Modern Italy has had an image as a particularly violent society, by western European standards, since the late 1960s. This fits the image of the Italian Renaissance, as conceived by Jacob Burckhardt in the nineteenth century, or fostered by the eminently readable Autobiography of the goldsmith-sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71), that features violence and bisexuality as well as great artistic and political tensions in Rome and Florence.1 Previous chapters have already exemplified tensions, strife and problems of control. This chapter will explore some causes and examples further, consider the extent to which conflicts were modified if not controlled, and note areas where social control, by governments, elites and the reformed church, increased.2
Italian sources suggest a violent society through the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, fostered by communal political struggle and baronial lawlessness. As indicated in Chapter 1, the post-1559 situation helped diminish violent political trouble, rendering urban areas more stable. Courtly and gentlemanly codes may have encouraged social-political struggles to be conducted in less overtly violent ways, as Edward Muir argues for the Friuli region after the murderous 1511 Carnival scene in Udine. The Counter-Reformation ethos fostered peace-making and loving your enemy, what John Bossy sees as a ‘moral tradition’. Rural violence, especially with waves of banditry, may not have lessened much, though Jesuits and other peace-makers even made inroads into remote southern fastnesses.3
Various factors encouraged lawlessness in Italian society, including geography. The ruggedness and remoteness of much terrain provided bases for fugitives from the law and (temporary) political losers. They could chose when and where to harry and raid. Forces of law and order or of the main political authority were at a considerable disadvantage. A multiplicity of hilltop communities and towns allowed dissident barons or communes to defy central authority. Where there were many small competing ‘states’, as in late fifteenth-century Romagna, disorder and violence would be encouraged, unless a lord (signore) was particularly strong.4 The high density of many Italian cities – on hilltops, or climbing up in the cliff-side as in Genoa – made the problem of keeping order within cities very difficult.
Violence is not necessarily a test of levels of social dislocation and disharmony. As has long been argued for England, bread riots or political ‘mob’ activity may have had some basic rules, orderly procedures and limitations on excess (by both rioters and governing authorities), that suggest a process of social adjustment and bargaining, not a breakdown in the structures of society. The cruelty and violence behind feuding and vendetta (allegedly an Italian speciality), may be interpreted – as in Angelo Torre’s study (1994) of an eighteenth-century Piedmontese vendetta – as part of fairly coherent procedures for altering and settling several different social relationships and power struggles. Insights into physical and verbal violence in Roman society in Cellini’s life-time suggest that much of the physical violence against persons and property, and a whole range of verbal abuse (often connected to the violence, and with strong sexual language), conformed to well-recognised patterns of behaviour, with recognised meanings for the recipients, and for the legal authorities who took cognisance of such cases, and often reacted appropriately according to the codes of honour and dishonour involved. Distinctions can be made between the violent brawling of (maybe drunken) youths, and violence conducted more rationally according to recognised responses to invasions of home and body (especially the female body), of affronts to and betrayal of personal and family honour or friendship.5
Brigandage and banditry – seen as major scourges through the early modern period – were sometimes part of strategies of political conflict, landlord–peasant relations, or governments’ law-and-order policies, not just products of personal greed, dire necessity or original sin. Bandits were much feared, and were mythologised. Not all banditi should be seen as ‘bandits’ in normal English usage, meaning armed gangsters creating mayhem in the countryside. Governments lacked the resources to imprison criminals for long. Declaring somebody a bandito was a common sentence, applied when death or the galleys were deemed too severe, or politically unwise, and a fine was considered impractical. But additionally somebody could be declared bandito, without trial, if contumaciously not appearing when summoned to court to face accusations and charges. Given problems of communication, the innocent or guilty, unaware of an initial summons, might be thus banditi before they knew it. Others did not risk the vagaries of a court, and fled. Banditi thus disappeared from major urban areas – where authorities and their police (sbirri) or soldiers might readily capture them – to remoter villages or towns.
Some banditi tried to settle unnoticed into a new environment to live peaceably and law-abidingly, as Bologna court records suggested. Others of course sought safety and income by joining a band of banditi to pursue a criminal career. Banishment could be rescinded and the accused receive grace, by making peace with the original victim, by paying a fine to the court or another state institution – the Grand Dukes Medici had this as a major element in their punishment and fiscal policies – or by securing the intervention of a confraternity or guild given the privilege of releasing prisoners and the condemned. A bandito could secure his own pardon by killing or securing the capture of another, notorious, bandito. Prospero Lapino, sometime miller of Montalera, prosecuted 1595–6 in Perugia, then in the Roman Governor’s court for ‘excesses’ (murder, knifings, sexual molestation, pigeon stealing, fraud), had earlier been pardoned for armed violence when he helped kill a notorious bandit leader, Count Cesare Montemelini.6 Different states made conditions about what kind of bandit could be killed to secure remission for the killer. Such procedures encouraged violence through the countryside. Governments hoped real troublemakers would eliminate each other. It added to the unrest of some contado areas – but that was of less concern usually to central authorities, until banditry became too rampant – as it did in the Papal State, Tuscany and the Kingdom of Naples in the late sixteenth century.7
Some bandit groups were formed by evil, criminal men (occasionally women) intent on stealing, pillaging and raping to survive and enjoy life, while others fitted Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘social bandit’ model, the Robin Hood who stole from the rich to help the poor, with selective targeting of victims and rules of what might be seized and redistributed. Marco Sciarra’s great band caused havoc in the Abruzzi region, then the Papal State, Tuscany and the Veneto between 1584 and 1593. In Rosario Villari’s view, Sciarra led ‘a genuine guerrilla force’ whose main members ‘scrupulously followed norms of behaviour which conformed to Sciarra’s social ideal’.8 However, many bandit bands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were geared to feuds and vendettas among leading families. Those running a vendetta could take advantage of criminal bandits, exiles and soldiers, as in the west Friuli in the 1560s– 70s. ‘For some, military service, crime and membership of an armed band were interchangeable or alternative forms of employment.’9
In the Val Fontanabuona of Liguria more than 200 bandits active between 1564 and 1635 have been identified. Few were professional or career criminals, or simple peasants. Many came a distance, from families of tavern-keepers and millers or workers with silk and velvet – all occupations that could involve, or easily lead to charges of, fraud. Taverns were ideal meeting places for those involved in illicit activities. Bands formed and dissolved quickly. They worked along the trade routes between Rapallo, Chiavari and Genoa or the Po valley, attacking mule trains carrying olive oil, grains and chestnuts. Powerful local figures, nobles in the sixteenth century, more often merchants in the mid seventeenth backed them. Banditry connected thereby with both local feuding and business activity, licit and contraband.10
