The Evolution of States Part 27

[Footnote 573: Sismondi, _Republiques_, xii, 38-41. The land was already cultivated on the _metayer_ system, half the crop going to the tenant--a state of things advantageous all round. Villari (_Two First Centuries_, p. 315) p.r.o.nounces that the Florentines looked sagaciously to trade, but hara.s.sed agriculture. This does not seem to be true of Italian polity in general.]

[Footnote 574: As to these, consult M'Crie, _History of the Reformation in Italy_, ed. 1856, pp. 23-25.]

[Footnote 575: See Sismondi, _Republiques_, xii, 39, as to the utter ruin of the Pisan territory by Florence.]

[Footnote 576: J.A. Symonds, _The Age of the Despots_, ed. 1897, pp.

61-62.]

[Footnote 577: Sismondi, _Republiques italiennes_, iv, 174-77.]

[Footnote 578: Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 239. So Perrens: "Its glory belonged to the democratic period" (_Histoire de Florence_, Eng.

trans. of vol. vii, p. 171).]

[Footnote 579: Cp. Zeller, _Histoire d'Italie_, 1853, p. 309.]

[Footnote 580: Roscoe (_Life of Leo X_, ii, 318) attributes to the rivalry of Leonardo and Michel Angelo at Florence (in 1500, while the Medici were in exile, and the city was self-governed) the kindling of the art life of the greatest period. And see Perrens (_Histoire de Florence_, Eng. trans. of vol. cited, p. 457, also as cited below, p.

249) on the decay of architecture and the check to art through the policy of Lorenzo. "Art under the grandfather," he declares (p. 434), "_completed_ a remarkable evolution which has no equivalent under the grandson." Previously (p. 200) he had noted that "many works of which the fifteenth century gets the glory because it finished them, were ordered and begun amid the confusion and terrible agitation of the demagogy." As to Cosimo's expenditure on building see p. 166, and on letters p. 168.]

[Footnote 581: Zeller, p. 310. The _De falsa donatione_ was certainly an abusive doc.u.ment. See Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, pt. i, ch. iii, sect. i, par. 7, _note_.]

[Footnote 582: Burckhardt, as cited, p. 279. Another estimable type was Fra Urbano. See Roscoe, Leo X, i, 351, 352. On the character of Poliziano see Perrens, trans. cited, p. 441.]

[Footnote 583: Cp. Burckhardt, pp. 203, 204, 291; Zeller, p. 330; and von Reumont, _Lorenzo de' Medici_, Eng. trans. ii, 18. Lorenzo expressly cut down the scope and the resources of the Florentine _Studio_ for selfish personal reasons. Perrens, trans. cited, pp. 436-37. It was Bernardo Nerli, not Lorenzo, who bore the cost of printing Homer. _Id._ p. 443.]

[Footnote 584: See the estimate of Venetian ideals in Burckhardt, _Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy_, pt. i, ch. vii.]

[Footnote 585: Nys, _Researches in the History of Economics_, 1899, pp.

66-67; Frignet, _Histoire de l'a.s.sociation commerciale_, 1868, p. 78.]

[Footnote 586: Prof. Giacomo Gay, _Dei Carattere degli Italiani nel medio evo e nell' eta moderna_, Asti, 1876, p. 8.]

[Footnote 587: By Prof. Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, p. 97.]

[Footnote 588: Compare these as described by Ranke (_Latin and Teutonic Nations_, Eng. tr. p. 248) with those of old Athens.]

[Footnote 589: Burckhardt (Eng. tr. ed. 1892, pp. 71, 72) gives some ill.u.s.trative details. See also H. Brown in _Cambridge Modern History_, 1902, i, 284. But cp. Geiger, _Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland_, Berlin, 1882, pp. 265-66, as to the _per contra_.]

[Footnote 590: Nys, _Researches in the History of Economics_, 1899, pp.

64-65, and ref.]

[Footnote 591: Cp. _The Dynamics of Religion_, by "M.W. Wiseman" (J.M.

R.), 1897, pp. 175, 176, 181.]

[Footnote 592: "Non partec.i.p.avi Firenze nelle faccende d'Europa cos largamente, come Venezia e Genova, s per essere continuamente straziata dalle fazioni e s per non avere dominio di mare. Dal che nasceva, che niun cittadino potesse sorgere in lei di nome e di appichi esterni tanto possente che potesse stabilirvi da per se o la liberta o la tyrannide"

(C. Botta, _Storia d' Italia_, 1837, i, 124). But Genoa also had countless strifes of faction, so that the vera causa of the greater inner development of Florence must be held to be her lack of external dominion and occupation.]

