Individuals had associations with and loyalties to family and kin; they might have them with an elite social group disassociating itself from other sectors of society, though this is less clear-cut in Italy than in some other European areas where nobility was more clearly defined. Between these groupings and belonging to a village or city, other groupings and partial loyalties existed. Particularly in cities, physical area groupings such as districts and parishes subdivided the large environment. Areas were dominated by an elite family with patronage networking below. Institutional organisations such as guilds, confraternities, universities, colleges and religious houses could variously group people. This chapter will selectively illustrate some such groupings, showing the loyalties and tensions involved. An obvious subdivision and grouping would seem to be the parish; this, however, has many complexities and variations within Italy in the first part of our period, but becomes more standard and significant under Catholic reform policies, and will be discussed separately in Chapter 10. In the earlier period other neighbourhood organisations were sometimes more important, and will be discussed below. The creation of the ghettos for Jews is an extreme form of zonal and loyalty control within some cities, and merits specific attention. We have encountered the guilds as economic organisations, but they could have wider significance, overlapping with the lay confraternities which may have grouped, for religious and non-religious purposes, up to a third of the population, rural as well as urban.
The discussion here challenges two major theories about the early modern period; first that the Italian Renaissance feeding into our period was characterised by a growing ‘individualism’of self-expression and identity, and men (if not women) broke free of corporate identities, familiar destinies and group activities. Second, it tests the idea that as cities expanded – or at least a few great cities developed – a growing degree of anonymity led to alienation in the pre-industrial city; (though the philosopher Descartes in the seventeenth century happily lauded Amsterdam for the anonymity it provided). Several modern studies demonstrate that individuals could be part of networks of loyalties and associations, structured laterally or hierarchically, with room for various forms of neighbourliness; group loyalty through common activity might still reign supreme over individualism or ‘the family’.
Cities, towns and larger villages might have formal subdivisions imposed by secular and/or religious authorities: the parish, the administrative district, the electoral district, the local defence and policing sub-unit. Less formal neighbourhood zones might develop over time, based on industrial trade and artisan groupings, or on a major monastery. A leading family clan might develop a neighbourhood patronage network, permeating down through the orders of society.1
For an individual, locating himself spatially within a city might be of considerable importance, and he might use various reference points. The Florentine painter Neri di Bicci stated in his account book (Ricordanze) in 1475: ‘a painter, from the parish of San Friano, the district of the Drago, and the quarter of Santo Spirito’; while in his 1427 tax return Salvestro di Ciecho di Lenzo called himself: ‘shoemaker, popolano and citizen of the city of Florence, and the parish of San Pier Maggiore and of the district of the Chiavi [Keys]’.2
Some city administrations encouraged parochial subdivisions for secular purposes within the larger organisational districts – though, confusingly, secular and ecclesiastical parish boundaries could diverge, as in Perugia and Verona. For administrative purposes cities were often subdivided into various larger districts: in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Rome had thirteen rioni; Venice six sestieri; Florence four quartieri (after 1340, being reduced from sixths); Naples twenty-nine ottone; Siena seventeen contrade; Brescia four quadri, Perugia five porte, Verona forty-seven contrade, and so on. Such subdivisions were variously used for allocating places on municipal councils or guild committees and for organising tax collecting or civic guards. In some cases, maybe most, such subdivisions remained administrative and book-keeping units. But in others, particularly Perugia and Siena, they had wider sociological significance.
Perugia had five districts, named after the five main gates (Porte) of the city; Porta Sant’Angelo, Porta Sole, Porta Eburnea, Porta Santa Susanna, and Porta San Pietro. These persisted as the organisational units for all purposes; major councils, emergency committees, guild boards would have so many representatives per Porta. The dependent countryside with its lesser towns and villages, the contado, was subdivided as similar extensions of these city Porte. The parishes (forty in 1564 for a population of probably just under 20,000) were largely fractions of these Porte, but some inconveniently cut across Porta boundaries and caused confusion. The five Porte were and have remained the key social divisions, as I found in the 1960s when my elderly neighbours in Porta San Pietro still used them as reference points. Perugia’s centre, of Etruscan origin, is on the top of a high hill; the Porte districts meet there, and stretch out and down the five fingers of the city’s structure to the main exit gates of the walled city. In the early modern period chroniclers gave references in their narrative to these Porte. The violent and often murderous ‘Battle of the Stones’ – a contest like a local football match that should have side-tracked the violent energies of youth in a politically violent city – which survived up to the later fifteenth century, was organised on the basis of Porte. The leading oligarchic families tried to establish their power bases within a Porta, as the obvious political unit, but also might organise neighbourhood parties – as for a wedding – on the same basis. The main Baglioni households were concentrated in San Pietro, the Oddi and Della Corgna in Santa Susanna, the Ranieri in P.Sole, and Arcipreti in Sant’Angelo. Other foci for loyalty, such as confraternities, or leading monasteries, cut across the Porta groupings, or subdivided them; the rival monasteries of San Pietro (Benedictine) and San Domenico (Dominican) were both within Porta San Pietro. But for Perugia the Porta unit was socially and culturally significant.3
The Sienese contrade have been seen as the key to that city’s society. These seventeen contrade still have publicity because of the horse-race, Palio, run two or three times a year in the main square – though only ten contrade compete in any one race. These contrade have been the subject of modern sociological analysis, with some historical background research. The Palio is not a folklorist revival, but a more or less continuous activity since the 1560s or 1570s. The current seventeen contrade with their emblems were established by the 1540s (though there may have been others in the sixteenth century as well). The contrade had and have their own officials, their own property, and act as corporate bodies. Each had its own church and priest, separate from the normal parish church, its own patron saint as well as symbol (e.g. the Giraffe). Their officials organised services, processions, games as well as the horse-races, celebrations with tableaux and feasts involving the district. In the sixteenth century when the Medici Dukes gained full control over Siena they curbed some political aspects of contrada organisation but encouraged them to be involved in non-political activities, such as the pawn-broking system of the Monte dei Paschi (founded in 1472, it has evolved into one of Italy’s major banks). When Grand Duke Peter Leopold in 1784 as part of his enlightenment programme seized a certain amount of ecclesiastical property, he handed over some to the contrade corporations. For Siena the contrade were neighbourhood associations linking all levels of society in a loyalty network.4