The worst period of banditry was probably from the mid sixteenth century to the early decades of the seventeenth, generated by the ending of the major European conflicts by 1559, and the fall of the Republic of Montalcino, or ‘commonwealth of exiles’ (1555–9), resisting the Emperor, the Medici of Florence and their supporters in captured Siena. The survivors infested the remoter parts of Tuscany, and backed Alfonso Piccolomini, Duke of Montemarciano, as the major bandit leader.11 Other nobles in the Papal State, Tuscany, Venetia and the Kingdom of Naples under threat from central governments, affected by shifts from arable farming to pasturage acted as leaders or, like the Caetani, protectors with safe castles. Religious wars in France and the Netherlands encouraged soldiers to move between transalpine soldiering and home brigandage, like Prospero Lapino. State cooperation finally tamed the worst excesses of this cumulative banditry, including the break-up of the Marco Sciarra bands. However, the food crises of the 1590s added to violent protest, desperate criminality, punishments by banishments. From the seventeenth century the brigandage problem seemingly lost some vendetta and noble-feuding elements for at least north-central Italy. The combinations of contrabanding, profiteering, localised feuding, social protest against landowners and tax collectors and self-protection of banditi still generated violent troubles, especially in areas remote from judicial control. Typically we find this in Friuli in the late eighteenth century, when tobacco had become a major focus of theft and smuggling over the Venetian– Austrian borders; this overlapped with social-protest brigandage as rural conditions declined. Forceful use of sbirri by the authorities based in Udine, Cividale and Pordenone encouraged resentful support for brigands and smugglers, to liberate whom whole villages – men, women and children, backed by priests and some local nobles (like Count Giuseppe di Prampero at Gemona in 1779) – were prepared to attack and kill officials and their police. Worse violence was to follow with the French invasions and the fall of the Venetian Republic.12
In southern Italy the infestation of the countryside with bandits was even harder to eradicate, especially when some noblemen willingly offered protection, used bandits for their own disputes and hampered government action. Sometimes, however, Viceroys did organise a major purge, as over Marco Sciarra’s allies in the 1590s, or again in the 1680s. The Viceroy G. de Haro y Guzman, Marchese del Carpio, ensured that leading noble protectors of bandits were harshly imprisoned for some years – including the Dukes of Termoli (who died in prison), of Acerenza and of Ardore (who was, unusually for a nobleman, severely tortured) – while armed forces were deployed in strength, especially in the Abruzzi and Campagna. Eventually hundreds of bandit leaders were decapitated, and a thousand sent to the galleys. Brutal resolution could work, but few Viceroys had the determination or the available forces to keep up the pressure against lowly criminals and criminal aristocrats.13
Selfish criminal activity, clan or personal vendettas and anti-government protests by high or low born usually made common cause. This generally counteracts concepts of ‘class war’ in the countryside. The interlocking of urban and rural society means that it is hard to distinguish between ‘peasant’ revolts and urban riots, though Tuscan mountain villages staged a largely successful peasant revolution against Florentine tax exploitation in the early fifteenth century.14 The troubles centred on the Carnival massacre in Udine in 1511 combined an urban revolt of lower orders against the elite, elitist factional fighting and rural conflicts where ‘peasants’ under one clan, the Savorgnan, fared better than those under other landowners – such that peasants fought peasants, often as well-organised village communities.15 The Naples and Palermo revolts of 1647–8 (and continuing longer in parts of the Kingdom of Naples) show the co-mingling of all levels of society at key points of the revolt – against foreign occupation, taxation policies or food shortages. The key events were in the two great cities, but there were many ripple effects for months after in smaller towns and università, where local issues produced different configurations
The key periods when there was seething rural discontent and violence over a wide area, such that peasant revolt might be seen as a dominant factor, were probably in the late 1490s to 1520s in the south and in the Veneto, especially Friuli (during the Italian War period); in parts of the Papal States and neighbouring areas of Naples and Tuscany in the 1570s–90s, overlapping with connected and separate brigandage problems; and in the late 1640s and early 1650s following the Masaniello revolt in Naples. None of these appear to be as extensive as the French peasant revolts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Urban riots over rising grain prices or food controls did take place, though there seems no easy pattern. Naples may have been more vulnerable than other large cities, as in 1505, 1508, 1585–6 and 1647. As in 1647 some riots had significant consequences. A Faenza riot over corn prices in 1477 brought down leading Manfredi signori, though the rioters allowed other family members to take over. Trouble over food in Venice in 1527–9 led to positive government policies to ensure food supplies, and help for the poorest. Other cities learned similar lessons that rendered rioting less likely.16
Sixteenth-century revolts in the Kingdom of Naples are not easily seen as simply anti-feudal. Revolts against changes in feudal lordship might be connected with wider political policies of the government (notably with the Spanish–French conflicts in the early sixteenth century), with known or feared characteristics of the new baron and his family. Revolts might be against obvious excesses of power, but also over any innovations by a more active baron or over ambivalent views about forest rights, pasturage and the use of common lands. The rioters might be lowly peasants, or lesser nobles, civic officials of the università and substantial farmers. Leading nobles were readily killed by vassals, especially in 1513–14, including the rising merchant Count G. C. Tramontano at Matera, whose lavish lifestyle incurred wrath. (Even in the twentieth century thousands lived in curious cave dwellings in the ravines there.) Matera successfully secured the recognition of communal privileges by 1518. Other Basilicata communes successfully revolted against unwelcome new feudatories. Among those who seem to have been killed for seeking to raise feudal exactions were Duke Belisario Acquaviva at Nardò, and a poet, Galeazzo di Tarsia, signore of Belmonte (Calabria), in 1553.17
The most famous and spectacular Italian revolt in our period was that in Naples in 1647. The background factors included bad harvests and food shortages, rising taxes by the Spanish authorities to pay for their world-wide war struggles, increasing exactions imposed on peasants from some landowners to pay for their conspicuous consumption, inflated dowries, and declining incomes from other sources. An influx of peasants into Naples made the situation more volatile when taxes were raised on flour, vegetables and fruit to pay for the Spanish armies. News of a revolt in Palermo (in May), which prompted the cancelling of a tax on fruit, encouraged the initial attack on the tax office in the Piazza del Mercato on Ascension Day (6 June). Two leaders soon emerged: a fisherman, Masaniello (Tommaso Aniello of Amalfi), and a lawyer, Giulio Genoino, who had long argued for the political equality of middling classes (popolo) with the nobles. Masaniello was initially a popular hero (having support from recent peasant incomers as well as long-term residents, whether artisans or professionals), especially in the light of early assassination attempts by nobles and financiers anxious to save their palaces from attack and looting. Two Carafa brothers and some alleged assassins were killed with certain ritualistic gestures, and echoes of popular justice meted out to Giovanni Starace in the 1585 Naples revolt. Masaniello was praised as ‘a man sent from God’, who sought social justice and economic benefits, then allegedly became somewhat megalomaniac and ‘mad’, so was called a ‘tyrant’ by erstwhile supporters. He was then assassinated (16 July) by a baker (Salvatore Cataneo), the man in charge of corn supplies (Michelangelo Ardizzone) and others; his head was carried around the city on a pike, while children dragged his body through the streets. Who lay behind the plot is unclear; the Viceroy (the Duke of Arcos) or Genoino were the chief suspects, in collusion but from different motives (as Rosario Villari believes). When the authorities then reduced the size of the official bread loaf – sold at controlled prices – the dead Masaniello became a folk hero again, and was given a spectacular funeral. Soon talk started of miracles resulting from relics, such as his hair. Public agitation continued spasmodically into the next year in Naples itself – with major riots or demonstrations by weavers or armed students. Genoino (until banished by the Viceroy) and others pursued a more intellectual and subtle republican cause. With the involvement of some dissident aristocrats a Republic was declared, the rule of Spain rejected and appeals made for French support. The Masaniello revolt turned into an international episode in the Spanish–French struggle for hegemony. After a mismanaged French intervention Naples returned to Spanish allegiance in April 1648.
