Florence After the Medici

Tuscan Enlightenment, 1737-1790

Corey Tazzara, Paula Findlen, Jacob Soll, Corey Tazzara, Paula Findlen, Jacob Soll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000711707
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del Renacimiento europeo

Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone works are Eric Cochrane's Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies (1961) and his Enlightenment Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973). It is high time to revisit the Tuscan Enlightenment. This volume brings together an international group of scholars with the goal of putting to rest the idea that Florence ceased to be interesting after the Renaissance. Indeed, it is partly the explicit dialogue between Renaissance and Enlightenment that makes eighteenth-century Tuscany so interesting. This enlightened age looked to the past. It began the Herculean project of collecting, editing, and publishing many of the manuscripts that today form the bedrock of any serious study of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari, Galileo, and other Tuscan writers. This was an age of public libraries, projects of cultural restoration, and the emergence of the Uffizi as a public art gallery, complemented by a science museum in Peter Leopold's reign whose relics can still be visited in the Museo Galileo and La Specola.

Part I
The Politics of Knowledge in Enlightenment Tuscany

1
The Enlightenment at Work

Ideology, Reform, and a Blueprint for a Constitution

Renato Pasta

Since Eric Cochrane’s seminal account of Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, early modern Tuscan and Italian history have grown as rich and detailed fields of research. John Najemy’s recent volume on Florence provides a well-informed, balanced view in English on Tuscan history up to 1575.¹ Many of the relevant topics in the rise of Medici power and their subsequent rule have recently been explored, special attention being paid to politics, culture, and administration. A mildly revisionist orientation has also taken ground, providing a general evaluation of events which contrasts with the traditional narrative of the “decline” of Italy after the High Renaissance.

The new perspective sheds light on the active role of the periphery and the Estates in the domestic affairs of the Tuscan State, and it emphasizes continuity and stability rather than change in its development, as well as the marked resilience of the Medici power system in the face of military, economic, or diplomatic pressure. After the dire decades in the mid-seventeenth century, a slow demographic and agricultural recovery set in, and the grand dukes contributed to it, helping to transform the region into what it would later become by the end of the eighteenth century: a land for farming and large-scale urban ownership tied to the export trade of agricultural produce on a widening Italian and international market. Agriculture expanded, but only partially substituted for the demise of the traditional urban and textile manufacturing.

Since the 1970s, discussion of the multifaceted history of Tuscan society has reflected the debate on the origins of “the early modern state.” Research has generally endorsed a critique of the Weberian analysis of the checkered growth of the state as institutional and administrative rationalization.² Like state formation elsewhere in Europe, Tuscany—a grand duchy since 1569—was a “composite monarchy” based on privilege and the control of jurisdiction, arising as a common body with often poorly delimited borders that encompassed a patchwork of towns, villages, fiefs, and urban suburbs derived from the late Middle Ages. No overarching “absolutist” power was firmly established, especially after the death of Ferdinand I in 1609 and the end of the centralizing drive of the first Medici rulers. Semi-independent communities survived throughout the early-modern period, and customary self-rule prevailed in many localities under the loose surveillance of the “Nine Guardians” of the domain of Florence, a magistracy Cosimo I had established in 1560. As late as the 1740s, the jurist Pompeo Neri numbered approximately five hundred different local statutes in the areas surrounding Florence alone.³ As Elena Fasano has shown, a powerful government at the top became quite weak in the provinces, especially so in the mountain lands near the borders.⁴ Indeed, after the annexation of the Republic of Siena in 1556, the grand duchy preserved its dual constitutional arrangement, which kept the Northern lands directly ruled by Florence (the “Stato Vecchio,” which stretched westwards to the Mediterranean) as quite tightly separated from the province in the South next to Siena (the “Stato Nuovo”). Stability and resilience seem a feature of Medici rule in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries. It was predicated on a customary agreement between the grand duke, the urban nobilities, and the Church. Access to court, the collective magistracies, and public office was usually open to the privileged orders and to the members of the military Order of St. Stephen, which from 1562 had shaped a common ethos for provincial elites.

Cosimo III (1670–1723) has probably gained most from recent scholarship. His ecclesiastical policy has to some extent been freed from the traditional charge of “bigotry” and passive subservience to Rome. Cosimo encouraged the introduction of new orders regular in Tuscany and favored the cult of holy relics, following the religious principles of the Catholic Reformation. Accordingly, in 1691 he forbade the teaching of any atom-istic doctrine at the University of Pisa. But he also made his religious behavior and convictions ritually open in order to capture his subjects’ feelings and strengthen his own charisma and the monarchy. The court expanded to a population of approximately eight hundred, a size far from that of the Hofburg and Versailles, but comparable to that of many “Residenzstätte” in Germany. It hosted a lively intellectual life ranging from theatre and the arts to natural philosophy, the latter keeping the experimental legacy of Galileo alive. At the turn of the new century Florence was beginning to become a pole of learning for the Republic of Letters, largely thanks to the librarian to the grand duke, Antonio Magliabechi.⁵

