If you were a petitioner to the government of Siena in the later Middle Ages, you would enter the Sala della Pace, a painted room in the city’s great Gothic town hall, the Palazzo Pubblico. There you would face the nine governing councillors, known as the noveschi, seated on a dais beneath a large fresco representing Good Government. The fresco would be encouraging because it depicts the winged figures of Faith, Hope and Charity flying above the six female virtues, who include Peace and Magnanimity. The figure of Justice is especially reassuring: her scales are even, and each one carries an angel. Standing there, you might feel you were before a just and more or less ideal government, which is what the noveschi thought they were.
If you glanced at the walls to the right and left, you would quickly understand the difference between good government and bad government and thus be in a position to select the sensible path to follow. The fresco to the right, The Well-Governed City, illustrates the benefits you would expect from such a title. The elegant city is inhabited by happy dancers, industrious artisans, people with good food and fine garments and leisure to chat and read and play board-games. Outside the city gate their rustic compatriots are also merry, usefully employed threshing corn and gathering the harvest, and prosperous as well, owning chickens and donkeys and saddlebacked pigs. Such joys are absent in the fresco to the left, The Ill-Governed City, where a horned Tyranny presides over a dark, spectral landscape beyond the walls and scenes of violence and insecurity within: a dagger is drawn, a woman is seized by soldiers, a corpse lies on the ground. Fear stalks the countryside with a sword, while Justice is vanquished, hands bound and scales broken.1
The frescoes were painted between 1337 and 1340 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, late products of the golden age of Sienese painting that was begun sixty years earlier by Duccio di Buoninsegna, continued with Simone Martini and terminated by the Black Death in 1348 that carried off Lorenzetti, his brother Piero and every established Sienese artist except Lippo Memmi. Whereas Duccio’s rich, translucent works were painted in the service of religion, and the town hall’s most famous painting, the Guidoriccio, portrays a Sienese general, Lorenzetti’s most celebrated works are the mesmerizing political allegories that cover the walls of the Sala della Pace. In The Well-Governed City everyday scenes of rural and urban life were depicted with a skill and love of detail unmatched by anyone until Pieter Brueghel, who must surely have seen them when he visited Siena 200 years later. Guided by the city’s rulers, Lorenzetti’s role was less the contemporary chronicler than the propagandist of communal government and advocate of a civil life unsubordinated to religion. Symbolism in such matters was important. When the councillors constructed the tower of the Palazzo Pubblico in 1338, they ensured that, although it was built at the bottom of a slope, it would be higher than the tower of the cathedral, which is on a hill.
Siena still seems one of the blessed places of the Earth, a town whose beauty alone might justify the claim inscribed on the Camollia Gate: cor magis tibi Sena pandit – ‘Siena opens her heart wide to you’. From the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo, the three terzi (districts) spread along the town’s three curving ridges, their harmonious buildings constructed in the bricks of that warm hue known to artists as ‘burnt sienna’. In the prosperous years before the Black Death, ‘the city of the Virgin’, as it was called, had a population of over 50,000 in addition to another 50,000 in its contado, the country districts and small towns it controlled to its south and west. By the time of Lorenzetti’s frescoes, Siena had added Grosseto and Massa Marittima to its domains.
The city owed much of its wealth to bankers: the Bonsignori were the papacy’s principal money men in the thirteenth century, and the Monte dei Paschi has claims to be the oldest bank in the world, functioning without interruption since 1472. Its chief disadvantages – common to most hill-towns founded by the Etruscans – were its distance from a river and a water supply too meagre to support manufacturing and the labour it required: Siena could thus never hope to compete with the great woollen industries of Lucca and Prato, towns built next to rivers on the plains of northern Tuscany. Yet the Sienese – whom Dante dismissed as vain and derided for their expensive search for an underground stream that did not exist2 – were unable to grasp there might be a limit to the size of their population. By the 1330s Florence had twice as many inhabitants as Siena, yet it was at this time that the smaller city, already possessor of the striking zebra-striped cathedral we see today, decided to erect the largest church in Christendom. The project was halted by the Black Death, which killed half the town’s population, and was abandoned soon afterwards, but some of its pillars and arches still stand as testament to monumental ambition. The existing cathedral, which is pretty large itself, would have become merely the transept of the greater glory.
Siena’s rulers, whom their subjects might meet beneath Lorenzetti’s frescoes, were titled ‘the Nine Governors and Defenders of the Commune’, whose regime, buttressed by councils and committees, lasted from 1287 to 1355. Although the Nine themselves were a self-perpetuating oligarchy, choosing their successors from some sixty families, they were supported by a wide coalition of classes and interests and directed one of the most stable city-states of the Middle Ages.
On taking office, the Nine swore to provide ‘a good peace and concord’ to the people of ‘the magnificent city of Siena’. The wording of the oath was laudable, and so was the constitution of 1309 which enforced planning permission. Serious and resolute about their cultural duties, the Nine ordered the building of the Palazzo Pubblico and later its huge tower; they paved the Piazza del Campo in roseate brick in a herringbone pattern; and they commissioned Duccio’s great Maestà as an altarpiece for the cathedral. They also compelled citizens to embellish their city: houses required building permits and final inspections, they had to be built with loam with façades of brick, and they were supposed to have columns and arches – though evidently many did not.3
Harmony and uniformity were priorities. Streets were widened and straightened, thoroughfares paved, overhanging buildings forbidden. The Nine employed officials ‘in charge of the beauty of the city’ as well as firemen and night-watchmen to preserve it. They were strict also about rubbish, requiring shopkeepers to sweep the street in front of their shops on Saturdays and sending out enforcers to ensure that this was done. Less civic-minded citizens may sometimes have been irked by the regulations. Prostitutes were excluded from certain areas, especially around the cathedral, while in the Campo no one was allowed to carry weapons, feed babies or even eat figs.4 The Nine would evidently not have tolerated the gum-chewers of today.
Siena with its commune, its culture and its civic pride resembled other city-states that speckled northern and central Italy in the Middle Ages. The inhabitants of these places shared both a loyalty to their cities and a pride in their achievements that helped define who they were and how they behaved. They might fight and riot with their fellow townsfolk but they revered their cities. In his Purgatorio Dante stresses the personal identification with a city when one character declares ‘Siena made me’ and another embraces a stranger on discovering he is a fellow Mantuan.5 The Florentine Boccaccio, the literary colourist of his age, demonstrated his loyalty in the Decameron by disparaging citizens of nearly all Italian cities except his own and Bologna. The Sienese are credulous and the Venetians untrustworthy, Pisan women are ugly and Perugian men are sodomites, in the Marches the males are uncouth and mean-hearted, like those from Pistoia, who are also rogues. The south contributes its share of wickedness with assassins from Sicily and thieves and grave-robbers from Naples, but no people rival the ‘rapacious and money-grubbing’ Genoese, who are depicted as pirates, misers and murderers. Boccaccio’s happy fornicators and shameless adulterers come from all over Italy, but the only consistently good people live in Florence, where the women are all beautiful and the men are noble, chivalrous, agreeable and wise.
