The Evolution of States Part 25
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With Dante we are already in the fourteenth century, close upon Petrarch and Boccaccio; and already the whole course of political things is curving back to tyranny, for lack of faculty in the cities, placed as they were, to learn the lesson of politics. Their inhabitants could neither combine as federations to secure well-being for all of their own members, nor cease to combine as groups against each other. Always their one principle of union remained negative--animal hatred of city to city, of faction to faction. It is important then to seek for a clear notion of the forces which fostered mental life and popular prosperity alongside of influences which wrought for demoralisation and dissolution. Taking progress to consist on one hand in increase and diffusion of knowledge and art, and on the other in better distribution of wealth, we find that slavery, to begin with, was substantially extinguished in the time of conflict between cities, barons, and emperor.
Already in the fifth century the process had begun in Gaul. Guizot treats the change from slave to free labour as a mystery. "Quand et comment il s'opera au sein du monde romain, je ne le sais pas; et personne, je crois, ne l'a decouvert; mais ... au commencement du Ve siecle, ce pas etait fait; il y avait, dans toutes les grandes villes de la Gaule, une cla.s.se a.s.sez nombreuse d'artisans libres; deja meme ils etaient const.i.tues en corporations.... La plupart des corporations, dont on a continue d'attribuer l'origine au moyen age, remontent, dans le midi de la Gaule surtout et en Italie, au monde romain" (_Civilisation en France_, i, 57). But a few pages before (p. 51) we are told that at the _end_ of the _fourth_ century free men commenced in crowds to seek the protection of powerful persons. On this we have the testimony of Salvian (_De gubernatione Dei_, lib. v). The solution seems to be that the "freed" cla.s.s in the rural districts were the serfs of the glebe, who, as we have seen, were rapidly subst.i.tuted for slaves in Italy in the last age of the Empire; and that in the towns in the same way the crumbling upper cla.s.s slackened its hold on its slaves.
Both in town and country such detached poor folk would in time of trouble naturally seek the protection of powerful persons, thus preparing the way for feudalism.
At the same time the barbarian conquerors maintained slavery as a matter of course, so that in the transition period slaves were perhaps more numerous than ever before (cp. Milman, _Hist. Lat.
Christ._ 4th ed. ii, 45-46; Lecky, _European Morals_, ed. 1884, ii, 70). Whatever were the case in the earlier ages of barbarian irruption, it seems clear that during the Dark Ages the general tendency was to reduce "small men" in general to a servile status, whether they were of the conquering or the conquered stock. Cp.
Guizot, _Essais_, as cited, pp. 161-72; _Civilisation_, iii, 172, 190-203 (lecons 7, 8). The different grades of _coloni_ and _servi_ tended to approximate to the same subjection in Europe as in the England of the twelfth century. But in France and Italy betterment seems to have set in about the eleventh century; and the famous ordinance of Louis the Fat in 1118 (given by Guizot, iii, 204) tells of a general movement, largely traceable to the Crusades, which in this connection wrought good for the tillers of the soil in the process of squandering the wealth of their masters. Cp.
Duruy, _Hist. de France_, ed. 1880, i, 291.
The process of causation is still somewhat obscure, and is further beclouded by _a priori_ views and prepossessions as to the part played by religion in the change. The fact that the Catholic Church everywhere, though the last to free her own slaves,[553] encouraged penitents to free theirs, is taken as a phenomenon of religion, though we have seen slavery of the worst description[554] flourishing within the past century in a devoutly Protestant community. Pope Urban II actually reduced to slavery the wives of priests who refused to submit to the law of celibacy, handing them over to the n.o.bles or bishops.[555] The rational inference is that the motives in the medieval abandonment of slavery, as in its disuse towards the end of the Roman Empire, and as in its later re-establishments in Christian States, were economic--that (1) n.o.bles on the one hand and burghers on the other found it to their advantage to free their slaves for military purposes,[556] by way of getting money; (2) that the Church in the Dark Ages actually had to enrol many serfs as priests, the desire of freemen to escape military service by taking orders having made necessary a prohibitory law;[557]
and (3) that the Church further promoted the process,[558] especially during the crusading period, because a free laity was to her more profitable than one of slaves--as apart from her own serfs. Freemen could be made to pay clerical dues: slaves could not, save on a very small scale.
