The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600 (Studies in European History from the Journal of Modern History)

r'[/,e (jrigins of l/,e dlale in 9laLy 130lJ-1600

Studies in European History from the Journal of Modern History John W. Boyer and Julius Kirshner Series Editors

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JULIUS KIRSHNER

The University of Chicago Press Cbicago and London

The essays in thIS volume onginally appeared in the Journal of Modern HIstOry, 67 supp. (December 1995). © 1995 The UnIversIty of ChIcago Press All rights reserved. Published 1996 Pnnted in the United States of America ISBN (cl.) 0-226-43769-8 ISBN (pa.) 0-226-43770-1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The ongIns of the State In Italy, 1300-1600 / edIted by JulIus KIrshner. p. cm - (StudIes In European hIstory form the Journal of modem hIstory) The essays In thI~ volume ongInally appeared In The Journal of modern hIstory, December 1995 supplement Includes bIblIographIcal references and Index ISBN 0-226-43769-8 (cloth). - ISBN 0-226-43770-1 (pbk) 1 Italy-Hlstory- 1268-1492 2 Italy-Hlstory- 1492-1559 I KIr~hner, Juhu~ II Sene~ 3 Italy-Hlstory- 16th century DG531 075 1996 96-12101 945' 05-dc20 CIP

The paper used In thIS publIcatIon meets the mInImum reqUIrements of Amencan National Standard for InformatIon SCIences - Permanence of Paper for Pnnted Library Matenals, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Contents

Editors' Note 1

JULIUS :BJRSHNER

Introduction: The State Is "Back In" 11

PIERANGELO SCHIERA

Legitirrlacy, Discipline, and Institutions: Three Necessary Conditions for the Birth of the Modern State 34

GIORGIO CHITTOLINI

The "Private," the "Public," the State 62

ALDO MAZZACANE

Law and Jurists in the Formation of the Modern State in Italy

74

ELENA FASANO GUARINI

Center and Periphery

97

ANTHONY MOLHo

The State and Public Finance: A Hypothesis Based on the History of Late Medieval Florence 136

TREVOR DEAN

The Courts

152

ROBERTO BIZZOCCHI

Church, Religion, and State in the Early Modern Period 166

RICCARDO FUBINI

The Italian League and the Policy of the Balance of Power at the Accession of Lorenzo de' Medici 200

INDEX

Editors' Note The eight essays published in this issue were originally delivered at a bilingual conference on the origins of the state in late medieval and early modem Italy held in April 1993 at the University of Chicago. The conference, which brought together historians from England, Italy, and the United States, was sponsored by the Journal of Modern History and the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trent. We wish to express our gratitude to the individuals and organizations whose generous support made the conference possible: Giorgio Chittolini, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera, who conceived the conference-and were largely responsible for its planning; Stefano Maria Cacciaguerra Ranghieri, formerly Consul General of Italy in Chicago; and Annamaria Lelli, formerly of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Chicago. Financial support was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Consulate General of Italy in Chicago, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Chicago, the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trent, and the University of Chicago Press.

