Italy in the early modern period, roughly from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, Renaissance to the Enlightenment, is not normally seen as a coherent unit. Politically it was subdivided into different kinds of States, as maps 2 and 4 indicate.1 In the nineteenth century the dominant European statesman Prince Metternich notoriously stressed, when resisting nationalism, that Italy was merely a ‘geographical expression’. It remained without political unity until 1870–71 when Rome itself was finally absorbed into United Italy, and became the capital. Even then the political state of Italy might arguably be seen as devoid of real Italian national feeling through the peninsula. It has been argued that there was a deep North–South divide within Italy, based on mutual ignorance, distrust or envy, that had made political unity of the whole geographical expression even more difficult for the few who desired it; and rendered such full unity unpalatable even to the majority of those who understood what was taking place in the 1850s to 1870s. Bitter civil war scarred the South in the 1860s.
Though the new Italy was supposedly based on linguistic nationalism and the sense of a common Roman classical past, very few spoke a common Italian language, and even fewer could have felt that they were heirs to a proud Roman past. Estimates of those who spoke ‘Italian’ at Unification vary from about 2.5 per cent to 12 per cent. The area is still possibly the most diverse linguistically in Europe. There are debates over definitions of ‘language’ and ‘dialect’, whether Italy has and had many languages (Florentine, Venetian, Sicilian, Calabrian, etc), or many dialects, derived from a common Latin origin. Some treat Ladino and Friulian as dialects, rather than separate languages. There are and were areas within Italy where other languages were spoken; southern areas where the common language was Greek or Albanian, and northern borders where French, German, Slavic languages and mixed dialects prevailed. All these languages had contaminated, infiltrated, or enriched (depending on your point of view) the speech and writing of wider regions.
These comments on linguistic disunity can be treated in various ways, and be misleading. Modern expectations of those living in monolingual societies, and wanting a common international language for instant communication, may exaggerate 1 the difficulties of the past scene of linguistic diversity and mutual incomprehension. In our period the educated elites had the common language of Latin useable through the peninsula and further afield till the eighteenth century at least. Furthermore the sixteenth century saw, after some intense and interesting debate, the recognition of an educated Italian vernacular language, based on Florentine and Tuscan; though thanks to a leading Venetian writer, Cardinal Pietro Bembo, it was old-fashioned Tuscan literary grammar, syntax and spelling rather than contemporary sixteenth-century discourse. The spread of printing ensured a ubiquity of this more or less agreed Italian, whether the presses were in Florence, Milan, Rome, Naples or Venice; though the Venetian presses also printed literary texts in Venetian dialect. Public notices, legal, ecclesiastical, charitable, were printed in this Italian; one has to assume that in the market square or church porch there was the odd person able and ready to read out, translate into another dialect and explain them. Thereby, a knowledge of some standard Italian percolated through society, to be heard and spoken, but not read. As will be suggested at various points, the numbers of people from all levels of society who moved about Italy, between dialect areas, were considerable and many must have learned to cope with verbal communication quickly. A Calabrian arriving in Naples or Rome, a Roman, Florentine or Friulian reaching Venice, would initially find most speech around incomprehensible; by prior design or chance they might find a family or group from their own dialect and ‘national’ background. But they must have soon become comprehensibly involved with other languages.
Court records such as those of the Venetian Inquisition, the Roman Governor’s criminal court, or the Bologna Torrone, suggest members of the lower orders from a variety of regions adequately communicated verbally – not just with knife and fist. Similar records throughout Italy put the evidence of the accused or witnesses in more or less standard Italian, though a few phrases and words might be in a local dialect. This was true even in the South. David Gentilcore, who has considerable experience dealing with investigative records, has found only one extensive record in a regional dialect (Calabrian). Some dialect comes through when a local scribe for the feudal court in the Calabrian village of Pentidattilo records a complex trial concerning murder and abortion in 1710; his record involved a complex translation procedure.2 There are implications for those seeking to comprehend what ‘voice’ is coming through such records. But in this context I would stress peoples’ abilities to overcome linguistic disunity, with the help of notaries and lesser scribes as communicators in society. Many travelled widely through their home region, towns and countryside, and were able to communicate, trade and intermarry.
Given the disunity even at the time of Unification, should we not confine ourselves – especially given the richness of local history – to reasonably coherent and cohesive sub-areas; based on old states, dynastic conglomerations or regional economies? One response is to say that because there is a modern united Italy – for good or ill, and under whatever threats over recent years – there should be pre-modern studies that illuminate the background of that same area, precisely explaining the diversity, conflicts and near incompatibilities from the past that still affect the stability and fragility of the present. Another response, especially from non-Italians, is that a perpetuated concentration on the famous sub-divisions – of Florence/Tuscany, the old Papal State, the Venetian Republic, or the Kingdom of Naples – distorts historical understanding by down-playing comparative analysis with near neighbours. The regional specialisation of many Italian historians, and fear of their professional rivals, means they would rather prove their breadth of learning, by alluding to French or English history than to a different Italian region.
