To take 1450 as our starting point is of course to make an approximate choice. For greater precision (though it would in fact be misleading) one might have taken the fall of Constantinople (May 29, 1453) or the Peace of Lodi (April 9, 1454) which saw the opening of a long period of peace in Italy—a restless and suspicious peace perhaps, but peace all the same, which would last broadly until the French invasion of September 1494. Lodi set the seal on a balance of power in Italy of which the European balance of power would afterwards be but a reflection and extension.
I need hardly say that the “Italian” of my title is also a convenient fiction for the purposes of exposition, and indeed an anachronism. Fifteenth-century Italians did indeed feel different from other peoples in Christendom, but they were divided among a series of tiny states, little Italies, lively, jealous, and sometimes violent units, not unlike the nation-states of Europe in the recent past, whose “greatness” lay only in the eyes of shortsighted beholders. For the divisions of Italy, in that age at once so far from the present and so near to it, offer an image of the recent history through which we Europeans have all lived and indeed continue to live. So to say “Italy” or “an Italian” is to use a misleading singular. An obvious remark, but one so easily overlooked that it has to be made at least once.
The Subjugation of Three Civilizations
In about 1450, the world influenced by the teachings, the various economies, and the intellect of Italy covered Europe in the wide sense, plus the Mediterranean—although in the non-Christian countries it was usually confined to coastal strips with no access to the hinterland. But the entire sea, that is its waters and surface area, depended in some degree on the narrow Italian peninsula, which cut it in two the better to control it, as if geography had sympathetically connived with Italy’s predominance.
The whole can be seen as an immense echo chamber, a zone of diaspora and influence, spatial evidence of domination (or perhaps we should call it “imbalance”), of a very special kind—and all this had been achieved well before 1450, in the course of a long history of effort, renewed endeavor, patience, and strategic victories. A few words must be said on this score, otherwise the “present”—1450—cannot be explained. How did Italy, or rather a handful of Italian cities, a few men in all, succeed one day in acquiring and holding on to a position of domination vis-à-vis Byzantium, Islam, and western Europe? The last had been a slow developer, but the first two had long been worlds of splendor and superiority. Only an exceptional breakthrough could have overcome them. We need not linger over the details of these struggles, whose outcome long remained in the balance. We shall approach them only at the point where success seemed to be within grasp.
Byzantium: A Civilization Worn Threadbare
The decisive blow against Byzantium was struck in 1204, with the diversion of the Fourth Crusade, during that “orgy of capitalism,”14 which led to the fall of Constantinople, and was even more pronounced after its fall. Until 1261, the great city was the capital of a Latin empire. The reconquest of the “citadel” by the Palaeologi of Nicaea in 1261 did little to alter Byzantium’s fate: its decline was slow until 1453, since it remained both on the route to the wealth of Asia, and on that taken by goods exchanged for this wealth. So its prosperity endured. But that prosperity had in reality been appropriated by Italian merchants, mostly Venetian and Genoese, for their own advantage. In 1348, the Genoese customs post at Pera collected revenue to the tune of 200,000 gold solidi while the imperial customs of Constantinople received a mere 30,000!15
Constantinople was to thirteenth-century Italians what Shanghai was to the Europeans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sooner or later, everything fell into eager foreign hands. Genoese merchants settled north of the Black Sea, at Kaffa in the Crimea, in about 1290; much later and this time in league with the Venetians, they reached La Tana, on one of the mouths of the Don estuary, on the Sea of Azov; and at about the same time, Trebizond, on the route to Tabriz and Persia. Venetians and Genoese often came to blows over these distant markets, so much wealth was there at stake. But after 1395 and the devastating advance of Tamerlane, the Black Sea route to Asia lost much of its appeal to long-distance traffic. One of the stages in and reasons for the decline of Byzantium was the shift southward to Syria and Egypt of the major trade routes to Asia, in particular the pepper and spice trades. The Black Sea now had only its own produce to offer: timber, grain, Caucasian slaves, dried fish, and caviar.
But this trade was not inconsiderable—and it was certainly enough to make the Genoese of Kaffa and the Venetians of La Tana hang on to their distant outposts. How determinedly the two republics protected and patrolled these remote colonies! From Venice, the Arsenal sent the posts, scaling irons, nails, arrows, longbows, and crossbows needed to defend Tana,16 for the little town huddled by the marshes was on perpetual alert against constant attacks by the Tartars, a people forever on the move with their herds of horses, sheep, and oxen and their covered and open wagons. The inhabitants of Tana watched the enemy from their ramparts for days on end, fascinated by this tumultuous spectacle of men, women, children, beasts, and wagons on the move. “La sera,” writes one eyewitness, “eravamo stracchi di guardar” (“By nightfall we were exhausted with watching”).17 Historians have marveled, not without reason, at the saga of the building of the fortress of São Jorge da Mina by the Portuguese on the coast of Guinea in 1475. Every stone to be transported to Africa was cut and numbered in Lisbon. But much the same had been accomplished by Venice and its painstaking Arsenal on behalf of La Tana, years before.