Life was communal; there was not much of a barrier between public and private lives. People identified themselves with the commune and its symbols, above all with the local patron saints such as St Nicholas in Bari, St Ambrose in Milan and St Januarius (the blood-liquefying San Gennaro) in Naples. The patron saints of Venice (St Mark) and Siena (St Catherine) had devotional parity with the Virgin. Other symbols were the campanile, the bell-tower with magnetic appeal, and the carroccio, the ox-drawn wagon carrying flags and a cross into battle. It was embarrassing and humiliating to be unable to defend your carroccio and lose it to the enemy. The Milanese lost theirs in 1150 to the Cremonese and again in 1237 to the emperor, when it got stuck in the mud at the Battle of Cortenuova.
Medieval Italians talked of their city as if it were a kind of paradise, its life regulated by sublime statutes framed by lawyers at the new University of Bologna. They were proud of its appearance, especially as culture was then chiefly civic and communal; the great age of individual patronage, both noble and ecclesiastic, came later. Entire populations would turn out with trumpets and pipes to celebrate an artistic event, as the people of Siena did in 1311 when they escorted Duccio’s Maestà from the painter’s workshop outside the city through the gate in the walls and up to the cathedral. Since things were constructed in their name – and not, as later, in that of the Medici in Florence or the Gonzaga in Mantua – they could take a proprietorial interest in the paving of streets, the laying out of squares, the building of stone bridges.
Nine centuries after their emergence, the city-states remain embedded in Italy’s psyche, the crucial component of its people’s identity and of their social and cultural inheritance. Modern inhabitants of these cities are still proud of their heritage and feel responsibility for its retention. That is why the town centres – though not unfortunately much of the country outside them – are so well preserved today.
Yet for all their culture and prosperity and the participation of their citizens, the city-states were predestined to fall. Their failure was inherent in the circumstances of their formation and development, scores of little towns living close together, anxious about spies and plotters inside the walls, nervous of large and predatory neighbours without. Fear and suspicion led to alliances and pre-emptive moves and an endless succession of little wars. The cities needed a benign protector such as Rome had once been and the Holy Roman emperors never were – until the eighteenth century, when it was too late. It was the endemic factionalism and violence in Italy that made Dante plead not for a state or a nation but for a strong and universal empire.
Nationalist historians later hailed the Florentine poet as the ‘father of the nation’, but Dante cannot objectively be seen as a proto-nationalist. He never visited the south nor indeed much of the north but, even in the central areas that he knew, he noticed little that the Italians had in common, acknowledging (in Latin) only that they shared ‘certain very simple standards of customs and manners and speech’. As he wandered about in his exile, the great Florentine decided there were just two possible forms of government, the communal and the imperial, and, much as his work was imbued with a municipal spirit, he recommended the latter because it was more likely to establish peace and order. He did not consider Italian unification as a conceivable third way. Sovereignty and secular authority, he believed, should belong exclusively to the Holy Roman emperor, who derived his powers not from the pope but from God. Dante wanted rulers who were ‘illustrious heroes’ like Frederick II and his son Manfred, and towards the end of his life he put his faith in the Emperor Henry VII, whom he acclaimed as the ‘lieutenant of God’, ‘the consolation of the world’, a modern Augustus to whom the Almighty had entrusted ‘the governance of human affairs so that mankind might have peace under the cloudless sky that such a protection affords’.6
Italy’s self-governing communes had their origins in the ancient polis, in the cities that the Greeks had established in Sicily in the middle of the eighth century BC. Such entities also existed under Rome, autonomous though not independent, and it has been estimated that in the age of Hadrian there were 1,500 of them, containing about half the population of the empire.7
Italy’s communes emerged in the late eleventh century into the vacuum left by absentee emperors which bishops and imperial officials were unable to fill. By 1150 all the larger towns of Tuscany and Lombardy had communes, though there were few in feudal Piedmont and none in the south. The empire’s delegates were replaced by elected consuls, laws were made by councils, and administration was directed by committees. Communes differed over the details of elections – secret ballots, terms of office, eligibility and so on – but their institutions, like their ethos, corresponded. They governed their cities through similar sets of officials and they all set out to control their surrounding countryside, establishing their contadi by conquest or purchase and ensuring that their nobles lived in towers or palaces in the city rather than in threatening castles outside.
As populations grew and city walls were extended during the twelfth century, defects in communal government began to show. Power struggles among the elites, feuds among the nobility and civil strife among all classes brought problems that were seldom solved by part-time amateur governments. Short terms of office and complicated balloting procedures seemed admirable in theory, but they led to inexperienced officials and administrative inefficiency. People were loyal to their commune but not on the whole to its leaders, whom they regarded as simply the chiefs of the faction currently in power. As the absence of impartiality became more blatant and more critical, communes of the late twelfth century began appointing a new official, the podestà, to deal with problems of justice, civil disorder and fractious aristocrats. The significance of this figure was that he was neutral, a nobleman usually from another city who might be expected to stay impartial and above faction. For some decades in some cities the system worked up to a point, but the innate instability of the city-state, which the Greeks themselves had been unable to stabilize, left the role of the podestà increasingly irrelevant and eventually redundant.
In the early days the communes had been run largely by aristocratic alliances, yet their expansion and growing wealth seemed to require the participation of other classes, especially the cities’ merchants and bankers. These were after all the chief generators of wealth, important figures not only in the communes but also in the panorama of European trade, which they dominated. Risking piracy or shipwreck at sea or robbery on land, they were the men who supplied such needs and luxuries of the material life as leather from Córdoba, wool from the Cotswolds, sugar from Damascus, spices from the Levant, tuna from Sardinia, ceramics from Majorca, sword-blades from Toledo, almonds from Valencia and raisins from Màlaga. Not surprisingly, they felt entitled to some say in government and resented their exclusion from office.
Merchants, bankers and the rest of the middle classes – from lawyers and doctors to shopkeepers and artisans – were grouped in the city’s guilds. The 12,000 citizens of Prato had fifteen guilds, of which the most important, representing the town’s chief industry, was the Arte della lana, the wool merchants’ guild. In the hierarchy of Florentine guilds of the period the most influential were those of judges, bankers, doctors, dealers in silk, traders in wool and furriers, who were much in demand in winter because pelts were cheaper than cloth. Florence’s Arte dei medici e speziali, which included doctors, surgeons, dentists and opticians, had over a thousand members: after passing their exams doctors had to promise to refrain from taverns and brothels and in return they were rewarded by the city with a horse, an attendant and exemption from paying taxes.8 Surviving Florentine guildhalls, such as those of the silk makers and the wool merchants, are among the city’s loveliest buildings.
