The section that follows is probably the most contentious in the book. It seeks to propose a framework for tackling the major questions already considered in such a way as to integrate them into a valid model of Italian grandeur and decadence between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The model will of course make it necessary to go back earlier than 1450 and to look forward beyond 1650—and even to seek comparisons outside Italy. Our biggest problem will be to avoid repeating the arguments already outlined, but they must nevertheless be taken into consideration.
Imaginary Graphs
Nowadays historians are familiar with graphs. But no graph, however skilled the programmer, could be constructed from a systematic ordering of the quantitative and qualitative data at our disposal in this instance. In any case, what “indicators” could one use to measure “greatness” or “non-greatness,” terms too vague for prompt mathematical equivalents? The only alternative is to imagine a graph. This may be worth doing, on condition that it is regarded simply as one way of discovering a language and logic that can at best do no more than simulate the evidence. If this approach does nothing more than eliminate others equally gratuitous, it will not have been a complete waste of time.
Our impossible graph then (which I will now take as drawn) would begin in about 1100 and end in about 1650. Between these two dates, we should imagine not one but two peaks: I suggest 1350 and 1595, debatable choices certainly, but our graph cannot possibly be a simple one rising to a single peak like a symmetrical Gaussian curve. The low point between 1350 and 1595 might fall at about 1450 or possibly 1500—in other words I am suggesting that we can find a long-term crisis in Italy during the same hundred years (1350–1450) that the rest of Europe was subject to a violent, dramatic, and durable crisis, in which plague (the Black Death) and war were compounded by a series of long economic recessions. Italy was not immune from these troubles. In the Decameron, Boccaccio and his friends take refuge in a villa in the Florentine countryside to escape the plague in the city. But Italy, being better placed thanks to its wealth and accumulated technical skills, and having more or less successfully emerged from feudalism during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,195 withstood the battery of disasters better than Europe as a whole; it therefore did not lose its comparative superiority—and that was what mattered.
Having established our two peaks then, we are immediately faced with another thorny question: supposing our dates to be reasonable, should the 1350 peak be higher, lower, or about the same as the 1595 one? Some historians, Pierre Chaunu among them, have come to argue that the “long” sixteenth century (1450–1650) was as much recovery as advance. Perhaps they are right. But I think they may have been distracted by the greater accuracy of the population statistics we now have, thanks to progress in historical demography. The year 1350 is probably at about the same level as 1550 or 1575, if one is thinking in terms of the population figures for Europe as a whole. And the same would be true of Italy. But demography is not everything. World supremacy after all passed in turn to Holland and then to England, neither of which had a large population: in about 1600 there were some two million inhabitants in Holland and five million in England.
What “greatness” really meant was surplus wealth, of which the dazzling presence could be sensed for so long in Italy: it was what existed over and above everyday life, the basic economy. It did not, let me insist, mean a fantastic accumulation of goods, but rather a stream of ships returning from the Levant or the Indies, carrying precious cargoes (pepper, spices, silk), it meant luxury industries, and it meant a supply of gold and silver. Between 1500 and 1650, according to official records, a total of 160 tons of gold and 18,000 tons of silver from America arrived in Spain and from there reached the rest of Europe. Its effects are nevertheless well known. So if one thinks of the rapid increase in production, the massive new amount of currency in circulation, and the change in the dimensions of the known world, one is surely bound to recognize that the economic level in 1595 must have been higher than in 1350. And along with this superiority went everything else: volume of trade, power of the state, and before long a new impetus in science.
It is in any case an error to suppose that decadence is a kind of return to square one. The Italy of 1650 was not the Italy of the early days of Venice and Amalfi. And I do not see it as necessarily inferior to the Italy of the fourteenth century, brilliant though the earlier age may have been. Everyone thinks for instance that “France under the Sun King,” Louis XIV, was “greater” than France under de Gaulle, but the “inferior” France of the l960s had a population two or three times greater and was many times richer. Greatness, in the sense that historians use the word, is always measured by the greatness of others. Greatness means being “greater” than someone else. The Britain of today is more beautiful (which is not difficult), more equitable, but less great than it was in the Victorian era: less great, even if in June 1940 it saved the world, less great precisely because the Second World War confirmed the superpower status of two massive states, the United States and the Soviet Union, with the inevitable rise of China to come.