See Larroque, as cited, ch. ii. The claim of Guizot (_Essais_, p.
167; _Civ. en Europe_, lec. 6) that the religious character of most of the formulas of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt proves them to have had a specially Christian motive, is pure fallacy. Before Christianity the process of manumission was a religious solemnity, being commonly carried out in the pagan temples (cp. A. Calderini, _La manomissione e la condizione dei liberti in Grecia_, 1908, p. 96 _sq._), and there were myriads of freedmen. It appears from Cicero (_Philipp._ viii, 11, cited by Wallon, _Hist. de l'esclavage dans l'antiquite_, ii, 419) that a well-behaved slave might expect his liberty in six years. Among the acts of Constantine to establish Christianity was the transference of this function of manumission from the pagan temples to the churches. Thus Christianity took over the process, like the idea of "natural equality" itself, from the pagans.
And the principle goes farther. In Adam Smith's not altogether coherent discussion of the general question,[559] the unprofitableness of slave labour in comparison with free is urged, probably rightly, as counting for much more than the alleged bull of Alexander III (12th century); while the interest of the sovereign as against the n.o.ble is noted as a further factor. As regards the "love of domination" to which Smith attributes the slowness of slave-owners to see the inferiority of slave labour, it is to be remembered that the Roman slave-owner was fixed in his bias by the perpetual influx of captives and cheap slaves from the East; that this resource was lacking to the medieval Italians, who had to take the costly course of breeding most of their slaves; and that in such circ.u.mstances the concurrent pressure of all the other causes mentioned could very well suffice to make emanc.i.p.ation general.
While the lowest stratum of the people was thus being raised, the state of war was for a time comparatively harmless by reason of the primitiveness of the fighting. The cities were all alike walled, and incapable of capture in the then state of military technique;[560] so they had periodical conflicts[561] which often came to nothing, and involved no heavy outlay; even the long struggle with Barbarossa was much less vitally costly to the cities than to Germany. Frederick's eight variously devastating campaigns, ending in frustration, were the beginning of the medieval demoralisation of Germany,[562] to which such a policy meant retrogression in industry and agriculture; while the Lombards, traders and cultivators first, and soldiers only secondarily, rapidly made good all their heavy losses.
It was when the practice of war grew more and more systematic under Frederick II, and the policy of cities became more and more capricious for or against the Emperor, that their mutual animosities became more commonly savage. Thus we read that in 1250 "the Parmesans were overthrown by the Cremonese, losing 3,000 men. The captives were bound in the gravel-pit near the Taro ... the whole population seemed to have been captured. The Cremonese tortured them shamefully, drawing their teeth and ramming toads into their mouths. The exiles from Parma were more cruel to their countrymen than the Cremonese were."[563] And, indeed, the Parmesans a century before had burned Borgo San Donnino and led away all its inhabitants as prisoners.[564] Now the Cremonese threw into prison 1,575 of their Parmesan enemies; and when after a year the dungeons were thrown open, only 318 remained alive.[565] Thus civilisation in effect went backwards on several lines at once, the spirit of internecine strife growing step by step with the economic process under which the community divided into rich and poor, as formerly into n.o.ble and plebeian.
Up till the end of the thirteenth century, however, the growth of capital went on slowly,[566] and the division between rich and poor was not deep, the less so because thus far the middle and upper cla.s.ses held by the sentiment of civic patriotism to the extent of being ready to spend freely for civic purposes, while they spent little on themselves as compared with the rich of a later period. So that, although the republics were from the first, in differing degrees, aristocratic rather than democratic--the _popolo_ being the body of upper-cla.s.s and middle-cla.s.s citizens with the franchise, not the ma.s.s of the population--and though the workers had later to struggle for their political privileges very much as did the plebs of ancient Rome, the economic conditions were for a considerable period healthy enough. A rapid expansion of upper-cla.s.s wealth seems to have begun in the thirteenth century, in connection, apparently, with the new usury[567]
and the new monopolist commerce connected with the Crusades; and it is from this time that the economic conditions so markedly alter as to infect the political unity and independence of the republics without subst.i.tuting any ideal of a wider union.
