The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

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.

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 nobles, 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, éd. fran. 1886, ii, 546), that "under the new régime as under the old, Egypt and Syria remained open to the Venetian merchants." It is hard to reconcile these data with the assertions 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 illustrated 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, passim.

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 municipal 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 municipal improvements.

As to Spanish misrule, see Cantù, Storia degli Italiani, cap. 139, ed. pop. ix, 512; Sismondi, Républiques, 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.