After 1395 then, Constantinople was being exploited by foreign merchants, and no longer stood on the busy route to the gorgeous East. Things began to fall apart in Byzantium. The population dwindled, those who remained were poorer, buildings crumbled. And the currency was in a perpetual state of depreciation, as Italian gold coins became more sought after than the hyperperum (despite its name, which originally meant “purer than pure”). What was more, Genoese and Venetians not only coined false money (so-called hyperpera from Pera, Crete, or Negroponte) but appropriated public revenue, and controlled the gold and grain markets. How could the emperor mint sound currency when he had no access to the gold mines of Macedonia? Half-empty streets, and a population “ill-clad, miserable and poor”—such was the impression of a traveler to Constantinople in 1438.18 There was no more trade, no more industry. The acclimatization of the mulberry tree and the silkworm in Italy, and the valuable textile industry that resulted, ended the ancient and profitable lead in silk manufacture on which Byzantium’s fortunes had been founded. The decline of Byzantium could be glimpsed, in early symbolic form perhaps, in the fashions adopted by the still-gilded Byzantine youth, which now, however, wore “headdresses in the Latin style with Persian and Turkish costume.”19
The Byzantine empire, assailed from far and near, withdrew into itself. The basileus scarcely controlled more than the two cities of Constantinople itself, contained by mighty ramparts now too vast for it, and Thessalonika, where no more was now heard of the fabulous St. Dimitri markets held in front of the city’s Golden Gate.20 It was a virtually deserted town when the Venetians annexed it without compunction in 1423 only to lose it seven years later to the Turks. Byzantium by this time consisted only of the capital city, the miraculously still-beating heart of a great body that was now long dead.
That the Italians should not have been more sensitive to this distress, which was to their initial advantage but would also shortly lead to their downfall, is rather curious. But there are plenty of curious things in history. To the merchant, the potential two birds in the bush mattered less than the one in the hand: business, markets, control of key routes—whatever the political and economic disarray of the Black Sea, the Balkan peninsula, Asia Minor, or the Greek islands. Genoese and Venetians, warring brothers, never found far apart, still controlled the Black Sea and had established themselves in the Aegean: Venice already held Negroponte (the island of Euboea) from which Venetian “settlers” were exporting grain, and Candia; before long, after 1479, she would hold Cyprus as well, partly by agreement with the Genoese businessmen. Genoa possessed the island of Chios, the most remarkable of these western colonies in the Levant.
Eventually, the wholesale and extraordinary decline of Byzantium enabled the Turks, who now controlled Asia Minor, to advance through the Dardanelles (1356). Having established themselves at Adrianople, they pressed their advantage across the Balkans, and a century later, in 1453, they took Constantinople. Too many historians have underplayed this event—but it would be the foundation for centuries to come of the great might of the Ottoman empire, as Italy would before long find to her cost. But was there any reason to be apprehensive at the time?
In those days, ships and galleys were valued in terms of the number and quality of the troops they carried (slingers and archers) and the skill of their crews. On May 29, 1416, Piero Loredano and the Venetian fleet had won a crushing victory over the Turkish navy at Gallipoli. It was but a short step from there to underestimating the enemy. True, the conditions of naval warfare were about to change, with artillery being loaded directly on to ships. And Constantinople, a city shaped by the sea, would help the Turks in their pursuit of maritime strength, as Venice was to realize during the first Turkish war (1463–1479), which turned to her disadvantage.
In 1453, however, all that lay in the future. Venice had been kept informed by its “secret services” and knew about Turkish designs on Constantinople ahead of time. As early as February measures had been taken, which were later to be extended, to protect the Byzantine capital, “of which it might be said that it belongs to us,” as one reads in the debates of the Senate.21 Yet, in the event, Venice’s warships and galleys did not venture beyond Modon and Negroponte respectively. The speed of the Turkish victory had rendered any intervention futile. A deal had to be struck. A Venetian “orator,” Bartolomeo Marcello, was sent to Constantinople, where he obtained the release of 117 Venetians, 47 of them patricians, all of them merchants, and some of them compromised in the heroic defense of the city. He also recovered their property, and all for 7,000 ducats.22 So it was perfectly feasible, and certainly worth trying, to coexist with the infidel victor. In any case, how could Venice live without the Turks, without their cheap raw materials and the huge markets they represented? By April 1454, the Signoria was coming to terms with the Sultan. The instructions given to the Venetian ambassador were quite clear: “Et dispositio nostra est habere bonam pacem et amicitiam cum domino Imperatore Turcorum” (“Our intention is to have a good peace and friendship with the lord Emperor of the Turks”).23
Italian Footholds on the Coast of Islam and Ventures Inland
The Crusades had apparently ended with the defeat of the West and thus of Italy. St. Louis was taken prisoner in Egypt in 1245 and died outside Tunis in 1270. Constantinople became a Greek city again in 1261 and, with the fall of Acre, Christendom lost its last significant position on the Asiatic mainland. But the waters of the Mediterranean, especially the eastern reaches, were still held by Christian sailors and traders. And this victory canceled out everything else.
In practice, in economic terms, ancient privileges persisted unaltered, in particular those of Italian shipping and trade. In the late fourteenth century, the Italians still came and went as they pleased in the ports and markets of Syria and Egypt, where the Levant’s outlets to the Mediterranean and western markets were now established: Tripoli in Syria, Aleppo, Beirut, Damascus, Alexandria, and later Cairo. Whether along the coast, or in the great caravan rendezvous further inland, Italian and other western merchants, while they might not always get their own way, certainly made their presence felt, buying up the goods of eastern merchants, whose monopoly stopped at, or near, the coast. Thus they obtained drugs, dyestuffs, pepper and spices, cotton thread and fabric, silk, rice, and beans. Since interest and curiosity had very quickly been aroused about the source of the most valuable of these goods—pepper and spices—an expedition was launched by the Vivaldi brothers from Genoa, out beyond Gibraltar and into the Atlantic, but it ended with obscure loss of life and possessions, somewhere on the African coast. Their attempt was made in 1291, the same year as the fall of Acre. Were they searching for the route discovered two hundred years later by Vasco da Gama?
The Italian presence in North Africa followed a similar pattern. All the coastal towns were involved: Tripoli in Barbary, Tunis, Bône, Bougie, Algiers, Oran, and Ceuta. Inland, there were Italian merchants to be found alongside Marseillais and Catalans in a major center like Tlemcen. In all these places, there were thriving merchant colonies. It was child’s play to buy in Genoa a bill of exchange payable in Oran or Tunis.24 North Africa yielded a constant flow of products: hides, wax, grain, as well as goods from the Saharan trade; dates, black slaves, elephants’ tusks, ostrich feathers, gold dust from the Sudan. Gold belonging to Venetian merchants was shipped from Tunis in Venetian galleys for greater safety,25 and taken to Corfu. Occupied since 1385, this was a vital base from which Venice could control the entrance to the Adriatic and patrol the entire sea, a vantage point almost at the juncture between the east and west basins.