More positively, a justification for an Italian-wide study of the very diverse peninsula rests on the realisation that at least among the elite of early-modern Italy there were concepts of the unity of ‘Italy’ and Italians. Florentines, Milanese and Venetians might regularly fight each other for control of northern Italy, but they were Italians with a common Roman past dominating an Empire – different from the barbarians, whether Christian French, German, Swiss north of the Alps, or heathen Muslims of the Ottoman Empire threatening across the Mediterranean waters or down from the Slavic north-eastern corner. This attitude of there being different kinds of foreigners, aliens and enemies lies behind the peroration of Niccolo Machiavelli’s notorious The Prince (mainly written 1512–13); Machiavelli wanted the peninsula cleared of non-Italians, especially Swiss and German mercenary soldiers working with Imperial, Spanish or French princes. Despite the interpretations of nineteenth-century nationalists and more recent political scientists, it is difficult to accept that Machiavelli seriously envisaged a single Italian state as a permanent result, but he desired Italy to be free for Italians to contest among themselves. Like his fellow Florentine historian and friend Francesco Guicciardini, he was horrified at the ease of the French invasion of Italy in 1494 that left Italy dominated, if not fully occupied, by non-Italian rulers for the rest of our period. Machiavelli blamed lazy, luxury minded, Italian princes and patricians, and notably the Papacy which had not been strong enough to unite Italy, but strong enough to prevent another ruler from doing so. He wanted an end to Italian decadence, which might virtuously be achieved by a Medici prince from Florence uniting Italian forces against non-Italian barbarians. This reaction to the 1494 invasion generated an increased cultural and moral concept of italianità, but not a political movement for unity.3
Following the Reformation schism and the Catholic reform, church leaders (like Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino) saw Italy as a Catholic church unit; with the Alps and the Inquisition tribunals combining to create a cordon sanitaire to keep out heretics and heterodox ideas. But not till the eighteenth century (and hardly then) was a single Italian state perceived to be feasible or desirable.
The divisions and contrasts within the Italian peninsula were, and are, considerable; between the mainly mountainous areas and the smaller plains, between great cities on coasts and rivers, and numerous città perched on high hilltops; between great feudal monoculture estates growing grain or pasturing sheep, and tiny multipurpose terraced strips mixing vines, olive trees, goats and chickens; between large extended families and the widow-run room of children; between great palace complexes like the Vatican or the Gonzaga palace in Mantua, and the hovels or even caves of the rural poor.
For many historians the fundamental divide in Italy is between the North and the South (the Mezzogiorno). The Mezzogiorno might, for some, include Rome and the surrounding Campagna and the Abruzzi; but more consistently it refers to what was the Kingdom or Viceroyalty of Naples, with the islands of Sicily and Sardinia often included, (although I am largely excluding these islands from my ‘Italy’). The concept of Il Mezzogiorno, or The South, is both geographical and attitudinal. The southern part of Italy has general geographical differences; more adverse climatic conditions, creating less diverse and less rich agricultural conditions; from these derive lower standards of living for most of the population, and more difficult communications. The south is often characterised as maintaining, or re-introducing a more intense ‘feudal’ structure socially and economically, nobles dominating large monoculture estates and having full feudal legal rights over towns and villages. Naples came to dominate the whole region, attracting the elite of feudal property owners, of educated professionals and adventurous international traders. The rest of the South was left with limited capital resources, less diverse occupations, less intellectual challenges; the south lacked the competitiveness of the rival city states and communes of the north. Thence derived the alleged torpor and unproductiveness of the Mezzogiorno. In the eyes of some Italian commentators – exemplified by the philosopher-historian who dominated Italy’s intellectual world from the late nineteenth century, Benedetto Croce, and by a modern Marxist historian, Rosario Villari – the southern problem was exacerbated when Spanish control was consolidated from the early sixteenth century (and ratified in the peace settlement of 1559). Spanish influence supposedly consolidated feudal noble control, emphasising courtly manners, and chivalric codes of behaviour on the part of the elite, with accompanying disdain for hard work, manual labour, and capitalist entrepreneurship. With the addition of rigorous counter-reformation orthodoxy the South lost its renaissance humanism, its intellectual and commercial competitiveness, and lapsed into torpor except when it came to the preservation of ‘honour’ and the pursuit of vendettas.4
Various sections of this book will test these myths or realities. The South has been much less studied than the North, though there have been beneficial changes recently – as with the investigation of socio-religious history, or family and household structures. Hostile impressions have discouraged investigation of the southern past; fewer universities there have meant fewer local researchers. Images of the South, its poverty, its supposed violence and its distrust of outsiders, have discouraged the kind of foreign scholar who has so enriched the study of northern Italy. Within the south, Naples’ past political, economic and cultural predominance seems to have led later historians to ignore Reggio Calabria, Nicastro, Potenza, Cosenza, Taranto, Bari or Lecce for example. These cities apparently rarely made the historical impact that, say, other cities in the Papal State besides Rome did, such as Perugia, Todi, Foligno, Orvieto, Spoleto, Ancona, all of which have attracted international scholarship for studies of our period.