Meanwhile the revolt had been taken into the countryside, and peasants killed landowners who failed to show sympathy. Giuseppe Galasso (1977) pointed to ‘revolutionary’ provincial leaders like Matteo Cristiano in Puglia and Lucania, or Ippolitano Pastena in the Salernitano region. According to the Medici agent, in Calabria there was no hamlet (casaluccio) that had not made a revolution with burning, murdering and theft. Francesco d’Andrea, a leading lawyer-administrator and part of the intellectual/professional elite (ceto civile) was involved in the protest movements in the Abruzzi, and ready to justify this in his memoirs much later. Baronial excesses and aristocratic arrogance or worse had become intolerable for many in most levels of society.19
On the Masaniello urban revolt there were many contemporary accounts, from conflicting viewpoints, that have allowed for varied interpretations of motivations and actions. The events highlight the major political, financial, economic and social tensions in a Kingdom where the strains of the Spanish imperial wars had worsened conditions for most people. However, the cult of Masaniello was fostered by propaganda writings, elitist and popular, by prints and paintings (by Micco Spadaro especially), by medals (including ones showing Masaniello on one side, Oliver Cromwell on the other) and by oral communications. He remained a figure who could be invoked as revolutionary martyr and popular hero – to inspire protest against government tyranny, excessive taxation and greedy landowners – through to the French Revolution and the declaration of the Neapolitan Republic in 1799.
The Masaniello revolt in Naples itself was clearly multi-layered and multi-causal, as many sectors of society vented their anger against Spanish authority and economic conditions in general, but diverse and more personal targets in particular. The social diversity of those involved, and their conflicting aims, made a dramatic result unlikely, short of strong French involvement – but Paris had its own crises. The wider arena of revolt in the Kingdom, while less clear in details, seems to have been a more widespread and interlocked series of anti-feudal revolts than encountered before or later until the early eighteenth century. The unprecedented publicity, with popular religious overtones, of the Naples revolt probably encouraged more people to act through the Kingdom on endemic local grievances.
Controlling Italian society, whether through judicial proceedings or policing activity, was extremely difficult in the early modern period. Communication difficulties through hostile terrain inhibited knowledge of crime through much of the contado, and the policing of any legal response. Let bandits eliminate bandits. A multiplicity of states and semi-independent jurisdictions competed or colluded depending on temporary political circumstances. The legal structures were complex. The strong theoretical foundations of Roman Law, civil and criminal, competed with Canon Law for anything that might pertain to the Church, and fundamental communal statutes drawn up over the centuries to govern local procedures, policies and targets – supplemented by edicts and decrees on a more temporary basis. Italian universities specialised in training men to take full advantage of legal conflicts. There were grey areas between Civil and Canon Law; local edicts might supplement Canon law, say, over marriage procedures. Some states like Venice paid little attention to Roman Law, relying more on their own law creation and procedures, while the Papal State was more wedded to Roman law. For those with money and power, there were endless opportunities to dispute jurisdictions and competence procedures. However, at a serious criminal level justice might be quick and arbitrary even over powerful nobles who got caught.
State and cities had numerous courts and tribunals, with varying degrees of investigative, judicial and punishing powers, using their own officials and ‘police’ to apprehend, investigate and punish. Councils and committees that were primarily deliberative, administrative and executive might have certain judging, punishing and policing roles attached. Florence in the 1560s had about twenty-eight courts and tribunals that could issue criminal condemnations – though Cosimo I had made one, the Eight on Public Safety (Otto di Guardia a Balià), the most powerful and wide-ranging criminal court, and central to his policies. This controlled the main police force at the Bargello prison, but there was also the more notorious prison of the Stinche, with other police. The Abbondanza tribunal primarily controlled food supplies, but was competent to try and punish those involved in smuggling and fraud. The office of the Capitano della Parte Guelfa mixed civil and criminal cases in dealing with property conflicts. The Sanità was the chief public health body, which (as in other cities like Bologna) could dominate the scene during plague and other epidemic crises. Specialist ‘moral’ courts existed, such as the Onestà to deal with licensed brothels and illegal prostitution, and the Ufficiale di Notte, which from 1432 to 1502 specialised in sodomy cases. The latter became the competence also of the Conservatori delle Leggi, whose major remit concerned banditry and altering banishment orders.
Other large cities similarly had numerous courts, if not so many. In Venice the most powerful executive council, the Council of Ten, could turn itself into a court for ‘political’ offences, and was responsible for some secret executions. The Avogadari di Comun was the chief criminal court and policing establishment; but the deliberative Council of Forty (Quaranta), partly dependent on it, could handle assault cases including rape. In Rome the Governor’s Court, based in the Tor di Nona prison till the seventeenth century, then in the model New Prisons (Carcere Nuove, built 1652–7), was more obviously the dominant criminal court. It was headed by a leading ecclesiastic, as was the Vicariate court, which dealt with spiritual cases which included marital offences, midwifery, morals, exorcism and licences for schoolmasters. Some of these problems and offences could also be investigated by the Holy Inquisition. The Senator’s court, based on the Capitol (Campidoglio) was the leading municipal court, dealing with both criminal and civil cases, which sometimes challenged Papal powers.20
Policing power was variable in competence and riddled with corruption. Forces were ill-paid and untrained, employing former prisoners and soldiers. Joining briefly secured weapons for private use later. Being a court or tribunal official must have opened up opportunities for wheeling and dealing, accepting bribes and fees. The use of informers seemed crucial in helping unmask crimes, especially in the countryside. Military garrisons were used to help keep order, and soldiers accompanied city-based authorities appointed to control the contado and prevent serious trouble. The Venetians from the early fifteenth century established local military forces, cernide, to police and discipline their mainland territories. By the seventeenth century these were well and diversely armed (keeping the Brescia armaments industry occupied), but the costs of maintaining them upset local cities and communities who were made to pay for them, and who resented interference in their traditional smuggling activities. In the early seventeenth century Venice hired Corsicans, or Turks and Venetians from the Balkans, to police the Friuli and Polesine especially, because they had no local ties, allegiances or interests.21 Venetian officials supervising the Terraferma in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequently complained to the Republican Senate that they lacked enough soldiers to tame the armed bravi of local noble landowners, exploiting their peasants.
In Bologna the Torrone was the major magisterial court covering city and contado, and had its own sbirri. Its copious surviving records of denunciations and reports surprisingly show how a police official or small group might appear in remote areas, and catch trouble-makers; or might be summoned for alleged acts of violence and intimidation. Men guarding sheep on the hills, having words, coming to blows, were reported and imprisoned at least overnight. Arrogant youths of the middling sort were arraigned with insulting and threatening social inferiors, though the sbirri might on other occasions have trouble asserting their authority and protecting the weak. As Ottavia Niccoli (1995) using Torrone files stresses, there was much youth crime, with young children as perpetrators and victims. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth century groups of children (pre-teens or early teens), without parental control, were some menace to society. That we know of such activities indicates efforts to maintain some law and order. At least in Bologna and some of its contado, sbirri working for both secular and ecclesiastical authority might appear at house doors, in hostelries and rented rooms hunting for priests sodomising boys, wenching and gambling, or for laymen who were too openly adulterous. Some appearances by the sbirri suggest tip-offs from the public. At least in the city they pursued those suspected of evading plague regulations, whether by immorality or seeking to work in closed-up workshops.22
Excessive sbirri activity might be resented by a local community. Letters sent from Castel Bolognese by its vice-podestà to the central Bologna government in the 1660s and 1670s expressed unhappiness about the size and cost of the sbirri attached to the Bargello court. They wanted the Legate to reduce the squad to the least possible, so money could be spent on repairs to walls, mills, houses and public streets. The Bargello court did all sorts of deals with bandits from Romagna, (also part of the Papal State, but separately administered). But Bologna failed to protect the smugglers (contrabbandieri) from Castel Bolognese – involved in traditional wine and wheat smuggling – when they sought to defend themselves and their goods by resort to archebuses against officials from the courts of Romagna and Imola. Such smugglers should not be harshly punished. Thanks were offered when central Bologna authorities released Domenico Camersini, ‘our inveterate smuggler’, who might otherwise have suffered unduly. Within a ‘state’, or subsection of it, jurisdictions and officials clashed, lacking a common purpose. Economics demanded that some traditional illegal pursuits should continue (even if to the detriment of the central exchequer).23
Prisons were not primarily for punishment of criminals, at least until the eighteenth century, when qualms about capital punishment and the wish to curb bandits in rural society, suggested prisons be more used for correction and control. Prison rooms and cells were used to detain those arrested until they could be produced in a court, or have evidence recorded. Pre-trial investigations might necessitate a longish period in the prison. Cost-effectiveness suggested quick punishments not needing imprisonment: death, galleys, floggings, penances, fines, exile. Prison as a sentence was for the clergy, for ‘political prisoners’, for opponents of the state or city, feudal lord or church authority, where execution or exile might be more troublesome. Graffiti visible and recorded in prisons in Venice, Ferrara or Palermo give evidence of longer-term prisoners, some of whom faced execution. Otherwise prisons were for alleged or convicted debtors who could or would not pay and for beggars and other troublesome poor cleared from the streets.