So behind the graph for Italy, one has to imagine graphs representing Byzantium, Islam, and the Western world as a whole. If Italy was soon to emerge above the rest, it was because Byzantium was falling apart, because it was a capital with nothing left to feed on—and because Islam had almost entirely lost the Mediterranean Sea.196 And if Italy declined, it was because the graphs of the other Western powers were now set to climb. Italy followed suit, but neither overtook nor any longer controlled the trend. Italy declined because Holland was rising. In sum, the stakes of greatness are substantially if not entirely external ones. It is the rest of the world that tolerates, accepts, or destroys our greatness. So our fall, if fall there be, is shared.
The Means of Achieving Greatness
Greatness implies access to the outside world: if that is restricted, greatness is likely to wane or fade; if it is increased, greatness asserts itself. It is clear that this two-sided problem one way or another brings us back to the means whereby domination is created, expressed, and maintained. If we consider the possible comparisons before the Industrial Revolution (which altered the proportions of any form of domination), then the “modern greatness” of Spain, Holland, England, or France always tells us one simple thing, namely that in a given economy (the Mediterranean plus Europe, or the entire world in early modern times), there is always, justly or unjustly, a hierarchy. Greatness basically benefits one of the partners, creating an asymmetry in the economic area within which it is an agent and in which it has longer- or shorter-term privileged status. This rule is not only valid in Western and Mediterranean history, but could be applied anywhere: Islam, India, and China have all enjoyed greatness on the same basis.
True greatness endures—it has time, that precious commodity, on its side. But ephemeral instances of greatness can sometimes tell us more than durable ones. They expose how the whole thing works. France is a good example in this respect. Historians see France as forever collapsing and rising again, chasing after a greatness that has always evaded it, leaving it bruised and embittered; then along comes the new opportunity it was waiting for and the adventure begins all over again; a series of actions both comparable and mutually explanatory.
A period of domination, if it lasts, attains a certain degree of perfection, but never perfection as such. If we were to visualize in the abstract, outside history, all the means one could imagine of achieving domination, and then to confer all these means on some imaginary power, we should of course have created a monster unknown to history. No great power would ever have possessed all of them; every great power has its feet of clay, its Achilles heel. And it is the failings of greatness that take us to the heart of the problem. For if every domination is imperfect from the start, precisely because of the very structure of its success, it is easier to see why its history is endlessly interrupted by troubles, anxieties, failures, and disorders. Imperfection helps to explore the mystery of these inevitable repeated setbacks. It is only natural then that Renaissance Italy does not appear under the completely unclouded sky imagined by naïve admirers. Britain in the past or America today, although great powers, have witnessed their share of alerts, dramas, and crises, as no one would deny.
Sea Power
The five European examples of greatness chosen for comparison not surprisingly perhaps add up to a commentary on the notion of sea power as understood by Admiral Mahan. All of them were based on strength at sea. Being only half successful in this respect was a constant source of weakness in the case of France. France had money, population, competent commanders from the aristocracy, soldiers, political will, plentiful natural resources, a state established both early and comparatively solidly, and policies, energetically and skillfully pursued, that were at least as reprehensible as everyone else’s. But, in the sixteenth century, France lost Italy, of which it had so long dreamed, not on the field of Pavia in 1525, but three years later in 1528, when Andrea Doria abandoned the blockade of Naples and went over to the imperial camp with his galleys. Without the Genoese navy, it was impossible for the King of France to dominate either Italy or the Mediterranean, so imperial or “universal” domination was out of the question. Then in the seventeenth century, Louis XIV was defeated at La Hougue on May 26, 1692. His immediate response was to say “Forty-four of my ships have beaten ninety of my enemy’s,” which was true, but in reality the French navy never recovered from a “victory” that was in fact a disaster. And, finally, the great epic of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, that expenditure of huge capital to no avail, came to an unprofitable end at Trafalgar on November 21, 1805, between two in the morning and five in the afternoon. So on three separate occasions, for reasons so obvious that no one can fail to see them, France lost greatness just as it was within reach. A book written long ago by Emile Bourgeois pointed out the mortal conflict between France’s maritime and continental destinies. France lies at a crossroads of Europe, surrounded by lands and seas and unable to neglect any of them. Thus it has had to divide its efforts. England by contrast could afford to ignore land power.
