The social and economic history of any area is conditioned by that area’s basic physical geography.1 The Italian peninsula is predominantly characterised by mountains and high rugged hills; and few plains or rolling fertile downs (Map 1). No easy terrain for farming, or internal communication, the mountainous areas produced few profitable mineral resources in the period. The peninsula’s long coastline is not that beneficial, with comparatively few natural harbours; rivers connecting mountains and the coast have hindered rather than helped the profitable use of the coastal plains. Much intervention by man has been needed to derive economic benefit from the rivers and coasts.
The mountain ranges of the Alps in the north, and the Apennines curving down the spine of Italy are the dominant features, leaving the valley of the Po and its tributaries, the most fertile plain area, as the key to northern agricultural prosperity. Crossing the mountains remained difficult and hazardous, especially in winter, until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Travellers have left telling records of the difficulties and dangers, but also of the intrepidity of many who did travel, and the employment of many who assisted them.2 There were many Alpine crossings – Braudel calculated twenty-three for the sixteenth century, seventeen of which had been used since Roman times. In the western Alps the main routes to and from Italy and the Lombard plain were the Mont Cenis and St Bernard passes. Genoa, with its beneficial deep-water harbour, was protected by the northern end of the Apennines, through which there were reasonable passes (Giovi and Bocchetta) into the Lombard plain. But Genoa as a commercial Republic was hampered by having to rely on reasonably tranquil conditions in Piedmont and Lombardy to allow goods to be carried on to the Mont Cenis and St Bernard passes. Such factors tended to encourage Genoa to concentrate on sea routes. Venice, as the rival international trading power, developed a more beneficial situation from the fifteenth century. In land trading north through the eastern Alps, its goal was the Brenner pass, best approached via the Adige, Val Sugana or Piave. Rivers in between – the Po, Piave and Brenta – though not ideal were preferable to roads. Control of the Adige routes essentially required control of Verona; from the early fifteenth century the Venetian Republic secured dominance over that city in its mainland, Terraferma, expansion. The Venetian Republic could thereby develop a more diverse economy than Genoa.
Further south the Apennines impeded north–south and east–west communications, and encouraged political fragmentation. South of Piacenza and Parma, men and goods could cross the Apennines via the Taro river and Cisa Pass to Sarzanello and La Spezia, and so down the coastal route through Tuscany. The French invading army under Charles VIII in 1494 took this route.3 Those seeking access from the Bologna region to Tuscany and Umbria had difficult routes – whether via the rivers Setta and Stura to Prato, or through Firenzuola and Scarperia to Florence. Further south, the crucial links were from Faenza to Florence by the Val di Lamone; Forli to Florence via Castrocaro; Rimini to Arezzo through Borgo San Sepolcro. Umbria has been able to maintain adequate communication across the centuries, thanks to the Bocca Serriola and Bocca Trabaria passes from the Tiber valley across the Apennines. These routes explain the strategic, commercial (and ultimately cultural) importance of some smaller cities of north-central Italy. Further south communication routes would take advantage of the Tiber valley, then coastal routes on the Tyrrhenian sea or the Adriatic coast. Much of the south is rugged, arid, inhospitable – discouraging communication and perhaps civilised development – though river gorges such as those of the Bradano allow penetration inland.
Braudel and others have emphasised the importance of mountains, and the relationships with the foothills and plains for developments within Italy. Some caution is required here. The assumption that there was an almost automatic drawing down of hillbillies to the lower areas, except when hilltop cities had to be created, because mountain areas were poorer, is misleading. At least in late fourteenth and fifteenth century Tuscany and the neighbouring Bolognese areas, mountain inhabitants could be better off than those lower down and closer to the cities; and mountain people more often migrated from one mountain area to another, before moving down into plains or cities.4
The rugged Friuli region has achieved notoriety for its magical practices and beliefs investigated by the Inquisition, and effectively written up by Carlo Ginzburg in his studies of a heretical miller, Menocchio Scandela, and of benandanti, or nightriders who battled with evil forces.5 The survival of pagan rituals and popular heretical beliefs is often attributed to remote mountainous territory. Yet Menocchio’s home town of Montereale is in the foothills, with high Dolomite mountains behind, and the lower level of the great Tagliamento river bed south towards the Venetian lagoon. That river bed has been dried up through historic times; not very fertile but crossable without great impediment. Looking up above Montereale one can see paths and small tunnels, which date from the early modern period and further back. In fact this was an area that from Roman times saw much transit of goods and people, to and from the Germanic areas down to ports on the Venetian lagoon, to Aquileia, to the east and into the Istrian area and the Balkans. People and places in the Friuli and the Veneto could be remote, and snowbound in winter, but also they had significant contact with the wider world. Material goods and ideas moved and had their influence.
The river systems of Italy are crucial, but they present many problems, and are hardly as beneficial as a quick look at a physical map might suggest (Map 1). In summer many rivers dry up almost completely; in winter they are variable with erratic rainfall; many are prone to flooding, and sweep away beneficial soils. The Arno flowing through Florence is an obvious example of such problems. Italy has few lakes, and many catchment basins are meagre. Steep slopes, and the nonporous nature of many rock structures, render many river regimes unhelpful. For geographers the most satisfactory river regimes centre on Pescara, fed by the Nera and Velino and limestone springs in the Abruzzi, and the Tiber, as fed by the same rivers, with the Aniene as well. The Volturno and Sele render the Campagna region fairly fertile. The Po river with its tributaries has been the key to much of northern Italy’s economic prosperity, but the irregularity of Alpine rainfall, seasonal fluctuations and flooding have produced major disasters. Human intervention – especially from the fifteenth century with canals, river re-routing and irrigation schemes – has tamed some of nature’s excesses and improved the economic and social benefits.