Florence had complex organisational and loyalty structures. After 1343 it had four administrative quarters, divided into four Gonfaloni each, with parochial divisions used for secular as well as religious purposes criss-crossing these new administrative boundaries The Gonfaloni districts were named after their flag emblem (The Red, Black, White or Gold Lion, The Unicorn, The Keys, The Green or Black Dragon, etc.), and were led by a standard-bearer, the gonfaloniere. Originally these were defence systems for the popolani (middling classes) against the nobles; but they came to serve wider political and social purposes. The Gonfaloni elected representatives to the Signoria, the main legislative councils, and various committees. The gonfaloniere and his organisation was ‘to give aid, counsel and support to any member of that society, so that none should suffer any offence against his person or his property from anyone’, according to a 1415 statute. During the 1494–5 crises of the Republic, with Fra Savonarola leading the anti-Medici campaigns ‘the men of the gonfaloni gathered in the churches and held many councils’ (according to the diarist Luca Landucci), and says another diarist Bartolomeo Masi, ‘the company gonfalonieri overran the city in the name of the people and its freedom’.5
The districts of the Red Lion and of the Green Dragon have received detailed study.6 The Red Lion district covered two main parishes, San Pancrazio and San Paolo, and contained the major properties of two dominant clan families, the Rucellai and the Strozzi, who provided leading opponents of the Medici. For years the district leader was the Abbot Benedetto Toschi of the Vallombrosan convent, who protected the interests of the exiles. The Medici in turn used the Golden Lion district as a neighbourhood power-base, but sought to operate within the Red Lion as well to undermine the opposition. The Green Dragon district was in a poor quarter with many cloth workers, based on the parish of San Frediano and the Carmelite church of S.Maria del Carmine. The Soderini and Brancacci families provided patrician leadership and patronage. The parish church was a focal point of loyalty, backed by two confraternities in Sant’Agnese and San Frediano. They developed strong neighbourhood loyalties, and sought to keep out ‘foreigners’, but the Medici made strenuous efforts to create a patronage network there and to undermine the Soderini, by joining confraternities (and becoming officials) and distributing alms. These districts served many purposes of political organisation (for manipulating elections and councils), for patronage over jobs and contracts and for helping the poor, as through local confraternities. There was a hierarchical structure of neighbourhood allegiances for the mutual benefit of leading families and those ready to serve them. That these neighbourhood districts could not be exclusive to any one clan meant that they were not entirely self-contained or harmonious. The considerable use of the gonfaloni during the period of Fra Savonarola’s domination, 1494–8, meant that when the Medici were fully restored to power in 1531 they finally abolished the gonfaloni. Thereafter other ways of organising social relationships within the city, especially the parishes or confraternities, had to be devised.7
Some Venetian neighbourhoods have also been studied, especially those of the Nicolotti and the Arsenal (Map 5). In the West Dorsoduro area of the main lagoon area of Venice is the parish church of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, around which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there developed a fairly well-defined social community.8 It was a community of fishermen and artisans in the parish of San Nicolò, but also including the smaller parish of Sant’Angelo Raffaele. St Nicholas is the patron saint of fishermen, and the twelfth-century church dedicated to him (with a prominent bell tower and open space, campo, around it) was the social centre for the Nicolotti. The community earned an officially recognised independent status, led by a top official, the Gastaldò, who was often called a Doge, and who – along with other local officials – was elected by the local community. At an annual ceremony the Doge of the Nicolotti met the Doge of Venice to show allegiance, and receive authority. In 1586 this community had a population of 3992 inhabitants in 981 families; 355 heads of households were given as fishermen. The Nicolotti gained various privileges for fishing in the local waters, both freshwater and salt; though from the later sixteenth century State officials (notably the Savii dell’acqua) sought to impose controls and restrictions on methods of fishing and on the diversion of waters. The Nicolotti comprised a fairly self-contained working-class community; they developed their own confraternities, and alms-houses for their own poor. In 1721 the Nicolotti established their Fraternity for the Poor (Fraterna dei Poveri ) to control the distribution of assistance to the poor, and to find work for the unemployed and vagabonds. There was some outside investment in houses and shops – from the Tron and Barbarigo families of the San Polo parish, and from the major city-wide confraternities, the Scuole Grandi of San Marco and San Rocco especially; and, by the seventeenth century, from the Procurators for state-assisted housing.9 This may be seen as some outside attempt at social control and social welfare. The neighbourhood identity of the Nicolotti was seen particularly in rivalry against the Castellani, the inhabitants of the Castello and Arsenal district of the city.
The Arsenalotti comprised a coherent neighbourhood community in the parishes of Santa Trinità, San Martino, San Biagio and San Pietro di Castello (the Cathedral parish of the Patriarch) on the extremities of the city.10 In 1642 there were about 3200 members of the Arsenalotti families, with 855 working men over eighteen. A consolidated number of families lived and worked in the Arsenal area, with many now owning their own houses. A management enclave existed near the Arsenal (Campo dell’Arsenale) with state-provided housing large enough to include resident servants. Parish records suggest much intermarrying within the area, and within the street or campo area, suggesting a close-knit community. The focal point of worship and society was the chapel of the Beata Madonna, with a miracle-working image to offer good luck to those on the way to work; it was situated on the fondamenta of the canal giving access to the Campo dell’Arsenale. The Arsenal area was not fully self-contained, lacking a broad range of shops and non-shipbuilding crafts in the area, though a shopping street along the Rio di Castello (sixty-eight shops in 1661) provided limited goods and services, while itinerant sellers paraded the streets. Women played significant roles. They headed about 21 per cent of households, not just because they were widows having lost their men at sea. A number were of foreign origin, often prostitutes. Women worked as canvas cutters for sails, but they could be sailors and blacksmiths; and more obviously midwives, wetnurses. Plenty acted as healers and cunning-women, to the concern of the Inquisition authorities.
