Download PDF | Popular Government and Oligarchy in Renaissance Italy (Medieval Mediterranean) by C. Shaw, Brill 2006.
351 Pages
PREFACE
Among the wide variety of regimes governing the towns and cities of Renaissance Italy—whether they were independent republics, the seats of lords or princes, or subject communities that were part of a larger state—popular government and oligarchy were not opposites, or even opposite ends of a spectrum. Nor were they necessarily antagonistic, and certainly not mutually exclusive. This is not a book about two radically, clearly distinct forms of government.
Popular government here is taken to mean a broadly-based government in which a significant proportion of adult male citizens from various social groups could participate in the governing councils, and would be eligible to hold elective political and administrative offices. Such governments were more common in fifteenth-century Italy than might be supposed if viewed from the perspective of sixteenth-century Italy, where oligarchic regimes with participation in government restricted to a closed, economically and socially privileged, often hereditary, group have been regarded as the norm. In practice, most civic governments in Renaissance Italy were a mixture of popular government and oligarchy. At the heart of many broadly-based regimes would be a smaller group of men who tended to hold important political offices more frequently than their fellows, and whose opinion carried greater weight in councils.
On the other hand, oligarchic regimes could be tempered by institutions or procedures or traditions that provided opportunities for those outside the closed circle to express their opinions, accept or reject policies and proposals, or take part in electoral processes for offices they could not aspire to hold themselves. In both types of regime, the concept of the popolo as the embodiment of the constitutional, the moral authority on which the political system rested could, at moments of crisis and political turmoil, be brought into play. General discussions about developments in political society and institutions in fifteenth-century Italy have little to say about popular government. This might seem odd, given that the central topic of debate has been the nature of the state. Analysis of the factors preventing the unification of Italy into a nation-state, the question that preoccupied nineteenth-century Italian historians, has been superseded by analysis of the nature of the Renaissance state, or the regional state, the territorial state, the composite state, the modern state or the precursor of the modern state. Connected with these are reflections on the nature of the relations between central government and the periphery, on factions, on patronage and clientage, on court society, and on the formation of patriciates.
When the nature of popular government would seem to be a pertinent field of enquiry, to say the least, for historians discussing most of these subjects, why does it figure so little? The answer seems to be an assumption that popular government had lost out to oligarchy long before. Discussions of popular government focus on the communes of the thirteenth century. By the early fourteenth century, the main question for historians has become the transition from communal government to signorial government, from republics to submission to a more or less legitimate lord or prince. Whether for independent republic, subject town or base of signorial power, it is assumed that the prevailing form of civic government in the fourteenth century was already oligarchical.
Debate about why popular governments would become oligarchical have, therefore, focused on the political society and institutions of the earlier period.1 A link has been suggested between the development of larger and more powerful states in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the fostering of oligarchy, as an alliance between the ‘principal men’ of subject communities and the central political authorities ‘made clearer the differences between a restricted governing oligarchy and the mass of the population’.2 Central governments, it has been argued, favoured oligarchies in subject communities because they made control easier; stronger government favoured oligarchy at the centre, too.3 Leaving aside the question of whether this link can in fact be demonstrated4 , the argument is that the stronger state—whether Renaissance or territorial, regional or modern—encouraged oligarchy, not that it created it. The die had been cast long before.
Consequently, general arguments about popular government do not encompass the fifteenth century, and general arguments about political society and the state in the fifteenth century do not encompass popular government. Studies of individual Italian towns or regions in this period, however, can have much of value to tell about popular government and the shift towards oligarchy, as will be abundantly evident from Part II of this book. A wealth of material for reflection has been found in the works of historians writing about towns from the Alps to the island of Sicily. So again the question arises, why has this not fed into the general arguments and theories? One explanation appears to be the persistence of the idea that popular government should be defined as government in which representatives of the trade guilds, the arti, had an important, if not dominant, role.5
Why this notion should be so persistent is difficult to understand, in the light of the sophistication of the debates about the nature of the ‘popolo’ in the thirteenth century, which have moved well beyond this simplistic view, and the fact that this was not how contemporaries would have defined a ‘governo popolare’. Whatever the reasons for it, such equivocation about the nature of popular government in Renaissance Italy has stood in the way of reflection on it, and on the relation between popular government and oligarchy. As there is so little guidance on these problems in the literature, how can they be addressed? The approach adopted here is to study popular government and the transition to oligarchy in one city, Siena, and then to take themes and questions from this case study to provide a framework for an analysis of popular government and oligarchy in other Italian towns and cities.