The exit systems of the Po, however, highlight an additional problem: that many Italian rivers end in marshy, swampy coastland – eroding the coast and silting up lagoons (except where, as with Venice, the authorities over centuries have organised remedies). In the absence of adequate human intervention and control, areas further south like the Comacchio and Ravenna regions, or (on the Tyrrhenian coast) the deltas of the Tiber, Arno and Ombrone were insalubrious and under-productive, characterised through the early modern period by malarial conditions. Elsewhere along the coast, torrential river outlets have undermined the natural potential of bays to serve as ports.
Italy’s physical geography helps explain the location and nature of the significant medieval and early modern urban centres: on key river locations, near passes and travel routes or high up on hill slopes or even tops – despite problems of water supply. Towns perched on hilly outcrops took populations away from erratic torrential rivers and streams, left lower slopes for productive agriculture and made the human communities more defensible against rival communities, feudal lords or robber gangs.
The mountainous and hilly nature of much of the peninsula should not indicate that all was barren and unproductive – leaving prosperity just for the Lombard plains, the Po valley, the Campania or the Puglian coast. Many mountain areas had arable land on hill-side terraces, or in the valleys: Braudel cited Spoleto as one of the best examples of a city in mountainous land, but with a fertile plain. Vines grow high up on Mount Etna, maize was brought to the Cosenza region in the sixteenth century, and grows at altitudes up to 1400 metres; wheat and barley are found at even higher levels in the Abruzzi. In central Italy when olive growing became marginal on higher slopes, hazelnuts and almonds contributed to the economy. Chestnuts were brought into the northern and central Apennines at high levels to be a staple of peasant diets, often to the detriment of older forest trees such as beech. Favourable climatic conditions in Umbria in association with intermontane basins (as in high points like Norcia or Gubbio) have enabled inhabitants to cultivate the terraced hills with wheat, beans and fodder, cutting back the old forests and bringing in almonds, olives, figs and then in our period, mulberries. This agricultural world sustained largish populations in cities high above, as in Todi, Perugia or Assisi.
Through the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as foreign travellers to Italy more frequently recorded their impressions, they increasingly noted with admiration how hillsides in northern and central Italy were terraced, and intensely managed to utilise varieties of crops, trees and interspersed animals. Irrigation schemes, the way vines and fruit trees were cared for from Lombardy through the Papal States to Terra di Lavoro (north of Naples), were admired by careful observers like Arthur Young from England, the German Goethe or the French Charles de Brosses, who declared of the Vicenza–Padua landscape: ‘... there is no more beautiful or better decorated opera scenery than a country like this.’6
Contrasts came, then as now, when the South was surveyed. The South (the modern regions of Abruzzi, Campania, Molise, Puglia (or Apulia), Calabria and Basilicata, to which Sicily and Sardinia can be added) is predominantly mountainous and hilly, with only about 23 per cent plains. The mountainous lands are more arid than further north, their rock formations more unstable; speedy evaporation in summer, unreliable rainfall and the absence of permeable rock that might help trap water (except in the Campania), inhibit productive agriculture. The natural conditions, backed by policies of governments and feudal landowners from the late middle ages, encouraged the pasturing of sheep and goats over considerable areas – to the ultimate detriment of the soil. Deforestation and consequent erosion through the early modern period to the present has added to the poverty of the soil and the inhabitants. In the south the mountainous areas remained more isolated. The limited communication between human habitations further inhibited economic, social and cultural diversity in comparison with Umbria let alone the southern Alps and northern and central Apennine regions. Mountain snow and ice could be economically beneficial, and not just for those providing for ice-cream lovers at the Medici court in Florence. A Sicilian nobleman, Antonio Ruffo, was able to become a major art patron and collector in Messina (dealing with painters including Salvator Rosa, Poussin and Artemisia Gentileschi, and collecting Rembrandt works) – thanks in part to his monopoly control of ice supplies, derived from mountainous properties in Sicily and Calabria.7
The geographical scene changed through the early modern period from human intervention as well as climate. Deforestation, with its effects on climate, the soil and the structure of land, has been a constant detrimental factor, and not just in the south. In the northern Lazio until the sixteenth century an extensive forest of oak trees, the Selva di Manziana, stretched from the Tolfa hills to Bolsena; only a little survives.8 However, mainly beneficial human interventions could affect the vegetation and water regimes of Italy. Mulberry trees were increasingly introduced from the later middle ages for silkworms; this particularly affected the Lucca, Florence and Bologna areas, then Piedmont, the Veneto (especially from Verona to Vicenza) and, by the eighteenth century, parts of the south. The ailanto was introduced from southern Asia in the eighteenth century for the same purpose. The mulberry tree became a major feature in peasant farming and the peasant economy – sometimes under direct government pressure, as when as early as 1440 the Florentine government on behalf of the silk guild compelled rural property owners or occupiers to plant at least 50 mulberry trees.
The cultivation of the saffron crocus increased in the period. Saffron was used for medicinal purposes, flavouring and colouring. While just another contribution to varieties of cultivation in Lombardy, Piedmont and Monferrato, it had more economic significance for other key areas, in Puglia and especially the Abruzzi. In the fifteenth century Abruzzi saffron became prized by German merchants operating out of Venice, and some (such as the Welsers and Baumgartners) established representatives in Aquila to organise the trade.