The Arsenalotti or Castellani gained a reputation among the rest of Venice as tough, violent and arrogant. Their community solidarity was most clearly expressed in the Battle of the Bridges; as an extension of ancient sports (like Perugia’s Battle of the Stones, above) and Carnival celebrations at various stages in the year, youths of given areas had massed struggles to control particular bridges, to show off local neighbourhood prowess.11 Some such battles were unplanned gang-fights, but major planned events could become major spectator events, with accompanying gambling and feasting. A great show was provided for Henry III of France’s visit to Venice in July 1574. Often the struggles came down to a battle between the Nicolotti and Castellani; the fishermen of San Nicolò and the arsenal workers of the Castello would provide the leadership and hard core of the teams, but would absorb other youths from contiguous areas. In 1639, 30,000 people from far and near witnessed a series of battles for the Ponte dei Gesuati, a wide bridge on the Zattere, which allowed spectators to see from boats on the Giudecca Canal.
These inter-neighbourhood struggles could be violent and costly. Over forty people were killed in the 1639 series of battles, and city life could be disrupted as shops were closed and production ceased for days. But such struggles could accentuate group solidarity, and allow youthful frustrations and violence to be dissipated in partly organised and controlled circumstances, diminishing the chances of totally uncontrolled urban riot.
The neighbourhood loyalties of few cities have yet been analysed. Much depended on geographical configurations, administrative structures and the placing and relocation of powerful families. In sixteenth–seventeenth century Brescia the administrative districts did not match the five-gate spatial structure, or the locations of elite clans, who dominated more by brute force than the mutually helpful social relationships found in Florence, Genoa or Siena.12 The neighbourhood divisions and loyalties of Rome would repay close study. Knowledge of the confraternities, guilds and hospitals of the Trastevere district (until recently a poor artisan area), suggests that this had a degree of social cohesion. The Piazza Navona was to a large extent taken over by the Pamphili family immediately on the election of Cardinal G. B. Pamphili as Pope Innocent X in 1644; dramatic celebrations with fireworks and architectural decorations were focused there, then palaces and churches were elaborated to enhance the family prestige. Both artistic and political patronage seem to have created networks of supporters in this district.13
The examples have shown urban neighbourhood subdivisions that were formed through a combination of geography and initially fairly arbitrary administrative arrangements, but which were fostered by political and social leaders. Neighbourhood loyalties could exist and be welcomed for purposes of political patronage, economic solidarity, charitable purposes and entertainment. The formation of these networks and loyalties were to a large extent voluntary. The next neighbourhoods to be discussed were formed under some compulsion.
The most obvious neighbourhood groups, confined in delimited locations in some cities, were the Jews in ghettos.14 ‘Ghetto’ derives from the first official segregated area established in Venice in 1516 (Map 5). This was on a former foundry area on the edge of the Cannaregio district, and the name ghetto probably derived from a word for casting metal. Segregation of Jews from Christians in cities had been practised earlier, and was desired by many Jews to develop their own culture, and as protection against intermittent anti-Semitism. In the fifteenth century some cities like Bologna (1417) or Turin (1425) banned cohabitation of Jews and Christians. Major Jewish contributions to biblical scholarship and to medicine were appreciated in cultural circles, but some Franciscans led attacks on the supposed excessive profiteering of Jewish moneylenders, and established from 1462 onwards Christian pawn-broking institutions – Monte di Pietà – to replace them. Franciscan propaganda was often misleading, as Jews had in fact been invited to cities like Verona and Brescia to be cheaper lenders than usurious Christians. However, the creation of the Monti made it easier for preachers, governments or local communities to ban Jewish moneylenders or expel all Jews. The creation of the Venetian Ghetto Nuovo (New Ghetto) followed debates on whether Jews should be expelled from the city. The Republic decided not to have a Monte in Venice itself, but use Jewish lenders, under strict government control. All Jews were, however, required to move to a restricted residential area, from where they could do business and trade, and be locked in at night. This New Ghetto held about 700 persons. It established precedents for similar ghetti in Italy and further afield. The policy for Catholic Europe of either banning Jews altogether (as Iberia had done from the late fifteenth century), or having them firmly segregated, was reinforced by Pope Paul IV’s Bull Cum nimis absurdum of 1556, which was coupled with a policy of banning Jews from the Papal State, except for ghetto areas created in Rome (1556) and then Ancona. Other Italian states followed suit, with ghettos created in places like Florence (1570), Siena (1571), Verona (1599), and a range in the next century – Bologna, Cremona, Ferrara, Modena, Padua, Reggio and Rovigo. Some small Jewish communities survived, or re-created themselves in the later sixteenth century onwards, without a formal Ghetto being created; this could happen quietly and precariously even in the Papal State (with Perugia), or more obviously across the Veneto, such as San Daniele, San Vito, Portogruaro and Spilimbergo. The counts of Spilimbergo allowed the Jews there to do everything the Christian merchants and artisans could.15
The ghetti gave advantages and disadvantages on both sides. They varied considerably in size and conditions. A recognised area gave the Jews more security than being caught between changing policies of bans and readmission, and they could retain their own religious practices and culture. It might protect them from the kind of anti- Semitic accusations of ritual murder of children that led to the cruel persecution in Trent in 1475, when the body of a two-year old was discovered in the cellar of a Jewish house on Easter Sunday, and attempts to have baby Martyr Simon canonised.16 Governments that recognised the economic merits of Jews as traders, bankers and moneylenders but also as doctors and scholars could more readily defend their presence against religious zealots who wanted to exclude Jews from Europe. Under Catholic Reform pressures, Jews were at times subject to harassment or temptation to convert. Those in the Roman Ghetto were forced to hear conversion sermons, and males might be subject to ignominious nude racing competitions. Some confraternities attempted conversions, and offered money to poor Jews who succumbed. Venetian Inquisition records show Jews converting a number of times to secure funds (returning to the Ghetto when fortunes improved); they were seldom severely punished. The states or cities most favourable to the Jews in the sixteenth century and beyond were the Venetian Republic, Piedmont under Emanuele Filiberto from the 1560s, Ferrara and Modena under the D’Este and later Livorno under the Medici. They gathered in Jews expelled from Spain (1492), Portugal (1498), some coming via the Netherlands, others from parts of German, from the Levant, from other Italian states (as when Ferrara rescued Jews from Ancona at the height of Pius V’s papal threats). The resulting communities became very diverse and vital. Under Medici encouragement, Livorno’s Sephardic population grew from 134 in 1601 to 1250 in 1645, while under the Austrian Peter Leopold the community expanded to 4327 in 1784.
