The Evolution of States Part 26

(_b_) As regards Genoa, the explanation is similar. That republic resembled Venice in that it was from the beginning a city apart from the rest of Italy, devoted to foreign commerce, and absorbed in the management of distant possessions or trade colonies. When we compare the intellectual history of two such States with that of Florence, which was not less but more republican in its government, it becomes clear that it was not republicanism that limited culture in the maritime cities.

Rather we must recognise that their development is a.n.a.logous with that of England in the eighteenth century, when the growth of commerce, of foreign possessions, and of naval power seems to have turned the general energies, hitherto in large proportion intellectually employed, predominantly towards practical and administrative employment.[591] The case of Florence is the test for the whole problem. Its pre-eminence in art and letters alike is to be explained through (1) its being in constant touch with all the elements of Italian and other European culture; and (2) its having no direct maritime interests and no foreign possessions.[592]

IV. With the patronage of the princes of Ferrara, history a.s.sociates the poetry of Ariosto and Ta.s.so, though as a matter of fact the _Orlando Furioso_ seems to have been written before Ariosto entered the ducal service. But even if that and the _Gerusalemme_ be wholly credited to the principle of monarchism, it only needs to weigh the two works against those which were brought forth in the atmosphere of the free cities in order to see how little mere princely pay can avail for power and originality in literature where the princely rule thwarts the great instincts of personality. Ariosto and Ta.s.so are charming melodists; and as such they have had an influence on European literature; but they have waned in distinction age by age, while earlier and later names have waxed. And all the while, what is delightful in them is clearly enough the outcome of the still manifold Italian culture in which they grew, though it may be that the influence of a court would do more to foster sheer melody than would the storm and stress of the life of a Republic.

Sismondi (_Republiques italiennes_, iv, 416-18), admits the encouragement given to men of letters by despots like Can' Grande, and the frequent presence of poets at the courts. But he rightly insists that the faculty of imagination itself visibly dwindled when intellectual freedom was gone. It is interesting to note how Montaigne, writing within a century of the production of the _Orlando Furioso_, is struck by its want of sustained imaginative flight in comparison with Virgil (_Essais_, B. ii, 10; ed.

Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 432). Compare the estimate of Cantu, _Storia degli Italiani_, cap. 142, ed. pop. x, 180-86.

In fine, we can rightly say with Mr. Symonds himself that the history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races.[593] And _this_ process, surely, was not accomplished at the courts of the despots. Nor can it well be disputed, finally, that the Spanish domination was the visible and final check to intellectual progress on the side of imaginative literature, at a time when there was every prospect of a great development of Italian drama. "It was the Inquisitors and Spaniards who cowed the Italian spirit."[594]

Equally clear is it that the republican life evolved an amount of expansive commercial energy which at that period could not possibly have taken place under a tyrant. The efforts by which Florence developed her trade and power--efforts made possible by the mere union of self-interest among the commercial cla.s.s--will compare with any process of monarchic imperialism in respect of mere persistency and success.

Faced by the jealous enmity of Pisa, their natural port, and suffering from the trade burdens laid on them by the maritime States while they lacked a marine, the Florentines actually opened up trade communication with China when shut out from Egypt by the Venetians; traded through the port of Talamone when the Pisans barred their traffic; took Provencal and Neapolitan galleys in their pay when the Pisans and Genoese tried to close Talamone; and, after becoming masters of Pisa in 1406, not only established a well-ordered marine, but induced Genoa to sell to them the port of Leghorn. They could not, indeed, successfully compete with the Genoese and Venetians till the fall of the Greek Empire; but thereafter they contrived to obtain abundant concessions from the Turks, while the Genoese were driven out of the Levant. Commercial egoism, in fact, enabled them to tread the path of "empire" even as emperors had done long before them; and they hastened to the stage of political collapse on the old military road, spending on one war of two years, against Visconti, a sum equal to 15,000,000 at the present time; and in the twenty-nine years of struggle against Pisa (1377-1406) a sum equal to 58,000,000.[595] Thus they developed a capitalistic cla.s.s, undermined in the old way the spirit of equity which is the cement of societies, and prepared their own subjection to a capitalist over-lord. But that is only another way of saying that the period of expansive energy preceded the age of the tyrant, wise or unwise.

When all is said, however, there can be no gainsaying of the judgment that the strifes of the republics were the frustration of their culture; and it matters little whether or not we set down the inveteracy of the strifes to the final scantiness and ill-distribution of the culture.