Thus Islam, although in control of the hinterland, was open to foreign penetration via the insidious sea on which, with few exceptions, all the ships were Christian. And in order that the pattern established in the Middle and Far East be more or less reproduced with regard to North Africa and the Sahara, the Genoese Antonio Malfante in 1447 advanced as far as Tuat, in search of the source of the gold of the Sudan.26 By this time, Portuguese caravels were already venturing down the African coast as far as the Gulf of Guinea. Which would triumph, the men of the sea or those of the land route; the Portuguese or the Genoese?
The question of overland travel having been raised, we should bear in mind that many journeys to the interior, across sand, mountain, and desert, still remain completely unknown. Records of Malfante’s trip have survived only by chance. Islam had certainly been crossed from end to end by western travelers. To take but one example, without going back as far as Marco Polo, Niccolò dei Conti, born at Chioggia in the Venetian Dogato, made long visits to India and the East Indies between 1415 and 1439.27 Vasco da Gama did not “discover” the Indies: he simply discovered an entirely maritime route by which to reach them. And according to Sanudo, when he got there, he found Venetian merchants already in residence. I like the following anecdote: on May 21, 1498, as Vasco da Gama’s ships were at anchor in Calicut Bay, there arrived to meet his emissaries two Moors of Tunis, who spoke Catalan and Genoese. “How the devil did you come here?” they exclaimed. The Portuguese reply is revealing: “Vimos buscar cristãos e especiaria” (“We have come in search of Christians and spices”), they said.28
It would be both exaggerated and misleading to imagine that the travels and initiatives of Italian merchants had been helping to weaken Islam from before the days of Vasco da Gama. The Italian merchants had in fact respected Islam’s role as intermediary between East and West. And it was not until 1516–1517 that the Turks took over Syria and Egypt—without, in the event, forbidding Christian traders to use these staging posts. Only in 1518 (Algiers), 1551 (Tripoli), and 1574 (Tunis), did the Turks move into the Maghreb, and then it was in response to the brutality and success of the Spanish “crusade” more than to any supposedly damaging activity by Italian merchants.29 In fact, “Italian North Africa,” if one may call it that, was already on the wane before the Turkish invasion. It had started to decline in importance soon after the Spanish advance by Pedro Navarro between 1509 and 1511.
Western Europe, Italy’s Land of Opportunity
One should not leap to the conclusion that “backward” western Europe was simply dominated by an Italy that was if not inimitable certainly consistently superior. Western Europe should not be regarded as undeveloped or more rustic than it actually was. Indeed, if Europe was a land of opportunity for the Italians, it was because it represented an up-and-coming economy and civilization on which it was possible to base profitable superiority.
Italy and Europe at the time of the Renaissance should not be imagined like a painting by La Tour, with the light concentrated on a single person and the rest of the picture—Europe—remaining in shadow. Everything was shared. Each time Italy embarked on a period of prosperity, the rest of Europe followed suit—or sometimes even preceded it. Even in the sensitive area of art, where it might seem that the influence was all one way, reciprocity of perspective was in fact the rule. It was at exactly the same time that an identical fashion for painted portraits appeared in both Italy and the Netherlands. There was a clear “bipolarity” in the West as a whole: the southern pole was Italy, the northern one Flanders. The time would of course come when Italy would be considered “the mistress of complete art.”30 But that moment was not reached until a rather late date. It had not yet been reached in 1434, when the Lucchese merchant Arnolfini and his wife had their portrait painted in Bruges, by Jan van Eyck. And when the pattern of influences really began to operate in the second half of the fifteenth century, it would always work both ways. Flemish painting, with its powerful realism, most apparent in portraits and landscapes, had more impact than one might think on the painters of Italy. Enough anyway for Michelangelo later to express irritation at Flemish painting, which he is supposed to have described as nothing but “rags, hovels, green fields, shadows of trees, bridges, and rivers which they call landscapes, with many figures here and there . . . without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion.”31
But are bipolarity and dialogue adequate words to convey the variety of Europe in this period with its many talents and the surprises it held in store, ready to surface at moments throughout its history? After all, Portugal had invented the caravel and navigation on the high seas—in other words the key to the world. Flemish painters, notably van Eyck (1400–1441), had developed the technique of oil painting, and Flanders was neck and neck with Italy, if not a little ahead, in discovering linear perspective. Germany rediscovered gunpowder, and invented the blast furnace and the printing press: the first printers in Italy were all Germans. The Swiss cantons, in their struggle against Charles the Bold, reinvented the foot soldier, the infantryman who was to dominate future battles. Spain in the course of the conquest developed the famous tercio, the infantry regiment that would give it supremacy in battle (and therefore in Italy) until at least 1643, the date of the battle of Rocroi. France under the Capetians in the thirteenth century had gained such preeminence—thanks to the growing importance of the Champagne fairs, the widespread influence of Gothic architecture, which, like the Romanesque, had originally been a “French style,” the fame of the university of Paris, and the success of the monarchy—that an Italian historian, Giuseppe Toffanin, saw European thought as being centered on France and its capital city. He regarded the thirteenth century as il secolo senza Roma, the century without Rome, the title of one of his remarkable books. So Europe was by no means a docile pupil content merely to sit at the feet of a venerated master. The history of Italy in the end comes to mean the entire history of western Europe, the totality of its relations, legacies, and acquisitions: a history of partnership in a common wealth, to which all contributed and from which all received something. Without this shared wealth, as the historically minded sociologist Alexander Rustow rightly argued, “without that shared development of the urban culture of the Middle Ages, fragmented into a multiplicity of national units, of which France and Burgundy [i.e. the Netherlands], not Italy, would [long] be the leaders, the Renaissance would not have been possible.”32
The Renaissance, according to this view, was the collective achievement of the West. But Italy, which in the fourteenth century was still only a face in the crowd in the newly diversified Europe, soon afterwards began to emerge, to move ahead and to demonstrate its superiority. For Italian superiority is something else without which the Renaissance cannot be conceived. The emergence of Italy was indeed the key question.