Spain’s problems were different but equally instructive. Let us agree for a moment that Spain “won America in the lottery,” although that is not quite true. At all events, Spain proved quite equal to her destiny. Castile organized the “Spanish Indies” and the system of Atlantic crossings that Pierre Chaunu insists on calling “Seville’s Atlantic.” We know about the thousands of boats traveling to and from Spain in this essential trade zone. Was Spain’s big mistake to have paid too much attention at the same time to Italy and the Mediterranean? Possibly, for Spain triumphed where victory was not really important—at Lepanto in 1571—and lost, or began to lose, where the real conflict was being played out, in the Atlantic, or rather in the treacherous trap of the English Channel and the North Sea, which closed on the Invincible Armada in 1588. I say “began to lose” since in 1597, and again in 1601, Spain proved capable of sending north two more armadas, only to see them dispersed by unpredictable northern storms. It was only in 1628 that the fatal blow eventually fell on the fleet of the Carrera de Indias, when it was surprised and captured by Piet Heyn’s Dutch fleet at Matanzas, on the way out of Havana. Nevertheless for more than a century (from 1492 to 1628) Spain had controlled the middle Atlantic with her ships from Biscay (possibly the best in the world) and Andalusia, as well as the heavy vessels of Flanders and the Hansa. That control would probably have been more effective if all the ports in the Peninsula had been allowed to engage in the Indies trade from the start (something that happened later, much too late, in 1784).
With Italy and the sea it is practically the same story. The Italian navies maintained their supremacy from the twelfth century until at least 1550 or so, possibly until about 1570. The date is uncertain because, unlike the French or Spanish cases, there was no major disaster to mark the end of the Italian fleet, no date to go down in history, no La Hougue or Trafalgar. But there can be no doubt that Italian greatness in this respect came to an end about then.
In 1530 or so, as we have seen, the ships from the Atlantic had stopped coming on their usual Mediterranean voyages, and they stayed away for years. But they returned with the economic upturn of the years 1570–1575. At this time, while they did not sweep all before them, they unquestionably helped bring about the decline of the old order.
This was not so much because they were backed by a powerful economy. Shipping was a business on the whole handled by the poor. The rich tended to hire other people to do it for them, and to recruit foreign crews. Venice recruited in Dalmatia and the Greek islands; Genoa was from the start a major customer for the great sailing ships of Ragusa, financing their voyages, buying carats or shares in the profit on their cargoes and having a large say in their itineraries. The golden age of the Ragusan merchant fleet corresponds, as if by coincidence, to the 1530s to the 1570s, when northern ships were absent from the Mediterranean.
The consequences of the northern invasion were foreseeable: during the latter part of the century, there was a regular reduction in the tonnage of the Venetian merchant fleet, if not of the shipping in the port. Custom was being taken away from Venetian Theships and crews. And this is a significant example. The northerners had better-built ships, better cruising speeds, and better defenses in the event of attack. They were also prepared to turn pirate themselves on occasion. The Catalans to some extent, and the Marseillais to a greater one, played a part in this proletarian conquest of the seas. Even the fleet of the Algiers corsairs was a northern one.
