What had happened was the attainment of the capitalistic stage and the enthronement of capital in the republican State. In place of strifes between wealth and nobility there had arisen the strife of capital and labour, the new aristocracy of wealth having in large part taken the place of that of descent. The latter transition had occurred nearly simultaneously in the other remaining Republics. Genoa had substituted factions with the names of new wealthy families for the old. In Siena, where the bourgeoisie dispossessed the nobles, they were in turn assailed by "reformers" of the lower class, who were finally defeated in battle and exiled wholesale (1385). Meantime the hereditary tyrants of Milan, the Visconti, with their singular continuity of capacity, had grown stronger than ever, had built up a native and scientific military system, and more than ever menaced all their neighbours. Florence called in aid successively from Germany and France (1390-91); but the Milanese army triumphed over all; and the skilled adventurer Sir John Hawkwood, the hired general of the Florentine troops, could not hold his ground. The Emperor, as usual, was satisfied to take payment for non-intervention; and the reigning Visconti, Gian Galeazza, invested by the Emperor with the titles of Duke of Mantua and Count of Pavia, and the lordship of twenty-six cities, had by the year 1402 further compassed, by all manner of fraud and force, the mastery of Pisa, Perugia, Genoa, Siena, Lucca, and Bologna, dying of the plague at the height of his power. His sons being boys, his power broke up among his generals, to be in large part recovered later, however, by his second son, who first assassinated the elder.
At this stage Venice once more intervenes, taking up the cause of Verona against the tyrant of Padua, whom, having defeated him by her carefully-chosen and supervised mercenaries, she put to death (1406). He had been the ally of Florence; but Florence let him fall, being now wholly bent on reconquering Pisa, her natural seaport. Pisa, in turn, always invincibly opposed to Florentine rule, was on commercial grounds backed by Genoa, now under the nominal rule of a representative of the King of France, who, however, sought to sell Pisa to the Florentines, and did receive from them 200,000 florins. Still resisting, the Pisans recalled an exile to lead them; and he in turn sold them for 50,000 florins, this time to their complete undoing. Refusing all Florentine favours, the bulk of the ruling middle-class abandoned the city for ever, taking much of its special commerce with them. Meantime, the kingdom of Naples, under an energetic king, Ladislaus, had acquired most of the States of the distracted Church, menaced Florence, and was pressing her hard, despite French support, when Ladislaus died (1414). By this time the new Visconti was establishing himself at Milan by means of mercenaries, commanded for him by well-chosen captains. Six times were the Florentines defeated by his forces; till his capable general, Carmagnola, whom he had disgraced, revealed to the Council of Venice his master's intention to attack them; and Venice joined Florence to crush the tyrant. Carmagnola, acting slackly, met ill success, and was therefore executed by his Venetian masters. But the Visconti too finally died defeated, leaving his power to a new adventurer, Francesco Sforza, who had married his daughter, and had fought both for and against him in the endless imbroglio of Italian conspiracy.
Florentine republicanism was now near its euthanasia. By the fatal law of empire, the perpetual enterprise of destroying other men's freedom left Florence unfit to use or to defend her own; and the tyrants of Pisa became meet for the yoke of tyranny. The family of Medici, growing rapidly rich, began to use the power of capital as elsewhere less astute adventurers used the power of the sword. From the overthrow of the ciompi party in 1382 to 1434, the Republic had been ruled by a faction of the new commercial aristocracy with substantial unity; and the period is claimed as the most prosperous, intellectually and materially, though not the most progressive, in Florentine history.
See above, p. 226-27. Perrens (Histoire de Florence, trans. cited, pp. 171-72, 202) thinks otherwise, but does not blame the oligarchy. Sismondi, in his larger and earlier work (Républiques, ed. 1826, xi, 2), represents that Florence ceased to be great under the Medici; cp. however, xii, 52, and the different note in the reactionary Short History (p. 224), where he deems that in this period were born and formed "all those great men" whose glory is credited to the Medici. This holds good of Brunelleschi the architect, Masallio the artist, and Ghiberti the sculptor, as well as of Poggio and other scholars. Cp. Zeller, Histoire d'Italie, 1853, p. 309, and the list given by Perrens, Histoire de Florence, trans. cited, p. 456. M. Perrens pronounces that under Lorenzo "the decadence of sculpture is visible, and still more that of architecture," both being too rapidly produced from motives of gain (La civilisation florentine du 13e siècle au 16e, 1893, p. 190). Here he follows Romohr (see Histoire de Florence, last cited). Lorenzo, he notes, had the reactionary belief, odd on the part of a merchant, that only nobles could produce perfect work, they only having the necessary leisure. He accordingly ignored all plebeian genius, such as that of Leonardo da Vinci.