Controlling rivers, creating canals, draining marshes, had been part of medieval interventionism in the natural scene. In the thirteenth century various canals were built in the Milan area: the Chiaravalle, La Muzza and the Naviglio Grande. In 1400 Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan ordered the building of the Milan–Pavia canal. Milanese authorities had various undertakings to control the waters of the Ticino and Adda, employing Leonardo da Vinci among others in such operations. The authorities in Arezzo in 1341 inaugurated schemes to drain the Val di Chiana, digging channels to the Arno. The Medici of Florence could consequentially develop a large estate there in our period. In the sixteenth century the Medici Dukes of Tuscany improved the health and agricultural conditions around Pisa by draining marshes, and in the early seventeenth century extended the work to marshes between Pisa and Livorno [Leghorn], which they developed thereby into one of the major Mediterranean ports by the eighteenth century. The course of the Arno was altered, the Navicelli canal constructed and Pisa thereby given easy water access to both Florence and Livorno. Similarly, Venetian authorities in the sixteenth century altered the courses of the Brenta and Piave rivers, (the latter judged in a 1552 government decree as ‘the principal enemy of the lagoon’),9 and then in 1605 the Po itself, to manage better the coastal area and save Chioggia from the adverse effects of water flows and silting. Through the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the Venetians publicly and privately manipulated their parts of the Po valley with irrigation channels, canals, bank building, etc. as part of new land investment, agricultural experimentation and the development of villa and country-house living.
By the eighteenth century, travellers in Italy could contrast the beneficial effects of human intervention in the Po valley, in Tuscany (including the Val di Chiana) and in Umbria, with the neglect or failed interventions in the Roman Campagna, on which John Moore in his A View of the Society and Manners in Italy (1780) commented:
After having traversed the fertile and cultivated valleys of Umbria, one is affected with double emotion at beholding the deplorable state of poor neglected Latium [Lazio]. For several posts before you arrive at Rome, few villages, little cultivation and scarcely any inhabitants are to be seen. In the Campagna of Rome... no trees, no inclosure, nothing but scattered ruins of temples and tombs, presenting the idea of a country depopulated by pestilence.10
The physical geography of the Italian peninsula dictated that there would be relatively few coastal ports to dominate international trade; that inland cities might thrive to control crucial river traffic – as with Florence, Verona and Mantua; that many other urban communities would be at high altitudes, and densely packed, for geographical reasons as much as for defence in the midst of social and political strife. Much ingenuity was required to control and improve water regimes for agricultural productivity, human health and personal or commercial communication. Geographical conditions helped dictate the continuing contrast between the more prosperous, progressive and mobile north and centre of Italy and the poorer more static south, with its latifundia estates, however much one might blame in addition political ineptitudes or cultural attitudes of the Aragonese and Spanish rulers of Naples and Sicily.
Through the early modern period, Italy was one of the most densely populated and urbanised parts of Europe – especially in the north – comparable with the Netherlands.11 Population figures for the whole territory have to be tentative throughout; though for certain urban areas and their dependent more rural territories (the contado) fairly reliable figures survive from the later sixteenth century (see Appendix). Italy had a population of about 10 million in 1300 and rising; it plummeted by about a third in mid-century following the Black Death plague, rose more steadily to 11 million in 1500 and more dramatically to 12 million by 1600. It fell after devastating plagues again to 11 million by the mid-1650s and rose to 13 million by 1700.
Thus, through our early modern period the population rose, but dramatic mortality crises caused sudden dips. These crises were variable across Italy, and the patterns of recovery uneven. Normally mortality was less than the prevailing fertility, so there should have been a slow tendency towards population growth. ‘Normal’ mortality is seen as prevailing when there were no major famines, plagues and pestilences, or wars to create ‘catastophic’ mortality. The patterns of urban growth or decline were complicated. Cities were probably more adversely affected than rural areas by major epidemics; but complicated political and economic factors affect the figures for individual cities. As the Appendix indicates, a few cities grew dramatically from c. 1500 to c. 1700; some cities were surprisingly static, and some saw major slumps. Demographers argue that in the period mortality within a city outweighed fertility, so that a city or large town’s population would need a balance of immigrants from countryside or small towns to sustain its overall level. Political, economic and cultural factors then explain why a Rome or Naples, for example, attracted far more immigrants through the sixteenth century than Florence, Siena or Lucca.
Italian demography in the period was characterised by high fertility and high mortality, with the mortality for babies and young children being very severe. A rate of 150–250 deaths of children in the first year per 1000 live births would seem to be normal; but a figure of 450–500 was not that uncommon, as shown by Fiesole in the seventeenth century. Death rates of children after the first year remained high as malnutrition, childhood diseases and hygiene problems took their toll. There were plenty of children around; Carlo Cipolla calculates that about a third of the population was under fifteen years old, who constituted about 90 per cent of the dependent population; i.e. there were very few old or totally infirm adults for the breadwinners to support. Children provided the pressure points, with families facing the problem of balance between not enough children and too many. The latter could lead to abandonment, and the growing foundling problem in Italy from the late fifteenth century; abandonment at least in the early months, meant death for most babies.