From the beginning of the thirteenth century associations between members of various guilds were formed under the term the popolo, though the word itself is misleading because people later regarded as ‘the people’ – the poor, the peasants and the unskilled workers – were excluded from it. The popolo consisted of many different types of guildsmen pressing for political concessions from the nobles; its richer members, such as merchants and lawyers (known as the popolo grasso), aspired to office, while its poorer members, such as shopkeepers and artisans (the popolo minuto), demanded equitable justice and taxation, matters in which nobles often had an unfair advantage. Class distinctions, however, were seldom precise, and the factions that fought and rioted in the cities were rarely homogeneous. Nobles sometimes joined the popolo, guildsmen often sided with the aristocracy, and men of the popolo minuto frequently fought against the adherents of the popolo grasso.
Urban conflicts increased at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Armed bands of the popolo managed to expel the nobles of Lucca in 1203, and the popolo took power in that city again in 1250 and shortly afterwards in Bologna and Genoa as well. Even Siena, more peaceful than most cities, suffered sporadic riots, risings and coups in the three decades after the overthrow of the Nine in 1355: the popolo were in power from that year to 1368, when an uprising put leaders of the popolo minuto into government. Yet the triumphs of the popolo were really limited to Tuscany, especially Florence, where the popolo minuto shared power for much of the fourteenth century; in only a handful of towns in Lombardy, Emilia and the Veneto did it enjoy more than a transient success.
Urban violence was not only between classes or economic interests. Aristocratic factionalism – too many nobles competing for too few offices – often developed into warfare. As the magnates lived in cities rather than castles in the country, they felt the need to build urban strongholds in the form of medieval skyscrapers, towers sometimes 200 feet high, a phenomenon now best represented in the small town of San Gimignano and in the city of Bologna, where twenty-two of its more than eighty towers are still fully or partially standing; Florence in its heyday contained even more, perhaps as many as 150. Such structures were clearly designed for military purposes, to serve as watchtower and refuge and defensive bastion, but they were also objects of prestige value, of ostentation and arrogance and the desire to intimidate. They answered to man’s perennial yearning to build higher than his neighbours, to ‘tower over’ others.
Class, competition and vendettas all contributed to factionalism; so did distant loyalties to the empire and the papacy. Yet the victory of one faction over another seldom resulted in peace. Once they had expelled or exterminated their opponents, triumphant Guelphs could be relied upon to turn against each other in town after town – Parma, Florence, Reggio, Piacenza, Imola, Modena and indeed others. The feud in Florence between the strongly pro-papal ‘Black Guelphs’ and the more conciliatory ‘White Guelphs’ forced Dante into permanent exile.
Looking back from the foreign invasions of the sixteenth century to the medieval experience of the city-states, Francesco Guicciardini, the great Florentine historian and statesman, admitted that the ‘calamities’ that Italy was enduring might have been avoided if the country had been united. Nevertheless, there would not have been such wealth, such merchandise, such a ‘splendour of innumerable noble and beautiful cities’, under a single power; thus he was glad that neither Frederick nor anyone else had emerged as king of all Italy.9 In any case rivalry between communes had certain healthy aspects: it assisted civic patriotism and loyalty to a city, and it promoted artistic competition between neighbours. Furthermore, rivalry did not invariably degenerate into violence. Communes were sometimes able to cooperate – as they demonstrated in the various incarnations of the Lombard League. They might have no desire for unity or federalism but they were prepared to form tactical, temporary alliances to ward off a threatening outsider.
Left to themselves, however, the communes had a natural tendency to expand – to strengthen a border, thwart a rival, acquire more agricultural land – and expansion was inevitably achieved at the expense of weaker neighbours. From the beginning of the fourteenth century it was clear that Florence, which had once lagged behind Lucca and Pisa, would become the dominant power in Tuscany and thus a city to be feared and even hated by other cities. Poor Prato, only eleven miles from Florence, never had a chance. It was absorbed in 1350, soon followed by Arezzo, Pisa and eventually Siena; only Lucca remained permanently beyond the Florentine reach. Other cities were as predatory and successful, notably Milan and Venice, which between them came to control most of the north and the north-east. Wars between the cities continued for a hundred years from the Black Death until the Peace of Lodi in 1454, which established the Lega Italica (Italian League), whose members pledged to come to each other’s defence. By that time power in the peninsula was effectively divided among Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples and the Papal States.
The internal factionalism of the cities, so incessant a feature of the thirteenth century, raised doubts about the viability of communal government. Decades of anarchy and violence left people yearning for strong leadership even if they lost some of their liberties as a result. Communes thus began to welcome dictators in the Roman sense, men who would lead their cities in a crisis and retire soon afterwards. As it turned out, however, the most successful ‘temporary’ leaders refused to retire and instead became ‘signori’ and founders of dynasties. It would be simplistic to describe this process as a descent from democracy to tyranny, but the change was significant: decisions were now made by one man, whose successors were his descendants. Not many people, it seems, reacted to this development by weeping for lost liberty or sighing for a return to the commune.
Signorial rule was more common in the north, where feudalism was invigorated as a result, than in Tuscany, on the other side of the Apennines. By the middle of the thirteenth century it had come to Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Cremona, Pavia and Piacenza. Some cities, such as Genoa, Bologna and Perugia, oscillated between old and new regimes before opting for one, Genoa eventually returning to republicanism and Bologna and Perugia becoming signorial. Others succumbed quickly to powerful and enduring dynasties such as the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Malatesta in Rimini, the Montefeltro in Urbino, and the Visconti and Sforza in Milan. The heads of the Estensi family became lords of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio in the thirteenth century and, though later deprived of Ferrara by the pope, they carried on as dukes of Modena (one of their daughters marrying the Stuart King James II) until overthrown by nationalists in 1859.
The signori would not have got where they did without being clever, ruthless, rich and intimidating. Yet few of them were as cruel as Ezzelino da Romano, aptly placed by Dante boiling in blood in the seventh circle of the Inferno. He was one of the monsters of Italian history, who called himself ‘Vicar of the [Trevisan] March’ and terrorized the cities of Verona, Vicenza, Treviso and Padua in the first half of the thirteenth century. Some of the others were generous and up to a point civilized, such as Oberto Pallavicini, Ezzelino’s counterpart in the west, or Luchino Visconti in Milan, the most talented and sympathetic of all, a man whose family ruled over much of Lombardy and the north until 1447.
