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.