Much of the wealth of Florence must in early republican times have been drawn from the agriculture of the surrounding plains, which had a large population. Machiavelli (_Istorie fiorentine_, 1. ii) states that when at the death of Frederick II the city reorganised its military, there were formed twenty companies in the town and sixty-six in the country. Cp. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 365.
Dante (_Paradiso_, xv, 97-129) pictures the Florentine upper cla.s.s as living frugally in the reign of Conrad III (d. 1152). Borghini and Giovanni Villani decide that the same standards still prevailed till the middle of the thirteenth century. (Cited by Villari, p.
200, and Testa, pp. 89-91: cp. Riccobaldi of Ferrara, there cited from Muratori; Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. tr. iii, 293; Trollope, _History of Florence_, i, 34; and Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th ed. iii, 342-44.) If these testimonies can be in any degree trusted, the growth of wealth and luxury may be inferred to have taken place in part through the money-lending system developed by the Florentines in the period of the later Crusades, in part through the great commercial developments.
The wool-trade, in which Florentines soon surpa.s.sed Pisa by reason of their skill in dyeing, was a basis for capitalistic commerce, inasmuch as the wool they dyed and manufactured was mostly foreign, the Tuscan region being better suited for the growing of corn, wine, and olives than for pasture. Already in 1202 the Florentine wool trade had its consuls. (Villari puts these much earlier. He traces them in 1182, and thinks they were then long established.
_Two First Centuries_, pp. 124, 313.) Woollen-weaving was first noticeably improved by the lay order of the Umiliati at Milan about 1020; and this order was introduced about 1210 into Florence, where it received special privileges. Thenceforward the city became the great emporium for the finer cloths till the Flemings and English learned to compete. (Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, as cited, iii, 265-70.)
The silk manufacture, brought into Sicily from the islands of the Archipelago by Roger II in 1147, and carried north from Sicily in the reign of Frederick III, seems to have existed in Florence at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but to have flourished at first on a larger scale at Lucca, whence, on the sack of the town by Uguccioni della f.a.ggiola in 1315, most of the Lucchese manufacturers fled to Florence, taking their trade with them.
(Pignotti, iii, 273-74; Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 323.) Many had fled to Venice from the power of Castruccio Castracani, five years earlier. (Below, p. 243.) Being much more profitable than any other, by reason of the high prices, it seems to have speedily ranked as more aristocratic than the wool trade; and when that declined, the silk trade restored Florentine prosperity.
(Villari, as cited.)
The business of banking, again, must have been much developed before the Bardi and the Peruzzi could lend 1,500,000 florins to Edward III of England (G. Villani, xi, 88; xii, 54, 56; Gibbins, _History of Commerce_, 1891, pp. 47, 48; Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 340. Pignotti, iii, 279, Eng. tr., estimates the sum lent as = 3,000,000 of modern money). This function, in turn, arose on the basis of commerce, and the _cambisti_ are subjects of legal regulation in Florence as early as 1299. (Pignotti, iii, 276.) On this line capitalism must have been developed greatly, till it became the preponderant power in the State. Even as the kings and tyrants were enabled, by borrowing from the bankers, to wage wars which otherwise might have been impossible to them, the republican statesman who could command the moneyed interest was destined to supersede the merely military tyrant. In Genoa the bankers coalesced in a corporation called the Bank of St. George, which controlled politics, traded, and even made conquests, thus giving a historic lead to the Bank of Amsterdam. (Cp. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 341; J.T. Bent, _Genoa_, 1881, ch. ii.)
Summing up the industrial evolution, we note that about 1340 there were 200 cloth factories in Florence; and a century later 272, of which 83 made silk and cloth-of-gold. At the latter period there were 72 bankers or money-changers, 66 apothecary shops, 30 goldbeaters, and 44 of goldsmiths, silversmiths, and jewellers. The artisan population was estimated at 30,000; and gold currency at two millions of florins (Pignotti, iii, 290-91). Concerning Milan, it is recorded that in 1288, a generation after it had lost its liberties, it had a population of 200,000 (certainly an exaggeration), 13,000 houses, 600 notaries, 200 physicians, 80 schoolmasters, and 50 copyists of MSS. (Hallam, _Middle Ages_, i, 393, citing Galvaneus Flamma; cp. Ranke, _Latin and Teutonic Nations_, Eng. tr. p. 111.)