Introducticln: The State Is "Back In" Julius Kirshner University of Chicago

In his essay of 1958, "Was There a Renaissance State?" Federico Chabod proposed that states did emerge in ]taly in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but he was properly cautious in equating Renaissance states with modem states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 1 He considered alien to the Renaissance state such essential features of the modem state as patriotism, national identity, and boundaries. Even the term "state," or stato, did not acquire its celebrated modern impersonality-its distinctness from the person of the ruler-until the eighteenth century. 2 It was nevertheless axiomatic, Chabod argued, that Renaissance balance-of-power diplomacy was predicated on the existence of states. He was familiar with Max Weber's claim that the Italian signoria "was the 1first political power in Western Europe which based its regime on a rational administration with (increasingly) appointed officials.,,3 On the basis of Weber's sociology of the bureaucratic state and the city and Otto Hintze's s,tudies on the formation of states and the Prussian civil service, which were still in vogue at the time he composed his essay, Chabod was led to argue that the salient characteristic of the Renaissance state was a staff of trained officials with distinctive routines and 1 Federico Chabod, "Y a-t-II un etat de la Renaissance?" in Actes du colloque sur La Renaissance (Paris, 1958), pp. 57 - 7 4. For the English and Italian versions, see Federico Chabod, "Was There A RenaIssance State?" In The Development of the Modern State, ed. Heinz Lubasz (New York, 1964), pp. 26-42, and "Esiste uno Stato del Rinascimento?" in Chabod's Scritti 5ul Rinascimento (Turin, 1967), pp. 593-601. 2 Federico Chabod, "Alcune questioni di terminologia: Stato, nazione, patria nel linguagglo del Cinquecento," in Scritti sul Rinascimento, pp.625-61 (originally published in 1957); Alberto Tenenti, Stato: Un'idea, una logica: Dal comune italiano all'assolutismo francese (Bologna, 1987); and Paolo Grossi, L' ordine giuridico medievale (Bali, 1995), pp. 41-49. 3 Max Weber, "The City," in his Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1978), 2: 1318. Weber's essay was probably written around 1913 and publi shed posthumously in 1920- 21 in the Archiv fur SocialpoUtik. For an assessment of thIS work, see Wilfried l\ippel, "Introductory Remarks: Max Weber's 'The CIty' Revisited," in Athens and Rome, Florence and Venice: City-States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 19-30.

ThIS essay ongmally appeared m the Journal of Modern Hlstory 67, suppl (December 1995)

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a collective Identity which carried out defined tasks impartially. If the modem state did not yet exist in the Renaissance, it was, according to Chabod, first anticipated in the protean administrative apparatus of the signorie and principalities like the Visconti-Sforza duchy of Milan. Chabod dismissed as fetching but fanciful the Burckhardtian trope of the state as a work of art. Scholarship that glorified despots as ruler-artists, or that transformed lords and princes of once-independent communes into lawful dictators-or conversely, that demonized the Renaissance state as an instrument of repression and exploitation wielded by a ruling minority-he considered a mockery of the historical record. Methodologically, as one would expect of a historian whose ideas were conditioned by archival research, Chabod distrusted one-sided models that easily eliminated the contradictions and the haphazard, halting, and backtracking developments that marked the maturation of the state in Renaissance and early modem Italy.4 Chabod's essay, I believe, along with his splendid research on the duchy of Milan, had less to do with a search for modernity than with a hopeful attempt to provide both a plausible alternative to approaches to the past (de)formed by right- and left-wing politics and a worthy historical foundation for the post-World War II Italian Republic. 5 His identification of political modernity with the admInistrative state contrasts sharply with Antonio Gramsci's identification of the Communist Party as the "Modem Prince," prepared to act ruthlessly to achieve its ends. Comparing Chabod's cautious optimism to the current despair of the philosopher Lucio Colletti is also instructive. Again invoking the spirit of Machiavelli, Colletti questions whether present-day Italy, lacking military forces capable of intervening in Bosnia-or even of defending tourists sunbathIng on its Adriatic coast from Serbian reprisals-deserves to be called a state. 6 Chabod's state-oriented model of Renaissance Italy endures in the United States as well as in Italy. His essay is still cited piously by those scholars who view the emergence of administrative functionaries in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance as prima facie evidence of state building, rationalization, and modernization. Yet from the outset, in his own country, Chabod's conceptu4 See FederIco Chabod's "USI ed abusl nell'ammInistratIone dello Stato dl MIlano a mezzo '500." in Studl stoncl In onore dl Gluseppe Volpe, 2 vols (Florence, 1958), 1:95-191. 5 On Chabod, the antI-FascIst, patrIot, and liberal, see the essays publIshed In Fedenco Chabod e fa "nuova storiografia" italiana daf primo af secondo dopoguerra (1919-1950), ed. Brunello VIgezzI (MIlan, 1984), esp Giuseppe Galasso, "La storia reglonale e la formazlone dello Stato moderno," pp. 163 - 230. 6 LUCIO CollettI, "Se 10 Stato e' un'Illusione," Cornere della Sera (June 20, 1995), pp 1, 5 It must be noted that whIle Chabod was agaInst mIlItarIsm, he recognIzed the necessIty of powerful mIlitary forces in the development of modem states.