Italian adults mostly married surprisingly late; and late marriage was the key to population control or limited growth. Females might not marry until their early or mid 20s, males till their late 20s, or even early 30s. Figures on age of marriage for Italy are patchy, and show both status and regional variations. In the seventeenth century among nobles in Florence, Genoa and Milan the females tended to marry aged 19–20, but the males 33–36. In Empoli between 1650 and 1700 males married on average at just 29, females at 24. In Venice 1740–44 the average age for males was 31.4 and for females 29.3. But in Puglia females seemed to marry earlier: at 16.6 in Ceglie in 1603, 19.9 at Lucera in 1621. Late marriage tended to limit the period of child-bearing. Some of the abandoned children were illegitimate children whose birth reflected the pressures of these late marriages, since from the later fifteenth century there was increasing reluctance to accept illegitimate children as part of family and household. But premarital conception may equally have led to the marriage or to publicly agreed and permanent cohabitation. The late age of male marriage was seen as causing problems, particularly in fifteenth and sixteenth century Florence where, authorities argued, it fostered the male homosexuality for which the city was notorious. Italy through the period maintained a population section of unmarrieds – as secular clergy, monks, friars and nuns. This would in particular affect the population profile, and fertility, in towns and suburbs. Recent evidence suggests also that in cities a fair number of other adults, including women, never married.
The major factors in the fluctuations in the population were the mortality crises, which tie in with many areas of social history. The mortality crises were caused by plagues and other diseases, famine and war; sometimes by all of them coming together. The great plague crisis of 1347–50, the Black Death, was the most devastating, reducing the population by about a third. In demographic terms the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a long slow recovery. Arguably Italy had been overpopulated, and the slower recovery was beneficial. For the surviving families it had meant more opportunities for land ownership or control, for job opportunities and prosperity.
Many plagues occurred subsequently through our period, but the term plague (peste or pestis) was, and is to be, used vaguely. It is unwise to assume that many, if any, of a variety of disease epidemics were of bubonic plague involving the bacillus Yersinia pestis, as identified and studied from the later nineteenth century. The medical conditions, patterns of mortality and the spread of epidemics as reported by competent and observant medics and health officials at the time seldom tally with modern data and analysis; more careful, unprejudiced, analysis is needed to identify different serious epidemics.12 Contemporaries were aware of a number of epidemics, human and animal, that were fatal, and they used various terms. Some doctors or government officials recording many deaths seemingly affected by fevers, buboes, skin lesions or blotches, etc. were loath to declare it pestis, because this brought into play strict quarantine regulations that could have major economic repercussions, as will be discussed later.
Plague remained an intermittent crisis factor – and certainly a fear – through the fifteenth century in local areas (as for example in and around Perugia in the 1480s), though possibly not of major demographic significance. But plague produced some catastrophes on a broader scale in the next 150 years. Pestilences were devastating in the 1522–8 period for nearly all Italy – though linked with other epidemics and diseases for humans and cattle, and the impact of war. Then mortality rates were 7 or 8 times the normal in some of the worst affected areas like Tuscany. In 1575–7 Venetia, Lombardy and Sicily were badly affected by plague; in 1629–31 most of northern Italy except Friuli and Romagna; in 1656 Genoa, Rome and Naples. According to Venetian records 46,721 people died in Venice during the main plague period from July 1575 to February 1577. At the height of the next great visitation, from July 1630 to October 1631, 46,490 died in the city or special plague hospital zones (lazzaretti). During a great panic on the 14–15 August 1630, allegedly 24,000 persons fled the city. It is estimated that half the population of Mantua, Milan and Padua died from plague in 1629–31, 56 per cent in Verona, and a third of Bologna and Venice. M. Barbagli suggests that 1,100,000 people throughout Italy died from this epidemic. The Naples epidemic of 1656 (heavily concentrated in the period from the end of April to late September) generated some of the most horrendous estimates of its mortality, though many fail to distinguish between those who died and those who fled. More rational calculations suggest that the city’s population in 1657–8 was two-fifths what is had been in 1654–5, with 240–270,000 persons out of 400–450,000 in Naples and its vicinity dying of plague or allied causes. Similarly, Genoa and its dependent littoral territory dropped by about 90,000 in its population from 440,000 to 350,000; the city of Rome fell from 120,000 to 100,000.13
The impact was devastating beyond the immediate deaths. Government actions to prevent the spread of plague (whose vehicles of contagion were not understood) could virtually close down the economy, as victims and their families were isolated, houses shut, clothes and other goods burned to prevent contamination, cities closed off from neighbours and travel curtailed. Food supplies became a serious problem, further affecting health and life. The next season’s sowing, pruning and harvesting were endangered. Though fewer mouths needed feeding, fewer farmers were available to act quickly, and it was harder to get food into beleaguered cities. It is unclear which sectors of society suffered most, or recovered best. Some detailed Venetian studies do not substantiate the old argument that the upper classes, especially nobles could survive better, because they could more readily escape the city into supposedly safer villages. The younger generation apparently suffered less than the older in Venetian epidemics, especially in the 1630–31 crisis. The Jews may have been proportionately the worst affected sub-group in Venice in 1575–7, because of the density of occupation in the Ghetto, though the calculations are affected by the problem of establishing who fled, never to return to Venice.
The rapidity of demographic recovery after plague was dependent on other variables. Plague probably hit whole families, or left others largely unscathed, except maybe for the elderly. Those who survived plague and immediate food/health conditions were comparatively healthy – fit to procreate again and take advantage of new economic opportunities. If the general economic climate was favourable soon the population might rise, and immigration into key cities be hastened. Venice recovered well in most ways after 1575–77; but recovery after 1631 was slower because the wider economic climate in northern Italy – affected by the Thirty Years’ War north and south of the Alps – was less favourable. Venetian families were smaller on average than before.