The sources for studying the Mezzogiorno are also much more limited than for the North, because fewer documents and contemporary books were produced in the first place with a less literate, less urbanised, less politically fragmented society. What was produced has suffered from greater attrition, through earthquakes, climatic adversities or German vindictiveness on evacuating Naples in 1944. When and where they do survive, poverty, indifference and ignorance have caused materials in feudal and ecclesiastical archives and libraries to be lost, eaten up, dampened or rendered inaccessible. So the southern problems dictate that attempts to test or change the image are made difficult.
For all the divisions within Italy, ‘Italy’ had an image in the eyes of non-Italians that was largely favourable and/or magnetic, even if the perception of Italy was normally of the nearer and more accessible northern, urban, Italy.5 Through the period of our study, from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries ‘Italy’ (like Europa pursued by Jove), was envied, admired, coveted, lusted, by rulers and the elite of much of Europe. If she did not satisfy or satiate, if gold proved mere gilt, if overtures were rejected, then admirers turned to despisers – as with Erasmus, Luther and Calvin, or Kings Charles VIII and Louis XIV of France. Italy and Italian based scholarship and the arts were central to the fifteenth-century classical Renaissance; for the rediscovery of lost manuscripts, the improvement in classical texts, in purifying the writing and speaking of Latin, and then Greek; for discoveries in anatomical sciences, in the portrayal of the human body, in perspective. From Italy came not only ideas and the means of their communication, but also commercial and industrial leadership, banking facilities utilising paperwork as well as gold coinage, florins from Florence and ducats from Venice. Italy also provided leadership in communication and commerce: transforming Germanic inventions in movable type from the world of secrecy into the realms of middle-class education and near-mass communication (with the printed illustrated newssheet).
Though Italy dominated culture and commerce less from the mid sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, plenty was left for non-Italians to envy. There were the courtly, gentlemanly and ladylike manners of The Courtier [Il Cortegiano, published 1528], the dangerous but exciting republican ideas of Machiavelli or the Venetian Republic; the canvases of great painters like Titian and Veronese who mastered the art of oil-painting (even if northerners had first developed the medium); the musical expertise of great composers like the Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Cavalli and Vivaldi (even if Netherlanders in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century had largely taught the Italians); there was Italian silk, damask, furniture, mirrors, drinking glasses, maiolica tableware, decorated pistols and daggers (preferably not to be used) for comfortable civilised living, and the imagery thereof. Those seeking classical erudition, scientific training, artistic treasures (classical or modern) headed for Italy, to be involved in universities – at least in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – and academies, then salons, coffee-houses and theatres in the seventeenth and eighteenth. Those of a Catholic persuasion from the later sixteenth century might look to Italy (primarily Rome though not exclusively so) as offering religious leadership. There were books of all categories from Italian presses, especially Venetian.
Thus from an international perspective Italy, or key parts thereof, was central to European consciousness – to taste, education in the broadest sense, to manners and conduct, to commercial practice and procedures. Politicians – out to rape the peninsula – ensured that the Italian/non-Italian interchange was more complicated, involved and violent, as will become clearer below. The social and economic bases that produced the desirable Italy, and the way the pursuers also altered that society, will become evident as the book progresses.
The social history developments have to be set within a framework of many different political units.6
The political geography of Italy in the early fifteenth century was extremely complex, and the political conflicts intense. Any map is inclined to mislead by implying the existence of coherent ‘States’ in a modern sense of reasonably structured political units; though by 1559 (Map 2) agglomerations of cities, towns and feudal estates had been consolidated into fewer, more integrated, political units. In the fifteenth century two major monarchical states covered the bulk of southern and central Italy, the Papal State and the Kingdom of Naples. The latter, (theoretically, until 1787, a feudal dependency of the Papacy), was ruled by members of the House of Aragon from Spain. Many overmighty feudal barons alternately had to be cajoled or beaten into accepting central direction from Naples (or Palermo or Barcelona). The coherence of the Papal State or States was even more problematic in the early century since rival popes claimed authority to rule both church and state. The situation was eased in 1417 when Pope Martin V was generally recognised as the single legitimate Pope. But it was long before he and his successors could seriously claim to have made themselves safe and secure in the Vatican within Rome, with moderate control over the territorial State with its subinfeudated families controlling some towns and countryside, oligarchic city communal governments and warlords or tyrants with more temporary control of other cities.