The history of Holland’s greatness follows exactly the same pattern and has already been referred to. The initial achievement was the seizure of the sea route from the Baltic to the Iberian peninsula, to Lisbon and Seville. This had been accomplished by 1530, sixty years before Cornelius Houtman’s voyage, and a century before the encounter at Matanzas. The Dutch breakthrough in its early stages very closely resembled the slow but steady progress made by the ships, the seamen, and the aggressive cities of Italy in the eleventh century. Behind the Italian exploits, there had been a similar infrastructure of ships that were more maneuverable and efficient, and crews less well paid than anyone else’s. And the Mediterranean of the tenth and eleventh centuries was also quite a primitive and open sea. As in the days of Hesiod, anyone could set off on an adventure at any time: such as the group of Muslims from a suburb of Cordoba—well inland—who set off by boat in the tenth century, sailed to the other end of the Mediterranean, and seized the island of Crete: Byzantium had a good deal of trouble getting it back.
The Italian seamen of those early days were also ready to tum adventurer. Their voyages remind me of the trips made by the wild “Americans” of the eighteenth century: whalers or traders in flour, timber, and rum, who sailed to the northern Pacific and the China seas, in unsound vessels manned by alarmingly filthy crews often drunk on rum, and navigating without compasses (indeed this “primitive” navigation at such a late date obliges us to reconsider our oversimple versions of shipping history). But the American shipping of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century did not last. The steamship finished it off, and by the 1840s English steamers were working the Atlantic route—a silent victory often ignored by history.
In short, it seems to be a general rule that there is a lean and hungry phase at the beginning of every episode of sea power. Then comes the wealthy period, for which Venice coined or repeated the proverb “Sailors like fish go rotten if their heads are out of water”—leading inevitably to takeover by a poorer rival.
Space and Greatness
Every episode of greatness assumes an area of domination (abroad), larger than the area actually possessed (at home). Greatness, that is, implies extra space. For Spain, simplifying somewhat, that extra space meant the mid-Atlantic and the Americas: the ocean, which was not easy to control at first, then the land masses of America, and the islands, which were held on to with the tenacity of a peasant race. Spain could not be ousted from its territorial possessions.
In much the same way, Genoa and Venice held on to the areas of the Mediterranean necessary to their greatness, either by force or by means of their merchant colonies. These areas began to slip from their grasp only in 1453 with the Turkish advance, and it did not happen all at once. Meanwhile the strengthening of their trading colonies in the west, thanks to the flow of trade to the New World and the Far East, compensated for the grievous losses in the Levant—compensated in terms of money, that is, not of territorial possession.
The old geographical explanation of the reorganization of world trade routes faces us once more, of course. I have questioned its importance—but only as regards the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth, there can be no doubt whatever that the new shape of the world brought immense disadvantages, indeed it dealt a mortal blow, to the Mediterranean world by which Italy was surrounded. But it is surely untrue that the effect of one space on the other is a merely physical phenomenon. Space is activated only by human intervention. It was not the “rise of the Atlantic” that ruined or outclassed the Mediterranean, but the initiative grasped by the United Provinces in visualizing the possibility of a world economy: and that was a human initiative. What people could accomplish in the north could surely have been accomplished in the south. After all the Genoese had in their own way for a while dominated Spain’s Atlantic trade.
Werner Sombart perceived this problem in his book The Jews and Economic Life in which he assumed this change to have been caused by the transfer of the networks of Jewish merchants. But was it not rather the success of Amsterdam that attracted the Jewish merchants in the first place? He is however right when he remarks that Genoa was just as well placed on the map as Hamburg, London, Antwerp, or Amsterdam to exploit the seventeenth-century world economy as it gradually emerged. Before air travel, passengers for South America preferred to board in Genoa or Marseille, rather than in Hamburg, Le Havre, or even Bordeaux. Geography was not the problem: what was needed was both the will and the capacity to hold on to these world routes.
The best position for action of this kind is usually a midway one, at the point where a short-radius area meets one of longer radius. Amsterdam’s value lay in the shorter circuits linking it with the Baltic, England, Germany, Poland, Muscovy, France, Portugal, and Spain. Merchandise arrived in these centers for resale. Could the area around Genoa compete with this maritime arc from Gibraltar to Kronstadt? I doubt it, although, through Cadiz, Italy remained firmly connected to Spain and thus to the Americas.