Signorial rule was neither inevitable nor always successful in the cities where it was imposed. Venice and Siena escaped it altogether, and others rejected it after experimental periods. Cities with a weak landed nobility and a strong urban economy were less susceptible than others to the ambitions of aspiring signori. Pisa was the only great Tuscan city that was signorial for long. Florence had a republic on and off until 1530, nearly 300 years after signorial government had become established in some cities of the north. Lucca had signori at the beginning of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – with a period of Pisan rule in between – but thereafter re-established a republic that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century, when it was captured by a French revolutionary army. Napoleon Bonaparte later gave it to his sister Elisa.
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) seems almost too good to have been true. The illegitimate son of an exiled Florentine, this generous and attractive figure was one of the great intellectuals of his age. He was a priest and a secretary at the papal chancery, yet he managed to exclude religion from nearly all his writing. At school in Padua he had studied classical Latin literature and he quickly grasped how the lessons of ancient Rome were pertinent to the republics of contemporary Italy. Writing as an adult in both Latin and Tuscan, Alberti produced books that included poetry, biographies, a comedy, treatises on philosophy, one work on diplomatic ciphers and another one on mathematics. He wrote the first Italian grammar, which promoted the use of the Tuscan vernacular, and the first book of geography in Europe since the classical era; in his work On Painting he established the rules for achieving perspective in art.
As the pope’s architectural adviser, Alberti wrote a survey of architecture in ten volumes, the most important work on the subject during the Renaissance. Yet, like other scholars of his time, he was eager to be a useful citizen and to put his theories into practice; he thus became an outstanding architect, as the churches of Sant’ Andrea in Mantua and Santa Maria Novella in Florence demonstrate. His talents were diverse but they were also complementary. He was the archetypal ‘universal man’ of the Renaissance, one of a band of remarkable humanists who in their range were the intellectual counterparts of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
Humanist thought owed much to republican Rome and much also to the republican communes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the period when patriotism and active citizenship were encouraged, when the bishops and imperial agents lost power and people recognized each other as fellow citizens rather than as fellow subjects of a remote sovereign. To civic pride, an inheritance of communal Italy, the humanists added the aim of a secular intellectual life and a spirit of scientific inquiry. They attacked superstition and the corruption of the Church, they insisted on research uncontaminated by religion or politics, and they promoted the revival of classical learning, finding and preserving Greek and Latin texts and arguing that these contained instructive and relevant material that could not be found in the Bible. Their work was supported by nobles, rulers and sometimes even a pope, men who were eager to become patrons of scholarship as well as of art. Several of these humanists were given posts in government, especially in Florence, the capital of humanism from around 1375 to 1450.
The inspiration for the humanists was the Tuscan Petrarch, who died in 1374; for them he had something of Virgil as a poet, of Seneca as a stoic and of Cicero as a stylist; he was revered too as the discoverer of Cicero’s letters to his friend Atticus. Yet the humanists of succeeding generations were not inclined to limit themselves to his precept of study and solitude. They wanted a life of service also, to be administrators as well as scholars, to advance the cause of republicanism through example and education, training citizens to strive for the ideal republic through a knowledge of history, philosophy, the classical texts and to some extent science. Coluccio Salutati was a bibliophile and chancellor of Florence, in charge of the republic’s official correspondence, while Leonardo Bruni followed him as chancellor and was in addition an historian. The combative Lorenzo Valla was a philosopher, historian and secretary to the King of Naples; he was also the man who punctured the temporal pretensions of the papacy by revealing that the ‘Donation of Constantine’ was a forgery.*
The humanists were not the first people to look to ancient Rome as their exemplar. The political instability of their commune had left medieval Florentines sighing for a new Caesar, while Rome’s populist dictator in the fourteenth century, Cola di Rienzo, had declared himself tribune, proclaimed Roman rule over the world and granted Roman citizenship to the Italian cities.† Yet Bruni and the humanists were inspired by the Roman Republic rather than by Caesar, Augustus and their heirs. Cicero was their hero, Virgil their poetic inspiration. The Florentines now saw themselves as defenders of liberty against the encroachments of tyranny, though they tended to exaggerate the resemblances with Rome, even thinking of their citizens as ‘true Roman people and descendants of Romulus’.10 Exaltation of the ancient republic sometimes had unforeseen and even undesirable consequences: several aspiring assassins of the ruling Medici in the early sixteenth century – one of them successful – were hoping to emulate Brutus, the most notorious of Caesar’s killers. Remarkable though the humanists were, their constant identification with the classical world seems sometimes naive. Italians of their time did not actually lead lives very similar to those of the ancients, except perhaps for those with villas in the countryside, and they found pageants and dancing more entertaining than gladiators and oratory. Nor did their architecture have as much in common as they seemed to think. Just as Romanesque buildings are not Roman except for their rounded arches, so Renaissance churches, even those by Alberti, do not closely resemble the pillared temples of the classical world.
The Florentines were a proud people with much to be proud about, though they did not always see their projects through to completion: most of their principal churches were left without façades.‡ After the Black Death their economy revived rapidly, and by the end of the fourteenth century they had acquired a silk industry and a new set of bankers, among them the Medici. Their city-state had also expanded by 1433 to absorb nearly the whole of Tuscany except for Siena and Lucca. Venice may have been a more successful republic§ but – in the fifteenth century at least – Florence was the more intellectual and cultured one. Florentine painters, sculptors and architects were innovators, encouraged by the humanists and by their own study of classical forms. Several of them were scientists as well. Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome for Florence cathedral is not only an artistic masterpiece but an engineering triumph as well. With its 4 million bricks, it remains the largest masonry dome ever built, larger than St Peter’s in Rome, St Paul’s in London and the Capitol in Washington.
Another reason for Florentine self-congratulation was the system of government, the Signoria and two consultative bodies (the executive branch), the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune (the legislature), and a fairly effective civil service. The Signoria consisted of eight chief magistrates (known as priors) chosen by the four districts of the city, and a ninth, the gonfalonier of justice. As they were elected for terms of two months only and prevented from being immediately re-elected, it was difficult for priors to accumulate power or aspire to tyranny. By 1400 some 6,000 citizens were eligible for the chief magistracies, a figure that gave Florence a degree of political participation larger than anywhere else in Europe: during the 120 years before that date members from 1,350 families became priors. The spirit of the communes and the example of Rome seemed to have helped forge a just and plausible system.11
Yet the republic never managed to solve the problem of factionalism, endemic to all city-states except Venice. Ideal theoretical systems were incapable of preventing feuding between groups of powerful families. Thus the republic was usually in a precarious position, and in the 1430s it effectively succumbed to the Medici, as later republics did in 1512 and again in 1530. The humanists despaired at the extinction of their hopes for what seemed so irrational a reason as factionalism. Leonardo Bruni remained chancellor under Cosimo de’ Medici but he no longer aspired to change his world; as a solace he read Plato in his spare time while pondering on what might have been.
