93-94n177, 96). 223 Below, *text at nn310-28.

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The ritirata’s flat portion was begun with the San Piero Gattolini ‘puntone e baluardo’ (Figure 1u),224 so the hill is not mentioned in the construction’s early designations: these included ‘the San Pier Gattolini construction (muraglia)’,225 from the so-called church, parish, and gate (Figure 1v),226 and, following the church’s demolition in autumn 1545,227 ‘the Santo Spirito bastions’,228 after the eponymous quarter, coinciding with the entire Oltrarno.229 On 12 March 1548, the ritirata’s Annalena gate was begun near the foot of the hill’s slope and continued, ‘as one can see, at the San Giorgio hill’ (Figure 1w).230 Francesco Seriacopi, who originally inspected Florence’s defences with Belluzzi,231 soon reported to Cosimo on ‘the San Giorgio construction and cortine’.232 The latter were the ritirata’s partly built curtain walls and flanks, descending from the hilltop to Annalena (Figures 1q to w). On the summit, 100 men levelled ‘orti’ ‘at the extramural excavations’ (two teams towards the San Piero Gattolini puntone and two towards the San Giorgio gate); stones invaluable for the construction were found ‘at the excavations outside the San Giorgio [gate]’ (Figure 1x). A 1549 Seriacopi report on the ‘San Giorgio fabrica’ justifies his preference for oxen teams over donkeys to transport stones and earth, praising their ability to ‘drag more earthwork timbers (‘facine’ sic, ‘fascine’) on steep and flat terrain’;233 this suggests that the construction involved earthworks, on the hill’s summit as well as its slope. So what exactly were Cosimo’s hilltop fortifications? In April 1544 he ordered a ‘parapet’ be added to the (intramural) cavaliere where Malatesta’s 224 Cronaca, 50, 16.V.1545; Lapini, 104-05, 22.V.1545; puntone (1551 ‘Sindicheria del Campuccio’, Deliberatione Sindachi). For foundation accounts, see Cronaca, 47, 48-49 (17.I, 25.III.1545); MdP 1171, ins. vi, 265, Pierfrancesco Riccio to Cosimo, 20.IV.1545. 225 Cronaca, 57, 128, III.1547, III.1551; ASF, CPR 138, fols. 61 r, 66r (6.III.1545, 27.II.1546). Payments were ‘posti a libro de bastioni’ (fol. 63r, 4.IV.1545), but there was a ‘libro di San Piero Ghattolini’ soon after (fol. 65 v); on CPR 138’s damaged state, see Lamberini, Sanmarino, 1:84n148. 226 Dei, 91; Sznura, 96n8, 121n93, 137n22; Stradario, xxvi-xxviii. San Piero’s intramural parish, not in the 1562 census (Fiorentini nel 1562, 3-34), was transferred to that of San Felice in Piazza (ASF, NotAnte, G304, fol. 79, 1568), though its extramural component remained (Piante di Popoli, fol. 2). 227 Cronaca, 57. 228 ASF, MdP 1170A, fasc.ii, ins. 23, Antonio Taddei to Cosimo, 14.VI.1546. 229 Eckstein, xi. 230 Cronaca, 77; this must be 1548 s.m. (cf. ibid., xvi-xvii, 123-24), not 1548 s.f. = 1549 s.m., as Lamberini suggests (Sanmarino, 1:95n183). 231 On this provveditore delle fortezze, see Sanmarino, 1:382, index, ‘Ser Jacopo (Serjacopi), Francesco’. 232 ASF, MdP 387, fols. 3-4, 1.IV.1548. 233 Ibid., fol. 307, letter to Lorenzo Pagni, 4.V.1549.

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siege cannon had been.234 Ten months later he approved work on the San Giorgio hill’s earthen baluardo;235 this probably corresponded to the intramural baluardo that Segni reported Cosimo built ‘at the top of the Pitti orto’, to Adriani’s hill-crest baluardo, and to Seriacopi’s 1549 San Giorgio earthworks.236 ‘Things on the San Giorgio hill’ were interrupted in May 1546 when the construction’s engineer, Nanni Unghero, died,237 but building works and excavations were continuing four months later.238 Soon after, the ‘San Giorgio baluardo’ construction was interrupted when excavating the cortina’s foundations towards the San Giorgio gate encountered obstacles:239 earth displaced from ‘the bastion made for the siege’; a quarry (intended for use in the past); and some thin stone seams (‘filaretti’), geologically common but potentially unstable.240 To secure the foundations, the masons argued that they had to excavate to the lowest foundation levels of the ‘baluardo’ and the gate’s threshold.241 While awaiting advice, they sought Cosimo’s permission to move from outside to inside the walls some of the earth that would be left over from the ‘baluardo’.242 Six weeks later,243 when the San Giorgio ‘baluardo’ was 12 braccia high (7m) (the usual height of the ritirata’s curtain walls),244 it was proposed that the remaining 40 braccia of stones be used to raise it another 4 braccia (2.33m), expecting that Cosimo would think this sufficient ‘for his purposes’;245 this would make the cortina 16 braccia (9.34m) high, as Cosimo’s 1554 fortified walls at Monteriggioni would

234 ‘far’ il parapetto al cavalier dove stava l’archibuso di Malatesta’ (ASF, MdP 618, fol. 19v, secretarial summaries of business with Cosimo 1544-57, 8.IV.1544). 235 ‘che s’attendeva a lavorar’ al baluardo di terra a San Giorgio’ (ASF, MdP 617, secretarial summaries of business with Cosimo 1540-59, vol. 2, fol. 609, 12.II.1545). 236 Above, *text at nn211,216,234. 237 ASF, MdP 377, Pierfrancesco Riccio to Cristiano Pagni, fols. 171, 226 (20, 28.V.1546). 238 ‘Al monte s’attende a murar’ e cavar secondo l’ordine di Sua Excellenza.’ (ASF, MdP 378, fol. 481, Pierfrancesco Riccio to Lorenzo Pagni, 24.IX.1546). 239 ASF, MdP 379, fol. 243, Jacopo de’ Medici to Cristiano Pagni, 24.XI.1546. 240 In the 1547 landslide below the Costa San Giorgio, ‘R.N.’ (probably Raffaele Nasi) thought water seepage into vertical filaretti made his house collapse (ASF, CS1 325, fols. 3v-4v; Sznura, 101; above, *n149). 241 ‘per quello che iudicono questi nostri maestri saren forzati a voler porre il fondamento della cortina sicuro, andar a trovar il piano del basamento da basso del baluardo et della sogla della porta di San Giorgio’ (above, *n236, MdP 349, fol. 243). 242 ‘cioè quella [terra] che avanzerà al baluardo perché cene sarà assai d’avanzo’ (ibid.). 243 ASF, MdP 4 fols 245-46, Pierfrancesco Riccio to Lorenzo Pagni, 13.I.1547. 244 Cf. above, *n232 (MdP 387, fols. 3-4). 245 ‘pensando Francesco [Seriacopi] che questa altezza possa per aventura bastar’ alla voglia di Sua Eccellenza’ (above, *n245, MdP 381, fols 245-46).

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be.246 Cosimo then agreed the stones should be moved from the baluardo’s intramural side to where its construction was to continue.247 It is hardly surprising that Florentines noted Cosimo’s increasing ‘boldness’ in the later 1540s. They witnessed a new ‘baluardo’ on the San Giorgio hilltop replace the extramural siege fortification with a consolidated and higher version of Malatesta’s intramural cavaliere. Rising 2.33m above the city walls, it straddled them like a cavaliere a cavallo;248 indeed, the ‘cavaliere di S. Giorgio’ that appears twice in Cosimo’s 1551 delineation of neighbourhood boundaries, once outside the walls and once inside, must be his ‘baluardo’.249 According to Enrico Coppi’s published edition of the Cronaca, ‘the costa San Giorgio foundations were begun’ in April 1547;250 but the manuscript he used, and two manuscript copies of it, recorded that ‘the foundations were begun on the costa San Giorgio fortress’.251 This ‘fortress’ was almost certainly the intramural part of our San Giorgio ‘baluardo’ (‘cavaliere’, ‘bastione’). In his 1558 Fireworks for the Feast of St. John the Baptist, Giovanni Stradano (d. 1605) depicted the city side of this eminent hilltop defence and then repeated it, less distinctly, in his 1561-1562 Festival of the Tributes in the Ducal piazza, both in the ducal palace252. The vaulted embrasures or bombproof shelters characteristic of cavaliers,253 referred to in 1563 as ‘le cannoniere del baluardo di San Giorgio’, are visible in the earlier work.254

Personalizing the defences As Florence’s legitimate ruler, Cosimo possessed but did not ‘own’ the city walls that his ‘baluardo’ straddled, and no one could build near them

246 Pepper and Adams, 167. 247 Above, *n232 (MdP 387, fols. 3-4), Cosimo’s rescript; ASF, MdP 1173, ins. 1, 29, Lorenzo Pagni to Pierfrancesco Riccio, 17.I.1547. 248 Maggi and Castriotto, 20rv. 249 ‘E fossi [outside] delle mura nuove dal Cavaliere di S. Giorgio […]. / Lungo le mura vecchie di dentro da detto Cavaliere di S. Giorgio cioè dalla Torre battuta’ (Deliberatione sopra li Sindachi, ‘Sindicheria del Ronco’); cf. ‘Lungo le mura di Firenze dalla torre battuta fino alla porta à San Miniato’ (ibid., ‘Sindicheria di Costa’). 250 ‘si cominciò i fondamenti della costa di San Giorgio’ (Cronaca, ix, 65, 15.IV.1547). 251 ‘si cominciò i fondamenti della fortezza della costa di San Giorgio’ (BNCF, FN II,IV.19, fol. 103v); cf. ‘Alcuni ricordi’, fol. 169v; Del Migliore, ‘Zibaldone’ 4, fol. 216v. 252 Allegri and Cecchi, 211; Baroni Vannucci, 90. 253 Florio, 57; Pepper and Adams, 25 (E). 254 ASF, MdP 219, fol. 4, Cosimo to Alamanno dei’ Medici, 13.I.1563 (BIA 19465).

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without his permission.255 He now acted, indirectly, to appropriate them more tenaciously. In February 1550 his secret counsellor and lieutenant in the Magistrato Supremo, the lawyer Angelo Niccolini (d. 1567), acting covertly as Eleonora di Toledo’s procurator, negotiated six purchase contracts with the various Pitti part-owners of the family’s fifteenth-century Oltrarno palace; 256 unf inished but ‘proud and regal’, it had been begun by Luca Pitti (Figure 1y).257 The palace was subdivided among numerous family members;258 some squabbled, but all sold their portions.259 On 15 March 1550 Niccolini nominated the buyer of the Pitti palace and orto as Eleonora (d. 1562),260 a shrewd investor who accumulated great wealth in properties and income.261 The acquisition, for 9000 scudi or scudi d’oro, was concluded on 17 May 1550,262 when we learn that Niccolini had hitherto reserved the obligation to nominate either Cosimo or his wife,263 presumably in case Eleonora died before concluding the contracts. Between 1551 and 1557 the couple consolidated the Pitti estate.264 Cosimo purchased the adjacent Boboli properties from 1564 on, after Eleonora’s death (Figured 1t, z).265 Eleonora was involved in the negotiations and financial arrangements before the original contracts were finalized,266 and her Pitti register records the capital sums paid to the Pitti.267 But her finances were intertwined with her husband’s from the start, possibly because her dowry fund was 255 A prohibition first promulgated on 17.V.1531 (Pratilli and Zangheri, 1:23-25). 256 Parigino, 99; ASF, MS 4309, fol. 16, 24.I.1550. On Niccolini, see Litchfield, 38-39, 67-68, 90; Diaz, 87-88n4; Hale, Florence, 119-21; Parigino, 45-46; and below, *n267. 257 Machiavelli, Istorie, 457. 258 Parigino, 92. 259 On the trades, sales and legal suits involving Buonaccorso di Giovanni Pitti and two sons of Benedetto Pitti, see BNCF, GC, cass. 7a, ins. vii, fol. 16rv, 2.X.1549; ASF, MS 1122, cases 113, 202, 162 (4.XII.1549-8.III.1550); Cosimo referred the dispute to the Ruota (MS 1123, 331/119, 10.V.1550). 260 Parigino, 99-100; Capecchi, 21. 261 ASF, MR 34, ins. 7; Fedeli, 235; Teicher, 354; Parigino, 90-106; Edelstein, 72-74, 92. 262 Parigino, 92; ASF, AD 320, fol. [1v]). In her absence, the notary acted as Eleonora’s procurator (ASF, NotAnte A395, fols. 208v-209). 263 ASF, NotAnte A395, fols. 181-182v. 264 Parigino, 100. 265 Ibid., 78, 93, 101. 266 On Eleonora’s proposed mode of payment (Monte di Pietà deposits at 5%), see ANicc, M. 4ta, 1 (211). ins. 15, Jacopo Guidi to Angelo Niccolini ‘del consiglio secreto di Sua Excellenza’, 25.XI.1549. Some Pitti wanted cash but others three-year Monte deposits at 7% (BNCF, GC, cass. 7a, viii, fol. 14 rv); they promised not to alienate or sell their property to anyone else, and Niccolini (or his nominee) to observe the terms agreed or pay double (ibid., fols. 15-17, mostly 2.X.1549). 267 Eleonora’s libro, ‘dove si terrà contto della compera fatta del palazo già de Pitti’ (ASF, AD 320, ins. 1, fols. 1-8; BNCF, GC, cass. 7a, vi, fol. labelled ‘Partite dei Salviati per conto dei Pitti’).

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involved.268 Indeed her register records Cosimo’s paying 10,624.14.8 fiorini to the Pitti by 12 September 1560, mostly between 1 February 1550 (two days before the first two contracts) and 15 November 1553.269 A 1560 audit of Cosimo’s Monte di Pietà accounts records his many 7% interest and capital payments to the Pitti, back to January 1553,270 and related material from February 1560 shows he paid the 5775 fiorini still owed to them, going back to 17 November 1551.271 In October 1550 Cosimo ordered his Pratica Segreta to consider the compulsory purchase legislation he finalized in January 1551, for the convenience of anyone in his state who ‘wanted to build a new palace or houses, or enlarge them’;272 this law, clearly helpful in developing the Pitti estate, only he could promulgate. In 1555-1556, for example, ‘His Excellency, or rather the most Illustrious Duchess’, bought a ‘casetta’ on the Chiasso della Cava, ‘demolished to adorn the Pitti palace’; Cosimo authorized the payment for it.273 In 1560 he gave Eleonora permission to make a will,274 and she made Cosimo her universal heir in her final one.275 In 1564 he abdicated powers to Francesco, his dynastic heir,276 giving this prince regent the Pitti estate in July 1568.277 This predictable donation did not include Cosimo’s strategically charged hilltop projects, however. He had retained control over the state’s fortresses, militia, and income,278 and, as we shall see, he continued to mandate their building and funding expenditures until his death in 1574.279

Whose hill revealed Who acquired the Pitti property, then, and why? The original contracts named Eleonora, but Cosimo paid large sums to her and the Pitti. In the 268 Below, *text at nn292-96. 269 ASF, AD 320, ins. 1, fols. 10 left (de dare) and right (de avere), via Averardo di Alamanno Salviati (fols. 9-11); Parigino, 99. 270 The Monte’s 30.X.1560 ‘Bilancio et ristretto de conti’ with Cosimo (ASF, Sindaci 3, ins. 4). 271 ASF, Sindaci 2, no. 89, including Cosimo’s rescripts. 272 Pratilli and Zangheri, 1:74-77; Cosimo received a draft, to ‘racconciar, porre e levar quello fussi indicato più iusto e onesto’ (ASF, PS 1, no. 96, 27.X.1550). 273 ASF, DG 952, ins. 2, recapito 428, with ‘ricordo’ by Santo Spirito’s friars, 10.IX.1556. 274 ASF, MR 34, ins. 7, fol. 96rv, 21.I.1560. 275 ASF, MdP 5922A, fols. 128r-131 r (copy of her 16.XII.1562 will). 276 Galluzzi, 1:53-54. 277 Parigino, 107; Capecchi, 31, citing, ASF, SRPoss 820, fol. 73v, ‘Donazioni’. 278 Priuli, 75-76. 279 Below, *n324.

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1550s she concentrated on the gardens, 280 but their designer, Niccolò Tribolo, reported to them both,281 or to Cosimo alone,282 and on Tribolo’s death (7 September 1550), his plans were passed not to Eleonora but to Cosimo, at his request.283 Some contemporaries, and even Cosimo, 284 implied or claimed that he bought the property,285 but others said both were involved. In one place, Vasari wrote that Cosimo bought the palace and had Tribolo design its gardens, and in another, he claimed that Eleonora purchased it,286 advised by her husband, and that, had she lived, she meant to spend 40,000 ducats a year, ‘to see it finished, or in fine shape’.287 Razzi claimed that she bought the palace, intending only to repair it, and that Cosimo and his successors f inished and enlarged it, 288 which they did. These disparities are partially explained by rhetorical habits and a common tendency to credit male rulers with more ‘agency’ than their wives. But one astute Florentine reported that his compatriots believed the Duke’s role was central. This they deeply resented, for reasons of interest here: Then, on 15 May 1550, His Excellency [Cosimo] entered the Pitti palace and arranged it in order to live there, and thus he had had it put in the name [‘dire in nome di’]289 and dowry fund of the Duchess, 290 about which the entire city was very discontent, both with that legal ownership 280 Vasari 1568, 2:373-374; Rinaldi, using Eleonora’s ‘Libro di ricordi e conti’ (ASF, SRFF [previously FM] 68, for 1550-1555); Francesca Petrucci. 281 ASF, MdP 1176, ins 4, 2, Jacopo Guidi to Pierfrancesco Riccio, 9.IV.1550; MdP 1170, fasc. iv, fol. 621, Lorenzo Pagni to same, 2.V.1550. 282 ASF, MdP 613, ins. 6, Pierfrancesco Riccio memos to Cosimo, fols. 59-60 (8.X.1549), 122-24, 51-54 (4.X, 2.XI.1550), 20-23, including report that ‘il muro che rovinò alla strada della porta a San Giorgio che serra il giardino è a buon termine’ (7.III.1551). 283 Cosimo’s rescript on letter from Riccio: ‘mandatemi qua Francesco di ser Jacopo e Davitte [Fortini] con tucti li disegni del orto di [med(ici?)][sic] Pitti e tucti li indirizzi che’l povero Tribolo haveva perché diamo l’ordine a finir la piantata’ (ASF, MdP 613, ins. 6, fols. 118-119, ‘giorno di santo Cosimo del 50’ [27.IX.1550]). 284 ASF, MdP 395, fol. 711, Averardo Salviati to Cosimo, 30.I.1550; MdP 192, fol. 114, copy of Cosimo to Averardo, 31.I.1550: Cosimo and Eleonora used the Salviati bank (above, *nn266, 270; Teicher 350n26; Edelstein, 72-74nn7, 9). 285 Lapini, 107. 286 Bocchi, 64. 287 Vasari 1568, 6:97; 2:373-74. 288 Razzi, ‘Compendio’, fol. 46v. 289 Rezasco, 353, III. 290 Her dowry was agreed at 50,000 ducati; 20,000 from her father, 10,000 the counterdowry from Cosimo plus another 20,000 he donated, ‘to increase the dowry’ (Parigino, 95). In reality, Cosimo gave her 20,000 scudi and falsely claimed the Viceroy had paid him 30,000 scudi (Spini, 135).