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We can now generalise, then, the conditions of the rise of the arts and sciences in medieval Italy. First we have seen commerce, handicraft, and architecture flourish in the new free cities, as they did at the same time in Genoa, Pisa, and Venice. In the south, again, in the Two Sicilies, under the reign of Frederick II, prosperous industry and commerce, in contact and rivalry with those of the Saracens, supplied a similar basis, though without yielding such remarkable fruits. There, however, on the stimulus of Saracen literature, occur the decided beginnings of a new literature, in a speech at once vernacular and courtly, as being accepted by the emperor and the aristocracy. The same conditions, indeed, had existed before Frederick, under the later Norman kings; and it is in Sicily about 1190 that we must date the oldest known verses in an Italian dialect.[568] Some of them refer to Saladin; and the connection between Italian and Arab literature goes deeper than that detail; for there is reason to suppose that in Europe the very use of rhyme, arising as it thus did in the sphere of Saracen culture-contact, derives from Saracen models.[569] In any case, the Moorish poetry certainly influenced the beginnings of the Italian and Spanish. About the same time, however, there occurs the important literary influence of the troubadours, radiating from Provence, where, again, the special source of fertilisation was the culture of the Moors.[570] The Provencal speech, developed in a more stable life,[571] took literary form before the Italian, and yielded a literature which was the most effective stimulus to that of Italy. And, broadly speaking, the troubadours stood socially for either the leisured upper cla.s.s or a cla.s.s which entertained and was supported by it.
Here, then, as regards imaginative and artistic literature, we find the beginnings made in the sphere of the beneficent prince or "tyrant." But, exactly as in Greece, it is only in the struggling and stimulating life of the free cities that there arises, after the period of primary song, the great reflective literature, the great art: and, furthermore, the pursuit of letters at the courts of the princes is itself a result of outside stimulus. It needed the ferment of Moorish culture--itself promoted by the special tolerance of the earlier Ommiades towards Jews and Christians--to produce the literary stir in Sicily and Provence.
Again, while the Provencal life, like the Moorish, included a remarkable development of free thought, the first great propagation of quasi-rational heresy in the south occurring in Provence, it was in the free Italian cities, where also many _Cathari_ and _Paterini_ were found for burning, that there arose the more general development of intelligence. That is to say, the intellectual climate, the mental atmosphere, in which great literature grows, is here as elsewhere found to be supplied by the "free" State, in which men's wills and ideas clash and compromise.[572] In turbulent Florence of the thirteenth century was nourished the spirit of Dante. And it is with art as with literature.
Modern painting begins in the thirteenth century in Florence with Cimabue, and at Siena with Duccio, who, trained like previous Italian painters of other towns in the Byzantine manner, transcended it and led the Renaissance.
The great step once taken, the new speech once broadly fixed, and the new art-ideal once adumbrated by masters, both literature and art could in differing sort flourish under the regimen of more or less propitious princes; but not so as to alter the truth just stated. What could best of all thrive was art. Architecture, indeed, save for one or two great undertakings, can hardly be said to have ever outgone the achievement of the republican period; and painting was first broadly developed by public patronage; but it lay in the nature of the case that painting could find ample economic furtherance under the princes and under the Church. For the rule of the princes was not, save in one or two places at a time, a tyranny of the kind that destroys all individuality; the invention of printing, and the general use of Latin, now maintained a constant interaction of thought throughout all Europe, checked only by the throttling hand of the Church; and the arts of form and colour, once well grown, are those which least closely depend on, though they also thrive by, a free all-round intellectual life. The efficient cause of the great florescence of Italian art from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century was economic--the unparalleled _demand_ for art on the part alike of the cities, the Church, the princes, and the rich. From the tenth to the thirteenth century the outstanding economic phenomenon in Italy is the growth of wealth by industry and commerce. In the same period, Italian agriculture so flourished that by the fifteenth century Italy would on this ground alone have ranked as the richest of European countries.[573] From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century the outstanding economic fact is the addition to this still increasing wealth of the foreign revenues of the Church.[574]
In the sixteenth century all three sources of wealth are almost simultaneously checked--that from agriculture through the miserable devastation wrought by the wars[575] and by the Spanish and papal rule; and then it is that the great art period begins to draw to its close.
