The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

The régime of the local tyrant now rapidly developed. On the fall of the Pisan tyrant rose that of Lucca, Castruccio Castracani, the great type, after Ezzelino, of the Italian despot-adventurer of the Renaissance. Such a leader was too dangerous an antagonist to such a corporation as that of Florence—once more (1323) reconstructed on an upper-class basis, with a scrutinised franchise, election by ballot, and a more complicated system of offices than ever.[615] To command them against Castruccio, they called in the Catalonian general Cardona, who utterly failed them. He took the course of so handling and placing his troops as to force those citizens in the army who could afford it to buy leave of absence, and was finally defeated with his wilfully weakened army. Florence was driven to call in the King of Naples, at the price of conferring the signoria on his son. Meanwhile the new emperor Ludwig, called in by Castruccio, plundered the Milanese and imprisoned their lords, the Visconti, who had been of his own party; extorted 150,000 florins from the Pisans; tortured, to extort treasure, a Ghibelline who had given up to him a fortress in the papal State; and generally showed the Italians, before he withdrew, that a German tyrant could beat even a native at once in treachery, cruelty, and avarice. Castruccio and the son of the King of Naples, who had proved a bad bargain, died about the same time as did the reigning Visconti at Milan, the reigning tyrant at Mantua, and Can' Grande of Verona, the successor of Ezzelino, who had conquered Padua. Again the encouraged middle class of Florence recast their constitution (1328), annulling the old councils and electing two new: a Council of the "People," composed of 300 middle-class citizens, and a Council of the Commune, composed of 250 of both orders. Elsewhere the balance inclined to anarchy and despotism, as of old. A new emperor, John of Bohemia, offered (1330) a new chance of pacification, eagerly welcomed, to a harassed people, in large part shaken by military dangers in its devotion to republicanism, and weary of local tyrannies. But against the new imperialism Florence stoutly held out, with the aid of Lombard Ghibellines; the new emperor, leaving Italy, sold his influence everywhere to local tyrants, and once more everything was in suspense.

At length, in 1336, there occurred the new phenomenon of a combination between Florence and Venice against a new tyrant of Padua and Lucca, who had betrayed Florence; but the Venetians in turn did the same thing, leaving the Florentines half a million of florins in debt; whereupon they were attacked by their old enemies the Pisans, who heavily defeated them and captured Lucca, for which Florence had been fighting. It was in this stage of demoralisation that the Florentines (1342) suddenly forced their signoria to give the war-lordship to the French Gaultier de Brienne, "Duke of Athens," formerly the right-hand man of the son of the King of Naples, who had now been sent to them as a new commander by that king, on the request of the Commission of Twenty charged with the war. The commission elected him to the sole command in order to save themselves[616] and pacify the people; and his natural associates, the old nobility, counselled him to seize the government, which he gradually did, beheading and exiling the discredited middle-class leaders, and so winning the support of the populace, who, on his putting himself for open election to the signoria for one year, acclaimed him to the function for life. To this pass had come the see-saw of middle class (popolo) and upper class, with a populace held in pupilage.

Sismondi, in his Short History, pp. 147, 148, seems to represent the episode as wholly one of wanton popular caprice and venality, even representing that Duke Gaultier was only by chance in the city. The narrative of Machiavelli explicitly sets forth how he came through the appeal of the Commission of Twenty; how the nobility and some of the bourgeoisie conspired with him; and how the populace were worked upon by the conspirators. The public acclamation, bad as it was, had been carefully subsidised. The middle class, whose war policy, however, had brought the city into such danger, were far more guilty than the mostly unenfranchised populace. Sismondi had latterly an undue faith in the principle of middle-class rule. (Cp. Mr. Boulting's Memoir in his recast of the Républiques, p. xxiv.) In his Histoire des républiques italiennes (v, 329-53) he sets forth the financial corruption of the middle-class rulers (p. 330), and recognises that they and the aristocrats were alike dangerous to liberty. Cp. as to his change of front, F. Morin, Origines de la démocratie, 3e édit. 1865, introd. pp. 17-18.

Within a year, partly on the sudden pressure of a scarcity, the tyrant was overthrown, after having wrung from Florence 400,000 florins and infuriated all classes against him and his race. Not the least of his offences was his conclusion of a peace with Pisa, by which she for a given period was to rule over Lucca. The rising against him was universal. Three of his henchmen were literally torn to pieces with hands and teeth: a madness of fury which was only too profoundly in keeping with the self-abandonment that had placed the tyrant in power. The political organism was beginning to disintegrate. A new constitution was set up, with a leaning to aristocracy, which was soon upset by the middle class, who in turn established yet another. The nobles, believing the populace to be hostile to the bourgeoisie, attempted anew a revolution, and were utterly crushed. And now began, according to the greatest of the publicists of the Renaissance, the final enfeeblement of Florence, in that the ruin of the nobility, whose one merit had been their fighting power, led to the abandonment of all military exercise.[617] Yet Florence a generation later made vigorous war under a "committee," and in the meantime at least the city tasted domestic peace and grew in civilisation. And though we doubtless exaggerate when we conceive of a transition from what we are apt to figure as the fierce and laughterless Florence of Dante to the gay Florence of the Medici, it is hard to hold that life was worsened when men changed the ways which made them collectively capable of rending with their teeth the carcases of those they hated, and which left the Viscontis of Milan capable of torturing their political prisoners to death through forty days.