Prisons varied from a small tower room or cellar to a major building complex. Large prison complexes, as in Florence, Milan, Rome and Naples, had different rooms and sections to combine the various functions – from court room, torture chambers and single cells for the dangerous, to large rooms for male and female prisoners who might move about freely within the complex, and even leave and return. Since it was desirable to have food and drink provided from outside by family, friends or creditors there could be considerable contact with the outside world; and opportunities for escape. John Brackett has well described the old Florentine Stinche prison, while visitors to Venice can join excellent guided tours of the prisons in and attached to the Doge’s Palace.24 They show very mixed conditions in terms of space and light (and their absence), if not the filth, damp and rats. For many prisoners there was a social community within the complex, with discourse and intercourse. Religious reformers from the mid-sixteenth century provided spiritual comfort, education and books, as well as food and medicines. Venetian Inquisition records show that prisoners charged with serious heretical offences and beliefs freely discoursed with other prisoners, and received visitors. Sometimes they talked too freely – and provided evidence against themselves.25
Grey areas between crime and morality existed then as now if sometimes differently, as over rape, prostitution, sodomy, verbal assaults, blasphemy, superstitious practices, inappropriate begging or wandering about at night. Offences were handled in different courts in various ways: criminal, civil, mixed, ecclesiastical. Sometimes special offices and courts were created to deal with specific problems; Venice from 1537 had a Bestemmia magistracy primarily to curb blasphemy, but also handling cases of verbal abuse, and even of sedition (if the Council of Ten did not itself take these). But Florentine sodomy and prostitution cases might appear in other courts besides the specialist Ufficiali di Notte and Onestà courts, so even here historians have trouble tracking down the incidence of offences, and the extent of punishment. The harsh statutory punishments for offences like sodomy or rape (including the death penalty), sometimes contrasted with the actual punishments meted out. Confusion can be caused by the way moral and religious accusations were made, openly or in secret denunciation boxes, when the accused might have offended with other crimes (theft and fraud), or non-criminal political or social offences and insults.
Rape, as already mentioned, was treated primarily as a violent assault, and an offence against the honour of the father and the family, more than against the girl or woman herself. Since a sexual crime involving a mature woman was likely to involve passion and even love (which Venetian courts apparently took more cognisance of from the mid fifteenth century), the court might punish less harshly than for a ‘rational’ crime like housebreaking. Rape against children or nuns was treated more seriously than against other women, and could lead to serious punishment; as could gang rapes. But in many cases a rape charge was resolved by marriage to the perpetrator (if unwed), or a dowry payment that would allow her to marry another, so restoring her (and the family’s) honour. It was hard for a female to prove rape against a totally uncompromising male, especially if she was pregnant, since her (at least partial) cooperation in the act was often assumed. Awareness that a ‘rape’ charge could be a complex marital strategy (as already discussed), must have made it even harder to persuade a court to convict and punish a seriously violent rapist.26
Adultery was punishable by death in some law codes; in Ferrara the guilty woman was to be burned alive, but not the man. In practice the courts often took a much more lenient view, as in sixteenth-century Venice, though the honour of offended aristocratic families might encourage the murder of both male and female offenders, with little consequence for the murdering cuckold or his supporters.
Sodomy was one of the sex crimes that occasioned the most extreme statutory penalties, and excited the most lurid pulpit and other condemnations. The concern stemmed primarily from the Old Testament and the Church’s opposition to any sexual act that could not be productive. The word sodomia was given various meanings, though it usually covered sexual acts between males; it could include anal intercourse between heterosexuals, lesbianism, oral sex and masturbation. ‘Sodomy’ could constitute a form of birth control within marriage, even if few were prepared to admit it. Confusion can thus be caused in trying to decide what took place when courts or chronicles made brief references. In practice the courts dealt mainly with male homosexuality, and reserved the extreme punishments for cases where young boys were involved, and/or leading clergy. The punishment procedures were often erratic, and seemingly became more lenient over time. Renaissance classical interests might have made male friendship, love and sexual activity more acceptable – and prevalent. We know most about homosexuality in Florence and Venice, cities that were denounced as being the most vilely sodomitic, and where authorities at times might have been the most tolerant. Michael Rocke (1996) has seen sodomy as prevalent through all levels of society, and as being part of the male life cycle of both the elites and the artisan classes. Youths between thirteen and eighteen appear in the records as ‘passive’ partners, often serving many ‘actives’, who were generally aged from about nineteen to thirty, then demonstrating their virility and indulging in male bonding through group sodomy sessions. Clearly many then entered married heterosexual lives, with very few older men appearing before the courts. There are doubts whether actual homosexuality then ended when past practitioners now had a female partner; just as some of the extrapolations from the figures for the extent of youth homosexuality have been challenged. Florence’s Europe-wide reputation for sodomy was one reason why its special court was abolished in 1502 – for highlighting the crime. It was then dealt with by a variety of courts, and officials may have deliberately curtailed prosecutions in the interests of the city’s image. Late marriage and celibacy among the upper ranks of Venetian society may have similarly encouraged male homosexuality there. The continued insistence on clerical celibacy risked encouraging homosexuality. Rocke judges the incidence in Florence of clerical sodomy as low, and lower than in Venice – as indicated by known accusations and charges; but ecclesiastical court records, difficult of access, need more study. Indiscreet clerical buggery of very young boys did risk a death sentence, but much might have been discreetly covered up.27
‘Sodomy’ could be a useful charge or libel to throw at enemies to secure their arrest, or to make them desist from certain activities. Like charges of ‘atheism’ it can mislead as to the orientation of those so accused. The charge was used against the major baroque poet Giambattista Marino as part of a literary duel, when his arrest in 1598 had probably been for seducing a rich merchant’s daughter in Naples. Some poems imply that he at least viewed homosexuality with favour. Benvenuto Cellini had charges of sodomy thrown at him, including by his arch rival Bandinelli, though he was almost certainly actively bisexual. There were cases where religious and sexual deviancy probably genuinely went together. When the priest Francesco Calcagno was charged in 1550 by the Venetian Inquisition with atheism, blasphemy and sodomy, he advocated under questioning the superiority of homosexuality over heterosexuality, which was ‘a matter for plebeians’. In the early seventeenth century philosopher-libertines like Antonio Rocco, who popularised the heretical ideas of Galileo’s friend Cesare Cremonini about the immortality of the soul, had allegations of homosexuality and writing obscene poetry thrown at them (in the Council of Ten rather than the Inquisition), though they were not condemned – Rocco at least had powerful political supporters.28