One reason for the republic’s failure was its military incompetence. While its various wars against Milan may have been defensive ones, the campaigns against its Tuscan rivals were aggressive and, as it turned out, often farcical. Humiliated repeatedly on medieval battlefields by armies from Pisa, Siena and Lucca, the republic later employed its artist-scientists to combine with its soldiers to defeat the enemy by means of ingenious engineering. Already famous for his as yet uncompleted dome, Brunelleschi was dispatched in 1430 to Lucca, where he began to divert the River Serchio so as to flood the land around the city and force it to surrender. The still more ingenious Lucchesi, however, sallied out and breached Brunelleschi’s new canal, flooding the plain in an unexpected way so that it demolished a dam built by the architect and swamped the Florentine camp. Seventy years later, a new republic tried a similar tactic, although this time the plan was to divert the River Arno away from Pisa so as to leave that city without water. The engineer employed to design the project was Leonardo da Vinci, an even more versatile figure than Brunelleschi, but his miscalculations with his canal were as embarrassing as his predecessor’s. On this occasion the waterway was destroyed not by the defenders but by a storm which collapsed its walls.12
Whatever they might say about being the heirs of Romulus, the Florentines knew they were not very good at warfare. They were too prosperous to want to fight and perhaps too individualistic to form a disciplined militia of citizens. As a result they entrusted their defence to foreign protectors (usually Neapolitan) or hired mercenaries, who were mostly brutal, expensive and unreliable. The Florentine hierarchy had a different explanation for the city’s lack of virility – the rifeness of sodomy which, it claimed, corrupted and enfeebled its manhood and resulted in a low birth rate. Florence was indeed so notorious for this propensity that Florenzer became a German word for pederast. In response, the government encouraged anonymous denunciations of suspected pederasts and created special magistrates, ‘Officials of the Night’, to enforce new laws against the vice. Niccolò Machiavelli was one of those accused of sodomy, though in his case with a woman, a prostitute known as ‘Curly’.
Less questionable explanations for the instability of the republic might be sought in its constitutional flaws – electing a new executive every two months was an inept interpretation of democracy – and in the city’s ethos, which encouraged the belief that in Florence (unlike Venice or Siena) the public good should give way to private interest. Despairing of its politicals, Dante had earlier castigated Florentines as ‘the most empty-headed’ of all Tuscans and compared their city to a ‘sick woman who can find no rest on her downy bed but tosses and turns to try to ease her pain’.13 Even more frustrated by Florentine fractiousness was Machiavelli, a great Renaissance figure who has been much vilified by posterity: since Shakespeare referred to him as ‘the murderous Machiavel’, his name has been such a byword for political duplicity that it is still used to describe behaviour that he himself would never have countenanced. Machiavelli’s republican convictions have been somewhat obscured by his most famous book, The Prince, in which he explained how an authoritarian ruler could secure power and advised princes that it was safer for them to be feared than be loved – advice closely followed by hundreds of rulers of numerous nations over subsequent centuries. Yet he was a genuine republican, much influenced by his study of Cicero, and he urged Florentines to emulate the ancient Romans’ patriotism and sense of responsibility; had they been able to do so, he believed they could have built the finest republic of all time. He was also perhaps the only real Italian of his age, a man who did not simply shout ‘Italia!’ as a rallying cry for expelling invaders but seems to have believed that a unified Italy was a potential entity whose emergence had hitherto been thwarted by the papacy. The last chapter of The Prince is an ‘Exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarian yoke’ and a plea for someone to lead the way.
In the middle third of the fifteenth century the effective ruler of Florence was Cosimo de’ Medici, a great European banker with branches as distant as London, Bruges and Lyon. He had opposed the war against Lucca and had been exiled for his wisdom. After the debacle and the resulting chaos in Florence, he was invited home to govern behind the façade of republican institutions. A learned and conscientious man, he understood the inherent strength of Florentine republicanism and never tried to make himself a signore. The Signoria and the councils remained, their composition subtly influenced by Medici’s supporters. Cosimo himself was seldom an official: prudently, he limited himself to three brief periods as gonfalonier of justice.
His talents were inherited not by his son Piero ‘the Gouty’ but by his grandson Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’, a man of multiple accomplishments. Cultured and intellectual, Lorenzo was the most charismatic exemplar of a Renaissance ruler, a statesman whose diplomatic skills preserved peace in Italy for most of his ‘reign’ between 1469 and his death in 1492. After the ‘Pazzi Conspiracy’ of 1478 – an assassination attempt that missed him but killed his brother – he found ways of excluding his family’s opponents from office although, like his grandfather, he refused to become an official with a title himself. His position was never legally defined and, apart from being known as ‘il magnifico’, he held no rank. After he died, an official decree referred to him merely as ‘the leading citizen of Florence’.14
If one obstacle to a republican revival was the quality of the Medici rulers, another was the ineptitude of the republicans themselves. A second Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s son and successor, lacked his father’s negotiating skills and during the King of France’s invasion of 1494 he blundered so deeply that he was forced into exile. Yet the new republican regime, led initially by Girolamo Savonarola, the radical priest and demagogue, had learned none of the lessons of the old: its constitution enlarged popular participation and made Florence both more democratic and more difficult to govern than before. Furthermore, it wasted most of its short lifetime trying to recover Pisa, a city which, though Florence had conquered it in 1406, had been independent since the arrival of the French. As Pisa’s harbour had silted up, the city was now of little use to the Florentines, and their obsessive, fifteen-year-old war to recover it, which included the fiasco of Leonardo’s canal, almost bankrupted them.
The diplomatic power of the Medici was another problem because the family was no longer limited to Florence, even if it was not until later in the sixteenth century that it supplied two famous queens of France. Giovanni, the cardinal son of Lorenzo, became papal legate to Bologna and the Romagna in 1511, a position he used the following year to organize an army of Spanish and papal troops to overthrow the Florentine Republic and bring his family, headed by his brother Giuliano, back to power. Another year on, Giovanni became Pope Leo X and immediately made his illegitimate cousin Giulio the Cardinal-Archbishop of Florence. Leo died in 1521 and was succeeded by the only Dutch pope, Adrian VI, who lasted barely a year and was followed by Giulio, who as Clement VII directed the papacy for eleven turbulent years from 1523. After a last spasm of radical republicanism chased the Medici out of Florence again in 1527, Clement devoted his time to defeating the new regime and securing his family’s return. Although the city’s new fortifications, built partly by Michelangelo, held out well, forces belonging to the pope and the Emperor Charles V starved the last republic into submission in 1530.