Neither republics nor princes seem ever to have aimed at its diffusion.

The latter, in common with the richer ecclesiastics, did undoubtedly promote the recovery of the literature of antiquity; but where the republics had failed to see any need for systematic popular tuition[596]

the princes naturally did not dream of it. It would be a fallacy, however, to suppose that, given the then state of knowledge and of political forces, any system of public schooling could have saved Italian liberty. No cla.s.s had the science that could solve the problem which pressed on all. The increase and culmination of social and political evil in Renaissance Italy was an outcome of more forces than could be checked by any expedient known to the thought of the time. It must never be forgotten that the very dividedness of the cities, by maximising energy, had been visibly a cause of their growth in riches;[597] and that, though peace could have fostered that when once it had been attained, anything like a federation which should secure to the satisfaction of each their conflicting commercial interests was an enormously difficult conception. It would be a bad fallacy, again, to suppose that there was lacking to the Italians of the Renaissance a kind of insight or judgment found in other peoples of the same period. There is no trace of any such estimate in that age; and we who look back upon it are rather set marvelling at the intense and luminous play of Italian intelligence, keen as that of Redskins on the trail, so far as the realisation of the self-expressive and self-a.s.sertive appet.i.tes could go. The tragedy of the decadence, here as in the case of Rome, is measured by the play of power from which men and States fall away; for the forces which next came to the top stand for no mental superiority.

The problem, in fact, was definitely beyond the grasp of the age. It remains to realise this by a survey of the process of decline from self-government to despotism.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 541: Leo estimates that as early as the reign of Louis the Pious the Church owned about one-third of the land of Italy. Cp. B. iii, cc. 1, 3, as to the process.]

[Footnote 542: Names derived from the German Welf (or Wolf) and Waiblingen; Italianised as Guelfo and Ghibellino. Waiblingen was the name of a castle in the diocese of Augsburg belonging to the Salian or Franconian emperors, the descendants of Conrad the Salic, Welf was a family name of the Dukes of Bavaria and Saxony, who constantly resisted the predominance of the emperors, both of the Franconian and the Hohenstaufen lines. The names seem to have become war-cries in Italy about the end of the twelfth century. In Florence they appear first in 1239. Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 181, _note_.]

[Footnote 543: Sismondi, _Short History_, p. 81.]

[Footnote 544: As to the relations of successive popes in the Dark Ages--each cancelling the acts of his predecessor--see Sismondi, _Republiques_, i, 142; Gregorovius, as last cited, and _pa.s.sim_.]

[Footnote 545: Prof. Butler (_Communes of Lombardy_, p. 231), credits the Italians with having acquired, as a result of the perpetual wars of the cities, "a breadth of view and a vigour of mind unknown among the urban populations of other lands." How can "breadth of view" in politics be ascribed to communities whose unending strifes finally brought them all under despotism?]

[Footnote 546: Machiavelli, _Istorie fiorentine_, l. ii. The seven major _arti_ were (1) the judges and notaries; (2) the dealers in French cloths; (3) the money-changers; (4) the wool traders; (5) the physicians and apothecaries; (6) the silk dealers and mercers; and (7) the furriers.]

[Footnote 547: Pignotti, _Hist. of Tuscany_, Eng. trans. iii, 260.]

[Footnote 548: H. Scherer, _Allgemeine Geschichte des Welthandels_, 1852, i, 337, 338.]

[Footnote 549: Cp. Symonds, _Age of the Despots_, ed. 1897, pp. 26-27.]

[Footnote 550: Villari, _Two First Centuries_, p. 310; Hallam, _Introd.

to Literature of Europe_, ed. 1872, i, 8, 16, 19, 71, 77, 78. But see p.

74 as to the stimulus from Italy in the eleventh century. Cp.

Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, B. viii, Kap. vii, -- i (Bd. iv, 604-605), as to the primitive state of mental life in Rome in the twelfth century, and the resort of young n.o.bles to Paris for education.]

[Footnote 551: In the previous edition I accepted the still current statement that Salerno drew its first medical lore from the Saracens.

But Dr. Rashdall has, I think, sufficiently shown that there is no basis for the theory (_The Universities in the Middle Ages_, 1895, i, 77-86).

Salerno seems rather to have preserved some of the cla.s.sic lore on which the Saracens also founded. Arabic influence in the Italian schools began in the twelfth century, and was in full force early in the fourteenth, when Salerno was in complete decline (_Id_. p. 85).]