Prostitution received ambiguous treatment by Italian authorities. Basically it was considered a necessary part of social life, to be tolerated but controlled, and taxed. Prostitutes might appear in denunciations and trials for other reasons, since their real and alleged skills could include love magic, healing powers and prognostication. Courts were not necessarily hostile to prostitutes. Prostitutes were afforded legal protection by the Roman Governor’s court against physical assaults from clients, would-be clients, rejected lovers and pimps; they were given their say in pre-trial and trial proceedings and listened to with considerable openness and tolerance. Their own physical and verbal assaults often met with lenient and understanding treatment – as long as any ‘magical’ arts used were not too extreme or threatening.29
The establishment of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Rome in 1542, and the subsequent creation (or re-creation) of local tribunals in the different states, was a turning point for the control of society, but this needs cautious treatment The public images of ‘the Inquisition’ are generally hostile, and almost invariably misleading. The ‘Italian’ versions are tainted by the (again usually exaggerated) criticisms of the Spanish version, created from 1478 and under royal control rather than papal. The Roman Holy Office, its creation influenced by the Spanish, developed a permanent bureaucratic structure under the leadership of a Congregation of Cardinals headed by the Pope. This linked with tribunals elsewhere. It could never exercise within Italy the kind of central leadership that the Suprema central body did in Spain and its empire. The existence of local tribunals and their exact form and local operation had to be negotiated with the rulers of each state.30
At present our best knowledge concerns Venice and the Veneto. The Inquisition in Venice was a joint operation between church and state, and its archives ended up as part of the State Archive and so readily consulted. Once under way the inquisition tribunals operated very legalistically, under rule books and guidelines in the hands of well-trained lawyers, with theological advisers. Prior investigations and subsequent trial proceedings were more thorough than in other ecclesiastical or secular courts. Physical torture was used sparingly, and under fairly strict regulation – though there could be significantly effective psychological torture through the lengthy investigations carried on while many accused remained in prison, and the nature of the accusation and the accusers often remained unrevealed. Death sentences were rare and usually reserved for heretics deemed to have lapsed, and to be a threat to others. The Friulian miller, Menocchio Scandela, made famous by Carlo Ginzburg (1980), was only put to death after a second trial, for repeatedly propagating his strange views on the origins of the universe, angels and men (as worms from moulding moving cheese); for being a repeat heresiarch. This was at the insistence of Rome, when local inquisition officials favoured leniency. Some booksellers were executed – but only when they had too frequently been caught printing and selling far afield books prohibited by the Index. The inquisitors were mainly intent on re-educating the ignorant and misguided, and emphasising the importance of Church authority in teaching, rather than with serious punishment and retribution.
The tribunals were under-staffed, and the Italian ones – unlike the Iberian – did not have ‘familiars’ paid to assist with snooping and denunciations. Records for Venice, Bologna and Florence suggested a lot of voluntary denunciation of neighbours and self-confession (as well as some appearances under pressure from parish priests and confessors). Some denunciations followed inquisitors’ requests that parish priests warn their congregation about the dangers of certain beliefs and practices. Denunciation and confessions often remained uninvestigated because the tribunal thought the matter too trivial, reckoned witnesses would be hard to find, had no resources to pursue the matter further or judged the issue to be one of neighbourly dispute, with a possibility of false accusations. Only a few denunciations and confessions were taken to a lengthy investigation and trial. The tribunals kept files open in case further allegations were made against the person. Since enough business came their way from outside, Inquisition officials in Italy seem seldom proactive, confining their initiatives to checking on those already convicted of significant heresy, and members of their family; as for example with the anabaptist Bernardin Barbano of Vicenza in 1573, or Marco Cerdoni and his sons from Dignano, as deniers of Purgatory.31
From the 1540s to 1570s or so the inquisitors (along with active bishops) were primarily intent on curbing the more serious errors of faith; with ‘Lutheranism’, a loose term that could embrace Valdesian and Calvinist versions of Protestantism, with anabaptism and with the dissemination of books banned by the various versions of the Index of Prohibited Books from 1559. Venice had the problem of Jewish converts and Jewish–Christian relations, while Naples had worries about the real conversion of Muslims. Increasingly the inquisitors took on a much wider range of issues, connected with sexual morality, the misuse of sacraments and sacra-mentals, magical practices and superstitions (love magic and magical practices for healing, for finding lost property or treasure), with fasting. With the Council of Trent reinforcing that marriage is a sacrament, any sexual misconduct or deviancy outwith a proper marital relationship could become a concern for the inquisition, as possible heresy. Table 11.1 gives some idea of the pattern of interest in the best documented tribunals of Venice and the Friuli.
These figures are of accusations, denunciations and self-denunciations, not trials. Classification is based on the main aspect seized on by the compilers of different inventories, who used various definitions. The Venetian inventories used Lutheranism vaguely to cover a variety of non-Catholic beliefs, while the Friulian general heresy cases could include the close following of Lutheran beliefs. ‘Abuse of sacraments’ in Friuli was inventoried as a secondary charge, (probably included with magical arts). Headings used in Venetian nineteenth-century inventories can be misleading. That said, these figures give some indication of what inquisitors, parish priests and denouncing neighbours found alarming, and when. A shift in both areas from doctrinal heresy and confessional heterodoxy to moral heresy and magic is clear.
Table 11.1 Accusations and denunciations before Venice and Friuli Inquisition tribunals, 1547–1720
In the campaigns to enforce good Christian practices and morality the Inquisition tribunals and the ecclesiastical courts of the Patriarch of Venice and the archbishops of Bologna, Florence and Siena worked together. In Venice the Patriarch or his substitute sat on the Inquisition tribunal, and denunciators clearly had an option whether to take an issue to the Inquisition or the Patriarchal court. In the Bologna and some Tuscan dioceses the archbishops could be more pro-active and intrusive over sexual immorality by clergy and laity, and called on the secular police (sbirri) as well as their own employees, which gave them more useable manpower than the Inquisitors.
Venetian records show that clerical authority had considerable difficulty through to the later seventeenth century at least in enforcing the rules of fasting, in curbing attempts to use ‘superstitious practices’ (casting ropes or beans, looking into glass carafes, etc.) to affect love relations or health, and find lost or stolen property. Venetian women as well as men were vocal about the justification – especially in terms of biblical teaching, or silence – for fasting rules, the efficacy of the cult of the Virgin and saints, and the doctrine of Purgatory. In some cases, artisans and prostitutes (home-bred or foreign) were almost certainly reading gospel texts in the vernacular, as well as questioning what was heard in sermons.32 The apparent openness of discussions in hostelries, in the streets, on balconies or at mainland mills, implies that ecclesiastical curbs and fear of the inquisitors were limited. Accused and witnesses could boldly reply to the tribunal or recording notary with seemingly limited fear of the consequences.