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[‘titolo’]291 and that particular property [‘vocabolo’],292 the citizens saying that he was putting a weapon into the hands of his children and that it was tantamount to having subjected his children and the entire city to the Spaniards,293 when [Cosimo and Eleonora] came to their natural end, so that in no respect was the city pleased by that purchase, despite the fact that it was, without a doubt, entirely his [Cosimo’s] own idea. And the Florentine Republic hated his wife, so that no man dared to speak of this case because one was immediately met with executioners’ axes (mannaie) and prisons; so may God be the one to take good care of the city and its suffering people, who at the time were much afflicted.294

Though prejudiced, the chronicler probably voiced a widespread belief. ‘Nothing more worthy of his power and greatness of spirit could have come into the hands of Duke Cosimo than this palace’, wrote Vasari, as if Luca Pitti himself had built it for him.295 Cosimo’s historian and maternal uncle Nerli, whose Commentari (c. 1549-1552) he encouraged, read, and glossed in manuscript,296 noted that factional politics had associated Luca with the hill, not the palace;297 this detail must have tickled Cosimo, who finally gained the hill when he gained the palace (Figure 1d, y). One can argue, then, that Cosimo wanted the Pitti property and acquired it through Eleonora, whom he trusted to promote the family’s interests.298 She surely inspected it before the purchase, since she was rumoured to have encouraged Cosimo’s 1547 ‘fortress’ foundations near the San Giorgio gate299 and is known to have appreciated the views of Florence from this area of the Pitti garden (Figure 1g).300 But Eleonora would not have intervened independently in his strategic plans for the capital or its hill. Cosimo’s Oltrarno fortifications increased Florence’s military security while simultaneously enhancing the property’s, just before the couple acquired it. His ‘San Giorgio 291 Berger, 738, on titulus and ownership acquisition; Tommaseo and Bellini, 19:440 (12). 292 Tommaseo and Bellini, 20:516 (3), referring to ‘i beni, e loro vocaboli e confini’. 293 Cf. the ‘contemptible words against the Spanish nation’ used by the San Gallo gate police to a high-ranking Spaniard carrying Imperial dispatches to Cosimo (ASF, MdP 386, fol. 531, Giovanni Conti to Lorenzo Pagni, 5.V.1548). 294 Cronaca, 118. 295 Vasari 1568, 2:374. 296 Albertini, 320-21; Cochrane, Florence, 72-73; Hurtubise, 148. 297 Two factions formed after Luca’s fall: the ‘parte del piano’ (Medici supporters) and the ‘parte del poggio’ (Pitti supporters) (Nerli, 50). 298 Segni, in Pieraccini, 2:61-62; Teicher, 352-53n31; Parigino, 102-06; Edelstein, 87. 299 Above, *text at n157. 300 Richa, 10:230.

326 SUZANNE B. BUTTERS Figure 6 Alessandro del Barbiere, (Fei) attrib., Fantasy view of the Neptune fountain, the ducal palace, the Uffizi ‘strada’ and the San Giorgio hill beyond, private collection. Photograph by Cosimo Boccardi, Fondazione Federico Zeri, inv. 84493 (‘La riproduzione fotografica è tratta dalla Fototeca della Fondazione Federico Zeri. I diritti patrimoniali d’autore risultano esauriti’).

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baluardo’, a 1550 boundary of the Pitti property,301 overlooked the city, the hills, the palace, and the orto and replaced the siege’s ‘gagliardissimo cavaliere’ with one astride the walls. Eleonora was mother of Cosimo’s dynastic heirs, but she herself could not succeed him. It was imperative, then, that he acquire the Pitti property, and the hill, for himself and his male successors. Benedetto Dei (d. 1492) was proud that Florence had no citadel or fortified stronghold.302 Machiavelli argued that an empty hill indicated a ruler who governed by trust and that citadels were insufficient to hold subjugated cities.303 In 1549-1550 Charles V began a citadel on one of Siena’s hills.304 Cosimo’s contemporary occupation of the San Giorgio hill’s principal property pre-empted the construction of such an alien stronghold in his capital. Charles, who knew Florence,305 could hardly have criticized Cosimo’s display of military wisdom, designed, one could argue, to keep the city secure for the Emperor and achieved with the help of his Spanish wife. The ‘San Giorgio baluardo’ signalled a citadel without quite being one, straddling the walls while a spectacular garden took shape on the Pitti slopes below. Had Cosimo managed to modernize Florence’s defences, strengthen his personal security, and still retain Machiavelli’s ‘empty hill’? To all appearances, perhaps, but recollections with implications inhabited that ‘emptiness’.

Walter’s phantom citadel (1566-1568) A view southward from Florence’s piazza towards the Oltrarno,306 anonymous and known only from two black and white photographs, shows the remains of a towered castle on San Giorgio’s hilltop (Figure 6). This castle, in a theatrical painting laden with political innuendos, manifests the hill’s strategic significance as Walter, Cosimo, and the Florentine public understood it. Datable between March 1566 and 1567/68, as we shall see, the painting contains telling imagery and resonances for Cosimo’s contemporary hold on Florentines, and on its intramural hill.

301 ‘murus seu il bastion’ sue Excellentie’ (ASF, NotAnte A395, fol. 168r-182v, sales on 3, 8, 15.II.1550). 302 Dei, 77. 303 Machiavelli, Istorie, 194; Machiavelli, Principe e Discorsi, 349-56; Hale, ‘Fortify’. 304 Pepper and Adams, 59-60. 305 Ughi, 82. 306 Entitled ‘A Florentine Capriccio with a view of the Uffizi and the fountain of Neptune, horsemen and citizens in the square’ when a private collector bought it (London, 1960), it measured 49¾” x 36½” (126.37 x 92.7cm) (Sothebys, 43/ 116).

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As an embellished view of local topography and monuments, the picture resembles contemporary painted scenery (prospettive), then a burgeoning genre. The luminosa prospettiva for La Cofanaria (1565),307 performed to celebrate Francesco de’ Medici’s Imperial marriage, provides a telling comparison. According to Giovanbattista Cini (d. 1586), author of the comedy’s intermezzi, and a published description of the 1565 wedding festivities,308 it showed a heightened perspectival view along the axis of the Santa Trinita bridge and Via Maggio, from Santa Trinita to the Oltrarno’s San Felice in piazza;309 it faced south, then, like our view, but would not have included the San Giorgio hill (Figures 1d, cc, dd, ee). Cini’s contemporary, Domenico Mellini (d. 1620),310 noted other features of this prospettiva: the variety of its diligently rendered palaces and houses that increased its beauty and perspectival efficacy; the Santa Trinita bridge shown anachronistically, before its 1557 destruction by flood; and its inclusion of the temporary arch erected at the bridge, for the bride’s entry into the city.311 Mellini also praised the ‘marvellous’ urban ‘prospettiva’ that Stradano painted to disguise an awkward street abutting on the 1565 entry route; he singled out its ‘beautiful varied colours, artful foreshortenings, beautiful and rich fictive buildings’, as well as its lively street scene (which our picture also depicts), showing ‘coaches, women on horseback, and others half-hidden at windows, while men out walking withdrew behind a corner, and, gazing at their beloveds, watched them intently’.312 The development of periaktoi soon made scene changes possible.313 Lanci’s two west-facing views for I Fabii (February 1568), showed the ducal palace and its surroundings314 and the cathedral, seen from the nearby Canto alla Paglia (Figures 2H, I).315 La Vedova (1569) and its interludes, both by Cini, included three Lanci scene changes: a northfacing urban view (from the ducal palace to the cathedral);316 a rural one (showing Arcetri, a hilltop village ‘outside the san Giorgio gate’, surrounded by palatial villas, gardens, vineyards, and estates); and finally, a wild one, 307 Cini, ‘Descrizione’, 572. 308 On Cini, see Feo. 309 Cini, ‘Descrizione’, 572. 310 Cavarzere. 311 Anna Maria Petrioli Tofani, Luogo teatrale, 97; Starn and Partridge’s reconstruction (256) includes Cosimo’s Justice column, but neither Cini nor Mellini mention it. 312 Mellini, Descrizione, 57; Cini (539-40) describes it more simply. 313 Lodovico Zorzi, in Luogo teatrale, 34-34. 314 Petrioli Tofani, in ibid., 99, citing Ceccherelli’s 1567/68 account. 315 Petrioli Tofani, in Luogo teatrale, 99-100, 7.13bis; Ciabani, 154-56. 316 Petrioli Tofani in Luogo Teatrale, 100-101, quoting Giunti’s 1569 Raccolto delle feste; and 30, plate IV.

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just outside a city gate (showing a reed-filled swamp, home to the peasants whom the goddess Latona changed into frogs).317 Typologically, our picture resembles these prospettive, then, but it differs by combining urban and rural views in a single scene: the foreground’s cityscape; the San Giorgio hill (a fortified rus in urbe); and San Miniato and mysterious buildings just beyond. A higher hilly landscape extends further back, with villas on its slopes and ridges,318 and a centrally located pyrotechnic display rests on the horizon. The painting was clearly conceived by someone au fait with comedies staged at the Medici court. As in prospettive, the picture mixes the real and imagined, contemporary and anachronistic, permanent and temporary. The castle (imagined), dominates the Uffizi piazzale below, flanked by the building’s two-storey, partially completed east and south wings,319 with imaginary towers at their river corners (Figures 1i, 11). The east wing faces an array of Florentine palaces, inaccurately located but stylistically plausible, perspectivally correct and artfully depicted, like both the 1565 prospettive. Two of the palaces are historiated, their dense figurations resembling the 1565 temporary decorations,320 and the programmatic palace façades devised for Cosimo’s two cup-bearers.321 A large fountain dominates the left foregound. Its colossal bronze Neptune, gripping his trident with both hands, strongly resembles the Neptune that Cosimo ordered Stoldo Lorenzi (d. 1583) to create for the Pitti vivaio in March 1566.322 Standing where Ammannati’s permanent marble Neptune had been placed in June 1565, it recalls the active aquiferous Neptune that Cosimo had wanted for this site. His March 1566 commission to Lorenzi provides a terminus post quem for our picture. The ducal palace, set on the piazza’s historic brick paving,323 is recognizable but considerably narrower than it should be, and inaccurately windowless below the second floor; this makes it look unnecessarily forbidding, inaccessible, and old-fashioned compared to the colourful palaces opposite and the airy new Uffizi. This strong contrast conjurs up Cini’s comparison 317 Ibid. 318 Allegri and Cecchi, 171, figure 34, 21 (11). 319 Completed by 1565, the west wing, begun in 1565 to support the Corridor, was underway in 1567-1568 (Conforti, 181-85, 189n117, 190n121). 320 Mellini, Descrizione, 34-38; Cini, ‘Descrizione’; Ginori Conti; Starn and Partridge, 218-25. 321 Palazzo Almeni (Bartoli’s 1553/54 programme, followed by Vasari), and Palazzo Montalvo (Borghini’s and Vasari’s 1568 programme) (Davis, 127-28, 142-48, 162-70,195n146). 322 Lapini, 128; Wiles, 59-61, 117-19, 121; Acidini Luchinat, ‘Fontana’, 31-37, 40n31, figures 8-9; Veen, 103-12. 323 Cf. Chiarini and Marabottini, 69-70, figure 9.

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between the Rome of Augustus and Cosimo’s Florence: Augustus found Rome in brick and left it in marble (as Suetonius had put it),324 but ‘Cosimo, having received Florence in stone, charming and beautiful, will leave it to his successors far greater, still more charming and more beautiful, and enlarged and overflowing with every kind of graceful, magnificent and commodious decoration’.325 German halbardiers guard the area in front of the palace, where two male statues replace Michelangelo’s David and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus. These colossi also suggest links to the 1565 wedding apparatus. One stands to the portal’s left, a chaplet in his right hand and his right foot on a tree stump. Old, bearded, and nude except for light drapery over the left side of his head and left arm, he must be the veiled god Saturn; in the palace’s Quartiere degli Elementi, Vasari depicted him veiled, seated under an oak tree.326 Associated with the zodiacal sign of Capricorn, the Golden Age, and Justice, no god was more central to the Medici duke’s Augustan ideology.327 What should we make of Saturn’s attributes? The tree stump cannot refer to the marble ones used as leg buttresses by Roman sculptors (Saturn rests on the stump, not next to it).328 It is no Medici broncone, the hard-pruned laurel stump whose vigorous resprouting symbolized the family’s perpetual return to Florence, even in the face of exile and assassinations (Saturn’s stump does not sprout).329 And it cannot refer to Johanna of Austria as the ‘imperial stock (scion)’ that the Medici family ‘had now acquired for itself’, an arborial metaphor in one of her 1565 entry’s inscriptions (no emperor’s daughter should serve as a foot-rest).330 Instead the stump is better understood in connection with the statue’s circlet of sparse but evenly distributed leaves, which must be the classical oak-leaf wreath (corona civica). Worn by Jupiter (Saturn’s son and father of the Olympian gods), whose sacred tree was the oak, it had been appropriated by Cosimo: Florence holds one over his head at the centre of the Sala Grande’s soffitto (1564-1565);331 and another surmounted the 1565 temporary arch erected at the piazza’s eastern 324 Suetonius, 66; cf. Borghini, in Belloni and Drusi, 73-76, 83. 325 Cini, ‘Descrizione’, 569-70. 326 Muccini and Cecchi, figure p. 59; Vasari 1568, 8:35-44 (Ragionamento on the ‘Sala di Saturno’, internally dated 1558). 327 Cox-Rearick, 269-83. 328 E.g., the Apollo Belvedere (Bober and Rubinstein, figure 28). 329 Cox-Rearick, 23-31, 237-40. 330 A plausible translation of ‘nunc ascita sibi Caesarea sobole’; for the whole inscription Cini, ‘Descrizione’, 546. 331 Vasari 1568, 8:221; Muccini 1990, 128-29; Veen, 66-67.

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entrance; this rehearsed the virtues or Prudenza civile of Cosimo’s rule.332 Saturn’s association with oaks and the oak-leaf crown make it likely that our colossus rests his foot on an oak stump. Given the god’s significance for Cosimo, we must ask what his statue meant. It seems to allude to the return of Saturn’s Golden Age, under a ruler who wears the oak wreath; Jupiter in myth; Augustus in ancient Rome; and now Duke Cosimo. But Ovid’s three mythical ages (Gold, Silver, Iron) could be read in terms of Christian Justice, at least in the political and legal thinking of the Medici court.333 In the past, when Florence’s justice was administered by the many, special interests and unruliness had thrived; now, administered by Cosimo, a single prince, Justice was equal for all.334 Saturn with his oak stump and wreath probably refers to the Golden Age that returned under Cosimo; not Ovid’s, when men did right without the need for laws,335 but, rather, a civilized and equitable age, when Medici justice ‘gave everyone his due’. This nude colossus stands to the portal’s right and, with his sword at rest, brandishes what looks like a mustachioed head. But whose is it? Logic excludes Florence’s usual symbolic candidates: Goliath, Holofernes, Medusa, and John the Baptist, the city’s patron. There remains, however, the possibility of a traitor’s severed head, displayed by his executioner to the Florentine public. Recent events make this harsh interpretation plausible. In 1559 Pandolfo Pucci’s dangerous conspiracy against Cosimo was uncovered. Interrogated in the Palazzo del Podestà, Pucci and his co-conspirators revealed how they planned to kill Cosimo while he rode around Florence on horseback. Three conspirators were decapitated in Piazza Sant’Apollinare, Pandolfo ignominiously hanged from the Bargello’s windows, others given lighter sentences, and Pucci’s family shown clemency by Cosimo.336 Cini, Cosimo’s devoted protégé since age twelve,337 asked Borghini to include a depiction of ‘plots uncovered [against Cosimo]’ on the 1565 Prudenza civile arch mentioned above; this, he argued, would illustrate the Duke’s clemency to the families of rebels and traitors, following their punishment;338 Borghini

332 ‘Prudenza civile’ (Cini, ‘Descrizione’, 561-64); ‘Prudenza et governo civile’ (Mellini, Descrizione, 101-10); Starn and Partridge, 225, 291-93; Veen, 94-96. 333 Puttfarken, 143-49 and figures 17a, 17b; Ovid, 31, 33. 334 Vasari 1568, 8:41. 335 Ovid, 31. 336 Cini, Vita, 437-41; Baker, 473. 337 Feo. 338 Starn and Partridge, 352n126, Cini letter to Borghini (1565).

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refused.339 In his manuscript biography of Cosimo, however, Cini would include a separate section entitled ‘The conspiracy of Pandolfo Pucci and other Florentine citizens against Duke Cosimo’, which circulated widely in manuscript;340 a good account of the conspiracy appear in the Vita’s published version (1611).341 Conspiracies against Cosimo were not overtly mentioned in the 1565 apparatus, then, and even Borghini held back from his initial idea for one element in the palace courtyard’s decoration: a commemorative medallion to celebrate Cosimo’s ‘having added fortifications to the city walls, and acted most severely against robbers, murderers and men of the very worst type’.342 But the 1565 decorations did allude to Cosimo’s stern justice. Most eloquent was ‘Il Cavallo’, the temporary equestrian monument showing Virtue defeating Vice, erected just beyond the Palazzo del Podestà, in Piazza Sant’Apollinare,343 the most common site for judicial beheadings (Figures 1c, ff).344 Though Cini claimed it was a space filler and ‘had nothing to do with the nearby court building’, an allusion that called attention to their connection,345 Mellini, writing earlier, was more forthright. He explicitly located the monument, ‘behind the Palazzo del Podestà, seat of the tribunal of criminal and civil justice, on the Piazza Sant’Apollinare’ and mentioned that the hideous figure being slain by a heroic horseman, ‘was overturned under the horse, with his head, which projected, dangling outside [the monument’s] base’;346 what better allusion to decapitation? Mellini’s account of the monster’s significance ends with a list of the pernicious (Iron Age) forces that Cosimo’s Justice had to hold in check: That beast and cursed Fury stood for the Genetrix of discord and factional animosity; the mother of insults and outrages; the sower of hatreds, the inventor of thefts, assults and plundering. And finally, as the enemy of Justice’s good laws and peace, [she] destroys and scatters communities (popoli) […] By a just, strong, temperate and powerful hero, she has been

339 Ibid., 180. 340 Feo. 341 Cini, Vita, 437-41. 342 ‘Munimenta addita moenibus in latrones, sicarios et in pessimi exempli homines severissime animadversus’ (Scorza, in Belloni and Drusi, 73). 343 Cini, 559-60; Mellini, Descrizione, 97-98; Starn and Partridge, 179. 344 Above, n00. 345 Cini, ‘Descrizione’, 559. 346 Mellini, Descrizione, 97.