Another form of greatness is possible, relating to the immediate area. Sixteenth-century France for instance represented a very large area at the time. It could accommodate almost anything without being entirely occupied by it, whether the Hundred Years War or the Wars of Religion, neither of which overwhelmed the country. And external war remained on the periphery; the enemy made few inroads on French soil, even if he captured Marseille (1536), Meaux (1544), Amiens (1596), Corbie and Saint-Jean-de-Losne (1636), or Cambrai, and Douai (1712). I have always imagined France during the Wars of Religion as something like China in the days of the generals, in about 1930: a huge expanse in which couriers, travelers, and even armed troops could be swallowed up. To travel from Paris to Marseille took ten to fifteen days in the age of Louis XIV. Italy was a large country too, but it could be crossed without too much difficulty and lay open to the outside world, as it had long before the Italian wars. To enter Italy meant opening a series of doors, but only one after another, so the difficulty was divided up in advance. And the peninsula was accustomed to invasion. There had already been “Italian wars” in the time of Barbarossa, Frederick II, the Angevins, and the Aragonese. But the leading cities, which thought themselves unique in the world, had long been able to feel sheltered behind their fortifications—until the day when cannonfire proved capable of demolishing their gates.
The United Provinces, one might argue, were even smaller. But in 1672, if the dikes had not been opened in time, what would have become of Amsterdam at the hands of an efficient French army? A miracle is an exception that proves the rule. As for England, its small size was compensated for by the sea that magnified the area around it, enabling it to breathe and defend itself. But in today’s world, where size is a source of supremacy, England’s size is a disadvantage.
Capitalism and Sectors of the Economy
Every example of greatness operates through a system of action and control, in other words an economic system plus a political system. If they are to be efficient, these systems have to be linked and coordinated; the means of production, the organs of decision-making, the intermediaries, the institutions, and the priorities to be pursued have to form a coherent whole; in the centuries we are studying, there had to be already in existence an effective capitalist order. The words capitalist and capitalism, particularly the latter, are anachronistic terms but convenient tools for the historian, making it possible to identify the question immediately. They are so indispensable that one finds them being used by historians who fiercely deny their ambiguity—only to find that they are hard to pin down. But why not simply accept them, since everyone knows, and it has been perfectly obvious since the Industrial Revolution, that there is capitalism and capitalism! To my mind, there has to be some kind of capitalism at the center of any rise to dominance in modern times and, inevitably, in every process of decline.
In this last respect, what kind of system was at work in Italy when decline began, or even earlier?
In Venice, where the chance survival of sources gives us some information, commercial life was dominated above all by the Florentines, who owned trading firms, and by the Genoese, who controlled currency exchange, the trade in silver, and maritime insurance. The Florentines seem to have been even more firmly ensconced than the Genoese. Indeed following the interruption to the Piacenza fairs in 1621, which had brought heavy Venetian losses, there had been something of a reaction against the Genoese. At any rate, here we have a clear image of capitalist maneuvering as between different active Italian groups: some were winning, some were losing. But we do not entirely understand the game. A tentative model for what was happening might go as follows: Jewish moneylenders at the lowest rung of the ladder, handling everyday transactions, Florentines a little higher up, dealing in medium-level but still prudent affairs, and the Genoese at the top level, the narrowest and most precarious platform of capitalist business. If this was so, Venetian patricians looking around for some alternative when the profits from trade began to diminish would have found all these positions occupied and would therefore have fallen back on buying landed property instead. But perhaps they needed no incentive to move in this direction?
Naturally, if we are interested in Italian decadence, we would like more information about the establishment in Italy of foreign capitalism, about the slow ousting of the dominant Italian system by Dutch or English money. The Dutch seem to have made an early impression on Venice, on Naples, and above all on Livorno, whose merchants were, according to one expert, nothing but “commission agents” by 1720. English investors seem to have preferred Genoa, where the first English firms appeared in about 1640. Felipe Ruiz Martín has even wondered whether the money that Genoa continued to lend the King of Spain was not actually English money in disguise. But secret financial deals are only suspected, not confirmed. And what route could such foreign money have taken?