The laity could readily use the inquisition for their own advantage, to seek revenge on enemies or punish a practitioner of magic who failed to deliver what was required by denouncing her as whore and witch. A suspected thief or cheat might more readily be curbed by accusing him of blasphemy, as with G. P. Sorattini in Vicenza in 1646. In 1653 the vice-chancellor to the Venetian Patriarch, Francesco Mattei, was denounced as a blasphemer; but it was indicated that his accusers were the target of legal cases he was trying to enforce.33 An approach to the Inquisition could forestall a troublesome accusation from another, and consciences about past misdeeds could be cleared in return for a few minor penances. For outsiders the Inquisition could help secure integration into society. In 1638 Emanuele Lobo approached the Florentine inquisitor; he was a circumcised Jew from a Lisbon family who wanted to be assured he could live now unmolested as a Christian in Tuscany; he claimed he had been forcibly circumcised by his father as a youth, when he had fallen ill. In 1639 two Saxon Lutherans, shoemakers, re-educated by Jesuits, sought absolution from the Venetian Inquisition to live freely in this city; as did two Calvinists (a French soldier, and an Italian who had fought in France), who had been converted to the Catholic faith by Capuchins, who attested to their contrition.34
The Italian inquisitions and other ecclesiastical courts, backed by episcopal decrees and legislation, campaigned against many superstitious practices, and ‘witchcraft’, which were seriously attempted by men and women. Plenty believed they had the ability and knowledge to use incantations, blessed objects from talismans to umbilical cords, holy oil and sacrament bread, special concoctions (that could involve menstrual blood or semen as well as herbs) – to affect for good or ill the lives, health and love lives of others. Such beliefs and practices were fairly common currency in the countryside, but also in a great city like Venice. Neighbours reported the incidents and failures; inquisitors and bishops varied in how seriously they responded, but generally they sought to educate, to curb, but to impose only minor penances. The harsh sentences tended to be reserved for those, especially priests and friars, who seriously misused the sacraments. Even if the alleged or actual practices involved invoking the Devil or devils, the inquisitors seldom panicked or overreacted – unlike in other areas of Europe. There was little in Italy that could be called a witch-craze. Italy, at Todi in the early fifteenth-century, may have produced the stereotypical witch image (sex with the Devil, flying, etc.), that was fostered by the Dominican Malleus Maleficarum from the 1480s, with grim results in certain parts of Europe. But Italian society was not seriously afflicted by witch-hunting; thanks largely to the due legal processes of well-trained inquisitors, the limited use of torture, a healthy scepticism about mass conspiracies, a less fervid misogyny, an acceptance in all levels of society of beneficial healing and love-magic in the hands of women and maybe a healthy scepticism about the power of the Devil. Several of those accused probably believed in their magical arts, in sabbats, in devilish pacts and even that they could fly by night, and had lurid sexual fantasies. It is probable that some benandanti in Friuli genuinely thought they had flown out in spirit to do good, to save the harvests, against evil forces. It is interestingly debatable how far such people were affected by malnutrition, dangerously adulterated food, herbs and ointments used for contraception and abortion that might also induce hallucinations (belladonna, henbane, Datura with atropine).35 A Dominican theologian, Jordanes de Bergamo in the 1470s claimed that ‘the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.’36 Italian clerical and secular judges tended to be sceptical about the more fanciful and devilish accusations and claims.
The Inquisition was potentially the most powerful and efficient institution to control beliefs and behaviour, and its remit under ‘heresy’ was very wide. In practice it was less intrusive and feared than usually imagined, and its judicial procedures were probably fairer than those of most secular and other ecclesiastical courts. It impinged seriously on few people. It was as much a weapon for lay society as against it. Its denunciations and cases reveal much about social tensions. It was a control mechanism, but in its own terms it offered amelioration through re-education and the chance of salvation.
In Chapter 6 it was noted that among many who might be ‘poor’ permanently or for part of their life, there were some deemed to be dangerous for society and needing to be controlled. Especially from the early sixteenth century some authorities and writers worried about an urban underclass that preferred to live from begging, stealing and fraud.37 In the countryside there were similar people (some hitherto urban dwellers driven out or fleeing as banditi), who created gangs to threaten honest peasants and travellers. These groups were seen as permanent problems. Additionally there were fears of what would happen under food and economic crises leading to very high food prices, starvation and unemployment. In such circumstances the poor needing help within the city might rise from 10 per cent to 40 per cent or more. But such crises tended to attract incomers from smaller towns and villages, seeking food supplies and philanthropic help.
Many poor were seen as menacing and undeserving of assistance, especially in cities where they might cause riots and be criminal. Begging threatened the respectable in the streets, and even worshippers in church during Mass. As already indicated, at the sign of economic crisis alien beggars and prostitutes were expelled; as in Florence in 1498, Lucca in 1527 and 1539–40, Bologna through the 1560s, Rome in 1561 and Mantua or Bologna in the 1590s. Governments banned public begging, except possibly for strictly licensed groups like the blind and crippled. Policies were adopted to institutionalise the resident able-bodied poor in ‘hospitals’ to protect society generally, make them work and save their souls by curbing their sinfulness. Girls and vulnerable women (orphans, ex-prostitutes, battered and abandoned wives) were helped and protected in institutions, to save them from male depredations or their own sexuality. These policies were affected by ideas that the poor were especially sinful, as the Jesuit Paolo Segneri, adviser to the Grand Dukes of Florence, argued in the seventeenth century.
Civic authorities accepted some obligations to assist long-term resident poor, even if they simultaneously punished them. Occasionally the real needs of innocent, and starving, contadini would be recognised, as by the Farnese rulers of Parma in the great 1591 crisis; they were given a little help in food or money, but sent out of the city after a night. The same family did somewhat unusually recognise that involuntary unemployment could result from food-price crises, and had some job creation schemes.38
In line with European-wide attitudes from the early sixteenth century, some Italian authorities considered confining the dangerous and undeserving poor, or the vulnerable. The confining might be in prison, in sections of hospitals, in special conservatories or in hostels. Welfare and control went together; civic rulers, church leaders and lay confraternities co-operated. The combination of attitudes and forces was possibly most successfully seen in the development in Bologna from 1563 (effectively), of the Opera dei Mendicanti (Beggars’ Institution). Trying to take beggars off the streets, it helped with shelter, food, clothing, medicines and spiritual comfort; it provided work opportunities, compulsory for the able-bodied, and punished the recalcitrant and immoral. Holding up to about 1400 male and female persons (as in 1590), it provided some solutions, whether the perspective was that of policing, moral reform or the relief of starvation. Hospital and confinement policies and practices in other cities followed. Papal imitations for Rome itself provided unfortunate examples of failure. Sixtus V’s S.Sisto hospital (planned for 400 inmates), of 1587, designed to clear virtually all beggars off the streets, soon was left to the blind, poor girls and disabled widows. His successors were unable or unwilling to fund it, and some religious reformers as well as beggars objected to strict confinement and no-begging procedures. Innocent XII’s similar effort (1692) had a like opposition and failure. In the later seventeenth and eighteenth century the secular rulers of Turin possibly had better policies and institutions to control the poor, provide welfare and foster a work ethic. But getting the institutionalised poor to produce cloth and clothing brought protests from free guild workers about unfair competition.39
For many Italians harsh confinement and control policies did not work economically in this world, and were unsatisfactory in the religious economy of saving souls hereafter. Social amelioration, combining philanthropy, control and manipulation, was more satisfactory.