Introduction: The State Is "Back In"

3

alization was never fully accepted as orthodoxy. Rather, it was resolutely contested, criticized as a distortion of the past by Marxian historians for whom the autogenic development of regional states in the Italian Renaissance was a harbinger not of modernity but of unabashed regression: of the loss of communal liberties, social involution, economic stagnation, and galloping aristocratization. This critique paralleled a widespread conviction at the time that the contelnporary Italian state was not the strong modem state envisioned by Chabod, but a vacuous entity occupied by political parties dedicated to patronage-namely, the control of the means of administration for the purpose of allocating public resources to special interests. Furthermore, the master narrative of traditional political history, centered around turning points in high politics, fell into disrepute from a series of conspicuous methodological assaults: first, from social history, which made political and legal theory and institutions expressions of ambient social structures; second, from historical ethnography, which metamorphosed political practices into self-fashioning rituals and strategies; and third, from poststructuralism and Foucauldian epistemology., which radically reconceived the Renaissance state as a decentered site for discoursing subjects, the production of knowledge, and administrative procedures and personnel de signed for the surveillance and control of populations and territory. In Italy, the genre of political history focusing on particular individuals, acts, and events, though battered, was never choked out by exotic species of historiography imported directly from France or indirectly from the United States. Obituaries announcing its dernise have turned out to be premature. The ingrained resilience of established political history is largely due to traditions of empirical and philological scholarship; intractable localism and geographic diversity not easily reduced to holistic paradigms; vocabularies of power and authority originating with the Romans and continuously enriched by over two thousand years of history; and never-ending discussions about the actual workings of politics that began in the Renaissance. Traditional political history is typically directed toward identifying the particularities of state formation in [taly rather than toward model building, comparisons, hypothesis testing, or e\Jen finding a Sonderweg that might serve to explain the rise of centralized states. At the same time, without abandoning its grounding in archival and philological research, the genre of political history has expanded to include new multidisciplinary and comparative approaches. Methodological challenge's have roused Italian historians to reappraise their fundamental assumptions regarding the emergence of an organized system of regional states. The Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trent has been at the vanguard of this "reappraisal. " The conferences and publications sponsored by the institute, which bring together contributors from different countries, have

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opened fresh vistas on the creation of regional states. L' organizzazione del territorio in Italia e Germania, secoli XIII-XIV (Bologna, 1994), edited by Giorgio Chittolini and Dietmar Willoweit, is an illuminating comparative historical venture investigating political, institutional, social, and geographical similarities and differences in the territorial consolidation of city-states in Germany and Italy. La repubblica internazionale del denaro tra XV e XVII secolo (Bologna, 1986), edited by Aldo Maddalena and Hermann Kellenbenz, suggestively treats merchant banking in early modem Europe as a sort of superstate avant la lettre, an "international republic of money" that profited while servicing the fiscal needs of the emperor, kings, and princes. Paolo Prodi, codirector of the institute and a distinguished historian of medieval and early modem ecclesiastical institutions and political theology, has written a deservedly praised study of papal monarchy in early modem Europe. His Sacramento del potere: II giuramento politico nella storia costituzionale dell 'Occidente (Bologna, 1992) reveals that the act of oath taking (sacramentum iuris) functioned as a transcendent justification of both the vertical ties binding ruler and subjects and the horizontal ties binding citizens within the city-state to each other. Pierangelo Schiera, the institute's other codirector, is well known in Italy and Germany for his many publications on Staatsrechtswissenschaft and his translations introducing to an Italian audience the works of German historical scholarship on the state, including Otto Brunner's Land und Herrschaft and the controversial writings of the antiliberal political and constitutional theorist, Carl Schmitt. 7 The collaboration between the institute and the Journal of Modern History is an opportune outgrowth of the JMH's long-term commitment to publishing research articles and review essays on early modem Italy-a decisive period, we believe, in the development of what has been aptly described as "the state tradition in Western Europe." 8 The eight articles published in this volume are revised versions of papers delivered at the conference held in Chicago in April 1993. We have chosen not to include the formal comments of the respondents, which have already been published in the Italian version of the conference's proceedings (Origini della Stato: Processi di formazione statale in Italia fra medioevo ed eta moderna [Bologna, 1994], edited by Giorgio Chittolini, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera). It will be obvious immediately from the table of contents that this volume does not offer conlprehensive coverage (which would have quadrupled its size) but concentrates on a thematically coherent group of eight issues. Other key issues, ranging from art and power 7 An excellent EnglIsh translatIon of Brunner's work with a cntical introductIon has been pubhshed as Land and Lordship, trans. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia, 1992). 8 Kenneth Dyson, The State Tradltlon in Western Europe (Oxford, 1980).