While the revenue of the Church from the northern countries was sharply curtailed by the Reformation, which in rapid succession affected Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and the Scandinavian States, the trade of Italy began to be affected through the development of the new sea route round the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese; and though that gradual change need not have brought depression speedily, the misrule of Leo X, raised to an unprecedented secular power, and the crowning blow of the Spanish Conquest, following upon the other and involving government by Spanish methods, were the beginning of the end of Italian greatness.
Prof. Thorold Rogers repeatedly generalises (_Six Centuries of Work and Wages_, p. 157; _Holland_, p. 49; _Economic Interpretation of History_, p. 11) that the Turkish conquest of Egypt (1517) blocked the only remaining road to the East known to the Old World; and that thenceforth the trade of the Rhine and Danube was so impoverished as to ruin the German n.o.bles, who speedily took to oppressing their tenants, and so brought about the Peasants' War, while "the Italian cities fell into rapid decay." Whatever be the truth as to Germany, the statement as to Italy is very doubtful.
The Professor confessedly came to these conclusions from having observed a "sudden and enormous rise in the prices of all Eastern products" at the close of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, not from having ascertained first the decay of the Italian cities. Now, H. Scherer expressly notes (_Allgemeine Geschichte des Welthandels_, 1852, i, 336), that Selim I, after conquering Egypt, made terms with his old enemies the Venetians (who were then the main Eastern traders in Italy) and "bestowed on them all the privileges they had under the Mamelukes." Prof. Rogers states that "the thriving manufactures of Alexandria were at once destroyed."
Scherer states that Selim freed from imposts all the Indian wares brought into his States through Alexandria, while he burdened heavily all that came by way of Lisbon. Heyd sums up (_Histoire du commerce du Levant_, ed. fran. 1886, ii, 546), that "under the new regime as under the old, Egypt and Syria remained open to the Venetian merchants." It is hard to reconcile these data with the a.s.sertions of Prof. Rogers; and his statement as to prices is further indecisive because the Portuguese trade by sea should have availed to counteract the effect of the closing of the Egyptian route, if that _were_ closed. But the subject remains obscure: Prof. Gibbins (_History of Commerce in Europe_, 1891, pp. 56, 57) follows Rogers without criticism. The difficulty is that, as Scherer complains (i, 272), we have very few records as to Italian trade. "They have ill.u.s.trated nearly everything, but least of all their commerce and their commercial politics." The lack of information Scherer sets down to the internecine jealousy of the cities. But see the list of works of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries given by Heyd, i, p. xvii _sq._, and his narrative, _pa.s.sim_.
So superficially has history been written that it is difficult to gather the effect thus far of the change in the channels of trade; but there seems to be no obscurity as to the effect of papal and Spanish rule.
What the arrest of trade began, and the rule of Leo X promoted, the desperate wars of France and Spain for the possession of Italy completed, and the misgovernment of the Spanish crown from 1530 onwards perpetuated. Under sane rule peace might have brought recuperation; but Spanish rule was ruin prolonged. Destructive taxation, and still more destructive monopolies, paralysed commerce in the cities under Spanish sway; while the executive was so weak for good that brigandage abounded in the interior, and the coasts were raided periodically by the fleets of the Turks or the Algerine pirates. The decline of the art of painting in Italy (apart from Venice and Rome) being broadly coincident with this collapse, the induction is pretty clear that the economic demand had been the fundamental force in the artistic development. The Church and the despot remained, but the artistic growth ceased.
Always in need of money for his vast outlays, Leo administered his secular power solely with a view to his own immediate revenue, and set up trade monopolies in Florence and the papal estates wherever he could. As to the usual effects of the papal power on commerce, see Napier, _Florentine History_, 1845, ii, 413. "The Court of Rome, since it had ceased to respect the ancient munic.i.p.al liberties, never extended its authority over a new province without ruining its population and resources" (Sismondi, _Short History_, p. 319). Roscoe (_Life of Leo X_, ed. 1846, ii, 207) speaks of a revival of Florentine commerce under Leo's kinsman, the Cardinal, about 1520; but this is almost the only glance at the subject of trade and administration in Roscoe's work.