After plague, tifo, which might have been typhus or typhoid involving rashes and fever, was probably the next most serious epidemic for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Typhus, a microbe (rickettsia), was spread by lice and fleas, while bacterial typhoid involved salmonella typhi, largely spread through faeces.14 The major epidemics identified by Massimo Livi Bacci (1976) were in 1505, 1528, 1590–1, 1620–1, 1628–9 (immediately preceding plague in some areas to complicate interpretations, as for Florence or Turin), and 1648–9 (especially in Florence), then in 1817–18. In 1590–1 the death rate in certain districts of Florence was four times the normal; 1620–1 was less dramatic because sanitary officials were more vigilant. Typhus and typhoid killed less than plague; of those affected only 20–40 per cent died, while 70–80 per cent of those identified as having plague died from it. But typhoid left survivors seriously debilitated – so presumably more susceptible to secondary illnesses, less fertile and less economically productive. Survivors could retain rickettsia, in some cases enough to damage others again. Tifo induced less fear and hysteria than plague (which led to the scapegoating of ‘anointers’ (untori) and other supposed spreaders) – or for that matter syphilis in the early years of first epidemic when communicated by soldiers and their camp followers during the Italian wars of 1494 and after. Quarantine regulations against tifo were less severe, and so the economic disruption was less.
While tifo seems to have declined as an Italian scourge in the later seventeenth century, it was to be followed by smallpox, which has not been identified as a problem, if existent, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The major crises of smallpox so far noted by Livi Bacci were in Milan in 1707 and 1719, Verona in 1716 and Bologna in 1729. It was lethal for children under the age of ten or so; for adults it was aesthetically disfiguring but seldom fatal. There were some areas in the eighteenth century which have been identified as having endemic smallpox; notably the ports of Livorno and Portoferraro. In Livorno between 1767 and 1804 a steady 10 per cent death rate was attributable to smallpox; while in Portoferraro there were five occasions in the eighteenth century when smallpox was given as the cause of 40–50 per cent of deaths. Such death-dealing, particularly to children, would have had a longer term effect on the overall population than many other epidemics.
The direct impact on mortality, fertility, and general health of other illnesses and diseases – of fevers, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, dysentery, etc. from contaminated water supplies, fetid housing and bedding – have received little study, though Cipolla has shown that public health officials and doctors were as aware as many poor of their existence and debilitating effects. Malaria, linked as we saw above with Italy’s physical geography, explains the underpopulation and economic backwardness of areas like the Tuscan Maremma, the Roman Campagna, or Calabria.
Food crises led many to die of starvation, but Livi Bacci (1990) has challenged some older views about their long-term demographic effects. Chronicles, diarists and government edicts indicate that throughout the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries cities and rural areas suffered from major harvest failures – caused by bad weather, insect infestations, or warfare and pillage – and that local people starved or came close to starvation. Basic grain stocks might run out, or the prices of grains and bread rocket beyond the means of all but the richest, or those with access to some charitable handouts. Such food crises might be fairly localised, or affect large parts of Italy in the same year or years. General food crises can be declared for the 1520s, 1549, 1555, 1590s (as for much of Europe), 1602, 1637, 1648 (a general European crisis year), 1678, 1694, 1709–10, 1764–7 and 1816–17 which is seen by Livi Bacci as the last of the great food crises for Europe.
Perugia in the Papal State provides a good example for studying crisis years between 1480 and 1540. Chroniclers and officials recorded the following years as crisis ones for grain supplies: 1484, 1489, 1491, 1496, 1505, 1509, 1511, 1519, 1523– 34 without relief of a good harvest, 1536, 1538–9. Locusts created major damage in 1491 and 1495. It can be added that ‘plague’ (including some animal epidemics), contributed to mortality and ill-health in 1482, 1486–7, 1487–9, 1493, 1496, 1504–5, 1522–9 – though the nature of the plagues cannot be convincingly determined from the vague terminology.15
Chroniclers, diarists, ambassadors, local historians and polemicists all described people dying in the streets of starvation in particular cities. The Venetian sources report Romans starving in the winter of 1504–5, despite serious attempts by Pope Julius II to secure grain supplies from far afield. The famous Venetian diarist and historian Marin Sanuto lamented how poor men and women were dying in the streets even of Venice itself in 1527, as well as in less well-organised and charitable areas like Rome and other cities of the papal State. Reports through the 1590s comment on those starving to death in cities like Ferrara, Modena and Bologna; or barely surviving as they tried to live off ‘bread’ made from flour adulterated with tares and darnel.