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struck down, exhibited in the city (‘mandata per terra’) and made to die a painful death.347

Beyond Il Cavallo, the Prudenza civile arch included sculptures of the two pillars of Justice: Grazia, indicating ‘the reward or remuneration that wise princes are used to conferring on virtuous and good men, for their good works’, and Pena, shown as a menacing figure of Nemesis, sword in hand, embodying the punishments meted out to ‘the depraved and criminals’.348 The retribution (Pena) exacted by this implacable goddess is delivered for Cosimo by this colossal executioner, while Saturn holds the corona civica, symbol of the Duke’s authority and his restorative Justice (Grazia). In its secular subject and figure sizes, the painting resembles Stradano’s palace genre scenes349 or the ‘workshop’ pictures that Borghini and Vasari devised for Prince Francesco’s cabinet (scrittoio) from 1569 on.350 Alessandro del Barbiere (Alessandro Fei), our painter clearly moved in Medici circles. Some have suggested Stradano or Girolamo Macchietti,351 but a more likely candidate is Alessandro Fei del Barbiere (d. 1592), a Stradano assistant whose skill in handling middle-sized figures was ‘abundantly inventive’.352 Good at surveying buildings and painting ‘perspectives’,353 he executed topographical views (prospettive) of the civic ‘piazze’ of Tuscan cities for the Sala Grande, where La Cofanaria was performed in 1565,354 and he completed the Goldsmiths’ Shop for Francesco’s scrittoio before January 1571.355 Here Fei set a populous genre scene, charged with political significance, in the new Uffizi’s modified but recognizable ground floor. Fei’s Fantasy View (Figure 6) displays the artist’s range of talents, and its idiosyncratic imagery suggests that a contemporary literato devised it. But for whom? Not Cosimo (the castle and executioner were too explicit). And not Borghini (all his paintings were religious).356 More

347 Ibid., 98; ‘mandare per terra’ refers here, I think, to displaying and torturing heinous criminals en route to a painful execution, or displaying parts of them afterwards (Giovanni Villani, 12:152). 348 Cini, ‘Descrizione’, 563. 349 Muccini and Cecchi, 145-46; Muccini 1992, 168-71. 350 Conticelli, ‘Guardaroba’, 50. 351 Berti, figure 1; Sotheby’s, 43, item 116. 352 R. Borghini, 1:637; Baldinucci, 3:527; for some Stradano examples, see Muccini and Cecchi, 145-46. 353 R. Borghini, 1:634, 635, 637; Allegri and Cecchi, 248, 250. 354 Mellini, Descrizione, 114 and antepenultimate page (unpaginated). 355 Conticelli, ‘Guardaroba’, 50, 351-59, and plate XXXIII; it measures 116.5 x 82 cm., slightly smaller than our picture (above, n00). 356 Scorza.

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likely, then, is Cini. Devoted to Cosimo357 and a staunch supporter of his fierce judicial policies, this friend of Borghini and Vasari had the expertise and views needed to devise the picture, and to enjoy it. Our painting clearly post-dates March 1566 and pre-dates 1568. In 1566 Vasari was finishing the second edition of his Vite (1569), and Cosimo learned that he was related, ostensibly, to the Duke of Athens, in 1567.358 Vasari expanded his 1550 life of Andrea Pisano (d. 1548), noting that he had been Walter’s chief architect,359 for whom he had designed a citadel on the San Giorgio hill. Vasari’s collaborators and friends, such as Borghini, Razzi, and Cini, surely knew of the story, and Cosimo too. How might they have interpreted this depiction of Cosimo’s Florence with a Walterish castle on the San Giorgio hill? Was it a learned reference to Florence’s history to illustrate Villani, or Razzi on Walter, or Vasari’s Vita of Andrea Pisano? Did its decayed state suggest a fortified structure on this site was a thing of the past? Or, rather, that it needed updating? Or did it prompt odious comparisons between the two dukes? The picture’s exact date and circulation is unknown, so further speculation is idle, but it was created at a pivotal moment in the hill’s strategic development, which coincided with a growing awareness of Walter’s plans for a citadel and of Cosimo’s putative ancestral link to some Medici dukes of Athens.

A stronghold with a view In 1568 the Pitti garden’s boundaries included the old city walls, the new ones (with the ritirata),360 and the Costa’s final stretch to the San Giorgio gate361 with its access lane to the property’s intramural ‘San Giorgio quarry’ (Figure 1aa).362 The 1547 ‘fortress’ foundations had been here, and, from 1545 on, work progressed inside and outside walls on the summit’s San Giorgio ‘baluardo’, a Pitti boundary in 1550.363 Its absence as a boundary in 1568 can be explained by the hilltop construction begun in that year. In 357 Feo. 358 Above, n00. 359 Vasari 1568, 1:491-92 cf. Vasari 1550, 138-43. 360 Cf. ‘murus novus iusta hortum Sue Excellentie de Pittis nuncupatum’ (ASF, NotAnte G303, 1567, fols. 133-134). 361 ASF, SRPoss. 4115 (Cosimo’s properties, 1568), fol. 2rv; 4117 (Francesco’s properties, 1568), fol. 1r. 362 ASF, CS1 34, Cosimo to Francesco Seriacopi, fols. 136-137, 12.XII.1553; Sznura, 97n11; Stradario, 29. 363 Above, *n303.

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1569 Cosimo called it a ‘casino [offering] the most delightful and beautiful view in the world’,364 but it had first been termed a ‘loggia’ or ‘loggias’ and then ‘the Belvedere’,365 for the spectacular views its back-to-back loggias provided.366 Their sharp contrast, revealing all city to the northwest and all countryside to the southeast, prompted to compare them to the contrasting ‘prospettive’ that scene-changing periaktoi made possible.367 On 21 February 1569 work began on ‘the foundations and construction of that high wall that supports the Belvedere lawn (‘pratello’), outside the San Giorgio gate; and the Belvedere’s foundations were begun [in May]’.368 Concurrently, Cosimo assigned funds ‘for the Belvedere a Pitti’s stone quarry’, producing stones for this and other constructions,369 and in 1572 slaves were quarrying slabs (lastre) ‘in the ditch at the foot of the Belvedere’.370 The Belvedere’s quarries were furnishing ‘dressed stones’ for the Pitti palace’s construction in 1575371 and went on supplying them elsewhere.372 In 1577 Bartolomeo Ammannati (d. 1592), the Belvedere’s likely architect,373 recalled that he had purposely exposed the ‘ditch quarry outside the Belvedere’ (Figure 1x), by having earth excavated ‘to a depth equal to the height it would be carried up’ in order to fill (‘riempiere’) ‘the Belvedere cavaliere’;374 and in some 1576 accounts 364 ‘ma sopratutto il Casino, che ben presto sarà finito con la loggia per la banda che guarda il giardino, donde si vede un prospetto piacevole, et bello che si possa veder al mondo’ (ASF, MdP 233, fols. 29v-30, Cosimo to don Garzia di Toledo, 3.VII.1569). 365 Cosimo’s mandated its construction funds: ASF, MdP 232, fols. 6v (9.VI.1568, ‘loggia et vivaio de Pitti’); 26v (1.X.1568, ‘la muraglia delle loggie del giardino de Pitti’); 33v (25.XI.1568, ‘la fabbrica della loggia di Belvedere’); 39r (22.XII.1568, ‘la muraglia di Belvedere’); 46v (15.II.1569, ‘la muraglia di Belvedere de Pitti’); 72r (16.VI.1569, ‘la muraglia di Belvedere’); MdP 238, fols. 1, 8, 14, 42, 83 (18.VII.1571-25.III.1572, ‘per Belvedere’ or ‘la fabrica di Belvedere); MdP 241, fols. 8, 25 (25.VII.1572). Francesco authorized Cosimo’s final mandate, MdP 241, fol. 113v (19.VI.1574, ‘la muraglia di Belvedere’); it was still being financed in IV.1585 (ASF, SRFF [previously FMR] 42, fol. 43v). 366 ‘150-miles’ (248 km) (‘Véro, e distinto ragguaglio’, fol. 404v). 367 Berti, 90-91, 130-31, figures 126-27. 368 Lapini, 162. 369 ASF, MdP 221, fol. 56v, Tommaso de’ Medici copy of Cosimo memo to Vieri de’ Medici, 20.V.1569; cf. ASF, CPN 1466, no. 216, Benedetto Uguccioni to Francesco I, 11.I.1580. 370 ASF, MdP 238, fol.45, Cosimo rescript on Vieri de’ Medici letter, 2.II.1572. 371 ‘pietre da lavoro’ (ASF, SRFF [previously FMR] 90, fol. 7, 20.IV.1575). 372 Ibid., fol. 40v, 6.II.1588; ASF, SRFF (previously FM) 42, fol. 33, 6.VII,1583. 373 Puccini, 135 and n87. 374 ‘la cava del fosso fuori di Belvedere […] tanto a basso per portarla tanto in alto […] il cavaliere del Belvedere’ (ASF, CPN 1195, fol. 449r, 14.VIII.1577, Ammannati to Capitani di Parte); this Belvedere quarry should not be confused with the ‘cava di San Giorgio’ (above, *text at n311) and the ‘cava di Boboli’ (ASF, CPN 1463, Benedetto Uguccioni to prince regent Francesco, fol. 451, 27.IV.1570; Ricci, 259, II.1585).

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for work on what must have been the same structure it had been called ‘il baluardo di Belvedere’.375 These details suggest that Cosimo’s earlier cavaliere a cavallo determined the height of the Belvedere’s elevated terrace and that its foundations were sunk into the cavaliere, consolidated with earth from its extramural side. The terminological variety surrounding this structure must surely reflect its hybrid origins, development, and positioning with respect to the city walls. Building work ensued on what were probably the extramural remains of the ‘San Giorgio baluardo’ and its ‘strada’. The use of commandeered labourers (opere),376 often employed on public projects such as earthworks,377 suggests they were consolidating the ‘baluardo’s earthen structure transected by the Belvedere pratello’s extramural wall.378 But what did it look like? In 1584 Buonsignori depicted an elongated rampart here and a quarry beyond the strada, but his Belvedere, with a misleading elevation, has no extramural pratello. In contrast, the unusual map of Florence in the Vatican’s Galleria delle Carte Geografiche (1579-1581) depicts the Belvedere perched on a high terrace astride the walls,379 a position that Pezzano’s 1577 description also implies: ‘on the city walls [above the Pitti palace’s garden], there is a most beautiful palace which reveals the entire city and the vast countryside around it, on all sides’.380 That these are in the spirit if not the letter of the site’s history is confirmed by extending the city walls’ trace west of the San Giorgio gate on two later plans of the summit (1620 and 1850); these dotted lines clearly run under the Belvedere and its pratello.381 Soon after Cosimo’s death, Francesco capitalized on the military value of views by ordering some hasty work on Florence’s San Giorgio fortifications,

375 ASF, CPN 735, fol. 140r, Luca Fabbroni to Francesco I, 1.III.1576. 376 Cosimo mandated its construction funds: ASF, MdP 221, fols. 103v (‘l’opere’ at the San Giorgio ‘baluardo’, 11.VIII.1571), 104v (‘l’opere’ at the San Giorgio ‘baluardo’ and ‘strada’, 18.VIII.1571); MdP 238, fols. 24, 31v (‘l’opere’ that worked at the San Giorgio ‘baluardo’, 28, 30.X.1571), 36, 42rv, 44v-45, 69, 90 (‘l’opere et altre spese per la fabrica del baluardo di San Giorgio’, 3.XII.1571-10.IV.1572); 111, 117 v (‘la fabrica del baluardo di San Giorgio’, 12-16.V.1572); MdP 236, fol. 111 (‘la fabrica del baluardo di San Giorgio’, 17.V.1573); MdP 241, fol. 105v (‘le spese del baluardo di San Giorgio’, 31.VII.1573). 377 Ughi, 76-77; Butters, ‘Pressed Labor’, 70-75; Butters, ‘Comandati’. 378 Cf. Maggi and Castriotto, 88v. 379 Camerota, 98-100, plate1. 380 Pezzano, 69. 381 Mazzanti reaches a similar conclusion by other means (2008, 242-48), though her interpretation of the relationship between the 1529 Malatesta cavaliere and the cavaliere a cavallo that would support the Belvedere differs from mine.

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levelling certain torrioni that had been built on top of the stone puntoni with those stone balls.382 They began to dismantle them and raze them to the level of those puntoni, and to create an even surface on which masses of artillery could be placed towards the city, and it would be more convenient in that way.383

That these operations concerned what remained of Cosimo’s baluardo, below and around the Belvedere, seems confirmed by the hilltop construction begun by Ferdinando I (r. 1587-1609) in 1590. A day before its plan was traced out,384 he told the Ferrarese ambassador Girolamo Gilioli that he wanted a summer house in the Pitti garden, as respite from the sun and heat.385 But Gilioli soon suspected that the building intended for ‘convenience and recreation’ would be a fortress.386 And so it was:387 a modern citadel, built ‘at Florence’s San Giorgio gate, in the Pitti orto, under the Belvedere construction’.388 Cosimo’s ‘San Giorgio baluardo’ could already accommodate guns in 1563 and 1574,389 but Ferdinando’s citadel was intended to house so much artillery that one engineer feared its open space would become overcrowded.390 Assessments of its value to the Medici regime were uniformly positive. According to its architects, the fortress would ‘dominate the entire city, and make the Pitti palace secure’.391 Gilioli wrote that, ‘[located] on Florence’s Pitti hill, [it promised] to provide greater security for Ferdinando’s person, to bridle the people, and to defend

382 Puntone, synonymous, over time, with torrione, bastione, and baluardo, indicated a multisided fortification projecting to a point (above, *n192, 224); Tommaseo and Bellini, 15:223 [4]; Maggi and Castriotto, 19v-20r; Lapini, 105n1; Lamberini, Sanmarino, 1:87, 116, 180, 198). Varchi (Storia, 1:680) mentions ‘un alto e fortissimo cavaliere’, built ‘sopra uno di quei puntoni, ovvero bastioni’, in San Miniato’s ‘orto’. 383 Arditi, 8-9 (mid VII.1574); cf. Maggi and Castriotto, 12r; and cf. Mazzanti 2008, 254. 384 Lapini, 304 (13.VIII.1590). 385 Ferdinando ‘*[parlò] di voler far fare nel giardino de Pitti una fabrica per l’estate per diffendersi dal sole, dal quale restava assai offeso, et dal caldo.*’ (ASMo, AF 32, 59, Girolamo Gilioli to Duke of Ferrara, 14.VIII.1590, referring to Sunday, 12.VIII.1590). 386 ‘*La fabrica che il Gran Duca fa fare a Belvedere dentro a Piti che si tenea havesse a servire per commodità et diporto pare che si cominci hora a scoprire che habbia ad essere per quanto intendo fortezza*’ (ibid., 61, same to same, 21.VIII.1590). 387 Ibid., 71, same to same, 11.IX.1590. 388 Lapini, 304, 307, 13.VIII, 28.X.1590. 389 Above, *nn text at nn256,330. 390 Pieroni’s discussion of ‘[la] fortezza di Belvedere con il signor colonnello [Orfeo Galliani]’ (Pieroni, fol. 489r). 391 ASMo, AF 32, 77, Gilioli to Duke of Ferrara, 22.IX.1590.

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against foreign troops, were the occasion to arise’.392 The San Miniato and Belvedere fortresses ‘lorded over Florence, and dominated it’, noted Filippo Pigafetta,393 and John Hale would observe that the Fortezza da Basso and the Belvedere fortress held Florence between them, ‘like a pincer’ (Figure 3B, F).394 The Belvedere casino rose innocently above the ramparts, without compromising their military effectiveness (Figures 17, 18). Ferdinando’s new citadel completed his father’s long-term plan for the hill, its legitimacy rhetorically justified by Ammirato’s refutation of Machiavelli’s arguments against such structures.395 Cosimo’s patience, far-sighted rule, and numerous dynastic heirs allowed him to achieve what the impatient, short-sighted, and childless Duke of Athens could not. His defences liberated him, and his successors.

Displaying the Athenian connection The Walterish castle depicted in Fei’s prospettiva (Figure 6) suggests that Cosimo’s public attitude to the Duke of Athens softened after 1567, but other visual evidence virtually proves it. Vasari listed 251 portraits of famous men and women in his Vite’s 1568 edition.396 Cristofano dell’A ltissimo (d. 1605) had copied these for him from portraits in Paolo Giovio’s famous Como ‘Museo’, or modelled new ones on them. Displayed in the Duke’s refurbished palace guardaroba, in a collection Vasari called Cosimo’s ‘Museo’,397 they included not only a portrait of ‘Duca Cosimo’ himself, among those of fifteen secular ‘Huomini Illustri di Casa Medici’ but also one of ‘Gualtieri Duca d’Atene’, among those of 25 ‘Huomini Heroi’.398 Significantly, Giovio’s ‘Museo’ had never contained a portrait of Walter,399 so Cosimo must have specially

392 Gilioli, fol. 7r-v. 393 ‘ambedue [fortezze] signoreggianti et à cavalliere’ (Heikamp, 434). 394 Hale, ‘Fortify’, 195. 395 Ammirato, Discorsi, 2:233-46; Hale, ‘Fortify’, 201-02. 396 He notes that 29 portraits are still being painted and leaves three names blank, because models for them had been hard to find. 397 Nachlass 1:502, Vasari to Cosimo, 12.V.1558; Fasola, 171 (18). Allegri and Cecchi republish Vasari’s table (310-12; cf. Fiorani, 27, 283n22), which he prepared just before publication, having completed his revisions soon after 1566 (Vasari 1568, 7:609; Rubin, 188-89, 225-26). His 1568 Vita of Cristofano (VII, 608-09) refers to 280-plus Giovian portraits in Cosimo’s guardaroba; 1570 and 1574 inventories of it list 229 (not 237) and 238 (Fiorani, 26-27, 283n22). 398 Allegri and Cecchi, 311. 399 Fasola (173-80) lists c. 413 Como portraits.