As a result of tolerated immigrations the Venetian ghetto complex was expanded with the addition of the Ghetto Vecchio (1541), and the Ghetto Novissimo (1633). It reached a peak of about 5000 inhabitants then but soon declined. Restricted by canals, the housing became dense and high rise, as can be seen by the modern visitor. Within this Ghetto considerable self-government was granted, and the community could develop a number of synagogues, schools and Jewish confraternities. Once the gates were closed at night a sense of freedom might prevail, to be celebrated with lively entertainment, including dancing frowned on by some rabbis (as also in Mantua). There was a mix of rich and poor throughout its existence (while Rome had few rich Jews). Numerous shops and warehouses served the Jewish residents, and non-Jews who could enter by day to trade or borrow. Jews could similarly exit to the rest of Venice. They were allowed storehouses elsewhere in Venice, and Jewish second-hand dealers competed or co-operated with the Christian arte degli strazzaruoli, and could serve Senators and foreign ambassadors as well as the poor. Major Jewish merchants traded with the Ottoman Empire, notably through Salonica and Alexandria, to the benefit of the Republic, as the Muslim world tolerated Jews more than Christians.
This links with serious issues of identity and loyalty. Ghettos were meant for Jews, who had never been baptised. Once baptised, the convert to Christianity (converso) was meant to live as a Christian with Christians, and was liable to Inquisition jurisdiction if he or she deviated. Many Jews, especially in Iberia had been forcibly converted (and so could stay), but many had later fled. If they reached Venice (and later Tuscany and Livorno), Venetian authorities might not hold the forcible conversion against the converso, and gave the choice of reverting to a Jewish life (and so live in the Ghetto), or re-affirming a Christian identity. This created a fluid and complex situation that presented both the Inquisition and state officials with many problems. Peripatetic families divided, some reverting to Judaism, others saying they were true Christian converts, as in the case of Gaspare Ribeiro and his children in a famous case in 1580. Gaspare himself moved between the two religions, whether because of genuine uncertainty, fear or dissimulation. A number of merchants like him found it convenient to be Christian in Italy, and Jewish in places like Salonica (Thessaloniki). A Jewish leader, Chaim Baruch, consul to the Levantine Jews, likened such men to a ship with two rudders, sailing with different winds according to convenience.17 He was no happier with such behaviour than were the Inquisitors. But the Venetian system, as to some extent the Ferrara, Modena and Livorno ones, allowed some fluidity of body and soul between the Christian and Jewish environments. Inquisition records testify to social interactions, active sex lives, love-magic practices and sorcery across the religious and physical divides, despite the creation of ghetti being designed to prevent this. For example in 1587 Valeria Brugnaleschi (widow of a physician) and her daughter Splandiana Mariano were investigated for using sorcerous incantations, diabolic objects and a flask of holy water to conjure devils, seeking to find stolen property, and using semen in love concoctions. Some of their activities took place with Jews in and outside the Ghetto. Valeria had lived in the Ghetto for two years, where she taught Jewish girls reading and writing. According to a witness (a ‘good Christian’), she believed ‘the faith of the Jews is better than ours and that it pleases her more because they observe it better’. The two women were sentenced to be whipped publicly, pilloried and exiled for five years ‘for love magic, witchcraft and bean-casting’, as a placard was to declare – not for consorting with Jews.18 The Venetian Ghetto was a neighbourhood community (or group of communities when separate synagogues were fully established), but in practice Jews and Christians could cross physical and social borders.
Guilds and confraternities provided institutions that offered social cohesion and networking opportunities, which could generate loyalty as well as serving their main economic and religious purposes, respectively. The economic roles of guilds have been discussed in Chapter 5. More can be said here about their wider social aspects, and their relationship with lay confraternities.19 In some examples the organisation grouped together a narrow band of people within a social hierarchy, while others attempted to unite rich and poor, or high, middle and lower orders.