The population fortunes of individual cities, and the balance between city and its dependent territory (contado), were also affected by political and economic factors (see Appendix). Political developments from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries caused a shift of emphasis from many middle-sized urban communities to a few much larger ones. Through the fifteenth century, north and central Italy was politically fragmented, with many independent or quasi-independent cities run by communal oligarchies, dominant families or petty military signori. Amidst conflict and tension territorial states were consolidated, based on Milan, Venice, Florence and Rome. The Peace of Lodi recognised one stage in the consolidation of the territorial state, but it was only after the 1559 peace that the more modern concept of a centrally organised, ‘absolutist’ state was more fully realised. Then Rome, Milan, Florence and Naples emerged more obviously as capital cities; they attracted the most politically active, those who wished to serve in a fuller bureaucracy, those seeking a court environment. Servants and the service industries followed, especially in a changing cultural environment more disposed towards conspicuous consumption. The political centralisation and the decline of communal oligarchies or petty tyrants with their own courts, diminished the importance and population attractiveness of cities like Siena (absorbed into the Tuscan state of the Medici Dukes), Pisa, Arezzo, Perugia, Viterbo, Rimini, Orvieto, Brescia, Bergamo, Salerno and so on. Ferrara’s demographic position changed after 1598 when, with the ending of the legitimate line of the ruling D’Este family, the city reverted to direct papal control as an integrated part of the Papal State, losing its political and cultural importance.
There were complications and anomalies. Florence should have increased its population like Rome and Naples as the capital of a larger, absolute state. But here a rise of a bureaucratic and court-centred population was offset by a failure to return to the great textile producing activity of the middle ages. Genoa’s continuing prosperity in the sixteenth century – based on banking and trading – did not lead to a major urban population increase, in part because its location on the littoral with mountains behind restricted growth physically. It only slowly recovered from the 1656 plague disaster. Its chief economic rival, Venice, although limited by its lagoons, could expand to its islands with engineering ingenuity. Venice, Rome, Milan, Naples could recover from disasters of plague and disease. Rome revived after the major sack by plundering troops in 1527; Brescia, sacked in 1512 (and hit badly by plague in 1630–31), was less resilient.
Rome grew as it became the centre of a more consolidated Papal State, and benefited from the revival of the Papacy and the desire of successive popes to show Rome as a fit city to lead the Catholic world. It attracted more pilgrims (who needed to be welcomed, cared for and persuaded to buy goods if they did not remain), artists and craftsmen working on palaces for cardinals and their relatives or major new churches for the new religious Orders, but also peasants driven from surrounding farms as landowners shifted from arable to pastoral farming. Naples similarly with its Viceregal court dominated the politics and culture of a wide territory, and was the Mecca for the noble elite of the whole Viceroyalty and those who wished to serve them, and for the peasants escaping feudal depredations, shifts to arable farming and the extreme misery of remote areas.
The effects of economic fortunes on particular cities and their populations will become clearer in later chapters, in discussion of industrial and agricultural changes and developments in rural proto-industrialisation from the later seventeenth century. Though debates abound about the causes and effects of diseases and food crises for Italy as a whole, and some areas in particular, there is no doubt that disease and dearth generated many fears, from which some cities and state governments were spurred to attempt preventive and remedial actions, and philanthropic organisations were developed. Better provided and organised cities tended to attract people from less well-off cities and villages seeking help, and notably basic food supplies. Italy had a great variety of food sources, though securing access and a fair distribution was inevitably problematic.
Italy’s geographical features and demographic factors indicate potential problems over basic food supplies.16 Human ingenuity was needed to maximise the use of difficult terrain and erratic water supplies, but when so employed considerable food diversity could result. As elsewhere in Europe, adequate increases in food production did not keep up with the population in the sixteenth century, and it was difficult in many areas to maintain the standard of living in food consumption. In Italy’s case from the late sixteenth century grain supplies were increasingly sought from outside the peninsula and Sicily (notably from the Baltic). Meat consumption may have declined. Greater diversity of agricultural production in the eighteenth century resolved some basic supply problems – giving cheaper, but less nutritional foods (such as maize and rice) for the poor.
The staple foods for Italians were grains and wines. Wheat was produced in the grain-growing areas of northern Italy, Romagna, Umbria, Puglia or Sicily and Sardinia; but almost never alone as a grain crop. Wheat (Triticum vulgare) was for the best flour and bread, and for the richer sectors of society, predominantly in the major cities. Cheaper grains were spelt (particularly in the earlier half of our period) and millet which was more widespread. Millet produced a coarse flour, but it was more long-lasting; the Venetian Republic in the sixteenth-century led the way in choosing this for storing in warehouses to cope with years of dearth. Barley, which features for example in Umbrian records of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries alongside wheat and millet, was more for horses than humans, but it was also made into a mush, or barley water for feeding the sick. Rye, grown in northern Italy by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, became a more important food ingredient when Venetian and Roman governments started importing it from the Baltic in the crisis of the 1590s. By and large within Italy wheat did better in the drier southern and central regions, while the lesser grains could succeed in the more humid air and soils of the north.