It was recognised that some poor deserved assistance, and that even those normally well off could come to need temporary ills ameliorated from outside the family. Contemporary attitudes until the eighteenth century encouraged social amelioration.40 Poverty was a blessed state, if voluntarily sought, and it could ease the path Contemporary attitudes until the eighteenth century encouraged social amelioration. 40 Poverty was a blessed state, if voluntarily sought, and it could ease the path through Purgatory to Heaven. Riches impeded that path, but if honestly earned and morally dispersed they had virtue and a beneficial social function, as was stressed by San Bernardino of Siena in the fifteenth century: ‘The rich are necessary for republics, and the poor are necessary for the rich’.41 Alessandro Sperelli echoed this in 1666, when he argued that the rich could help the poor materially, and the poor pray for the rich in return. Giving to the poor brought the giver closer to God. Using modern ‘capitalist’ arguments a Sicilian priest in Rome, P. De Angelis, shortly before had advocated alms-giving by the rich to the poor:
Such is the debt of charity, the more a man gives, the more he becomes a creditor; whatever you give in alms here on earth, you deposit in heaven, and whatever you give to your brother, you keep for yourself, so it is with alms, by answering to the needs of another, you yourself acquire merit, and by helping others you yourself profit.42
Debates took place through the period on who constituted the poor, who should be helped at what point, and what priorities should operate if the resources for assistance were limited. In famine crises governments, confraternities and hospitals recognised the need to help all they could without too elaborate discrimination (other than between those who belonged to the city or district and those who did not). In more normal conditions discrimination and preferences appeared, simple or very elaborate, workable or not. San Bernardino had a very long list of categories for those giving alms; the donor should think first of his family, then saints, the honest, friends, Christians (not infidels), nobles where poverty was not their responsibility and they were ashamed to beg, and then other poor.43 Other poor were then categorised, though not prioritised, as the imprisoned (by implication for debt), those afflicted by age, sickness, blindness and other disabilities, girls of marriageable age whose honesty is endangered unless quickly married, young wives whose poverty might entice them into sin – prostitution. Philanthropic confraternities might concentrate their help for their own poor – old and sick brothers and sisters, and vulnerable female relatives. Some spent considerable time judging individual cases by perceived need, while others elected to specialise in one category of poor – prisoners, the hospitalised, poor girls. The single most popular category was that of the poor girl or woman in need of a dowry to secure a suitable marriage, to guarantee her honour and respectability.
Philanthropic activity expanded from the later fifteenth century, embracing more in society than had been catered for by medieval confraternities and guilds, or the hospices-cum-hospitals promoted by them or city governments. By the mid eighteenth century, enlightened reformers campaigned against charitable activities generally, especially by confraternities or alms-givers, on the grounds that they simply encouraged further idleness, undermined a productive economy and discouraged the able from supporting their needy families.
In policies, intellectual argument and in institutional development many parts of Italy moved towards a modern welfare system; notably Venice, as the French prophet Guillaume Postel praised in 1546.44 This involved an awareness of needs, as well as some rational analysis of how they might be met, and of how to allocate limited resources, when amelioration was possible and control necessary. Through the period state and civic authorities generally shifted to a greater control of palliatives. The voluntary sector – largely in the hands of lay confraternities and some new religious Orders like the Jesuits, Barnabites, Capuchins and the hospital Order of Camillians – was more controlled, but attempts to remove it from the picture were soon abandoned (as with Sixtus V in 1587). Bishops and parish priests remained involved. The Council of Trent demanded episcopal involvement, at least in ensuring testamentary dispositions were fulfilled, and parochial reforms encouraged the role of parish priests in recording the poor, and who deserved support.
Much amelioration was potentially on offer, though real assistance could be diminished by the maladministration, corruption and empty hostels as revealed by some records. Physical assistance, in food or money, was often woefully inadequate, even deliberately mean. In practical terms the means to tax society to help the vulnerable did not exist, nor did the mentality concerning taxation. Early modern donors and policy makers saw spiritual salvation, the salvation of the soul, as more important than physical help; and the fate of the donor’s as significant as that of the receiver’s in the amelioration process. Much charity was fostered by other-worldly religious figures, and those with guilty consciences, seeking the salvation of souls hereafter. But a charitable institution such as Milan’s Scuola della Dottrina could derive benefits from worldly entrepreneurs who founded it in 1429, such as Donato Ferrario and his associates in business, legal activities, and the affairs of churches.45
The worst conditions for the largest numbers in society came when bad weather and poor harvests produced very high food prices, near starvation and unemployment. Epidemics, especially if it was decided that ‘plague’ was the cause (requiring stringent quarantines, so curbing economic life), also increased the chance of starvation for the living. Through the period the governments developed policies and procedures to protect the major cities at least, where social unrest was most dangerous. Grain supplies were secured from better-off areas – as far away as the Baltic in the 1590s crises – and distributed at controlled prices or free according to need. Efforts were made to standardise the production of loaves, and to prevent adulteration and fraud. Rome and Venice tried to stockpile grain supplies from good harvests in preparation for dearth. In seeking to commandeer supplies for a major city, a surrounding territory might suffer, as Umbria did for Rome in the 1580s, leading to a riot in Perugia in 1586. But Italy’s major cities had fewer food riots than one might have expected, through palliative actions as much as rigorous policing. We know that in Naples and Modena controlled selling prices could not be kept that much below a market level, so free or further subsidised provision was crucial for many poor. There were variations in the extent to which the distribution of food to the poor was handled by government agencies, or by confraternities and private hospitals. A balanced combination, as in cities like Lucca, Genoa, Venice or Prato, seemingly worked best. Up to a third or quarter of a city population might be receiving some food assistance, as in Bologna in the 1590s, or Prato in 1621–2. The governments of Bologna and Bergamo were unusual in making efforts also to help their contadini. A succession of Venetian officials dealing with the Bergamo region were very aware of poverty problems, given an agriculturally poor region, and many fluctuations in the fortunes of the mines or silk mills. They encouraged food storage for emergencies, and the charitable work of Misericordia confraternities that existed in about half the communities.46
Hospitals and confraternities were central to this welfare in normal times. ‘Hospital’ is a misleading word, because in our period it could cover anything from a major medical institution to a small room used to shelter pilgrims, sick travellers, a pregnant woman or old person without family support. In the medieval period many such little ‘hospices’ were founded, and a few famous major hospitals such as Florence’s S.Maria Nuova or Prato’s Misericordia, with competent medical facilities, a reasonable recovery rate and provision to shelter the indigent poor or receive abandoned babies. From the fifteenth century, governments increasingly reorganised the hospital systems to create large, multi-purpose hospital complexes. The Milanese Ca’ Granda hospital (from 1459, with Filarete as architect) was the most spectacular project at this stage, though it had been preceded by Cuneo (1437), Casale and Turin (1440). In the 1450s Ospedali Maggiori were created in Mantua, Cremona, Reggio Emilia, Bergamo and Lodi; in the 1470s Genoa, Parma, Ferrara, with Modena, Novara and Imola in the 1480s. Some of the development was based on criticisms of the clerical and confraternal inefficiency in small hospitals/hostels, and on the assertion of princely or civic pride. But in most cases princes, municipalities, church leaders and confraternities co-operated in the running, servicing and fund-raising for such institutions. Amalgamated efforts bore fruit in the development and redevelopment of the great hospital complexes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – such as Rome’s S.Spirito in Sassia, and S.Giacomo degli Incurabili, Naples’ Spirito Santo and Annunziata, Perugia’s Misericordia, or even Turin’s S.Giovanni in the eighteenth century, despite a strong princely secularisation policy. Other cities, including Venice, maintained an array of decentralised hospitals, while the above cities might also have specialist hospitals. Florence provided the model hospital for foundlings, the Innocenti. Rome’s S.Giacomo was an initial specialist in treating syphilis, though later it broadened its coverage, and Rome’s confraternity hospital of S.Maria della Pietà dei Pazzarelli from the 1560s pioneered a humane approach in treating the insane.
