Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy

John E. Law, Bernadette Paton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754665083
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351950350
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Building on important issues highlighted by the late Philip Jones, this volume explores key aspects of the city state in late-medieval and Renaissance Italy, particularly the nature and quality of different types of government. It focuses on the apparently antithetical but often similar governmental forms represented by the republics and despotisms of the period. Beginning with a reprint of Jones's original 1965 article, the volume then provides twenty new essays that re-examine the issues he raised in light of modern scholarship. Taking a broad chronological and geographic approach, the collection offers a timely re-evaluation of a question of perennial interest to urban and political historians, as well as those with an interest in medieval and Renaissance Italy.

PART I
Communes and Despots

1
Communes and Despots: The City State in Late-Medieval Italy¹

P.J. Jones

It is a commonplace of political history that in the later Middle Ages the city states of north and central Italy were the scene of a conflict in the theory and practice of government between two contrasted systems: republican and despotic (or in contemporary terminology, government ‘a comune’, ‘in libertà’, and so on, and government ‘a tiranno’, signoria or principato). The conflict began about the mid-thirteenth century, and in most places, sooner or later, was settled in favour of despotism. As early as 1300, in fact, in purely territorial terms, the contest was becoming uneven: much of Lombardy with Piedmont, Emilia and Venetia, and most of Romagna and the Marche, were under despotic rule; and already certain writers, like Albertino Mussato, were beginning to speak, with classical reminiscence, of a predetermined cycle in the development of states.² There was much to encourage such beliefs, even though, in the congested political society of medieval Italy, the development of states was seldom wholly free. From an early stage, indeed, the decline of communal institutions was accompanied by a process of regional consolidation, in which, independently of forms and principles of government, the larger states swallowed up the small. In this way, by the fifteenth century, a number of territorial powers had emerged – Milan, Florence and Venice, Mantua and Ferrara – which shared, by uneasy balance of influence, the control of Upper Italy. But through all phases of territorial politics the advance of despotism was maintained.³ At the close of the Middle Ages there were few towns which were both independent and freely self-governing; fewer still which could look back on a history of unbroken liberty. Even by those most concerned to preserve it, the day of the small, independent, commune was admitted to be over.⁴ And certainly, in retrospect, for most communes the period of effective autonomy, between feudal and despotic rule, must have seemed brief enough: a few generations of turbulent self-rule or partial self-rule in the shadow of local feudatory or magnate. In an age when, even in Italy, most government was seigneurial or royal, what is remarkable is not the return to monarchy, but rather its interruption.⁵

For Italian political theorists monarchy remained the common ideal of government, not only for civilian and canon lawyers or academic philosophers, but also for humanist writers, of whom a number in the fifteenth century composed conventional tracts on the rule of princes.⁶ Princely rule, however, was not the exclusive ideal. On the contrary, it was precisely in the later Middle Ages, when monarchy was everywhere gaining ground and political indifference increasing, that Italy was swept, in the words of one writer, by ‘a current of republicanism’ in sentiment and doctrine.⁷ The inspiration of both ideals was no doubt often literary, and their expression rhetorical and abstract: in differing degrees monarchists and republicans alike fed upon classical tradition, as interpreted in the legal and philosophical learning of the Middle Ages or rediscovered by humanistic study; and both were concerned with ideas more than programmes of political action. But, for all the divorce existing between the active and contemplative life, the time and place of these writings, and the themes commonly developed, betray quite clearly also the influence of events. Such influence is evident in the new emphasis laid by Marsilius of Padua and others on the principle of popular sovereignty;⁸ it is evident even more in the theory, consecrated by Bartolus, of the sovereign city state and of tyranny as a usurpation of sovereign civic authority;⁹ but most of all it is evident in a new preoccupation with the rival merits of despotic and communal government. Hints of this appear quite early in chronicle-writing and satire. Then, from the later-fourteenth century, as republican Florence and Venice became involved in growing conflict with the despotism of Milan, professional literati began increasingly to take sides: principles of ‘civic humanism’ emerged, and the power of the pen began to be compared with the power of the sword. Florence, in particular, became a centre of republican diplomacy and propaganda, and, nurtured largely by war, a specifically Florentine folk-lore of republicanism developed, a belief, partly conventional, partly sincere, in the sturdy democratic virtues of the Florentine business class. The Venetians were less demonstrative, but their constitution, misinterpreted, became the republican ideal. Less vociferous also were the partisans of despotism, but they engaged in the literary war; and so, in scattered writings, polemical and academic, the elements were slowly prepared of a debate about government, which, purged of rhetoric and redefined in realistic terms, was brought to a conclusion by Machiavelli, Guicciardini and others in the sixteenth century. The arguments on both sides were predictable and simple. The republicans’ theme was liberty, liberty in the double sense of elective government and independence of foreign domination. The monarchists’ theme was order, peace and unity. Both claimed to represent the rule of law (not least in defence against the other), and both expressed devotion to cultural values.