Mainland Italy had since Roman times imported basic grain supplies; from Egypt, north Africa, Sardinia and Sicily. By the sixteenth century the encroachments of desert and the Ottoman Turk limited the first two areas as sources, while soil exhaustion and erosion reduced the exports from Sicily. The Ottoman areas still supplied Italians; the Genoese in the eighteenth century used locally grown wheat for the richer classes, importing cheaper grains from the Levant for the poorer. Venice imported its bean supplies from Alexandria. The Baltic trade came into major use in the 1590s and 1600s. The Dutch and English, rather than Venetians or Genoese, were the major carriers, and their involvement in this crisis trade gave them openings into Mediterranean seafaring and trading that they maintained – to the long-term detriment of the Venetian economy in particular. This long-distance hunt for grain supplies was dramatic in its organisation and broad impact, though its contribution to Mediterranean food supplies may have been exaggerated, along with the decline of Sicilian contributions.17
Rice had been introduced into Italy in the fifteenth century, and was soon a cheaply sold food in the Ferrara market; by the seventeenth it was a significant crop in Lombardy, Piedmont, Venetia, Romagna, Tuscany, Naples and Sicily. Rice flour was mixed with other flours to make poor people’s bread; it was rarely eaten by the rich. The introduction of rice crops became part of capitalist development, and was seen by Braudel as creating peasant proletariats. Maize or indian corn (Zea mays) was another new food, for the poor and animals. Maize, originating in southern America, arrived in Venetia about 1539. Confusingly it came to be called gran turco, which had been one of the names for buckwheat (grano saraceno, Fagopyrum esculentum) which had been brought from the east in the fifteenth century and grown in northern Italy as well as more prevalently in France. Maize was soon commercially developed in the Polesine area near Venice, and by the end of the century was found across most of the Venetian mainland territories growing among other crops. Maize was primarily made into corn-meal cakes and polenta for the poor, and rarely provided food for the rich. By the eighteenth century Venetian peasants were selling their good quality wheat for export and living off less appetising maize. Other crops that could provide basic food and nutrition were pulses, lentils, beans, chick peas (known in Venetia as menudi or minuti, minor foods). In hilly areas, and elsewhere in dearth conditions, the main flour became that made from chestnuts, the albero del pane, ‘bread tree’. Nuts were also used to produce edible oils – as much as olive-oil. How much the population derived from these foods, as from vegetables, herbs, wild fruits, fungi, remains unstudied. Most of these food sources were local, and on a small scale; therefore not well documented, unlike the main grains of large-scale production, trade and transport.
Wine and olive oil of varying qualities was available locally throughout most of Italy. Olive oil in its different qualities from successive pressings and treatments was a food, a cooking medium, a fuel for lighting, a lubricant and the basis of soap. Olive-soap was seen as crucial for washing wools, and promoted as such in Tuscany and Piedmont from the later middle ages. Olives for multi-purpose uses did well in subalpine regions, as around Lake Garda, Como and Monferrato. In the eighteenth century improvements in olive production became the target of enlightenment reformers in the Kingdom of Naples.18 Wine was a necessity of life, as food with a significant calorific contribution to the average diet, and as a safer liquid that water for much of the time. As a generally critical English traveller, Samuel Sharp, noted in 1767:
The people in Italy... spend more than you would believe on wine, but neither their abilities nor the example of their betters, lead them into drunkenness: They have a great notion that [wine] is wholesome, so they give it to their children at the breast.
It was also seen as a key to social harmony and well-being, the key to good secular and religious festivals and good labour relations.19 Italian wine production was plentiful not only in northern and central Italy as now, but the Kingdom of Naples also produced considerable quantities. There were wine connoisseurs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ready to praise local vintages – of Montepulciano or Orvieto for example – but the pursuit of vintage productions as in Tuscany dates from the eighteenth century. By then travellers in Italy also praised the skill and attractiveness of the terracing and planting of vines and olive trees on hillsides.
The extent of meat-eating in Italy is hard to gauge. Seemingly Italians were major meat-eaters until the end of the fifteenth century, and there was then a steady decline to a low point in the nineteenth. Within Italy beef cattle were not that prevalent, and the large herds in northern Italy in the eighteenth century were more for diary produce – cheeses – than meat. However northern Italy secured meat supplies from far afield – the Balkans, Poland and especially Hungary, from which huge herds were driven or brought by ship, to be slaughtered on the Lido of Venice for example. Elsewhere there were sheep flocks, for meat as well as wool. It was the basis for Rome’s high meat consumption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Puglia supplied mutton to places like Perugia and Florence in the fifteenth century. There were pigs, for which the cuisine of parts of Umbria was and is famous; or wild boar, which was cheap and plentiful in Sicily until at least the sixteenth century. In the later part of our period a decline in the consumption of fresh meat may have been balanced by an increase in salted or smoked meats and sausages: Parma hams, zamponi, or salami (the centre of much competitive selling and monopoly battles among the guildsmen of eighteenth-century Rome). A Perugian writing in 1607, Cesare Crispolti,20 considered that the Perugian contado was well supplied with meat: cattle, pigeons and poultry. The prevalence of these last two (and smaller birds that modern Italians are so keen to shoot to extinction) in the diet is hard to gauge, but was almost certainly significant.