Introduction: The State Is "Back In"

5

to sexuality and gender, from warfare and military organization to the political theorizing of ~~iccolo Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, surfaced at the conference bUlt were not treated systernatically. From the beginning, it must be stressed, the conference planners-Chittolini, Molho, and Schiera-tried to be inclusive. A large group of scholars representing a variety of methodological and conceptual approaches-sometinles in contention with each other-were invited to participate. The result was four exciting days of debate about the challenges and rewards awaiting those who wish to decipher the elusive mysteries of the state in Renaissance and early modem Italy. Differences aside, there was general agreement among the participants that the rulers of the Italian regional states tended to consolidate power in their own hands, especially in regard to judicial, fiscal, and military matters. But this historical pattern, they admonis.hed, should not be taken to mean that autonomous self-sustaining centralized administrative structures came into existence. Indeed, the notion of a centralizing state was literally inconceivable, and its use as a category of analysis for understanding the Italian regional state in this period is best avoided. N or should these Italian regional states be represented by the figure of the sovereign, a juridical persona endowed with total control of all the available resources in the territories he administered. Nor should they be equated with the monopolistic powers associated with sovereign states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which possessed the self-defining capacity to determine the legitimate scope of their own authority-what German jurists call Kompetenz-Kompetenz. More positively, a majority of the discussants stressed the political adaptability and dynamism of the new regional states in insuring internal order, external security, spheres of liberty, and territorial equilibrium. In hindsight, thi s transformation may seem natural and even predictable, an outcome contrived by history's invisible hand. Yet, as shown by the articles in this volume, as well as the massive scholarship on which they rest, the making of the regional states was a kaleidoscopic event opening up a new imaginative territory that can be fruitfully studied from different angles. Schiera returns to Weber's classic discussion of the Italian communes and signoria in Z)ie Stadt (The city) to launch his own article on the political legitimacy of the aborning regional states. For Weber, the sworn corporate bodies of urban merchants and artisans in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries represented self-consciously illegitimate and revolutionary political associations. Bloody conflicts between the popolo and the nobility torpedoed the republics and self-governing towns, paving the way for the city tyrant. This illegititnate political figure would eventually earn the obedience of homo urbanus and homo rationalis by providing political security while preserving the trappings of the old constitutional order. Eventually his rule was institutionalized as a hereditary patrimonial princedom. Schiera explores the

