CHAPTER XVII

A REVIEW OF THE STATES OF ITALY (ABOUT 1300)

Now that the two great actors, whose long-drawn quarrel has been the main thread of Italian history, have made their exits, and left us, as it were, with a sense of emptiness, it becomes necessary to call the roll and make a better acquaintance with the lesser dramatis personæ, who step to the front of the stage and carry on the plot of history. The programme reads as follows:—

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
The PapacyAn absentee.
The EmpireA shadow.
The Kingdom of NaplesHouse of Anjou reigning.
The Kingdom of SicilyHouse of Aragon reigning.
FlorenceA Guelf democracy.
SienaA Ghibelline city.
PisaA Ghibelline city.
GenoaA maritime aristocracy.
VeniceA maritime oligarchy.
MilanA Lombard commune.
SavoyA feudal county.
Guelf cities of Tuscany, communes of Lombardy, petty marquisates of the northwest, etc.

In the South, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies has already been torn in two. Charles of Anjou, the conqueror of the Hohenstaufens, clever, shrewd, and capable as he was, had overreached himself. He entertained great ambitions, and was dreaming of Constantinople and its imperial crown, when a rebellion known as the Sicilian Vespers broke out in Sicily. The country had been overrun with French office-holders and French soldiers, and the Sicilians, who regretted the Hohenstaufens, had reached the utmost limit of endurance. The whole island had become a powder-box; it was a mere matter of accident where and how the powder would ignite. A French soldier insulted a woman on her way to church. In a moment he was killed and his fellow soldiers massacred to a man. "Death to the French!" resounded over the island, and the infuriated Sicilians put all to the sword. The revolutionists needed a leader, and, as the old Norman blood royal still survived in Manfred's daughter, they invited her husband, King Pedro of Aragon, to be their king. Pedro accepted, and he and his descendants, the House of Aragon, made good their claim to the throne of Sicily against all the attempts of the House of Anjou and of the lords suzerain, the Popes, to oust them. By this revolution, Sicily was separated from the Kingdom of Naples for more than a hundred years.

In the centre of Italy there was great disorder. The lords of the Papal States remained at Avignon, and attempted to govern their dominions by legates; but though their sovereignty nominally extended from the Tyrrhene Sea to the Adriatic, they were impotent to enforce it. There was no unity; each town was governed separately by a papal legate, by a powerful baron, or by a communal government. Rome itself, which in the absence of the Popes had dwindled to a little city of ruins, towers, churches, vineyards, and vegetable gardens, was in constant disorder. The towns near by were often faithful to their allegiance, but across the Apennines the obstinate little cities between the mountains and the sea were almost always independent. At present there is nothing of sufficient interest to prevent us from treating Rome as carelessly as the Popes did, and passing hurriedly through to Florence and the independent communes of Northern Italy where we must pause.

Prior to the wars between the Empire and the Papacy feudal institutions had prevailed there, though with less vigour in Northern Italy than elsewhere in Europe, and all the land had been divided up into various fiefs, in which counts and marquesses held sway. During those wars the cities shook off Imperial dominion and got rid of Imperial rulers, and began their careers as independent Italian communes. Most of these cities were of old Roman foundation, but the time of Hildebrand and Henry IV may be deemed their nativity, as then they first appear in Italian history as individuals. All these towns were little republics, each with its own character, but all conforming more or less to a general type. Within massive walls the city clustered round two main points, the cathedral, which was flanked by belfry and baptistery, and the piazza (public square), on which fronted the Palazzo Pubblico, the city hall, where the magistrates had their offices. Round about and radiating off, houses and palaces, grim and heavy, stood high above the narrow streets. Scattered here and there scores of private fortresses raised their great towers thirty yards and more into the air. Street, palace, tower, all were obviously ready for street warfare, waiting on tiptoe for the bells to ring.