It certainly did not come in the first place by the straightforward route of banking and credit. The English and Dutch attacked the Italian system from below, with their shippers, merchants, industrial goods, their indispensable commodities such as Cornish tin and lead, hides from Russia, and barrels of herring. And such assaults—or services, whichever way one looks at them—were often in fact the work of Italian émigrés, sometimes Protestants, often merchants who had settled in England or Amsterdam. They can be traced through the commercial correspondence surviving in the archives. The economic system of the Italian cities gradually became disorganized—or perhaps a better word would be dislocated. An economy forms a whole, from the most basic transactions and humblest activities in the marketplace to the most hazardous speculation by the specialists (at the Besançon exchange fairs for instance). Everything is connected. If any single sector is experiencing either weakness or strength, the negative or positive impulse is reflected throughout the system. In Spain, the decline of agriculture, since neither the nobles nor the bourgeoisie were investing in it anymore, opened up the national market to foreign corn, from the Baltic, controlled (ironically) by Amsterdam. In Italy, the reverse happened: the money of patricians who had once been merchants went into land purchases, whether in Venice, Florence, or more predictably in Naples. Social tensions followed and peasant society found itself back under a stricter order. But production and productivity went up. From now on, Italy needed no foreign bread. In that case, it no longer needed so urgently to export either manufactured goods or liquid cash. Was this a good thing? From the point of view of the quality of life perhaps it was: I would certainly rather have lived in Tuscany, than in Spain under Philip IV or even in France under Louis XIV.
What was definitely disorganized however was the merchant fleet. Italy lost some of the profits from freight, and one way or another ended up paying foreign shippers. In any case, the latter had quite simple tactics: they tried to include in their itinerary either Genoa, Livorno, or Naples, where they would obtain cash in return for barrels of herring, copper rosettes, and pigs of tin or lead. Once they had the coin, their most advantageous course was to go to the islands in the Levant to buy raisins or casks of Malmsey wine, or better still to press on to Syria and Egypt, returning with silk, spices, drugs, and cotton.
This trade would fall off to some extent but it remained highly profitable after 1620. One had to reckon with a steady rise in price as the cargoes approached Europe. Naturally, manufactured goods going the other way were part of the system: English kerseys (carisee in the Italian documents) were to be found in the Mediterranean before the sixteenth century. They were not only sold in Italy but also re-exported to the Balkans and Asia, indeed they flooded the Mediterranean, coming overland from the Netherlands and Hamburg, across the well-organized roads of Germany or even France, but also by the easier sea passage.
In the Mediterranean, northern shipping thus gradually took over from the Italians. In fact Italian merchants had always, since the Champagne fairs, bought with one hand to sell with the other. This also explains the early association of the most active cities (Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence) with Germany, since German products needed outlets in the Mediterranean. Venice’s relations with Ravensburg, Ulm, Regensburg, and Augsburg—over a very wide radius—were the classic ones of the merchant to the craftsman. It was only in a series of erratic bursts punctuated by pauses and slowdowns that industry became established in Italian cities. So in Venice the Arte della Seta and the Arte della Lana (the wool and silk guilds) were eclipsed from time to time. The latter did have an Indian summer between 1580 and 1610, but that was followed by a severe decline. The example simply confirms the rule that industry is a shifting activity, starting up in one place then another, then somewhere else again. In about 1650, the silk industry virtually deserted the south of Italy for the north. Sooner or later in the seventeenth century, all the other Italian industries went into decline. Rising prices and wages had their effect. The artisans could no longer afford to live in town. The Arti, which kept wages high, could no longer compete with external competition. And the retreat of artisans to the countryside did not promote a spurt of industry there, as it did in France or England. So the looms fell silent.
The outcome of this decline and fall has often been studied. We could do with more detail, but the general result is already apparent. What happened in Italy was that a long, catastrophic industrial crisis followed on the heels of a long, catastrophic shipping crisis.
