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ITALY: A SHORT HISTORY
Florence was the site of an Etruscan settlement and later became a Roman town on
the Cassian Way (the modern Piazza della Republica is on the site of the Roman
Forum). In the 5th and 6th cent. A.D. the city was controlled, in turn, by the Goths,
Byzantines, and Lombards. It became an autonomous commune in the 12th cent.
Italian civilization is said to have officially started (made its transition from prehistory to history [literacy] with the Etruscan peoples. The Etruscan civilization lasted
for seven centuries. Remains which can be defined as Etruscan date back into the Iron
Age, to aout 800 BC, and are centered in the area between Rome and Florence, the
area which the Romans were to call Etruria. The modern name “Tuscany” – Italian
“Toscana” – comes, of course, from the Latin name ‘Etrusci’, sometimes shortened to
‘Tusci’. Their wealth, and so their civilization, was based on the rich deposits of
metals in the area – especially of iron ore, but also of copper, lead and tin. They share
with the Greeks the distinction of being the first city-builders in Italy. At the peak of
Etruscan civilization there were twelve cities, linked in a Confederation, but with each
city retaining autonomy and a cultural identity. The Etruscans were engineers as well
as architects. They drained the land, and built good roads, anticipating the Romans,
and they were also a sea-faring people, trading happily with Carthage.
Long before Etruscan civilization had reached its peak, a Latin people was
living on the seven hills of Rome. Two powerful myths were to be born concerning
the foundation of Rome. 1) a Trojan, Aeneas, escaping from conquered Troy, after
many adventures reached Italy, and founded the city of Lavinium in Latium. 2) Told
by one of the greatest of European historians, Livy (Titus Livius) wrote his
monumental history of Rome; some of the episodes in his re-telling were taken from
Greek stories, and not necessarily believed to be true. Ex.: The story of Romulus and
Remus – ‘the twins’ born of a Vestal Virgin, saved from drowning by a she-wolf who
suckled them, (but some think that the she-wolf was actually ‘a common whore called
Wolf by the shepherds’). Romulus kills Remus, and founded Rome. An Etruscan
king, Tarquin, is said to have been on the throne in the early sixth century, and
another Tarquin to have been the last, when, in 510 BC, the Romans secured control
and founded the Republic.
With the foundation of the Roman Republic came for the first time in Italy a
dim realization of a basic principle of political philosophy – that the people were
sovereign. The concept was to be lost with the decline of Rome and the coming of the
Middle Ages, and not to be properly rediscovered until the ideas of the French
Revolution crossed the Alps in the 1790s. In Rome it was expressed by the phrase
‘Senatus Populusque Romanus’, the Senate and Roman People, the initials of which,
SRQR, are still stamped on public property in Rome. The Senate in practice was often
in confrontation with the people, but disputes rarely led to bloodshed. The
confrontation never, of course, allowed the people real power, but in the first century
or so of the life of the Roman Republic resulted in a ruling coalition of the older upper
class from the days of the kings with a new, rich, republican class.
The headship of the executive government was provided by two Consuls,
whose qualifications for office were that they had been in both of two junior posts –
quaestors and praetors. Twenty quaestors were elected annually, and on election
became members of the Senate. In practice, the system kept power in the hands of a
limited ruling class, but did not fail to produce able and highly trained men. The more
democratic element in the constitution of the Roman Republic consisted in the
election of ten Tribunes. They could start legislation, and veto bills. The Tribunes
themselves were often rich nobles, but they provided an important countervailing
force against the Senate, and were supposed to represent the plebeians.
The Roman empire was not the creation of the Roman Empire, but of the
Roman Republic. Under the Republic Rome developed from being one force among
many in the Italian peninsula, in the first place, to being in control of the whole
territory of what we now know as Italy; in the second place, to being the dominant
power in the Mediterranean; and in the third place, to controlling and dominating
most of the known world. And the whole process took only three or four centuries.
(Skipping about 7 centuries of history)
By 400AD, we are starting to hit the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century and
throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a new kind of political institution
emerged in Italy – the city-states or city-republics, whose political organization
became known as the ‘commune’. The characteristics of this institution were that it
was essentially secular, its executive officers were elected, by varying methods, and it
had de facto independence, although often – and initially, always – under the nominal
overlordship of emperor, pope, king, or duke. Communes in their more typical form
existed in North and Central Italy, but they were not unknown in the South.
The central officials of the commune were the ‘consuls’ – a word brought
back into use in eleventh-century Italy from the faint memories of the Roman Empire.
At some stage consuls came to be elected and to acquire executive power. The first
time the term appears in the records of medieval Italy is in1081-5 when consuls were
in office in Pisa. There was also variety in the methods of choosing consuls.
Sometimes names were put to a general assembly for approval or disapproval by
acclamation, as at Pisa in 1162. Often the consuls had to have executive decisions
approved by a council, either a large, popular one, or a smaller one, packed with the
rich. Councils or varying size, and sometimes two or three in number, took the place
of the popular assembly, or arengo, as cities grew larger and the practical difficulty of
formulating policy in a huge gathering became too great. Methods of election of
councils were varied, sometimes involving a system of indirect election of electors,
sometimes the drawing of lots. If the drawing of lots appears a somewhat irrational
way of choosing delegates, it at least diminished the risk of corruption. Members of a
council were anyhow meant simply to represent the citizens, and in theory the office
could be performed by any sane adult. Fear of corruption played an important role in
the evolution of the communes. Consuls were in office for only very short periods –
sometimes only a few months. Sometimes, too, ... they were obliged to live in
complete isolation during their brief periods of office, to avoid any contacts which
could result in bribery.