Under Pope Gregory XIII (1572-84) there was for a time fair prosperity in States that had formerly suffered from more precarious tyrannies; but ere long "the taxes laid upon persons, property, and commerce, to replace the lost revenues of Christendom, dried up these resources"; and many cities fell into poverty. Ancona in particular was so crushed by a tax on imports that her Mediterranean trade was lost once for all. (Zeller, _Histoire d'Italie_, 1853, p. 406.) Sismondi's charge is substantially borne out also by Ranke's account (_History of the Popes_, Eng. trans. 1-vol. ed. 1859, pp. 118-19) of the ruinous impositions of Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), who taxed the poorest trades and the necessaries of life, besides debasing the coinage and raising further revenue from the sale of places at exorbitant prices, leaving the holders to recoup themselves by extortion and corruption. Cp., however, Zeller, pp. 409-10, as to his munic.i.p.al improvements.
As to Spanish misrule, see Cantu, _Storia degli Italiani_, cap.
139, ed. pop. ix, 512; Sismondi, _Republiques_, xvi, 71-76, 158-59, 170, 217; Symonds, _Renaissance_, vol. vi, pt. i (Catholic Reaction), pp. 52, 65; Procter, _History of Italy_, 1844, pp. 218, 219, following Muratori and Giannone; Spalding, _Italy_, ii, 264-72, citing many other sources. "The Spaniards, as a Milanese writer indignantly remarks, possessed Central Lombardy for 172 years. They found in its chief city 300,000 souls; they left in it scarcely a third of that number. They found in it seventy-five woollen manufactories; they left in it no more than five"
(Spalding, ii, 272). Agriculture suffered equally. The decay of manufactures might be set down to outside causes, not so the rise in taxation.
Yet the decadence does not seem to have been universal, or at least was not continuous. In Sicily, it is alleged, though the statement is hardly credible, the revenue, which in 1558 was 1,770,000 ducats, was in 1620 5,000,000 (Leo, _Geschichte von Italien_, v, 506, 507); and at the latter date, according to Howell, Naples abounded "in rich staple commodities, as silks, cottons, and wines," from which there accrued to the King of Spain "a mighty revenue," which, however, was mostly spent in the province, being "eaten up 'twixt governors, garrisons, and officers" (Letter of October, 1621, in _Epistolae Ho-elianae_, Bennett's ed. 1891, i, 130). Thus there would seem to have been marked fluctuations, for in the time of Pope Gregory Naples is described as sinking under oppression and Milan as prosperous (Zeller, p. 407). The inference seems to be that some governors learned from the failures of their predecessors to handle trade aright.
The case of Florence after 1587, finally, shows how a wise ruler could so profit by experience as to restore prosperity where misrule had driven it out. Duke Ferdinand (1587-1609) was technically as much a "tyrant" as his brother and predecessor Francis, but by wise public works he restored prosperity to Leghorn and to Pisa, whose population had latterly fallen from 22,000 to 8,000 (Zeller, pp. 406, 411), and so increased both population and revenue that he even set up a considerable naval power. The net result was that at 1620, even under less sagacious successors, Florence "marvellously flourished with buildings, with wealth, and with artisans"; and the people of all degrees were declared to live "not only well but splendidly well, notwithstanding the manifold exactions of the Duke upon all things" (Howell's Letter of November, 1621, ed. cited, i, 136).