There still remained the enviable credit machinery. City banks had become more numerous in the late sixteenth century while leaving plenty of room for private credit firms. During the general recession, credit and financial and banking capitalism survived quite well. In Genoa, the system remained in working order until about 1627 and even later. But was this to Italy’s advantage? This credit was disconnected from normal economic life in the peninsula, and was basically used to manipulate the money of the King of Spain. Nevertheless it attracted, by what seemed to be a natural development, the money of the Genoese themselves, speculators, rentiers, aristocrats, tempted by the interest rates on offer: 8 or 10 percent a year, reckoning postponements between fairs at 2 or 2.5 percent. What happened here was what would happen to French savers during the Third Republic: money was taken out of national circuits to be invested in whichever foreign government loans looked tempting—including in the later example those of the Russian government. The same thing took place mutatis mutandis in eighteenth-century Holland. So the Amsterdam bourse became the center for loans, the foreign bond market. Dutch investors held between a fifth and a third of English government loan bonds. They lent money to all governments, whether Catherine the Great, Louis XVI, or the Elector of Saxony, who wanted to become King of Poland.
That said, let us imagine that Italy, which had not yet faded from the scene in 1600, had been able by some miracle to benefit from the advice of a modern economist (with some historical knowledge) and that he had proposed a remedy, a plan. It is of course a quite impossible scenario; the gulf between his warnings, advice, and requirements, and the situation as it was then viewed by those in responsibility, who considered themselves reasonable men, would be enormous and unbridgeable. The learned doctor would have been treated to gales of laughter from a patient who did not consider himself ill. For what authoritarian policy would have been able to make the Venetian patricians go back into shipping, when they were making profits of 100 percent on their agricultural land, as against 10 to 15 percent (risks not included) by financing ships to sail to Egypt or Syria? In Genoa, to snap off the cursed thread of the asientos would be to cut off the flow of silver; it would mean making a heavy loss in the immediate future, since an asiento was usually repaid with another asiento in a sequence rarely settled by the finiquito. One might as well have invited these wealthy persons to declare themselves bankrupt. And who would have been able to explain to the princes and republics of Italy, as well as to the Spanish who had an interest in the question, that they ought to be working towards the political unity of the Italian peninsula, and towards a “common market” in the interests of all Italy? Long-term lucidity is not the usual characteristic of political leaders—still less of businessmen.
Greatness and Culture
The most important thing has yet to be said. I remember a melancholy conversation I once had in 1945 with the French Revolution historian Georges Lefebvre. What he said was in substance: “People have always said that power and culture, or rather cultural influence [we were talking about French cultural influence] are quite independent of each other. Germany in the early nineteenth century, they said, had plenty of cultural influence, but it was divided, trampled by French soldiers, and later controlled by Metternich. But really power and cultural influence are two faces of the same coin.”
I am not so sure of that as was my illustrious colleague—with whom indeed I argued fiercely that day in a corridor in the Sorbonne. I am still not so sure. Cultural influence in the case of Spain during the Golden Age was a sort of afterglow. And could the same not be said of France, without going as far back as the secolo senza Roma? French cultural supremacy always seems to follow some political failure. In 1529, only fourteen years after Marignano, French expansion was over, given the mistakes made by François I and the incredible luck of the Habsburgs; but this was when the French Renaissance flowered—for there was a French Renaissance. After the great wars of Louis XIV, another resounding failure, came the France of the Enlightenment: “le grand siècle, I mean of course the eighteenth,” as Michelet said. After 1815 came Romanticism; after 1919 and the failure of the French peace as France understood it, after a “victory” that left France totally exhausted, came a literary, artistic, and scientific flowering such as we had not seen for a long time. Leon Brunschvig, referring to Greece and to the owl, symbol of Athens and its influence, used to say: “The bird of Athena, which unfortunately takes flight at nightfall.” Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me that there must be a kind of nightfall preceding, and determining, almost every case of cultural greatness. It is the darkness that provokes a multitude of lights. France has been quite privileged from this point of view. And in this sense, night, or a version of night, fell at least twice on Italy, first in about 1450 then again in about 1600. The sky of the whole of Europe was lit up by it.