Italian areas north of the Papal State had a whole range of larger or lesser republican city states, dukedoms, marquisates or other princely regimes. The early fifteenth century involved a struggle between the Republics of Venice and Florence and the Dukedom of Milan to carve out and consolidate large territorial states based on their capital cities, with a competition to absorb lesser cities. Venice sought to dominate Padua, Verona or Vicenza; Milan to conquer Pavia, Como or Lodi; while Bergamo or Brescia might go either way. Florence struggled to conquer or entice Pisa and Arezzo, Prato and Siena. These northern struggles were not immune from intervention by Naples and the Papacy; and the northern republics or princes had their greedy eyes at times on parts of those southern territories. There were plenty of mercenary soldiers (condottieri) ready to get involved – for money, prestige, or even to create their own petty state. These condottieri had included foreigners, such as the English Sir John Hawkwood (known to Italians as Giovanni Acuto), whose unusually loyal services to Florence earned him a superb frescoed equestrian portrait in Florence Cathedral by Paolo Uccello (1430), as well as the splendid civic-sponsored funeral (1394), which had set new standards for the ritual treatment of death.7
A few exemplary events at the beginning of the fifteenth century can illustrate the political struggles of the period. In 1402 Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti died unexpectedly, on the brink of capturing Florence. This unexpectedly ended one of the most serious threats to the Florentine republic. Out of this struggle, and fortunate salvation, Florentine humanist scholars and officials developed concepts of republicanism, freedom (for themselves if not Arezzo or Pistoia), civic humanism and the high virtue of the active life as opposed to contemplation and retreat from the sinful world. More politically, the setback for the Milanese–Visconti empire contributed indirectly to Venetian as well as to Florentine aggrandisement. Venice took Padua from the Carrara family in 1405, while in 1404 Vicenza had chosen Venetian republicanism rather than the Carrara dynasty. Verona also fairly willingly submitted. Later Venice encroached against the Milanese and Visconti, taking Brescia in 1426 and Bergamo in 1428.8 From some of these events developed the greater territorial states, to be accompanied sometimes by the creation of wider economic conglomerates, and affecting the ebb and flow of Italian urban history and culture.
The Peace of Lodi of 1454, formally between Milan and Venice but also leading to a settlement between Florence and the Papacy, was a significant marker point. It brought a degree of peace to the Italian peninsula, although partly intended as a prelude to a new Crusade against the Muslim Ottoman Turks who had finally seized Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in 1453. The fall of the largest city of the period, the centre of the old Eastern Empire and of the Eastern Orthodox church, was a dramatic symbolic event – though the Ottomans had been eating away at Eastern Christendom in Asia Minor and the Balkans for a long time. From the Italian viewpoint there were benefits in the flight of Greek scholars and manuscripts to Italian courts and universities to buttress the classical revival: with significant effects not only on classical studies, but on broad scientific knowledge, theology, moral philosophy and social teaching, as on philanthropy. The sixteenth-century Florentine historian, Francesco Guicciardini, looked back on the period 1454–1494 as a golden age of peace, leading to major cultural achievements, and the benign leadership of the Florentine republic by the Medici family.
Guicciardini had wittingly exaggerated the degree of peace. There were continuing struggles within the Papal State and the Kingdom of Naples in the attempts to establish control. The Guicciardini and Machiavelli families within Florence had not only to confront the problems of war between Florence and the Papacy, but the considerable violence of the Pazzi conspiracy (1478). The Pazzi and others seeking to overthrow Medici domination killed Giuliano de’ Medici in the Cathedral and wounded his elder brother Lorenzo Il Magnifico. Lorenzo and his supporters took bloody revenge on those conspirators they caught. This event is a reminder of the violent political struggles, the vendettas, the exiling, the painting of the hanged plotters as mural advertisements of their treachery that are part of the urban scene, even in periods of golden peace.
However the myth of peace was constructed at the height of much worse violence and depredation inaugurated by the 1494–5 invasion of Italy by the French under the personal command of King Charles VIII. This event is crucial for all aspects of Italian history.9 Charles claimed the throne of Naples. Invading Italy in September 1494, he and his considerable army reached Naples in February 1495. On the way they took control of Milan and drove the Medici out of Florence (with the aid of Florentines hostile to the Medici). Charles was soon back in France; but this brought no respite to Italy. The King had launched the peninsula into what has become known as the Italian Wars, lasting until 1559. Italy was the centre, or one of the centres, of international conflict. The French reappeared under Louis XII in 1499, and often dominated the north from Milan. The Spaniards, based in the south, contended for control of the whole peninsula, especially when King Charles of Castile, Aragon, Naples, etc. became Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 and brought in German resources as well. The Turks harried the Italian shoreline, and Sultan Suleiman I seems seriously to have considered taking Rome for his empire. Germans and Swiss fought also as mercenaries on all sides. Italian states manoeuvred between the outside powers, for and against each other, as alliances and leagues were formed, broken and reformed. Peace came in 1559 with the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, when the French and Imperial-Spanish sides were exhausted. Italy was left dominated by the Spanish, now under Philip II, sovereign over Naples, Sicily, Lombardy and coastal ports like Port’Ercole in Tuscany.