The example of Siena will be treated as a starting-point for the broader analysis, not as a model. It provides a good basis because Siena’s government changed over a few decades in the second half of the fifteenth century from being one of the most broadlybased of any major Italian city to one dominated by an oligarchic group, with an incipient signoria. Looking at developments in this one city raises a broad range of issues concerning the nature of civic government and political society in Renaissance Italy and the transformations they were undergoing. Examining in detail the developments in one city also brings out the complexity of the process of change, of the links between institutional reform and innovation and the change in political thinking and social attitudes that they could express, the resistance change could arouse, the reversals suffered by those promoting new ways of governing their community, and the influence of external example and pressure.
Taking a line from the case-study of Siena helps to give some direction through what would otherwise threaten to be a confusing morass of information on other towns and cities. In Part II of the book, the focus widens to encompass the whole of Italy, to examine the nature of popular government and of oligarchy, how one might give way to the other, how they might coexist, what ideas about government, politics and society might underpin them. How far directions, suggestions or threats from outside the community, from political superiors or other powers shaped civic governments will also be considered. What was the influence of war, and in particular, of the Italian Wars that brought conquest and occupation by ultramontane powers? Did the French and Spanish favour oligarchy in the towns that came under their rule, or their influence?
Did the Italian Wars deliver a death-blow to popular government in Italy? A deliberate effort has been made to cover a range of urban communities, from small towns to powerful cities, and situated throughout Italy, not just in central and northern Italy, the ‘Centro-Nord’ commonly regarded not only as the stronghold of powerful civic government, but as constituting a discrete political system from that of southern Italy. It would be pointless to try to argue that there were not great differences between the provincial towns of the kingdom of Naples and the great cities of the Lombard plain, but there were other ways in which the università, the urban political communities, of the South belonged to the same political world as their counterparts, the comuni of the North, and to compare their institutions is not perverse. Accordingly, this study ranges from Piedmont and Venice to Sicily.
It would indeed have been perverse to ignore the outstanding profusion of studies on Florence, and several important developments in the government of Florence are central to the concerns of this book. But Florence has not been taken as the norm, the benchmark. No town or city could be, such was the range of variations on the basic structure of legislative councils and executive committees that was the template for civic government throughout Italy, even in states ruled by princes, not republics. Particular attention has been paid to two other cities, Bologna and Genoa. Bologna was chosen for closer study because oligarchically-inclined Sienese looked to the Bolognese government as a model. Genoa was chosen because, from a study of political life in fifteenth-century Genoa on which I have been engaged, I was aware of some particularly interesting elements of popular government there.
Furthermore, recent work on sixteenth-century Genoa by Italian scholars, notably that of Arturo Pacini, has made clear that the famous reform of the government of Genoa in 1528 was far from being the classic example of the institution of a closed oligarchy, a civic nobility, it has long been considered to be.6 This book deals with only some aspects of the complex problem of the advance of oligarchy and the related spread of aristocratic ideals, prejudices and habits, and the identification of political oligarchies and civic nobilities. The vexed question of shifts in the economic interests and strategies of civic elites, and their relation to wider economic changes in Italy, for example, is not tackled here. In focusing on certain aspects of the problem and not trying to encompass them all, it is hoped that at least those aspects under scrutiny can be seen more clearly, and in that way this study can contribute to our understanding of the whole.
The political lexicon of Renaissance Italy included several important, widely-used, words and concepts such as signoria, popolo, stato, balia, reggimento, that have no exact equivalent in English or convey nuances that a straightforward translation cannot capture. In some circumstances, for example, it is possible to translate ‘il popolo’ as ‘the people’ in a context where the meaning would not be lost, but in others, such as when the term refers to the popolo as an institutional element of civic government, the English word cannot convey the full or exact significance. Consequently, while the attempt has been made to avoid using words unfamiliar to those who do not know Italian, and sprinkling the text with italicized words and phrases, it has sometimes been unavoidable, if important nuances and distinctions were not to be lost. A glossary is provided, to give definitions and explanations of the most-frequently used terms to help the nonspecialist grasp these nuances. In order to avoid the text of the comparative chapters in the second half of the book sinking under the weight of scholarly apparatus, only those sources that were found to be most useful for the matters dealt with in this book, and those from which quotations or references to primary sources have been taken, have been cited. Only works cited have been listed in the bibliography.
This book was largely researched and written while I was a Senior Research Fellow at Warwick University, with fellowships from the Humanities Research Board and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, in the Department of History, and then in the AHRB Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites and Court Cultures. I am very grateful for the support I received there during my years at the university, in particular from Professor Julian Gardner, and above all from Professor Michael Mallett. I have worked with Michael Mallett on a succession of research projects over twenty years, and his combination of level-headed good sense, formidable industry and unflagging enthusiasm for historical research has made him a most congenial colleague and mentor.
I am also grateful to Professor David Abulafia of the University of Cambridge (where I am now a Senior Research Associate at the Faculty of History), for recommending this book to Brill, to the anonymous reader of the manuscript for the publisher for encouraging me to clarify my arguments and conclusions, and to Marcella Mulder, associate editor of Brill, for her patience and efficiency.
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