1. This research project focuses on the problem of local politics in a traditional society. The larger context is the Republic of Genoa between the sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries; the particular example comes from a portion of eastern Liguria .
The events related here stem from the heart of the historical period whose raw material has been fashioned by historians into one of the most important processes of European history: the ‘formation of the modern state’. Indeed, according to this formulation the state and the political structures of the Old Regime constitute a central historiographic problem. But it did not take long for this theme to acquire the status of a paradigm according to which all political phenomena and social movements in general were interpreted—often in a one-directional way. The study of heterogeneous and multiform political realities on the ground has been sacrificed, at least in part, so that state formations, norms, and institutions could receive attention. This has meant eliminating from historical analysis many forms of political aggregation and integration, along with the social actors who animated them. The angle of observation employed in such studies attends almost exclusively to the processes by which central powers were reinforced and ‘modern’ institutional forms were constructed, resulting in a partial or deformed image of the constitution and transformation of the legitimacy of public authority.
Italian historiography has focused above all on institutions, on measuring the growth of the state’s organs and functions, and on the long-term tendencies of politico-administrative centralization. Studies of territorial administration and organization, taxation , and judicial systems have been guided by this perspective. However, such work has devoted little or no attention to the concrete, everyday ways in which relations of power and authority were articulated; to social practices and exchanges; to relations between groups and individuals; or to conflicts and the frequently tight connection between processes of social differentiation and integration. With a few exceptions, research has continued to employ, with varying degrees of awareness, a model whose basic characteristics had been delineated by Federico Chabod between the 1930s and the 1950s for the Milanese state.1 Any case that did not seem to include elements that anticipated the modern state was time and again declared to be archaic or marginal.
Italian history is characteristically polycentric history, with very diverse forms of territorial integration and many kinds of power configurations. It thus invites us to check and refine influential paradigms and broad categories of analysis. Beyond the realm of Italian history, the social sciences have constructed a variety of models for examining the problem of the ‘formation of the modern state’ and the reach of ‘government’ in Old Regime society. But these models have generally privileged the state formations that, through a long process of ‘evolution’, eventually made it to the present day—the handful of survivors from among the hundreds that had existed in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe.2
While it may be true that some studies have stressed the ‘resistance’ encountered by the processes of state centralization, such work has also underestimated the great variety of historical situations, cultures, forms of daily life, and local dynamics and practices over which the centers of government were said to have affirmed their own authority and legitimacy . Similarly overlooked has been the ability of communities and local social formations to condition and manipulate governing practices and political ideas, while also formulating questions and articulating responses. Other dimensions to the state-centered interpretive scheme are its evolutionary or functionalist bent and its theories of acculturation. These claim that the expansion and consolidation of state power rendered local worlds progressively homogeneous, destroying cultural differences and imposing new hierarchical systems of communication and exchange. Ways of life and practices that were not captured by this process lost their value for historiographic investigation; even if they left significant documentary records, they were obliterated or liquidated as residual.
This unilateral and elitist viewpoint is perhaps even clearer in the realm of political history: the dominant historiographic approach seems at best to acknowledge local responses by the ‘forces of resistance’ to a political competition that is essentially defined by its ‘central’ or ‘high’ quality.3
Resistance, anomalies, residuals, marginal cases: these are concepts that, frequently associated with dichotomous oppositions—between state and society, state and community , center and periphery, high and low4—have eliminated from historical investigation and empirical verification significant portions of past reality. But these very cases, apparently marginal ones, when investigated deeply and in microscopic fashion, can be symptomatically valuable. They can reveal more broad and general historical realities, and they can ultimately play a decisive role in verifying and questioning interpretive categories and established models, even creating new ones. This problem is central for my book, and in the following pages I will seek to explain why. I will begin with the broadest context: the Genoese state during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
2. The case of the Republic of Genoa does not seem to fit any model of the modern state that has been developed to this point, nor does it correspond to the kind of regional state that is usually seen (albeit in very diverse territorial configurations) as prevalent in early modern Italy.5 Perhaps representations of the Genoese state as marginal or curious help explain why it has not attracted scholarly interest in investigating and identifying its original characteristics. But in what terms, precisely, was the Genoese case anomalous?
The historiography is just about unanimous in considering 1575 to be the pivotal year in Genoese history. That year’s civil war between the new ( Nuovi ) and old ( Vecchi ) nobles took place in the city and in some of its hinterlands, constituting a point of reference for the local political developments described in this book. The shockwaves sent by this event throughout Europe,6 together with similar events in other states (the French religious wars, the Dutch revolt, and the disputes between the ‘young’ and ‘old’ patricians in Venice from about the same years),7 help explain why the conflict of 1575 touched off a long political debate, from multiple perspectives, over the nature and history of the Republic. The main point of discussion was how to define the social boundaries of the nobility in the city’s official registry, but this was inseparable from a problem raised in almost all political writings: the influence and significance of factions in Genoese history and forms of government. ‘Universal factionalism’ (l’universal delle fattioni) was perceived as a structural element of the Republic’s political life, and historical narratives of the city revolved around the ‘civil discords’ (discordie civili).8 Even in the writings of Andrea Spinola, which articulated a perspective and a critique from within the early seventeenth-century oligarchic government, the term ‘Factions’ (Fattioni) occupied a significant position: “We Genoese are by nature factionalistic, and ready to create [factions] where none exist.”9
Genoese factionalism depended on “the public things.” This is because the nobility were not a homogeneous group, or “a certain virtue of issue [la schiatta], and of blood.” Rather, they were the total number of those inscribed (“nobility by pen” is what the anonymous author of the Dialoghi sopra la Repubblica di Genova (1623) called it). This made them a kind of civil nobility defined by the monopoly of public offices, linked to administration and government, such that differences between those inscribed were more of a political nature than anything else. But factions were also rooted in behaviors that were private and family -oriented, expressed in ceremonial practice and sociability whose sites were urban and separated: alberghi (topographical associations of family members and clans ), conventicole (political cliques ), loggias, and the porticoes of San Pietro and San Luca (near piazza Banchi).10 The simultaneously horizontal and vertical character of the internal divisions of the nobility (the latter linked to “family mixing,” kinship links, and expectations about being inscribed) created a situation in which the entire s...