The effects of the Italian Wars were considerable and multifarious, both negative and positive. The 1494 French army was one of the largest so far known in European warfare; and it came with heavier guns for bombarding cities. Thereafter warfare was more intense and destructive than Italy had experienced before. The practices and threats of war caused new developments in the design and construction of city defences, castles and war machinery. This provided work for famous – or soon to be famous – artists: Leonardo da Vinci in Milan and elsewhere, Fra Giocondo in Naples and Padua; Antonio San Gallo the Younger and other relatives in Florence, Nettuno, Civitavecchia, Civita Castellana and Perugia; Michelangelo in Florence. From military architecture and machinery such designers developed ideas that soon influenced civil and ecclesiastical architecture, urban design and planning. The cities of Rome, Florence, Naples, Perugia and later Turin were to be among the beneficiaries. With larger armies and greater defence systems, the costs of war were considerably inflated. This required more taxation and levies, necessitating more efficient government officials, and/or more ruthless tax farmers and bankers. So political leaders were pushed towards greater centralisation, a better structured State with a semblance of a modern bureaucracy, and towards theories of the absolute state under which representative institutions, selfish privileged aristocracies and communal oligarchies, would not have the right and power to frustrate the will of the sovereign ruler supposedly acting for the good of all. These political theories and practices might be some time in the fulfilment, but the Italian Wars had pushed developments in those directions.
More immediately the war period 1494–1559 had had some devastating effects on people and places. The number of great set-piece battles was surprisingly small, but the wider effects of war conditions were often intense. The battle of Ravenna on Easter Sunday 1512, when the French defeated the Spanish, led to considerable casualties and the sacking of Ravenna. Other major examples of sacked cities were Rapallo by the Swiss in 1494, Brescia (by the French) and Prato (by the Spanish on behalf of the Medici) in 1512, and Rome in 1527. Cities might be besieged for lengthy periods: Pisa by the Florentines through the 1490s, Verona (occupied by Spanish and German imperial forces) by Venetian and French allies, Naples by the French 1527–8, Republican Florence by the Medici Pope Clement VII and his Imperial supporters 1529–30, Siena by the Medici and Spanish 1552–5. Some of these sieges were resolved without major destruction, but they still seriously affected normal life.
More insidiously the war periods saw the spread of diseases, starvation, as food supplies were plundered or peasants rendered unable to sow new crops, and economic recession. The 1520s in particular were grim years of plague, typhus (especially in 1528), bad weather and famine. From 1495 syphilis became a deadly and disfiguring affliction. The disease was allegedly brought back from the New World by Columbus’ expeditions, though some medical historians have suggested that a strain was part of the European scene before, or that syphilis was a variation of yaws (still afflicting Africa) that became sexually transmitted.10 However, without doubt it was the French march to Naples and back in 1494–5 that turned syphilis into a major scourge, transmitted by the soldiers and their camp followers. Italians tend to refer to it as the mal francese, the French pox, though the French and others blamed the Neapolitans. Initially syphilis had a high mortality rate, and created considerable fear and shock affecting the mood of the period, much like the modern AIDS epidemic.
The second major psychological shock to the mentality of the period, after syphilis, came from the Sack of Rome in 1527, when unpaid imperial troops (mainly German) went on the rampage, raping, sacking, looting and creating mayhem. The extent of the human suffering is obscure, especially as plague, malaria and food shortages added to the mortality and to the flight of survivors. The looting and destruction were considerable, especially of more decorative and portable works of art such as relics in lavish containers, jewellery, tapestries (such as the papal series for the Sistine Chapel woven to paper designs or ‘cartoons’ by Raphael, some of which are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), stained glass, smaller antique statues and the like. Some works of art survived, to be preserved elsewhere, including some of the Raphael tapestries, but much ornate medieval gold and silver was lost. André Chastel (1983) and other commentators argue that the psychological impact was considerable, shaking Romans, Italians and other Europeans out of a complacent or over-confident mood, out of excesses of paganism and classical idealism, into a more reflective and serious Christianity. Artists, musicians and writers moved away from classical harmonies, into more emotional, tense, dissonant forms of expression. Moods of despair, anxiety or cynicism are detected in writers like Francesco Guicciardini or Piero Valeriano, and artists like Michelangelo, Rosso Fiorentino or Sebastiano del Piombo. While northern reformers might welcome the destruction of reliquaries, Catholic faithful were shocked by stories about the preserved heads of Saints Peter, Paul and John being laughingly kicked about the streets of Rome by drunken Germans. The sack was seen as the wrath of God; it almost certainly drove Italian religious leaders to take the threat of Lutheranism more seriously, and to seek reform of the church from within. Rome recovered, and some of the destruction acted as a stimulus for a new Rome, which gradually moved towards a more suitable environment for leading a reformed Catholic church.