In recent years this political literature has received unstinted study from historians;¹⁰ fugitive though it often is, there seems little danger of it dying of neglect. Some doubt remains, however, about its practical influence,¹¹ and, even more, it must be said, about its relation to political reality. That disagreement might be sharp between principles and practice is a fact confessed by contemporary observers. It appears most emphatically in the relations between states, where constitutional differences were no bar to common action by despotisms and republics or to a common policy of subjugating neighbours in the name of political ‘freedom’.¹² What remains indeterminate is the effect, within states, of differences of regime and the true measure of contrast between communes and signorie. In no sense, it need hardly be said, was it a contrast of democracy and dictatorship.¹³ Despotic government was not totalitarian; communal government, though sometimes called democratia, knew nothing of manhood suffrage. By the statutes of most Italian towns, qualification for citizenship, and even more for office, was restricted almost exclusively to property-owning burgesses of local origin and prolonged residence. Rustics, the largest class, though combined in rural communes, were defined by law as natural inferiors and were almost nowhere granted political rights; nor were the humbler townsmen, the wage-workers and ‘plebei’ (Giannotti); nor finally were the citizens of independent towns, incorporated by conquest in expanding territorial states. Though allowed some powers of self-government, they were not admitted to political representation. Representative parliaments, in Italy as elsewhere, were the creation not of urban but of feudal regimes. Under the rule of the richer republics, Venice and still more Florence, subordinate communities were degraded to a position of colonial dependence and ruthlessly exploited in the economic interest of the dominating town. ‘Florentina libertas’ was for Florentines alone.¹⁴

But if political rights, on republican principles, were narrowly distributed, narrower still, in republican practice, was the normal distribution of power. Despite all constitutional checks and balances, power in the Italian communes clung obstinately to wealth and migrated with movements of wealth, and through all revolutions of political and economic regime, oligarchy, in fact or law, was the predominant form of government. In the first century of the commune this represented, in contemporary language, government of those called minores or pedites, who constituted the populus, by the class of maiores or milites, a composite group of feudal gentry and merchants, who in Florence, for example, may have numbered some 100 families. In a few towns, notably Venice, this patrician regime survived unchallenged for as long as the commune lasted; but in most places, from about 1200, it began to break up. On the one hand the governing class fell apart into rival factions; on the other the populus or popolo, enriched by trade and enlarged by urban immigration, began to rebel against magnate domination, and in the course of the thirteenth century secured a share, and in places control, of the communal government. These fratricidal divisions, partly of social origin, more often political or personal, are the familiar theme of medieval Italian history.

More difficult to establish is their effect on the tenure of power. A common result of party warfare was mass emigration and persecution; hundreds of citizens were excluded from political life. Against this, the emancipation of the popolo certainly admitted large numbers to nominal rights of government, though in places it also resulted in partial or total disfranchisement of the grandi (at Florence in 1295 about 150 families).¹⁵ But at no time did the popolo include the whole people, or even the whole commune. Rather was it a ‘party’, the pars populi, for which the property qualification might be higher than that for the commune.¹⁶ The groups most powerfully represented were the richer trade guilds, especially the guilds of bankers, business men and industrialists – the popolani grassi. At Florence in the 1330s over 70 per cent of all major offices were held by members of the three wealthiest guilds: Lana, Cambio and Calimala. Then, in 1343, by a popular revolution, the full corporation of 21 guilds gained access to governing power. The effect of this, it has been calculated, was to render eligible for high office some 3,500 men, from a total urban population of 75,000–80,000 souls. In the sequel the number increased slightly, but at no stage was more than one-tenth of the eligible class effectively qualified for office, about 750 persons at most, and of these an excessive proportion were still drawn from the upper guilds or from client lower guildsmen.¹⁷ Such was the type of government described by contemporaries as democratia and represented by Florentines as an egalitarian, broadly-based polity; and indeed, as long as it lasted, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• Note on the Cover Illustration
• PART I Communes and Despots
• PART II Power and Restraint
• PART III Political Thought
• PART IV Communes and Despots
• PART V The Case of the Medici
• PART VI Culture, Art, and Patronage
• PART VII Epilogue
• Index