Giotto: frescoes in Arena ChapelGiotto painted frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy, about 1305–06.A. Dagli Orti/DeA Picture Library
The darker side of this intense community life was conflict. It became a cliché of contemporary observers that when townsmen were not fighting their neighbours they were fighting each other. Machiavelli explained this as the result of the natural enmity between nobles and “the people—the former desiring to command, the latter unwilling to obey.” This contains an essential truth: a basic problem was the unequal distribution of power and privilege, but the class division was further complicated by factional rivalry within the ruling groups and by ideological differences—Guelfism, or loyalty to the pope, versus Ghibellinism, or vassalage to the German emperors (see Guelf and Ghibelline). The continuing leadership of the old knightly class, with its violent feudal ways and the persistence of a winner-take-all conception of politics, guaranteed bloody and devastating conflict. Losers could expect to be condemned to exile, with their houses burned and their property confiscated. Winners had to be forever vigilant against the unending conspiracies of exiles yearning to return to their homes and families.
Machiavelli, NiccolòNiccolò Machiavelli, oil painting by Santi di Tito; in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.Mondadori Portfolio/age fotostock
Leaning Tower of Pisa (left) and the cathedral, Pisa, Italy.Photos.com/Thinkstock
Cathedral of San Martino, Lucca, ItalySCALA/Art Resource, New YorkDuring the 14th century a number of cities, despairing of finding a solution to the problem of civic strife, were turning from republicanism to signoria, the rule of one man. The signore, or lord, was usually a member of a local feudal family that was also a power in the commune; thus, lordship did not appear to be an abnormal development, particularly if the signore chose, as most did, to rule through existing republican institutions. Sometimes a signoria was established as the result of one noble faction’s victory over another, while in a few cases a feudal noble who had been hired by the republic as its condottiere, or military captain, became its master. Whatever the process, hereditary lordship had become the common condition and free republicanism the exception by the late 14th century. Contrary to what Burckhardt believed, Italy in the 14th century had not shaken off feudalism. In the south, feudalism was entrenched in the loosely centralized Kingdom of Naples, successor state to the Hohenstaufen and Norman kingdoms. In central and northern Italy, feudal lordship and knightly values merged with medieval communal institutions to produce the typical state of the Renaissance. Where the nobles were excluded by law from political participation in the commune, as in the Tuscan cities of Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca, parliamentary republicanism had a longer life; but even these bastions of liberty had intervals of disguised or open lordship. The great maritime republic of Venice reversed the usual process by increasing the powers of its councils at the expense of the doge (from Latin dux, “leader”). However, Venice never had a feudal nobility, only a merchant aristocracy that called itself noble and jealously guarded its hereditary sovereignty against incursions from below.
Wars of expansion
There were new as well as traditional elements in the Renaissance city-state. Changes in the political and economic situation affected the evolution of government, while the growth of the humanist movement influenced developing conceptions of citizenship, patriotism, and civic history. The decline in the ability of both the empire and the papacy to dominate Italian affairs as they had done in the past left each state free to pursue its own goals within the limits of its resources. These goals were, invariably, the security and power of each state vis-à-vis its neighbours.Diplomacy became a skilled game of experts; rivalries were deadly, and warfare was endemic. Because the costs of war were all-consuming, particularly as mercenary troops replaced citizen militias, the states had to find new sources of revenue and develop methods of securing public credit. Governments borrowed from moneylenders (stimulating the development of banking), imposed customs duties, and levied fines; but, as their costs continued to exceed revenues, they came up with new solutions such as the forced loan, funded debt, and taxes on property and income. New officials with special skills were required to take property censuses (the catasto), calculate assessments, and manage budgets, as well as to provision troops, take minutes of council meetings, administer justice, write to other governments, and send instructions to envoys and other agents. All this required public space—council, judicial, and secretarial rooms, storage space for bulging archives, and both closed and open-air ceremonial settings where officials interacted with the citizenry and received foreign visitors. As secular needs joined and blended with religious ones, towns took their place alongside the church and the monasteries as patrons of builders, painters, and sculptors (often the same persons). In the late 13th century, great programs of public building and decoration were begun that were intended to symbolize and portray images of civic power and beneficence and to communicate the values of “the common good.” Thus, the expansion of the functions of the city-state was accompanied by the development of a public ideology and a civic rhetoric intended to make people conscious of their blessings and responsibilities as citizens.
The city-state tended to subsume many of the protective and associative functions and loyalties connected with clan, family, guild, and party. Whether it fostered individualism by replacing traditional forms of association—as Burckhardt, Alfred von Martin, and other historians have claimed—is problematic. The Renaissance “discovery of the individual” is a nebulous concept, lending itself to many different meanings. It could be argued, for example, that the development of communal law, with its strong Roman influence, enhanced individual property rights or that participatory government promoted a consciousness of individual value. It could also be argued, however, that the city-state was a more effective controller of the loyalty and property of its members than were feudal jurisdictions and voluntary associations. In some respects the great merchants and bankers of the Renaissance, operating in international markets, had more freedom than local tradespeople, who were subject to guild restrictions, communal price and quality controls, and usury laws; but the economic ideal of Renaissance states was mercantilism, not free private enterprise.
Initial letter of the Magnificat, from the Book of Hours of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, illuminated manuscript page by Giovannino de' Grassi, c. 1385; in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence (Fondo Landau-Finaly MS. 22, fol. 147 v).SCALA/Art Resource
Cosimo de' Medici.Stock Montage/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesAmid the confusion of medieval Italian politics, a new pattern of relations emerged by the 14th century. No longer revolving in the papal or in the imperial orbit, the stronger states were free to assert their hegemony over the weaker, and a system of regional power centres evolved. From time to time the more ambitious states, especially those that had brought domestic conflict under control, made a bid for a wider hegemony in the peninsula, such as Milan attempted under the lordship of the Visconti family. In the 1380s and ’90s Gian Galeazzo Visconti pushed Milanese power eastward as far as Padua, at the very doorstep of Venice, and southward to the Tuscan cities of Lucca, Pisa, and Siena and even to Perugia in papal territory. Some believed that Gian Galeazzo meant to be king of Italy; whether or not this is true, he would probably have overrun Florence, the last outpost of resistance in central Italy, had he not died suddenly in 1402, leaving a divided inheritance and much confusion. In the 1420s, under Filippo Maria, Milan began to expand again; but by then Venice, with territorial ambitions of its own, had joined with Florence to block Milan’s advance, while the other Italian states took sides or remained neutral according to their own interests. The mid-15th century saw the Italian peninsula embroiled in a turmoil of intrigues, plots, revolts, wars, and shifting alliances, of which the most sensational was the reversal that brought the two old enemies, Florence and Milan, together against Venetian expansion. This “diplomatic revolution,” supported by Cosimo de’ Medici, the unofficial head of the Florentine republic, is the most significant illustration of the emergence of balance-of-power diplomacy in Renaissance Italy.