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commissioned his. Although he had forbidden the copying of these works, 400 from 1569 on, Cosimo’s great ally, Cardinal Giovanni Ricci, had many of the guardaroba portraits copied for his Pincian villa in Rome. 401 Sometime after March 1570 and before Ricci died in 1574, a portrait of ‘Gualtieri Duca d’Athene’ entered his Giovian collection. Displayed among the ‘Huomini Illustri’, 402 it was still there in 1588, twelve years after Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici bought Ricci’s villa. 403 This suggests that Cosimo had Walter’s portrait painted after learning about the Medici dukes of Athens in October 1567 and that Ricci acquired his replica after Cosimo’s 4 March 1570 grand ducal coronation in Rome. 404 The guardaroba original was not in the Pitti palace in 1577, among the portraits from Cosimo’s Giovian ‘Museo’;405 instead it went to the Uffizi between 1587 and 1591. 406 Walter’s image had found a flattering public setting, in Medici Florence and Rome. A wish to acquire politically advantageous titles helps to explain why Cosimo alluded to his connection with the dukes of Athens. It supported his efforts, from the late 1550s, to secure a regal title. 407 In 1567 Vasari claimed that Cosimo had become so great that ‘he needed little more to become king of Tuscany’;408 the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany, bestowed on him by Pius V in 1569,409 ‘uti Rex et Magnus Dux ac Princeps merito existat’, 410 was a near miss. But a more comprehensive explanation lay in Cosimo’s longstanding precedence dispute with the dukes of Ferrara, largely dissipated when he

400 Nachlass 1:502, Vasari to Cosimo, 12.V.1558. 401 Deswarte-Rosa, ‘Ricci’, 161-66 and ‘Le décor’, 535-37; Butters, Fumagalli, and Deswarte, doc. 285. 402 Ibid., doc. 406, a post-mortem inventory for cardinal Ferdinando of Ricci’s 248 Giovian portraits (23.IX.1575), later called ‘102 [sic] portrait paintings’ (doc. 426, 4.II.1576, fol. 437 v). 403 Cecchi and Gasparri, 433 (ASF, GM 79 [sic, 790], fol. 187 v). 404 Lapini, 165-68; Ricci, 32-35. 405 Pezzano, 66-69. Cosimo’s ‘Giovian’ portrait was there, where it remains (here, f igure 1), inscribed ‘Cosmvs Med. Flor. et Senarvm Dux II ~’, though Pezzano refers to it as ‘Cosimo gran duca’ (69). 406 Inscribed gvalterivs athenarv: dux (Uffizi, 634); the Uffizi’s Giovian collection (ibid., 603-64) numbered over 300 in 1591 (Bocchi, 50). 407 Marrara, 27n48; Butters, Vulcan, 1:89-90, and ‘Contrasting Priorities’, 190; Veen, 76-78. Much earlier, a French rumour circulated that Charles V, ‘volesse far’ il principe [Francesco] Re di Toscana’ (ASF, MdP 619, vol. 2, secretarial summaries of business with Cosimo fol. 662, 3.I.1549). 408 Vasari 1568, 8:66. 409 Marrara, 27-31. Maximilan II (r. 1564-76) called the Medici rulers ‘Dukes of the Florentine Republic’ until he recognized Francesco’s grand-ducal title by substituting the papal investiture with his Imperial one (2.XI.1575) (Diaz, 188-91; Gustavo Bertoli, in Belloni and Drusi, 54-57). 410 Marrara, 29; Butters, Vulcan, 1:89n33.

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acquired the exalted title.411 Since the early 1540s the Ferrarese had claimed that they were superior in dignity to the new dukes of Florence, because their title and authority, like those of other Italian rulers, came from an Imperial grant.412 Cosimo, by contrast, rested his case on two claims: firstly, that the Florentine Republic had always been sovereign, free from Imperial authority, and preceded the Ferrarese; and, secondly, that the sovereignty that had resided in the Florentine people during the Republican period had passed to him.413 Unlike the Medici, the Este owed their titles to the Emperor, who was their feudal overlord, as were the pope and the French king.414 Cosimo denied that Charles V’s confirmation of his ducal title meant that Florence was an Imperial fief or that he was an Imperial vassal. 415 The Medici dukes of Athens added sparkle to the family’s lineage, but Cosimo’s title as Duke of Florence embodied the city’s ancient sovereign authority. Florence’s ‘nobility’ was recognized rhetorically, even by Venice’s ambassadors.416 To gain noble titles, however, Florentines had to soften their mercantile image and demonstrate the worthiness of their family lineages. 417 In 1589 the Servite Luca Ferrini (d. 1593) tackled the subject in his Treatise on Florence’s Nobility Even Though it is Mercantile, exploiting the Medici-Athens connection in one of his arguments. After distinguishing between five different nobilitadi (natural, intellectual, physical, by birth, and by divine calling), 418 Ferrini discussed Florentines noble by birth, a category including the legitimate children of an emperor, king, archduke, duke, prince, marquis, count, lord of a castle, or citizen.419 Starting with the Medici (born to politically eligible citizens and therefore ‘nobles’),420 he listed the Queen of France, Caterina de’ Medici (d. 1589) (mother of three kings and mother-in-law of the kings of Spain and Navarre); three grand dukes (Cosimo, Francesco, and Ferdinando); and 411 Carte Strozziane, 1:221-29; Adriani, ‘Vita’, 21, 23-24, 91; Mellini, Ricordi, 42-43; Galluzzi, 1:42; Veen, 73-76. 412 Mannori, 79-88. 413 ASF, MM 39, ins.11, ‘Informazione a Sua Maestà Cattolica [Philip II] intorno alla Libertà della Città di Firenze’; Carte Strozziane, 1:71-72, no. 12, doc. 42, fols. 215-220; Adriani, ‘Vita’, 21, 23-24; Rubinstein, ‘Florentina Libertas’, 273-74; Marrara, 23-25; Mannori, 75-88; Veen, 74-76, 204-05n75. 414 Alvise Contarini, 71, 76-78; Veen, 73-76; Cochrane, Italy, 168-69. 415 Cosimo held the Sienese state as a feudal concession from Philip II, with Imperial ratification (Veen, 76-78; below, *text at n377). 416 ‘La cittá di Fiorenza è […] tutta bella, nobile, ricca ed industriosa’ (Fedeli, 214; cf. Priuli 70). 417 Mini; Tomaso Contarini, 266; Ferrini; Marrara, 44-45; Litchfield, 52-61; Butters, ‘Duomo’, 481-83; Veen, 187. 418 Ferrini, 21-22. 419 Ibid., 31. 420 Florentine women were ‘noble’ if associated (by birth or marriage) with a Florentine ‘padre cittadino statuale’ (Carnesecchi, 42-43, Cosimo’s 1562 sumptuary law).

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four dukes (Lorenzo Duke of Urbino, Giuliano Duke of Nemours, Alessandro Duke of Florence, and ‘Pietro Medici Duca d’Atene, Gouernatore di Napoli, Romania, e Argos’.).421 Ferrini’s passage is based on one in Paolo Mini’s 1577 Defence of Florence,422 but with a significant difference: Mini jumps directly from the dukes of Florence, Urbino, and Nemours to the Acciaiuoli dukes of Athens (r. 1388-1395, 1402-1458), bypassing ‘Pietro Medici Duca d’Atene’. In his Vita di Cosimo, completed around 1583, Cini claimed that Eleonora di Toledo’s father ‘drew his ancient origins from the Palaeologue emperors and from Greece’ (which Mannucci does not), but he did not mention any Medici connections with Greece or the dukes of Athens.423 The publication of Mannucci’s 1586 biography after Mini’s 1577 Difesa and before Ferrini’s 1589 ‘Discorso’ may explain Cini’s uniquely oblique allusion to Cosimo’s connection with Greece (via his Spanish marriage) and Mini’s omission of the topic altogether. But Ferrini added Pietro Duke of Athens to strengthen his argument that Florentines were noble, sure to please Cosimo’s son, Grand Duke Ferdinando.424 In 1712 Lorenzo Maria Mariani devoted six folios of his Genealogia della nobile famiglia Medici to the Medici of Athens, systematizing the links, but selectively. 425 The Giovanni de’ Medici beheaded by Walter appears,426 but Ferrini’s ‘Pietro Medici Duca d’Atene’ is called ‘Piero Governatore di Napoli di Romania, et Atene’, 427 and one of his three sons, ‘Cosimo’. Strikingly, the thirteenth-century ‘Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Athens’ is absent, as he is from the wider historical record. 428 Was the Medici copy of Baldwin’s 1255 donation a forgery, then?429 Of course Cosimo laid no claim to the title. He and his lawyers knew, not least from Philip II’s 1558 investiture of him with the Sienese state, that the King of Spain himself claimed the title ‘Duke of

421 Ferrini, 31-32. As written, ‘Governor of Navplion, the Latin empire of Constantinople [‘Romania’], and Argos’, is absurd; cf. Wolff; Longnon, 234, 817 (‘Argos’); Setton, ‘Catalans and Florentines’, 246-53; below, *n374. 422 Mini, 239-40. 423 Vita (largely completed by 1583), 2-3, 102-03. 424 Ferrini’s dedicatee ([i-v], 5.VI.1589) was Pietro Usimbardi (1539-1612), Ferdinando’s secretary and biographer (Saltini, in Usimbardi, 367-68). 425 ‘Ramo di Niccolò Rosso et Medici d’Atene (ASF, MM 604, fols. 58-63). 426 Ibid., fol. 59; Giovanni Villani, 8:7-8. 427 ‘Napoli di Romania’ (Navplion) (Mannucci, 12). 428 The Burgundian de la Roche dynasty held the Athens ‘lordship’ (or ‘duchy’) from 1205 to 1308; in 1255, the Duke of Athens was Guy I de la Roche (r. 1225-63), not ‘Cosimo de’ Medici’ (Longnon, 240-47; Wolff and Hazard, 827-28 (‘De la Roches’). 429 Above, *text at nn6-7.

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Athens and Neopatras’, 430 inherited from Charles V through the kings of Aragon431 and, ultimately, from the Catalans who had dispossessed Walter’s father in 1311 and succumbed to the Aragonese crown in 1379.432 Cosimo was wise not to invoke his Athenian namesake directly, and Mannucci did not. 433 In 1713-1714, shortly before Mariani wrote, the Habsburg Empire was dismembered, Catalan independence lost, 434 and the Spanish crown’s Bourbon successors dropped the Aragonese claim to the duchy of Athens and Neopatras. 435 In Florence, the Grand Ducal title was now universally recognized, and exalted marriages had brought the Medici more titled connections.436 The city’s sensitive sites were long since under Medici control, its population calmed, and its hilltop citadel built. The title ‘Duke of Athens’ had exhausted its political usefulness then, but Mariani’s exclusion suggests that it retained its power to provoke odious comparisons.

Abbreviations br braccio/a DBI Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vols.1- (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana lb libbra *…* decoded version of a text in code

Measurements 1 Florentine braccio = .5436 m 1 Florentine libbra = 339.542 gm 1 Florentine miglio = 1653.6 m = 1.654 km 1 meter = 39.37 inches = 3.28 feet 430 ‘Philippvs Dei Gratia Rex Castilla […] Dux Athenarum & Neopatræ […]’ (ASF, Trattati internazionali, App., custodia 1, int. 2, fol. 3r, Brussels, 25.XI.1558). 431 Emperor Charles V (r. 1519-58), in 1524 Vitoria treaty (Davenport, 121); Ferdinand (r. 1479-1516) and Isabella (r. 1474-1504), ‘King and Queen of Castille, Leon, Aragon, Sicily […] duke and duchess of Athens and Neopatras’, in 1494 Tordesillas treaty (Encyclopedia of World Trade, 1003); Alfonso V, King of Aragon and Naples (r. 1415-58) (Nicol, 30); ‘Peter IV’, King of Aragon, r. 1336-87 (Hazard, 793); Catalan-Aragonese Empire (Elliott, 27-31). 432 Setton, ‘Catalans in Greece’, 172-75, 187, 212-24; Setton, ‘Catalans and Florentines’, 225-43. 433 Above, *text at nn1-7. 434 Elliott, 375-78. 435 Setton, ‘Catalans in Greece’, 187. 436 Saslow; Mamone; Sanger, 57-62.

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Currie, Elizabeth, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Davenport, Frances Gardiner, European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States to 1648 (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1917). Davis, Charles, ‘Frescoes by Vasari for Sforza Almeni, “Coppiere” to Duke Cosimo I’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 24 (1980), 127-202. Deswarte-Rosa, Sylvie, ‘Le cardinal Giovanni Ricci da Montepulciano’ and ‘Le décor de la villa Ricci’, in La Villa Médicis, dir. by André Chastel, co-ord. by Philippe Morel, vol. 2: Etudes (Rome: Académie de France à Rome, École française de Rome, 2009), respectively 110-69 and 531-38. Diaz, Furio, Il Granducato di Toscana. I Medici (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1976). Donsì Gentile, Iolanda, ‘Le fonti documentarie dell’Archivio di Stato di Napoli’, in AA.VV., Napoli nel Cinquecento e la Toscana dei Medici (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1980), 25-55. Eckstein, Nicholas A., The District of the Green Dragon: Neighbourhood Life and Social Change in Renaissance Florence (Florence: Olschki, 1995). Edelstein, Bruce L., ‘La fecundissima Signora Duchessa: The Courtly Persona of Eleonora di Toledo and the Iconography of Abundance’, in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo Duchess of Florence and Siena, ed. by Konrad Eisenbichler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 71-97. Edgerton, Samuel Y., Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Elliott, John H., Imperial Spain 1469-1716 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963). [Encyclopedia of World Trade] AA.VV., Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005). Fasola, Bruno, ‘Per un nuovo catalogo della collezione Gioviana’, in Atti del Convegno Paolo Giovio: il rinascimento e la memoria, Como 3-5 June 1983 (Como: Presso la Società a Villa Gallia, 1985), 169-80. Feo, Michele, ‘Cini, Giovan Battista’, DBI, 25 (1981), 608-12. Fiorani, Francesca, The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography and Politics in Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). Folena, Gianfranco, ‘Borghini, Vincenzio Maria’, DBI, 12 (1971), 680-89. Galluzzi, Riguccio, Istoria del granducato di Toscana sotto il governo della casa Medici, 5 vols. (Florence: Gaetano Cambiagi, 1781). Gilbert, Felix, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). Ginori Conti, Piero, L’apparato per le nozze di Francesco de’ Medici e di Giovanna d’Austria (Florence: Olschki, 1936).

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Gnoli, Umberto, Topografia e toponomastica di Roma medioevale e moderna, intro. by Kivio Jannattoni (Foligno: Edizioni dell’Arquata, 1984). Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961). Green, Louis, ‘Florence and the Republican Tradition’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 6: c.1300-c.1415, ed. by Michael Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 469-87. Hale, John Rigby, ‘The End of Florentine Liberty: The Fortezza da Basso’, in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. by Nicolai Rubinstein (London: Faber, 1968), 501-32. —, Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983). —, ‘To Fortify or Not to Fortify? Machiavelli’s Contribution to a Renaissance Debate’, in John Rigby Hale, Renaissance War Studies (London: Hambledon, 1983), 189-209. Heikamp, Detlef, ‘Firenze, anno 1600, vista da Filippo Pigafetta’, in Magnificenza alla corte dei Medici. Arte a Firenze alla fine del Cinquecento (Milan: Electa, 1997), 430-37. Hazard, Harry W., ed., The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, vol. 3 of A History of the Crusades, general ed. Kenneth M. Setton, 5 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975). Hurtubise, Pierre, Une Famille-Témoin: Les Salviati (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1985). Lamberini, Daniela, Il Sanmarino: Giovan Battista Belluzzi architetto militare e trattatisa del Cinquecento, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 2007). —, and Maura Tamantini, Le acque del Giardino di Boboli (Livorno: Sillabe, 2013). Lefevre, Renato, ‘Madama’ Margarita d’Austria (1522-1586) (Rome: Newton Compton, 1986). Lessmann, Johanna, ‘Studien zu einer Baumonographie der Uffizien Giorgios Vasaris in Florenz’ (PhD diss., Fakultät der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn, 1975). Litchfield, R. Burr, Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians 1530-1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Longnon, Jean, ‘The Frankish States in Greece, 1204-1261’, in The Later Crusades, 1189-1311, ed. by Robert Lee Wolff and Harry W. Hazard, vol. 2 of A History of the Crusades, general ed. Kenneth M. Setton, 5 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 235-74. [Luogo Teatrale] Il luogo teatrale a Firenze: Brunelleschi, Vasari, Buontalenti, Parigi, exh. Florence, 1975 (Milan: Electa Editrice, 1975). Mamone, Sara, Firenze e Parigi: due capitali dello spettacolo per una regina Maria de’ Medici (Cinisello Balsamo [Milan]: Amilcare Pizzi, 1987).

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Manetti, Renzo, Michelangiolo: le fortificazioni per l’assedio di Firenze (Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1980). Mannori, Luca, Il Sovrano Tutore: Pluralismo istituzionale e accentramento amministrativo nel principato dei Medici (Secc. XVI-XVIII) (Milan: Giuffrè, 1994). Marrara, Danilo, Studi giuridici sulla Toscana medicea: contributo alla storia degli stati assoluti in Italia (Varese: Multa Paucis, 1981). Martines, Lauro, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). Mazzanti, Beatrice, ‘Belvedere prima del Forte di Belvedere. Cosimo I de’ Medici e la costruzione della Palazzina del Belvedere sull’orlo delle mura d’Oltrarno’, in Alessandro Rinaldi, Sul limitare della città. Storia e vita delle mura urbane a Firenze tra Seicento e Ottocento (Florence: Edifir, 2008), 241-63. —, ‘La difesa di Firenze nel secondo Cinquecento e la “Nova Fortezza di Belvedere”’, in Castellum, 48 (2006), 52-72. —, ‘La Palazzina del Belvedere’, in Ammannati e Vasari per la città dei Medici, ed. by Cristina Acidini and Giacomo Pirazzoli (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2011), 221-22. Morrogh, Andrew, Disegni di architetti fiorentini 1540-1640, trans. by S. Dinale, exh. cat., Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi (Florence: Olschki, 1985). Muccini, Ugo, Le sale dei Priori in Palazzo Vecchio (Florence: Le Lettere, 1992). —, Il Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio (Florence: Le Lettere, 1990). Muccini, Ugo, and Alessandro Cecchi, Le stanze del Principe in Palazzo Vecchio (Florence: Le Lettere, 1991). Najemy, John, A History of Florence 1200-1575 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). Nicol, Donald M., The Immortal Emperor: The Life and Legend of Constantine Palaiologos, Last Emperor of the Romans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Paoli, Cesare, ‘Della signoria di Gualtieri duca d’Atene in Firenze’, Giornale storico degli archivi toscani (1862), 81-121, 169-277. Parigino, Giuseppe Vittorio, Il Tesoro del Principe: funzione pubblica e privata del patrimonio della famiglia Medici nel Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1999). Pepper, Simon, and Nicholas Adams, Firearms & Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in Sixteenth-Century Siena (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Petrucci, Franca, ‘Colonna, Stefano’, DBI, 27 (1982), 442-45. Petrucci, Francesca, ‘Un nuovo regno d’Arcadia a Firenze’, in Niccolò detto il Tribolo: tra arte, architettura e paesaggio, ed. by Elisabetta Pieri and Luigi Zangheri (Signa: Comune di Poggio a Caiano, 2001), 127-36.