[Footnote 593: Vol. cited, p. 3. Cp. Burckhardt, _Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy_, pt. iv, ch. iv, p. 309. Both writers adopt the language of Michelet.]

[Footnote 594: Burckhardt, p. 317. The Counter-Reformation, of course, must always be taken into account in estimates of the latter period of Italian history. The regeneration of the Papacy after the Reformation is to be credited jointly to Spain and the Reformation itself.]

[Footnote 595: Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. tr. iii, 282-92.]

[Footnote 596: Study suffered in Florence particularly from the faction troubles. The _Studio_ or college, founded in 1348, was closed between 1378 and 1386; reopened then, shut in 1404, again opened in 1412, and so on. Cp. Napier, _Florentine History_, 1846, iv, 75; Perrens, _Histoire de Florence_, Eng. tr. of vol. vii, pp. 172-77; and von Reumont, _Lorenzo de' Medici_, Eng. tr. i, 428-30.]

[Footnote 597: Mr. Symonds notes (_Age of the Despots_, p. 34) how Guicciardini argued this (_Op. Ined._ i, 28), as against Machiavelli's lament over the lack of Italian unity.]

Chapter III

THE POLITICAL COLLAPSE

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Given the monarchic and feudal environment, the chronic strife within and between the Italian cities can be seen to be sufficient in time to undo them;[598] and some wonder naturally arises at their failure to frame some system of federal government that should restrain their feuds. It was their supreme necessity; but though the idea was now and then broached,[599] there is no sign that the average man ever came nearer planning for it than did the Ghibelline Dante, with his simple theory that Caesar should ride the horse,[600] or than did the clear brain of Machiavelli, with its longing for a native ruler[601] like Cesare Borgia, capable of beating down the rival princes and the adventurers, and of holding his own against the Papacy. One of the statesmen who harboured the ideal was Rienzi; but he never wrought for its realisation, and his devotion to the Papacy as well as to the headship of Rome would have made it miscarry had he set it on foot.[602]

The failure of Cesare Borgia, who of all Italians of his day came nearest to combining the needed faculties for Italian unification, is the proof of the practical impossibility of that solution. But a federation of States, it has been reasoned, was relatively feasible; why then was it never attempted? As usual, the question has been answered in the simple verbalist way, by the decision that the Italians did not strike out a political philosophy or science because they were not that way given. They lacked the "faculty" for whatever they did not happen to do; whereas the ancient Greeks, on the contrary, did theorise because that faculty was theirs, though they had not the faculty to work out the theories.

_E.g._ the reasoning of so intelligent a thinker as Heeren: "Among those countries in which [political speculation] might have been expected to give the earliest sign of life, Italy was undoubtedly the first: all the ordinary causes appear to have united here; a number of small states arose near each other; republican const.i.tutions were established; political parties were everywhere at work and at variance; and with all this, the arts and sciences were in the full splendour of their revival. The appearance of Italy in the fifteenth century recalls most fully the picture of ancient Greece. And yet in Italy, political theories were as few as in Greece they had been many!--a result both unexpected and difficult to explain. Still, however, I think that this phenomenon may be in great part accounted for, if we remember that there _never was_ a philosophical system of character or influence which prospered _under the sky of Italy_. No nation of civilised Europe has given birth to so few theories as the Italian: none has had less genius for such pursuits. The history of the Roman philosophy, a mere echo of the Grecian, proves this of its earlier ages, nor was it otherwise in its later." (Essay "On the Rise and Progress of Political Theories," in _Historical Treatises_, Eng. tr. 1836, p.

118.)

To say nothing of the looseness of the generalisation, which ignores alike Thomas Aquinas and Vico, Leonardo and Galileo, Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno, it may suffice to note once more that on this principle the Germans must be p.r.o.nounced to have been devoid of theoretical faculty before Leibnitz. On that view it does not become any more intelligible how "they" acquired it.

Seeking a less vacuous species of explanation, we are soon led to recognise (1) that the case of medieval Italy was to the extent of at least two factors more complicated than that of ancient Greece; and that these factors alone might suffice to explain their non-production of a "theory" which should avail for the need; (2) that the theories of the Greeks did not avail to solve their problem; and (3) that the Italians all the while had really two theories too many. At the very emergence of their republics they were already possessed or wrought upon by the embodied theories of the Empire and the Papacy, two elements never represented in the Greek problem, where empire was an alien and barbarian thing suddenly entering into the affairs of civilised h.e.l.las, and where there was nothing in the nature of the Papacy. These two forces in Italian life were all along represented by specific theories; and their clash was a large part of the trouble. Their pressure set up a chronic clash of parties; and the theorist of to-day may be challenged to frame a theory which could have worked well for Italy otherwise than by setting those forces aside--a thing quite impossible in the Middle Ages. If mere system-making on either side could have availed, Thomas Aquinas might have rendered the service.[603]