The West Encircled
It was not a question purely of intellectual eminence or cultural prowess. Underlying Italian predominance, there very soon stood revealed economic sources of superiority. To neglect these would mean failing to understand a crucial process. The heyday of the Champagne fairs may indeed have corresponded to a “century without Rome.” But those fairs were entirely dominated by the merchants, moneydealers, and carriers of Italy.
In similar fashion, even before the long sequence of political, economic, and social crises brought by the Hundred Years War, which so dislocated the West, the Italian economy had already thoroughly succeeded in penetrating and encircling Europe. As early as 1297, the Genoese had established a direct and regular shipping link between the Mediterranean and the North Sea. From Cape Finisterre in Spain to the mouth of the Channel, their ships had a straight run, so none of them needed to put in at French ports.33 By about 1317, Venice had also organized the same pioneering maritime link, and before long all Mediterranean vessels above a certain tonnage were able to reach Bruges and the English ports. Thus was achieved one of the great feats of long-haul trade (di largo respiro as the Italians called it): a direct meeting, thanks to the Italian merchant, between those ideally complementary kinds of merchandise, the woollen cloth of the Netherlands and the rich products of the Middle and Far East: pepper, spices, sugar, perfumes, silks, mordants for dyeing fabrics, and dye plants. Thus was inaugurated the long round trip from Bruges to Syria and Egypt. To the west, the major ports on the route were Aigues-Mortes, Barcelona, and especially Valencia, Seville, and Lisbon, from where the ships sailed directly to England, putting in at Southampton and London before going on to Bruges, where Hanseatic shipping from the Baltic and the North Sea met up with traffic from the Mediterranean.34
During the same period an active stream of carters and carriers was moving to and fro over the great Alpine passes—the Brenner and the St. Gotthard—linking the Netherlands to Italy, and animating a string of already thriving towns just outside France: Cologne, Nuremberg, Baste, and before long Augsburg, which mining entrepreneurs were to turn into the capital of silver extraction. In short, an unparalleled volume of traffic was now circulating round the edges of western Europe—bypassing its temporarily less accessible heartland, but benefiting the regions it brought into contact with one another: the cities of Italy, Flanders, and England, or the “free” towns of Germany with their southern extension, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the great goods depot, almost a town in miniature, that stood near the Rialto in Venice.
So even before that many-sided crisis we know by the convenient but misleading name of the Hundred Years War, Europe was already enmeshed in an unequal system, “loaded” so to speak in Italy’s favor. The Italians were able to manipulate the Geneva fairs, which they had helped to create in the early fifteenth century, and where the regular European trade deficit resulting from the balance of trade was settled to their advantage. From the start they had made the necessary—and considerable—effort to gain control of these fairs, which indeed became very successful as a result.35
Venice’s Galere da Mercato
This long-distance view from outside requires some conclusion before we move on to tackle the important internal questions. But a graphic image may be more helpful than an extended commentary. One is provided by the cumulative picture of the sailings of the Venetian galere da mercato that emerges from the series of maps worked out for the years 1332 to 1534 by Alberto Tenenti and Corrado Vivanti (1961).36
Venice was not, of course, the only city responsible for this geographical Italian predominance, but Venice was certainly central to the prosperity built up to the detriment of others, and in this respect can be seen as exemplary. As early as the fourteenth century, the Signoria had placed its ships, built at public expense, at the disposal of the patricians who controlled both commerce and government. These galleys (galleys by design, but using oars only for entering and leaving port, and traveling mostly under sail), originally of about 100 tons and later reaching 200 or 250, were put up for auction every year and hired out to the highest bidder. Those who received them negotiated deals with other merchants to assemble cargoes. Freight rates and sailing dates were arranged by the vigilant city authorities.
Neither the details of the operation, nor the methods whereby Venice determinedly sought to foster trade links and to protect its ships from any competition (which included a form of long-term dumping, with state subsidies to private individuals) need concern us here, however. The important date in the establishment of the system is perhaps 1346 (the same year as the battle of Crécy), when for the first time, we find references to the so-called “Flanders” galleys: these, as we saw earlier, were the major link between the Italian economy and cloth from the Netherlands or wool, lead, and tin from England.37
By 1450, all the routes were in operation: the Romanian galleys that went to La Tana and Trebizond; the Syrian and Alexandrian galleys; the Aigues-Mortes galleys; and from 1436 the Barbary galleys (which had by 1442 added Egypt to the coasting voyages they made from port to port along the North African coast). All these convoys, of three to five ships, were interlinked: goods brought by one would be picked up by another, at more or less regular dates, in the warehouses of the Dogana da Mar. So Venetian shipping made up a living system, each part connected to another. The galere da mercato did not of course rule out private shipping, of which the most important examples were the great roundships, the enormous vessels that made the mude (voyages) to Syria to fetch bulky bales of cotton. The round trip of the mude (about six months all told) represented the fastest available return on merchant capital, since the operation consisted simply of sending money and reselling the cotton. The least wealthy and the most prudent merchants tended to prefer this brisk trade, which did not tie up their assets for too long.38
By 1450, the itineraries of the state galleys alone, that is Venice’s official shipping, would if drawn on a map look very like an octopus, with tentacles reaching into the entire area penetrated by Italians outside the peninsula. Venice and other Italian cities following her example were thus dispatching goods and money far overseas, in order to receive in turn even greater riches. This map of the Venetian shipping routes gives a better idea than anything else could of the co-ordinated effort, the calculated penetration of space, and the superior command of the crucial transport sector that provided Italy for so long with its livelihood.