The alternative to a republican form of government was that of a lord or
signore – a personal or family despotism. Powerful families had indeed done much to
form the communes and to shape and dominate their institutions. But the distinction
between the two forms of government was not always very clear-cut, since signori
often retained republican institutions, and often ruled in a paternal or benevolent
manner, with the full confidence or approval of the citizens. Nevertheless there is a
contrast between Florence, which retained the reality of a republic until 1431, when it
accepted the very mild despotism of the Medici, and Milan, where a strong
authoritarian government emerged over a century earlier.
In the 13th cent. the Guelphs (who were propapal) and the Ghibellines (who were
proimperial) fought for control of the city. By the end of the 13th cent. the Guelphs
held control, but they then split into warring factions, the Blacks and the Whites, best
remembered because Dante, a Florentine, was banished (1302) as a White Guelph.
Warfare raged, too, with other cities, notably Pisa, as the merchants and bankers of
Florence made their own fortunes and that of the city; the sale of Florentine silks,
tapestries, and jewelry brought great wealth. Florence grew as a result of war,
absorbing Arezzo, Pistoia, Volterra, and Pisa. Growth was temporarily halted in 1348,
when the Black Death killed approximately 60% of the city's population.
The history of Florence in the later Middle Ages contrasted sharply with that
of Milan. After the battle of Benevenuto in 1266 the Florentines had expelled the
Ghibellines. Guelf Florentines, middle-class members of the guilds or arti, took over
the government of the city. But the old nobility resisted the change, and became a
violent element in the life of the city. In the fourteenth century the Guelfs were split
into the Blacks, representing bankers, merchants and artisans, and the Whites,
representing the declining nobility. Temporary disasters, like the failure of the Bardi
and Peruzzi banks in the 1340s, and – far more terrible in human terms – the Black
Death of 1347-8, did not permanently alter the fact of Florentine prosperity. It was
based on finance, commerce, and the wool trade. It was the poorer workers in the
woollen industry, the ciompi or wool-carders, who were to rise in revolt in 1378. The
poorest workers were not citizens, and were thus denied the vote for any of the
elections in the republic. For a moment they secured the support of the lesser guild,
and some of them were even elected to office. A balia, or special commission,
including many working-class members, held power for six weeks, and arranged for
the creation of the new guilds in which even the poorest in the woollen industry
would be represented. The aims of many of the ciompi were not all that radical, but
others wanted a new social order.
Historians have concentrated so heavily on Florence, the impression has
developed that the fourteenth century was a largely republican one, with despots
taking over in the early fifteenth century, as the Medici did. But the communes in
other cities – and not only in Milan – were already, by the end of the thirteenth
century, dominated by single families, or signori. An oligarchy composed of many
families had often been replaced by a dynasty, whether with or without the
assumption of titles. Although the signori would sometimes cloak their despotism
with a bureaucracy, their individual tastes would emerge in the patronage of the arts
as in the formulation of foreign policy. By the fourteenth century the Holy Roman
Empire in its medieval form would never again dominate Italy.
Florence became a city-state and in the 15th cent. came under the control of Cosimo
de' Medici, a wealthy merchant and patron of the arts. Although republican forms
were kept until the 16th cent., the Medici family ruled, and Lorenzo de' Medici, who
held power from 1469 to 1492, was able to put down the Pazzi conspiracy (1478),
instigated by Pope Sixtus IV.
Florence in the fifteenth century was in the vanguard of prosperity, the peak
may be said to have been reached under the early Medici in the period 1434 – 92. In
the period three of the Medici family successively ruled Florence, but the two
significant figures were Cosimo, who was in control from 1434 to 1464, and Lorenzo
‘il Magnifico’, who ruled from 1469 to 1492. The two men took no title, and
controlled what was theoretically still a republic, with complex republican
institutions. Only on very rare occasions did they take any office themselves, yet their
indirect influence gave them despotic power in practice. The head executive officer,
or gonfaloniere, had very prescribed powers, and was elected for only two months.
He had to be a member of one of the seven great guilds, or arti. The class system, and
the predominance of the class of merchants, bankers and industrialists, was thus
enshrined in the constitution. The greater guilds, or popolo grasso (fat people) had the
dominant position, but the lesser guilds, or popolo minuto (small people), were
represented in government. Beneath the gonfaloniere were eight other executive
officers, the priori, six of whom had to be from the greater guilds, but two from the
lesser guilds. The gonfaloniere and the priori were together known as the signoria,
and they held office in the great medieval palace, the Palazzo Vecchio.
The old aristocracy was a suppressed class, allowed only a small role by the
constitution. Of the two legislative houses, the upper or consiglio del comune was
elected on a constituency basis by the four quartieri – quite literally the four
‘quarters’ of Florence, which still exist today. The nobility were allowed seats on the
consiglio del comune, but not on the consiglio del popolo, or lower house, which was
confined to the arti. Citizenship was restricted to members of the arti, who could
together be summoned by the bell in the Palazzo Vecchio to meet in a parlamento in
the piazza. The parlamento provided the ultimate constitutional sanction:
propositions put to it by the signoria could be approved or disapproved by the shouts
of the citizens.
These republican institutions had, of course, existed before the Medici, but
they had not prevented another family, the Albizzi, becoming dominant for the long
period from 1382 to 1432. The Albizzi represented the rich middle class, and it was as
a representative of the lesser middle class, the popolo minuto, that the banker
Giovanni de’ Medici became prominent and was elected gonfaloniere.