THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EVOLUTION

§ 1

In the twelfth century, then, we find in the full flush of life a number of prosperous Italian republics or "communes," closely resembling in many respects the City-States of ancient Greece. The salient differences were (1) the Christian Church, with its wealth[541] and its elaborate organisation; (2) the pretensions of the Empire; and (3) the presence of feudal nobles, some of whom were first imposed by the German emperors on the cities, and who, after their exodus and their life as castle-holders, had in nearly every case compromised with the citizens, spending some months of every year in their town palaces by stipulation of the citizens themselves. All of these differentia counted for the worse to Italy, in comparison with Hellas, as aggravations of the uncured evil of internal strife. The source of their strength—separateness and the need to struggle—was at the same time the source of their bane; for at no time do we find the Italian republics contemplating durable peace even as an ideal, or regarding political union as aught save a temporary expedient of the state of war.

On the familiar assumption of "race character" we should accordingly proceed to decide that the Italians, by getting mixed with the Teutons, had lost the "instinct of union" which built up Rome. Those who credit "Teutonic blood" with the revival never think of saddling it with the later ruinous strifes of cities and parties, or with the vices of the "Italian character." The rational explanation is, of course, that there was now neither a sufficient preponderance of strength in any one State to admit of its unifying Italy by conquest, nor such a concurrence of conditions as could enable any State to become thus preponderant; while on the other hand the Empire and the Church, each fighting for its own hand, were perpetual fountains of discord. The factions of Guelph (papal) and Ghibelline[542] (imperial) stereotyped and intensified for centuries every proclivity to strife inherent in the Italian populations.

All the cities alike were at once industrial and military, with the exception of Rome; and for all alike a career of mere plunder was out of the question, though every city sought to enlarge its territory. Forcible unification could conceivably be wrought only by the emperor or the Papacy; and in the nature of things these powers became enemies, carrying feud into the heart of every city in Italy, as well as setting each on one or the other side according as the majority swayed for the moment. At times, as after the destruction of Milan by Frederick Barbarossa, hatred of the foreigner and despot could unite a number of cities in a powerful league; but though the emperor was worsted there was no excising the trouble of the separate interests of the bishops and the nobles, or that of the old jealousies and hatreds of many of the cities for each other. Pope Innocent IV, after the death of Frederick II in 1250, turned against the Papacy many of the Milanese by his arrogance. They had made immense sacrifices for the Guelph cause; and their reward was to be threatened with excommunication for an ecclesiastical dispute.[543] The Christian religion not only did not avail to make Italians less madly quarrelsome than pagan Greeks: it embittered and complicated every difference; and if the cities could have agreed to keep out the Germans, the Papacy would not have let them. Commonly it played them one against the other, preaching union only when there was a question of a crusade.

As a civilising lore or social science the religion of professed love and fraternity, itself a theatre of divisions and discords,[544] counted literally for less than nothing against the passions of ignorance, egoism, and patriotism; for ignorant all orders of the people still were—more ignorant than the Greeks of Athens—in the main matters of political knowledge and self-knowledge.[545] Yet such is the creative power of free intelligence even in a state of strife—given but the conditions of economic furtherance and variety of life and of culture-contact—that in this warring Italy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there grew up a civilisation almost as manifold as that of Hellas itself. The elements of variety, of culture, and of competition were present in nearly as potent a degree. In the north, in particular, the Lombard, and Tuscan, and other cities differed widely in their industries. Florence, besides being one of the great centres of European banking, was eminently the city of various occupations, manufacturing and trading in woollens and silks and gold brocades, working in gold and jewelry, the metals, and leather, and excelling in dyes. In 1266 the reformed constitution specified twelve arti or crafts, seven major and five minor, the latter list being later increased to fourteen.[546] Pisa, beginning as a commercial seaport, trading with the East, whither she exported the iron of Elba, became the first great seat of the woollen manufacture.[547] Milan, besides silks and woollens, manufactured in particular weapons and armour. Genoa had factories of wool, cotton, silk, maroquin, leather, embroidery, and silver and gold thread.[548] Bologna was in a special degree a culture city, with its school of law, and as such would have its special minor industries. But indeed every one of the countless Italian republics, with its specialty of dialect, of life, and of outward aspect, must have had something of its own to contribute to the complex whole.[549]

In the south the Norman kingdom set up in the eleventh century meant yet another norm of life, for there Frederick II established the University of Naples; and Saracen contact told alike on thought and imagination. All through these regions there now reigned something like a common speech, the skeleton of old Latin newly suppled and newly clothed upon; and for all educated men the Latin itself was the instrument of thought and intercourse. For them, too, the Church and the twofold law constituted a common ground of culture and discipline. On this composite soil, under heats of passion and stresses of warring energies, there gradually grew the many-seeded flower of a new literature.

Gradual indeed was the process. Italy, under stress of struggle, was still relatively backward at a time when Germany and France, and even England, under progressive conditions quickened with studious life;[550] and there was a great intellectual movement in France, in particular, in the twelfth century, when Italy had nothing of the kind to show, save as regarded the important part played by the law school of Bologna in educating jurists for the whole of western Europe. For other developments there still lacked the needed conditions, both political and social. The first economic furtherance given to mental life by the cities seems to have been the endowment of law schools and chronicle-writers; the schools of Ravenna and Bologna, and the first chronicles, dating from the eleventh century. Salerno had even earlier had a medical school, long famous, which may or may not have been municipally endowed.[551] To the Church, as against her constant influence for discord and her early encouragement of illiteracy,[552] must be credited a share in these beginnings. After the law school of Bologna (whence in 1222 was founded that of Padua, by a secession of teachers and students at strife with the citizens) had added medicine and philology to its chairs, the Papacy gave it a faculty of theology; and in Rome itself the Church had established a school of law. The first great literary fruit of this intellectual ferment is the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), a performance in which the revived study of Aristotle, set up by the stimulus of Saracen culture, is brought by a capacious and powerful mind to the insuperable task of philosophising at once the Christian creed and the problems of Christendom. Close upon this, the Latin expression of accepted medieval thought, comes the great achievement of Dante, wherein a new genius for the supreme art of rhythmic speech has preserved for ever the profound vibration of all the fierce and passionate Italian life of the Middle Ages. In his own spirit he carries it all, save its vice and levity. Its pitiless cruelty, its intellectuality, its curious observation, its ingrained intolerance, its piercing flashes of tenderness, its capacity for intense and mystic devotion, its absolute dogmatism in every field of thought, the whole pell-mell of its vehement experience, throbs through every canto of his welded strain. And no less does he incarnate for ever its fatal incapacity for some political compromise. For Dante, politics is first and last a question of the dominance of his faction: his fellow-citizens are for him Guelphs or Ghibellines, and he shares the Florentine rabies against rival or even neighbouring towns; his imperialism serving merely to extend the field of blind strife, never to subject strife to the play of reason. Exiled for faction by the other faction, he foreshadows the doom of Florence.

§ 2

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.

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 nobles 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) nobles 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.

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 noble 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 circumstances the concurrent pressure of all the other causes mentioned could very well suffice to make emancipation 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 noble 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 classes 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-class and middle-class citizens with the franchise, not the mass 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-class 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 substituting any ideal of a wider union.

§ 3

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 ProvenÇal 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 class or a class 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 ProvenÇal 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.

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.

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 criticism of this well-marshalled passage 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 illustrations 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, constituting 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 constituting an endowment of research. If the revival of classic 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 LÆtus, who almost alone of his class 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 class 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 classes 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 class. 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 class away from literature;[589] and only men of the middle class 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—Titian, 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 Marseilles 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).