The reconsideration of Tuscan history currently under way has shaded the bleak picture of a general “decline,” but it has not dispelled it. Credit has been given to Cosimo III for his attempts (usually short-lived or failed) to redress finance and taxation and to streamline the panoply of collective public institutions. But he never challenged the role of the elites in government, nor their pervasive network of clients and the attendant practice of corruption. Change would come at a later date under the renewed balance of power ushered in by the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe. The death of Cosimo’s eldest son and successor, Prince Ferdinand, in 1713, dealt a hard blow at the personal and family level as well as to the monarchy itself; it paved the way to the dreaded prospect of an end to the dynasty, as the marriage of his brother Gian Gastone proved barren. The fate of the Medici actually paralleled that of other Italian ruling families first established during the Renaissance, such as the Gonzaga in Mantua (1708) and the Farnese in Parma (1734). Only a few years later Ludovico Antonio Muratori lamented the demise of the old princes, which was depriving the country of its benevolent, natural rulers.⁶ The Habsburgs succeeded to the throne of the grand dukes in 1737, following an agreement by the European powers signed in 1735. Gian Gastone de’ Medici (1671–1737) has only recently begun to be given his due as an intelligent and cultivated sovereign, especially at the beginning of his unhappy reign.⁷ But the future lay with a young prince of the House of Lorraine, a military commander in the war against the Ottomans and husband to the future (from 1745) Empress-Queen, Maria Theresa.⁸

The Enlightened Regime of Peter Leopold

The political break of 1737 ushered in several changes in politics and institutions.⁹ Under the massive and growing international power of the Habsburgs, the persistence of the Ancien Regime in Florence began to flounder. The new grand duke may well have looked to Tuscany only to squeeze money out of the country. But the Regency government he established shared a different ethos from that of the local aristocracy and was determined to enforce the will of the prince, breaking with the mutual understanding and consensus between the sovereign and the local elites. Francis’s best official in Florence, Count Emmanuel de Richecourt, had clear ideas about what was to be done. In order to secure the fulfilment of requests from Vienna, a general overhaul of extant institutions—which still looked surprisingly “republican”—was mandatory. Whether enlightened or not, post-feudal Absolutism had come to stay. Like most dynasties elsewhere in Europe, the Habsburgs faced an almost constant state of war and the needs of a growing bureaucracy. Expanding state revenue meant challenging a web of long-established social powers, beginning with the Church and noble privileges. In Florence, a 1738 law forbade the bearing of arms by the agents of the Inquisition as well as by the nobility. Attempts at changing the management of charitable institutions, which mixed ecclesiastical and noble control, stumbled on hefty opposition in Florence and Siena. In March 1743, censorship was taken away from the Inquisition and transferred to lay officials with only limited responsibility left to the bishops.¹⁰ The new arrangement paved the way for the development of a selective public opinion, which lent the grand duchy some free space for ideological debate. In 1751, new legislation was enacted curbing the expansion of Church property in a country where the clergy accounted for three percent of the population but owned perhaps a third of the best agricultural land. One year earlier, the government had reshaped the legal status of the aristocracy—a complex, mixed body which included some feudal families, about three thousand members of the Order of St. Stephen, and those households whose ancestors had covered the top public charges during the republic or during Medici rule. Since mid-century, the prince alone would acknowledge noble privilege, and only if proved by longstanding legal evidence. Reform of noble status also occurred in other Italian polities, such as Naples, at the time.¹¹

Recent scholarship on the Regency reveals the historical function of the period in itself, as well as how it paved the way for change during the following generation. After 1765, the top officials in government, the jurists Pompeo Neri and Giulio Rucellai, provided the linchpin between the Regency and the new grand duke, Peter Leopold, the third son of the Imperial couple. He first arrived in Florence at the age of eighteen and later succeeded his brother, Joseph II, in 1790 for a short spell in Vienna as Emperor Leopold II.¹² Neri had spent a decade in Milan in the 1750s, where he had masterminded the reform of local government and implemented the land-tax register (catasto) which has fostered agricultural growth ever since. Rucellai headed the office of the royal jurisdiction from 1734 and shaped the relationship between Church and State until his death in 1778. The role of officials in steering change and advising the grand duke has often been emphasized by historians as they dispelled the legend of Leopold as a young demiurge committed to bringing about a set of coherent reforms inspired by the Enlightenment. Rather, the fresh arrangements in the public domain required painstaking negotiations within the government and a constant effort to mediate between conflicting interest groups. No ruler inclined to promote the “public happiness” could dispense with a competent staff and usually non-noble advisors. The top-ranking state officials remained few throughout Leopold’s reign, and actually their numbers shrank, as did the number of noblemen in the high ranks of the bureaucracy.¹³ But the decision-making process remained checkered and often torn by personal strife.

A far-reaching plan to promote private property and peasant land-holding, for example, was launched in 1769, but floundered in the 1780s against gentry opposition and the workers’ lack of investment capital. Similar strategies were being worked out elsewhere in Italy, such as in Sicily and Calabria after the devastating earthquake in 1783, but they also failed because the lands allotted to the peasantry were rapidly marketed to bourgeois or noble buyers. In Florence a conflict opposed the Secretary of Finance, Angelo Tavanti, a remarkable expert in economic matters, to a younger counselor to the prince, Francesco Maria Gianni, who eventually became the chief advisor to the grand duke.¹⁴ Their seething conflict concerned the opportunity to establish a land tax in Tuscany following the advice of the French Physiocrats, a strategy that theoretically would reduce indirect taxation and help repay a huge state debt inherited from previous governments. The land tax project developed during the high tide of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Tuscany and Enlightenment in the Atlantic World
• PART I The Politics of Knowledge in Enlightenment Tuscany
• PART II Commerce and the State
• PART III History, Culture, and Enlightenment
• Epilogue: The Encyclopedic Prince: Grand Duke Peter Leopold (1747–92) and the Meaning of Tuscan Enlightenment
• Contributors
• Index