Still the process of disintegration and reintegration proceeded. The tyrants of the smaller cities usually established themselves by the aid of professional mercenaries, German and other, whom, when their funds failed, they turned loose to shift for themselves, having in the meantime disarmed the citizens. These companies, swelled by others disbanded after the English wars in France, ravaged and plundered Italy from Montferrat to Naples, and were everywhere bought off save by Florence. Only the Pope and the greater tyrants could keep them regularly in pay; and by their means the Viscontis became lords of sixteen cities of Lombardy, while the Papacy began to build up a military power. Naples, on the other hand, continuously degenerated; while Genoa and Venice exhausted each other in deadly strife for the commercial monopoly of the East; and Pisa leaned to the Viscontis, who ultimately obtained its headship.

Rome, popeless, and domineered over by warring nobles, had its brief vision of a republic under the dreamer Cola di Rienzi, who at last fell by the hand of the masses whom he had for a brief space hypnotised. Neither he nor they were meet for the destiny they fain would have fulfilled; and had people and leader alike been worthier, they would ultimately have failed to master the forces joined against them. Rienzi's brief, and on some sides remarkably vigorous, administration in 1346-47 was not wholly unworthy of his ideal of "the good estate"; he seems, indeed, to have ruled the Roman territory with an efficiency that recalled the ancient State; and his early successes against the nobles tell of unexpected weakness on their side and energy on that of the people. His dream of an Italian federation, too, remains to prove that he was no mere mob-leader. But had he been as stable in purpose and policy as he was heady and capricious, and had the Roman populace been as steadfast as it was turbulent, the forces of division represented by the nobles and the Papacy would ultimately have overthrown any republican polity. What Florence could not compass, Rome could not maintain. Two centuries before, Arnold of Brescia had fallen, after fifteen years of popularity, as soon as pope and emperor joined hands against him; and the papalism of Rienzi was as fatal to him as anti-papalism had been to Arnold. Had Rienzi had his way, the Pope would have at once returned to Rome; and where the Papacy was, no republic could endure, however strong and sober were its head. And Rienzi was not sober. After his overthrow in 1347 and his seven years of wandering exile, he was restored solely by the choice and as the agent of the Pope at Avignon; and his death in a tumult after four months of renewed office was the end of his cause.

In Florence the disintegration went on apace. A new emperor, Charles IV, charged the city 100,000 florins (1355) for her immunities, leaving all men hopeless as ever of the Empire as a political solution; and when the crimes of the Viscontis drove cities and Papacy to call Charles in against them (1368), he did but use the opportunity to levy blackmail wherever he went. Later (1375), the Papacy combined with Florence against the reigning Visconti, but only to betray its ally. And now occurred what for a time must have seemed a vital revolution in Italian affairs; the infuriated Florentines suddenly allying themselves with Visconti, the enemy of the day before, against the treacherous Pope, and framing a league with Siena, Lucca, and Pisa against the Church that Florence had so long sustained. Eighty towns in ten days drove out their legates; and furious reprisals broke out on all hands, till the very Pope at Avignon was fain to come to stay the universal warfare. Now, however, an aristocratic and papalist party in Florence bitterly opposed "The Eight" who managed the war, the aristocracy having gravitated to the papal side; and at length exhaustion and the absolute instability of all alliances brought about a peace in which most of the cities, freed from the Papacy—now become an affair of two mutually anathematising heads—fell once more under local tyrants. In the hour of extreme need the Papacy was, if possible, a worse influence than the emperor; nowhere was to be found a force of stability save in the tyrannies, which were merely unstable with a difference.

Florence, still republican and still obstinately prosperous, stood as a strange anomaly in the general transformation. But she had now reached the stage when the long-ignored populace—the multitude beneath the popolo—made up of handworkers with no nominal incorporation or franchise, was able to press its claims as against the other orders, which in turn were divided, as of old, by the jealousies between the major and minor middle-class guilds and between the new nobility of capital and their former equals. Refused the status of incorporation, the ciompi ("chums" or "mates," from the French compère) made their insurrection in turn, finding for the nonce in a wool-carder a leader of the best quality the time could show, who carried his point, was chosen head magistrate, enforced order among his own partisans, and established a new magistracy, with three representatives of the major arts, three of the minor (1378).

Among other things, the ciompi demanded that interest should no longer be paid on the public debt; that the principal be paid off in twelve years, and that no "small people" should be sued for debts under fifty florins for the next two years (see Trollope, ii, 216). The trouble was that the brains in the movement, good as they were, could not permanently control the spirit of riot. Sismondi, after arguing (Short History, p. 182) in the Whig manner that "those who have not learnt to think, those to whom manual labour leaves no time for meditation, ought not to undertake the guidance of their fellow-citizens," amusingly proceeds (p. 185) to point to the capacity of Lando as showing "how much a free government spreads sound sense and elevated sentiments among even the lowest classes of society." Immediately afterwards he has to record how the upper classes fell into fresh disorders.

But where the educated burgesses and nobles had failed in the science of self-government, the mass of untrained toilers[618] could not succeed. Suborned doubtless by the other classes, they rebelled against the man whom they had made leader, and were by him promptly and capably suppressed, many being exiled; whereupon in due course he was himself deprived of his post by the old parties, and the new order was annulled (1382). After fresh strifes and proscriptions among the aristocracy themselves, all traces of the popular rising were effaced, and the aristocracy of wealth was definitely re-established.