The Rise of the Italian City-States
Let us now return to the heart of the story. At the center of the system organized to its own advantage, Italy was far from being a completely peaceful zone.
This was an age of more or less rapid growth throughout Europe. Outside Italy, after some delay, there appeared in the latter part of the century the first modern territorial states: France under Louis XI (1461–1483), Spain under Ferdinand (1479–1516) and Isabella (1474–1504), England under Henry VII (1485–1509). Appearances notwithstanding, we should not be too ready to believe that such states were the achievement of truly outstanding individuals. A general movement favoring the growth of the monetary economy encouraged relations, multiplied exchanges, and rendered political units that were too small more vulnerable, creating at the same time entities marked out for success—“universal spiders’ webs.”
The history of Europe had long been a race: city against state, or perhaps one might say hare versus tortoise. The hare, the nimble city-state, seemed, logically enough, to be winning all the prizes at first. But the fifteenth century was the period in western Europe when the slow but steady tortoises began to reach the winning-post. The territorial state triumphed, we may note, in the extreme west of Europe, bordering the Atlantic, an ocean that had not yet made its fortune: Columbus did not set sail until 1492. In fact the territorial state became established in precisely those regions that had not yet been taken over by the swift-moving city-states. It had scarcely any cities to contend with: very few of them were powerful, and those few were often isolated. This was a stroke of good fortune for the modern monarchies—the near absence of any serious urban obstacle to their ambitions and to the “state bureaucracies” that encouraged the “horizontal” development of the major political units. How could “Germany” in the broad sense and how could Italy in particular ever have achieved unity? Both of them were bristling with city-states. Elsewhere, the isolated city tended to capitulate in front of the modern state: Barcelona in 1460, Granada in 1492, and one might even include Constantinople in 1453, for the Turkish empire had grown up for precisely the same reasons as the kingdoms of the Atlantic seaboard, in an economically backward area. The same would be true of Muscovy and later of Poland.
Italy was, however, additionally prey to an acute political crisis. Before the European tortoises had really started moving, Italy had been undergoing a profound transformation of its political structures since about 1400, a good half-century in advance of the rest. Its territorial states—the Papal state, and the Kingdom of Naples, seized by Alfonso the Magnanimous in 1442 and united to Sicily—had become consolidated without any spectacular upheaval. They represented in fact an archaic, feudal, and seigneurial Italy, one that was “underdeveloped.” On the other hand, a major transformation was taking place among the richest and most active city-states. They were taking over smaller towns and subjugating them, in the course of wars that were sometimes no more than military parades, sometimes more destructive. Venice moved into Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, and Udine, and expanded into their territory; Genoa destroyed Savona; Milan became the Milanese; Florence defeated Pisa with savage exultation in 1406—witness the cold and scornful account by Gino di Nero Capponi, one of the architects of this victory over the old enemy, for the seaport of which he would be the first Florentine governor.39
So a new map was being drawn and a new political fabric woven, in which the cities, by now truly city-states, found themselves jointly engaged, the Italy of outstanding economic achievement. They did not allow territorial states to insert their bulk between them, as happened in Germany for instance, where the cities were surrounded, stifled, or at the very least jealously watched. Even when transformed into principalities, the Italian cities remained cities, units of a special kind: the Milanese was still essentially Milan, Tuscany, even after 1434, was still really Florence. So, as cities and as states, they derived from their hybrid nature both their strength (their economic dynamism) and their weakness, now that the threatening reign of large states, with large or comparatively large armies, was approaching.
Italy in 1450: On the Brink of an Industrial Revolution?
We need not dwell on this founding crisis of the Italian city-states, nor on the details of the fratricidal wars and the series of changes that accompanied them. It is certainly clear that the early fifteenth century did not see any major economic decline. It was perhaps a far cry from the high point reached in the mid-fourteenth century. But the critical questions are first whether Italy, in its new form, would take the lead in the rather uneven competition between European states—something of which there seems to be little doubt, even among economists—and secondly whether the new Italy would continue to forge ahead, which seemed highly probable. In fact all these conflicts and transformations, as in a chemical reaction, could hardly have taken place without some loss of heat and energy; and this does indeed seem to have been the case, though hard evidence is difficult to come by. What had been taking place, it seems clear, was a general putting of the house in order, a reinforcement of those “poles” of growth constituted by cities that were enormous by the standards of the time: Florence, Genoa, Venice, Milan. Their wars were not always mere shadow play or confined to verbal insults, but firearms did not yet exist. A city could be captured only by a long siege that starved its defenders out, by trickery, or by treason: a single gate had to be forced or opened. The condottieri were the technicians of wars that were often ingenious, but in which comparatively little blood was shed. At worst, a few horses might get away or follow a fleeing enemy, a few villages might be burned or threatened with burning. Gian Galeazzo Visconti complained (was he sincere?) that “the pen of Coluccio Salutati—the humanist and Chancellor of Florence, a fierce polemicist of the latter fourteenth century—had done him more damage than thirty squadrons of Florentine cavalry.”40 These were to some extent—and in retrospect one is relieved to hear of it “phony wars.”