We are in sight, then, of the solution of the dispute as to whether it was the republics or the "tyrants" that evoked the arts and literature in medieval and Renaissance Italy. The true generalisation embraces both sides. It may be well, however, to meet in full the "protectionist" or "monarchist" view, as it has been very judiciously put by an accomplished specialist in Italian culture history, in criticism of the other theory:--
"The obliteration of the parties beneath despotism was needed, under actual conditions, for that development of arts and industry which raised Italy to a first place among civilised nations. We are not justified by the facts in a.s.suming that, had the free burghs continued independent, arts and literature would have risen to a greater height. Venice, in spite of an uninterrupted republican career, produced no commanding men of letters, and owed much of her splendour in the art of painting to aliens from Cadore, Castle-franco, and Verona. Genoa remained silent and irresponsive to the artistic movement of Italy to the last days of the Republic, when her independence was but a shadow. Pisa, though a burgh of Tuscany, displayed no literary talent, while her architecture dates from the first period of the Commune. Siena, whose republican existence lasted longer even than that of Florence, contributed nothing of importance to Italian literature. The art of Perugia was developed during the ascendency of despotic families. The painting of the Milanese school owes its origin to Lodovico Sforza, and survived the tragic catastrophes of his capital, which suffered more than any other from the brutalities of Spaniards and Frenchmen. Next to Florence, the most brilliant centres of literary activity during the bright days of the Renaissance were princely Ferrara and royal Naples. Lastly, we might insist upon the fact that the Italian language took its first flight in the court of imperial Palermo, while republican Rome remained dumb throughout the earlier stage of Italian literary evolution. Thus the facts of the case seem to show that culture and republican independence were not so closely united in Italy as some historians would seek to make us believe.
"On the other hand, it is impossible to prove that the despotisms of the fifteenth century were necessary to the perfecting of art and literature. All that can be safely advanced upon this subject is that the pacification of Italy was demanded as a preliminary condition, and that this pacification came to pa.s.s through the action of the princes, checked and equilibrated by the oligarchies of Venice and Florence. It might further be urged that the despots were in close sympathy with the ma.s.ses of the people, shared their enthusiasms, and promoted their industry.... To be a prince and not to be the patron of scholarship, the pupil of the humanists, and the founder of libraries, was an impossibility. In like manner they employed their wealth upon the development of arts and industries.
The great age of Florentine painting is indissolubly connected with the memories of Casa Medici. Rome owes her magnificence to the despotic popes. Even the pottery of Gubbio was the creation of the ducal house of Urbino."[576]
The criticism of this well-marshalled pa.s.sage may best be put in a summary form, as thus:--
I. (_a_) The despot promoter of arts and letters is here admittedly the pupil and product of a previous culture. That being so, he could avail for fresh culture in so far as he gave it economic furtherance. He might even give such furtherance on some sides in a fuller degree than ever did the Republics. But he could _not_ give (though after the invention of printing he could not wholly destroy) the mental atmosphere needed to produce great literature. None of the above-cited ill.u.s.trations goes any way to prove that he could; and it is easy to show that his influence was commonly belittling to those who depended on him.
(_b_) The point as to pacification is unduly pressed, or is perhaps accidentally misstated. It is not to be denied that the despot in the Italian cities, as in old Greece and Rome, did in a measure earn popular support by giving the common people relief from the strifes of Guelphs and Ghibellines. But the despots did not pacify Italy, though they to some extent set up local stability by checking faction feuds.
(_c_) The popes were in the earlier Middle Ages a main cause of the ill-development of Rome. Their splendid works were much later than many of those of the Republics. St. Mark's at Venice, a result of Byzantine contact, was built in the eleventh century, as was the duomo of Pisa, whose baptistery and tower belong to the twelfth. The Campo Santa of Pisa, again, belongs to the thirteenth and fourteenth, and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence to the end of the thirteenth. And the great architects and sculptors of the thirteenth century were mostly Pisans.[577]
II. The point as to the lack of the right intellectual atmosphere under the princes can be proved by a comparison of products. The literature that is intellectually great, in the days before printing equalised and distributed cultures, belongs from first to last to Florence. Dante and Machiavelli are its terms; both standing for the experience of affairs in a disturbed but self-governing community; and it was in Florence that Boccaccio formed his powers. "Florentine art and letters, const.i.tuting the most fertile seeds of art and letters in Italy, were essentially republican; many writers, and most of the artists, of Florence were the offspring of traders or labouring men."[578] What the popes and the princes protected and developed was the literature of scholarship, their donations const.i.tuting an endowment of research. If the revival of cla.s.sic learning and the rapid growth of art after the middle of the fifteenth century be held, as by some historians, to be the essence of the Renaissance,[579] then the Renaissance is largely the work of the despots. But even the artists and scholars patronised by Cosimo de'
Medici were formed before his time,[580] and there is no proportional increase in number or achievement afterwards. On the other hand, it was _mere_ scholarship that the potentates fostered: Lorenzo Valla, welcomed for his _Elegantiae latinae linguae_, had barely escaped exile for his _De falsa donatione Constantini Magni_;[581] and it is impossible to show that they promoted thought save in such a case as the encouragement of the Platonic philosophy by Cosimo and Lorenzo. For the rest, the character of the humanists whom the potentates fostered is admittedly illaudable in nearly every case. Pomponius Laetus, who almost alone of his cla.s.s bears scrutiny as a personality, expressly set his face against patronage, and sought to live as a free professor in the University of Rome.[582] And it is open to argument, finally, whether the princely patronage of the merely retrospective humanists did not check vital culture in Italy.[583] It is true that when "despotism" has been so long acquiesced in as to mean a stable social state, there may take place under it new forms of intellectual life. The later cases of Galileo and Vico would suffice to prove as much. But it will hardly be suggested that monarchic rule _evoked_ such forms of genius, any more than that the papacy was propitious to Galileo. In both cases the effective stimulant was foreign thought.