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Pieraccini, Gaetano, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo. Saggio di ricerche sulla trasmissione ereditaria dei caratteri biologici, 3 vols. (1924; repr. Florence: Nardini, 1986). Pope-Hennessy, John, Cellini (London: Macmillan, 1985). Pratilli, Giovanni Cascio, and Luigi Zangheri, La legislazione medicea sull’ambiente, 3 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1994-1995). Pretzler, Maria, Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth, 2007). Promis, Carlo, Gli Ingegneri Militari della Marca d’Ancona (1865; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1970). Puttfarken, Thomas, ‘Golden Age and Justice in Sixteenth-Century Florentine Political Thought and Imagery: Observations onThree Pictures by Jacopo Zucchi’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43 (1980), 130-49. Repetti, Emanuele, Dizionario geografico fisico storico della Toscana, 6 vols. (Florence: presso l’Autore e Editore coi tipi di Giovanni Mazzoni, 1833-1846). Rezasco, Giulio, Dizionario del linguaggio italiano storico ed amministrativo (1881; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1982). Richa, Giuseppe, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine divise ne’ suoi Quartieri, 10 vols. (1754; repr. Rome: Multigrafica, 1989). Rinaldi, Alessandro, ‘“Quattro pitaffi sanza le lettere”: i primi anni del Giardino di Boboli e lo ‘spartimento’ del Tribolo’, in Boboli 90. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi per la salvaguardia e la valorizzazione del Giardino, 2 vols. (Florence: Edifir, 1991), 1:19-30. Rosenthal, David, ‘The Genealogy of Empires: Ritual Politics and State Building in Early Modern Florence, I Tatti Studies. Essays in the Renaissance, 8 (1999), 197-234. —, ‘Owning the Corner: The ‘Powers’ of Florence and the Question of Agency’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16 (2013), 181-96. Roth, Cecil, The Last Florentine Republic (London: Methuen, 1925). Rubin, Patricia Lee, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). Rubinstein, Nicolai, ‘Florentina Libertas’, in Nicolai Rubinstein, Studies in Italian History in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, vol. 1: Political Thought and the Language of Politics, Art and Politics, ed. by Giovanni Ciappelli (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2004), 273-94. —, ‘Notes on the Word stato in Florence before Machiavelli’, in Nicolai Rubinstein, Studies in Italian History in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, vol. 1: Political Thought and the Language of Politics, Art and Politics, ed. by Giovanni Ciappelli (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2004), 151-63. —, The Palazzo Vecchio 1298-1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).

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Sanger, Alice E., Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). Saslow, James M., The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). Satkowski, Leon, Giorgio Vasari: Architect and Courtier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Scorza, Richard A., ‘Vincenzo Borghini’s Collection of Paintings, Drawings and Wax Models: New Evidence from Manuscript Sources’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 66 (2003), 63-122. Sestan, Ernesto, ‘Brienne, Gualtieri di. Sesto conte’, DBI, 14 (1972), 237-249. Setton, Kenneth M., ‘The Catalans and Florentines in Greece 1380-1462’, in DBI, 14 (1972)., 225-77. —, ‘The Catalans in Greece 1311-1380’, in The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. by Harry W. Hazard, vol. 3 of A History of the Crusades, general ed. Kenneth M. Setton, 5 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 167-224. [Sothebys] Catalogue of Fine Old Master Paintings, auction sale by Sotheby & Co., London, 22 June 1960. Spini, Giorgio, Cosimo I e l’indipendenza del principato mediceo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1980). Stradario storico e amministrativo della città e del comune di Firenze (Florence: Enrico Ariani, 1929). Starn, Randolph, and Loren Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy 1300-1600 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). Sznura, Franek, L’espansione urbana di Firenze nel Dugento (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975). Teicher, Anna, ‘Politics and Finance in the Age of Cosimo I’, in Strumenti e veicoli della cultura. Relazioni politiche ed economiche, vol. 1 of Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del ‘500 (Florence: Olschki, 1983), 343-62. Tolias, George, ‘Nikolaos Sophianos’s Totius Graeciae Descriptio: The Resources, Diffusion and Function of a Sixteenth-Century Antiquarian Map of Greece’, Imago Mundi, 58.2 (2006), 150-82. Tommaseo, Nicolò, and Bernardo Bellini, Dizionario della lingua italiana, 20 vols. (1865-1879; repr. Milan: Rizzoli, 1977). Trexler, Richard C., Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, London, and Toronto: Academic Press, 1980). [Uffizi] Gli Uffizi Catalogo Generale, 2nd ed. (Florence: Centro Di, 1980). Veen, Henk Th. van, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, trans. by Andrew J. McCormick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam, 1960).

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Wiles, Bertha Harris, The Fountains of Florentine Sculptors and their Followers from Donatello to Bernini (1933; repr. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975). Wolff, Robert Lee, ‘The Latin Empire of Constantinople’, in The Later Crusades, 1189-1311, ed. by Robert Lee Wolff and Harry W. Hazard, vol. 2 of A History of the Crusades, general ed. Kenneth M. Setton, 5 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 186-233. Wolff, Robert Lee, and Harry W. Hazard, eds., The Later Crusades, 1189-1311, vol. 2 of A History of the Crusades, general ed. Kenneth M. Setton, 5 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

About the Author Suzanne B. Butters, Emerita Professor in Art History, University of Manchester



Renaissance Cities through Ruskinian Eyes An English Architect in Italy in 19021 Stella Fletcher

Abstract By travelling from Britain to Italy to seek inspiration and by making the reverse journey in search of employment with wealthy landowners, Inigo Jones and Giacomo Leoni neatly illustrate architectural history’s Anglo-Italian strain, but do not account for all the variations on that theme. At least two others were encountered by Michael Mallett in the course of his career: work by a British architect in an Italian location, in the shape of Edwin Lutyens’s design for the British School at Rome, where Mallett was assistant director in the 1960s, and the impact of the Grand Tour in his adopted county of Warwickshire, found at Compton Verney, the country house designed by Robert Adam. Elsewhere within the historic boundaries of Warwickshire one would be hard pressed to identify Italianate influences in the houses, inspired by vernacular architecture, and the churches, inspired by Byzantine precedents, of the Birmingham architect Edwin F. Reynolds (1875-1949), but sufficient evidence exists among his books and papers to confirm an interest in Italian architecture. In 1902 Reynolds made a whistle-stop tour of the peninsula, travelling as far as Rome and working his way back via Florence, Venice and a number of other cities. The time available was so short that he prepared his rail travel and hotel accommodation in some detail. Throughout the tour he continued to make notes about journeys, hotels 1 This essay has been made possible by Richard Phillips, who generously granted access to the library and papers of his grandfather, Edwin Reynolds. It draws on the unpublished family history compiled by another grandson, Rob Colquhoun, which includes Sutton Webster’s list of Reynolds’ oeuvre up to 1922. The author would also like to thank Robert Pitt (Warwickshire County Record Office) and Veronica Phillips for assistance with the illustrations.

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_flet

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and expenses, but priority was given to describing and drawing buildings. Thus did a hitherto unappreciated traveller make his minor contribution to the history of the British in Italy. Keywords: architecture, churches, hotels, palaces, photography, rail travel, travel writing

When Michael Mallett welcomed visitors to his 1830s villa in Leamington Spa their first lesson in Italian history on the wall behind him: a print of Antoine Lafréry’s Le sette chiese di Roma (1575), which depicts pious pilgrims worshipping at the four major basilicas within the city’s walls while others venture fuori le mura to the shrines of Sts. Paul, Laurence, and Sebastian. It was from that house in Leamington that Michael made many an archival pilgrimage to Italy, carrying a back-breaking quantity of index cards, on each of which he collected information about an individual member of one or another later Quattrocento elite. In making those pilgrimages he may or may not have followed the sixteenth-century example of Warwickshire’s most famous son, but his familiarity with some of the various states of preRisorgimento Italy certainly emulated Sir Roger Newdigate of Arbury, George Lucy of Charlecote, and John Throckmorton of Coughton, the county’s more enthusiastic grand tourists. Warwickshire also produced George Eliot, whose appreciation of Florence and Rome is manifest in Romola and Middlemarch respectively. For his part, after the death of John Hale, Michael considered himself to be unique among Renaissance historians because he could work with equal facility in two important centres, namely, Florence and Venice. One further connection between Warwickshire and Italy can be found somewhat closer to Leamington in the person of the poet Walter Savage Landor, who was born in Warwick in 1775, enjoyed wealth from an estate at Bishop’s Tachbrook, and died in Florence in 1864. Landor, however, was no model for Michael. At Oxford in the 1790s he was reputedly a ‘mad Jacobin’ and was sent down after an incident with a shotgun; at Oxford in the 1950s Michael was briefly a Jacobite, but is not known to have antagonized the authorities in any way. Landor was difficult, quarrelsome, and courted controversy. Michael, by contrast, not only wrote about diplomacy but was also a model of it. Warwick being a small town, it is but a short distance from Landor’s birthplace near the Eastgate to the final home of a man who spent considerably less time in Italy but who nevertheless left a detailed documentary record of his first visit there. Edwin Francis Reynolds was born in Handsworth,

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Birmingham, on 30 November 1875, the third son of Alfred John and Harriet Reynolds. Alfred inherited his father’s metal-working business, which thrived under his leadership and came to specialize in the production of bicycle tubes.2 The business was managed by four successive generations of the family. Edwin’s was the generation that could afford to diversify, which his second brother, John, did by becoming a distinguished amateur astronomer and, in due course, president of the Royal Astronomical Society. Edwin chose architecture.3 Birmingham’s Unitarian and Quaker Liberal elite had ensured that the city was provided with a healthy range of civic amenities, including the School of Art, where W. H. Bidlake began teaching architecture in 1892. Reynolds was among his first students and soon acquired a reputation as a particularly accomplished draughtsman. The works of Ruskin loomed appropriately large in his library, and, like many of his architectural contemporaries, he was influenced by W. R. Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth. Indeed, among Reynolds’s published student designs, those for a church on a hill and a country house evoke the spirit of Lethaby and Voysey respectively. 4It was also in 1892 that the conventionally Anglican A. J. Reynolds became an alderman in the Conservative interest. Without venturing into the connections – mystic or otherwise – between the building industry and local government, it is safe to say that, in this case, there was a sudden convergence of interest between the spheres of architecture and bicycle tube manufacturing. By 1901 Edwin Reynolds was working in London. In 1903, the year that J. F. Bentley’s multi-domed brick and marble Westminster Cathedral opened for worship, Reynolds’s design for a domed, thoroughly Byzantine town church was awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Soane medallion.5 The prize included a travelling scholarship, and he duly spent nearly two years exploring as far afield as Egypt, Greece, and Turkey, an itinerary which may have been determined in part by his brother’s astronomically inspired visits to Egypt from 1902 onwards and which certainly resulted in various lectures and a three-part publication on the mosques of Constantinople.6 In the practical matter of earning a living, not even the exotic Near East could compete with the lure of Birmingham and its rapidly expanding suburbs. In 1905 Reynolds established his own practice there, doubling 2 On the Reynolds Tube Co. Ltd. and its predecessors, see Tyler. 3 Reynolds’s career is summarized in his RIBA obituary and can be reconstructed from Foster; his significance is assessed by Granelli, 58-59. 4 Reynolds, ‘Country Church’ and ‘Country House’. 5 Reynolds, ‘Town Church’. 6 Reynolds, ‘Imperial Mosques’.

364 Stell a Fletcher Figure 1 Edwin F. Reynolds c. 1915-1917

up as an evening lecturer at the School of Architecture, of which he was later deputy director. The moment was highly propitious, not only because his father served as the city’s lord mayor in 1905-1906, but also because it coincided with the creation of an Anglican diocese of Birmingham, with the inspirational Charles Gore as its first bishop. Reynolds’s earliest church, All Saints, Four Oaks, was consecrated by Gore in 1908, but most of his commissions in this period were for factories, commercial buildings, and houses, including some for the family firm, others for the Challen in-laws of his eldest brother, and a house in Harborne for John, complete with an observatory in the garden. This was subsequently the home of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Cadbury, of the chocolate-making dynasty, and remained essentially unchanged 80 years after construction. In 1909 Reynolds married Gertrude Mabel Clutterbuck and settled near her family’s home at Lapworth, where a number of his houses and the most Gothic of his ecclesiastical fittings may still be found.7 The country house business dried up during the second decade of the century, partial 7

Witchell and Hudleston, 117-18.

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compensation emerging in the demand for war memorials, though Reynolds’s principal project during the war years was the most monumental of his churches, St. Germain, Edgbaston, a generously proportioned basilica with strong Masonic connections. In 1926, after being overlooked for the directorship, he resigned from the School of Architecture and formed a partnership with the firm of Wood and Kendrick, acting as their ecclesiastical specialist. His brick-built Anglican churches with their light but austere interiors can be found throughout the Birmingham area, but his only mark on the city centre’s skyline was made in 1938, when he added a massive tower with distinctive saddleback roof to J. L. Pearson’s church of St. Alban at Bordesley. As demand for anything but the most basic of churches dried up, he developed a secular second string, designing public houses for the Birmingham-based brewers Mitchells and Butlers. In the same period he was engaged by Graham Baron Ash to turn a relatively modest dwelling into the Tudor fantasy that is Packwood House at Lapworth, though it was more sensitive care of historic buildings that came to dominate his later career, whether for Birmingham City Council at Aston and Blakesley Halls or for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at its properties in and around Stratford-upon-Avon. Restoration work on Northgate, a late seventeenth-century house in Warwick, introduced Reynolds to what became his home in 1933. He died on 18 January 1949, a pillar of county town society. According to Levi Fox, director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust from 1945, Reynolds was an easygoing liberal-minded gentleman who belonged to a bygone age, but this assessment was at odds with his family’s experience of him as a workaholic. There is evidence to suggest that, even in the apparently leisured Edwardian era, he was a young man in a tearing hurry. More than six decades after Reynolds’s death, some of his books and papers remain at Northgate. These include a 7x4.5″ pocket-book identified as the property of E. F. Reynolds of 61 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill Gate – the address at which he appears in the 1901 census – and marked as being of ‘great value’ to the owner.8 It opens with meticulous preparations for an architectural tour of Italy in March and April 1902 and proceeds to record what he saw, where he stayed, and the cost of virtually every item of expenditure. Much of the unpaginated preparatory material is inspired by Baedeker’s guides to northern and central Italy, which Reynolds owned in the editions of 1899 and 1900 respectively. Four sides are devoted to 8 Reynolds, Travel diary. Hereafter, references to this work will only be provided for material that appears in the paginated section.

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international railway timetables, from which he selected the Mont Cenis route for his outward journey and the St. Gotthard for his return. He paid £16 6s. 5d. to Thomas Cook’s for tickets, presumably including a ‘combination through ticket’ for travel in Italy, as recommended by Baedeker. Cook’s also provided him with £20-worth of ‘circular notes’, the precursor of travellers’ cheques, which he could exchange for cash in the course of his expedition, together with £3-worth of French currency and £2-worth of Italian. The French franc and the Italian lira were then interchangeable in value though not in hard currency. Reynolds kept his petty cash account in francs. Preparations continue with a summary of his itinerary. Rome was his first objective, followed by Florence, Pistoia, Bologna, Ravenna, Ferrara, Venice, Padua, Verona, Milan (with an excursion to Pavia), and Como, with the time of each train departure noted. Pressure of time clearly precluded visits to Brescia, Mantua, Lodi, Saronno, and Chiaravalle. Thereafter ten sides of the notebook are devoted to the buildings that he intended to inspect in each city, some supplemented by the names of their architects. Preparations conclude with a list of the hotels, private apartments, and restaurants that he hoped to patronize in eleven Italian towns and cities; a shorter list on the facing page identifies those where he actually stayed and dined. The main paginated and indexed section of the notebook then records what Reynolds saw during his whistle-stop tour, during which he made notes on some 60 churches and 37 other buildings, accompanied by more than 50 sketches and another 50 plans. Most of the pencil drawings were made from personal observation, confirmed by occasional notes stating that a few were drawn from memory or from photographs. The final section – again unpaginated – consists of general notes, an aide memoire about money, and four sides of itemized expenditure. Reynolds’s sense of mission contrasted with the aimlessness of a younger Englishman who spent the year from October 1901 travelling in Italy and Austria, with consequences familiar to any reader of Where Angels Fear to Tread or A Room with a View. With time on their hands, E.M. Forster and his mother ventured further than Reynolds and took a route that was in some respects the reverse of our architect’s, beginning in Como and going on to Milan – complete with day trip to the Certosa di Pavia – and Florence. By December they were in Perugia, followed by Rome in early spring of 1902 and Naples in May. In each city they stayed long enough to follow Baedeker’s ‘short itineraries’. The Forsters’ rate of progress put them firmly in the tradition of the grand tourists, but they had already been overtaken by Thomas Cook’s first exercises in mass tourism to Italy. In 1900 the firm organized special six-day tours of Rome during the Holy Year, together with the official

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English national pilgrimage in October, when the ‘industrial classes’ were permitted to stay for no more than four days. Another large-scale pilgrimage followed in 1901 to mark the opening of the new century. For the most part, international travel remained the preserve of the middle and upper classes. Thus Reynolds’s first two trains, the 9pm departure from Charing Cross on Wednesday 26 March and the connecting service from Calais, were both so crowded that, in the latter, he moved from first to second class in order to enjoy more space.9 After resting at the Hotel du Rhin in Amiens and visiting the city’s cathedral, he was in Paris by Thursday evening. The 10:20pm departure took him to Turin, where he arrived at 3pm on the Friday. Architecturally, Turin was arguably the most exciting city in Italy at the beginning of the new century. Some of its finest Liberty-style buildings can be dated to 1902, thereby coinciding with the first international exhibition of modern decorative art, which opened in the city on 10 May. However, even had Baedeker not left him in ignorance of recent architectural developments, Reynolds was single-minded in his quest for historic buildings and refused to be distracted by any contemporary work. After a long wait in Genoa, a slow train took him on to Rome, where he arrived about two hours later than scheduled. By then it was the morning of Holy Saturday, and the delay meant that he was not in the city early enough to witness the lighting of new fires in its churches. Before the mid-twentieth-century reform of the liturgy there was little else he could have witnessed that was unique to the Easter weekend. Towards its conclusion, Reynolds’s thoroughly prosaic journey had a poetic counterpart in Hilaire Belloc’s pilgrimage from Toul to Rome in the early summer of 1901, an account of which he published the following year as The Path to Rome. Whereas Belloc approached Rome on foot along the Via Cassia and first saw the dome of St. Peter’s rising over the modern caserma which defended the recently developed area of Prati, Reynolds was safely deposited at Stazione Termini and driven to his hotel for Fr.1.50. The two travellers were, however, united in quickly repairing to cafés: with characteristic exuberance Belloc called for bread, coffee, and brandy, whereas the more restrained Reynolds merely recorded how much he paid for his unidentified sustenance. Of Rome itself in 1902 much can be gleaned from the memoirs of the diplomat Rennell Rodd, who was in charge of the British embassy to the Quirinale by the end of April, the ambassador having withdrawn due to ill health. Among other things, Rodd recalled the season of Reynolds’s brief visit as the period in which plans were formulated to 9

For other experiences of international rail travel, see Pemble, Mediterranean, 25-29.