The citizens were divided into three classes. The upper class included the old nobility, the high clergy, the large merchants, the rich bankers; the middle class included the petty merchants, the tradesfolk, the master artisans; and below them came the miscellaneous many. In some cities the nobility, allying itself with the proletariat, held the political power. But in the more democratic cities, like Florence, the trades and crafts controlled the government. In Florence there were seven greater guilds,—judges and notaries, wool-merchants, refiners and dyers of foreign wool, silk-dealers, money-changers, physicians and apothecaries, furriers; and fourteen lesser guilds,—butchers, shoemakers, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and so on. Every freeman was obliged to belong to one of the guilds; Dante was enrolled in the guild of physicians and apothecaries. Trades and crafts descended from father to son, and each guild was divided into masters, journeymen, and apprentices.

In the government, executive, legislative, and judicial powers were distinguished, but not strictly separated. The executive power was vested in one man, or in several men, who were assisted by a kind of privy council. This council superintended various matters of public concern, such as weights, measures, highways, and fines. There was also a larger council, to which, as well as to public office generally, only the enfranchised citizens were eligible. These privileged persons were never more than a small fraction of the population; in Florence, for instance, barely three thousand, even in her populous days. Finally, there was a parliament or assembly of all the free citizens, which met on the piazza, and shouted approval or disapproval to such questions as were submitted to it.

In the earlier days the joint executives were called consuls. Their places were not easy. If they were fair to all, they displeased their own party; if unfair to the opposite party, they were liable to retaliation. The difficulties of partisanship led to the appointment of a new officer, the podestà. The name and idea came from the governors put in the Imperial cities by Barbarossa. The podestà, who was elected by the citizens, supplanted the consuls in all their more important functions; he became the head of both the civil and the military service, a kind of governor. He was a nobleman, chosen, in the hope of avoiding local partisanship, from some other Italian city. The citizens, if Guelf, of course chose a Guelf; if Ghibelline, a Ghibelline. When the podestà's term of office, which was usually six months or a year, began, he came to the city bringing two knights, several judges, councillors, and notaries, a seneschal and attendants, and in the piazza took his oath of office,—to observe the laws, to do justice, and to wrong no man. His duties, and often his movements, were carefully prescribed; sometimes he was not allowed to enter any house in the city other than the palace prepared for him. At the end of his term he was obliged to linger for a time, in order to give anybody who might be aggrieved an opportunity to lodge a complaint against him and obtain redress. Such was the ordinary form of communal government; but the constitutions varied in different cities, and in each city shifted every few years, as class feeling, partisan enmity, or new men suggested changes.

The prosperity and power of these communes came from trade, and show how trade prospered and riches accumulated. Some merchant guilds carried on a very extensive business. Take the wool guild of Florence. Tuscany yielded a poor quality of wool, and as it was impossible to weave good cloth from poor wool, these Florentine merchants imported raw wool from Tunis, Barbary, Spain, Flanders, and England, wove it into cloth so deftly that foreigners could not compete with them, and exported it to the principal markets of Europe. Trade with the North, however, was less important than trade with the East. Merchandise was carried over the seas more easily than over the Alps, and in many respects the products of the East were better and more varied than those of northern Europe. The Italians loaded the galleys of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa with silken and woollen stuffs, oil, wine, pitch, tar, and common metals, and brought back from Alexandria, Constantinople, and the ports of Asia Minor and Syria, pearls, gold, spices, sugar, Eastern silk, wool and cotton, goatskins and dyes, and sometimes Eastern slaves. Such a wide commerce outstripped the capacity of barter and cash, and gave rise to a system of banking, with its attendant credits and bills of exchange. The quick-witted Florentines excelled at this business, and great banking houses, like the Bardi and the Peruzzi, had branches or correspondents in all the chief cities.