The Sack of Rome had positive effects. It dispersed some influential people, or discouraged others from returning: artists, religious leaders, patrons. Rome’s loss was Venice’s gain. The sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino moved to Venice, contributed much to urban development and classicised Venetian architecture. Serlio, who had survived through the Sack, published in Venice inventories of Roman buildings, and promoted the images of classical architecture. Doge Andrea Gritti, Serlio’s sponsor, was intent that Venice should be the new cultural leader of Italy in place of Rome. Pietro Aretino had left Rome for Venice before the Sack – forecasting its occurrence – and declined to return. Out of Venice he expanded his reputation as poet, dramatist, high-class pornographer, letter-writer, journalist and publicist for himself and artistic friends. In the somewhat freer atmosphere of mid-century Venice he was to have some impact on attitudes to vernacular literature, to artistic style and to women’s roles and gender differences.11
By contrast, from the diaspora from Rome came serious, moralistic religious reformers, particularly Gaetano da Thiene and Gian Pietro Carafa (later Pope Paul IV); having started a society of clerics in 1524 to promote religious and social reform they and supporters dispersed from Rome in 1527. They took their reform ideas to Venice and Naples in particular. From their initiatives arose the new Order of Theatines that was to play a major role in Catholic reform, especially in the Kingdom of Naples.
The horrors of war that seriously disrupted society had a major impact on religious reform and philanthropic activity. Those who witnessed bodies lying unburied, the sick lying in the streets, raped women and orphaned and abandoned children wandering through city and countryside, were sometimes shocked and moved into starting lay confraternities or clerical societies to organise assistance; to found hospices, hospitals, conservatories and other refuges. The sack of Brescia in 1512, and particularly the raping of citizens by the soldiery, led Countess Laura Gambara to provide a refuge (eventually called the Conservatorio delle Convertite Della Carità) to protect vulnerable girls; this was to inspire many similar conservatories for girls and women. Later Girolamo Miani, a Venetian nobleman, similarly reacting to the effects of war in northern Italy, founded a company, the Servants of the Poor (Dei Servi dei Poveri) in 1534, to organise orphanages. Major ones were opened in Brescia, Pavia and Como. Friends and associates undertook similar work through lay confraternities, while Miani’s immediate circle went on to create the Regular Clerks of Somasca, (the Somaschi). By the end of the century this Order had become notable for also offering educational facilities for poor slum-dwellers, as in Rome and Naples. So out of the disasters of war emerged major efforts to provide Catholic philanthropy.
The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis of 1559 is another obvious marker in the history of the Italian peninsula (see Maps 2 and 4). It enabled the Italian states to restructure and consolidate themselves in relative peace. Philip II’s Spanish rule, led by resident Viceroys in Naples and Palermo, or Governors in Milan, involved the native elites of the areas; and the southern areas were probably better controlled and governed (to the benefit of the average inhabitant) than they had been for ages. The extent of Spanish influence – often seen in the past as detrimental to liberty of thought, humanist culture and renaissance values – has probably been exaggerated, though it is now clear that Philip II had a Hispanicising policy even in Rome.12 Spanish feudal attitudes, courtly manners and chivalric concepts may have accentuated existing tendencies towards economic and cultural ‘refeudalisation’. A supposedly hostile Spanish attitude towards ignoble involvement in commerce and manual labour, which might have threatened the creation of wealth, can be balanced by other considerations. The South’s involvement in the wider Spanish imperial enterprises – notably in trying to preserve the Netherlands – meant that the Spanish Italian areas provided men, materiel and materials for the imperial struggle. Capitalist northern Italians had opportunities for investment and commercial exploitation.
Outside the Spanish areas, the 1559 peace left the Venetian and Genoese Republics, the Duchy of Tuscany (under the Medici family again) and the Papal State as more integrated and centralised states. In effect north and central Italy had fewer centres of political power; the second rank cities and their dominant elites were more controlled; there was less factional fighting, less rebellion, and the general urban populace probably enjoyed a more placid existence than their predecessors in the centuries of communal ‘liberty’. Siena, Bologna, Perugia, Orvieto, Verona, Vicenza or Brescia might for the rest of our period be less exciting places politically, have less local leadership, but they also had less civil war. There might have been cultural losses as patronage concentrated more on Florence, Rome or Venice. While some of these cities suffered economic decline, it is hard to argue that this was largely because they had lost de facto political control of their own destiny. The elites of the secondary cities redeployed their energies, their investments and talents, and many were incorporated further (as individuals, families or within corporations and local institutions) into the faster developing, pluralistic regional states.13
The peace of 1559 was followed by the conclusion of the Council of Trent in December 1563. This Council of the Church had met intermittently since 1545, (1545–7, 1551–2, 1562–3) either to produce some reconciliation with Protestants (for most involved a forgotten target or forlorn hope by the time the Council got down to business), or to define true Catholic doctrine, remedy acknowledged defects and immoral behaviour, and programme procedures for improving the church and its members. The ratification of the decrees, their printing and distribution to bishops and some other clergy by the summer of 1564 launched reform programmes of considerable consequences for society generally. Policies and implementation varied vastly through the peninsula, and worked at different rates of progress. Aspects of the impact of Trent and reformers inspired by it will be discussed further in various chapters; but it can said here that what generally emerged was a more coherent and regular religious–social life based on the parish church, through which society was more controlled and documented. There were major implications for the position of women, and male attitudes towards them, for marriage, education and philanthropy.