There had been dozens of republics in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A number survived into the next century but were then extinguished by signori or absorbed by neighbours. After oscillating between republican and signorial rule, Bologna and Perugia were incorporated into the Papal States in the sixteenth century. Milan, the most successful signory of all, demonstrated that the old communal spirit was still alive when, in the middle of the fifteenth century, between the end of the Visconti and the beginning of the Sforza dynasties, it threw up a short-lived regime, the Ambrosian republic, known after its patron saint. Yet it fell because, as with most Italian republics, it was divided into factions, because its leadership became unrealistically radical and because ultimately most of its merchants and nobles did not want it. Signorial Milan had been the model for people who sought an alternative to communal instability.
In the early sixteenth century only five republics were left, Venice, Genoa and three in Tuscany. Florence’s went in 1530 followed by Siena’s a generation later, leaving Lucca the sole survivor of the inland republics. Like the Venetians and the Genoese, the Lucchesi had realized that republicanism was safer in the hands of a select oligarchy than in a system such as the Florentine that opened government office to thousands of unqualified people.15
Although Siena remained intact until it was absorbed by Florence in 1557, its economic power had vanished long before. So, unfortunately, had its cultural identity. By the early fifteenth century its population had declined to 20,000 – less than half of what it had been before the Black Death – though the influence of its great artistic age was still visible, exemplified by the exquisite paintings of Sassetta, a late follower of Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Yet that age was soon gone, along with the city’s communal culture and Gothic architecture, vernacular brick losing out to classical stone and marble; even Duccio’s Maestà was removed from the altar of the cathedral. The shadow of the Florentine Renaissance was partly responsible. So was the Piccolomini family, which produced the two Sienese popes, Pius II and Pius III. The first of these had an interesting pre-priestly life as an excommunicate, secretary to an anti-pope, poet laureate at the Habsburg court in Vienna, talented humanist scholar and begetter of numerous illegitimate children. When he became pope in 1458, he directed his humanism towards the rebuilding in Renaissance style of his home town Corsignano, which was rechristened Pienza in commemoration. He also made his nephew, the future Pius III, Archbishop of Siena, an appointment that led to the construction of a series of classical white palaces for the Piccolomini clan amidst the burnt sienna bricks of communal Siena.
After it had lost its cultural identity, Siena also lost its artistic reputation. Here too the Florentines made a contribution. As the art historian John White noted, ‘the patent on the history of art was taken out in Florence’.16 The chief culprit was Giorgio Vasari, a poor painter, a pedantic architect and the wrecker of Florentine Gothic, but celebrated for being the author of a hugely influential work celebrating the supremacy of Florentine art, Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors, published in 1550. For Vasari and his myriad followers, art had been rescued from its dismal medieval abyss by the talents of Florence. The age of the ‘primitives’, wooden and lifeless, had been vanquished by the Florentine Renaissance, an extended miracle begun by Giotto, continued by Masaccio and completed by Michelangelo. In such a narrative there was no room for Duccio, Simone Martini or the Lorenzetti brothers; forgotten – or, if remembered, mocked – they were only rescued and revived in the 1930s by the English art critic John Pope-Hennessy. The reputation of Florentine art is of course unassailable, but its supremacy can nowadays be somewhat qualified. It was ‘rather an exciting experience’, said a director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, to witness the end of the oldest tradition in art history: ‘Vasari’s Florentinocentrism’.17
Power in Italy in the late fifteenth century was effectively shared among five states: a genuine republic (Venice), a nominal republic (Florence), a duchy (Milan), a kingdom (Naples) and the Papal States, a monarchy without a fixed dynasty, although several families were soon competing to supply more than one pontiff.** The variance in title was more than nominal: it reflected real differences in ethos between the states.
European society in the late Middle Ages was being happily seduced by aristocratic values and monarchical glamour. In Italy the world of communes and citizens was disappearing beneath a panoply of princes and their courts; aristocratic pomp and competitive extravagance had almost everywhere become the fashion. Government officials were now being selected by rulers instead of being balloted or chosen directly by voters. In the monarchies – as in the smaller lordships – the life of the state was being conflated with the life of the court, and the officials of the two became effectively indistinguishable.
Civic patronage survived in the republics though on a smaller scale than in the fourteenth century, when the communes of Florence and Siena built their glorious palaces of government. Yet elsewhere in Italy patronage was now in the hands of princes and, to a lesser extent, the Church and wealthy noblemen. The versatile craftsmen of the Middle Ages – humble men toiling in teams in their workshops – gave way to flamboyant and temperamental artists who preferred to work at a court. Some of the best, such as the Venetians Tintoretto and Giovanni Bellini, stayed at home – Tintoretto apparently only once left Venice, for a brief business visit to Mantua with his wife – but others were attracted to princely courts by the allure of sophistication, the promise of riches, an abundance of good food and frequent theatrical entertainments. Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo all worked for long periods for powerful patrons. So did Titian, who spent much time depicting the Emperor Charles V at the imperial courts in Bologna and Augsburg, painting for the emperor’s son, Philip II of Spain (who never paid him), and accepting commissions from the Farnese pope, Paul III. In 1533 Charles rewarded him with a noble title.
The first real court painter was Andrea Mantegna, employed by the Gonzaga marquesses of Mantua from 1459 until his death forty-seven years later. He was a clever choice for a dynasty with such political and cultural pretensions. With his talents, his knowledge of the classical world and his understanding of perspective, Mantegna managed to glorify his subjects, making his nobles seem like saints or ancient heroes as well as contemporary men. Viewers of his powerful series The Triumph of Julius Caesar (now at Hampton Court) can sense the implied connection between his patrons and the conquering Caesar, who is depicted parading through Rome preceded by his soldiers, trumpeters, prisoners and booty. Both parties to this business arrangement were satisfied. Mantegna, the son of a woodworker, acquired an income, a house and the noble title he craved; the Gonzaga got their propaganda and the reputation they still enjoy, that of being great and generous patrons of the arts.
In the fifteenth century Milan was the most aggressive and successful of the mainland states. It was also one of the richest, its prosperity extended into its contado by canals and irrigation, the introduction of rice and the planting of mulberry trees for the nascent silk industry. The Sforza’s Milan seemed the leading candidate for princely pre-eminence in Italy until the French invasions of the late fifteenth century which led eventually to the city’s absorption by the Spanish.