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respective roles of the papacy and the empIre in their capacity and readiness (for a price) to confer political legitimacy on the signorie. He argues that political legitimacy for both mInor signorie and the large regional states was not founded on papal and imperial InterventIon, invited and important though that may have been. Nor was the new authoritarian law-and-order statism based on ideological forms of coercion or cultural hegemony, as Gramsci would have insisted. Rather, Schiera alleges, it was grounded in voluntarism: the collective desire of subjected citizens for the political stability and material benefits that ensue from fulfilling civic obligations and obeying the law. As Aldo Mazzacane observes, the cosmos of law was not an immutable entity; it changed as society changed. Thanks to the studies of European and Amencan legal historians, we have numerous illustrations of how medieval and early modern legal culture, despite its forbidding formalism and projection of immobility, was in constant flux, shaped and reshaped by wealth and power. Modern notions such as the rule of law and Rechtsstaat have been mistakenly applied to thIS non-rights-oriented legal culture. It cannot be stressed too strongly that in this period there was no necessary connection between civil and political liberties, while disputes over "inviolable" privileges and corresponding duties were subjected to endless and often inconclusive exercises of judicial discretion. Indeed, we now have a greater appreciation of the creative role of civilians and canonists from the twelfth century on-in Imagining ever more subtle configurations of power and authority, in drawing bluepnnts for their legItimate use, and in addressing the Intricate relationshIp between citizens and governments, subjects and rulers. Mazzacane's own artIcle shows how the opinions of several leading jurists made important contributions to theorizing the Venetian territorial state. 9 Elena Fasano GuarinI reprises her own pioneering research on Grand Ducal Tuscany and the latest Italian historiography treating the regional states as complex territorial structures. By the sixteenth century, the local communities-the so-called periphery of the regional states-were no longer self-sufficient islands basking in their ancient privileges, immunities, and autonomy (iura propria). They could no longer afford to confine their efforts to defending their particularity and to resisting the authority of the so-called center; they were now compelled to join a regional network of political relations. Conversely, these local communities were condemned to atrophy when they failed to make this leap and to comprehend that a realization of their own interests was linked to a broader system of political associations and 9 See also Ingnd Baumgartner, "Rechtsnorm und Rechtsanwendung In der veneZlanlschen Terraferma des 15 lahrhunderts: Die Consilia von Bartolomeo CIpolla," 1n Consiha 1m spaten Mute/alter Zum hlstonschen Aussagewert einer Quellengattung, ed Ingrid Baumgartner (S1gmanngen, 1995), pp. 97 -103.

Introduction: The State Is "Back In"

7

a dispersion of power throughout the territory. It thus happened that local communities, including client groups, institutional actors, and sectoral elites, continued to implement critical political functions. These thenles reemerge in Roberto Bizzocchi's discussion of the early modern incarnations of church, religion, and state. He recognizes that the constant com petition for resources generated tensions and jurisdictional conflicts bet\veen church and state. Paradoxically, these conflicts were the inevitable result of the close collaboration between church hierarchies, local elites, and ruling dynasties like the Sforza and Medici in resolving legal disputes, conferring ecclesiastical offices and benefices, and, above all, alienating fanlily property to local ecclesiastical institutions in order to avoid taxation. Overall, the Italian-style marriage between church and state served to perpetuate the center's control over the periphery and to retard for several hundred years Italy's entry into the club of modern states. Noone is better qualified than Riccardo Fubini, an expert on Florentine diplomacy in the fifteenth century and an editor of Lorenzo de' Medici's correspondence, to parse the shifting diplomatic relations among Florence, Venice, Milan, the papacy, and the kingdom of Naples. His essay on the cooperation of these principal powers in creating the Italian league (1455 - 94) sheds new light on the origins, aims, and consequences of balance-of-power diplomacy. He demonstrates that, in addition to resolving conflicts among its principal menlbers and their clients and insulating the Peninsula from foreign invasion, an overriding purpose of the league was a "mutual commitment to support the respective internal regimes or at least not to interfere with them" (pp. S187 - 88). These aims were successfully realized. He also presents new evidence that leads him to endorse Guicciardini's praise of Lorenzo as a skillful statesman and Florence as a "point of balance" in mediating the conflict between the duchy of Milan and the kingdom of Naples. In his trenchant survey of recent scholarship on Italian courts, Trevor Dean reminds us th at the subject took off as a respectable field of academic study only in the ]970s. This event was precipitated by Norbert Elias's epochmaking works, Die hofische Gesellschaft [Court society] and Ober den Prozess der i.~ivilisation [The civilizing process], published in 1969. Elias's identification of the development of the European courts and courtly culture with the development of modern states and civilization, though criticized for its baggage of inchoate assumptions and factual deficiencies, has nonetheless provided a highly productive research agenda. As a staunch adherent of "the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition," Dean finds the project of comparative historical sociology unhelpful, contending that its homogenizing models of traditional and modern society have produced caricatures of complex historical phenomena. Similarly, he is dismissive of the series of works of structuralist literary criticism and history on the Estensi court in Ferrara and