In Perugia the top-ranking guilds lost their primary economic functions, and became elite social and political networking groups between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Through the sixteenth century, and especially after the Papacy reasserted control over the city in 1540, the aristocratising top families concentrated more and more on the Mercanzia and Cambio guilds, and clearly their membership had nothing to do with relevant commerce and banking activity, and everything to do with council electoral politics – even if the papal Governor had the real power. These top guilds in Perugia, as elsewhere, were inclined to become exclusive political-social clubs for those whose power base was landed and/or professional (in law and the University), to the detriment of local economic activity. Eventually membership of the Mercanzia and Cambio guilds in Perugia was confined to those deemed noble. It was this uneconomic social elitism, as in places like Milan, that partly explains the attack on the guilds by eighteenth-century enlightened writers.20
Most Italian guilds or trade and craft corporations had many functions. Besides the economic roles and the regulation of working conditions, and the connections with wider urban politics and administration alluded to above, the guilds could be a centre of religious activity, entertainment and social welfare for members and their families. As a result they could be important social and loyalty groups outside the strict working world. Most guilds had an oratory (as Perugia’s Cambio had), or a chapel within a church that was special to them. They would at least have an annual patronal feast-day celebration of solemn mass, which might involve all members parading with lighted candles (as for the barbers of Naples). In Milan the ribbon-makers (bindellari) had a weekly Mass; the Cremona smiths a monthly one. Guilds might be responsible for maintaining a chapel within the Cathedral, a parish or other church, providing a priest and ensuring its decent upkeep. Such connections should have led to more regular religious commitments by guildsmen and the fostering of community loyalties – as apparently with most guilds in Florence, Verona, Milan, Turin and Ferrara. In Florence the famous Baptistry was entrusted to the Calimala wool-merchants’ guild by 1592. In Rome the barbers in 1508 commissioned Raphael to design a new church of Sant’Eligio. In Catanzaro the Silk Guild from 1401 had a chapel in the Cathedral, and in 1569 funded a new chapel in San Domenico. The Venetian mercers through their own guild-confraternity and through the Scuola di San Teodoro, which they dominated, came to control the major feast of San Tedoro (9 November) and major public celebrations.21
In Rome the economic guild was based on a church or chapel where meetings could take place; this seems to be mandatory by the eighteenth century. In a dispute (1785–6) between the wool-workers (Lanari, or Giovani Lavoranti of the Arte Della Lana) and the Merchants and Masters (Padroni ) of the Collegio di Mercanti Lanari, the former challenged the right of the latter to make or reform statutes for the former; the Masters had no chapel of their own. The Cardinal Protector agreed:
The first requirement needed to obtain the approval of any statute whatsoever is to have a Church, Oratory, or at least Chapel where it is possible to meet collegially, and without such a requisite one cannot concede to anyone the faculty to form or reform statutes.22
The wool-workers were based on the chapel of San Biagio in the parish church of Santa Lucia de’ Ginnasi; they alone maintained it and recognised the acts of visitation from the Cardinal. The Masters had no role in this, therefore they were not a proper corporation, and could not issue a statute banning the wool-workers from working in their houses. The archival documentation indicates that for the wool-workers the chapel was both their legal basis, and the foundation of their loyalty; they wanted to preserve it against interference from the bosses.
Guild group activity might be public, in city processions, especially for Corpus Christi. Such occasions could become unseemly in that rival guilds (and confraternities) vied with each for precedence, and for display, in the interests of communal social prestige, and possibly sometimes economic advertising. Special public celebrations brought out the different guilds in group presentations, such as the celebrations in Venice of the naval victory of Lepanto against the Turks in 1571, the visit of French King Henri III in 1574 or the Roman thanksgiving processions at the end of the plague in 1632.
Public Roman guild celebrations may not have been that common. The 1632 events partly connected with the fact that during the plague, as at other times, the guilds had been required to provide groups of guards to protect the city from plague-bearing outsiders. Roman guilds were sometimes involved in organising Carnival celebrations. In Florence public group activity by guilds tended to be discouraged, following the labour unrest of the Ciompi revolts back in the fourteenth century.
Guilds were involved in various aspects of social welfare; such as assisting with the payment for funerals in fifteenth-century Florence, and providing dowries for guildsmen’s daughters, or relief for widows. The possibilities of such relief could encourage guild loyalties and commitment that would go beyond pure economic necessity. Such welfare activity overlapped with that of the confraternities.
Lay confraternities were and are associations of people who come together to promote their religious life in common, according to certain agreed rules.23 Confraternities still exist in small numbers, but they played their main role in religious-social life from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Though often primarily concerned with preparing for the afterlife, and praying for souls, the confraternities could be fully involved in the social, political, charitable and cultural life of communities. Though predominantly for lay men, they could also involve clergy, women and children – as members or as recipients of philanthropy.
Lay confraternities and guilds developed side by side from the fourteenth century in urban communities, and inevitably some overlap and confusion existed between them. Some trade guilds formed confraternities as more or less separate organisations instead of just having religious and welfare activities within the trading/artisan corporation. This was particularly so in Venice, where most trade guilds (arti) created separate religious fraternities, usually called scuole. The two units might share leading officials. The scuola was for the religious and social welfare aspects of community life. A guild member might be compelled to enrol in the related scuola, unless he or she was a member of another scuola dell’arte, guild-linked scuola. Alternatively a group of people in a particular trade or craft might start a confraternity, and then try to turn it into an economic guild. In Venice immigrant Germans working as assistants to master-bakers were allowed to start a scuola in 1422 ‘for the sole purposes of looking after their souls and of correcting the errors to which they are prone’;24 but by 1543 the master-bakers were complaining that these assistants were trying to use this scuola as a threat to the economic and religious organisations of the master-bakers. In Florence the wool-trimmers (cimatori) created a religious confraternity in 1494, which by 1508 was allegedly conspiring to fix prices and organise strikes. Similarly in late sixteenth-century Naples artisan-based confraternities were accused of using their corporate solidarity to ensure fixed minimum wages.
Membership of religious brotherhoods or confraternities, with or without economic or political overtones, could constitute one of the most meaningful social relationships of medieval and early modern Italian society. Confraternities became more widespread, more diverse in their activities and more socially significant from the late fifteenth century in Italy. They are important for the social historian for the way they grouped people in society, and affected social conditions and behaviour – whether in the narrow religious context, or in social welfare schemes.