Fresh fish, from tuna and squid to anchovies and sardines, presumably provided a basic food for some coastal areas, though the Mediterranean was not that prolific. River fish were also in limited supply. The major inland lake of Lake Trasimeno, serving Umbria and Tuscany, provided pike, carp, eel, tench and chub. Again according to Crispolti, who itemised this stock, the supply of fish was plentiful in the neighbouring river systems of the Tiber, Chiascio, Chiani and Nestore. Smoked and salted fish from afar added to the diet elsewhere, as in Venice which consumed herrings from northern seas so treated. Much had come through France, but in the seventeenth century the English merchants took over the main supply of preserved fish, smoked herring, salted pilchards, cod and sometimes salmon; they were primarily brought during the winter to Livorno and distributed from there by sea or land for the high demand during Lent.21
Fasting was likely to affect the males and females in monastic houses most, and one might be tempted to feel sorry for those so deprived of meat for up to 120 days a year, and restricted in food intake in many other ways. Many picture a few well-fed abbots and priors offering hospitality to distinguished visiting laymen and women, while most nuns and friars were near starvation or malnourished. But a recent study of food in monastic institutions in southern Italy at the end of period reveals a more complex situation. Though in a supposedly poorer part of the world, the male and female inmates appear to have had an abundant, healthy and varied diet through the year, even with days of only bread and water. Many had access to fresh fish of considerable variety; the Clarisse nuns of Francavilla listed 21 different fish at one point. The terms verdure (greens) and legumi (vegetables) imply a restricted diet, but in fact can cover a range of vegetables, pulses and salads that would put many modern greengrocers and supermarkets to shame. They were well supplied with eggs and dairy products. Nunneries in southern Italy as in Venice could produce a considerable range of cakes and sweets; needed to reward the visiting priests, confessors and sometimes workmen, they were unlikely to have passed by the mouths of nuns and their converse helpers. Attempts by the Patriarchate of Venice to curb such supplies, or the keeping of chickens within convents (treated as pets as well as egg suppliers), were clearly in vain. While monks, friars and nuns might have been thus better fed than their peasant and artisan lay neighbours, the evidence from their sources reminds us of the variety of food supplies that could be available in country and town.22
Briefly looking at food and drink supplies that might be brought into the larger cities at least for the wealthier, one might highlight – besides the salami, sausages and smoked fish already mentioned – Campagna cheeses like cacio cavallo that were sent to Rome, Livorno and Naples; the Cretan and Dalmatian cheeses imported into Venice; or maraschino liqueur from Zara over which Venetians established monopoly control in the eighteenth century. By the eighteenth century brandy, coffee and chocolate were part of the consumption of the not so rich as well as the elite of leading cities, especially Venice and Rome.
The rich could enjoy a considerable variety of foods derived from various parts of Italy or abroad, and the less well off might similarly indulge during major festivities. The Venetian writer Orlando Lando in the 1550s cited the food that might satisfy the gourmet in Italian cities: sausages from Bologna and Monza (its fine sausage, luganica sottile), zampone (bacon hock) from Modena, cheeses from Florence and Piacenza, pheasant and chestnuts from Chiavenna, special pies from Ferrara, gnocchi from Piacenza, mince (tomarelle) from Monza, quince jam from Reggio, marzipan from Siena, fish and oysters from Venice. In 1600 the Perugian confraternity Della Morte organised a pilgrimage to Rome for the Jubilee celebrations, a long account of which survives written by one of its leading organisers, canon Marc’Antonio Masci. The confraternity received hospitality from confraternities of other cities as it marched in orderly fashion down to Rome; and the canon was particularly impressed by the food, wine and music offered. At Deruta they were given a meal in the main square which included roast kid, sausages, ham, cheeses, omelettes, expensive vegetables (unfortunately not specified); near Rome they were welcomed by cartloads of food for a meal sent by marchese Ascanio della Corgna, which included capons, sausages, hams, loaves of bread, cheeses, a great quantity of artichokes and barrels of both red and white wine.23
The contrast with this good living and celebration is what was eaten when the poor were desperate with hunger and poverty. With a shortage of grain, even the coarsest bread was adulterated in many ways, but particularly with darnel seeds, with ghittone – a herb with black grains normally used as chicken feed – and un-ripened vetch grains. Piero Camporesi has recently suggested that these ingredients could readily lead to hallucinations and drugged conditions. A late sixteenth-century Bolognese poet, Giulio Cesare Croce – from the poor, writing of the poor and to some extent for the poor – called darnel bread ‘dazed’ bread. In addition, bread even in more normal times might have additions of sesame, fennel, cumin and poppy seeds. While much of this was for seasoning, poppy seeds in particular could lead to hallucinations. Poppy seeds were readily available as the sixteenth-century writer Pietro Andrea Mattioli stressed – in Tuscany, Lombardy and the Trentino mountains where poppies grew with broad beans. Concoctions from poppy seed were also used to calm fretting, teething babies – and their nurses. Children were fed with a pap made from hemp or linseed with apples and pears.24 From the literature and chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Camporesi has suggested that many of the poor would have existed in drugged states, by deliberate commission in normal or abnormal times or the unconscious results of famine conditions. Hunger and pain might be dulled, but imaginations might readily be stimulated to wild fantasies and sensual dreams. Adult peasants in particular would be rendered less fit for work; they and their children were ready to imagine the unreal, to absorb and elaborate on improbable tales. This mental and physical environment may explain how people could confess, without torture, to the most unnatural and improbable actions raised in witchcraft trials. I suggest also that the religious ecstasies of ascetic holy women and men could be affected by stale mouldy bread and putrid water, equally likely to distort and challenge the imagination. The drugged state of the urban poor might also be a partial explanation for violent collective action – particularly the bizarre crowd behaviour in the Masaniello revolt in Naples in 1647.
This knowledge of food supplies, of their origins and of their deficiencies, should provide understanding of the causes of social prosperity, of the wheels of commerce, of the richness and poverty of human imagination and mentalities. Italy’s geography provided many contrasts between barren, dangerous areas, and those able to provide considerable diversities of food, especially when aided by human ingenuity to control water supplies. Many Italians could be well fed, but most could be rendered vulnerable and endangered by cruel changes in weather and by disease epidemics. Those able to control the natural resources, and access to them, could generate much prosperity, and support large urban areas, but geographical conditions in much of Italy also enabled many more rural areas to prosper from a diverse economy. Such fundamental structures help explain why, despite vagaries in international economic developments, adverse political interventions from outside and natural disasters, the overall economic scene through the early modern period was generally prosperous, and could recover from crises better than sometimes alleged.