From the 1590s Italy faced growing pressures and tensions, economic, social and political, which suggest a general ‘decline’ in Italian fortunes and European influence. The modern cultural historian may counterattack with positive arguments that from then Tridentine puritanism and paranoic repression diminished, that painting, sculpture and music became more adventurous (especially in Rome and – at least for music – Venice), that conspicuous consumption on comfortable living generated activity in luxury crafts and trade. But the crises of the 1590s, and the sequels, had wider impact.14 That decade saw as elsewhere in Europe, years of poor harvests under adverse weather conditions, famines, recessions in textile industries. The hunt for new food supplies brought in Dutch and English shippers, transporting grains from the Baltic. Their entry into the Mediterranean markets opened up opportunities and enticements that were not forgotten; so they remained to challenge the economic trading activities of the Venetians in particular, and to add to the problems of piracy on the high seas.
In 1618 the crises in the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg lands, and Bohemia in particular launched Europe into a war period that came to be known as the Thirty Years’ War. The effects on Italy were complex. To begin with the Italian states were not directly involved, but they were affected economically. The Venetian Republic suffered through disruption to its northern markets – for textiles, luxury goods such as glass, or possibly foods. But Lombardy and Naples had benefits from helping to man and supply the Spanish armies. Also northern merchants were flexible enough to compensate for the loss of German trade by pursuing markets, especially for luxury textiles, in places further afield, such as Poland (at least until it faced crisis in 1655).
Conditions worsened for Italians when in 1627 Duke Vincenzo II Gonzaga of Mantua died without direct heirs. This produced a succession crisis, leading to war and the sack of the city by the Imperial army in 1630. It was not just that Mantua itself was a strategically important state; its Gonzaga rulers also had the marquisate of Monferrato with its crucial fortress of Casale, controlling north-western routes in and out of Italy. The succession with its properties were thus of considerable interest to the Spanish Habsburgs under Philip IV, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, (who was technically the feudal superior of Mantua), the French, and the House of Savoy ruling Savoy and Piedmont. The struggle for Mantua and Monferrato was intense, time-consuming and costly for all sides, devastating for the main cities and disruptive of the economy of northern Italy. This struggle coincided with a major plague epidemic (and typhus or typhoid in some places like Tuscany) 1629–32, and the armies exacerbated the spread and impact of diseases and death. The French Duke of Nevers was eventually recognised as the successor to Mantua, which gave the French a major excuse for intervening in north Italian affairs for the following decades.
As the Thirty Years’ War ground on further north, the Spanish Empire became more hard-pressed, suffering more defeats and set-backs. One effect was to increase the financial pressures on its Italian states, Naples in particular, so that through the 1630s and 1640s the economic position of the Viceroyalty became worse, and the social tensions greater. The combination of long-term depression and short-term food and tax crises produced the major revolts in Palermo and Naples in 1647 (the Masaniello Revolt), and through much of the Kingdom of Naples. The Spanish authorities managed to resist both native rebels and French interlopers and to restore a semblance of order and authority. However the second half of the seventeenth century following the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, is seen largely as a period of economic and cultural stagnation, even if there was relative peace politically. Recent scholarship has been more inclined to highlight some intellectual and artistic vitality, in Naples, Venice and Turin, for example.
Italy was thrown into major political turmoil with the Spanish Succession crisis of 1700. Charles II of Spain died, as expected, without a direct legitimate heir. Fear that the whole world Empire would all pass to either an Austrian Habsburg or a French claimant had led to partition treaties ahead of the King’s death, and then to war. The political fate of Naples, Sicily, Lombardy and Sardinia was at stake, and strongly contested. The Peace of Utrecht in 1713 left the Austrian Habsburgs in control of Naples and Lombardy, and the House of Savoy in possession of Sicily. But the logistical inconveniences of the latter occasioned an exchange with Austria in 1720, so that Savoy ruled Sardinia, and Austria ruled Sicily. The scene again changed when in 1735, as a by-product of the War of the Polish Succession, Austria ceded Naples and Sicily to a Spanish Bourbon, Charles III son of Philip V of Spain. Succession crises were fashionable in this period, to the further detriment of Italy. The end of the Farnese line as Dukes of Parma and Piacenza in 1731 led to Spain taking over these useful Po valley states within a few months; in 1748 it was recognised internationally that they should be ruled independently by Don Carlos. With the death of Grand Duke Gian Gastone in 1737 the Medici family finally petered out as rulers of Florence/Tuscany. This lazy alcoholic – though sometimes a well-intentioned and humane man – had become increasingly an embarrassment and scandal, as reputedly his court had become more and more dominated by riotous feasts with homosexual orgies.15 Tuscany was handed over by the international powers to Duke Francis Stephen of Lorraine; but since he had married in 1736 Maria Theresa, heir to the Austrian Habsburg lands (who succeeded in 1740), Tuscany was soon part of the Austrian Empire.