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create a library and museum in the house at Piazza di Spagna where Keats had died in 1821.10 Somewhat less informative is Hall Caine’s Anglo-Roman novel The Eternal City (1902), though it was soon popular enough to be made into a stage play. For recent reflections on Roman history there was F. W. Rolfe’s Chronicles of the House of Borgia, but this is most unlikely to have influenced Reynolds’s appreciation of the city. Baedeker advised visitors to engage hotel rooms in advance, a precaution which was presumably all the more necessary in Rome at Easter but which Reynolds evidently omitted to follow. He selected two Roman hotels from the guidebook’s list: the Minerva, an ‘old-established house’ near the Pantheon, which was where the ‘better class’ of pilgrim stayed during the official English pilgrimage in October 1900, and the Alibert, in the English quarter near Piazza di Spagna.11 In the event, arriving in Rome on Holy Saturday, Reynolds was clearly disappointed at the Minerva but managed to find a room at the nearby, lower-status Hôtel S. Chiara. Indeed, at Fr.3.10 per night inclusive of tips, the S. Chiara provided the cheapest accommodation he found on the entire tour, though there is no indication one way or the other that he was able to confirm Baedeker’s warning about beds in such establishments being more likely to ‘harbour the enemies of repose’.12 Safely, if perhaps not comfortably, billeted in a central location, Reynolds set about verifying Rome’s manifold architectural attractions. According to his guidebook, even a ‘hasty glimpse’ of the city required a visit of at least a fortnight.13 Reynolds had three days. He made straight for St. Peter’s basilica and immediately betrayed his ignorance of Catholic culture by referring to it as a cathedral. Whether ignorance merged into hostility cannot be confirmed from our source, but there is no hint that Reynolds was in any danger of being beguiled by popery, perhaps not least because of its long tradition of fulminating against Freemasonry. Externally, St. Peter’s offended his eye in almost every conceivable respect. As he took in the scene from a well-positioned café, Maderno’s façade appeared ‘a very wretched performance and pure bathos. The showy parade of columns and entablatures is confused and without meaning, and the clumsiness and heaviness quite painful’.14 Fortunately, Bernini’s colonnades impressed him by their magnificence and relative simplicity, inspiring his first section 10 Rodd, 12, 14-15. 11 Baedeker, Central Italy, 128; Champ, 209. 12 Baedeker, Northern Italy, xix. 13 Baedeker, Central Italy, 143. 14 Reynolds, Travel diary, fol. 5 v.

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drawing of the expedition. Heading back towards the Tiber, he made brief notes on the Palazzo Giraud (now Torlonia), which he attributed to Bramante. As afternoon turned to evening he reached Borgo S. Spirito and was sufficiently moved to sketch the Ospedale and church of S. Spirito in Sassia, complete with campanile and distant gateway. Across the river in Via Giulia he copied the inscription on Sangallo’s house and found much to interest him at the Palazzi Farnese and Massimi. His evening walk then took in S. Andrea della Valle, where the façade was covered in scaffolding, S. Agostino (‘commonplace – bad decoration’), the Cancelleria, S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini (‘fine brick exterior […] could not get inside’), and S. Maria sopra Minerva.15 At no point does he suggest that these churches held anything other than architectural interest for him. At 8:30 and 11:00 the following morning Anglican worship was available at All Saints, Via del Babuino. Baedeker did not inform our man that All Saints was built to the design of G. E. Street, whose study of Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages Reynolds acquired at some point, but this would not have been sufficient to distract him from the task of accumulating examples of more venerable architecture. Across the Tiber, Leo XIII, the 91-year-old prisoner in the Vatican, blessed a relatively small number of the faithful while Reynolds headed in the opposite direction. By midday on Easter Sunday he had visited the Pantheon, the Gesù, the Capitol, and parts of the Forum. During the afternoon he appears to have surveyed the Colosseum (‘the interior in a more ruined condition than I had imagined’), S. Maria in Aracoeli, S. Clemente, S. Prassede with its ‘horribly restored nave’, S. Maria Maggiore, and S. Stefano Rotondo.16 By the evening he had reached S. Giovanni in Laterano, but the brevity of his notes suggests that he was either flagging or contending with the fading light. Perhaps the former explains why he made no notes at all on Monday morning. In the afternoon he sketched the Palazzo Regis (now more easily identified as the Museo Barracco) and made a return visit to St. Peter’s. Finally, in the evening, he repaired once more to the Palazzo Farnese to make detailed drawings, including a cross-section of the cornice. Just as Reynolds was not a man to be sent off balance by the aesthetic appeal of Catholicism, so he remained careful to record his expenses. On Easter Sunday none were incurred beyond those for meals and liquid refreshment: a note to himself to take a tram to the Lateran may not have been followed. On Monday non-food purchases resumed, and Reynolds declared

15 Ibid., fols. 12r, 14 r. 16 Ibid., fols. 19r, 22r.

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himself to have been ‘done down’ at a café that charged Fr.1.60 for a drink between lunch (Fr.1) and tea (85 centimes). Much of Tuesday, 1 April, was devoted to travel, Reynolds’s train departing from Rome at 9:40am – ten minutes later than timetabled – and arriving in Florence nearly six hours later. It was ‘very full at first’, and he ‘did not travel with Metzler’, to whom no earlier reference had been made. By 1902 Florence was short of neither the guidebook-clutching inglesi immortalized by Forster nor of British residents, but none of them appear to have made any impact on the young architect.17 Unusually, he had identified potential accommodation at addresses not listed in Baedeker – with Signora Focardi on the third floor at Via Giotto 11 and at Borgo SS. Apostoli 1 – so clearly intended to avoid the hotels and pensioni, with or without south aspects, favoured by British visitors.18 This time the reality worked out better than planned, for he found a room – no. 57, to be precise – at the venerable Hôtel Porta Rossa in Via Porta Rossa. For two nights the bill came to Fr.20.20, to which he added Fr.2 in tips. As separate dinner expenses are not listed he must have dined at the hotel, which had its own restaurant, but he lunched ‘al Lido’, a ‘decent cheap’ establishment in Via Brunelleschi, so well away from the British habitués of the Gran Caffé Doney in Via Tornabuoni. Architecturally, Florence brought welcome relief from the ‘over-done Rococo’ of Rome, and Reynolds’s overall impressions of its buildings were positive, even if his assessments had to be balanced in order to be of future utility.19 Thus he rated the cathedral group as ‘very fine in colour’, with the Baptistery its least pleasing element.20 The Palazzo Vecchio, also surveyed on Tuesday afternoon, was ‘powerful […] with an uncompromising outline of rugged picturesqueness’ but had ‘some curious complications at the junction of the two periods of building’.21 During his evening walk he compared and contrasted the Palazzi Strozzi and Pitti. Having no use for secular buildings on that scale, he measured and drew the former’s rustication and eaves as elements that might be somehow utilized independently. On Wednesday Reynolds’s focus turned to churches, beginning in Oltrarno with S. Spirito and S. Maria del Carmine and working towards S. Lorenzo, by way of S. Maria Maggiore. The Palazzi Guadagni and Riccardi (as it was then known) were studied en route. If judged by the quantity of drawings these various 17 For Florence and its resident foreigners on the eve of Reynolds’s visit, see Roeck. 18 Examples of such hotels may be found in Lamberini, 133. For Forster’s accommodation problems in October 1901, see Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, 48-49. 19 Reynolds, Travel diary, fol. 27 v. 20 Ibid., fol. 28r. 21 Ibid., fol. 28r.

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Figure 2 Sketches and notes made by Edwin F. Reynolds in Florence, Wednesday 2 April 1902

buildings inspired, S. Spirito’s ‘simple system of squares’ was of greatest interest.22 During the late afternoon and evening he revisited the Duomo and studied the Palazzo Quaratesi, the Badia, and the Bargello before seeking to comprehend the cortile of the Palazzo Vecchio. By Reynolds’s standards, there was something almost relaxed about Wednesday. Thursday, by contrast, brought the last of his ‘mornings in Florence’ and the belated realization that an uncommonly intense aesthetic experience could be found by heading to the southeast of the city centre. His detailed measurement of corbelling on the south side of Piazza S. Croce was surely made on Thursday, though it appears among Tuesday evening’s material. S. Croce itself triggered an appropriate quantity of notes and sketches but, if anything, Reynolds was more pleased to discover the fifteenth-century cortile at Via Borgo S. Croce 6 (Palazzo Antinori-Corsini): As a matter of construction it is difficult to see how the half-vault on the left holds up with the 2 stories brought over it. Probably corbelled out 22 Ibid., fol. 31 r.

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by means of the usual Florentine stone brackets and masked with the vault. Somewhat of a tour de force, but done so simply that the effect is quite natural and good.23

From there it is clear that he made the ascent to S. Miniato al Monte, which inspired more extensive notes than any other individual building on the entire tour. And then: The view from the terrace in front of the church should have been magnificent – overlooking the valley of the Arno with the city lying in it and the hills, with their fine outlines and picturesque woods, beyond. Unfortunately the sky was very heavy and the air full of mist and low-lying clouds, but even then enough could be seen to suggest its beauty.24

At no other point did he permit himself such a non-architectural distraction, but so influential were photographs taken from that vantage point that he knew precisely when he was supposed to be appreciative.25 In the course of his 49 hours in Florence Reynolds made no fewer than five separate purchases of photographs, spending from 30 centimes to Fr.2 on individual transactions. One way or another, Florence was in danger of getting the better of our industrious tourist, and so little time remained before the 4:55pm departure for Pistoia that plans to visit the Palazzo Rucellai, S. Maria Novella, and the Biblioteca Laurenziana on his way back to the station – presumably not in that order – had to be abandoned. The overnight stop in Pistoia was determined more by the rail network than the significance of its architecture, which had to serve as a substitute for unverified Pisa. The cathedral, S. Giovanni, Ospedale del Ceppo, and S. Andrea were examined immediately, followed by S. Maria del Carmine, S. Andrea again, and Madonna dell’Umiltà the following morning, meaning that Reynolds diverged little from Baedeker’s list of ‘principal attractions’. Architectural strengths and weaknesses were noted, and particular attention was paid to the colouring of the Della Robbia frieze on the façade of the Ospedale, which no photograph could have conveyed accurately. At the ‘unpretending’ Albergo Rossini in Via Cavour he dined in, the bill coming to Fr.6.55, with Fr.1.50 in tips.26 23 Ibid., fol. 41 r. 24 Ibid., fol. 45v. 25 The significance of such classic images is explored by Smith. 26 Baedeker, Northern Italy, 401.

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According to Reynolds’s original plan, his next destination should have been Ravenna, where he hoped that the Friday afternoon and evening would suffice, but this necessitated a time-consuming detour, and he opted instead for the most direct route towards Venice. If Ravenna’s basilicas were a significant loss, then so was Bolognese brickwork, little of which could be appreciated once the projected two-and-a-half-hour visit was reduced to nineteen minutes between trains. He spent Friday night at the ‘well spoken of’ Stella d’Oro in Ferrara, where he was charged Fr.6.35 and gave Fr.1 in tips.27 The following morning he surveyed the cathedral and S. Francesco before breakfast, though so marked was his disinclination towards post-Quattrocento ornament that he would surely have found the former’s decoration ‘atrocious’ even on a full stomach.28 In Venice, which he declared to be ‘very full’, Reynolds had intended to stay in a private apartment at Riva degli Schiavoni 4150, next to the Pietà, which is listed in Baedeker under the name of Frau Rambuseck-Adami.29 A gondola took him from the station to that address at a cost of Fr.2.30. It seems that the landlady then directed him to another of her properties, and a porter was engaged for 60 centimes to transfer the luggage. The new room was at Campo S. Moisè 1464 and cost 3 lire a day tout compris. ‘Moderate-priced Venetian lodging[s]’ were sufficiently familiar to non-Venetians that Arthur Wing Pinero did not have to specify their details when he set an act in one.30 The internal arrangement of no. 1464 was so intriguing that Reynolds jotted down every twist and turn he was required to take as he ventured from his room back to the front door. Dark corners may be imagined, for electricity was not available in Venice until 1905. All Reynolds’s meals were of necessity taken elsewhere, including at L’antica Panada in Calle degli Specchieri. Baedeker warned him that this establishment was ‘often crowded in the evening’, but such may have been its attraction, for he had now been in Italy more than a week and registered no sign of socializing with anyone other than Mr. Metzler, whose company can be no more than inferred.31 Venice was home to a well-structured British community, led by the redoubtable Lady Layard, whose salons at the museum-like Ca’ Cappello were on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the historian Horatio Brown, who was similarly hospitable on Monday evenings at his 27 Ibid., 336. 28 Reynolds, Travel diary, fol. 51 r. 29 Ibid., fol. 55v; Baedeker, Northern Italy, 243. 30 Pinero, 185. 31 Baedeker, Northern Italy, 243.

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house on the Zattere. Edwin Reynolds did not intrude into their rarefied world, let alone into that of a Jamesian novel, such as that year’s offering, The Wings of the Dove.32 Rather, his reference to ‘La Padana’ is followed by ‘(Bunce, artist)’. Instead of being a recommendation by the Birmingham painters Kate and Myra Bunce, who certainly belonged to his cultural circle back home, this is more likely to refer to an encounter with the American William Gedney Bunce (1840-1916), who painted numerous Venetian scenes and was something of an institution in the city by 1902. The omission of Ravenna meant that Reynolds arrived in Venice about twelve hours earlier than originally planned. His survey of the city’s architecture began at S. Marco during the afternoon of Saturday 5 April, the day that had started in Ferrara. The basilica struck him as ‘somewhat smaller in scale than was anticipated’, but this he attributed to ‘so much large work at Rome and Florence’.33 Many of Reynolds’s Venetian notes are in an undated addendum to the diary, though it may be supposed that it was also on the Saturday afternoon that he studied the exterior of the Palazzo Ducale, where the tracery compensated for the ‘weak and cardboard-like’ appearance of the upper portions.34 Sansovino’s ‘overrated’ Biblioteca Marciana made an unworthy neighbour: ‘The fine arcades of the Doge’s Palace are too near for it to compare at all well’.35 Although he went on to have responsibility for numerous historic buildings, at this stage of his career he was more interested in proportions and materials, and ventured no comments on controversial nineteenth-century restorations. Another controversy erupted only a matter of weeks later, after the campanile collapsed on 14 July. Reynolds may have been one the last architects to study the original structure, but he had little to say about it beyond the bland comment that it ‘seems to be characteristic of the district’.36 Further undated notes relate to palazzi along the Grand Canal. As one might expect, the older and more ‘dilapidated’ ones tended to create a more positive impression than their later, larger neighbours.37 His own Baroque neighbour, the church of S. Moisè, was even further from his tastes and merited no comment whatsoever. The record of Reynolds’s second Sunday in Italy suggests no inclination to meet his fellow Anglicans at St. George’s in Campo S. Vio, for his morning 32 Those who wish to eavesdrop should consult Pemble, Venice Rediscovered and ‘The Resident Strangers’. 33 Reynolds, Travel diary, fol. 56r. 34 Ibid., fol. 96r. 35 Ibid., fol. 97r. 36 Ibid., fol. 55 v. 37 Ibid., fol. 98r.

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Figure 3 Plan, section, and notes made by Edwin F. Reynolds at S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, on Monday 7 April 1902

was devoted to the study of churches on the opposite side of the Grand Canal: S. Salvatore, S. Fantin, S. Maria dei Miracoli, SS. Giovanni e Paolo (with the Scuola di S. Marco), S. Stefano, and S. Maria Formosa. Among these, S. Stefano was noted as having a ‘bad exterior but interesting roof’, and S. Salvatore would have appeared somewhat cold and bare had it not been for the scarlet Easter hangings.38 During the afternoon he visited S. Maria della Salute, where he made two sides of notes, traced a plan, and drew the building in section, but was not so distracted as to miss the brickwork of the nearby ex-abbazia of S. Gregorio. This first full day in Venice was completed with a church crawl that took in S. Zaccaria, the Pietà, S. Giorgio dei Grechi (which Reynolds compared to the London church of St. Mildred, Bread Street), and S. Lorenzo. In the course of the day he paid 60 centimes for ‘ferries’, which was Baedeker’s term for traghetti. 30 centimes took him to the Salute and back, which leaves the other journeys as a matter of speculation. On Monday Reynolds made notes on a modest total for four buildings: the Frari and neighbouring Scuola di S. Rocco before lunch, S. Giorgio Maggiore 38 Ibid., fol. 61 r.

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and the Redentore afterwards. In the light of his usual work rate there was certainly time for more, but whether he visited the Gesuiti and Murano – as suggested at the top left of Figure 3 – cannot be verified by any architectural notes, though 50 centimes were spent on ‘ferries’ and Fr.1.30 on a gondola. If there was any question of Reynolds’s pace slackening – perhaps over dinner or coffee with Mr. Bunce – then he endeavoured to compensate by spending more on photographs during the Venetian phase of his tour than he did in any other city. On Tuesday morning he made a return visit to S. Marco en route to the Pietà, paid Fr.10.10 to his landlady, and took a gondola to the station in time to catch the 8:45am departure for Padua. Most of his Venetian objectives had been realized, though Torcello had presumably proved to be too ambitious. During five hours in Padua he spent more money on photographs than on refreshments and visited three churches: the Carmini, S. Giustina, which he recorded in one of his most detailed drawings, and S. Antonio. By 4:16pm he was in Verona. Here architecture from the twelfth century to the Renaissance had inspired a string of Ruskinian superlatives, and Reynolds responded accordingly, both in his choice of churches to study and in his reactions to them.39 By the end of the day he had seen the Duomo, S. Anastasia, and possibly S. Fermo Maggiore, which he drew from memory the following day. In two sides of general notes he contrasted Veronese building materials with those employed at Padua and the ‘stiffer’ decorative foliage with the more naturalistic forms found in Venice.40 These musings may have accompanied his dinner at the second-class but ‘agreeably situated’ Albergo S. Lorenzo, suggesting that he was alone with his thoughts once more. 41 Ruskin had lamented that ‘too many people give too little time to Verona’, and Reynolds duly fell into that category, Wednesday morning having to suffice for the Palazzo Canossa, the Castel Vecchio, and battlemented bridge over the Adige, which he considered to be a group of unqualified magnificence, S. Zeno (‘splendid exterior and interior’), Porta Palio, and Porta Nuova. 42 Was it any consolation that Reynolds spent more than twice as much on photographs in Verona than he had in Padua? Architectural inspections did not resume until Thursday morning, by which time Reynolds had travelled to Milan, secured accommodation at the Hôtel Biscione & Bellevue, where Forster and his mother had failed to 39 Ruskin, A Joy for Ever, 86-87. 40 Reynolds, Travel diary, fol. 77r. 41 Baedeker, Northern Italy, 207. 42 Correspondence of John Ruskin, 37; Reynolds, Travel diary, fol. 79r.