The economic and political destiny of the Church may be said to have been determined in the eleventh century, when, after a desperate struggle, begun by Pope Hildebrandt, celibacy was forced on the secular clergy. The real motive to this policy was of course not ascetic but economic, the object being to prevent at once the appropriation of church property by married priests for family purposes, and the creation of hereditary t.i.tles to church benefices. An evolution of that kind had actually begun; and there can be no question that had it not been checked it would have been fatal to the Papacy. Naturally the married clergy on their part resisted to the uttermost. Only the desperate policy of Hildebrandt, withdrawing popular obedience and ecclesiastical protection from those who would not give up their wives, broke down the resistance; and even thereafter Urban II, as we saw, had to resort to the odious measure of making priests' wives slaves.[604] From that period we may date the creation of the Church as a unitary political power. Sacerdotal celibacy took many generations to establish; but when once the point was carried it involved a force of incorporation which only the strongest political forces--as at the Reformation--could outdo, and which since the Reformation has kept the Church intact.

It is true that the monk Arnold of Brescia, burned alive by the Papacy in 1155, fought a long battle (1139-55) against the papal power, creating an immense ferment in Lombardy, and rousing a strong anti-papal movement in Rome itself (Sismondi, _Republiques italiennes_, i, chs. 7, 8; Gibbon, ch. 69); and that, as noted by M'Crie (_Reformation in Italy_, p. 1), "the supremacy claimed by the bishops of Rome was resisted in Italy after it had been submitted to by the most remote churches of the west"; but once papalised, Italy necessarily remained so in her own pecuniary interest. Cp. Rogers, _Economic Interpretation of History_, p. 79.

Arnold's movement led even to a revolution in Rome; but after he had ruled there for ten years, overbearing two successive popes, one of greater energy, Adrian IV, excommunicated the city, so expelling Arnold. Adrian then, making a bargain with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa at his coronation, got the republican leader in his power; and the movement ended with Arnold's life. The Papacy was now an irremovable element of division in Italy; and disunion was thenceforth the lot of the land.

If we seek to localise the disease, however, we find that no one factor is specially responsible. The alien emperor, coming in from outside, and setting city against city, Pavia against Milan, and n.o.bles against burghers, is clearly a force of strife. Again, whereas the cities might on the whole have combined successfully against the emperor, to the point of abolishing his rule, the Papacy, calling him in to suit its own purposes, and calling in yet other aliens at a pinch, is still more a force of discord. At times the emperors, in the worst days of Roman corruption, had to choose among the compet.i.tors nominated to the Papacy by the intrigues of courtesans and n.o.bles and the venal votes of the people, thus identifying the man they chose with their cause.

Hildebrandt, again, after securing that the popes should be elected by the cardinals, became the fiercest of autocrats. By his strife with Henry IV he set up civil war through all Italy and Germany; and when in his despair he called in the Normans against Rome, they sold most of the people into slavery.[605] Later, in the minority of Frederick II, Innocent III so strengthened the Church that it was able by sheer slaughter to crush for a generation all Provencal heresy, and was able to prevail against Frederick in its long struggle with him; in so doing, however, deepening to the uttermost the pa.s.sion of faction in all the cities, and so preparing the worst and bloodiest wars of the future.

Yet, on the other hand, if we make abstraction of pope and emperor, and consider only the n.o.bles and the citizens, it is clear that they had among them the seeds of strife immeasurable. The n.o.bles were by training and habit centres of violence.[606] Their mutual feuds, always tending to involve the citizens, were a perpetual peril to order; and their disregard of law kept them as ready to make war on citizens or cities as on each other. Again and again they were violently expelled from every Lombard city, on the score of their gross and perpetual disorders; but they being the chief experts in military matters, they were always welcomed back again, because the burghers had need of them as leaders in the feuds of city with city, and of Guelphs with Ghibellines. So that yet again, if we put the n.o.bles out of sight, the spirit of strife as between city and city was sufficient, as in ancient Greece, to make them all the prey of any invader with a free hand. They could not master the science of their problem, could not rise above the plane of primary tribal or local pa.s.sion and jealousy; though within each city were faction hatreds as bitter as those between the cities as wholes. Already in the twelfth century we find Milan destroying Lodi and unwalling Como.