[Footnote 552: As to the att.i.tude and influence of Gregory the Great see Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, as cited, i, 4, 21, 22; and Gregorovius, B. iii, cap. iii, -- 2 (ii, 88). As to the reforms of Gregory VII in the tenth century, see also Gregorovius, B. vii, cap. vii, -- 5 (iv, 288).

See the latter writer again, B. vii, cap. vi (iv, 242-46), and Guizot, _Civilisation en Europe_, lecon vi, ed. 1844, pp. 159-60, as to the effect of Hildebrandt's policy in dividing the Church.]

[Footnote 553: Cp. Boulting-Sismondi, p. 9; Muratori, _Dissert._ xv, cited by Lecky, _Hist. of European Morals_, ii, 71; Milman, as last cited, ii, 51.]

[Footnote 554: We know further from Salvian, as noted above, p. 119, that the Christians of Gaul treated their slaves as badly as the pagans had ever done (_De gubernatione Dei_, l. iv). As to the whole subject, see the valuable researches of Larroque, _De l'esclavage chez les nations chretiennes_, 2e ed. 1864, and Biot, _De l'abolition de l'esclavage ancien en Occident_, 1840.]

[Footnote 555: Lea, _Hist. Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, 2nd ed. pp.

242-43.]

[Footnote 556: Cp. Sismondi, as before cited, and Testa, as cited, p.

92. Testa's book, like so many other modern Italian treatises, is written with the garrulity of the Middle Ages, but embodies a good deal of research. The pietistic pa.s.sage on p. 93 is contradicted by that on p. 92.]

[Footnote 557: Hardwick, _Church History: Middle Age_, 1853, p. 58 and refs. Manumission was the legal preliminary to ordination; but it was often set aside, with the object of having the serf-priest more subject to discipline. Cp. Tytler, _Hist. of Scotland_, ed. 1869, ii, 255, as to bondmen-clerks in Scotland in the thirteenth century.]

[Footnote 558: As in the war of cities against n.o.bles under Conrad the Salic. See above, p. 203.]

[Footnote 559: _Wealth of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. 2.]

[Footnote 560: Cp. Butler, pp. 224, 229.]

[Footnote 561: As to these see Testa, p. 56. Compare the accounts of the later bloodless battles of the _condottieri_, which were thus not without Italian precedent. Between 1013 and 1105 Pavia and Milan had six wars. Butler, _The Communes of Lombardy_, p. 58.]

[Footnote 562: Cp. Heeren, _Essai sur l'influence des Croisades_, Villers' tr. 1808, p. 101; Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_, 8th ed. pp. 199, 211, 213, 223; Stubbs, _Germany in the Middle Ages_, 1908, pp. 105, 197.]

[Footnote 563: _Memoirs of Fra Salimbene_, tr. by T.K. L. Oliphant, in same vol. with _The Duke and the Scholar_, 1875, p. 120.]

[Footnote 564: Butler, p. 98.]

[Footnote 565: _Id._ p. 314.]

[Footnote 566: Wealth-acc.u.mulation first took the form of land-owning.

At the beginning of the twelfth century the Florentine territory was merely civic; at the end it was about forty miles in diameter.

(Trollope, _History of the Commonwealth of Florence_, 1865, i, 85.) The figure given for the beginning, six miles, is legendary and incredible.

See Villari, _Two First Centuries_, pp. 71-72.]

[Footnote 567: As everywhere else in the Middle Ages, interest at Florence was high, varying from ten to thirty per cent. Pignotti, _Hist.

of Tuscany_, Eng. tr. 1823, iii, 280. Cp. Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th ed. iii, 337.]

[Footnote 568: Bartoli, _Storia della letteratura italiana_, 1878, tom.

ii, cap. vii.]

[Footnote 569: Sismondi, _Literature of the South of Europe_, Eng. tr.

i, 61, 85, 86, 87, 89; Bouterwek, _History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature_, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 22, 23; Bartoli, i, 94.]

[Footnote 570: Sismondi, as last cited, i, 74, 76, 80, 242; Bartoli, tom. ii, cap. i, and p. 165.]

[Footnote 571: "The union of Provence, during two hundred and thirteen years, under a line of princes who ... never experienced any foreign invasion, but, by a fraternal government, augmented the population and riches of the State, and favoured commercial pursuits ... consolidated the laws, the language, and the manners of Provence" (Sismondi, as last cited, i, 75).]

[Footnote 572: See above, p. 135 _sq._, as to the theory of the culture-value of the despot.]