Lay confraternities are documented from the early Christian centuries, but fully developed from the thirteenth century under the impact of new Marian cults, flagellant movements, hospital expansion and the diversification of some trade guilds. Further variety and growth came with Catholic Reform in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in promoting more outward-looking philanthropy, new Marian cults, more respectful adoration of the Host and more frequent communion for the laity. Medieval fraternities had offered some welfare help to members of the fraternity, and close relatives. From the late fifteenth century some increasingly assisted poorer members of society outside the fraternity. After precedents from fraternities in Brescia and Ferrara the Companies of Divine Love (initiated by Ettore Vernazza in Genoa in 1497) notably spread new charitable and devotional ideas, and fostered hospital practice. The effects were felt both within the confraternity movements, and on the new Religious Orders like the Oratorians and Theatines.25 The promotion of the Rosary by the Dominicans led to the growth of confraternities dedicated to it, initially in Germany, then France and Italy (from Florence’s San Marco Rosary confraternity of 1481, then Venice’s San Domenico in Castello in particular). The Rosary confraternities became especially important for the spiritual life and social roles of women.26
The reforming Catholic hierarchy’s attitudes to confraternities were ambivalent; while bishop Giberti of Verona early on valued new Corpus Christi fraternities for the veneration of the Host, other clergy were suspicious of lay confraternities because they were dominated by laymen and allowed laymen to preach, or discuss the Bible and doctrine, because they were often very secretive or because they had unseemly feasts. The suspicions encouraged the Council of Trent to rule in 1563 that confraternities, hospitals and similar pious places should be subject to episcopal control, especially through the scrutiny of their statutes and accounts. Subsequently fraternities came under fuller clerical supervision, not without lay protests. Following the lead of archbishop Carlo Borromeo of Milan, reforming bishops tended to encourage Rosary, Sacrament and Christian Doctrine confraternities based on the parish church and under the priest’s supervision, and to discourage societies that existed independently in their own oratories. The new and reformed Orders, especially the Capuchins and Jesuits, fostered more as part of their mission campaigns in city slums or remote rural hills. The Jesuits particularly provided a whole network of religious-social relationships across Italy and other parts of Europe, in bids to combat heresy.27
By c.1600 fraternities had a considerable variety of devotional and philanthropic preoccupations. So people were grouped together for diverse purposes, and could satisfy many different needs by being members. The welfare that many fraternities offered provided incentives for association, as co-operative providers of help as well as potential beneficiaries in times of trouble. Socially it interconnected rich and poor, for mutual benefit of soul and body.
Membership in any individual fraternity varied from a handful to many thousands. Naples’ company Dei Bianchi had about 6000 in 1563. This organisation ran a range of welfare activities, in which active members probably operated in more manageable sub-groups. The top group of Venetian fraternities, the Scuole Grande, officially had 500 to 600 members; the Perugian Name of God (Nome di Dio) confraternity had at least 824 male and female members in 1613. At the other end of the scale, village Rosary or Holy Sacrament societies might only have half-a-dozen members. The more usual membership was probably between 20 and 50.
A city might have over a hundred confraternities. Venice had 120 in the early sixteenth century, 387 in the eighteenth; Genoa had at least 134 operating between 1480 and 1582, though some came and went rapidly. Rome in 1601, according to Camillo Fanucci’s 1601 guide to Rome’s religious and charitable institutions, had 49 confraternities based on guilds or national groups of foreigners in the city, 52 ‘universal’ fraternities, and 11 confraternities based on or running hospitals.28 Perugia city, with about 19,000 people, had over 40 confraternities in the early seventeenth century; and there were 139 confraternities in eighty-eight smaller towns and villages in the rest of the diocese. In the south, Lecce and surrounding Puglia were prolific in confraternities by the seventeenth century; a local historian cited 27 in 1634. Terra d’Otranto (which included Lecce) in the eighteenth century saw the fullest expansion of confraternities; when a third or more of the Otrantine communities had a Sacrament fraternity, a third had a Rosary one, and 29 per cent one dedicated to the Immaculate Conception (Immacolata). Research on Puglia and other southern provinces is revealing ever more confraternities being founded in more rural areas through to the late eighteenth century, and decorating chapels, though evidence on what else they did is limited. Many of these remoter ones appear to have been parish-based devotional confraternities, but some ran hospitals or hospices, had cheap loan systems or provided dowries for poor girls. The diocese of Benevento had 94 confraternities in 1590 (population about 136,000), and 352 in 1737 (population 124,924).29
In the later part of our period, when new catholic-reform fraternities were added to older medieval institutions that were reinvigorated, up to a third of families might have some contact with a confraternity. In some areas like Milan, Genoa and Bologna the proportion was probably much higher. Thus we are dealing with potentially very significant social groupings.
Confraternities were primarily male societies. Some were exclusively male or, occasionally, female (often dedicated to the Rosary or Saints Ursula (Orsola) and Anne); others were sexually mixed, though men dominated the offices that organised them. This factor helps explain our difficulties in detecting female participation, which has been under-recorded, (Mackenney 1997). Male exclusiveness was based on a number of attitudes besides prevalent views about female inferiority, and the need to keep women tied to the home. The economic-guild origins of some societies usually dictated male membership. Many fraternities were flagellant in theory, and often in regular practice up to the early fifteenth century and again from the later sixteenth, which discouraged female participation. Flagellation involved the whipping of one’s own bared back, or that of a another brother, as penitential mortification in memory of Christ’s whippings. This was a popular devotion in central Italy in the fourteenth century, and one major type of confraternity had incorporated it into its rituals. The scene could be bloody especially when whips with sharp metal barbs were used; though some fraternities instead used silken cords symbolically. Such a group session was not usually deemed suitable for women – as participants or witnesses. However some flagellant confraternities did have women members, some with their own communal flagellation sessions. Women were often seen as gossips, as a Corpus Domini fraternity in San Frediano, Florence, made clear in its 1573 statutes,30 so their presence was discouraged in societies that might have political overtones, be suspect to some outside lay or clerical authorities, or which mixed socially diverse men who would not want such close co-operation to be known in the public domain. Some confraternities should obviously be seen as male-bonding societies, as in Florence, which could lead to charges that they promoted homosexual relationships.