III. (_a_) The case of Venice has to be explained in respect of its special conditions. Venice was from the first partly aloof from ordinary Italian life by reason of its situation and its long Byzantine connections. It was further an aristocratic republic of the old Roman type, its patrician cla.s.s developing as a caste of commanders and administrators; and its foreign possessions, added to in every century, reinforced this tendency.[584] The early usage of civic trading, carried on by means of fleets owned by the State, was habitually turned to the gain of the ruling minority. The use of the fleets was generally granted to monopoly companies, who paid no duties, while private persons did; the middle cla.s.ses in general being allowed to trade only under burdensome restrictions.[585] Here were conditions contrary in effect to those of the progressive days of Greece. Contrasted with Florence, the Italian Athens, Venice has even been likened to Sparta by a modern Italian.[586] It has been more justly compared, however,[587] with Rhodes, which, unlike Sparta, was primarily a commercial and a maritime power; and where, as in Venice, the rich merchants patronised the arts rather than letters. From the first Venice achieved its wealth by an energetically prosecuted trade, with no basis of landed property to set up a leisured cla.s.s. In such a city the necessarily high standards of living,[588] as well as the prevailing habit and tradition, would keep men of the middle cla.s.s away from literature;[589] and only men of the middle cla.s.s like Dante, or leisured officials like Poggio and Boccaccio and Machiavelli, are found to do important literary work even in Florence. Hence the small share of Venice in the structure of Italian literature.
The same explanation partly holds good of art. Venice, however, at length gave the needed economic furtherance; and men of other communities could there find a market, as did Greek sculptors in imperial Rome. Obviously a despot could not have evoked artists of Venetian birth any more than did the Republic, save by driving men out of commerce. But it is in Venice, where wealth and the republican form lasted longest, that we find almost the last of the great artists--t.i.tian, Tintoretto, Veronese. After these the Caracci, Guido, and many others gravitate to Rome, where the reorganised Church regains some riches with power. We are to remember, too, that the aristocratic rulers saw to the food supply of the whole Republic by a special promotion of agriculture in its possessions, particularly in Candia; besides carefully making treaties which secured its access to the grain markets of Sicily, Egypt, and North Africa.[590] Here again we have to recognise a form of civic self-preserving resource special in origin to republics, though afterwards exploited by autocracies, as earlier in the case of imperial Rome.
The fact that Venice _did_ maintain great artists after the artistic arrest of Tuscany and Lombardy, is part of the proof that, as above contended (p. 221), it was papal and Spanish misrule rather than the change in the channels of trade that impoverished Italy in the sixteenth century. Venice could still prosper by her manufactures when her commerce was partly checked, because the volume of European trade went on increasing. As Hallam notes: "We are apt to fall into a vulgar error in supposing that Venice was crushed, or even materially affected [phrase slightly modified in footnote], as a commercial city, by the discoveries of the Portuguese. She was in fact _more opulent_, as her buildings themselves may prove, in the sixteenth century than in any preceding age. The French trade from Ma.r.s.eilles to the Levant, which began later to flourish, was what impoverished Venice rather than that of Portugal with the East Indies." As the treatise of Antonio Serra shows (1613), Venice was rich when Spanish Naples was poor (_Introduction to the Literature of Europe_, ed. 1872, iii, 165, 166).