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find rooms a few months earlier, and possibly followed up an aide-mémoire by calling on Mr. Metzler at his hotel, the Grande Continentale. 43 Mantua would have involved a Ravenna-like detour so was abandoned, though it may be noted that Reynolds later acquired Julia Cartwright’s biography of Isabella d’Este, which was being written in the spring of 1902. He did not possess Cartwright’s earlier life of Isabella’s sister, Beatrice, Duchess of Milan. Somewhat surprisingly, he began his sketches and notes at S. Satiro, followed by an unspecified church in Via Torino (S. Giorgio), and S. Maria delle Grazie, the interior of which he considered ‘a good example of what can be accomplished with well-managed lighting’, but surely too ‘wooden’ to be by Bramante. 44 Thursday afternoon was devoted to S. Ambrogio, which created an altogether positive impression, as it had on Forster, and the ‘confusing’ S. Lorenzo, a late Renaissance work that ‘looks practically new’.45 Returning to the hotel in Piazza Fontana, he had a second opportunity to study the Duomo and only then recorded his thoughts on it: ‘after the first astonishment has worn away, the excessive workmanship becomes in itself wearying and monotonous and the effort to produce something merely wonderful obtrudes too obviously’. 46 On the Friday he visited two more churches, S. Fedele and S. Alessandro, before turning to secular buildings, including the Palazzo Marino and Ospedale Maggiore. Unlike most visitors, he was interested in the Brera’s exterior, including the coupled Doric columns in the cortile, though the Fr.4 spent on ‘photos & cards’ could have represented an intention to defer appreciation of the building’s contents. Again Reynolds concluded his lightning tour with some general impressions, one of which was that the Gothic work was much restored and lacked the fresh appearance he had found in Verona. Considering his own family’s rising fortunes, there is a certain irony in his conclusion that ‘Milan suffers – architecturally speaking – from its commercial prosperity and continuous growth, the proportion of old work not being large, and what there is having the usual commonplace surroundings of a modern city’. 47 Perhaps Reynolds was already in Como when he recorded those comments, for the night of Friday 11 April was spent at there, at the Hôtel-Pension Belle-Vue. There had been no excursion to Pavia. Architecturally, Como 43 On 22 October 1901 Forster assured E.J. Dent that he ‘yearn[ed] for the attractive looking Biscione, which couldn’t take us in’; Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, 46-47. 44 Reynolds, Travel diary, fols. 82v, 90r. 45 Ibid., fol. 85r. 46 Ibid., fol. 83r. 47 Ibid., fol. 90r.

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was something of an anticlimax, but on Saturday morning he followed his now-familiar pattern by visiting the cathedral and a couple of churches. Thereafter, his route back home can be traced by means of the Fr.2 he spent on dinner in Lucerne and his Fr.1 cab fare in Paris. He was in London by late afternoon on Sunday 13 April. By 1902 there was nothing particularly remarkable about members of the British middle class visiting Italy, but the twenty-six-year-old Edwin Reynolds evidently felt that his architectural education would not be complete without a personal study of buildings that were perfectly familiar from words and images, even if he allowed himself no more than a fortnight in which to undertake the process. He arrived in Italy with clearly defined, essentially Ruskinian, architectural priorities, and his brief tour merely confirmed his existing opinions in matters of scale, style, function, and materials. In all buildings he looked for clarity, balance, and harmony with their settings, and was repelled by confusion or excessive decoration, which he generally labelled as ‘late Renaissance’. Wherever he went, his greatest enthusiasm was reserved for bricks, their sizes, uses, and regional variations. Italy was a three-dimensional pattern book, full of details that might prove useful at some point in his future career. If architectural details were of use to him, then the practicalities and minutiae of his travel diary may be of greater interest to us. Exclusive of rail fares, Reynolds’s nineteen-day tour cost Fr.282.60 or £11 15s. 6d., of which lodgings and living expenses accounted for £8 19s. 6d., and the purchase of 291 photographs, including some of cities he did not manage to visit, came to £2 16s. Expenses included tips to porters and sacristans at the rates advised by Baedeker, together with Fr.6.05 for cigarettes, tobacco, and matches. He paid only one entrance fee, of Fr.1, at S. Lorenzo in Florence, presumably for admission to the sacristies and the Cappella dei Principi. Much of the pocket-book’s value lies in such details, for he was not in Italy long enough to graduate from the status of tourist to that of traveller. Indeed, when Michael Mallett looked at the volume, he found the list of expenses to be the greatest source of interest and focused on the details of Reynolds’s expenditure in Venice. With an attention to petty cash that matched his eye for architectural detail, Reynolds noted that he paid 20 centimes to ‘hookers’, that is gransieri, men wielding large hooks, whose job was to hold gondolas still while passengers alighted. Michael permitted himself a rare ungentlemanly lapse: ‘Remarkably cheap’.

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Bibliography Baedeker, Karl, Italy, Handbook for Travellers, First Part: Northern Italy, 12th ed. (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1899). —, Italy, Handbook for Travellers, Second part: Central Italy and Rome, 13th ed. (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1900). Champ, Judith, The English Pilgrimage to Rome: A Dwelling for the Soul (Leominster: Gracewing, 2000). Forster, Edward M., Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, vol. 1, ed. by Mary Lago and Philip N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983). Foster, Andy, Birmingham (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). Granelli, Remo, ‘All the World and Time Enough’, in Hammer and Hand: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Birmingham ed. by Alan Crawford (Birmingham: Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 1984), 41-60. Lamberini, Daniela, ‘Residenti anglo-americani e genius loci: ricostruzioni e restauri delle dimore fiorentine’, in Gli anglo-americani a Firenze: idea e costruzione del Rinascimento, ed. by Marcello Fantoni (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2000), 125-42. Obituary of Edwin F. Reynolds, RIBA Journal, 56 (September 1949), 507-08. Pemble, John, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). —, ‘The Resident Strangers of Nineteenth-Century Venice’, in Ralph A. Griffiths and John E. Law, eds., Rawdon Brown and the Anglo-Venetian Relationship (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005), 43-54. —, Venice Rediscovered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Pinero, Arthur Wing, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (London: William Heineman, 1895). Reynolds, Edwin F., ‘Design for a Country Church on a Hill’, The Builder, 76 (18 February 1899), 170 and illustration. —, ‘Design for a Country House’, Academy Architecture and Architectural Review, 15 (1899), 72. —, ‘Design for a Town Church’, The Builder, 84 (14 February 1903), 168-69 and illustrations. —, ‘Imperial Mosques of Constantinople’, Architectural Review, 25 (1909), 72-81, 219-32; 26 (1909), 20-32. —, Travel diary, 1902, private collection. Rodd, James Rennell, Social and Diplomatic Memories, 1902-1919 (London: Edward Arnold, 1925). Roeck, Bernd, Florence 1900: The Quest for Arcadia, trans. by Stewart Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). Ruskin, John, A Joy for Ever, 2nd ed. (Orpington: George Allen, 1889).

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[Ruskin and Norton] The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, ed. by John L. Bradley and Ian Ousby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Smith, Graham, ‘Florence, Photography and the Victorians’, in John E. Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen, Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 7-32. Tyler, Eric C., Reynolds in Retrospect: A Complete History of Reynolds Tube Co. Ltd (Birmingham: Reynolds Tube Co., 1948), 8. Witchell, Mark E.N. and Christopher R. Hudleston, An Account of the Principal Branches of the Family of Clutterbuck from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Time(Gloucester: John Bellows, 1924).

About the Author Stella Fletcher, Associate Fellow of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick



Bibliography of Michael Edward Mallett (1932-2008)1 Humfrey Butters and Suzanne B. Butters

Books The Florentine Galleys in the Fifteenth Century, with the Diary of Luca di Maso degli Albizzi, Captain of the Galleys, 1429-1430 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty (London: Bodley Head, 1969). Venice and its Condottieri, 1404-54 (London: Faber, 1973). Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (London: Bodley Head, 1974). The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice, c.1400-1617, co-authored with J.R. Hale (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Lorenzo de’ Medici Lettere, 5: (1480-1481) (Florence: Giunti Barbéra, 1989). Lorenzo de’ Medici Lettere, 6: (1481-1482) (Florence: Giunti Barbéra, 1990). War, Culture and Society in Renaissance Venice: Essays in Honour of John Hale, coedited with David S. Chambers and Cecil H. Clough (London: Hambledon, 1993). Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics, co-edited with Nicholas Mann (London: Warburg Institute, 1996). Lorenzo de’ Medici Lettere, 7: (1482-1484) (Florence: Giunti Barbéra, 1998). The Emergence of Permanent Diplomacy in Renaissance Italy, University of Leicester, Centre for the Study of Diplomacy, Discussion Paper no. 56 (Leicester: University of Leicester, 1999). Condottieri and Captains in Renaissance Italy, co-edited with D.J.B. Trim (Leiden: Brill, 2003). The Italian Wars, 1494-1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe, co-edited with Christine Shaw (Harlow, UK, and New York: Pearson, 2012).

1 Works listed in chronological order. For Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vols.1- (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana), see DBI.

Butters, Humfrey and Gabriele Neher (eds), Warfare and Politics: Cities and Government in Renaissance Tuscany and Venice. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789089647474_hsbu

382 

Humfrey But ters and Suzanne B. But ters

Contributions to multi-authored books ‘Pisa and Florence in the Fifteenth Century: Aspects of the Period of the First Florentine Domination’, in Florentine Studies, ed. by Nicolai Rubinstein (London: Faber, 1968). ‘Callisto III, papa’, in DBI, 16 (1973), 769-74. ‘Venice and its Condottieri, 1404-1454’, in Renaissance Venice, ed. by J.R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 121-45, 00-00. ‘Cantelli, Ludovico’, in DBI, 18 (1975), 00-00, 253-54. ‘Canigiani, Piero’, in DBI, 18 (1975), 94-95. ‘Canigiani, Gherardo [di Iacopo]’, in DBI, 18 (1975), 90-91. ‘Canigiani, Giovanni’, in DBI, 18 (1975), 93-94. ‘Canigiani, Gherardo [di Bernardo]’, in DBI, 18 (1975), 91-92. ‘Canigiani, Simone’, in DBI, 18 (1975), 95-96. ‘Capponi, Gino [di Neri di Gino]’, in DBI, 19 (1976), 29-31. ‘Capponi, Gino [di Neri di Recco]’, in DBI, 19 (1976), 26-29. ‘Capponi, Giovanni’, in DBI, 19 (1976), 54-55. ‘Capponi, Niccolò [di Giovanni]’, in DBI, 19 (1976), 78-79. ‘Capponi, Niccolò [di Piero]’, in DBI, 19 (1976), 79-83. ‘Capponi, Piero, in DBI, 19 (1976), 88-92. ‘Capponi, Recco’, in DBI, 19 (1976), 96-97. ‘Capponi, Neri’, in DBI, 19 (1976), 70-75. ‘Capponi, Zanobi’, in DBI, 19 (1976), 100-01. ‘Some Notes on a Fifteenth-Century Condottiere and his Library, Count Antonio Marsciano’, in Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. by Cecil H. Clough (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1976), 202-15. ‘Preparations for War in Florence and Venice in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century’, in Florence and Venice. Comparisons and Relations, ed. by Sergio Bertelli, Nicolai Rubinstein, and Craig Hugh Smyth, 2 vols. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979), 1:149-64. ‘L’Esercito Veneziano in Terraferma nel Quattrocento’, Armi e Cultura nel Bresciano 1420-1870. Supplemento ai Commentari dell’Ateneo di Brescia (1981) (Brescia: Tipo-Lito Fratelli Geroldi, 1981), 181-96. ‘Reflections on Florence and Venice on the Eve of the War on Ferrara’, in Renaissance Studies in Honour of Craig Hugh Smyth, ed. by Andrew Morrogh, Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi, Piero Morselli, and Eve Borsook, 2 vols. (Florence: Giunti Barbéra, 1985), 1:147-53. ‘Il condottiero’, in L’uomo del rinascimento, ed. by Eugenio Garin, Vittorio Giacopini, M. Granata, and C. Ioviero (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1988), 45-69.

Bibliogr aphy of Michael Edward Malle t t (1932-2008)

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‘The Florentine Otto di Pratica and the Beginning of the War of Ferrara’, in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, ed. by Peter Denley and Caroline Elam (London: Westfield College, University of London Committee for Medieval Studies, 1988), 3-12. ‘The Theory and Practice of Warfare in Machiavelli’s Republic’, in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. by Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 173-80. ‘Lorenzo de’ Medici and the War of Ferrara’, in Lorenzo de’ Medici: New Perspectives, ed. Bernard Toscani (Pieterlen and Bern: Peter Lang, 1993), 249-62. ‘Venice and the War of Ferrara, 1482-84’, in War, Culture and Society in Renaissance Venice: Essays in Honour of John Hale, ed. by David S. Chambers, Cecil H. Clough and Michael E. Mallett (London: Hambledon, 1993), 57-72. ‘The Art of War’, in Handbook of European History, 1400-1600: Late Middles Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, I, Structures and Assertions, ed. by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 535-62. ‘Lorenzo and Venice’, in Lorenzo il Magnifico e suo mondo, ed. by Giancarlo Garfagnini (Florence: Olschki, 1994), 109-21. ‘Siegecraft in Late Fifteenth-Century Italy’, The Medieval City under Siege, ed. by Ivy A. Corfis and Michael Wolfe (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995), 245-55. ‘Horse-Racing and Politics in Lorenzo’s Florence’, in Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics, ed. by Michael Mallett and Nicholas Mann (London: Warburg Institute, 1996), 253-62. ‘Personalities and Pressures: Italian Involvement in the French Invasion of 1494’, in The French Descent into Renaissance Italy, 1494-95: Antecedents and Effects, ed. by David Abulafia (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), 151-64. ‘La conquista della Terraferma’, in Storia di Venezia: dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, vol. 4: Il Rinascimento, ed. by Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1996), 181-244. ‘Venezia e la politica italiana: 1454-1530’, in Storia di Venezia: dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, 4: Il Rinascimento, ed. Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1996), 245-310. ‘Politics and Society’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Italy, ed. by George Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 57-85. ‘The Northern Italian States’, The New Cambridge Medieval History, 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 547-57. ‘Mercenaries’, in Medieval Warfare: A History, ed. Maurice Keen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 209-29. ‘Additional Bibliography’, in John Rigby Hale, Renaissance Europe 1480-1520 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 262-67.

384 

Humfrey But ters and Suzanne B. But ters

‘Venetian Elites in the Crises of the Early Sixteenth Century’, in The World of Savonarola. Italian Élites and Perceptions of Crisis, ed. by Stella Fletcher and Christine Shaw (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 151-61. ‘Condottieri and Captains in Renaissance Italy’, in The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military Professionalism, ed. by D.J.B. Trim (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 67-88. ‘I condottieri nelle guerre d’Italia’, in Condottieri e uomini d’arme nell’Italia del Rinascimento, ed. by Mario Del Treppo (Naples: Ligouri, 2002), 347-60. ‘Venezia, i Turchi e il Papato dopo la pace di Lodi’, in Il sogno di Pio II e il viaggio da Roma a Mantova, ed. by Arturo Calzona, Francesco Paolo Fiore, Alberto Tenenti, and Cesare Vasoli (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 237-46. ‘Federico da Montefeltro: soldato, capitano e principe’, in Francesco di Giorgio alla corte di Federico da Montefeltro, ed. by Francesco Paolo Fiore, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 2004), 1:3-13. ‘Nicolai Rubinstein and the Lorenzo Letters’, in Nicolai Rubinstein: In Memoriam, ed. by F.W. Kent (Florence: Olschki, 2005), 25-34. ‘Siena e le guerra d’Italia’, in L’ultimo secolo della Reppublica di Siena. Arti, cultura e società, ed. by Mario Ascheri and Fabrizio Nevola (Siena: Accademia Senese degli Intronati, 2008), 95-106.

Articles ‘Anglo-Florentine Commercial Relations 1465-1491’, The Economic History Review, 15.2 (1962), 250-65. ‘The Sea Consuls of Florence in the Fifteenth Century’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 27 (1959), 156-69. ‘Castel Porciano. An Abandoned Medieval Village of the Roman Campagna’, coauthor David Whitehouse, Papers of the British School at Rome, 35 (1967), 113-46. ‘Diplomacy and War in Later Fifteenth-Century Italy’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 67 (1981), 267-88. ‘Ambassadors and their Audiences in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Studies, 8.3 (1994), 229-43. ‘L’arte e la carriera militare di Bartolomeo Colleoni’, Bergomum, 95 (2000), 37-50.

Bibliogr aphy of Michael Edward Malle t t (1932-2008)

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Videos American Independence, 1776, Warwick History Videos (Coventry: University of Warwick, 1990). The Struggle for the Mediterranean in the Sixteenth Century, co-author Gordon Randall (Falls Church, VA: Landmark Media Inc., 1995).