However, over our period female participation in confraternities, whether alongside men or in separate institutions, received some encouragement. As a Sacrament fraternity at Ponte a Greve near Florence argued in 1564, God created woman to help man, so the fraternity should now admit women and allow them to share all the benefits alongside men, though not be office-holders. The Barnabite Order and other reformers, especially in Rome and Lombardy, encouraged family membership and sharing in the same confraternities. The creation of Christian Doctrine confraternities to help teach in Sunday schools encouraged the involvement of women, especially when the schools set out to teach girls as well as boys. The development of women-only sororities in the sixteenth century was probably accelerated by the negative factor of male exclusiveness in existing fraternities, and by a more positive feminist movement to enhance women’s spiritual well-being. The growth of the Rosary cult, which had a particular appeal to women, led to many Rosary sororities, which gave women a group loyalty outside the home and immediate family. Some expressed themselves by commissioning their own chapels and paintings to their taste; the sorority of Our Lady in Sant’Antonio Abate, Perugia, commissioned a Nativity from Lo Spagno, and other panels from Mariano di Ser Austerio (1510–19).31
For the individual man or woman, confraternity activity might be occasional and limited, or very full: involving regular communion, singing lauds and offices of the Virgin, flagellation, public processions, annual general meetings, business meetings of officials to allocate alms and dowries, or helping equip and decorate the parish church. It is very difficult to establish the degree of active membership, the numbers for whom being part of a fraternity was a major experience and commitment – as opposed to those who enrolled to ensure a decent burial and subsequent regular prayers for their soul, or as an insurance policy for hard times when alms, cheap or free housing, marriage dowries might be provided. Ronald Weissman’s studies of some Florentine fraternities, especially San Paolo in the fifteenth century, suggests that active/passive involvement varied considerably thorough a life-span. My own investigations of attendance or voting show some societies with high turn-out of enrolled members for meetings, others where real activity was confined to officeholders. In some confraternities, notably in Bologna, Modena and Milan, there was a formal distinction between an inner active elite (stretta), and a wider (larga), more irregular membership. On the evidence of Perugian fraternities like San Martino and San Girolamo, it would seem that it was difficult to get a member dismissed for irregular participation – or even for immoral and troublesome behaviour. Brothers were clearly unhappy to break a relationship once a loyal commitment to the group had been made; as for example with a Francesco di Fabri, brother of Bologna’s Santa Maria della Vita, who was reinstated – on the promise of better behaviour – after being suspended for disobedience over speaking improperly at meetings, not carrying a torch at a woman’s funeral when ordered, threatening the Prior and so forth.32
Group solidarity through the confraternity was ideally designed to end disharmony and enmity, encourage humility, foster brotherhood and reduce social inequalities. Much might be achieved through a fraternal Holy Communion, as the Florentine humanist Cristoforo Landino stressed to the Magi company in 1476; it was a symbolic act of fraternity that ‘purged... the old condition of malice and iniquity’ and made brothers ‘new unleavened dough of sincerity and purity’. In the same year another lay preacher, Giovanni Nesi, in his Holy Thursday sermon to the Florentine Nativity fraternity, on Humility, urged them to:
become one group in which the rich man befriends the poor man, the great befriends the lowly, the powerful befriends the powerless, and the lord befriends his servant. And having put aside honours and human dignities, let each (as is the precept of the Lord) not love his neighbour less than he loves himself... Pythagoras certainly understood this when he said that friendship is one composed of many, and knowing that all things are held in common among friends.33
Group activity was for many probably fullest and most meaningful when brothers foregathered for a group penitential flagellation session in a darkened chapel or meeting room, and followed it with ritual cleansing, singing, Vespers or a Mass; for the annual patronal festival, involving both a general business meeting, and a feast of food and wine; for great processions – whether celebratory for a feast-day or victory in war; or for pleading for God to stop incessant rains or an epidemic. Processions could involve the donning of coloured cloaks and hoods, carrying of torches, painted banners, playing of musical instruments and singing, and might end with refreshments of food and wine. Group activity and social involvement would be enhanced if such processional celebrations involved putting on full plays or mounting illustrative tableaux on carts pulled through the streets. The Florentine fraternity, the Company of the Magi, was notable for its plays in the fifteenth century; Roman confraternities performed in the Colosseum. In the 1590s in Rieti a number of confraternities put on plays about Christ’s Passion, Ascension and Resurrection, or about Saints Barbara, Biagio, George and John the Baptist.
Confraternity pilgrimage journeys took members to a distant holy place – to the well-known Virgin’s House in Loreto or Santa Maria degli Angeli below Assisi, to a more locally advertised sanctuary like the Madonna della Ghiara at Reggio Emilia (after an association with a miracle there in 1596) – or particularly to Rome for the Great Jubilees or Holy Years every 25 years from 1550. These Jubilees involved hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, many of whom went as confraternity groups. The extensive surviving record of the Perugian Company of Death (Della Morte) pilgrimage to Rome in 1600 indicates how elaborate and significant such an enterprise could be. It involved disciplined walking from Perugia to Rome and back; with singing, lavish entertainment – food, wine and music – by other confraternities, visits to the great Roman basilicas, and a Mass in the new St Peter’s (still under construction) celebrated by Pope Clement VIII.34
Some fraternities had no fixed location; most were based on an altar or chapel in a parish church; others had modest oratories or rooms of their own, while a few had spectacular premises – especially the top Venetian group of discipline fraternities, the Scuole Grandi, which made significant contributions to religious art and music. It was probably where a confraternity had its own premises that the social grouping, cohesion and loyalty was most significant. A fraternity might have a long, tortuous and emotional struggle to move from a Cathedral or parish church into its own self-contained premises, as Perugia’s Sodalizio di San Martino eventually succeeded in doing in 1585.35
Confraternities could be agents of social cohesion, or social tension and divisiveness. Loyalty to the single confraternity produced major conflicts with rival confraternities. There could be regular disputes, even full-scale battles, for precedence in processions that would reflect social prestige and historical longevity. Such conflicts were regular in Venice, and of some concern to state authorities through the period, as the competing scuole tried to negotiate the narrow bridges over canals, and side alleys. Good Friday 1512 was marred by serious jostling in the large St Mark’s square. In the 1620s, two communities outside Naples expressed their views about the status and division of parish boundaries by confraternity parades under suitable banners. Major disputes could fester, as in Bologna through the sixteenth century between Buon Gesú, Santa Maria della Vita (Life) and Santa Maria della Morte (Death) over the right to bury certain people or organise the funeral procession in a given order.