South-east along the Po Valley, uncomfortably close to Milan and Venice, were two small but vigorous principalities, the duchy of Ferrara and the marquessate of Mantua. Further away in the hills of the Marches was another one, the remarkable realm of Urbino. In each case the ruling princely family remained in power for centuries – until the main branch died out. Given the nature of Renaissance politics and the fickleness of allies, this was an astonishing achievement and one that would have been impossible had the families been less ruthless and opportunistic. The success of the Gonzaga owed much to their notorious skill in identifying and then siding with the likely winner in any war. It owed even more to the political and military talents of Isabella d’Este, a daughter of the Duke of Ferrara who became regent of Mantua after the death of her husband (the marquess) in 1519 and so enhanced the prestige of her domain that her first son became a duke and her second a cardinal. Yet the finances of these high-spending states were always a problem, especially in Mantua and Urbino, cities that at the end of the fifteenth century were challenging the cultural primacy of Florence. The Duke of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro (Piero della Francesco’s sitter in the most famous of Renaissance profiles), was the archetypal Renaissance prince, a scholar, bibliophile and builder on a colossal scale. Yet he was unable to sit back and enjoy his pictures and his vast ducal palace. Financial needs forced him to exercise another talent – fighting – in the service of wealthier rulers; the employers he fought for as a condottiere or mercenary commander included kings of Naples, dukes of Milan and three popes.
Historians encourage us to remember that the Renaissance in Italy was not confined to Tuscany, the north and the Papal States. Yet the variation in its cultural impact on different parts of the peninsula illustrates as well as anything the contrasts between southern Italy and the centre-north. In the middle years of the fifteenth century Alfonso V of Aragon also became King of Naples and Sicily and transferred his court to the Campanian city, where he did indeed preside over a culture that blended the Italian Renaissance with Spanish Gothic.†† Yet his influence did not last. On his death in 1458 the kingdom was divided, Sicily and Aragon going to his brother while Naples was left to endure the cruel and incompetent rule of his son Ferrante. Although Naples became the largest city in Italy, it failed to retain its cultural influence.‡‡
Outside the southern capital there was little sign of the Renaissance. The south lacked the small courts and independent cities that stimulated cultural and economic life further north. In Apulia the town of Lecce later enjoyed an efflorescence in its own style of Baroque and today revels in its reputation as ‘the Florence of the south’ – not a very apt sobriquet because the glories of Florence come from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and not from the city’s imitative Baroque moment. Churches in Basilicata in the town of Matera, where many citizens in the twentieth century still lived in caves, may be Romanesque or Baroque or a mixture of the two, but they are not classical. This is often the pattern in other towns of the south except where natural calamities occurred that required a total rebuilding. Like Messina across the Straits, Reggio di Calabria is today an entirely twentieth-century city dating from the 1908 earthquake. In south-eastern Sicily the towns of Noto and Ragusa were more handsomely rebuilt, in golden Baroque, after the earthquake of 1693. What was left of Catania after Mount Etna’s most savage eruption in 1669 was destroyed by an earthquake a generation later – disasters to which the city’s inhabitants responded by erecting one of the densest and most imposing concentrations of Baroque churches in the world.
Since the thirteenth century, the south had been impoverished by rivalry between the Angevin and Aragonese dynasties and by incessant struggles between monarchs and their barons. Matters did not improve much when the Spanish crown took over at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Apart from keeping the peace in Sicily, the new rulers seemed to think the island did not need governance; no Spanish king went near the place except the Emperor Charles V, who was also Charles I of Spain, and who went everywhere. Perhaps they had a point. The Sicilian nobles seemed to be happy idling in Palermo, spending the rents from their estates on building palaces and buying titles from the Spanish – a brilliant scheme for raising money for the government: in the seventeenth century over a hundred princedoms were created in a population of about a million.§§ Palermo thus acquired plenty of grand buildings but it lacked the kind of intellectual life it had enjoyed under King Roger and the Emperor Frederick. The Renaissance largely passed it by; so, later, did the Enlightenment.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century Rome became the centre of the High Renaissance, but not long before that, at a time when Masaccio and Donatello were transforming art in Florence, the ancient centre of the world was a small town with ruins. For most of the thirteenth century the papacy had resided in Avignon, directed by seven consecutive French popes and 111 French cardinals; returning to Rome in 1377, it suffered the Great Schism, a period of forty years during which there were always two – and sometimes three – rival popes, each with his own set of cardinals and each claiming to be the legitimate pontiff. Only when the confusion was over and the papacy was in the hands of one man, the Colonna Pope Martin V (1417–31), could the rebuilding of Rome begin.
The pace of growth was brisk. In little more than a century Rome became a city of palaces, fountains, paved streets and new churches; as it did so, the population increased from 17,000 to 115,000, making it the third-largest city in Italy after Naples and Venice. The building of the new was accompanied by much pillaging and destruction of the old: Egyptian granite from the Baths of Caracalla was taken for the fountains in the Piazza Farnese, and the Colosseum proved to be a handy quarry for the Ponte Sisto. No one could accuse the Renaissance popes of having a sentimental concern for conservation. They were intent on building monuments in the Eternal City that would emblazon their names for eternity: the della Rovere, Medici and Farnese, and later the Borghese, Barberini, Pamphilj and Chigi.
The papacy’s greatest patron of the arts was also its most bellicose warrior, the della Rovere Pope Julius II, an impetuous and irascible pontiff devoid of spiritual tendencies who persuaded a reluctant Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, even though the artist grumbled that his profession was sculpture not painting – just as he grumbled later that he was not an architect when Pope Paul III cajoled him into taking over the building of the new St Peter’s. Julius did, however, recognize Michelangelo’s true vocation by commissioning him to sculpt two monuments to the della Rovere personal glory: the papal tomb, which he did not complete, and a papal bronze statue that was installed in a church in Bologna but removed a few years later and melted down for cannon for the Duke of Ferrara.
Invariable priorities for Renaissance popes were the embellishment of Rome, the success and enrichment of their families, and the preservation – and, when possible, the extension – of the Papal States. Few pontiffs bothered much about religion until the Reformation except to employ interdicts and excommunication against their enemies. It is indeed difficult to understand these men without ignoring their religious roles and treating them instead as typical Renaissance princes, more brutal and rapacious than many, but similarly passionate about riches, art, power and their dynasties. Corruption in Rome was worse than anywhere else in Italy, perhaps because popes had more means to corrupt and more desire to be corrupted than other princes: people were prepared to pay a lot of money for a benefice and a fortune for a cardinal’s hat. Sometimes, however, cash was sacrificed to the principle of nepotism, relations being advanced to positions where they could be trusted to promote the interests of the pope and the rest of the family. Sixtus IV (1471–84), the first della Rovere pope, started the fashion by making three of his nephews cardinals (including the future Julius II) and awarding six bishoprics to one of them who died in his twenties. The Spanish Borgia pope, Alexander VI (1492–1503), was even worse, appointing his monstrous son Cesare Archbishop of Valencia at the age of sixteen and a cardinal the following year; later he made him Duke of Romagna and encouraged him to set up a Borgia state in the north that was mercifully short-lived.