About the Authors Humfrey Butters, Emeritus Reader in History, University of Warwick Suzanne B. Butters, Emerita Professor in Art History, University of Manchester

Index of Names1 Adam, Robert 361 Adriani, Giovanni Battista 297, 304, 317-8 Agostini, Niccolò degli 133 Albany, duke of see Stewart Alberti, Donato 191 Albret, Jeanne d’ 175 Alessandro, duke of Florence see Medici Alexander VI, pope 144-5 Alexander of Roes 30 Alviano, Bartolomeo d’ 117-8 Amalfi, duke of see Piccolomini Álvarez de Toledo, Eleonora, duchess of Florence 22, 304-6, 308, 322-5, 327, 341 Pedro, viceroy of Naples 175, 303, 308, 324n290, 341 Ammannati, Bartolomeo 172n30, 329, 335 Ammirato, Scipione 338 Ammoniti, Lapo 191 Andrea da Firenze 193 Angiollelo, Giovan Maria 66-7 Anglo, Sydney 144 Anne of Cleves 163 Antonio di Castelnovo 235 Arborio, Mercurino, marchese di Gattinara 273-5, 279 Aretino, Pietro 166n15 Aringhieri, Alberto 135 Ash, Graham Baron 365 Augustus, Roman emperor 330-1 Avalos, Alfonso d’, marquis of Pescara and of Vasto 286 Avity, Pierre d’ 30 Avogadro, Luigi 95, 234 Bacci, Maddalena 178 Nicolosa 178 Baglione, Malatesta 317-21 Baldini, Baccio 304 Baldwin II, Latin emperor 295, 341 Ballotta, Ercole 165, 178 Bandinelli, Baccio 330 Barbari, Jacopo de’ 201, 204, 251 Barbarigo, Andrea 230n8 Barbarossa, Hayreddin 175n42 Baron, Hans 27, 34-5, 52 Bartoli, Cosimo 314, 316 Becker, Marvin 38 Belloc, Hilaire 367 Belluzzi, Giovanni Battista 298, 313-4, 317-9 Bentley, John Francis 363 Berengo, Marino 39

Bernardini, Achille 165 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 368 Bertelli, Sergio 46 Bidlake, William Henry 363 Biondo, Flavio 29 Lapo 191 Biringucci, Vannoccio 317 Black, Anthony 35 Black, Jane 40 Boccaccio, Giovanni 29, 254 Boccanegra, Guglielmo 195 Bodin, Jean 35-6 Bon, Bartolomeo 208, 212 Bordone, Benedetto 251 Borghini, Vincenzo 297, 331-4 Boucher, Jean 46 Botero, Giovanni 36 Braccio da Montone 152, 155 Bramante, Donato 369 Brandi, Karl 162 Bregno, Lorenzo 75 Brown, Alison 189 Brown, Horatio 373 Brown, Patricia Fortini 20, 228-9 Bruni, Leonardo 15, 29, 34, 40, 295 Buc, Jean 50-1 Budé, Guillaume 35 Bugni, Chiara 63-4, 73, 75 Bunce, Kate 374 Myra 374 Bunce, William Gedney 374, 376 Buondelmonti, Zanobi 148 Buonsignori, Stefano 298, 303, 314-5, 336 Buonvisi, Martino 283 Niccolò 272 Burckhardt, Jacob 16, 27, 32, 39, 43, 50-1 Burke, Edmund 33 Burke, Peter 257 Bussone, Francesco, count of Carmagnola 234 Cadbury, Paul 364 Caesar, Julius 152 Caine, Hall 368 Calendario, Filippo 217n32 Cardona, Ramón de, viceroy of Naples 145 Carmagnola see Bussone Carpaccio, Vittore 258 Casola, Pietro 230-1 Caspary, Gerard 50 Castiglione, Baldassare 47, 157 Cavallini, Pietro 193

1 Many thanks to Stella Fletcher for her invaluable help in compiling this Index. I am very grateful (GN).

388  Cellini, Benvenuto 308 Cerchi, Umiliana dei 190n11 Ceriana, Matteo 74 Cerretani, Bartolomeo 146 Cessi, Roberto 243 Chabod, Federico 27, 38, 43 Charlemagne, emperor 29, 294 Châlon, René de, prince of Orange 167, 173 Charles II, duke of Guelders 162 Charles V, holy Roman emperor 18, 21, 42-3, 161-3, 165-7, 169-71, 173-7, 265-91, 294, 297n27, 306-7, 313, 327, 340, 342 Charles VIII, king of France 82, 144, 268 Charles of Anjou, duke of Calabria 296, 300 Chevalier Bayard see Terrail Chittolini, Giorgio 36-9, 46, 237 ‘Chiappino’ see Vitelli Cimabue 29 Cima da Conegliano 134-5 Cini, Giovanbattista 328-9, 332, 334, 341 Cippico, Coriolano 71 Clement VII, pope 285, 287, 289, 311; see also Medici Clutterbuck, Gertrude Mabel 364 Cohn, Samuel 51 Cola di Rienzo 196-7 Colonna, Camillo 164-5, 167, 170, 173, 175 Fabrizio 18, 144-60 Marcantonio 146n7 Muzio 146n7 Prospero 146, 148, 278, 280 Stefano 166, 175, 318 Compagni, Dino 189 Concina, Ennio 210 Contarini, Marin 206, 210-1, 219-22 Coppi, Enrico 321 Cordo, Bartolomeo 128-32 Corio, Bernardino 30 Corfino, Marcantonio 21, 255, 258 Cornaro (Corner), Caterina, queen of Cyprus 20, 227, 231-5 Giorgio see Corner Corner (Cornaro), Alvise 241-2, 245-7 Zorzi (Giorgio) 20, 205, 210, 231, 233-5 Cosimo I, duke of Florence see Medici Cozzi, Gaetano 39 Cremona 44, 83 Cromwell, Thomas 44 Crouzet-Pavan, Elisabeth 250 Da Canal, Maria 74 Nicolò 63, 65, 67, 69-71, 74 Dante (Alighieri) 19, 45, 194-5 Dardani, Alvise 87-9, 95, 97 Davanzati, Bernardo 295, 306 Davis, Charles 34 Dean, Trevor 46 Dei, Benedetto 327 Dell’Altissimo, Cristofano 338

Warfare and Politics

Della Robbia, Andrea 372 Della Rovere, Francesco Maria 148 Del Vasto, marchese see Avalos Dolfin, Zuam 95 Domenichi, Lodovico 172n30 Doria, Andrea 286 Antonio 170 Durkheim, Émile 48 Dyson, Kenneth 28, 36 Eleonora, duchess of Florence see Álvarez Elias, Norbert 27, 45-6 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 362 Elliott, John 43 Erizzo, Anna 63 Paolo 63, 65 Este, Alfonso I d’, duke of Ferrara 289 Beatrice d’ 233, 377 Ercole II d’, duke of Ferrara 176 Francesco d’ 176 Isabella d’ 233, 377 Evans-Pritchard, Edward 49 Falletti, Girolamo 176 Fantoni, Marcello 51 Farnese, Ottavio, duke of Camerino 170 Pier Luigi, duke of Parma 307 Fazio da Pisa 165, 173 Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino 148 Fei, Alessandro, ‘del Barbiere’ 326, 333 Ferdinand, archduke of Austria 175n41, 282 Ferdinand I, king of Naples 144 Ferdinand II, king of Aragon and Naples 1456, 148, 157 Fermiano, Caruso 165 Fernández de Córdoba, Gonzalo 145 Luis, duke of Sessa 278-84 Ferramola, Floriano 227, 237-8 Ferrini, Luca 340 Finley, Moses 49 Foix, Gaston de, duke of Nemours 95 Odet de, vicomte de Lautrec 285 Folin, Marco 44 Formaleoni, Vincenzo Antonio 64 Forster, Edward Morgan 366, 376-7 Foscari, Francesco, doge of Venice 202, 206, 208-12, 219-21, 232 Fox, Levi 365 Fracastoro, Girolamo 246 Francis I, king of France 42, 148, 176-7, 267, 272-3, 277, 284-5, 288, 290 Freud, Sigmund 33 Fulceri da Calboli 194 Gabrielli, Cante dei 191, 194n29 Gaius Fabricius Luscinus (“Fabrizio”) 150 Galasso da Carpi 93 Gallo d’Arezzo 172

389

Index of Names

Galluzzi, Riguccio 305 Gambara, Caterina 232 Giovanni Francesco 235 Gattinara, marchese di see Arborio Gelzer, Matthias 44 Gherardino da Gambara 195n29 Ghiaggiolo, count of see Malatesta Ghirlandaio, Domenico 237 Giacomo della Marca 68 Giannotti, Donato 317 Gibbon, Edward 27, 31 Gigli, Silvestro, bishop of Worcester 271 Gilioli, Girolamo 337 Giocondo, Fra 246n21 Giotto (di Bondone) 29 Giovanni da Pescia 165, 174, 178 Giovio, Paolo 338 Girolami, Remigio de’ 34 Gore, Charles, bishop of Birmingham 364 Grimani, Alvise 256n69 Giustinian, Giustiniano 74 Antonio 74 Gombrich, Ernst Hans 27, 33, 39 Gonzaga, Francesco, marquis of Mantua 93, 232, 234 Gonzalo de Córdoba see Fernández Goody, Jack 49-50 Goy, Richard 249 Granvelle, Nicolas Perrenot de 288, 307 Grassis, Leonardo di 94 Greenblatt, Stephen 50 Gritti, Andrea, doge of Venice 88-90, 94-5, 97 Grubb, James 39, 52 Guarini, Fasano 40 Guenée, Bernard 35 Guicciardini, Francesco 35, 83, 288, 302, 315 Guido, duke of Bari 296 Gullino, Giuseppe 210-1 Hadrian VI, pope 280, 282 Hale, John Rigby 97, 229, 232, 338, 362 Hankins, James 34 Harrington, James 30 Hawkwood, John 68 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 27, 33 Henry III, king of France 46 Henry VII, king of England 42 Henry VIII, king of England 163, 282 Hollar, Wenceslaus 167-9, 171 Howell, James 30 Hurlburt, Holly 235 Innocent VIII, pope 144 James, Henry 50 Joanna II, queen of Naples 152 Johanna of Austria 330 Jones, Inigo 361 Jones, Philip 27, 36-9, 41

Judde de Larivière, Claire 121 Julius II, pope 113-15, 124n58, 125, 128, 145-6 Jung, Carl 33 Keats, John 378 Kent, Dale 44 Kent, Francis William 44 Knapton, Michael 39-41, 252n52 Knecht, Robert 42 Koenigsberger, Helmut 43 Konstantinidou, Katerina 257 Kristeller, Paul Oskar 34 Lafréry, Antoine 362 Lando, Pietro, doge of Venice 254 Landor, Walter Savage 362 Lane, Frederic 67 Lannoy, Charles de, viceroy of Naples 277, 279, 282 Latini, Brunetto 34 Lautrec, vicomte de see Foix Laven, Peter 246, 253 Law, John 39-40 Layard, Mary Enid 373 Lazzarini, Isabella 41 Leo X, pope 147-8, 273-5, 280, 311-2; see also Medici Leo XIII, pope 369 Leoni, Giacomo 361 Lethaby, William Richard 363 Lion, Girolamo 232 Loaysa, García de, cardinal 288-9 Lodovico da Montealto 283 Lombardo, Pietro 71 Tullio 63, 75 Loredan, Leonardo, doge of Venice 113-4, 127n66, 135 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio 195 Lorenzi, Stoldo 329 Los Cobos, Francisco de 288 Lottini, Gianfrancesco 302 Louis XII, king of France 120, 128, 268, 273 Louis XIV, king of France 45 Louis de Flandre, seigneur de Praët 288 Lubkin, Gregory 46 Lucy, George 362 Luigi da Porto 81 Lutyens, Edwin 361 McFarlane, Kenneth Bruce 44 Machiavelli, Niccolò 18, 28, 30, 35-6, 89, 120, 144-60, 249n36, 305, 315, 317, 327, 338 Machietti, Girolamo 333 Maderno, Carlo 368 Magi (Maggi), Girolamo 166, 172, 176 Major, Russell 42 Malatesta, Giacomo 165n10 Malatesta di Sogliano, count of Ghiaggiolo 165

390  Mallett, Michael Edward 15, 80, 97, 144, 229, 232, 234, 361-2, 378, 381 Mannori, Luca 40 Mannucci, Aldo 294, 296, 299, 341-2 Manuel, Juan 271, 276-8, 281 Manutius, Aldus 294 Marcello, Margherita 211 Marcellus, Marcus Claudius 152 Marco da Lezze 70 Margaret of Austria 297n27, 301 Margaret of Parma 170n23 Mariani, Lorenzo Maria 341-2 Marignano, marquis of see Medici Marini, Andrea 243-5, 247, 249 Marsilius of Padua 34 Martinengo, Lodovico 234 Marx, Karl 28, 39, 48 Mary of Hungary 173n32 Maximilian I, holy Roman emperor 111, 119, 124, 127, 129, 267-8, 273-5 Maximilian II, holy Roman emperor 339n409 Marzilla, Juan Abril de 286-7 Medici, Alessandro de’, duke of Florence 162, 189, 269, 285, 287, 297, 301-4, 309, 312-3, 341 Caterina de’, queen of France 290, 340 Cosimo de’ (d. 1464) 212 Cosimo I de’, duke of Florence and grand duke of Tuscany 19, 22, 162-3, 165-7, 172, 173n35, 175-6, 178, 293-342 Cosimo de’, ‘duke of Athens’ 295, 299 Eleonora de’ see Álvarez Ferdinando I de’, cardinal, grand duke of Tuscany 337, 339-41 Francesco I de’, grand duke of Tuscany 294, 315, 328, 333, 340 Francesco de’, of Athens 294, 295n7, 299 Giovanni de’, cardinal 145-7; see also Leo Giovanni de’ (d. 1526) 165n9 Medici, Giovanni Giacomo, marquis of Marignano 170 Giuliano de’ duke of Nemours 341 Giulio de’, cardinal 147-8; see also Clement Ippolito de’, cardinal 288 Lorenzino de’ (d. 1548) 309 Lorenzo de’ (d. 1492) 145, 165n8, 270n13 Lorenzo de’, duke of Urbino (d. 1519) 148-9, 341 Lucrezia de’ 147 Paolo de’, of Athens 294, 295n7 Piero de’ (d. 1503) 146, 296 Pietro de’, ‘duke of Athens’ 341 Mehmed II, Ottoman sultan 63, 65, 68 Mellini, Domenico 328, 332 Merlini, Giambattista 126-7 Martino 126-7 Mérode, Renaud de 169, 171 Meserve, Margaret 67 Mesue, Johannes, the Younger 243 ‘Metzler’ 370, 373, 377

Warfare and Politics

Michelangelo (Buonarroti) 313-4, 317, 330 Michelet, Jules 32 Milton, John 35 Mini, Paolo 341 Minutoli, Gianbattista 272 Mocenigo, Francesco 232-4 Pietro 67-8, 71 Montauri, Paolo di Tommaso 191 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat) 33 Monticini, Antonio 64 Morgante da Castiglione 165 Moro, Cristoforo, doge of Venice 68, 71 Morosini, Elisabetta 232, 235 Moryson, Fynes 243 Mozzarelli, Cesare 46 Muir, Edward 48 Naldi, Dionesio 115 Namier, Lewis 44 Nardi, Jacopo 315 Nassinis, Nassino de’ 233-4 Needham, Rodney 49 Nerli, Filippo 301 Newdigate, Roger 362 Niccolini, Angelo 322 Nobili, Cesare de’ 272-6 Olivieri, Ascanio 256n69 Olmi, Giuseppe 46 Oporin, Johannes 295 Orange, prince of see Châlon Orlando, Ermanno 250-1 Orsini, Alfonsina 146 Clarice 145, 165n8 Giordano 165, 167, 172 Niccolò, count of Pitigliano 131n75, 232, 234-5 Otto of Freising 30 Ottokar, Nicola 44 Pagès, Georges 42 Palma Giovane 135 Palmer, Richard 256 Pareto, Vilfredo 28 Paruta, Paolo 91 Pasqualini, Alessandro 178 Paul II, pope 68 Paul III, pope 170n23 Pausanias 295 Pennington, Kenneth 36 Pearson, John Loughborough 365 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 29, 202 Petrella, Giancarlo 121, 135 Philip II, king of Spain 294, 341 Philip VI, king of France 299, 301 Piccolomini, Alfonso II, duke of Amalfi 289 Pietro di Carpegna 177 Pigafetta, Filippo 338 Pinero, Arthur Wing 373 Pinturucchio 135

391

Index of Names

Pio, Margharita 235 Pisano, Andrea 334 Pitti, Jacopo 297 Luca 322, 324 Pius IV, pope 295 Pius V, pope 295, 339 Pocock, John 27, 35 Politi, Giorgio 44 Post, Gaines 35 Premarin, Polissena 73 Matteo 74 Prentout, Henri 42 Priuli, Girolamo 110-1, 120-1, 124, 126-7 Publiese, Giacomo 66 Pucci, Pandolfo 331-2 Quaglioni, Diego 36 Rangone, Tommaso 214 Raverti, Matteo 219, 221 Razzi, Silvano 299, 324, 334 Reeuwijk, Erhard 251 Reynolds, Alfred John 363 Edwin Francis 23, 361-78 Harriet 363 John 363-4 Ricasoli, Giovan Battista, bishop of Cortona 167, 169, 172-5 Ricci, Giovanni, cardinal 339 Rizzi, Alberto 117 Robert of Anjou, king of Naples 300 Robertson, William 31 Robortello, Francesco 166n15 Rodd, James Rennell 367 Rolfe, Frederick William 368 Romano, Dennis 210, 232 Rossi, Lorenzo 121-3 Rubinstein, Nicolai 29, 34, 44, 270n13 Rucellai, Bernardo 149-51 Cosimo 148-53, 155-7 Ruskin, John 376 Ryan, Alan 48 Sabbadino, Cristoforo 21, 241-2, 245-9 Sacchino, Francesco Maria 115-6, 128, 135 Salimbene de Adam 192 Salviati, Giuliano, cardinal 147 Jacopo 147, 288 Sangallo, Antonio da, the Younger 369 Sanguinazo, Nicolò 85, 88 Sanseverino, Galeazzo 232, 235 Gaspare (‘Fracassa’) 232, 235 Sansovino, Francesco 242 Jacopo 205 Santi, Leone 166, 173, 178 Sanudo, Marco 233 Marin, the Elder 196 Marin, the Younger 20, 64, 66, 69, 80, 83, 85-6, 94-5, 111, 119-21, 126-8, 201-6, 227-9, 231-5, 237

Saussure, Ferdinand de 47 Savorgnan, Antonio 81 Girolamo 81, 91 Schiavo, Tommaso 65, 69 Schopenhauer, Arthur 16, 27, 33 Scipio Africanus 152 Segni, Bernardo 297 Seigel, Jerrold 34 Seriacopi, Francesco 319 Sessa, duke of see Fernández Sforza, Francesco I, duke of Milan 152, 155-6, 223 Francesco II, duke of Milan 268, 285 Galeazzo Maria, duke of Milan 46, 68 Lodovico (‘il Moro’), duke of Milan 232, 235 Muzio Attendolo 152, 155 Shakespeare, William 362, 365 Shaw, Christine 80 Sismondi, Charles Léonard de 31-2 Sixtus IV, pope 144 Skinner, Quentin 27, 34-6, 58 Sleidanus, Johannes 167n19 Soderini, Francesco, cardinal 145-6 Piero 145-7, 305 Sophianos, Nikolaos 295 Spada, Niccolò 243 Specklin, Daniel 178 Starkey, David 35 Stefani, Marchionne di Coppo 302 Stewart, John, duke of Albany 284 Stradano, Giovanni 311, 321, 328, 333 Strozzi, Filippo 176n47 Piero di Filippo 176 Street, George Edmund 369 Syme, Ronald 44 Tenenti, Alberto 46 Terrail, Pierre, seigneur de Bayard 84 Thomas, William 297 Throckmorton, John 362 Torrentino, Lorenzo 295 Totila, king of the Ostrogoths 29, 294 Trexler, Richard 48 Tribolo, Niccolò 324 Trissino, Leonardo 83 Tron, Giovanni 71 Nicolò, doge of Venice 71 Ugo da Cesena 165 Unghero, Nanni 320 Urfé, Claude d’ 309 Usnago, Orsa (Suor Orsola) 74 Pietro 74 Vaglienti, Piero 302 Varanini, Gian Maria 39-40 Varchi, Benedetto 299, 308-9, 317 Vasari, Giorgio 29, 178, 299, 311-2, 315, 317, 324-5, 330, 333-4, 338 Venier, Beatrice 64, 73 Ventura, Angelo 39, 81

392  Vesalius, Andreas 173 Villani, Filippo 15, 29 Giovanni 197, 297, 299 Matteo 308 Vinta, Francesco 295 Vitelli, Giovan Luigi (‘Chiappino’) 166, 170n23, 172, 177-8 Paolo 170n23 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 27, 31, 33 Voysey, Charles Francis Annesley 363

Warfare and Politics

Walter, count of Brienne and duke of Athens 22, 293, 296-302, 305-6, 308-10, 312-3, 327, 334, 338-9, 341-2 Weber, Max 39 Wilhelm, duke of Cleves, Jülich and Berg 19, 161-3, 169, 173-4, 176n46, 179 Women’s Voices (suppressed) passim Zorzi, Andrea 41, 44 Zorzi, Francesco 64, 74-5