Later, in the thirteenth century, Genoa ruins the naval power of Pisa,[607] then under the tyranny of Ugolino, in a war of commercial hatred, such as Pisa had before waged with Amalfi and with Lucca; in the fourteenth, Genoa and Venice again and again fight till both are exhausted, and Genoa accepts a lord to aid her in the struggle, Pisa doing likewise, and so recovering strength on land;[608] in the fifteenth and sixteenth, Florence spares no cost or effort to keep Pisa in subjection. This fatal policy, in turn, was the result of the frequent attempts of the Pisans to destroy Florentine trade by closing their port to it.[609] All along, inter-civic hates are in full flow through all the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines; and the menace of neither French nor Spanish tyranny can finally unify the mutually repellent communities.

We may, indeed, make out a special case against the Papacy, to the effect that, but for that, Italian intelligence would have had a freer life; and that even if Italy, like Spain and France and England, underwent despotism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, her intellectual activity would have sufficed to work her recovery at least as rapidly as the process took place elsewhere. It has been argued[610]

that the liberating force elsewhere in the sixteenth century was the Reformation--a theory which leaves us asking what originated the Reformation in its turn. Taking that to be the spirit of (_a_) inchoate free thought, of developing reason, or (_b_) of economic revolt against the fiscal exactions of an alien power, or both, we are ent.i.tled to say broadly that the crushing of such revolt in Italy, as in Provence and in Spain, clearly came of the special development of the papal power thus near its centre--the explanation of "national character" being as nugatory in this as in any other sociological issue.

Heeren naturally rests on this solution. The "new religion," he says, "was suited to the north, but not to the south. The calm and investigating spirit of the German nations found in it the nourishment which it required and sought for.... The more vivid imagination and sensitive feelings of the people of the south ...

found little to please them in its tenets.... It was not, therefore, owing to the prohibitions of the government, but to the character of the nations themselves, that the Reformation found no support among them" (vol. cited, pp. 58, 59). The two explanations of climate and race can thus be employed alternatively at need.

Ireland, though "northern," is to be got rid of as not being "German." For the rest, the Albigenses, the _paterini_, the reforming Franciscans, and the myriad victims of the Inquisition in Spain, are conveniently ignored. Heeren's phrase about the "almost total exclusion" of the southern countries from the "great ferment of ideas which in other countries of civilised Europe gave activity and life to the human intellect" can be described only as a piece of concentrated misinformation. And a similar judgment must be pa.s.sed on the summing-up of Mr. Symonds that "Germany achieved the labour of the Reformation almost single-handed" (_Renaissance in Italy_, 2nd ed. i, 28). There is far more truth in the verdict of Guizot, that "la princ.i.p.ale lutte d'erudition et de doctrine contre l'Eglise catholique a ete soutenue par la reforme francaise; c'est en France et en Hollande, et toujours en francais, qu'ont ete ecrits tants d'ouvrages philosophiques, historiques, polemiques, a l'appui de cette cause" (_Civilisation en France_, i, 18). Motley, though an uncritical Teutophile and Gallophobe, admits as to Holland that "the Reformation first entered the Provinces, not through the Augsburg but the Huguenot gate" (_Rise of the Dutch Republic_, ed. 1863, p. 162). As to the spirit of reformation in Italy and Spain, the student may consult the two careful and learned _Histories_ of M'Crie, works which might have saved many vain generalisations by later writers, had they heeded them. The question of the supposed racial determination of the Reformation is discussed at some length in _The Saxon and the Celt_, pp. 92-97, 143-47, 203, 204. Cp. _The Dynamics of Religion_, 1897, pt. i; _Letters on Reasoning_, 2nd ed. 1905, pp. 20-24; and _A Short History of Freethought_, vol. i, chs. ix, x, xi.

The history of Italian religious life shows that the spirit of sheer reformation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was stronger there than even in France in the sixteenth, where again it was perhaps positively stronger than in Germany, though not stronger relatively to the resistance. And in Italy the resistance was personified in the Papacy, which there had its seat and strength. When all is said, however, the facts remain that in England the Reformation meant sordid spoliation, retrogression in culture, and finally civil war; that in France it meant long periods of furious strife; that in Germany, where it "prospered," it meant finally a whole generation of the most ruinous warfare the modern world had seen, throwing back German civilisation a full hundred years. Save for the original agony of conquest and the special sting of subjection to alien rule, Italy suffered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries less evils than these.

The lesson of our retrospect, then, is: (1) generally, that as between medieval Italian development and that of other countries--say our own--there has been difference, not of "race character" and "faculty,"

but of favouring and adverse conditions; and (2) particularly, that certain social evils which went on worsening in Florence and are in some degree present in all societies to-day, call for scientific treatment lest they go on worsening with us. The modern problem is in many respects different from that of pre-Reformation Italy; but the forces concerned are kindred, and it may be worth while to note the broad facts of the past process with some particularity.