It has in any case been established beyond reasonable doubt that the new Italy was steadily progressing or reviving, gaining that lead which would be essential to its greatness. Renato Zangheri has even argued that, between 1400 and 1450, Italy was on the verge of an industrial revolution,41 or at least was moving in that direction. There had indeed been an agricultural revolution, particularly in Lombardy with the development of forage crops, irrigated fields, and new plants (rice and mulberry trees), while important progress had been made in livestock farming. In Milan and elsewhere, Florence in particular, there were concentrated what were (for the time) huge numbers of artisans. Milan and Lombardy between 1300 and 1500 give one the impression of a region living a charmed life, free from the recession affecting other parts of Europe at the time, an “impression of major constructive and innovating activity.”42 What was more, at the very same time as the Portuguese shipping ventures and the exploits of Henry the Navigator, Italian shipping was building up an intensive network of regular services—one of the major revelations of the extraordinarily rich Datini archives.43 For instance, between 1394 and 1407 Polo Italiano’s ship made the run from Genoa to Bruges fifteen times, as well as making five voyages in the Mediterranean, one of them to Chios, from which it sailed directly to Bruges—and this is but one example among many. These merchant voyages became more frequent and more regular and opened the door to a wider range of cargoes: goods paid freight according to their value, which made it possible to carry the bulkiest and least expensive commodities over a long distance: grain, salt, timber, wool, hides. This was the “transport revolution” described by Federigo Melis.44 The seas now saw the appearance of some very large Italian vessels. Genoese carracks could weigh as much as 1,200 to 1,500 tons—probably the limit for wooden sailing ships; the English Indiamen of the eighteenth century that sailed to China were of barely larger tonnage, and for the fifteenth century this was colossal.
On St. Martin’s Day 1495, two of these Genoese merchantmen, as tall as houses, were lying off Baia near Naples, just as the French were hastily evacuating the city. According to Commynes, if they had sent their crews ashore, they might have reversed the situation, “for those from the two ships would have been enough to recover the city of Naples for the present.”45 Unfortunately for the French, the Genoese did not risk it.
But the industrial revolution did not after all take place in the advanced and go-ahead Italy of the fifteenth century. What was lacking? Was it simply that the population was not big enough or, as some have suggested, that Italy did not possess a “national market”? Such a revolution would also have required the unity of the peninsula—under the leadership of Milan what was more, with Filippo Maria Visconti (1392–1447) succeeding, for example, in his major advance into central Italy. In retrospect, we might be drawn into deploring, in the name of the economy, the liberal and republican resistance of Florence, a reaction that usually receives the sympathy of historians. But even if Italy had been unified, and capable of standing up to the political giants surrounding her, would she have been equal to developing the new structures of an industrial revolution several centuries earlier than Britain? It is hard to give a short answer to such questions, which are nevertheless of prime importance since they force us to think about what the industrial revolution really meant. I believe that it implied a set of circumstances that were not available to Italy. But the fact that the issue has been raised at all is evidence of Italy’s precocious vigor and of the thoroughgoing nature of the upheaval experienced during the first half of the fifteenth century. What was vanishing was a seigneurial and communal history, one that had nevertheless been characterized by a degree of liberty, a certain way of life within a small radius, a civilization that included the free organization of the Arti (guilds). To speak of an ancient popular culture is perhaps to go too far. But what would come afterwards was entirely aristocratic and princely in nature, transplanted from an ancient context. Civilization rose to the top of society, as a diver rises to the surface of the water.
Merchants as Ambassadors Abroad
The Italy of the early Quattrocento was a force within western Europe, but its writ ran no further. The doors of the civilizations of Byzantium and Islam remained closed to it. This was a matter of mutual incomprehension, some historians say, and there is an element of truth in that. But from as early as the eleventh century, to go no further back, Italy had been visiting Byzantium or the cities of Islam, civilizations which were richer than its own. Here Italy was the pupil who listened and borrowed. The famous medical school at Salerno reproduced the teachings of Arab medicine. And literary critics have conclusively demonstrated the borrowings Dante and his contemporaries made from the Arab authors whom they took as their models on account of their philosophical and scientific superiority. So there was never any question of Italy trying to influence those who were richer and more brilliant than itself. On the contrary, Greek scholars were being received with much respect in Venice and even Florence by the late fifteenth century. Indeed when Constantinople fell in 1453, the exodus of Greek intellectuals to Italy—however intolerable some of these refugees later turned out to be—represented an enormous cultural transfer. It was as if Aeneas had once more brought to Italy “the gods of Troy.” Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472) was the most famous of these expatriates. In Venice, “his library became the famous St. Mark’s library,” and without him “the Aldine family would never have been able to publish their first great editions.”46 A second wave of humanism was launched, with Greek as its vehicle. Its architects were many, among them a refugee this time to Florence not Venice, Johannes Argyropoulos, who would teach Aristotle’s natural philosophy in the Studium Generale. His name is mentioned in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks though we do not know whether the painter attended his lectures.
To receive is one thing, to give another. Italy would exert lasting influence only in western Europe, within a civilization related to its own and welcoming toward it. Even in this important direction, however, it seems that Italian superiority long took a purely material, commercial, and financial form. The Italians scattered throughout western Europe were either merchants or, more often, moneylenders. Wherever one cares to look, whether in Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Lisbon, London, Bruges, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Paris, Rouen, Avignon, Montpellier, or Marseille, one finds these clusters of Italian merchants. The immense amount of material to be found in the correspondence sent and received by Francesco di Marco Datini, the merchant of Prato whose fabulous archives have survived, is as concerned with dispatching bills of exchange as it is with merchandise.47 An entire sophisticated system of credit, truly a “superstructure” of economic life, had already been established. There was, so to speak, an airmail service linking Bruges to Genoa, Florence to Montpellier, Paris, and London, or Barcelona to Venice. Meanwhile what people noticed most was the physical movement of goods. The most spectacular sight to be seen must have been the arrival in Bruges—the central rendezvous of trade—of Venetian galere da mercato (the galere di Fiandra), of Genoese carracks, and later of Catalan roundships. Whenever the ships came in, Bruges was transformed into a marketplace, rather as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the great Indies companies opened their warehouses at carefully selected moments, to put their goods on public sale.