A more successful and somewhat more attractive dynasty was the Farnese, whose pontiff, Paul III (1534–49), was the brother of the Borgia pope’s mistress. Paul saw his son established as Duke of Parma and Piacenza, an independent duchy which his descendants ruled for the next 260 years (latterly through the female line) and then for a decade in the middle of the nineteenth century. He was also the grandfather of Alessandro Farnese, known as ‘the Great Cardinal’ for his charity and his political skills, and great-grandfather of another Alessandro, the renowned soldier who retained the southern Netherlands for Spain and might therefore be regarded – for better or worse – as the father of modern Belgium.
Nepotism remained a compulsive papal habit for 200 years – except during the brief reign of the Dutch pontiff Adrian VI (1522–3) – until the Neapolitan pope, Innocent XII, put a stop to it late in the seventeenth century. Even so, it enjoyed a revival when the Braschi pope, Pius VI (1775–99), made one of his nephews a duke and another a cardinal shortly before the French Revolution. Corrupt and lamentable as it was in principle, nepotism also encouraged papal fantasies and military adventures: the Farnese in Parma, the Borgia in the Romagna, the Medici against the republicans of their native city – these families’ papal representatives were fighting primarily for their relations. In addition, nepotism damaged the reputation of the Church since it was hard for Christians to see much of a connection between the lives of Jesus and his disciples and those of the Renaissance popes and their courts. Many people in southern as well as northern Europe wanted the Church to be reformed, bishops forced to live in their dioceses and abuses such as selling indulgences ended. Yet the papacy wanted money a lot more than it wanted reform: as Pope Martin V is alleged to have said in the early fifteenth century, ‘Without reform the Church has been advancing for fourteen centuries; without money it might not last a week.’19
At the Lateran Council of 1513–17 the reformers were decisively defeated. Assisted by Spain, the Church then retrenched, dogmatic and authoritarian, rejecting humanism and rejoicing in the eventual triumph of the Counter-Reformation over the classical values of the Renaissance. Paul IV, the elderly pope elected in 1555, burned books by the thousands, confined the Jews of Rome to ghettoes and ordered fig-leaves to be painted on to Michelangelo’s figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Most of his successors and their cardinals insisted upon a strict observation of the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63), the doctrinal essentials of the Counter-Reformation. The dynamic and influential Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo (1538–84 and canonized in 1610), ordered the prohibition of dances and carnivals and forced his priests to interrogate their parishioners for information about heretics and banned books. Although the papacy did make a few concessions to reformers at Trent – bishops were told to reside in their bishoprics – its refusal to compromise with Protestantism made the division of Europe inevitable and lost it England, Scotland, Zurich and Geneva, the Netherlands, most of Germany and Scandinavia. The Protestants in Italy soon emigrated, mainly to Geneva, but most Italians remained faithful to the Church, their devotion to the Virgin and the saints outweighing their dismay at the behaviour of the popes.
As successful as the Farnese in the pursuit of family interest were the Medici popes, who twice succeeded in bringing their exiled family home to Florence and back to power. After 1530 Pope Clement VII and his recent foe and current ally, the Emperor Charles V, agreed that the Medici should become hereditary rulers of Florence and decided the line would begin with Alessandro, an illegitimate teenage great-nephew of the first Medici pope. When, a few years later, the newly anointed Duke Alessandro was murdered by a jealous cousin, no suitable descendants of Lorenzo the Magnificent could be found to succeed him, yet such was the magic of the family name that another Medici teenager was found to step in, a relation (luckily called Cosimo) so remote that he could not even claim as his ancestor the great Cosimo, the first member of the family to rule Florence.
The new Cosimo proved to be as patient and skilful as the old one, dealing diplomatically with the most powerful of all emperors, from whose son he obtained – after a siege – the long-desired Siena, whose Palazzo Pubblico was soon decorated with the Medici coat of arms. He employed spies and confined political opponents, yet he succeeded in creating a stable administrative system that endured almost unopposed for 200 years. As befitted the age and its aristocracy, the Medici moved out of the family’s palace in the old city and crossed the Arno, installing themselves in the vast and ponderous Pitti Palace, where they had plenty of space to lay out the Boboli Gardens. More significantly, Cosimo came to regard his realm as the state not the city, a departure from the instincts and habits of previous Medici. He acknowledged he had a duty to develop the economy in the whole of his dominions, not just in the capital and its old contado. When the pope promoted him in 1569, Cosimo chose to take the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany; henceforth the Medici were not so much Florentines as Tuscans.
Cosimo and his successors were able rulers and enlightened economists; some of them were also scientists. They developed Livorno (which for centuries the British insisted on calling Leghorn) as a free port and encouraged merchants from anywhere to settle there, including the Jewish ancestors of Benjamin Disraeli. They also tirelessly promoted agriculture, notably with energetic but largely unsuccessful attempts to drain the coastal marshes of the Maremma. The line died out, however, in an ambience of archetypal decadence. The penultimate grand duke, Cosimo III, who ruled longer than any Medici (1670–1723), was a bigot, a prude and a collector of holy relics. Under him the Tuscan navy was reduced to a total of three galleys while the army contained soldiers who were senile, lame and half-blind.20 His successor, Gian Gastone, achieved decadence in a different way: often drunk in public, he was a slothful homosexual with little chance of producing children with his frightening German wife. Widely mocked though he was, Gian Gastone was nevertheless a more sensible and tolerant ruler than his father. He reversed the Church’s encroachments in Tuscany and revoked anti-Semitic edicts; he also reduced taxes on the peasantry and abolished those levied on beasts of burden. Following his death in 1737, the family became extinct, though the duchy lived on under a new dynasty until, through no fault of its own, it was engulfed by the hysteria of the Risorgimento.
The Medici’s last act encapsulated attitudes they had held for centuries towards their rights, duties and the importance of public relations. Gian Gastone’s sister, Anna Maria Ludovica, decreed that after her death (1743) all the family properties, all the paintings and statues and jewellery, should remain ‘for the ornament of the state, for the benefit of the people and for an inducement to the curiosity of foreigners’. Although this treasure was left to the next line of grand dukes, it was never ‘to be alienated or taken away from the capital or from the territories of the grand duchy’.21 It is still in Tuscany.