Cosimo de' Medici, descendant of a democrat, was grown too rich to be one in his turn; and between him and the Albizzi, who led the ruling faction, there grew up one of the old and typical jealousies of power-seekers. Exiled by a packed balia, Cosimo's wealth enabled him to turn the tables in a year and exile his exilers, taking their place and silently absorbing their power. "The moment was come when the credit of the Medici was to prevail over the legal power of the Florentine signoria." Thus when the Visconti died, Cosimo and the doge of Venice combined their forces to prevent the recovery of the republican independence of Milan, whose middle class, divided by their own jealousies, speedily succumbed to the fraud and force of Sforza, the Visconti's heir.
For thirty years Cosimo maintained at Florence, by the power of capital, prosperity and peace under the semblance of the old constitution, the richer of the ever-renewed capitalist class accepting his primacy, while the populace, being more equitably governed than of yore under the old nobility, and being steadily prosperous, saw no ground for revolt. Capital as "tyrant" had in fact done what the tyrants of early Greece and Rome are presumed to have often done—favoured the people as against the aristocracy; Cosimo's liberality giving employment and pay at the same time to the artisans and to the scholars. Under Cosimo and his political colleagues, doubtless, the subject cities were corruptly governed; but Florence seems to have been discreetly handled. Attempts to break the capitalistic domination came to nothing, save the exile or at a pinch the death of the malcontents.
[Under all of the Medici, it appears, "the fiscal legislation adhered to the principle of burdening the old nobility of the city" (Von Reumont, Lorenzo de' Medici, Eng. tr. i, 33). They however built up a fresh public debt, and their finance had very crooked aspects, especially under Lorenzo, who lacked the mercantile faculty of his grandfather (id. pp. 31-33. Cp. Perrens, Histoire de Florence, trans. cited, pp. 55-60, 288, 408-13, 416-17). Lorenzo was even accused of appropriating the dowries of orphan girls; and it seems clear that he defrauded the monte delle doti, or dowry bank.
As regards fiscal policy, it may be interesting to note that in Florence taxes had been imposed alternately on capital or income from the thirteenth century onwards, both being taken at the lowest values, and rated at from one-half to three per cent. according to the estimo (Esquiron de Parieu, Traité des impôts, 2e édit. 1866, i, 417). These taxes in turn were probably suggested by the practice of ancient Athens, where extraordinary revenue for war purposes was obtained "partly from voluntary contributions, partly from a graduated income or property tax." In 1266 a fresh income-tax of ten per cent. on an already heavily taxed city incited the decisive rising against the rule of the Ghibelline Count Guido. The earlier historians of Florence, like most others, pay little attention to the history of taxation; but details emerge for the later period.
In 1427 Giovanni de' Medici imposed on Florence a tax called the catasto—apparently not, like earlier taxes of the same name, based on a survey of land, but on disposable or movable capital—and also one of ½ per cent. on income over what was necessary to support life. Further, he levied a super-tax, which was paid by 1,400 citizens out of the 10,000 who came under the catasto. At a pinch, the catasto was levied several times in the year. Yet further, a regularly graduated income-tax was imposed by Cosimo de' Medici, in 1441, and raised in 1443; but, in this case, the salutary principle of sparing the amount of income necessary to sustain life seems to have been departed from, since incomes of from one to fifty florins paid 4 per cent., the rate gradually rising thereafter to 331/3 per cent. for incomes over 1,500 florins. By reason of bad finance, further, taxes had now to be levied even ten and fifteen times a year. Cp. Perrens, as last cited. It is yet further noteworthy that, from 1431 to 1458, traders were required to show their books to the revenue officers for the purpose of fair assessment. The abandonment of this provision seems to have been partly due to the evasions practised by the traders, partly to the irritation and the abuses set up by it.]
At Cosimo's death there was dynastic strife of capital, as elsewhere of blood; but the blundering financier Pitti went to the wall, and the invalid Piero de' Medici kept his father's power. At his death the group of his henchmen kept their hold on it; and in time his son Lorenzo ousted them and engrossed all, escaping the plot which was fatal to his brother. The failure of that and other plots, in Florence and elsewhere, sufficed to prove that the artisans, well employed and protected by the laws, had no concern to upset the orderly and business-like "tyranny" either of one great capitalist or of a prince, in the interest of an oligarchy which would rule no better, which gave them no more of political privilege than did he, and which was less ready than he with public gifts. Thus he had little difficulty in cutting down every institution that restricted his power, whether popular or oligarchic.[619] Italian republicanism had always been a matter of either upper-class or middle-class rule; and when the old upper class of feudal descent was superseded by one of commercial descent, the populace had nothing to gain by supporting the bourgeoisie. A capitalistic "lord," most of whose wealth was in its nature unseizable, was thus a more stable power than any mere swordsman among swordsmen; and Lorenzo de' Medici not only crushed all the conspiracies against him, but held his own against the dangerous alliance of the republican Pope Sixtus IV and the King of Naples—the menace of Turkish invasion helping him. When, early in his reign, he joined in and carried through the plot for the confiscation of Volterra, chiefly in order to secure a hold on its rich alum mines, his popularity at Florence was in the ratio of the baseness of his triumph. As always, imperialism and corruption went hand in hand, and the Florentines ensured their own servitude by their eagerness to compass the fall of others.[620]