Among the Italians abroad then, merchants were particularly prominent. They were already being accompanied by soldiers, sailors, adventurers, intllectuals, and artists. But the latter did not arrive in large numbers and were certainly not received as revered and indisputable masters. They appeared very early in Avignon, but seem to have slipped in one by one. The Italian goldsmiths there were originally commercial travelers, merchants rather than artists or artisans selling their own craftsmanship.48 From about 1328 Italian painters began to find work in French artists’ studios, but only as subordinates. There was no question of their being seen as having something unusual to offer, let alone a new vision of the world. That day had not yet come. Even later, when the great sculptor Francesco Laurana, Dalmatian by birth but trained in Italy, and having worked in Sicily and Naples, came to the court of King René of Provence from 1461 to 1466 and from 1475 to 1502, he made little impact. In Marseille he sculpted the altar of Saint Lazare at the Major, and the reredos at Saint-Didier; the tomb of Giovanni Cossa in the church of Sainte-Marthe in Tarascon; and probably the tomb of Charles IV of Anjou intended for Le Mans cathedral.49 But despite the maturity of his style, he did not really exert much influence on French sculpture. At this period, Italian art did not yet have any great prestige and influence beyond the Alps.
Even such a great humanist as Petrarch, when he came to France, was doing no more than furthering an analogous or even older movement there, which was now beginning to gather strength. Before Italy could become the center of major cultural influence, Italian merchants would have to become, over time, even more refined; Italy would have to distinguish itself more clearly from the rest of the West; Italian nobles would have to make the move to the cities earlier than their counterparts in Europe, and build houses and palaces there. The cities of Italy would have to expand, renew themselves, and embark on great building programs; the Renaissance in its full flowering would have to become indisputably established there; public spectacle would have to be on a scale never seen before; the bourgeoisie would have to become more important and much time would have to pass.
But in the meantime, the other European countries would have asserted their own personalities. The warm welcome they would one day offer to Italian culture would in every case—and in a variety of different ways—be strongly counterbalanced by their own national cultures, by now firmly established and unwilling to give ground to the interloper. Italy did not prevail without a struggle—and that struggle would actually contribute to her greatness.
Italian Humanism: No Breakthrough until the Mid-Fifteenth Century
The word humanism, coined by Georg Voigt in 1859, has had a very successful career. With a little encouragement it might even become a slogan of present-day political philosophy: one often hears references today to “the new humanism” or “the third age of humanism.” Any inquiry into human nature comes under this heading, and many things are grist to its mill.
In the following pages, this word will certainly not be used in this new and distracting way, nor will it quite be used in its once usual sense of ancient culture, derived from humanitas and humanae litterae. What today’s historians prefer to mean by this inspiring watchword is no longer simply the return of Western thought to a certain form of classical antiquity, although that remains an essential feature of it, but a more complicated cultural phenomenon, a slightly mythical one perhaps, not unlike what is meant by that other vague term, the Renaissance. “Humanism begins when medieval civilization dies,” said one historian in 1935, “and with it the economic and social concepts proper to the Middle Ages.”50 But we know that the Middle Ages were a long time waning.
What is more, the term Renaissance, launched by Michelet and Burckhardt, is often confused with the concept of humanism—except that humanism emerges first, as the earliest architect, begetter, animator, and propelling force of that universal transformation (destruction and reconstruction), which goes by the very general name of the Renaissance. Humanism travels ahead of the movement, like a quartermaster finding lodgings for the troops. It is the Renaissance before the Renaissance so to speak. And many historians are quite happy to accept this, being willing to see humanism as something very ancient, something already present in the hybrid thought of the Middle Ages, into which memories of classical Rome were incorporated, despite the confusion they caused by coexisting with Christianity. In short, humanism dates from long before Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374), the first man to explain the whole range of its meanings. Augustin Renaudet after all saw fit to entitle one of his books Dante Humaniste (1952).
Although long established, humanism took on a new vigor, to become present everywhere in the West, much as science would later, at the crucial turn from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. All over Europe, there appeared men of passion, versed in the “three languages” (Greek, Latin, Hebrew), brimming with self-confidence, and openly careerist. Sometimes they forced their way into the universities and imposed their ways of teaching. More often, they found doors closed to them and the humanae litterae had perforce to flourish outside the privileged and unwelcoming academy.51 The humanists found it easier to penetrate the chancelleries, found niches in modest livings of the Church, sometimes made their fortunes in the courts of princes (though that was fraught with danger) or founded circles and academies, meanwhile persecuting those of backward-looking mind (of whom there were plenty). Among themselves they quarreled shamelessly; they were arrogant, insufferable, and—in their own eyes at least—indispensable. Humanism was a sort of epidemic sweeping through Europe, although unlike the plague which attacked the entire human race, humanism affected only small groups of people: Latin speakers were necessarily men apart.
The driving force behind humanism was no doubt a more or less widespread sense of crisis. The collapse in the fifteenth century of both Empire and Papacy, those twin pillars of Christendom, and the series of wars, recurring depressions, and relentless outbreaks of plague all contributed to create a kind of mal du siècle, encouraging a latent cultural revolution. Humanism was moreover a means of destroying something already on the point of collapse but still presenting an obstacle and hindrance. It was an “ideology” in search of itself, difficult or impossible to define, since it was constantly changing. Perhaps this was the first attempt in the West to find a lasting form of ideology—unless, as J.A. Maravall thinks, scholasticism was the first to fulfill that function.
To call it an ideology is to identify it as a loose system of ideas, beliefs, declarations, prejudices, connected by a sometimes less than perfect logic, but connected all the same. An ideology cannot but be all-enveloping: its nature is to take over the individual and oblige him to submit to constraint, as he is generally only too pleased to do. In short it is a kind of replacement civilization, designed to repair the holes and fill the gaps in an existing civilization, now perceived as damaged or deficient. Logically it calls for enthusiasm, conviction, the certainty that one is right, and the lure of success. That it should consist of a bit of everything is logical too: the plaster used to patch up the cracks blends with what was already there.