Some general institutions cared for people from cradle to (not necessarily early) grave; receiving abandoned babies and wet-nursing them, providing medical and surgical care for all ages, and shelter and nursing for the poor old infirm. Conditions fluctuated considerably, with limited concepts of hygiene, and a two-per-bed practice till the late seventeenth century or later. Rome’s S.Spirito and Naples’ Annunziata became very rich institutions, served the rich as well as poor, trained and used famous surgeons and utilised the best apothecaries. Nursing and food provision relied heavily on the family, confraternity members and some of the religious Orders. The moves under Catholic Reform to enforce the enclosure of nuns and curb female Tertiaries forestalled the development of dedicated female nursing.
From the 1490s a new spirit of philanthropy was promoted by various religious reform movements, and stimulated by the disasters or war, disease and famine. The Company of Divine Love, spreading from Genoa, was the most significant initial promoter of social welfare (including trying to tackle the syphilis epidemic). The better-off were urged to help others by organising and working in hospitals, orphanages and conservatories, or at least raising money for them. The founder of the Oratorians, St Philip Neri, tested his would-be followers by sending them to the Roman hospitals to clean wounds and sores, and comfort the sick. Other social religious leaders like Bartolomeo Stella, Girolamo Miani and Countess Laura Gambara reacted to the horrors of war, and civilian casualties, by creating special institutions (often called conservatories), that would rescue orphans and vulnerable women. Northern and central Italy at least soon had a significant number of such institutions, particularly for vulnerable girls and women. Some institutions started by including the really poor, but studies of Perugian and Bolognese institutions, for example, suggest that by the later sixteenth century the protected girls and women were from families that had some resources.
For economic reasons these conservatories could only cope with very limited numbers of the vulnerable females; Naples’ conservatory attached to S.Spirito had about 400 girls in 1587, the Perugia Casa delle Derelitte about 40–50 through the later sixteenth century. To forestall some social problems, confraternities and other pious institutions provided welfare on a much wider scale by allocating dowries to poor girls and women, so they could marry with respect, or enter a nunnery. A fair number of confraternities might allocate them at the rate of one to three a year; a few might provide ten or more. Rome by the late seventeenth century was providing about 3000 dowries a year, most through the specialist S.Annunziata confraternity, which organised major ceremonial processions for the recipients, as a propaganda exercise. Competition to obtain dowries, especially if open to non-confraternity applicants, could be intense. The sums involved were not necessarily that large, but possibly enough to improve marriage prospects, or allow entry to a better-class nunnery.
Though begging and alms-giving were often attacked, in practice the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a development of organised relief in money or kind for those deemed to need and deserve help. In real crises people turned up at the door of fraternity buildings, or at convents, and received help indiscriminately. But in more normal circumstances needy individuals and families could get a little help from fraternities, parish priests and their committees, hospitals or municipal governments’ agencies. This involved list keeping, scrutiny, house visiting, certificates from doctors or parish priests and maybe the issue of official licences. A few might be sustained this way for a while, through an illness crisis or pregnancy, but surviving lists and accounts indicate that the sums involved were meagre, enough to buy food or wood for heating for a few days rather than months. But such a sum might have made a real difference in allowing somebody to secure a blanket or cloak to protect from cold. A successful petition to a confraternity might secure a single sum that was enough to get a breadwinner out of a debtor’s prison and back to earning.
There were some confraternities, as in Bologna, Florence, Lecce, Milan, Naples, Rome and Venice, that specialised in helping indebted prisoners secure release so they could work and support families again. Others, along with religious orders such as Jesuits and Capuchins, provided help with food, drink, clothing, spiritual welfare, even education, for those in prison – whether for criminal or civil offences, or pending trial. Others comforted the condemned from confession to execution, and gave some assistance to the family. Some confraternities and (at least in Rome) trade guilds had the privilege to secure a pardon for certain persons condemned to death or the galleys.
Conforming with the injunction to house the poor, some fraternities – best studied and known in Venice – provided rooms and houses free or at reduced rents ‘Amore Dio’. The Venetian Scuole Grandi offered between forty and seventy almshouses, while a lesser scuola like the Santissima Trinita (near S.Maria della Salute) in the seventeenth century had about ten on offer – advertised on public notices at the Rialto and San Marco. Efforts were made to ensure inhabitants maintained proper moral standards. Competition for such housing could be considerable. Most went to confraternity members and their relatives, but some could be for outsiders. We know of a certain amount of corruption in some Scuole Grandi housing, with the less than poor securing such housing.47
Increasingly through our period the poor, and not so poor, could ameliorate their situation by resorting to pawn-broking systems, notably the Monti di Pietà (or dei Poveri). These institutions developed out of Perugia and other Umbrian cities in the 1460s, under the influence of Franciscan preaching, advocating a Christian nonprofit, cheap lending system to replace the allegedly extortionate Jewish lenders. Loans were to be given on the basis of pledged goods, which could be redeemed either with no additional charge, or a minor percentage to cover administrative costs, if those were not covered by the municipality or a charitable fraternity. Central and northern Italy cities took up the idea for their poor, (sometimes accompanied by some virulent anti-semitism, especially when the dynamic preacher Bernardino da Feltre was involved), though it was not till the 1530s that Rome and Naples followed. Venice itself decided not to have a Monte di Pietà, but to use the Jewish money lenders (under strict control over interest rates) instead. Cities in the Terraferma like Brescia, Padua and Chioggia did develop them. Monti were started through southern Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under civic or confraternal influence. Some, like that in Bitonto, added other charitable facilities and actions (hospitals, dowry funds, orphanages). Monti di Frumentari helped peasants by lending seed or money to start a new crop, especially useful in preventing one bad harvest having a major knock-on effect for the next. The ideal of the Monti was to help the poor; however, from the mid sixteenth century many provided investment and lending facilities for the better-off, with some – as in Siena and Naples – being the foundation of major modern financial institutions.
Italy developed many ways of alleviating the suffering of the poor and disadvantaged. Assessment of the degree of help really provided is difficult through want of evidence. Many institutions – like the Monti, the conservatories for girls and women at risk, the alms-houses – started with ideals of helping the lowest levels of the poor, but tended from the later sixteenth century to target middling respectable poor, and leave the lowest strata to casual assistance, mutual help (legal or criminal) – or none; with prison-like confinement as a likely outcome if not earlier death. Money left to aid the poor could too readily be diverted into building operations; the goldsmith and poet Alessandro Caravia so complained about the competitive extravagance of the Venetian Scuole Grandi, especially San Rocco and the Misericordia (which could not complete its new premises).48 Impressive Monti buildings, as in Vicenza or Naples, might face similar criticisms. But the Italian urban poor still probably had more, and more diverse, opportunities to obtain some physical and spiritual assistance than most Europeans.
This chapter started by emphasising the violence and lawlessness in much of Italian society, and the difficulties of control, especially in rural areas. Government institutions were weak, and all levels of society were ready to take advantage of this fact, often co-operating in local circumstances, in some unlikely alliances. Straightforward class conflicts, or town–country battles are not found. Italians in conflict with lay or clerical authority could often find support and protection somewhere, just as those in need of amelioration of their living conditions had some chance of obtaining a little relief.