Some confraternities were socially exclusive – for nobles, or particular craftsmen; others deliberately mixed social ranks, rich and poor, in the interests of social harmony – or to group the most religiously committed of a parish.. Confraternities might group together members of a number of artisans from different trades and crafts, as a lower middling solidarity group; such as Santa Maria dell’Orto in the Trastevere district of Rome, which ran a notable hospital for members of thirteen local guilds – from millers, poulterers and fruiterers to local gardeners, vermicelli-sellers and river-bank traders. Jesuits sometimes encouraged social segregation; in Lecce they had five different fraternities for nobles, students, scholars, youths and artisans – and there was another fraternity for peasants not sponsored by the Jesuits. In Perugia the Jesuits divided their sponsored fraternities between nobles, artisans and contadini. From the sixteenth century the increased stress on noble and gentlemanly values and status encouraged the creation of some noble-only confraternities. Naples, as one might expect, took this path – as with the creation of the Venerazione del Santissimo Sacramento for noble men (under Jesuit leadership), and the Devote di Gesù for noble women (1554). In Perugia Bishop Bossio in 1565 started the Annunziata for nobles only. One should stress, however, that while the noble-exclusiveness gave social solidarity for their common worship or administrative roles, in these cases the noblemen concerned themselves charitably with outsiders; abandoned girls and converted prostitutes in Naples, poor girls needing dowries in Perugia.
Many confraternities, in contrast, sought social cohesion and class co-operation within their societies. Genoese nobles chose mixed rather than exclusive associations. Perugian records that indicate membership show that the leading fraternities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mixed members of leading aristocratic families, notaries and lowly artisans. Venice’s Scuole Grandi and scuole delle arti mixed rich and poor, masters and journeymen, high and low born. As the Counter- Reformation progressed, and more parish-based fraternities and sororities emerged, more devotional associations linked different orders of society in a common cause and loyalty. In such socially mixed fraternities the nobles or other upper orders tended to dominate the official positions – as a deliberate policy of social control in Florence under the Medici Grand Dukes. Noble leadership might more innocently be justified in that nobles had more time than working craftsmen to be fully active organisers of funerals or charity; but it could be resented as in Vicenza’s Crocefisso fraternity, which ruled in 1602 that offices should be allocated equally, and not be reserved for nobles.
Immigrants into some cities could find a social grouping, and focus of loyalty through ‘national’ fraternities.36 In the larger cities there were ‘national’ fraternities exclusively or predominantly for foreign groups. These might be non-Italian groups like the French, Flemings, Germans (which might include northern Netherlanders, Bohemians or Hungarians, as in Perugia), Slavs, Greeks or Albanians; they might also be people from another part of Italy away from home-base: Lombards, Bolognesi, Florentines. The configurations depended on the city and the type of immigrant. The national confraternity would be run by long-term alien residents in the city, but offer a welcome to more temporary visitors – students, pilgrims, legal petitioners from the same locality. They had their own churches or chapels, and ran hospices or alms-houses. Venice, with numerous immigrant workers, had national guild groups, such as the fraternity for German cobblers and shoemakers as well as the aforementioned scuola for German assistant bakers. This meant that a traveller or potential immigrant could arrive in a large city like Rome or Venice, lesser ones like Perugia, Verona, Siena and Bologna, and find a religious-based community that understood the home language and customs, and which offered temporary help with accommodation, with illnesses – and in the end, funerals. This might be the path for gainful employment and permanent residency. Those who stayed, but did not prosper too well, could receive alms or – as with the Bolognesi and Spaniards in Rome – help with dowries for their daughters.
Thus the national confraternities helped overcome the anonymity and dangers of the big city. The extent to which they maintained alien loyalties and sub-groups over a long period is hard to gauge, though there was pressure from the Spanish establishment, through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century to maintain and foster ‘la natione spagnuola’ in Rome, involving all levels of society through its confraternity of the Holy Resurrection. In fifteenth-century Siena, German artisans centred on the confraternity of St Barbara in the Dominican church, and expressed their pride and identity in commissioning an altarpiece from Matteo di Giovanni (1478), with various Germanic characteristics. At this point they had Sienese supporters, but subsequent relations are not yet clear. In Venice the German and Greek Orthodox communities did largely maintain separate identities and loyalties; in the case of the Germans this was encouraged or enforced by suspicious government authorities worried about Lutheran influences. Roman parish records for the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century suggest impressionistically that the immigrant populations from outside Italy as well as within were soon scattered as far as housing is concerned; and that Flemings, French as well as Neapolitans, Romagnoli, Lombards and Piedmontese did not predominantly seek marriage partners or godparents from the same nation.37 Presumably most who stayed in Rome soon amalgamated into local parish and district networks, and the national confraternity and its church ceased to be dominant. The latter served a major, but short-term, role.
This chapter has illustrated a number of social groupings that were open to the individual (notably in cities), should family and clan fail him or her, and should additional social solidarity be needed. Some groupings were extensions of the workplace or work-organisation – guilds and some confraternities – and likely to be combining social equals. Neighbourhood organisations, and other types of fraternities following Giovanni Nesi’s ideal, consolidated some social hierarchical relationships, buttressing patronage networks, and possibly mutual political interests. Over the period the importance of the neighbourhood and district organisations may have declined (certainly noted in Perugia and Florence, if not Venice and Siena), though there are few studies to provide suitable evidence. The growing emphasis on status through the period may have weakened neighbourhood solidarities and some confraternity attempts to link most ranks of society, rich and poor, in one group. Parish groupings and loyalties, as we shall see next, became more important from the mid sixteenth century. As with families and clans, many tensions could develop – within neighbourhoods, guilds and confraternities. What can be emphasised is that the individual within a city could find a number of social networks to help promote his interests, protect him or her when vulnerable or to offer consolation. This applied to immigrants who broke ties with family and clan, which remained the mainstay (if anything) in rural society, at least until in some areas the parish and parish-linked confraternities also offered welfare and support.