Humanism was in this sense no more a simple return to antiquity than the art of the Renaissance was the resurrection of Vitruvius. Antiquity was an alibi, a dream one might enter to escape the contemporary world, which could not be the world of Cicero and Seneca. Humanism claimed to offer “progress and a return to the past,” which is a contradiction in terms, and to combine “in a single intuition nature, virtue, beauty, reason, antiquity and the Christian religion”52 —a naïve program perhaps but a revolutionary one. Philology might be a small thing in itself, but the freedom of intellect and the rational criticism it required amounted to a major step forward!
As it was, the tertium regnum, the “third force” of humanism, gradually imposed itself throughout Europe, and a network of correspondents made of it a “European republic of letters,” a world apart, a nervous system that gradually extended to cover all of Christendom, developing sensitive or ultrasensitive antennae for any event that might happen.
In that world of about 1400, Paris did not lag behind Florence or Rome; Strasburg or Basle were the equals of Padua. A specialist has even written, apropos of Paris: “The time lag [between European humanism and that of Italy] which was until recently thought to be quite established, now seems to be minimal or even nonexistent. In some cases, one might even wonder whether French humanists did not show the Italians the way.”53
The same might be said of Germany, which was powerfully influenced by the holding in two of its cities of the Councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Basle (1431–1449); humanism was certainly given a considerable boost by these international meetings, by the presence there of men like Nicholas of Cusa or Enea Silvio Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius II)—but already at this stage, the first seeds of the new thinking had begun to germinate there.
As regards humanism then and the cultures coming face-to-face with it, there was for some considerable time a west European equilibrium, in other words exchange took place on a basis of reasonable equality. The imbalance that would make possible the rise of Italian humanism became evident only during the second half of the fifteenth century at the earliest. The heart of Europe, that is to say France, had been ravaged. Italy on the other hand had been protected from the worst, and that was important. Here the uninterrupted succession of generations of humanists encouraged a certain progress, an accumulation of knowledge, reaching down “from Petrarch via Salutati to Bruni”; and Italian humanism, once launched, naturally moved on to reach its peak with the age of Poliziano, Ermolao Barbaro, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola. This was the age of enthusiasm for the study of Greek and Hebrew, the age too of the printing press. The first printer in Italy, a German, is mentioned in 1467. Does the establishment of these pre-conditions explain the great Italian breakthrough? In Paris, which we may regard as a typical example, it does seem that the flame of humanism was revived by Italians. Gregorio Tiferna, a native of Rome, was teaching at the University of Paris between 1456 and 1458. Among his listeners were two outstanding students, Robert Gaguin and Guillaume Fichet. About twenty years later came Filippo Beroaldo the Elder, and then his successors—a disputatious group: Fausto Andrelini, Girolamo Balbo, Cornelio Vitelli. The great teachers of later years were, among others, an Italianized Greek, Johannes Lascaris, and Girolamo Aleandro. The latter’s inaugural lecture in 1508, read at top speed, lasted two and a half hours without damaging the author’s reputation—it was already too great to be touched.54 By this time, French humanism seemed to be restored to health: “Guillaume Budé was a French Poliziano, Lefèvre d’Etaples a French Pico della Mirandola.”55 Who could say fairer than that?
But are words like “restored to health,” which I have not invented, the right ones to use? The problem can be reconsidered in every detail, but I doubt whether it can be resolved once and for all. If we stay with the French example, which is partly valid for other countries, we should have to identify some kind of gap or breakdown during the difficult time France was experiencing. Such is not to be found before 1418, according to a brilliant study by Ezio Ornato (1969), and most people will agree with him. But, he goes on, “What about after 1418? To prove the existence of a decline after that date, it will not be enough simply to point to the sudden disappearance of the best-known humanists who fell victims to the civil war; we should also have to demonstrate that the milieux in France which ought to have been transmitting the new culture—notably the universities and chancelleries—had been rendered incapable of training a new generation of cultured men able to carry on the tradition. I hope presently to help demonstrate the contrary.”56 Whom are we to believe? In this debate, in which Italy is our chief area of concern, reconciliation seems to be the sensible course to take. All humanism is in a sense twofold, with first a national and then a European component. Pico della Mirandola spent the years 1485 to 1488 in France; Lefèvre d’Etaples went to Florence, Padua, Rome, and Venice in 1488 to 1489 and again in about 1500. Is it really impossible to reconcile the notions of on the one hand a perfectly healthy French humanism and on the other an outstandingly healthy Italian humanism, coming to meet it and maintaining natural links with it? If this could be done, it would mean accepting that the same set of circumstances, the same conjoncture, prevailed for humanism in France, Italy, and perhaps elsewhere as well.
The same conjoncture? I am inclined to say, yes very likely. And the same structure too, by which I mean the same basic reality. Nonspecialist historians would at this juncture make a more obvious but unanswerable point: humanism was an urban phenomenon, connected with the rise of the bourgeoisie. A priori one would naturally expect Italy to be leading the field: where else in Europe were there so many rich cities, so many bourgeoisies comfortably established? On the question of quality, the debate remains open, but in terms of quantity the immense superiority of Italy is obvious. If we are looking for “critical mass,” as Pierre Chaunu would say, this is certainly the place to look.
Once these considerations are made, it becomes clear why Alberto Tenenti does not like discussing humanism in the broad sense until after 1440;57 not because he believes that no humanism existed before the Italian influence made itself felt, but because it was only then that humanism took on European dimensions, finally finding a firm foundation, and preparing, without it being apparent at the time, to confront the great religious conflicts that would gradually break out towards the end of the century and more particularly in the next. Humanism—like science in our own time—would find itself facing unexpected responsibilities at about the same time, and in the train of the same movement as the end of the Italian wars. Revolutionary in spirit, humanism would lead to that more obvious revolution that we call the Reformation—a tidal wave that was about to engulf Europe.