This large commerce in face of the obstacles that barred its way seems extraordinary. A city like Florence, for instance, especially in the earlier days, was greatly hampered by the conditions about her. Outside her walls, within the radius of a dozen or twenty miles, were castles manned by arrogant nobles, who made traffic unsafe. They would not conform to the new economic condition of society except upon compulsion. Rival cities refused to let Florentine wares pass through their territories without payment of ruinous tolls. Wars were waged to moderate these exactions. Or, again, war was necessary to enforce the rights of Florentine citizens in other cities. Moreover, each city had its own system of weights and measures, its own coinage; each imposed customs on all wares entering its gates, in earlier days so much a cart-load, afterwards a percentage of the value. On all highways, at all bridges and fords, there were tolls to be paid. From city to city a merchant had to change his money, until in later times certain coins, like the Florentine florin, passed current everywhere; and sometimes, on entering the gates, he was obliged to adopt a distinguishing badge, as, for instance, according to the usage at Bologna, putting a piece of red wax on his thumb-nail. These were the fetters placed on trade in time of peace; but peace itself was transitory and uncertain. Apart from the wars with the Emperor, the cities periodically fought the feudal nobility, or one another. Venice made war on Ravenna, Pisa on Lucca, Vicenza on Treviso, Fano on Pesaro, Verona on Padua, Modena on Bologna, and the greater cities, like Milan and Florence, on any or all of their respective neighbours. When a city had no absorbing war abroad, factions fought at home. Burghers and nobles barricaded the streets, manned the towers, rang the bells, shot and hacked one another with spasmodic fury. The burghers generally won. They then banished hundreds of their adversaries, and made laws against them. In some cities a register was kept to record the names of the nobles whose democracy was suspected; in others, as in Lucca, nobles were excluded from all share in the government, and were not allowed to testify against burghers. In Pisa, if there was disquiet in the streets, the nobles were obliged to stay indoors.

These factions called themselves Guelfs and Ghibellines. At first Guelfs were the burghers of the communes and partisans of the Papacy, and Ghibellines partisans of the Empire and the feudal system; but subsequently the terms merely served to distinguish political parties, whose platforms, as we should say, shifted with questions of the hour. Even when these two factions were at peace, they distinguished themselves by different badges and fashions. The merlons of the Guelf battlements were square, those of the Ghibelline swallow-tailed. Good party men wore caps of diverse pattern, did their hair differently, cut their bread and folded their napkins in different ways. It was enough that one side should bow, take an oath, harness a horse, in one mode, for the other side to start a contrary fashion.

The growth of population, of property, of commerce, however, shows that history may easily dwell too much upon fighting and war. In these petty wars and street frays, the numbers engaged were few, and but little blood was shed. Most of the fighting was a consequence of economic difficulties. It was the mediæval equivalent of strikes, lock-outs, boycotts, undersellings, rivalries, riots, and other phenomena of modern industry.

The maritime cities were in a very different position from the inland cities, and had a different history. They enjoyed great advantages for trade. No feudal barons could bar the sea, and pirates and infidels were not serious impediments. Greater commercial prosperity, however, begot more bitter commercial jealousy. Genoa hated Pisa; no Genoese sailor could endure the cut of a Pisan sail. Both cities had a large trade in the Levant, and being so near each other became deadly rivals. They fought spasmodically for years, from the Gulf of Genoa to the Black Sea, and at last came to the death grapple. The time was unfortunate for Ghibelline Pisa, as a Guelf league had been attacking her on land. The decisive battle was fought off the island of Meloria, a few miles from the mouth of the Arno. The Genoese, who outnumbered the Pisans, won a great victory, destroyed or captured many galleys, and took ten thousand prisoners (1284). Pisa never recovered from this blow. Florence and Lucca took immediate advantage of it to unite with Genoa, and force Pisa to submit to a Guelf government; and from this time on greedy Florence, like a hawk, kept her eyes fixed on poor Pisa, impatient for the time when she should seize her prey.

Genoa remained a republic, active, eager, impetuous, torn by factions and subject to many vicissitudes, but lack of space compels us to leave her and pass on to where "Venice sits in state, throned on her hundred isles." She, queen of the sea, had even a more lavish portion of individuality than her sister cities, individual as they all were, and hardly belonged to Italy, so completely did she hold herself aloof from the two great interests of mediæval Italy, the Empire and the Papacy. No cries of Pope's men and king's men, of Guelf and Ghibelline, disturbed the Grand Canal or the Piazza of St. Mark's; no feudal incumbrances hampered her mercantile spirit, nor did papal anathemas cause a single Venetian ship to shift her course. Venice had long remained loyal to Constantinople, and even after all political dependence had ceased, was, in character and aspect, more a Constantinople of the West than an Italian city, a grown-up daughter, more beautiful than her beautiful mother, who, living her own triumphant and unfilial life, still retained many of her mother's traits. Untroubled by sentiment, even in the Crusades, Venice always kept steadily in view her fixed purpose of increasing her commerce and of securing foreign markets; and this purpose shaped her political actions, and also, indirectly, the form of her government.