It was not until 1763 that the Italian peninsula entered a period of peace, with agreed territorial settlements. Severe famine conditions particularly affected the Kingdom of Naples, Tuscany and Rome. This helped stimulate an interesting stage when serious attempts were made to implement enlightenment policies. Whatever the depth or shallowness of the economic and cultural decline of Italy from the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, a sense of risorgimento (revival) reigned from the 1760s, building on previous intellectual developments and reform moves, particularly in Naples. The weaknesses of Italian culture, in thrall to the French or to distant glories of the past, the economically unproductive results of outmoded feudal attitudes and institutions, the deficiencies of old legal procedures and practices all came under scrutiny from men as diverse as the long-lived Jesuit Saverio Bettinelli (1718–1808) (whose literary and historical critique Il Risorgimento, 1775, was to have such resonance), the Naples Professor of Political Economy Antonio Genovesi, the Modena cleric and historian Ludovico Muratori and the Lombard criminologist and state counsellor Cesare Beccaria. Rational analysis in much of Italy was accompanied by attempted remedies. The states of Tuscany, Lombardy, Naples, Modena and even the Papal States were to have ministers, counsellors and administrators who were themselves writers on reform, and/or were friends, collaborators and students of such writers and university teachers. Our early modern society was changed.16
The 1789–91 French revolutionary events had mixed effects on thinking Italians. If much had been achieved by reformers – particularly in agricultural improvements, legal reforms and the diminishing of conservative clerical teaching and influence – there were many frustrations. Most reformers, many of them lesser nobles and urban patricians, had secured action through absolutist princes, without many calls for a widening of political power – partly on the grounds that such a prince, if enlightened by suitable advisers, would secure action more quickly than a more democratic process involving benighted aristocrats and middle classes. However, by 1789 many reformers, like Beccaria and his erstwhile friend and associate Pietro Verri, were feeling frustrated by the limited changes that had been achieved, and what they heard out of France seemed inspiring. But as France degenerated into violence, and then liberated or invaded north Italy, attitudes towards France and new ideas became more mixed. Italy was again thrown into considerable chaos – intellectually, socially and economically – during the French occupation period. It was out of the combination of enlightened reform and of French-induced chaos and Napoleonic restructuring that modern Italian society emerged.
Though disunited politically through the period there was a sense of Italian identity, at least in high political and cultural circles, based on cultural identities, and a sense of geographical integrity. Resentment at trans-Alpine interference (as mention of another round of anti-French feelings in the eighteenth century has just suggested), could provide stimulus to action, and at least cultural vitality. The struggle to bring back the Pope, as a single agreed leader, to Rome, is one marker for the beginning of the period (1417), to be followed by a belated response to French invasion in 1494. Resentment at French cultural influences is one trigger for the risorgimento that helps end the era.
The fairly static and the changing political situations affect the social scenes in various ways. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century the political geography was simplified, by external pressures and internal ambitions. The concentration of some political leadership in fewer cities affected urban demography and locations of economic activity, to the detriment of some intermediary cities, and impinging on all levels of society. More narrowly the simplified political scene changed the nature and roles of some of the elites, both within cities and in the rural world, though as we shall note, there were not the neat urban/rural, commerce/land divisions alleged for other states like Spain, France or Prussia. The political and military struggles of 1494–1559, besides eventually producing more centralised states, affected demographic patterns and economic activities (especially those connected with warfare). The evil effects of war and accompanying health problems dislocated society, added to banditry problems, but also generated welfare schemes and affected attitudes to morality and religious duties. The comparatively peaceful period, politically, from 1559 to 1700, to some extent under Spanish attitudes and threats, allowed new elites to entrench themselves, religious reformers to consolidate some Tridentine policies, and both to join political leaders in imposing more social control. As often before, climate threats and health crises were ready to disturb the stability, and endanger economic development, when serious wars did not. The last section of our period, from 1700, sees war and disease combine to produce more misery and dislocations; but unlike in the early sixteenth century, when reformers produced socio-religious palliatives, the new reformers were tempted to challenge the old society more fundamentally. Landholding and feudal systems, the dominance of aristocratic elites, the once revered contributions of religious education and welfare came under serious criticism, if not very effective execution. This was heading for a new era.
The political divisions overall, and local areas of cohesion, the impediments to political unity, the crises of demography, the distribution of economic prosperity and poverty, what dictated social mobility or immobility, were all significantly affected by Italian geography, which deserves a chapter of its own.