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the Farnesi court in Parma published by the Centro Studi Europa delle Corti. Fixated on deciphering the mental habits and social grammar of court society, the structuralist approach, in Dean's eyes, is an elaborate intellectual game that has had the stultifying effect of turning the court into an ahistorical, self-referential mise-en-scene. Dean conceives "the court as an open rather than a closed space, a space open to a vast range of outside influences" (p. SI44). Accordingly, he calls for systematic archival research that would propel the field beyond problematic assertions about the existence of a discrete court culture, the curialization and domestication of the nobility by a distant, sacralized prince, and the court as a vehicle for state building. As warfare among states became more capital-intensive in the early modem period, the ability to mobilize unprecedented amounts of capital efficiently through mechanisms of public finance and taxation became a primary policy objective of European states. Recent scholarship recognizes that different political institutions and socioeconomic infrastructures prompted states to take divergent paths to reach this objective. Yet many historians agree that paying for the skyrocketing costs of warfare, or what Charles Tilly calls "capitalized coercion," was the biggest single stimulus in European state formation. lOIn his article on Florence, Anthony Molho argues that the Tilly model and the accompanying jargon of historical sociology does not adequately account for the underlying forces shaping the public finances of Florence or other major states like Venice, Genoa, and the kingdom of Naples. Decisions regarding taxation and public finance, according to Molho, were driven less by the costs of war than by the "internal politics of regimes in power" (p. 103). In this perspective, Florence, in the period bracketed from the fall of the Ciompi regime (1382) to the advent of the Medici regime (1435), appears to have been a state on the road to modernization. It was a period of almost constant warfare financed by millions of florins raised through forced loans, dramatically increasing the city's public debt (Monte Comune). It was a period of "centralizing administrative tendencies" and expansive territorial integration exemplified by the acquisition of Pisa in 1406 and a lex terrae detailed in the statutory compilation of 1415. It was also a period of fiscal experimentation: first with the Dowry Fund (Monte delle doti), created in 1425 with the dual aim of encouraging marriage by reducing its costs and using deposited funds to extinguish the city's public debt, and then with the catasto (1427), a system of tax assessments based on relatively objective criteria and fiscal equity imposed on the inhabitants of the capital city and the Florentine territory. The catasto got off to a solid start but stalled under Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici, when the administration of public finances and the distribution of the 10 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

Introduction: The State Is "Back In"

9

tax burden was manipulated increasingly to satisfy the commercial interests and lifestyles of Florence's elite to the detriment of the public interest and trust. Such were the beginnings of a patrimonial state characterized by the exploitation of public institutions and resources for the private ends of the Medici and their kinsmen, allies, and clients, with a corresponding fixation on fiscal privileges and exemptions-a state of affairs perfected in the sixteenth century under the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. To the liberal mind imbued with the Weberian ideal of a formally guaranteed legal order and impartial administration, the patrimonial state really adds up to misgovernment, institutionalized greed, and deep-dyed corruption, making it incompatible \\rith the idealized modem administrative state. Historicists like Giorgio Chittolini see things differently. Invoking the antistatist vision of Otto Brunner and his school, the generative structuralism of Pierre Bourdieu, and the microstoria of anthropologically inclined Italian historians, Chittolini argues that it is ahistorical to dub clientelism, factions, and feuds as antimodern, dysfunctional associations and thus as evidence of statelessness. These collective practices were not only treated as accepted means of negotiating authority, power, and obligations but in addition they "might better be understood and judged in historical terms as elements of cohesion and consolidation of the state" in Renaissance and early modem Italy (p. 51).