Originally the citizens, assembled in public meeting, elected the Doge, and exercised a right to vote on important political matters; but the great families soon acquired control, and little by little turned the government into an oligarchy. The first great step was taken in Barbarossa's time, just when the Lombard cities were struggling to free themselves from Imperial dominion. A Great Council of four hundred and eighty members was established, to which were given the powers of legislation, appointment, electing the Doge, and filling vacancies in itself. The franchises of the people were all taken away and the oligarchy left supreme. This oligarchy of merchant princes, in whom patriotism, pride of place, and love of gain harmoniously accorded, was an exceedingly competent body of men. The greatness of Venice was their greatness, and they pursued it devotedly. Beginning early in life these patricians were trained for their duties by service in the navy and in the merchant marine, or by employment in the government of the various cities, islands, and territories included in the long stretch of coastwise empire. Knowing that Venice lived by commerce they made every effort by war, diplomacy, and private enterprise, to extend that commerce. After the conquest and division of the Eastern Empire (1204) they became more eager than ever for a monopoly of trade with the Levant, and inevitably came into deadly rivalry with Genoa, also passionately eager to hold the gorgeous East in fee.

The wars with Genoa, destructive though they were for the time being, were of service to the aristocracy, for they made the Venetians appreciate the value of a compact governing body; and the aristocracy took advantage of that appreciation to tighten its hold on the government.

Throughout the thirteenth century the Great Council, though it consisted entirely, or almost entirely, of patricians and elected its own members, had been open to all classes. Any citizen, however unlikely to be elected, was eligible. At the close of the century the patricians secured the enactment of a series of measures, which in substance divided the citizens into two classes, those whose ancestors had sat in the Great Council, and those whose ancestors had not, and decreed that only members of the first class should be eligible. This legislation is known as the closing of the Great Council. As all those who were eligible naturally wished to become members, the Council gradually increased until it finally numbered over fifteen hundred. The patricians also further curtailed the powers of the Doge, divided the various functions of government among the main subdivisions of the Council,—the Senate, the Council of Forty, the Doge's cabinet, and the Council of Ten,—and gave to the State the definite form of government which it maintained to its end.

From Venice we must pass by Milan and the cities of the Po, to where in the extreme Northwest the Counts of Savoy, perched on the Alps, maintained a precarious sovereignty over both slopes, with no resources except the muscles of their mountaineers and the possession of Alpine passes. Little did the proud maritime cities, Genoa and Venice, the great inland cities, Milan and Florence, and Rome least of all, suspect that these poor counts would one day consolidate all the territory from the foot of the mountains to the Riviera in a compact little kingdom (Piedmont), and from that as a pedestal, step to still higher honours. The House of Savoy runs aristocratically back into legend; but about the year 1000, a certain Humbert of the White Hand, emerging from historic obscurity, obtained the city of Turin and part of Piedmont, as a marriage portion for his son, and thereby secured to his house a footing in Italy (1045). In the course of another century or so these Savoyards in a succession of Humberts and Amedeos, brave, shrewd, and usually successful men, extended their dominions by war, by marriage, and by bargains. They made the most of their position as door-keepers to Italy, and exacted various privileges from needy Emperors, as the price of passing the Alps. They fought rival counts, waged innumerable petty wars, and rightly or wrongly acquired territories which are now parts of France, Switzerland, and Italy. The succession of counts reads like any other mediæval genealogy; and their exploits, raids, and sieges viewed from this cold distance have a somewhat monotonous similarity; but survival proves the worth and valour of the stock, and when after long centuries the people of Italy had need of princes, the House of Savoy was the only noble house that had retained power and respect. It is a brilliant example of the truth of the saying that those who have been faithful over a few things shall be masters over many.

Such were the political divisions of Italy in this transition period which intervenes between the departing Middle Ages and the incoming Modern World.